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"Jeff Bezos' managers at Amazon find him formidable enough. But the figure that overwhelms their lives goes by the internal nickname 'the empty chair.' Bezos periodically leaves one seat open at a conference table and informs all attendees that they should consider that seat occupied by their customer, 'the most important person in the room.'"1
I think Bezos is onto something important with the empty chair. Apparently, others agree because this portion of the Forbes article was tweeted many times. Here's why I think this can be an effective leadership approach.
I owe my career in change management, and especially my focus on resistance to change, to what I learned at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. Gestalt is a type of psychology that looks for the whole picture. Rather than trying to force people to change, it takes a more paradoxical approach by heightening the understanding of the forces at play right now - the things that hold the status quo in place. That increased awareness allows change to happen. A classic gestalt intervention also is called the empty chair. In therapy, a person sometimes is asked to imagine that another person is sitting in that chair. In other cases, the chair may represent some aspect of the client him/herself - for instance, the part that is ambivalent about taking...