In early April, 2010, I met with my business manager to discuss the our progress relative to our business plan. Three years earlier, I had moved to Kyrgyzstan and started a social-enterprise company that would train and certify English language teachers. Since their training would involve student teaching and mentorship components, we would also offer English classes. The niche, though, would the teacher-training, which was designed to rival the Cambridge English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) program, but with an emphasis on using the resources available in developing countries. On the day that we met, we had English courses at eight centers across the city, three local teacher-trainers, five expatriate teachers, six full-time local teachers, and over 200 student-teacher alumni. We were a full eighteen months ahead of schedule on the original five-year plan.
On April 7, snipers started firing on the crows of protestors who were storming the President’s office complex. Within 48 hours, hundreds of buildings had looted and burned. The property records office was torched, so impoverished people from the regions started a land-grab, trying to construct mud-brick homes on any empty land available. Almost 300 of them settled on the field across the street from our house. The city was in lock-down. The police had disbanded because mobs kept attacking anyone in uniform. A couple weeks later, the transitional government said it would again enforce order, but they announced that the former president has absconded with most of the money in the treasury, so they couldn’t pay teachers for the remainder of the school year. Groups of squatters began killing foreigners and seizing their homes. On April 25, about 20 tanks and armored personnel carriers lined up in front of our house and aimed at the squatters. Our squatters ran, and the field returned to normal, but fighting continued across the country until over 2,000 people were dead and hundreds of thousands were homeless (Putz, 2015).
This set our business plan back. Within months, the expatriates had all left. Demand for long-term services, like language learning, tanked. Competition from the thousands of unpaid English teachers skyrocketed. Then the humanitarian organizations came in to rebuild, and all of them wanted English speakers who understood the concepts of Western professionalism, and they offered my local employees three to five times the salary they had made working for me. It was contract work to last no more than three years, but they all went for it.
In October, 2010, I was invited to a meeting of similar international social-entrepreneurs in Tajikistan. I jumped at the opportunity for some consultation on the big questions like whether it was worthwhile to try to rebuild the company, and whether we should switch to a non-profit model. There were fifteen of us in the meeting, and about half of us had come for serious advice on practical issues of running a business in Central Asia; questions like, “What’s an ethical compensation system for minimally-trained employees in a country with 20% unemployment?” and “What’s the best way for an upper-level Western manager to address conflicting demands by the IRS and local tax offices?” and “In cultures that place high values on familial relationships (Hofstede & Bond, 1988), how do you address nepotistic practices?”
The group facilitator, though, was a charismatic leader convinced that the psychodynamic approach was the best way to serve his followers. Our conversations looked like this:
Me: I’m still committed to staying here and working for change in the educational sector, but I no longer convinced that a commercial educational enterprise can work. What do you think? Should I start an NGO (non-government organization) instead?
The Psychodynamic Leader (TPL): How did you feel about this when you wrote your business plan?
Me: Well, I wrote the plan planning that it would succeed. I had an exit plan, but it didn’t include a revolution.
TPL: But you knew that Kyrgyzstan had a revolution in 2005. Do you think you might have been showing a little narcissism in thinking that what happened to others couldn’t happen to you?
Me: Not that many countries have revolutions twice in five years. I can’t imagine a business plan that includes an exit plan that accommodates total societal collapse.
TPL: Now you’re showing a lot of negativity. If I remember right, your business plan included an exceptionally-long list of obstacles. Can you think of other instances when you’ve shown negativity in past ventures?
Me: Not usually. But there are a lot of obstacles to for-profit businesses in the social sectors of developing countries.
TPL: I’m sensing some displacement here, but let’s move on. You mentioned your local employees all leaving. What is it you think they really wanted that other employers could provide and you couldn’t?
Me: More money.
Other Participant: Yeah, the motivation to take the high short-term gain instead of the long-term gain is common here.
TPL: Now what we’re seeing here is mirroring…
This type of discussion ran for two days. Those who asked how to deal with domineering bosses in high power-distance cultures (Hofstede, 2003) were told to examine themselves for inferiority complexes. Those who asked how to deal with employees in the same cultures who expected them to maintain high power distance were told to examine their relationships with their fathers.
The fact that this psychodynamic leader left us all frustrated, despite his good intentions (He’s a nice guy!), should not come as a surprise. Freud did not base his theories on scientific observation, and after a century of applying his theories and studying the outcomes, there’s no strong evidence that his theories are accurate (Myers & DeWall, 2015). Moreover, I have written in previous discussions about the dangers of abusive applications of leadership, but this approach is by far the most dangerous. The psychodynamic approach not only assigns the leader the responsibility for articulating vision, motivating a team, and establishing processes, it gives the leader the authority to diagnose all failures in terms of followers’ unconscious problems. To increase the chance of abuse even more, the leader’s diagnoses are infallible because any protestation against the diagnosis is a denial, transference, or mirroring, which confirms the diagnosis. When a proof against a claim is seen as proof of the claim, we’re in Wonderland (Carroll, 2015). As C.S. Lewis said, “we are arguing like a man who should say ‘If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.’” (Lewis, 1960).
While it’s true that an organization may develop patterns that no one consciously planned when a leader tries to identify followers’ unconscious motivations the burden of proof falls on the leader (Myers & DeWall, 2015). I have yet to see a psychodynamic leader provide proof.
Cartoon: Muirhead, C. (2012, December 17). Getting away with it. Retrieved February 24, 2018, from http://chrysmassociates.blogspot.com/2012/12/getting-away-with-it.html
References
Carroll, L. (2015). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ostrich Books.
Hofstede, G. (2003). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. SAGE Publications.
Hofstede, G., & Bond, M. H. (1988). The Confucius connection: From cultural roots to economic growth. Organizational Dynamics, 16(4), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(88)90009-5
Lewis, C. S. (1960). The Four Loves. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Retrieved from https://www.abebooks.com/Four-Loves-C-S-Lewis-Harcourt/154744330/bd
Myers, D. G., & DeWall, C. N. (2015). Psychology (11th ed.). Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-11th-David-G-Myers/dp/1464140812/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498731782&sr=1-1&keywords=myers+psychology+11th+edition
Putz, C. (2015). Remembering Kyrgyzstan’s Revolutions. The Diplomat. Retrieved from https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/remembering-kyrgyzstans-revolutions/
