While on the flight home from Cambodia about a month ago, I read a book titled Leadership and Self-Deception by the Abridger Institute. The book has been transformative in my life. The basic premise of the book is that we are all self-deceived far more often than we think and when we are we will never function effectively as leaders. The book calls being self-deceived being “in the box.” When we’re in the box, we tend to exchange the corporate results of our organization, church, business or family for the single result of self-justification. Put simply: when I am self-deceived my major objective is to justify my thinking and behavior to make me right and everyone else wrong.
Until I read the book, I didn’t realize how easy it is to betray ourselves and thus fall into self-deception. The book is presented in the format of many of Patrick Lencione’s books, with a “fable” being the basis of the book. In Leadership and Self-Deception the fable is about a man who recently took a job at a new company, and is required to go through training with “Bud.” Bud is a master of presenting the concept of self-deception, because he was once a self-deceived leader himself, and as with all of us, is still working at staying “out of the box.”
For our purposes, let’s use one of the examples Bud offered in the book to see how easy it is to betray ourselves and then to move into self-deception. Bud offered the example of a time when he and his wife had an infant. In the middle of the night, Bud woke up to the cries of the baby. His feeling was, “I ought to go take care of the baby.” But instead of acting on the feeling, Bud betrayed the feeling and waited. For what? We all know, right? He waited for his wife to wake up and take care of the baby. As he lay there pretending to be asleep and not acting on his impulse to care for his son, Bud started moving to self-betrayal. Here’s how it worked: Bud thought something like this, “I’ve been working really hard, and I have an important meeting tomorrow. I need my rest. My wife doesn’t have anything that urgent to do. In fact, she’s actually rather lazy. She’s not that great a wife, and I am a great husband and father, because I work so hard to provide for us.”
Do you see what Bud did? He inflated his own goodness and magnified his wife’s flaws. He even invented a few flaws. That’s what we do when we’re in the box. We inflate our own value and devalue others. Bud’s definition of being in the box is when we treat others as objects and not as people. The book offers explanations of how we get in the box, how we get out of the box and how we stay out of the box. While it’s a fairly quick read, I’ve gone through it twice, because it’s principles are immediately applicable. Any time I start to justify myself when I’m thinking about someone else, I ask whether I’m self-justifying in order to make myself seem better than I am. If so, I realize I’m either in the box or moving there.
After that it’s a simple–not necessarily easy–but simple process of thinking through the steps necessary to treat the person as a person and to stop the self-justifying behavior. That does two important things: 1) it gets me focusing on the true results I’m working toward instead of working toward self-justification; and 2) it gets me thinking about the person in question as a person and not as an object. I find myself checking my motivations more often than in the past, and when I’m moving toward or am already in the box, I can get out much more quickly. Indeed, I was often in the box toward folks without recognizing it all.
One more important truth from the book is that we can be out of the box toward some people and in the box toward others. It isn’t an all or nothing matter. We must relate to every person as individual people. We either value them as a people or we devalue them as objects. I would encourage you to pick up a copy of Leadership and Self-Deception or listen to it on Audible. It’s worth far more than the purchase price. If you operate from a Christian worldview as I do, you will notice that the book is not from a Christian frame of reference. What I’ve noticed is I’ve inserted the concepts of sin and grace into my application of the principles and have found the book’s theses even more helpful.
Here’s to leading better by getting out of the box–today!