Ed Batista

A Reading List for New Executives

While most of my clients are senior leaders in roles they expect to hold for the foreseeable future, over the years I've also worked with many people through the process of navigating a professional transition. And most of my clients who aren't in transition themselves hire new executives regularly, so as a result much of my writing involves helping people get off to a good start. Here's a compilation of posts I often share with executives as they begin a new role:

 

1. A Checklist for Someone About to Take On a Tougher Job

A New Culture: New opportunities often require us to step into a new organizational culture where the formal signs and artifacts look the same, but their informal meanings and interpretations are quite different.

Stretching: Just as we can miss the subtleties of a new organizational culture and fail to adapt, we can mistakenly assume that we’re being asked to do more of what led us to succeed in the past and miss opportunities to stretch.

Onboarding: Typically the more senior the role, the less structured the onboarding process. The key is to think like an organization and take responsibility for our own onboarding.

Self-Care: At more senior levels optimum performance is about being in the best possible mental, emotional and physical condition to maximize our focused attention and to support effective decision-making and interpersonal interactions.

Professional Development: Finally, stepping up means taking ownership of our long-term development as professionals. The higher we rise, the less we can depend on someone more senior to guide us.

 

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2. Conform to the Culture Just Enough

You're in a new leadership role, you see some room for improvement, and you want to make some changes. Unless it's a turnaround in which the intent is to radically transform a dysfunctional culture, your success will hinge on your ability to conform just enough. If you conform too much, you'll miss opportunities to influence positive change and make a difference. And if you don't conform enough, your efforts will be ignored or rebuffed, and eventually you'll burn out or be rejected.

 

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3. First Impressions

The critical thing to notice early on in a relationship is the extent of the vacuum that surrounds us, reflecting how little we know about each other. What are your intentions? What are your capabilities? Are you trustworthy? Will you have my back? Who ARE you?

 

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4. Role Clarity and Role Confusion

A theme in my practice is the vital importance of a sufficient degree of role clarity--a shared understanding among colleagues that allows them to answer a set of questions that are rarely made explicit and yet are ever-present in organizational life:

• Who are we to each other?
• What are our relative positions in this environment?
• In what ways are our roles similar? In what ways do they differ?
• And how might any of this change over time, or in certain settings?

 

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5. Capacity, Methodology, Innovation (On Hiring)

The leader who seeks to hire an innovator must be prepared to face resistance throughout the organization and to help the innovator navigate around it--or overcome it. This gets much harder when the innovator begins to challenge some of the leader's own preferences and prerogatives--as they inevitably will.

 

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6. Necessary Friction (CEOs and Product Leaders)

(Although aimed at Product leaders, the ideas discussed here pertain to other functions as well.) Determining the right level of involvement by your CEO will benefit both you and them, and one way to gauge this is by striving for the right amount of friction.

 

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7. Better Working Relationships

A set of steps you can take to begin to address a working relationship that's faltering or didn't get off to a good start.

 

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8. Better Conditions for Working Remotely

Given that many of us will continue to work remotely at least part-time, it's worthwhile to consider how investments in better working conditions might pay off in the long run.

 

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9. Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care

A theme that emerges consistently in my practice is the importance of open space, deep work, and self-care. What do I mean by these terms, and what’s their significance for effective leadership?

 

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Photo by Ashley Coates.

Pain Is Mandatory. Suffering Is Optional.

At last you cry out in anguish: "Why me?" God answers: "Why not?"

You can so stand it.

After all, it's only pain.

What makes it seem unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.

~Sheldon Kopp, 1979 [1]

Legal cases often involve damages for "pain and suffering" to compensate people for the wrongs they've been subjected to. But I think it's useful to distinguish between the two terms and regard them as different aspects of the human experience. In this context, pain is mandatory. It isn't just on the menu--it comes with every order, and we can't send it back. But suffering is optional. It's something we choose, although often without realizing it.

Pain is mandatory for a number of reasons. First, it's needed to keep us safe. We identify sources of physical and psychological pain very early in life, and (usually) we learn to avoid them. There are people with genetic mutations who don't feel pain, and such a condition might sound enviable until we learn that these people constantly break bones and burn themselves without even realizing it. [2] An inability to feel pain is incredibly dangerous, and we can readily grasp why the capacity for pain conferred an evolutionary advantage on our distant ancestors.

Pain results from our nature as organic beings who are prone to physical frailty. We tend to forget this aspect of life until it becomes impossible to ignore it. If we're fortunate, our experience with painful injuries and health issues are delayed, but a hidden cost of that good fortune is the mistaken belief that we've somehow been spared this fate. (My friend and colleague Joe Dunn has observed that in our 40s we slowly become "old young people," and in our 50s we're suddenly "young old people," and that's a perfect description of my last decade.)

Pain is a by-product of the inadequacy we feel when we compare ourselves to others. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman has suggested that whenever we're not preoccupied with a specific task, our brains rely upon a "default network" whose focus is "social cognition [which entails] thinking about other people, oneself, and the relationship of oneself to other people." [3] As a result, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has noted that "it's impossible not to compare ourselves with others... Social comparisons arise naturally, automatically, and effortlessly." [4]

And pain springs from the fact that we're finite creatures with infinite psychological appetites. Anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker observed that "the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic," and our symbolic selves are essentially bottomless pits of need. [5] Our craving for attention, our acquisitive impulses, even our sexual drive are all manifestations of a futile but determined effort to transcend mortality, and are thus reliable sources of pain when we inevitably fall short of our yearnings and aspirations. [6]

In contrast, suffering is a consequence of how we view our pain. Suffering can magnify pain, making it worse and more intense. And suffering can extend pain, transforming it from an aspect of life that comes and goes into a continuous state, or even a way of being. But we can be deliberate and intentional in deciding how to view our pain, and in that sense suffering is optional.

We choose to suffer when we fail to learn from experience and identify sources of pain that might be avoided in the future. This can be a particular challenge for extreme optimists, who may seek to suppress negative emotions associated with setbacks. [7] But at various times we're all subject to a tendency to discount or ignore these feelings, and yet in so doing we condemn ourselves to repeat the same mistakes. Instead, we can accept and learn from our failures.

We choose to suffer when we strive for permanence in a fleeting and transient existence. There's an apt line of scripture inscribed upon the Buland Darwaza, an immense gateway near Agra, India, built in 1575 by the Mughal emperor Akbar: "The world is a bridge. Cross it, but build no house upon it. The world endures for but an hour. Spend it in devotion. The rest is unseen." [8] Whatever our spiritual beliefs, we can acknowledge that our efforts in this existence are impermanent, and rather than resist the inescapable, we can embrace mortality.

