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Looking for quotes from Arbinger Institute’s Leadership and Self-Deception? What can these quotes teach you about leading outside the box?
Leadership and Self-Deception is a fable about facing self-deception as a leader and overcoming your distorted views of others. Only when you realize how important it is to treat your employees with respect and understanding can you start to become a great leader.
Here are some of the top Leadership and Self-Deception quotes with explanations.
5 Leadership and Self-Deception Quotes
Self-deception—our tendency to see the world around us in a distorted way—is a common personal and organizational problem. Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute explains how self-deception derails personal relationships and keeps organizations and leaders from achieving the results they want. Instead of focusing on producing results, many leaders are trapped “in the box” of distorted thinking—they blame others to justify their own failures and can’t see how they themselves are a problem. They create the “people” problems that plague many organizations. Through a business fable, this book tells leaders how to get “out of the box”—but you don’t have to be a leader to use the principles to change your life and workplace.
Below are the top Leadership and Self-Deception quotes:
“Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions.”
Self-deception—our tendency to see the world around us in a distorted way—is a common personal and organizational problem. Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute explains how self-deception derails our relationships and keeps organizations and leaders from achieving the results they want.
Instead of focusing on producing results, many leaders are trapped “in the box” of distorted thinking—they blame others to justify their own failures. They create the “people” problems that plague most organizations. Through the fictional story of a new executive joining an unusual company, this book tells leaders how to get “out of the box”—but you don’t have to be a leader to apply the principles to your life and workplace.
“Self-betrayal” 1. An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of “self-betrayal.” 2. When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal. 3. When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted. 4. So — when I betray myself, I enter the box.”
The way you get into a box, or become trapped by self-deception, in the first place is by betraying yourself. You betray yourself when you choose not to do what you know you should do or actually want to do—for instance, not holding an elevator for someone, or feeling that you should apologize to someone but not doing so.
To manage outside the box, leaders need to be prepared to handle the most common workplace self-betrayal: employees get into a box in terms of their relationships with coworkers and undermine the company’s results.
Your success as a leader depends on avoiding self-betrayal by being true to yourself and responding to others’ needs. When you’re out of the box of self-deception, you can support out-of-the-box behavior in others. Leaders owe it to themselves, their company, and their employees to be out of the box.
“What must it be like to be the son of someone for whom you can never be good enough?”
During the discussion of blame and reinforcement, Tom thought of his 16-year-old son, Todd, and how he’d never felt his son was good enough. Perhaps he needed his son to be a problem in order to feel justified in always seeing him as a problem. He wondered how that would feel from his son’s perspective.
The need to see others as problems applies to many workplace interactions as well, Bud explained. You may need for people to perform poorly or create problems to justify your rationalizations and behavior toward them. So you provoke them to create problems and join you in a mutually reinforcing cycle of blame.
This soon affects how you begin to talk about them to others. The more people you can get to agree with you, the more justified you feel in your position. For example, if you were the parent whose son came home late, you might enlist your spouse to join you in blaming your son. At work, you might seek allies to reinforce and further feed your blame cycle with someone.
“Whenever we are in the box, we have a need that is met by others’ poor behavior. And so our boxes encourage more poor behavior in others, even if that behavior makes our lives more difficult.”
While being in the box affects the way you see things, it also greatly affects others. When you blame others, they react and suddenly they’re in the box too. You get into a destructive cycle with them. You blame them, they react to your blame, you blame them even more, they react, and so on. You reinforce each other’s reasons to stay in the box and act badly.
In a sense, you actually collude with each other, because to justify your behavior, you each need the other person to behave badly. You end up undermining the effectiveness of everything you do and making things worse.
“Merely knowing the material doesn’t get you out of the box. Living it does. And we’re not living it if we’re using it to diagnose others. Rather, we’re living it when we’re using it to learn how we can be more helpful to others—even”
The ideas in this book can help organizations succeed and improve personal satisfaction and relationships. The following are areas where you can apply the concepts:
- Applicant interviewing and hiring: Ask job applicants to read; then discuss the concepts and how they apply to company practices and expectations. Use this to evaluate whether candidates have the characteristics necessary for success.
- Leadership and team building: Teach leaders how to be out of the box so they can help and lead others to get results. Also, teach the concepts to improve cooperation and teamwork.
- Conflict resolution: Because most conflicts are rooted in blame, you can reduce them by teaching people how to stop being in the box/self-deceived and blaming others. Teach them to instead focus on others’ needs. Problems can’t be resolved until people understand their role in creating them in the first place.
- Building accountability in organizations: Teaching leaders to be out of the box encourages initiative, responsibility for results and for responding to others, and accountability.
Personal development: Getting out of the box increases happiness and satisfaction. It improves self-esteem, treatment of others, and the ability to change.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Leadership and Self-Deception summary :
- How self-deception derails personal and professional relationships
- How to get "out of the box" of distorted thinking
- Why you need to stop seeing others as obstacles or threats
