On Leadership Shadows

The Shad­ow is one of Carl Jung’s most pow­er­ful con­cepts, an arche­type of per­son­al and col­lec­tive uncon­scious­ness. Its rel­e­vance is that all of us have parts of our­selves that we do not know, and yet in the maze of our lives, we seek unknow­ing­ly to under­stand. Shad­ow, said Jung, is every­thing we have no wish to be — an amal­gam of weak­ness­es and embar­rass­ing, shame­ful qual­i­ties as well as a great deal of repressed “stuff” (such as an unex­pressed cre­ativ­i­ty) that is pure gold. All of what we attempt to hide from the world by first hid­ing from our­selves is Shad­ow. The inner push-pull of need­ing to know our­selves yet keep­ing parts of who we are dis­tant from con­scious­ness results not just in inner con­flict but also the reflec­tion of that con­flict in our out­er lives. We dis­cov­er our­selves in repeat­ing pat­terns of events and rela­tion­ships that we have attract­ed, draw­ing us clos­er to know­ing what we need to know, but are afraid to know about who we are. As Jung report­ed­ly said (per­haps this is only a para­phrase), “What you don’t bring to con­scious­ness appears in your life as fate.”

If you want to know more about Shad­ow, you might try this book or this one.

The rel­e­vance of the Shad­ow arche­type for lead­er­ship is stag­ger­ing. For it is pre­cise­ly these hid­den qual­i­ties and char­ac­ter­is­tics that leak into rela­tion­ships with those being led. It is often said that the cul­ture of a work­place is the prod­uct of a lead­er’s own per­son­al­i­ty. But how much does the leader know of his or her per­son­al­i­ty and its actu­al effects? For exam­ple a leader will ask oth­ers to over­come a prob­lem fac­ing an orga­ni­za­tion, and in the efforts of peo­ple to over­come that prob­lem they dis­cov­er how much the leader is uncon­scious­ly col­lud­ing in cre­at­ing the prob­lem. How­ev­er, this is undis­cuss­able with the leader, lest there be retaliation. 

Some years ago I lis­tened to the CEO of a large mid­west­ern com­pa­ny make a speech to hun­dreds of super­vi­sors in his orga­ni­za­tion, exhort­ing them to help sup­port and help grow the employ­ees who they were priv­i­leged enough to work with. “You are moth­er and father to these young peo­ple who start their work­ing life here,” I remem­ber him say­ing. Lat­er, talk­ing with peo­ple who had been with the com­pa­ny for some time, I learned that he had the bad habit of angri­ly and abu­sive­ly dress­ing employ­ees down in pub­lic — some­thing peo­ple accept­ed about him, but per­haps not exact­ly in line with his stat­ed pref­er­ence for super­vi­so­ry rela­tion­ships. And, of course, this con­tra­dic­tion was undis­cuss­able. Some­times after his tantrums it was rumored he had to lay down on a cot in his office to sleep, thor­ough­ly exhaust­ed by the scathing exer­cise of his pow­er. In an entire­ly dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, in which I hap­pened to be doing some inter­view­ing, the CEO had a rep­u­ta­tion for blow­ing up in a way that caused his pant legs to hike up, with employ­ees rat­ing him on whether today’s explo­sion was a “one leg or a two leg tantrum.” And then there was one of two top man­agers at a nuclear pow­er plant who had a rep­u­ta­tion for his famous “melt­downs.” It appeared that all of these men in top lead­er­ship roles sim­ply accept­ed their angry reac­tions and ratio­nal­ized them away as unim­por­tant aspects of their own styles even while pub­licly espous­ing an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of per­son­al and cor­po­rate values. 

How could this be so? How can such incon­gruity exist in a sin­gle person? 

Shad­ow.

And we all have it. You and I may say to our­selves, but that’s not me. I’m not such a hyp­ocrite. And in fact, I may say, I con­demn such hypocrisy. Peo­ple like that make me sick, I may say with­out even a momen­t’s reflec­tion. And yet I remain unaware of how I real­ly feel — which is angry and fear­ful and self-right­eous. You see? And while you or I might think we are not doing so, in that moment we find our own ways into revenge, if only in the way we think about an “us” and a “them.” We have already sub­tly learned to retal­i­ate against the peo­ple we say we hate because, after all, they retal­i­ate against us. This is com­mon­ly known as the begin­ning of a war.

In a way we are all about two or three years old when it comes to Shad­ow. Have you ever seen a young child put her hands over her eyes and repeat that charm­ing provo­ca­tion, “You can’t see me!” That’s how Shad­ow oper­ates. We put our hands over our own eyes and imag­ine no one can see us. Where Shad­ow is con­cerned, we can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between our state and the state of oth­ers — but we think we can. And Lord help the per­son who sug­gests oth­er­wise in an effort to awak­en us. This is one way to define what it means to be unconscious.

