On Hypocrisy and Self-Protection

A typ­i­cal injunc­tion is that lead­ers should always “walk their talk.” A cost of lead­ing, per­haps, the price of being in a more exposed and influ­en­tial place where the scruti­ny is that much greater. As a cul­ture, we all seemed tuned to search for hypocrisy in oth­er lead­ers, always ready to share a dis­ap­point­ment in some­one else’s dis­cov­ered feet of clay.
Yet, what real­ly is the prob­lem here? And so what?

A host of exam­ples come forward:

• The CEO who says he would like “to open up com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the man­age­ment team” but becomes angry and abrupt­ly ends the effort when mem­bers of his senior group sug­gest that his own behav­ior (blow­ing up at man­agers pub­licly) is part of the rea­son peo­ple don’t speak up.

• The senior VP of research who says he wants to encour­age more cross-dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tions, but is well known as the road­block because he auto­crat­i­cal­ly reserves all deci­sions to herself.

• The man­ag­er who wants to guide a team that in her words, “feels more like a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice than a work unit” but who becomes so emo­tion­al about human rela­tion­ships and is so deci­sion-avoidant that she dri­ves peo­ple away from her own vision.

• The Vice Pres­i­dent who wants his depart­men­t’s man­age­ment group to oper­ate as a self-lead­ing team and believes so thor­ough­ly that the end of the day “the best idea will win through debate” that mem­bers’ con­flict­ing ide­olo­gies (includ­ing his own) keep the group stuck in a frus­trat­ing cycle of deci­sion-less conversations.

• The CEO who touts the impor­tance of the company’s brand and core val­ues (integri­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty, etc.) but is well known for wimp­ing out when it comes to hold­ing his senior team account­able to these values.

In each case, the leader is a well-inten­tioned per­son whose own behav­iors con­tra­dict the stat­ed goal. Yet a vari­ety of defens­es pro­tect the per­son from con­struc­tive­ly hear­ing and deal­ing with the data — in turn deeply under­min­ing the orga­ni­za­tion­al per­for­mance the leader says is so desired.  In the first case, the leader becomes more abu­sive and shuts down when hear­ing about the gap in his own behav­ior. In the sec­ond, the leader sim­ply doesn’t respond (he doesn’t have to, after all). In the third, the leader takes it per­son­al­ly and emo­tion­al­ly and can­not decide what to do. In the fourth, the leader wants to debate the point. The fifth lis­tens to feed­back sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly but does not act. In each instance, even though the inter­est is cre­at­ing a more open, inno­v­a­tive, and humane orga­ni­za­tion, the behav­ior of the lead­ers is incon­gru­ent. Offer­ing this data to them sim­ply ampli­fies rather than reduces the defen­sive reaction.

This dynam­ic eas­i­ly leads peo­ple to a moral judg­ment, that the lead­ers are hyp­ocrites; rein­forc­ing an under­ly­ing belief, often part of the default cul­ture, that all lead­ers are hyp­ocrites as an arti­fact of their acquired power.

The Incongruency Principle

Instead of “walk the talk,” or the moral­ly loaded term,“hypocrisy,” let’s call it some­thing more neu­tral, and try to fig­ure out what’s real­ly going on. Let’s call it the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple: the notion that if lead­ers are the real sys­tem with­in which an orga­ni­za­tion’s mem­bers oper­ate, then in part the sys­tem works against itself.

To begin with, this part of the sys­tem is often undis­cuss­able because the defen­sive reac­tions to talk­ing about “defensive reac­tion­s” are so strong as to make it a dan­ger­ous or futile con­ver­sa­tion. The sit­u­a­tion, to use Chris Argyris’s words, becomes “self-seal­ing.”

But this is not news, Argyris him­self and oth­ers hav­ing cov­ered the ter­ri­to­ry com­pre­hen­sive­ly. We know there are sacred cows, ele­phants in the room, a dead moose on the table, all ref­er­ences to incon­sis­ten­cies that we have learned to talk around, not direct­ly about, at least not to those who can do some­thing about the prob­lem. The undis­cuss­ables are about peo­ple, us.

The ques­tion is do we real­ly under­stand our own per­son­al incon­gru­en­cy and the defen­sive reac­tions we exhib­it? Do we know how our defen­sive behav­iors are inter­pret­ed by oth­ers and their impact on the work? And could we actu­al­ly turn the for­mu­la around in some way so that what has been a detrac­tor to our cred­i­bil­i­ty would be an asset? How could our incon­gru­en­cy in fact set the stage for coura­geous breakthrough?

