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Developing Engaged Citizens
149 Plays10 months ago
In this episode of the Doorknob Comments podcast, we are excited to sit down with Dr. Edward Shapiro, a distinguished author and psychoanalyst.
During our conversation, we discuss his book "Finding a Place to Stand.” We explore the significance of family dynamics, institutional roles, and citizenship. He highlights the value of self-reflection and the challenges of leadership in a polarized society. Dr. Shapiro also shares a story illustrating the importance of action in confrontational situations. His book serves as a testament to the value of this learning process and is a recommended read for anyone interested in leadership, group relations, and active citizenship.
Key Takeaways
- Engaged citizenship is vital for a cohesive society and involves active listening and open-mindedness.
- Group relations conferences provide insights into organizational dynamics and the role of authority.
- Leadership requires courage to act in challenging situations, as illustrated by a social worker's story.
- Learning from others and self-reflection enhance leadership.
- Asking “How are they right?” rather than “How am I right?” is a paradigm shift for effective listening and collaboration.
In This Episode:
- [04:30] Experiences and journey to Austin Riggs
- [14:30] Therapy and its role in family dynamics
- [19:49] The family as an institution
- [22:39] The book's idea in addressing societal issues
- [24:28] The concept of good citizenship
- [30:10] Group relations conferences and their impact
- [45:19] "Why do I have to do this?"
Notable Quotes
- [12:47] “People resist impatient people who are labeled by others as one of the problems of family dynamics.” - Ed
- [19:49] "The family is an institution and like any institution, it has a mission on behalf of society, and that mission is development - Ed
- [38:32] "I don't know that everybody wants to be a leader. Many people are afraid of leadership because of what's happened in their families around taking up leadership roles. We always bring our family role into our organization.” - Ed
Resources and Links
Doorknob Comments
Dr. Edward Shapiro
Dr. Fara White
Dr. Grant Brenner
Recommended
Transcript
The Family's Mission and Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
And what I learned that changed my career from the places that I've been is that the family is an institution. And like any institution, it has a mission on behalf of society. And that mission is development toward maturity. Hello, I'm Dr. Farah White. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner.
00:00:22
Speaker
We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York. We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the door knob comment. Door knob comments are important things we all say from time to time, just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the door knob.
00:00:39
Speaker
Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life. The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. Maybe
Ed Shapiro: A Career in Psychiatry
00:00:51
Speaker
we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves. And sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out.
00:01:06
Speaker
Welcome to the doorknob comments podcast. I'm your host Farrah White, and I'm here with my co-host Grant Brenner and our very special guest, Ed Shapiro, an accomplished author, psychoanalyst, Harvard trained physician, former CEO, organizational guru, and more. Ed Shapiro was the medical director and CEO of the Austin Riggs Center and clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale study center.
00:01:29
Speaker
He is a principal in the Boswell Group of New York, a founder of the International Dialogue Initiative, and on the advisory board of partners confronting collective atrocities. He is a distinguished faculty member at the Erickson Institute for Education Research and Advocacy. He has published three books and over 50 articles and book chapters on human development, personality disorders, organizational and family dynamics, and citizenship, presenting papers around the world.
00:01:56
Speaker
His latest book
Influences and Career Journey of Ed Shapiro
00:01:57
Speaker
is Finding a Place to Stand, Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens. Dr. Shapiro has received the Felix and Helene Deutsch Scientific Award from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, the Research Prize from the Society for Family Therapy and Research, and the Eisenberg Teaching Award from McLean Hospital.
00:02:17
Speaker
He was named Outstanding Physician, Outstanding Psychiatrist for Advancement of the Profession by Massachusetts Psychiatric Association and since 2011 has been named in the US News and World Reports list of top doctors. Welcome. Thanks Farah. Quite a mouthful. I think when someone is so accomplished, it's really important to take deep breaths when you're reading their bios. You need some voice lessons before an intro like that.
00:02:46
Speaker
It's okay if we call you Ed, yeah? Absolutely. Thank you. Is it okay? Can I ask how you decided to become a psychiatrist? That's a complicated question. My oldest brother was a psychoanalyst and he was 15 years older than I. So when I was a child, I was hanging around these people who were talking about interesting things.
