Even When You’re Smooth, Maybe You’re Not
Case Illustration
All names and identifying details in these case illustrations are fictional. They are composite sketches drawn from clinical and coaching experience, not accounts of real individuals.
Same smile, same posture, same two hands.
The instant the Center for Human Genomics (CHG) at the prestigious and storied Westermane University decided not to offer a position to the media-savvy and colorful Sherwin Kahn, MD, Ph.D., it fell under a media glare.
Kahn was a gifted media personality, sought after for his personable ease in making genomics and its relevance accessible to wide audiences. He also had a sizable social media following, and some at Westermane liked the idea of attracting his kind of star power to the school. But the hiring committee thought his CV was academically thin compared to his future colleagues. They were also uneasy about the fact that a good part of the value Kahn offered was in simplifying what was complex, at times leaping beyond the data to make claims popular to the public mind but by no means incontrovertibly proven.
What the CHG faculty did not expect was a leak leading to a news article announcing that the position was offered to him anyway. Now the discrepancy was public, the candidate was posting to his following and hinting at a lawsuit, and the faculty wanted to know who had overruled them.
To Provost Alfred Delmond fell the unenviable task of calming the irate CHG faculty. Delmond himself was uncontroversial. An ever-present slight smile on his face, smartly if neutrally dressed, his posture held the same way, yet without appearing stiff. He always looked the same, and so did his hand gestures: the same two hands, held parallel in front of him, palms facing, pendulating up and down from the wrist with his speech. Delmond was a good administrator, not hugely admired, but not disliked either. He was particularly adept at smoothing out controversies without apparently taking sides or committing to anything. Yet in this meeting his stock language peppered with “process, perspectives, framework” was not making its usual progress at ushering a resolution in and the audience out.
Most complaints that flew in hot and heavy Delmond had expected. He’s had as good as no research record. His CV was full of media events, TED talks, astoundingly few peer-reviewed publications. He misinterprets facts — might one even say… misleads on ambiguous data? Some were incensed that Kahn was apparently willing to torch in the media the institute that he purported to want to be a part of, and might still — if the administration had its way. One of them, Simpson, suggested an anonymous exposure of Kahn’s thin academic credentials, both in justification of their original decision, and unstated, as a strategy to force him to back down. At this Delmond’s demeanor remained the same. His hands went on pendulating at the same pace, through the same arc, but the wrists were no longer loose and the fingers pressed a little closer together. Nobody in the room could have said what had changed, and Delmond himself would have denied that anything had. He intervened, “There’s no reason, I think, that we can’t address the underlying concern without creating a larger problem.” “Why would it cause a larger problem?! How much worse can it get?” someone rebutted.
Delmond tried some more careful phrasing, while more of his musculature tightened underneath the same posture, the same smile. He had a lifetime of habit keeping his outward appearance perfectly consistent. Unperceived by him though, the inner tension was tiring him out, and his phrases came out more mechanically than ever. Gradually, the heat in the room transformed into a kind of stiff tension. People who had forgotten to be self-conscious in the heat of their anger sat up straighter, found their faces and jaws getting stiffer, and a different type of thought pattern emerging. “Is this worth crossing swords with Admin over?” “My tenure review is coming up.” “Oh dear, with luck Kahn will drop out on his own.”
As the room finally got quieter and slower, Delmond himself relaxed, though he did not feel it. Instead, he let out something uncustomarily spontaneous. “Marcus wants him,” he told the group. Marcus was CHG’s primary donor.
As he stepped into the Faculty Club’s cloakroom, Sammy, the old retriever that lived there, was lying asleep on half of his cashmere scarf, now clearly soiled. He nudged Sammy none-too-gently off it. Sammy did not budge. He tried pulling it out but realized it would ruin the scarf. Finally he gave Sammy a hard poke with the toe of his boot, and this time, Sammy, with a start and yelp, sprang up and ambled away.
As Delmond walked home he took a call from Marcus. “How’d the meeting go, Al?” “Without a hitch!” he answered. “It’s a disciplined group once the parameters are clear.”
He hung up, continuing his walk on the dark, cold, nearly empty street. He hadn’t told Marcus that Simpson wanted to go after Kahn’s CV to hit back. Marcus wouldn’t like that. What if Simpson did it? Alfred became aware he was sawing his teeth forward and back, which he sometimes did since childhood, but had trained himself never to do in public. He had learned to do it to distract himself when his parents fought and now he found it comforting, even as he had been severely disciplined to avoid showing it.
Ah, tomorrow. He had an appointment with Burns, his dentist, and he’d forgotten to tell his assistant. He began arranging his appointments. The Student Union could be skipped, and HR could be rescheduled. That should do it. His head ached. Today’s meeting went far longer than it should have — he must be losing his touch. He hoped his wife did not want to go Italian tonight. That stuff roiled his stomach and he didn’t want to order chicken again. His jaw was sore. Too many visits with Burns, monthly now. He’d have to set a limit on him.
