convinced of its worth, or just because they do not see a chance to change jobs or
are too well paid to quit. In this way one can gauge whether the employees are really
involved or are simply doing their jobs; and, especially because these factors can
hardly be measured by instruments, for leaders evaluating success starts with
evaluating themselves.
3.2.3 Leading Means Knowing Yourself...........................
The systemic approach of the Academy considers leadership as an integral phe-
nomenon, but focuses on a dimension that remains a blind spot of other systemic
approaches: the leader itself.
Leadership requires self-knowledge. If I want to establish and maintain
a relationship then I cannot perform the calculation with completely unknown
variables; at least one variable needs to be known – myself.
Everybody thinks: “But I know who I am, what I want and what my goal is,”
especially confident, strong leaders, which is why especially leaders balk at intro-
spection. The reason is that they do not trust their perception of themselves nor their
emotions. As an example: A leader does not feel sufficiently informed by his
employees. But he does not dare to express his anger clearly. Instead he starts
his own internal (mental) blacklist, which finally leads to a hard step. And when
that happens the employees cannot understand why the boss reacts so harshly. The
leader did not want to share anything – and has to bear the consequences.
We like to fool ourselves concerning our self-perception. Our emotions, think-
ing, acting and our relationships are not controlled by rational, obvious and known
motivations only. It is much more the case that we are the product of irrational,
partly unconscious principles, images, messages and role expectations. The thought
of being controlled by something beyond their own control is hard to accept –
especially for leaders.
A great number of managers simply “function.” They do not know what they
feel and certainly not what others feel. In many cases – and that is worse – they have
stopped feeling anything. In psychology this deficit is called “alexithymia.” The list
of typical symptoms reads like a brief description of the average German manager:
lack of imagination, limited emotional life, lack of joy, lack of spontaneity, little
empathy, extremely factual expression, and a total concentration on facts. At the
same time these people think they are socially competent and pleasant-natured,
in short that they are good bosses (see de Vries 2002, p. 113 ff.).
Reinhard K. Sprenger analyzed another dimension of this problem: “Most
leaders are not aware that not the “matters as such,” but their perceptions of
them, their frame of coordinates become visible through these matters. Therefore,
they are not interested in themselves and certainly not in the uniqueness of their
experience. They are interested in everything that is taking place at the periphery of
their existence without acknowledging that something is taking place within them-
selves” (Sprenger 2002a, p. 107).
130 3 Systemic Leadership or: Designing a World That Others Want to Be Part Of