We choose to suffer when we cling to control and refuse to accept limits on our agency. We can take substantial steps to influence many aspects of experience, including our subjective sense of well-being, but those efforts will not protect us from pain. [9] As the Buddhist author Pema Chödrön has noted, "Sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head." [10] Rather than fruitlessly insisting on total control, we can seek out pockets of agency.

And we choose to suffer when we imagine that we should be free from pain. It's understandable that we might wish to eliminate the sources of pain noted above, but we should also consider the gifts that accompany the pain they bequeath us. Physical pain teaches us to stay safe and free from harm. The pain of mortality is what makes this existence meaningful. The pain of falling short in our comparison with others and in our own self-assessment keeps us moving forward, a state that is undoubtedly a "feature" for the species, even if we as individuals experience it as a "bug." The idea that we might enjoy these gifts painlessly is a form of magical thinking.

I'm not suggesting that we should cease efforts to alleviate pain, our own or that of others. But as psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp was keenly aware, our "mistaken belief that it can be cured" is what makes pain unbearable.

 

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Footnotes

[1] What Took You So Long? (Sheldon Kopp and Claire Flanders, 1979)

• On page 60 of Joan Tollifson's 2019 memoir, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, she attributes a similar line to her teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, but fails to provide a source. This seems worth noting (if only to recommend Tollifson's deeply moving and very funny book), but I'll continue to credit Kopp, as the line is certainly consistent with his overall philosophy.

[2] A family in Italy doesn't feel pain because of a gene mutation. (Jessica Hamzelou, NewScientist, 2017)

[3] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, page 18 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

[4] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[5] The Denial of Death, page 26 (Ernest Becker, 1974)

[6] Sex, Fame, Money and Death

[7] The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[8] For more on the Buland Darwaza, see the British Library's Online Gallery and this Guardian review of Tarif Khalidi's The Muslim Jesus by William Dalyremple (2001). The latter two sources use the same translation found on Wikipedia, but I prefer the slightly different version quoted by historian Michael Woods in Episode 2 of his epic series Legacy: The Origins of Civilization (2002).

[9] Attitude and Behavior

[10] When Things Fall Apart, page 70 (Pema Chödrön, 1997)

 

For Further Reading

The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

Pockets of Agency

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

 

Photo by Matthew Rutledge.

Relating to Our Inner Critics

A theme in my practice is helping a client renegotiate their relationship with their inner critic, and I've developed a set of principles that guide our work together on this topic:

• Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.
• And until now they've served us well.
• But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.
• So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.
• But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.
• The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

What do I mean by all this? And how can we put these ideas into practice?

Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.

We often apply disapproving labels to our inner critic such as "gremlin" or "saboteur." There can certainly be value to this approach, not only because it allows us to establish a sense of distance from this aspect of ourselves and view it more objectively, but also because it helps us envision and personify our inner critic, which is helpful in engaging it in a dialogue. But a problem with these labels is that they presume an antagonistic relationship, and in my experience the opposite is far more common: Our inner critic desperately wants us to succeed. It may be hopelessly misguided or tragically inept, but rather than deliberately seeking to undermine us, it has our best interests at heart. By assuming good intentions, we can engage our inner critic far more productively.

And until now they've served us well.

The paradox is that until our inner critic became an obstacle to be overcome, it served a useful purpose in our lives. It motivated us to raise our aspirations and do better work. It encouraged us to shake off complacency and try harder. It protected us from embarrassing oversights and fateful missteps. This was often unpleasant, of course--inner critics aren't known for their subtlety or tact. They probably used harsh language or employed crude tactics, such as reminding us of the cost of failure and stoking our fears and anxieties. But in the initial stages of our life and career when our inner critic first emerged, this may have been the only way we knew how to motivate ourselves.

But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.

And yet we're no longer at the outset of our life and career, nor are we the same person we once were. The irony is that our inner critic may have played a significant role in this evolution. By motivating, encouraging and protecting us in an earlier era, our inner critic enabled us to tackle new challenges and alter our circumstances, and in the process we became a different person. We're more capable and thus more confident. We feel a greater sense of agency and control. We're less fearful and anxious. Our inner critic may even go silent for while--until, suddenly, they come roaring back to life. If we've grown used to their absence, this can be profoundly confusing and alienating: Who is this critical voice in my head, and why are they so negative?

So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.

This is the root of the problem: Inner critics aren't particularly flexible or responsive to change. They emerged in response to a particular set of challenges at a particular time in our life, and they developed their motivational repertoire in that context. But even as they enabled our own evolution, their limited perspective has prevented them from evolving in turn. This is entirely predictable--our inner critic is, of course, an aspect of our own personality that we differentiated from our conscious self at a time of need to serve a specific purpose. Having done so, we relied upon our inner critic to play their part in the pursuit of our own growth and development. We valued the results they helped to bring about, but we didn't like how they made us feel, and so we kept our distance whenever possible, leading them to stagnate.

But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.

The dilemma that although our inner critic works for us, they have lifetime employment. Any attempts to fire them will be futile and counter-productive. This is a function of our inner critic's lack of sophistication, noted above. They can't grasp that we've evolved to the point where their guidance is no longer needed, and thus they interpret efforts to dislodge them as signs that we're about to make a grave mistake. Red alert! they shriek in protest. The more we try to ignore them, the more agitated they become. This is usually the point at which a client raises the issue with me.

The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

The starting point in this process is exploring the points above. They're not all equally valid for everyone, of course--we're dealing in metaphors and archetypes here. But I've found most of them resonate with people in one way or another, which normalizes their struggle and allows them to relax. And once we've acknowledged that our inner critic has our best interests at heart and has served us well, but their approach is increasingly out-of-date and unhelpful, we can stop fighting our inner critic and begin collaborating with them. Rather than demonize our inner critic for its shortcomings, we can adopt a more compassionate stance toward them--which, of course, means being more compassionate toward ourselves. Our inner critic is doing the best it can--as are we.

Most inner critics emerge as authority figures--when personifying our inner critic, many of us see or hear a parent, a teacher, an athletic coach, an early manager. So it's understandable that in a previous era our inner critic took charge, and we deferred to them. They claimed the seat at the head of the table, and we assumed that they deserved it. But today that arrangement no longer meets our needs. Rather than try to exclude them altogether, we can invite them to take their rightful place. Rather than feel hectored and oppressed by them, we can appreciate their efforts on our behalf. Rather than seek to ignore them, we can engage them on our own terms. Someday we may even be able to thank them for their service and convince them to take some well-deserved time off.