The relationship with your horse
Alfred’s super power is that he looks exactly the same whatever is going on. Same smile, same posture, same two hands pendulating from the wrist. This fictional character is a study in stress, or allostatic stress, that has become so habitual that a person does not identify it as stress. For Alfred, the long habit of containing and constraining free movement — posture, slumping, swaying, hurrying, all the language the body uses to express its changing inner states — has been, apparently over a lifetime, strenuously brought under the control of a discipline of stillness. Even the appearance of being relaxed and in a state of equanimity has been paradoxically coopted into a stress condition.
Start with the room. Nobody in that meeting could have said Alfred’s demeanor changed, and he would have denied it. But his hands tightened, and somehow the room knew. This is emotional contagion1, an extraordinarily sophisticated mechanism by means of which a vast segment of the animal kingdom, from bees to humans, communicates, not only to other individual members of its species but often to an entire flock or community, swiftly and nonverbally. It is particularly strong, and evolutionarily selected for, with threat-related signals — and there was threat in that room from every direction. Kahn is not happy about being rejected, or half rejected, half accepted. CHG doesn’t want its academic standards compromised or its identity altered. With a provost in the room, some of the untenured faculty feel a potential threat to their own status. And Alfred, even if he’s the last to know it, is under threat too, not only the old familiar threat of people fighting, but the challenge to his own job performance.
So the faculty were angry, but then the anger went stiff. Jaws tightened, people sat up straighter, and a different kind of thought came in: is this worth crossing swords with Admin over? My tenure review is coming up. With luck Kahn will drop out on his own. Nobody was argued out of anything. Instead, the room became quiet, because it picked up at some level that this was not a safe place to push. Alfred, who in his own turn sent the signal in his habitually subconscious way, took the quiet for a “disciplined group.” My point is that there is a cost to stress, and when it is in a leader, it is paid by the people around him.
The other cost is Alfred’s own. He told Marcus the meeting went without a hitch, and he probably meant it. He means it the way he means everything: he is telling himself there were no problems. That is his whole life, his whole persona. All’s okay, small smile, smooth. For him to say “Houston, we have a problem” he would have to be a different person. Watch what happens on the walk home when the problem tries to come up. Most people after a meeting like that would review it. Will Simpson really go to the press? Will there be consequences for me? Alfred starts to review and worry — for a sentence — and then goes to managing his calendar. Ho hum. Ho hum is his safe place.
But the body is there anyway. He saws his teeth, forward and back, in the dark with no one to see. His head aches, and he thinks the meeting probably ran too long and he must be losing his touch. His wife wants Italian, his stomach is roiled, and he eats chicken again. His jaw is sore, and Burns is demanding too many visits, so he’ll have to set a limit on him. Notice that he notices all of it. What he doesn’t see is their connectedness. Each of these bodily signals gets its own explanation and its own file. Nearly all of the explanations are outside him: the meeting, the wife, the dentist. He doesn’t venture to wonder what’s really eating his gut.
He is like a horse trainer who rides his horse — his body — way too hard and then takes it regularly to the vet to cope with the structural damage. Burns is concerned — Alfred is losing bone. But for Alfred the vet is the problem. He isn’t aware, and can’t let himself be aware, that he’s riding his horse too hard. The severity, the discipline, the harshness are all defended against, kept out of his self-concept and out of his awareness. That is his life strategy. It’s not surprising, then, to see that he runs his institution the same way: fragment, rename, manage each piece separately, never state what is actually happening.
It started early for Alfred, as it does for many people. With parents fighting, one might guess that a child would feel frightened or angry, and grinding one’s teeth in any direction, or bruxism, might be an effort to constrain and contain strong feelings that are deemed undesirable to express — frustration, helplessness, resentment. Yet Alfred associates it with soothing. I’m not saying it isn’t soothing for him — it clearly is. It’s both. And being forcibly prevented from doing it was a form of removing from him a form of containment. It’s the one expression he allows himself, and only privately, where otherwise he allows himself so little range of bodily, facial or gestural expression. None of this was a conscious decision. I mean, Alfred did not decide one day that he would show nothing but a genial exterior to the world, for the rest of his life. It’s more like a river. The beginning of the river — the source — is a child in a house where people fought, and where he probably felt frightened. What I’m describing is where it ends up: smoothing out conflict, avoiding collisions, avoiding the uncomfortable.
Alfred is an extreme version, and his way of not knowing is his own. The specific administrator with the specific calendar to disappear into. But this happens to a greater or lesser extent to almost everyone. People often aren’t aware that they habitually cross their legs, or how they hold their shoulders, or the tightness in their abdomen, or any other habitual constriction or laxness anywhere in the body. And the way each of us doesn’t know is specific to us. Like so many people, leaders get wrapped up in doing, and everyone has their own version of ho hum. But the more influence a person has, the more people the cost falls onto. So the question isn’t whether you are like Alfred. It’s the question of what your relationship with your horse is.
Notes
1 Eliska Prochazkova & Mariska Kret (2017), “Connecting minds and sharing emotions through mimicry: A neurocognitive model of emotional contagion,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 80:99–114. ↩
See also: The Body — the cluster landing page that frames this territory.
See also: The Apps You Can’t Close — on stress that never gets switched off.
See also: Vijay — When Optimism Filters Out Feedback — another leader who doesn’t register what’s coming back.
See also: The Cost of Not Being Seen — the capstone.