Last week news broke that 15 year-old Phoebe Prince killed herself after months of harassment and bullying by her classmates at a South Hadley, MA high school. School administrators initially denied knowing anything about it, even though Prince’s mother had complained to school officials, and a renowned bullying expert had been called in to consult on the problem (Coloroso reported that the school had not fully implemented her recommendations: http://thecrimereport.org/2010/04/02/ma-school-where-student-died-hadnt-carried-out-anti-bullying-plan/).

And over the Easter weekend, while many senior Catholics across Europe apologized in their Easter addresses for the ongoing sexual abuse of children by clergy, a senior cardinal defended Pope Benedict XVI from what he called petty gossip and a vile smear operation by the anti-Vatican media. On Good Friday the Pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the criticism of the Catholic Church over child abuse to the collective violence suffered by the Jews. (more…)

Randy Cohen, the New York Times’ ethicist, recently opined on the court ruling that ordered Google to release the name of the anonymous blogger whose site Skanks in NYC was devoted to slandering a fashion model:

Has anonymous posting, though generally protected by law, become so toxic that it should be discouraged?

This issue has gotten my attention as I’m preparing a workshop on Bullying in the Public Sphere. I often find myself drawn to read comments on news sites, drawn no doubt by the same impulse that makes me crane my neck as I drive by an accident. Unmoderated comment sections provide an un-chaperoned space for every adolescent impulse we’ve ever repressed. The comments rapidly devolve into nasty, name-calling, deliberately inflammatory and hateful. It’s this impulse (what possible evolutionary purpose might it serve?) that the mainstream media depend on for their fortunes, and is no doubt why there continues to be unmoderated comments sections after every article. (more…)

Remember this Nike ad of Charles Barkley?

Barkley went on:

I don’t believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models…. It’s not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn’t like it, they said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” Parents have to take better control.

This past winter, Portland’s honeymoon phase with its first openly gay mayor came to a trainwreck of an ending when the news broke (on Inauguration Day) that Adams lied about his sexual relationship with an 18 year old legislative intern.

Today it’s Edwards and his affairs. it seems each month, even week, there is another fallen angel, a politician, athlete, actor, celebrity, CEO, or person in a leadership position tumbling from a great height.

And usually at some point in the endless discussion, someone raises the point that he or she was a role model, and has greatly disappointed people.

I don’buy into this role model business. Whether or not you’re a role model is in the eye of the beholder. In which case, anyone can be a role model and not know it. if someone looks up to you, whether you are aware of it or not, you’re a role model for someone. Does that then stand to reason that you have a responsibility to uphold that person’s s image of you? Definitely not.

Maybe it’s my background in psychology but I don’t see it as the role model’s responsibility for not disappointing the one who looks up to him or her. Maturity, in my mind, requires the ability to be able to love or admire someone in their humanness, not in their super-humanness. We will inevitably be disappointed by our parents, our loved ones, a mentor. Are they at fault for not being perfect, or is it our responsibility to grapple with the fact of human complexity?

The past is never dead. It is not even past.

– William Faulkner

I just finished a Process Work seminar here in Auckland, the second in a series of three. Last week I was in Brisbane, and tomorrow I’m off to Tokyo for a training on workplace bullying (and to watch the US elections from abroad). This weekend’s seminar was called, The Unfinished Work of Ancestors. I wanted to explore how lineal issues, problems inherited from previous generations, determine, influence, and shape our current relationships and family life.

It struck me over the course of the weekend that not only are many of the issues and patterns we grapple with in relationship inherited habits of history, but also how relieving and liberating it is to view our chronic relationship challenges as ‘lineal’ problems – social, historical and political issues that our ancestors struggled with. We are positioned in history, shaped and influenced by social, historical and even natural forces – and the echoes of the great potato famine, World War II, the harsh lives of coal miners in Scotland, of itinerant workers, of Russian peasants reverberate in our intimate interactions, daily habits, and moods.

For instance, perhaps due to the seminar’s setting of New Zealand, the so-called “New World,” for Anglo-Europeans, immigration, refuge, deportation, and itinerancy were themes people connected to their relationship struggles . The immigrant or refugee psychology reflects itself as a lack of certainty, of ‘being-at-homeness,’ never certain of our foothold, of whether the world could sustain or welcome us. What looks like fear of commitment, intimacy problems, or feeling a lack of permission to be yourself with another, for many, was a reflection, amplified through the generations, of the fears and anxieties of their ancestors in a strange land, only tenuously and temporarily hosted by its peoples and government.