 

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For Further Reading

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

Why Change Is Hard

The Obstacle Is The Way

Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

 

Photo by Craig Oppenheimer.

Confusing Motion with Progress

Confusing motion with progress is an all-too-common mistake, and I see countless versions of it in my practice (and in my own life):

• The busy person who craves more free time but feels anxious when they see open space on their calendar. [1]
• The mid-career professional consumed by the sense that they're behind and need to catch up. [2]
• The leader of a growing organization who continues to think that they add value by doing more. [3]
• The leader whose business is succeeding but who nevertheless breaks things in order to "fix" them. [4]
• The former leader who's sold their company or hired their successor and is now struggling to find a sense of purpose. [5]

The challenge is that in the early stages of our career there's often very little difference between motion and progress. Our managers and the organization at large set our strategic priorities and provide some amount of tactical guidance. There's always a lot to be done, and the relative importance of various tasks may not differ all that much, so we need to dive in and keep going. And we have ample room to grow and improve in almost every area, but we may know relatively little about where our greatest strengths lie. Under these circumstances motion is progress, and so we never learn to tell the difference.

But at later stages of our career--and particularly when we're in a leadership role--things often look dramatically different. It's now our job to set strategic priorities, and we may have very little help. There's even more to be done, and even more people are competing for our time and attention, but now there's a massive gap between tasks that are truly important and those that are merely urgent. [6] And we still have room to grow and improve, but at this point, as Peter Drucker has noted, "It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence." [7]

So what can we do? There's no ready-made solution, but there are a few steps we can take in the right direction:

• Slow down. When motion = progress, slowing down feels like an unaffordable luxury. We have work to do! But when that equation falls apart--as it inevitably does--if we lack the capacity to slow down we invariably move with great speed in the wrong direction.
• Do the work. Take the time to reflect. Render our thoughts and feelings more tangible by writing them down in a format that's useful to us. Engage in a candid conversation with someone we trust who knows how to really listen.
• Get ready. Make room in our lives for acceptance, for compassion, for wisdom. When motion no longer automatically translates into progress, these are the qualities that will make all the difference.

This may sound simple, and these steps are certainly easy to grasp in principle. But they can be fiendishly difficult to put into practice, and in my experience most of us look for shortcuts. We don't slow down. We don't do the work. We don't get ready. And we're woefully unprepared when life changes. We just keep racing around the track faster and faster. Plenty of motion, very little progress.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care

[2] The Trap of Competition

[3] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

[4] Playing with Matches (On Feeling Needed as a Leader)

[5] You Quit. You're Free. Now What?

[6] Importance vs. Urgency

[7] Peter Drucker on Excellence, Careers and Planning

 

For Further Reading

The Importance of Slowing Down

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

When We Are Ready, The Practice Will Be Waiting

 

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker.

Lessons in Falling Down

The longer I am employed as a professor, the less sure I become as to what a teacher is supposed to do. When students say, either explicitly or implicitly, "Teach me," I become confused, because I seldom feel as if I have anything to teach...

I agree with the sentiments Carl Rogers expressed in "Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning" (1952). In essence, he contends that nothing of value can be taught, but that much of value can be learned. I suppose that's why I find teaching so unsatisfying and learning so much fun.

~Jerry Harvey, "Learning to Not*Teach," 1999 [1]

Harvey, a longtime professor of management at George Washington University, is best-known for the "Abilene Paradox" [2], and his simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and deeply heartfelt perspective has influenced my own views of teaching, leadership, and organizational life. In years past I believe I've lived up to Harvey's example, and my students in The Art of Self-Coaching at Stanford have learned a great deal--not because of my teaching, but because I extended an invitation to learn, and I created an environment in which almost all of them were eager to join me in the process. [3]

But this year has been different. I share Harvey's enthusiasm for learning (and his ambivalence about "teaching"), and I know that some of our most important lessons are derived from our failures. [4] So in the spirit of Melanie Stefan's "CV of failures" [5] and Bessemer Venture Partners' "anti-portfolio" [6], I'm motivated to share some lessons learned from this past Spring Quarter.

As I wrote last month, "I wasn't capable of doing my best work ever, but I did the best I could under the circumstances." [7] And I know some students valued their experience in the course, thanks to their appreciative messages, but the evaluations were the lowest I've ever received, and a few of the anonymous comments were quite critical. This wasn't surprising, although it was still disappointing. I made a number of choices that contributed to these results, and reflecting on them has been a rich learning experience.

Lesson 1: Past performance is not indicative of future results.

You'd think an MBA would have internalized this one, but apparently I'm still learning it. I assumed that because my first virtual Quarter went well I could replicate the experience, and I failed to consider what would change from one year to the next. In response to the pandemic Stanford moved all Spring 2020 classes online, and although it was certainly an adventure, given that my students and I were brand-new to virtual instruction, it felt like we rose to the challenge, and I look back on the experience as a success. In hindsight, however, it's clear that a number of factors changed from 2020 to 2021:

• The bar got higher. My course is built around exercises and conversations in pairs and small groups, which translate readily to the virtual environment. In 2020 I think the course compared favorably with others that emphasized lectures and full-class discussion, which can be less engaging online. But by 2021, after a full year of remote learning students had higher expectations for the virtual experience, and I made relatively modest changes to my own use of the medium.
  
• My students had changed. The year of remote learning had other consequences as well. My students in Spring 2020 regretted not having a final Quarter on campus, but my students this year spent a full 2/3 of their graduate school experience away from Stanford, often living and working under sub-optimal conditions. This Spring I received more requests from the school to accommodate students' various needs than I ever have before, and although I was more than willing to meet these requests, I failed to see this trend as an indicator of the challenges they were facing as a cohort.
• I had changed. As I noted last month, "I know my students have had a far more difficult time during the pandemic than I have, in part simply because I've been able to maintain my practice remotely while they were largely denied the on-campus experience that they had been anticipating." [8] And although I'm well aware that while the privileges I enjoy have insulated me from many forms of suffering over the past year, I've still suffered, and I'm a different person as a result. I'm a better coach--and that's how I spend 99% of my working hours, so I get many more opportunities to improve--but I may be a worse teacher.
  

As with so many changes triggered by the pandemic, it's unclear whether these factors are anomalies of 2021 or a "new normal" that I need to incorporate into my future plans.

