Ed Batista

You're OK, I'm Fantastic: Management and the New Narcissism

Are we becoming a society of narcissists?  And if so, what are the implications of excessive self-esteem for organizational leadership and management?

Decades of effort to improve our collective self-esteem (kicked off by Nathaniel Branden's The Psychology of Self-Esteem in 1969) have undoubtedly had positive effects, but there have also been some unintended consequences.  It appears that one such result is the steady rise in narcissism among college students over the past 25 years, as noted by Associated Press writer David Crary:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues...examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory [NPI] between 1982 and 2006...

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

David Bradford's class on High Performance Leadership at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, uses Michael Maccoby's Harvard Business Review article on Narcissistic Leaders as a central reading.  Maccoby explores the pros and cons of narcissism in the organizational context:

[Productive narcissists] are gifted and creative strategists who see the big picture and find meaning in the risky proposition of changing the world and leaving behind a legacy. Indeed, one reason we look to productive narcissists in times of great transition is that they have the audacity to push through the massive transformations that society periodically undertakes. Productive narcissists are not only risk takers willing to get the job done but also charmers who can convert the masses with their rhetoric. The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success. This tendency toward grandiosity and distrust is the Achilles’ heel of narcissism. Because of it, even brilliant narcissists can come under suspicion for self–involvement, unpredictability and—in extreme cases—paranoia.

(It may be useful to note that Maccoby is discussing "normal" rather than "pathological" narcissism.  In this context, narcissists are simply one of the three primary personality types identified by Freud--the other two being obsessives, who are focused on order and conscientiousness, and erotics, who are focused on relationships and loving and being loved by others.  As Maccoby notes, "Most of us have elements of all three [types.]  We are all, for example, somewhat narcissistic.  If that were not so, we would not be able to survive or assert our needs.  The point is, one of the dynamic tendencies usually dominates the others, making each of us react differently to success and failure."  My assumption is that Twenge's research uses the term in a similar sense.) 

What conclusions might we begin to draw if we look at Maccoby's analysis in light of Twenge's research?

• Narcissists will become an increasingly prevalent personality type in organizations.
• This means more "risk takers willing to get the job done" and more "charmers who can convert the masses."
• But it also means more "unrealistic dreamers" with tendencies "toward grandiosity and distrust."

So how do we make the most of narcissists' productive capabilities while minimizing the baggage they bring with them?  Maccoby's comment that narcissists turn unproductive when they lack "self-knowledge and restraining anchors" points to leadership development and management training programs that will allow narcissists to better understand themselves (and how their strengths can also be weaknesses) while making them more aware of their impact on others.

Executive coaching, T-groups, and other training services that provide people with specific, actionable feedback strike me as some of the most effective ways to insure that narcissists fulfill their productive potential while avoiding the pitfalls of their personality type.

T-Groups, Trust, Leadership and Management

Why are personal issues relevant in a professional setting?   How do our internal dynamics shape our external effectiveness as leaders and managers?  When designing leadership and management training programs, is it even necessary to address internal issues, or should we focus on external behaviors that are visible to others?

One of the most profound influences on my professional and personal growth has been my participation in "T-groups," an interpersonal training methodology (the "T" stands for "training") developed by social psychologist Kurt Lewin.  I first participated in a T-group through the Interpersonal Dynamics class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and over the past two months I've been co-facilitating a T-group consisting of second-year MBA students who are taking the same class (generally known as "Touchy Feely.")

I believe that the class's emphasis on the disclosure of personal issues is deeply relevant to my work of developing leaders and managers, but recently I've been asking myself why.  What's the mechanism by which participation in a T-group translates into greater effectiveness as a leader or manager?

First, I begin with the premise that trust = motive + reliability + competence.  We can discern others' reliability and competence from external signals, but we can only understand their motives by having candid (and thus difficult) conversations with them about internal (and often quite personal) issues.

Trust is so important in an organization because of the difference between alignment and agreement.  When people in an organization trust each other, alignment is sufficient for decision-making purposes (i.e. everyone can fully support a choice that's made, even if it's not their first choice.)  But when they don't trust each other, their skepticism or fear often compel them to require agreement (i.e. everyone has to get their first choice in order to proceed willingly.)  It's obviously much easier to obtain alignment, so if an organization can operate on that basis, it's going to be much more productive.

T-groups allow people to come together in a professional setting, have candid and difficult conversations about internal and personal issues, and in the process develop powerful bonds of trust. People do get a lot of valuable feedback in T-groups about communication mechanics, means of gaining and losing influence, and similar dynamics that could be replicated in a less personal setting, such as a workshop focused on external behaviors.

