Corporations on the Couch

By Sara C. Medina

An unorthodox consultant brings Freud into the boardroom

Business Consultant Abraham Zaleznik was presented with the following problem: the client was the head of a successful hosiery company that he had inherited from his father. As president, the man aggressively expanded the business, building additional plants and buying new machinery. Yet the market was moving away from his product. Hoping to improve things by a dramatic change he appointed a successor as president and made himself chairman. Then he went into a panic and consulted Zaleznik about whether to fire his successor.

Was this a case of poor executive selection? Faulty market research? Zaleznik's diagnosis went beyond both: the client, he concluded, had a father fixation. He had expanded the company in order to prove that he was a bigger and better executive than Dad, and then, when business faltered, he appointed a successor in an unconscious desire to find a scapegoat.

If this sounds like a highly unorthodox analysis, it is, because Zaleznik, 57, is a highly unorthodox consultant. He is not only Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social Psychology of Management at Harvard Business School and a private consultant of 30 years' experience, but also a certified psychoanalyst, one of a very few in the U.S. who have made a specialty of using Freud's teachings and techniques to put corporate employees--and sometimes entire corporations--on the couch. "To me," he says, "an organization is a working coalition among executives that can be disturbed by hidden emotional factors, like unresolved dependency, the inability of people to deal constructively with rivalry and aggression. My job is to remove these barriers so people's energies can be turned toward work and away from their defenses."

Zaleznik was already an experienced teacher, consultant and author of three books when he decided in 1958 to become a psychoanalyst. "I was very taken with the notion of unconscious motivation," he says. "This was the only field addressing itself to the problem." Licensed to practice in 1968, he was certified in 1975 by the American Psychoanalytic Association, a rare distinction for a non-M.D.

In his work, Zaleznik draws on a tiny, relatively unknown 1921 book by Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In it Freud attempted to get beyond conventional descriptions of group behavior by showing that in "artificial groups, each individual is bound by libidinal ties on the one hand to the leader and on the other hand to the other members." The members love the leader and share a common "illusion" that the leader "loves all the individuals in the groups with an equal love." Freud cited the Roman Catholic Church and the military as examples of cohesive groups in which this illusion works to sustain morale.

Corporate leaders, those symbolic "lovers" of all the employees, must be extremely careful not to upset group morale, Zaleznik has found. "They unwittingly become seductive of their people, and this creates undercurrents of rivalry and jealousy," he points out. Maurice Grossman, head of a nationwide chain of home-supply stores, based in Braintree, Mass., consulted Zaleznik after he brought in an executive from outside the company to be groomed as his successor. "It was poor people-handling," says Grossman. "I misunderstood what it would do to the four or five people on the next level. It brought out such strong feelings in the people around me that the organization ceased to be an organization." On Zaleznik's advice, Grossman helped the would-be successor to relocate.

The classic tools of Freudian analysis seem to be useful in solving corporate problems. In interviews with company executives, Zaleznik first enlists each person in the task, creating what is known in the world of analysis as a "therapeutic alliance." "I am inviting them to work along with me," he says. "If they identify with the work, they will join in and try to do a lot of it themselves."

The interviews are straightforward --"no hidden agenda"--but his psychoanalytic training helps him to "listen with the third ear not only to what the person says but to what he has to defend himself against: conflicts or ideas that are unacceptable to him." Zaleznik may also "speak the unspeakable," helping the executive articulate painful truths about his colleagues or himself--for example, when someone gets a job he wants but feels guilty about it, or when a company division is in trouble but its executives will not face the issue of enormous cash losses.

Transference, which, as Zaleznik says, is "the most important lever for understanding and helping patients in analysis," is also crucial to his corporate consultations. There, Zaleznik explains, it means that "a person will relate to me as he does to the people to whom he looks for help and support, and sometimes to his antagonists. People deal with their boss as they did with their parents, or with their peers as they did with their siblings." One of Zaleznik's interviewees, a candidate for a management job, was extremely guarded in answering questions, attempting to parcel out information and maintain control. Zaleznik advised against hiring him. "Later I learned he had a reputation for sandbagging people," says Zaleznik. "I didn't know that. But someone who is manipulative in all his relationships would reproduce that with me."

The hosiery company client who hired a man to replace him, then wanted to fire him, was a classic case of transference. "He was looking for justification for actions he wanted to take," says Zaleznik. "He wanted to get rid of the new president, and wanted me to give him permission. I was to act as a father surrogate." Freed by Zaleznik from his personal hangups, the man returned to the presidency, but he was too late to salvage the business. Burdened with plants and machines for making stockings, his firm was unable to retool for the coming new thing: pantyhose.

--By Sara C Medina. Reported by Ruth Galvin/Boston

With reporting by Ruth Galvin

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