Telling Fairy Tales in the Boardroom

How to Make Sure Your Organization Lives Happily Ever After

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137562746
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

We know where we are with a fairy story. There is a cast of predictable characters, the hero or heroine is submitted to terrible trials, cruelty, and injustice but in the end the baddies get their comeuppance, good triumphs, and everyone lives happily ever after. In this book Manfred Kets de Vries, one of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of leadership, and a pioneering practitioner in the field of psychodynamic executive coaching, draws on the format of traditional fairy tales and tells us five stories that dramatize five key themes of dysfunctional leadership. The accompanying commentaries analyze each tale and examine the ways in which it applies to leadership behavior and organizational practices. This diagnostic element is supported by self-assessment tests that reinforce the main lessons of each tale and guide the reader's interpretation of the results. With Kets de Vries's guidance you'll be able to help your clients create best places to work, where everyoneis the best they can be, and lives 'happily ever after'.

chapter 1

Introduction

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

—C. S. Lewis

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

—Albert Einstein

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

—Jack Zipes

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prisons of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

—Peter Ustinov

Introduction

We all know where we are with a fairy story. There is a cast of predictable characters (handsome prince, wicked stepmother, beautiful princess, the odd dragon, frog, or otherwise cursed beast, and so on). Our hero or heroine is submitted to terrible trials, cruelty, and injustice, but in the end the baddies get their comeuppance, good triumphs, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Knowing or anticipating the familiar framework of a story means that we absorb the learning it contains quickly; our mind is open to the message and not distracted or preoccupied by the structure of the tale. In this way, numerous traditional stories and fairy tales provide a shortcut to a moral lesson and reflections on human behavior. Their usefulness as a literary and psychological device has been recognized since the earliest times and has been perpetuated throughout our oral and written literary history, from Aesop’s Fables in 600 BCE, to the moral tales of La Fontaine in the 17th century and the Brothers Grimm in the 19th, and to the pantomime tradition in British theater, which continues to be universally popular. These archetypal tales, with their immediately recognizable dramatics, characters and fundamental moral truths, are the rootstock of most world fiction and drama, embedded in our ancestral human history. They transcend pure entertainment and, because they involve the reader or listener imaginatively, they appeal to our secret selves. This resonance enables storytellers to fulfill their basic therapeutic function—to reflect our deepest fears and desires and help us integrate them into a healthy personality.

In this book I have written new fairy tales for what may seem on first consideration an unlikely audience—senior executives and leaders of organizations, and the people who work with them as coaches. Some might consider this an eccentric enterprise. All I can say in response is that everyone likes a story—and fairy tales more than most—not least because we are all in the process of constructing our own story, the narrative of our own life. All coaching, psychotherapeutic, and psychoanalytical interventions begin with the request for the client to tell their story. For the five stories in this book I have borrowed the format of traditional fairy tales and used it to dramatize five key themes of dysfunctional or doomed leadership. This guise is an excellent means of transmitting messages that might otherwise fall on resolutely deaf ears.

The accompanying commentaries analyze the situational basis of each tale and the ways in which it is analogous to leadership behavior and organizational culture (effective or otherwise). This diagnostic element is supported by a real-life vignette that illustrates an occasion when I encountered dysfunctional executive behavior and how the situation was handled. A self-assessment test after each tale reinforces the main lessons and guides the reader’s interpretation of the results.

The stimulus for this little book of fairy tales for executives was an invitation to do a TED talk. These have a very different format from the speeches I am used to giving at conferences and so on. There’s no time to ramble. You have to stick to the point, as you have a maximum of 19 minutes for your talk. My presentations are usually much longer because I like to tell stories—and I also like to engage in dialogue with my audience when I give presentations.

I was bothered about how to present the essence of what I wanted to say within such a limited amount of time. But the major headache the time limitation gave me was also a blessing, as the challenge forced me to review the way I give presentations. The TED talk taught me something about the essence of storytelling.

What would be the best way to get what I wanted to say across? What did I want the audience to retain? What messages did I want them to take away from my stories? That last question made me think of fairy tales. Nearly all fairy tales contain a specific, hidden message. Fairy tales teach life lessons, reveal human foibles, and are very often highly moralistic. Like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain in his play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who says that “for years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it,” the TED talk challenge made me realize that all my life—in my work as a management professor, psychoanalyst, consultant, and executive coach—I had been telling fairy tales. Perhaps I should take the opportunity to do it more deliberately.

Fairy tales have always had a great attraction for me. As a child, I devoured one volume of fairy tales after another. I could never get enough of the stories. Now, I had a chance to configure a number of fairy tales for adults, for a specific purpose. But what sort of fairy tales would appeal to executives and hold meaning for them?

