Ed Batista

Goodbye, 2013

It's been an unusual year. There have been some very high highs: I believe I'm doing the best work I've ever done with my clients and students; my brother David realized a long-held dream and opened a bar; I began writing for HBR; I stepped into a new role with Stanford T-groups; and I realized how much I have to be thankful for.

And there have been some very low lows: I failed at an important project; I blew out a disk and was in pain for months; I'm no longer in pain, but I'm still struggling to exercise regularly (and to meditate at all); I wrote almost nothing from March through August; and I was reminded (several times) of one of my greatest weaknesses.

Somewhere in the midst of all this--neither a high nor a low--I finally, truly grasped the essence of mortality, and Seneca's On the Shortness of Life has stayed with me:

There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and...it takes the whole of life to learn how to die... [I]t takes a great man and one who has risen far above human weaknesses not to allow any of his time to be stolen from him, and it follows that the life of such a man is very long because he has devoted wholly to himself whatever time he has had. None of it lay neglected and idle; none of it was under the control of another, for, guarding it most grudgingly, he found nothing that was worthy to be taken in exchange for his time. [Ch. 7]

I'm a long way from living up to that standard, but I'm closer than I've ever been, and that's something.

Tonight Amy and I walked along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz and watched the sun set; it was a good way to end a year. See you in 2014.

Startups as Human Systems

Although the clients in my coaching practice come from a wide range of professions and work in organizations of all sizes, I see a large number of startup founders and other leaders from early-stage companies. And my work with these clients--as well as my own experience as the first employee at three nonprofit ventures--has led me to view startups as distinct human systems. There's no one-size-fits-all template to describe how these systems operate, nor are the interpersonal principles in startups fundamentally different from those in other organizations. But there are some tendencies that I see in my startup clients' companies on a consistent basis:

1. Complex Group Dynamics

This point underpins all the others below: Startups are deceptively complex organizations. The small number of employees and, often, the shared background of the founding team can give the impression that the company's interpersonal dynamics will be simple and easy to manage.

But by definition a startup is in the process of establishing its culture, the set of informal norms and formal practices that determine how people interact with each other in a given system. A startup's culture can change rapidly, sometimes with the arrival or departure of a single person. And while some founders are intensely deliberate about the culture they're creating, the pressure to tackle today's to-do list can make it easy to think of culture as something to be dealt with later. As investor Joel Peterson has said, every organization has a distinct culture--the question is whether it develops "inadvertently or with some planning and forethought." [1]

When the surrounding culture is subject to dramatic change--and when leaders may lack the capacity to step back and consider the cultural impact of their actions--group dynamics are inevitably complex. This complexity may become apparent only at key inflection points in the company's development--the first non-founder employees, a move to new space, the first firing, the departure of a founder--but effective startup leaders recognize this complexity well in advance of these critical junctures.

2. Communication = Survival

The efficient flow of information in a startup is critical to its health and success. Established organizations can survive inefficiencies, requiring multiple conversations to accurately transmit a message and get it to stick. They won't thrive, but they'll survive, sometimes for extended periods of time. Startups will die.

The presumption of simplicity noted above can fool startup leaders into thinking that good communication is a natural by-product of interactions within the company: We talk when we need to talk, and we meet when we need to meet. And if we're meeting and talking, we must be communicating.

But truly accurate and meaningful communication takes effort. We need to work at being clear and direct, because what we say isn't necessarily what the other party hears. [2] And we need to work at active listening, because even if we've absorbed the other party's message they may not truly feel heard. Effective startup leaders see communication as critical to survival and work to improve communication practices in the company at both the individual and group levels.

3. Feedback = Learning

A corollary to the point above: Just as startups depend on efficient communication to survive, they depend on effective feedback to drive learning. Note that good feedback doesn't simply mean honest criticism of counterproductive behavior; it also means heartfelt praise that acknowledges and rewards useful behavior. But just as we assume that our interactions with others naturally result in meaningful communication, we tend to operate under the belief that simply sharing our responses to others' behavior is all we need to do for our feedback to have the desired effect.