00:03:09
Speaker
I think that's the core motivation. That planted the seed. I wonder if we can all relate to that in a way, because for me, I grew up in a place where we saw psychoanalysts, people in my family in the early 70s. We all saw the same German woman, and I ended up reading about Freud and Jung in books that I picked up at the mall and caught the bug early. Same. Although I was not reading analytic theory, I was sneaking, my dad used to see patients in the
00:03:39
Speaker
of our home and I used to sneak in and read all the magazines because it was like Cosmo and all about relationship stuff. The magazines in the waiting room, not the journals. No, no, no. I was like one with the people.
00:03:57
Speaker
Interesting. That's maybe another topic. So you've done so much. I know you were the chief executive officer for Austin Riggs, which is a very unique and special treatment facility in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I'm wondering, you know, what that was like and what sort of your passions are currently. And then we can get into some of the work that you've been doing in finding a place to stand about good citizenship. First of all, thanks for inviting me. I want to take the weight of that heavy introduction off my shoulders, if I may. Every one of those titles reflects an unusual opportunity to learn something.
00:04:44
Speaker
And that's how I got to Austin Riggs, and that's how I got to write the book. So let me just say a word about that. When I entered college, the Soviet Union was terrifying, the rest of us. And I grew up in a multi-generational family where my grandparents brought in Ukrainian refugees to live in the basement. Sputnik went up right before I entered college, so I decided to major in Russian language and literature.
00:05:15
Speaker
And I joined the Yale Western Chorus and we went to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and sang, this was part of the cultural exchange, we sang on street corners and in parks and were followed by the KGB and they called us spies and we went to people's homes and talked to them. And I learned something about a terrifying totalitarian culture. And when I graduated,
Medical Education and Cultural Learnings
00:05:44
Speaker
I went to an experimental medical program that gave extra time to do something else. This was at Stanford. And I got a master's in anthropology. And I studied a witch doctor in Tobago in the West Indies and learned about a different kind of provision of medical care. And then I studied migrant workers. I worked in a migrant labor camp as a physician when I was in medical school.
00:06:12
Speaker
And then my father died and I went to Boston and finished medical school at Harvard and they got me a grant to go to Israel the day after the Six-Day War. So I was there for three months at an amazing time in that country and part of a study of suicide in Palestinian villages. So I had this incredible opportunity to study this kind of division within a society.
00:06:43
Speaker
I was deferred from the Vietnam War because I was in medical school. And after my psychiatric training, I went to the National Institutes of Mental Health. I was in the public health service. So I was positioned there instead of going to Vietnam for two years in a program where I got to study families.
00:07:07
Speaker
I was in the US PHS, but I was at NIMH, the National Institutes of Mental Health. Just a quick note for listeners, because I only learned this. I was working in a refugee camp of Afghan refugees a couple of years ago on a stateside military base, that there is a branch of the US armed forces
00:07:27
Speaker
uniformed services, more accurately called the United States Public Health Service, and they wear navy blue military uniforms, but they don't typically carry a sidearm, right? But they are another branch of the military alongside the army, the Marines, the Air Force, and people don't know about them. They're relatively small. So you were in the USPHS via NIMH, the National Institute of National Health Service. I was, but we didn't wear blue uniform.
00:07:51
Speaker
The U.S. Public Health Service actually is the only armed services branch that doesn't have a marching band. They would play kazoos or something.
00:08:07
Speaker
Well, they were great. They were great. We were at an Air Force base and they were incredible to partner with the team of social workers and the type of structure and help as a disaster mental health volunteer who's a civilian. It was great working with them. So anyways, thanks for the digression. There was an extraordinary opportunity. We had all kinds of resources. The families were involved in the treatment of the adolescent. And I learned about family dynamics there.
00:08:35
Speaker
And then that program got pressured out because of biological and behavioral psychiatry. They decided at NIMH, no more psychosocial research. And so I left and I went back to Boston and I tried to get a job. And the CEO of McLean Hospital said to me, amazingly, what do you want to do?
00:09:00
Speaker
And I said, I want to continue the work I did at NIMH. And he said, OK. He was the new CEO.
Managed Care and Austin Riggs Mission
00:09:06
Speaker
He had all kinds of leadership equity. And he set up a program that I ran for 20 years, continuing the family research at NIMH. So I learned so much about families and individuals. We ran an open setting for terribly troubled kids and their families.
00:09:27
Speaker
But then at McLean, just as at NMH, some kind of external pressure. This time it was managed care. Managed care said, we will not support long-term treatment. And so my program was a long-term treatment. And one of the byproducts of managed care, of course, of course, is that people who are in trouble, who don't get adequate treatment, go in and out of hospitals.
