It was after one of these chats – problems with a boss, as usual – that one of my colleagues said: ‘You should charge for this, you know.’ The time was approaching when I needed to move on from full-time work at the FT and the colleague’s remark started me thinking about my third career. I knew about coaching, but my chats had led me to think there was something deeper going on when people talked about work and their bosses, something more emotional, seemingly connected to attitudes to authority that were rooted in the past. So I decided to train in psychodynamic counselling. I supplemented my course reading of Freud, Klein, Bowlby and Winnicott with writers who applied psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking to the workplace – Manfred Kets de Vries, Michael Maccoby and Naomi Shragai. These three brought home to me something I had intuited – the ways in which people view their bosses as parents. The parental boss ‘When people close their front door in the morning and think they have left their families behind them for a simpler life at work, they are often mistaken,’ Shragai wrote in an FT article in 2014. ‘Our families, particularly our earliest relationships, live inside our minds and fi nd their way into all our subsequent relationships, including those in the workplace.’ 1 I wasn’t consciously aware of possible parental attitudes towards my bosses when I was an underling. The parallel revealed itself to me when I became a boss myself. It was the way my team looked to me to solve their problems; to be a rock of emotional stability when everything seemed to be going wrong; and particularly the way some of them craved my approval. That I might have my own problems and insecurities didn’t seem to matter to them. What was going on? My readings of the writers who specialised in the psychology of work helped to enlighten me. Maccoby wrote that employees did have a rational approach to their bosses – like Terry they wanted money and promotion. But there was also an irrational side to their attitude to their managers. Maccoby likened this to the transference. Freud noticed his patients’
tendency to love and idealise him. It was as if, Maccoby said, people were relating to him as if he were some important person from their past – usually a parent. This transference of feelings from patient to therapist, Maccoby wrote, applied just as strongly to employees’ relationship to their bosses. 2 Kets de Vries adds that ‘all of us act out transferential (or historical) reactions on a daily basis, regardless of what we do.
Understanding the process of transference is critical to being able to understand the nature of the leader-follower interface.’ 3 So how do we work therapeutically with someone with Terry’s problem – a boss who blows hot and cold, who can’t make up his mind whether or not he likes Terry and his work? The fi rst thing is to acknowledge Terry’s discomfort about his boss, Miles. You don’t need to be a trained counsellor
THERAPY TODAY 38 MAY 2024 ‘In my experience, both in the workplace and as a counsellor, employees don’t spend time wondering about how their bosses came to be the way they are’
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