Lesson 2: Safety, trust, and intimacy are the foundation for learning.

You'd think I'd have internalized this one as well. As I wrote over a decade ago,

The foundational qualities that define every group are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy: Safety = A belief that we won't get hurt. Trust = We mean what we say and we say what we mean. Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public. When safety, trust and intimacy are established, these qualities support the actions that lead to greater success as a group: experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to be vulnerable. When we feel able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness (and our awareness of others) and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals more effectively increases dramatically. [9]

Historically I would memorize students' faces from the class roster so that I could greet them by name the first time they walked in the door. Letting students know "I see you" goes a long way toward creating a safe, trusting, and intimate learning environment. Last year I wondered how we'd fare without access to this and other in-person practices, but it turned out to be relatively easy to establish sufficient safety, trust, and intimacy among my students in Spring 2020--and yet here, too, I failed to appreciate the impact of some significant changes this year:

• I was an unknown. For several years I've taught in Autumn, Winter and Spring Quarters, but by the end of 2019 I knew I needed to reduce this load, a decision I made pre-pandemic. Last year I informed the dean who oversees my course that I wouldn't teach in Autumn 2020 and Winter 2021, and we agreed that I would return in Spring 2021. This was the right choice, but a consequence is that my students in 2021 knew very little about me, unlike in prior years when my Spring Quarter students had much more context from 72 of their classmates. This year's students had heard about the class and had high expectations for the experience, but I was an unknown entity, not a trusted figure.
  
• I was less available. In addition to teaching less often during the course of the year, I needed to limit the amount of time I dedicated to the process, a decision I made as a consequence of the pandemic. My clients and I were facing the biggest challenge of our careers, and something had to give. So last Spring I decided not to hold coaching sessions with students, and instead offered optional introductory 1:1 meetings via video, and 35 out of 36 signed up. Those students may have regretted the opportunity for more in-depth coaching sessions, but I didn't hear concerns about my lack of availability, and our introductory meetings as well the context provided by my Autumn and Winter Quarter students presumably allowed them to feel a sufficient sense of safety, trust, and intimacy with their classmates. This year I again offered introductory 1:1 meetings in lieu of holding coaching sessions during the Quarter, but only 2/3 signed up, resulting in fewer connections. Despite this, there was also an appetite for more 1:1 time, at least among some students, that I was not fulfilling: One of the most pointed comments in this year's evaluations called me "potentially the least available GSB professor outside of class." Whether or not that was a widely-held view, it's easy to conclude that it contributed to a diminished sense of safety, trust, and intimacy.
• I was less vocal. In my class I have students submit weekly essays that discuss their experiences in the course and the upcoming week's readings. Historically I've offered comments on each student's assignment--typically clarifications or references to other resources. But in recent years I began to wonder whether this might be counter-productive. I hope students view these essays as opportunities to make meaning for themselves, not performative exercises, and it occurred to me that my comments were reinforcing the latter. And some of last year's course evaluations suggested that my comments felt intrusive in what was essentially a personal journal. So this year I decided to comment very rarely--but several evaluations expressed frustration that their work wasn't being acknowledged. I don't know how many people felt that way, but it certainly didn't help to foster the learning environment I was aiming for.

I can't return to teaching three Quarters a year, nor can I offer multiple coaching sessions to students. I could conceivably offer more feedback on written work, and yet it's unclear whether that's truly desirable. So I'm pondering how to be more known, available, and vocal in order to create a sufficiently safe, trusting, and intimate learning environment in this particular context.

Lesson 3: What's most important can't be taught--it must be learned.

Here I'm in full agreement with Harvey's comment above, and this credo has informed my work for well over a decade. In 2007, the year I joined Stanford's staff as one of the GSB's first Leadership Coaches, I saw an interview with Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic who became an acclaimed professor at Harvard Business School, in which he had this to say about experiential learning:

I don't think you can teach leadership, I think you can learn about it. I think you can learn about yourself. It comes from within, from who are you inside and what makes you tick, and what are those tapes playing in your head about what you want to be and what your limitations are. [10]

For the next 10 years I sought to apply this principle in such settings as Leadership Labs, the Leadership Fellows program, and Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely). While my colleagues and I offered students relevant frameworks and research on leadership, group dynamics, and related topics, truly meaningful learning had to come from within. To learn anything of lasting value, students needed to translate these concepts into a personalized set of hypotheses and test them repeatedly in a wide range of scenarios.

And for the last 7 years my aspiration in The Art of Self-Coaching has been to apply this same principle to the topics on my syllabus: change, attention, emotion, happiness, resilience, vulnerability, unhappiness, and success. While I believe I've compiled a useful body of conceptual material to help guide students through the course, I certainly don't think of myself as someone who can "teach" students all they need to know on these topics. I do think of myself as an experiential educator who can create the conditions in which people not only accept an invitation to learn, but also "learn how to learn" so that they can continue the process long after the class is over. [11] That didn't happen this year, at least not to the standard I set for myself.

Lesson 4: Learning from failure doesn't feel good--and that's OK.

The British trainer and consultant Roger Greenaway identifies four steps in the process of debriefing past experiences:

• FACTS: What happened?
• FEELINGS: What did I experience?
• FINDINGS: Why did this happen?
• FUTURES: What will I do differently? [12]

The emphasis on emotion here is important. Failure reliably evokes uncomfortable feelings, and when we don't acknowledge them they often get worse. [13] So in addition to the lessons above, I've also learned (yet again) that I can admit failure and learn from it without being unduly distressed. I am disappointed that my students had such an unfulfilling Quarter, and at the same time I know that I did the best I could under the circumstances. As I wrote recently,

Some failures are permanent and terminal, of course...but the vast majority of our "failures" aren't nearly so consequential, and whenever we're pursuing something ambitious...we will fail, repeatedly. But in the process we are also ruling out possibilities as we seek to understand what works. [14]

 

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Footnotes

[1] How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife?: And Other Meditations on Management, pages 74-75 (Jerry Harvey, 1999)

[2] Abilene: Lonelieness and Belonging in Organizational Life

[3] In 2020 I made a version of the course freely available to the public and archived it on my site. The following page includes webinar videos, my slides, and all course readings. Anyone can take the course at their own pace, and all they need to provide is a partner:

• The Art of Self-Coaching (Public Course)

[4] The Working Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

[5] A CV of failures (Melanie Stefan, Nature, 2010)

• Other, similar efforts have received wider notice--notably that of Johannes Haushofer--but Stefan's was the first. Stefan was interviewed in 2017 by Veronika CH in her How I Fail series.

