What do you do when evidence surfaces that you were wrong, you believed something in error, you were fooled or conned?
The two most common behaviors:
1. Double-down on the original belief. “I didn’t follow an unscrupulous leader, she’s a genius and most people simply can’t see that.” “That threat wasn’t a hoax – our proactive steps meant it didn’t happen.”
2. Rationalize that the blame lies entirely with others. “There’s no way I could have known that Nobel Prize winner in physics didn’t understand the gold market.” “He is PMI certified, so it’s not my fault that he ran the project into the ground.”
The least common behavior? Honest assessment based on facts, evidence, and outcomes – to purpose to be better next time.
I don’t have a consistent explanation for our frequent refusal to acknowledge we need to change something in ourselves.
Permission to be blunt? *Grow up.* Be the leader who acknowledges an error in judgment or being fooled. Own your part. Learn from your experiences – there is always an adventure of learning and adapting if you’re willing to take it. Model this for others.
The grizzled older man sitting next to me on the plane regaled me with stories of growing up along the Chesapeake Bay. The most memorable:
“My daddy taught us kids to swim the hard way. He rowed me out about a quarter-mile into the bay, then tossed me overboard and told me to swim to shore. The swimmin’ part wasn’t so bad, but getting out of that gunny sack with the big rock was a trick, I tell ya.”
Poorly designed work systems — all the processes and procedures and division of labor that overwhelm even talented people. They know how to swim, but the systems act like the gunny sack and big rock.
One of the great business breakthroughs of the 20th century was learning how to optimize an overall system for a desired result. People learned through process design, supply chain logistics, and high-throughput manufacturing that you must avoid optimizing every sub-part of a process if you want the maximum process throughput. The global maximum point is different than local maxima:
We’ve also learned to eliminate wasted effort and materials, and reduce defects. The LEAN practices include moving tasks/equipment/people closer together to minimize wasted steps and time.
There are two key action steps for leaders charged with improving workplace system performance:
1. Focus on the correct system output to maximize.
Systems are perfectly designed to produce the results they produce. If you want different results, change the system. Beware of optimizing your system for an overly-narrow result; think larger. The most helpful approach is to think from the customer backwards. Who is receiving the output, what do they value, and how can you deliver that? I see far too many cases where organizations optimize within silos of activity, forgetting that every organization exists to serve someone.
2. Strengthen the who-does-what-how-and-when component of systems with incentives to continue to optimize in the desired direction.
You can and should use tools and automation to improve processes, increase throughput, reduce time and labor, etc. There is no resting content because continuous improvements will be required over time.
Most process improvement efforts I’ve seen fail on people issues rather than technology issues. Workplace systems always involve people, and people are messy. Leadership would easier without people, but then leadership would be unnecessary! People are the who-does-what-how-and-when component of workplace systems.
To gain scale and efficiencies organizations tend to divide up work among a set of specialists who each can operate efficiently on a narrower range of work. Large corporations often outsource tasks or project work, or rely on services provided by others. The challenge is to develop a coordinated operating model for each contributor for every part of the process, and then continue to look for improvements.
The new problem created by dividing up the work, compounded if you are paying people for specific work tasks rather than the overall deliverable, is that you created a perverse incentive for individuals to maximize their efficiency at the expense of others. You’re focused on local maxima, rather than the global maxima that best helps your final customer. If you’re paying someone X dollars/hour for their work they have an incentive to maximize their hours, rather than optimize your overall system.
One way that commercial building construction has improved over the past few decades is the practice of a contractual incentive to complete projects on-time with the right building quality. The message to the general contractor is simple: Finish the project early? I’ll pay you a little more. Finish late? I will pay you less?
My observation from working with multiple organizations: most HR, Finance, IT, and Legal departments don’t create these kinds of incentives with contractors, services, and providers.
