Self-deception—our tendency to see the world around us in a distorted way—is a common personal and organizational problem. Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute explains how self-deception derails our relationships and keeps organizations and leaders from achieving the results they want.
Instead of focusing on producing results, many leaders are trapped “in the box” of distorted thinking—they blame others to justify their own failures. They create the “people” problems that plague most organizations. Through the fictional story of a new executive joining an unusual company, this book tells leaders how to get “out of the box”—but you don't have to be a leader to apply the principles to your life and workplace.
You’re in a state of self-deception when you know or want to do the right thing but don’t do it. By not acting, you betray yourself, then feel guilty or frustrated by your behavior. To justify it, you blame the other person for causing a problem. You’re deceiving yourself about your behavior and motivations.
You don't see that you’re causing the problem and therefore you can’t resolve it. The book refers to this deluded state as being trapped “in the box.”
For instance, you betray and then deceive yourself when you:
A company can’t solve problems that are getting in the way of results if the people causing those problems are in the box, or unable to see how they’re responsible.
When you’re in the box, you see only your own interests and have a distorted view of others—you see them as objects or as problems standing in your way. In contrast, when you’re out of the box and not limited by your distorted view, you see people as being human like you and having equally legitimate interests.
How you feel toward someone depends on whether you’re viewing them from in or out of your box. Here’s an example of how this works:
An in-the-box view: As a business traveler boards a bus, he notices there are few open seats. There’s an empty seat next to him but he doesn’t want to sit with anyone, so he puts his briefcase on the seat and spreads out a newspaper in front of him.
He viewed the other passengers as threats or problems rather than as people like him with the same right to a seat. He sees himself as more important and everyone else and their needs as secondary (he’s deluded or deceiving himself).
An out-of-the-box view: A couple is traveling together but the bus is crowded and they can’t find seats side-by-side. A woman with an empty seat beside her offers to take another seat so the couple can sit together. She sees them as people with needs and interests like hers. She’s outside the box and sees the things with a clear view.
On the two buses, the same thing is happening on the surface—both the business traveler and the woman are sitting next to empty seats. But their mental states of being in and out of the box are different.
How you truly feel about a situation or person—whether you're in or out of the box—comes through regardless of your words. Others sense how you feel about them and respond in ways that may be the opposite of what you want.
The way you get into a box, or become trapped by self-deception, in the first place is by betraying yourself. You betray yourself when you choose not to do what you know you should do or actually want to do—for instance, not holding an elevator for someone, or feeling that you should apologize to someone but not doing so.
Once you’ve betrayed yourself, you act in destructive ways to justify or rationalize it:
By blaming and mistreating others, you provoke unconstructive behavior from them in return. Now, they’re in the box too, and you get into a destructive cycle with them. You blame them, they react to your blame, you blame them even more, they react, and so on. You reinforce each other’s reasons to stay in the box and act badly.
To justify your behavior, you each need the other person to behave badly. You end up undermining the effectiveness of everything you do and making things worse.
Here’s an example of how mutual blame and reinforcement work:
There are two ways distorted thinking or being in the box keeps companies from getting results or accomplishing their goals.
1) When you’re in the box, you’re focused on self-justification—you wish for others’ failure so you can feel vindicated for blaming them. But wanting others to fail goes against your company’s or organization's interests.
2) Also, when you’re in the box and focused on yourself, you view results in a distorted way. People may describe you as results-focused, but you’re mainly interested in using results to make yourself look good.
You prioritize your results over other people’s results and may trample others to get your results. By being in your box, you provoke others—for instance, by withholding information or resources—and they respond by doing the same things. You feel justified in blaming them and they feel justified in blaming you.
This kind of contagion can easily spread through an organization, so that instead of focusing on results, people and departments align against each other. Although they were hired to help the organization succeed, they end up taking satisfaction in others’ failures and resent anyone’s success.
In addition to undermining a company’s results, distorted in-the-box thinking creates “people” problems that can seriously damage or sink the organization. They include:
In-the-box thinking (self-deception) starts with self-betrayal, so addressing self-betrayal is the solution to “people” problems.
When individuals fail to do things they should for coworkers, they betray themselves and blame others to justify their behavior. As the problems escalate, everyone participates in a collective betrayal of not helping the organization achieve its results, as they were hired to do.
