Understand Your Family Ghosts At Work with Deborah Ancona

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:00)
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Hi, I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm gonna bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.
There's a funny TV show called Ghosts. A young couple lives in a big old manor house, full of ghosts from the varying centuries, and the ghosts have a lot of opinions. They have a lot to say. They have a lot of judgments. They're always present. I live in a very old farm house too, and I often wonder what ghosts live in my house and what they think of me and my family.
MIT's Deborah Ancona says we all bring ghosts with us every day. Some are good and friendly, others not so much.
The ghosts are the behaviors, the feelings, the associations from our past, from our families of origin. Today we're going to talk about how family systems theory affects us all at work. It's the idea that human behavior can be understood through the lens of the family unit as a cohesive system, where each member plays a role.
It's really a useful framework at work. We've talked about it before. But I love Ancona's work, helping us unpack our ghosts, deciding which ones we want to shut away and which ones we're glad are with us. I found it really helpful in my own life because, you know, my ghosts are very much about a childhood where I felt like a lot was up to me. I was on my own to keep my sister safe, to keep things steady. Those are the ghosts that stick with me every single day and push me, make me controlling, make me a real pain in the you know what, but also have made me who I am. I think I'm on good terms with my ghosts now. I'm so excited to have Dr. Deborah Ancona on the show. She's a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and she's studied this topic in depth with students and in the literature. In our conversation, we're going to explore the ways that family systems theory, our ghosts, impact our work and our leadership.
I just want to start out if you could define, who are our family ghosts?

**Deborah Ancona** (4:29)
I think it's more actually the question of what are our family ghosts? So ghosts, as we define it, and we, Dennis Perkins and I who did the work on the HBR article, view it as the fundamental attitudes and behaviors that evolved from our family of origin, and actually sometimes prior to family of origin, that follow you into the present. So these ghosts, these ways of thinking, these ways of behaving are not left behind. In fact, we bring them with us or we bring some of them with us, and there are some good ones and there are some bad ones.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (5:09)
One of my favorite anecdotes, I think it was in your HBR article, was the anecdote about a man who had grown up to be a really successful leader, but he couldn't handle when people weren't happy, or if he wasn't making people happy, and he traced it back because when he was a kid, if you didn't have fun on the family vacation, damn it, you were going to have fun on that vacation, damn it. And I just was laughing out loud because, frankly, my kids and I joke that we've never had fun on a family vacation, so.