But even more than other forms of communication, truly effective feedback is the result of hard work and dedicated effort. In part this is because giving and receiving feedback is stressful--even when it's positive--and when we're under stress we're much less effective communicators. [3] We absorb and process information less efficiently, we're less creative at solving problems, and we fixate on perceived solutions without testing alternatives--in short, perfect conditions for feedback that doesn't stick. [4]

Organizations seeking to maximize learning must counter these effects by building a feedback-rich culture in which a heightened sense of safety and trust makes truly candid feedback possible. [5] And effective startup leaders establish these conditions early and reinforce them often.

4. Relationships Matter

Interpersonal relationships in startups tend to matter even more than they do in established organizations. One dysfunctional relationship can affect the entire company, especially if a founder is involved. And a single person with poor interpersonal skills can undermine every working relationship around them--again, especially if it's a founder.

But relationship difficulties in startups can often be masked or go unaddressed. Leaders may assume that the founding team's pre-existing friendships or shared background automatically translate into healthy working relationships. When founders themselves lack interpersonal skills, co-founders and early employees are typically reluctant to confront them. And the pressure to deliver results often leaves little time to discuss interpersonal issues.

Yet my clients' experiences demonstrate the importance of interpersonal factors in a startup. The single issue I discuss most frequently with founders is how to better manage difficulties in their working relationships with co-founders, senior employees and investors. [6] Note that this work doesn't just involve building stronger personal connections--it also entails exerting influence and wielding power. [7] Effective startup leaders make time to reflect on their key relationships and attend to difficulties early.

5. Leaders Are Levers

Much of the discussion above has focused on the challenges faced by founders that derive from startups' scale and stage of development, but I also want to highlight an advantage: Startup leaders enjoy a tremendous amount of personal leverage to drive positive change and make mid-course corrections when necessary.

All leaders striving for change must work within an existing culture. In established organizations this is a slow, painstaking and failure-prone process, and even the most highly effective individual leaders can struggle as they attempt to indirectly influence parts of the organization that are well beyond their personal reach. But in the context of a startup's small scale and evolving culture, founders and other senior leaders have many more opportunities to connect directly with every employee, allowing them to have a significant impact through their personal example.

This leverage has a flipside, of course: When startup leaders fail to live up to the principles they espouse or prove untrustworthy in some other way, it's obvious to everyone in the company and rapidly undermines employees' loyalty and commitment. Effective startup leaders realize that their leverage comes at a price, and they will be expected to walk their talk every day. [8]

 

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Footnotes

[1] Joel Peterson on Organizational Culture

[2] Intent vs. Impact (When Communication Goes Awry)

[3] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

[4] Giving Feedback That Sticks [PDF]

[5] Building a Feedback-Rich Culture

[6] Better Working Relationships

[7] Power Struggles Among Nice People

[8] Leader as Avatar

 

For Further Reading

Startup Leadership: A Greater Us

Startup Leadership: Are We Rowing or Rafting?

Startup Leadership: Are We Video-Gaming or Ditch-Digging?

Startup Leadership (A compilation of posts on themes I see regularly in my practice.)

 

Updated November 2022.

Photo by Heisenberg Media.

Building a Feedback-Rich Culture

As an executive coach and an experiential educator, I’m a passionate believer in the value of interpersonal feedback. To become more effective and fulfilled at work, people need a keen understanding of their impact on others and the extent to which they’re achieving their goals in their working relationships. Direct feedback is the most efficient way for them to gather this information and learn from it.

But the form that most interpersonal feedback takes--a conversation between two people--can trick us into seeing it as a product of the relationship when it’s equally (if not more so) a product of the surrounding culture. Even people who aren’t interested in or skilled at giving or receiving feedback will participate in the process (and improve) when they’re working in a feedback-rich environment. And the most ardent and capable feedback champions will give up if the organizational or team culture doesn’t support their efforts.