But they also get hands-on experience asking and answering challenging questions on personal topics, which allows them to practice having difficult conversations when emotions are running high and being authentic in order to develop trusting relationships with colleagues.  Those dynamics are unique to T-groups (or at the very least would be difficult to replicate in a typical behavioral workshop.)

Do people grasp how to do these things skillfully after taking a single class?  No--and if my experience is any guide, it's a lifelong process.  Do students come out of the class and apply these techniques unskillfully and even inappropriately?  Absolutely--but they have to make those mistakes if they're going to continue learning.

I don't view this as an either/or proposition.  I'm a big fan of workshops, role plays, video analysis and other techniques that allow us to better understand how our external behaviors are perceived by others and how they enhance or diminish our effectiveness.  That said, I also believe that these training tools have the greatest impact when they're complemented by something like a T-group that addresses internal issues as well as external behaviors and allows to better understand the connections between them.

On Gratitude: One Hand Clapping

Yesterday I sprained my wrist skating in Golden Gate Park.  It might be broken--I'm getting an X-ray later this morning to find out.  The pain is manageable as long as I keep it still, and I've broken my wrists three times and sprained them even more, so I'm familiar with the drill and expect all will be well in a few weeks.

But I'm surprised by how upset I've been to have my typing speed reduced by about 90% and to be essentially unable to write (it's my left wrist, and I'm left-handed.)  This is partly because I love my work and I hate to think about the hit my productivity is going to take, but at a deeper level, I feel cut off from people because I can barely type a coherent email (this post is a trial) and even from my own thought processes because I learn by taking copious handwritten notes.

I was feeling a little sorry for myself this morning when I saw Jessica Guynn's article on Kaboodle co-founder and CTO Keiron McCammon in the S.F Chronicle.  McCammon had to have his left hand amputated following a paragliding accident just over a year ago.  Guynn writes...

Today, McCammon has not only adjusted, he is thriving. He swapped his Jeep Wrangler for a Toyota Prius with the license plate 1 HANDED, commuting 80 miles round-trip from his Danville home in the carpool lane. He types with four fingers on one hand rather than pecking at the keyboard with two fingers on each. He has experimented with prosthetics so he can get back to the activities he enjoys, from practicing yoga to riding a bike to playing the guitar. This winter, he hit the slopes to snowboard again. As an amputee, he gets half-price lift tickets.

Guynn also quotes one of Kaboodle's VC investors...

"[McCammon] obviously went through a lot of pain, and that would have affected my psychology," said Rajeev Motwani, one of the original investors in Google. "It would have made me a bit sour. But I have never once heard him complain about anything. That's what you look for (when) you invest in a company: a founder who has ownership of what he is doing and does whatever it takes to make it succeed. Keiron is a wonderful example."

Well, that helped me put things in perspective right quick.  Rather than feel self-pity, I feel incredibly grateful for the fact that my disability is just temporary, for the good health I'm blessed with 99% of the time, for the opportunity to do work that I love (and that I can do one-handed, just at a slower pace), and for my wife, who's cheerfully taken on all household duties requiring both hands.  It's a refreshing reminder of just how good I have it.

Read more about McCarron's experiences at A One Handed Blog.

UPDATE: Good news--my doctor thinks I just tore some soft tissue.  He's sufficiently confident that no bones are broken that he didn't even want an X-ray--he just told me to watch the pain and check back in if it doesn't improve.  I can't put weight on my left hand, and certain arm movements are pretty painful, but I CAN type with just a little discomfort.  I can even write if I'm careful to hold my wrist still.  So my gratitude continues to grow.

Soft Skills for MBAs

From Phred Dvorak's February 12 article on M.B.A. Programs Hone "Soft Skills":

[B]usiness schools are devoting [greater attention] to topics such as teamwork, leadership and communicating -- the "softer" side of management. Typically, those soft skills got shorter shrift in M.B.A. programs than "hard" skills such as strategy or financial analysis.

The schools are responding to employers' growing interest in soft skills. Executive suites are increasingly composed of managers running far-flung operations who must attract and retain knowledgeable workers. That puts a premium on skills such as communicating and brokering compromises...

The Stanford Graduate School of Business this fall will revamp its leadership-training curriculum, requiring all first-year students to take personality tests, participate in teamwork and management-simulation exercises and critique their people skills. The school will bring in executive coaches to watch the simulations and offer advice. The training is aimed at getting students to look at how they behave and how effective they are, says Evelyn Williams, an expert in leadership simulations who is overseeing much of the new coursework.