00:09:57
Speaker
Anyway, they closed my program. So I had to leave. And I was lucky enough to be chosen as the CEO and medical director at Austin Riggs. So that's how I got to Riggs. So Austin Riggs, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, just context. Austin Riggs is, and I've sent patients to Austin Riggs who have very complex problems. And it's an amazing environment that sort of
00:10:28
Speaker
does provide long-term care and really values understanding not just the family dynamics that patients are affected by, but also how that is expressed in the interactions with staff. And so I'm sure you'll tell us more about how incredibly therapeutic that can be and how much of a lost art it is.
00:10:49
Speaker
for listeners, I believe movies like Girl Interrupted, so Austin Riggs is probably the premier hospital, psychiatric hospital in the country, maybe in the world, I would say, and is used often as like a template for movies, novels, and whatever else, because it's unusual in that it's not, I don't know if it's still like this today, but I heard that it was,
00:11:15
Speaker
not really a locked psychiatric ward and that people were able to sort of mill around, go inside, outside, which is really quite special. I think Girl Interrupted was actually done at McLean. I found that. It was. Okay. That McLean used to be the kind of program that focused on psychosocial issues. Riggs is an extraordinary institution. It's a tiny hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the Berkshires on Main Street.
00:11:45
Speaker
And it's not that sort of unlocked, it's unlocked. Patients are free to go to go, come and go. There are no restrictions, there are no seclusion rooms, there's no, people are free. And they come, almost half of the patients have had nearly full suicide attempt. So the negotiation at the front door is serious. The mission is the most powerful aspect of Riggs.
00:12:14
Speaker
It celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. So it has survived against all the pressures that closed the other places that I was talking to you about. Its mission, and really, that mission is very important to me. I was there as CEO for 20 years. The mission is to help so-called treatment resistant patients become people taking charge of their lives. And one of the translations
Community Approach at Austin Riggs
00:12:40
Speaker
of that mission,
00:12:42
Speaker
relates to the family dynamics that I had been studying. People who are labeled by others, treatment resistant patient. People who are labeled by others is one of the problems of family dynamics. You get into irrational roles in family, you get called the crazy one, or the patient, or the star, or the, you know, this is the way families work. People get into irrational roles.
00:13:10
Speaker
RIGS helps people get out of those rules and take charge of their lives. And given the trouble that they have when they come into the hospital, that negotiation at the front door makes very clear to the families and to the patients and to the staff that everybody's anxious because we're trying to help patients take up their own authority for their lives. And that means in an open setting, there's a risk.
00:13:40
Speaker
So the negotiation at the front door is all about authority, all about people taking charge. And we work with the families and with the patients in a therapeutic community, which is organized by the staff, but run by the patients. The medical director gives them a budget and they plan their own activities and they elect officers and the staff consults to the system they create. They put the Shakespearean company and the Berkshires
00:14:10
Speaker
puts on a play a couple of times a year that the patients and people from the outside community participate in. There's an authorization from the task to help people take up their own authority. It's a phenomenal place. I'm biased, of course, but working there is a privilege. I'm curious what your thoughts are in a simplistic sense. I have the idea that, well, number one, there's a lot of
00:14:38
Speaker
media coverage and interest in short-term therapies that are structured. And then there's a movement I see back in the direction of longer-term, what are called psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapies, including looking at systems like the family system. And the financialization of medicine makes that harder because short-term treatments that appear to have a good evidence base appear to be
00:15:03
Speaker
effective and financially efficient, but you end up just with chronic problems that are very costly. So in an environment like Riggs, a person could have a couple of decades of really problematic family environment, and they may have been diagnosed with biological type problems and treated in many different biological or psychotherapeutic ways.