Individual psychotherapy, the habit of looking inward, while yielding tremendous insights, needs to be complemented, at least occasionally, with this broad sweep of history. We are who we are for so many reasons, and to realize that our strange tendencies and pesky moods are not only to be found in a psychology text, but in a history book, is, at least for me, a huge relief. What won’t yield to self-reflection and inner probing might best be explained and even resolved by reading the history that our forebearers lived.

It’s been quiet on the blog, but not due to a lack of activity. It’s riding season, and I keep forgetting how much it takes to get in shape early in the season. Reach the Beach in 100 degrees was a sufferfest. But that’s not the only thing keeping me busy. Last Tuesday was the Oregon primary, and the media descended on Portland, along with Obama, Bill and Chelsea Clinton. I’m a sponsor of the third grade at Rigler Elementary, as part of the I Have a Dream foundation, which was one of the organizations taking part in a community service project with the Clintons. So there I was, on Sunday morning, with a small group of kids and adults planting tomatoes and painting murals in a community garden with Bill and Chelsea. After an hour of cameras clicking, tomato planting and painting, I hopped on my bike, and whizzed across town to Tom McCall Waterfront Park to join a throng of 75,000 people listening to Barack Obama.

But with all that activity and excitement, one image keeps replaying in my mind. I had an opportunity to talk for a few minutes with Chelsea Clinton, without the media or other adults around. We chatted about nothing in particular, just small talk about community projects, teaching, and the like. I avoided asking anything political, or about her mother’s campaign, and yet I noticed she studiously avoided eye contact. Now, maybe I’m making a big deal out of this, but she kept her eyes downcast the whole time. Reading into it I got the sense that the public has to be a frightful thing for her.

And this is where this post winds its way back to leadership and power. I’ve been asking, what is it about leadership, about power, that lends itself to abuse or corruption? The problem is, though, the question doesn’t differentiate the person from the role. The leadership role and the person inhabiting that role are not one and the same. Stepping into a role is like stepping into a vortex of energies. You become a target for projections of all kinds: you are admired, hated, feared, seen as a role model, castigated for failing to be a role model. Your role represents qualities that you personally could never fulfill. And the role, as I pointed out in Public Life, Private Selves, has qualities and features that can take on a life of their own. So fully investigating power and its use and abuse has to take into account not just the individual, and what he or she does with power, but the role, and what influence or affect the role has on the individual.

When leaders or those in power are criticized, even if justified, too much is made of their personality, which leads to a dead end conversation: people in power are corrupt, psychopathic or evil. But if leadership can truly be everyday leadership, something for us all to share, then knowing more about the role and how projection and expectation factor into it, is important. There’s a reality to projection, to social expectation, and stereotyping. Studies show that expectations can play a determining role in performance. If teachers expect students to do poorly, students tend to do, well, poorly. And vice versa. High expectations can raise performance. I have had both experiences. I’ve stepped into the role of facilitator, and people expect me to know, and somehow I always find something brilliant to say. Likewise, I’ve been in the facilitator role when it was “take a shot at the leader” day, and well, it’s no fun.

Back to Chelsea. I kept thinking about her childhood, growing up hearing and seeing difficult, critical and nasty things being said about your parents, about you. What it must be like to be in the public eye, while her father’s infidelities were daily fodder for months on end. Then, just as things subside, your mother runs for President, and there you are again, in the public eye, open season. My eyes would be downcast too. Do I want to be open to whatever some stranger might say to me? Or even what they might think? How would I protect myself from that? How do we survive the roles we’re in? Step one is to become aware that we are in roles, that what happens to us is not just personal, but belongs to the role. Peter Block, who writes about leadership and about consulting, says, when working as a consultant, “take nothing personally before 6 pm.” In other words, what happens to you is addressed to the role, not only you.

Too often, our political leaders only embody the role, but not the personal part. But occasionally, there are amazing glimpses of the role and the person, separate yet relating. Later that day, Obama displayed that skill, something I have seldom seen public figures do:. He said, “I tried to run a positive campaign. But I haven’t always been successful in that. It’s hard. When someone whacks you, you get hurt, and want to whack back.” There’s a human in that role. Are we ready for that? Meanwhile, the media say: toughen up, it’s part of the deal to be whacked, whack back, and the American public need to know their leaders can be tough and take it. Or do we? I’d like to ask Chelsea what she thinks. Her eyes, or what I project into them, tell me otherwise.

