Thoughts On Leading With Greatness: Recent Episodes
Jim Salvucci
Each Thursday I share new ideas for leaders and aspiring leaders on mission clarity, self-awareness, and human skills — a slightly irreverent kit of Tools+Paradigms for leaders and aspiring leaders like you. Visit GuidanceForGreatness.com
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In some ways, I feel my writing is spinning in place as I age in place, so I’ve decided to take a few months off—at least—as I consider my next move and enjoy my summer. Summertime is the perfect time to take time.
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The best artists, like the best leaders, never treat their work as finished. They master their craft, then break it, reworking, searching, risking public failure rather than coasting on what already worked. Let's call that restlessness unsettlement. It's a value leaders and artists share more deeply than any other.
This episode makes the case for it: not repetition, not persistence for its own sake, but the discipline to keep moving toward something not just different but better and the nerve to smash your own best work when there's somewhere else to go.
Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, and Henry Threadgill supply the evidence. The lesson isn't "lead like an artist. The stakes and the processes are worlds apart. It's narrower and harder: be self-aware but not self-satisfied, disciplined in a way that's true to yourself, and willing to build, break, and build anew.
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So much information, and so little time to review it, which is to say nothing of comprehending and intelligently responding to it. We drift in a world awash in information, gulping it down as quickly as possible in hopes we don’t drown.
Yet, “leaders are readers,” or so they say. Leaders gain knowledge and a degree of understanding by guzzling information.
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What does a person’s behavior suggest about their level of competence?
The most competent among us aren’t hyper-confident and are often riven with self-doubt, which you might not realize if you aren’t close to them or you actually are them. I’m not talking about imposter syndrome. The self-doubt a competent leader experiences is an entirely healthy and even necessary element of their competence.
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Most leadership advice suggests that empathy is a key component to effective leadership, and I won’t disagree. Leaders empathize to improve their ability to communicate and to compromise. But…
Empathy is not inherently good. Empathy can be a component of morality, but it’s not moral in itself.
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Have you ever considered the inherent value of taking action and getting things done? We sometimes refer to comic book heroes as “action heroes,” but do you think action is heroic in and of itself?
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Leaders understand that justice is a key leadership value and that it must expand beyond mere retribution toward a more holistically just future.
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Leaders know that silence enhances pain, trauma, and injustice. Silence is the tool of the cruel. Leaders stand tall as its sworn enemy.
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The truth is that the player who attempts to bluff always does so from a position of deficiency. You wouldn’t be bluffing if you placed a high bet on, say, a straight or a flush unless you somehow knew for a fact that your opponent held four of a kind. Therefore, bluffing is always a de facto admission of weakness even when the player wins.
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Leadership and writing have some direct parallels, not the least of which is that when done well, people don't notice.
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Slide 321 of the most exhausting PowerPoint I ever sat through taught me almost nothing about advising students—but it accidentally taught me much about leadership. So did a brilliant, infuriating Korean student who could humiliate me with grammar rules but couldn't write a single clean sentence. Both stories point to the same lesson: you can know everything and still not know how to do anything.
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Why do we impose thoughtless, unnecessary, even harmful rules on ourselves and our organizations? Tradition, inertia, inherited habits, the hidebound predecessor whose practices nobody questioned. Over time these ad hoc rules harden into identity—"this is just who we are"—and can even manifest as what I call bureaucratic compulsive disorder.
They're garbage rules that squander time, energy, and opportunity while we pretend they're values or identity.
This week I draw on Bob Newhart, Viktor Frankl, Bob Dylan, and a hoary tale about a beef roast to make the case for a leadership practice as clean and resolute as the problem demands. The answer is simpler than you think—and harder than it sounds.
Great leaders don't ask "what else can we do?" They have a better question ready.
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The leadership gurus I call the nabobs of negativity insist leaders need to learn to say "no" more often. But is the big problem in leadership truly leaders who don't say "no" enough, as the nabobs would have it, or leaders who say "no" too often?
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Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result isn't insanity, not when it benefits the bosses.
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Abraham Lincoln is often cited as an exemplary president for leaders to emulate. While that's true, his leadership is far more nuanced and complicated than most people realize, and therefore he's a more useful model of leadership. Honest Age is an honest model of leadership.
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Just because it’s infinitely difficult to contemplate the infinitesimal doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn all you can about Quantum Bossing—QBossing. It’s a great way to use everyone’s (even your own) profound ignorance of science to justify just about anything. And if you can convince everyone of an absurdity, such as you’re in two places at once, they’ll eventually give up, give in, and pledge themselves to you like, say, a quark to maybe a gluon.
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Want to hear about my dream? Sure you do.
The exasperation, anger, disgust, frustration, and helplessness the dream evoked recalled my anguish working at some pretty screwy universities. In fact, I could point to particulars in my lived experience that directly paralleled my dream.
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Systems thinking is a handy skill for a leader to have, and I suspect a lot of leaders are systems thinkers even if they never thought of themselves as such.
So, let me hit you with systems axiom 1: There is a correlation between systems thinking and successful leadership—keeping in mind that correlation is not causation.
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What do you call someone who sits back in the face of wrongdoing?
Complicit.
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Leadership is just another type of human relationship.
Leadership is not much different from friendship, animosity, acquaintanceship, or even romance. It harbors no mysteries that any of these or other human relationships hold.
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What can a conscientious leader dedicated to human decency do to get a more objective self-assessment than private reflection will provide?
Let me ask the question more eloquently: who calls you on your st?
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There is no leadership without justice.
If you’re a leader, the means to your goal is simple: just act justly to achieve justice.
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Much bullying, even the vast majority of bullying, serves no real purpose at all. Think of the schoolyard bully. After he has successfully terrorized all his peers into submission, he really has no reason to continue bullying on a regular basis, but he does.
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The story of Odysseus and his monstrous confrontations offer lessons for leaders, both good and bad.
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What does it really mean to think and write about leadership?
The best writers on leadership—even if they don’t see themselves this way—are in fact moralists in that they concern themselves largely with questions of right and wrong, good and bad.
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One aspect of leadership that rarely gets its full due is its integral relationship to power. The pursuit of power (as with its counterparts, wealth and fame) can be corrupting but not necessarily so. While power offers myriad opportunities for abuse, it also presents positive possibilities.
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Here’s a dirty secret that few acknowledge inside or outside of education: teaching only takes place when learning takes place. In other words, unless someone actually learns, no one has done any teaching. For what is teaching without learning? One hand clapping.
It’s the same with leadership. You can’t be a leader if no one follows. Seems obvious, right? You can’t lead the cavalry charge if there is no cavalry. But we make that mistake all the time.
he First Follower Effect: How Fearless Followers Make the Leader
Every Leadership Problem Is a Teaching Problem
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Have you ever seen the sitcom Abbott Elementary? Among the many memorable characters populating the school, my favorite is the principal, Ava Coleman. To say Ava is self-serving is an understatement, but she also can be outward looking if only when you least expect it. Overall, though, she’s simply a terrible boss and therefore a lousy leader for her struggling little school. Even so, Ava’s words and actions teem with sharp revelations about the impact crappy bosses have on the day-to-day workplace.
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A Festive Parody for this Season of Joy
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Without the core—the why and how of it all—most would-be leaders struggle to find generic strategies that fit their circumstances and implement them successfully over time. Forget adapting.
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Real trust takes a lot more than a momentary exertion of empathy. In reality, the mechanics of trust can be complicated and dynamic, which is why the best leaders have a profound appreciation for trust and carefully cultivate and nurture it.
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Despite everything we’re told (and perhaps believe) greatness doesn’t drive lasting progress. Goodness does. Greatness as we rate it has to do with one’s prominence, such as position, wealth, influence—all fleeting and limited. Meanwhile, true goodness tends toward the humble and yet can be far more persistent and powerful.
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For years, I struggled to accept compliments with the grace they deserve. When praised, my mind would grumble, “What’s their angle” or “If only they knew…” I’d tell myself I needed to dismiss their recognition so I could “stay humble,” which really just reflected a limiting belief that I'm not deserving.
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I have a confession to make. I’ve been misleading you—maybe even lying to you—for years. The fact that I’ve been lying to myself all that time doesn’t make it any better.
The lie I’ve been telling us all is that great leadership will lead to business success. In fact, I know of no studies or slam-dunk examples that definitively demonstrate this claim. I’ve also said that bad bossing is incompetence in practice, which I maintain, but we can identify plenty of objectively bad bosses who are wildly successful.
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The b*t is that so many people must seek mental health treatment of all sorts because of their jobs*. No one should have to go to therapy because their boss is a dipshit bully, their colleagues are creeps, or their whole organization is a cesspool of toxic behavior. And yet we do. I’ve done it more than once and because of more than one noxious employer.
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Great leaders know that creating general rules to address a single, narrow issue can result in unfortunate outcomes throughout an organization. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a fruit fly.
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One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is countering, neutralizing, and helping others cope with bullies. Every bully is a fraud—a weakling and a coward—and deep down they know it. We all do.
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Have you ever seen the British version of The Office? The office manager, David Brent, presents himself as a benign leader, but he’s aggressively benign, and the show demonstrates amply that such a beast can be as toxic as the worst boss.
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Humans love categories. We can’t get enough of slicing and dicing things into small parts and putting them each into their own cozy cubbyholes. We do all this because categories help us make sense of the world.
Classification serves a useful function,but such systems lack an inherent basis in reality. Great leaders recognize the mixed nature of our drive to taxonomize. Leaders also know that our very humanity renders classification ultimately counterproductive.
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The best leaders think about systems of thought—their own and others’—to understand how leadership functions. They consider systems of thought when they make decisions or need to persuade. They contemplate when to press those systems and when to ease off.
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I call this technique “the buy-In boomerang.” It’s a logical turnabout that uses someone’s own stated standards against them. It’s a way of neutralizing a passive aggressive bully by getting them to buy into your argument. This technique draws on established psychological principles like commitment and consistency, but it specifically applies it to workplace bullying where evidence is ambiguous.
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Call them what you will: conciliators, moderates, normies, or rationalists, many of these people who guard the status quo constitute the extremist middle. In politics, they’re called “radical centrists,” but they pop up in all sorts of scenarios. They’re radical because of their ferocity.
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Leaders are individuals, but their individuality is almost irrelevant when it comes to their leadership success. The best leader is, after all, just another team member.
For a leader, what could be more wonderful than heading an effective organization that has earned a top award? Such collective success can be more satisfying than any individual prize.
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Leaders think a lot about success, so let’s do that. Success is obviously the goal, but what do we mean by it? All too often we focus on the wrong kind of success or the wrong metrics of success.
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What a spectacle! A 70-something-year-old white man commanding the stage as he bellows into a microphone. He holds this packed stadium in thrall to his every utterance. The crowd is in raptures. His crowd. They’ve heard all he has to say before, and they want to hear it all again. They cheer, they chant, and they yell his words back in sync to him.
This is not some tawdry political rally, though, and the man on stage is no bumptious demagogue. He is Bruce Springsteen—“The Boss”—performing at a recent concert I attended. And I can tell you that his reputation as a fantastic showman is solid.
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Great leaders think about legacy—what values and behaviors they’re passing down over the long haul, to whom, and how those recipients will carry what they learn into the future. Only this way can leadership have a positive effect beyond the immediate. Like all aspects of leadership, legacy thinking is imperfect, but it’s always preferable to the toxic bequest of bad bossing.
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While there are traits and factors where leaders and philosophers significantly diverge, they also have a great deal in common. It behooves the leader to consider the philosopher’s way and embrace it wherever most beneficial while understanding the differences between leadership and philosophy.
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With all the leadership advice (most of it quality) cluttering social media, our bookcase shelves, and our Audible lists, you’d think that we’d see a profound and widespread positive shift in how people in general manage. I guess things have gotten a bit better in spots, but overall the same assumptions and practices—the same bossing ethos—that have always held sway remain set. Most people in positions of authority cling to mere bossdom.
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Let’s create a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine a continuum stretching from the bossiest of bosses on one end to the most virtuous of servant leaders on the other. Contemplating this continuum reveals a paradox of perception. Here’s how the paradox works: the more an individual’s behavior leans toward the virtuous leader end of the continuum, the more we perceive their flaws and inconsistencies no matter how minor or anomalous.
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How can leaders maintain their decency in a world of indecency.
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“One day…”
Only two words, but what an impact! It’s the battle cry of the chronic procrastinator. We promise ourselves and others that we’ll get around to that task or fulfill that desire…one day. Our intentions may be innocent and pure, but our motivation is slippery—that is, if it even exists.
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Here’s a fun fact. King Oedipus murdered his father, married his mother, and brought plague to his city, which makes him the perfect case study for toxic leadership in the modern workplace.
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My excitement defies description—even by me!—as I announce the release of my TEDx talk for TEDx Clarkstown!
It’s called “Swizzle: The Way of the Change Agent,” and whether you're a regular reader of On Leading with Greatness or new to my writing, this talk might just surprise you. The energy, the storytelling, the ideas—they translate differently on stage, and I think you'll find something to connect with.
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Here’s to the people who make true leadership possible, whose tireless efforts and devotion bring about change.
Here’s to the ones who do, who execute, who put into place. When the day is done and all is quiet, they remain unsung. Without them, though, nothing would happen.
that team.
Here’s the followers without whom there are no leaders.
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Have you ever been given the silent treatment? Have you ever been silenced?
Humans—being social creatures—rely on communication in all its forms to make connections. We need communication to thrive. In fact, communication is the second of the 4 Cs of effective leadership along with character, compromise, and collaboration. You simply can’t lead without being a good communicator.
But I want to talk about communication’s opposite: silence.
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The truth is that the player who attempts to bluff always does so from a position of deficiency. You wouldn’t be bluffing if you placed a high bet on, say, a straight or a flush unless you somehow knew for a fact that your opponent held four of a kind. Therefore, bluffing is always a de facto admission of weakness even when the player wins.
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You’re a good person. I’m a good person. That woman over there, see her? She’s a good person. The man right past her, the one kicking his dog, he’s a good person too.
Are you buying any of this?
Please don’t.
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Learn how marketing eats merit for breakfast.
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Think of a clenched fist. What comes to mind? For most people a fist evokes strength, aggression, and even a touch of violence. A raised fist screams defiance and declares revolutionary solidarity. A fist shaken in the face? It’s a prelude to a fight. In our culture, fists are undeniably masculine. Men punch, and women slap. Or so we imagine.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that bosses—as we conceive them—are more comparable to fists than open hands. Bosses want to exude an aura of toughness, an uncompromising stance. The stereotypical hardboiled, cigar-chomping autocrat. The iron man: red hot on the outside but cool within. Like a boss, right?
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Let’s sketch a scene. Imagine holding a classic rocks glass—one of those short tumblers used for whiskey. Its thick walls and solid base give it an appealing heft in your hand. Now picture a fancy swizzle stick leaning tall against the rim. Go ahead and grab that stick and give it a good whirl, really swizzle the hell out of that glass.
Oh, and one tiny detail, the glass in your hand, the one you’re vigorously swizzling, is filled with semi-liquified crap.
Feeling queasy? Sorry about that, but it could be a side effect of today’s focus—the art and value of progressive s**t-stirring!
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We don’t often think of the typical workplace as a site of worship, but workplace-based worship is widespread among the religious and the non-religious alike. From the devout believer to the avowed atheist, many or even most of us worship power.
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One pair of homonyms that directly relates to leadership and that consistently causes spelling angst is “principle” ending in “le” and “principal” ending in “al.” More critically, though, we also mix up the meaning of these words when it comes to leadership, thinking that “principal,” meaning the first and foremost, is more important than “principle,” meaning a rule or code.
I can offer any number of examples of bosses, people in leadership positions, unarguably the principal individuals, who are deeply unprincipled.
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What does a person’s behavior suggest about their level of competence?
The most competent among us aren’t hyper-confident and are often riven with self-doubt, which you might not realize if you aren’t close to them or you actually are them. I’m not talking about imposter syndrome. The self-doubt a competent leader experiences is an entirely healthy and even necessary element of their competence.
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"Hero” is an overused and much abused term. There’s even a concept called “heroic leadership.” (And now we are at the heart of the matter!)
Think about that phrase. What does it evoke for you? What image does it conjure?
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Most leadership advice suggests that empathy is a key component to effective leadership, and I won’t disagree. Leaders empathize to improve their ability to communicate and to compromise. But…
Empathy is not inherently good. Empathy can be a component of morality, but it’s not moral in itself.
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Have you ever considered the inherent value of taking action and getting things done? We sometimes refer to comic book heroes as “action heroes,” but do you think action is heroic in and of itself?
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Sometimes it’s okay to break the rules. Sometimes it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Do you ever break the rules on purpose?
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Have you noticed the recent change of seasons? I always feel inspired by the arrival of a new April to change things up myself. How about instead of writing about how awful bosses are, we take a look at how to be the best boss possible? After all, bosses are people too (at least in the biological sense).
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So much information, and so little time to review it, which is to say nothing of comprehending and intelligently responding to it. We drift in a world awash in information, gulping it down as quickly as possible in hopes we don’t drown.
Yet, “leaders are readers,” or so they say. Leaders gain knowledge and a degree of understanding by guzzling information.
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Why do the best leaders find it necessary to eschew comfort to pursue progress? It’s for the same reason that the best teachers challenge themselves while seeking to disrupt student complacency.
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In the workplace and elsewhere, we can witness a different but similar sort of corruption in which an outside influence eats away at integrity until it’s compromised out of existence. That influence could be money or power, but often it’s overwork and stress leading to exhaustion, shoddy work, cover-ups, and increasing dishonesty. Much corruption stems from mental and moral fatigue and the action or inaction of those at the top of the organization.
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The power structures and politics of the average workplace provide a perfect arena for cruelty. I have written about the necessity of human decency in leadership and the workplace, and decency forms the thematic backbone of my upcoming book, Greater than Great. I’ve also addressed the causes and types of bad behavior in the workplace, but what about plain mean-spiritedness in our workaday lives?
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The current fashion is for business leaders to excitedly prattle on about “moving fast and breaking things,” but that’s most often heedless and even childish advice. “Breaking things” only works if you don’t care much what comes next. One of the fundamental challenges of leadership is deciding if, when, and how to disrupt the status quo—to break things.
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There they are. The terminal words. “Common sense.” The phrase is just another way of declaring, “You shut up now. We’re done here.” It’s is a vestige of a supposedly bygone era when bosses simply made up rules as they went along, often after the fact.
It makes an excellent conversation ender because who can argue with common sense? It’s the answer to every tough “why?” or “how?” question that you want to evade. You can even wield common sense in response to quantifiable or demonstrable matters.
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Why does the autocratic workplace—that gulag of ineptitude—still hold such appeal? Why are workers willing to overlook their broken cultures and the fecklessness that accompany them? I’ve addressed the mythology of autocratic bosses before, but why do we allow or even want our entire workplaces structured in their image?
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Have you ever noticed on social media that people who include others in their selfies are usually the most prominent person in every photo? It’s as though they’re the protagonist in some unwritten narrative. If every picture tells a story, these selfies shout out that one person matters more than the rest. Such photos are visual symbols of main character syndrome (MCS) at work.
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When we hear the word “severance” we usually think of a severance package, the money and benefits granted to some terminated workers. But severance refers specifically to the act of severing employees from their employment by “cutting” positions or directly “axing” workers. Like “termination,” these are violent words, indicating a chopping off, an amputation, decapitation, or death. Workplace lingo can be so cruel!
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It’s time I come clean. I’m always writing about integrity in some form or other, and I’m sincere in my desire to encourage the understanding and practice of integrity among leaders. Candidly, though, I rarely write about the downside of integrity: it can hurt.
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We humans have a love-hate relationship with efficiency. On the one hand, we keenly want our systems to be efficient, to not waste time, energy, or physical resources. On the other hand, most efficiency stratagems are indistinguishable from austerity schemes handed down from on-high. The truth is that sustainable efficiency rarely comes from above or from outside.
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When was the last time you reviewed your past, present, and yet to be?
It was a dark and stormy afternoon. Eb was in the middle of chewing out stupid Bob, who was on the verge of tears.
Eb was furious at Bob for his constant nattering about Eb’s alleged neglect of the corporate mission. “What a lot of hooey!” Eb yelled. “The mission’s just a sap to sell more stock to do-gooder shareholders, or haven’t you figured that out yet!”
With that he summarily fired Bob. “I want you out of here by five, sharp!”
Bob gasped, “But, sir, it’s Christmas Eve!”
Eb relished for a moment the tears welling up in the poor man’s eyes. What a crybaby! Eb then snapped at him, “If I could, I’d fire you on Christmas! Now pack up your belongings and get out!”
As pathetic Bob shuffled out the door, Eb enjoyed the man’s departing sniffles and thought how satisfying it was to fire Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve. He might just have to make the Christmas Eve firing a tradition.
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What happens when people obey in advance?
Once bully bosses establish themselves as the alphas, many employees will submit in advance with little prompting. Capitulators compromise their values, betray loyalties, and even sacrifice their own most fundamental interests to cater to a boss’s whims. Here’s a simple rule: True leaders never obey in advance.
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Great leaders act. They strive to do good—to do both good work and good works. Everything else they leave to the neutrals—those chronically indifferent, morally gutless, and ethically spineless “caitiff wretches”—the chief enemy of the good.
When the neutrals sit down, you know it’s time for the leaders to stand up.
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Love him or despise him, Clinton stood as a colossus in American politics despite his profusion of personal failings, retrograde behaviors, and carnal appetites—which seem almost quaint today. One of the keys to his apparent political success was also his greatest deficit as a person: his ability to compartmentalize.
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Let’s talk about that most persistent of boss myths: that the tougher they are, the more effective they are. This nonsense is related to the “strongman” myth in politics, which assumes that authoritarian leaders are somehow superior at getting things done. There’s that tired line about how Benito Mussolini, the brutal fascist dictator of Italy known as Il Duce, got the decrepit Italian trains to run on time. Except he didn’t. What worked so well in fascist Italy wasn’t the rail system; it was Mussolini’s propaganda machine.
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The Ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch may offer some insight here. Plutarch wrote, “I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod.” Perhaps feeling a little cheeky, he added, “My shadow does that much better.” Plutarch certainly would have rejected an enabling shadow like Jeff Greene as a friend. As it goes with television characters and Greek philosophers, so it goes with leaders. Unchecked personal loyalty can be detrimental and even destructive as we see with Larry’s friend Jeff. As Plutarch suggests, such an ally is as useless as a shadow or worse.
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We all know the type. Think of television and movie characters such as Logan Roy from Succession. Or consider historical world leaders such as Napoleon. What do all these individuals—real or imagined—have in common? They have all embraced the “strongman” model of leadership . The strongman model occurs far more prevalently in everyday life. It’s the way of many or even most bosses.
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Just the other day, something extraordinary happened. Someone praised me.
Not that no one ever praises me, but it was the context that made it land differently.
For years, I struggled to accept compliments with the grace they deserve. When praised, my mind would grumble, “What’s their angle” or “If only they knew…” I’d tell myself I needed to dismiss their recognition so I could “stay humble,” which really just reflected a limiting belief that I'm not deserving.
Like all limiting beliefs, it’s silly and untrue of course; earned praise is deserved praise. I eventually realized how off-putting it was when I deflected others’ compliments. I wasn’t being humble. I was being ungracious and ungrateful.
So, I learned to accept compliments in the spirit they’re offered. This shift also unlocked the door to gratitude and its rewards.
What happened the other day reminded me of all this.
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Bossplainers have a compulsion to expound on how to do everything. Their behavior is utterly demoralizing because it starts and ends with the assumption that people don’t know what they’re doing. Every error—perceived or real—is blown out of proportion.
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One of my favorite sayings comes from Mike Tyson, the champion boxer:
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
So, if plans are so useless, why plan?
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Are you ready for a shocking revelation that could save your business and improve the wellbeing of everyone around you? Well, brace yourself because what I’m about to expose may upset you.
If you’re a clear-thinker who values candor, keep reading and heed every word. Your company’s and even your own future may depend on it.
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Let’s just get this out of the way: Bosses are never leaders. As for leaders, they’re never bosses.
So, it’s that simple. Bosses aren’t leaders. But how do you tell the difference between a mere boss and a true leader? Sometimes it’s just obvious. You simply know. But if you’re not sure, one easy test is to determine which direction they’re running. One will be running away and one running toward.
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Leadership is practically in my blood. From a young age, I have been thrust into leadership positions, and I had to rely on my wits to succeed. Nonetheless, I always was a pretty good gut leader.
Leadership is a skill, and like any other skill you can be born into it, but it must also be learned. The thing with learning new skills, though, is that while someone can guide you through the process, they cannot teach you the actual skill. That only comes through application and practice.
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Are you awake? How can you be sure?
Someone once observed, “It’s only when you wake up that you notice you were sleeping.” It’s a thinker, a puzzle, a paradox. Consider how often you operate on autopilot, un-present and unaware of your unawareness. It takes an act of consciousness—triggered from the outside or from within—to realize we’ve been sleepwalking.
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What a spectacle! A 70-something-year-old white man commanding the stage as he bellows into a microphone. He holds this packed stadium in thrall to his every utterance. The crowd is in raptures. His crowd. They’ve heard all he has to say before, and they want to hear it all again. They cheer, they chant, and they yell his words back in sync to him.
This is not some tawdry political rally, though, and the man on stage is no bumptious demagogue. He is Bruce Springsteen—“The Boss”—performing at a recent concert I attended. And I can tell you that his reputation as a fantastic showman is solid.
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Have you ever felt like you’re faking your way through work and life? This happens to most if not all of us—the phenomenon we call “imposter syndrome.”
As a leadership coach and as a fellow human being rumbling along this rugged road of existence, I’ve encountered this syndrome more times than I care to ponder. You know it well. It’s that insidious nagging voice that tells you, "You don't belong here," despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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Last year I delved into the corporate culture of crisis, shedding light on its high costs and offering some strategies to break free from the grip of this mindset. If you missed that, you can catch up with the article here.
Now let’s dig a little more deeply into crisis culture, starting with the word itself.
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It’s time I expand my reach to a much bigger crowd, one teaming with mindless ambition, baseless pride, and bottomless avarice. That’s right, this one isn’t for the rare servant leader. It’s for superabundant self-serving bosses! You know who you are—the top dogs, the fat cats, the kingfishes.
So let’s pluck some of that low-hanging fruit and help you head honcho-types out there to up your nasty bossing game.
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Confucius offers this insight on gaining wisdom:
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
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Have you ever tried to transform the very soul of an organization—its culture? Quite the task, right? To thoroughly transform a culture for the better, you need to look to and master the Rule of Thirds Strategy.
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Let’s sketch a scene. Imagine holding a classic rocks glass—one of those short tumblers used for whiskey. Its thick walls and solid base give it an appealing heft in your hand. Now picture a fancy swizzle stick leaning tall against the rim. Go ahead and grab that stick and give it a good whirl, really swizzle the hell out of that glass.
Oh, and one tiny detail, the glass in your hand, the one you’re vigorously swizzling, is filled with semi-liquified crap.
Feeling queasy? Sorry about that, but it could be a side effect of today’s focus—the art and value of progressive s**t-stirring!
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Tell me if you’ve seen something like this: You’re at work (or working from home), toiling away, when suddenly there’s an announcement. Your coworker just got the big promotion everyone was vying for. Let’s call him Chad. This isn’t the first time our buddy Chad reaped the rewards, which would be great if Chad were the go-getter his win streak suggests, but everyone knows Chad’s a dud.
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Have you ever thought about your legacy?
For leaders, legacy is paramount. But the leader’s legacy is not about self-congratulation and ego-stroking. In fact, the leader’s legacy is largely the result of leaders just doing what leaders do, making a significant impact that happens to reverberate long after they’ve left the building.
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“One day…”
Only two words, but what an impact! It’s the battle cry of the chronic procrastinator. We promise ourselves and others that we’ll get around to that task or fulfill that desire…one day. Our intentions may be innocent and pure, but our motivation is slippery—that is, if it even exists.
Consider this current moment—right now. Whatever is happening, much seems set. It’s hard for us to imagine change without choosing to do so. So we have two flavors of “one day” to savor. The first is the “one day” of chronic delay—I’ll get to it. The second is the “one day” of inevitable change—it’ll get to me.
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Great leaders work to build relationships and cultures that eliminate assumptions. They engender mutual trust, transparency, and open communication. It’s an ongoing process, sure, but well worth it. What’s more, great leaders also ask (and answer) a lot of questions, and not just when they are new! Dump the assumptions and give it a try. Thrill as you discover your team’s unexpected skills. You never know who might turn out to have that secret ability you need. They may even know how to drive stick.
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Let me tell you about this truth my friend Jeff laid on me a few weeks ago. Jeff is a serial entrepreneur and all-around wise man, and he observed, “in any communication, the listener has all the power.” That profundity has been tumbling around in my head ever since. It’s a great way for leaders to think about communication. When it comes to a delivered message, the ear has it all over the mouth.
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In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, philosopher, and holocaust survivor, writes of his experience: “From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.”
To be clear, Frankl isn’t drawing a simplistic line between the camp overseers—the perpetrators—and the prisoners—their victims with the former as the indecent race and the latter among the decent race. His observation comes after recounting a surprising act of compassion by a camp foreman who risked his life to slip Frankl a piece of his own bread rations. This kindness, small but monumental, illustrates Frankl’s assessment of human nature that “the boundaries between groups overlapped.” That decency can exist in the most indecent of places.
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In this episode of On Leading with Greatness, Jim Salvucci of Guidance for Greatness delves into the counterintuitive reality of leadership where we often favor flashy, incompetent leaders over consistent, capable ones. By contrasting the styles of a crisis-loving manager named Carl and a reliable, drama-free manager named Pam, Jim highlights the societal bias influenced by the Dunning-Kruger effect and the action fallacy. Discover why marketing and sensationalism overshadow true merit and learn how to identify and nurture genuinely effective leaders.
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So which is it? Are leaders born or bred? Are they delivered by the proverbial stork, or are they mainly a product of their story? As I cruise the podcast circuit as a guest, this question keeps popping up: Is leadership innate or something that must be cultivated over time?
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How effectively do you market yourself? How actively do you ignore the hype and elevate merit?
Great leaders have a duty to discover merit amidst the noise of marketing, and I can help.
Unlock the Great Leader Within! Download my free resource, the Transform To GREATness Toolkit, now!
I look forward to hearing from you.
If you want to invite me speak at your event or appear on your podcast, visit these pages for more information:
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Dr. Jim Salvucci is an author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant. He served higher education for 30 years as an English professor, dean, and vice president before founding Guidance for Greatness to guide young bosses to become the next generation of great leaders. He is a certified Tiny Habits coach as well as a certified Thrive Global coach and life coach and holds leadership certificates from Harvard University and the Council of Independent Colleges. Central to Jim’s leadership philosophy is that all great leaders are decent humans as well as great teachers, guiding their people and their organizations through values toward success.
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Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.“
Good ol’ Ben Franklin was onto something. Sacrificing our sacred freedoms for some fleeting security is foolish, but we see it all the time. The backstory of this quote is a bit tangled, but the core message remains as sound as a hundred dollar bill. Don’t undersell what’s most important.
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What do people really mean when they say someone is good deep down?
Filbert was a bit of a nut. His wife would say that all the time with a chuckle. Usually she said this right after he pulled “one of his stunts.” It was not easy being married to Filbert, and her little pun was just one way she coped. When Filbert acted out, his friends would say, “that’s just Filbert being Filbert,” and offer a wry little laugh of their own.
The people who worked for Filbert generally feared him. For decades he had held his entire building floor in a simmering state of anxious misery that occasionally boiled over into roiling terror.
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Here’s the scene: A street partially excavated, construction equipment scattered about, jackhammers and backup beepers striking a symphony of cacophony. But, lo, what do I behold rounding the corner? Could it be? Yes, a lone driver has decided, despite all the barricades and “Do Not Enter” signs, that this street is still an active thoroughfare. Even the seasoned construction workers shake their heads and tsk-tsk at such foolishness. This episode repeats all day and all night as drivers test the reality of a dead-end street. This bizarre ritual is a perfect analogy for how managers and leaders navigate decisions.
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Here’s a story about leveraging visibility to maximize transparency by utilizing the transparency paradox. Some years ago, I was elected the chair of the Faculty Council at my university—a representative group of professors who help steer the policies and curriculum of the school. Such bodies are rarely a hotbed of controversy although they can wield considerable influence.
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Think of a clenched fist. What comes to mind? For most people a fist evokes strength, aggression, and even a touch of violence. A raised fist screams defiance and declares revolutionary solidarity. A fist shaken in the face? It’s a prelude to a fight. In our culture, fists are undeniably masculine. Men punch, and women slap. Or so we imagine.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that bosses—as we conceive them—are more comparable to fists than open hands. Bosses want to exude an aura of toughness, an uncompromising stance. The stereotypical hardboiled, cigar-chomping autocrat. The iron man: red hot on the outside but cool within. Like a boss, right?
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People often think that leadership ability is something that you must be born with, like green eyes or curly hair, as if leadership skills spontaneously generate or derive from an inherited “leadership gene.” Leaders, though, are developed more than born.
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Have you ever watched the 1992 cinematic classic Glengarry Glen Ross? If not, you’re missing out on one of the most intense and brutal takedowns of the modern workplace. While the homogenous casting dates it a bit, the film—based on David Mamet’s play—offers a high-octane drama populated by Hollywood heavyweights who greedily chew up the scenery.
I encourage you to watch the film less as a commentary on masculine corruption and more as a workplace drama—a critique of modern office culture. Great leadership committed to treating people as human beings, not just "resources" or “marks,” would transform this sales office and likely boost sales in the long run. It might not make the best cinema, but such a norm surely would be a welcome change in the real world.
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Have you ever had a boss who valued numbers above all else? The kind of person who gets all bogged down in the minutia and can’t see the big picture? I had one of those bosses, the provost of a small university—in charge of all things academic—and I would have found his antics hilarious if the consequences weren’t so dire. Simply put, my boss never met a number he couldn’t misunderstand.
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Jonathan was enjoying a quiet evening relaxing at home alone when he hit on the idea of taking a hot bath. “Nothing soothes those old aches and pains quite like a long soak,” he told himself as he filled the tub.
Soon the tub was brimming, and a tantalizing mist rose from the water. Jonathan climbed in and carefully lowered himself, relishing the contrast between cool of the air and the steamy water. The tub was so splendidly full that it threatened to spill over. A little water even sloshed to the floor when he shifted to get comfortable. He slipped into a luxurious stupor, lulled by the warmth and the steady trickle of excess water pouring into the overflow drain.
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What would it take to up your gaslighting game?
Welcome everyone to my supremely succinct and most authoritative lesson on how to gaslight effectively. After decades of close observation while suffering at the hands of gaslighters, I am delighted to offer this compact treatise on the ways and means of gaslighting to you, the morally reprobate public.
My regular followers will be surprised that I would offer advice on how to gaslight. After all, I usually write appeals to people’s basic human decency and rail against bullies and liars and other incompetent humans. In other words, most bosses..
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Effective delegation is a key skill for any decent leader. Even if things go sideways, choosing to entrust your team with tasks, decisions, and authority is always a noble move—that is, so long as they have the wherewithal, mindset, resources, authority, autonomy, and guidance to prevail. Few leadership practices will hone your skills quite like responsible delegation.
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Think of your worst job interview experience, and I bet I could match or top it with one of mine from my decades in higher ed. I could regale you with such classic tales as the college president who interviewed me while delirious with the flu or the school that put me through a grueling all-day interview only to announce at the end that they had always intended to hire an internal candidate. Come to think of it, both interviews were at the same college decades apart! I am not kidding!
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Let’s talk about that most persistent of boss myths: that the tougher they are, the more effective they are. This nonsense is related to the “strongman” myth in politics, which assumes that authoritarian leaders are somehow superior at getting things done. There’s that tired line about how Benito Mussolini, the brutal fascist dictator of Italy known as Il Duce, got the decrepit Italian trains to run on time. Except he didn’t. What worked so well in fascist Italy wasn’t the rail system; it was Mussolini’s propaganda machine.
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Grab your space helmet and strap in, folks! We’re about to launch into the one of the universe’s great conundrums:
Which is superior, Star Wars or Star Trek?
As a sci-fi devotee who will sit through the most tedious space-travel saga, I am too familiar with this cosmic clash and how it reflects our culture.
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Let’s call Marni’s approach “disagreeing to agree.” It can go by a variety of names, but it is a powerful move in the leader’s playbook. Whether formal or informal, planned or spontaneous, or with individuals or groups, disagreeing to agree creates space for discussion and even arguments while insisting on the civil tone and mutual respect that team members deserve and that productive discourse demands; in other words, it allows and even encourages dissent and debate within the bounds of civility.
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Bullying in the workplace is more prevalent than we probably like to admit, but we tend to view it as an anomaly—an isolated bug rather than a widespread feature.
What if I told you instead that many workplace structures themselves encourage noxious behavior? What if workplace policies and procedures—even some of the ones that are supposed to foster a healthy workplace—provoke abuse and bullying? More often than we may realize, bullying is a built-in feature and not just a bug.
Let’s sneak a peek behind those sunny “we value our employees” posters tacked up in the breakroom and uncover some of these features.
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One of the biggest leadership myths is that “leaders get things done,” a notion I find disastrously specious, as I discussed in my piece on steering clear of gurus.
This misconception has led many to believe that tangible outcomes are the best or even the only hallmark of exceptional leadership.
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Change is inevitable. You’ve heard that before, but it bears repeating. Change is what happens while you are off planning for something else altogether. Birth is change. Life is change. Death is change, too. Change in itself is neither good nor bad, but everything changes for better or worse. Even stone changes.
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Impulsiveness is usually rewarded as though impetuousness is the best path to success.
However, in the reality of everyday human existence, how frequently do we face such stark and immediate choices that demand instant action? And when we do act thoughtlessly in such situations, how often does it turn out a-ok?
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One of the most pernicious practices of the bad boss is bullying. From the monstrous cruelty of public humiliation to the comparatively elegant art of gaslighting, bully-bosses have a diverse arsenal of tricks. What sets bully-bosses apart from most other bullies is the control they—as bosses—exert over every aspect of the workplace. I know how to neutralize a colleague who tries to bully me, but a bully-boss is a different matter.
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Yes, I had them do an assumption audit, an evaluation of ideas they unconsciously embraced. I gave them the assignment two weeks in advance so that they could stew over it. Also, we needed time to have an in-depth discussion about the meaning of “cultural assumptions.” After all, few people—particularly young college students—have ever contemplated such things let alone audited them.
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Communication is the second of the four elements of leadership that all great leaders practice—the 4 Cs: character, communication, compromise, and collaboration. [link] Moreover, at the core of impactful communication reside three interwoven and equally vital components, the three keys necessary to unlock effective communication: message, audience, and clarity.
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Can people gain intelligence, or do we all just stay the same level we were born at?Your circumstances do not dictate your mindset. Your choices do.
If you are fixed in place by a fixed mindset, you can choose to grow with a growth mindset. If you are scarred by a scarcity mindset, you can choose dance with an abundance mindset. Your mindset is one of the few things entirely within your control, so take control. All you need to start is change your mind.
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When was the last time you reviewed your past, present, and yet to be?
It was a dark and stormy afternoon. Eb was in the middle of chewing out stupid Bob, who was on the verge of tears.
Eb was furious at Bob for his constant nattering about Eb’s alleged neglect of the corporate mission. “What a lot of hooey!” Eb yelled. “The mission’s just a sap to sell more stock to do-gooder shareholders, or haven’t you figured that out yet!”
With that he summarily fired Bob. “I want you out of here by five, sharp!”
Bob gasped, “But, sir, it’s Christmas Eve!”
Eb relished for a moment the tears welling up in the poor man’s eyes. What a crybaby! Eb then snapped at him, “If I could, I’d fire you on Christmas! Now pack up your belongings and get out!”
As pathetic Bob shuffled out the door, Eb enjoyed the man’s departing sniffles and thought how satisfying it was to fire Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve. He might just have to make the Christmas Eve firing a tradition.