00:15:25
Speaker
But but the short story is kind of like we need to treat the family and we also need to create a kind of temporary family, which changes the person's personality and hinges on them developing a sense of authority and autonomy. And that starts even before they begin treatment. Farrah, what's your take on this? Yeah, I think it makes sense. I do think lately
00:15:51
Speaker
there has been, I guess, more of an awareness, at least within my practice. And Grant, I don't know if you're getting phone calls and people looking for, let's say, therapists that were trained in internal family systems. So these things are, I think, back in the awareness as
00:16:11
Speaker
you know, important and relevant and part of our treatment. Right. And even last week we did an episode on siblings and particularly
00:16:22
Speaker
on growing up with a sibling with a disability and how that really shapes us. So that part is heartening to me, but what I really like to add about your book is how it outlines really this as a foundation for functioning in society, right? And that it's the family's job to create a person who can function and be a good citizen in society. And so I'm wondering,
00:16:50
Speaker
sort of how the inspiration for this came about. You know, I got two things to say in response to both of your comments. One is a story, Grant, in response to what you said. I
The Family's Role in Society
00:17:04
Speaker
did a family consultation months, a long time ago. The system asked me to see the family because they were having troubles with anger. And the patient had been treated in a system where he'd gotten behavioral treatment.
00:17:20
Speaker
Behavioral treatment is very useful. People learn a lot from it. But they learn a language, which is a kind of funny language. And so I met with this family, and I said to the kid what the story, asked him what the story was. And he said, well, I have problems, this was the hospitalized patient. He said, I have problems with my anger. And I've learned a lot of tools to help you with it. The family's in the room.
00:17:50
Speaker
So he was giving me this language that he had learned, very useful language about helping him to manage his impossible. And then I said, who are you mad at? And he turned to his father and he said, you. And that was the shift into the family.
00:18:09
Speaker
No one had asked him that from a strict behavioral paradigm. That's not a question. I remember I was speaking with someone who's a DBT therapist, which also can be an excellent therapy. Dialectical behavioral therapy includes the behavioral piece. And I said, well, they were focusing on this idea that if you make assumptions about other people, it's going to be problematic. And I kind of said, well,
00:18:31
Speaker
Is it possible that the assumption that you're talking about, though, is something you feel that you're seeing in the other person, what psychoanalysts call projection? And the therapist said, maybe, but we don't address that. So in this case, you kind of asked him where it was really coming from. Well, that connects to your question about the family. You know, I learned in my training, Winnicott's comment stands out to me. He said there's no such thing as an individual.
00:19:01
Speaker
And he was referring to the fact that the mother-baby unit is the existential basic unit. Donald Winnicott, just for the readers, for the listeners, was a well-known psychoanalyst and pediatrician. And he was actually on the radio and talked about parenting. And he said there's no such thing as a baby without a mother, right? Yeah, which really is the first step toward thinking about systems.
00:19:28
Speaker
Because once you have the baby mother, then you have another caretaker who pays attention to the outside world, and you have other children. And what I learned that changed my career from the places that I've been is that the family is an institution. And like any institution, it has a mission on behalf of society. And that mission is development toward maturity.
00:19:54
Speaker
the facilitation of developmental tasks for each family member, not just for children, because parents grow up by the fact that they are raising children. So there's a maturation task that faces every member of the family. And if you begin to think about the family as an institution and think about what we learn in our families about institutions, it really opens up your mind because we learn about what being a member means. We learn about the mission.
00:20:24
Speaker
We learn about the ways people can collaborate around the developmental tasks of every family member. We learn about irrationality and the irrational roles that get set up in families, the scapegoat, the star, the bad apple. These are things that people begin to carry in their development that have to do with just what you said, Grant, about some aspect of some parent that they can't bear
00:20:54
Speaker
and that they're located in their children. So parents learn how to parent because of their experience being parented as children. And they try to use that experience sensibly to manage their families. And they have a couple of choices about that. They can repeat the same problems that they had in their families, or they can learn something from their children, from their partners, and from the way the family grapples with the task.
00:21:22
Speaker
And everybody in families learns what happens when everybody loses sight of what they're doing there, which is about development. And as a model for institutional life and the nature of irrationality in institutional life, it is unparalleled. And if we can learn from it, we can manage our institutions better.
00:21:46
Speaker
I could tie back to the workplace. What are your thoughts, Farrah? I have a lot of thoughts, but I'm cognizant that you do too. Yeah, I think certainly managing our institutions and I'm thinking about everything that's happening in this country and in the world and how nice that would be. And some of the things that you brought up in your book about
00:22:15
Speaker
how it is really hard for people. Sometimes people want to disavow or say, well, I'm not part of this institution. And then they lose the opportunity to be within it and create some change. So I guess there are a lot of different ways to do that, a lot of different levels, but I'm, yeah, just feeling like your work is probably more relevant than ever.