The following post begins to explore the question of abuse of power, or failures of power. In my earlier post I asked, can we learn how to use power well, like we learn how to ride a bike, or does power really have some corrupting influence? Which, if any, features related to high rank alters behavior or even personality?

A lot has already been written about the now fading scandal concerning former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. In the heat of the discussion, the question reverberating through the blogosphere was, “What was he thinking?” The easy answer of course, is: he wasn’t. Thinking, as in carefully weighing pros and cons, considering consequences, cost-benefits, and all that, nope, that probably wasn’t done, or at least, done thoroughly. It couldn’t have been a very cogent thought process that led him to pay $80,000 over the course of several years for dates (sessions? appointments?) with high priced prostitutes.

My inquiry here isn’t about sex or prostitution. It’s about risk and the private lives of public figures. What possible thought or non-thought processes allow the Eliot Spitzers, Mark Foleys and Bill Clintons of the world to risk their careers in such high stakes pursuits? Or, in some secret recess of their mind, do they want to get caught, to torpedo a career they don’t, albeit subliminally, want? In his Newsweek.com article, Notes on a scandal, Howard Fineman, writes:

Spitzer is a type I have seen before: a candidate who needs to rocket at warp speed because he does not dare stop to consider whether he really wants to be living the political career he is living. Spitzer, it turns out, hated some or all of what he was, what he wanted to be, or what he had become. Why else would he knowingly risk destroying his life’s career?

One wonders, how many people, at the top, or near to it, find themselves in a life no longer their own? Surrounded by people they don’t like or don’t trust, doing a job they don’t like, or responsible to a public they scorn? Is it much different from anyone of us stuck in a job or role we don’t like? We manage to tolerate it by engaging in things that take the edge off, some illicit, others less so: drinking, hanging with buddies, hobbies, having affairs or visiting prostitutes, etc.

But for a leader in a public position, it’s a different story. We imbue the role of leader with heroic stature, we don’t want to know about the private doubts, fallibilities, and lack of perfection. We don’t want to see ourselves up there, some poor schlub bumbling and stumbling, we want to see heroes.

It’s a love/hate relationship we have with the human side of leadership. On the one hand, we love a personable, folksy, emotionally accessible person, the “Gipper,” the fatherly or motherly figure we can relate to. Yet on the other hand, we demand strength, infallibility, and heroism. And we are surprised to discover our leaders have human desires and needs, just like the rest of us.

This pressure to be perfect we put on the role of leader creates a schism between the public self and the private self. The public self is the hero, the private self remains inaccessible, hidden from public view. And so a gulf begins to widen between the public role and the private self widens, eventually morphing into a compartmentalized existence, a split personality of sorts. Over time, even the leader starts to believe in his or her public self, believing that what’s performed on stage is the real self. Likewise, the private self, the needs, emotions, self-doubt, and desires that are kept out of the picture become so secret that it is easy to believe they don’t exist, that others can’t see them. Because I don’t see this part of myself, others can’t either. But our secrets compel us. Our hidden selves are most dangerous; they become autonomous and push us to do things, even reckless things, in order to be gratified and indulged.

This is a problem for public figures and for all of us in jobs where the role demands a one-sided expression of the personality. And positions of power and leadership are typical of this. In so-called normal life, the boundaries between parts of ourselves are probably meant to be thin, almost permeable. It’s messy this way, but robust and secure. It’s what we call conscience. My professional self is there to remind me when I am at the office party, hey, you have to be at work on Monday with these people, watch yourself. Or, my parental self is never too distant, even if I’m holiday, or out for dinner, the parental antenna is on alert, just in case the phone rings.

But in roles where the stress, expectations and demands are super high, the boundaries thicken, sometimes necessarily so. Walls go up to protect and buffer the one self from the others. Police officers or soldiers for instance, frequently report that they cannot share their experiences with their close friends and loved ones. They come home, sit in front of the TV, or drink, and numb themselves out. They do not, and cannot transition easily between public and private selves because the experiences they have in their public selves are beyond what most people want to hear about.