[6] The Anti-Portfolio, Bessemer Venture Partners ("Honoring the companies we missed.")

[7,8] June 2021 Newsletter

[9] Safety, Trust, Intimacy

[10] Bill George on Teaching Leadership

[11] Learning How to Learn

[12] Your Guide to Active Reviewing (Roger Greenaway)

• Don't be put off by the somewhat baffling design of this website--it's a treasure trove of resources, such as Reviewing for Results and Reviewing by Doing.

[13] Why You Can't Stop Thinking About Something

[14] The Working Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

 

Photo by Zombieite.

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

At various points in our personal and professional lives we realize that things are amiss. Sometimes there's just a vague sense of unease, a flickering shadow that gives us pause. On rare occasions it's a full-blown crisis, a breakdown, a sudden and sharp recognition that important parts of our lives are broken. More often we find ourselves somewhere along that spectrum, aware that we've drifted away from our hopes and aspirations, confused as to how we got here, uncertain about what to do next.

Each of these moments presents us with an opportunity to do the work. To acknowledge to ourselves, and to others, that we're flawed, anxious, misguided, grasping, human. To recognize that our explanatory narratives and organizing principles--the ways we interpret and make sense of the world--are out of date and need revising. To pause our ordinary activities and ask Why am I doing things this way? Or even Why am I doing these things at all?

But doing the work is work. It takes effort. It compels us to see ourselves clearly and honestly, and to cultivate a tolerance for the resulting discomfort. It takes time. It requires us to deprioritize other commitments and reserve those hours for these purposes. And it takes patience, because the work is a process, not an event. Breakthroughs and epiphanies do occur, but not on a reliable schedule, and usually after a period of struggle.

Most of us opt out, declining these invitations on a consistent basis. We don't have the energy, we don't have the time, we don't have the patience to do the work. At least not today, not this week, not this year. Or so we tell ourselves. And for long stretches of time, sometimes decades, this is fine. We cope. We get by. We muddle along. But without regular maintenance, things tend to work until suddenly they don't, and that's as true for individuals and careers as it is for relationships, operating systems, and internal combustion engines.

Sometimes a crisis or breakdown jolts us out of our illusions and into reality. The work will get done under these circumstances, but it's a hard way to get started. We thought we were taking a walk around the block, only to find ourselves hitchhiking cross-country, with just the contents of our pockets to see us through. Thus the value of accepting the invitation, even--and perhaps especially--when we'd rather not. Every uncomfortable experience we avoid is a missed opportunity to practice for the times when we have no choice.

So what does this look like in concrete terms? What is the work? There are three fundamental practices, although they can take countless forms:

Reflection

It starts by creating some open space that will allow us to think. Then we need to stop "doing things" for a while and perhaps just sit there, although this doesn't mean that "nothing happens." A fallow field looks lifeless, but the soil is actively replenishing itself to prepare for the next growing season. And when we sleep our brain doesn't "turn off"--it's humming with activity in preparation for our next period of wakefulness.

Similarly, when we pause to reflect, we transcend our deliberate intentions and allow all sorts of other things to happen. We tune in to faint signals that are drowned out by the noise of daily life. We slow down our monkey mind, gaining perspective on our assumptions, interpretations and responses. We stop confusing motion with progress.

Reflection can occur in a brief interlude, a long walk, a meditation session, a quiet drive. It can take a few minutes or occupy a span of hours. But it doesn't happen when we routinely prioritize what's urgent and neglect what's important.

Journaling

And yet reflection isn't enough. After a period we have to take our abstract thoughts and feelings and render them more specific and tangible. We have to make choices about what to focus on and what to leave out. And we have to distill it all into language, which necessarily involves a form of "translation," even when writing in our mother tongue.

This act of journaling accomplishes many goals at once: It strengthens our memories of experiences, evokes implicit emotions about those experiences, and helps us work through and resolve difficult emotions. It also allows us to revisit these ideas over time and to share them with others.

There's no particular format that's optimal, but note that I'm not talking about the equivalent of a middle-school diary in which we meticulously record the mundane details of existence--such efforts are quickly abandoned. A journal can be a leather-bound volume, a stack of Post-Its, a Word doc, or a website. And a journal entry can be an in-depth essay, three words scrawled at bedtime, a string of musings, or even a post like this one. The key is choosing a format that meets our needs, making it more likely that we'll follow through.

Dialogue

Despite the necessity of solitary reflection and journaling, we can't go into a corner and think our way to the solution in isolation. We desperately want this to be true, so we can hide our vulnerability and avoid the terrible embarrassment of being flawed, anxious, misguided, grasping, human.

But we are fundamentally social creatures, and reality is socially constructed through narrative. Doing the work inevitably entails sharing our thoughts and feelings with others in order to create and re-create our narratives, solidify and re-establish our reality. We must be seen and acknowledged, and we must observe ourselves in the image reflected back by others.

Again, there are innumerable settings in which to pursue this practice: An informal talk with a friend. A formal engagement with a coach or therapist. A T-group, peer support network or even a 12-step meeting. All are forums for dialogue in which we can be witnessed and bear witness in turn. And yet such conversations don't always come easily--they must be built on a foundation of safety, trust, and intimacy.

 

These practices are the building blocks of The Art of Self-Coaching, the course that I created at Stanford in 2015 and made freely available to the public last year.

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For Further Reading

Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care

How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

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

Important vs. Urgent

The Value of Journal Writing

Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

Self-Coaching is SOCIAL

Safety, Trust, Intimacy

The Art of Self-Coaching (Public Course)

When We Are Ready, The Practice Will Be Waiting

 

Photo by Public Domain Pictures.

Don't Take That Job

I'm not a career coach who helps people find their next professional role, and my clients are typically senior leaders in positions they expect to hold for the foreseeable future. But I've worked with a number of clients through a transitional period, usually triggered by a business event such as an acquisition, or by their conclusion that it was time to move on and the business would be better served by new leadership.

I've written previously about effective transitions, but ineffective transitions generally involve taking a job too soon, against your better judgment, or for the wrong reasons. Here I discuss those topics at greater length, drawing on my work with clients who accepted offers they later came to regret.