The way to get out of the box, or escape your distorted thinking about others, is to see them as people rather than obstacles or threats. You need to see others as people with needs on a par with your own needs and stop resisting your sense of obligation to others.
As soon as you stop resisting and choose to respond to others’ needs, you’re being true to yourself. You no longer need your self-justifying thoughts and feelings—and you’re out of the box.
This is difficult when self-justifying behavior has become a habit, but it’s doable one step at a time. The fact is that while you’re in the box with some people, you’re probably and out of the box with others at the same time. This is a positive sign because being out of the box with someone means you have the capacity to change your perspective more generally and be out of the box with others in your life as well.
When you’re out of the box with someone, your awareness of their needs can help you break down your boxes with others. When you start seeing one relationship more clearly, you begin seeing others more clearly as well.
The more you stop resisting others’ needs and respond to them instead, the more you’ll stay out of the box. This doesn’t mean doing everything for everyone—it means doing what you can. Appreciating others and treating them considerately is liberating and frees up the energy required for self-justification.
To manage outside the box, leaders need to be prepared to handle the most common workplace self-betrayal: employees get into a box in terms of their relationships with coworkers and undermine the company’s results.
Here’s how it develops: When most people start a job, they’re thankful to have it and feel an obligation to contribute to the company’s success. They start out wanting to do their best, but over time their feelings change. They begin to develop negative feelings toward coworkers and to have problems. They get into boxes.
Managers who are in the box themselves, or thinking in distorted ways, can’t fix these employee problems. But being out of the box and seeing the situation clearly allows you, as a manager, to assess responsibility and solve the problems. Because you’re not focused on blaming others and justifying your own actions—but on meeting the company’s needs—you’re in a position to help employees stay on track.
From an employee’s perspective, it’s challenging to work for a boss who’s often in the box, and you can get pulled into a box of your own, in which you justify your failings by blaming your boss’s bad behavior. Of course, once you respond from within your box, you need your boss to continue being a bad boss to maintain your justifications.
Instead, when your boss is in the box and behaves badly, you should take note of the effects and resolve to be a better leader yourself if you get the chance someday. People may follow an in-the-box manager because they feel they have no other option. But forcing allegiance isn’t leadership. In contrast, people choose to follow out-of-the-box leaders.
Your success as a leader depends on avoiding self-betrayal by being true to yourself and responding to others’ needs. When you’re out of the box of self-deception, you can support out-of-the-box behavior in others. Leaders owe it to themselves, their company, and their employees to be out of the box.
Self-deception—our tendency to see the world around us in a distorted way—is a common personal and organizational problem that deserves more attention. It determines how we relate to others as well as how they respond to us. In Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute, the authors explain how self-deception can derail personal relationships and keep organizations and leaders from achieving the results.
Self-deception, or a skewed view of reality in which we feel others are always to blame, keeps us from solving problems or even recognizing that we have problems. When we’re self-deluded, we don’t see that we’re often the cause of problems. For example, when a baby learning to crawl gets stuck under a chair, she may push against the chair. Her solution for getting out doesn’t work, and it may make things worse and increase her frustration because she can’t understand that she's creating the problem.
Our self-deception hinders our ability to make good decisions, undermining our leadership effectiveness and happiness.
This book, published by the Arbinger Institute (no authors are named), is about how to solve the problem of self-deception, both in individuals and organizations. Through the fictional story of a new executive joining an unusual company, the book explains how and why self-deception develops and how to counter it.
You’re in a state of self-deception when you know or want to do the right thing but don’t do it. By not acting, you betray yourself, then feel guilty or frustrated by your behavior. To justify it, you blame the other person for causing a problem. You’re deceiving yourself about your behavior and motivations.
You don't see that you’re causing the problem and therefore you can’t resolve it. The book refers to this deluded state as being trapped “in the box.”
For instance, you betray and then deceive yourself when you:
Tom Callum was a month into his new job leading a division at Zagrum Company when he was requested to attend a day-long meeting with Bud Jefferson, executive vice president and chief assistant to the company president, Kate Stenarude.
Colleagues had told Tom that new employees’ meetings with Bud were the key to the company's exceptional performance, so Tom looked forward to learning the success secret. When Tom arrived for the meeting, Bud immediately cut to the chase. He shocked Tom by announcing that Tom had a problem he needed to solve in order to survive at Zagrum Company. A big part of the problem was that Tom didn’t recognize he had a problem in the first place, although everyone around him, from his coworkers to his family, could see it.
