Ed Batista

The Layer Cake of Working Life

I've written a subsequent version of this post specifically for senior leaders:

Some Baggage We Take with Us (On Leaving a Leadership Role)

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In my work with a client in recent weeks, it occurred to me that he was seeking to effect change at several different levels in his professional life, and it was important for us to be clear about which level he was addressing in any given moment. Thinking further along these lines, I realized that we're always working on multiple levels--work life as a layer cake--and a clearer understanding of what each level encompasses (and what we can and can't do there) would provide a useful conceptual framework.

Working my way down from the top of the graphic above...

At the Structural level are the big-picture circumstances of our working lives: Our career path, our professional identity, our organizational affiliations and all the other ways in which we might answer the question, "So what do you do?"

At the Contextual level are those factors related to our current situation: Our specific role and (in some cases) job description, our explicit and implicit responsibilities, and the obligations and expectations we bring to our reporting relationships (up, down and sideways).

At the Interpersonal level are the issues that arise within every unique configuration of individuals: Our relationships with our peers, superiors and subordinates, not only one-on-one, but also in any permanent or temporary groups.

Finally, at the Internal level is our intrapersonal response to all of the above: The mental models, attitudes and beliefs we use to interpret and make sense of our professional lives (and selves); the emotions that accompany and underlie these conceptions; and any self-coaching practices we employ to influence these responses.

So how can we put this framework to, uh, work?

One guideline is "start low." As we move up from Internal to Structural, the scope of change that can be effected gets "bigger" (in a sense) but the degree of immediate personal control that we can exert gets correspondingly "smaller." So when change is desired it may be useful to start at the Internal level to see what we can accomplish on our own. Perhaps nothing needs to change other than our own mental models, beliefs or emotional state.

Starting low also insures that we don't "skip a step" and drag unresolved issues along with us in the process. For example, we may need to change careers to find fulfillment--a big Structural shift--but if the root of our unhappiness actually lies at the Internal or Interpersonal layer, we'll eventually encounter the very same problems again in our new role.

Finally, it's useful to remember that we're always evolving on all levels at once, and changes on any one level will inevitably affect the others. Change in ourselves will affect our interpersonal relationships. Changes in our relationships will affect how we fulfill our roles and responsibilities. And changes in those contextual factors will affect our fit with our organizations and our professional identities. 

One last note: The boundaries between these levels are extremely amorphous and are by no means clear or discrete. I'm not suggesting that desired changes fall neatly into one level and not another. But hopefully this model allows us to more accurately diagnose where change would be most useful and to target our efforts accordingly.

We're Leaky (Emotional Signals and Cognitive Dissonance)

As Vickie Gray has noted, "Holding back your feelings doesn’t keep them hidden, it just makes your behavior incoherent." [1] Which reminds me of something I first heard from either David Bradford or Mary Ann Huckabay at Stanford many years ago: "We're leaky."

When we try to suppress our feelings, we "leak" in all sorts of ways that send powerful signals to those around us. Our body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, eye contact (or lack thereof) and countless other non-verbal cues shout to the world "SOMETHING'S UP!!!" even as we insist, "Everything's fine."

And when it comes to sensing others' emotional signals, we're like one of those remarkable pigs that can smell a truffle three feet underground. [2] As a species we've evolved an exquisitely sensitive set of receptors tuned to the emotions of those around us. So not only do we convey emotions quite readily no matter what's actually said (even when we say nothing at all), but other people are much more perceptive than we typically realize. We're leaking, and we're fooling no one.

But just because we can apprehend others' feelings doesn't mean we can comprehend them. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has written, the pathways through which we experience emotions are a "quick and dirty processing system." [3] We sense something, but we can't quite make sense of it. We feel, but we don't understand.

And this is where things can get incoherent very quickly. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we can't stand the cognitive dissonance that results when we sense another person's emotional state, but we don't understand the rationale for their behavior. So we fill in the gap and invent an explanation that removes the dissonance. Sometimes we're right, and sometimes we're very, very wrong.

The key is simple in theory but sometimes very difficult to put into practice: Acknowledging and disclosing our emotions fills in the cognitive gaps and allows others to clearly understand what we're feeling. Of course, this is harder when we're tired, stressed, vulnerable, threatened, or experiencing emotions that we're reluctant to share, such as embarrassment or shame. So it's essential to practice. Talking about feelings doesn't come naturally to many of us, but like any learned skill, it gets easier with repetition.