00:22:44
Speaker
Well, there's this very powerful idea among many. And just for listeners who want to check it out and will repeat it at the end, the title of your most recent book is Finding a Place to Stand, Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens. And I hear you saying that really the family right now is where that
00:23:09
Speaker
ought to happen and maybe sometimes does happen, but maybe it always happens. We've seen a shift in the structure of the family and I think we've seen more dependency meaning that people take less individual accountability
00:23:25
Speaker
But a core idea is that the family has an important function in society, which is to produce good citizens who can then go on to contribute. So Farah, if
Understanding Perspectives and Reducing Polarization
00:23:39
Speaker
you're referring to the disruptions in the political landscape that we're seeing in the US and around the world,
00:23:45
Speaker
There's a sense that people may not be able to be good citizens, and we should define what that means. So for example, on social media, and Ed, I think this will go to conflict resolution work that you're much more familiar with and experienced than we are.
00:24:01
Speaker
That means that when people enter a conversation with someone with whom they disagree, instead of having a constructive conversation that leads to some kind of mutual solution, it turns into an intergenerationally transmitted repetition of conflict, discord, and aggression. But the idea that the family is really meant to produce good citizens. So what is a good citizen? What would you say? I actually don't like that term.
00:24:33
Speaker
I think a better term is engaged citizen. There are disengaged citizens and there are engaged citizens. And the dilemma that faces us is how do you manage engagement? What is it that the polarization that you talk about, Grant, and the arguments that we have now between people we consider others,
00:25:00
Speaker
If I had, you know, that heavy list of titles you laid out me at the beginning, if I had to think about one thing that I learned in my career that transformed everything I think about, it is this. How are they right? The consideration of listening to another person in terms of how they're right is an extraordinarily difficult discipline.
00:25:27
Speaker
I found it hard to learn. I find it incredibly hard to teach, but it's central to the dilemmas that face us around polarization. It is so easy for us to figure out how they're wrong. They have the wrong information. They're listening to the wrong people. They don't understand what's really going on. All of that kind of how they're wrong gratifies us and devalues them.
00:25:54
Speaker
struggling to listen for what aspect that they're speaking about that fits our experience or fits the task that we're working at together, that's a challenge. But if I had to give up everything else I learned and held on to that, I'd be way ahead of the game.
00:26:14
Speaker
how is the other person right, even if we see them as our opponent or adversary. Instead of how am I right, especially, yeah, how am I right is what people tend to do. We tend to listen in order to make our case when it's finally our turn to speak. And listening in that way that you're describing, and it's funny because I just saw some research pop up and this is something I'm interested in on the level of the individual brain and mental function.
00:26:40
Speaker
is executive control, particularly inhibitory control. What researchers call IC, inhibitory control, is correlated with resilience and it's correlated with creativity because you have to be able to slow yourself down, especially when you're talking with your enemy or your perceived enemy. Precisely right, yeah. I do wonder, I guess from
00:27:06
Speaker
your perspective, listening for how someone is right. When we're already sort of in a state of heightened anxiety or defensiveness, are there ways that we can sort of prime people to do that? Three tips for being an engaged citizen who asks, how is the other person right? Well, I mean, one of the stories I use about that question is when Jimmy Carter
00:27:36
Speaker
brought Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat to Camp David to try to solve the Palestinian crisis. Each one of them, Begin and Arafat, were terrorists. They had murdered people on the other side. And they hated one another. And if they had the opportunity, they would have killed each other. And Carter was trying to find a way to begin a conversation.
00:28:05
Speaker
And he came up with two things to say to them that slowed them down. The first was, he said to them, you are both people of the book, referring to the Bible. And the second thing he said to them was to bring out his pictures of his grandchildren. And they all had pictures of their grandchildren. So the dilemma of finding a task that transcends the enmity, that precludes conversation,
00:28:33
Speaker
is the same kind of challenge as listening to how they're right. And the thing you mentioned earlier, Grant, I also want to say something about projection and what we call projective identification is one of the poisons that leads to polarization and enmity. Maybe I should say a little bit about what that mechanism is. It's a way of managing conflict.