Our M.B.A. students "can pontificate like the best of them. But can they do?" says Ms. Williams.

As I wrote back in December, I'm one of those executive coaches now working with Evelyn at the Stanford GSB's Center for Leadership Development & Research.  My colleagues and I are "watching simulations and offering advice," but we're doing a lot more as well.

We're supporting the new Leadership Fellows program headed up by Evelyn, which offers a select group of MBA students the opportunity to develop their leadership and team-building skills, which they'll help teach to the First Year students next fall.  We're facilitating T-groups in the school's Interpersonal Dynamics class and supporting other Organizational Behavior courses in coach, mentor and teaching assistant roles.  We're developing assessment tools to help students better understand their strengths and areas for development as a leader--and all that's just a start.

These and other activities form an important component of the business school's new curriculum, which...

...includes expanded leadership and communication development. The Strategic Leadership course [which includes sections to be taught by Leadership Fellows] will integrate strategy with leadership development and implementation. Critical Analytical Thinking will have as a major feature the honing of students’ written and oral communication skills. In a new capstone seminar near the end of the two years, students will synthesize what they have learned, examine strengths and weaknesses in their personal leadership style, and reflect on how they hope to achieve their goals as they embark on their careers.

I'm excited to be a part of this initiative at the GSB (where the leadership development opportunities were a lot more limited when I was a student a decade ago), and I'm firmly convinced that this increased emphasis on "soft skills" will prepare these students to be far more effective leaders not just later in their careers but right out of the gate.
 

The Problem with Positive Feedback

A common theme in my coaching and teaching is the ineffectiveness of positive feedback. It frequently fails to make an impact, and at times it can even cause intense anxiety. But isn't praise supposed to make us feel good? What's happening here? I see three factors at work:

1. Waiting for the Other Shoe

When we deliver negative feedback (or any unpleasant message), we often try to soften the blow by leading with something positive. As a result, people on the receiving end may come to hear positive feedback as a hollow preamble to the real message. Rather than feeling genuinely appreciated, they're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

2. Staying Out of Debt

A related dynamic is the use of positive feedback to overcome resistance to a request or a demand. The feedback can create a sense of obligation, a "social debt" that the recipient feels compelled to "repay" by acceding to the giver's wishes. There's an underlying logic here, but there's also an inherent contradiction: Most people don't like being indebted and don't feel good when they are.

3. Currency Devaluation

Like any currency, positive feedback loses value when there's too much in circulation. Psychologist Richard Farson and business author Ralph Keyes have noted that too much praise can render positive feedback effectively useless: "In the workplace, praise can become what is called a 'dissatisfier.' Like a salary, it is less likely to motivate when it’s given out than demotivate when it’s expected but withheld." [1]

So how can we avoid these traps?  Three recommendations:

1. Don't Abuse Soft Startups

Although research supports the value of "soft startups" that initiate difficult conversations on a positive note, feedback given in that context should be authentic and relevant to the issue at hand. [2] Learn how to deliver critical feedback candidly and directly while minimizing the risk of defensiveness. [3] Don't abuse the soft startup principle by swaddling a substantive critique in superficial praise. 

2. Just...Stop

Try giving some positive feedback...and stopping.  Don't overdo it--bear in mind that too much praise will eventually have the same effect as no praise at all.  But by uncoupling positive feedback from any goals other than acknowledging and expression appreciation for the recipient, you can increase its value as a motivator.

3. Be a Better Recipient

Finally, in addition to being more thoughtful about giving positive feedback, we may also need to be more thoughtful about receiving it. [4] If we blindly react to praise with (in Peter Vajda's words below) "skepticism, dis-belief, arm's-length appreciation,and/or embarrassment," that's going to make the giver feel awkward, if not resentful, and it's going to keep us from developing a stronger relationship.  As always in interpersonal dynamics, it's a two-way street.

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Footnotes

[1] The Failure-Tolerant Leader (Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes, Harvard Business Review, 2002)

[2] The Value of Soft Startups

[3] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

[4] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

Updated February 2021.

Photo by Aaron Matthews.

5 Things You Didn't Know

I've been tagged by Greg Yardley and Michael Stein (no, not that Michael Stein, the other one)  so here are five things you probably didn't know about me...

