Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box

Amazon.com
Using the story/parable format so popular these days, Leadership and Self-Deception takes a novel psychological approach to leadership. It's not what you do that matters, say the authors (presumably plural--the book is credited to the esteemed Arbinger Institute), but why you do it. Latching onto the latest leadership trend won't make people follow you if your motives are selfish--people can smell a rat, even one that says it's trying to empower them. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. We deceive ourselves in subtle ways into thinking that we're doing the right thing for the right reason. We really do know what the right thing to do is, but this constant self-justification becomes such an ingrained habit that it's hard to break free of it--it's as though we're trapped in a box, the authors say.

Learning how the process of self-deception works--and how to avoid it and stay in touch with our innate sense of what's right--is at the heart of the book. We follow Tom, an old-school, by-the-book kind of guy who is a newly hired executive at Zagrum Corporation, as two senior executives show him the many ways he's "in the box," how that limits him as a leader in ways he's not aware of, and of course how to get out. This is as much a book about personal transformation as it is about leadership per se. The authors use examples from the characters' private as well as professional lives to show how self-deception skews our view of ourselves and the world and ruins our interactions with people, despite what we sincerely believe are our best intentions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Current organizational theory finds itself in the same situation that medicine faced a century and a half ago. In those days, doctors didn't understand how a single disease could lie below the surface of a range of different symptoms, and they had no conception of how germs cause disease. As a result, they could only treat symptoms. Leadership and Self-Deception shows how business, like people, can be afflicted by "disease" - in this case self-deception, the major culprit in corporate failure. The book explains how leaders can escape self-deception and put to use the skills, systems, and techniques that will bring success to themselves and their organizations.

SYNOPSIS

Leadership and Self-Deception introduces readers to an important new idea in organizational thinking. It shows how the problems that typically prevent superior performance in organizations are the result of a little-known problem called "self- deception."

￯﾿ﾽ According to the authors, people who are in self-deception live and work as trapped in a box. Blind to the reality around them, they undermine performance-- both their own and others'. The problem is, being in the box they can't see that they undermine performance. Consequently, they don't change, and neither do their results.

￯﾿ﾽ The good news is that there is a solution to self-deception and the costly problems that arise from it. Leadership and Self-Deception shows what self- deception is, how people get trapped in it, how it kills organizational performance, and--most importantly--the surprising way to solve it.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People