Bud explained that problems like Tom’s develop when people put their own needs first and justify treating others badly without accepting or realizing they’re doing so. Tom, like most people, was deluded about his behavior. Under questioning from Bud, Tom acknowledged feeling “stuck” with some incompetent or lazy employees. But Tom felt he was treating them appropriately by being direct in pointing out their faults or by manipulating some of them to get what he wanted.
Bud pointed out, though, that Tom wasn’t handling people as effectively as he thought he was, and likely was making things worse. His sense of reality was distorted—he was focused on others’ faults when he himself was the problem.
Bud explained that if you’re treating people appropriately, but still feel they’re a problem or don’t respect them, that message (how you really feel about them) comes through—and they respond defensively.
Bud acknowledged once having the same shortcoming of being blind to his impact on others, which was why he could help Tom succeed. Bud described an experience early in his career when, as a young lawyer, he participated in putting together a big financing deal. As Bud focused on his part of the deal, he isolated himself from colleagues and failed to work as a team player. He saw himself as committed and hardworking, but colleagues viewed him as disengaged and not committed to the team or its overall vision.
Bud began to resent his colleagues for questioning his commitment—he’d left his wife and newborn son and had flown across the country to work on the project, which he felt made him the most committed member of the team. He didn’t see that he was a problem for the team—he really just wanted to get the project done so he could go home. Bud was “stuck” in his experience.
In telling this story, Bud explained to Tom that when you can’t see or accept that you’re the problem, you’re “in the box,” metaphorically speaking. You have a distorted and limited perspective. This is an example of self-deception, one of the most common and destructive problems in organizations.
A company can’t solve problems that are getting in the way of results if the people causing those problems are unable or refuse to see how they’re responsible.
Bud’s story reminded Tom of a former boss at his old company, Chuck Staehli, who undermined teamwork because he treated employees badly and took credit for their successes. Yet Staehli would never have considered himself a problem.
Bud replied that Tom's former boss exemplified self-deception—the problem of not knowing or accepting that you’re creating a problem because you have a distorted view of reality.
To further illustrate how self-deception works and the harm it can cause, Bud told the story of a Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis, who pioneered antiseptic procedures among maternity patients at the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-1800s.
The hospital had a high mortality rate in the maternity ward—one in 10 women who gave birth there died. Semmelweis was determined to find the cause of the disease, then called “childbed fever,” but no matter what he tried, half the women who became ill with it died.
Semmelweis discovered that mothers in the section with the high mortality rate were treated by doctors, while those in another section with much lower mortality were being treated by midwives. He standardized the procedures in the two sections, but it made no difference. He then took a four-month leave to visit another hospital. While he was gone, the number of deaths dropped—so he concluded that the cause was something he was doing.
Because Vienna General was a research hospital, doctors spent time treating patients and also studying cadavers, but midwives only treated patients. Semmelweis decided he must be transmitting something harmful—some sort of “particles”—from cadavers to patients with his hands. He instituted a policy requiring doctors to wash their hands in a chlorine solution before treating patients—and the mortality rate plummeted to one in 100. This led to an eventual scientific understanding of germs.
The doctors had been carrying a germ they failed to recognize, which created a host of symptoms that all could have been prevented by one action: handwashing. In the same way, leaders in many companies spread a “germ” that causes a host of what we call “people” problems. However, the germ can be eliminated by one action.
Self-deception—leaders being trapped in the box—is the disease, Bud said. “People” problems, such as lack of motivation and resistance, are the symptoms, which are caused by the same germ.
The germ that creates and spreads dysfunction in organizations and families is self-betrayal. Part 2 of this book will explain how self-betrayal develops but can be eliminated in one step, allowing seemingly intractable “people” problems to be easily solved.
You’re in a state of self-deception when you don’t realize or accept that you’re creating a problem because you have a distorted view of reality. You blame others in order to rationalize or justify your failures. (You’re deceiving yourself about your behavior and motivations.) The book refers to this deluded state as being trapped “in the box.”
Think of a problem at work in which you were involved. How did the problem develop?
What was your role in the problem?
