Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box

by The Arbinger Institute

Self-deception actually determines one’s experience in every aspect of life.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse.

“There is no solution to the problem of lack of commitment, for example, without a solution to the bigger problem—the problem that I can’t see that I’m not committed.”

“That’s usually the case. Identify someone with a problem, and you’ll be identifying someone who resists the suggestion that he has one. That’s self-deception—the problem of not knowing and resisting the possibility that one has a problem.

‘Bud,’ he said, ‘we’re happy to have you with us. You’re a talented man and a good man. You add a lot to the team. But you won’t ever let us down again, will you?’

‘I want you to consider something, Gabe,’ I said to him. ‘Really think about it. When you’re going out of your way to do all those things for Leon so that he’ll know you have an interest in him, what are you most interested in—him or his opinion of you?’

They seem to produce anyway. And they inspire those around them to do the same. Some of the best leaders in our company fall in this category. They don’t always say or do the ‘right’ things, but people love working with them. They get results.

no matter what we’re doing on the outside, people respond primarily to how we’re feeling about them on the inside. And how we’re feeling about them depends on whether we’re in or out of the box concerning them.

One way, I experience myself as a person among people. The other way, I experience myself as the person among objects.

And that’s because they don’t know how much smarter smart people are, how much more skilled skilled people get, and how much harder hardworking people work when they see, and are seen, straightforwardly—as people.

“They’re all examples of self-betrayal—times when I had a sense of something I should do for others but didn’t do it.”

“Well, you might think about it a little. When dealing with germs, the mere fact that someone else is sick doesn’t mean that I’m not sick. In fact, when I’m surrounded by sick people, chances are greater that I will get sick myself.”

“trying to change others doesn’t work.”

“That’s why skill training in nontechnical areas often has so little lasting impact,” Lou said. “Helpful skills and techniques aren’t very helpful if they’re done in the box. They just provide people with more-sophisticated ways to blame.”

“the people problems that most people try to correct with skills aren’t due to a lack of skill at all. They’re due to self-betrayal. People problems seem intractable not because they are insoluble but because the common skill interventions are not themselves solutions.”

“Because I was in the box, I couldn’t mean it. In the box, every change I can think of is just a change in my style of being in the box. I can change from arguing to kissing. I can change from ignoring someone to going out of my way to shower that person with attention. But whatever changes I think of in the box are changes I think of from within the box, and they are therefore just more of the box—which is the problem in the first place. Others remain objects to me.”

“The box is a metaphor for how I’m resisting others. By ‘resisting,’ I mean that my self-betrayal isn’t passive. In the box, I’m actively resisting what the humanity of others calls me to do for them.

We need to honor them as people. And in that moment—the moment I see another as a person, with needs, hopes, and worries as real and legitimate as my own—I am out of the box toward him.

“So, in this case, being out of the box and seeing others as people doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly bombarded with burdensome obligations. It simply means that I’m seeing and appreciating others as people while I’m driving, or shopping, or doing whatever it is I am doing.

“So your success as a leader, Tom, depends on being free of self-betrayal,” Bud said. “Only then do you invite others to be free of self-betrayal. Only then are you creating leaders yourself—coworkers whom people will respond to, trust, and want to work with. You owe it to your people to be out of the box for them. You owe it to Zagrum to be out of the box for them.”

“Oh, that this first-year guy messed up or something like that,” I said. “I would’ve found some way to make sure that he knew it wasn’t my fault.” “Me too. But that’s not what she did. She said, ‘Jerry, you remember that expansion analysis? Well, I made a mistake on it. It turns out that the law has just recently changed, and I missed it. Our expansion strategy is wrong.’ “I was dumfounded listening to her. I was the one who’d messed up, not Anita, but she—with much at stake—was taking responsibility for the error. Not even one comment in her conversation pointed to me. “ ‘What do you mean you made a mistake?’ I asked her after she hung up. ‘I was the one who didn’t check the pocket parts.’ This was her response: ‘It’s true you should’ve checked them. But I’m your first supervisor, and a number of times during the process I thought that I should remind you to check the pockets, but I never got around to asking until today. If I had asked when I felt I should’ve, none of this ever would have happened. So you made a mistake, yes. But so did I.’

I wasn’t focused on results at all; I was just focused on myself. And as a result of that self-betrayal, I blamed others for everything.

“And in the unfortunate case where we have to let someone go,” he continued without pause, “we aim to let a person go, not an object. It’s an entirely different thing.”

Our research shows that people intuitively know of the problem of self-deception. They know of it not primarily because they recognize it in themselves but because they observe in others the tendency to overinflate performance relative to results, and they observe how people explain this difference by blaming others for problems rather than taking responsibility themselves.

From reading the book, you know that one of the key differences between these two experiences of life is the way we see and experience other people: When we are in the box, we experience others not as people with their own lives but as objects within our lives. When we experience others in these two ways, we experience ourselves differently as well. The choice to see another as either a person or an object is a choice between whether we will see and experience ourselves and others truthfully or erroneously.