 

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Footnotes

[1] @VGrayAuthor (Vickie Gray, 2012)

[2] Truffle hunting demonstration with a pig [0:20 video] (11hblog, YouTube, 2009)

[3] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

Photo © 2011 J. Ronald Lee via Flickr.

 

Marcus Aurelius, 3,000 Years and the Present Moment

Today I talked with a client about mortality and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present--being "in the moment"--is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius that I find both bracing and comforting:

Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [1]

I had been thinking along these lines well before the conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.

In the "unpublished jottings" that close Christopher Hitchens' posthumous book Mortality he includes this brief note: "Larkin good on fear in 'Aubade,' with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either." [2] Hitchens, who wrote these lines while dying of cancer, is referring to Philip Larkin's haunting poem from 1977, which he had begun and set aside three years earlier, returning to it only upon the death of his mother. The short verse includes the following stanza:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round. [3]

Hitchens and Larkin take issue with stoicism and its seemingly inhuman implication that our fear of death is so foolish and irrational that it should be easily surmounted. I haven't read Hume or Lucretius, so I can't characterize their perspective, but I don't think that's an accurate description of Aurelius' view. In the introduction to the Oxford edition of the Meditations, classics scholar R. B. Rutherford emphasizes that "Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter... At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [4] Aurelius wasn't rebuking us for our irrational fear of death; he was encouraging himself to be brave.

At times like this I find the above passage from the Meditations comforting because I accept Aurelius' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years, and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment. And I find this passage equally bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can I can sit back and let it pass by, as I so often do, or I can step forward and do something meaningful with it.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Meditations, Book II, Chapter 14 (Marcus Aurelius)

[2] Mortality, page 92 (Christopher Hitchens, 2012)

[3] "Aubade" (Philip Larkin, 1977)

[4] Meditations, pages ix-x.

Photo by Martin Fisch.

On Zynga and Greater Fools

From James Temple in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

In early April, Zynga Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus dumped 15 percent of his shares for about $198 million, in an unusual secondary stock offering that came almost two months before the official selling lockup for insiders ended. It turned out to be spectacular timing--at least for Pincus and other executives and early investors. They unloaded big portions of their holdings for $12 per share. By the end of July, after the social gaming company whiffed on second-quarter analyst expectations and sliced forecasts for the year roughly in half, the stock had dipped below $3...

Rank-and-file Zynga employees also feel they've missed out on riches. On the question-and-answer site Quora, anonymous users who said they were Zynga workers vented their frustrations over working long hours for years only to wind up with restricted stock that tumbled in value before their lock-up period ended.

"I worked 100 hour weeks," one wrote. "Week, after week, after week. I hated the management. I hated the culture, but we all knew the IPO was right around the corner, and once it came, as long as the s----- [sic] organization could keep it together for the lockout period, I'd have made bank, and in some way, that would have made my three and something miserable years there worth it."

As someone who's lived and worked in San Francisco for over two decades--including nearly six years as a Leadership Coach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business--I certainly know people who've spent untold hours at jobs they don't particularly enjoy in the hopes of realizing a big payday from an IPO or acquisition. That's not a choice I'd make, and it's not a life I'd want to live, but I realize that people may make that choice for any number of reasons, and I empathize with those who've followed that path only to find their hopes dashed.

But in some cases employees seem to be praying that they make it into the castle with early investors before the drawbridge is pulled up--while counting on acquirers or public investors to be the greater fools. Temple notes that shareholders have sued Zynga, claiming that the secondary offering constitutes insider trading and citing the "colossal losses" experienced by both non-executive employees and other public shareholders.

I'm appalled (although, sadly, not surprised) by the actions taken by Zynga's executives and early investors, but I can't quite bring myself to see all of the employees as victims here. At least some of them hated management, hated the culture, thought it was a shitty organization and were just hanging on until the IPO, when public investors--who knew even less about the company than the employees did--would unknowingly take the fall for everyone else. (You didn't even need to be an employee to have a dim view of the company: over the past year or so several of my MBA students at Stanford mentioned what they perceived as an unhealthy working environment at Zynga.)

I'm not suggesting that Zynga employees were seeking to mislead public investors, but I'm less empathetic than I might be otherwise. As Joseph Sternberg wrote just last week in the Wall Street Journal, "The [greater-fool theory of investing] is more than a little dangerous, and plenty of people have lost a lot of money when they discovered they were the fool at the end of the chain."

Photo © Paul Sakuma, Associated Press.