00:29:02
Speaker
internal conflict. So for example, if I, if I'm in conflict between my wish to be independent, and my dependent needs, and I'm struggling around that conflict, and I look around the world, and I find somebody that I can identify as more comfortable being dependent than I am, then I can locate my dependency in him. And I can have contempt
00:29:31
Speaker
for his dependency. And as long as I manage it that way, I can feel proud of my independence. And as long as I stay in touch with this guy that I've put in that irrational role and feel contempt for, I have touch with all parts of myself. This is a mechanism we all use around conflict. That's how we create enemies. You know, I got involved in the two places that
00:29:58
Speaker
one of which wasn't on your list that I want to say something about. And that is the Group Relations Conferences. The Tavistock
Group Relations and Leadership
00:30:06
Speaker
Institute in London and the AK Rice Institute in America. Can you tell our listeners what Group Relations is so they understand how, August, these two institutions are, AK Rice and Tavistock? Yeah, I will. You know, Freud invented a weird setting.
00:30:26
Speaker
Somebody lies on a couch and somebody stands behind. It's very weird. It doesn't happen in life except in psychoanalysis, but it's a setting that produces a profound way of understanding the unconscious mind. And these groups, Tavistock Institute and AKWISE, have developed a model for a conference, which is similarly weird. It's a very unusual structure. You bring people together who don't know each other from all walks of life.
00:30:54
Speaker
and you invite them, the staff invites them to create an organization in three or four days. There are all kinds of ways that they provide to help them do that, but the challenge is to create an organization for the purpose of study. The task is to study the organization that they create, and particularly to focus on authority, how people take up leadership roles, how people get irrational around those issues,
00:31:22
Speaker
how they undercut the possibility of omission, how powerful omission is to create rational work. It's an enormously fascinating opportunity to learn about social irrationality.
00:31:38
Speaker
They're very heavy events just for the listener. I've participated in some of them years ago and I'm interested in going again, but just essentially like you would sign up for a conference. It could be a two or three day, five days, sometimes they're residential, but you meet in a large group.
00:31:54
Speaker
together, it could be 100 or more people. And then you break down into different smaller groups. And some of the smaller groups are to talk about certain specific issues. Other smaller groups might be a different group of people to talk about what the conference is like while you're doing it. But the goal is to learn about your own participation and the process of a group.
00:32:17
Speaker
So it's kind of trippy. It can be very intense emotionally. It's like getting a year of therapy, like in one injection in a weekend. And then if you're in therapy, usually you go back and you've learned so much about yourself that you take a while to work through it. But as you said, Ed, the focus is always around authority relations within the group. Yeah. Almost exclusively.
00:32:40
Speaker
in some way, shape or form. It might be race and authority. It might be corporate leadership and authority. It might be gender. So I just, I wanted to give the kind of the practical is like you go there and you do this intense kind of wild thing with people you've never met before. Maybe you have a couple of friends. And sometimes it becomes really, it becomes very heated, right? Sometimes if you're worried about leadership,
00:33:05
Speaker
and you're trying to get involved in something that actually matters to you, it can get quite easy. But the first conference I went to, I was having trouble in my organization. I was leading a small program at McLean Hospital. And I went to this conference as a member, and I found myself doing the same things in the conference that I was doing in my organization. But this time, people could tell me. So I could see my own
00:33:33
Speaker
leadership function and the effect it had on the group. And it changed the way I ran my organization. It was very extremely useful. Can you speak a little more? Were there any particular kind of things you got from it that you were able to bring into practice as a leader? Well, you don't have enough time for me to tell you all of the applications that I that I use that work for in every leadership role I was in.
00:34:00
Speaker
But one of the central things that changed my life actually was at one of these conferences on the staff was Wesley Carr, who was then a young English cleric and subsequently became the Dean of Westminster Abbey. And he and I became close friends and wrote a book together called Lost in Familiar Places. I went to Westminster Abbey with him and he brought me out into the outside world.
00:34:28
Speaker
because he ran institutions that had enormous impact on the society around them. He was the guy who organized Princess Diana's funeral, which millions of people around the world attended. I once visited him in his little apartment in Westminster Abbey. There was a small British apartment. He took me up into his library
00:34:55
Speaker
And he opened up the wall of his library, and it overlooked the Tomb of the Unknown and Westminster Abbey. It was massive. And I could see something about the kind of weight a public leader carries on their shoulders. Weight of tradition, a weight of history, and a weight of omission. And my work with him was terribly important, and my work at Viggs.
00:35:20
Speaker
And I ended up consulting to his parish and his cathedrals, and he ended up consulting to my programs and to the Austin Riggs Center. And all of those consultations came out of the group relations conference experience.
