Transference
Charisma is the transference of enthusiasm — Ralph Archbold
I wrote an article about Masks a little while ago. This article is building on top so it is worth reading it before this one.
By transference in this article I refer to an unconscious redirection of one’s feelings triggered by an event in the past to a situation in the present.
We are short on sleep because our kid is waking us up all night or we are still angry to a person who was behaving rude with us on the train this morning on our way to the office. We arrive to the office in a less-than-optimal emotional state… and start making mess 🤦♀️.
We may be impatient with a team member, don’t show up on time for a meeting and make the whole room wait for us perhaps or write an email to a peer having rather careless choice of words all over.
The issues we generate around ourselves usually backfires on us, pulling us even further down, making even bigger mess, causing a downward spiral hard to break.
This is only the short term case of transference 😱 but transference can go much deeper, for example we can mistrust somebody at the workplace who resembles a hostile ex-colleague in manners, voice or simply by external appearance.
On the other end of the scale, transference can also trigger us being overly compliant to someone who resembles a former mentor, partner or teacher we loved a lot 🤔.
How can we get rid of transference?
Well, as long as it remains unconscious, we cannot 🤷♀️. We can focus on raising it to the conscious level though as much as possible by being aware of our emotions and reflecting on our behaviour.
Why do we feel in a specific way towards a colleague? Why do we find somebody easier to spend time with while others we feel wanting to avoid? Did they really do something gave us a reason or are we rather on auto-pilot with regards to our behaviour towards them? Can we find somebody who they remind us? If so then can we be sure they are really alike?
The more we bring unconscious (biased) behaviour to the conscious level and reflect on it, the better we will be at stopping transference, see our colleagues for what they are.
One specific mistake I find with leaders make quite regularly is to have favourites in the team.
Although it feels great for the one being our favourite, and feel comfortable for us having them around, we introduce tension into the team and make it hard to function properly. By rewarding the favourite person without any specific contribution (based solely on our bias of liking them) we are sending the wrong message to the team that not everybody is equal.
Treating everybody equal (inclusive behaviour) should not be mistaken with treating everybody the same which denies their uniqueness though, is important to mention.
If we refrain to give in to our bias to have favourites and treat everybody in the team as equal… would it stop us having friends at the workplace?
Does this mean that leadership have to be strictly professional and therefore lonely? That’s a very good question to reflect on and a story for another article 😃.
Contributing through comments
It would be great to hear your views on this article by commenting on the page or contacting me through Medium or Twitter below.
Connect to Miklos on Medium
https://medium.com/@miklos.sagi
Hi Miklos, Thanks for your article. I can relate to your thoughts shared, few things can be helpful from my experience e.g moving from Dependent to Interdependence, having empathy , staying mindful (fully present) . Keep writing. Regards