You're like a dull knife, just ain't cutting.
You're just talking loud, and saying nothing.
~James Brown [1]
Developer and entrepreneur Paul Graham recently posted an essay entitled "Fierce Nerds":
The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a rule extremely competitive — more competitive, I'd say, than highly competitive non-nerds... Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young... Another quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence. Not all nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at least moderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the confidence to be fierce. [2]
Most of my clients are founder/CEOs with a technical background. I don't know that they would identify as "fierce nerds," but they're certainly very competitive, confident, and intelligent, so I'm familiar with the type and experienced in working with them. Having described this type, Graham then offers readers who do identify as fierce nerds some advice:
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems... The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully... How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects...
Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea. But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself. [3, my emphasis]
While coaching isn't therapy [4], there are certainly parallels, and many of Graham's readers might include coaching in the "something like that" category. I can't speak for therapists, but the purpose of coaching isn't to blunt the sharp knife, but to learn to how to use it. Whether my clients identify as "fierce nerds" or not, we're often working on the impact of their fierceness, and our goal is never to "turn it off," but to ensure that it's deployed with intention to desired effect. What does this look like in practice?
Cultivate the Capacity for Emotion Regulation
Emotions matter, in countless ways. They alert us to potential opportunities and threats. They're essential inputs into the process of logical reasoning. They allow us to rapidly process vast amounts of data from multiple sources in parallel, without having to rely on the vastly slower process of conscious deliberation. And they enrich the human experience immeasurably: What would it be like to live without joy--or without grief?...
[But] a simplistic interpretation of the idea that "emotions matter" is "My feelings are justified, because they are my feelings. My feelings at this moment take precedence over all other considerations. I have the right to express my feelings any way I see fit. And if I believe that you are causing my feelings, you are obligated to modify your behavior in order to align with my desired emotional state." [5]
Understand the Difference Between Force and Power
I'm not saying that forceful, expressive behavior is always unhelpful. As I've noted before, some research suggests that people with angry facial expressions are perceived as "threatening, competent, powerful, and dominant," and another study indicates that angry people may perform better in confrontational tasks. But this research applies specifically to overtly and explicitly hostile situations--in other words, anger is useful when we're in a fight.
And in my experience very, very few scenarios in organizational life can truly be classified as "fights." Plenty of professional confrontations feel like fights--but they're not really fights. Far more common are what I call "power struggles among nice people," and executives who show up in such contests acting like they're in a fight almost always lose. They misread the situation and make a host of tactical errors because force isn't power--and when we confuse the two we can actually give away power and put ourselves at a disadvantage. [6]
Wield Authority Gracefully
We can view an employee with "authority issues" not as an angry person, but an anxious one. They're unsure of their own ability to create order and safety, and uncomfortable with the power required to do so. They're in awe of the leader who can create order and safety by wielding power effectively, desperate to do so on their own, and fearful that they will fail. They are profoundly stuck, and when they cannot exert agency by moving forward, they will do so by remaining firmly in place...
An empathetic response to resentment and resistance entails viewing such behavior as an attempt by the employee, however misguided, to achieve a more comfortable relationship with power--not only that of the leader, but also their own. This doesn't mean that the leader is precluded from providing critical feedback, but this will always be more effective when delivered from an empathetic stance (which includes asking, "In what ways am I part of the problem?") [7]
A book that helped inspire my decision to launch my coaching practice in 2006 was Susan Scott's Fierce Conversations, and she characterizes such interactions as follows:
Focus on results. Deep-seated accountability.
Naming and addressing the issues truthfully and effectively.
The timely resolution of periodic leadership challenges.
Effectively confronting attitudinal, performance or behavioral issues. [8]
A dull instrument won't achieve these outcomes. A substantial degree of fierceness is necessary to even be willing to have such a conversation. But a sharp knife in untrained hands is a clumsy weapon, as dangerous to the person holding it as it is to someone on the receiving end. In the hands of someone who's been willing to do the work, however, such a blade becomes a scalpel, whose sharpness makes it all the more effective.
Graham seems to be suggesting that the fierce can either A) blunt themselves to avoid harm or B) act without forethought or inhibition and view any consequences as the cost of being fierce. If that's an accurate characterization of his position, this strikes me as a false dichotomy. I'm firmly committed to the idea that we can remain passionately fierce and reap all the benefits articulated by Scott above while also taking care to avoid unnecessary harm to ourselves and to others.
Footnotes
[1] Talking Loud and Saying Nothing (James Brown, 1972)
[2] Fierce Nerds (Paul Graham, 2021)
- To be clear, I've also found Graham's work quite moving.
[3] Ibid.
[7] Authority and Control in Organizational Life
[8] Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time, pages xx-xxi (Susan Scott, 1999 edition, revised 2004)
Photo by Chef Matt Rock.
