Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box

Remember, people primarily respond not to what we do but to how we’re being—whether we’re in or out of the box toward them.”

The more people we can find to agree with our side of the story, the more justified we will feel in believing that side of the story. I might recruit my spouse to join with me in blaming my son, for example, or I might gossip about others in order to gather allies at work in my collusion against another person or department.

“So,” Lou said, turning to the board and writing, “trying to change others doesn’t work.”

In fact, assigning responsibility in such a case is actually a way of helping someone. It is an entirely different thing, however, to excuse one’s own role in a problem through the guise of holding another responsible.

And every time I’ve betrayed myself, I’ve seen myself in certain self-justifying ways—just like I did in the story we’ve been talking about. The result is that over time, certain of these self-justifying images become characteristic of me. They’re the form my boxes take as I carry them with me into new situations.”

If you seem to be in the box in a given situation but can’t identify a sense you betrayed in that moment, that’s a clue that you might already be in the box.

The reason why horizontal alignment is such a helpful indicator of mindset is that a hyperactive self-interest, which is what drives someone who is in the box (or who has an inward mindset), doesn’t incentivize a person to build awareness about the objectives, needs, and challenges of his or her lateral coworkers.

“That’s right,” Bud said. “In the box, leaving is just another way to blame. It’s just a continuation of my box. I take my self-justifying feelings with me. Now it may be that in certain situations, leaving is the right thing to do.

“No. That’s right, he wasn’t,” I said. “At the same time that he was inflating Nancy’s faults, he was also minimizing his own. He was inflating his own virtue.”