When French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the phrase “bad faith,†he was referring to any form of self-deception that denies the existence of human freedom. When someone says he “had no choice,” this points directly to an illusion, for Sartre contended that we always have a choice; even in not choosing we make one. When we pretend to be forced by conditions or obligations to make a certain decision, we are lying to ourselves. We always have freedom, although the choosing can be enormously difficult or painful precisely because there are always consequences.
While I’m not a fan of all existentialist thought, I do find the concept of bad faith to be fundamental to leading authentically. I recall working with a government executive who led a 2,000 person organization. I suggested one evening that perhaps he could intervene in a situation where key staff were banding together and hiring personal lawyers to address the imminent possibility of inter-employee lawsuits in his agency. Tensions were running very high and the clear desire of many was that he spend a few minutes talking with people, reducing peoples’ fears, encouraging and supporting them to work through the problems. He looked at me in complete frustration:
“What you don’t understand, Dan,” he said to me, “is that I have no power.” He went on to explain how his actions were constrained by law, by the prerogatives of the Human Resources Director who reported to him, by community and internal politics. There was nothing, after all, that he could do to prevent people from hiring lawyers. Listening to him, he certainly seemed buffeted by forces beyond his control. He seemed to have turned himself into a a dead or passive thing rather than standing in the place of his personal and organizational capability. This is what I think it means to operate in bad faith.
Every day in little ways we can hide from our choice points and fail to take direct responsibility for our decisions. I believe we do so out of a fear of who we are, a fear of being an outlier of some kind. We worry about our losses — reputation, money, stature, friendships. And in these economic times, the temptation to hunker down, to be less real to ourselves and others, to avoid our choices and to go along becomes increasingly palatable. And yet this is the last thing that we need right now as organizations. This is the time when the creative human spirit exercising freedom to decide, to choose, will be the most valuable.
I remember years ago in another organization facing layoffs how the leader wanted to keep the bad news hidden until the last possible moment. He excused this by saying that he didn’t want to “scare people.” But of course there are no secrets really, and people knew that change was coming. They were already scared, and only he seemed not to know it. His misplaced “protection” of his employees actually treated them like things or children, rather than as mature individuals who also possess the freedom to choose. In truth the only person being protected was himself. He had told himself a story about why he could not be more open.
In the current and coming difficult times, we are both together in our hard choices and alone with them. Sartre also said that freedom involves the anquish of making difficult decisions — ones where we have no roadmap and those potentially hurtful to others. We’ll have plenty of such choices, including how to change our organizations, how to communicate those changes, how to foster and support a sense of strength and responsibility in everyone. There is a buddhist saying to the effect that “even walking across a meadow kills a few blades of grass.” This means that if we choose to cross the meadow, to make change, then it will necessarily have an effect. If we can’t handle that thought, movement of any kind quickly becomes impossible.
As I write these words, I feel in my chest the burdens and strengths that have come from my own choices. I feel my past, my projects, relationships retained and lost…my decisions. Sometimes I have experienced regret for those choices. As Sheryl Crow sings in The Difficult Kind,”…there ain’t nothing like regret to remind you you’re alive.” But in the end, all the choices add up and hold around a center that is the person I have determined myself to be.
Existential perspectives push us — face first — into the walls of what we don’t want to own, what we displace and discard, what we rationalize about ourselves and our beliefs. We are pushed into all those things we want to be unconscious about in ourselves. In such bright light, as leaders, we may find that some of our truths are our most telling falsehoods, some of our righteousness is based on insensitivity and ignorance, some of our choices for ourselves and others are nothing but a disaster in the making. The boon of such perspectives, as hard as stone, is their requirement that we wake up from our passivity, that we wake from the bad dreams of a naive self.
Once awakened, I believe, then something else has room to come in. (This is where I leave the existential pack.) Call it grace or compassion, maybe the waters of forgiveness. It goes by many names, and it is true and real only if it flows upon the bedrock of what actually is.