So as leaders, how do we build a feedback-rich culture? What does it take to cultivate an ongoing commitment to interpersonal feedback? Here are four essential elements:

1. Safety and Trust

To give and receive truly candid feedback, people must feel a sense of safety and trust. [1] Neurologist and educator Judy Willis emphasizes the relationship between positive emotion and performance, and as leaders we need to foster it to ensure that colleagues learn from feedback. [2] Note that this does not mean avoiding confrontation or offering only support and comfort. It does mean being highly attuned to people’s readiness for a challenge and their emotional state in a given interaction.

To create safety and trust:

• Get to know each other. Make an effort to understand colleagues as individuals. This doesn’t require a great deal of time or deep, personal disclosures — just taking a moment to ask about someone’s weekend and occasionally sharing stories of your own.
• Talk about emotions. The ability to discuss emotions is a critical feature in any group that aspires to share effective feedback, not only because feelings are at the heart of most difficult feedback, but also because feedback inevitably generates difficult feelings. When we can talk about our embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, and even anger, the culture is sufficiently safe — and robust — to handle real feedback.
• Make it OK to say no. A risk in feedback-rich cultures is that people feel obligated to say “Of course,” when asked, “Can I give you some feedback?” The freedom to postpone such conversations when we’re not ready to have them ensures that when they do take place all participants are willing parties.

2. Balance

We often think that good feedback is honest criticism, but that’s just half the story. The other half is truly meaningful positive feedback, which is all too often absent in organizations. You can’t have one without the other, but so many obstacles prevent us from offering and accepting positive feedback. We worry it will sound insincere. We worry it is insincere. We worry it will make us look like suck-ups. We worry it will make us seem weak. And since we don’t do it very often, we’re not very good at it. But recent research at Ghent University in Belgium indicates that positive feedback promotes self-development. [3] Further, as University of Washington psychologist John Gottman has noted in his study of long-term relationships, in the most successful ones the ratio of positive to negative interactions is 5:1 even in the midst of a conflict. [4] Strong relationships depend on heartfelt positive feedback--so we need to practice.

To establish balance:

• Offer some positive feedback…and stop there. Too often we use positive feedback to cushion the blow before delivering criticism, but that practice inevitably degrades the value of our praise and renders it hollow.
• Start small. We miss opportunities to provide positive feedback every day because we have this idea that only big wins merit discussion. When we see any behavior we want to encourage, we should acknowledge it and express some appreciation.
• Praise effort, not ability. Research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that praising persistent efforts, even in failed attempts, helps build resilience and determination, while praising talent and ability results in risk-aversion and heightened sensitivity to setbacks. [5]

3. Normalcy

Trainings and workshops can create space for people to be open to new ideas and experiment with new ways of communicating, but the next day everyone goes back to the real world. You have to integrate the behaviors you want into your team’s daily routines in order to normalize those behaviors within the organization’s culture. If feedback is something that happens only at unusual times (such as a performance review or when something’s gone wrong), it’ll never really be an organic part of the organizational culture. It has to show up in everyday life--on a walk down the hallway, at the end of a meeting, over a cup of coffee. Make feedback normal--not a performance review.

To make feedback normal:

• Don’t wait for a special occasion. A mentor of mine, Vince Stehle, once told me, "Don’t build a castle; put up a thousand tents," and that certainly applies to feedback. [6] Don’t turn it into a complex, cumbersome process; just take a few minutes (or even a moment) and make it happen.
• Work in public. Certain conversations are best held one-on-one, but too often we treat all feedback as a potentially embarrassing or even shameful process to be conducted under cover of darkness. When sufficient safety and balance exist, even critical feedback can be provided in larger groups. This not only allows everyone present to learn from the issues under discussion but also allows people to see how to give and receive feedback more effectively.

4. Personal Accountability

As leaders who want to promote a feedback-rich culture, we have to walk the talk every day. Research by Harvard Business School’s Lynn Paine and colleagues makes clear that employees are more sensitive than leaders to gaps between companies’ espoused values and actual practices. [7] Our teams will take their cues from us as to what’s acceptable, and if we don’t take some risks in this area, they won’t either. Why should they? This doesn’t mean we’re going to get it right all the time. If we’re taking some meaningful risks, then of course we’ll make some mistakes. The key is to fail forward and view those mistakes as essential learning opportunities. Let those around us know that we’re trying to get better at giving and receiving feedback, too, and ask for their input on how we’re doing.

