The Drivers of Negative Behavioral Differentiation
Written by admin on October 2, 2009 – 4:10 am -As we have studied BD, it has become apparent to us that companies can also fall prey to some negative behavioral drivers. These are institutional attitudes and values, usually propagated and reflected by the companies’ leaders, that result in behaviors toward customers that negatively differentiate the company from its competitors. The negative drivers we will describe are institutional narcissism, greed, insularity, schizophrenia, and scapegoating. The companies that manifest these syndromes have alienated customers, lost opportunities, and often been pilloried in the press.
Institutional Narcissism
The standard diagnostic manual for psychiatry is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IVTM). According to the DSM-IV, individuals with the narcissistic personality disorder “have a grandiose sense of self-importance,” “believe they are superior, special, or unique and expect others to recognize them as such,” and “generally have a lack of empathy and have difficulty recognizing the desires, subjective experiences, and feelings of others.”[18] The term narcissism derives from Greek mythology and the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and was turned into the narcissus flower. People who are narcissistic have a strong sense of entitlement (the world owes them much), believe that others are envious of them, and are arrogant or haughty. People who are said to be a “legend in their own mind” are likely to be narcissistic to some degree. Much of their speech is self-referential (”This is what I think.” “If you were like me….” “Here’s how I see it.”), they relate to the world mostly as it revolves around them, and they are the heroes of their own stories. To hear them tell it, they are always responsible for successes and never to blame for failures. Healthy, successful people may also be self-confident, proud of their accomplishments, and willing to accept responsibility for their successes, too, but they also acknowledge their shortcomings, share the credit with others, and have a realistic view of themselves as members of the human race. Narcissistic people typically have an abnormally high need for validation, which may mask subconscious fears that they are worthless, and they are often scornful of “the average person.”
Institutions can be narcissistic, too. We met a consultant in a prestigious professional firm several years ago who told us that he didn’t like any of his clients. We asked why and he said, “Because none of them is as smart as I am.” When organizations attract and reward people with such attitudes, the institution itself can be infected with overweening pride and self-importance. The disease can spread to others in the organization who would not normally be arrogant and condescending and cause them to treat people who are not members of their elite club as though they were not worthy. This syndrome exists in sports teams, too. Successful teams can become so full of pride and so convinced of the accolades an adoring press heaps on them that they believe they are invincible. The inevitable loss to a “lesser team” is stunning. On a grander scale, armies have suffered the same fate. The Japanese military of World War II was spawned from the Bushido culture and believed itself to be superior and invincible, especially after a string of early victories throughout Asia. When its fortunes were later reversed, an army that had been arrogant and cruel became desperate and suicidal rather than face an unthinkable reconstruction of its self-image.
Narcissism is the sin of pride, and it can occur in any organization, or part of an organization, that prides itself on hiring the best and the brightest, or on having the world’s finest products and services, or on being unbeatable in one way or another. Clearly, companies should strive to be best in class; they should attract and hire the smartest, most capable people they can find; and they should try to instill pride in their workforce. However, pride becomes narcissism when the people in the organization begin thinking that they are better than the people they serve. To attract the smartest people, organizations may promote themselves in ways that make them appear elite (”We’re the most prestigious firm. We have the smartest people”), and this appeals to the vanity of the smart candidates they are trying to attract (as well as to the customers they serve). Then people in the firm start believing their own hype. They become inordinately proud of themselves and certain that no one knows more or is more capable than they are, and this institutional narcissism creates blind spots. If they are the smartest group of professionals, then what could they possibly learn from others, including their clients?
This fallacy of superiority is disastrous from a behavioral standpoint because it breeds arrogance, disdain for the people they are serving, and an inability to hear evidence or see perspectives that contradict their own. Arrogance can stifle listening (because no one else has anything useful to say) and learning (because they know it all already). It can make consultants blind to what they don’t know and can’t see. Besides being full of themselves, they don’t know what they don’t know. Their learning channels are shut off, so they misunderstand their clients’ needs, make the facts fit their hypotheses, or propose solutions their clients can’t adopt because of cultural or organizational barriers the consultants ignore. Moreover, they tend to treat all clients except the most senior executives as resources-necessary but inconsequential means to an end. The reputation for arrogance and insensitivity some consultants, accountants, lawyers, and bankers have stems from their callous treatment of people in client organizations they don’t consider worthy.
We are not arguing that all professional firms are like this. On the contrary, most treat their clients well and some excel at positive BD. However, there is a tendency in organizations that take excessive pride in the brilliance of their professionals to assume an elite organizational persona that infects its members with arrogance and causes them to behave in ways that clients experience as insensitive, dismissive, and condescending. Several years ago, a senior project manager with a global engineering and construction company told us about the consulting firm they had hired to analyze their organization and recommend ways to improve its structure and performance. Throughout the project, the consultants were rude and condescending, he said, especially to anyone below the C-level (CEO, CFO, COO). They listened only to the people they thought were important, and they dismissed a number of the “soft issues” that most employees felt were a primary concern. When the project was completed, the senior project manager told us, “We all agreed that these consultants were real bright-and we’d like to get a couple of them in our headlights.” He added that he would never agree to work with this firm again.
Institutional narcissism tends to afflict senior members of professional firms more than junior members (many of whom believe, at least for a while, that they were hiring mistakes), and it can pervade the organization. It can influence how firm members relate toward one another (creating a kind of Darwinian culture in which members compete with one another for the distinction of being the smartest) and how they relate toward the people they serve. It can cause the kind of ruthlessness seen in Enron before the collapse, depicted in the film Wall Street, and described by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Further, it can cause the institution to value toughness (often disguised as “high standards”) over compassion, which results in insensitivity and a callous disregard for human considerations the institution and its members deem trivial. Customers, like all human beings, don’t like being trivialized or talked down to, so this behavior tends to negatively differentiate the narcissistic institution and its members.
The problem with narcissists is that they don’t believe they have a problem. Their sense of superiority blinds them to the impact they are having on other people, and this is true of narcissistic institutions as well. They generally fail to see the impact of their negative behaviors on customers, and they don’t hear it when outsiders try to tell them. Harvard’s Chris Argyris believes that this stems from the fact that the smartest people are the ones who find it hardest to learn: “Those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the welleducated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporations.”[19] Such professionals are usually very successful at what they do, so when they do fail, says Argyris, “They become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the ‘blame’ on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it most.”[20]
We identify with the institution in which we work, the god in which we believe, the football team for which we cheer. Institutional narcissism, with its narcissistic transference, can be even more powerful than individual narcissism, leading to mob rule, racism and persecution, to tribal and religious conflicts and wars of mass death and massive destruction. It can corrupt the institution and the purposes for which it was created.
–James Cumes, The Human Mirror: Narcissistic Imperative in Human Behavior
Taken From : Winning Behavior—What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently
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