Your leadership opportunity is to grasp #1 – know the correct system output to optimize – and then work out the people issues to execute to that vision. How can you help people to work together rather than separately? Get rid of the unnecessary gunny sack and rock problems in your systems, and let your people swim!
(Note: this was originally published by the author on LinkedIn in 2014)
[I hope some people reading this will be truly ticked off. I aim to hook a nerve, and yank.]
We’re desperate for leadership.
All leadership begins with self-leadership.
Self-leadership is a function of self-discipline.
We need self-discipline about our eating, sleep, exercise, and nourishing our minds and hearts. You already know what is best. Do that.
Today, at least in the US, we face a combination of trends which will require a new level of discipline:
Infatuation with style over substance. Style matters, but increasingly passes as a substitute for substance.
Ascending post-modern worldviews are dominant in education, corporate leadership, governments. Fewer people accept the idea of absolute truth. Dialog about truth is swiftly converted into arguments about power. Opinion is frequently honored above truth.
Diminished context. Social media largely operates outside complex context. Subject lines, headlines, text messages, and soundbites are sufficient to reinforce mindsets.
Declining trust in most institutions. This is understandable — many institutions are recognizably corrupt.
Large percentage of the population spends hours every day immersed in information streams, weirdly compelled to “keep up.”
We swim in abundance of stuff, food, sanitized environments, and information. Many of us are not handling abundance well. This is proving to be unhealthy.
Far more remote work, less time at the work-site. Distractions abound, peer pressure is physically absent, the benefits of face-to-face social interaction are missed.
T.S. Eliot captured it well in his “Four Quartets” poems:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind
You might be saying, “But not me, Glenn, no, I’m different!” Are you sure? Let’s test it out:
How do you feel if you sit perfectly still, no sound, no flickering images, for 5 minutes?
If you searched and couldn’t find your smartphone for 15 minutes, what’s your panic level?
When was the last time you turned off your phone for any length of time while you were awake?
If I demanded that you read nothing but books more than 400 years old for a week – no news, no social media, no podcasts – what’s your first reaction?
Full candor: I fail these tests, too.
I’m not trying to make a political commentary – these are the trends in our cultural environment, which is where we must exercise our leadership work.
We’re deeply in this reality. Yet we have agency. We can make choices.
I challenge you to be an intentional leader rather than passively absorbing every aspect of cultural trends. I challenge you to be a free man or a free woman, rather than a slave to circumstances and circumstantial evidence. We desperately need leaders who think for themselves, who speak outside echo chambers, who call out bullshit, who love fiercely, who rally people without manipulating them, who command respect from others even as they wrestle with constructive disagreements.
This level of leadership comes at a price, beginning with your self-discipline. Practice stepping up and out of the swirls of information and emotion which captivate most people. Recognize that the statement “Your truth” is actually “truth and your opinion.” Fast from incessant mindless activity and task completion. Do something which makes you physically uncomfortable every day – a cold shower, fasting from a meal, sitting in a hard chair, exercising in a new way, studying a difficult subject, talking with people who hold a completely different worldview. Select for quality and depth of information and insights. Invest time in measured reflection and meditation on events; Experience is not the best teacher – evaluated experience is. Demand context and alternative perspectives. Demand evidence of truth statements. Live more generously with people than they might deserve. Don’t fall in love with the idea of “the people” and then fail to interact with actual flesh-and-blood messy people.
98% of the people around you may be slaves to their inbox, smart phone, and information as someone-with-an-agenda presents it to them, but purpose to be in the 2% who strive for freedom. It’s a both-and situation – understand the reality of where the 98% are living, and live differently.
Pursue this self-discipline and you’ll become the leader that the people in your sphere of influence actually need. Model this self-discipline, and your sphere of influence will increase.
We had a running joke in my competitive grad school program: “Half of us have impostor syndrome, and the other half don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” I remember multiple times feeling like everyone was about to discover I was an incompetent, ignorant fraud. The same thing happened several times in my early career at Pioneer – I’d have this sensation of being 9 years old in oversized clothes, cluelessly sitting at the adult table while they’re asking for my solution to a world-shattering problem!
