“In organizations, this mirroring dynamic between leader and follower can become collusive. Followers are eager to use their leaders to reflect what they would like to see. Leaders, on the other hand, find the affirmation of followers hard to resist.” (Northouse, 2015.)
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Collusion: secret agreement of cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose. (Webster’s Dictionary, 2017)
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Think about what is written above, collusion, is this something that you really want to have an opportunity to reside in your company? The text Leadership: theory and practice, discusses mirroring and idealizing as something we have done since we were babies. We looked up to our mother first as someone to be like, then as we got older and experienced in business we have had mentors and leaders that we have wanted to emulate.
If you search for the word collusion, you will find various examples of the definition, but if you look up collusion under News you will find numerous articles of companies under investigation for collusion. Whether it be price-fixing, backdoor negotiating, or sexual favors collusion looks like an extremely bad thing existing in companies. So the bigger question now is, how do you prevent collusion?
The first thing we all must understand is that to have growth within organizations, there must be some type of mentorship program. This program needs to be designed to identify individuals who have the propensity to grow into greater leadership roles and have the traits indicative of organizational values. Once identified, those individuals need to have an opportunity on a consistent basis to speak to individuals in higher positions to gain more knowledge of responsible, leader behavior. This would allow those individuals opportunities to grow internally as well.
The textbook discusses Group Coaching as a way to apply a “very effective methodology for applying the psychodynamic principles to leadership development.” (Northouse, 2015). It talks about having an external facilitator conduct various surveys and feedback questionnaires aimed at understanding each individual (leader) on a more personal level. This seems like a great way to start understanding people, surveying is an easy way to grab a lot of peoples’ thoughts on a particular subject. The problem I see with this is that you cannot control the amount of thought that a person puts into the survey. So you may not be getting the true thoughts of a person and the true traits of some of the leaders being coached.
Once in the group coaching, each person is describing various things about themselves and the facilitator is there to help understand them and provide coaching to better those individuals. I find this type of forum ineffective because people are placed in front of others and will do anything to not be judged. I, personally, think a lot of the thoughts, feelings, and motives of each leader will be skewed to the more positive side to show people that they are “not that bad.”
Now, the textbook states that group coaching has several advantages:
1) “Highly intensive and effective intervention to prepare leaders for individual and organizational change.” (Northouse, 2015.)
2) “Ensures the team will assume a constructively challenging follow-up role supporting one another.” (Northouse, 2015.)
3) “In group coaching, individuals benefit because they become mutually invested in encouraging the new behaviors that each one has identified.” (Northouse, 2015.)
There are many more advantages to group coaching described in the textbook, I just feel like a lot of the emotions of leading will be left out because of the desire to be viewed as something they are not completely.
After this group coach activity the idea would obviously be to have those leaders go back to their daily jobs and provide greater opportunities to junior-level employees and grow the leadership. So with this power, what is the off-chance that someone would abuse that power, whether it be financially or sexually? There are numerous reports of senior-leaders using their position of power for gain, so does group coaching cover those things? How does it get discussed in an open forum to allow everyone an opportunity to break down the ethical side of leading? Because ultimately that’s what I’m getting at, ethics. Forget Group Coaching, interventions, mentorship counseling, how do WE ensure our senior leaders are ETHICAL and how do we allow our junior employees to see that we are ETHICAL? Thoughts…?
Your post has given me an entirely different perspective on mirroring and idealizing in organizations.
I think an unethical leader will take advantage of his followers and followers– whether they are ethical or unethical—will obey their leader because it is extremely challenging and disheartening to admit that your leader is taking advantage of you and the organization you both work for.
I immediately thought of Enron as I was reading your post. I think collusion could have probably been prevented at Enron if they would have had a mentorship program in place. Without having one, founder Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling were able to hide their fraud for years. However, would a mentorship program be able to identify a leader’s weaknesses? For instance, would it have become evident whether or not Lay was aware of Skilling’s illegal activities, or if Skilling was leading Lay into a collusion course? As Northouse indicates during the focus on the shadow side of leadership, narcissism can be constructive if it enables a leader to support his/her environment with trust and control of his actions or it can be reactive if a leader is driven by power, prestige and superiority (2016, p.305).
I concur that Group Coaching may not always be an effective method to understand individuals on a more personal level because unethical leaders are not going to divulge personal information about themselves or their intensions to others.
Group coaching could work in organizations but it’s difficult to determine whether unethical behavior could have been prevented in organizations like Enron because their leaders mostly did not want “organizational change or to be mutually invested in encouraging the new behaviors” (Northouse).
This is a very thought provoking and insightful post. I agree with you regarding the probability that people are going to withhold a certain aspect of their personality in group interactions due to perception. I work in an environment that relies on training and mentoring for new employees. Standardized procedures are taught to people entering the lab and are therefore trainees are partly at the mercy of their mentor to learn how to do their jobs. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to discrepancies (as you have mentioned) in how one person performs a task compared to another given the “grey area” existing in standardized procedures. This often depends upon the mentor/leader, as our text describes, “taking actions that shore up their image rather than the needs of the organization” (Northouse, 2016). Collusion, as you have mentioned, often results in a sort of, “my way is better than yours” type of manner. You pose a good question, how do we ensure ethical leadership? Our text touches on narcissism and even states that it can be constructive (Northouse, 2016). Contrary to my initial impression, I think that there is some value in the psycho dynamic approach. Although maybe not in its group couching application. Perhaps leaders/mentors would benefit from shadow side evaluation. Great post!