Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box

Self-betrayal is the germ that creates the disease of self-deception.

“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.”

We have discovered that clients are able to understand and apply the concepts we teach more easily if we characterize our work in terms of “mindset change” rather than “way-of-being change.”

“That’s right,” Bud said. “In the box, leaving is just another way to blame. It’s just a continuation of my box. I take my self-justifying feelings with me. Now it may be that in certain situations, leaving is the right thing to do.

If people act in ways that challenge the claim made by a self-justifying image, we see them as threats. If they reinforce the claim made by a self-justifying image, we see them as allies. If they fail to matter to a self-justifying image, we see them as unimportant.

The more people we can find to agree with our side of the story, the more justified we will feel in believing that side of the story. I might recruit my spouse to join with me in blaming my son, for example, or I might gossip about others in order to gather allies at work in my collusion against another person or department.

“Yes. I want you to think about how and whether you really focused on results during the time you worked with him. I want you to consider whether you were open or closed to correction, whether you actively sought to learn and enthusiastically taught when you could have. Whether you held yourself fully accountable in your work, whether you took or s

Remember, people primarily respond not to what we do but to how we’re being—whether we’re in or out of the box toward them.”

The out-of-the-box nature of your experience with Bud and Kate invited you to do something that we never do in the box—it invited you to question whether you were in fact as out of the box as you had assumed you were in other areas of your life.

“Here at Zagrum, we use the term ‘what-focus’ to describe whatever a person is focused on achieving. Out of the box, my what-focus at work is results. In the box, by contrast, my what-focus is justification. That’s the first reason why the box always undercuts results.”