Looking at your answer to the above question, would you say that you’re “in the box” (your thinking is skewed toward blaming others and rationalizing your role) or “out of the box” (you clearly see what you could have done better)?
Leaders who are in the box create or exacerbate problems by trying to manipulate others. But your motivation comes through regardless of your words. Others sense how you really feel about them and respond in ways that may be the opposite of what you want.
People recognize and resent insincerity and manipulation. It doesn't matter what management technique you use—managing by walking around, practicing active listening, or showing interest by asking personal questions. People pick up on and respond to the feelings behind your actions (your feelings toward them).
Self-deceived leaders who try to manipulate others provoke them to resist. In contrast, an out-of-the-box leader’s words may be unpolished, but she still may motivate people and inspire loyalty. They grasp the underlying message of how she feels about people; the words themselves are secondary.
Here are some examples of how people pick up on insincerity at home and at work:
In both examples, the first person’s words and gestures didn’t match his feelings, and the other person responded with resistance.
As their meeting continued, Bud told Tom about an incident during his early years working for Zagrum company. He worked hard under a short deadline to complete every aspect of an assignment except a small one—he was tired after hours of work and decided this aspect was unimportant compared to all he'd accomplished. The next day, Bud presented his work to company executives, and noted at the end that he hadn’t finished the one small thing.
Lou Herbert, then company president, turned to then-vice president Kate Stenarude and reassigned the task to her. As Bud left the meeting feeling embarrassed, Lou walked him back to his office. After a friendly conversation, Lou gently said that he hoped Bud wouldn’t let the team down in the future. Lou was a legend in the company and industry for the way he inspired and motivated people—and now Bud understood why. He sensed that Lou cared about him and wanted him to do better, and he responded by improving his performance rather than by feeling resentful or threatened.
As Bud spoke, Tom realized that his own insincerity was part of the reason his wife Laura seemed increasingly resentful toward him. He was burying himself in his work and spending little time with her. She got the feeling from him that she and their son Todd were an annoyance and a burden to him. Their interactions had become superficial and strained.
People pay attention to the vibes they get from others, Bud noted. Some leaders can be awkward yet inspire commitment and results, while others can say exactly the right things but fail as leaders because people realize they’re insincere and discount what they say.
Regardless of what management technique you use, people pick up on and respond to the feelings behind your actions (your feelings toward them). If you convey insincerity or disrespect, they’ll resist or respond in ways that make matters worse.
Think of a time when someone asked for your opinion on something, and you sugar-coated your response because you didn’t want to offend them. Did they pick up on your true feelings? How do you know this?
How could you have conveyed your true feelings honestly, without offending them?
Think of a situation at work where you’ve held back until now from saying what you think. How can you convey your views in a constructive way?
When you’re in the box, you see only your own interests and have a distorted view of others—you see them as objects or as problems standing in your way. In contrast, when you’re out of the box and not limited by your distorted view, you see others as people like you with equally legitimate interests.
How you feel toward someone depends on whether you’re viewing them from within the box or from outside the box.
An in-the-box view: As Bud boarded a bus, he saw there were few open seats. There was one next to him but he didn’t want to sit with anyone, so he put his briefcase on the empty seat and spread out the newspaper he was reading.
Bud viewed the other passengers as threats or problems, not as people like him with the same right to a seat. He saw himself as more important and everyone else and their needs as secondary (he was deluded or self-deceived).
An out-of-the-box view: On another trip, Bud and his wife were traveling together but couldn’t find adjoining empty seats. A woman who was reading a newspaper had an empty seat beside her and offered to take another seat so Bud and his wife could sit together. She saw them as people with needs and interests like hers. She was outside the box and saw the things clearly, without distortion.
On both buses, the same thing was happening on the surface—both Bud and the woman traveler were sitting and reading newspapers. But their mental states of being in and out of the box were different.
Bud’s travel experience reminded Tom of a recent incident at work where he’d gotten upset and sharply criticized a woman—even threatening her job—who used his conference room and erased notes on the board without asking permission.
As Tom discussed the incident with Bud, it occurred to him that he’d been in the box and viewed the woman in a distorted way, as a threat or nuisance to him rather than as a person who probably had a good reason to use the room (although she shouldn’t have erased the board without asking). He hadn’t even asked her name.