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The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus left us this morsel to ruminate on: “Character is destiny.” It’s a well worn and venerable saying, but, frankly, I just can’t agree with him, at least not in our common understanding of his meaning.
Character is the first of the core elements of leadership—the 4 Cs—along with communication, compromise, and collaboration. Your character consists of your values, habits, beliefs, resilience, experiences, and everything else that drives or limits your behavior.
My issue with Heraclitus’ saying does not stem from the word “character,” though, but from the word “destiny.”
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In his soulful song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen sings of the opportunity for wisdom that imperfection offers us:
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in
Instead of hiding these imperfections or hiding from them, Cohen offers a different course. The lyrics describe a wounded world where everything—good, bad, or banal—is fleeting. War, love, and even governments are ever coming and going like the day itself.
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What is the role of a boss? What if less bossing resulted in better productivity?
Most bosses will tell you that they want to overcome obstacles, but what if I told you that the boss can be one of the biggest obstacles? The boss’s role, at its core, is to make it easier for the team to do its work and be successful. Sadly, most bosses are more concerned about advancing themselves, protecting their interests, and hitting arbitrary (and often counterproductive metrics, so the last thing they consider is how to help their team members except as it reflects well on them. Worse still, it is pretty rare that they even know how to help. So imagine a situation where a boss had proof positive that their routines, including meetings, were largely unnecessary and even
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How do you master the little things in order to make big changes?
Two airliners take off from Newark Airport back to back and head due west. On one, the passengers are dressed for warm weather and sport sun hats. Their luggage is brimming with lightweight clothes and sandals. On the other plane, the passengers are wearing long sleeves and long pants. Their suitcases are stuffed with extra layers and some overhead compartments contain coats.
After some miles flying west, one plane alters its path a few degrees south. The other does so a couple of degrees north. Several hours later, the first lands in Los Angelos, the other in Anchorage. Just a subtle change in a trajectory makes all the difference.
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Why are bosses so overpowered by the power of having power?
Let’s call this phenomenon BUI,bossing under the influence, which, like its more familiar counterpart, DUI or driving under the influence, can have far-reaching consequences. While the drunk driver may cause vehicular mayhem, accidents, grave injuries, and even death, the boss under the influence wreaks their own havoc in the workplace and well beyond.
You can think of it as drunk bossing, where bosses tipsy on power regularly cause anxiety and misery at work, which goes on to disrupt life at home.
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I must confess that my most recent post, which delved into the dark side of compromise, was difficult for me to write.
It compelled me to dip into some of my past, which can sting. I do that a lot, though. The real challenge was crafting a clear, complete, and convincing argument. That’s the fun part, but I admit that in that piece I may have fallen short of my goal.
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Leadership is pretty simple in concept. For instance, I'm an enthusiastic advocate of what I call the 4Cs – those four cornerstones that are indispensable for effective leadership: character, communication, compromise, and collaboration. I wrote about the 4Cs previously. Today I want to focus on just one of the 4Cs, the one that is a bit of a double-edged sword—compromise.
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Dysfunctional organizations always out themselves. Despite their attempts to compensate for their incompetence with apologies and small gestures, they can never get the fundamentals right. It’s like a boat with a chronically leaky hull. You can bail all you want with as many buckets as you can find, but that boat is going down.
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What would it be like to be the last person on Earth?
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He then responded with a bit of cornpone that was new to me, drawling, “Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I chuckled at the pleasantry and went right on fixing what was not broke. After all, “ain't broke” doesn't mean “couldn't be better.”
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Leadership is practically in my blood. From a young age, I have been thrust into leadership positions, and I had to rely on my wits to succeed. Nonetheless, I always was a pretty good gut leader.
Leadership is a skill, and like any other skill you can be born into it, but it must also be learned. The thing with learning new skills, though, is that while someone can guide you through the process, they cannot teach you the actual skill. That only comes through application and practice.
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How often have you heard that confidence and getting things done are definitional leadership qualities?
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The difference between bossing and leading is massive. Yes, of course, most leaders are bosses on some level, but very few bosses are leaders. Boss is a position. Leader is an attitude of greatness, whatever the position, which is why untitled (and unentitled) employees can be great leaders without being bosses.
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Last week I delved into the corporate culture of crisis, shedding light on its high costs and offering some strategies to break free from the grip of this mindset. If you missed that, you can catch up with the article here.
Now let’s dig a little more deeply into crisis culture, starting with the word itself.
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Picture this series of disasters! The phone rings, an email arrives, a report request lands on your desk, someone demands answers, dammit, answers! Welcome to the woeful world of the corporate addiction to urgency. It is as if urgency itself is an emergency—the crisis of urgency. But as I always say,
If everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.
In other words, once everything becomes equally urgent, there can be no priorities, and chaos ensues.
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Rope is an incredibly simple but amazing tool. Imagine a world without it—no sails raised to harness the wind, no stones transported miles to construct the pyramids, the highest mountain peaks unscaled. For millennia, rope has hoisted laden pails from wells, secured the beams of modest dwellings, and flown our proud banners. Even laundry once relied on rope to dry in the heat of the sun.
Like any versatile tool, however, rope has its dark uses. Rope can truss limbs—securing animals for the slaughterhouse and humans for bondage. Yes, rope can guard us from danger and maintain order even in the largest crowd, but it also restricts our free movement, marking forbidden perimeters and enforcing confinement. And in the darkest chapters of human stories, rope can be used to take life.
Surprising as it may be, I wielded a lot of rope as a professor and as a boss.
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Have you ever tried to transform the very soul of an organization—its culture? Quite the task, right? To thoroughly transform a culture for the better, you need to look to and master the Rule of Thirds Strategy.
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Driving my bosses bonkers has always been my specialty. What better way to keep them on their toes? Besides, I figure, what else is a boss there for?
Way back in the 1900s, I was a professional set builder for a couple of major Philadelphia theaters. I was a decent enough carpenter, better than most, but my technique was somewhat unorthodox, which worked well in the quirky realm of theater. I was pretty happy with the gigs.
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Bosses generally hate questions because, in their narrow thinking, questions, even when they ask them, are a sort of trap. Bosses fear that asking questions may make them seem confused, ignorant, and weak. That’s why so many bosses’ questions are actually lightly disguised accusations or threats: “When are you going to get that Fluggenhopper report to me, Jenkins? Don’t you know I have an early tee time tomorrow?”
But, let’s say an employee is the one asking questions. From the typical boss’s perspective a questioning employee represents several possible threats.
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You know the phrase “like a boss?” It was the liveliest, hippest phrase in English a few years back. But, alas, it suffered an untimely and completely meaningless death upon the 2020 release of the the megaplex mediocrity Like a Boss. Prior to that, the phrase was inescapable, but what did it really mean?
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Let me tell you about this truth my friend Jeff laid on me a few weeks ago. Jeff is a serial entrepreneur and all-around wise man, and he observed, “in any communication, the listener has all the power.” That profundity has been tumbling around in my head ever since. It’s a great way for leaders to think about communication. When it comes to a delivered message, the ear has it all over the mouth.
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So if harassment, discrimination, and even stealing—all heinous practices—are not taboo, what is? What workplace practice, at its mere mention, universally causes us to recoil in dread and disdain and even disgust? What then is perhaps our greatest workplace taboo?
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My brother, an engineer, used to design control systems for manufacturing plants. Many of his clients came from the pharmaceutical industry, which generated a ton of anecdotes about the wonderful wooly world of drug companies.
One of his best observations was what he dubbed the “rubber chicken effect.”
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Okay, I admit that I spend way too much time grousing about bad bossing. I mean there have to be a few good bosses out to look up to, right? Well, I have done the research and can assure you that there are a some outstanding innovators to admire. Let’s check out a few of these trailblazers—explorers, if you will—boldly bossing where no boss has bossed before.
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You have heard the proverb “cheaters never prosper.” Whadda load!
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You know the guy. The one who puts a positive spin on every situation, who smooths over all the rough edges. At first it may seem okay. After all, who wants to deal with negative vibes? Dr. Goodvibes is here to make it all go away, to turn that frown upside down. When you are in Dr. Goodvibes’ presence, your worries disappear. There can be no regrets, no suffering. Setbacks, problems, even trauma are all just in your head, like delusions and hallucinations and nightmares. None of that bad stuff is real. Only the good prevails.
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How can you use radical transparency to manufacture authority?
Responsibility without authority is a mess. If you are a boss, never ever put anyone in that situation. Never. If you are stuck with a crappy boss who subjects you to such abuse, consider embracing the mess and turning your greatest disadvantage into an advantage by owning it. Radical transparency — openly sharing your vulnerability — can be a powerful tool to win friends and allies and self-generate authority while keeping your integrity intact.
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It is high time I come clean. Why am I always ragging on bosses in my essays? It’s not that I hate every boss. After all, I was a boss, and while I am sure a few of my people would argue I was just another bad boss (and sometimes I was), I always strived to improve and had evidence that I did so. As I became more experienced as a supervisor, I tried to assure that I was a whole lot better at leading than when I started, but I also knew I could be much better still.
And that’s the thing. Bosses can all be better. If you are a boss, don’t despair. You can be a good boss. You can be a leader. You can be a great leader! The first step is to admit you have a problem, and the problem is you are a boss. All too often the last stop before hell is a corner office.
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My best friend when I was about 12 was a boy I’ll call “Randy,” which rhymes with his real name…which was not Mandy or Candy or Sandy. Randy was a total nerd, which suited me since I was too. He had some quirks, though, that even I couldn’t tolerate over the long haul. One of his worst foibles was his cheating when we played games. It didn’t matter the game or how many people were playing. If Randy saw an opportunity, he would cheat and then just deny it when caught. I even saw him cheating at solitaire! Why would anyone cheat at solitaire?
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How do you handle mistakes?
Recently a friend told me about a situation she had with her employer. I’ll keep it vague to protect the innocent (and, by extension, the guilty I suppose). My friend had a question about how to proceed with with a task. She has two managers, which is structurally a bad situation from the get-go. One is conscientious but overworked and beleaguered. The other is overbearing and unapproachable. Their areas are entirely separate from one another, but both equally supervise my friend.
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The last college I worked at had a scarcity mindset that affected every decision large or small as mindsets do. It was the result of a pretty severe financial crisis from years before and the drastic emergency measures put in place to offset the losses.
Whenever someone wanted to oppose an idea (or impose another draconian cut), the budget was the go-to argument. There was no arguing with the budget.
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Have you ever been called to a mandatory meeting with no explanation? Have you ever been required to perform a task or work on a project without any sense of its purpose? Have you ever been forced to have fun at work?
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I have a confession to make. It is one I don’t lightly admit in public. There is something about me that sets me apart from most of the people in America, Europe, and throughout much of the world you know. My secret behavior is likely to make you think much less of me.
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What do people really mean when they say someone is good deep down?
Filbert was a bit of a nut. His wife would say that all the time with a chuckle. Usually she said this right after he pulled “one of his stunts.” It was not easy being married to Filbert, and her little pun was just one way she coped. When Filbert acted out, his friends would say, “that’s just Filbert being Filbert,” and offer a wry little laugh of their own.
The people who worked for Filbert generally feared him. For decades he had held his entire building floor in a simmering state of anxious misery that occasionally boiled over into roiling terror.
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Here is the scene. You are in an audience listening to a dynamic speaker who prances across the stage, mic in hand, full of zeal and conviction. She is preaching the gospel of leadership, and you and your fellow audience members are her latest apostles-in-training. She is making some sense, but you have little time to process what she is saying before she excitedly jumps to the next point and then the next. Her rapid-fire delivery soon overwhelms your brain, inducing a passive state as you absorb her litany. The energy in the room is crackling. It’s almost unbearable.
And then she says it. Enunciating the words like they are part of an elaborate incantation: “Confidence is the foundation of leadership.” At that moment, your critical thinking skills, which had been taking a little smoke break in the alleyway, kick back in: “Is that true? Is confidence so vital to being a leader?” But before you can fully contemplate her statement, she releases another zinger with all the fervor of a gospel singer: “Leaders are the ones who get thing done.”
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The word reason has to do with explanations and rationality. To be reasonable is to be logical, persuasive, and persuadable. We imbue reasonableness with all manner of virtue. Justice is reasonable. Sobriety is reasonable. Common sense is reasonable.
And yet, it is the reasonable that allows for injustice. The people regarded as most reasonable sit idly not wanting to make waves while others suffer. The reasonable can be too sober, stripping life of its joys, large and small. The most common sensical humans often misunderstand and misjudge the counterintuitive, the nontraditional, the innovative, and the absurd. Some extremely reasonable people accept and repeat untruths because they seem familiar and safe. Citing tradition is the trump card of the reasonable.
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Leadership is in my blood, literally.
My father was a leader in the truest sense. He was often out in front even when he did not have a title or position to put him there. He spent his life leading, and his example still inspires my leadership philosophy.
Dad’s early life was rough. Unlike my father, his father was not a warm and loving man, and his mother made it clear that dad was neither expected nor wanted. He spent a lot of time at his Aunt Laura’s around the corner in Philadelphia’s Overbrook neighborhood where his older female cousins doted over him. That’s probably where he learned to love.
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What would it take to up your gaslighting game?
Welcome everyone to my supremely succinct and most authoritative lesson on how to gaslight effectively. After decades of close observation while suffering at the hands of gaslighters, I am delighted to offer this compact treatise on the ways and means of gaslighting to you, the morally reprobate public.
My regular followers will be surprised that I would offer advice on how to gaslight. After all, I usually write appeals to people’s basic human decency and rail against bullies and liars and other incompetent humans. In other words, most bosses.
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I recently heard a local politician quip, “I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but they put covers on books for a reason.” It’s a clever turn of phrase, and he has a point. Modern book covers are a marketing tool and are supposed to indicate, reflect, or symbolize something about the contents of the book. Therefore, the cover should have some meaning and some bearing with regard to the book itself.
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What if I told you I knew one weird trick for doing a better job hiring?
Anyone who hires employees wants to do it better. Even if your hiring record is superb, you must realize you are living on borrowed time. Your very next hire might be the toxic, culture-crushing mistake you had evaded thus far.
I oversaw a lot of hiring in my day, and I am pretty proud of my record. Sure there was the occasional challenging case, but even those few had their virtues and most worked out just fine with some guidance. I took hiring very seriously, but my approach was somewhat novel.
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Your values serve three purposes in your work that would seem contradictory. First, they anchor you, assuring that you do not go too far astray. Second, they drive you, serving as a means to propel you forward. Third, they serve as a destination.
How can values do all three?
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Keep you in place,
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Move you forward, and
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Loom somewhere in the distance?
So how can you put your values to work in all three states? There is a four-part process that starts with identifying your values.
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Recently I ran a brief workshop during a weekly meeting of my Master Networks chapter. I pretty much have carte blanche during these trainings, so I try to change it up quite a bit. This time, I took a different approach altogether and, instead of presenting ideas or leading a discussion, I turned it into a controlled brainstorming session. I asked the twenty-plus people in the Zoom room, “what is a leader?”
The response was excellent with almost everyone able to contribute a word, phrase, thought, or definition in the ten minutes we had to complete this training. Later I shared a written synopsis with the participants. In it, I formulated a definition of a leader based on our brainstorming:
A leader is someone who guides others while serving alongside them, nurturing them, and focusing on self-improvement for themself and the entire team.
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Why do we tend to think that more is always better?
A long time ago, when I was an English professor, I reported to a department chair who had an odd quirk. Whenever we were to work on a new task or design a new course, she would fall back on the same strategy: “We will take what we are doing now and just do more of it.” Every time she said that she would smile broadly and tilt her head to one side as though she had just invented the formula for instant success. The whole scene was bizarre as were her two underlying assumptions:
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What we were already doing was a-ok and not worth improving; and,
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That quantity was the same as or more important than quality, that size was all that really mattered.
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What is an iconoclast, and why should you behave like one?
Every great leader thinks and behaves like an iconoclast.
Would you be best described as a conformist, a contrarian, an individualist, or an iconoclast? How can you behave more like an iconoclast?
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My vast and deep experience working for others and failing miserably at it can stand as inspiration and model for those who also aspire to be lousy employees. For me, my formula for failure starts with my bad attitude. I have been headstrong, some have even said arrogant, in the cause of doing the objectively right thing. Worse still, in my twisted mind, bosses exist primarily to help their people do their job better, not the other way round. That is why, when I was a boss, I spent much of my effort on smoothing the way for my people to succeed, a source of severe criticism from the bad bosses I reported to.
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What is the connection between curiosity and dissent?
The Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov [na BAW kiff] in his novel Bend Sinister wrote, “Curiosity … is insubordination in its purest form.” This association of curiosity and insubordination resonates with me because my experience bears it out. For instance, I don’t tell the story often, but I once had my voice taken away because of my curiosity. I am not sure I ever got it back entirely.
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Do you offer others dignity?
What if I told you that there is a resource of endless increase that would benefit you and those around you? That this resource is readily available to each and every one of us, that it is inexpensive, and that expending it can result in a full return with interest. That the only byproduct of using it is goodwill and trust.
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How well do you live up to your own self-image?
It is only in living and doing as the person you know you are at your core that you can actually be the person you are at your core.
Be the person you think you are.
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How good are you at sorting out sincere well-wishers from manipulators and kiss-ups?
If you are a leader, you must learn to identify and accept genuine compliments, learn to thwart manipulators, and learn to ignore kiss-ups. It’s a vital skill and an ongoing challenge, but there is an upside. So long as you are vigilant and honest with yourself and others, over time the manipulators and kiss-ups will become less of a problem as they discover their efforts are fruitless.
How do you sort genuine well-wishers from manipulators and kiss-ups? How effective are you at neutralizing manipulators and kiss-ups?
As a leader you must carefully sift sincere well-wishers from toxic people, and I can help.
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How do you master the little things in order to make big changes?
Two airliners take off from Newark Airport back to back and head due west. On one, the passengers are dressed for warm weather and sport sun hats. Their luggage is brimming with lightweight clothes and sandals. On the other plane, the passengers are wearing long sleeves and long pants. Their suitcases are stuffed with extra layers and some overhead compartments contain coats.
After some miles flying west, one plane alters its path a few degrees south. The other does so a couple of degrees north. Several hours later, the first lands in Los Angelos, the other in Anchorage. Just a subtle change in a trajectory makes all the difference.
In his poem “The Swing,” Seamus Heaney writes,
Fingertips just tipping you would send you
Every bit as far – once you got going –
As a big push in the back.
Heaney is describing the momentum of a child on a swing, which can easily be maintained or even increased with the slightest of efforts.
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What does it take to be a great leader?
Being a leader is not remarkable in itself. For one thing, leadership can be situational or even sporadic. The kid who stands up to the bully to protect her friend is a leader even if she sits back down quietly afterward. The teacher who guides students to understanding is a leader even if he never says anything at faculty meetings. The supervisor who finds it in herself to reach out compassionately to employees who may be troubled is a leader. The driver who refuses to go over the speed limit in a busy residential area even when there is an angry tailgater behind her is a leader.
So leading is widespread and even common. Leading is often reactive. We can all be and frequently are leaders in big and small ways. And while I have been known to draw a sharp distinction between being a boss and being a leader, pretty much every boss is a leader sometimes but a scant few are great leaders anytime.
Leadership is like the ocean surf. Waves lap the beach, sometimes gently and sometimes with fantastic force, enough to reshape the sand if not the shoreline. They come and they go.
Great leadership is something else. Great leaders are not waves, nor are they the tide. They are more akin to the moon, exerting an invisible and ineluctable influence on the ebb and flow of the oceans and therefore sculpting and defining the land. Great leaders are always there, always active, even when you don’t know it.
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When was the last time you reviewed your past, present, and yet to be?
It was a dark and stormy afternoon. Eb was in the middle of chewing out stupid Bob, who was on the verge of tears.
Eb was furious at Bob for his constant nattering about Eb’s alleged neglect of the corporate mission. “What a lot of hooey!” Eb yelled. “The mission’s just a sap to sell more stock to do-gooder shareholders, or haven’t you figured that out yet!”
With that he summarily fired Bob. “I want you out of here by five, sharp!”
Bob gasped, “But, sir, it’s Christmas Eve!”
Eb relished for a moment the tears welling up in the poor man’s eyes. What a crybaby! Eb then snapped at him, “If I could, I’d fire you on Christmas! Now pack up your belongings and get out!”
As pathetic Bob shuffled out the door, Eb enjoyed the man’s departing sniffles and thought how satisfying it was to fire Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve. He might just have to make the Christmas Eve firing a tradition.
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In my line of work helping young bosses become great leaders, the fight-flight response often comes up. With so many stressors and threats in the daily workplace — be it malevolent bosses and colleagues, crises large and small, or just the dreaded deadline — fear and anxiety are ubiquitous. In the face of these threats, we often stand ready to do battle or run away.
More often, though, we just freeze. In the workplace for so many, maybe most, the freeze response is all-too familiar.
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What are the 4 Cs of leadership success?
All great leaders rely on four qualities that I call the four Cs of leadership.
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Character
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Communication
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Compromise, and
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Collaboration.
Achieving lasting success without these four qualities is possible, but it is far less likely. When you have the 4 Cs, you hold the winning hand.
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There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
Paulo Freire
How does being led by their people contribute to the success of great leaders?
Teachers Are Learners
It took years before I was a confident enough teacher to shove aside my best-laid plans in favor of meeting the emerging and changing needs of students. I had begun to wonder what good it was to force a lesson on students that they were not ready to hear and grasp.
Too much of teaching leans heavily on fully covering the content of the subject matter while ignoring whether the students understand it sufficiently to proceed. When I was a university dean I had many a discussion with faculty members who steadfastly believed plowing ahead through the subject was more important than assuring that students thoroughly learned the material.
Faculty, particularly in textbook-heavy courses, sometimes expressed concern that they needed to move onto the next chapter of their textbook even though their students were still not grasping the material in the current chapter. The textbooks were often cumulative — each chapter building on the previous chapter — so without understanding, say, chapter three, how could the students learn chapter four and so forth?
Whenever I suggested that the professor may want to linger a bit longer than intended over that pesky chapter three, the response often was, “but then we won’t be able to cover the whole textbook.” My challenge to them was to consider sacrificing finishing the book in order to assure their students understood most of the material. In other words, to learn from the students what they needed and what drove them rather than imposing something on them.
I rarely won this argument though. After all, there is no easy or perfect solution to the dilemma, and the faculty had the academic freedom to teach as they saw fit. Nonetheless, I regularly took on the topic because I wanted the faculty to question the arbitrary decisions of a textbook publisher and instead learn from and be led by the students if only in this small way.
“Wow,” you may be thinking, “you mean that to be a good teacher, you just have to do what your students want?”
That is not it at all,That is not what I meant, at all.
Another way of thinking about it is to draw a distinction between coveringmaterial — with its emphasis on imparting knowledge — and uncoveringmaterial — with its emphasis on discovery leading to understanding. Like all such dichotomies, the distinction is a bit overstated, but it is still quite apt. In addition, the similarity to the choices leaders have to make is striking.
As I have long argued, teaching and leading use much the same skills to achieve similar results. Simply put, teachers are leaders and leaders are teachers. Moreover, since, as education philosopher Paulo Freire has observed, you need to be a learner to be a teacher, it makes sense that leaders are also learners.
Leaders Are Learners
But did you know that leaders are also followers?
I don’t mean one leader following another, which of course happens. Nor do I mean a leader who leads from behind the way a sheepdog guides sheep. That is a powerful method of leading — gently pushing rather than pulling — but it is not what I am referring to here. Great leaders are, in fact, directly led by their own followers.
“Wow,” you may be thinking, “you mean that to be a great leader you just have to do what your followers want.”
Well, uh, again no. That formulation does not describe a leader. It describes a U.S. senator.
Like a great teacher, a great leader is not led by their followers’ agenda but allows and encourages their followers to lead them to a better understanding of their followers themselves, what drives them, what concerns them, what inspires them, etc. In other words, their needs and motivations. The leader subsequently can use that understanding to urge them toward an agenda that will fulfill their organization’s mission.
A great leader also encourages their followers to guide them to new knowledge, alternate perspectives, and innovative ideas. In short, a leader learns from their followers and is therefore led. That is just one reason why an abundance of diversity of all sorts (identity, experience, perspective, etc.) is so important to organizations since, when let loose, diversity can spark creativity. A smart leader readily taps into and learns from such diversity to assure continued and longterm success.
To sum this all up, leading, like teaching, is all about two-way communication — listening first and then expressing. Leaders must have the humility to really hear their followers and act on what they learn. Great leaders don’t just use communication as a means to simply cover what they want to say. Great leaders communicate by uncovering what their people need in order to assure success and fulfill their mission.
Everything else is mere bossing.
How can you better learn from your people? Do you regularly allow yourself to be led by your people?
You can find success by being led even as you lead, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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The squirrel is a curious creature that is one-third rat, one-half furniture duster, and four-fifths dog toy. I have always enjoyed the antics of squirrels although I have also rained curses upon them as they raided my bird feeders. As thieves, they are relentless and clever as you may surmise from the many squirrel-proof feeder designs on the market. The squirrel can climb anything you hang a feeder from. If you install some sort of baffle to deter climbing, the squirrel will leap down from above. A few fancier feeders are designed to seal shut under the squirrel’s weight. Some squirrels, though, will eventually figure out how to distribute their weight so that they can feast. Relentless.
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Why do so many bosses think they have to go it alone?
Unfortunately, many businesses and other organizations have cultures that isolate and insulate individuals even when they are supposed to operate in teams. Structures and incentives tend to encourage individual effort, and people tend to see themselves as lone operators in a sea of activity and even turmoil. Therefore our systems themselves reinforce the human propensity to go it alone and rarely reward the self-discipline required for cooperation.
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What are the practical advantages of getting out of your office?
Peripatetic is just a fancy word for walking around. It comes from the name given to the adherents of Aristotle who, according to tradition, followed him as he strolled through Athens and philosophized. Peripateticism is not just for followers, though. It is also a great way to lead and manage people. As I wrote recently, great leaders open their eyes and ears to learn about and from their people. Wandering among and interacting with your people with such openness is a simple and rewarding way build mutual understanding. Additionally, although it is not the main focus here, the health benefits of walking are well established.
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How can you master the discipline of leadership?
Perhaps you have heard it said that leaders are just born or that leaders are forged in moment of crisis. There is a bit of truth in those beliefs but the vast majority of leaders and every single truly great leader became who they are by developing an understanding of leadership. (Note that I am not referring to bosses here.) Therefore leadership is a discipline, and like all disciplines you must study, practice, evaluate, and revise your views of leadership if you are to be great.
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How can working alongside others be a bad thing?
Have you ever noticed how you go through life believing some things as near absolutes without much thought? Maybe such beliefs reflect your personal values or are based on some cultural assumptions. We all do it. Nonetheless, perhaps something about one belief bothers you a bit, like there may be a dark side to it. One of my strongest and most persistent beliefs is in the positive power of cooperation.
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What does it mean to be a wide-open leader?
To be sure, opening wide is a key to leadership, but great leaders know there are plenty of other things they should open wide well before they open their mouth.
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What constitutes your personal brand?
People often ask me why I write what I write and do what I do. Well, after a lifetime of watching good people get hurt by bad bosses, I am deeply concerned with preventing others from being burned. I am no longer in a position to directly protect people who are being hurt, but I can help them build the resilience they need to stand up, withstand, and still become their best. I can also help those with some pretense to power discover strategies to act as benevolently as possible … or at least to act benignly. That is my personal brand.
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How can you use radical transparency to manufacture authority?
Responsibility without authority is a mess. If you are a boss, never ever put anyone in that situation. Never. If you are stuck with a crappy boss who subjects you to such abuse, consider embracing the mess and turning your greatest disadvantage into an advantage by owning it. Radical transparency — openly sharing your vulnerability — can be a powerful tool to win friends and allies and self-generate authority while keeping your integrity intact.
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Can people gain intelligence, or do we all just stay the same level we were born at?Your circumstances do not dictate your mindset. Your choices do.
If you are fixed in place by a fixed mindset, you can choose to grow with a growth mindset. If you are scarred by a scarcity mindset, you can choose dance with an abundance mindset. Your mindset is one of the few things entirely within your control, so take control. All you need to start is change your mind.
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What happens when you have reached your upper limit, your capacity, your outer edge? How do great leaders prevent their people’s brains from pixelating?
Cia Verschelden’s book Bandwidth Recovery explores this very topic. Verschelden aimed her book at college instructors and administrators, but it has universal application. It describes college students’ psychoemotional needs by using the analogy of bandwidth — the range of frequencies that dictate data transfer amount and speed. If you have ever paid for internet service, you are likely well aware of the concept, but it is worth reviewing.
Internet bandwidth is a limit that cannot be exceeded. Think of how a highway can handle only a certain number of vehicles at one time. Just one too many, and traffic grinds to a halt. I know you have had this experience.
The trouble begins even before you reach fullness, though. On a highway, as the number of vehicles approaches the upper limits of capacity, everything starts slowing down long before it stops. So not only is there a maximum limit, but the closer you get to that limit, the harder it is to proceed. Traffic moves, yes, but only at a crawl. If there is an accident blocking a lane, then highway capacity itself drops and exacerbates the delay. The same is true for data bandwidth. As you approach the upper capacity, its speed tapers off. You have no doubt dealt with frozen and pixelated Zoom calls. Welcome to the rush hour of bandwidth capacity!
Similarly, there is an upward capacity for what we can deal with mentally and emotionally, and as we approach it, our capabilities begin to collapse. It’s like your brain, just like that Zoom call, becomes pixelated.
I want to expand on Verschelden’s take and on her focus on students. Our bandwidth usage consists of our entire psychoemotional spectrum on top of the time and other resources required for our work.
Still seething from that big argument with your spouse? That takes up bandwidth. Worried about your credit card debt? There goes some more bandwidth. Boss breathing down your neck? Oh, you know that will be burning up some bandwidth. Day-dreaming about your weekend getaway? That requires bandwidth too. Suffering longterm PTSD? That is like losing a permanent chunk of your bandwidth. Or, how about this one? Have a strong sense that your co-workers and/or bosses judge you based on your race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, religious choices, etc.? That eats away at your bandwidth capacity like five Zoom calls on a single DSL line.
Going further, even physical phenomena consume bandwidth, ranging from the slight and momentary to the momentous. Are you hungry? Are you hangry? Does your back ache badly? Chronically sleep deprived? Have a migraine? Hungover? Feeling under the weather? Suffering from debilitating allergies? Find your chair horribly uncomfortable? Have been staring at the computer too long? Enduring a chronic ailment? Driven to distraction by the fact that your co-worker absently hums “Baby Shark” whenever he uses the copier? Bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth!
Each of these matters — the trivial and the awful, takes us away from our focus on our work, but notice how so many are outside our immediate control. Sure, there are things you can do to alleviate the pressure. Mindfulness exercises — meditation or even just a few deep breaths — can help clear your mind and settle your emotions. Scheduling breaks is a tried and true method for freeing up some bandwidth. Naps are like rebooting your internet connection and can be an amazing aid for eliminating mental and physical exhaustion and increasing productivity, but just try taking a ten- to twenty-minute nap on the job in our closely monitored and workaholic workspaces!
And therein lies much of the challenge. Most of the work humans do for a living is not designed for humans as they are but for humans as bosses want them to be.
And it’s not just the work of the mind. It’s similar if you work with your hands. I have done both, so let me speak to that. Your physical and psychoemotional states will also affect your ability to perform whether you are toiling away in an office tower or toiling away to build an office tower. In fact, just as with mental capacity, people pushed to their physical capacity for too long suffer serious consequences.
The simple fact is that workers — mental or physical — are people, and as people they have three-dimensional lives. One can compartmentalize life’s dimensions to an extent, cordoning off the pieces of your day by, say, suppressing the demands of home life while at work. But that is not sustainable and is, let’s be fair, deceptive if only to the self. Like all suppression, it will lash back with gusto.
The television series Severance plays off this concept. In it, employees have had their work minds physically separated from their non-work minds through some newfangled biotech. When they go to work, they have no memory of their outside life and no idea who they are in the wider world. The reverse is true for their non-work selves. Of course, the working selves (called innies) become more and more curious and then obsessed with their other halves (called outies), but the outies tend to view their innie selves with some contempt. Plot complications ensue.
The point is that people remain people whether they are at work or are at home. We imagine that we can push ourselves to the limit at work and just recoup at home, but home life has its own challenges of course. Worse still, our bosses too often expect us to perform to assumed levels of capacity at work and don’t care much how or where or whether we recover in the off hours. Burnout is inevitable — the permanently pixelated brain.
Ironically, bosses think the answer to too much is to add some more. Some employers compensate by emphasizing wellness and even offering healthful benefits, which while a positive trend, is ameliorative rather than preventative. Offering Zumba classes an hour before opening will do little to alter the bandwidth equation.
Instead, bosses could throttle back the work demands, taking into account the inviolable limits of mental bandwidth and the deleterious effects of pushing people too hard. Great leaders know that productivity tends to increase when workers’ needs are honored and met. Great leaders treat bandwidth as the precious resource it is. If you think your people’s complaints are just unreasonable, perhaps it is so. Or perhaps it is you.
As with that highway traffic or your broadband internet, people have their limits. The question is how do we manage mental and physical capacity so we don’t all end up pixelating our brains? The first trick is to remember that pushing too much runs afoul of the law of diminishing returns. Therefore minding workplace bandwidth has twin goals: improved productivity and wellbeing. No matter how many bland platitudes we imbibe on the virtues of more effort, the reality is that workers are just as much people as their bosses and have similar capacity and limitations. Great leaders start with that truth.
Do you know your own bandwidth capacity? Do you know the bandwidth capacity of those who work with and/or for you?
To be a great leader you must carefully monitor and manage, bandwidth as a limited and precious resource, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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Big boss man, can't you hear me when I call? Well, you ain't so big, you just tall, that's all.
Luther Dixon and Al Smith
It is high time I come clean. Why am I always ragging on bosses in my essays? It’s not that I hate every boss. After all, I was a boss, and while I am sure a few of my people would argue I was just another bad boss (and sometimes I was), I always strived to improve and had evidence that I did so. As I became more experienced as a supervisor, I tried to assure that I was a whole lot better at leading than when I started, but I also knew I could be much better still.
And that’s the thing. Bosses can all be better. If you are a boss, don’t despair. You can be a good boss. You can be a leader. You can be a great leader! The first step is to admit you have a problem, and the problem is you are a boss. All too often the last stop before hell is a corner office.
I would further argue that being a boss is largely incompatible with being a great leader, with the caveat that there are some bosses who are great leaders.
Like maybe three.
I kid. It’s eight.
But it can be done. A boss can be a great leader although bossing as we generally conceive it runs in a contradictory direction. Everything is stacked against good bossing. To be a boss in the typical mode, one must put oneself and one’s own success first even when that personal success is disguised as something less self-serving. Yes, there may be feints toward a more inclusive and open approach, but the default is me, me, mine! Some bosses, maybe even many, manage to rise above this solipsism, but they will defensively sink right back down when things get tough. It’s a form of psychological regression. Worse still, the reward system for bossing is almost entirely geared against truly great leadership. For instance, short-term gain, one-off successes, and reaching measures instead of hitting goals are often the mark of a successful boss, not overall organizational wellbeing and longterm and consistent achievement.
What’s a good boss to do?
Let me offer a partial list of the ways a mere boss can become a great leader, keeping in mind that many leaders are not bosses at all. If you want a more comprehensive and personalized understanding of how to become a great leader than I offer here, you will have to hire me. After all, I can’t just give it all away. This boy’s gotta eat too!
Before we begin, let me remind you of a few benefits of being a great leader. Great leaders know how to drive people toward a common good. They get others to do what needs to be done because they want to do it. Great leaders run highly productive organizations. Turnover is not an issue. Success is measured in actual collective achievement of goals, not by reaching individual measures. Most importantly, great leaders leave the world a better place than they found it.
A Free but Partial Guide to Great Leadership
I have to say, I write about this stuff all the time, but here it is in small.
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Preparatory to anything else, great leadership is built on a foundation of human decency and integrity. Imagine a house that rests on a weak foundation. That house will eventually begin to sink into the earth, right? Same with leadership. Leaders who do not permanently ground themselves on human decency and integrity will sink into mere bossdom. Guaranteed.
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Next is to know thyself. You must know who you are deep down to be a great leader, your needs, peeves, drives, and desires. What about you pisses off others? What about you pisses you off? Start your self-explorations with an evaluation of your assumptions and values. What is most important to you? Live those values.
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Now let’s talk about communication. I don’t mean just yakking at people. A good communicator starts with listening, really listening. Some people call this “active listening.” I call it, “shut up and listen then maybe talk.” It’s hard as a boss because you are expected to speak and be authoritative and all that b*t. Take command of the meeting! Demonstrate your authority! Great leaders know how to be in charge without taking charge. They empower* their people.
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Speaking of which, stop trying to be the authority and just be authoritative. You are the authority. Embrace your reality, but don’t fall in love with it.
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Related to communication is empathy. I’ll write more on this at a later date, but empathy is one of the most overdone and misperceived concepts in our society. Here I mean it simply as trying to see things from another’s perspective. Otherwise, you will be talking at cross purposes. Oh, and seeing things from another’s perspective includes how you yourself are seen. It’s really hard to see yourself as others see you, so you need to find ways of getting feedback. (See communication.) As the American Bard sang,
I wish that for just one time You could stand inside my shoes You’d know what a drag it is To see you
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Don’t be a (pick one: jerk, ae, overbearing blowhard, bully, narcissist, or stupid #%&@!$). It’s really that simple. Don’t be. It’s literally your choice and one of the few things you can really control.
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While we’re on the topic, stop trying to control things. I have written about this a few times. Control is an illusion. The more you try to control, the less control you have. If you stick your thumb in every pie, you will just end up with a lot of ruined pies. Yadda, yadda.
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Learn to take risks. Learn to accept not fear failure (your own and others’), and learn to learn from failure. We can call this curating risk and failing better. Admittedly, I struggle with this one.
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Acknowledge as a leader that you need to have a healthy ego and are keen on gaining a degree of power. Great leaders seek power to accomplish something beneficial and never to lord it over others. And don’t forget to regularly stuff that bloated ego in a sack and throw it in the river.
There are a bunch of other dos and don’ts, such as starting with yes, solving problems rather than pointing fingers, always searching for a better way, and more subjects I have written on or may some day write on.
The most important thing is that as a great leader you can never stop. Do all this stuff intentionally all the time. Great leaders are great when they wake up in the morning, all day long, right through dinner, and as they down a scotch at night in front of the TV. Leadership is not like Batman, putting on an uncomfortable outfit to go to work. Wearing the most badass rubber ensemble does not a leader make. Let’s face it. Batman is a sociopath. Leadership is more like being Superman. The ordinary Clark Kent thing — the guy in the glasses and a flannel suit — is the costume, and that costume is not only a disguise, but wearing it all day potentially has another effect. It may, just may keep the big guy a bit humble. Superman is an altruist.
So, to be a great leader, whether you are a boss or not, you need to be most like Super(fill in the noun of choice). Always going for greatness on the inside but presenting modesty outside to the world. Always being modest on the inside, and guiding the world with your greatness.
How can you be a great boss? How can you become a great leader?
You deserve the best from your bosses just as others deserve the best leadership from you, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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And I'm never going back To my old school
Donald Jay Fagen / Walter Carl Becker
My old school was tiny. Classes could be just ten people sitting around a table, and I will forever be grateful to my parents, federal financial aid, the student loan system (at 9% interest!), and a steady stretch of year-round employment for the opportunity to attend such a college.
I was an English major and had to take a course my first semester in reading poetry. The instructor, Professor Clark, was a crotchety cuss right out of central casting. Hell, he was bearded and even smoked a pipe! He was probably only about forty, but acted like a world-weary codger with little patience for the ignorant teenagers who disrupted his pipe-puffing ruminations by showing up to his seminar room for regularly scheduled classes.
Professor Clark lorded it over his, maybe, dozen students in the room. A few pretended to be inspired and challenged by his diatribes about how we were so incapable, and they found his favor and some success. The rest of us were just intimidated. He could be a mean son-of-a-b***h both in and out of the classroom. I remember receiving my first graded paper, unhelpfully marked up with baffling red marks and rude notations. The final comment all-but declared me a hopeless idiot.