Don't Take a Job Too Soon

Poorly managed transitions are often the result of attempts to quell anxiety, and that's almost always the case when someone takes a job too soon, without sufficient consideration of their other options and the opportunity cost. As an alternative, you can seek to regulate your anxiety [1,2], starting by acknowledging that it will be a feature of what author and consultant William Bridges calls "fallow time," referring to the period between crops when land is left uncultivated: "First there is an ending, then a beginning, and important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature." [3]

Anxiety may not be an issue at all in the initial stages of your transition. You may well feel the need for some rest and relaxation, and an empty calendar looks appealing. However, Bridges reminds us, this sense of ease is difficult to sustain, in part because contemporary culture no longer reflects the agricultural rhythm that makes a fallow period necessary: "One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, 'emptiness' represents only the absence of something." [4]

More specifically, you probably enjoy being busy and productive, and once the "vacation" phase of your transition is over, you're likely to feel some unease. This is one reason why it's so important to have a plan, as noted in my previous piece--daily routines and long-term goals help to assuage the discomfort evoked when a clear calendar begins to feel like a void. But the intention isn't to distract yourself with a dizzying schedule of activities, because part of the value of a fallow period is to be found in the emptiness itself.

At a distance, a fallow field looks lifeless, but at a molecular level the soil is replenishing itself to prepare for the next growing season. A sleeping person looks inert, but their brain is a hive of neurological activity as it prepares for the next period of wakefulness. Similarly, the spaciousness that you experience as your transition progresses may feel merely like an "absence," and yet it's worth considering that this may be the necessary condition for the emergence of something uniquely valuable that could only occur in a fallow period.

Don't Take a Job Against Your Better Judgment

In my experience it's very rare for people to be entirely surprised when a new job doesn't work out. In almost all cases where a client came to regret accepting an offer, they recall doing so against their better judgment. Even if we stipulate a degree of hindsight bias, it's clear to me that intuition has a meaningful role to play in the process of charting our professional paths, and we ignore it at our peril.

We need not regard intuition as some form of mysticism. Economist and psychologist Herbert Simon offers a matter-of-fact definition of the process: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." [5]

The challenge is that this recognition often occurs on the margins of consciousness, triggered by subtle cues that can be difficult to identify explicitly. Further, we may discount our substantial expertise in sizing up people and situations because these particular people and this particular situation are new to us, and so we may ignore our misgivings because they seem "illogical."

Years ago my colleague Bonnie Wentworth taught me to distinguish between A) an intuitive sense that something is amiss, and B) the cognitive interpretation of just what is amiss. Even when the latter isn't quite accurate, the former is usually worth exploring further. I don't believe that intuition is always an unerring guide to right action, of course. But before you accept an offer against your better judgment, ask yourself: Am I looking for reasons to say yes? If so, consider the offer from the opposite perspective: Look for reasons to say no, and be sure to factor in your intuitive response. 

Don't Take a Job for the Money

I'm not suggesting that compensation is irrelevant or that it shouldn't factor into your decision, particularly when choosing from among competing offers. There is a positive correlation between income and life satisfaction, although this does not imply causation, and in general the relationship between money and happiness is complex and not fully understood. [6] I'm also keenly aware that many people don't have the luxury of making tradeoffs regarding compensation because their personal obligations compel them to take the highest-paying work available.

But if you're like many of my clients you don't face that kind of financial pressure. You may have been well-compensated in past roles, and upon your latest transition you may have negotiated a severance package or realized a substantial windfall. But even under these circumstances you may still place substantial emphasis on your earning power and future compensation. An offer may come along that's "too good to turn down."

In these cases it's worth bearing several factors in mind. First, we often confuse our material needs with material wants. Determine what you must earn in order to satisfy your needs. Also, note the inevitability of what psychologists call "hedonic adaptation"--we readily incorporate changes in our life circumstances and take them for granted. [7] It's a near-certainty that the boost in well-being you experience from increased compensation will wear off sooner than you think.

And despite the correlation between income and life satisfaction referenced above, note that all of the research on the subject that I'm familiar with shows that this relationship isn't constant. The level of income varies across studies, but there's clearly an inflection point beyond which greater amounts of income contribute less and less to our sense of well-being--so consider how close to that point you might be already.

Don't Take a Job for Your Image

We think constantly about other people, and we care a great deal about what they think of us. This is not only an unavoidable aspect of human psychology [8], it's actually a desirable trait. The capacity to envision ourselves as we appear to others and to improve their perception of us has a number of prosocial benefits. [9,10] But while this is a "feature" for the species, as individuals we can easily experience it as a "bug." We can become so obsessed with maintaining a successful image that public perception takes precedence over our lived reality, and we make suboptimal choices as a result.

This is often a factor when clients find themselves unhappy in a new role. They were unduly influenced by the high status conferred by the industry, the organization, the title, the perks. They were recruited by someone prominent in their field, and the attention was flattering. They liked the way the role looked on their resume, and the upward trajectory it portrayed. It was a bright, shiny object, and it reflected back an image of themselves that was pleasing and reassuring.

How we're perceived by others can have a significant impact on our relationships and our sense of self-esteem, and I'm not recommending that we feign indifference toward those perceptions. But when you find yourself attracted to an opportunity because of the image it represents, it's worth asking what you might be giving up in exchange. Over the years I've observed a distinct version of this trade-off in elite organizations:

In almost all situations the elite organization levies some sort of tax on its leaders--something is extracted in exchange for the desired opportunity. These trade-offs and taxes are critical elements in the relationship between an organization and the leaders who inhabit it... Many leaders within an elite organization feel anxious at the possibility of losing their position--not because they fear unemployment, but because their work is such an important part of their identity. [11]

Don't Take a Job to "Show Them"

Even if you initiated your transition, you may feel that you have something to prove to someone. You may feel an impulse to demonstrate to colleagues, friends, family, classmates, or mentors that you're as capable as ever. And if your transition was initiated by someone else who suggested (or concluded) that you're not capable, you almost certainly feel an urge to "show them." This is an understandable impulse--and yet just as when we allow an obsession with image to cloud our judgment, accepting a role to "prove something" or "show someone" can cause us to make bad choices for worse reasons.

Note how much power we give away when we get caught up in this cycle. Rather than rely upon our own assessment of our accomplishments and abilities, we give others the authority to make those evaluations. Rather than trust in our self-efficacy, we ask them to tell us what we're capable of. Rather than chart our course independently, we allow them to determine our path.

The irony is that the people we're seeking to make an impression on are thinking about us far less often than we imagine. As theologian Eric Springsted has noted, "We are subject to an illusion" that leads us to act "as if we were at the center of the world." [12] So if you find yourself drawn to an opportunity because you hope to "show them," ask yourself: Are they really thinking about me? Probably not.

