Your Leadership Shadow

What you’re about to read is not for the faint hearted and as you read, if you stop to think, “Oh my God he’s talking about me”, well it’s a pretty good sign that this information is of major importance for you on your leadership journey.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, taught there are two parts of our personality. The Persona and The Shadow. Our persona is the part of ourselves that we make public, the face we wear in society. In fact the word persona is from the Greek word meaning mask. It’s our “show”.

Our persona is shaped by all the forces that shape our identity including:

• Childhood Conditioning;
• Our Culture;
• The Job We Have;
• Our Socio Economic Status, and
• Beliefs we’ve taken from our parents.

Within the persona is all the stuff we accept about ourselves both good and bad. We can change this mask to fit the situation in a conscious manner. We can alter our “show”.

The Shadow

Our persona’s partner is one which is less visible and one we try to hide from people, one that exists outside the light of day, often outside our consciousness and this is the shadow. Our shadow.

The shadow is full of all those things we have no wish to be, and certainly no wish to present to others; our fears, our insecurities, our anxieties. It’s the part of ourselves that we are often not in touch with or have possibly disowned.

In that way the shadow isn’t necessarily our dark side, I just like to use this to set the tone. It’s the side of us that is actually in the dark. In other words it hasn’t come into the light as yet. It’s almost like our personal blind spots. And it can possess both positive qualities and lessons about ourselves that we haven’t quite yet found, often called our “gifts”, and also the “negative qualities” about ourselves that we just don’t want to know about.

The Shadow and Leadership

Often the reason leaders find it hard to get inspired themselves or get committed performance from their teams is that their shadow gets in the way. Worst still, as a leader your shadow can cast darkness over your whole team or business with disastrous results. And everybody else but you will know about it!

Let’s take an over controlling Chief Executive. Lets make him a male this time although any gender will do. He’s an extremely self confident leader who positions himself in the centre of action and even distances himself from things that could portray him in a bad light. He insists that his senior managers don’t say anything of controversy unless it goes through him. He carefully monitors the information given to his board. He wants to see the minutes of every meeting his senior team have. In other words he’s actually running by fear. This is exactly what happens in the organisation. The organisation begins to breed a culture of fear. This CEO’s psychopathology has been projected like a net over the whole organisation and becomes the embodiment of his shadow.

How Do You Know If You Have A Shadow?

Everyone casts a shadow; we all have one. Imagine standing under a lamp post in the dark. The further you move away from the lamp light the longer your shadow.

This is exactly how it is in our personal lives. The more self awareness you have, or enlightenment, the closer you are to the lamp post, the less the extent of your shadow. The bigger the ego, the longer the shadow.

Move too far away from the light (self awareness) and the shadow gets longer and longer.

How Do We Know We’re Dealing With Shadow Material?

When someone’s behaviour gets us a little concerned but doesn’t really upset us or simply informs us it’s probably got very little to do with our shadow. However, when someone does something that really gets up our nose, in other words it really inflames us and we hear ourselves saying things like “I can’t stand her doing that”, or “How dare he do that”, there’s a big chance that we are projecting our hostility onto them. Just as a projector takes an image and projects it onto a wall. So we are projecting our anger onto the other person. Often because we can’t handle it in ourselves.

Carl Jung said that when an inner situation (emotion or feeling) is not made conscious to us and happens outside of us and we place a huge judgement, anger, or a lot of psychic energy around it, it’s possibly telling us more about ourselves than it is about the other person. What you’ll find is unless you start to come to grips with your shadow you will see it everywhere. It will keep on following you around and popping up in your life. In fact it will attract the very people that you may often dislike until you get the lessons and then move on in your journey.

For instance, if anger, hatred, jealously or destructiveness are unexpressed and unresolved wherever you go (just like our shadow) you’ll attract people who appear to have these characteristics. So when we feel extremely negative or violently destructive towards another person, nearly always there’s something about ourselves that we need to accept. “There’s something in this for all of us”.

The Shadow In Business

Parker Palmer in his book “Leading From Within, Insights on Leadership” has identified 5 monsters or shadows that can exist within leaders and impact their behaviour and results in their business.

1. The Shadow of Insecurity

 This means the leader may not really know who they are as a person and what they stand for. They therefore gather round them symbols to help them try to stamp their identity on the business. This comes through in terms of their title, their status, in terms of them always giving presentations rather than their team members, in terms of the hierarchy they like to create within the business and often a non-collaborative style, or aloofness.

2. The Shadow of Hostility

Ever dealt with a real mean bastard? It’s a do or die effort with everything and everybody. Leaders with this shadow continually look to see where people are undermining them. They are convinced it’s a dog eat dog war and are therefore continually on tender hooks. This drives trust south and coercive power north rather than creating a sense of community in their team or business.

3. The Shadow of Functional Atheism

“If it’s going to be it’s up to me”. This shadow manifests itself with the leader thinking they are ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the business. They need to make it happen in full. You see this in leaders who have incredibly high standards with no one else ever living up to them. That’s why their car is in the car park first thing in the morning and last thing at night and 50% of their emails are probably sent out of hours, like 11pm on a Sunday evening.