The fact was, although I had taken Honors and AP English in high school, those classes rarely covered poetry, which did not help much with the AP exam. Like so many others I found poetry confounding and mystifying and had little sense of how to even approach it let alone interpret it.
Professor Clark was to be my first guide on my journey through what I perceived as the foreboding and treacherous terrain of poesy. I remember bungling through Donne and Keats and Shakespeare, unable to touch the invisible and impossibly high bar set by Professor Clark. Yet I worked hard and applied myself, took his advice, and plowed on. For. Three. Semesters.
My college had and still has a requirement called “Moderation” in which a committee of professors reviews students’ work during sophomore year to see if they have what it takes to continue in their majors. During my Moderation, one of my reviewers remarked with wonder that I had taken Professor Clark three times in a row and had earned only a B-minus for each of those semesters. “Why,” she asked, “did you keep taking him if your grade was not improving?”
I responded without any forethought and with all sincerity, “because I am not in college for grades. I am here to learn.” (Insert knowing laughter here.)
They were impressed by my answer, which was chock full of all the idealistic naïveté a nineteen year old could exude and, sad to say, absolutely no guile. They quickly approved my continuation as an English major. What choice did they have at that point, disarmed by my callow candor as they were?
By then, I had moved on from Professor Clark’s toxic salon and was thriving in other classes with other professors but for one thing. I still could not read poetry. All that work, all that abuse, all that humiliation, and all those B-minuses, and poems still perplexed me.
It was then I realized. Professor Clark was tough. Professor Clark had high and exacting standards. Professor Clark knew his stuff. But Professor Clark was a truly shitty teacher. In my fourth semester as an English major I had to start from scratch learning to read poetry.
Years later, when it was my time to lord it over a classroom, I thought about Professor Clark, how he had terrified the students in his thrall, convincing them that he must be a brilliant teacher because he was so demanding and mean. I thought, maybe that is the way. After all, he was probably replicating the behavior of his professors. Then, I thought about how I had learned so little in his classes. I thought about how I largely taught myself to read poetry. I also thought about how horrible Professor Clark made me and everyone feel. I finally thought, nah. I then chose to be a very different teacher.
I recount this tale of woe not to elicit your sympathy for my adolescent travails but to make a point about bosses. Yup, bosses.
Bosses
Like many professors — particularly back in the day — many bosses are elevated to their positions with little or no knowledge or perspective on their new role. Worse still, they barely understand the significant difference between managing and leading let alone the fact that they have to master both. These shortcomings are only amplified by many, many so-called leadership trainings that focus primarily on management matters (budgets, HR, scheduling, etc). Even when such trainings do teach actual leadership, they frequently fail to convey how critical the ongoing development of leadership skills is to a boss’s success as well as that of their people and their organizations.
So, what is a new boss to do? Well, most often, like Professor Clark, new bosses simply fall back on the only models they have seen, which is what their own bosses had always done. Therefore the prevalence of jerks in the Kingdom of Bosses only begets more jerk bosses, full of self-importance, self-service, and gratuitous cruelty. They fail to accommodate the very individuals they are charged with guiding, leaving many good people and much productivity by the wayside while championing sycophants and fellow blowhards. They preach high standards and perpetuate mediocrity.
If most bosses view their predecessors’ behavior as the best or only model, as I believe was the case with Professor Clark, then no wonder they then mimic it. Worse still, as with any copy of a copy, the outcome deteriorates over time, so most bosses are just bad imitations of their forebears.
The trick is to break the cycle, to find a different way. What way, perhaps you are wondering? Well, to start with, not that way. In other words, you must first choose not to be like your bad bosses of yore. Don’t be like Professor Clark. If you start with that realization and commit to it, you are way ahead of the game although far from the finish.
In short, bad predecessors can still be a model, a model of how not to behave. I call this learning from the negative paradigm and wrote about it here.
You have to build the boss role for yourself. That does not mean just doing the opposite of your bad bosses, which I wrote about here.
Instead, be true to your values and to the mission of your organization. Remember that the primary purpose of any boss is to make people successful. Bosses exist to help their people deliver on the mission, whatever that be. For too many bosses, intimidation is their go-to motivator, but, as with Professor Clark, it will turn out to be a bust in the end.
The key is to focus on elevating your people, leaning into your values, and fulfilling the mission. View whatever bossing you saw before or see around you with a jaundiced eye. Maybe you had a good boss or two. If so, ask yourself what made that boss so effective. Was it just because this person made you feel good, or was there actual evidence of quality and improvement all around, not just with yourself? Importantly, how can you be even better than that good boss?
Good bossing, like anything of value, is a genuine challenge. It requires constant awareness and assessment and reassessment of yourself, of your experience, and of others. Great leadership requires much the same, but it also demands a fundamental commitment to your personal and professional values plus the wherewithal to put them into action.
I am almost certain you have had a Professor Clark in your life, perhaps several — an authority figure who attempted to cow you, probably as a cover for their own perceived and evident deficiencies. Learn from that negative paradigm. Choose to be different. Choose to be better. Don’t be like Professor Clark. Even graded on the curve and with all the extra credit points thrown in, as a teacher and as a human being, he still earned his F.
What assumptions about leadership do you make because of your bosses, past and present? What can you do to break the cycle of bad bosses?
You deserve the best from your bosses just as others deserve the best leadership from you, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
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Okay. Now we can eat.
Paulie in Goodfellas (Paul Sorvino)
My wife, Marie, and I are pretty good cooks, if I say so myself, but our methodology is radically different. She will find recipes she likes and purchase the ingredients at the store. When cooking, she will follow the recipe although she will frequently make substitutions due to necessity or taste. For instance, she usually doubles the garlic and reduces or eliminates salt. I, on the other hand, prefer to go to the store and buy what appeals to me. Then, when it is time to cook, I pretty much just make it up. As you may have guessed, we rarely cook together.
To be sure, we both can cook both ways. She is as good an improviser as I am, and I can follow a recipe. In fact, I would argue that my improvisatory skills are largely due to my experience with recipes. Needless to say, we eat pretty well although I am sure Marie would do better in the final judgment of a cooking contest. Then again, have you tried my pesto?
Notice that while how we shop and cook (our inputs) is quite different, our outputs (the presentation of the meal itself) is usually objectively good, and the final product can be quite satisfying (our outcomes).
Let’s mess with this culinary bliss a bit. When we were first starting out way back in the 1900s, our meals could be decidedly hit or miss. We had access to pretty much the same ingredients, but we still struggled to make it all work. You can follow a recipe or the directions on the package, but much of the skill of cooking is mastering the subtleties. For instance, I have learned to remove pasta from the boiling water a few minutes before the time indicated on the box because it will continue to cook, and if you smother it in hot gravy (that’s Italian-American for “tomato sauce”) it will cook even more. Plan accordingly, and don’t you dare tell me to rinse the cooked pasta in cold water to keep it from cooking longer! Really. Just don’t.
For years I followed the directions on the box, and, yes, I admit I tried the cold water trick too. I either ended up with mushy, overcooked pasta or with pasta that was slimy and flavorless (because of the cold water rinse if that isn’t clear). At some point, I just started testing the pasta before it was officially done, and realized the thing to do was to drain it when it was still a little too hard. Molto bene!
But what about inputs? Sometimes we cannot get the ingredients we want, or something goes awry. Maybe those greens started turning a little sooner than we anticipated, or that head of cauliflower that got shoved to the back of the fridge is getting spongy gray patches on its surface. Both of us, Marie and I, can readily compensate with substitutions or interventions. For instance, a bunch of kale that has started to yellow is no good in a salad or at the center of a cooked dish, but it could still play a supporting role as an ingredient. Did you know you can grill greens, by the way?
Similarly, sometimes one of Marie’s recipes is a bust, or I just really overplay my hand while improvising. Even then, we can usually compensate and recover the meal. When that fails, we just break out more wine!
Well. That’s it! That’s the essay. No other point to make.
Except maybe a little about inputs, outputs, and outcomes. First some basic definitions. Inputs are the elements that you start with. Outputs are the final product. Outcomes are the quality and use of the product — how it functions out there in the world. This essay consists of words and ideas (inputs). The output is the essay itself. The outcome is how it is received and used. If you learn from it, that is a good outcome.
Ingredients and effort are inputs, I think we can all agree. The quality and type of ingredients along with the effort and degree of skill applied can determine the output, the meal. The outcome, how the meal actually tastes or is received is largely dependent on both although not perfectly so. Have you ever had a meal come out all wrong and yet still be delicious? Maybe you did not have the ingredients you wanted, or the recipe promised more than it could deliver. The food does not look or taste as it should, yet it is satisfying in the end. Go figure.
You can also have all the right inputs and reach the right output, but the meal tastes bland. I know people who cook like this. They buy the best ingredients, use high-end cooking equipment, and work their tails off while following the recipe to the letter. They are so highly skilled that the presentation (the way the food looks when served) is something out of a culinary magazine. Yet, consistently, their meals are blah. Pass the hot sauce, please! Yes, they enjoy their bland diet and, of course, wilt like grilled kale in the presence of my pesto. Still, they seem to input a great deal for clearly mediocre outcomes. Such bland food simply doesn’t require all they put into it.
Say. This wouldn’t happen to sound like anyplace you may have worked? Maybe everything there is about completing forms (inputs) and filing reports (outputs), but the upshot is perpetual mediocrity (outcomes)? Perhaps every intervention there revolves around adding or tweaking forms or producing more reports to no avail. What a waste.
Tweaking the same-old business inputs is like blaming the grocer or the recipe writer if your meals come out the same-old way. Really? Is there anything else you could change?
Perhaps you are thinking, “Jeez, Jim, let go of the food thing! Are you hungry or something as you write this?”
Well, a little now.
Okay, so my point — before I go fix my (delicious) lunch — we often imagine that by controlling the same-old inputs we can perfectly control outputs and therefore outcomes. As I hope my cooking class has demonstrated, inputs can be hugely impactful with regard to outputs and outcomes. Except when they aren’t. The assumption that controlling the same inputs over and over will directly control outputs is a fallacy beloved by perfectionists, micromanagers, small-minded bureaucrats, and other control freaks.
Remember my pasta box rule? When I used to follow the directions perfectly, too often everything seemed great until we actually put the goopy spaghetti into our mouths. Al dente? I think not! More like Al Gore! The pasta we purchased was good. The process was accurate. It looked okay, spaghetti strands not clumping or slimy. What went wrong?
Finally the point, and then we can eat!
Inputs are important. Ingredients, recipes, skill, technique. Maybe you even get an output, a meal, that is precisely what you intended. You can get all that perfectly right and still end up with blah. Sometimes you need to revise or even chuck the old inputs altogether.
There was an Italian restaurant that opened in the small Iowa town I lived in a while back. Good food was pretty hard to find in that town, so I was excited. I even turned a blind eye to obvious flaws. The restaurant had all the right stuff going in, though. The restauranteurs had experience and some skill. The restaurant dining room was very good. The kitchen was more than sufficient. The food looked and smelled good. A deft twirl of the fork and…
Mah.
Dr. Sal’s Pesto Se Ne Hai il Coraggio (Pesto If You Dare)
INGREDIENTS
-
2 cups fresh herbs, packed (Basil is traditional, but you can use any herb that is not too overwhelming. Sage, for instance, is too strong on its own. Yet, you can blend herbs, so blending basil and sage works well. I also sometimes make it with one cup of herbs and one cup of greens such as kale or spinach. The greens add a rich dimension to the pesto, but don’t use greens that are old and yellowing.)
-
1/2 cup nutritional yeast (Grated parmesan or pecorino or another hard, salty Italian cheese is traditional. My doctor told me to lay off the cheese, so I use nutritional yeast, which I have come to prefer in pesto. If you crave the salt from the cheese, you can add salt. Or just use the cheese. What do I care?)
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Garlic (The amount? More. Recipes often call for two cloves. If you don’t use at least double that, you might as well buy that green goop they sell in jars.)
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1/4 cup toasted nuts (Pine nuts are traditional but expensive. Other mild nuts, such as almonds, work great. Someone once told me that sunflower seeds are a cheap and delicious substitute. After trying that out, I agree that sunflower seeds are, indeed, cheap. I wouldn’t use walnuts or anything that bitter although you may dig it. By the way, toasting the nuts does not involve dropping them into a standard toaster!)
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Fresh ground black pepper to taste.
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For the truly adventurous, add a little fresh hot pepper — like maybe up to half a jalapeño.
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2/3 to 1 cup extra virgin olive oil (Start with a small amount and add more as you go. If it looks dry, add a bit more, but don’t overdue it. You don’t want your pesto to look like the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day. Come to think of it, you don’t want your pesto to look like the Chicago River on any day.)
STEPS
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Take tradition. Toss it into the breeze.
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Grind all the ingredients except the oil in a blender until smooth, or use a mortar and pestle if you have no sense. As you blend, add oil a little bit at a time as needed (keeping in mind the Chicago River limitation).
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Spread it on anything except breakfast cereal. Raw. Cooked. It’ll knock you out!
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Did I mention this pesto freezes nicely? You may have to add oil once it defrosts, though.
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If the pesto comes out crumby, don’t blame me. I only wrote the recipe. You own the outcome.
Buon appetito!
How often do you consider the distinction among inputs, outputs, and outcomes? Do you ever find yourself focused on inputs when you should be more concerned with outcomes?
You can learn how to stop wasting time and energy and get great outcomes, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
William Shakespeare
As great as you are, man You’ll never be greater than yourself
Bob Dylan
What does it take to be a great leader?
Being a leader is not remarkable in itself. For one thing, leadership can be situational or even sporadic. The kid who stands up to the bully to protect her friend is a leader even if she sits back down quietly afterward. The teacher who guides students to understanding is a leader even if he never says anything at faculty meetings. The supervisor who finds it in herself to reach out compassionately to employees who may be troubled is a leader. The driver who refuses to go over the speed limit in a busy residential area even when there is an angry tailgater behind her is a leader.
So leading is widespread and even common. Leading is often reactive. We can all be and frequently are leaders in big and small ways. And while I have been known to draw a sharp distinction between being a boss and being a leader, pretty much every boss is a leader sometimes but a scant few are great leaders anytime.
Leadership is like the ocean surf. Waves lap the beach, sometimes gently and sometimes with fantastic force, enough to reshape the sand if not the shoreline. They come and they go.
Great leadership is something else. Great leaders are not waves, nor are they the tide. They are more akin to the moon, exerting an invisible and ineluctable influence on the ebb and flow of the oceans and therefore sculpting and defining the land. Great leaders are always there, always active, even when you don’t know it.
Notice in my examples of leadership how the leader is a force for good. Forgive me if I refuse to entertain the opposite for now. If leadership can be a force for good, it behooves us all to be leaders — to contribute to the good — as much as possible, which is part of the secret of becoming a great leader.
Great leadership is neither purely situational nor sporadic. Great leadership is never accidental or simply reactive. Great leadership is intentional, a conscious choice. Great leadership is founded, fostered, and grown with purpose. Great leadership persists because it is nurtured and valued.
Great leaders know this. No one can be unaware of being a great leader. Great leaders are habitually modest, though, and may not see themselves as great — after all there is so much more they could be doing to be even greater!
Great leadership is not a goal, an end in itself. Being a great leader means the opposite; it means never resting on your status or accomplishments. It’s like being an elite athlete. To become elite, you must increase your ability through constant and rigorous practice. You must optimize your body to perform at the highest level every time.
Imagine, though, an elite athlete who says, “well, I am already elite. I have achieved my goal,” and then stops practicing and working out. I will bet you know of someone like this, someone who once played a sport with great success who has now let themself go. They were once elite, but what are they now?
It is similar with the life of the mind. I have known individuals with the highest degrees from the most prestigious institutions. They may hold fancy titles like “professor” or “dean,” but now that they have achieved their intellectual goal, they no longer seek to know and understand broadly. Their willingness to learn has dissipated or their learning has become so narrow that they have little interest in any other topic but the minutest one they study. Or they have settled their focus on day-to-day drudgery, just pushing toward the weekend. Would you consider such a person an intellectual? Certainly in the past, but how about as they are now?
Great leadership is just the same. It is not a bar to be met, but like athleticism or intellectualism, it is an aspiration to continually pursue. You must constantly cultivate and maintain your great leadership. The simple fact is that every leader, no matter how accomplished or great, could be better, and the best leaders embrace this truth and are always up for the challenge. The best leaders, great as they are, are never good enough in their own minds.
Of course (need I say this?) great leaders do not beat themselves up in the face of their evident and myriad human inadequacies. The pursuit of great leadership is not related to the perpetual disappointment of perfectionism. It is instead the keen awareness that one can always improve.
Great leaders see virtue in the pursuit itself, and they are ready to adjust and adapt as needed. Therefore great leaders must develop, hone, and persistently apply skills such as open communication, empathy, self-assessment, and adjustment. Great leaders must master the skills — and they are skills — of change and human decency. Great leaders need to recognize and embrace the knowledge that great leadership is a lifelong process, one that can never be shirked even for a second. They know that the great leader who stops the pursuit, who retires from the quest, is no great leader at all and perhaps never was. Anything short of total pursuit is not so great.
You are a leader — whatever your path in life. Even if it is only occasional and temporary. Every time you pick your head up to take note and sound concern, you are leading. Leadership can and must be a force for good, and goodness demands the intentional pursuit of greatness. Everything else is just so-so.
Great leaders are great citizens of the world. They watch out for their own wellbeing so that they can better watch out for others — changing the tide with utter dependability. Great leaders move everything forward and hold everything together to the benefit of the many.
So be a great leader! There is nothing preventing you. The world needs you!
How conscious are you of your leadership role? Do you understand the distinction between being a boss and being a great leader?
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May you live all the days of your life.
Colonel Atwit
Recently my wife and I were driving innocently along a city street when a commercial panel van stopped in front of us at a red light. Obviously this was not the most momentous event in itself, but I noticed that the van had painted on the back in large letters,
FEAR DOESN’T KEEP YOU FROM DYING. FEAR KEEPS YOU FROM LIVING.
My first thought (and possibly yours): “Hey, that’s cool. We shouldn’t fear fear.” I pointed it out to my wife.
I imagined the business owner being inspired by the saying. Perhaps the sentiment motivated her as she founded the business and guided it toward success. Maybe her business cards feature the aphorism, which she hands to prospective customers who say, “hey, I like that.” The slogan helps her form bonds.
I also imagine her purchasing her first business van and hiring a painter to put the maxim in large letters on the back. The painter probably said, “righteous, my dude.” (That is how I suppose commercial van painters talk, but I am open to correction.) The saying is certainly attention getting, but I struggle to recall what the business was. In that sense, it was a marketing failure.
The light changed, and we drove on. Still, being who I am, I continued to contemplate the saying. I later looked it up, and it is similar to a quote from the Egyptian author and Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz: “Fear doesn't prevent death. It prevents life.” (I have also seen it attributed to Buddha, but that seems spurious. He certainly never owned a van.)
As I thought about it more, though, and with all due respect to Mahfouz (or his translator, as it were), I realized the first half of the van’s bit-o’-wisdom (and Mahfouz’s), is all wrong. The second half is a little more nuanced but is also wrong on its face.
Let’s be up front here. Fear has a purpose — an evolutionary purpose — and that very purpose is, in fact, to prevent harm and even death.
Yup. That is what fear does. If a hero rushes into a burning building to rescue a kitten, we say that person overcame their fear to perform that selfless act. If that hero dies as result of the rescue attempt, we can easily see how fear, properly heeded, could have prevented that outcome. Therefore, fear can preserve one’s life.
To be sure, I am not advocating that we all give into our fears any more than I would argue we should give into our anxieties and worries. In fact, I have written on this very topic.
Fear, like worry, can be overdone and can be our undoing, certainly, but what I am suggesting is that our fears need to be balanced with reality. The hero who risks all to rescue a kitten either does not fully grasp the danger or values a kitten’s life over their own.
Whatever the case, heeding their natural fear of the burning building and the harm it could do would have preserved the life of the would-be hero who is free then to go on and perhaps rescue a different kitten from a less perilous situation, such as annoying people by appearing in too many adorable Instagram photos.
As for the second half of the saying — that “fear keeps you from living” or as Mahfouz puts it “prevents life” — well, yes and no. On the one hand, as we have seen, fear actual preserves life. You presumably wouldn’t step in front of a moving panel van because of your fear of being squashed. Right?
But of course by “living” and “life” both the van and Mahfouz mean “experiencing the fullness of one’s existence.” There is a similar use of the term “life” in a quote from my good buddy Jonathan Swift (we have never met) that makes the rounds of inspirational posters and whatnot. My wife, perhaps in an effort to taunt me, even came home with a refrigerator magnet with the quote:
May you live all the days of your life.
This sounds great, right? Again, the supposed meaning is to live life to the fullest. Except that Swift originated the statement in his Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, a series of dialogues featuring fictional members of the “most polite” set in English society. Anyone who knows anything about Swift and his satiric ways can guess by the sardonic title of his work that these dialogues will be designed to mock his subjects.
Indeed the lengthy dialogues are relentlessly clever, insufferably witty, and utterly vapid. The quote from my fridge magnet — “May you live all your days of your life” — is no exception. It occurs as a toast by Colonel Atwit to Miss Notable (the names are a clear hint) and is an example of the empty-headed speech of the fashionable set. After all, whether there be one million, one thousand, or just one day left, how can you not live all the days of your life? For Swift, this line taken literally (as with many others in Ingenious Conversation) is a big duh.
It is perhaps Swift’s vengeance or maybe curse that the quote has been reproduced without apparent irony on countless inspirational consumer items, such as fanny packs, stress balls, and that damn magnet. By the way, notice how Swift ruins everything? I love him for it.
Which brings us right back to the words on the panel van: “Fear doesn’t keep you from dying. Fear keeps you from living.” I hope I have successfully established that the first part is flat-out wrong. If not, let me reiterate. Fear keeps you from dying. It does a lot of other things too, good and bad, but life preservation is its main purpose. Capisce?
The second part of the van’s claim is only true if we take “living” to mean living well or living fully, which is not really all that profound. On it’s surface, it is pretty silly.
To be sure, I get the spirit of what the van is trying to tell us. Fear can hinder our full enjoyment of life. And I agree wholeheartedly. Still, I am bothered by not just the imprecision of its pronouncements but by the van’s negligence. It is reckless, and no one wants to see a reckless van careening down our streets!
The moral of all this? Well, there are several. First, develop a healthy understanding of and relationship with fear. Do not allow fear to debilitate you any more than you allow fearlessness to endanger you. Great leaders curate fear and risk.
Second, words matter, and while a saying on the back of a van does not warrant the scrutiny I have indulged in, someone actual paid someone to paint that saying, and someone actually painted it. If you are going to put that much into a saying on the back of your van, choose more wisely.
Third, while rear doors can be compelling and may seem authoritative, don’t trust everything you read on the back of a van.
Now, go forth and live your life (whatever that means).
How well do you manage fear and anxiety? How healthy is your relationship with fear?
Learning to manage and curate fear and risk will be critical for you to develop as a great leader, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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I You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean
Bob Dylan
One thing I have learned over my many years of fumbling through life is that mistakes get made. How is that for a profound revelation? Mistakes happen, and, yes, yes, (yes!), we should learn from our mistakes, which means first learning to own them. Blah, blah. Blah.
Blah.
All true, painfully true, and a topic for another day.
Speaking of true, it’s true confession time! Forgive me, readers, for I have erred. For a long time I found it challenging to own my mistakes. I’d blame others or circumstances or bad luck (curse you, cosmos!) even when I knew damn right well that I had messed up, slipped up, tripped up, fallen short, dropped the ball, blew it, muffed it, botched it, flubbed it, and ultimately screwed the pooch. (It is best not to dwell on that last one.) This predilection wasn’t some sort of chronic pathology, but it took deliberate effort for me to admit my role in an error.
Eventually I recognized this shortcoming, but then I sort of overcompensated and became very hard on myself. I would take the blame for things that were happenstance and over which I had little control. It got to the point where genuine people would pay me genuine compliments, and I would genuinely suspect their motives, which is genuinely ungenerous on my part. I had to consciously resolve to be gracious in the face of their horrid sincerity! I still struggle with this new openhearted approach, but I am striving to improve.
In fact, you can help me in my journey. Go ahead. Reach out and pay me a compliment or two. I can take it. Be sure your compliments are of the particularly fetid kind, like, “I love reading your writing, Jim. It really does the trick when I have insomnia.” Or, “The best feature of your weekly essays is their short length!” Or, “My, you are a handsome man for such a geezer!” Trust me, I can handle your atrocious accolades, and I really need the practice accepting them.
Please.
Oddly, while receiving compliments has been a burden for me, offering them has been almost the opposite. In fact, I sometimes am so free with my compliments that I have to rein myself in so I don’t sound like a babbling brook of blarney. However it may seem, I have always strived to assure that the compliments I pay are well earned.
Did you catch that? It’s funny, the language of compliments — “offer,” “pay,” “earn.” Who knew compliments were so transactional, so fiduciary? Compliments are the coin of the realm. What we need are more complimentary compliments, freely conveyed and readily received. Complimentary compliments to complement a spirit of generosity.
When I was a boss, I found that a well-placed (and sincere!) compliment could really make a difference to the recipient and help build relationships. I also noticed that there was a ripple effect as my complimentees became enthusiastic complimenters among their peers.
I have also had a couple of bosses who were excellent at doling out praise when it was due. I even had one who was a liar, a bullshitter, and a bully, but he sure knew how to give a sincere compliment when warranted. Of course, in retrospect, the stark contrast between his supportive and sincere praise and the rest of his behavior just contributed to the whole gaslighting thing.
On the other extreme, I had a different boss who seemed congenitally incapable of giving individual compliments. I only heard her do so once (not to me!) when not under duress although she was capable of generating a group compliment of the “you’re-a-swell-team” type on special occasions, such as tipsy Christmas parties.
The only other time I heard her give an individual compliment was, as I said, under duress when, because of my puckish nature, I tricked her into complimenting me in front of her boss.
It went like this. Her boss said that I handled an event well. I thanked him and then turned to my boss, saying, “you did a good job too.” Trapped! She was obligated to reply in kind or look like a jerk. It was bizarre to observe her countenance morph into several shapes as she struggled with her dilemma. Ah, good times.
Why are compliments so complicated? Why do we struggle to both give and receive praise? Part of the problem is flattery. In the moment, it can be hard to discern the sincere from mere puffery. Then there are those who use even sincere and warranted compliments as a tool of manipulation, like my other boss, the lying, b****g, bullying gaslighter. Then there are all those narcissistic weirdos, like the non-complimenting boss I described, who imagine that individual praise is an enervating indulgence.
Add to all that freakery the fact that so many of us suffer imposter syndrome even late into our careers and that society tells us that anything short of perfection is failure while adding that we should appear (not be) humble and whatnot, and what you get is utter dysfunction. Therefore, I cannot but conclude that among our many crises, our culture suffers a crisis of commendation. A compliment gap, if you will.
Meanwhile, there are those countless blowhards who consume both warranted and unwarranted plaudits like Tik Tacs, wolfing them down by the fistful. Most of these people are no more deserving of praise than you or I — and probably are less so — but they seem to dominate workplaces, organizations, and even society although their numbers are small. Some become politicians. Others are commanders of industry. Still others are right in the building with you now. You know who I mean. You know exactly who I mean.
Paying compliments, sincere and earned compliments, is the quickest way to up your leadership game. Accepting sincere and earned compliments with gratitude is a bit trickier, but — perhaps paradoxically — it too will set you on the path to great leadership. The reason compliments are so important is because they make everyone feel good — complimenter and complimentee — so gracious acceptance is a positive for all. Also, and this is key, when compliments are sincere and earned they are the truth, and the truth is always better than the alternative.
So sincere compliments are, or at least should be, just a part of our everyday human connections, part of how we communicate and interrelate. In that spirit,as we conclude here, just know that you are fabulous!
I mean it.
How ready are you to offer sincere compliments? How ready are you to accept sincere compliments?
Giving and receiving compliments are critical skills for you to master as a leader, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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Originally published 12 August 2021
Leaders at every level need to understand that an individual’s perception is reality. This statement is not the same as “everything I believe to be true is true,” which is just lazy, fanciful thinking. Nor is it a license to insist that everyone share your perceptions, which is bullying. Indeed, the failure to grasp this last point or, more cynically, an effort to exploit this last point has led this nation to the cultural-political precipice where we teeter at this moment.
Wise leaders both recognize and respect that their people’s perceptions are their people’s reality. This fact is particularly acute when crossing cultural divides, including (but decidedly not limited to) race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and even organizational rank. Again, we are not here contemplating a license for people, whether leaders or followers, to impose their perceived reality on others or to do as they please. In fact, it is quite the opposite. This essay is a call for leaders to credit others’ different points of view and to supply a heuristic razor for doing so: perception is reality.
In every venue of our society we sort individuals, including ourselves, into identity groups. This inclination and the hierarchies that can ensue will often generate friction and dissonance and significantly contribute to intractable dysfunction in organizations. A wise leader will have tools for resolving such challenges. For instance, a Black, female employee may explain to a White, male boss that she contends with discrimination in their workplace. The boss can have no direct access to her experiences and perceptions and may subsequently not discern any offense, so it behooves him, rather than dismiss her concerns, to listen carefully and defer to her point of view unless and until evidence demonstrates she is in error.
This way of thinking, that others experience events and reality that is different from and perhaps not accessible to us, is patently obvious yet somehow regularly escapes our grasp. Some people are even hostile to this basic notion, a stance that stems from ignorance driven by a dangerous solipsism.
Since you cannot walk in another’s shoes, it is smart to accept their perceptions as their reality. You need not adopt it wholesale as your reality, of course, but you must give other’s perceptions wide berth to stretch and flex while tempering your assumptions. All too often as leaders we immediately want to instead constrain the perceptions of others and impose our own, particularly when they are outside of or challenge our perceptions or foil our designs. Reminding ourselves that our own reality is based entirely on the vagaries of our own perception is helpful here.
So I am introducing a heuristic razor, a tool for getting at the heart of a problem and making decisions. Again, as with all heuristic razors, it is a great tool to start with, but it cannot be your last or only tool. Let’s call it the perception-reality razor.
In longhand: Always assume that another’s perception is valid unless and until evidence demonstrates otherwise.
In shorthand: Perception is reality.
To be sure, sometimes your experience with a person will provide sufficient evidence to conclude otherwise. For instance, if that person has proven time and again to be unreliable for whatever reason, then it would be foolhardy to assume the next time will be different. But, let’s face it, those situations are vanishingly rare. If you are a boss, it is vital to apply this razor liberally by starting with the default that an employee’s perception — sometimes articulated as a complaint or criticism — is valid.
Admittedly, something inside us tends to resist the truth of this razor. One challenge is that we naturally struggle to perceive things in any other way but our own. Good leaders, though, can and must do so in order to remain effective. If it helps, consider this a form of cognitive empathy.
In cases where an accusation is made, this razor may seem opposed to our culture’s sense of justice, which is built around the idea that all individuals are innocent until proven guilty. In other words, the proof of an offense is the burden of the complainant not the alleged offender, who need not prove their innocence because it is assumed.
Superficially, defaulting to another’s perception that they have been wronged may seem counter to this principle of presumptive innocence, but not so. First, the default to innocence is an important and noble concept and can and should inform our decision making, but it is primarily a function of the criminal justice system and does not apply so neatly to other areas.
Second, default innocence, though a vital part of the criminal trial system, does not preclude accusation and investigation of suspects. In fact, when law enforcement investigates a crime, they primarily try to prove guilt rather than search for exculpatory evidence and even make arrests based on their suspicions. When bosses deal with a workplace accusation, they are at first more like law enforcement than judges. Later, as circumstances warrant, they may have to pivot to the more neutral stance of the judiciary.
Wielding the perception-reality razor can be difficult to master since it calls for a leap of trust and often puts us at odds with our own perceptions, thus requiring humility and resilience. It also often involves delicate matters of human identity and demands a dose of empathy. Finally, being all about human perceptions, it runs against all manner of behavior, including irrationality and dishonesty. In short, it sucks, but in a wide world of things that really, really suck, like facing workplace discrimination or bullying, applying the perception-reality razor entails a pretty minor exertion.
Pro Tip: Remember, as a heuristic tool, the perception-reality razor — perception is reality — can clarify quickly, but it is only a tool of first resort.Do you find the many rules of communication daunting? Do the rules sometimes get in the way of expressing yourself?
Next week I will present a new original piece.
How do you adjust when others’ perceptions do not square with your own? Do you want to learn a more effective approach to understanding the perceptions of others?
You can be the sort of great leader who appreciates and manages perceptions, and and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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It shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.
Jonathan Swift
Originally published 23 September 2021
Look. I generally detest listicles and have resisted compiling them, with one exception: my spontaneous parody of the listicles that abounded in honor of the 80th birthday of my good friend Bob Dylan.
That said, enjoy the following listicle!
This one is on effective oral and written communication, but what I offer are not rules. They are more like guides, mere suggestions, helpful hints, noodgy nudges, and the like. After all, rules just beg to be broken. For instance, consider my personal rule that I don’t write listicles. So take that, rules!
The Lucky 13
- Clarity trumps everything.
In this statement, “everything” includes everything on this list. The fundamental goal of communication is to get a message across, and unclear writing axiomatically does not do so. Therefore, it is imperative that you eschew obfuscation and dispense with befoggery. Then again, virtually everything on this list has to do with maximizing clarity, so this listicle is merely an abundancy of redundancy.
By the way, if you write incoherently because you figure, “Tough nuts! I’ll communicate however I like because I’m the boss,” then be aware that, while you are successfully making that point, no other point is getting through.
- Know your audience.
Who is your audience? What do they look like? How do they dress? Are they nice? Do you think any of them might be willing to lend me some money?
Identifying your audience is key to how you will shape and tune your communication. If you are writing a blog that only a handful of friends will read, that is quite different than a blog that is open to the public and promoted on Twitter.
If you are not sure who your audience is exactly or if your audience is potentially very broad, a good trick is to imagine an audience that will absolutely and purposely misinterpret your communication. The fact is, they will.
- Know your genre.
“Genre” is fancy talk for format or type. Just like your audience, the format of your communication dictates many factors, including tone, length, style, etc. Writing an email is different than writing a letter, which is different than delivering a speech, and so forth.
Social media is a particularly perilous genre, especially for those of us who grew up thinking social was a word to describe disease and that telephones are utterly useless for taking photos. After all, where would you put the film? Even with that newfangled social media all the kids are into these days, though, these guides apply.
- Communicate the message you want to hear the way you would want to hear it.
This is the writing equivalent of the Golden Rule and is therefore a matter of empathy really. We have all had to suffer through poorly communicated material, usually due to a lack of clarity, so pity your poor audience and don’t try to wow them with quasi-profound obscurity.
Here is a simple exercise for mastering this Golden Rule of Writing.
Recall a piece of writing or other communication that you found baffling and confounding. If you ever had to read a paragraph over and over or asked the person sitting next to you, “What did she mean by that,” don’t assume the problem is with you. Instead, identify what made that communication so confusing and frustrating. Was it poorly structured? Did it use overly difficult language? Was it illogical?
Have you figured it out? Good. Now, don’t do that.
Here’s another helpful tip.
If you ever think to yourself, “oh, it’s okay. They will get what I mean,” you are wrong, just wrong.
Rewrite. Partial (or wishful) communication is always miscommunication, and it’s your job to be clear. Don’t leave it to others to figure out.
- Sarcasm is a double-edged sword.
Go for it. Use sarcasm indiscriminately. You won’t regret it.
As a card-carrying Gen X sarcasm addict, I get cut by this one all the time.
- Mind your grammar and mechanics.
Know and respect grammar and mechanics but don’t obsess and don’t be slavish to the standards. Grammar is the rules for both oral and written language, such as how to use the parts of speech. Mechanics is the rules that apply only to written language, such as punctuation. Good grammar and mechanics usually aid communication, but reliance on the rules can also and should never hinder clarity or style.
For instance, you may wonder, “is it ever okay to break the rules and, say, use a sentence fragment or slang?” Sure nuff. Yup. Uh-huh.
And, while you are not obsessing over grammar and mechanics, don’t fall for bogus grammar rules. If you are not sure what I mean, go ahead and feel free to quickly look up “split infinitive.” I’ll wait.
Now look up “dangling preposition.” Got it? Good.
Now forget you ever learned about them. They are bogus rules.
And, one more thing. Fergodsake, spare us the confusion and just use the Oxford comma!
- Straight talk is a virtue.
Straight talk means getting to your point with as little fluff as possible. I wrote a whole essay on this once. You want to avoid passive aggressiveness, caginess, and over-wordiness, which lead to miscommunication.
One danger here is that straight talk can sometimes come across as curt and rude. Avoid being rude and turning off your audience unless you have reason to do so, such as they are all jerks. Also, be aware that emails are notoriously difficult to keep short and to the point without sounding impolite. I always try to include some pleasantries (“please,” “thanks”) and then sign off with an upbeat “Best.” If you receive an email from me that does not include such courtesies, I probably just don’t like you.
Guides 8, 9, and 10 below are closely related but worth discussing separately.
- Go ahead, use cliches, but sparingly.
Don’t get your knickers in a knot over this one. Sometimes cliches are just the thing to get the job done. A wisely used cliche can be the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, and the right stuff. The heart of the matter is to make sure you use the right cliche at the right time so it’s not a fish out of water. And, bottom line, whatever you do, when it comes to cliches, don’t beat a dead horse.
- Euphemism is sometimes necessary, but it still flirts with miscommunication.
Euphemism is a way to avoid saying something directly, ostensibly to soften a blow, and that is a good thing. You wouldn’t say to a grieving child, “Hey, that sucks, your mom dying in that horribly gruesome way yesterday and all.” But euphemisms can also be purposely misleading. For instance, how might our views of war change if instead of using the euphemism “collateral damage” we straight up said “we killed innocents.”
- The same is true for jargon.
Jargon is specialized language that can aid internal communication in professional fields. Used externally, though, it is just showing off or, worse, participating in a conspiracy against the public. Lawyers are notorious for slinging jargon among civilians in order to wow and/or dumbfound the lay populace. My favorite legal phrase, by the way, is “to make whole,” as in, “my partners and I are confident that this generous settlement will be sufficient to make your client whole.” It just means “compensate totally.”
- Be bold.
Surprise your audience. Thrill your reader. Assault their comfortable assumptions. Don’t be afraid to take risks in your writing to get people’s attention and your point across. That last phrase, by the way, was a slick use of zeugma, which has nothing to do with Zumba, which has nothing to do with Roomba, which has nothing to do with rumba, which is a vacuum cleaner. No, wait. That one is a dance, or is that rhumba?
Anyway, don’t be ordinary.
- Remember COP — Clarity, Organization, and Precision.
This is a handy mnemonic acronym like FAN BOYS (for the coordinating conjunctions) or ROY G BIV (for the colors of the spectrum).
We have thoroughly contemplated the virtues of C: Clarity. If you have already forgotten, go back to 1. And get that memory thing checked out by a professional.
O: Organization has to do with logic, and there is a really handy rule of thumb here: be logical. Can it be easier than that?
P: Precision is saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Be careful not to confuse accuracy and precision, though. Accuracy is always precise, but precision is not always accurate. Saying “it is now twelve, noon, on New Year’s Day” is precise but would be inaccurate if the real time were one in the morning sometime in July.
- Read. Listen. Mindfully.
I considered listing this one first because it is so important, but I made it last instead so it would stand out and linger in your recollection like the first time you woke up in bed next to a dead kangaroo or like a McDonald's jingle.
The best communicators are the best audience members first. Every communication you read or listen to is an opportunity to hone your skills. If something strikes your fancy (which is fancy talk for “you dig it”), try to determine why. Can you make that part of your repertoire (which is fancy talk for “stuff”)? In contrast, if someone’s attempt at communication vexes you (which is fancy talk for “pisses you off”), figure out why. How can you avoid doing the same thing?
