me what’s going on?’’ would elicit a halting story of suffering. The suffering was inflicted by the employee’s boss, whose behavior could take many forms, such as tyrannical control or public humiliation of the employee. The variations never failed to amaze me, but the common theme was of abrasive behavior that had pushed the employee to the point of . . . what? To find the answer, I uttered the psychotherapist’s classic question:
Counselor: And how does this make you feel?
Employee: Like getting back at him.
Counselor: Have you thought of how you would do that?
Employee: Yeah. [An embarrassed silence.] With a gun.
Counselor: Do you have a gun?
Employee: Uh . . . yeah . . . out in my truck. That’s why I called you.
The same pain that cut through me as a child when confronted with suffering now sliced through my adult soul. This man was suffering—tormented by his impulses to silence his tormentor, shamed by his loss of control, and humiliated by his need to seek external restraint for his retaliatory impulses. He had reached the point where he saw his gun as his only remaining defense against his boss’s aggression. He was one of many, and as the arsenal in our office safe increased, I wondered how this could be happening. Having experienced good parents and good bosses, I was mystified—why would bosses brutalize their employees, and how could companies tolerate this infliction of suffering? What were the dynamics of aggression and defense that created such profound anguish? These questions set this boss whisperer on a journey to understand these unmanageable managers and learn how to tame their abrasive aggression.
2 Boss Whispering
I have a confession to make: I don’t call myself a boss whisperer in real life. I refer to myself as an executive coach, the standard term applied to coaches who work with businesspeople. I have mixed feelings about the executive coach label because it suggests that I restrict my coaching to the upper echelons of bossdom, otherwise known as the C-level: CEO, COO, CIO, CFO, and assorted other chiefs. I am distinctly uncomfortable with such an elitist conceptualization of coaching and have to restrain my potentially abrasive comments when other coaches boast that they work exclusively with top executives, as if this were some sort of badge of honor. I’m not terribly impressed with physicians who take pride in treating only the wealthy or powerful—it doesn’t make them better doctors. Bosses at every level struggle with management challenges, and to limit their access to coaching because of the outrageous fees charged by many of these C-level coaches is, I believe, unethical. Tirade over.
Back to my confession about the boss whisperer title: when I was a doctoral student I couldn’t resist buying a book whose title promised that a dissertation could be written in only fifteen minutes a day. What a promise! What a title! What a gimmick! Not far into the first chapter the author confessed that the probability of completing one’s dissertation in one’s lifetime by writing for only fifteen minutes a day was pretty low. She was right—I upped my minutes, finished my dissertation, and to this day admire her ability to come up with a catchy title and deliver some very helpful wisdom. I trust you’ll excuse this so-called boss whisperer from using similar tactics so long as I pitch forth with some helpful horse (or should I say boss) sense.
Boss Whispering
Even though I don’t initially refer to my work as boss whispering, the term roughly describes what I do. Much like the horse whisperer who calms unmanageable horses, I work to calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses to trample on others’ emotions. I became a boss whisperer the same way that horse whisperers start, by carefully observing horses (or in my case, bosses) and trying to understand why they behave as they do. This requires trying to get into their heads and see the world through their eyes. This process of observing behavior in order to decipher its meaning is actually the process of empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean feeling for (sympathy)—it means feeling into, or feeling with, as in putting one’s self into the shoes (or hooves) of other beings to better understand the feelings that motivate their problematic behaviors. Using empathy, the whisperer gains insight into the abrasive behaviors and translates this insight into methods specifically designed to calm the horse (or boss) and eliminate the maladaptive behavior without the use of force or intimidation.
Calm the fears that drive abrasive bosses? Because of their intimidating, aggressive styles, it can be a stretch to believe that these fear-inspiring individuals are themselves driven by fear. I’ll discuss this concept in greater detail in Chapter Four, but for now I want to emphasize that emotions drive, or move, behavior: the word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere (‘‘to move out’’). To understand behavior, one must seek to understand the underlying emotions that move (motivate) the behavior. I call this reading emotions—putting yourself in another’s shoes (in other words, using empathy) to decipher the fears motivating problematic behavior. Horse whisperers spend a lot of time hanging around the ol’ corral, observing what motivates horses to do what they do. As a subordinate, peer, executive, and boss whisperer, I’ve spent a lot of time in corporate corrals observing boss behavior. But my training in whispering started long before those years spent with bosses—I’d been reading emotions since I was knee-high to a psychiatrist.
My Apprenticeship in Emotional Literacy
Remember that my earliest lessons in suffering were taught by animals. However, my earliest lessons in reading emotions were imparted by humans and, more specifically, by my father. This should come as no surprise: if you’re the child of an auto mechanic, chances are pretty good that you’re going to learn more than the other kids on your block about how car engines work. Born to a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist, I grew up hearing a lot about people’s psychological workings, otherwise known as psychodynamics. My dad didn’t use that term with me—he just got me thinking about why people do what they do. For example: I was probably nine years old, sitting in a car with my dad at a stoplight, observing a disheveled man walking with a strange gait, shouting and waving his hands. ‘‘See that man over there?’’ my father asked. ‘‘He’s probably schizophrenic.’’ I somehow knew that schizophrenia meant mental illness, but I still questioned, ‘‘Couldn’t it be that he just walks funny?’’ I don’t remember my father’s exact response, but in that early interchange I was being taught that behavior has meaning and that with psychological insight one can read the underlying meanings (motivations) of behavior. This man’s behaviors were the external expressions of his internal struggle with psychosis.
These tutorials continued throughout my childhood. I have another memory of our family attending a banquet held for one of my father’s colleagues. When we got home, my father commented that the man was depressed. How could he possibly know that? The man had made no mention of depressing events or depressed feelings. When I challenged my father, he responded with a description of what I would later learn to be vegetative symptoms of depression: ‘‘Well, he’s normally talkative, but he said very little, never smiled, and hardly ate.’’ My father was able to observe and interpret this constellation of behaviors (withdrawal, flat affect, disturbed appetite) as probable indicators of depression. What an education! I was learning by observing my father’s exercise of psychological insight: the practice of reading emotions to understand behavior. Over time I gradually learned to observe behavior and do my best to accurately interpret its significance.
My education wasn’t always fun. Psychiatrists read behavior, and let me tell you, it can be pretty irritating when you’re the book they’re reading. I remember telephoning my parents during my freshman year at college to nervously declare that