Part of the answer appears to be in acknowl­edg­ing that the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple offers an emi­nent­ly pow­er­ful and down­right inspir­ing opportunity. 

An Example

I’m work­ing as a coach with Bob, num­ber two in a tech­ni­cal ser­vices firm and slat­ed to take over the pres­i­den­cy in a few years. He’s come up through the ranks and is superb tech­ni­cal­ly but isn’t so good with peo­ple. In fact, there have been com­plaints of a con­fi­den­tial nature to the HR Direc­tor who is ask­ing me now to help Bob but can­not, because of the con­fi­dences, actu­al­ly dis­close what the nature of the prob­lems are. All she can say is that because of them, Bob’s future as Pres­i­dent is def­i­nite­ly in jeop­ardy. So I sug­gest Bob get some feed­back from oth­ers, and I will teach him how to get it. The first thing we do, using the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple, is to have Bob artic­u­late his vision of the kind of work­place rela­tion­ships he would like to cre­ate. I’m ask­ing him to tap his per­son­al values.

This is a tough task for him. He has a hard time get­ting through these “touchy feely” things, he says, and he’s also so per­fec­tion­is­tic that he wants what­ev­er vision he assem­bles to be incon­testable to oth­ers. But after a day or two of thought, he soft­ens and becomes more him­self. He says to me, “You know, it real­ly only comes down to one thing, respect. That’s the kind of rela­tion­ships I want to have, rela­tion­ships of respect.”

“Great,” I say, “let’s start there. Now, Bob, you know that we wouldn’t be doing this work if there were not some kind of prob­lem, and nei­ther you nor I know what it is at this point, but what’s impor­tant is just to find out by ask­ing some ques­tions of a few peo­ple that you think might be able to give you data — in this case, in the area of respect. Who do you want to talk to? Who can help most?”

Bob iden­ti­fies sev­en peo­ple on his own, three of whom I learn lat­er, were sources of com­plaints to the HR Direc­tor. So I’m think­ing he has an inkling of some kind where the prob­lem might be. I teach him to start each con­ver­sa­tion by clear­ly stat­ing that he would like to build rela­tion­ships of respect as part of his role and to ask about any­thing he might be doing that inter­feres with that — this is the appli­ca­tion of the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple. We talk about cre­at­ing a safe, sin­cere envi­ron­ment for his talks.

After three con­ver­sa­tions Bob calls me up to tell me it’s already clear where the pat­tern is — for that’s what I’ve asked him to do — not to fix­ate on indi­vid­ual rela­tion­ships so much as find the pat­terns that are in the way of his stat­ed goal.

He tells me that he’s learned about how his sex­u­al­ly ori­ent­ed abu­sive lan­guage with staff is under­min­ing his cred­i­bil­i­ty as a boss and deeply dis­tress­ing staff mem­bers. He shares spe­cif­ic exam­ples with me, some of them shock­ing. At that point he and I can begin look­ing togeth­er into some alter­na­tive meth­ods of deal­ing with his frus­tra­tion and anger at work, espe­cial­ly when the per­for­mance of his team mem­bers seemed to reflect some lack in his own lead­er­ship capa­bil­i­ties. Embar­rass­ment that things had not been done per­fect­ly had been dri­ving him to some very bad behavior.

You can ask, shouldn’t he have known bet­ter? Wouldn’t that be com­mon sense, espe­cial­ly when dis­crim­i­na­to­ry lan­guage of any kind is known to be ille­gal? If he was tru­ly inter­est­ed in respect­ful rela­tion­ships, how could he have engaged in this con­duct in the first place? Good ques­tions, and they get at the per­son­al and emo­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty and uncon­scious­ness of our defen­sive sys­tems and how rec­i­p­ro­cal they are with oth­ers. Who would talk with him about this behav­ior, giv­en the very pat­tern of abus­ing oth­ers that he had adopt­ed? Indeed, how would he have learned about his blind spot with­out ask­ing in this way?