00:35:36
Speaker
Are there ways I think of, I mean, obviously ideally for people to do one, you know, one of these programs, but are there ways on like a smaller everyday level that we can try to implement or find out something about our leadership skills? Well, you can learn something about group relations and organizational dynamics.
00:36:04
Speaker
learn something about how systems work. One of the things that you might be able to use, in addition to listening to how the other person is right, the focus on the task that keeps groups rational. That's all that we've got. If you focus on the work you're gathered to do, behavior will be rational. But groups tend not to get consistently rational. And when they don't,
00:36:33
Speaker
It's useful to notice it, to notice that the group is no longer working on the task. They're doing something else. People are there for some other reason. It looks that way. They're there to get their dependency needs met. They're there to fight with the leader.
00:36:51
Speaker
or to run away from the task, or to play with their telephones, or God knows something else. And if you notice those- This comes up all the time, right? All the time, in every organization. I mean, it comes, I'm chuckling, because even when we try to plan the podcast, Farron and I will sometimes, I'll be, I'm the one who's trying, we take turns kind of holding the task. But what I was gonna say is, even though it's important to focus on the task to stay rational, if you try to be the one who,
00:37:19
Speaker
keeps the group on task and the rest of the group is not interested in you having that role, then that doesn't work, right? You can feel like you're right because you're trying to keep people focused. We all agreed to do this, but you still end up in conflict because of these other agendas that people have. And you can't just point it out to them. You can do something about yourself.
00:37:47
Speaker
you can participate in a different way as a group. You're right that if you say we're losing sight of the task, that that utterance is a leadership function. And every time you take a leadership function, you're in danger of getting killed for it. The fight, a fight against the leader is a inevitable aspect of leadership. But what I learned from my many leadership position is they can only kill you once
00:38:15
Speaker
They can beat you
Leadership Challenges and Environmental Adaptation
00:38:16
Speaker
up a lot. Do you think it's true that sort of, this is not accurate, but do you think it's true that everyone wants to be a leader, but no one wants to lead? Every truism is true. I don't know that everybody wants to be a leader. Many people are afraid of leadership because of what's happened in their families around taking up leadership roles. We always bring our family role into our organization.
00:38:45
Speaker
And sometimes we see it, sometimes we don't. Some people are more naturally inclined to take on the role of leader. They may have certain skills and talents that incline them to leadership. So coming back to your book as we come into the homestretch for this podcast, and I would recommend that anyone who is even slightly intrigued by discussing group relations and roles and engaged citizenship,
00:39:11
Speaker
I would recommend that anyone who is interested in leadership, group relations or engaged citizenship, check out your book, Finding a Place to Stand, Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens. I've read a lot of group relations work over the years. They can be very, very dense academic papers or books on trauma and organizations can be extremely technical. Your book is, it's concise in just the right way.
00:39:36
Speaker
your discussion and description of group relations and the stories you use make it really relatively easy to follow, very easy to follow. You know, it's one of the few books on this subject where outside of an academic setting, I really picked it up and haven't been able to put it down. And I'm someone who's got 10 or 11 different books I'm reading. One of the things I really loved was the joke you told in your book about the three envelopes. And I'm wondering if you're prepared to
00:40:05
Speaker
to share that joke because I think it's so sort of chock full of some kind of wisdom and I'd love to hear what you think it says too. The joke is a it's a very familiar joke in the organizational world. The new CEO takes up his role, goes to his desk and he sees three envelopes and the note says open one of open each one in sequence around any crises you feel. So the first crisis comes he opens the first envelope
00:40:35
Speaker
and it says, blame your predecessor. So he blames his predecessor and goes through and the next crisis opens up and he opens the second letter and it says, blame the environment. And so he blames the environment and he manages the institution and the third crisis comes up and he opens the last envelope and it says, write three envelopes. It's a story about denying responsibility.
00:41:04
Speaker
You can, as a leader of an organization, you can, if you blame your predecessor, that's a terrible idea. Your predecessor, like you, will be making terrible mistakes. You'll make them, they'll make them, and blaming somebody else for what you're up against, I think is a terrible idea. Blaming the environment, however, is pretty good. The environment changes. Managed care comes in, the bio-behavioral,
00:41:34
Speaker
Revolution transforms psychosocial treatment. The environment changes and you have to adapt to it. But if you take the position in relation to the environment, how are they right? Then you learn something from the way the world is changing and you adapt your mission to the changing world without losing it. So blaming the environment, okay. But blaming is not the right word. Listening to the environment is the right word.