Storytelling is a universal phenomenon. The cultures in which we live largely consist of the stories people have told about their experiences. Storytelling has always given us a window into our evolutionary history. Since the beginning of time, storytelling has been a community act that involves sharing knowledge and values—a form of communication that evolved along with the human species. Before most people could read or write, the stories told at firesides and in village market places were the way our predecessors handed down laws and values, religious beliefs, taboos, knowledge, and wisdom. Communicating through stories has been one of the most unifying themes in the history of humankind. Before the eighteenth century, in particular, fairy tales were a common source of entertainment for both adults and children—an essential part of daily life.

The stories told dealt with basic life events, especially coming-of-age processes and the emotional ups and downs associated with them. Stories were highly effective ways of mastering the psychological conflicts that humans face. Birth, death, marriage, love, hate, fear, joy, wickedness, forgiveness, rejection, and acceptance were regular themes.

Because these stories dealt with the most basic elements of human existence, the same types of story were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation over widely divergent cultures and periods in time. The similarity of these stories reflects the underlying group dynamics that are shared by all cultures. Just as stories about strange real-life experiences are told and re-told, the classic fairy tales familiar to most societies came into being through the same tradition of repetition. In spite of many variations, the main themes of these stories remained very much the same.

Fairy tales and fables form part of our collective cultural heritage, capturing the most extreme forms of human drama and emotions. They are also the metaphoric reflections of significant events. Storytelling enabled our ancestors to survive and thrive, as the stories reflected psychic realities and lived experiences. Their stories helped them navigate the dangers surrounding them, often demonstrating the triumph of the small and weak over the large and powerful. In that respect, these stories can also be seen as tales full of hope. They are also moral tales, presenting basic human values. More often than not, generosity and kindness are rewarded in these stories, while greed and cruelty are punished.

Storytelling has not lost its value as a fundamental human activity, even in our digital age. The stories that reflect our cultural heritage are as relevant today as they were generations ago. Through them we tap into the wisdom of the collective unconscious that derives from our ancestors’ cultural heritage. Influenced by these stories, and guided by the archetypal characters represented in them, we can figure out what kind of people we are, and what kind we would like to be.

Stories of this kind touch us in more ways than we can fathom, so that even in contemporary society, we are constantly drawn back to ancient parables, fables, and fairy tales, reworking them in modern contexts. There is a sense of cultural communality, in that the modern teller of a tale, by telling it, is linked to everyone who has told such stories before.

Many of us fail to realize the extent to which stories influence our behavior and shape our culture. Yet even though we may not be aware of it, stories drive everything we do—how we think about our past, decide on our present, plan for our future, regulate our conduct, and even define our personalities. We gain a sense of who we are by listening to stories, telling others stories and building an interior narrative about the things that happen to us. From the point of view of human development, each of us is a storyteller at heart. We are the heroes and heroines of our own life narratives. Stories help us to find our way through the maze that is our life’s journey. They are beacons of certainty in a sea of turmoil.

The themes of traditional fairy tales and the way they are constructed dramatize the issues that preoccupy us. Each character in these stories portrays a state or condition of our own nature, consciousness, and emotional and spiritual development. We engage our imagination when telling or listening to a story, and begin to develop thoughts, opinions, and ideas that align with those of the storyteller. In this way we step out of our own shoes, see things differently, and experience empathy with the hero or heroine of the story. Because of this, the stories we hear can have a powerful influence on our beliefs and moral values.

Our identification with the protagonists in traditional tales is simplified by their one-dimensional characterization. They are simple, clever, ugly, beautiful, poor, rich, wicked, or kind-hearted. Precisely because these tales do not explore deeper dimensions of human experience and relationships, they gain in clarity. Not only are their descriptions rather superficial, the heroes, heroines, and villains of these tales are usually also nameless (maiden, woodsman, goblin, king, queen, big bad wolf), or given token names (Jack, Snow White, Prince Charming, Wicked Stepmother). The illusion created is that the hero or heroine could be any one of us, and that strange and wondrous things can happen to all of us.

The magic of these tales is built on abstraction. They have non-specific settings (the forest, a castle, a land far, far away), polarized characters (entirely good or entirely evil) and most importantly take place “once upon a time,” which needs no further precision. All these things are instantly understood by us. Their lasting appeal attests to their richness and effectiveness as methods of symbolic and artistic communication.

Most of us first encounter traditional tales in childhood, but in fact they are far from being stories just for children. They are encoded with spiritual and moral lessons for all of us. They help us understand that conflict is followed by some kind of resolution; they teach us that there is always a way out. In this way, they provide us with a safety net. Through fairy tales, we form a concept of how the world works and what our place in this world should be.