To walk the talk:

• Be transparent. Everyone around us--colleagues, superiors, direct reports--should know that improving at giving and receiving feedback is an ongoing goal of ours.
• Ask. We can’t just sit back and wait for feedback to be offered, particularly when we’re in a leadership role. If we want feedback to take root in the culture, we need to explicitly ask for it.

 

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Footnotes

[1] See Safety, Trust, Intimacy and How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger).

[2] The Neuroscience of Joyful Education (Judy Willis, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007)

[3] Improving Feedback Reports: The Role of Procedural Information and Information Specificity (Marjolein Feys, Frederik Anseel and Bart Wille, Academy of Management, 2011)

[4] The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (John Gottman and Nan Silver, 1999)

[5] The Right Mindset for Success (Sarah Green interviewing Carol Dweck, Harvard Business Review, 2012)

[6] Don't Build a Castle; Put Up 1,000 Tents

[7] A Global Leader’s Guide to Managing Business Conduct (Lynn S. Paine, Rohit Deshpandé, and Joshua D. Margolis, Harvard Business Review, 2011)

Originally published by Harvard Business Review.

Many thanks to Lisa Burrell.

Photo courtesy of HBR.

Startup Communication at Flixster

Today I facilitated a workshop on Startup Communication at Flixster in San Francisco aimed at helping co-founders 1) communicate more effectively with each other, 2) establish group norms in the company that support better communication and 3) model better communication with their employees.

Twenty-two co-founders from 11 ventures participated, and although I always enjoy working on this topic with this audience, there was something special about today's group. They were eager to dive in, push themselves and take some risks, and there's nothing more gratifying for a facilitator.

The event was organized by Alicia Morga and Joe Greenstein who care deeply about this topic (and who personally walk the talk.) Thanks to everyone who was able to be there--I really enjoyed it.

Doing Less, Leading More

Our first accomplishments as professionals are usually rooted in our skill as individual contributors. In most fields we add value in the early stages of our careers by getting things done. We’re fast, we’re efficient, and we do high-quality work. In a word, we’re doers. But when we carry this mindset into our first leadership roles, we confuse doing with leading. We believe that by working longer, harder, and smarter than our team, we’ll inspire by example.  Sometimes this has the desired effect–as Daniel Goleman wrote in his HBR article “Leadership that Gets Results,” this “pacesetting” leadership style “works well when all employees are self-motivated, highly competent, and need little direction or coordination.” But the pacesetting style can also carry a high cost – Goleman notes that it “destroys climate [and] many employees feel overwhelmed by the pacesetter’s demands.”

Instead of simply doing more, sustaining our success as leaders requires us to redefine how we add value. Continuing to rely on our abilities as individual contributors greatly limits what we actually contribute and puts us at a disadvantage to peers who are better able to mobilize and motivate others. In other words we need to do less and lead more. Sometimes this transition is obvious and dramatic, such as when we’re promoted and obtain our first direct reports or hire our first employees. Suddenly we need to expand our behavioral repertoire to incorporate new leadership styles as a means of influencing others effectively. (“Leadership That Gets Results” provides a useful roadmap here, highlighting the styles that have the greatest positive impact or are used less frequently by managers.)

Subsequent transitions may be more subtle and nuanced, such as when we go from leading front-line staff to leading managers, who themselves must navigate this same transition. A coaching client realized that he was running his company as though he were the “Doer-in-Chief,” and this model of leadership had permeated throughout the organization and was holding everyone back. He revamped his role, delegating almost all of the tasks on his to-do list to his senior managers and had them do the same to their direct reports. Rather than simply creating more work for junior employees, this emphasis on leading rather than doing resulted in greater efficiencies throughout the company. In my client’s words, “We went from being firefighters to being fire marshals,” taking a more strategic approach to the business, redesigning inefficient systems, and solving problems before they became crises.