Bud noted that the secret to Zagrum Company’s success was building a culture where they treated others as people rather than objects. While skill and talent are important at all companies, the difference at Zagrum was that its people-centered environment encouraged talented people to work harder. In contrast, leaders in most organizations are trapped in the box of self-deception and treat people as obstacles rather than inspiring them.
Bud told Tom that he knew the woman Tom had called on the carpet—Bud pointed out that her name was Joyce Mulman, which indicated to Tom that Bud had already heard about the incident. Bud suggested that not being interested in learning a person’s name is a sign you aren’t interested in knowing her as a person. He said Zagrum’s executive team made a point of learning as many employees’ names and faces as possible. It occurred to Tom that he didn’t know the names of more than 20 people in his division of 300.
Feeling defensive, Tom argued that he was justified in chastising Joyce. The problem was, Bud said, that Tom was in the box. The outcomes you get as a leader depend on where you’re coming from (inside or outside the box), not on what you do and say. Coming from the right place, you inspire people to do their best; coming from the wrong place, you exaggerate others’ faults and inspire their resentment.
This doesn’t mean you need to be soft or easy on poor performance. You can effectively deliver tough performance messages, as long as you do it from outside the box, where you have the other person's best interests in mind. That’s what Lou did when he chastised Bud for not completing his assignment.
But tough messages are ineffective if delivered from inside the box. If Lou had delivered his tough message from inside the box, where he was focused on negative feelings toward Bud rather than on Bud’s best interests, the outcome would have been the opposite (Bud would have resented him instead of improving). Lou would have created more problems for himself and the people around him.
The meeting with Bud broke for lunch and Tom took a walk to contemplate what he had heard. First, he decided to look for Joyce Mulman and apologize for mistreating her. Joyce’s office was empty so he sat down outside it and waited for her. When she arrived, she was surprised and alarmed to see him. She hastily apologized for her office being in disarray with reports stacked on the floor and her children’s artwork everywhere.
Tom assured her he hadn’t come to criticize but to apologize for his previous behavior. Joyce responded that she was sorry for erasing his notes from the board and had been worrying about it ever since. He said he should have handled it in a way that didn’t make her lose sleep, and they parted on better terms.
Then Tom called his wife Laura just to say hello—this surprised her because he normally only called about problems or when he wanted something. She responded skeptically when he said he was just calling to see how things were going. “You must want something, or you wouldn’t be calling,” she said. Tom felt defensive and instantly forgot the morning’s training. He asked why she had to make things difficult when he was just showing concern for her. She sarcastically thanked him for his sudden concern. He answered with more sarcasm, causing her to hang up. He decided he couldn’t help being in the box with her because she was so difficult.
When you’re in the box, you see only your own interests and have a distorted view of others—you see them as objects or as problems standing in your way. In contrast, when you’re out of the box, you see people as being human like you and having equally legitimate interests.
Think of an incident recently where you were “in the box” and treated someone (for instance, a family member or a store clerk) as an obstacle or problem. What was the incident?
What did you say or do? How did you feel afterward?
How do you think the other person viewed the incident? If you had considered that person’s view, how would you have handled the situation differently?
The way you get into a box, or become trapped by self-deception, is by betraying yourself. You betray yourself when you choose not to do what you know you should do or actually want to do—for instance, not holding an elevator for someone or feeling that you should apologize to someone but not doing so.
Once you’ve betrayed yourself, you act in destructive ways to justify or rationalize it:
Over time, certain behaviors and justifications can become habitual for you and you apply them (carry your box with you) in many situations.
As he walked back to the meeting room feeling frustrated, Tom encountered the company CEO, Kate Stenarude, who had succeeded Lou Herbert as president. She was on the way to join their meeting.
Kate asked how it was going, and Tom said he had learned he was in the box. She replied that everyone found themselves in the box occasionally—the key for individuals and the company was not perfection but to operate outside the box as much as possible. Doing so was critical to providing the kind of leadership that set the company apart.
They joined Bud in the office to continue the meeting, focusing next on how people end up trapped by distorted thinking. Bud started with a story that illustrated the stages of self-betrayal. He was awakened one night by his infant’s crying. His first thought was to get up and take care of the baby so his wife Nancy could sleep. But he didn’t act on it.
Here’s how the self-betrayal process played out in Bud’s example:
1) By not getting up when he knew he should have to take care of the baby, Bud betrayed himself.