Here’s hoping you find something useful here. If you take away one thing from this listicle, let it be that rules, guides, suggestions, and the like are supposed to enhance your communication. Never let them hinder your communication. And let me reemphasize 11: Be bold.
I know that I missed your favorite communication tip, so let me know your additions by email or, preferably, in the comments. If you disagree with anything here (and I’m sure some do), let me know as well. I look forward to the conversation.
Do you find the many rules of communication daunting? Do the rules sometimes get in the way of expressing yourself?
You can be a great leader, one who readily navigates the challenges of communication, and and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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Now everything's a little upside down As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped What's good is bad, what's bad is good You'll find out when you reach the top You're on the bottom
Bob Dylan
My Catholic school days taught me a lot, albeit little I was supposed to learn. For one thing, I was quite a freethinker by parochial school standards. I had wild, wild thoughts and too often even blurted them out, which I am certain thoroughly endeared me to my classmates and to my teachers.
Indeed, my attempts at being true to myself and to my intellectual pursuits were so universally well-regarded that by the end of sixth grade, I had become afraid to raise my hand. The bullying from classmates I learned to deal with, but the teachers were another thing. My classroom silence lasted all the way through college.
Still, being a curious kid — that is, both inquisitive and odd — I often made pronouncements that annoyed or bored my classmates. Usually these occurred well outside the classroom.
One time — and somehow I remember the location but not the circumstance or the topic — my few friends and I were in the schoolyard, which was really just the church parking lot, and someone said something along the lines of, “if this thing is not true, then it’s opposite must be true.” Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that my reproduction of this statement is not verbatim.
That half-baked observation struck me in an instant. It was a profundity that warranted a reply in the style that only I among our little group had mastered, the understated manner I had carefully nurtured to defend myself in that hostile educational environment. I replied something along the lines of, “don’t be stupid. Just because X is wrong doesn’t mean -X is right, you idiot.”
I am sure we had substantial discussion about the propriety of name calling, which would itself undoubtedly involve a good deal of name calling on both sides, but inevitably we would have settled down into a more philosophical exchange, arguing our points, Plato-like, well until we were called in from recess.
Sadly, I think in that moment I hit on the first and best truth I have ever hit on. The idea that just because something is wrong doesn’t mean its direct opposite is right has stood me in good stead throughout my life. It has protected me from the lure of knee-jerk contrarianism and fostered my more individualist or even iconoclastic outlook.
The Opposite
Don’t get me wrong. There is much to be said for doing the opposite. In fact, I love counterintuitive thinking and use it frequently in my approach to life and to my writing. It’s just that just doing the opposite is no less absolute than just staying the course. Few things in life are so linear. For instance, think of how you got to where you are now in life. Was your path a series of straight-up choices like climbing a ladder, or was the way more convoluted than that?
There is a great Seinfeld episode that plays off the power of doing the opposite. In it, George, the schlemiel character, realizes that every choice he has ever made is wrong. He decides on the spot — the spot being the corner diner — to change it up and do the opposite of what he normally does. Instead of his usual lunch he orders chicken salad on rye, which in his mushy mind is the opposite of his regular tuna on toast.
“Nothing’s ever worked out for me with tuna on toast,” he defiantly proclaims. Cue laughter.
He then, against his every inclination, approaches an attractive woman and boldly states, “My name is George. I’m unemployed and live with my parents.” Despite his evident shortcomings, he gets a date, and that date leads to an unlikely job interview with the New York Yankees. During the interview, George encounters George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ overbearing owner, and, again defying his instincts, proceeds to lambast Steinbrenner to his face. Steinbrenner hires him right then.
If only such were the way in the real world. Then again, who among us would choose to live in Seinfeld’s world? I mean aside from Jerry Seinfeld.
Opposing the Opposite
It’s true that choosing to do the opposite of what you know to be wrong will improve your chances of doing right if only because you are avoiding that wrong thing. But the opposite is no panacea, George Costanza’s experience aside. Thoughtlessly doing the opposite will work, but only with stopped-clock accuracy — that is, only when the time and circumstance happen to align. Therefore, it behooves us, when faced with an obvious wrong choice, to seek out the right choice as best we can.
Aside from inconsistent results, merely choosing to do the opposite has some other ramifications we must consider. For one, regularly doing the opposite sets up a world where there is only X and -X, which is almost always a false dichotomy. There are rarely only two choices.
Think of an elevator. Before you board, you will only have two directions to choose, up or down, right? Upon boarding, though, there will be several floors to stop at, each of which is itself an option. And then there’s always that terrifying alternative to the elevator called “the stairs.” Or you could just wait in the lobby and not go anywhere, one more possibility still. Come to think of it, Batman seems to have forged his own methods for accessing the top floors. See? Far from there being only two choices, the possibilities turn out to be numerous, perhaps endless.
Besides, it would be silly to assume that the right choice is the exact opposite of the wrong choice — “I went up on the elevator last week on my way to talk to the boss, and he yelled at me. Therefore today I will press the down button to get to his office. After all, once bitten, twice shy.”
More often than we care to admit the best choice is to abandon the question altogether, leave the building, go for a walk, and enjoy a park. Just give the boss the slip and live the good life. If we instead limit ourselves only to doing the opposite, we are left with just two options even though options abound, a true false dichotomy.
The other danger of just doing the opposite, choosing -X as the winner every time, is that it creates a sense that our world is populated by only absolute winners and absolute losers — a zero-sum game — which is itself a false dichotomy. The binary philosophy of zero-sum is a pathology that infects the likes of bullies, sociopaths, my sixth-grade teacher, and other miscreants.
I don’t mean to suggest that George Costanza is a sociopath for switching to chicken salad. But, then again, there was that series finale…
The zero-sum approach, because it sees winning as an absolute necessity, becomes a justification for lying, cheating, deception, and other destructive behaviors. That is ultimately where the binary logic of choosing X or -X leads. A world where there are only two possibilities is a two-dimensional world, flat, featureless, and as distorted and misleading as a Mercator world map.
——
The truth is that sometimes doing the same or obvious thing is the right choice, sometimes doing the opposite of that is the right choice, and sometimes doing something entirely else is the right choice. And don’t forget that doing nothing at all is itself a choice, and it too could be right or wrong. The key is in that phrase, “the right choice.”
Our decisions are typically driven by invisible habits and paradigms that serve a purpose at first but that become hindrances over time. Of course you cannot and should not throw out all your habits and practices, but it is important to recognize them for what they are and to act accordingly. B.J. Fogg of Tiny Habits fame teaches us that we can create healthy new habits, that we can master the skill of change and allow positive change to be a force for good in our lives.
The trick is to understand that maybe tuna on toast is a satisfying lunch, but a big salad from time to time may be even better.
How do you know when to just do the opposite or even throw out the old models and start from scratch? What can result from doing so?
Learning to be a great leader requires you to be able to add, subtract, and balance when you make decisions, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Intro and outro podcast theme music by LiteSaturation from Pixabay.
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THIS INSTALLMENT IS AN ENCORE PRESENTATION FROM AUGUST 2021
Welcome to my first Ted talk.
Two types of politics pervade most workplaces. One is the politics of possibility, the idea that, through sheer persuasiveness and appeals to values, people can be recruited and motivated to work together for good. That their passions and their intellect can be encouraged to join forces in common cause for the betterment of all.
The other is sadly much more pervasive, the politics of power, which centers on the ego and the zero-sum game and relies upon the machinery of personal destruction. In this brand of politics, the we is never evoked but in service to the I. Accomplishments remain singular affairs. Even collaborative effort is merely the coming together of individuals in support of their individual interests. Practitioners of this political philosophy are the type who tend to claim most or all the credit no matter their contribution. For them, the betterment of the organization has no purpose but as a means or byproduct of the betterment of the self.
As a recovering academic, I have too much experience with the politics-as-a bloodsport crowd and the untold damage they inflict on individuals and institutions. Unfortunately, in most industries, the same politics of winner-take-all overwhelmingly dominates. Individuals seek to position themselves to protect their interests at the expense of their organizations, their clients, and even their missions. The ignoble and petty politics of ego and personal gain flourish and prevail with sometimes devastating consequences. For an object lesson, look no further than the many and mighty deep and wide travails of higher education.
So how about the politics of possibility, of getting things done, of maximizing and sharing the win? How can we assert the power of such politics in our organizations?
Talkin’ Ted: Ted Lasso vs Jamie Tartt
(With occasional translations for those whose first language is American)
In the first season of the television series Ted Lasso, two characters evoke two different world views for getting things done. On the one hand is Jamie Tartt a young football (soccer) star, noted for his brashness — hence the name Tartt. His idea of how to win games is to take control of the ball and charge toward the goal. The fact that he is a cracking (supremely talented) player means that his approach is relatively successful even if he is a bit of a prat (arrogant fool). When he scores a goal (point), he celebrates his accomplishment as a singularly personal event that just happens to benefit his club (team).
In the clubhouse (locker room), he is a self-interested bully who demonstrates his lack of respect for his club mates (teammates) through his nonstop expressions of self-regard. He does not encourage his club mates, nor does he celebrate their successes since, in his zero-sum mind, their success somehow dulls his luster. For Jamie, the team is merely an accessory to his glory, a means for a winner like him to take all. If the team wins, it is because of him. If the team loses, it is despite his dazzling and lone(ly) play. Jamie will even throw a wobbly (have a temper tantrum) at his club mates in order to deflect blame.
In the politics of the clubhouse, Jamie dominates by inspiring a bold mix of fear, hatred, and admiration in his mates (colleagues). If they do not openly adore him or, worse still, if they show him up, they will face his considerable wrath. His is the politics of power, ego, personal destruction, and self-promotion. For him, the club only exists to serve his needs. Elsewhere I have written of the overall deleterious effect of such beasts in the workplace.
The set-up of the series is that the new gaffer (coach), Ted Lasso, is a hyper-amiable American whose experience is limited to coaching American football (football) at a uni (college) in Kansas. Ted, of course, knows nothing about football (soccer). He, in fact, has unwittingly been brought in to fail and to scupper (destroy) the team.
As it turns out, though, Ted knows nearly everything about leadership and about clubhouse politics. His approach is relentless positivity enhanced by a distinctive cheekiness (slight irreverence), as he introduces the players to the power of possibility and ropes them in through sheer persuasion — hence the name Lasso. Eventually, instead of a team built in service of individual players and their performance on the pitch (field), these lads (men) begin to coalesce in service to the club. Ted’s approach confuses and frustrates Jamie, to be sure, but it also fascinates him.
Ted also knows that building a team is not about just collecting individual stars and sending them out onto the pitch. Instead, he slowly persuades those individual players that they are best when they work together in service to the club. His political approach is informed by his inherent human decency as it advances the art of the possible.
Ted Lasso’s clubhouse politics is expansive and optimistic, a world in which everyone can be a winner. Jamie Tartt’s is insular and self-serving and only allows for one winner. In life, the most brilliant (very good) leaders are builders, like Ted. They are patient and consistent and are not overawed by raw talent and drive. Armed with fortitude, courage, and resilience, they serve the team or organization and never the other way around.
In a world that demands quick results and instant gratification, the Ted Lassos are all-too rare. Rarer still is the environment that allows them to flourish. Instead, we most often see the Jamie Tartt philosophy of zero-sum individualism receive all the praise and resources despite its vapid and decidedly nihilistic outlook.
The politics of possibility can be challenging to implement and even harder to maintain. Such a political approach is marked by inclusiveness, collaboration, and personal humility. Society’s immediate rewards perversely go to the rugged individualist who gathers glory as though glory were a finite resource. Think about that. The politics of personal power, being a zero-sum game, regards glory and winning as finite. If you win, I lose, therefore…
How obviously and utterly dozy (wrongheaded)! Yet, we insistently and persistently laud such counterproductive behavior.
The politics of possibility is the antidote to the toxicity of personal destruction. Bad being stronger that good, it can be hard to break through by practicing the art of the possible, but the alternative is unacceptable. We need to be builders like Ted Lasso. Otherwise we will continue to live in a world overrun by gits (dipshits) like Jamie Tartt.
Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
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You want to talk to me Go ahead and talk Whatever you got to say to me Won’t come as any shock
Bob Dylan
The difference between bossing and leading is massive. Yes, of course, most leaders are bosses on some level, but very few bosses are leaders. By that I mean too many bosses do too little to bolster their leadership skills and many in fact assume they are leaders simply because they are bosses. If you make that assumption, I can guarantee you are no leader no matter what your title. Boss is a position. Leader is an attitude of greatness, whatever the position, which is why untitled (and unentitled) employees can be great leaders without being bosses.
Leaders intuitively understand the difference between bossing and leading even if they do not put it in those terms. They know that there are times when bossing may be necessary but that leading is always called for.
Bosses and leaders even have different ways of talking. Here are some things I have heard dopey bosses say.
Pro Tip: If you want to talk like a leader, just flip these statements around.
Things Dopey Bosses Say
“My people keep preventing me from implementing my great ideas. Why? They’re great ideas!”
Now, it could be that your people are a bunch of malcontents, but that would not be the case if you were any kind of leader. More than likely, though, the truth is that your ideas weren’t such great ideas after all.
I know of a brand new boss who complains widely and loudly how his people constantly block his ideas. The problem is that his best ideas had long ago been implemented, well before he got on the scene, which he would have known if he had bothered to listen or do his homework. The bulk of his ideas, though, are insipid.
“Our leadership team is really smart, so we don’t need to get some other brains on this to help us out.”
Just as no individual can know it all, no leadership team has all the answers. There is nothing wrong with bringing in expertise or just fresh thinking whether from inside or outside the organization. Indeed, trusting your people to participate in decision-making is one of the most powerful tools you can use. It is a sign of a healthy organization. This is how leaders think.
“This is an at-will state,” and “other duties as assigned.”
When these appear in a job description or are stated as de facto policy, written or otherwise, you have just stripped your people of autonomy and dignity. First, the facts. All fifty states have some degree of at-will employment, but only Montana (freaking Montana!) limits that status to the first six months of employment, which is in line with, ya know, civilized nations. When Montana is the progressive groundbreaker, you know something is wildly amiss.
At-will employment policies send the message that bosses are monarchs and employees are disposable serfs. By the way, if you are in the habit of disposing of people at will, you have no chance of ever becoming a leader unless you change your ways — to be more like Montana.
As for “other duties as assigned,” while you may legally be able to get away with this, doing so is fundamentally dishonest. If you don’t know how to write an accurate job description, find someone who can. If an employee’s duties must change down the line, that is something to negotiate in good faith, not impose. Only dopey bosses treat their people like ranch horses.
“I have to check or even do everything because everyone else is incompetent.”
Do we really have to rehearse this one? If you think or say this, then I know for sure who is incompetent in that scenario. Either you don’t know how to hire and train people, or you’re just full of yourself. Or both. Frankly, you ain’t all that (and everyone knows it even if you don’t). This stupidity is the hallmark of a dopey boss.
“When I hire, I try to trip up the candidates over and over in order to weed them out.”
The attitude that the job candidate is in the hot seat and you are supposed to get them to slip up is both archaic and counterproductive. If, instead, you treat the job application process as an uplifting and mutually beneficial interaction, you are accomplishing two things at once. First, you are sending a message about the positive culture you are cultivating and setting the successful candidate on the right path. Second, you are leaving every candidate, no matter the results, with good feelings about you and your organization, which will reflect well on you down the line. You say you don’t care about either result? Well, shame on you, boss!
“I don’t want my workers to worry/panic/complain, so I keep information from them if I think it will bother them.”
It’s hard to believe that this one is even a thing, but I know it is. Here is a rule of thumb: maximize transparency and omnidirectional communication. Unless you oversee a bunch of teenaged workers in a fast-food franchise at the mall, your people are adult professionals. Treat them as such. No one likes secrets, and no one likes to be patronized.
And, yes, there are items that for legal and other reasons must be kept secret, but in a culture of openness, everyone can easily understand and accept that fact. If you think this one is too hard, I can assure you that the alternative is far harder. Leaders relate through communication.
“My people are lucky to be working at all. They couldn’t get hired anywhere else.”
I worked at a college where the president literally thought like this and even sometimes said it aloud. He was a jerk and a very bad boss.
“No one works harder than I do, and I expect my people to work just as hard.”
I have gone on and on and on about the BS virtue of hard work. Instead of working harder, try working better and striving to work best. Simply working harder is always counterproductive, and expecting others to work harder is even worse, particularly if they are not compensated for their time. Bosses don’t understand any of this.
"I expect exemplary behavior from my people, but since I am the boss, I do as I want."
If you are the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type, just stop it! That attitude goes by another name: hypocrisy. In contrast, great leaders strive to be great all the time and inspire greatness in their people by modeling the best behaviors themselves.
“We can all aspire to greatness, and we can always be greater still.”
Whoops! That one snuck in. This statement reflects the triumphal mindset of true leaders. If you want to lead, start here.
You probably heard echoes of bosses past in some of these statements. Maybe you have even heard your own voice.
The boss mindset is ego-based. It involves short-term thinking and lacks fundamental human decency. The leader mindset is broad minded and values based, imbuing every act with a conscious commitment to integrity. It’s a challenge, and all the more so since the leader mindset requires constant vigilance. Bosses pump and preen their egos. On the other hand, leaders regularly stuff their egos in a sack and throw them in the river.
Bosses fail and fail again, wasting much of their time and their people’s time compensating for their ineffectiveness. Sadly our culture rewards bossing behaviors, such as displays of power and mindless cruelty, which distorts things so that even those failures look like successes. Leaders, being human, will fail as well, but they learn from their failures and those of others and tend to be most efficient in the long run. Again, sadly, our culture often denigrates leadership behaviors, such as openness, but the rewards are well worth it.
Bosses are rarely leaders, but leaders are truly boss.
When you speak, do you sound like a boss or a leader? How do you know?
Great leadership is a mindset you must cultivate and constantly revisit, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
Bob Dylan
I recently heard a local politician quip, “I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but they put covers on books for a reason.” It’s a clever turn of phrase, and he has a point. Modern book covers are a marketing tool and are supposed to indicate, reflect, or symbolize something about the contents of the book. Therefore, the cover should have some meaning and some bearing with regard to the book itself.
Then again, covers can also be misleading, obscure, or perfectly uninformative. For instance, I am reading a 1995 novel by Richard Ford called Independence Day. The front cover, which is presumably all we mean when referring to judging covers, is dominated by a photo of a furled U.S. flag in front of a green lawn viewed through a rain-spotted screen. As striking as it is, the photo conveys little information.
Of course the cover also features words. Aside from the title and the author’s name across the middle, we learn, along the top, that the book was a “NATIONAL BESTSELLER.” We also learn that Ford is the “Author of The Sportswriter.” The cover neglects to tell us that this particular book is a sequel to said The Sportswriter, an odd omission. As it happens, I have never read The Sportswriter, so already I am at an assumptive loss reading Independence Day although I wouldn’t know that from the cover.
Out of the way in the upper right, a black circle with hard-to-read gold lettering informs the sharp-eyed reader that something or someone — the book? The author? — is the “WINNER of the PULITZER PRIZE.” That is a good piece of information, but I had to look it up to find that it refers to this novel itself and not an earlier book or the author himself.
Finally, way down in the bottom-right corner in white lettering against the dark foliage of a shrubbery in the background photo, there is this blurb from The New York Times: “Powerful…as gripping as it is affecting…, Ford has galvanized his reputation as one of his generation’s most eloquent voices.” If I weren’t so lazy, I might want to locate the original review to see what words those ellipses stand in for.
All of this information, the verbal and the nonverbal, reveals little of the content or even style of this book. I cannot even discern its genre — fiction, history, biography, etc.
So what do we really mean when we evoke the well-worn metaphor of judging a book by its cover? Well, the most obvious offense we wish to mitigate is committing a superficial rush to judgment. For instance, that novel I am reading, Independence Day, I probably would have rejected it based solely on the cover. Sorry, designer, but the image — colorful as it is — leaves me cold. I only picked up the book because a guy I just met recommended it, and it was a good recommendation.
So, aside from books themselves, what else do we judge based on their cover? Here are a few possibilities.
I like it when people look me in the eye when we speak, but I have encountered and even known plenty of people who just can’t look you in the eye for whatever reason. And there may be a host of reasons beyond their control. Yet some folks make it a point of high virtue and pride never to trust someone who won’t look them in the eye, thereby judging the person by their interpersonal superficialities.
Or, this. When I was a college dean, I once had to have a stern conversation with a professor who brutally called out some poor freshman in front of his classmates for wearing torn jeans to class. The professor tried to pass it off as though he were giving the kid some advice about what to expect in the working world, but he was just being a prick, judging a student by his jeans.
And what is it with shoppers rejecting a nice piece of fruit because of some slight (and edible) blemish? I have done it myself, and shame on me for judging an apple by its skin.
Instead, imagine getting to know a person before rejecting them for something as trivial as not making what you deem proper eye contact. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for not trusting people. Eye contact is a poor one. If you get to know the person, you may learn that they must constantly compensate for a condition they cannot control. That, in fact, they are persistent, brave, and strong. Oh, and trustworthy.
Or what if that professor, rather than choosing to humiliate the young student he is charged with teaching, bothered to find out more about the student? He would have learned that the student was just a sensitive young man trying to figure out where and how he fits in. His torn jeans were his way of expressing himself in the moment and not the result of him being too stupid or morally reprobate to wear proper pants.
The thing is, that student was still finding his way in college and did not need this BS. Unfortunately for that professor, by not learning more about his student, he did not recognize that this young man was no passive sufferer. The student, in fact, had the temerity and wherewithal to report his professor’s mean-spiritedness. Rather than the cowering victim the professor expected, that student stood up to a more powerful bully, ratty jeans and all, and contributed to the hastening of that professor’s long overdue retirement.
What if I just bought that apple and then took a bite? I might even find that blemish was the sweetest part of the fruit.
Judging the Cover
Perhaps perversely, book covers being as limited as they are, I have always enjoyed inspecting the cover after finishing the book to see if I understand the intent of the design. Certainly some book covers are almost literal in depicting a scene or motif that appears inside. Others are completely mysterious or just have a picture of the author or the title on a colorful background. But many, maybe most, are somewhat in between, inspired by the content but not particularly revealing or, dare I say, inspiring.
So by judging a cover by it’s book I hope to glean some insight about the book that I have just finished, and sometimes I am actually successful. I also almost always can surmise something about the way the book has been marketed.
In other words, we can learn a great deal more about the world if we not only not refrain from judging books by their covers but also get into the habit of judging covers by their books. By coming to understand the reality of the outside after familiarizing ourselves with the inside, we may learn a bit more about what lies within while almost certainly gaining insight into how we and others approach and interpret surfaces. As the politician said, “they put covers on books for a reason.” And such awareness of our own and others’ perceptions can be invaluable, much more valuable than just judging a book by its cover.
How often do you base your assessments on superficialities? Do you ever seek to judge a cover by its book?
The world is a tapestry of perspectives you can master, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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The world of research has gone berserk Too much paperwork
Bob Dylan
Let’s start by stipulating that you are busy, very busy, very, very busy even. What with the kids and that damn dog and your nagging boss, not to mention the sheer number of tasks you are expected to complete in a given work day. You’re busy. I get it.
Let’s also stipulate that there is no inherent virtue in being busy. Can we agree to that? Take a deep breath here before you react. Think. Just because someone does lots of stuff does not mean they are doing good or even doing good work. Just doing more stuff is neither a moral imperative nor a sure means toward effectiveness.
By extension, you therefore do not have to compete with your co-worker, neighbor, sibling, or even spouse over who is the busiest since busyness is — wait for it — meaningless in itself. Besides, count on it, you’re really busy. Really, really busy. So what?
What if I told you that busyness is as much as mindset as, well, any other mindset you might have? By mindset, I mean a deep-seated inclination, a set of unquestioned assumptions and all the habits and paradigms that accompany them.
Mindsets can be wonderful. If you truly believe that you can indeed learn new tricks no matter how old you are, you will tend to keep learning. If you truly assume that you will meet your personal goals, it is likely you will succeed.
Mindsets can also be debilitating. If you tell yourself you are bad at math, well, guess what. Even if there is no intrinsic reason or evidence that you have a math deficiency, every time you encounter a math problem you will tend to freeze up. Similarly, if you imbibe the notion that you, your family, or your organization simply lack the resources to get ahead, you will, indeed, lack the resources to get ahead. We call that the scarcity mentality, and it’s a killer.
Educators, following the work of Carol Dweck, tend to divide mindsets into two categories: growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. An example of the latter is the belief that my intelligence level is set, that I cannot grow smarter no matter how much I try. In contrast, a growth mindset would tell you that you can, indeed, improve your mind and increase your intelligence. By the way, can you guess which one of those is accurate?
Let’s try another. A fixed mindset will tell you that it’s all stacked against you. That the income you have now is about all you can ever expect. Sure you may get raises and promotions, but those will be incremental. You will never achieve your financial dreams and will wallow in scarcity. On the other hand, a growth mindset would tell you that what you make now has little bearing on what you will have in the future, that your income can increase exponentially. If you really believe this, both your attitude and — this is important — your behavior will change for the better.
So, let’s play with this idea that busyness is a mindset — something we believe without any doubt, an assumption, a habit. Is it a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?
Got your answer? Go ahead and just shout it out there.
Well, I can’t hear you anyway, so I will just tell you. It’s a fixed mindset. Much like the scarcity mindset, the belief in the need to stay busy embeds you in a permanent state. You are busy for two reasons. One is that you have lots to do or perceive that you have lots to do. In this respect, you are not so unique. The other is that you are busy because you think you should be busy or, perhaps unconsciously, want to appear busy to others.
To compound this silliness, we even compare our levels of busyness, like it’s some sort of contest. I am sure you have chuckled over the notion that whoever has the most stuff when they die wins, right? That’s just stupid. (I’m looking at you Musk and Bezos.) Well, the busyness mindset, that lame competition we all endure, similarly suggests that whoever is doing the most when they die wins. Wow! Just wow! If my calendar is full of upcoming appointments when I shuffle off this mortal coil, then I am a winner!
Yay me.
I’ll bet that you have, many times, tried to impress someone with how busy you are. I know I have. I’ll also bet you have done so more than once in the past week. Maybe, even more absurdly, you tried to compete with someone over who got the least sleep.
I long ago started prioritizing sleep (not always successfully), and I cannot tell you how many times I was in a conversation where people were comparing their lack of sleep as if competing to see who could bottom-out first. It’s like a drinking contest where the winner is the first to get carted off to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Whenever I dared to chime in with “I try to get eight hours,” the reactions ranged from disbelief to actual revulsion. People thought less of me.
These folks would usually respond with something like, “I could never get eight hours! Not with all the things I have to do!” Saying you are merely trying — just trying — to get eight hours is regarded as though you just announced you never wash your hands after using the toilet.
Let’s shake on that.
The source of the problem with this competitive busyness/sleep deprivation nonsense is not the individual. We have all been swept up in a cultural phenomenon that imposes this debilitating mindset on us.
That said, the solution does lie with the individual. Each of us can opt-out of the mindset. Again, I am stipulating that you truly have much to do — you are way too busy — but that fact does not mean you have to maintain the busyness mindset.
There is something called Parkinson’s Law, which states, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.“ In other words, you will use whatever time you have to complete a task. This is why we rarely finish work early … unless we resolve to do so.
That last point is critical. We somehow can fill our every day with toil deep into the evening except when we have a four o-clock tee time or when tea time is at four o’clock sharp.
I became aware of the notion that we take all the time we have to complete a task when I first started teaching as an adjunct professor. I realized that no matter whether I had one, two, or three courses a semester, I was just as flustered and harried by the workload. Initially I assumed that when I had only one course to teach, I was just putting in extra work. Or maybe I was skimping on the work for each class when I had more courses to teach. Over many years, though, and with ever-increasing workloads, I realized that I performed roughly the same amount of work for each course no matter the number, but I was somehow expanding that work when I had fewer courses to fill the time I had.
To be sure, I don’t mean that I was taking undue breaks or goofing off. Somehow, as per Parkinson’s mystical law, I was expanding the time on task it took to get the same quantity of work done. Eeek!
Eventually, I made some adjustments to how I viewed work, and my time-on-task reduced. In short, I shifted my mindset. Mind you, it isn’t easy to do this in our society, and I have reverted many times, even recently. The siren-song of the busyness cult is quite powerful.
So yes, you have lots to do. You are truly, truly busy.
But are you really?
Yes, yes. Of course you are.
But, really?
What steps can you take to prioritize your important work over your busy work? How can you shift your mindset to resist the lure of busyness?
You can strike the balance in your work and life that you deserve, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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There is nothing so stable as change.
Bob Dylan
Back in April of 2021, the business and entrepreneurship guru Sahil Bloom posted on Twitter a simple but profound observation.
The world wants you to be normal. Our systems and institutions are all designed to make it easy to be normal. Maintaining your distinctiveness is possible, but it will require effort — painful, constant, relentless effort. But stay the course. You’ll find it’s worth it.
Bloom sets himself up here as an enemy of the normal, of the comfortable, of the same-old-same-old, of the status quo as he advocates for individuals and organizations to lean into their distinctiveness in order to differentiate themselves from the herd.
My experience working in higher education exposed me to leaders who professed to do just that but instead did little to distinguish themselves or their institutions. They established entire offices devoted to communication and marketing and charged them with conveying the institutional brand to the world — a quixotic task given the sameness of so many colleges. I really felt for those marketing folks. These professionals would identify areas of potential differentiation only to have it all undermined by leaders who blanched at the perceived risk of actually being different. Sameness seems safer. Normality seems best.
I once had a college president veto a much-needed and innovative major with the absurd question, “why should we be the first?” Higher ed is pretty good at generating innovative ideas for others to execute, but as an industry seeking to improve its practice (educating students) and enhance its product (educated students), too often, higher ed is where innovation goes to die.
Many higher ed leaders, particularly but not exclusively at smaller schools, act as though they can simply continue to do the same-old-same-old and then add some secret sauce:
Our students! Our dorms! Our location! Our one popular major! Our sports fields! Our endowment! Our lazy river! Our parking garage!
In reality, their schools are pretty much alike, as evidenced by their largely interchangeable mission statements. I have seen exceptions, but they are, indeed, exceptional.
One school I worked at was located in an extremely impoverished part of the country and prided itself on giving opportunities to under-resourced kids. The only problem with that claim was that the graduation rate for the college was and is less than one-third. In other words, the opportunity offered was for masses of students to run up debt while there was not much opportunity to complete a degree. Frankly, from a financial standpoint, those students would be better off never attending college or attending one where success is more attainable.
The problem is, in my professional opinion, systemic and solvable. The college had and has a superb faculty and a staff of dedicated professionals as well as decent facilities — in other words, good bones. Nonetheless, instead of addressing the graduation rate with the sincerity and creativity it deserves, senior administrators largely dismissed it as “historical” when it came up at all. I learned it was best to never even mention the graduation rate or any other niggling challenge around the president, who grew surly whenever her fragile sense of contentment was threatened.
Instead of tackling problems, the leadership there opted for gimmicks, tweaks, half-measures, and one-offs that were supposed to reverse course but did little at all. Worse still, some of these ventures were well off-mission and therefore added no discernible (let alone measurable) value to the institution or its students.
Surfing
The major obstacle to overcoming the odds is never challenging them.
Price Pritchett
Smart leaders don’t go around generating gimmicks and certainly don’t ignore or dismiss systemic problems. If you are a leader and don’t at least try to address systems, you are no leader of any worth. You’re probably just a boss like the college presidents I have mentioned. Every systemic problem has a solution. It may not be easily accessible. It may even be out of reach, but it does exist.
The job of a leader is, first, to recognize its existence and, second, to prioritize putting a solution in place. Often doing so will require the abandonment of the status quo and involve some risk, and poor leaders are inherently risk adverse. True leaders, in contrast, are sensible about risk. Indeed, true leaders are curators of risk.
True leaders are not cowards and they’re not cowboys. Cowboys are, by definition, rugged individualists and therefore not good leaders. If you are a boss and regularly shoot from the hip, please just stop. You can put out an eye doing that!
Instead, good leaders are good surfers in that they know how to ride or surf the status quo in order to get ahead. And as everyone knows, you can’t surf very well if you’re wearing leather chaps and Western boots.
Most people think of the status quo as flat, featureless, and waveless. Drifting in the status quo, though, is like being caught up in a giant ocean swell. Everything seems just fine until you realize that the calm water you were enjoying is transforming into a massive breaker rising well over your head. In other words, if you are sure of anything, you can be sure of this: even the status quo entails risk.
There is no way to quell a roiling sea, so you must get above it, ride it out, catch that wave, and surf. Sure, you might wipe out, but then again, with some skill and confidence you could maintain your balance and propel toward new and exciting possibilities. And even if you do falter, you can get back up on that board again. Alternately, staying put while doggy-paddling for dear life in the expansive sea of the status quo, will all-but guarantee that you eventually will drown, that is if the sharks don’t get you first.
Normality Is Just Plain Normal
I think this is what Bloom is talking about when he advocates resisting the call to be normal. Normality, like the status quo, is a trap — a deceptively calm sea. As with that college with the abysmal graduation rate, maintaining the status quo, being normal, is tantamount to failure. In fact, if over one-third of your students do not graduate from your school in a timely fashion (and close to 50% don’t graduate from any school at all), you have already failed. The success of a college is measured by the quality of its student learning, not whether you manage to keep the doors open and the tuition dollars flowing.
Being different, doing different is hard. As Bloom says, “it will require effort — painful, constant, relentless effort.” Different is a challenge, the sort of challenge that real leaders run toward.
You have heard it said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Well, fiercely maintaining normality and the status quo in the face of abject, persistent, and systemic failure renders that insanity as something even more sinister. It’s akin to willful neglect. People get hurt as the institution fails. Those who seek reform, reset, and redirection are stifled, co-opted, or tossed away.
That’s worse than insane. It’s evil.
How can you learn to surf the status quo toward greatness? How can you learn to be a curator of risk and a champion of positive change?
You can resist and overcome the false calm of the status quo, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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John Henry hammered in the mountains
His hammer was striking fire
But he worked so hard, it broke his poor heart
And he laid down his hammer and he died
Traditional
John Henry was a steel-driving man, or so the song goes. A figure of American legend and the subject of many heroic songs and tales, John Henry was a Black railroad worker in the 1800s who challenged a newfangled steam-powered drill to a contest. Henry, according to the lore, won the competition but died soon after from the strain.
That model of labor, the man who can just push himself further and further — suggesting that all effort is just a matter of willpower — is a myth that still burdens our workplaces and our approach to work. It’s the idea that if we just do more — one more thing — productivity will increase, as though we will never reach the point of diminishing returns.
The Lure of Fake Rigor
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
Various attributions
I taught college composition for years, and I have heard some interesting theories of learning from select colleagues. These are the ones who would insist that students just need to write longer and more demanding essays to become proficient writers. They were blind to the fact that assigning unreasonable work just overwhelmed students and stifled their ability to learn and progress. Those teachers not only pushed their students past the point of diminishing returns, but they also engendered unintended consequences — including cheating.
If you suggested that perhaps a different type of assignment would be more effective, they would invariably claim that their expectations were “rigorous,” implying that your practice was not. This came up all the time in discussions of college courses of every sort. “More is better,” was the mantra. Read more pages, write more pages, take more tests, break more backs, and the only thing there was less of was time. I coined a phrase to describe this wrongheaded and lazy — yes, lazy — thinking: “fake rigor.”
Fake rigor is when something is harder but decidedly not better. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating against hard work, but, as I have written elsewhere, hard work is no substitute for smart work. The lure of fake rigor in our culture can be powerful, and I am afraid I succumbed to it my first few years of teaching. Over time I wised up and started experimenting with shorter assignments on the basis that almost all professional writing is, in fact, brief: emails, memos, letters, summaries, etc. It is pretty rare that an individual will have to crank out a lengthy report, if ever, and very often it will be a team effort.
Moreover, short writing is more challenging. Anyone who sends you a multi-screen email is just slacking off. I noticed that when I gave students 20-page assignments, they tended to pad the content with fluff. There is no room for fluff in a 4-page paper let alone a thoughtfully crafted email. I eventually came to reward students for coming in under length while still covering the topic in a persuasive manner. That’s inherently good writing!
In other words, there is more rigor (discipline, if you will) in creating something succinct yet sufficient than in self-indulgently blathering on. Oh, and it is harder to get away with plagiarism in a short piece.
There is no doubt that you improve your writing through frequent practice, so I saw to it that my students wrote at least as many pages per semester as anyone else’s students only they did so in shorter, pithier assignments rather in one or two unwieldy fluff-fests.
The Deception of Rigmarole
This propensity to privilege longer over better has nothing to do with rigor. Having the biggest pile of garbage is not something to crow about. As with fake rigor, it’s still just stinking garbage.
Here is a useful word you don’t hear too often: rigmarole. Rigmarole is much like fake rigor in that it masquerades as quality because it is hard. If you have to fill out two forms to perform one function, isn’t that inherently superior? After all, more is always better, right?
This sort of thinking is the hallmark of bureaucratic mindlessness. It’s why health insurance companies put you through the wringer every time you go to the doctor and then pretend they don’t have to cover your bills. Rigmarole.
The Power of Tiny Thinking
I recently trained to become a certified Tiny Habits coach. If you don’t know what Tiny Habits is, I suggest you check it out here: tinyhabits.com. Better still, buy the book. B.J. Fogg, the behavioral scientist who created the Tiny Habits method, is a big proponent of the idea that less can be more. Here are a just a few of his discoveries.
You can accomplish more by expecting less — particularly at the outset.
“Powering through” often leads to mediocrity and even failure.
The feeling of success leads to positive outcomes.
The best changes result from feeling good.
Tiny Habits sounds easy, and the method is so in many superficial ways, but that ease can be a bit misleading. The true Tiny Habits practice is, in fact, rigorous in application and profound in impact. Tiny Habits unleashes the power of small.
The Tyranny of Bossware
You may have heard of bossware. It’s software installed on workers’ computers so that their overlords can monitor their “productivity.” I put productivity in scare quotes because bossware has little to do with being productive. It’s really about time on task, which is an entirely different thing. If you don’t see the difference, simply consider the last time you were caught in traffic on a trip you normally make with no delays. Same distance as always, same destination, but this time the traffic exacted significantly more time on task. Was that extra time inherently more productive? Now imagine you had no mobile phone or audiobooks.
The use of bossware is a classic example of the confusion of rigor with rigmarole — mistaking time on task or sheer effort for productivity and treating a measure as a goal. For more on this latter, see my essay on Goodhart’s law called “Soviet Nails.”
Bossware, like pointlessly long assignments, will likely lead to costly unintended consequences, including corner-cutting, subversion, malcontentment, insubordination, sabotage, and employee churn.
The Benefits of Rigor
Rigor, in its purest form, is about holding yourself and others accountable. Effective leaders know that they cannot fake rigor and cannot substitute rigmarole for it. Good leaders know what bosses miss. We cannot put quantity over quality, and, by the way, quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
My first job out of college required me to teach a reading rate and comprehension course. Our operating premise was that if you read too slowly, you will be bored, and your comprehension will drop. If you read too fast, you will be overloaded and face identical results. The idea of the course was to teach people to increase their reading rate to the point of maximum comprehension and no more. It worked pretty well, I’d say.
The premise of that program is precisely what so many organizations and their lousy bosses don’t get. The more you push effort, the more return you get until you don’t. Bossware is just the latest fad in the misguided mindset of many workplaces. Bosses who treat a worker as they would a machine claim they don’t want lazy workers, but they themselves are lazy thinkers. While I can imagine some industries where bossware might make some sense, I am going to guess that those are usually not happy places to work.
The days of John Henry, the steel-driving man, are long gone (if they ever existed). Workers are not interchangeable with steam engines. People are not expendable like equipment — mere human resources. And true leaders understand the difference between rigor and rigmarole. Furthermore, true leaders, even when they are in charge and have a big title and a corner office, are never bosses.
How do you differentiate between rigor and rigmarole, between being a leader and being a boss? How can you resist the lure of fake rigor?
