115 Journal of Education and Vocational Research Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 115-117, Apr 2012 (ISSN 2221-2590) Reflections on Leadership and Career Development Book Review Author: Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries Reviewed by: Shiva Kumar Srinivasan IIPM, Chennai, India shiva.srinivasan@iipm.edu What does psychoanalysis have to teach us about the theory and practice of leadership? How can these insights, if any, be leveraged to develop careers systematically? What, more specifically, is the role that the behavioural sciences, or the ‘clinical approach’ to leadership coaching, can play in the formation of management professionals? These then are the governing set of questions which Kets de Vries addresses in this book. All these questions however are in the service of an even more fundamental problem: How can leaders learn to be ‘decisive’ without ‘acting-out’ repressed conflicts (of which they are unconscious) in the symbolic realm? The preoccupation with ‘reflection’ in this literature then is an attempt to coach leaders in executive development programmes to pose existential questions at periodic intervals without hurtling into the future in a mindless fashion. This was the danger that Kets de Vries had caricatured much earlier in his career under the aegis of the title ‘life and death in the executive fast lane’ for individual executives, and the ‘neurotic organization’ to delineate the irrational behaviour of firms. The main takeaway in these studies is that whole organizations can act-out like leaders. The only difference is that in the case of organizations, the pressure to do so comes from the anxieties or insecurities experienced by the ‘dominant coalition’ in a firm. But, whatever may be the affective sources of acting out, the effect is the same. It creates a mess which will become increasingly difficult to clean up for those in charge. It is therefore a good idea for leaders to set up socio-cultural mechanisms that will help to discharge affects periodically without destabilizing the organization. The idea that the quality of governance can improve the emotional health of an organization or conversely that the emotional health of an organization(especially of its dominant coalition) will eventually improve the quality of its governance mechanisms then is the theoretical ideal that the INSEAD School of Organizational Psychology has been pushing relentlessly for a number of years. There is needless to say a problem of what is ‘cause’ and what is ‘effect’ here since it appears that in practice either could be the cause or the effect given the theoretical propensity to invoke models of ‘reverse causation’ in psychoanalysis. The adjective that best captures this ideal is termed ‘authentizotic’ (i.e. an organization where employees feel ‘psychologically safe’ to be themselves, and can therefore pursue the goal of being ‘authentic’ in their interactions with colleagues and customers). This ideal and the question of its ‘possibility’ or ‘impossibility’ as a set of modalities that can be actually operationalized is however not a problem of Freudian metapsychology for them, but a pragmatic set of questions that can be worked- through in executive coaching and management development programmes. It is important to understand this clearly since Sigmund Freud himself felt that there was something inherently impossible in psychoanalysis as a profession, and had done some important pioneering work on group psychology before concluding that the three ‘impossible professions’ for him were psychoanalysis, education, and governance. Strangely enough, these are precisely the areas in which Kets de Vries is determined to make progress without allowing his attempts to be derailed by the difficulties involved in doing so. Another way of looking at this ideal then is to situate it quite simply as the latest incarnation of the ancient Greek ideal of ‘Know Thy self’ (applied albeit to the context of management education). The executive coach fashions his professional identity not only on the psychotherapeutic professions, but is, more fundamentally, preoccupied with Socratic midwifery in the realm of the coagulated affects and ideas that hold executives in their grip. The Socratic ethic of psychoanalysis and allied professions then is what is at stake in the existential challenge of self-reflection. The reality check for executive coaches and coaches when they interact is this: Will they be able to incorporate the need for periodic reflection as an ethical ideal in their notion of leadership practice? It is not necessarily the case here that the notion of reflection must take on the magnitude of a ‘Stoic ideal’ in an executive’s psyche. It will suffice if it at least helps him to identify, name, and work-through counter-transferential affects when he interacts with his subordinates or followers so that he is able to live the ‘examined life’ in however modest a way: hence the interest that Kets de Vries continually evinces in Zen narratives given their implications for the brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by AMH International (E-Journals)