2) He started seeing things in a way that justified his choice: Since Nancy didn’t immediately get up either, he started to feel she was being lazy, inconsiderate, or even faking sleep to force him to get up. In reality, Nancy wasn’t nearly as bad as Bud made her out to be. In fact, he’d never noticed any flaws until he needed to exaggerate them to justify his own behavior.
3) His view of reality became distorted. As Bud began seeing Nancy as an inadequate wife and mother, he began seeing himself as the victim. He was hardworking and important; he had to get up early in the morning, so he deserved uninterrupted sleep. He exaggerated his own virtues—he saw himself as a good husband and father when his behavior demonstrated the opposite.
4) Bud’s distortions and justifications could become habitual (he would carry his box with him) if, the next time the baby cried, he felt no sense that he should respond.
As he listened to Bud and Kate discuss the crying baby story, Tom couldn’t see how it applied to his relationship with Laura.
He felt resentful toward Laura, but believed his feelings were justified. She seemed to always find fault with him—for instance, complaining that he buried himself in his work and was no longer interested in her. It was true that they seemed to be living separate lives, but that was her fault as much as his.
He couldn’t have betrayed himself by choosing to ignore her needs—because he didn’t have a sense of something he should do for her in the first place.
However, Bud pointed out that If you’re already in the box, or have a distorted attitude toward someone, you won’t have an impulse to help them—and not having a desire to help someone is a sign you’re in the box.
So after an initial act of self-betrayal that he couldn’t remember, Tom’s pattern of blame and justification in interacting with Laura had become a habit—he carried his box with him. He felt she was being ungrateful for all he did for her whenever she accused him of not caring for her or his son Todd. By continuously exaggerating her faults, Tom could justify not taking her complaints of neglect seriously.
Bud added that many positive self-images are a good thing when you’re out of the box, but become twisted or inaccurate when you’re in the box.
For example if you think of yourself as a good husband but are in the box and you justify not spending time with your wife, then you’re the opposite of what a good husband should be. Outside the box, however, thinking of yourself as a good husband might lead you to do positive things for your wife.
As another example, an in-the-box feeling of being right or always knowing the answer can cause you to make mistakes due to not listening to others. Outside the box, a feeling that you're knowledgeable can give you the confidence to make difficult decisions.
Generally, you create self-justifying images because you’re concerned about how you look.
Tom began to understand that he was “carrying boxes” or maintaining self-justifying images that determined how he interacted with his wife. While he was angry at Laura for being in the box, he himself was in the box toward her, and he wasn’t seeing her a person with needs on a par with his own.
He began to think that while she had problems, he had problems too. Being open to the possibility that he had a problem was freeing because it meant he could create a better future.
You betray yourself when you don’t do something you feel you should do—for instance, not apologizing when you know you should. Once you’ve betrayed yourself, you feel guilty and try to justify it—for instance, by exaggerating other people's faults.
Think of a situation at work or at home where you thought of something you should do, but you didn’t do it. How did you feel immediately after choosing not to act?
What rationale or justification did you come up with to make yourself feel better for not doing it?
If you had done what you felt you should at the outset, how would you have viewed the situation differently?
While being in the box affects the way you see things, it also greatly affects others. When you blame others, they react and suddenly they’re in the box too. You get into a destructive cycle with them. You blame them, they react to your blame, you blame them even more, they react, and so on. You reinforce each other’s reasons to stay in the box and act badly.
In a sense, you actually collude with each other, because to justify your behavior, you each need the other person to behave badly. You end up undermining the effectiveness of everything you do and making things worse.
Here’s an example of how mutual reinforcement works:
During the discussion of blame and reinforcement, Tom thought of his 16-year-old son, Todd, and how he’d never felt his son was good enough. Perhaps he needed his son to be a problem in order to feel justified in always seeing him as a problem. He wondered how that would feel from his son’s perspective.
The need to see others as problems applies to many workplace interactions as well, Bud explained. You may need for people to perform poorly or create problems to justify your rationalizations and behavior toward them. So you provoke them to create problems and join you in a mutually reinforcing cycle of blame.
This soon affects how you begin to talk about them to others. The more people you can get to agree with you, the more justified you feel in your position. For example, if you were the parent whose son came home late, you might enlist your spouse to join you in blaming your son. At work, you might seek allies to reinforce and further feed your blame cycle with someone.
