Notes and Takeaways from Leadership and Self-Deception
When I read it: September 2022
Why I read it: This book covers the important leadership topic of self-deception. Left unchecked, self-deception corrupts our families and organizations, driving away the most important people in our lives. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, I encourage you to skim these notes.
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My notes
About Leadership and Self-Deception
In the book Leadership and Self-Deception, The Arbinger Institute presents “the box” as a metaphor for how you resist others when you are self-deceived. When you’re in the box, you actively resist what humanity calls you to do for others. Almost any behavior can be done either in the box or out of the box. Therefore, once you’re in the box, you can’t behave your way out of it. You get out of the box by seeing others as people and questioning your own virtue. The moment you see another human being as a person, with needs, hopes, and worries as real and legitimate as your own, you are out of the box toward them.
About The Arbinger Institute
The Arbinger Institute was founded in 1979 by Dr. C. Terry Warner. Through training, coaching, and consulting, Arbinger helps help individuals, teams, and organizations move from the self-focus of an inward mindset to the results-focus of an outward mindset.
Defining self-deception
According to Oxford Languages, self-deception is the act of allowing oneself to believe that a false feeling, idea, or situation is true.
Self-deception touches every aspect of life.
Left unchecked, our self-deception determines how we experience the world and can drive away the most important people in our lives.
Self-deception corrupts our view of ourselves, our circumstances, and other people.
When you’re self-deceived, your view of reality is distorted. You don’t see yourself or others clearly. You can’t see that you have a problem and you’re often resistant to competing viewpoints.
Self-deception blinds us to the true causes of our problems, making it impossible to make wise decisions.
When you’re self-deceived, you view your needs and desires as primary and everyone else’s needs and desires as secondary. You minimize others and feel negative emotions of anxiety, irritation, fear, and anger.
When you’re self-deceived, you experience yourself as a person among objects, not a person among people. You don’t see people as people. You see people as objects and minimize them.
Self-deception occurs on a person-by-person basis. You can be self-deceived about one individual and not self-deceived about another.
How we become self-deceived
Self-betrayal leads to self-justification which leads to self-deception.
First, it starts with self-betrayal. As a human, you have a sense of what others might need and how you can help them. If you sense a way to help someone and fail to honor it, you betray your sense of what is right. A self-betrayal is any act contrary to what you feel you should do for another person based on your morals. Think about any time when you had a thought about something you should do for someone else, and tried to ignore it.
Second, self-betrayal turns into self-justification. When you betray yourself, you seek to justify your action by distorting the situation and the people involved. This leads to inflating your own virtue and seeing the other people involved as objects. Your thoughts and feelings shift to attempt to justify your failure by inflating others’ faults.
Third, self-justification turns into self-deception. As you justify yourself, your view of reality becomes distorted and you deceive yourself.
Source: Arbinger.com
Self-deception reduces our effectiveness
People respond to how you’re feeling about them, not what you say or do to them. When you’re self-deceived, you see people as threats, nuisances, and problems. When you’re not, you see them like yourself with hopes, needs, and desires.
When you try to say or do the right thing when you are self-deceived, you invite unproductive responses.
Self-deception invites insecurity and leads to self-sabotage. When you’re self-deceived, you undermine the effectiveness of everything you do. You’re more worried about what’s good for you and your own reputation. You think your results are more important than other people’s results. When you’re self-deceived, you’re focused on self-preservation.
Self-justifying images
Over time, as we betray ourselves, we come to see ourselves in various self-justifying ways.
Most of us have self-justifying images we’re carrying around with us and we’re ready to defend them against attack. When people threaten our self-justifying image, we see them as threats. When people validate our self-justifying image, we see them as allies. When people fail to matter to a self-justifying image, we see them as unimportant.
Self-deception creates vicious cycles.
Self-deception creates internal vicious cycles. When you are self-deceived, you seek even more self-justification which leads to further self-deception.
Self-deception creates external vicious cycles. Self-betrayal is the germ that creates the disease of self-deception. And like any disease, self-deception is contagious. When you are self-deceived, you invite others to be self-deceived. You gossip and spread your distorted view in order to gain additional self-justification. Before you know it, you’re colluding with others to feed each other's need for self-justification. You provoke in others the behavior you dislike in them. And they provoke in you the behavior they say they hate in you.