You can tap into true rigor and be the leader you were always meant to be, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Swallow your pride You will not die, it’s not poison
Bob Dylan
Much of my perspective on the working world and on leadership has been shaped or warped by my experience as a faculty member and then a dean at a small university outside of Baltimore. It’s a good part of the reason I have such a low tolerance for incompetent leadership and have made it my goal to guide leaders to greatness. The university had once been a dynamic place, but it had long fallen into dysfunction and moral corruption by the time I left. Therefore, many of the lessons that I took away were what I call negative paradigms, an opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes.
To be sure, I have made plenty of my own instructive errors, but operating in that environment was like tap dancing in a minefield while bombs dropped from above. It was impossible to know what was a misstep and what was just bad luck.
In preparing for this essay, I went back and looked at my daily notes for just two months in spring 2014, and I find I am reliving the anxiety as I write. There was little remarkable about that stretch, yet the record is filled with unaccountable mistreatment, much of which I had forgotten. Now reading the account of these abuses piled one upon the other creates the sensation of a large mass throbbing in my chest — an alien and unwelcome presence.
My only purpose in reviewing my notes from that period in particular was because it was around the time the president of the university abruptly stopped speaking to me for no discernible reason, a silence that lasted for nearly two terrifying years. My only comfort then was that I was not the first to receive such treatment. I probably was not the last either.
Needless to say, his animus left me utterly distraught and scared for my job and career. Workplaces should not have that much power over our lives.
This essay, though, is about the aftermath, which is itself instructive and, I hope, much more amusing.
Even as I experienced such ongoing workplace trauma, I was searching for another job because, well, obviously. As I might put it in a given job interview, I was not fully aligned with my institution’s practiced values, which is a polite way of saying it was a non-stop shitshow there. Finally, around Christmas 2015, I had an offer to be a vice president under a fabulous president, a real and rare leader, at a small university in rural Iowa.
Lo and behold, right after I told my bosses I would be leaving at the end of the semester, I encountered my old president, but instead of the silent treatment he greeted me warmly. What a bizarre shock! Pretending that our relationship had been perfectly collegial all along, he immediately started quizzing me on details about my new school and its president, most of which were ludicrous because I had literally just been hired. It occurred to me that he saw my career success as some sort of feather in his cap, which was just the twisted way his mind worked. In reality, I was fleeing him and his abusive underling, my horrible boss. The president concluded our little conversation by adding, “make an appointment to see me just before you leave. I have some advice for you.”
Now two things are worth pointing out here. One was that I would be staying on until graduation which was in May, so my departure was still five months off. The other is that my contempt for this disgusting little troll was bottomless as was his for me, so I had no interest in any advice he could offer. Still, I thanked him and slipped away.
This went on for the whole semester. Time and again, he would stop me in the hallway and quiz me about my new Iowa school. He was trying to dig up dirt from what I could gather. Every now and then he would remind me to make an appointment to get his advice. I always assured him I would, and I always made an immediate intention to forget. He kept harassing me, though, so I finally gave in and scheduled a meeting with him the Monday before graduation, the last week I would be there.
The Friday before that Monday meeting I ran into the president again and he reminded me that “we have our meeting Monday.” It was difficult to understand how this meeting was such a big deal for him. He seemed to be looking forward to it. In response, I muttered something appropriately polite, and he added, “I have some advice for you.” I already knew this part, so I thanked him, looking for an escape, but he kept going. “I also have a gift to give you.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised and a little weirded out, “that is very nice.”
“It is a book.”
“Oh,” I replied with as much enthusiasm as I could fake.
“Yes. It is worth between 15 and 20 dollars.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.” What a wingnut!
That following Monday morning I showed up for our 9:30 meeting at 9:20, hoping to get it over with as soon as possible. As I checked in with his assistant, who looked at me with pity, he spotted me through his open door, waved me into his office, and sat me down. I had only been in that house of mirrors a handful of times over a decade-and-a-half of employment and then not for several years. We chit-chatted for a bit as he asked some of the same questions about my new school that I had already answered, and then he stood up. “I just remembered. I have that book for you.” He sauntered over to a tall stack of paperback books and took one off the top. “I plan to give these to all the vice presidents and deans, but you won’t be here when I do.” He handed me some pop psychology book, and I thanked him. So much for the special parting gift.
He sat down again, apparently very pleased with himself. “Before you go, I want to make sure I give you that advice.” I braced myself. How could this still be a thing? What wisdom could this feckless sadist actually have to share? More importantly, how could I possibly get it together enough to feign interest?
He started by telling me how he grew up on Long Island and went to college in St. Louis in the 1960s. This was all common knowledge because he mentioned it frequently in public speeches. He then explained how when he first moved out to the Midwest, he struggled to acclimate. He could not figure out what the trouble was, but then it hit him. He smiled at the memory of his adolescent brilliance.
On Long Island, he was never far from the ocean, but in the Midwest he was nowhere near the ocean. I chuckled politely at his lame anecdote, but he was not done.
He then proffered his sage advice, the advice he had first mentioned back in January, the advice he had primed me for and pestered me about over the past five months.
This! Was! The! Big! E! Vent!
His smile widened: “So, when you move from Maryland to Iowa,” he paused to build drama, “you need to understand that there’s no ocean there.” He kept grinning, waiting for my reaction. I thought he must be kidding and smiled back at the stupid joke.
He then pretended he had something else scheduled and ended the meeting abruptly. He had not been kidding. That was it. The advice. As I said goodbye to his assistant and wandered out into the hallway, I checked the time. It was just 9:30. Ten wholes minutes had passed.
Although this man had two decades on me, he lacked fundamental wisdom, which is vital to effective leadership. His arrogance and narcissism were toxic to his capacity to learn and develop and poisoned the culture of his institution from the top down. I have no doubt that all along he thought he would come up with some brilliant counsel at the last minute, but when the time came, he could only offer inanity. Instead of just swallowing his pride and letting it go, he had to say something, anything. I’ll bet he told himself afterward that he was just sticking it to me all along, putting me on, trolling me. He was like that.
Good leaders, in contrast, are constantly on guard against the encroachment of their egos. They seek always to improve and to cultivate wisdom in themselves and in others. They eschew personal animus, petty grievances, and churlish behavior. In short, they strive to act decently in all things so they don’t just go ahead and make an ass of themselves for all time.
How do you defend against the relentless onslaught of empty pride and ego? How do you cultivate wisdom for yourself and your organization?
You can lead the way to greatness, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Teachers touch eternity through their students.
Freeman Hrabowski
Every leadership problem is a teaching problem.
In other words, the same skills one uses to teach are precisely the ones an effective leader needs. Now, when I talk about teaching, I am drawing on my background as a college professor and administrator, but please don’t picture a sepia-toned image of some tweed-clad egghead behind a podium perched on a platform droning on as students attempt to capture his (yes, his) pearls of wisdom in their notes.
That outdated model is what we derisively call “the sage on the stage” mode of lecturing. It and its variants may work for a few students, who are usually the types who could still learn if you locked them in a room with only a book and a lamp, which is to say a very special few. The most effective instructors rely on modes of dynamic interaction over lectures.
But this is an essay about leadership, not teaching, or, more precisely, it is about the nexus of effective teaching and effective leadership. The sort of problems that beset leaders in just about any field are just versions of the problems teachers face in class. They may vary in the particulars, their scope, and the stakes, but — and this is important — the ways of coping are remarkably similar.
In no particular order, here are a few (not all) basic necessities to being an effective college teacher and how they pertain to leadership.
- Setting Goals
Good teachers need good goals. I am not talking about measures, such as students earning certain grades. On the confusion of goals and measures, see my essay on Goodhart’s Law.
Good teachers know where they are directing their students and what they intend their students to leave with. Yes, there are assignments and tests, but a superior teacher will understand that those are mostly crude instruments for assessing what a student has learned. The true goal is the learning. Oh, and rigorous goals (not simply difficult goals) are more motivating than insipid goals. I will address the difference between rigor and rigmarole in a future essay.
The same for leaders. You want your people to complete their tasks and behave in certain ways — in other words, do their jobs. But what do you ultimately want from them or, more compellingly, for them? Keep in mind, it may not be easily gaged or measurable at all. The measure is less important than the achievement.
- Planning
Related to goal setting is planning. And the first rule of planning is “know thy stuff.”
In grad school I had a fabulous professor named Linda Hutcheon. She told this horrifying/hilarious story about the first time she had to give a lecture. She was extremely busy and never got around to reading the novel she was to teach, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, which is, as they say, a bear. She found herself behind a podium with a room full of impatient students and an hour to fill, so she proceeded to give her entire lecture on just the first paragraph of the book.
Now, Linda is brilliant and charismatic, so she can pull off such a stunt. I certainly could not. But while she was no doubt engaging and even remarkably insightful, the lecture was probably not particularly edifying for the students. She knew her stuff in that she knew how to belabor the reading of a single paragraph, but she did not know the novel itself and could offer nothing of worth on that score.
Once you fully know your stuff, though, there are two things to look out for in planning. The first is overplanning, laying everything out minutely, the opposite of Linda’s predicament. You have heard the proverb “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” The line is from the poet Robert Burns. He knows what he is talking about because he’s from Scotland.
When I first started teaching, I was advised to have a lesson plan broken down into ten-minute increments, and I stupidly took this advice with predictable results. Instead of focusing on the students, their needs, their pacing, and their learning, I found myself focused on staying on track.
Which indicates the other concern with planning: sticking to the plan no matter what. One of the paradoxes of planning well is that you then can adapt or abandon your plan when it is not working or because something else will work better.
My best classes were the ones where I threw out my lesson plan and winged it. In fact, I had great semesters when fifteen minutes or so into just about every class, I would dramatically crumple my lesson plan into a ball and toss it into a trash can. The students would howl with delight because they knew we were off the races. And here’s the thing. Although we got there via an unexpected route, by the end of the semester we always covered all the necessary material while assuring that the students were truly engaged in learning it.
How could I do this? Because I was so prepared, and that preparation gave me the understanding and confidence to try something different, to explode the status quo.
Good leaders know how, know when, and are willing to — even are enthusiastic to — explode the status quo to get to better results. Bad leaders stick to their guns no matter what.
- Communicating
This one should be a no-brainer, but it escapes so many leaders. Good teachers make it their mission to communicate clearly to their students, but they are equally as keen to listen to their students — not just what they say but also the nuances and inflections of how they say it. Much of the communication from students, by the way, is non-verbal. Good teachers can tell when students have something on their minds but are silent. Really good teachers can do so on Zoom.
Communication is about conversation. How did I know when to abandon a lesson plan? Because my students told me when. Of course, never once did they say, “hey, Dr. Sal, why don’t you throw away that lesson plan.” They told me by how they responded to the material — the answers they gave, the questions they asked, and their unspoken reactions or non-reactions, even utter silence. In other words, we had conversations going even when I was doing most or all of the talking. I was open to them, which helped them open to me and to each other.
As I have said elsewhere, in communication, clarity trumps everything.
How does this differ from effective leadership? Not one jot.
- Guiding
The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.
Herbert A. Simon
To my claim that “every leadership problem is a teaching problem,” I sometimes add, “and every teaching problem is a teaching-of-composition problem.” Those who have taught college composition or another skills-based course usually know what I mean. I discussed the peculiarities and particularities of teaching and learning skills in my recent essay entitled “What If You Really Could Learn to Fly through a Hole in the Back of Your Head.”
The simple fact is, you can give people information and guide them toward understanding and practice, but they have to come fully into learning on their own. One of my friends and colleagues, Jerry Van Aken, used to say, “you can lead a student to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.” Quite.
Same for leaders. Unless a process is just rote steps, if it involves any degree of comprehension, a leader can only guide people to fully grasp what is needed — even more so when adaptation is required. Good leaders take on the role of careful teacher. The worst bosses always have “to do everything myself because everyone else is incompetent.” Can you guess who in that scenario is definitely incompetent? Think of a teacher who complains about their students being too stupid to learn. Can you guess who is the stupidest one in that scenario?
I’ll go one further. A really good leader invites people to explore ideas and processes and guides them, walks with them, as they do so. John Amaechi says that leaders should engage others in a way that tells them, “Not only does your path to success exist, but I am going to walk it with you.”
Such a leader allows people to get to their goals in their own way as much as possible. You can often tell an organization that has a lot of bosses and no true leadership by the number of locked-down bureaucratic rules and procedures that are in place. Yes, some of these are vital, particularly in certain settings, but when they exist for their own sake, not much leading is or even can be going on.
This essay is already growing a bit long, so here are a few other places where good teaching and leading overlap:
5. Patient Repetition 6. Cutting Some Slack 7. Not Being a Jerk 8. Following Through
You probably get the idea, but if you want to hear more on those items, just let me know.
Great leaders are, in fact, great teachers (and vice versa), and engaged followers can be much like students who are eager to learn and excel. The more you are aware of these facts and adopt the mindset of an effective teacher, the better you can lead.
Do you think of yourself as a teacher when you lead? How can you more actively include teaching skills in your leadership practice?
You can be the great teacher-leader you were meant to be, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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The squirrel is a curious creature that is one-third rat, one-half furniture duster, and four-fifths dog toy. I have always enjoyed the antics of squirrels although I have also rained curses upon them as they raided my bird feeders. As thieves, they are relentless and clever as you may surmise from the many squirrel-proof feeder designs on the market. The squirrel can climb anything you hang a feeder from. If you install some sort of baffle to deter climbing, the squirrel will leap down from above. A few fancier feeders are designed to seal shut under the squirrel’s weight. Some squirrels, though, will eventually figure out how to distribute their weight so that they can feast. Relentless.
Squirrels can be crafty, squirrels can be acrobatic, squirrels can be as monomaniacally focused as a teenaged boy on a hot date or eating a hot pocket. But squirrels are decidedly not smart. After all, while that squirrel is obsessing over how to score a big bird-feeder bonanza, it could be gathering acorns and whatnot aplenty.
When I worked at a small university in the Baltimore suburbs, my office was in a modest building on the edge of a woodsy campus that had once been a large farm. My building was a converted caretaker’s house — very quaint. We had a little open porch and garden out front and our own paved parking lot. We also had a bird feeder and would enjoy watching through a window the variety of birds that visited. The chickadees, titmice, and finches would perch and feast above while the mourning doves grazed for dropped seeds on the ground.
Of course we also had squirrels. Lots of tenacious, voracious, and bodacious squirrels. Consequently, we devised and purchased many contraptions for thwarting their feeder heists, which would be successful until the squirrels happened upon a workaround. We eventually gave in and bought a stupidly expensive feeder that automatically sealed its little seed portals when it sensed a squirrel’s weight. Each spring a new generation of squirrels would begin its round of attempts on that formidable feeder, and almost every year they succeeded.
One year, though, for whatever reason, the local squirrel colony just could not figure out how to defeat our squirrel-resistant feeder despite their every desperate caper. They dove at it, jumped at it, and chewed on it. They even attempted to dismantle it, removing hardware that we had to replace, all with no success.
One precocious squirrel, though, became obsessed with cracking the feeder in his own unique and indirect way. It started with him scaling the screen of the window in our common room and clawing and chewing the upper edge of the lower window sash. There was no screen at the top, just a storm window, so he could climb no further. (And, yes, he was a he.) After a week or so of this climbing and chewing, he had done some visible but minor damage to the top frame of the lower window sash and now had a better grip to rehearse his next maneuver.
Over several weeks, he managed to grasp that edge tightly enough to flip himself upside down and slam his body into the acrylic pane of the upper storm window. The pane served as a sort of vertical trampoline that would launch him — have you guessed it? — in the direction of the feeder! You would be working away in your office and hear “Boom!” It was our acrobatic rodent and his outlandish Cirque du Squirreleil act. If you were lucky enough to witness his stunt, you would see him crash always short of the feeder that was just five feet away.
Boom! Boom!
Whoosh!
Splat!
It had to hurt. You never knew when he might try, but he would only make one or two attempts a day before returning to the good life of gathering the nuts that had fallen from the numerous giant oak and walnut trees that surrounded us.
What did he intend to do if ever reached his destination, though? The feeder would seal the instant he was on it, so maybe he figured if he flew in, the feeder would think he was just another bird and grant him access.
As it turns out, I happened to witness his final attempt.
I was working upstairs in my office late after everyone else had gone home when I heard, “Boom! Boom!” I knew it was either Eval Squirreval at it again or yet another timid student who had overlooked the eye-level sign that said, “please just come in. No need to knock.” I ran down the stairs hoping for the former.
It was!
I arrived just in time to bear witness to his daredevil finale. Never before had he gripped the upper edge so resolutely. Never before had he pounded his tiny body so many times against the storm window. “Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!” I saw the acrylic pane undulating with kinetic energy and wondered how much it could take.
“BOOM!” Rocket squirrel exploded into the air.
Now, you may have enjoyed videos of flying squirrels gliding with gentle grace to the ground. You have certainly observed squirrels leap nimbly from tree branch to tree branch or bolt athletically from rooftop to rooftop. I doubt though you have ever witnessed anything like the final launch of Rocket Squirrel.
He soared in a not-so-elegant arc — limbs flailing uselessly — past the feeder, over the garden, and several feet into the paved parking lot. All told, I would estimate that Rocket Squirrel’s uncontrolled flight covered at least twelve feet. Astonishing.
At the end of his journey, he slammed upside down into the asphalt and lay there stunned. The darkest thoughts filled my mind in those seconds before he suddenly righted himself, shuddered his body, and shook his head. He glanced around as if to assure himself that no other squirrels had witnessed his misadventure and then bolted toward the nearest tree. I imagine he had thought this was going to be his moment of greatest glory, but it was in fact his bitterest disappointment.
Rocket Squirrel retired that window-banging routine on the spot. We never knew why. Maybe his critter brain now associated the stunt with pain, lots of pain. Or, maybe he actually had the sense to know he was defeated. Just as likely — rattled as he was by his uncontrolled landing — he became easy pickings for one of the resident red foxes or patrolling hawks.
Whatever the case, given the passage of time, his reckless ways, and the possibility that he suffered some damage upon landing, I cannot imagine that Rocket Squirrel is still with us. One fact remains, though. That year, our squirrel-proof feeder remained undefeated.
Moral 1: Don’t confuse persistence, even clever and effective persistence, with intelligence.
Moral 2: It is relatively easy to be clever and even inventive when stealing, breaking, and otherwise causing mischief. Try creating. That takes real intelligence.
Moral 3: Even a stupid squirrel has sense enough to quit.
How can you sort persistent effort from effective productivity? How can you continue to build toward a goal in a world that rewards activity for activity’s sake?
You can achieve greatness while smashing false paradigms, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Alexander Pope
You are no doubt aware of the series of megahit movies that started with The Matrix in 1999. Here is a brief overview for those who — due to a lengthy coma or prison sentence — remain somehow ignorant of the premise of the original movie: Sometime in the future, humanity has been linked en masse to a simulated reality called, you guessed it, “the matrix,” which is run by artificial intelligence. (As I wrote that sentence, I swear I heard Alexa giggle.)
Of course, no one inside the matrix realizes that their physical body is just part of some sort of giant battery. (Stay with me here.) Meanwhile, some lucky devils get to escape the horrid matrix, which overflows with the sumptuousness that marks what we call human reality. Instead they opt live to free in a dank underworld where they eat gruel that is literally gray and are constantly hunted by mechanical sentinels that look like squids, move like squids, and are commonly known as “squids.”
With such an alternate quality of life available, is it any wonder that few are ever tempted to snarf up those red pills? After all, who would want to escape a world — however artificial — of plenitude, indoor plumbing, and a visible sky, where colors range well beyond the grayscale and most squid encounters involve marinara on the side? Keanu Reeves maybe, but not this guy.
But I am getting away from myself. Pardon me. Alexa’s persistent cackling can be very distracting.
One of the things about the people who leave the matrix is that they can go back in due to a hole in the back of their heads. (Stay with me here.) They can also obtain whatever skill they desire instantly via this same hole. So, if you need to operate a helicopter on the fly (Alexa told me that joke) you can just plug in and download a handy helicopter manual into your brain. Soon you will be whirlybirding around the matrix without a care or a seatbelt. If you need to become a martial arts master, plug in, and with one press of a button you are soaring like Bruce Lee on a wire suspension system.
Now, I have never studied martial arts, but I was devoted to the TV show Kung Fu when I was a tyke. Therefore, I speak with some authority. I am quite sure that downloading a judo book does not make you a judo master any more than David Carradine made a credible Chinese monk. Sure, you would know some stuff about judo, lots of stuff, but don’t go knotting that black belt just yet. You have to be able to apply what you know.
Somehow, though, in The Matrix series, you not only know the moves and what-for of martial arts instantly through your posterior head hole, but you also become an expert practitioner, a master of all the intuitive aspects of the practice, such as anticipating your opponent or knowing when to kick and yell rather than yell and kick. What’s more, you can effectively fight someone who has long been an accomplished martial artist. Sure, they can still mash you into the floor, but you will get in more licks than you deserve to.
I call b**t. I don’t believe more than half of that matrix stuff.
The fact is that knowing is not true learning. I can memorize a poem, know it cold, and not have a clue what it means. I could even memorize a poem in a language I do not understand. So what?
Understanding is key to learning.
Sure there are ways of classifying learning that are more complex and precise, but in the most conventional sense, you don’t have learning without understanding.
Knowing ➕ Understanding ______________________ Learning
Additionally, when it comes to learning skills, such as flying helicopters, acquiring new languages, driving cars, beating people up with your feet, or even writing, knowing and understanding must be augmented by a good deal of doing — i.e., practice.
Knowing Understanding ➕ A Bunch of Experience ______________________ Skills Learning
Just trust me on this one. You do not want to go joy-riding with a matrix head-hole-trained pilot who’s never actually been in a cockpit before. Wave politely and say, “no thanks, I’ll jump.”
A Little Learning
We often confuse knowing with learning. Alexander Pope famously wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” The idea is that if you have only a slight understanding of what you know, you may grow overly confident and screw up. Unfortunately you have probably more often heard people misquote Pope as saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The difference is salient.
One thing I have observed over decades as an educator is that brains are not buckets to be filled with nuggets of knowledge. That is not what education is. That is not what learning is. There is a reason we pay teachers poorly to do thankless work and be treated like garbage. Teaching and learning involve complex processes that require expertise, experience, and massive patience. Learning is not listening to this lecture, reading that book, and memorizing another thing. Learning is certainly not plugging your brain into a computer and downloading manuals. (Quiet, Alexa!) Learning itself is a skill, one that must be taught through practice.
Politicians, pundits, and other creepy-crawlies often confound learning with bucket-filling in order to make a point or score a point. Don’t fall for it. Learning is complex. Learning is highly individual. Learning is inefficient. And learning is itself a vital skill we must master if we are ever to free ourselves from our horrid AI overlords so that we can live as liberated humans in fetid underground caves decorated in gray tones, contentedly savoring our gruel while fending off inedible squid.
Do you understand the difference between knowledge and learning? What degree of mastery do you have in the skill of learning?
You can better master the skill of learning at every level in order to foster change and innovation, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Thy love is false; thy star hath sunk; virtue is a mockery!
From The Temptations of Hafiz (1845)
You have perhaps heard of sunk cost. The sunk cost fallacy is the belief that because you have already invested money or resources in an idea, product, or service, you must not abandon that idea, product, or service even if it no longer works for you. It is more a matter of emotion than thought.
The business world is rife with illogical sunk-cost thinking, which is why you see a company continuing to struggle with failed hardware instead of abandoning it and starting anew. We are all subject to the fallacy. It’s why I won’t get rid of my expensive new sneakers even though they are killing my feet. I have worked for colleges where they would not abandon utterly inadequate data management systems simply because they had spent so much on them. I am sure you have had similar experiences.
The sunk cost fallacy assumes that because something warranted a significant financial investment in the past, it is too valuable to do away with no matter the evidence.
Similarly, what I call the sunk virtue fallacy assumes that because a significant investment of effort in the past was effective, it is too valuable to do away with, no matter the evidence. Clinging to sunk virtue can be like clinging to a half-wrecked boat. You are lucky to keep your head above water.
Virtue Sunk: An Unreal Tale
Once upon a time, there was a princess, named Princess Buttertub, who inherited her kingdom only to discover a destructive force that threatened its very existence. Her new kingdom was deep into budgetary trouble, which would require extraordinary intervention if the princess were to save her land. She had to act quickly and decisively to save the day, so Princess Buttertub gathered her closest noble lieutenants, and they plotted drastic moves to fix their financial problems.
Some of their solutions centered on significantly increasing the workload of their subjects. Others had to do with cutting expenses alongside extreme tactics to immediately increase revenue, such as exorbitant taxes on the serfs. Princess Buttertub, in an uncustomary act of selflessness, even reduced her own fortune to a level she thought the kingdom could sustain. The situation was that bad. In short, she and her team of nobles did what had to be done no matter what. Their personal sacrifice was great, almost heroic, but what they asked of others was as great or even greater.
Eventually their efforts were successful, and the members of the Royal Court showered them with gratitude and praise.
Years went by. Princess Buttertub’s team of noble lieutenants that had saved the day was still intact. Unaccountably, the emergency decrees and practices that were implemented to offset the financial shortfall were also still intact. The workloads and taxes imposed on their subjects remained unconscionably high. Some of the most draconian emergency cost-cutting and egregious revenue-generating practices remained in place. The stated thinking was that since these practices had been critical during a crisis, discontinuing them could be risky. Soon, these directives became law in all but name.
Meanwhile, the kingdom had stagnated. Buildings crumbled and projects were left unfinished. Even the Royal Palace, Princess Butterctub’s own abode, had sewage in its basement and chickens running wild in its backyard.
Sure there were some years that the kingdom thrived more than others, but its condition contracted and expanded within the confines of hardened parameters, never to do much worse or better than it had already done. A scarcity mindset pervaded everything. Chronic problems were allowed to continuously suck up time, energy, and money in lieu of investing resources to address them. The only qualities in abundance among the princess and her leadership were low expectations and an inferiority complex.
Any attempts by newcomers to unravel the emergency policies were met with open hostility, even viciousness, which should not be surprising. After all, the storied team that saved the kingdom now drew much of their authority and power from continuing those very policies and practices that had seemed so virtuous and heroic in the past.
Meanwhile, Princess Buttertub nurtured and protected her noble lieutenants like a mama bear. She did not care that — as with her — virtually all their goodness, all their virtue, had been spent years before never to be replenished. They remained noble in title but not in person.
Moreover, the Royal Court also fell for the sunk virtue fallacy. They continued to reward the princess for her fortitude in the face of crisis even though the kingdom itself had long since become mired in mediocrity. She had saved the kingdom only to have it subsist like a comatose patient.
Sadly, the kingdom’s many strengths and resources were squandered as Princess Buttertub and her lieutenants jealously guarded the status quo and the benefits it conferred upon them. Some simple fixes for major problems were readily at hand so long as the Royal Court, the princess, and her noble lieutenants were willing to risk letting go of their emergency policies, so long as they were willing to admit that their past heroics were not a guarantee of present virtue. They refused to accept that the very practices that had once saved the kingdom were now the source of its sinking fortunes.
And they all lived miserably ever after.
We often make the same mistake in our daily decisions. Not only do we hang onto poor investments because of sunk costs, we assume that past virtue inevitably leads to future success. While someone’s past actions can be a strong indicator of their future behavior, it is far from a reliable predictor.
B.J. Fogg, the behavioral scientist behind Tiny Habits and a budding revolution in our understanding of the ability to change for the better, has found that behavior consists of three elements: motivation, ability, and a prompt. Without the presence of all three factors, we simply don’t act.
Our Princess Butterctub’s most virtuous behavior was prompted by an emergency that she inherited upon taking charge of her kingdom. She and her noble team’s ability to address that emergency was limited, but their motivation — existential fear — was high enough to offset their inability, which allowed them to plow ahead. Later when their many efforts paid off and the emergency had passed, the prompt to action morphed into stagnation. The need to make drastic alterations was replaced by a fierce unwillingness to let go of the status quo.
To be sure, as with the initial change, her noble lieutenants’ ability to maintain the status quo over time was low. One secret they don’t tell you in school is that maintaining the status quo can be tremendously hard and risky in the long run. Treading water at first is easy, but over an extended period it is exhausting and invites sharks. To offset that difficulty, though, the noble team’s motivation to continue as is remained high because they now enjoyed the dominance the status quo conferred, which they feared losing. Thus, even though their ability to stay put was diminishingly scarce, their motivation to do nothing was sky high.
The sunk virtue fallacy can blind us to the truth that present circumstances reveal. It can affect our business decisions and our personal relationships.
The next time you need to make a decision about a person or action based solely on their past, consider the factors that marked that past. Do they exist now? Are they likely to exist in the future? If not, then beware of clinging to the fallacy of sunk virtue.
What sunk virtues do you cling to? What past efforts now threaten to sink you and your organization?
You can let go of past efforts, even once-effective ones, that no longer serve, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Values aren't buses... They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are.
Jennifer Crusie
Pam was a senior manager with ambitions. She had climbed higher in her organization than she had ever before imagined, but now, heady with that success, she could easily imagine climbing higher still. What got her to this level was tenacity and focus, never being satisfied with anything less than perfection. She always got the job done at any cost, and she made damn sure others saw her that way.
It was also important to her that she be perceived as a woman of great virtue. It was part of her brand. So every week she sat in her favorite pew with her family for services. If her boss happened to sit nearby, that was just a happy coincidence. She projected the image of the professional paragon, complete with a perfect family. Her religious convictions also gave her further license to preach about civility in the workplace and collegiality.
At work, all that mattered was the work. If she had to toil for inhuman hours, so be it. Just so long as everyone knew it. Anyone who left at the end of the day — early is how she saw it — was just lazy and self-interested. Why shouldn’t she benefit personally from her extraordinary commitment?
Her greatest fear was to be outshined, and she loathed being questioned. After all, what kind of a person would dare to question perfection?
When it came to her employees, she knew how to box in troublemakers or torment them until they broke or fled. She even found ways to target perceived rivals at her own level. Sometimes she would just casually drop a comment about their supposed shortcomings or some perceived slight into a conversation with her superiors. She would always preface her critique the same way: “Far be it from me to talk about a colleague…” That formula never failed to get the attention of her bosses.
In fact, “far be it from me” became her signature. The second that incantation spilled from her lips, her coworkers would wince in anticipation.
While she was professionally successful, climbing higher and higher, anyone who cared to pay attention could tell that inside she was roiled with misery. Moreover, she trailed a wake of tribulation that threatened to overwhelm everyone around her.
Values, Values, Everywhere
Every single person, Pam too, has some set of values even if they are not always aware of or loyal to them. Every leader, Pam too, holds true core values, even leaders who are driven by twisted or false values.
Core values in practice are immutable, undilutable, and utterly scrutable. Values are not situational. You cannot be value-driven while compartmentalizing your values — applying them here but not there. You don’t dice, slice, or purée values to serve them up this way today and another way tomorrow. Like integrity, values must be both whole and solid.
I don’t mean to suggest values are absolute, never to bend or change over time. Your values can and must evolve over time. A values-driven leader welcomes challenges because such challenges will strengthen your convictions or will inspire you to reconsider them. But in daily practice, values are clear and firm. They are not mysterious, hidden, or fluid. They are at your core, and you had best know and be true to what is at your core.
Pam projected values like morality and selflessness to the world and probably believed she lived them, but she twisted them. Her religious practice, while an honest devotion, was also an opportunity to virtue signal, perhaps as much to herself as to her boss. Her morality became an excuse to force her impossible code on others. Her selflessness morphed into endless toil, which only served her perfectionism and ambition. Her professions of civility and collegiality were really a demand that everyone conform to her wishes without criticism or even question.
False values are bad. Twisted values are even worse. When you twist your values, you are embarking on a sustained effort to gaslight yourself as well as the world.
In contrast, true and worthy values are self-evident and not self-serving. A values-driven leader can have ambition, to be sure, but values never exist to primarily serve that ambition. In fact, it is the other way round.
Many leaders are transactional in their approach — I do this for you so you will do that for me — which is just fine up to a point if such bartering is necessary. Wholly transactional leadership is not compatible with values-driven leadership, though. Pam viewed others mostly in service to herself and to her ends, shifting or abandoning her stated values accordingly and doling out favor in hopes of a return. Values without integrity are of no value.
Truly values-driven leadership is instead transformational, assuring that you and those around you be their best self. It is never solely self-interested, but looks outward while encouraging others to do the same.
Sincerely values-driven leaders may even find themselves in a position where they must sacrifice their personal ambitions in order to stay true to their core. They trust that in the end, their values will triumph. At the very least, they will not have betrayed their core self just for a job title and some coins.
Values-driven leadership will ask a lot of you, but as a values-driven leader you will attract and retain the best talent. You will learn to motivate others to do what needs to be done because they want to do it. You will inspire innovation and foster collaboration. Because you know and adhere to your core, you will serve as a transformative leader, focused on progress — not false aspirations of perfection — in every aspect of your practice.
Being a values-driven leader requires self-awareness, courage, fortitude, persistence, vulnerability, transparency, and a service mindset. Values-driven leaders model their values in all that they do and both drive and empower others to do the same. They persist because their values give them strength even in the face of setbacks and failure. And they check in regularly with their values — assuring that they and others can identify their values both in name and in practice.
The values-driven leader is a positive force for success. Your values, when put into practice, can transform this world for the better. That’s why they are so valuable.
Are you aware of the values at your core? Are you up to the challenge of values-driven leadership? Do you practice your values with consistency and maybe make this world a little better than you found it?
Leaders need to tap into their values to be most effective, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Do you know what a bootstrap is? It’s that little loop or tab at the top of a boot. It may in the back, or there may be one on each side. It’s there to help you pull the boot onto your foot.
Do you have a pair of boots like that? I want you to try something with them. Go ahead and get them. I’ll wait.
If you don’t have boots with bootstraps handy, that’s okay. You can do this experiment in your head.
Got them in hand—or in your noggin? Good, now put them on. Don’t be shy. Use those little bootstraps to pull them snug. Great. Now we will do something requiring much more exertion.
I need you to stand up and then squat way down. Now, grab those bootstraps and pull. I mean really pull! Yank yourself right up into the stratosphere.
Now, how does your butt feel? It’s probably where you landed if you made any progress at all. You have now experienced the futility of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
This is one lesson I am not sure I have ever fully absorbed. I call it the Bootstrap-to-Butt Surety.
I say I have never learned the lesson, but my situation is a little more complicated than that. I have always known that the whole bootstrap thing is bogus, but I have, at the same time, utterly imbibed the pull-yourself-up myth. A contradiction, I know, and one that has messed me up my whole life. I think my imbibition stems from a series of experiences from when I was much younger.
After my first year of college, I went home to the Philly suburbs (that is, Delco to the initiated) to work as the technical director of a local theater called Summer Stage, which, amazingly, is still in existence as a theater camp. Back then, it seemed more catch-as-catch can, particularly in the rough-and-tumble scene shop where we built the sets. Most of the actors and crew members were high school and college age with a few adults doing adult things like designing sets and directing plays, which were the usual fair of musicals and shows for the kiddies.
As technical director, I oversaw all aspects of the technical production: sets, lighting, etc. It was a big job even on such a small scale, particularly for an 18 year old. I had a handful of employees, who were all older than I was, and a host of volunteers who ranged in age from about 13 to probably about 30. I was not up to the challenge, but I was too stupid to know it.
The thing is, being in over my head had already become sort of my thing. For example, when I was maybe 12, I ended up in the top leadership position in my little Boy Scout troop because, well, there was no one else. We had a lone adult — the scoutmaster — who worked with us. He was a good guy, but I had no idea what I was doing and almost no guidance because the scoutmaster was himself overwhelmed. When I finally quit at age 14, I was burnt out. Imagine being burnt out at that age. Of course, being stupid, I didn’t understand what I was going through and just figured I had grown too old for scouting.
Summer Stage was similar in that I had little or no guidance in terms of workspace leadership. I knew how to build sets, and I knew enough to delegate the stuff I was not good at, like lighting and painting, but I knew almost nothing about how to move others to get things done. My predecessors in the Summer Stage scene shop pretty much just bullied people until they either fled or did the work. That style was not a natural fit for me.
Since I wasn’t into scaring people off, I had the added burden of managing a bunch of young teens who wanted to help out but had no skills and were a danger to themselves and others around power tools. Now that I think about it, I am damn lucky I never had to transport some kid and their freshly liberated finger to the hospital.
The head of Summer Stage, Harry, was a visionary founder and producer. What he created was pretty special and apparently launched the career of at least one very famous person, some semi-famous people, and a few other more locally renowned theater professionals. I was not among them, by the way, and Harry pretty much left me on my own, which suited me just fine.
Still, my cluelessness made me dangerous.
For the first production that summer, some forgettable musical that I have forgotten, the set designer was an arrogant incompetent who demanded we build a hideous and massive 3d structure (like 20-foot wide by 12-foot tall and three-foot deep) that would rotate on a pivot. I knew this was not going to work but went ahead and built it anyhow with a few key tweaks to give it a better shot of functioning.
Frankly, this thing was unsafe. It was huge and heavy, and sure enough one night my tweaks failed and its pivot broke, causing the structure to roll free, threatening actors and audience alike. The monolith was so big that even a few feet of movement was not readily discernible. Fortunately a sharp-eyed crew member noticed before it tumbled off the stage.
During a scene change we repositioned the structure. Then with one of the smaller teens, I climbed inside so we could reattach the pivot. We had to do our work between scenes when the orchestra was playing to cover the sound of tools. I don’t remember what we did, but somehow we fixed it and got through the final weekend of production without incident.
The following year I was technical director again, and another designer walked in with a crazy set requiring a poorly supported walkway about 10 feet in the air. I divined a clever way to engineer this, but I discovered how close to disaster we came when we dismantled the set at the end of the run. My engineering was on the brink of failure. The production was Annie, and a collapsed walkway would have dumped one group of little chorus girls on top of another.
I should be in jail.
My point here is that, while I got the job done with minimal harm, I could easily have injured or even killed someone with my incompetence. I had no one to guide me, no one to mentor me, no one to turn to. I knew these designs were dangerous, but I went ahead and built them anyway when a more seasoned professional would have refused.
In short, with no mentoring or guidance or even healthy models of leadership, I was bootstrapping all the way. I thought I could do anything, get away with anything, and needed no one. I may have avoided landing on my butt at that moment, but I deserved to, and these types of experiences messed me up for decades in ways I can only begin to understand now. I have bootstrapped my whole life even though I have always known that bootstrapping is b**t. How many times did I end up on my butt as a result? Looking back it boggles my mind. The good news is I have always strived to learn from my mistakes. Sadly though, some of those mistakes were avoidable and extremely costly.
If you are tempted to say, “But, Jim, you’ve done well in life,” save it. My successes only started racking up when I learned to accept the help of others. And until I learned that lesson, I learned very little else. Worse still, even now I have a hard time accepting help. Bootstrapping is my drug.
My arrogance (for that is what bootstrapping is) was never a substitute for the learning I could have absorbed if I had sought help. Frankly, I have never had a true long-term and trustworthy mentor, and yet I have mentored many toward success. What I learned is what I teach, and my first and most critical lesson is that no one can really do it on their own.
So what is the bootstrap-to-butt surety? It is the assurance that if you do it yourself you will eventually land on your ass, maybe over and over, like me. No one really does it all by themselves. No one. No one is fully self-made despite self-congratulatory claims to the contrary. Everybody needs somebody sometime. Next time someone tells you to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, give them the boot.
Do you have an impulse to go it alone more often than not? Do you resist when others want to guide you?
You need to reject the bootstrapping myth, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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You ever seen a ghost? No
But you have heard of them
Bob Dylan
It is a bit hard for me to admit it, but I believe in ghosts. It’s particularly hard for me because I am a highly rational person. As a baseball fan, I scoff at the foolish superstitions that riddle the game. During a potential no-hitter, I will openly talk in the stands about the hit count, which freaks everyone out.
“You’ll jinx it!” They complain.
“Ha, ha,” I chuckle. “If I had the power to influence events just through my words, I would use that power to benefit all humankind, not just baseball.” Then I might add another chuckle for emphasis.
