Kets de Vries is a psychoanalyst, economist, leadership coach, professor, widely published author and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. He got involved in coaching in 2003 when he became director of the new Insead Global Leadership Centre (IGLC) in Fontainebleau, France.
Insead, one of the world’s biggest and most renowned business schools, launched its GLC to share expertise and best practices about leadership globally and to engage in cross-cultural research, finding better ways to develop leaders.
He performs several roles at the school. He is the Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt chaired professor of leadership development and clinical professor of leadership development, as well as the director of two Insead programmes – the Challenge of Leadership: Creating Reflective Leaders; and Consulting and Coaching for Change: Creating Reflective Change Agents (CCC).
For Kets de Vries, the most important thing in his work is creating a tipping point and bringing about durable change in leadership behaviour, which he says is much easier in groups.
Tunnel vision
A major issue for him in his work is “the difficulties people have in dealing with ambiguity”. He explains: “People struggle with how to make competence agile when we have such complex structures. When I look at the top of companies, even the top people don’t grasp the complexity. How can companies with tunnel vision become boundary-less when they have high diversity in terms of culture, not only gender?
“I get people to group together and we start to talk in a gentle way about the elephant in the room and I think that’s one of the reasons why what we do works.”
Kets de Vries has learnt from hard experience that if you want to change people, dealing with cognition alone is not enough. “People can know something cognitively but not emotionally,” he says. He believes that whereas successful leadership coaching is often the outcome of a one-to-one process, private coaching sessions rarely have a lasting impact, partly because of their infrequency.
“You can often do so much work to create a plan and nothing happens. People come out with a big hooray, then nothing,” he says.
“I do all kinds of coaching but the group coaching technique that all my coaches use is the most successful,” he explains, although clients didn’t welcome the method initially “because it’s high touch and costs money”. He adds: “Sometimes it feels like we’re a one-trick pony, with group coaching as the traditional format.”
He believes group leadership coaching works because participants become committed to helping each other to change and live up to their promises.
Shame, guilt and hope act as powerful motivating forces. In a group setting “people create
a public state of intent” and are thus more likely to see change through.
The powerful emotional experiences that come out of group leadership coaching also help to facilitate change. He believes people rediscover themselves and come to understand their lives better by telling personal stories, while listening to stories also offers a powerful learning experience.
“Every time people are on the stage they learn something about themselves. I really don’t know what will happen – it’s like a detective story.”
Kets de Vries draws on his background in psychoanalysis (he has had a practice since 1982) to let participants tell their story, while he might ask questions such as what typical family dinners were like and what makes them angry, sad or passionate. Then he invites others to talk about them, using metaphors such as what kind of animal comes to mind.
“We get the craziest animals,” he says. Then he invites people to share what advice they would give them as a friend.
Common principles on his programmes are not doing any harm, “striking when the iron is cold”, confidentiality and performing a delicate dance of facilitator and coach. It’s about practice, training, being respectful and “creating the space”.
Programmes are “extremely intense”, says Kets de Vries. “It becomes a very frank community and people start to practise and experience other behaviours. Before they know it, they’re on automatic pilot.”
That said, sometimes it is better for executives to go off to work somewhere else to “recreate themselves” otherwise the organisation “bounces them back again” to their former behaviour patterns, says Kets de Vries, who has developed executives for clients ranging from ABB, KPMG, McKinsey, Nokia and Unilever. But things really start to shift when participants’ partners get involved.
Author, author
He is one of the most productive people at Insead, having written many well-informed and thought-provoking articles and 30 books, including as co-author of Coach and Couch: the Psychology of Making Better Leaders. He usually writes about leadership but his latest (and favourite) is Sex, Money, Happiness and Death, which came out in May. He is just finishing a book called Beyond Coaching, and a book on character and leadership is due out in September.
Kets de Vries says he learns from writing and becomes totally focused on it but lately, he laments, “I’m more of a manager because I run a large centre. I don’t like meetings very much – I’m quite an introvert although I’m good at hiding it.”
In our interview his thoughts come tumbling out too fast for him to complete sentences – not easy to capture but fascinating to listen to. As one of his CCC students puts it: “All the while, his mind is making links, back-flips and pirouettes like a ballet dancer or, better still, a trapeze artist.”
Another CCC student, Hande Yasargil Atesagaoglu, had been a dedicated reader of his books but was surprised when she joined the course. “His books are deeply intellectual. It’s easy to believe this man spends all his life between the classroom, the customers he is working with and behind the analysis couch. You never expect to find an adventurer, a hunter, traveller, storyteller, compassionate friend and a colourful person with different tastes about the world.”
There appears to be little doubt about Kets de Vries’ teaching abilities. At Insead, he received the Distinguished Teacher Award for the MBA programme and from 1974 to 1985 he was consistently among the two top-rated teachers at McGill University’s Faculty of Management. He says: “I’m a very good teacher and speaker. It’s hard to fall asleep in my class. I pick on someone at the front then someone at the back so people stay awake in case I ask them a question. I use lots of humour.”