This emphasis on leading and not merely doing has had a profound impact on management education. In 2010 Dean Garth Saloner of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (where I’m a Lecturer) told McKinsey that, “The harder skills of finance and supply chain management and accounting…have become what you think of as a hygiene factor: everybody ought to know this… But the softer skill sets, the real leadership, the ability to work with others and through others, to execute, that is still in very scarce supply.” We expect our students to have solid technical and analytical skills—to be effective doers. But we also expect that within a few years of graduation our students will be managing people who are even more technically and analytically capable than they are—and this requires them to be effective leaders.

Many of my executive coaching clients and MBA students at Stanford are going through a transition that involves a step up to the next level in some way. They’re on the cusp of a big promotion, or they’ve launched a startup, or their company just hit some major milestone. Very few, if any, of these people would say that they’ve "made it"; they’re still overcoming challenges in pursuit of ambitious goals. And yet their current success has created a meaningful inflection point in their careers; things are going to be different from now on. The nature of this difference varies greatly from one person to another, but I see a set of common themes that I think of as "the problems of success," and this is the third post in a series on that topic. Here's the first: Learning to Say "No" Is Part of Success. And here's the second: Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance.

This post originally appeared at HBR.org.

Photo courtesy of HBR.

All Souls and Brotherly Pride

A few days ago, my brother David opened All Souls, a bar at 725 T Street NW in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington DC. Here's how he describes it on their Facebook page:

A corner bar where all are welcome and there's a little something for everyone.

All Souls seeks to be a neighborhood bar. We’re not a sports bar, a gastropub, a wine bar, a speakeasy or a restaurant. We will be none of these things, yet we will have something for everyone. You will be able to find the craft beers of a gastropub and the interesting labels of a wine bar. If you prefer a cocktail it will be crafted with care and attention to detail. The food will be simple, but elevated, not your typical bar food. And you’ll be able to enjoy all of it while listening to good, eclectic music or watching the game quietly playing in the background.

David's a longtime DC bartender and bar manager, including a number of years at Jaleo and Zaytinya, and running a place like All Souls has been his dream forever. Opening a new bar in DC takes a tremendous amount of work and patience, and David's poured his heart and soul into it.

Tonight David Garber, Commissioner of DC's Navy Yard neighborhood in Ward 6 was walking down T Street...

Walked past @allsoulsbar & @RightProperBeer on way to metro in Shaw -- both opened this week, both filled up. Congrats! Look fwd to visits.

— David Garber (@GarberDC) December 11, 2013

And we had the following exchange...

@GarberDC Awesome! Glad to hear it & hope you get there soon. My brother David owns @allsoulsbar. cc @RightProperBeer

— Ed Batista (@edbatista) December 11, 2013

@edbatista @allsoulsbar very cool -- as a brother myself I appreciate the proud brother seal of approval :)

— David Garber (@GarberDC) December 11, 2013

@GarberDC It'll be a very proud moment indeed when I get back to DC & pull up a barstool @allsoulsbar :-)

— Ed Batista (@edbatista) December 11, 2013

I'm really glad Garber shared that, because it reminds me how truly proud my brother Matthew and I are of David. Many, many people have made All Souls possible--most notably my talented sister-in-law Soung Wiser, whose awesome design firm did the logo you see in the window above (along with many other contributions.) And yet I do take a unique sense of brotherly pride in all of David and Matt's accomplishments, and it'll be a particularly special moment when the three of us get to pull up stools at All Souls and have a drink together. I hope you get a chance to stop by.

Rubbernecking (Stop Wasting Attention)

Turn your critical lens toward things you think matter, that you want to discuss [and] share. Let practice win out over rubbernecking.

~Tyler Green [1]

"Rubbernecking" is a great way to describe how we let things that don't matter distract us from things that do.

Rubbernecking happens when we notice other people paying attention to something (real or virtual) and automatically assume that it's worthy of our attention as well.