00:42:01
Speaker
Finally, ultimately, either you retire or they kill you off.
Engaged Citizenship and Conclusion
00:42:06
Speaker
Those are the choices. I fortunately, after 20 years in my job, retired. And when I retired, I decided I was really driven to take the opportunities I'd have and put them together in the book. And that's what I did. And I appreciate what you said about it, Grant. But for me, it was the stories that tell the development
00:42:30
Speaker
For sure. And it strikes me that if you're the one who is saying, let's listen to the other person and ask how are they right when most of my peers are convinced they're wrong and are invested in fighting, you're not necessarily going to be popular. Popularity is an overused term of a little use. Well, meaning you can catch a lot of heat for doing that. Well, people stop listening. Yeah. And I would imagine that, you know,
00:43:01
Speaker
it prevents that sort of forward movement and that engagement, right, that we're all kind of hoping for.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think it takes courage to do that, to what you're saying. It takes courage to fight against repetition of trauma. It takes courage to be the one who is saying the uncool or unpopular thing, even when you have a strong conviction that it's going to be useful. You know, it's not easy to be an engaged citizen. It takes courage and it takes a lot of gumption. You know, if you're learning from others,
00:43:38
Speaker
Learning is very gratifying. It's almost as gratifying as fighting. But it is still gratifying.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah, curiosity and the gratification of growth. I think that's a good call out as we're winding up. Farrah, any reflections as we wind up for today? Well, I just want to thank you for being here today, but also for sharing so generously, really, these
00:44:15
Speaker
concepts with us and I hope that people will listen and really try to incorporate some of it into their lives and their worlds because I do think it could be transformative.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely go get a copy, finding a place to stand, developing self-reflective institutions, leaders and citizens. The stories are really, really good. Do I have to tell one of the stories? Yeah. Yeah. And then you can let us know where to find you. There's only one story that I just want to underline because it has to do with what people might pay attention to.
00:44:55
Speaker
I heard the story at a conference. I thought about it for a year, and it was one of the seminal stories of the book. There's this black social worker in London who was riding on a bus at night at a time of a fireman strike. Firemen were on strike. There were riots in the streets. There were racial tensions. He's on the bus. There were black adolescents in the back of the bus, West Indians, a white bus driver, and a few white passengers.
00:45:24
Speaker
And the kids in the back of the bus are taunting the white bus driver with racial taunts. And the white passengers are sitting there doing nothing. And he's a black social worker. And he says to himself, why do I have to do this? He says it with some irritation. That question, why do I have to do this? Why do I have to take a risk to intervene in a situation that has implications?
00:45:51
Speaker
I spent a year thinking about that question. The usual answer to that question, which is about disengaged citizen, is to say, I don't. Somebody else will do it. And we stand back. This guy said, listen to himself, because he realized if that question is coming up for him, it touches something in him. Something that has to do with values, with the values of his ethnicity, with the values of the organization's a social worker.
00:46:20
Speaker
with his belonging to a church, all of those things were touched by his own question. Why do I have to do this? And he stood up and asked the kids to cut it out. And he recognized he was the only one on the bus who could do it. That kind of question, why do I have to do this, was stimulated by the George Floyd murder. And millions of us around the world said, why do I have to do this in the middle of the COVID pandemic? And we all got out on the streets.
00:46:49
Speaker
across differences and took up the role of active citizen. I just want to say that story because it was such a powerful story behind the writing of this book. Yeah, and I think if people do pay attention to what's happening in this world, right, those moments will probably come up for all of us. I hope we ask ourselves that question and consider that the right answer is not, I don't have to do anything.
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah. And that's ever more complicated because of things we won't be able to get into today, like misinformation and creating kind of false groups that think that they're doing the right thing. But maybe, maybe they've been under the sway of a cultish leader or, you know, something like that. And maybe that that's a, that's a whole other level. Um, so where can people find your work at?
00:47:44
Speaker
Well, I have a website, which is one of the places you can find it. It's EdwardRShapiro.com. And the book, you can find it from the publisher at Karnak. It is a wonderful website called Firing Your Mind. But Karnak is the place where you can find it on Amazon. Very good. Thanks very much again. Thanks Farah, as always. Thank you very much for the invitation. Appreciate it. Good talking with you.
00:48:14
Speaker
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