“Ha, ha.”
Although I was raised Catholic and went to twelve years of Catholic school, let’s just say the indoctrination did not take.
“Ha, ha.”
I believe in what humans can experience and can logically conjure, not hypotheticals.
Yes, I am hyper-rational and altogether immune to superstition. (Knock wood.) And yet, I tell you, ghosts are real.
They lurk all around us. Where? Everywhere! You don’t see them, of course, because they are ghosts, but they are scary as they float around sowing uncertainty and disappointment. They flit about our world with impunity, reeking havoc. When you have an encounter with a ghost, you cannot even be sure what is happening, but you can be assured that nothing good can come of it. There is something just so terminal about ghosts.
I’ll be honest. I have no idea what these ghosts consist of. Many people think of ghosts as the spirits of the dead who haunt the Earth, but that is childish nonsense. Real ghosts are of another origin entirely.
Most seem to be the spirits of still-living people that get loose in the world from time to time, escaping their corporeal cage to disrupt the normal functions of normal people. Others, I suppose, are almost always out there, roaming free of their heedless hosts and causing mischief.
Maybe it’s because I am so driven by rationality that I find these ghosts so vexing. Many other people I speak to don’t seem as put out by them — annoyed, yes, but not overly concerned. I, on the other hand, am just so baffled as to their very existence that I can’t get over it.
The prompts that can induce an otherwise decent and thoughtful human being to issue forth their ghost to haunt the world vary. Sometimes it is a lack of attentiveness that unleashes the ghost. The person who is supposed to be in control just lets their guard down long enough for the ghost to bolt. Often this inattentiveness comes about because of overwork, stress, and/or a perceived lack of time. It may be a temporary slip or for some people something just this side of a perpetual state.
Sometimes, the ghost gets out because the host person is just that type, rude enough to not care what mayhem their ghost might stir up. Other times, the ghost is produced on purpose. This happens a lot really. The person consciously chooses to let their ghost run amok. It may be a one-off, to seek vengeance on an individual or out of cruelty, or it may be the result of a general contempt and arrogance.
The most common reason a person will allow their ghost to fly free is pretty ironic. They let their ghost out due to fear — fear of rejection, fear of next steps, fear of commitment, fear of facing facts, fear of intimacy, fear of effort, and so on. Whatever the fear, these people figure that a ghost that is sort of on their side can protect them, so — blorp! — out spurts their ghost. Excreting a ghost to confront fear seems to me a strange defensive strategy no matter how commonplace.
Really, of course, this fear they are trying to avoid never really goes away because it is never faced. Instead, these people somehow overlook the fact that the only way they can beat their fears is by having a robust and, yes, intact spirit inside them to bolster their integrity and resilience. Like I said, ironic.
These ghosts are often the ruin of good human relationships, trust, and communications as they go about their fetid business, leaving their victims wounded and confounded.
Ghosts regularly spook budding romantic relationships, growing acquaintanceships, and even some longstanding and intimate bonds. When ghosts interfere with these types of human interactions, someone will certainly suffer confusion and doubt and likely get hurt.
Ghosts also haunt professional relationships, and the same confusion and doubt can ensue. So often it is just neglect and laziness that causes professionals to suddenly inflict their ghost on the world, but callousness, self-importance, and fear may be at play too. The effect can be debilitating, but professionals just try to move on and ignore the ghost as much as possible and not take it personally.
You know about these ghosts and may not even realize it. Maybe you are one of those people who allows your ghost to float about freely. We all do from time to time, and sometimes — in the face of untenable circumstances — doing so is the necessary or even the most humane thing to do. But some people are chronic in their ghosting and don’t seem to care about the harm they do. After all, it is not them, right? They’re not at fault. It’s the ghost!
In recent months, I have found myself ghosted by a surprising number of people in my professional life. I will never know why. Some may have misinterpreted my motives or purpose. Others may just not have any use for me, which is fine. Still others feel they don’t have the time, which is often a self-con. And the rest are just ignorant. And don’t get me going about the ones who commit to forming connections and then just — blorp! — disgorge their ghost rather than respond to an email or something. It can be humiliating. In professional settings, it is the height of unprofessionalism. In personal relationships, it’s just contemptuous.
As organizational psychologist Adam Grant recently observed,
Ghosting is cowardice plus selfishness.
Yes, ghosts are both real and plentiful. Ghosts can hurt. Ghosts can cause real damage. Your ghost may be messing with someone’s livelihood or breaking their heart. Launching that inner ghost for no good reason is unacceptable. It’s just mean.
Why do we so often fall short in communicating with others? What can you do to improve your skills of attentiveness and communication and scare off the ghosts that haunt us all?
You can learn to transform your relationships with others through communication, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
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Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
My dad has always been a natty dresser. Even now in assisted living, he insists that the color of his pants and shirt be compatible. He never appears for meals two days in a row wearing the same thing, and is appalled at the prospect.
Coming up, I got to see my father wearing all sorts of weird but fashionable (then) items. If you don’t know what a dickey turtleneck is, look it up and be prepared to guffaw. Ah, the seventies.
Lest you think my dad was an executive or a salesman or some other sort of white collar worker, let me disabuse you. He ran printing presses for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and was blue collar and union. His sartorial tastes, though, were influenced by his dad, Louis, née Lucio, an Italian immigrant and master tailor who always dressed impeccably in a handmade three-piece suit as he imperiously took his evening stroll through the Overbrook neighborhood of West Philly. The kids in the neighborhood, my dad’s friends, called him King Louie.
So it was only natural that I continue the tradition. Still, when I was an English professor, I admit that I too donned the shabby-chic uniform of my tribe: tee-shirt, jeans, Converse All-Star high tops (black), and a sport coat. Always a sport coat. In fact, I wore sport coats the way other people wear windbreakers. I wore them on camping trips. Eat my s’more, King Louie!
When I became a college dean, my wife took me shopping so I could look the part. I bought a bunch of suits and other professional attire, and every day I wore a suit to work. Like my grandfather, King Louie, I was impeccable. My tie would stay on until I got home and sometimes long after if we went out. Even on casual Fridays, I would relax only enough to wear separates — dress pants, dress shirt, sport coat, and dress shoes. My only other conciliation would be that my tie might, might feature the school colors if they matched what I was wearing.
Given my longstanding philosophy that leaders should be open and approachable, particularly when they are bosses, it may perplex some of you who did not know me then to learn that I was so formal in my dress. In fact, I have a closet full of French cuff shirts, which have moldered in the Covid era. So, why was I so well-tailored? Wouldn’t my suit-and-tie put off the scruffy professors who reported to me?
To be honest, much of the reason I wore suits every day was just personal inclination. I liked to play dress up. You have to understand that I look real good in a suit — that according to the only person whose opinion matters, my lovely and horribly myopic wife. Oh, and did I mention that I also have a taste for fedoras, which only, um, tops off, my predilection for leather jackets? Yup, there I was bounding across campus in a cool leather jacket, snazzy fedora, and flashy business suit.
Keen.
At the same time, there was some strategy involved. The suits were meant to send a signal — that I stood apart, that I was not entirely one with the faculty and administrators who worked under me.
Surprised?
Let me explain. By dressing with intent, I anticipated, in a material way, what John Amaechi recently advocated in his excellent book The Promises of Giants: “be bold and vulnerable.” That is, I was consciously putting myself out there visually as “the boss” while, also consciously, not behaving like a typical boss as much as possible. I got better at managing this dichotomy over the years ironically as my bossing titles grew more boss (if you catch my drift). In other words, I was less bossy as I became more of a boss even though my clothes grew bossier still. Oh, and one of my suits was by Hugo Boss. And would elicit cries of “You go, boss!”
In my imagination.
When I first became a dean, I was advised to leave all my faculty ways and mindsets behind. Leaders, I was told, stand entirely apart from their people. I could no longer think of such unwashed folk as friends and colleagues, which really went against my inclination. For many months, though, I complied with this advice by assuming the role of the boss that matched the suits. Eventually, though, I realized that I was miserable and ineffective while playing that part. I thought, what if there were another way? I was no longer faculty, but I also was not entirely comfortable with the role of boss-apart, the manager who did not fraternize with the little people. I embarked on an adventurous experiment.
I resolved that, against all advice and the example of my superiors, I would loudly project boss through all the superficial means — clothes, office, desk accessories, etc. — but my actions would be more those of a real person. And there is a difference between a boss and a real person. To be clear, I also learned to eschew playing the fool and pretending to be “down with the people.” When you are the boss, that stance is both false and insulting. Instead, I just tried to act decently with people and to project some reasonable facade of being a human being despite my title, my posh pen and pencil set, and my collection of luxury paperweights. I would be ever-conscious of my role and my need to lead, but I would also be myself as much as allowable.
Of course, this was a trial-and-error activity as well as being fluidly situational. I got it wrong one way or the other all the time as I tried to recalibrate for this person and this group and this circumstance all while managing my own moods, needs, and ego. As difficult as it could be, though, I found I grew much more comfortable with myself and confident in my leadership role. My suits expressed my bosshood, but I expressed me from within them.
I also noticed that most people began responding to me in more positive ways, as though I were approachable and even (heaven forfend!) trustworthy and deserving of respect. Let me tell you. When you are the boss, not playing the role of boss is hard because everyone, and I mean everyone — your employees, your peers, and even your own bosses — expects and demands it. Still, the more I shed that role, the more my people and others looked to me for leadership. As my perceptions and mindset changed, so did theirs. Sure, some jerks saw me as weak and tried to take advantage, but I was secure in my suits, which could also serve as a sort of armor when necessary.
Now, I am aware that these sartorial details play out very differently for women. Still, I think the basics are there: expressing a message of authority with your attire while behaving in a way that befits your status as a decent human being. I would love to hear from women if they agree or not.
The way I figured it, if I could pull off wearing a fedora with a leather jacket and business suit, I could pull off dressing like a boss and acting like a person. My results varied, but I like to think that the combination worked more often than it failed. I can attest that my mildly eccentric approach was disruptive in a way that was healthy for the stuffy, status-quo oriented culture of universities. I can also say dressing with intent took some fortitude and a great deal of attentiveness.
So where do I go from here? I think my next sartorial move should involve capes or maybe a dapper dickie.
Do you consider the messages you send through your appearance and through your behavior? Whether or not you are a boss or leader, do you dress with intent?
You can learn to communicate in positive ways through image and action, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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For April, the 1st among fools
Don’t follow leaders.
Bob Dylan
March 32, 2022
Please refrain from using imperatives and the imperative mood. It is annoying, so just stop it.
If you are not sure what an imperative is, look it up.
Reflect on the deluge of the imperative that washes over our everyday existence, and be sure to observe how much you contribute to this imperative abuse. Face the fact that you are likely a major offender as well as a victim. Now, let’s review all the examples of the imperative you see around you.
Think about Signage
Consider, for instance, signage produced by governments, businesses, churches, schools, and other authorities. Let's review a few. “Stand back.” “Pull forward.” “Stop.” “Proceed with caution.” “Yield.” “Stop. Look. Listen.” “Ring bell for service.” “Wait here until your number is called.” “Place order here.” “Speak into the microphone.” “Pay here.” “Use other door.” “Keep door closed.” “Park in back.” “Don’t park here.” “Don’t block driveway entrance.” “Don’t block garage entrance.” “Park in designated area.” “Do not enter.” “Do not block.” “Do not exit.” “Place donation in box.” “Take one.” “Give here.” “Do not touch.” “Do not chew gum.” “Beware of the dog.” “Do not pet the dog.” “Curb your dog.” “Please dispose of dog waste properly.” “Please dispose of litter properly.” “Do not dispose of garbage here.”
And finally, “Stay off the grass,” which, think about it, can serve as either a prohibition against trespassing or an admonition regarding the use of an infamous gateway drug.
Consider Your Car Bumper
Note how bumper stickers are also a rich source of imperatives. “Vote.” “Save the whales.” “Eat the whales.” “Vote early and often.” “Don't tailgate.” “Eat Bertha's Mussels.” “Just try to take my gun.” “Vote Republican.” “Visit California.” “Vote Libertarian.” “Visit South of the Border.” “Vote Democrat.” “Stop at Wall Drugs.” “Honk if you love Jesus.” “Honk if you support Resolution 718b.” “Honk if you are horny.” “Vote as if your life depended on it.” “If you see this van a-rockin,' don't come a-knockin’.” “Don't laugh. It’s paid for.” “Vote for the crook.” “Defund the police.” “Defend the police.” “Shop local.” “Don’t vote for the crooks.” “Choose civility.” “Bring back prayer in school.” “Keep prayer out of school.” “Keep your laws off my body.” “Vote Green Party” “Coexist.” “Think peace.” “Free the People.” “Impeach Bush.” “Tax the rich.” “Don't eat meat.” “Eat the rich.” And, of course, the more recent additions, “Make America Great Again” and “Let’s go, Brandon.”
While you are at it, be sure to savor the wonderfully paradoxical authoritativeness of the classic bumper sticker directive:
“Question authority.”
Remember Your School Days
Recognize how your life has always been filled with commands and demands. Call to mind your own school days with teachers and staff barking orders all morning and every afternoon. “Pay attention.” “Do your work.” “Do your own work.” “Be quiet.” “Speak up.” “Spit it out now.” “Hurry up.” “Don't run.” “Speed it up.” “Slow down.” “Line up.” “Sit down.” “Stand up.” “Get over here.” “Stay there.” “Do this.” “Stop doing that.” And, revel along with me in my personal favorite from my Catholic high school days:
“Get a haircut!”
Listen to the Music
If you really want to go nuts with imperatives, think about how many popular songs boss us around when it comes to matters of love and romance. “Love Me Tender.” “Love Me Harder.” “Love Me Two Times.” “Love Her Madly.” “Love Me Do.” “Love Me Like You Do.” “Stop, In the Name of Love.” And pause to appreciate how hard it is to best the frank seduction, “Lay, Lady, Lay. Lay across my big brass bed.”
For a tour de force of musical imperative abuse, also by Bob Dylan, check out his “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Delight in this one snippet:
Get sick, get well Hang around a ink well Ring bell, hard to tell If anything is goin’ to sell Try hard, get barred Get back, write braille Get jailed, jump bail Join the army, if you fail
If you are not in the mood for love or just want to “Twist and Shout,” then “Let’s Dance” away your sorrows. “Do the Hustle.” “Everybody Dance Now.” “Do the Locomotion.” “Dance the Night Away.” “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes.” “Save the Last Dance for Me.” “Do a Little Dance. Make a Little Love. Get Down Tonight.” Or, just keep it simple and “Dance, Dance.”
If dancing is not your thing, enjoy this select list of motivational titles. “Get Up.” “Get up offa That Thing.” “Get Up, Stand Up.” “Party Up.” “Party Down.” “Walk This Way.” “Jump.” “Whip It.” “Come Together.” “Go Now.” “Call Me.” “Shout.” “Hush.” “Knock Three Times.” “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” And “Do That To Me One More Time.”
Finally, forgive my Fr*nch, but here is a classic hip hop imperative from the 80s:
“Fck the Plc.”
And Don’t Forget to Support Our Sponsors
Now ponder the biggest imperative offender of all: advertising. “Buy it now.” “Shop with us.” “Use our product.” “Use less.” “Use more.” “Pay less.” “Don't pay more.” “Buy now, pay later.” “Don’t take our word for it.” “Ask your doctor.” “Ask your pharmacist.” “Ask your vet.” “Ask your grocer.” “Ask your friends.” “Ask about our layaway plan.” “Visit our store.” “Check out our website.” “Find us on Facebook.” “Follow us on Twitter.” “Like us on Instagram.” “Call any time.” “Apply for service.” “Don't be fooled by substitutes.” “Get what you deserve.” “Look for our coupons.” “Click here for more.” “Fly the friendly skies.” “Fly American.” “Buy American.” “Buy bulk and save more.” “Don't let it get away.” “Get away from it all.” “Don't throw away your money.” “Trust your money with us.” “Save money with us.” “Send money.” “Eat here.” “Eat beef for dinner.” “Eat mor chikin.” “Join now.” “Act now.” “Don't act yet.” “But wait, there's more.” “Don't let this deal get away.” “Call us now.” “Clip and save.” “Don't miss our sale.” “Live the good life.” “Retire here.” “Try our mattress.” “You've tried all the rest, now try the best.”
Finally, ruminate on the liquor industry’s masterfully duplicitous exhortation that simultaneously encourages a vice while moralizing against its consequences:
“Drink responsibly.”
“Just do it.”
Scream in frustration if you must, but don't overlook the fact that imperative reform starts with you!
Say what you will, since we are so awash in imperatives, it is, frankly, imperative that we extricate ourselves and our society from their pernicious ubiquity, so start with yourself. Conduct an imperative audit. Document how many times a day you use imperatives in your speech and writing. Keep precise notes and review your list at the end of the week. Notice how often you fall back on using imperatives and contemplate how overbearing it can be. Change your ways. Resolve to do better.
Admit that we are all at fault, and feel free to point a finger at me. I am not immune to the lure of the imperative, but don't judge me too harshly. Remember that I am only human.
Now, go forth. Do no harm. And stay off my lawn!
Have a nice day.
Do you know that imperative abuse is not a real thing? Did you not understand that my overuse of imperatives in this essay was just for fun?
You can hone that sense of humor and sharpen your ability to spot irony, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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A leader … is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.
Nelson Mandela
The world seems to be too full of advice about what leaders are. Frankly, as a leadership coach, mentor, and all around expounder, I too am too full of advice about what great leaders are. For instance, check out my piece on my leadership maxim: “Leaders Relate.”
This time, though, I am going to declaim on what leaders are not, particularly when they have the title of boss.
Too often leaders who are bosses fall into the boss trap. This may sound like some sort of snare set by a venal, perfidious, and pernicious world to capture all the wonderful bosses and keep them from doing good, but I can assure you that the world is not the primary culprit here. Nor are rivals. Nor are employees. The boss trap does not spontaneously generate, either. Indeed, the boss trap is conceived, designed, assembled, set, baited, and sprung by the very bosses it ensnares. The boss trap is self-ordained and, therefore, utterly avoidable.
Let’s start with a clarifying premise:
If you are a leader, you are not all that.
In other words, being a leader, a true and effective leader, is not a badge to wear or a trophy to display. Quite the opposite actually. A true and effective leader is a study in humility, for the best leaders seek always to improve themselves and those they serve. That’s right. Serve. Those who enthusiastically follow great leaders do so not out of reverence for some dear leader whom they love and fear. They follow because their leader serves them by enabling them to put their values and the values of the institution to work. This is even more true when you are a leader who happens to be a boss. Understanding and acting on that basic fact will help you avoid or, if your are already snagged, immediately free you from any boss trap that — I reiterate — you yourself will have set.
To help you evade the boss trap, let’s consider some truths that will render you impervious to its lure.
Bosses Are Not the Organization
Whatever the organization — a business, a nonprofit, a university, an agency, a club, a group — whoever runs it had best get it into their head that they and the institution they lead are entirely separate, discrete, independent, unconnected, divergent, and distinct entities. In short, if you lead an organization, learn this mantra:
I am not the organization, and the organization is not me.
Recite it aloud to yourself slowly. Rinse. Repeat.
Think of it this way. Imagine you suddenly disappeared from the organization tomorrow. Say you were abducted by aliens or crushed by a falling piano or won big in the lottery, would your organization cease to exist? Perhaps if you are its founder and it is the product of your labor of love. But even then, would it disappear really? If so, why is it so fragile? What purpose does it serve if it is so conjoined with an individual? Too many bosses equate themselves with the organization they lead. From there, it is a simple hop to the idea that what is good for you is good for the organization and vice-versa. That sort of thinking is debased and produces an ethos of corruption — intellectual and otherwise.
Bosses Are Not the Mission
Similarly, too many bosses think that, through some mysterious process of transfiguration, they are a manifestation of the mission of their organization. The mechanism by which they come to this conclusion is irrelevant. All that matters is the result. Here is the logic:
The mission is all about doing good. The mission and I are one. Therefore, all I do is good.
Just as with leaders who think they and the organization are one and the same, with some distance and candor, you can see how this sort of thinking will lead you pretty steadily along the path to perdition.
Bosses Are Not the Best at Everything
Wow. If I had a nickel ... At one college where I worked, the president corralled herself within a small circle of lieutenants. Several times, when we were faced with a decision that was beyond the competence of the people in the room, I would suggest we reach out to someone on campus who actually had the expertise. It’s a funny thing to work at a college where you employ all these highly educated experts, called faculty, and then never consult them in their areas of specialization. It’s common, actually. Some college leaders are overly fond of hiring outside consultants to offer advice on what they pay some faculty members to literally teach. The president of this particular college fell into the other trap where she thought that a single group of people was a braintrust that could lick any problem because they had lofty titles, which she of course had conferred on them. In response to my suggestions that we consult faculty expertise, she would sniff, “We are all smart people here. We can figure it out.” The sweeping arrogance combined with the abundant stupidity and naked contempt packed into this one statement always bowled me over and explained much.
No, bosses, you do not know it all and cannot do it all. In fact, the best leaders — the ones with sense — will regularly follow the lead of even the least among their charges, cultivating them and counting on them to bring their own perspectives and genius to bear on a problem all while driving them forward.
Bosses Are Not the Only Competent Ones
Even worse than the arrogant stance I describe above is the belief among some bosses that they are the only ones who are competent in an organization. They micromanage their people and constantly and minutely critique and correct their work. After a short while, their people catch on and just stop producing anything but first drafts, which, of course, only confirms to their brainiac leader that the employees are all incompetent. Mission accomplished!
If you are a boss and think you are the only truly competent one in your organization, answer me this. How competent is someone who continuously hires and retains nothing but incompetents?
I can keep going like this, how bosses are not the sole bulwark against chaos or how they don’t have perfect perception or how they are not the one true manifestation of all that is good in the universe. If you are a boss and think your title confers anything close to these statuses on you, you are deeply out of touch, and everyone knows it, particularly your closest and most sycophantic followers, who use that knowledge to manipulate you every single day.
Great bosses are great leaders, and great leaders are lesser than.
Great leaders understand that they are only human — perfectly imperfect and barely adequate. They toil constantly to be better, to be the best, but they acknowledge that they always fall short, always. As great leaders though, they also understand that any fall is just an opportunity to stand up and stand taller. They don’t tell themselves fairy tales about how wonderful they are because they know they are not. Such tales are but a trap that leaders set for themselves. And who better to know what bait will lure you to your own trap?
Great bosses — being great leaders — serve. Great leaders know they are lesser than, a status they embrace because that very knowledge is what makes them great.
Are you a leader or emerging leader who wants to escape the leadership/boss trap? Do you want to better understand how to serve first in order to make your organization successful?
You can put your values to work to eliminate the boss trap forever, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
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My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow
Andrew Marvell
Way back in the 1900s, when I was but a tyke, I used to marvel that a head of broccoli looked like a little tree. Then I noticed that each stalk of that head was like the whole head in miniature and that each floret at the end of a stalk was like the stalk itself. From there I imagined each bud that composed the floret was itself like the floret that was like the stalk that was like the bunch that was like a tree. I wondered then if each bud would have its own stalks, florets, and buds. About this time my revery would be broken by my parents.
“Jimmy! Stop picking at your food.”
I must confess that I had similarly incisive commentary to offer on cauliflower.
What I and so many kids, I’m sure, had stumbled upon was the concept of fractals, geometric shapes, such as the Mandelbrot set (above), that mimic themselves at every level of scale as you zoom in or out: tree, broccoli head, stalk, floret, bud, and so on. Dr. Seuss played with this idea of relative perspective in his classic Horton Hears a Who! in which a speck of dust contains an entire world not unlike our own or, at least, not unlike our own as conceived by Dr. Seuss. For those not familiar with the book, here is a plot synopsis.
An anthropomorphic elephant heeds the demands of voices only he hears and resists his community’s attempts to free him from his delusions before they are all infected.
Nothing Is Great or Little
Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
Jonathan Swift
Broccoli fractals can give us perspective on, well, perspective. How we perceive things in our world is how they are. I have written about how good leaders recognize that everyone’s perception is, in fact, their reality in an essay called the “Introducing the Perception-Reality Razor.”
What we see or accept is what we believe and these beliefs affect our assessments of our experience.
For instance, let’s return to that delicious broccoli I loved to pick at as a boy. When I looked closely at a head of broccoli, I saw a tree. When I zoomed in on a stalk I saw a head. When, I really concentrated, though, that stalk itself grew into a tree or, in a trick of the mind, it could shrink to become a floret in a much bigger head of broccoli. Etcetera, etcetera. Each component of that head of broccoli, fractal-like, could replicate the whole depending on my perspective and my imagination.
Here is another way of thinking about it. If my mom plunked that entire head of steamed broccoli on my plate and then said, “Go ahead. Have at it, boy,” I would have been overwhelmed and a little nauseated. One head of broccoli is much too much for a little boy to eat, but it was perfect for our family. The children’s story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” captures this relativity well. If you have forgotten the story, here is a plot synopsis.
A privileged girl breaks into a stranger’s house and raids the kitchen, eventually passing out glutted on a bed only to be discovered by the residents, a family of half-starved beasts returning home to feed.
Now, let’s take that whole head of broccoli off that little boy’s plate, where he has been picking at it, and place it in some other contexts.
Picture this scene. In the parking lot of the local supermarket you are loading your groceries into your trunk. A head of broccoli drops to the ground and rolls under the tire of a vehicle driven by a reckless teenager. You would likely be upset at the loss and at your sudden inability to serve broccoli at dinner that night. You can already hear your children’s lament: “Where is the broccoli? You promised us broccoli for dinner. Why did you lie? Why do you always lie?” Many tears and years of expensive family therapy ensue all due to an errant head of broccoli.
Alternate Scene 1: Imagine that same head of broccoli perched precariously at the top of a large pile inside the Mega-Mart Discount Big Box Store and Gift Emporium. Due to a seismic disturbance too slight to be perceived by humans but violent enough to jostle green vegetables, the head of broccoli falls to the floor right into the path of a shopping cart driven by a reckless teenager, mangling the head. The store manager might be irked by the mess but not much concerned at the loss. After all, there is plenty of broccoli in the pile, so the loss of one head is almost immaterial.
Alternate Scene 2: Back at the big Broccoli Distribution Center warehouse number 12 in the Broccoli District of the city, that same head of broccoli falls out of a box only to be smashed by a forklift driven by a reckless teenager. No one notices.
Alternate Scene 3: Farmer Bob’s Small Family Broccoli Plantation and Industrial Agri-Complex™️ stretches as far as the eye can see…
You get my point. The significance of a single head of broccoli varies depending on its context and its observer. For the little boy, it is overwhelming. For the family, the head constitutes a substantial part of dinner. For the grocer, it is just a mess to clean in aisle 1. For the wholesaler, it is merely another stain on the floor among thousands. Etcetera, etcetera.
Same head of broccoli, different contexts, different observers, and different perspectives. In other words, the significance of that head of broccoli varies even if the head of broccoli itself does not.
The same thing happens with our perceptions of ourselves. We can view our accomplishments and our setbacks as big or small simply by reframing the context. If you swing at the softball and miss, you can get upset and storm off the field or you can recognize that one strike alone matters little. If that one strike happens to cost you the game, it may sting more, but in and of itself it is no different than any other strike among many. It’s just a pitch and a swing.
Or how about a more positive result? You connect with the ball and it goes over the fence. You can jog around the bases thinking, not a biggie, just luck. It’s just a pitch and a swing with a happy ending. Or you can feel pride and celebrate, flipping your bat, pumping a fist, and pointing and laughing at the pitcher. The choice is yours. You get to decide if the homerun is a big deal or not, just as with the setback of that single strike. It’s up to you. (By the way, according to behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg, there can be tremendous benefit to celebrating triumphs on the spot although I am not sure even he would advise taunting the pitcher.)
Now let’s consider my plot synopses for Horton Hears a Who! and “Goldilocks.” They were inspired by my favorite plot synopsis of all time:
“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.“
This, as you know, is the plot of The Wizard of Oz. Here is my plot synopsis of another famous movie:
Henry has it all — his glamorous dream career, the respect of his peers, money, women, and power — but will he give it up for a quiet life of anonymity with the woman he loves? Set to a classic rock soundtrack.
All these synopses are factually accurate, but all are also slyly misleading. We can make children’s stories seem ominous, make a beloved movie classic sound brutal, or turn a brutal gangster movie like Goodfellas into a romantic comedy simply through word choice, selective omission, and shifting emphases. After all, who can deny that the action of “Goldilocks” revolves around a burglary gone wrong?
In short, our perceptions are all relative and are, therefore, relatively within our control. I can celebrate a tiny achievement and dismiss a major failure. I can accept others’ judgments or make my own assessments because these things are not big or small or good or bad or scary or funny in and of themselves. Their impact is ultimately up to me, how I receive them, and how I perceive them.
Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that no head of broccoli is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
How does your perception shape your self-awareness? How does your self-awareness shape your actions?
You can choose your perceptions, your reactions, and your behavior in order to better navigate your life, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
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Please share this post on social media.
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A friend of mine is a cop who used to teach in a big city training academy. My friend has a sharp intelligence and restless mind along with the persistent temerity that often accompanies those qualities. This combination allows him to see and understand what others might overlook or willfully ignore. He also suffers from a sizable sense of integrity. As a police instructor, he sometimes expressed frustration at the curriculum. I have reviewed several curricula of police training academies in my past life as a dean overseeing Criminal Justice departments, and I must say I was underwhelmed from a pedagogical standpoint. They were too long on specifics and too short on perspective. My friend’s misgivings were certainly warranted.
He — being himself — pushed against the strictures and shortcomings of what he was supposed to teach, and made some headway in getting things done more effectively. It is almost impossible to overcome structural inadequacy, but my friend was as successful as he could be. He engaged his cadets in his inimitable way and certainly provided them training that surpassed the sum of the parts available to him.
One of my friend’s biggest frustrations, though, was not with what did or didn’t happen in the academy. It was what happened immediately after. Upon graduation, the soon-to-be rookies would be paired with a trainer, a veteran cop who would be their guide and mentor as they learned the ways of policing in the field, which is to say, the streets. Typically, the first thing a field trainer said to his or her charge was “forget everything you learned in the academy.”
You may have heard this line before. It is a law enforcement cliche, but it has some merit. After all, as any educator of any sense knows, you can’t just teach someone abstract material and expect much success when you send them out into the world. The hands-on nature of fieldwork is a powerful teaching tool. My friend knew this, and one of the reforms he tried to make to his academy’s curriculum was to offer more practical training, such as simulations.
Unfortunately, while the field trainers are right about the power of hands-on learning, they were wrong about the cadets’ academy studies. As flawed as the curriculum was, it still contained vital information and important material — such as, uh, the law — that a few months or even years of field training just could not replicate. By telling them to forget the academy, the trainers were discarding all the dross of the academy curriculum, for sure, but also all the gems, and thereby setting up the cadets to replicate the kinds of problematic scenarios we see in so many of our police forces. Policing challenges have as much to do with poor training as with bad apples and systemic dysfunction.
More than the Sum
Now I want to bring this all back to a subject I know a great deal more about: higher education in the U.S.
Students, parents, employers, and even some college administrators and faculty often express consternation with the broad-based or liberal learning typically taught in our colleges and universities. Some people mistakenly imagine that it needlessly delays, distracts from, or even dilutes specialized study in the major. I have served under a university president who more than once told me that such broad-based education was “just an employment scheme for faculty who would otherwise be unemployable.” He was not a very good president.
The classic analogy for this liberal education starts with picturing a capital T. The vertical leg of the T represents the specialized knowledge you gain from your college major. The horizontal bar of the T represents the broad learning that is required for a student to have a complete education. Studying in the major runs narrow but deep while liberal education is shallow but broad. The analogy is limited — unnuanced, outdated, and stodgy — but it gets you there reliably enough. It is the Model T of higher ed.
In many college curricula, this broad-based learning — the horizontal top of the T — is called “general education” although it goes by many names and can take many forms. General education is why a nursing major must study history and art, why a physical education major must study algebra and communication. It is the reason an English major has to take a lab science and psychology. It is the purpose behind everyone taking a writing course.
Frankly, I can go on and on and on about how counterproductive and ineffective many general education requirements are. I am a big supporter of the ideals of general education but was, when I worked in higher ed, a persistent advocate for innovation and reform. Nonetheless, the overall concept is both sound and critical to superior education. I have even argued that general education can be more impactful than what students study in their majors.
Many Americans do not realize that our tradition of liberal education is fairly distinctive in history and in comparison to most of the planet’s other higher ed systems. Part of this distinctiveness is all those “extra” or “useless” or “b**t” courses students take on top of their major courses. These general education courses are much like what cops are supposed to to take away from the police academy as they go out into the field. That seemingly extra stuff heightens your ability to perform in your chosen field and to navigate the world intelligently. Furthermore, and this is a fact, most people, including college graduates, will change their career field several times before retirement. I have done so myself, and that transition benefits from learning in a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and modes of thinking, howsoever that occurs.
For instance, having a grasp of the scientific method can enhance a historian’s practice and may even influence their research methodologies. A businessperson who is familiar with the nuances of writing and speaking is going to be a much more effective and persuasive communicator. An engineer who understands the subtleties of artistic creation will have a leg up in designing new systems. A software engineer will be well served by a comprehension of human behavior, particularly when pursing that dream of becoming an entrepreneur. And let’s not forget the role of such learning in everyday human interactions and experiences.
Did you ever wonder why some computer applications almost seem designed to drive you nuts? Have you ever expressed frustration about a bank manager’s lack of comprehension and empathy? Have you ever thought about why a few cops act as though civilians are a different species while the rest recognize that we are all in this thing together? Most likely, no matter how good some individuals are at their most narrow tasks, their broader shortcomings are due to their poor understanding of world at large. They cannot grasp how you see the world because of their mediocre education in general. In fact, the things we learn that may seem irrelevant are often the most relevant of all even if we cannot perceive it. They enhance rather than detract.
In that way, as my friend the former police academy instructor understood, learners are best served by an array of knowledge and understanding. Your education is the sum of all you learned — whether you thought it valuable or not — and the best learners know that learning is more than the sum of its parts. When it comes to learning, 1 + 1 = 3.
What more can you gain from truly understanding how all your learning in school and in life applies to your day-to-day work? How can you capitalize on the sum of your learning rather than just the parts?
You can tap into the full potential that all your learning offers, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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A lot of readers might not know this, but for years I was in a cult.
With the perspective of time I can now see it clearly. How could I have been so easily duped? This cult was so subversive that its own leadership, which was diffuse, was largely not aware that it was heading a cult. Leaders, in fact, often suffered the most from the cult’s abusive practices, which, as true believers, they still endorsed. Anyone who openly resisted this cult was threatened with ostracism and destitution, to be cast out from the fellowship and to fend for themselves in the outside world. It was a pretty bleak cult, and it is hard now from this distance to understand its allure.
According to various experts, and I am not one, there are a number of criteria that constitute a typical cult. These experts do not agree on all the indicators or so much as their number, but there is significant congruity. An article by Sasha Blakeley called “Cult Characteristics and Behaviors” captures some of the most commonly-listed criteria, which I will use to describe my cult.
The Charismatic Leader
My cult did not have a leader per se. As I said, the leadership was diffuse, which made it all the more insidious. Instead, this cult slavishly followed and worshipped an unreasonable and impossible ideal as though it were an entity. As an entity, though, this ideal offered little appeal on its own, instead holding out rewards that would flow from its adoration. All of these rewards were material, and real-life examples of the ideal’s greatest adherents and their appreciable gains were exalted with gusto. Most were well-known — celebrities even — who supposedly had gone from ruin to glory just by worshipping this ideal, which of course was largely untrue. Still, from within the cult it all made sense and was quite plausible and deeply desirable.
Ideological Purity
Since the cult followed an ideal, purity of thought was essential. Anyone who resisted or opposed the cult or questioned the truth of its central dogma was mocked, shamed, or punished. The worst punishment, in the cult members’ minds, was banishment and denial of access to the ideal’s rewards. If you were outside the cult, you allegedly would tarry in perpetual lethargy and penury. You could even be denied employment and the ability to sustain yourself.
Conformity and Control
Everyone associated with the cult had to abide by its rules at all times. Although the rules were few, they had ramifications that could affect and regulate every moment of your day, where you spent it, who you spent it with, and what you did. The leadership would enforce the rules and discipline the worst offenders, but most enforcement came from the rank-and-file members of the cult themselves who policed their own.
Mind-Altering Practices
Almost voluntarily my fellow cult members and I would subject ourselves to practices that tended to sever our hold on reality. For instance, self-imposed sleep deprivation was so pervasive that members of the cult would actually compete to see who got the least sleep. Confessing you had a good night’s sleep would expose you to doubt and scorn. Insomniacs were regarded with admiration and sometimes envy. To the cultists, the need for sleep was a weakness and an enemy of the ideal.
Not surprisingly, as with other cults, chemical substance abuse was common. Drugs were needed to counter the effects of sleep deprivation, so caffeine in all its forms topped the list. Among some sets, though, harder stimulants, including illegal substances, might be used to limit the need for sleep or to enhance adherence to the cult ideals even during recreation time — a practice cultists called “playing hard.” Paradoxically, alcohol was a common sleep aid when all that caffeine and the trauma of cultist privation made necessary sleep impossible.
Isolation and Love-Bombing
I already mentioned how isolated cult members were. They spent almost all their time with other cult members, even in their ostensible off hours. Their friends, their lovers, their spouses, indeed their families were rarely not members. Therefore, every conversation and interaction was at least tinged with cultist propaganda and doctrine. Ironically, despite this immersive interaction with other adherents, the rigors of the cult’s practice were such that they often resulted in the dissolution of meaningful social ties, such as lost friendships, separation from family, and divorce.
As for love-bombing, when members were recruited to the cult, which was not a formal or necessarily conscious happening, virtually anything they did that adhered to the cult’s ideals would be met with effusive praise to encourage them to seek the cult’s rewards. Members sometimes received substantial prizes to encourage and further hook them, but these benefits could never compensate for the gargantuan efforts their devotion would demand.
Us-vs-Them Mentality
Anyone who was not a member of the cult or did not profess and practice its ideals was regarded with extreme pity, utter contempt, or fear — sometimes in combination. They were considered benighted souls with no hope of achieving any of life’s rewards or, less generously, as sinners whose reprobate beliefs and lives were to be condemned. Anyone attempting to leave the cult would face certain abuse. I can assure you that there are current adherents to my former cult — knowing and unknowing — who are reading this and regarding me in just this way.
Time and Energy
Time and energy were commodities of the highest value to the cult. This meant that — in addition to sleep — exercise, self-improvement, and outside interests needed to be sacrificed, limited, or adapted to match the cult’s standards. As a result, cult members’ diets often privileged processed foods, such as fast food and power bars, which were high in carbs, particularly sugar. Such unhealthy food was just another drug for cult consumption. In this sense, it was a death cult that did not value the wellbeing or lives of its members or even its leaders. Everyone was expendable and replaceable.
Apocalyptic Thinking
While not every cult is apocalyptic, and my cult was not focused on any particular end-times beliefs, such concerns always lurked in the background. Adhering to the cult’s ideals was a way of staving off some sort of vague coming disaster that would ensue if members grew lax or allowed their minds to fill with doubts or distractions. We were doing God’s work, we were told, with the explicit admonition that any other beliefs or practices were the work of Satan and threaten the world order as we understood it.
My Ongoing Escape
I actually can never escape the cult entirely. While I reject its tenets and can see its ideals as ridiculous and its rewards as false promises, its doctrine and practices never leave my mind. What’s more, it is such a pervasive cult that it infiltrates every level of our society — from the schools to the corner office to the White House — and infects our culture like a virus. It is insidious, held up as a sacred virtue and used as an excuse for all manner of poor behavior, which I have written of previously.
Admittedly, this cult is responsible for forging most of what we enjoy and admire, and a lucky few have managed to reap some rewards. Nonetheless, it has probably destroyed far more than it has created, and much of what it has constructed could have been built through other means or was not worth building at all.
Sadly, you are most familiar with my old cult.