Most­ly, we find it easy to see Shad­ow in oth­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly when our own Shad­ow is trig­gered. Every­where else we may notice incon­gruity, con­tra­di­tion, weak­ness, every­where but in our­selves. But per­haps our very cer­tain­ty that we see anoth­er’s Shad­ow is an aspect of our own still wait­ing to be discovered. 

A super­vi­sor in a train­ing class I was con­duct­ing ner­vous­ly stood up and con­demned the lack of integri­ty among senior man­agers in her orga­ni­za­tion. It was a small orga­ni­za­tion and they were were in the room, some­what embar­rassed and angry. Late the next day, as the ses­sion con­tin­ued, she went through waste paper bas­kets search­ing for crum­pled notes by these man­agers, search­ing for some­thing that would prove her ear­li­er indict­ment of them. “See,” she said, when she lat­er brought me the notes she had fished out. “See how they are!” Indeed, the crum­pled papers proved that the senior man­agers had been pass­ing notes that com­ment­ed about some of the peo­ple in the ses­sion, then throw­ing them away. The com­ments were in poor taste, bad jokes, an exam­ple of bad judg­ment all. But for her they had also become some­thing much big­ger. Before she’d brought them to me, she’d tak­en them around in the back­ground to every­one else in the ses­sion, includ­ing the peo­ple com­ment­ed about, a pro­found­ly embar­rass­ing “gotcha” in its own right. Gen­er­al­ly, I’ve come to think of Shad­ow as any time we enact some form of retal­i­a­tion while claim­ing it’s the oth­ers who lack integri­ty. Were the man­agers jus­ti­fied in doing what they did? Was the super­vi­sor jus­ti­fied? You decide.

Shad­ow can be a tremen­dous teacher — if we can stand the process of learn­ing. The fel­low at the nuclear plant had an epiphany one day that his behav­ior was get­ting in his own way. He had thought of him­self as a “good leader” and a “good per­son,” and one day he began to acknowl­edge how embar­rassed he was about his blow-ups. How could such an insight hap­pen? I don’t know. Maybe it was a book he read, maybe a moment with one of his chil­dren, maybe he just got tired of it. Any­way, he did what we all must do, which is turn and face the Shad­ow, and ask for help. It was an hon­or for me to help him. He already had so many of the answers. I asked him, “Do you know when you are about to blow up?” He told me, yes, he did, and I asked him how he knew. He said he could tell by the force with which he was grip­ping some­thing, the edge of the table, or a pen, or the arm of a chair. He said he could see his knuck­les turn white. “What will you do?” I asked him. He found his own solu­tion by promis­ing him­self he would notice his anger before it over­came him and he would leave the room for a moment before try­ing to con­tin­ue the con­ver­sa­tion. Now this does­n’t ask the deep­er ques­tions about the source of the offense that was dri­ving him to blow-up so often. Some­times that’s the prod­uct of life con­di­tion­ing such as pro­ject­ing old hurts as a child onto col­leagues who hap­pen to use the wrong tone of voice. But it was enough for him to begin to change the game. I remem­ber him say­ing to me “I used to think I was­n’t that kind of boss, but as it turns out I am that kind of boss. A few days after we had a con­ver­sa­tion he called me to tell me about an inci­dent in which he phys­i­cal­ly got up and walked out of the room for moment. When he came back, qui­eter, calmer, the con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ued unin­ter­rupt­ed and respect­ful­ly, and after­wards he felt so proud that he was able to make this small change for him­self and the orga­ni­za­tion. He had, of course, acknowl­edged to the group before­hand that he was now work­ing on this aspect of him­self and would they help by allow­ing him a moment if he need­ed it? This I believe is what a brave per­son, learn­ing, looks like.

Of course, for any one of us, it isn’t just anger that can leak. It can be just about any­thing; self­ish­ness, greed, manip­u­la­tion, envy, revenge. I’ve come to think that the dynam­ic of retal­i­a­tion and the fear of retal­i­a­tion in orga­ni­za­tions is dri­ven by indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive Shad­ow, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Shad­ow of lead­ers who do not notice their own emo­tion­al slides, or who have learned to excuse them as either nec­es­sary or unim­por­tant to their style. Shad­ow trig­gers Shad­ow and soon the cul­ture per­pet­u­ates itself as a con­fused mix­ture of the way we say we are and the way we real­ly are. 

One thing seems cer­tain. We are respon­si­ble for our Shad­ows, as much as our more con­scious deci­sions and actions. If we turn to face our own crap — what­ev­er it is — a bless­ing can descend. You don’t have to be a reli­gious per­son to sense that redemp­tion is hid­den in the Shad­ow as much as the sin or that lib­er­a­tion is con­cealed by the kar­ma that chains us to the very old­est pat­terns of our lives.

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