Let’s define imposter syndrome, and then talk about how you can effectively work through it.
From Wikipedia:
Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or interpret it as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be. While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally.
Nearly everyone I’ve asked will admit to impostor syndrome, though usually in the long-distant past, because it’s hardly safe to say “Yes, I experienced it just this morning.”
My suggestion for leaders: Gently appreciate that everyone on your team experiences some degree of impostor syndrome at least occasionally.
The best way to help others through it is to build them up, honor their engagement and contributions, and frequently remind them of their importance to the larger effort of your organization. When they express doubts in themselves give them reasons for your confidence and optimism. Encourage them to get help or practice where they truly don’t know what they should know to be effective. Mark out when and where they fall short of expectations, and always in a way that points to their ability to do better the next time. Celebrate when people are well-prepared (rather than procrastinate and then perform poorly). People will give more of what gets celebrated. You can even say privately, “See, you did well in spite of your doubts.”
Now let’s pivot to your impostor syndrome. That’s much harder to conquer.
The positive benefit of impostor syndrome is that it shows we want to do well, and for others to think well about us. [I acknowledge there are psychopaths who wield imposter syndrome as a weapon; that’s not you.] Be grateful for this positive core.
The challenge is to effectively work through all the ways impostor syndrome limits your ability to contribute. Here are a few tips:
Impostor syndrome thrives in the abstract, “what-if” realm. Taking action, even small actions, weakens it.
Imposter syndrome fears being laughed at by others, so crush it by laughing at yourself first. It’s ok to have an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, especially in new situations. I have learned to chuckle at my mistakes and errors, and remind myself that it’s ok to both be silly and to learn from it.
Impostor syndrome must have something to compare to – those super people who have more IQ, experience, panache, style, and granite-guts than you do. Impostor syndrome insists you compare yourself only to how you think those people are, not as they are, and certainly not as they were when they were in a new situation.
Impostor syndrome insists you believe that key people around you are thinking about you all the time. Reality check: other people think about you far less than you expect them to think about you, partially because we’re consumed with thinking about ourselves.
Impostor syndrome wants you think that you are the only person in the room experiencing these doubts. Untrue. See the encyclopedia entry for “human being.”
Remember that “faking your way through it” actually works much of the time. Even a forced smile changes your neurochemistry. Standing tall helps your blood pressure and breathing. You learned to walk as a toddler, and you learned to do pretty much everything you know despite the fact that you were a “fraud” before. Most of the inventions that undergird civilization started as experimental faking-till-they-made-it.
Impostor syndrome is only happy when you tell yourself a negative, fearful narrative. Remind yourself that you have a lot to offer and if you don’t offer it, you’re robbing the world.
Impostor syndrome loves loneliness. Surround yourself with people who help you bring out you. Seek positive feedback environments.
Sympathy is appropriate for a leader, but empathy is dangerous. People tend to use sympathy and empathy interchangeably but there is a difference.
Sympathy is understanding and appreciating another person’s situation or perspective. Sympathy helps you appreciate a problem but keep emotions in check while you ponder a decision for the group.
Empathy leads you to dramatically and fully identify with one person, or one sub-group — including emotions. Yet a leader in a group can’t have empathy with all of them. Empathy is dangerous because you’re likely to make a decision which is not best for the whole group.
Consider the case of a judge managing a trial. She can have sympathy for both prosecution and defendant, but empathy could easily undermine her ability to make an impartial ruling.
A leader needing to make tough decisions is wise to use sympathy and guard against empathy.
Two phenomenon which are simply part of the natural world and the natural order of humans:
Unequal distributions of pretty much everything. 80/20 is not a physical law but is incredibly common pattern. Sometimes it’s 70/30, and sometimes 95/5 or 99/1. Take any talent, any physical attributes, any social or economic outcomes — they all naturally settle into unequal distributions.