When power comes into play, the walls between public and private self are fortified by the trappings of the job itself – unlisted numbers, personal assistants, wood paneling and leather furniture, a limo and driver, private jets, mobile devices, and layers and layers of intermediaries that protect them from contact with their everyday self. There’s a scene in the romantic comedy, The American President, where the President wants to get flowers for his girlfriend. But for the life of him, he can’t get past those walls. He picks up the phone, but discovers he can only reach the White House switchboard. He doesn’t have a car he can drive himself. He can’t leave the White House without the Secret Service. Once, he finally manages to get an outside line, the florist shop assistant hangs up on him when he says. “I’m the President,” certain it’s a hoax.

But if we see leaders as heroes, we should remember that heroes and gods are meant, in the words of Whitman, to contain multitudes. Our superheroes all have alter-egos for whom we cheer just as loudly as for their amazing feats of strength. We love Peter Parker as much as we love Spiderman. It makes our superheroes even better, that there’s a flip side to them, that there is someone we can relate to, someone who fumbles in conversation, who wears glasses and pocket protectors and is picked on by the school bullies. Even the Greek gods reflected this paradox. They were venerated for their superhuman abilities and strengths, while at the same time driven by jealousy, vengeance, and insatiable appetites. They were saviors and villains, all without contradiction.

But in our modern version of heroes, in our leaders, we don’t tolerate that dualism. So leaders become estranged from their alter ego, from friends, family, and most of all from themselves. The walls that protect the private self from the public one create a loneliness that can’t be assuaged. We can’t be our self, our full self in public, with needs and desires. But in private, we indulge them. We cannot seek solace in public, where we will be shamed, but in private, with strangers, with people who are paid to listen, paid to care, paid to be nonpartisan. And as Charlie Sheen says, paid to leave afterwards.

In Primary Colors, Senator Jack Stanton, (a thinly disguised Bill Clinton) is sitting in a donut shop, at what seems to be 1 am. He’s the only customer, sitting in that cold florescent light of the shop. The camera pans out wide angle, and we see the empty streets, the loneliness of the city, of the hour, and of the man, as he in turn soothes and is soothed by the guy behind the counter. And you sense, this is what he’s craving, and perhaps what brought him to politics in the first place, the desire to connect with people, the ultimate bringing together of the real self and the public role.

I’m in Florida, visiting my parents on the Gulf Coast. When the plane landed in Dallas/Fort Worth, for the stopover, and again in Fort Myers, the ground below looked, well, scratchy. In contrast to the loamy and verdant patch of land I call home, the earth looked threadbare, like an old quilt that had seen better days. And it’s not just the geographical landscape in Portland that’s different. There’s a cultural landscape in Portland, in Multnomah County, Oregon that is markedly different from many parts of the country.

These thoughts bring me back to the question of power. Because in that luxuriant landscape of Multnomah County, it’s easy to get myopic, to think about the problems of power and leadership in more benign terms. My goal here is to look at how we use power, how and why we use it poorly, and how we can use it well. And yet, the question nags me, is it that simple? What about blatantly abusive, even evil uses of power? Can we really learn how to use power like we learn how to ride a bike, or does power truly have a corrupting influence? I’m not sure it does. Maybe the already corrupted tend to seek power. Because not everyone in a high rank position abuses power. Which lends weight to the argument, to use gun advocates’ phrase, that it’s not power that abuses, but the person. Or perhaps it’s a problem of scale, that because of their high profile, leaders’ egregious acts of abuse are more visible.

So, over the next few months I’ll be looking at the more difficult sides to power, whether there really are certain factors related to high rank that alter behavior, or even personality. One of the difficulties in tackling this question is that it’s often answered by those who have been hurt by power, so we seldom hear the story from both sides. For this reason, I like to consider power a problem of scale – even in a small way, if we have misused our power, we can shed light on this question: how if it all has power itself contributed to its abusive use?

I don’t believe leadership is best served by the parallels drawn to war and sports. It doesn’t capture the sense of service and eldership at the heart of leadership. But I do see one reason why military and sports metaphors are so often used to describe leadership challenges. War and sport have in common the need to develop mental toughness, so what you learn can be done under terrific psychological and physical stress. For an athlete, learning what to do is only part of the preparation; learning to do it on game day is another. That’s the difference between just being athletic, and being a top competitor. The professional athlete’s training includes psychological toughness by simulating game day conditions: high stakes, bad calls, mean crowds, horrible weather, and ruthless opponents. Because every athlete and coach knows that once you cross a threshold of stress, learning and thinking goes out the window. If you get triggered by stress, choking is inevitable. (more…)