Perhaps you are a member.
Perhaps you are a leader in it and don’t even realize it.
My road to recovery has been long and challenging, and I relapse frequently — affected by the tainted example of others around me and slipping into old habit. But ever since I began resisting, I can see how my life has improved. Relationships are stronger, I am healthier, and the returns are great and varied. It is an ongoing struggle to remain free, but I know I will never regret rejecting this cult that has stunted our world.
I am, of course, describing the cult of overwork, the twisted notion that toil is, in and of itself, the highest virtue.
Perhaps you already knew that.
Perhaps, although besotted by workaholism as I was, you have come to realize your are a part of this cult.
Perhaps you want to consider another way.
Doing so can be quite challenging, particularly when your employer and colleagues are adherents, but it is vital to recognize your dilemma. Step one, acknowledge the problem is a problem. Step two, recognize that every problem has a solution.
Are you in a chronic overwork situation? Does the cult of overwork pervade your workplace and/or your entire life? Does even your leisure time — how you shape it and how you spend it — reflect the dogma of the cult of overwork?
Whatever your position, role, or rank, you can transform your relationship with work, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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CAVEAT LECTOR; or, TRIGGER WARNING
THIS INSTALLMENT FEATURES A FAMOUS POEM THAT FEATURES A FAMOUS CUSS WORD. TWICE!
PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.
I struggle to express how reluctant I am to start with a trigger warning, which I find potentially infantilizing and insulting to my audience. Still, since my audience is wide and general, I offer it in the spirit of broad acceptance. As an English professor, though, I simply will not censor a poem.
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about
Bob Dylan
Act 1: Welcome to the family!
We are all just one big family here! You are now part of a wonderful community, but more importantly, you are part of our family. This is a great place to work because we consider ourselves a family. Sure, you work here, but it is more like being in a family than it is like being at a job. It’s the family atmosphere here really that sets us apart.
Act 3: You’re such a disappointment to the family.
You let me down, but what’s worse is that you let down our family. If you had a better attitude, you would appreciate how we are all a family. Even though we are a big happy family, you just don’t seem to want to fit in. I know we always say we are a family, but you just are not family material. I love you like you are my own family, but we are going to have to have some cuts and layoffs.
We’re a family. That’s how a lot of workplaces present themselves. They are families, not to be confused with employers. This is supposed to suggest that the workplace is a source of support and love, perhaps even unconditional love. Maybe it’s true or maybe not in any given workplace. If your employment situation is really like a big happy family, consider yourself lucky. Do a little dance. Celebrate!
🎵 “We are fam-i-lee!” 🎶
In the meantime, let’s contemplate the implications of familial metaphors as they play out in most workplaces.
They f**k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin
While there is an array of family types (nuclear families, extended families, single-parent families, foster families, adopted families, childless families, blended families, families by choice, grandparent families, stepfamilies, polygamist families, the Manson family, and even mafioso families) there is one basic structure within those variations. With the exception of childless partners, every family consists of those who identify as parents and those who identify as children. We will leave your pets and houseplants out of this.
Notably, the status of being a child in the family is not predicated on age or even on whether that child has a family of his or her own. Furthermore, most families operate as a benign autocracy that can extend well into the adulthood of the children. If you doubt me, whatever your age, imagine telling your mother that you are taking up free fall skydiving, are planning to get a neck tattoo, or intend to chew ice on a regular basis.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Philip Larkin
So, in a workplace family, how does this all unfold? Simple. Someone has to be the parents, and someone has to be the children. Once you have parsed this division of labor, it is pretty easy to suss out where it leads.
Just as parents tend to learn parenting from their parents, bosses tend to learn bossing from their bosses. This all sounds well and good until you consider this basic truth about photocopy machines: copies of copies deteriorate, growing less sharp with each iteration, a phenomenon known as “generation loss.” Copies of copies of copies, and so forth, are nearly unreadable. A few more generations, and they are unrecognizable. I think this same thing happens with both parenting and bossing. When we copy our predecessors, we forget that we are generations removed from the original, that they copied copies that were copied, and now you copy them and so on — generation loss.
The best thing to do is start over. Maybe use your predecessors as a rough template but then create a new model for how to be. Good parents do that, and so do good bosses.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
There is another obvious matter to address. Is your workplace family primarily functional or dysfunctional? I have heard it claimed that all families are dysfunctional, but I do not believe that. Too often we assume every setback, problem, and disaster is necessarily the result of dysfunction, but that is not a given. Dysfunction is a systemic failure, a failure to perform as a whole. Even when families face crises, these disasters are not necessarily the consequence of a systemic failure. Systemic failures — dysfunction — manifest most glaringly not in the big stuff but in the day to day, the little stuff. If the little stuff is needlessly rough, you’ve likely got dysfunction. If the little stuff is typically smooth, you probably don’t. Oh, and both function and dysfunction generally flow downward, at least at the outset. Eventually they develop into a feedback loop.
So, what sort of a family is your workplace? On the one extreme, is it the harmonious family of Bil, Thelma, Jeffy, and the rest of the Family Circus from the old funny papers, a world so precious and sweet that it has been known to promote tooth decay? Or is it the idyllic family of one of those prescription drug commercials in which Mom, Dad, the kids, and the dog all seem to be violently happy, hopelessly self-satisfied, and unreasonably delighted with one another, sharing meaningful smiles while they work on their hobbies together despite the fact that dad is suffering from some sort of not-obvious skin disorder? Ask your doctor.
Or, is your workplace family of an entirely different ilk? There are many models to choose from. Is it the family Philip Larkin describes in his poem “This Be the Verse,” the family that spans generations to mess you up, assuring that the ocean of misery “deepens like a coastal shelf?” Or is it the Royal Tenenbaums, a family that projects outward success but in which all the twists of each member’s psychology are further knotted up by the part-time patriarch’s manipulations. I have worked there.
Or, maybe, it reflects the familial dynamics of Succession in which Pop is cartoonishly overbearing, the mothers (biological and step) are near-cyphers or his useful idiots, and each child manifests a different worst aspect of the father with none of his resolve.
Perhaps your workplace emulates King Lear, in which the doddering patriarch falls prey to the sycophantic manipulations of his devious older daughters and subsequently disowns the youngest, the only one who truly loves him enough to be honest with him. Many needless deaths ensue. Is this what your workplace is like? I have definitely worked in this one.
Then again, why should the fathers have all the fun? There is Ozark, with its matriarch so ruthless she is driven to fratricide, Hamlet’s mother who is both doting and duplicitous, and Estelle Costanza — George’s mother — a woman whose voice alone is enough to drive any child to the very depths of neurotic narcissism that her son exhibits.
And what the heck is going on with Oedipus Rex, in which a man unwittingly marries his own mother, thus engendering children-siblings for him and children-grandchildren for her? I have worked in that one too, by the way.
Chances are, your workplace, good or bad, is not as extreme as any of these, but then where does it fall between the antipodes of the Family Circus and the Family Oedipus?
As you contemplate your answer, consider these wise words from psychologist Adam Grant, an example of what I call learning from the negative paradigm.
A cardinal rule of responsibility is to shield others from the suffering you endured. Good parents refuse to dump their childhood baggage on their kids. Good leaders and coaches refuse to perpetuate abusive patterns. You can choose to do right in the ways you've been wronged.
So, the workplace can be a family. One way or the other, yes indeedy. If that is how you see your workplace, think carefully now before proceeding. What sort of a family is it, exactly? Welcome to the family.
Workplace families can take a variety of forms, but they must be functional and supportive, like the best of families.
You deserve a healthy workplace environment, which starts with developing a supportive culture, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
Let me be clear at the outset. Leaders should be approachable, friendly even, genuinely warm, unfailingly polite, supportive, protective, driven by integrity, and collaborative. In other words, just plain decent people who lead by building good relationships. Leaders should be nice individuals who lead by supporting their followers, but that is not enough.
What leaders should never be is distant, surly, cold, rude, untrustworthy, undependable, corruptible, and self-centered. In other words, just plain a**s who lead by making it all about themselves.
Another thing leaders should never be, and this may surprise you coming from me, is utterly egoless. Ego is, in fact, the X factor in the mix of qualities that constitute leadership. Again, let me be clear, I still advocate for you to stuff you ego in a sack and throw it in the river on a regular basis, but as I wrote elsewhere your ego will resurrect rather quickly. You had best be prepared to manage it.
Simply put, a total lack of ego is disastrous in a leader. I learned this lesson from an incident early in my days as a college faculty member from which I extracted a good deal of wisdom from the failures of others, a practice I have written about before and which I call learning from a negative paradigm.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
Jean-Paul Sartre
My first year as a faculty member at a young college, I was appalled to discover that they had no policy for dealing with cheaters. Each case was left to the individual faculty member with no guidance or support. I knew from my previous experience at a school where cheating was rampant that we were woefully underprepared — “living in La-la Land,” is the phrase I believe I used. I admit that I was probably a bit vocal about this institutional shortcoming.
Toward the end of that school year, some administrator decided it was high time we had a policy on academic honesty and tapped two senior faculty members to develop it. They in turn, perhaps to shut me up, tapped me as a third committee member. We set about doing our homework, researching other institutions’ policies and studying the recommendations of organizations that sought to promote best practices in academic integrity. I learned a buzzword from the business world: “benchmarking.”
When we had a draft policy, we were told to seek preliminary approval from the top academic administrators before proceeding. The senior faculty members on my team decided I should present the draft to the deans because I was its chief author and because they felt it would reflect well on me. Were they being genuine advocates, or were they really just setting me up? I will never know.
So, there I found myself, a new faculty member sitting in front of a group of senior academic administrators headed by our super-nice college provost, an unselfish man with a soft way about him. I started my presentation of the draft by introducing our benchmarking data and then began describing the draft policy. About twenty minutes in, a woman burst into the room asking what she had missed. It was one of the deans. She sat down, and the provost asked me to bring her up to speed. I was no more than a few minutes along in my review when this same dean stopped me and demanded to know why I had not conducted any benchmarking. She then lectured me on the value of benchmarking and understanding best practices. Each time I tried to explain that I already presented our benchmarking, which was in her packet, she would just interrupt me.
My two faculty colleagues were visibly agitated but remained silent. The same with the administrator who was assigned to oversee our work and who happened to be my own dean. She had contributed nothing to the draft just as she did nothing to protect me from my tormentor. Others at the table looked down, embarrassed. No one had the guts or the decency to bail me out or even look my way.
For help, I turned to the affable provost, the boss of us all. His eyes darted about desperately as I was being berated by his subordinate. He would not make eye contact with me. He kept pursing his lips as if he were about to say something, but all that came out was a sound I can only describe as audibly puffing while trying to pronounce the letters M and B at the same time.
“Hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh.” Like a worn out train on its terminal run.
He was useless. Nearly catatonic. Fortunately, I can tough it out with a bully, and eventually the antagonistic dean wore herself out, allowing us to move on. Probably out of a sense of shame and guilt, the administrators then summarily voted to approve the policy, which would have been great except it was still merely a draft. We were just looking for permission to keep working on it. Although I pointed out the serious holes and clunky writing of our draft, the deans persisted, and that drafty draft became the policy, not to be revised for years to come.
Afterward my head was spinning. Why had all the people in that room allowed one person to hold sway? Why had no one defended me, a new and vulnerable faculty member, against that dean’s unreason and bullying? And, most baffling, why had her boss — the provost, the boss of the whole room — not reined her in?
That provost was a great guy, a genuinely generous soul with a pleasant way about him. He was approachable and made you feel good. But that was all he was, a nice guy. As a leader, he was just a figurehead, an ineffective manager who was too afraid to confront even egregious behavior and bullying right under his nose. His fecklessness permeated the campus, sowing disorder and confusion. During the episode, he looked distressed but said nothing. And what was that sound he was making?
“Hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh.”
Victims [of bullying] say that when they’re taunted and demeaned and no one comes to their defense, they start to believe they deserve it. They start to judge themselves and to think that they are inferior.
Carol Dweck
I realized that while the provost was apparently ego-less, which was admirable in its way, he was utterly incompetent as a leader. I took away several lessons about leadership from that day, which would come to guide my actions when it was my turn.
-
When a leader is useless or weak, the worst actors — always the worst — will rush to fill the void. Silence in the face of this onslaught condones and fosters its abuses.
-
The willingness to confront people and address immediate situations without cruelty is critical to effective leadership. The best leaders will not seek confrontation, nor will they shrink from it.
-
The best leaders are heat shields, protecting their people from abuse and destructive behavior. They can do this because the effective leader has a healthy ego.
-
Speaking of healthy egos, it may seem counterintuitive, but every good leader must have a healthy degree of narcissism that serves as a source of self-confidence and integrity, enabling them to withstand undue criticism and attacks. Good leaders keep that narcissism in check, though, by occasionally stuffing it in a sack and throwing it in the river and by welcoming, demanding even, constructive criticism. The rest — let’s face it, the majority — allow their narcissism run amok like bratty children in an Applebees.
Ego, therefore, is the X factor in leadership and commands perhaps the most challenging acrobatic act of all: maintaining the precarious balance of ego and egolessness, a delicate equilibrium that marks the exceptional leader.
That day I learned that there is such a thing as being too nice. Nice leaders finish last. Any leader who is all about being nice is no leader at all and is just setting their people up for abuse, which is merely a marginal improvement over the leader who is an active abuser. The X factor of leadership — the slippery element that sets the best leaders apart — is the willingness and ability to strike and maintain that balance between necessary narcissism and vital selflessness. No one can sustain it all the time, but the true servant leader never gives up trying.
Striking the balance between being a pushover and being too harsh requires constant monitoring and adjustment. Good leadership demands a degree of narcissism, which then must be managed vigilantly.
You can put your values to work and focus your leadership on guiding and improving others, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
Bob Dylan
Recently I watched yet another disturbing video in the inexhaustible (and exhausting) internet subgenre of someone-bullying-a-public-servant-over-rules-they-don’t-like. The story starts with a man and his daughter trying to enter a library only to be stopped by a librarian for not wearing a mask as required by public health policies. The video, taken by the man, shows the exchange between the librarian, who is a tiny, gray-haired woman with a spine of steel, and the man, who appears much taller given the downward angle of his camera. We never see this valiant videographer or his kid.
Whatever your feelings on the issue of Covid restrictions, this encounter seems needlessly performative. Despite his childish churlishness, though, the man is not entirely wrong. In fact, his main argument is intriguing: that the mask rule is only a rule so long as this librarian is “making the personal choice” to follow it. I have heard variations on this logic in other videos of the subgenre, but the way he frames it is distinctive in its clarity and sincerity. “This is your choice to do this,” he insists while demanding that she acknowledge her say in the matter, which we never hear her do.
His logic is sound. Rules only remain rules so long as we follow them. If everyone ignores the STOP sign on your corner, you might as well take it down for all the good it is doing. It’ll make a cool coffee table or a striking wall decoration behind the bar in your rumpus room. In the past several years we have seen a steady erosion of adherence to rules as leaders and others flaunt norms, tradition, expectations, subpoenas, laws, and even the authority of the courts. Each act of defiance, disobedience, and lawlessness that goes unchecked further undermines our social compact and weakens the coherence of society, which is a fact that seems to escape too many pundits and politicians. It is like lighting a bonfire in the middle of a frozen lake so you can bask in the warm glow.
Mmmmm. Toasty. Kerplunk!
To be sure, sometimes challenging and subverting the rules can be a force for positive change. An obvious example occurred during the Civil Rights Era when protestors staged acts of civil disobedience against unjust laws that discriminated against people for something as fundamental (and Constitutionally protected) as skin color. Certainly though, library man’s performance and others of the ilk bear little resemblance to lunch counter sit-ins, and the issue of public health mandates is undoubtedly of a different category altogether.
I rehearse all this to emphasize a point, our friend in the library’s point in fact. He is really onto something. Rules remain rules only so far as we follow and/or enforce them.
Not long ago I wrote about Bureaucratic Compulsive Disorder or BCD, the tendency of some bureaucracies (not all!) to create and adhere to arbitrary rules without regard to their logic or even the consequences.
But BCD would be nothing without its mindless enforcers: the rules fools.
Rules fools are those who impose and execute rules for their own sake. As with BCD, their accompanying mantra is something along the lines of “But this is our policy!” The sturdy librarian (who is barely audible in the video) uses a similar argument, which the man exploits. She would have done better just to tell him to leave and then repeat that until he did. By gently offering the explanation, “that is our policy,” she opens herself up to his hectoring. The fact that this particular rule exists for a plausible reason — whether you like that reason or not — becomes irrelevant once you get into an argument about its very actuality.
The librarian, though, is certainly not a rules fool — at least not in this instance. She appears to genuinely support the library’s policy as serving the public interest no matter what the man feels. Unfortunately, though, libraries can be breeding grounds for rules fools. When I was in graduate school at a large university, there was a sort of book-theft ring operating. To solve this caper, some genius decided that every bag should be searched upon departure even though there were detectors at the doors to prevent book theft. Because this was a massive library belonging to a massive university, the resulting backup at the exit could be considerable, particularly around lunch and other crunch times.
I often had library books in my bag, which I had legitimately checked out. Absurdly, when the inspectors would see the books in my bag, they would just let me pass without a word or further scrutiny, and it wasn’t because I appeared so trustworthy. (I looked like I had just come off the mountain after ten years in a cave.) In fact, they stopped no one, with library books or not, because the automated detectors were quite effective at catching any would-be thieves. Simply put, the human inspections were redundant and irrelevant. When asked why they were doing such a silly job, the bag inspectors would always reply without irony that this was the rule. Eventually they figured out that the stolen books absconded by another portal altogether, lower-floor windows probably. The rules fools, though, continued to jam up the exits for weeks before someone finally wised up and locked the windows, thus thwarting the Great Library Book Heist of 1995.
A variation on the rules fool mantra, “but that’s our policy,” is the phrase, “but it’ll set a precedent.” When I started as a vice president at one college, I found this phrase was at the ready on many tongues from the president on down. From time to time we would have a situation that seemed to warrant a waving of the rules. It could be drastic — such as a student missing a deadline due to an emergency hospitalization — or banal — a student taking the wrong class due to an advising error. These things would occasionally land on my desk for final arbitration. Whenever I made the call to waive the rule, invariably someone would call me up to warn me that we were “setting a precedent.” I had to explain — much along the lines of the man in the library — that we were only setting a precedent so long as we decided it was a precedent, that there is nothing inalienable about precedent. Precedent sounds very legalistic and threatening in a courtroom proceeding, less so when it merely means “but we don’t want to make a reasonable exception.”
BCD does not just affect bureaucracies, but it infects individuals as well, transmogrifying them into rules fools who seem to exist only to hinder progress. You may work with some of these folks — the HR office that requires you to fax documents rather than emailing or submitting them in person, the boss who insists on holding the weekly meeting even when there is no business and half of you are on vacation anyway, the business office that demands that you rent a car to travel even though it will sit at the airport for a week. Resist these fools when you can and be sure to self assess. When you are enforcing a rule, any rule, stop and ask yourself why. What is its purpose? If the answer is “because that is the rule,” then you need to recognize that you may have already joined the ranks of the rules fools. Resist.
Do you have to cope with rules foolery in your daily work? Do you find yourself enforcing rules that defy logic and explanation?
You can put your values to work and transform the rules fools culture, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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When there’s too much of nothing
No one has control
Bob Dylan
Picture this scene.
You walk into a local fast-food chain franchise for lunch. You know, the one in which the burger is king. The teenaged automaton behind the counter mechanically asks what you will have. On the menu board you see there is a new item listed: the IllusoryBurger™️. You are trying to watch your weight, and this IllusoryBurger™️ is advertised with surprisingly few calories. So, in the spirit of culinary adventurism, you announce boldly, “I wanna try that new IllusoryBurger™️.”
The teenaged bot confirms your order: “That is one IllusoryBurger™️.”
“Yup, I want a IllusoryBurger™️,” you repeat. But doubt creeps in quickly. Would a single IllusoryBurger™️ really be enough? “No wait,” you say. “I’ll have the Double IllusoryBurger™️.” Then, as if inspired, you add, “with cheese!”
The teenager doesn’t flinch before reciting, “For just 85 cents more you can have the Double IllusoryWhopper™️ with cheese.” The suggestion is so automatic you might as well be conversing with an algorithm.
“Oh, okay. Give me that,” you reply thoughtlessly, mesmerized by the teenbot’s machine-like drone.
In almost no time, you are taking your sandwich to an open table and unwrapping it. It looks delightful, that big bun so jam-packed that you can barely open your mouth wide enough to take a bite. As you lift it toward your face, a glob of moist mayo leaks from the back, lettuce juts out at screwy angles, an onion slice peeks from inside, a pickle chip threatens to abandon ship, tomato glistens red, a dollop of melted cheese dangles like an uvula in space. Scrumptious. Then, just two bites into your delicacy you realize that the IllusoryWhopper™️ is little more than a nothing burger. You have purchased a large — luxurious even — sesame seed bun jammed with mayo, lettuce, onion, pickle, tomato, and melted cheese, and that’s it.
Should you go up to the counter to complain? You did, after all, order the Double IllusoryWhopper™️ with cheese. You decide to settle in and content yourself with your big bun filled with veggies and goop and call that lunch.
The next day, you go back, and the same pimply adolescent behind the counter says, “would you like another Double IllusoryWhopper™️ with cheese today? You seemed to really enjoy it yesterday.” What happened to the teenbot from the day before? This kid now seems capable of passing the Turing test.
Of course, you would prefer your burgers to consist of physical matter. Then again, you are watching your weight, and the IllusoryBurger™️ has very few calories. Besides, you don’t want to look like you didn’t know what you were ordering yesterday. You purchase another Double IllusoryWhopper™️ with cheese and retreat back to your favorite table. The bun is so big, and there is so much lettuce and mayo and melted cheese, not to mention the fat tomato slice. This sandwich might as well be the regular Whopper. After all, it looks just like the Whopper. And thus the delusion sets in to take hold as you blithely chow down on next to nothing.
It’s a silly tale, I know. After all, it’s hard to imagine a fast-food chain serving such a nonnutritious and insipid item. And my parable is a little overstuffed, but I trust it is still digestible. Perhaps it reminds you of times in your workplace when you have had to swallow something just as utterly bereft of meat.
How often have you witnessed a frenzied colleague churning away at a problem that was not discernibly or appreciably challenging or even important? How many times have you been caught up in a miasma of meaninglessness, processing pointlessly redundant forms and generating report after report that no one will ever read let alone act on? Why?
This story is about the workplace nothing burger — mindless toil, endless busywork, and superfluous drudgery — being whipped up into a big, fat Whopper to be served hot and gobbled down on a daily basis.
In fact, we all do this. We maximize the significance of whatever is in front of us even when it is really not a big deal. We conflate urgency with importance, which scrambles our ability to set and maintain priorities. Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower had an elegant way of sorting out this muddle. The Eisenhower matrix is a handy tool for setting priorities within a simple framework.
The idea is that you assess each decision or project on the basis of its urgency (its need to be done soon) and its importance (its value to you and to your work in the future). The matrix is divided into four quadrants with four descriptors. The best place to operate is in quadrant 2 (important and not urgent) where your work has the highest value with the least pressure. The best bosses assure that their people are operating in quadrant 2 as much as possible. Quadrant 1 (important and urgent) is for critical items with imminent deadlines and for true crises.
Bad bosses are the ones who frequently elevate quadrant 3 (not important and urgent) and quadrant 4 (not important and not urgent) to the level of quadrant 1 and regularly turn minor and meaningless work into emergencies. The worst bosses are the ones who operate almost exclusively in quadrant 1 and treat everything as a catastrophe. The thing is, if everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. In other words, viewing everything as most urgent and important means that there is no baseline for setting priorities and no differentiation of tasks. I wrote about the relationship between crisis thinking and perfectionism some time back.
By definition, crises should be exceptional, not the norm. That’s what distinguishes a crisis as a crisis and not just as a setback or a challenging task. When I was a university dean, I grew so tired of hearing about false and overblown crises that I all-but banned the word. I told my people to think before they used the word “crisis” or any of its synonyms and to decide if what they were facing was really a crisis. The result? The occurrence of crisis thinking in our school rapidly dissipated, and we were then better able to prioritize. Amazingly, we soon found that many matters that had seemed crucial and that consumed our time were no big deal at all and could be easily dispensed with. Meanwhile, I watched other administrators continue to convert such nothing burgers into Whoppers, Double Whoppers, and even Triple Whoppers. Their entire mental menu was Whoppers with nary even a Whopper, Jr. in sight.
The funny thing is that because these connoisseurs of nothing burgers were constantly active, chomping down on air, they gave the impression that they were fantastically effective. They were not. These other administrators, though, regularly received accolades for all their restive exertion even as their people wilted like lettuce on a day-old hamburger. I wrote about the disproportional relationship between effort and quality in an essay entitled, “But I Worked So Hard on It!”
You see, the temptation to convert nothing burgers into Whoppers can have its own rewards. Hard work in some workplaces will masquerade as good work just as nothing burgers from my imaginary restaurant masquerade as flame-broiled all-beef patties. Poor leaders regard hard work as an end in itself. If you are stuck in a place where you are forced to consume endless meals of nothing burgers, there is good news, though. Even after you gorge yourself on a bunch of nothing burgers, you will still have plenty of room for fries and a large fountain soft drink.
Bon appetit!
Is your work culture rife with catastrophic thinking, poor priority setting, and overwork? How can you best apply the Eisenhower matrix and other tools to your daily work and use them to lead others?
You can set more productive priorities and work better without necessarily working harder, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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The stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
Gautama Buddha
A while back I wrote about imposter syndrome and how, when allowed to run rampant, it can hinder progress and encourage bad behaviors. As pervasive and damaging as it is, though, imposter syndrome is not nearly as insidious and debilitating as self-doubt, which can rapidly harden into regressive and persistent habit.
Since then, I have embarked on an ambitious journey to make a quantum leap, an exponential advance in my development as a person and as a professional. These essays I publish every week are a small part of that effort.
Lately, though, I have been plagued with self-doubt. How could I, little ol’ me, do anything of great value? This voice of doubt echoing in my skull, is, of course, the result of the garbage thinking and baseless assumptions that have cluttered my mind and probably your mind for decades. As vapid as these thoughts are, they are largely — perhaps entirely — responsible for every time you and I have tried something stupendous only to crap out.
What if, though, the onset of these doubts is itself part of the process? What if great progress is impossible without the experience of profound and debilitating doubt? Furthermore, what if powering through the doubt is exactly as wrong as yielding to it?
In fact, self-doubt is a necessary and beneficial part of the pursuit of any worthwhile goal. When you experience doubt, you know you are approaching the periphery of success. The more you doubt, the closer you are. Moreover, the absence of self-doubt is a sign that your goal is not particularly bold. Being absolutely sure at every moment of a process means that the end was always in reach. That is a perfectly dandy state of affairs for incremental development but only if you do not long to advance much beyond the status quo. On the other hand, if your ambition is to move well beyond what is already accessible, you will have to suffer self-doubt, and — rely on it — the more devastating the doubt, the more laudably aspirational the objective.
Easy and familiar effort will yield easy and familiar results.
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
Piet Hein
The Danish poet, inventor, artist, mathematician, scientist, designer, Resistance fighter, and all-around underachiever Piet Hein, posited that any problem worth solving is going to put up some serious resistance. By extension, any significant goal worth achieving is going to generate intense pushback as well. Much of that pushback (maybe all) is from inside ourselves, and much of that internal opposition will be in the form of self-doubt. (Fear is another factor I may address in a later piece — perhaps when I have made more headway overcoming it.)
Yes, the habit of self-doubt is a destroyer…if we let it be so. The impulse to self-doubt can become so overwhelming that it feels like we are mired in a thick, viscous goo. What should we do? Just give in and go nowhere?
Many choose the opposite and fight hard to dislodge themselves from the muck of self-doubt. Their resistance is noble, but it comes at the expense of time, energy, and resources. Even if they overcome their doubts, they will likely still fall well short of their goal and settle on some incremental achievement. They make progress, to be sure, but not the astounding progress of the exponential leap.
Think of the toy known as the Chinese finger trap. It consists of a short tube woven of bamboo strips. The idea is that, after putting an index finger in each end, if you try to remove your fingers by pulling them out, you will find they are stuck. The harder you pull, the more stuck you become. Increased effort, in fact, is counterproductive. If you have ever encountered one of these diabolical machines, you probably felt a moment or two of consternation as you struggled to extricate your helpless digits. Alternately, you could just resolve to spend the rest of your life with your index fingers bound fast together. Up to you.
What is required for extraction though is — counterintuitively — to push your fingertips toward each other rather than pulling away. As a result, the tension will slacken, and the tube will widen enough to release your fingers. You then will be free to try the trick out on some unsuspecting child you wish to torment.
It is the same with self-doubt in pursuit of a goal. If you choose not to give in to the doubt, your inclination will be to fight it, to plow through it only to find yourself more unable to move than ever. Instead, you need to do something completely unexpected (and, in reality, opposite). Don’t give in. Don’t battle.
Welcome, Frenemy!
We have already seen that self-doubt is a positive sign that you are on the right path of a worthy goal. We have also seen that neither giving into the doubt nor battling with it will get you very far. If you are still committed to your goal — your exponential explosion of progress — what choice do you have, then?
Time to reach for the counterintuitive.
Welcome the doubt. It is a happy signpost on the road to success. Encountering discouraging doubt along the way confirms both that your goal is worthy and that your direction is sure. Success is achievable.
Embrace the self-doubt. Embracing your doubts does not mean giving into them. It means learning from them to better understand the habits that hold you back so that you can adopt new, more useful paradigms to guide you.
Celebrate your self-doubt. Doubt is a manifestation of the challenging problem or ambitious goal fighting back from within to prove its value. It is a necessary step, an indicator of advancement, and an opportunity to discover more about your own self-imposed limitations. If you want to leap beyond what you thought was your potential, if you want to try something bold and new, if you want to become the someone you always desired, befriend your self-doubt. It is the frenemy you cannot do without.
Do your personal and professional goals fill you with debilitating self-doubt? Worse still, do your ambitions seem overly easy and familiar? How can you change your mindset and move toward your aspirations?
Your goals are achievable and you deserve to reach them. Understanding and overcoming doubt and other obstacles are critical to success, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late
Bob Dylan
Decades ago, my wife was a social worker advocating for nursing home residents. One resident she got to know well was Mr. Foley, who took a liking to this vibrant, pretty, young professional, who in turn found him to be wise and kindly. At some point in their acquaintance, he told her his life’s tale, which had all the makings of an O. Henry story. His experience would subsequently impact the life she and I have led.
Mr. Foley described his marriage and the choices he and his wife made. They decided early on that he should throw himself into his work to set them up for a future of blissful retirement while she took care of the home, as was the mode. They raised a family and did all the conventional things, but they denied themselves pleasures when they were younger so that they could save for their dreams of the future. In particular, they both loved to travel, so they planned to see the world once he was done with work.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Wallace Stevens
You can guess the upshot. Just as Mr. Foley prepared to retire at the conventional age, excited for the adventures he and his wife had put off so long, he suffered a devastating stroke, which is what landed him in the nursing home. Soon enough and sure enough the nursing home had drained them of all their savings as well as their lifelong dreams.
He ended this story with a moral:
“Live now. Don’t put off your dreams since you never know what will happen in the future.”
There it was. Mr. Foley’s regret of a lifetime rolled up into one wise platitude. My wife and I call his advice the “Mr. Foley Rule,” but we could more ungenerously have called it “Foley’s Folly.” You may recognize the Mr. Foley Rule as a variation of carpe diem or seize the day. My wife and I have invoked the rule often and have savored many adventures as a result.
That brings us to the present. Recently, my wife joined (and then quickly departed) a Facebook group that consists of people who are planning for their retirement. Most of the participants are younger, in their thirties and forties, and have decided to make sacrifices now so that they can live large later on. They — even more so than the Foleys — deny themselves pleasures, some going so far as to limit their very diets to save for the future. I don’t mean they don’t go out to restaurants. I mean that they subsist on ramen noodles, Dinty Moore, and other cheap and dodgy dorm food, all in the belief that what they save now by scrimping will be there for them down the line.
I hope these people are not disappointed the way the Foleys were. I hope they don’t live out their own O. Henry ironies — for instance, being done in prematurely by the very diet they adopted to economize for retirement or finding that their greatest life desire is actually free of charge. I hope that they get to relish their dreams all the more because of the sacrifices they are currently making. Sadly though, their self-denial is just as or more likely to lead to bitter regret as it is to well-subsidized bliss. There are simply too many variables that they have no control over — more than I could ever enumerate — and it remains no less true for being trite that there are no guarantees. I have previously written about the futility of human control in the context of perfectionism.
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
Bob Dylan
Let me be clear. I am not endorsing the devil-may-care or come-what-may or fiddly-dah or go-away-and-don’t-bother-me-now-I’m-busy attitude toward life planning that apparently comes naturally to us humans. In fact, I am a living example of the virtues of early planning. I can feel secure in my retirement outlook because my wife and I started preparing nearly two decades ago, and I trust you are doing the same, whatever your age or circumstance.
The thing is, with life planning or any such good, you can go too far. The Foleys went overboard in their anticipation of the complacencies the future would offer. You can limit and mitigate happenstance to some extent, but you cannot control or eradicate it. Accidents happen. Sickness happens. Jobs end. Relationships end. Lives end. Carpe diem!
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late
Bob Dylan
To be fair, though, I always found the concept of carpe diem a bit overwhelming. How do you seize the day, making the best out of every moment? Doing so itself seems exhausting. But as I age and age and age, I understand how much of life I have missed by not seizing it. One platitude that has always struck me is the observation that no one ever lamented on their deathbed, “I should have spent more time at the office.” Personally, I could have done better, particularly early on, to take that sentiment more to heart, but it still has had a significant impact on me and on my behaviors. Frankly, our culture worships in a cult of overwork, and the consequences are spectacularly devastating.
I am not big on meaningless regret, though, and I am still training myself to abandon the habit of worry, which, as I have written, are two sides of the same coin.
As a result, I have become more resolved to seize the day — at least as best one can during a global pandemic. I long that my wife and I stay hail and hardy well into the future, but we cannot count on that. We can only hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and expect something in between.
The lessons of mindfulness — drawing on Zen Buddhism — and the wisdom of Stoicism hold a similar message. The past is gone. The future is uncertain. We only have the present for sure, and there is no time like the present.
How do you — the present you — view the future? Are you prepared mentally and otherwise? What is your relationship to the balance of the rigors of work with the contentment available in your life?
Now is the time to set yourself mentally for the future while enjoying the present, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way
Bob Dylan
Do you remember that kid in the playground? You know, the one who had to be the winner every time no matter what. This is the kid who cheated at tag, who pushed the other kids off the monkey bars, who boasted — in the absence of all evidence — about zipping down the sliding board faster than anyone … ever. This is the kid who altered the rules and lied constantly for nothing more than bragging rights. Perhaps you lost a race or two to the nearest tree with this kid when you didn’t even know you were racing. You know the kid. Maybe you were that kid. Maybe I was that kid. Someone was.
This kid was the zero-sum kid. I hope the kid grew into a different attitude as an adult, but I wonder. There sure seem to be a lot of adherents to the zero-sum philosophy out there.
The zero-sum game is the belief that there are only complete winners and complete losers and that any win you have must result in a commensurate loss to me. In team sports, putting your personal triumphs over your team’s or teammates’ wins smacks of a poor attitude, and zero-sum players, no matter how talented, tend to drift from team to team. The euphemism is that they are no good in the locker room. In reality, they are just self-centered a**s.
The zero-sum approach represents a fundamental inability to process the world as it is. In an earlier essay entitled “Politics at Work” I addressed the difference between the politics of possibility and the politics of personal destruction, with the latter often being the result of a zero-sum outlook.
Zero-sum assumes that the resources of the universe are finite. While this may be true in a material sense — matter and energy cannot be created although with a modicum of cooperation there is plenty for all — it is not true in a psychic or metaphysical sense. Your good luck will rarely come at the expense of mine unless we are in direct competition. If you have a good day, that fact is unlikely to cause me to have a commensurately bad day unless I want it to.
Of course, you and I both have dealt with people who think like that, who seethe because someone else had some success. You know. That kid. That coworker. That frenemy.
Many zero-sum persons affect a rugged individualism, purporting to have achieved everything all on their own. In their minds, successes are exclusively their own doing while their evident failures are always someone else’s fault or are somehow not as evident as they evidently are. A zero-sum individual is a menace. In the worse cases they can be personally destructive and are not to be tolerated. Zero-sum creeps pretend they are perpetual winners, but they are actually losers, mere zero-sum zeros.
Worse still is the dysfunctional dystopia fostered by the zero-sum organizational culture. If you have toiled in such an environment, you know exactly what I mean, assuming the zero-sum world is not your element. In these organizations, jerks, cheats, and egomaniacs are rewarded while those with integrity are oppressed. Bosses blame others for their mistakes, claim credit for others’ successes, and take everything personally. These places tend to hemorrhage people, which makes sense since everyone in a zero-sum world is disposable and replaceable.
If you work in a zero-sum culture and are not yourself a zero-sum zero, you do not have too many good options. The best choice is to get out. The likelihood that you will be crushed by the culture or even accede to the culture is exceedingly high.
If you have any decency, such an environment is a torment, and there are few effective strategies for coping. Ignoring the zero-sum zeros just gives them license while challenging them just spurs them on. Zero-sum zeros, like extreme narcissists, are impervious to most criticism since they simply go ahead and change the rules and the measures to suit their interests. Scolding them is useless. Their gauge of success is always whatever makes them look the most successful at the moment, so your criticism will be meaningless. The more you yell and scream, the more they smirk and laugh at you. Their stance is both ingenious and pathetic. The zero-sum zero is generally also an accomplished bully.
If you are in such a situation — surrounded by zero-sum zeros — it is imperative that you not get caught up in their mindset. If you try to compete with them, you can never win. You will be playing their favorite game with their favorite rules, so it will tend toward their favorite outcome. Again, you are more likely to become like them than to change them. Worse still, if your boss is a zero-sum zero and you don’t care to join the dark side, you can either hide or leave.
Of course, if you are the boss and are dealing with zero-sum nonsense in your organization, you have all the power to end it. So end it. What are you waiting for? People are suffering. Productivity is strangled. Your organization is suffocating.
The zero-sum game is the enemy of teamwork, collaboration, and collective creativity. Like most any effort and like every stopped clock, it can have its moments of efficacy, but in the grand scheme it is always a loser. The zero-sum game is predicated upon a denial of the reality of our social nature and the power of cooperative effort. Whatever its occasional triumphs, the zero-sum attitude fosters a series of missed opportunities and trails misery in its wake. The zero-sum game is a fool’s game.
Do you have to deal with zero-sum zeros and other bullies in your work? Do you work in a zero-sum environment? How can you cope? Do you lead one? How can you end it?
You shouldn’t have to tolerate and endure such a world, and I can help you succeed. Click below for your free consultation.
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When in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.
Mark Twain
Those of you who regularly read my essays will know that I can be a wee bit cynical about bosses and the general state of bossing in our world. It is not that I think all bosses are bad — after all, I spent many years as a boss — but over decades I have had a series of bosses that ran from utterly mediocre to galactically bad with one major exception. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
One of the worst habits of horrendous bosses is a propensity to lie, mislead, b**t, and gaslight. Whether such prevarication is due to self-deception or outright malevolence is of little importance when you are on the receiving end of falsehoods. Also, while bosses may have to conceal information due to legal or other obligations, doing so should be infrequent and never part of a project to mislead.
For fun and to get new year off to a rip-roaring start, I have decided to collect a few of the whoppers that bosses have told me and others over the years. I list them in four categories followed by the truth behind the lie: the truth translation. Think of this as a Lies-to-Truth Glossary.
All of the lies I list are indistinguishable from the truth, which is how deception works, right? A lie is no good if everyone readily recognizes it for what it is. So, while all the items here turned out to be falsehoods — promises never kept or flat out fabrications — there is no reason these could not have been statements of truth.
Except they weren’t.