How do you know when you’re self-deceived?
Here are some signs you’re suffering from self-deception:
You feel stuck
You’re focused only on your own perspective
You’re resistant to alternative viewpoints
You’re not interested in learning another person’s name
You feel like you have to put up with others
You lack the desire to help others
You’re victimizing yourself
You’re blaming others
You’re criticizing others
You’re trying to control someone
You’re withholding information from someone
Self-deception in organizations and teams
In organizations, self-deception is common and damaging.
Self-deception is at the root of most cultural “people problems.” It invites all sorts of conflicts that get in the way of the results you're trying to achieve. When people are self-deceived, they’re not focused on results and others; they’re focused on self-justification.
A self-deceived organization is one filled with people who are focused on themselves and on being justified. An effective organization is one where everyone is focused on others and on achieving results.
Avoiding self-deception improves cooperation and teamwork.
Self-deception and leadership
Avoiding self-deception is at the heart of effective leadership. When you’re self-deceived, it is impossible to be a great leader. Your view of yourself and others is distorted from reality.
Self-deception reduces the influence you have on others. Leaders who are self-deceived provoke people to resist them.
A self-deceived leader can be really damaging because they infect everyone in the organization. Self-deceived leaders lead through coercion (i.e. force or threat of force).
When you are leading you are either self-deceived you are not. You either see people as they are—as people like you who have needs and desires as legitimate as your own—or you see them as objects.
In addition to combatting your own self-deception, one of the most important jobs of a leader is to help others see each other as people. In other words, effective leaders help the people they lead avoid self-deception. They develop a culture that invites, incentivizes, and supports people to see others as people. They institute systems to 1) help people focus on results and 2) help people to see when they’re self-deceived and are therefore distracted from focusing on results.
Self-deception and communication
People respond to our communication based on how we feel about them. People can sense how you experience them—whether that be as an object or a person.
Self-deception and feedback
When you try to give constructive criticism when you’re self-deceived, it invites resistance. When you try to give praise when you’re self-deceived, it invites resentment.
When you’re not self-deceived, you can be hard or soft and invite productivity and commitment either way. Tough feedback is effective when you see the person you are giving feedback to as a person.
When you’re self-deceived, you often assign responsibility to (i.e. blame) others in order to escape responsibility yourself. When you’re not self-deceived, you can assign responsibility with clarity based on reality and you can see your own role in it.
When you’re self-deceived, you destroy others’ enthusiasm and creativity.
Avoiding and recovering from self-deception
Here are some ways to combat self-deception:
See people as people. When you see people as people, you see them like yourselves. They have hopes, needs, cares, and fears.
Be interested in people not in their opinion of you. Get to know their names. If you’re not interested in knowing a person’s name, you’re probably not really interested in that person as a person. In situations where you’re unwilling to try to remember someone’s name, it’s a clue that you may be self-deceived and viewing that person as an object.
Honor what your conscience tells you to do for others. When you do this, you become less judgmental and treat others with more courtesy and respect. To be clear, honoring what our conscience tells us to do, doesn’t necessarily mean we do it. Sometimes we won’t be in a position to act, but when we don’t act for the right reasons and maintain our humane view of the person, we do not betray ourselves and invite self-deception.
Create rituals for self-examination and reflection. Create time and space where you can consider your relationships with fresh clarity.
Recovering from self-deception
It’s impossible to avoid self-deception 100 percent of the time. Self-deception is a natural part of being human. Effective self-management is not about avoiding self-deception, it’s about recognizing when you are self-deceived and combating it. You can inspire devotion and commitment in others, even when if you don’t always say or do the ‘right’ things.
To recover from self-deception, you need to apologize for past actions you regret.
Applying the concept of self-deception
What do families, neighborhoods, and companies have in common? All are organizations of people. The things that divide fathers from sons, husbands from wives, and neighbors from neighbors are the same things that divide coworkers from coworkers.
You can apply the concept of self-deception to (1) interviewing and hiring, (2) leadership and team building, (3) conflict resolution, (4) accountability transformation, (5) personal growth and development, and (6) marriage and parenting.
Random anecdotes
The purpose of a team is to achieve results together.
In the unfortunate situation when you have to let someone go, let them go as a person, not an object.
Inspiring self-accountability is every leader’s goal. Effective leaders hold themselves most accountable.