Rubbernecking happens when we suspect something's probably meaningless, but a faint, persistent anxiety keeps us fixated on it.

Rubbernecking happens when we know something's completely meaningless, but a fascination with the spectacle prevents us from turning away.

Why does this matter? Because of the importance of our focused attention. As I've written before, focused attention is our most precious resource because it's extremely taxing on our intellectual and emotional capabilities; it can have a amazingly powerful effect on its object; and it can't be subdivided. [2] (We can pay continuous partial attention to multiple objects, but we can truly focus on only one object at any given moment. [3])

And every instance of rubbernecking represents wasted attention--a valuable, finite resource dedicated to something meaningless and unrewarding. Note that I'm not suggesting that we never take breaks, daydream or even just goof off. But breaks, daydreams and goofing off are all essential forms of play that allow us to recharge and refresh ourselves. Rubbernecking is a waste, a state of useless vigilance that holds us in its grip until we're finally convinced that there's nothing to see here. And given that our focused attention is so taxing, powerful and limited, we waste it at our peril.

So what can we do?

Resist the Pull of Social Proof

Social psychologists call the phenomenon of being influenced by what others are paying attention to "social proof," and it's a compelling force. But social proof is a poor predictor of what's truly worthy of our attention; as Stanford professor Huggy Rao and his colleagues have written, "Reliance on heuristics such as social proof can often lead to overvaluation of the choice and regret about the decision." [4] When we find ourselves drawn in on the basis of others' attention, we're probably rubbernecking.

Consider Our "Return On Attention"

We talk endlessly about ROI, but what's the ROA in any given experience? What are we getting in exchange for this precious resource? Even when we're goofing off, we should be able to clearly identify the terms of the exchange--but if our answer to the question is, "Not much," or, worse, "I don't know," that's a sign that we're rubbernecking and should move along. [5]

Improved Emotion Regulation

Emotions are central to our reasoning and decision-making processes, and our ability to focus our attention on what matters is directly related to our ability to be aware of and regulate our emotions. [6] Note that regulation does not mean suppression; the better we can sense and understand our emotions, the more effectively we can articulate and express them. [7] But when we're not in touch with our emotions, when our anxieties and frustrations are operating just beyond our conscious awareness, we're more likely to soothe ourselves by rubbernecking. [8]

 

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Footnotes

[1] @TylerGreenBooks, November 12, 2013

[2] Spending Attention

[3] Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone, 2009)

[4] Fool's Gold: Social Proof in the Initiation and Abandonment of Coverage by Wall Street Analysts (Hayagreeva Rao, Henrich Grieve, and Gerald Davis, Administrative Science Quarterly, 2001)

[5] Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

[6] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[7] The Tyranny of Feelings

[8] The Marshmallow Test for Grownups

For Further Reading

Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)

Spending Attention

Updated March 2021.

Photo by Ted Kerwin.

Teach Concepts, Not Features

Technical educator and usability expert Jakob Nielsen makes a compelling distinction between teaching concepts and teaching features:

There is some value in teaching kids skills they can apply immediately, while they're still in school, but there's more value in teaching them deeper concepts that will benefit them forever, regardless of changes in specific applications. Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they're unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them--and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It's the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education. [1, emphasis original]

I was reminded of this yesterday as my MBA students at Stanford submitted their final papers for the Leadership Labs, a course in our core curriculum that I helped launch just a few months after Nielsen published his article. [2]

Nielsen's distinction transcends computer skills, of course, and I'd argue that it applies to learners in all settings, not just school. In general terms a feature is any subroutine that allows us to accomplish a task, from drawing a pie chart to leading a meeting. The technical task is much simpler than the interpersonal one, because people are more complex than software, but there's still a parallel: To accomplish a given task, we follow a set of steps that are likely to lead to success.

In contrast, a concept is a heuristic, not an algorithm. It's a more abstract--and more broadly applicable--set of ideas. The conceptual computer skills Nielsen discusses in his original article include search strategies, information credibility and user testing. Concepts don't tell us how to accomplish specific tasks. They help us predict outcomes, identify patterns, and understand why things are the way they are, but they don't lead step-by-step from Point A to Point B to success.