Beyond Judgment

Now the point of this is to move as quick­ly as pos­si­ble from judg­ment to com­pas­sion. We, too, have blind spots. We see them eas­i­ly in oth­ers, but as a ther­a­pist friend point­ed out, “When you are sure you see some­one else’s shad­ow, there’s a good chance you are stand­ing in your own.” The more impor­tant dis­cov­ery is that we are all impli­cat­ed pre­cise­ly because we don’t know what we don’t know, and we there­fore have an oppor­tu­ni­ty: we can always request data about our con­tra­dic­tions, and the results are like­ly to be valu­able. We can always ask, “How am I get­ting in the way of the things I say I want?” or even bet­ter, “How am I col­lud­ing in the prob­lems I say I want to solve?”

Mak­ing these ques­tions a con­scious, delib­er­ate, and con­tin­u­ous inquiry with oth­ers — a prac­tice — reduces the defen­sive­ness to a lev­el where we can actu­al­ly hear about the incon­gru­en­cy, and begin to do some­thing con­struc­tive about it. But it has to be a choice to ask, which means from the begin­ning we accept that some kinds of incon­gru­en­cy are always present — an inter­est­ing form of self-accep­tance that assumes we do not know our true impact.

And this point is key. I may well sus­pect who has a prob­lem with me, and have some sense of what it is I’m doing, as Bob did, but the tru­ly miss­ing piece is often the impact that prob­lem has on oth­ers and on the work. When Bob heard how dev­as­tat­ed peo­ple felt, how much time they spent at home try­ing to recov­er, how it affect­ed their day-to-day per­for­mance and mis­takes, how angry they were, it was a great deal eas­i­er for him to begin work­ing the issues — more so than even know­ing his future as pres­i­dent was at stake. But if you nev­er choose to hear the incon­gru­ent data, espe­cial­ly the impact part, if you run from it, if you allow your defen­sive reac­tions to pre­vent you from hear­ing about your defen­sive reac­tions, then you and the sys­tem you lead remain the same.

And this, it turns out, is pos­si­bly why inno­va­tion is often so hard in orga­ni­za­tions — because the deep­est inno­va­tions prob­a­bly tweak the per­son­al defen­sive­ness and sen­si­bil­i­ties of those who have the power.

The real tri­umph for Bob was not just end­ing bad behav­ior, it was replac­ing it with some­thing else that worked a whole lot bet­ter, and also know­ing that as a leader he could make a pro­found dif­fer­ence in the cul­ture of his orga­ni­za­tion by not just avoid­ing abuse, but active­ly inter­ven­ing when abuse of any kind was appear­ing in front of him. He went from avoid­ing cer­tain neg­a­tive com­ments and jokes to notic­ing and call­ing them out when they came up and with who­ev­er was voic­ing them.

Toward Breakthrough

This is a some­what harsh exam­ple of putting the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple to pos­i­tive use, but this essay is not about some­thing that’s nec­es­sar­i­ly harsh. It’s about the struc­ture and nature of an inquiry that can lead to break­through. How could you use the prin­ci­ple to make more every day improve­ments? Going back to the five exam­ples at the begin­ning of this essay, the fol­low­ing ques­tions could have been asked by the leaders:

“How am I per­son­al­ly con­tribut­ing to the prob­lem of a hes­i­tant and closed man­age­ment team?”

“How am I stand­ing in the way of the high lev­el col­lab­o­ra­tions I say I want?

“How is my own behav­ior inter­fer­ing with the ‘community of prac­tice’ work­place I’m try­ing to foster?

“What am I doing that pre­vents my man­age­ment group from becom­ing more self-managing?”

“In what ways am I work­ing against the val­ues of our com­pa­ny that I say I want to uphold and promote?”

Sim­ple ques­tions, yes, but rarely asked and rarely answered with the truth. And tak­en in this per­son­al form, they real­ly only scratch the sur­face of the Incon­gru­en­cy Principle’s pow­er. Since the lead­er­s’ behav­iors set the cul­ture of the work­place, learn­ing from con­tra­dic­tions active­ly empow­ers oth­ers broad­ly and makes learn­ing collaborative.

Imag­ine, for exam­ple, the last case, the CEO whose own behav­ior con­tra­dicts the val­ues of the com­pa­ny. These val­ues are stat­ed in cus­tomer lit­er­a­ture. They are broad­ly adver­tised as part of the company’s inter­nal super­vi­so­ry and man­age­ment train­ing pro­grams. They are, in essence, a core com­po­nent of the firm’s brand, it’s com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place dif­fer­en­tia­tor. So if the CEO begins to ask about him­self, the com­pa­ny is free to ask about itself. But if the CEO is not open to the con­tra­dic­to­ry data, isn’t learn­ing from the data, doesn’t want the data and con­tin­ues to behave defen­sive­ly, then the brand is nev­er lived — by him or any­one. The brand is not the vital force of the com­pa­ny. It can’t inspire.