And rather than allow "them" to make this decision for you, consider your own relationship with power and agency. What would it be like to decide for yourself, to make your own determinations, to take responsibility? As Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer has written, a "responsibility mindset is simply seeing oneself as an actor affecting, or trying to affect, what goes on rather than being in a more passive role of having things happen to oneself." [13]

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

• You Quit. You're Free. Now What?

• It's Time to Stop Interviewing

• The Work and The Job

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Footnotes

[1] The Tyranny of Feelings

[2] Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)

[3] Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, page 17 (William Bridges, 2004, Revised 25th Anniversary Edition)

[4] Ibid, page 133.

• I highly recommend Bridges' work for anyone going through a transition. For a further discussion, see William Bridges on Transitions.

[5] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)

[6] Myths in the science of happiness, and directions for future research (Ed Diener, 2008)

[7] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 18-19 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[8] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, page 18 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

[9] Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, pages xiv-xv (Randolph Nesse, 2020)

[10] What Other People Think About Us Matters. Here's Why. (Krystal D'Costa, Scientific American, 2012)

[11] How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)

[12] "Will and Order: The Moral Self in Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio," page 92 (Eric O. Springsted, Augustinian Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, 1998). This essay is also available as a chapter in Springsted's The Act of Faith: Christian Faith and the Moral Self (2015).

[13] "Changing mental models: HR's most important task" (Jeffrey Pfeffer, Human Resource Management, May 2005)

 

Photo by Open Grid Scheduler.

You Quit. You're Free. Now What?

Although I work primarily with senior leaders who expect to remain in their roles for the foreseeable future, I've also worked with a number of clients over the course of a professional transition. In some cases their move was triggered by a business event, such as an acquisition, the expiration of a lockup period, or the accomplishment of a long-awaited milestone. In other cases they simply felt that it was time to move on, and that the business would be better served by new leadership.

None of these clients considered themselves retired, and almost all intended to start another company or seek a new leadership role after a period of time. Some worked with me continuously during this phase, while others would hold occasional coaching sessions that allowed me to keep up with their progress. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that there's only one approach to a transition, but I've observed the following themes among clients who feel that they made the most of the opportunity.

Have a Plan, Hold It Loosely

You may begin your transitional period with a simple desire to take a break. You want an empty calendar and nothing more. In a sense you're "on vacation," and the last thing you want to do is plan. But vacations are respites from our day-to-day lives with clearly defined end points. Open-ended transitional periods are day-to-day life, and although it's initially thrilling to have no onerous obligations, eventually an empty calendar starts to feel just empty.

So after a few weeks, maybe a few months, it becomes important to have a plan. This can take many different forms, but in general there's value in having a set of A) daily routines and B) long-term goals. "Daily" need not mean "every single day," but, rather, "on this particular day" or "more often than not." The emphasis is on routine: a reliably predictable set of activities that guide one's investment of time and attention.

Some of these routines involve experiences that are ends in themselves, such as a reflective walk or time with friends and family, and it's essential to allow sufficient time for such "atelic" activities, which "do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they have been achieved." [1] But it can be equally valuable to establish a set of goals to accomplish during the transitional period, and I've worked with clients who've traveled to far-flung destinations, conducted lengthy meditation retreats, and mastered skills from needlepoint to alpine climbing.

And yet these plans must be held loosely, lest they come to feel like onerous obligations themselves. Sometimes this means going with the flow on a given day, relaxing or even abandoning your routines in order to be open to spontaneity and serendipity. And sometimes this means letting go of a goal when it threatens to diminish the intrinsic sense of fulfillment that motivated the activity in the first place. [2]

If It's Not a Clear Yes, It's a No

In some cases transitions are well-publicized, while in others they occur quietly. But when leaders move on, eventually word gets out that they're no longer working and "available" in some way. Once this happens you'll typically receive a number of inquiries from people seeking your time and attention. Some such inquiries involve full-fledged job offers, but many more involve part-time opportunities of one sort or another: consulting projects, advisory roles, speaking gigs, podcast appearances, and the inevitable requests to "pick your brain."

In the initial "vacation" phase of a transitional period, it's easy to turn down these requests, because the appeal of an empty calendar outweighs anything a part-time opportunity can offer. But as the weeks turn into months, you may begin to feel somewhat uneasy when confronted with so much spaciousness. You're probably used to feeling busy and being productive, and once you're sufficiently rested an open-ended vacation will lose some of its savor. It's still pleasant, but you likely want more out of life than that, particularly if you're envisioning a long-term transition.

At this point some of these part-time opportunities begin to seem more appealing, and you now have to wrestle with the challenge of how to decide which ones to accept and which ones to turn down. This is one reason why having a plan is so important--even when held loosely it helps ensure that proximate choices are guided by an overarching intention. A framework that's immensely useful in this context comes from the work of my colleague Dan Oestreich:

If it's not a clear yes, it's a no. The phrase tests our clarity and commitment... [While considering a project] I dithered and the phrase came back to me. It was clear this project was not for me. The real question, of course, is what’s behind the dithering. And there, I believe, calling up the phrase can help us identify where our sensitivities really are. As in, what’s really going on here? Will I disappoint someone else? Will I create an awkward moment? Will I violate my self-image in some way? Will I show my true colors, the ones I have trouble admitting to myself? [3]

Dan highlights the reasons why saying "no" can be so difficult: Someone will be disappointed. There will be awkward moments. You like to think of yourself as generous and accessible, so you will violate that self-image. And in so doing you will reveal your true colors, your real priorities, which may well feel vulnerable or embarrassing. And yet when you overcome these difficulties and say "no" to everything that's not a "clear yes," you'll invariably be happier as a result.

You Earned the Ph.D., Now Write the Dissertation

You undoubtedly learned a great deal in your previous role, and yet much of that knowledge has remained tacit and implicit, stored in your head, because you were too busy to write it down. One of the most valuable uses of time in a transitional period is documenting that knowledge and making it explicit, which I think of as "writing the dissertation after earning the Ph.D."

If you're a founder, this will undoubtedly take the form of a manual for structuring and scaling a company more effectively, drawing upon what went well--and what didn't--in your prior venture. But there are a number of topics that you may find worthy of reflection, no matter what your particular role or industry:

• How to be a better leader, particularly under adversity.
• How to build a stronger culture with more productive norms.
• How to interview, hire, level, and fire people more effectively.
• How to have better working relationships, particularly across differences in style.
• How to resolve conflicts and handle difficult conversations.
• How to invest in self-care and establish necessary boundaries.