4. The Shadow of The Fear of Chaos and Natural Order of Things

This shadow manifests itself in leaders trying to structure and order everything around them. The great old ‘Siggy’ Freud said, “It’s almost anal retentive behaviour”, but if they’re not in control then they’re very out of control. They haven’t yet accepted that we live in a world where anything can happen at any time. Rather than controlling what they can control i.e., their own behaviour and relationships with others, they produce a proliferation of norms, policies and standard operating procedures for everything rather than driving the business with these as support mechanisms and having a set of values as a guiding light. They talk about entrepreneurship and then produce a policy manual on how it will be done. Watch creativity and morale go south when this happens.

5. The Shadow of Denial of Their Own Mortality

The Buddhists make it very clear to us; “life is suffering” and the sooner we come to grips with this the sooner we get to really live, relate and make a difference. When this basic truth has not yet been accepted we try to keep everything alive – projects, people, relationships, old habits. We act as if everything will be the same in our changing world. We tend not to let go of our old ways and embrace the new. Eventually this can lead to a feeling of emptiness and sadness. An emptiness that can only ever be cured by relating to people and the business community in a whole new way.

So What Can You Do to Come to Terms With Your Shadow?

Re-read these notes; just an awareness of the shadow will begin to put you on the path of enlightenment.

Be aware that every time someone really upsets you, there may be an element of you projecting your own shadow. (We call this shadow boxing)

When you really are inflamed like this, here’s four questions you can ask:

What is it about me that I haven’t acknowledged in myself that makes me feel this way about them? Is it a “negative” quality? For example, because I don’t accept my own anger or can’t express my own anger I don’t like to see other people getting angry.

Is it an unexpressed need of mine? For example, because I deny my own need to be recognised, I get inflamed when someone else shows off or takes the credit for something.

Is it personal history? For example, was I continually let down as a child possibly by my parents, therefore every time the boss breaks a commitment to me, I get extremely angry, hostile or very depressed.

Another way to get to know your shadow is to complete a Myers Briggs Type Indicator (M.B.T.I.). A very popular tool that shows a range of behaviours on four scales. For example, someone who’s strongly Extrovert at one end of the scale with a strong need to be “out there” and energised by people around her or him, may not have accepted or possibly disowned the more Introvert side of themselves which wants to take relationships to a deeper level and secretly craves for space, silence and solitude.

Another way of coming to terms with our shadow is to write down all the things that really get up our nose about other people, the things that really inflame you. For example, when I first did this I wrote down such things as:

• Not goal orientated
• “Space cadets”, not grounded in business realities
• Wanting to save the planet
• Fiscally irresponsible

Then take those so called negative qualities and through your own filter system change them and put a positive spin on them. Negative Qualities Positive Spin on Them.

Negative Quality	Positive Spin on it
Not goal oriented	Going with the flow, enjoying life in the present.
"Space Cadets"	Not grounded Involved in a realm above the physical, which is the metaphysical and spiritual
Wanting to save the planet	Having a higher purpose, having your life stand for something.
Fiscally irresponsible	Not being so hung up on saving and investment that we miss the joy of the present (My grandfather used to say “save for a rainy day but don’t miss all the sunshine”)

Now what you have on the right hand column is the very essence of what you need to learn from the people that have been inflaming you or pissing you off . This is their GIFT to you.

We sometimes do this exercise in our workshops. You often need one or two partners to help you see that there may be a positive spin on some of the so called “negative judgements” and projections that you’re making about others (your shadow).

The Gift of Shadow

There’s a gift beyond every shadow; a gift that is ours but a gift that we receive only if we take the journey and begin to accept it.

We feel that our functioning at work is enhanced. We are more centred; we are better connected with people. We work with more consciousness and creativity, more vitality, more life force.

Our energy once spent repressing the shadow is now free for more productive and meaningful pursuits. Another gift of the shadow is a new kind of self confidence, not confidence built on positional power or status conferred by the corporation but the confidence that comes when we embrace our total selves, our total strengths, our total limitations, our vulnerabilities, our light and our shadow and learn that we’re okay as we are.

This is the self confidence built on a deep inner strength. The confidence we gain any time we leave the bondage of our shadow. Taking this inner journey also leads us to a sharper understanding and acceptance of our personal power. The leader who is truly empowered is the one who has some understanding of their shadow and develops some inner consciousness.

Another gift “shadow work” promises is that we will be better able to engage in the activity of leadership. The more consciousness we have of our inner lives the less tenuous and the more confident our involvement in leadership activities. We become leaders that people truly want to follow.

One final gift we receive from the journey is the gift of genuine partnership and real ‘connectiveness’ in relationships. With our kids, our team, our boss, our partners and our friends.

We become more understanding and accepting of others and better able to honour diversity. We have stronger and more meaningful relationships as a result of our personal inner journey. And it is this connection with ourselves and others that really enables us to do magnificent things in both our professional and personal life.

In Summary

We change not by trying to change, but becoming more aware of who we really are, both our persona and our shadow. The integration of shadow does not require acceptance, rejection, defence, justification or action; it only requires your awareness. An awareness that even by reading this, you are beginning to integrate. The reintegration of the shadow, the owning of some of your disowned “stuff ” can be simply accomplished by considering those rejected negative qualities you see in others, turning them into potentially positive qualities and seeing the gifts, insights and personal actions you require to enable you to be more whole. And for my money that’s what it’s all about.

“I will be remembering all the joy that love can bring when I am remembering the shadow of your smile”.

By: Paul Mitchell