I am a big proponent of the work of Carl Jung and the business world could benefit from his insights. Therefore, I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to Murray Stein about applying Jungian Analytical Psychology in the workplace. 

Interestingly enough we met on labor day, something Jung would call undoubtedly label as synchronicity!   

Murray Stein is a graduate of Yale University (B.A. and M.Div.), the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and the C.G. Jung Institut-Zurich (Diploma). He is a founding member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He has been the president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (2001-4), and the President of The International School of Analytical Psychology-Zurich (2008-2012).

He published tens of books about Carl Jung and analytical psychology, including for instance ‘Jung’s Treatment of Christianity’ and ‘Jung’s Map of the Soul’. The focus of our conversation was a book he edited with John Hollwitz called ‘The Psyche at work - Workplace Applications of Jungian Analytical Psychology’. 

We discussed a number of topics, including

- The essence of true leadership

- The identity of organization

- Business ethics

- The need for embracing the shadow to prevent shadow possession and corporate scandals

- The leadership style of different American presidents

- The relation between the need for self-reflection by leaders, executive coaching, and psychoanalysis

- The validity of MBTI

- The importance of having a personal North star

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Focusing on who we want to be, means opting for a position and choosing a course of action that brings us closer to the position we aspire to have. Focusing on doing means that we let our course of action be determined by what we consider to be intrinsically important. If we compare the differences between a position and a purpose, it becomes apparent that having a purpose is vastly preferable to having, or longing for, a position.

One of the big temptations we as leaders face is our urge to add value to the work of our staff.  Although this is tempting, it is a bad idea, both for our staff, as well as for ourselves. I use my personal 7-2-1 rule to combat my temptation. What do you use?

Leaders often tell their employees that they need to learn to deal with ambiguity. This is a polite way of saying that their behaviors need to compensate for shortcomings in the way decision-making processes in the organization are structured. This sounds great but comes at a cost...

Almost any sizeable company nowadays has a code of ethics. The main catalyst for this were the corporate scandals in the early 2000s (Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and others), and in the last couple of years having a sense of purpose has become pretty much en vogue.

As a result, every year millions of employees now dutifully complete e-learning modules and sign declarations (‘To the best of my knowledge…’).

The difficulty is that corporate codes of ethics are ‘duty-centered ethics’. Duty-centered ethics are ethics people need to formally adhere to, given their role or position in society. 

The real test for the way ethics are adhered to in organizations is therefore not the formal compliance with the code of ethics (for instance proving all employees completed their mandatory e-learning), but what happens in the daily reality of business life.

In this podcast, I talk about how organizations can achieve this. 

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I always felt sorry for the many famous artists in the Renaissance, who needed to compromise the quality of their work and their artistic integrity, in order to make sure their art suited the requirements of their patrons.

This challenge is not uncommon to the one management consultants and other professionals in business face. How can we translate professional integrity into commercial reality?

For a variety of reasons, a number of line managers frequently want to do the work of their direct reports. However tempting this might be, doing the work of your team is rarely a good idea, neither for you as a line manager, nor for your team. 

In the world of professional soccer, you are either a coach, coaching your team from the side, or you are a player in the field.  As a soccer coach, you cannot occasionally enter the field during a match, start playing with your team, leave the field again, and, a little later, reenter the field to play again. 

And for good reasons...

The book 'An Ugly Truth - Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination’ by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, describes the different scandals Facebook has been involved in in the past couple of years. 

The value of this book, compared to other recently published books about Facebook, is that it provides readers with a unique perspective on the impact the motivation and (lack of) ethics of the key decision-makers have on their decision-making.

At the same time, reading this book can teach us a lot about the importance of ethics in business.

When Steve Jobs launched Apple's 'Think different' campaign in 1997, he positioned this by saying: ‘This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us’.
Since then our world has become only noisier. Therefore we need to do three things if we want to make sure our audience understands what we want them to do.

In this podcast, I review why self-managing teams are an illusion, both in a theoretical, as well as in an empirical sense. 

Links to various sources I am referring to can be found in an article I wrote about this topic which ca be found here: https://tinyurl.com/ybvnwvds

I hope you enjoy this Podcast. Let me know!