One of the most fascinating phenomena that every organisation I’ve ever worked with manifests is parent-child, child-parent, parent-parent, and child-child unhealthy transactions.
In most organizations, most people have no idea that very often they are speaking, behaving, or deciding out of parent, adult, or child ego states.
The easiest way of understanding parent, adult, and child ego states is to focus on my inner dialogue, my self-talk, how I talk to myself. We all have an inner dialogue; everybody talks to themselves. It’s the healthiest thing you can imagine in any healthy life, in any healthy human being—their ability to talk to themselves.
As we talk to ourselves, Eric Berne, who created this model in the late 1960s in his first book, The Games That People Play, suggests and highlights that in our inner dialogue, there’s a child, exquisitely gifted in the emotional arena, who can bring innocence, playfulness, and fun into our inner dialogue.
There are two sides to the child: the natural child and the adapted child. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
In this dialogue, the adult will be bringing fairness, insight, wisdom, balance, and care, but also toughness when necessary. Berne suggested that for a healthy, happy life and a healthy, happy inner dialogue, it was best to remain in the adult state most of the time.
The parent in our inner dialogue can be heard saying things like, “Watch the road,” “Don’t cross over there,” “Go to the pelican crossing,” “That tea’s too hot,” “Be careful of that oven,” and so on.
Most of the time, that parent is nurturing. We’ll come back to the carping critical parent in a moment.
To keep it simple, we have those three ego states in our inner dialogue, operating a lot of the time. Berne suggests that for health and happiness, you should stay in your adult most of the time.
Here’s the rub: not many people know how to do that. Not many people in the workplace speak, behave, and decide out of their adult ego state. Very often, in organizations, I’m aware, and colleagues who work in training and development, coaching, and mentoring all agree, that most organizations are cesspools of parent-child, child-parent, parent-parent, and child-child transactions—often unhealthy transactions that frequently go unnoticed.
Most people don’t notice; they think it’s okay. They think that speaking to someone in a certain way is acceptable.
I have a little video extract from a not very well-known film (You Can Count on Me – 2000) that Matthew Broderick is in, where he’s having a difficult conversation with his deputy bank manager played by Laura Linney. She’s arguing for and trying to get permission to meet her child off the school bus every day.
Those of us who are familiar with these dynamics understand that he’s very much parenting her, telling her what to do, and being directive.
She’s being childish, playing the victim, saying, “It’s only a couple of minutes at four o’clock, and I’m back in two minutes.” It’s very easy for us to see it, but when I present this clip to most management groups, they have no clue. They think it’s okay. They all say, “She’s arguing her case; he’s the boss.”
There’s something fundamentally important that most people are oblivious to: it goes unrecognised and passes for acceptable behaviour.
Bottom line, a lot of the childish tantruming, which is all about “I’m going to get what I want, and if you don’t give me what I want, I will tantrum, play up, make a life of misery, and get under your skin until I get what I want,” or judgmental parenting, which is all about criticism, carping, being directive, hectoring in the Margaret Thatcher style, to get what you want.
It may be useful at this point just to highlight that the whole point of these games, as Eric Berne called them, is to get what you want.
When they’re young, most people discover a strategy—child or parent, or a combination.
Eric Berne suggests that most people can flip from child to parent, depending on how well it’s working. They can flip in milliseconds, depending on how well it’s working and if it’s getting them what they want.
Most people learn these strategies when they’re young, and then they practice and perfect these skills throughout their life.
Bottom line, in terms of organisations—commercial, voluntary, or public sector—these are deeply destructive. These parent-parent, child-child, child-parent, and parent-child transactions are deeply dysfunctional. They create misery, strife, and set up tensions—power tensions, influence tensions, tensions designed to grab influence and power. For most people and in most organizations, this doesn’t exist. For those of us who are skilled and trained in this field, as my colleague Sam mentioned earlier, most organizations are cesspools of this behaviour.
The key here, as I mentioned earlier, is that most people are oblivious; they don’t recognise it. The most powerful learning and development pathway here is simply to help managers, leaders, and teams—especially in my case, with videos, video clips, and video extracts—to demonstrate to them, to waken them up, to help them realize, to help them recognize the typical parent, adult, and child dimensions. Once they recognize them, they begin to become almost infatuated, fascinated. It’s like a whole new world has opened up to them.
From that moment onwards, they just become increasingly more skilled and increasingly more enthusiastic to identify the dysfunctional behaviour.
In so doing, they begin to self-correct. They begin to realise, “Wow, I think I might be doing some of that as well.”
This is a classical learning-by-discovery pathway, and once the awareness is there, it is a remarkably self-propelling journey of adaptation and self-correction.
Give me a call on 07850 143 209, write to me at email@dannymcguigan.com or connect with me on Linkedin.