Yasargil says: “He has a disarming charm; when he is lecturing you want to listen to him for hours. But he is not the kind of academic who thinks every idea is equally interesting and every opinion is equally valid. He has a commitment to finding what is true and what works in real life, and he has devoted his career and his significant intellect to identifying that truth.”
Kets de Vries uses 360-degree instruments frequently in his work to open up discussions. He has created four audits: the Global Executive Leadership Inventory, one of the few 360-degree tools with a clinical orientation; the Personality Audit; the Leadership Archetype Questionnaire; and the recently developed Inner Theatre Inventory to help executives understand the values, beliefs and attitudes that guide their behaviour. He is also developing the Organisational Cultural Audit, which should be ready at the end of the year.
Booooring!
These conceptual frameworks are drawn from a range of sources, from psychodynamic psychology (apart from psychoanalysis) and neuropsychiatry to appreciative inquiry and positive reframing. Another influence is the thinking of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, the William and Miriam Meehan professor in adult learning and professional development at Harvard University, as are the techniques of motivational interviewing.
Kets de Vries likens coaches to Zen masters1 in that they provide learning opportunities by giving constructive and balanced feedback, serve as sparring partners and help their clients to reflect on their own actions.
“As a way of clarifying and enhancing consciousness, coaching has become the Zen for executives,” he writes.
Kets de Vries is tireless in his drive to help leaders and coaches develop new insights. His colleague Randel Carlock, the first Berghmans Lhoist chaired professor in entrepreneurial leadership at Insead, says: “Manfred is often a pain in the bottom. He has the uncanny ability to identify behaviour patterns and then help you to develop new insights that improve your thinking and performance. His work on coaching demonstrates the power of psychological theory to improving individual and organisation behaviour.”
Student Yasargil says: “His humorous and playful treatment of the accepted wisdom always encourages me to think differently.”
She always recalls his “exaggerated exclamation: ‘booooring!’, when discussing the superficial but generally accepted intellectual currency in management, psychology and coaching circles”.
Primitive man
He says the issues that executives present most often at the moment are how to downsize in a decent way and how to own their own lives, perhaps looking to fulfil dreams of owning a winery or running a hotel in the Caribbean. Other common issues include how to achieve work-life balance.
He has seen it all over the years. “We get people from across the world and we have very few blips. Everyone’s normal until you look more closely but we haven’t had people having psychotic breakdowns.
“I must be somewhat crazy but I like a bit of craziness in people – it makes for creativity.”
What comes through from talking to him and from those who know him is his warmth and humanity. One student says: “His sharing of his emotions, whether sad for a friend or proud of one of his former students, is endearing and adds a warm touch to an exceptional mind.”
His secretary of 16 years, Sheila Loxham, says: “I could not have worked this long for someone that I did not like and respect as much as Manfred, and he makes me laugh every day.
“Manfred is an eccentric, which is lovely in this day and age. He has a fresh take on all new occasions and situations. He is compassionate, kind, humane and has a wicked sense of humour. He is a highly irreverent person and always manages to challenge the status quo. He is also a chocolate connoisseur, is very knowledgeable about mushrooms, and on colleagues’ birthdays, he sings Happy Birthday in Dutch,” notes Loxham.
He also loves to be outdoors. “That’s when I get my best ideas, walking around,” he says. “I’m primitive man – I like fishing, hunting and walking.”
Has he got his own work-life balance sorted out? “What I really enjoy is spending time with my family and reading a novel. But no, I’ve never worked so hard in my life. It’s a question of saying no but I feel responsible for my post-doctoral students.
“When I was off for three and a half months last year when I broke my back on top of a mountain – a real learning experience – I thought people would learn to deal without Big Papa, but no. I have got a very interesting life.”
Kets de Vries: CV
Present Programme director, Insead
1992-present Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt chaired clinical professor of leadership development
2003-present Director of Insead Global Leadership Centre
2008-present Distinguished professor and director of the Center for Leadership Development Research, ESMT, Berlin
1982-present Psychoanalyst in private practice
1987-1992 Director of the Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt chair in human resource management, Insead
1984-1985 Full professor, organizational behavior and management policy, Insead
1977-1982 Psychoanalytic Training, Canadian Psychoanalytic Institute
1983-1984 Visiting professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration
1968-1970 DBA, Harvard University
1966-1968 MBA, Harvard University
Reference
1 “Leadership group coaching in action: The Zen of creating high performance teams”, in Academy of Management Executive, 19(1), 2005
Further reading
- M K de Vries, Reflections on Character and Leadership: On the Couch, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, (in progress)
- M K de Vries, Sex, Money, Happiness and Death: The Quest for Authenticity, Palgrave, 2009
- M K de Vries, E Florent-Treacy & K Korotov, Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders (Insead Business Books series), Palgrave Macmillan, May 2007