In this way, you further amplify the problem. If anyone tries to correct you, you resist because you’re in the box of self-deception and can’t see that you’re the problem.
In many companies, this destructive cycle gets in the way of achieving the results the company needs.
Bud explained that there are two ways distorted thinking or being in the box keeps companies from getting results or accomplishing what they need to.
1) When you’re in the box, you’re focused on self-justification, and what brings you justification—the failures of others—goes against your company’s or organization's interests.
2) Also, when you’re in the box and focused on yourself, you view results in a distorted way. People may describe you as results-focused, but you’re mainly interested in using results to make yourself look good.
You prioritize your results over other people’s results and may trample them to get your results. By being in your box, you provoke others—for instance, by withholding information or resources—and they respond by doing the same things. You feel justified in blaming them and they feel justified in blaming you.
This kind of contagion can easily spread through an organization, so that instead of focusing on results, people and departments align against each other. Although they were hired to help the organization succeed, they end up taking satisfaction in others’ failures and resent anyone’s success.
In addition to undermining a company’s results, distorted in-the-box thinking creates “people” problems that can seriously damage or sink the organization. They include:
In-the-box thinking (self-deception) starts with self-betrayal, so addressing self-betrayal is the solution to “people” problems.
When individuals fail to do things they should do for coworkers, they betray themselves and blame others to justify their behavior. As the problems escalate, everyone participates in a common betrayal of not helping the organization achieve its results, as they were hired to do.
In many organizations, instead of focusing on results, people and departments are “in the box,” blaming and working against each other. This undermines the company’s success.
To what extent does the above description fit your company?
Who are you “in the box” toward at work (who do you feel is a problem or obstacle)? How do you treat them?
How does the way you treat them affect how they treat you? Are you both causing a vicious cycle?
How would treating them as a person with legitimate needs and interests affect how they treat you in return?
People sometimes try unsuccessfully to address the discomfort of being stuck in the box by taking one or more of the following steps:
The way to get out of the box, or escape your distorted thinking about others, is to see them as people rather than obstacles or threats. You need to see others as people with needs on a par with your own needs and stop resisting your sense of obligation to others.
As soon as you stop resisting and choose to respond to others’ needs, you’re being true to yourself. You no longer need your self-justifying thoughts and feelings—and you’re out of the box.
This is difficult when self-justifying behavior has become a habit, but it’s doable one step at a time. The fact is that while you’re in the box with some people, you’re probably and out of the box with others at the same time. This is a positive sign because being out of the box with someone means you have the capacity to change your perspective more generally and be out of the box with others in your life as well.
When you’re out of the box with someone, your awareness of their needs can help you break down your boxes with others. When you start seeing one relationship more clearly, you begin seeing others more clearly as well.
The more you stop resisting and instead respond to others’ needs, the more you’ll stay out of the box. This doesn’t mean doing everything for everyone—it means doing what you can. Appreciating others and treating them considerately is liberating and frees up the energy required for self-justification. For instance, in the example of Bud ignoring the crying baby, he probably expended more effort mentally justifying his inaction than he would have by immediately getting up and caring for the baby.
During the discussion of self-justification and provoking others, Tom thought of his wife and son and how he’d blamed and provoked them to justify his neglect of them. He realized they needed both his attention and apologies.
On his way home that evening (with his final session with Bud to take place the next day), Tom decided to pick up some items for a backyard barbecue. He would start turning things around by helping to prepare a meal for his family for the first time in months.
He also decided to ask his son to show him how to tune up his car’s engine. Todd liked working with cars, but Tom had ridiculed this interest because he wanted his son to have a higher-status job that would make his father look good.
That evening was the best Tom had had with his family in years. Without having any expectations, he just enjoyed spending time with them rather than thinking of them as problems or obstacles to his happiness. He cooked dinner and then worked with his son on the car. While Todd said little (at least they didn’t argue), Laura kept asking him what was going on. So Tom explained what he'd learned about how self-deception ruins your relationships. Laura didn’t quite follow his explanation, but they all went to bed without hard feelings for once.
The next morning when Tom arrived to meet with Bud, he found Lou Herbert, the company’s retired president, ready to meet with him instead. In telling Lou about his evening with his family, Tom realized that he’d gotten out of the box by thinking of them as people rather than problems and choosing to meet their needs.