1) My Undergraduate Wanderings: I attended three different colleges before graduating.  I spent my freshman year at Duke but then decided that I wanted to go to art school and (more importantly) needed to be closer to a girl who was at Dartmouth.  So I spent the next two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I learned how to work my ass off in order to get the most out of my talents.  After two years I was ready to return to academia, but with the hubris exuberance of youth, I decided that if I didn't get into Brown, I wasn't going back to college.  I didn't have much of a Plan B, but thankfully the admissions office gave me a shot.  My time at Brown was unbelievably fulfilling, and the whole experience was a lesson in not giving up and coping with change.  And I married the girl.

2) My Brief Musical Career: While I was in art school in Boston, I worked in a restaurant kitchen for a few months with Charles Thompson IV, aka Black Francis of the Pixies.  I told Charles that I wanted to learn to play guitar, and he said he had an old amp that he wasn't using anymore.  I dropped by the Pixies' practice space, and Charles gave me a Fender Bandmaster.  I was never any good as a guitar player, but I had some fun and hung on to that amp for ten years.  A few years after college, my brother David--a drummer--joined me in San Francisco and we kinda-sorta started a band.  While David was waiting for the rest of us to get our act together, he started "legendary angry emotional hard core" band John Henry West with some friends and went on to tour the country econo-style a few times.

3) What I Did On My Summer Vacation: In the summer of 1997 I took six weeks off from work and rode a motorcycle around the US--literally.  From San Francisco to Needles, CA to Cleveland, TN to Boston to Yakima, WA and back to SF.  One of the most vivid and challenging experiences of my life.  I still have the bike, an '84 Yamaha FJ 600 just like this one, but I haven't ridden seriously in years; maybe this summer I'll take a ten-year anniversary jaunt.

4) I Love Sad Movies: I'm a total sucker for them, from intense dramas to lightweight tearjerkers.  It started with The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I saw on cable when I was in high school, and has continued right up through The Notebook, which I saw on DVD last year.  I think it began because it was a (marginally) acceptable opportunity to cry as a boy, and even though I'm much more comfortable crying as a man, it's still a cathartic experience.

5) My Three Favorite Songs...are John Coltrane's India, Brad Mehldau's solo piano cover of Paranoid Android, and The Nerves' original Hanging on the Telephone.  Well, those are the all-timers, anyway; my favorite this week is probably Amy Winehouse's Rehab.  And my favorite album, track for track, is Haywood's We Are Amateurs, You and I.  (Note that everyone from Amazon to Last.fm misspells it.)

Thanks, Greg and Michael--that was fun.  I'm tagging Noah Brier, Sage Cohen, and Greg Neichin, three fascinating people I know from widely disparate aspects of my life.

The General Design Company

What's a blog for if you can't use it to pimp your friends and family every once in a while?  The General Design Company is a graphic design firm just launched by my sister-in-law Soung Wiser and her colleague Scott Livingston.  The two of them have been the creative team at BatesNeimand for a number of years, and although they're keeping their day jobs, they wanted to strike out on their own in order to take on new projects.

Their site's still under construction, but I expect to see something very spiffy there in the near future.  In the meantime, if you're looking for a graphic designer, give them a call.  Soung is incredibly talented and totally cool, and I am not biased at all.  Not one bit.

Home-Grown Managers

Where are small and mid-sized firms finding top management talent?  Right in their own backyard.  Today's Wall Street Journal features an article by Erin White on the growing trend of investing in local talent and transforming high-potential employees into high-profile managers:

[M]any U.S. companies [are] paying more attention to grooming their next generation of leaders.  Selected employees typically enter multi-year programs involving management classes, coaching sessions and so-called stretch assignments that throw them into big, unfamiliar challenges.

What's driving the trend?

The tight labor market puts a premium on retaining top talent and raises the cost of outside hires. And leaner corporate structures make it harder for managers to naturally hone their skills through incremental steps up the ladder; companies must instead formally teach them. Demographics play a role, too: The looming retirement of baby boomers is forcing companies to think about replacements.

White focuses on the Schwan Food Company, a $3.5 billion prepared food maker which has 35 employees in its Senior Executive Development Program and is about to create a similar program for 50 lower-level managers.  According to White...

Participants in the senior program are thrown into new jobs, take business classes, and are given mentors and coaches for support. They're also assigned to team projects with other program members. Participants must be willing to change jobs and relocate whenever the company asks.

[Schwan CEO Lenny] Pippin says the program has created a more worldly and self-confident work force. It also has developed a roster of potential future leaders -- unlike when Schwan reached outside to hire him, Mr. Pippin says. "I can go to the board, and I can talk to them about succession and the future leadership of this company for many years to come," he says.