This is, by the way, why val­ues train­ing pro­grams for staff are typ­i­cal­ly so use­less. If the lead­ers can­not them­selves show their own learn­ing based on the val­ues, why should any­one else? And we go back to a default cul­ture that assumes defen­sive incongruence.

But imag­ine if we could make a prac­tice of ask­ing and learn­ing from the data about where the brand isn’t real — what­ev­er that brand is. We could find all the places where change is need­ed, exact­ly where inno­va­tion needs to occur. And sup­pose that we didn’t dis­so­ci­ate the infor­ma­tion from our­selves; that it isn’t about the oth­er peo­ple, and our right­eous inter­ven­tions to stop them from doing the wrong things, but our hum­ble inter­ven­tions to learn about our own self-con­tra­dic­tions and blind spots? What then would be possible?

Why We Don’t Do This

What would pre­vent this hon­est ask­ing and hon­est answer­ing? Here we come to the nub of the mat­ter. We don’t ask and get straight answers to these sim­ple ques­tions because our inter­nal defen­sive process­es gen­er­al­ly won’t allow it — unless we are under, as Bob was, spe­cif­ic duress with sig­nif­i­cant rewards at stake. Our day-to-day iden­ti­ties, the process of inter­nal sta­bil­i­ty and con­gru­ence, will not grant per­mis­sion because we think, at some sub­lim­i­nal lev­el, that we will dis­in­te­grate with the incon­gru­en­cy, rather than trans­form. Once that poten­tial dis­in­te­gra­tion is scent­ed the dogs at the fence line of cur­rent iden­ti­ty begin to bark — and we step back from the edge, say­ing we don’t need to go there, have already been there, there’s noth­ing there to find, oth­ers motives are sus­pect, and it will take too long, any­way. The habit of ratio­nal­iza­tion steps in.

Defen­sive­ness is exact­ly that, a habit and a reac­tion, not con­scious­ness, not the delib­er­ate, sin­cere inten­tion and choice-mak­ing (soul-mak­ing) that can bypass defensiveness. 

Instead, the defen­sive reac­tions con­tin­ue to feed a pre­dictable, tra­di­tion­al work­place cul­ture in which speak­ing up is feared because of pos­si­ble reper­cus­sions and the belief it will sim­ply do no good. What we have instead of aware­ness is a self-rein­forc­ing sys­tem of low inter­per­son­al and orga­ni­za­tion­al trust. After all, fear-based cul­tures are actu­al­ly the safer ones, designed to pre­vent dis­rup­tion by not going near what is threat­en­ing. We nev­er ask the hard ques­tions and grap­ple with hard answers — because they deal with ourselves.

This sug­gests that the core prob­lem is first and fore­most one of the lead­er­s’ lack of self-trust, which is not exact­ly the same as low con­fi­dence. A per­son may appear to have a great deal of self-con­fi­dence, but actu­al­ly have very low self-trust. Self-trust is about being able to trust in a flu­id iden­ti­ty, know­ing that we are much larg­er than what­ev­er incon­gru­en­cy is dis­cov­ered and that we will reforge our­selves nat­u­ral­ly, trans­form­ing in process­es called grow­ing and learn­ing and wis­dom. It’s because we don’t trust trans­form­ing as peo­ple and as com­mu­ni­ties that the defens­es work so hard to pro­tect us and we must cre­ate fear-based cul­tures as a blan­ket of denial and dismissal.

Each of the five lead­ers men­tioned at the begin­ning of this essay lacked exact­ly this qual­i­ty of self-trust. What they did have was a strong sense of pride and con­fi­dence about the changes they felt they should fos­ter — it’s what they stood for, after all — and you can­not, I believe, real­ly sep­a­rate peo­ple from their impor­tant ideas. With­out self-trust, how­ev­er, if my ideas or direc­tions are ques­tioned, then I am in jeop­ardy, too and my defens­es are up, pre­cise­ly to pro­tect those ideas and the per­son behind them.