A key in this effort is finding the format and process that work best for you. By calling it a "dissertation," I don't intend to suggest that it should in any way resemble a dry, academic undertaking. It has to feel alive. You may prefer a stand-alone written document, a tool such as Roam or Evernote, or even PowerPoint. You may want to publish your efforts (or an edited version) on a personal site or via social media, you may want to share it only with close friends, or you may want to maintain strict privacy. And you may want to engage former colleagues and other thought partners in active dialogue, or you may prefer the solitude of your own thoughts.

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It's easy to not make the most of a transitional period simply by not following the guidelines above. The lack of a plan allows time to pass unproductively, while a rigid, inflexible plan leads to frustration. An inability to say "no" allows other people to set your priorities, leading to overwhelm and a lack of focus. Failing to document lessons learned makes it more likely you'll make unnecessary mistakes in your next venture or leadership role.

But an even easier way to mismanage a transition is to rush through it and take another full-time position too soon, against your better judgment, or for the wrong reasons, e.g. "the money's too good." Such mistakes are usually attempts to quell anxiety, and it's preferable to simply acknowledge that anxiety is an inevitable feature of what William Bridges called "fallow time," referring to the period between crops when land is left uncultivated: "First there is an ending, then a beginning, and important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature." [4] Bridges encourages us not to shrink from this aspect of experience, but to embrace it:

One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, "emptiness" represents only the absence of something. So when what's missing is something as important as relatedness and purpose and reality, we try to find ways of replacing those missing elements as quickly as possible...

You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence. [5]

There is undoubtedly something unique to be learned during this transition, something that can only be learned in a fallow time, a neutral zone between endeavors. I hope the guidelines above help you make the most of yours.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

• Don't Take That Job

• It's Time to Stop Interviewing

• The Work and The Job

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Footnotes

[1] Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, pages 133-134 (Kieran Setiya, 2017. This volume expands considerably on the topics Setiya explores in his 2014 paper, "The Midlife Crisis.")

[2] Babies, Bathwater and Goal-Setting

[3] If It's Not a Clear Yes, It's a No (Dan Oestreich, 2020)

• I've been inspired by this passage of Dan's before: The Final Third (On Mortality, Values and Spending Time)

[4] Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, page 17 (William Bridges, 2004, Revised 25th Anniversary Edition)

• I highly recommend Bridges' work for anyone going through a transition. For a further discussion, see William Bridges on Transitions.

[5] Ibid, pages 133-135.

 

Photo by Richard Walker.

How to Use a Knife (On Being Fierce)

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.

 

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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.

[4] Therapy Referrals

[5] The Tyranny of Feelings

[6] Force Isn't Power

[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.

On Speaking Up and Shutting Up

It took me a long time to realize that A) the impulse to stay quiet is a signal to speak up, and B) the impulse to say one more thing is a signal to stfu.

— Ed Batista (@edbatista) February 23, 2019

Recent work on emotion regulation [1] reminded me of this simple insight--and helps to explain why it can be such a challenge to put it into practice. The impulse to stay quiet and the impulse to say one more thing are invariably emotional responses. They obviously have a cognitive dimension as well, and whenever such impulses take hold of us we no doubt have our reasons. But the determination to allow such impulses to govern our behavior is fundamentally emotional.

We feel inhibited by something, or emotionally aroused by something else: The moment, the setting, the topic at hand. The person or people we're talking with, something they said earlier, the presence or absence of observers, our relationships with everyone involved. Our inhibition is often experienced as a sense of foreboding, wariness, anxiety, even dread. "Safer to stay quiet," we tell ourselves, and so we keep our mouths shut. Our arousal is often experienced as an irrepressible urge, an unshakeable conviction in the necessity and justice of what we're about to say. "I must speak up," we tell ourselves, and so we do.

The belief that emotion and reasoning work in opposition to each other is widely held--and fundamentally wrong. Neuroscience research has made it clear that among the various functions emotions serve, they are essential inputs to the process of logical reasoning. [2] Emotions allow us to make use of much larger amounts of data in the course of this process than we can access through the relatively slow mechanism of conscious cognition. But emotions are a "quick and dirty processing system," in the words of NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux [3], and USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio also makes clear that "uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior...[and] seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion." [4]

This is essential to bear in mind when we feel the impulse to stay quiet and the impulse to say one more thing: While emotions are necessary inputs for logical reasoning, by no means are they unerring guides to effective action, and in some circumstances they reliably lead us to act against our best interests. And in addition to this common thread it's also helpful to understand the differences between these two impulses.

The impulse to stay quiet is rarely a purely personal phenomenon. While our individual psychology inevitably plays a role, there are almost always group dynamics that contribute to our inhibition. The human system we're operating within at that moment--the relationship, the event, the group, the culture--is unsettled by our voice in some way and is acting to protect itself by repressing us. This need not take the form of heavy-handed censorship or overt hostility--it's often expressed in warm and pleasant tones. But when the system realizes that our contribution could be embarrassing or threatening, particularly to someone in power, it reliably enacts a "defense routine," in management thinker Chris Argyris' phrase, to ward off the embarrassment or threat. [5] Thus the impulse to stay quiet--and the vital importance of resisting the system's repression by speaking up. [6]

The impulse to say one more thing is undeniably influenced by the surrounding human system as well, especially if it's one in which we've felt repressed in the past. But in this instance we've felt free to share our voice and have been participating actively. The person or people we're talking with have been listening, receptive, open to our influence--and yet somehow it's not enough for us. We want something more from them, and we want it now, and we feel a frantic sense of urgency to get those needs met. The interchange is winding down--it may have even ended--when we suddenly extend it at the last second, our words tumbling out in a rush. We feel triumphant!--and then it's obvious that we should have kept out mouths shut. Our final contribution was unnecessary and even counter-productive, and our urge to express it was nothing more than impatience and narcissism. Thus the impulse to say one more thing--and the vital importance of mindful self-restraint.

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Tyranny of Feelings

[2] For more on the nature and purpose of emotion:

• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (Antonio Damasio, 2005)
• The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)
• The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)
• Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions (Victor Johnston, 2000)

[3] LeDoux, page 163

[4] Damasio, page 53

[5] Overcoming Organizational Defense: Facilitating Organizational Learning, page 25 (Chris Argyris, 1990)

[6] Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

 

Photo by Melissa Weise.