All forms of experiential learning work best when teachers and learners have a common understanding about the difference between concepts and features. The students who get the most out of the courses I teach are those who can generalize from specific artifacts (such as role-plays, exercises, a group project) and begin to explore how the underlying concepts embedded in the experience might apply to other contexts, other teams, other tasks. When we're unable to help students see that we're trying to teach concepts, they understandably think we're trying (and failing) to teach features.

Complicating matters further is the fact that interpersonal issues and group dynamics are so unpredictable that even the most fundamental concepts can never be relied upon all of the time. We work overtime to derive neat, orderly concepts from our messy, disorderly experiences, but that's not quite possible, as William James knew all too well. [3] And by definition experiential learning about groups and relationships occurs as the result of highly individualized (even unique) interactions between specific people.

But it's because human behavior can't be reduced to a set of algorithms that efforts to improve our understanding of relationships and group dynamics need to focus on teaching concepts, not features. Just as an understanding of technical concepts allows us to interact effectively with data while we learn the features of new software, an understanding of interpersonal concepts allows us to interact effectively with others as we learn the features of new organizations, new teams, new relationships.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Lifelong Computer Skills (Jakob Nielsen, 2007)

[2] Teaching Leadership with Stanford's Leadership Fellows

[3] William James on Experiential Learning

Updated October 2022.

Photo courtesy of Nielsen Norman Group.

Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

Success is typically a function of our passion for work and accomplishment. My clients and students are generally "happy workaholics" who love what they do and often wish there were more hours in the day to get things done. (I view myself this way as well.) The concept of life/work balance isn't that helpful for us, because there's always more work to do, we're eager to do it, and we wouldn't have it any other way. In some cases, particularly in junior roles early in our careers, this tendency can be exploited by a dysfunctional culture or an uncaring manager, and at those times we need to protect ourselves to avoid burnout. But as we advance professionally we're less subject to those external forces, and we need to protect ourselves primarily from our own internal drive.

Here's one way to think about protecting yourself. Years ago my colleague Michael Gilbert suggested that we substitute "boundaries" for "balance": while balance requires an unsteady equilibrium among the various demands on our time and energy, boundaries offer a sustainable means of keeping things in their proper place. Gilbert drew upon his training as a biologist in his definition of healthy boundaries:

Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy. [1]

What does this look like in practice? What types of boundaries do we need?

Temporal boundaries designate certain times exclusively for family, friends, exercise, and other non-work pursuits. Note that I'm talking not about balance but about boundaries. The amount of undisturbed time we preserve for certain activities will vary and may be quite small, but what matters is that we create and maintain a functional boundary around that time.

Physical boundaries ensure that we get out of our workplaces (whether we're working in an office, at home or elsewhere) at regular intervals and put some actual distance between us and our work. This includes not only the space itself but also all our professional tools and artifacts: laptops, tablets, phones, papers, everything. Again, the question is not about balancing the two worlds, but establishing boundaries to create the necessary separation.

Cognitive boundaries help us resist the temptation to think about work and focus our attention on the people or activity at hand. This is by no means an easy task, particularly given that so much in our working environment is designed to capture our attention: alerts, reminders, blinking lights and flashing icons. Recognizing when our attention is being held hostage by work and turning it elsewhere requires persistent, dedicated effort, but it yields substantial rewards, in part because our focused attention is one of our greatest resources. [2] And one reason I often recommend meditation is an improved ability to control where we direct our attention. [3]

This subtle shift--eschewing balance and establishing boundaries--isn't easy, but it's an essential step if we are to protect ourselves from ourselves and remain happy workaholics.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Good Fences: On Boundaries, Agency and Wholeness in Work Life (Michael Gilbert, 2008)

[2] What Are You Paying Attention To?

[3] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

For Further Reading

Importance vs. Urgency

Learning to Say "No" Is Part of Success

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore

Originally published at Harvard Business Review.

Updated March 2022.

Photo by Frederic Rivollier.