Anyone who has ever found themselves in a meeting facing an unconscious manager who leads the entire team straight into the wall will undoubtedly recognize themselves in this moment immortalized by Emmanuel Macron’s official photographer on June 9 at the Elysée. We are less than two hours before the president announced the dissolution. On this black and white shot, around a table, the head of state turns his back on us. In front of him, several defeated mines including that of Yaël Braun-Pivet. The President of the National Assembly, head down, looking bored, takes notes in her notebook. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, arms crossed, has the black look of someone who has just lost all respect for his N + 1. Because they are more in touch with reality, these two know the catastrophe that risks occurring. materialize at the ballot boxes in three weeks.
The next day, Yaël Braun-Pivet made his voice heard on France 2 – “There was another path, which was the path of a coalition”, while in front of his troops Gabriel Attal deplores a “sudden” and “brutal” announcement. A decision whose World tells us that it is the work of “apprentice sorcerers”, namely the handful of faithful advisors of the Head of State, who, upon reading the article published on June 12, seem to have taken great pleasure in serve our institutions as a gigantic part of Risk. This is what happens when you have a “narcissistic” manager in front of you, says Arnaud Mercier, doctor in political science at the IEP in Paris. Or “the deep conviction that we are superior to others, much more visionary, more intelligent”, and that we therefore have good reasons to obtain the approval of those around us through fascination.
But according to Arnaud Mercier, because we cannot be brilliant at everything over time, “this image that we project of someone highly competent is exhausted by the confrontation with reality”. The varnish ends up cracking. “However, whether or not your employees maintain their support for this type of management depends directly on the way in which you are capable, as a narcissistic manager, of integrating the contradiction and agreeing to demonstrate at one moment or another. another of humility”, describes the professor of communications. Because the denial of failure in a leader necessarily dismays those around him who are more lucid. He ends up saying that the “all-powerful visionary” is perhaps not that much. The masks fall and the king is naked.
Those who listened to Emmanuel Macron’s press conference on June 12 will certainly have heard this microscopic mea culpa: “If I thought I had done everything well, I wouldn’t be here, in front of you, today, I wouldn’t have dissolved and everything would be fine. So yes, I have a responsibility.” “A speech of false humility”, judge Arnaud Mercier who, in passing, observed the same thing with Gabriel Attal on France Inter the next day: “as soon as you follow up with them by asking them what they didn’t do well, there is no question cause, they give the feeling of blaming others, namely the rise of the extreme right throughout Europe or the fact of having poorly explained their policies. And the first to pay the price are the employees. In this case, the Macronist deputies. Who retain very deep resentment towards the head of state. Some presidential majority candidates thus made it known that they did not want him on their campaign poster. “They have sounded the alarm on pension reform, the multiplication of 49.3, etc. They feel like they have never been listened to and, what’s more, they are the ones who are going to pay the price on the evening of July 7, not President Macron,” explains the political scientist. This is one of the perverse effects of the narcissistic manager: the impact of his errors always falls on his colleagues.
“At the same time” also applies in management. Behind each “narcissistic” manager hides an omnipotent, miracle-working manager. The one who wants to be everywhere and decide everything, who does not have the will to delegate, believing that only he can carry out projects successfully. An omnipresence which manifests itself particularly in moments of crisis, according to Thomas Simon, professor of human resources at the MBS business school in Montpellier. The latest Europeans are the perfect illustration of this. “I have to do everything,” Emmanuel Macron was privately annoyed a few days before the election in the face of the inexorable rise of the RN in the polls. The day after a dissolution decided without consulting many people, it is again he who steps up to the plate, planning three interventions per week until the elections, as revealed by L’Express.
“Gérard Collomb was the first to sound the alarm”
If the omnipotent manager has at least the advantage of “giving rapid responses”, this celerity “harms the collective”, believes the professor, who warns against another consequence: the making of decisions “off the ground” on the part of a manager who “does not act in a consequentialist logic”. Team leader Macron thus did not take into account the fact that part of the electorate will be on vacation during the vote, nor the boom in proxies in the gendarmerie brigades and even less the consequences for the municipalities which find themselves obliged to urgently organize a two-round vote… Not counting the bill for such a dissolution (the 2012 legislative elections cost 154 million euros according to a Senate report).
Can we reasonably work over the long term with this type of manager? “They generally end up leaving a void around them, some no longer follow them. In the case of Macron, there have been a lot of them since 2017,” points out Arnaud Mercier. And the political scientist cites in particular the case of Gérard Collomb, who “was the first to have sounded a huge warning signal about the drift of the head of state towards omnipotent management”. For those who do not have the lucidity to distance themselves, there remains a refuge scenario: “getting yourself and your manager locked in a denial of reality and convincing yourself that you are right against everyone”. When the narcissistic manager gradually pushes aside those who do not think like him, he closes the circle around people who comfort him. In short, “a universal phenomenon in the history of power: courtesanry”, concludes the political scientist.
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