Bud arrived and said he’d invited Lou to talk about how understanding and eliminating self-deception had transformed Zagrum Company.
Lou’s story started with his son Cory, who was in constant trouble as a teenager. Finally, at wits’ end, Lou and his wife enrolled Cory in a wilderness program for troubled teens in Arizona. The program included a session for parents on self-deception and its impact on their relationship with their teenager.
Lou discovered he had been in the box in terms of his behavior and attitude toward his wife and children. He also realized that being in the box with his company had driven away some of his best employees.
As the company’s CEO, Lou had believed he was infallible and that if something went wrong, it was someone else’s fault. His blaming provoked resistance and mistrust. The more his team resisted, the more controlling he became until, finally, five of six executive team members left on the same day. He justified his behavior by rationalizing that they were incompetent anyway.
As the session in Arizona, Lou began to see his family and his employees differently, and he realized that to save his company, he needed to change himself, then put the self-deception training into practice and instill it in everyone who worked for him.
The first thing Lou did when he got back to work was to visit Kate Stenarude, who was one of the executives who’d quit. He apologized, explained what he’d learned, and implored her to come back to help turn the company around.
Kate gave Lou and the company a second chance. They started sharing the basic ideas about being in and out of the box with others in the company and the atmosphere began to change. Then over the years, they developed a system to incorporate the ideas into training as well as company strategy and practice. The process included a one-on-one meeting with each new employee introducing the concepts and an accountability system that focused on results and minimized “people” problems.
The result, Lou explained, is that Zagrum is an out-of-the-box company that keeps people focused on results while treating others as people.
Lou’s story about his son had a positive ending as well. While he was focused on changing the direction of his company, Lou and his son began exchanging letters during the two months of the wilderness program. Through the letters, they apologized, and started getting to know each other as people and healing their relationship.
The key, Lou said, was getting out of the box. You can’t know the people you live and work with until you see them outside the box, free of your distorted thinking and blaming.
Tom’s last step was to become an out-of-the-box leader to support Zagrum’s strategy and bottom line.
In their final conversation, Bud and Tom discussed managing outside the box. Bud cited a common workplace self-betrayal: employees get into a box in terms of their relationships with coworkers and undermine the company’s results.
Here’s how it develops: When most people start a job, they’re thankful to have it and feel an obligation to contribute to the company’s success. They start out wanting to do their best but over time, their feelings change. They begin to develop negative feelings toward coworkers and to have problems. They get into boxes.
Managers who are in the box themselves, or thinking in distorted ways, can’t fix these employee problems. But being out of the box and seeing the situation clearly allows you to assess responsibility and solve the problems. Because you’re not focused on blaming others and justifying your own actions—but on meeting the company’s needs—you’re in a position to help employees improve their performance.
Tom thought of his former boss, Chuck Staehli, whom he’d been blaming for treating employees badly and being difficult to work with. Chuck was clearly in the box, but Tom realized he was also in the box in terms of his thinking toward his former boss.
Bud acknowledged that it’s challenging to work for someone who’s often in the box, and you can get pulled into a box of your own, in which you justify your failings by blaming your boss’s bad behavior. Of course, once you respond from within your box, you need your boss to continue being a bad boss to maintain your justifications.
But when your boss is in the box and behaves badly, you should take note of the effects and resolve to be a better leader yourself if you get the chance someday. Bud explained that people may follow an in-the-box manager because they feel they have no other option. However, forcing allegiance isn’t leadership. In contrast, people choose to follow out-of-the-box leaders.
Your success as a leader depends on avoiding self-betrayal by being true to yourself and responding to others’ needs. When you’re out of the box, you can support out-of-the-box behavior in others. Leaders owe it to themselves, their company, and their employees to be out of the box.
Tom realized that to be a better leader and get results for the company, he’d have to rethink his job, use new methods of assessment and reporting, be accountable, and hold his employees accountable while also helping them improve their performance.
To help Tom get started, Bud gave him a quick-reference card about self-deception and how to counter it:
Families, organizations, and companies are made up of people. To know and appreciate them as people, you need to be out of the box and free of your blinders and self-centered thinking.
The ideas in this book can help organizations succeed and improve personal satisfaction and relationships. The following are areas where you can apply the concepts: