Ed Batista

Why Some Entrepreneurs Don't Know When to Quit

People mistakenly think it was the storm that caused the problem. It wasn't the storm that caused the problem; it was the time.

~Martin Adams, Mount Everest climber [1]

The sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger... In order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

~Jon Krakauer [2]

1. Introduction

In May 1996, eight people died on Mount Everest when they were caught in a storm as they descended from the summit. As professors of management Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier note, the avoidable disaster resulted from the unexpected decision by two expedition leaders to continue climbing when they should have abandoned their goal and turned back hours earlier:

In their pursuit of the summit both [Rob] Hall and [Scott] Fischer violated their turnaround times, which are optimal stopping points set to ensure that climbers have enough time to return to a point of safety before significant changes in the environment such as darkness or severe weather can occur. [3]

McMullen and Kier cite journalist Jon Krakauer, a climber on one of the expeditions who later wrote about his harrowing experience:

At Hall's suggestion, the two guides had agreed that "Anybody who wasn't within spitting distance of the summit by 2:00pm had to turn around and go down." But, adds Mountain Madness guide Neal Beidleman, "For whatever reason, it didn't happen..." Given Hall's conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. [4]

Despite the unusual setting, McMullen and Kier believe the Everest disaster holds some important lessons for entrepreneurs, who, like expedition leaders, must decide at regular intervals whether or not to persist in a risky pursuit. While my clients aren't mountain climbers--at least not professionally--most of them are founder/CEOs, which means that they're also attempting something difficult that has a high likelihood of failure. You have to be an optimist to launch an entrepreneurial venture, and as I've written before, "there's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely." [5]

And yet the events on Everest tragically underscore a related concept that I've also noted previously: "There's a point at which unbridled confidence is merely a wish, and optimism becomes magical thinking, which can be particularly dangerous for a leader. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and failure to learn from experience." [6]

But why does this happen? Why did the experienced guides on Everest display such poor judgment? Why do some leaders persist in failing efforts past the point when they should quit?

 

2. Escalation of Commitment

The technical term for such behavior is "escalation of commitment," defined by McMullen and Kier as "the proclivity of decision makers to maintain commitment to a losing course of action, even in the face of quite negative news." [7] Behavioral psychologists Katy Milkman and Theresa Kelly provide further context on this phenomenon:

Escalation of commitment is a risk whenever a decision maker (a) commits resources to a course of action (thereby making an "investment") in the hope of achieving a positive outcome and (b) experiences disappointing results. Invested resources may take any form from time, money, and labor to mental and emotional energy... While there are many situations where the best course of action is to commit further resources to a failing investment, the term escalation of commitment describes only those situations where objective evidence indicates that continuing with an investment is unwise, and yet an individual chooses to invest further in spite of this. [8]

Research on escalation of commitment indicates that the primary cause is the powerful drive to maintain consistency between our past commitments and present behavior (and to appear consistent in the eyes of others), as well as the corresponding drive to minimize the cognitive dissonance we experience when our commitments and behavior are inconsistent (or are perceived as such by others.) [9] In psychologist Robert Cialdini's widely-cited work on influence, he identified this need for consistency as a "central motivator" of human behavior:

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision... The drive to be (and to look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests... Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside there is a pressure to bring self-image in line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure--a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others portray us. [10]

Milkman and Kelly expand upon the manifestations of our drive for consistency and related psychological factors that contribute to escalation of commitment:

Self-justification theory... Feeling personally responsible for an investment that turns sour intensifies the threat associated with failure and increases a decision maker's motivation to justify the original choice to herself. Negative feedback on a past investment decision calls the validity of the original decision into question and is dissonant with a decision maker's natural desire to see herself as competent. Many decision makers attempt to eliminate this conflict by convincing themselves that their failing ventures will turn around if they simply invest more resources. To do so and succeed would prove that their original choice was valid and eliminate the "cognitive dissonance" created by the initial negative feedback.

Confirmation bias. Biased information processing is one way that decision makers reduce the dissonance that arises when their positive self-perceptions conflict with evidence that past investments are under-performing. After committing to a choice, people are far more likely to notice and overweight evidence that supports their decision and ignore and underweight evidence that does not. Furthermore, decision makers actively seek information that confirms the validity of their decisions...

Loss aversion... Research on prospect theory has demonstrated the the disutility caused by losses is greater than the utility obtained from equivalent gains... Negative feedback on an investment frames the decision about whether to continue with the current course of action as a decision about whether to accept a loss or to take steps to prevent locking it in...

Impression management... A decision maker may escalate commitment to her original investment to avoid admitting to others that the venture was a failure or that her decision was flawed. Such admissions might cause others to doubt her competence. Further, people tend to punish decision makers for inconsistency. [11]

Entrepreneurs are as subject to these psychological drives and biases as anyone else, and yet a hallmark of entrepreneurship is a willingness not only to commit resources to risky ventures, but also to rapidly withdraw them when necessary. [12] The most effective entrepreneurs aren't heedless daredevils--they're keenly aware that they may need to abandon their immediate objectives in order to retain the ability to pursue their long-term vision. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO who was recently convicted of fraud and now faces up to 20 years in prison, once said, "The minute that you have a backup plan, you've admitted that you're not going to succeed." [13] But that's not entrepreneurship--that's merely empty rhetoric that leads directly to escalation of commitment.

So why might entrepreneurs in particular might fall prey to this dynamic, and what conditions make that outcome more likely? Why do some entrepreneurs--typically known for their adaptability--find it so hard to quit? To answer these questions it's necessary to understand two psychological concepts that have significant implications for entrepreneurs.

 

3. Mindset Theory of Action Phases and Regulatory Focus Theory

The Mindset Theory of Action Phases, first developed by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, suggests that in setting and pursuing a goal there are two fundamentally distinct ways of thinking, gathering data, and processing information ("mindsets"). [14] Up until the decision to pursue a goal has been made, while goal-setting, we adopt a deliberative mindset, but once a goal has been selected and we've decided to pursue it, we adopt an implemental mindset. Gollwitzer notes key distinctions between the two mindsets in the realms of "cognitive tuning" (i.e. the information we tend to focus on), the degree of bias imparted to the information under consideration, and "open-mindedness" (i.e. receptivity to new information):

3.1. Mindset Theory of Action Phases

	Deliberative Mindset (Pre-Decision / Goal-Setting)	Implemental Mindset (Post-Decision / Goal Pursuit)
Cognitive Tuning	Focus on whether a goal is feasible and desirable via pros vs. cons and cost-benefit analysis.	Focus on where, when and how to accomplish the goal.
Biases	Information related to the feasibility and desirability of a goal is analyzed impartially. Accurate judgment of control.	Optimistic analysis that overestimates feasibility. Chosen goal seen as more desirable. Increased sense of control over events.
Open-Mindedness	Enhanced receptivity to all sources and types of information. Avoids dismissing information prematurely.	More selective information processing. Filters information based on relevance to the goal.

 

Regulatory Focus Theory, first developed by psychologist E. Tory Higgins, extends the basic "hedonic principle"--the idea that people approach pleasure and avoid pain. [15] Higgins suggests that there are two different types of motivation, which spring from two fundamental but distinct human needs: nurturance and security. When seeking nurturance we adopt a promotion focus, in which we strive to fulfill our aspirations and maximize accomplishments, but when seeking security we adopt a prevention focus, in which we strive to fulfill our responsibilities and maximize safety:

3.2. Regulatory Focus Theory

	Promotion Focus	Prevention Focus
Contributing Factors	Nurturance needs. A focus on ideals. Gain vs. non-gain situations.	Security needs. A focus on duties and obligations. Loss vs. non-loss situations.
Consequences	Sensitivity to positive outcomes. Approach as strategic means. Insure against errors of omission.	Sensitivity to negative outcomes. Avoidance as strategic means. Insure against errors of commission.

 

A more specific body of research has explored the implications of these concepts for entrepreneurial behavior. Studying the Mindset Theory of Action Phases, professors of entrepreneurship Servane Delanoë-Gueguen and Alain Fayolle have found that aspiring founders experience a mindset shift that enhances their commitment to the venture:

[Founders] become committed to their start-up goal and engage in a set of goal-directed actions...with the objective of launching their business... At this point, individuals pass a psychological Rubicon and reach a level of commitment at which giving up their project becomes less likely. [16]

In another study, professors of entrepreneurship Matthew Lynch and Andrew Corbett suggest that successful entrepreneurs regularly move from one mindset to another, depending on the circumstances and their immediate needs:

The cognitive shift from [deliberative] to implementative [mindsets] and back...is an ongoing process inherent in entrepreneurial action, and continues as the entrepreneur evaluates the opportunity... This shift of orientation within the entrepreneurial mindset is critical as flexibility with these cognitive mechanisms is often the determinant between failure and growth of the venture. [17]

Similarly, Higgins, the originator of Regulatory Focus Theory, and professors of management Joel Brockner and Murray Low, propose that entrepreneurs must alternate between a promotion focus and a prevention focus at various stages of the venture's development:

Rather than suggesting that one regulatory focus orientation is more likely to be associated with entrepreneurial success than the other, we suggest that both promotion and prevention foci are necessary for entrepreneurial success. For certain aspects of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., generating ideas with the potential to be successful), greater promotion focus is necessary. For other aspects of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., doing the "due diligence" when screening ideas), greater prevention focus is necessary. [18]

To clarify, there's no single mode--deliberative or implemental mindset, promotion or prevention focus--that characterizes entrepreneurial behavior. Entrepreneurs move from one mindset to the other and from one focus to the other over the course of their journey--and the most successful entrepreneurs are able to make such moves repeatedly as the environment evolves and new information emerges.

But under certain conditions entrepreneurs can find it difficult to shift from one mode to another as needed--and this is what may have caused the 1996 Everest disaster. The events on the mountain vividly illustrate the potential consequences of escalation of commitment, and McMullen and Kier suggest that it occurred because the expedition guides found themselves stuck in an implemental mindset with a promotion focus--and that being trapped at the intersection of these modes poses a risk for every entrepreneur.

 

4. Escalation of Commitment and Entrepreneurship

McMullen and Kier's assessment of the joint influence of the Mindset Theory of Action Phases and Regulatory Focus Theory on entrepreneurial behavior portrays four quadrants, which they label "eager goal-setting," "cautious goal-setting," "eager goal pursuit," and "cautious goal pursuit." [19] They note that each quadrant is characterized by strengths and weaknesses--and the key weakness of "eager goal pursuit" is escalation of commitment:

4.1. Joint Influence on Entrepreneurial Behavior

	Promotion Focus	Prevention Focus
Deliberative Mindset	Eager Goal-Setting: Strength: Alert to opportunities to replace the goal. Weakness: Sets unfeasible goals.	Cautious Goal-Setting: Strength: Careful planning. Weakness: Difficulty getting started.
Implemental Mindset	Eager Goal Pursuit: Strength: Alert to opportunities to achieve the maximal goal. Weakness: Escalation of commitment	Cautious Goal Pursuit: Strength: Vigilant to threats to the minimal goal and avoids unnecessary risks. Weakness: Over-cautious.

 

So while the adoption of an implemental mindset and a promotion focus enables an entrepreneur to remain undaunted by obstacles and persist in the face of long odds, it also increases the likelihood of escalation of commitment. The distinguishing factor, McMullen and Kier suggest, is what psychologists Veronika Brandstätter and Julia Schüler call an "action crisis," defined as the "phase of goal striving when setbacks have accumulated and failures in making progress towards one's goal are becoming highly visible...the phase in which the individual has already invested a great deal into his/her goal, encounters recurring difficulties, and finally is caught between further goal pursuit and disengagement." [20]

While an action crisis is an unpleasant experience for an entrepreneur, it serves an essential purpose by compelling them to assess the viability of their venture in the current environment. Research by Brandstätter and Schüler shows that people experiencing an action crisis return to a deliberative mindset, triggering a cost-benefit analysis that shifts the emphasis from how to accomplish their goal back to whether the goal should be pursued at all. [21]

But the challenge for the entrepreneur, according to McMullen and Kier, is that the adoption of an implemental mindset and a promotion focus is likely to forestall the onset of an action crisis. As a result they remain stuck in "eager goal pursuit," and this is what leads to escalation of commitment. What does this look like in practice? McMullen and Kier discuss four contributing factors:

Lack of Contingency Planning

Exit strategies prepare the entrepreneur for appropriate disengagement from goal pursuit, and thus minimize any future losses from a delayed reaction to environmental changes. However, the proactive behavior of planning for negative contingencies is practically eliminated by [eager goal pursuit.] By emphasizing the opportunities as opposed to the threats hidden by uncertainty, [eager goal pursuit] foregoes contingency planning, allocates attention toward efforts to avoid missed opportunities, and ensures that the entrepreneur responds to any opportunities revealed in the future by a changing environment. This can lead potentially negative outcomes to be overlooked and contingency plans to be ignored for best-case scenarios. [22]

Insufficient Risk Monitoring

Entrepreneurs commit to a particular goal assuming a certain level of risk exposure... However...entrepreneurs can find their assumptions violated by unanticipated negative changes in the environment... Upon recognition of these negative changes, an action crisis emerges in which the entrepreneur must evaluate whether the expected return is worth the increased risk exposure. Before such a decision can be made, however, one must become aware of the need to make it. Unfortunately, this awareness is delayed by the implemental mindset's allocation of attention toward volitional concerns [i.e. how to accomplish the goal] and away from motivational concerns [i.e. whether to accomplish the goal] caused by these unanticipated negative changes in the environment... Thus, forgoing contingency planning is likely to delay an action crisis because of increasing, but unmonitored, risk exposure from a deteriorating environment. [23]

Delayed Negative Feedback

An uncompleted goal prevents production costs from being treated as sunk because they are mentally categorized as investments rather than expenses until evidence overwhelmingly disconfirms the likelihood that they will produce the expected return... If commitment grows with time spent in goal striving, then anything that delays awareness of negative feedback is likely to encourage escalation. For example, sunk costs and time invested are costs of abandonment that grow from delay, further increasing the desirability of outcome attainment for decision makers who do not want to appear wasteful. Additionally, experience is likely to increase over time, making the entrepreneur more likely to believe that he or she can overcome negative feedback and succeed, thereby increasing the likelihood of escalation. [24]

Gain-Loss vs. Net Wealth Framing

Upon having an action crisis, cautious goal strivers are more capable than eager goal strivers of reclassifying the costs of goal pursuit from unrealized to realized losses because their cautious goal striving encourages the use of a net wealth frame used in decision-making as opposed to the gain-loss frame encouraged by eager striving. A gain-loss frame emphasizes what is lost if the entrepreneur fails to achieve the desired outcome... In contrast, a net wealth frame considers these costs in the context of what might also be lost in the entrepreneur is wrong in his decision to consider goal pursuit both in the moment...and over time. [25]

 

5. What Can Entrepreneurs Do?

The fundamental dilemma for any entrepreneur is that their propensity for "eager goal pursuit" is both a source of strength and a potential weakness. The very attitude that will enable them to resist the urge to give up when the going gets tough may also lead them into an unstoppable escalation of commitment. The dogged pursuit of their immediate objectives may then result in catastrophic losses that preclude them from finding alternative means of achieving their overarching vision.

Sadly, this is what happened to Rob Hall and Scott Fischer on Mount Everest in 1996. Presumably caught in the grip of "eager goal pursuit," they ignored or downplayed the deteriorating weather conditions, remained determined to lead their expeditions to the summit on May 10, and ultimately ignored their turnaround time. Among the most experienced mountaineers in the world, both men died in a storm described by Jon Krakauer as "nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had hit two hours later, it's likely nobody would have died." [26]

So if you're an entrepreneur pursuing an ambitious, high-risk venture, what can you do to avoid escalation of commitment? How might you capitalize on your capacity for "eager goal pursuit" while minimizing the possibility that you won't know when to quit? There's no single solution, but the research under discussion here and my work with founder/CEOs over the years suggest a number of potential steps:

Assess the Situation

All entrepreneurs can be subject to escalation of commitment, but certain situational factors can heighten the risk, as highlighted by psychologists Milkman and Kelly [27]:

• Personal responsibility. "An individual is more likely to commit additional resources to a bad investment if she was the one who originally endorsed it." To what extent do you feel personally responsible for the selection, pursuit and achievement of this goal?
• Sunk costs. "The more resources that have been spent on an investment, the more likely a decision maker is to escalate commitment." What costs--not only time, money, and labor, but also mental and emotional energy--have you invested in this goal?
• Proximity to completion. "The closer a project is to completion, the more likely decision makers are to exhibit escalation of commitment." How long have you been pursuing this goal? How close do you think you are to completion?
• Exogenous explanations for failure. "Escalation of commitment is also more pronounced when past investment failures can be blamed on unforeseeable, exogenous events... Any opportunity to blame a setback on an exogenous source helps a decision maker maintain his positive self-concept and the belief that his original decision was valid, increasing the risk of escalation of commitment." What unforeseen events have affected your venture? To what extent do you hold them responsible for the challenges you currently face?

Expand Your Self-Awareness

While an implemental mindset and a promotion focus may increase your determination to pursue your goals, one of the means by which this occurs is through a systematic distortion of the information you pay attention to, the information you ignore, and how you interpret that data. Greater self-awareness in the following areas can help you determine whether the specific distortions you're experiencing are a competitive advantage--or a source of danger:

• Attention management. A theme in my practice is that a leader's attention is their most precious resource--and yet it's both hard to direct and easy to waste, particularly when we're anxious or under stress. What observations can you make about where your attention is being directed, and why?
• How you think. As I've noted before, "leaders generally need longer blocks of uninterrupted time, free from distractions, to think creatively and to augment logical reasoning with intuition and inspiration." What do you know about the conditions that enable--and detract from--your ability to do your best thinking?
• Decision-making. Physician and psychologist Pat Croskerry has highlighted a range of factors that enable us to make better decisions. [28] How well do you understand the factors that help--and hinder--effective decision-making for you?
• Cognitive biases. The distortions induced by "eager goal pursuit" are a form of cognitive bias, a type of mental shortcut that we employ when problem-solving. What biases and heuristics can you identify in your own thinking?

Plan Ahead (and Embrace the Action Crisis)

As McMullen and Kier note, escalation of commitment occurs not at a single moment, but over the course of an extended period of time and is a consequence not of a single act (or a momentary failure to act), but of a series of steps that build upon each other:

The groundwork for escalation is often established long before the actual decision is made... Whether a decision to disengage or persist is made (cost-benefit analysis), depends on when that decision is made--i.e. how early a threat is detected (risk assessment)--which in turn depends on how that decision is made--by predetermined rules or in situ (contingency planning)--which ultimately depends on what information is cognitively accessible to the decision maker (the mindsets employed to manage environmental uncertainty). [29]

Assessing the situation and expanding your self-awareness are best undertaken well before they become necessary, but they remain useful at any point in the journey. And yet it's important to realize that the cumulative impact of a failure to engage in these efforts early on may be to delay an "action crisis"--that crucial juncture when "setbacks have accumulated and failures in making progress towards [your] goal [have become] highly visible." As noted previously, the value of this all-too-painful moment is that it shifts you out of "eager goal pursuit," causing you to stop asking how to achieve your goal, and compels you to ask whether you should continue. In addition to the steps above, you can prevent the deferral of an action crisis via the following:

• Slow down. A theme in my practice is the idea that "The impulse to hurry should often be interpreted as a signal to slow down"--and yet note that the state of "eager goal pursuit" can leave us feeling frantically behind, exacerbating the tendency to rush headlong toward the goal. What regular routines or habitual practices compel you to slow down and take stock?
• Seek out objective viewpoints. As Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, once wrote, "People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner." [30] Do you have trusted advisors who are invested in your personal well-being without being attached to the venture's success or failure?
• Prepare for cognitive dissonance. As I've noted before, entrepreneurs often experience cognitive dissonance because they must maintain "two very different views of the world... They must be exuberant optimists, portraying a compelling vision of a successful future... [And they] must also be keenly aware of the nearly endless list of risk factors and things that could go wrong." What helps you manage the uncomfortable feelings that result from this dissonant state?
• Learn from failure. Yet another theme in my practice is the inevitability of failure, in entrepreneurship and in life, which presents all of us with the same challenge: "See our failures clearly and acknowledge our contributions to the outcome. Study them closely to ensure we don't repeat the same mistakes. And remain sufficiently resilient to keep trying, sometimes over a period of years, while also knowing when to quit and abandon efforts that are unlikely to yield results." In what ways might you put these ideas into practice?

If you're an entrepreneur wrestling with the profoundly difficult question of whether or not to continue on the path, I truly wish you the best.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, page 261 (Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt, 1997)

[2] Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, page 233 (Jon Krakauer, 1997)

[3] Trapped by the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Opportunity Seeking and the Escalation of Commitment in the Mount Everest Disaster, page 667 (Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier, Journal of Business Venturing, 2016). Thanks to Ethan Mollick for the reference to this compelling paper.

[4] Krakauer, pages 261 and 273.

[5] The Traps We Set for Ourselves. For more on optimism and leadership, see Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000) and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).

[6] Ibid. For more on the psychological consequences of excessive optimism, see 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)

[7] McMullen and Kier, page 664.

[8] Escalation of Commitment (Katherine Milkman and Theresa Kelly), pages 256-259 in the Encyclopedia of Management Theory (Eric Kessler, editor, 2013)

[9] For more on escalation of commitment, in addition to the McMullen & Kier and Milkman & Kelly papers cited above see Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action (Barry Staw, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1976), The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action (Barry Staw, The Academy of Management Review, 1981), and Escalation of Commitment in Individual and Group Decision Making (Max Bazerman, et al, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1984)

[10] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, pages 57-77 (Robert Cialdini, 2006, 2nd edition)

[11] Milkman and Kelly.

[12] "A Perspective on Entrepreneurship," page 9 (Howard Stevenson, Chapter 1 in New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur, 1998, 5th edition)

[13] Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes: 'Avoid Backup Plans' (Deborah Petersen, Inc., 2015)

[14] Mindset Theory of Action Phases (Peter Gollwitzer, Chapter 25 in Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, Volume One, Paul van Lange, Arie Kruglanski and E. Tory Higgins, editors, 2012). Also see Action Phases and Mind-Sets (Peter Gollwitzer, Chapter 2 in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, Volume Two, E. Tory Higgins and Richard Sorrentino, editors, 1990)

[15] Beyond Pleasure and Pain (E. Tory Higgins, American Psychologist, 1997). Also see Promotion and Prevention: Regulatory Focus as a Motivational Principle (E. Tory Higgins, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1998)

[16] Crossing the Entrepreneurial Rubicon: A Longitudinal Investigation, pages 1058-1059 (Servane Delanoë-Gueguen and Alain Fayolle, Journal of Small Business Management, 2019)

[17] Entrepreneurial mindset shift and the role of cycles of learning, page 11 (Matthew Lynch and Andrew Corbett, Journal of Small Business Management, 2021)

[18] Regulatory focus theory and the entrepreneurial process, page 203 (Joel Brockner, E. Tory Higgins and Murray Low, Journal of Business Venturing, 2004)

[19] McMullen and Kier, page 672.

[20] Action crisis and cost-benefit thinking: A cognitive analysis of a goal-disengagement phase, page 544 (Veronika Brandstätter and Julia Schüler, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012)

[21] Ibid, page 550.

[22] McMullen and Kier, page 677.

[23] Ibid, pages 678-679.

[24] Ibid, page 679.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Krakauer, page 354.

[27] Milkman and Kelly, pages 257-258.

[28] The theory and practice of clinical decision-making (Pat Croskerry, Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, 2005)

[29] McMullen and Kier, pages 677, 679.

[30] Only the Paranoid Survive, page 92 (Andy Grove, 1996)

 

For Further Reading

To expand your self-awareness:

• Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
• How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
• Pat Croskerry on Effective Decision-Making
• When Heuristics Go Bad

To prepare for and embrace the action crisis:

• The Importance of Slowing Down
• Investment vs. Attachment
• The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO
• The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

 

Photo by Rick McCharles.

Compasses and Weathervanes (30 Questions for Leaders)

Compasses point true north and help us stay on our chosen path, no matter what's happening around us. They're not disrupted by environmental changes--but they can't tell us anything about those changes, and sometimes that's important information. Weathervanes are buffeted by the wind, turning to and fro and occasionally spinning in circles. They can't guide us to a destination, but they can tell us a lot about how difficult the trip might be, what we might encounter along the way, and if we should be traveling at all.

The compass is a popular metaphor for leadership--we value its steadfastness and reliability, and we want our leaders to exhibit those same qualities. The weathervane sometimes symbolizes bad leadership--we're skeptical of leaders who are too easily swayed and seem to lack conviction. But the most effective leaders integrate aspects of both: They have a clearly defined perspective, a set of values they strive to uphold, and the courage to make hard choices and unpopular decisions. But they're also aware of prevailing sentiments in their environment, open to alternative points of view, and able to adapt when necessary.

So the question isn't "What kind of leader should I be?" but rather "What kind of leadership is called for at this moment--and am I capable of summoning it?"

Perspective

1. What are the most important issues I face as a leader?
2. What are the most important issues we face as an organization?
3. What do I think should be done?
4. How well do my colleagues understand my point of view?
5. When I've been misunderstood, how have I contributed to the misunderstanding?

Values

6. What do I stand for as a leader?
7. How clearly have I articulated these values to others?
8. How accurately could my colleagues describe my values if necessary?
9. How do my values guide my behavior and influence my decisions?
10. The last time a value became a disadvantage, what sacrifices did I make to uphold it?

Courage

11. How do I determine "the right thing to do" in a given situation?
12. What role does the opinion of others play in this process?
13. What happens when I encounter resistance from a powerful figure?
14. What happens when I encounter resistance from a crowd?
15. The last time I had to stand alone, what did I do?

Awareness

16. How do I learn what people around me are thinking and feeling?
17. How often do I update this data?
18. How often am I surprised by what I learn?
19. Do people volunteer their views to me, or do I have to solicit them?
20. If I have to solicit someone's views, how might I be making them reluctant to volunteer?

Openness

21. How often do I hear points of view that differ from my own?
22. How direct and candid are people when they disagree with me?
23. How do I respond to them when that happens?
24. How would the people who disagree with me characterize these interactions?
25. When did someone last disagree with me in public?

Adaptability

26. How do I know when a change is needed?
27. How do I know when a change is overdue?
28. When I've resisted an overdue change, how did I justify the delay?
29. When did I last I change my mind in public?
30. When did I last I admit that I was wrong in public?

 

---

For Further Reading

Importance vs. Urgency

Developing Your Professional Vision

Courage Isn't Confidence

What Do Great Leaders Do?

How Leaders Overcome Adversity

Why Change Is Hard

Photos: Compass by Piqsels. Weathervane by Geograph.

Power Struggles Among Nice People

Most of my clients are CEOs of growing companies, most of the rest are C-level executives in similar settings, and a number of others are leaders in investment or professional services firms. In order to be effective in these roles they must be able to influence others, wield authority, and maintain status. At the same time my clients are conscientious people who care about the well-being of their employees and colleagues, aspire to make a positive difference in the world, and are striving to do their best.

As a result of these factors, a theme in my practice is what I describe as "power struggles among nice people." And yet a challenge is that many of us imagine that people who engage in power struggles aren't very nice, and that nice people shouldn't struggle for power. This leaves us with a stark choice: Be an asshole and win, or be a decent person and lose--but it doesn't have to be that way.

1. The Ubiquity of Power Struggles

We often think of a power struggle as a rancorous, zero-sum battle between bitter enemies, but that's just one version, and it's relatively rare. Far more common are the everyday efforts noted above: influencing others, wielding authority, maintaining status. Consider how often we engage in these activities every single day, and how infrequently we employ formal decision-making frameworks or conflict-resolution tools in the process. From this perspective we can define a power struggle in much less charged terms: any situation in which the parties must assert themselves to overcome resistance and achieve their preferred outcome.

There are no cartoon villains and few outsized expressions of force in these everyday power struggles. As I've noted before, force and power are not the same thing--force is "strength or energy as an attribute of action," while power as "the ability to produce an effect." [1] Most power struggles are rather mundane affairs, and in this sense we might think of them as the "dark matter" of organizational life--they affect almost everything but escape observation unless we're paying close attention. [2]

Why are power struggles so common? There's certainly a connection with our origins as a species. Primates rely on social structures to obtain resources and to defeat or evade threats, and humans possess the singular advantage of being able to cooperate in larger groups than our evolutionary rivals. [3] This has allowed us to dominate the planet, but as a consequence we face much greater competition from within the group, and we've had to develop a complex set of social skills to assert our preferences while minimizing intra-group conflict. [4] A similar pattern of constant, non-violent power struggles can be observed in the chimpanzee, which, notably, is the only other species of great ape whose social groups include multiple males that co-exist in a shifting dominance hierarchy. [5]

But we may wonder why humans continue to rely on informal displays of power to accomplish these goals. Why don't we utilize the other decision-making frameworks and conflict-resolution tools that we've developed more frequently? Because power struggles are often more effective than those alternatives.

2. The Desirability of Power Struggles

When defined as "zero-sum battles between bitter rivals," power struggles are obviously undesirable. Such efforts waste time and resources, cause needless division, and serve as distractions from more productive activities. But when we recognize a broader definition, it becomes apparent that power struggles are more efficient or less costly than the alternatives, which generally fall into one of three categories: voting, consensus, and hierarchy.

Voting is possible only under a highly specific set of circumstances: Decision-making authority can be fairly apportioned by vote, whether by person, ownership share, or some other method. All parties agree that a decision must be made at a certain point in time, after which further efforts to influence the outcome will be counter-productive. And the most powerful parties can be trusted to abide by the outcome when a vote doesn't go their way. We can easily see why voting is used so rarely in organizational life--although it's worth noting that votes are preceded by campaigns to win support in which expressions of power may figure heavily.

Consensus also comes with necessary preconditions: All parties must reach agreement in order to move forward, and even the least powerful figure has the authority to withhold approval. Complicating matters is the contemporary preference for the appearance of egalitarianism, which often results in a half-hearted attempt at obtaining consensus that inevitably stalls, at which point the most powerful party pulls rank and dispenses with the charade, resulting in a full-blown power struggle. But even in an authentic attempt to reach consensus, the discussions and debates that comprise the process are themselves a type of power struggle.

While there are companies, industries, and even parts of the world where hierarchy remains a primary means of decision-making and conflict resolution, that's not the case in my clients' organizations. To a large extent this is the result of two related trends in management over the past century: the increasing importance of the "knowledge worker" [6] and the move away from centralized command-and-control structures. [7] My clients and almost all of their employees and colleagues are knowledge workers of one sort or another, and in this context the leader who merely issues directives will eventually a price. Knowledge workers put a high value on latitude and autonomy, and they have a low tolerance for being repeatedly overruled.

But while leaders might refrain from relying explicitly on hierarchy to avoid alienating their employees, this isn't to suggest that hierarchy is absent or irrelevant. Hierarchical distinctions are a constant presence even in the flattest organizations [8], and parties engaged in a power struggle may exploit any such advantages in their efforts to prevail. But the subtle use of a hierarchical distinction while conducting a power struggle is very different than a dictatorial command. In these settings, most directives imposed via hierarchy can be viewed as the outcomes of failed power struggles, in which the leader had hoped to avoid "giving an order." [9]

So we see that alternative means of decision-making and conflict-resolution come with constraints that render them impractical in many circumstances, and that even when such means are employed the process typically involves a series of power struggles. Given these conditions, we might imagine that anyone who aspires to succeed as a leader would be ready to engage in power struggles on a regular basis--and yet that's not always the case. Many leaders in my practice report feeling surprised when power struggles occur, resentful of the obligation to participate in them, and depleted by the demands of the process. Why is this? What prevents these leaders from being better prepared for and more effective at engaging in this fundamental feature of organizational life?

3. The Problem with Nice People

As noted above, my clients can be characterized as "high-achieving nice people," and in my experience many nice people are uncomfortable with displays of power and put a premium on maintaining interpersonal harmony, which puts them at a disadvantage when they're obligated to assert themselves and overcome resistance in order to obtain a desired outcome. Further, if they continue to emphasize personal achievement over cultivating power and influence, they eventually limit their professional success.

To understand why, we turn to the work of the eminent 20th-century psychologist David McClelland, one of the leading scholars on human motivation, who theorized that people are driven primarily by three distinct needs [10]:

• The need for achievement, or "doing something better for its own sake, or to show [that one] is more capable of doing something." [11]
• The need for power, or concern "about having 'impact, control, or influence over another person, group, or the world at large.'" [12]
• The need for affiliation, "or the need to be with people" and a concern with "establishing, maintaining, or restoring a positive affective relationship with another person or persons." [13]

McClelland also studied people's capacity for "activity inhibition," or impulse control, and his research showed that the most successful senior leaders display 1) a relatively high need for power, 2) a relatively low need for affiliation, and 3) a high degree of impulse control, a distinctive pattern that he called "leadership motive syndrome." McClelland found that people who possessed this combination of traits were most likely to obtain senior leadership positions, ultimately outpacing those who merely had a high need for achievement. [14]

The latter group's focus on improved performance and desire for personal feedback helped them succeed at the outset of their careers, but limited their effectiveness at scale when results must be obtained not merely through individual effort but through the ability to lead others, and when feedback cycles are long and unpredictable. [15] In addition, McClelland noted that people with a high need for affiliation often have shortcomings as leaders as they strive to avoid conflict and prioritize warm relationships. [16]

These conclusions pose some significant challenges for "nice high-achievers":

• Nice people underestimate the importance of power and influence in long-term success at senior levels.
• They overestimate the importance of personal achievement and being liked.
• A consequent reluctance to engage in everyday power struggles prevents them from learning how to display power and exert influence effectively.

But a deeper understanding of this research makes clear that "nice people" aren't doomed to underachieve--and even possess several key advantages.

4. The Opportunity for Nice People

Let's highlight the relative dimension of McClelland's "leadership motive syndrome." It's not the case that effective senior leaders must possess the greatest possible need for power, or that a high need for affiliation is an inherent barrier to a senior role. The point is simply that their need for power must be relatively higher than their need for affiliation--in other words, senior leaders can't allow a desire to be liked or a preference for harmony to prevent them from displaying power or exerting influence when necessary.

Further, note the importance of impulse control in the most effective senior leaders. An alternative pattern of traits identified by McClelland was 1) a high need for power, 2) a low need for affiliation, and 3) a low degree of impulse control, which he called "conquistador syndrome." [17] Leaders who exhibit this pattern may enjoy some success, but their self-aggrandizing displays of power limit their effectiveness at senior levels, as McClelland and his colleague David Burnham concluded in a summary of their research:

The top manager of a company must possess a high need for power--that is, a concern for influencing people. However, this need must be disciplined and controlled so that it is directed toward the benefit of the institution as a whole and not toward the manager's personal aggrandizement... We discovered one more fact in studying the better managers... They were more mature. Mature people can be most simply described as less egotistic. Somehow their positive self-image is not at stake in their jobs. They are less defensive, more willing to seek advice from experts, and have a longer-range view. [18]

Put differently, the most successful senior leaders have a substantial capacity for emotion regulation. [19] They don't allow fleeting feelings to translate into counter-productive behavior. As McClelland noted, people with a high need for power think about "carrying out a number of impulsive aggressive acts...but they did not in fact do them more often" than people with a low need for power. [20] And nice people typically share that capacity for emotion regulation (even if it's often put to use in efforts to generate warmth and evoke positive feelings in others.)

Finally, observations from my practice suggest that nice people are likely to rank high on two dimensions of "emotional style" identified by neuroscientist Richard Davidson that are relevant here: 1) context-sensitivity, or the ability to grasp what will be perceived as appropriate in a given situation and tailor one's behavior accordingly, and 2) social intuition, or the ability to assess others' mental and emotional states on the basis of body language, tone of voice, and similar data. [21]

In sum, while nice people may have to overcome some self-imposed obstacles in order to engage in everyday power struggles, they're also likely to possess several characteristics that will enable them to be more effective in the process. So if you identify with this description--if you're a "nice high-achiever"--where do you go from here?

5. Putting It Into Practice

A note on social identity, including, but not limited to, gender and orientation, race and ethnicity, education and class background: I'm keenly aware that in many settings the behaviors that convey power and influence are historically associated with people who already hold power and influence. I realize that if you don't match that description in your organizational context you may well face additional obstacles when your efforts to exert power and influence run counter to the expectations imposed upon you as a result of your social identity. That said, I'm equally aware that merely conforming to those expectations is a likely path to frustration and underachievement. When we're not in a position to change the surrounding culture, one of the key steps is determining how to conform just enough to that culture to avoid being rejected by it while also ensuring that the culture doesn't dictate our behavior to our disadvantage--which is a challenge I've addressed with many "nice high-achievers" in my practice over the years. [22]

Our needs for achievement, power and affiliation are informed by a range of sources, from our family environments as children to our education and professional training to the culture at large. But if we determine that our current needs are resulting in behaviors that make it more difficult to achieve our goals, we can change our approach with a degree of self-awareness, deliberate effort, and practice over time. (McClelland noted the efficacy of management training workshops in helping leaders modify their styles and deliver improved results. [23])

It's also evident to me from my years as a coach and experiential educator that we can (and must) distinguish between our personal preferences and what is being asked of us in a given situation, and that effective leaders consistently get out of their comfort zone to experiment with new behaviors, even (and especially) when such efforts feel awkward or inauthentic. If you identify as a "nice high-achiever," I suspect that being more assertive to overcome resistance and obtain your desired outcome will feel uncomfortable--and I'm absolutely certain that you needn't allow such feelings to stand in your way. I'm hopeful that this reading provides a useful starting point in that process--and it's just a starting point. What's next?

Consider your beliefs about power and influence and how they affect your approach to everyday power struggles:

• Self-Awareness, Empowerment and Choice [PDF] (Patricia Day Williams, Chapter 7.10 in Reading Book for Human Relations Training, edited by Alfred Cooke, Michael Brazzel, Argentine Saunders Craig and Barbara Greig, 1999)
• Interpersonal Power
• Corn Mazes and Mental Models

Learn more about the means by which power and influence are displayed and the behaviors that convey power and influence:

• Force Isn't Power
• Weather Systems (Power, Charisma and Leadership)
• The Value of a Good Fight
• Power Play (Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harvard Business Review, 2010)
• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2010)
• Political Skill at Work: How to Influence, Motivate and Win Support (Gerald Ferris, Sherry Davidson and Pamela Perrewé, 2005 / 2nd edition, 2020)
• Harnessing the Science of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2001)
• The Language of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2008)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, 1984 / 3rd edition, 2021)
• Why It Pays to Be a Jerk (Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, 2015)

Actively experiment with alternative approaches, especially any that feel uncomfortable or inauthentic:

• Attitude and Behavior
• Conscious Competence In Practice
• Why Change Is Hard
• Comfort with Discomfort
• Leadership and Authenticity
• The Tyranny of Feelings

Get regular feedback and integrate it into your ongoing efforts:

• Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful
• Learning How to Learn

 

Dedicated to Jeffrey Pfeffer.

I didn't take Jeff's class "Paths to Power" when I was an MBA student at Stanford, but I discovered his work on power as a coach and it deeply informed not only my work with clients, but also my teaching when I later joined the Stanford faculty and became a junior colleague to Jeff. It's my understanding that I'm the only faculty member who ever taught Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely") and included Jeff's work on my syllabus, in part because I believe the course's T-groups are one of the best settings in which we can learn about power.

---

Footnotes

[1] Force Isn't Power

[2] What Is Dark Matter? (Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com, 2019)

[3] Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates (Robin Dunbar, Journal of Human Evolution, 1992)

[4] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, page 32 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

[5] Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes pages 104-105 (Franz de Waal, 2007). My understanding of De Waal's work suggests that while chimpanzee power struggles can turn violent and occasionally prove fatal, the vast majority involve dominance displays and the re-shuffling of hierarchical relationships rather than the elimination of rivals.

[6] The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Peter Drucker, 1966): "Today...the large knowledge organization is the central reality. Modern society is a society of large organized institutions. In every one of them...the center of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker... The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped." (pages 3-4)

[7] Beyond Theory Y (John Morse and Jay Lorsch, Harvard Business Review, 1970): "With highly uncertain tasks that require more extensive problem solving...organizations that are less formalized and emphasize self-control and member participation in decision making are more effective."

[8] Organizational Preferences and Their Consequences (Deborah Gruenfeld and Larissa Tiedens, Chapter 33 in the Handbook of Social Psychology, 2010): "The production of hierarchy is a central and omnipresent component of organizing."

[9] Leaders sometimes express a desire to operate in a more hierarchical environment where they could just "issue orders, like in the military." But I once asked a Navy SEAL officer how often he had given an order overriding a subordinate's dissent. "Twice," he said, "in thirteen years." Here, too, I'm reminded of a comment from Frans de Waal's research on chimpanzees, cited above, in which he notes that high-ranking members of a group seldom show their teeth in aggressive displays, presumably because they don't need to. (page 21)

[10] For an extensive discussion of each of these needs, see Human Motivation, Chapters 7-9 (David McClelland, 1987). Having developed his "motivational needs theory" around these three drives in the 1960s and '70s, later in his career McClelland suggested that a fourth such drive is the "avoidance motive," characterized by a fear of failure and a need to minimize anxiety and reduce distress (and discussed in Human Motivation, Chapter 10.) However, while McClelland's research on leadership identifies a relationship among the first three needs, he doesn't integrate the avoidance motive in the same way, nor is it included in most discussions of his theory, so I've omitted it here as well.

[11] Ibid, page 229.

[12] Ibid, page 271. (McClelland cites a definition made by his colleague and former student David Winter: The Power Motive, 1973.)

[13] Ibid, page 347. (McClelland cites a definition made by his longtime collaborator John Atkinson with Roger Heyns and Joseph Veroff: The effect of experimental arousal of the affiliation motive on thematic apperception, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1954.)

[14] Ibid, page 313:

"By way of contrast, those with high n Achievement peaked in their careers [earlier]. The nonlinear trend is significant. The explanation seems to lie in the fact that individuals high in n Achievement are used to doing things by themselves and for themselves... They are able to advance in the company as long as their job involves the individual contributions they make. However, at higher levels the focus on the job shifts to influencing others. The greater success of those with the leadership motive syndrome at this level can be explained on the grounds that they are interested in influencing others (the high n Power score), they are not unduly concerned about whether they are liked or not (the low n Affiliation score), and they are self controlled (the high Activity Inhibition score)."

[15] Ibid, page 254.

[16] Ibid, pages 354-355.

[17] Ibid, page 312.

[18] Power Is the Great Motivator (David McClelland and David Burnham, Harvard Business Review, originally written 1976, revised 1995, republished 2003.)

[19] The Tyranny of Feelings

[20] Human Motivation, page 281.

[21] 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)

[22] Conform to the Culture Just Enough

[23] "Power Is the Great Motivator" (McClelland and Burnham)

Photo by KAZ Vorpal.

Your 360 Report Is Ready

You're a senior leader who's initiated or agreed to participate in a 360-degree feedback assessment, with input from your direct reports and other colleagues, including (if applicable) peers, Board members, investors and other stakeholders. A coach or consultant has conducted a series of interviews with your feedback providers and distilled and edited their responses, or perhaps the qualitative feedback was entered directly by your providers and will be shared with you unedited.

If your 360 also included a quantitative component, your providers rated your capabilities on a number of items on a multi-point scale, and your feedback will be compared with others' to illustrate perceived strengths and weaknesses. Your ratings will probably be compared with those for all the leaders in your company who participated in the process, but the 360 provider may also have a larger data set derived from other organizations to provide a baseline.

You've just learned that your 360 report is ready, and you're about to review it for the first time. What can you expect? I no longer conduct 360 assessments, but I have in the past, and today I often work with clients to help them make sense of their reports. Here are four themes that characterize the 360 reports I've observed over the years:

1. It will be full of negative feedback and criticism.

It's typical for 360 reviews to be conducted in organizations where feedback is relatively infrequent, occurring at lengthy intervals in the context of formal processes, rather than on an as-needed basis in normal conversations. Anonymous 360s are often proposed as a way to navigate around a reluctance to share feedback more freely or discomfort with face-to-face dialogue. As a result, negative feedback is stored up instead of being discharged, which gives it more force and intensity when it finally finds expression in a 360. Further, in a 360 a number of separate incidents and situations are often distilled into a single comment, which can take the form of global criticism, rather than thoughtful critique, to use a distinction derived from the work of psychologist John Gottman: "[Criticism] is different than offering a critique or voicing a complaint. The latter two are about specific issues, whereas the former is an ad hominem attack: it is an attack on [the other person] at the core." [1]

2. It will have positive feedback as well, which you will discount or ignore.

One of the most reliable patterns in human psychology is the strength and duration of negative emotions and the relatively weak, fleeting nature of positive emotions. [2] This clearly benefits us as a species--evolution has selected for this response because it focuses our attention on potential threats and keeps us safe from harm--but at the individual level it also imposes a cost. We have to work much harder to acknowledge or even notice forms of appreciation and encouragement. As a consequence of this dynamic, every single time I've reviewed a 360 report with an executive they've rushed through all of the positive feedback it contains, or ignored it entirely, and focused almost exclusively on the negative.

3. If you have peers who provided feedback, they'll be the most negative.

This is a function of hierarchy and the role it plays in our working relationships. Even in relatively flat organizations, we consistently establish hierarchies--research psychologists Deborah Gruenfeld and Larissa Tiedens have noted that "the production of hierarchy is a central and omnipresent component of organizing." [3] We typically make a greater effort to regulate our behavior when interacting with someone who's more senior or junior to us in a hierarchy, and when a conflict occurs across a hierarchical boundary, the shared knowledge that the senior figure may choose to resolve the dispute by exerting their authority usually limits the extent of the struggle. In contrast, we're less regulated with people who occupy the same level in a hierarchy, and we often lack clarity on how to settle conflicts with peers, resulting in more rivalries and rancor. A predictable consequence of these factors is that 360 feedback from peers is more critical than feedback from superiors or subordinates. Executives are often surprised by this and may even feel betrayed because they view some of their peers as friends--and yet this, too, is a result of the relaxed boundaries and broader range of emotional expression that we allow ourselves with peers.

4. The feedback will focus on your agency to the exclusion of other factors.

In other words, you'll be portrayed as responsible for all of the problems cited in the report. (This will be more pronounced if you're the CEO, but it will be a theme in your report no matter what your title.) This is the result of another aspect of human psychology, a cognitive bias known as the "fundamental attribution error" which leads us to ascribe greater causality to individuals than to situational factors. [4] But this bias is heightened by the construct of the 360 itself, in which you're positioned as the player on the field and your feedback providers are positioned as "objective observers." What this framing fails to take into account is that the "observers" are also players, whose actions have shaped and influenced your own--but don't expect your feedback providers to take responsibility for their contributions, because being asked to provide feedback to someone else rarely prompts self-reflection.

So you've read your 360 report. Now what? What should you do with it?

Digest It

Most people initially have a negative response to their 360 report. This can be confusing, because in contemporary business culture we're so often told, "Feedback is a gift." And yet in my experience much feedback is stressful and unwelcome--some gift! The key is recognizing that all feedback, including your 360 report, is data. [5] And as you would with any data, you have to separate the noise from the signal. This is the essence of my commentary above--there's plenty of noise in your report, but there's also some very valuable signal. The task is to identify and focus on the latter without being overwhelmed by the former.

Specifically, be sure to thoroughly review and fully acknowledge the positive feedback in your report--it may be even more useful to you than the negative feedback, as the great management thinker Peter Drucker noted:

Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. Concentration should be on areas of high competence and high skill. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. [6]

Acknowledge It

Reviewing your report may feel like the end of the process, but it's really just the beginning. Once you've digested it, the next step will be to talk about it. This may seem paradoxical--didn't you go through the trouble of an anonymous 360 to avoid having these awkward conversations? That may have been the original plan, but organizations make a huge mistake when they imagine that leaders will read their 360 reports and magically transform themselves without any messy dialogue. The real value of a 360 report is in providing a shared data set and a common starting point for a series of conversations, and while these conversations won't necessarily be easy, they can be made less stressful. [7]

In many cases this process begins with the person who interviewed your feedback providers. They'll be able to clarify any ambiguous remarks and provide additional color. But there are limits to what you can accomplish here, especially if you feel inclined to argue with them about what you perceive as flaws or shortcomings in the report. Once they've answered your questions and provided some further context, stop. Don't argue with them. Go talk to the people whose perspective matters most--your feedback providers and other stakeholders:

• One-on-one: At the very least, I highly recommend meeting individually with each of your feedback providers to discuss your report. This will require a significant investment of time, but it will be the best way to separate the signal from the noise, because it will be easier for both parties to speak candidly. These conversations may still feel risky, but that's actually a reason to have them. [8]
• In a small group: Also consider meeting jointly with a subset of your feedback providers, typically your direct reports. This may also feel risky, even daunting, but it will be a unique opportunity to model how to respond to feedback, which will make it easier when you have critical feedback for them. [9] It will also create an opening for the other members of the group to consider their contributions to the problems identified in your 360.
• In larger settings: Finally, it may be advisable to share some remarks with a larger group that includes people who didn't provide feedback but still have a stake in your performance in some way. If you're a CEO or a functional leader this could be at an all-hands or an offsite, which is one of the most effective ways to build a feedback-rich culture. [10]

Respond to It

In whatever settings you choose to acknowledge the feedback you've received in your 360, it will be necessary to also respond to it by indicating what will happen--and what will not happen--as a result. Once again, positive feedback is often overlooked here, so be sure to articulate what you'll continue to do (or do even more of) in response. It's harder to determine how to respond to the negative feedback, but you don't need to agree with it or treat it like a set of obligatory duties. That's a sure path to overwhelm and resentment. But it's essential to avoid responding defensively or to reject it out of hand. Instead, recognize that every piece of negative feedback contains a request for change and that all change carries a cost. With that as a guideline, you can distinguish among the following:

• Easy changes you're happy to make: Your 360 report undoubtedly includes negative feedback on certain behaviors or aspects of your management style that you're not attached to and can modify without undue effort. Remind people that we all have blind spots, and they don't need to wait for a 360 review to give you similar feedback in the future.
• Hard changes you're willing to attempt: Your report probably also includes negative feedback on behaviors or aspects of your style that feel more deeply rooted or will be more difficult to change. Invite people to partner with you in this process, by offering help, support and understanding, and possibly by taking some responsibility for their contributions to the issue.
• Changes that will be too difficult or costly to undertake: By no means should you feel compelled to accede to all of the negative feedback in your report. Some of the changes people are asking for will either impose an intolerable burden on you or will prevent you from accomplishing your goals as a leader. But bear in mind that they're requesting these changes because these behaviors or aspects of your style are imposing a cost on them. You need not grant their request or agree with their point of view, but you can empathize with it. [11]

 

This is a companion piece to The Problem with Anonymous Feedback.

---

Footnotes

[1] The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling (Ellie Lisitsa, The Gottman Institute, 2013)

[2] Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Roy Bauermeister, Catrin Finkenauer, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001)

[3] Organizational Preferences and Their Consequences (Deborah Gruenfeld and Larissa Tiedens, Chapter 33 in the Handbook of Social Psychology, 2010)

[4] The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (Lee Ross, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1977)

[5] Feedback Is Not a Gift

[6] "Managing Oneself," Chapter 6 in Management Challenges for the 21st Century (Peter Drucker, 2001)

[7] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

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

[9] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

[10] Building a Feedback-Rich Culture

[11] Accountability and Empathy (Are Not Mutually Exclusive)

Image by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Skating Lessons (Advice from an Olympic Champion)

Ben LeBlanc, founder of Good Stock Soups and a coaching client, recently referred me to How to Skate a 10K, by Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel, an Olympic gold-medal winner and world record holder. [1] It includes a great deal of information that's only of interest to aspiring speed skaters (including a detailed training regimen that fills a 33-page spreadsheet!) But it also contains several passages that are relevant to anyone who's serious about their profession. I've reproduced them below and appended a set of related questions:

KISS - Keep it simple, stupid

My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not control. I did not become reliant on equipment that I could not easily access. I did not make plans that I did not understand. I did not follow a culture of buying a bike too expensive to bring about in the rain. To me speedskating was just a one legged squat, repeated over and over during maximum heart rate. It was all just very simple and I kept it that way. [2]

• How might you simplify your work?
• Where have you created or tolerated unnecessary complications?
• What is within your control? What is not within your control?
• What are you pretending to control?
• What expensive tools are getting in your way?
• What is the most basic repeatable motion?

Creating an environment, part 1

My job as an athlete was simple: set myself up for success. I could not control all aspects of the outcome of the competitions. But the things I could control I made sure to give an effort to control, at least to the extent I was willing to go to. I believed that the more stress stimulus I could give my body through training the more my body would develop. But the thing is, I could only withstand a certain level of total stress in my life. If I had problems in my life outside of training this would increase the total amount of stress on me and so I had to drop the amount of training I could perform, in order to drop the total stress volume to a comprehensible level. So, therefore, in order to be able to train at a high level I also needed a good social environment. [3]

• What enhances your capacity to tolerate stress?
  
• What diminishes that capacity?
• What stressors in other domains of life are undermining your work?
• To what extent are you tolerating stressors you could eliminate?

Creating an environment, part 2

I tried to only work with people I liked, I was fortunate enough to be able to choose this to some extent. Also, I always aimed to solve problems as soon as they occurred in order not to ache and waste energy on things not worthy of my attention. I was the one held responsible for solving those problems, even though my friends, family, coach etc. would help me. But since I held myself responsible for the solution to resolve itself, I wasn’t able to be upset that other people had not solved my problems for me. In this manner, I didn’t get stressed over other people not doing their job properly (or the way I wanted them to) and I had more energy to spend on training. I held myself responsible for setting myself up for success, but whether or not I succeeded in the end was not only up to me. I didn’t consider losing honorably a waste of time either. Since losing didn’t scare me too much, I was relaxed and could take on even more stress and more training. [4]

• What do you like about the people you're working with?
• If you're not working with people you like, why?
• What problems are you allowing to linger?
• How are you asking other people for help?
• How are you blaming other people?
• If you weren't scared, what would you do?

Creating an environment, part 3

I aimed to lower the resistance as much as possible, by creating a smooth environment, free of hassle. It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit. I wasn’t proud when I hated my session because I knew that in the long run I risked starting to drop hours if they weren’t fun enough. Doing boring sessions I considered to be a failure of making the training stimulating. I assessed this issue. For example, I hated bike trainer rides, so I bought Gore-tex clothing, mudflaps and spike tires (for the winter); I did not enjoy running in the fields, so I moved to the mountains. I set myself up for success by regarding my weaknesses. [5]

• Where is there resistance? What could be made smoother?
  
• What makes work fun? What would make it more fun?
• What are your weaknesses? What weaknesses are you hiding from?
• If you couldn't hide from those weaknesses, what would you do?
  

Being serious enough

It’s obvious at this point that I considered my performance to be altered by numerous different factors. I realized this in my early teens. However, back then I put lots of effort in trying to control all these factors and it drained me of energy and motivation. Then, very unexpectedly, I won the junior world championships and I came to realize that the award was not worth the cost. I felt like I had turned every stone and struggled so hard which had totally drained me of my motivation. When I was 18 years old I was going purely on autopilot. A few years later I accepted that my motivation is not infinite, but rather finite. Some efforts helped me approach my goals very rapidly while other efforts, also helping me fulfill my goals, did it a lot slower and not as efficiently. Some of these actions inspired me to take on even harder challenges, they increased my motivation! But some of them drained me of motivation instead. My entire training program was predicated on a foundation of inner motivation. If it ran out I could no longer keep up the hard work. Therefore I did not only evaluate my training, food, sleeping [and] living strategy on how successful it was, but also on how it made me feel and what it did to my motivation. The Olympic season of 2022 I was very dedicated to reach high goals and live up to a high standard on the competitive stage. But other years having fun was a lot more important as that made me want to keep on going, and to achieve big goals I had to keep on going. Therefore, even though it was sub-optimal considering my physical development, most of the time, for the sake of my long term inner motivation to keep up, I was just serious enough about being an athlete. [6]

• What awards are you striving for?
• What is the cost of your regimen?
• What practices boost your motivation?
• What practices demotivate you?
• Are you having enough fun? If not, why not?
• What would "just serious enough" look like for you?

 

Thanks to Nils van der Poel for the advice and to Ben LeBlanc for the pointer.

---

Footnotes

[1] How to Skate a 10K (Nils van der Poel, 2022)

[2] Ibid, page 18.

[3] Ibid, page 23.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, pages 27-28.

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

Resources for Managing Up

Although my clients are typically senior leaders, over the years I've worked with many people at earlier stages of their careers who had to "manage up" effectively--and even the leaders I work with face similar challenges in some of their relationships with their boards, investors and other stakeholders. I was recently asked to recommend some resources in this area--the list below is by no means comprehensive, but I think it's a useful starting point.

What we call "managing up" usually involves better understanding and being more effective at dealing with power dynamics, influence, culture and emotion regulation. (Note that by "regulation" I don't mean "suppression"--I mean being deliberate and thoughtful about how we express emotion in order to better accomplish our goals.)

1. Power Dynamics

I've learned much about power from my Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer:

• Power Play (Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harvard Business Review, 2007)
• Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2010)

Here's some of my work that incorporates Jeff's perspective:

• Force Isn't Power
• Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)

Psychologist David McClelland's "motivational needs theory" is very illuminating in this context:

• Power is the Great Motivator (David McClelland and David Burnham, Harvard Business Review, 2003)

Here's are two posts of mine on the same topic:

• Power Struggles Among Nice People
• McClelland and Burnham on Power and Management

Physician and organizational consultant Patricia Day Williams offers another useful perspective:

• Self-Awareness, Empowerment and Choice [PDF] (Patricia Day Williams, Chapter 7.10 in NTL's Reading Book for Human Relations Training, 1999)

And here's a post of mine that discusses Day Williams' work:

• Interpersonal Power

Other related posts of mine:

• Weather Systems (Power, Charisma and Leadership)
• Competence Isn't Power
• Three Definitions of Power

 

---

2. Influence

I continue to find the framework first developed in the 1970s by Arizona State psychologist Robert Cialdini the most compelling and useful way of thinking about influence:

• Principles of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini)
• Harnessing the Science of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2001)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, 2021, 3rd ed. / 1984, 1st ed.)
• The Language of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2008)
• The Uses (and Abuses) of Influence (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2013)

Here Jerry Useem, the longtime Senior Editor-at-Large of Fortune and previously a Research Associate at HBS, draws on research by Pfeffer, Wharton's Adam Grant, and others--ignore the silly headline, which is just clickbait and doesn't accurately represent Useem's point of view:

• Why It Pays to Be a Jerk (Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, 2015)

It's vitally important to exert influence effectively in a negotiation. As I've noted to clients countless times, we don't get what we deserve, we get what we negotiate:

• List-Price vs. Haggling (Culture, Compensation and Negotiation)
• Negotiating with Your Own Side

We begin to wield influence--or fail to--at the moment we first express interest in the role, well before our first day on the job:

• It's Time to Stop Interviewing

 

---

3. Culture

First, what do we mean by culture? Author and management educator Michael Watkins offers a useful definition:

• Consistent, observable patterns of behavior.
• A process of "sense-making."
• A carrier of meaning.
• A social control system.
• A form of protection evolved from situational pressures.

Watkins' article and a related piece by management thinker Jon Katzenbach and colleagues are useful primers on the concept:

• What Is Organizational Culture? (And Why Should We Care?) (Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review, 2013)
• 10 Principles of Organizational Culture (Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel and James Thomas, strategy + business, 2016)

It's essential to distinguish between an organization's explicit rules and its often implicit cultural norms:

• Rules Aren't Norms (On Company Values)

Our efforts to manage up take place within a specific culture, which contains a set of expectations--often implicit and unstated--about how to be effective and influential. We hold ourselves back when allow such expectations to dictate our behavior, and yet we're likely to have the greatest impact when we're perceived as a member of the culture and not an outsider:

• Conform to the Culture Just Enough

IBM researcher Geert Hofstede pioneered the study of how national cultures differ, and although we need to apply his insights with caution to avoid reductive stereotyping, his model can be immensely useful. INSEAD professor Erin Meyer has built upon Hofstede's work to address its implications for cross-cultural communication:

• Geert Hofstede on the Dimensions of Cultural Difference
• Erin Meyer on Culture and Communication

Some cultures are particularly challenging, and we need to learn how to take care of ourselves without their support:

• Surviving in a Toxic (or Merely Dysfunctional) Culture
• How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)

Managing up often involves encouraging senior leadership to be more open to feedback:

• Building a Feedback-Rich Culture
• Building a Feedback-Rich Culture from the Middle

 

---

4. Emotion Regulation

This starts with understanding emotions' function, and I find the work of neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Richard Davidson tremendously useful here:

• Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason
• 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)

Managing up means interacting with people in more senior hierarchical roles--sometimes challenging them, sometimes appeasing them--typically in circumstances when we feel a lack of authority or control and a degree of vulnerability. These situations often trigger strong emotions, and the goal of emotion regulation isn't simply to diminish what we're feeling and dampen our expressiveness, but to be deliberate and intentional in leveraging our emotions to help us accomplish our goals more effectively, both by managing ourselves and by having the desired impact on others:

• The Tyranny of Feelings
• Talking About Feelings
• Attitude and Behavior
• The Value of a Good Fight
• Neuroscience, Leadership and David Rock's SCARF Model
• Relating to Our Inner Critics
• Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)
• On Speaking Up and Shutting Up
• Leadership as a Performing Art

More specifically, effective managing up also entails "empathizing up," recognizing that senior leaders are human beings like everyone else:

• The Difficulty of Empathizing Up

 

---

Finally, consider working with a coach. Executive coaching isn't exclusively for "executives." There are many outstanding coaches who offer a sliding scale or a range of services that make them affordable to early- and mid-career professionals. Here are some questions to ask yourself and a prospective coach:

• How to Find (and Choose) a Coach

And here are some coaches I recommend for early- and mid-career professionals:

• Agnes Le, Executive Coaching
• Angelos Georgakis, Personal and Executive Coaching
• Celine Teoh, Executive Coaching
• Dana Bilsky Asher, Executive Coach and Facilitator
• Elena Chen, Executive Coaching
• Glenn Terrell, Shinji Consulting & Coaching
• Gwen Mellor Romans, Circle Hill Advisory
• Jennifer Ouyang Altman, Inner Radio Leadership Coaching
• Natalie Guillen, Advant Coaching
• Rodrigo Lopez, Rodrigo Lopez Coaching
• Stephanie Stevens, Authentic Leadership Coaching

 

Photo by Diane Cordell.

 

Extending Your Personal Runway

When a company isn't yet profitable, leadership is always keenly aware of their runway. The amount of cash at their disposal net ongoing expenses will determine the length of time they can continue to operate before something has to change: achieving profitability, raising additional capital, major cost-cutting, or ceasing operations. A theme in my practice is the leader who's assessing their "personal runway," which isn't quite as easy to calculate but has similar implications: There's a limited amount of time that they can sustain the status quo before something has to change.

My clients typically begin a coaching engagement occupying a leadership role that they expect to hold for the foreseeable future. But we work together for relatively long periods of time, so it's not uncommon for me to talk with a client about the possibility of a professional transition. In some cases this is a result of a change in the business, such as a potential sale to an acquirer or a major shift in strategy.

But just as often there's a change in my client, and they unexpectedly find themselves staring down the runway, wondering how far it extends. They're not planning to leave suddenly--which would be neither feasible nor desirable--but they've realized that they have a finite capacity to continue in their current role, and they're unsure how much time they'll have before they feel compelled to act.

Why does this happen so often? Senior leaders do enjoy many advantages: They're well-compensated, have a great deal of autonomy, and often feel a strong sense of purpose. But such roles also come with significant downsides. Senior leaders are the subject of intense scrutiny, receive little developmental feedback, and are rarely viewed empathetically by others. [1] So despite the many benefits of these roles, feelings of stress, fatigue and isolation can cause senior leaders to entertain thoughts of leaving.

If you're a senior leader and this resonates with you, what can you do about it? My work with clients in this area involves what we might call "extending your personal runway": Taking steps that will enable you to remain in the role long enough to engineer a desirable transition, rather than feeling obligated to make a suboptimal move. (Most of my clients are CEOs, and there are some factors that apply specifically to that role, but many of the issues I address here are relevant for anyone in a leadership position.)

 

---

Get Support

I'm biased, of course, but consider working with an executive coach. This need not be "career coaching," which involves helping you source and obtain a new role, should you choose to pursue one. It may be useful simply to have a trusted thought partner who understands the complexities of your role while remaining independent from the company. [2]

A personal coach can play a special role as a dedicated professional, but they're just one potential member of your "coaching team." There are undoubtedly other people already in your life or within reach who can also serve as sources of support, but you have to identify them--and understand the limits on the support they can provide. Family members and friends may be eager to help, but they may not fully grasp the challenges you face--and your need to talk about these challenges may exhaust their capacity to be present. In addition, cultivate relationships with peers--not just friends, but other senior leaders in similar roles. [3] The key in all of these relationships is letting the other party know what you need--people are often quick to jump in with advice, when you may just want to unburden yourself to an empathetic listener. [4]

A sometimes overlooked source of support is a truly outstanding executive assistant. If you don't have one, why not? As I've noted before, "a CEO who's spending time on tasks that could be delegated to an EA isn't being 'lean and scrappy'--they're stubbornly clinging to an outdated job description and hurting the business as a result." [5] Or perhaps you have a shared EA, or an "EA/office manager" for whom the role is merely a stepping stone to something better. In my experience when a leader finally finds a "professional EA" who views the role as a career path, the leader is not only much more effective, they're also far less stressed.

Finally, assess your finances. You needn't be motivated primarily by money to feel a heightened sense of opportunity cost as your tenure in a role lengthens. Perhaps your base compensation hasn't kept pace with the market, or a lack of liquidity is imposing constraints that are no longer palatable, or you're fully vested with no refresh on the calendar. We fail to obtain the financial support we need for many different reasons, but a common dilemma is the expectation that the necessary conversations will be uncomfortable or fraught. This may be true, but as I've noted before, "If it feels risky to say, saying it will carry a short-term cost [and] NOT saying it will carry a long-term cost." [6] I'm not suggesting that all you need to do is ask--you may face substantial resistance. But we don't get what we deserve--we get what we negotiate. [7] And a reluctance to thoroughly explore the possibilities will almost certainly shorten your personal runway.

 

---

Redefine Your Role

Your current responsibilities were determined at a particular point in your company's evolution and in your own growth and development as a leader. Some of the stress and fatigue you feel today are likely the result of gaps that have emerged over time among A) the tasks you do because they're "your job," B) the tasks you do that create the most value, and C) the tasks you find most fulfilling. While you undoubtedly face constraints in re-defining your role, all too often I see leaders laboring under outdated job descriptions that should be updated--and this is as true of CEOs as it is of anyone else. It's important to distinguish between the value you create through specific tasks and the extent to which those tasks are personally fulfilling:

This is obviously an oversimplified version of reality, and there are probably few, if any, neat and tidy divisions among your duties that correlate perfectly with this model--but it may still highlight some useful distinctions. As I've noted before, "I define 'work' as a vocation--a calling or a personal mission that provides us with an intrinsic sense of meaning and purpose. A 'job,' in contrast, is a set of responsibilities we fulfill in exchange for various forms of compensation. We get paid to do the job, but the work is its own reward." [8]

If you're like many senior leaders these categories overlap substantially but have drifted apart in recent months or years, which may be one of the primary reasons you're considering the length of your runway. Almost certainly there are a set of tasks that you find unfulfilling but through which you generate so much value that it's unrealistic to consider delegating or abandoning them, at least at present. You may conclude that this is The Job, i.e. the reason you get paid. But what's in the top-right quadrant? What responsibilities are both value-generating and fulfilling? And what might enable you to operate here as much as possible?

At the same time, there are almost certainly a set of responsibilities are are neither value-generating nor personally fulfilling, although perhaps they were in the past. A cynic might say, "This is The Job--this is why I get paid." But in my experience that's not true for senior leaders who enjoy a degree of control and agency in their work (although it may well be for people in other roles in dysfunctional bureaucracies.) Instead, senior leaders typically find themselves performing these tasks either because they have an outdated idea of the value being created, or they've placed insufficient value on their time and attention. Once these factors are recalculated, it can be surprisingly easy to...stop.

To help assess your current role in light of this model, here are three questions to ask (which I've discussed at greater length previously [9]):

1. What are you uniquely qualified to do?

This is likely a function of the talent you can attract and retain at present. You probably own certain responsibilities because no one better qualified is available, and efforts to delegate these tasks will have to wait. But consider whether you're holding on to these responsibilities because of an outdated belief that certain tasks are too important to delegate, a counterproductive need to maintain personal oversight, or difficulties in building scalable systems. Your unique qualifications may be less expansive than you think.

2. What are you obligated to do?

All leadership roles come with some responsibilities that can't be delegated, no matter how talented your team or successful the company. But while these tasks may well be yours as long as you hold the role, it's often the case that as the company grows and your role becomes more prominent, the stakes will be higher, requiring more thorough preparation and a greater amount of your attention. Consider how narrowing the focus of your role might allow you to perform these duties more effectively and efficiently.

3. What are you free to do?

I'm not suggesting that you should prioritize personal preferences over organizational imperatives--this is not an excuse to hold on to responsibilities that should be delegated. But in addition to the work that you're uniquely qualified to do, and the work that you're obligated to do, consider what work you're free to do, what tasks might lift your spirits and make the job more intrinsically rewarding. Some of this will be value-generating, while some will simply be play--and although we may need to impose limits on the amount of play in our professional lives, a little goes a long way toward making stressful and fatiguing experiences more sustainable.

 

---

Slow Down

Whatever steps you can take to extend your personal runway, it's also worthwhile to examine the forces that are causing you to accelerate toward its endpoint. It may be possible to slow down and lengthen your tenure in the process. Here are three factors that may be propelling you forward:

1. Inadequate Boundaries

If you're like many of my clients, you're not necessarily seeking "work/life balance," but at the same time, you're disinclined to devote the same amount of time and energy to work as you did in the past. This can result from many factors: Increasingly complex personal obligations, such as the needs of children, aging parents, a spouse or partner; or diminished personal well-being, ranging from the typical ailments of middle age to serious health issues. Or you may simply feel discontented or bored--the passion that once fueled your appetite for work has waned.

But while balance may be unattainable or even undesirable, you will almost certainly benefit from better boundaries. A healthy boundary isn't an impermeable barrier, but, like a cell membrane, it keeps the right things in the right places in the right proportions, while altering its permeability to adjust to changing conditions. As I've noted before, "Temporal boundaries designate certain times exclusively for family, friends, exercise, and other non-work pursuits... Physical boundaries ensure that we get out of our offices and workplaces at regular intervals and create actual distance between us and our work (which includes not only the office itself but also all our professional tools and artifacts–laptops, tablets, phones, papers, everything) [and] cognitive boundaries help us resist the temptation to think about work and focus our attention on the people or activity at hand." [10]

2. A Sense of Urgency

In this context it's important to distinguish between importance and urgency, which I define as follows:

Important activities are truly meaningful and fulfilling--to you, to the people who matter to you, to your organization, or to some cause that you believe in. They’re not necessarily time-dependent; they can be accomplished almost anytime, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.

Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone—although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that someone is going to be unhappy. They’re not necessarily meaningful or fulfilling, and accomplishing them may not actually make a significant difference. [11]

The dilemma, of course, is that "the time and attention we would otherwise devote to Important But Not Urgent activities is often sacrificed to address Unimportant But Urgent matters. The challenge is that we’re the only ones who care about the former, while the latter have many advocates." [12] You'll accelerate when you allow others' sense of urgency to dictate your priorities--and you'll slow down when you commit to such important-but-never-urgent activities as time with loved ones, a mindfulness routine, a workout, a good night's sleep.

3. Your Competitive Drive

Humans evolved to compare ourselves to others, to have a keen sense of our relative status, and to compete for resources and opportunities. We can't turn off these drives, nor would we want to. As with so many other confounding aspects of our psychology, they're features for the species that as individuals we often experience as bugs. [13] Even if you don't feel overtly competitive, if you're like many of my clients your sense of disenchantment with your current role is related to a perception that you're behind in some way--lagging after peers, classmates, siblings, or (most importantly) your own expectations.

The feeling of being behind inevitably provokes an urge to accelerate--you must catch up with whoever (or whatever) you're trailing--which will shorten your runway, potentially leading you to make suboptimal choices. There's no simple solution, but a starting point is considering the possibility that your competitive drive and the threat of loss that exacerbates it are, at least in part, illusions. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you should accept your current situation or stop striving to improve it.

But a counterpart to our proclivity for social comparison is the process of hedonic adaptation: We readily accommodate and soon take for granted changes in our circumstances. [14] The things we think will make us happy rarely make us as happy as we think they will, and the happiness they bring never lasts as long as we want it to. This is not a reason to stop trying to change your life for the better, but it may allow you to view your present condition with more equanimity, and to pursue your hopes for the future without rushing to get there.

 

This is a companion piece to Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise).

---

Footnotes

[1] Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)

[2] How to Find (and Choose) a Coach

[3] The Friendship of Wolves

[4] What Do You Need Right Now? (Advice, Listening, A Hug?)

[5] Three Stages of Executive Assistance

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

[7] Negotiating with Your Own Side

[8] The Work and The Job

[9] Three Buckets (On CEO Job Descriptions)

[10] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

[11] Importance vs. Urgency

[12] Ibid.

[13] The Trap of Competition

[14] Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" By "Getting Better"

Photo by Victor.

Risk Calculus and Social Norms

I'm old enough to remember when seat belts in automobiles went from simple lap belts to three-point shoulder harnesses. (The car of my Dad's that I loved the most, a 1966 Austin Healey, had seat belts that were largely notional.) But even more significant than the evolving technology were the evolving perceptions of risk and the social norms that governed behavior. Today seat belt usage in the United States exceeds 90 percent [1], but when I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s seat belts were routinely ignored. Although my parents were adamantly pro-seat belt--resulting in countless arguments that I always lost--by the time I was in high school seat belt usage was still well under 20 percent [2].

One reason for this was the perception that seat belt usage conveyed a certain attitude toward risk and a sense of judgment. Seat belts were viewed by many as unnecessary, to be worn only by the fanatically cautious. Drivers who asked their passengers to wear seat belts were considered anxious or controlling. Passengers who proactively put on a seat belt were implicitly expressing a lack of faith in the ability of the driver to keep them safe. I recall getting into cars and having to make a decision about whether or not to wear a seat belt based not only my perception of the driver's capabilities, but also on my relationship with the driver and the likelihood that they might take offense.

Today all this seems absurd, at least in the U.S. Seat belt usage has become so normative that for most people, most of the time, it's an automatic reflex. But it's worth noting that things weren't always this way, and it took decades of technological and social progress to arrive at the current arrangement [3]. And the reason I find this ancient history so interesting is that I see some important parallels with our response to the pandemic as we prepare to enter Year Three:

We lack a shared risk calculus.

By this I mean that we lack commonly understood definitions of "risky" and "safe." Although we now take it for granted that seat belts make us safer, for decades this was a point of contention. Seat belts were thought by many to cause internal injuries in the event of a minor collision or to pose a grave danger because of the possibility of entrapment in a burning or submerged vehicle. No one thinks this way anymore, even the small group of people who elect not to use seat belts in the U.S. They may be prioritizing comfort over safety, but they certainly don't think seat belts are "risky."

In stark contrast, our current perceptions of the risk of infectious disease and what constitutes safe behavior are wildly divergent. This is understandable, given the relative recency of the pandemic, the emergence of new variants, and subsequent changes in the scientific consensus. But as a consequence individuals must rely on their own highly subjective perceptions of risk and safety, which has profound societal and organizational implications.

We lack shared social norms.

The lack of a shared risk calculus makes it difficult, if not impossible, to agree on a set of appropriate responses. As a result, we don't know how to interpret peoples' behavior, and they don't know how to interpret ours. During the decades when seat belt use was atypical, putting one on could mean any number of things: a sense of caution, a lack of trust, or even a rebuke to the driver. Today it's such a widely accepted norm that it's never perceived as having some hidden meaning.

But in the absence of shared social norms regarding infectious disease, our behavior can be confusing or even inexplicable to others, and is therefore a subject of constant curiosity. What does it mean to attend an in-person event, or to decline to attend? What does it mean to wear a mask, or to refrain from wearing one? What does it mean to have physical contact, or to avoid it? We have no universally understood explanations, and in their absence we must interpret and reinterpret the world around us.

Why does this matter--and what can we do about it?

These issues have become a prevalent theme in my coaching practice at the moment, in part because we've reached a point in the pandemic when there's more confusion than ever. The recently emerged Omicron variant appears to be the most contagious yet--but it also appears to result in a relatively low rate of serious illness and hospitalization. This is making it even harder for the leaders in my practice to know how to respond.

Should they--yet again--minimize or eliminate in-person activities for themselves and their employees? Should they mandate masks, or encourage them, or ignore them? Should they gird themselves for one more round of intensified infection control measures? Should they assume that such measures will become a recurring aspect of life? Or have we reached the point where the social, psychological and economic costs of such measures outweigh the benefits? Nobody knows for sure--despite the vast chorus of voices promoting their preferred solutions--which means we must decide for ourselves.

I suspect that this confused state of affairs will persist for an extended period of time. It seems highly unlikely that society at large will arrive at a shared risk calculus and a shared set of social norms anytime soon. Recall that it took decades to reach a common understanding regarding seat belts, even though the science was relatively straightforward. But it does seem likely that in the next few months we'll recover from Omicron and continue the process of finding our way toward a "new normal."

And yet as we resume in-person events, widespread travel, and other activities that we took for granted pre-pandemic, we'll inevitably encounter people who don't share our risk calculus or our social norms. Some people will attend small gatherings but not large ones, and some people won't make any distinction. Some people will avoid physical contact or offer an elbow bump, while others will go in for a hug. And some people won't wear masks at all, others will wear masks at certain times, and still others will wear masks whenever they're in public [4].

We don't need a single risk calculus or a universal set of social norms to function effectively in groups, but the greater the divergence, the more likely it will be that we'll experience misunderstandings. So there are two helpful steps we can take in these potentially fraught situations: First, we can legitimize others' definitions of "risk" and "safety" and the resulting social norms that may differ than our own. I'm not suggesting that we should participate in activities that feel unsafe, or tolerate safety measures that feel oppressive. But we don't need to stigmatize others' choices and make them "wrong" in order to pursue the path that feels right to us.

Also, we can help others understand our own behavior by proactively communicating to them aspects of our risk calculus, rather than forcing them to guess. And here I'm not suggesting that we provide a lengthy rationale or strive to extract an admission that we're "right." We can simply be a little more overt and explicit about what we're doing and why--and hope that they extend to us the same understanding we've tried to extend to them.

 

This post is the sixth in a series on coping in the current environment:

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

---

Footnotes

[1] Seat Belt Usage in 2019 [PDF], (Traffic Safety Facts Research Note, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation)

[2] How States Achieve High Seat Belt Use Rates [PDF] (James Hedlund, S. Hope Gilbert, Katherine Ledingham, and David Preusser, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, 2008)

[3] The Surprisingly Controversial History of Seat Belts (Erika Janik, Wisconsin Public Radio, 2017)

[4] Nearly two decades after the SARS outbreak in East Asia, significant numbers of people continued to wear masks on public transportation. See Mass transit ridership didn’t snap back after the 2003 SARS outbreaks (Jake Blumgart, City Monitor, 2020).

Photo by Stian Olsen. Austin Healey photo courtesy of Silodrome.

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.

 

---

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.

 

---

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?

 

---

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?

 

---

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.

 

---

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.

 

---

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.

 

---

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.

 

---

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?

 

---

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.

 

---

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.