Hedgehog Effect

Why do so many teams fail to live up to their promise? Because of the obstinate belief that human beings are rational entities. And because team designers fail to take into account the subtle, unconscious dynamics that influence human behavior.

Coaches, consultants, and executives working with groups and teams are often alerted to the elephants in the room-but what about the hedgehogs? The great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drew an analogy between humans' and hedgehogs' discomfort with social proximity. In cold weather, hedgehogs cluster together for warmth but soon find that their spines hurt each other. Yet when they withdraw, they very quickly get cold again. Eventually, after a lot of shuffling, they find the optimum distance for warmth and comfort. For human hedgehogs, this conundrum-our simultaneous need for closeness and distance-is a fundamental reason why people often find it so difficult to work successfully in groups and teams.

However, the ability to work well in teams is essential in modern organizations and the price tag of dysfunctional teams can be staggering.

In The Hedgehog Effect, Manfred Kets de Vries presents the case for leadership group coaching as an experiential training ground for learning to function as a high performance team. His group coaching model, incorporating living case studies, has been developed over more than 20 years of delivering programs to top-level executives and sets the standard in the field of leadership group coaching.

Written for coaches, consultants, leadership development directors, and anyone working in or with teams, The Hedgehog Effect begins with an in-depth analysis of what teams and groups are all about. The intricacies of leadership coaching are illustrated with an elaborate example of a team coaching intervention. In Part Two, the author applies a psychodynamic lens to the dynamics of teams and groups, taking a close look at relationship patterns, how groups evolve, and the phenomenon of the group-as-a-whole. Part Three takes a more systemic perspective, addressing the challenges that change processes pose for people in organizations, and how to create best places to work. Kets de Vries supports the whole with the story of an organizational change initiative accomplished through group coaching.

"Yet another classic from Manfred Kets de Vries. Erudite, entertaining, witty, and nevertheless immensely practical and practicable. This time it is the elusive field of team coaching and coaching cultures that gets a timely core text, which I am confident generations of practitioners will use."
-Erik de Haan, Director, Ashridge Centre for Coaching

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries brings a different view to the much-studied subjects of leadership and the dynamics of individual and organizational change. Bringing to bear his knowledge and experience of economics (Econ. Drs., University of Amsterdam), management (ITP, MBA, and DBA, Harvard Business School), and psychoanalysis (Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association), Kets de Vries scrutinizes the interface between international management, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and dynamic psychiatry. His specific areas of interest are leadership, career dynamics, team building, coaching, executive stress, entrepreneurship, family business, succession planning, cross-cultural management, and the dynamics of corporate transformation and change.

A clinical professor of leadership development, he holds the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chair of Leadership Development at INSEAD, France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. He is the founder of INSEAD's Global Leadership Center. In addition, he is program director of INSEAD's top management program, The Challenge of Leadership: Creating Reflective Leaders (and has five times received INSEAD's distinguished teacher award). He is also the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership Development Research at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin. He has held professorships at McGill University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Montreal, and the Harvard Business School, and he has lectured at management institutions around the world.

The Financial Times, Le Capital, Wirtschaftswoche, and The Economist have rated Manfred Kets de Vries one of world's leading leadership theoreticians. Kets de Vries is listed among the world's top 50 leading management thinkers and among the most influential contributors to human resource management. He has been the recipient the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award from the American Psychological Association and the Freud Memorial Award from the Dutch Psychoanalytic Institute. He has also been given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Leadership Association, in recognition of his role as one of the world's founding professionals in the development of leadership as a field and discipline. Presently, Kets de Vries is seen as the leading figure in the clinical study of organizational leadership.

Kets de Vries is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 35 books, including Unstable at the Top; The Neurotic Organization; Organizational Paradoxes; Leaders, Fools, and Impostors; Life and Death in the Executive Fast Lane; The Leadership Mystique; The Happiness Equation; Lessons on Leadership by Terror; The New Global Leaders; The Leader on the Couch; Coach and Couch; Family Business: Human Dilemmas in the Family Firm; Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death; Reflections on Character and Leadership; Reflections on Leadership and Career Development; Reflections on Groups and Organizations; and The Coaching Kaleidoscope. Further titles are in preparation. His books and articles have been translated into 31 languages.