I love my job working to help Stanford MBAs develop their leadership skills, and I'm deeply grateful for the opportunities that allowed me to enjoy the benefits of that same graduate education, but what I find so exciting about Schwan's program and others like it is the recognition that management talent doesn't necessarily come with a blue-chip degree.

But I'm sure it took a substantial effort on Schwan's part to get this program off the ground.  What's needed is a pre-fab management training curriculum with executive coaching support that small and mid-sized companies could tap into and adapt to their own purposes without having to reinvent the wheel on their own.  Sounds like a job for someone working in leadership development at a top-flight business school...

When Heuristics Go Bad (On Cognitive Biases)

Cognitive Bias Codex by Buster Benson, designed by John Manoogian III.

Much of our problem-solving behavior relies on heuristics, conceptual rules of thumb that allow us to sift through information quickly and find a likely answer to a question more efficiently. We couldn't function without heuristics, but they're prone to biases which regularly lead us astray. Writing in The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman discusses heuristics and related biases that affect physicians--and which clearly affect the rest of us as well:

Representativeness Bias. Groopman writes, "Doctors make [representative] errors when their thinking is overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates of a disease, and thus attribute symptoms to the wrong cause." Pat Croskerry, a physician who's written "Achieving Quality in Clinical Decision Making" as well as "The Theory and Practice of Clinical Decision Making," told Groopman, "You have to be prepared in your mind for the atypical."

Availability Bias, which Groopman defines as "the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind." He continues, "[A] businessman may estimate the likelihood that a given venture could fail by recalling difficulties that his associates had encountered in the marketplace, rather than by relying on all the data available to him about the venture; the experiences most familiar to him can bias his assessment of the chances for success... (Psychologists call this kind of cognitive cherry-picking 'confirmation bias': confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information.)"

Affective Errors. Groopman relates how he once failed to thoroughly examine a patient whom he felt warmly toward in order to minimize the patient's discomfort and possibly because, "I hoped unconsciously that the cause of his fever was trivial and that I would not find evidence of an infection on his body." Groopman continues, "This tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true is what Croskerry calls an 'affective error.'"

Groopman concludes,

As...cognitive psychologists have shown, when people are confronted with uncertainty...they are susceptible to unconscious emotions and personal biases, and are more likely to make cognitive errors. Croskerry believes that the first step toward incorporating an awareness of heuristics and their liabilities into medical practice is to recognize that how doctors think can affect their success as much as how much they know, or how much experience they have. "Currently, in medical training, we fail to recognize the importance of critical thinking and critical reasoning," Croskerry told me. "The implicit assumption in medicine is that we know how to think. But we don’t."

Groopman's article focuses on the role played by heuristics in medicine, but his thesis is applicable in any field of endeavor; Croskerry could have said, "The implicit assumption in life is that we know how to think. But we don't." We could all stand to "incorporate an awareness of heuristics and their liabilities into our practice," no matter what business we're in.

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For Further Reading

Pat Croskerry on Successful Decision-Making

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet (Buster Benson)

Cognitive Bias Codex (Designed by John Manoogian III using Benson's framework)

• Large format paper version (Design Hacks)

Wikipedia's list of psychological heuristics

Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut? (Interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein)

Conditions for Intuitive Expertise (Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein)

Thanks to Roberto Fernandez, whose outstanding class on Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business first introduced me to heuristics and who impressed upon me the importance of recognizing that our minds play tricks on us in sadly predictable ways.

Updated July 2018.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Ourselves

In any number of circumstances, we're called upon to tell our story, to recount some aspect of our personal or professional history and how we came to be who we are. Here's how to do this more effectively:

• We often assume that because we've lived our story we know how to tell it, and so we wing it. This leads to rambling. Don't memorize a script, but map out the themes you want to address. Practice with a timer to get a sense of the rhythm and pace that feel right. Make the most of the time available, while ensuring that you don't run long.
• We rely too heavily on chronology, which is an obvious way to tell our story, but not necessarily the most compelling. What other lens can you apply to your experiences? What is the narrative arc? Seek to convey a sense of drama, rather than simply reciting facts as though you were reading your resume.
• We typically include too many details.Think bigger. Talk about the why, and not just the what and the when. Help people understand who you are and not simply what you've done.
• Most people speak too quickly in these situations. Slowing down is calming, gives your words more emphasis, and helps your audience. Remember that they want you to succeed as much as you do.

 

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For Further Reading

Stagefright and Public Speaking

Top Ten Speaking Tips (R. Todd Stephens, 2005)

Thanks to Raymond Carver for inspiring this post's title.

Photo by JohnDiew0107.