Although our orga­ni­za­tions do not get the best when defens­es are trig­gered, cul­tur­al­ly we are still mak­ing believe the ideas we are per­son­al­ly invest­ed in can be sep­a­rat­ed from our feel­ings. We pre­tend, we con­vince our­selves, we think we are get­ting the best, oper­at­ing under an increas­ing­ly schiz­o­phrenic for­mu­la that rates high­ly the per­son who has “the best idea” while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly expect­ing “collaboration” and coop­er­a­tive exe­cu­tion. Like as not we end up adopt­ing the idea of some­one who is no longer real­ly learn­ing, who has high con­fi­dence but low self-trust, who dom­i­nates well. As a con­se­quence, col­lec­tive ener­gy wanes, real inno­va­tion stalls while under the table each of our sep­a­rate defen­sive sys­tems con­tin­ues to react, bounc­ing in pre­dictable ways off any­one else in the same conversation.

Protecting Our Strengths

I’ve helped teams map out these defen­sive exchanges and mal­func­tions, based on a descrip­tion of indi­vid­ual defen­sive styles. What seems to be essen­tial in know­ing your own defen­sive style is often less about the how than the what. The how is about behav­ior, such as blam­ing oth­ers, get­ting mad or pushy, with­draw­ing, brood­ing, becom­ing hes­i­tant, con­flict avoidant, clever, manip­u­la­tive, argu­men­ta­tive, sar­cas­tic and so on — the way you go about pro­tect­ing your­self from a threat. But it is the what that is often the big­ger prob­lem. The what rep­re­sents the self-iden­ti­fied qual­i­ties of myself that I will defend at all costs, all aspects of a pre­ferred self-con­cept such as my integri­ty, my intel­li­gence, my pas­sion, my skill in this or that dis­ci­pline, my com­mu­ni­ca­tion, my love of oth­ers, my sense of equi­ty or fair­ness, my mis­sion in life, and so on and so on.

These are my self-defined strengths and, iron­i­cal­ly, it is these that make me the most vul­ner­a­ble. For when they are under attack (or I think they are or I am doubt­ing them myself), that’s when the how gets most active. Most of us have some sense of our down­sides, but we are not like­ly to feel demol­ished when they are point­ed out. We’ve already accept­ed them. When the strengths are in jeop­ardy, how­ev­er, the armies must march or retreat. We must fight or flee. We must shut down or try to con­trol. These ancient reac­tions of the rep­til­ian brain act up and then we act out.

Go back and look at the five lead­ers and con­sid­er what self-assessed strengths might be behind the defen­sive reac­tions. What you find are peo­ple who want to believe they are paragons of var­i­ous virtues — and don’t we all have this instinct? It behooves us noth­ing to say these five are not like us. They aren’t the exception.

In a way the com­pe­ti­tion for best idea these days is very much like say­ing we are com­pet­ing to be the best, smartest per­son — but we try to frame it in dis­guis­ing ways that deny the feel­ing. We believe in sci­ence. We believe in the val­ue of an abstract rea­sons and ways of being right. In this sense not much has changed between old style hier­ar­chies and new birthed mer­i­toc­ra­cies. In the lat­ter, above the water-line is the stat­ed inten­tion of fos­ter­ing a trust-based col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it in a flat­tened, peer-direct­ed envi­ron­ment, but below the water-line dom­i­na­tion is still at work, and it is this cul­ture of dom­i­na­tion based on what we think are our per­son­al strengths that makes the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple both valu­able and poten­tial­ly dis­turb­ing over the long haul. For the Incon­gru­en­cy Prin­ci­ple ques­tions our self-per­ceived strengths and the dual­is­tic cul­ture behind them, call­ing them out as the poten­tial flaws they can be. The Prin­ci­ple encour­ages us to go ever deep­er, to gen­uine­ly trust in our per­son­al trans­for­ma­tions, no mat­ter what cul­ture or orga­ni­za­tion­al design sur­rounds us or what self-con­tra­dic­tions we find, as a mat­ter of liv­ing a vital brand and a vital life. This makes the Prin­ci­ple itself a kind of “meta-strength,” but also a vul­ner­a­ble one, maybe even a spir­i­tu­al one, too; cer­tain­ly an unfin­ished one as all strengths tru­ly are. It’s the sort of lead­er­ship strength that can look sus­pi­cious­ly like a weak­ness to the con­stant­ly roam­ing rep­til­ian eye.

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