Natural selection favors some organisms (including people) over others at points in time. It might surprise you to know the full title of Charles Darwin’s most famous work: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” It should not surprise anyone that Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler all quoted from this book as justification for their worldview. Today’s readers will find it contains shockingly racist language.
Here are two important principles which we only have because of transcendance beyond the natural world:
Every human being is intrinsically valuable.
All people should be equally treated before the law.
Neither of these are derived from the natural world as we know it. These precious principles are the legacy of Western Civilization (Jerusalem and Athens).
Every human experiment to “perfectly correct” the problem of unequal distributions without a transcendent religious framework has led to tyranny. For example, Communist regimes generate a 98/2 ratio — there are always a small percentage of people who have most of the money and the power.
I’m a Christian first; my allegiance is to Jesus first. I’m a proud citizen of the USA second.
No political leader is the Messiah/Savior, and government cannot solve every problem. Do not be fooled by speeches and advertisements.
Voting is a privilege you should exercise wisely. There are billions of people who do not have this privilege.
Vote for a candidate on the basis of (1) policies & principles, and (2) character. Both matter. Only vote for candidates which reasonably conform to your standards on both (1) and (2).
Assess policies based on facts and outcomes. Thomas Sowell’s brilliant 3 questions are a good guide when evaluating a policy/program: Compared to what? At what cost? Where is your hard evidence?
People can change, but don’t expect a person’s primary character traits to change because you elected them into a leadership position.
Your vote is your vote. Vote your conscience. If you can’t support any candidate for an open position, leave it blank and move on to the rest of the ballot.
Be wary of political party affiliation. Tim Keller points out that Christians, based on the commands in the Bible,
Should be committed to racial justice
Should be deeply concerned about the poor
Should be pro-life, because all people are created in the image of God
Should believe that sex (at least for Christ-followers) should only be between a man and woman in marriage
Two look conservative, two look more liberal – and our two major parties unequally emphasize these. Therefore it should not surprise Christians that they don’t feel completely comfortable in one party.
Isaac Newton exploited his quarantine from the 1665-1666 London plague to work on his magnum opus, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he codified laws of motion. His third law states:
“When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.”
This law is also true in a general way about human behavior. When you raise your voice or vigorously push an idea, people naturally tend to raise their own voice, push back, raise defensive shields. Returning like for like is rarely a long-term solution, and often escalates tensions. This is why we have ancient wisdom such as the proverb, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
In processes, business models, even government models, if your mindset is “destroy” or “disrupt,” you’ve instantly stimulated an equal and opposite force. People will be motivated to disrupt you back. You will find yourself facing greater complexity than before. You engender bitterness and resentment.
It’s healthier and more productive to adopt the mindset of “transform.” All change is difficult. There will be resistance factors for all changes because the status quo has significant power. Focus your transforming efforts to create value that others recognize – faster, cheaper, simpler, more effective.
(Note: HT to Dan Sullivan and Perry Marshall who have published notes on this concept.)
I’ve written before about guarding against training your team to expect you to solve every problem they can’t solve easily or quickly. You can guide, offer suggestions, certainly encourage – but insist they operate at just-beyond their comfort level. Insist on their participation in the solution. Then they gain the confidence to tackle new problems.
However it’s also important to train people to ask for help from experienced people, rather than stewing and floundering on their own. My observation (myself and others) is that our pride gets in the way. Many of us don’t like situations where we don’t know the answers.
Most of us have the “movie” image of a Special Forces soldier – always confident, in control, always knowing what to do, knowing how to do everything. That’s not reality. If they don’t know something they need to know, they ask for help. If there are others with more experience, they ask for coaching to sharpen their skill. Their teammates will give them help. This is deeply embedded in the culture. All high-performing teams operate this way.
Is there an issue you’re facing right now where you should ask for help?
