A Thread of Consciousness

Open­ness is like a thread of con­scious­ness span­ning points that are often total­ly unconscious.

The head of a man­u­fac­tur­ing firm owned by a major nation­al cor­po­ra­tion was talk­ing to me about the senior man­age­ment team that report­ed to him. He asked me as a con­sul­tant, “Why aren’t they more open with me? Why don’t they speak up when they have the chance?” I did my best to explain to him some of the cul­tur­al dynam­ics of mis­trust in orga­ni­za­tions and how some of his own behav­iors, such as his judg­ments, demands and a sense of his own stature, might be play­ing into these dynam­ics. The Pres­i­dent expressed increduli­ty and doubt­ed the idea such dynam­ics might be oper­at­ing to pre­vent com­mu­ni­ca­tion with him. From his per­spec­tive, he felt quite close to his team. The issue from his stand­point was their competence.

But this fail­ure to notice his own style was only one facet of his uncon­scious­ness. Anoth­er was relat­ed to his behav­ior “up the system.” As our con­ver­sa­tion pro­gressed we slipped into a dis­cus­sion of his plans to talk to his boss­es at the cor­po­rate lev­el. Here he sought my advice on how to strate­gi­cal­ly posi­tion him­self and the needs of his own firm with them. When I sug­gest­ed he be quite open with them about how they were and were not sup­port­ing his enter­prise, he pushed back on me. “Oh, no, I couldn’t approach them that way!” Obvi­ous­ly I was sug­gest­ing some­thing too direct for his com­fort. He want­ed some­thing more strate­gic and guar­an­teed. And, in the moment, he cer­tain­ly wasn’t mak­ing the con­nec­tion about his own behav­ior being very like the senior man­agers he had ear­li­er crit­i­cized for fail­ing to speak up to him. Short­ly there­after our ses­sion ended.

It was only lat­er that night, alone at a Japan­ese restau­rant that I dealt with my own uncon­scious­ness about our con­ver­sa­tion. I had missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to draw a con­nec­tion – to help my client use his knowl­edge of how it feels to speak up the sys­tem to gain insight about the dynam­ics with­in his own orga­ni­za­tion. The ques­tion I had to ask myself was how could I have missed this? And the answer was clear: I was uncon­scious­ly afraid to tell him. I uncon­scious­ly feared his get­ting upset, judg­ing me, get­ting rid of me as a sound­ing board and con­fi­dante. Which is, of course, what most of his senior man­agers were also expe­ri­enc­ing. So instead I had let him off the hook, behaved as many oth­ers had around him, and rein­forced to him that his own hes­i­ta­tions to be open were cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the hes­i­ta­tions of oth­ers. I con­firmed that he and his sit­u­a­tion were special.

In the moment, fear trig­gers our igno­rance and self-pro­tec­tive blind­ness­es. Our respons­es become polit­i­cal and mol­li­fy­ing. A cocoon of habit and self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion takes over. The per­son­al wall goes up before the truth can be spo­ken. I had failed first to be open with myself — then with him.

And what if I had been open with him? Would he have under­stood? I don’t know and it hard­ly mat­ters because this sto­ry is less about him than it is about how per­va­sive fear-based uncon­scious­ness is, how eas­i­ly the threads of con­scious­ness get blown away. It’s about how that day he and I and his team all had some­thing in common.