The fairy tale

Fairy tales have always played a prominent role within the storytelling tradition. They are one of humankind’s most important sense-making mechanisms. They explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy and between the animate and inanimate world. In fairy tales, the most amazing things happen: animals talk; people turn into animals; fairies are helpers; goblins create mischief; dragons and other monsters lie in wait for us; and there are miracles just around the corner. When we enter these “other worlds,” there is the expectation that we will return to our own world with a new awareness, and with a new sense of energy and hope.

The perception that fairy tales are intended for the young is relatively new and has been reinforced by the Disney effect. These sanitized cartoon versions of classic fairy tales have stripped the originals of much of their complexity and sensuality and in the process lost a considerable amount of their symbolism. Most of us are unaware of the darkness of many versions of these tales, having been dazzled by the Technicolor versions with which we are familiar.

Fairy tales are one result of our struggle to control the bestial and barbaric forces that are part of the human condition through metaphors and symbolic narrative. They are the closets in which we keep our deepest secrets and fears. Think how many fairy tales dramatize some of our worst fears: abandonment, sibling rivalry, starvation, cannibalism, murder, rape, and incest. It’s no wonder that the fairy tales we are told as children mark us for life. But reading or listening to these tales allows us to work through these fears and learn about what’s right and what’s wrong. From an evolutionary psychological point of view, fairy tales may have been a developmental necessity, enabling us to master the challenges that life had in store for us.

Structural patterns

Most fairy tales start with the protagonist leading an ordinary, unremarkable life. To add to the sense of drama, our hero or heroine may have had an inauspicious start in life, being poor, bereaved, abandoned, imprisoned, mocked, or pitied. Yet he or she may be yearning for something more—an idea that we can all identify with. Early in the tale, the hero or heroine receives a “call” to bid goodbye to this dull life and embark on something exciting but unknown. Frequently the protagonist resists, but the pressure is on: the “call” cannot be ignored. Once the protagonist answers the call, there is often a period of preparation.

The time has come for the protagonist’s heroic journey, away from humdrum daily life to a land of adventure, trials, and magical rewards. Crossing the threshold into this other world is about taking risks and pursuing a quest. The hero or heroine is tasked with performing an extraordinary feat—like slaying a dragon or spinning a room full of straw into gold.

At this point in the tale, our protagonists face life-threatening dangers—journeys through pitch-black forests surrounded by wolves and bears, across treacherous mountains, or over endless deserts—or have to make superhuman efforts to fulfill their destiny. They encounter dragons, giants, goblins, wizards, witches, and trolls. Fortunately, however, the very act of crossing a dangerous threshold attracts helpers in the form of fairy godmothers, kind strangers, and animal guides, who may appear in disguise. These guides or mentors help our protagonists overcome the dangers they encounter and succeed in their quest. (In the fairy tales I recount in this book, our heroes and heroines will meet mentors and helpers in the form of a white raven, a stranger, an old crone, and the master teachers of four brothers.)

The most intense and dramatic part of the journey—the trial—has now arrived. The ability of our protagonists to complete the quest is challenged. To pass these tests, they must draw on the skills and insights they have gained on their journey. They will emerge triumphant, as transformed individuals.

In all these fairy tales, the protagonists survive not just the perils of the magic world but those encountered on their journey into their inner world. The figures and imagery in the tales—the wicked stepmother, fairy godmother, darkness, forest dangers, magic mirrors—may symbolize disturbing inner emotional states. Having overcome various challenges, very similar to rites of passage, the protagonists metaphorically “return” to the place where they started. They re-enter the “old” world, but they have changed profoundly. Things will never be the same again.

Many fairy tales can be interpreted as dramatizations of our inner darkness, allowing us to acknowledge and confront it. The deep, dark, dangerous forests where we get lost stand for the near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. Although the dark forest is an unknown place, inhabited by wild things, it is also a place of opportunity and transformation where we will find our true selves.

Then there is the happy ever after. Often the first glimmering of hope comes at the very apex of catastrophe in these tales. When all hope seems lost, the prince arrives, the villain makes a mistake, or the heroine returns from the dead. In fairy tales, there is a reward in the end, the humiliation or death of the villain, marriage to a prince or princess, and kingdoms or treasure to be granted.

The hope for transformation

If there is one clear constant in the fairy tale, it is transformation. These tales demonstrate that change is possible if we prepare ourselves for it properly. Personal transformation is one of the key themes in fairy tales. All the main characters in the most famous tales are transformed in one way or another. If we feel ugly, we can become beautiful. If we feel powerless, we can become powerful. We may be poor, but we can becom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• 1 Introduction
• 2 White Raven, or The Leader Who No Longer Knew Himself
• 3 The Bear-King, or The Price of Hubris
• 4 The Kindly Crone, or How to Get the Best Out of People
• 5 The Four Brothers, or How to Build an Effective Team
• 6 King Lion, or How to Build an Effective Organization
• 7 Happy Ever After
• Bibliography
• Index