Commonplace BS
Classic, everyday lies for all occasions
“No problem at all. I’ll handle it.”
translation: Nothing will ever happen on this front. Ever!
“Maybe.”
trans.: No.
“I’ll take this project off your hands for a while until you get through this rough patch.”
trans.: You will never touch this project again.
“I really appreciate all the work you are doing.”
trans.: I expect you to keep working like a dog for no reward or any acknowledgement beyond this lie.
“Let’s keep talking about your idea.”
trans.: I never want to hear mention of your idea again.
“I really want to do this for you, but then I would have to do it for everyone.”
trans.: I don’t want to do this for you.
“Let’s keep this just between you, me, and the walls.”
trans.: I am telling everyone this, and what I tell you may itself even be a lie.
Your Professional Stakes
Lies that affect your job status or career
“I have your back on this.”
trans.: You are dead meat.
“You have absolute authority on this project.”
trans.: You have absolute responsibility and virtually no authority.
“People are very upset with your decision.”
trans.: I am upset with your decision. I neither know nor care what others think.
“I expected much more from you.”
trans.: I expected you to fold to my bullying like a wet noodle.
“I hope you’re happy here.”
trans.: Please leave.
“We will miss you.”
trans.: Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
Gaslighting from on High
Lies to keep middle management and staff in their place, the stuff of corruption
“We are all one big family.”
trans.: You are children, and I am a dysfunctional parent.
“We will solicit everyone’s input before deciding.”
trans.: We will do whatever we want no matter what you think and will also use your candid opinions against you.
“The higher ups are still working on the details, so I can’t tell you much about it.”
trans.: The decision has been made, and you will not like it.
“I will tell you this, but you cannot share it with your staff.”
trans.: When it hits the fan with your staff, I intend to blame you.
The Big Meta-lies
Lying about lying
“I have no reason to lie.”
trans.: I am lying at this very moment.
“I told your colleagues what they needed to hear, but I am going to tell you the truth because I think you can handle it.”
trans.: I told your colleagues one lie, and now I will tell you a different lie.
“I will not tolerate lying.”
trans.: I hate being deceived, but I will not hesitate to deceive you.
“I would never lie to you.”
trans.: I am lying at this very moment.
Perhaps you have heard these lies yourself. Perhaps you have others to add. Perhaps you are lucky and have had nothing but honest bosses, which does happen I hear. Tell me your experiences in a comment or an email.
Even when a boss is fundamentally honest, a promise might not manifest, but a good boss will own responsibility for that fault with apologies all around. Good bosses know that all deception is heinous, even seemingly benign deception, and it is never okay to deceive adult professionals with the misguided excuse that you are protecting them from bad news. The worse situation is when a boss expects others to tell a lie on their behalf. Whenever that happened to me, I always found workarounds, sometimes at great personal cost.
The thing is, it does not have to be this way, which is my point. These statements do not need to be lies, and if they are lies, they don’t need to be said. A boss who lies, even a little — even for a supposedly good cause — is using their position to get over on an underling.
Bosses who lie are bullies.
Bosses who bully are incompetent.
Do I sound preachy here?
You betcha.
What is the role of lying in your workplace? Is it prevalent or rare? Do others participate in deception through concealment or outright falsehoods? Do you ever find yourself participating? How can you resist?
You can commit to honesty while navigating dishonesty, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Because of the holiday season, I am reposting this revised version of an essay from December 31st, 2020. It encourages you to commit the act of egocide over and over again.
At long last, the new year is upon us, and perhaps you are looking for a resolution. I have never been a big fan of setting resolutions for the new year since they seem to go by the by somewhere between January 2nd and January 31st, with the guilt setting in sometime around February 3rd. By Valentine's Day, all those resolutions seem to have been utterly abandoned and forgotten, but the guilt somehow lingers. At least that is my experience.
Since I started meditating a few years ago, I have come to understand that it is better to set intentions rather than resolutions. Intentions are more forgiving. If you slip up and don't meet your intention, you need only remind yourself that it was something you wanted to do not had to do, a pursuit more than a goal, and it then becomes much easier to absolve yourself and get back to that pursuit. A resolution is more final. The word even has "solution" built right into it. If you don't meet a resolution, you have failed. Cue the guilt! A resolution is a promise. An intention is an aspiration.
Whether you prefer resolutions or intentions, now is as good a time as any to reflect on the past and set some purposes for the future. I am going to propose a purpose for myself that will take some fortitude. I am going to stuff my ego in a sack and throw it in the river.
The act I am describing is one of neither homicide nor suicide. It is egocide, the murder of the narcissistic self. The ego.
At this point, the sharp reader may object that professing to do such a thing is an act of narcissism itself. By drowning the ego you are paradoxically focusing on it and thereby nurturing it. Like advertisements and politicians, the ego thrives on being seen and acknowledged, and even negative attention nourishes it. Certainly, if you are indeed that sharpest of sharp readers, you would be right. Which is why this whole exercise sucks and why it is so crucial.
Every day, we confront situations that challenge our sense of self and imperil our complacency. What if, and stay with me here, what if those challenges are not threats? What if they are opportunities for self-discovery and growth.
I readily acknowledge that these challenges could very well result in the destruction of our sense of self-satisfaction and self-confidence. But if so, wouldn't that suggest that these self-assurances were unwarranted to begin with or fundamentally flawed? A more beneficial outcome would be to treat such challenges as a chance to stress-test our sense of identity and make adjustments to build resilience through self-assessment.
The challenges I speak of are too myriad and varied to list or describe, but they are common. Most often, they arrive in the form of of questions or criticism from other people or they occur within as self-doubt.
Always, though, how we receive them is entirely within our control.
Yup. I wrote that, and I can hardly believe it either. Frankly, I hate when people say things like "Oh, so and so is criticizing you? Sooo what? Don't let it bother you. You're just giving them po-wer." The reason such so-called advice is so annoying is because it shifts the burden to the victim and makes nonreactivity seem easy, within reach, and we all know how hard it is not to become defensive in the face of challenges to the self, which is only natural and, to a point, appropriate.
And let's face it, other people can do horrible things to us. When I review just my past year, I can quickly compile a litany of grievances born of injustices, so I get it. But I also know — when I am being honest — that those grievances are all inside me. In fact, a little candid reflection reveals to me that the very people who committed injustices against me in the past year likely all congratulate themselves for having done some great service to the world in taking me on, for they, like me, are the heroes in their own stories. And just knowing that fact makes the injustice sting all the worse. My ire rises, and my ego, beaten and battered, swells like like a welt on a bruise on an abrasion. Let it go? How can I?
Nonetheless, I owe it to myself to step back. What does it matter that they congratulate themselves for a job well done when I can prove incontrovertibly, I assure you, that they are incompetent and malevolent hypocrites? The kind of people the worst people consider the worst people. What does it do for me, exactly? Even as I write these words, I can feel the flesh of my face tingling, flush with anger and pain. All of it, though, is me. Just me. Just me. My self. My ego. It takes every bit of strength of purpose I have to gather my poor beaten and wounded ego, stuff it in a sack, tie the opening, walk it down to the river, and toss it in.
Disclaimer: No actual littering will take place during this little act of egocide.
My ego will be back, maybe a bit soggy, but it will return even before I pivot from the river to head home. The point is, though, that I must train myself to understand that my ego is both vulnerable and invincible. It requires protection, but I should also be willing to abandon it, to drown it. It won't die, and neither will I. I won't even suffer. And doing so gives me a modicum of agency over my own life and guides me in my next choices.
Oh, and this exercise must happen every day, maybe several times a day. It must happen in my personal relationships. It must happen in my professional relationships. Sometimes it even must happen in my casual encounters.
A Digression Concerning a Casual Encounter
Here I am, pushing my cart up the aisle of a grocery store. The aisles each have clearly marked directional arrows in this time of COVID in order to keep people flowing with and away from and not toward each other. And here is some guy, oblivious or arrogant, coming the wrong way. Worse still, the aisle is busy enough that now my path is blocked because of him. I could get angry. I could even say something. If it weren't for my mask, I could give him such a frowning he would not soon forget! We could have a confrontation. After all, I am doing everything in my power to keep both myself and others safe during this pandemic (yay, me!), and this guy couldn't be bothered (boo, he!). I could shame him for being a self-centered ass, and he could shame me for being a sheeple. Or I could just seethe with anger for the next little while in the hopes that my wrath will telepathically assault him and disrupt his smug contentment.
Instead, I take a deep breath and look straight ahead with a neutral expression. I am down at the river watching my poor ego, trapped in a sack, writhing as it goes under seemingly for the last time. It's a goner for sure.
But lo! As soon as I have entered the next aisle, I am already engrossed in my search for clam juice. You don't want to ask an employee where the clam juice is. It is just too weird. How would that look? How embarrassing! Oh. See that? My stupid ego is back, and it is glowing with the pride in not reacting to that rude jerk. A paradox.
So that is my intention for the new year: to learn to stuff my ridiculous ego in a sack, tie it tight, and flip the bloated thing into the river with great regularity and glee. Wish me luck.
One final note for those of an etymological turn: I had assumed that "sheeple" was a very recent neologism and was surprised that my spell check did not flag it. Turns out, according to Merriam-Webster (an authoritative source for American usage) the term dates all the way back at least to 1945. I also used the word "yay" in the same paragraph, which was, according to M-W, first used in 1963. That makes it a relative youngster compared to sheeple. Huzzah!
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How do you keep that ol’ ego in check? How do you keep it from infecting humanity like some sort of rampant virus we just can’t seem to beat? Or, how do you keep the unchecked egos of others from overwhelming you and from turning you into them?
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Because of the holiday season, I am reposting this revised version of an essay from December 24th, 2020. It addresses the theme of human decency and demonstrates that decency can be, in its simplest form, superhuman.
A short while back I wrote about the power of decency, but what about the superpower of decency?
At the end of November 2020, an emergency physician in California tweeted a thread that went viral. The doctor, Taylor Nichols (@tnicholsmd), related the story of treating a particular patient in the midst of the pandemic, a time when so many, and none more so than medical professionals, have been physically and emotionally challenged beyond their limits.
Dr. Nichols' patient was struggling to breathe and begging the doctor to save his life. When his shirt was removed for treatment, the medical team, which Nichols described as "a Jewish physician, a Black nurse, and an Asian respiratory therapist," could see that his body was defaced with Nazi symbols, including a swastika tattooed prominently on his chest. As they set about caring for the patient, Nichols reflected that a man with such emblems of hatred inked on his skin had likely devoted himself to devaluing, or worse, the lives of the very people working to save his. Nonetheless, the team prepared to intubate their patient, a procedure that would expose them to considerable risk of contagion in this age of COVID.
The scene Nichols paints deserves further rumination.
Think about it. Here we see a patient whose naked flesh proclaims his raw hatred for these individuals who risk their own health and lives to preserve his life even as they know their success would free him to continue to promote his noxious views and threaten their wellbeing and that of their families and loved ones.
Nazi tattoos are not some deplorable cosplay fad. They indicate a commitment to white supremacy and to classifying specific groups of people as subhuman or not quite human and decidedly intolerable. His Jewish doctor even recognized one tattoo as the insignia of the SS, who were responsible for designing and executing the "Final Solution," otherwise known as the Holocaust. Perhaps, you may argue, this patient had an explanation for the repugnant tattoos. Perhaps he got them in prison because he needed the protection of a gang, or some such thing. Perhaps he had or would come to regret them. But why so many? And why keep them?
Reasserting the Human in Humanist
Nichols describes himself as a humanist in his Twitter profile, which can indicate a number of things. Based on his story, I would guess that he means that he derives his morality from serving humanity rather than from the doctrine and mores of an established religion, dogma, or code. If I am right, Nichols' humble commitment to the service to others is a stellar example of humanist morality in action. Clearly, the point of his thread is not to garner praise for himself and his colleagues for doing their jobs. Indeed, the narrative culminates in a candid moment of crisis when, exhausted by months of battling COVID in the face of those who deny its existence and reflecting on the hatred this particular patient expresses via his body markings, Nichols hesitates.
That is the point of his thread. Not that Nichols and his team treated a loathsome man they were obligated to treat, but that Nichols is human enough to equivocate in his moral and physical fatigue. It is a story of human beings taxed beyond their limits. And Nichols is a skilled enough storyteller that he ends it there without revealing if the team went through with the procedure. We are left to conclude that they did, that they finished with this racist patient before moving on to their next patient.
Again, the story is about Nichols' moral dilemma in the fog of his exhaustion.
It is a story of human decency told as decently as one can in 280-character bites. It even starts in medias res, which is a slick literary technique. For Nichols and his colleagues, this nightmarish scenario is just the quotidian, the day-to-day routine. Worn down as he must be, he still constantly does the right thing, the decent thing, no matter his feelings.
His story is a companion to that of Jodi Doering, a nurse in South Dakota who told her tale of moral outrage in the midst of gruesomeness on Twitter and CNN at around the same time. She spoke of patients who deny the existence of COVID and call her names even as they are dying of the disease. Like Nichols and his team, she continues to care for them in the face of their hateful contempt.
Her Twitter profile, which now lists her name as Jodi Orth (@jodiorth), has a banner that reads "Be a Good Human," sadly an increasingly radical stance. In fairness, I must note that her testimonial has been disputed as exaggerated, but I doubt the charge is true. Does it really matter? Whatever the case, as Nichols observed, simply continuing to treat patients in the midst of COVID denial and hostility to medical personnel from a wide swath of the population is demoralizing in the extreme, and even more so in a place like South Dakota where the governor herself has abetted the spread of the disease and openly contributed to the widespread denial and consequent contempt for medical professionals. “Be a Good Human,” indeed!
These tales of frontline medical practitioners, but two samples standing in for an untold number of told and untold stories, are more extreme than what most of us will ever experience. Still, they are clear instances of the power of decency, of remaining "a Good Human," in the face of horror.
I would go even further. For those of us in other walks of life, it is hard to imagine having to face anger, unreason, resentment, and hatred every day from the very people you are sworn to serve, be they patients on a gurney or governors in the statehouse. Practitioners in other professions may confront similar dilemmas, (law enforcement officers, teachers, and, yes, even lawyers come to mind), but not perhaps in such stark terms and under such constant duress.
In this way, maintaining basic human decency, being a good human, is not just a power, but it is a superpower. It takes an extraordinary amount of fortitude to assert decency day in and day out even without the onslaught of abuse and offense that medical professionals, these human beings, face. Maintaining decency along with its attendant virtues of integrity and compassion is conceptually simple but not easy, for it is not enough to declare "I am an honorable person, a good human" or to merely intend to be a virtuous person. Decency demands constant vigilance, vigilance that itself is enervating, which is partially why Nichols flagged for a moment before proceeding to work on his patient.
Human decency — being a good person in the face of crisis — is indeed a superpower. It is an act of heroism that may just save us all. While it is not as cool or fanciful as the ability to fly or turn invisible or punch through brick walls, it remains the only superpower that challenges our humanity and thereby the only one that can help make us fully human.
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Goodhart's law states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Put another way, when we set a performance measure as a goal or a bar to hit, people and organizations tend to find ways to achieve that measure without regard for whether their performance or production is truly effective, beneficial, or even desirable. Goodhart’s law has to do with unintended consequences.
You can see this law in effect in many workplaces, where time on the job (a measure) is treated as the performance target in lieu of actual productivity or what workers accomplish. This common standard is arguably a consequence of the Industrial Age when the hours spent on certain tasks — such as at a highly regulated factory — might be a reasonable gauge of productivity. Now, with our service economy, that is less likely to be the case although it may have pertinence in certain settings like manufacturing and retail. One need only look at the work-at-home phenomenon driven by the pandemic to see that traditional workplace performance goals may have hindered productivity all along.
How the Soviets Nailed Goodhart’s Law
An extreme and apocryphal example of the unintended consequences associated with Goodhart’s law comes from the Soviet Union. Our tale begins with the Soviet central planners, who, as they were inclined, demanded that factories increase the number of nails they manufacture. The factories then, to meet this demand with little fuss, simply made lots of tiny nails that were of no use. Thus they achieved the numerical goal, but only in practice, not spirit. The planners quickly got wise to this scheme, so they replaced the count-based goal with a weight-based goal. In response the factories started producing just a few giant nails, which were also useless.
I doubt this story is entirely true if at all, but it’s the same thing you see in many workplaces where employees waste their time on trivial tasks (or social media) in order to look busy and eat up the clock. If instead their performance were regulated by multiple criteria, such as task completion and quality contributions, their work lives could be more satisfying and more productive. Nonetheless, we almost universally rely on an artificially and arbitrarily derived goal of working a certain number of hours a week whatever the necessity or consequence.
Goodhart’s Law Goes to School
Our acculturation to this world of unintended consequences begins in school. One obvious example of Goodhart’s law stems from the dominance of the standardized test industry (a.k.a. the testing industrial complex). Many teachers are assessed in large part by their students’ performance on these tests, so the game becomes “teach to the test.” In other words, instead of maximizing a teacher’s ability to assure that students are acquiring vital skills — such as the ability to think critically, the development of intellectual curiousity, and the wherewithal to continue learning — teachers are compelled to attend to student knowledge of preset material and to practice sample test questions with little regard to the efficacy of the tests themselves. By the way, standardized testing scandals (a.k.a. cheating) are also predicted by Goodhart’s law.
It’s not just standardized tests, though. Grading of all sorts has a similar effect. When I taught college composition to first-year honors students, I found that many of these elite students — the ones the college was trying to lure because of their superior high school grades — were in fact remedial compared to the general population of students when it came to their aptitude for higher order thinking and their willingness to challenge their assumptions and take risks. Early in their schooling, these honors students had become adept at ascertaining and delivering just what their teachers and the testing industry wanted, with many preferring to play it safe. They found that they were good at merely accumulating and regurgitating knowledge and could rack up high grades while never leaving their comfort zone.
Don’t get me wrong, all of these students were bright, hard-working, and serious-minded, and many were as capable as or more capable than their non-honors peers. But most adhered fervently to the goal of accumulating points rather than challenging their minds, which was not a recipe for success in my classes. I was never popular with the honors students.
Goodhart’s law applies here: since the measure (a.k.a. high scores) was the initial and most significant criterion for admission, the students simply had to perform to that measure in as efficient a manner as possible to make the grade. While the honors students were not prone to cheating and in fact prided themselves on their integrity, many of them did, perhaps unwittingly, game the system. The focus on grades and scores as the goal has created a system of unintended consequences (a.k.a. grade grubbing) up and down our educational system and has undermined the true mission of student learning.
Goodhart’s Law at Work
It is similar in the workplace where we offer rewards of various sorts for meeting certain measures, for instance sales goals or snapshots of performance. These reward structures engender unintended negative consequences, including mistrust, team dysfunction, risk aversion, stunted creativity, and lowered productivity, to name a few. I have written about this reality in a different context.
The very practice Goodhart warns against — converting measures into goals — can be so ingrained that its effects become cultural. Within this culture of unintended consequences, organizations assume that because they have rules that are attached to measures, the rules themselves must be sound no matter how misapplied, which is also a manifestation of Bureaucratic Compulsive Disorder or BCD. A likely outcome is that as the unintended consequences mount, the expectations lower. We may meet the measures, but only at the expense of true success, a recipe for mediocrity.
So, what is the reward system in your organization? What are the measures of individual success, and what are the goals? What are the unintended consequences? Does your organization inspire the best from its people or just the most? Does your organization emphasize doing things right while suppressing or even penalizing doing the right thing? If so, your organization may be suffering the effects of Goodhart’s law. And, what will you do with all those Soviet nails?
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The other day I went to visit my father in St. Agonistes Hospital about five hours from my home, where I got to witness a clear manifestation of BCD or Bureaucratic Compulsive Disorder, an affliction that compels organizations to do irrational things for their own sake. My dad has unfortunately been at St. Agonistes a lot in the past year, so I am familiar with their Covid protocols for visitors, which apparently have not changed much in the face of changes in our understanding of the virus and its treatment, such as the vaccine.
The rules are pretty basic. Visiting hours are limited to 11am to 6pm, a considerable reduction from the hospital’s former hours of 8am to 8pm. I guess limiting the hours makes it less likely that someone could spread the disease, but I doubt it. After all, if I have Covid, what is the difference between being there seven hours vs twelve? I am no epidemiologist, but I imagine that seven hours is plenty of time to spread an infection.
One other restriction is that you must check in at security when you enter so that they can take your name and information and write it next to the name of the patient you are visiting (and, yes, this is all done on paper). That way, no one else can visit that entire day. I don’t mean that they are trying to prevent two people from visiting the same patient at the same time. That sort of makes sense. I mean that the patient can have no other visitor for the rest of that day. It’s a weird rule. They enforce it by making you wear an address label with your name, the date, the room number, and the security officer’s initials.
When I went to see my dad, I got there a few minutes before 11am, and they crowded the fifteen or so visitors who were waiting into a small atrium, transforming the space into a sort of impromptu Covid rapid infection unit mitigated only by our requisite masks. A little after 11, they had us line up inside the lobby, which was awkward because people had to sort themselves in the order we had arrived since the atrium was too tiny to maintain a line.
Being polite or stupid or both, I just went last even though others had shown up after me. It took a while to process everyone, but it was smooth from there. No one asked about vaccinations or tests, but they did take my temperature. Of course, because of my visit, my brother could not see our dad that entire day. I would be my father’s only allowed visitor for the next 24 hours even if I only stayed a minute.
I relate this anecdote because I am fascinated by the bureaucratic thinking that went into maintaining these protocols. Maybe there is some compelling public health research backing these policies, but nah. The protocols seemed makeshift as though they were hastily established in the early days of the pandemic — when we were still disinfecting our groceries and avoiding our neighbors — and were left in place without reconsideration. Worse still, the hospital did nothing to alleviate or even acknowledge the considerable stress and anxiety that both patients and their visitors will naturally be experiencing in a hospital setting.
Disclaimers
Before I continue, I need to point out that I am no knee-jerk enemy of bureaucracies. I actually believe bureaucracies and bureaucratic functions are a necessary bulwark against arbitrariness except when, as at St. Agonistes, the bureaucratic policies themselves become arbitrary, which is all too often. I have written on this balance in the past.
Nor am I against Covid protocols. I am willing to do whatever keeps people safe. Finally I certainly recognize that, in the context of my father’s hospitalization, this situation was but a peccadillo. I merely document it as a fine instance of bureaucratic inaction.
What gets me about St. Agonistes’ Covid protocols for visitors is that they do not reflect our evolving understanding of the disease and new treatments. This neglect is probably due the fact that by one measure and one measure only, the most important measure, they have worked. The hospital has avoided major outbreaks with these controls in place. But it is an error to readily attribute this success to these overly restrictive visitor protocols, which is precisely what they seem to be doing. Such reasoning, for those keeping score at home, is what we call cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this), or cum hoc for short, a fallacious assumption that correlation is the same as causation.
Since the beginning of the pandemic when these policies were put in place, we have learned much more about how the disease spreads and how to prevent it. The arrival of mass vaccination, however imperfect, has been a game changer. Meanwhile, St. Agonistes does not even ask if you have Covid symptoms let alone a vax or recent test. So, I could saunter in sporting full-blown Covid and, so long as I did not have a fever, the only thing preventing me from spreading the virus is my mandatory mask. Take that, acute-care patients!
St. Agonistes’ persistent insistence on limiting the number of visitors throughout the entire day is likely due to what I call Bureaucratic Compulsive Disorder or BCD. BCD is born of the assumption that if an organization has reached a desired outcome, then anything that took place along the way of reaching that outcome must have positively contributed to the achievement and must be perpetuated. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. The common cry of the BCD afflicted is, and you have heard it many times, “But this is our policy!”
The hospital apparently assumes that because visitors were not spreading Covid, everything they were doing at the time must have been effective and therefore must be continued no matter how apparently unscientific, ineffectual, irksome, disheartening, and even cruel the rules are. It’s like concluding that because you were jauntily whistling the William Tell Overture the first time you went through the automatic door at your local supermarket, you must whistle that same tune every time forevermore to get the doors to work. Cum hoc reasoning, like its cousin post hoc reasoning, can lead to such compulsive behavior.
Perhaps I am all turned around on the effectiveness of St. Agonistes’ Covid protocols for visitors, but I doubt it. Their restrictions seem a great example of BCD inaction. We know that patients tend to do better when they receive visitors and that the quality of medical care increases when loved ones are present. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.
Worse still, St. Agonistes’ policy is likely counterproductive. We know there are more effective methods for preventing the spread of Covid than just arbitrarily limiting the number of visitors and the length of their visits. Combine that with our knowledge that limiting visitation will potentially lead to less desirable medical outcomes across the board, and you have a case of a hospital not doing its best for its patients.
Again, bureaucracies are not inherently bad and can be highly beneficial and even necessary, but if you work for or with a bureaucracy, be on the lookout for the signs of BCD:
Arbitrary rules and procedures
A callous disregard for unintended consequences
Rampant intransigence
A deep-set reluctance to self-assess
A lack of common sense, and
The dumbass mantra, “But this is our policy.”
If your organization suffers from BCD, it is up to you to call it out and root it out in order to keep our bureaucracies healthy and effective. Make it your policy.
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Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters
Bob Dylan
The sheer quantity of articles and quotations on the subject of leadership is impressive. Lots of people over lots of years have offered lots of advice — in the form of adages, axioms, and maxims — but, as with any human endeavor, the results are decidedly mixed. Some leadership aphorisms are wise and pithy while most are banal or overwrought. More than a few are outright stupid or misleading.
Frankly, I have been feeling a bit left out of the leadership aphorism party that seems to take place all over the interwebs, so I have decided to contribute one myself:
Leaders relate.
Profound, huh? Catchy, too. Let me explain. The best leaders build and maintain relationships. They understand that leading is about people, so their leadership starts with relating to people. Their people see their backside far less than their faceside. Most aphorisms on leadership fail to acknowledge this truth, but there are exceptions. Here are a few of my favorites.
Mahatma Gandhi
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
Gandhi’s insight is key to my argument. The best leaders are relationship builders first, not champions of battle, not lifters of heft. Leaders create connections with and among humans.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
This is one of my favorite leadership insights on how leaders motivate others in a particular direction. I have written in the past on the power of a common mission to drive people forward. Achieving this ideal requires communication and persuasion through an appeal to shared values.
In another famous quote, Eisenhower links leadership and integrity. Quite right. I have written on that as well.
Lao Tzu
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, “we did it ourselves.”
A cousin of the Eisenhower quote above, Lao Tzu’s contribution is that leadership is in service to a group and/or cause. True leaders are not in it for personal glory but for collective good. If personal glory is your motivator, you are not a leader. You are merely a boss, and a really bad one at that.
Napoleon Bonaparte
A leader is a dealer in hope.
Sure, Napoleon is a problematic character — what with the overly eager war-making and empire-building and all — but this one is a powerful insight about a leader’s relationship to people and the ability to conjure a shared vision.
Grace Murray Hopper
You manage things; you lead people.
Yup. Simple. Clear. Wise. One of the biggest problems in the land of Bossdom is that mediocre and bad bosses think they need to manage people as though they are things. I guess, then, it is inevitable that a few will also try to lead things as though they are people. It makes about as much sense.
Ralph Nader
I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Uncle Ralphie. I just discovered this one, and it expresses my animating principle precisely. The best leaders, like the best teachers, serve in order to replicate, but they do not strive to replicate themselves, at least not in any precise way. These leaders strive to replicate the ethos they have developed and live by.
For good measure, here are a couple of quotes on leadership that I abhor.
Anonymous
Leaders lead.
This one slays me. The only wisdom to observe here is the fact that the original spouter (the ur utterer) of this trite and meaningless aphorism remains unknown.
Tony Blair
The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Does this guy ever get tired of being wrong? Saying no is ridiculously easy for a leader — in fact, addictively so. By way of thought experiment, let’s review a short dialogue.
Employee: Boss, I wanna…
Boss: No.
Employee: But…
Boss: No.
Employee: Can I at least…
Boss: No. Now go away.
Aaaaaand scene.
Seems pretty easy to me.
In contrast, saying yes requires temerity and creativity in order to follow through. To be clear, though, saying yes and not following through courts disaster and is not worth entertaining.
Also consider that the boss who says no because they think it makes them seem tough is like the teacher who fails students for the same reason. The latter misses the point entirely about what teaching and learning are. The former misses the same about leading. I wrote a whole essay on this issue way back when entitled “Start with Yes.”
The last two quotes, by Messieurs Anonymous and Blair, are dogs in part because they neglect the human factor. Blair reduces people to nuisances while Anonymous reduces them to cyphers. Both focus entirely on the leader and not qualities of leadership or, more importantly, the people who are being led.
In the other aphorisms, note that their merit is centered on the leader’s relationship with others. As I said, the best leaders are relationship builders. They work with and rely on their people to get things done, which means they know how to consistently move people in positive directions. You cannot pull this trick off if you don’t cultivate healthy relationships, which is why one mark of a bad boss is a tendency to spend much time pouring over endless spreadsheets and requesting pointless forms rather than seeking and welcoming interactions with actual human beings.
One important caveat: having relationships with your people, even healthy ones, does not automatically make you a good leader. Most people intuitively know that bosses who take you out to dinner or invite you to a round of golf or buy you a birthday cake may be nice people but are not necessarily good leaders. Doing all those things is just fine, but leadership relationships are not about the leader being amiable. In fact, they are not primarily about the leader at all. Nor can you build such relationships with herky-jerky one-offs — the five-year pin or the lavish Christmas raffle or the obligatory round of kudos at the beginning of a mindnumbing annual meeting.
No, true leadership relationships are meaningful, robust, and ongoing and require constant attention, assessment, and adjustment — just like all functional human relationships. Good leaders seek to empower their people, and the best leaders strive to be outshined by their people and are proud to have participated in their success.
Furthermore, the best leaders build such relationships in three dimensions — down, up, and sideways — and over time. Again, it takes a lot to create such relationships and even more to consistently and persistently recalibrate, but doing so can help foster a gratifying and productive work life for all.
Therefore, good leaders relate, and from the relationships they build, positive movement ensues. As you seek to move others forward as a leader, you cannot overlook the vital power of relationship building.
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Because of the Thanksgiving Holiday, I am reposting this revised version of the first essay in my series, from October 1st, 2020. It articulates the essence of what I see as the only hope for improved leadership and healthy workplaces: human decency.
Decent is a slippery word, which does not exactly qualify it for stand-out status within the English lexicon. On the one hand decent just means mediocre, acceptable. A grade of 'C' is decent. If someone says that their team has a decent chance of winning, save your money. It is not a full-throated endorsement of a sure bet. A decent song is one that I will not complain about but do not care if I ever hear again. A decent television show is one to watch if there is nothing else on. No one will be pleased to drive a long distance or pay a lot of money just for a decent meal. Decent is good enough and nothing more.
On the other hand, decent as a mark of character is high praise. Saying that someone is decent indicates that they have a goodness of spirit, honesty, and integrity. I may not agree with a given politician, but if I deem her a decent woman, I am suggesting that I respect her rectitude if not her opinions or convictions. Saying an actor is only a decent performer but is also a decent person is neither redundant nor contradictory. It offers faint praise for the actor's thespian prowess even as it commends the actor's personal righteousness.
So, in one sense, as a broad descriptor, decent means "good enough" while on the other, as an assessment of human behavior and motivation, it means "better than good." (I told you, slippery.) Obviously, achieving decency in the first sense is the definition of unremarkable. Achieving decency in the second is a mark of distinction, particularly in our current environment of rampant indecency.
This latter sort of decency, the decency of character, can be exemplified by a particular episode I am aware of that took place in an organization when the longtime CEO was in her last year before retirement. This CEO was a woman of deep conviction and honesty. In short, she was a decent woman and a decent boss. In her last year, the organization committed to a multiyear contract with a vendor that promised to help put the organization on a whole new economic footing while maintaining its focus on its mission. The CEO and her staff probed this offer in every way, including contacting the vendor's current clients, and, while they learned that the road might be rough, they were assured that any struggles would be well rewarded.
As it played out, though, the vendor was unwilling or unable to deliver on its promises right from the get-go. In addition, and more troubling, the vendor pressured the organization's staff to commit to directions that were perilous to the organization and to its ability to deliver on its mission. Upon learning of this looming crisis, the CEO first sought to reset the agreement with the vendor, but the vendor failed to meet the terms of the revised contract as well. She then negotiated to rescind the contract altogether after that first year, thus sparing the organization unnecessary struggles and sparing her successor as CEO the burden of an untenable contract.
Think of the wherewithal her action required. The CEO first had to accept and admit that the arrangement with the vendor, however well intentioned, was in error and that she herself had been mistaken. She further had to convince herself that despite strategizing and budgeting around the tantalizing promise of financial rewards for the organization, the promise was empty. Now the organization had to make up for the consequent budget shortfall.
Had the contract been successful, it would have sealed her legacy as a CEO. If it failed, blame for its failure would have largely fallen on her successor, thus still preserving the CEO’s legacy. So breaking the contract must have required an extraordinary act of self-discipline. Indeed, she scuttled the deal as almost the final act of her longtime career in leadership. It was the right thing to do and could not have been easy to present to her board. The correct decision required a leader with a core of fundamental decency who was more interested in the ongoing mission of the organization than she was in securing a legacy or protecting herself.
In a counter example, a CEO at another organization discovered, upon taking office, that the organization was in dire financial straights. To his credit, he worked with his team to devise techniques to keep the organization afloat. He did not, though, devise a strategy for moving past its precarious state, and those emergency actions quickly hardened into norms. Over years, they became sacrosanct practices, "the way we do things," and any effort to undo or even question the efficacy of those norms was met with extreme hostility and even viciousness. Anyone who proposed or sought to modify the practices was suppressed or purged, no matter their intention or approach.
It became apparent that the organization's mission was now subordinate to the practices that had been established. This CEO did not have the wherewithal to unwind the web of emergency actions he had undertaken because he did not possess a decent character. His method was to bluster, distract, and bully to get things done, which got them through crisis, but then he had no other tricks and accomplished little — the symptom of his rampant indecency. The overall quality of the organization itself, inevitably, diminished with little hope of improvement due to the CEO and his team's fecklessness and malevolence.
Both stories are true although with identifying details altered.
The CEO in the first example was inherently decent and possessed the integrity to make difficult decisions even when they might reflect badly on her. The CEO in the second example was truly indecent. While he rose admirably to face the crisis early in his tenure, that effort exhausted his stock of mettle. Hence, one organization could continue to be excellent, even after a setback, and deliver on its mission while the other inexorably sunk below the mark of mediocrity and could not fulfill its primary objective. It was, as an institution, less than decent.
So, human decency engenders excellence, which should not be surprising. A wise man said that "excellence is the result of habitual integrity" (often attributed to Lennie Bennett). Since decency and integrity are merely separate words to represent a person's inner strength and potency of character, it is not surprising that both describe the ingredient necessary to foster excellence in all we do.
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Once upon a time, there was a university dean who became troubled, as deans are apt. She started wondering how she could honestly know what sort of boss she was. While there was an annual evaluation system available, it was poorly designed and offered inadequate means to assess her performance as a supervisor.
So she asked one of her faculty members, a good friend and a very wise and erudite psychologist, how one knows that one is not self-deluding. How, she wondered, could she appraise her own performance and be assured that she was not just fooling herself? After all, by definition, a delusion is an inability to process the world as it is. It is a deceit. How could she know that she was not deceiving herself? How could anyone in a position of authority be truly self-aware?
Her friend thought for a few long minutes before replying, “By asking that question.”
It’s not the most satisfying answer — I’ll grant you that — but it is a good answer. Someone who is self-deluding would be unlikely to sincerely question, well, anything for fear of bursting the bubble of delusion.
She resolved then to continue to check in with herself by regularly wondering, “are you fooling yourself?”
Of course, her perspective is as limited as anyone’s, so she also implemented several other techniques for knowing and monitoring herself.
Listening: She embarked on an ambitious effort to gather information to assess her performance by becoming a more active listener and a less judgmental observer. She also gauged others’ reactions to her. Here’s a pro tip: if your people suddenly grow quiet when you enter a room and/or grow boisterous as soon as you leave it, something is likely amiss.
Studying: She started reading a lot, attending leadership conferences, and participating in trainings to improve her skills as a manager and leader. Continually absorbing and applying the wisdom of experts takes real commitment, but it is an ongoing and necessary process.
Disseminating: But it is not enough to simply study helpful material. It must be disseminated to everyone to establish guiding tenets for bosses and employees alike. Two of the most instantly transformational books she read (many times) were The No A*e Rule and *Good Boss, Bad Boss, both byBob Sutton. She purchased stacks of these books and would hand them out freely. Faculty and colleagues got a copy of the first, department chairs got both. She conducted a training for faculty on the No A*e Rule* and constantly referenced its precepts. Eventually the people around her got the message as they collectively put Sutton’s clear principles into action.
Gathering: She still needed honest feedback, though, so she put together an extensive evaluation survey of her work and sent it to all her people. When the anonymous results came in, she reviewed them with her faculty and staff. It was not the most pleasant process for her, but she discovered much about her people’s perceptions of her and grew as a direct result of that evaluation.
Acting: Collecting all that information is a critical but meaningless process if you do not act on it. First, you must understand yourself from others’ perspectives — and there is always more than one — and then you must apply the Golden Rule combined with radical empathy. The steps may be clear, but implementing them requires a vulnerability that most people, especially bosses, instinctively eschew. This part is not to be skipped, though. There is no fudging vulnerability.
Empowering: Even armed with all this knowledge and the will and means to put it into practice, she was not satisfied. No matter how much you look within or try to see yourself from without, it is challenging to monitor yourself and apply what you know on a daily basis, which is why she went one step further by ordering her lieutenants to call her out (candidly and privately) if she ever crossed a line. The most important line was between being a decent person and being an a*e, as Bob Sutton defines it.
One of her proudest moments as a dean was the first time one of her direct reports said to her, “You know, that email you sent yesterday made you sound like a bit of an a*e.” She praised him privately and then again publicly for his candor and apologized sincerely to the email’s recipients, all of whom, it turns out, had just written it off as no big deal.
To be sure, there were many, many times she crossed the line or failed as a boss, but her goal in all things was not perfection but constant improvement. Her efforts at dispelling delusion made her realize that self-awareness is perpetually fleeting, which is why she developed such a large and multidimensional net to capture it. No one thing will keep that old boss-ego and its consequent self-delusion in check, so you need to do them all some of the time and some all the time.
Policing and assessing your own behavior can be daunting and exhausting. Choosing self-delusion is decidedly easier — at least in the short run. Quickly, though, delusion — as with all deception — will undermine your integrity and erode your effectiveness. Delusion is a form of corruption. The trust that self-awareness engenders in others and in yourself, in contrast, can be positively and permanently transformational for yourself, your people, and your organization. Dispelling delusion is a perpetual effort, but is vital for upping your boss game.
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For P.J.S.
Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity
Bob Dylan
We are hearing a good deal about the Great Resignation, the phenomenon of a surprising number people dropping out of the workforce since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Many pundits and employers have claimed that people have stayed away from work because of pandemic unemployment benefits expansion. Others have noted fears of Covid in the workplace and childcare needs complicated by Covid. Still others have figured that Covid has given some folks the opportunity to dream big, to stretch themselves, to become more entrepreneurial, and to light out on their own. A vocal handful say that people have just enjoyed being out of work during pandemic shutdowns and don’t want to go back.
No doubt, all these reasons are true to varying degrees. The commonality is, of course, the Covid pandemic and its collateral effects. One such effect that most analysts overlook, though, is the sheer pressure the pandemic and pandemic restrictions have put on workers. People have been ready to pop for nearly two years because of the pandemic and its limitations. Worse still, that pressure is merely in addition to the considerable pressure people were already feeling due to the strictures of their daily work lives. At some point, something has to give. Economist Paul Krugman calls this phenomenon the “great rethink.”
A Far-too Typical Tale
I have an acquaintance who is retiring a few years before he intended, not because of Covid, per se, but because of how his boss handled employees during the pandemic. My friend worked as an engineer with his company for 40 years, a rare display of loyalty at this point in history. In fact, while he has worked in the same place all these decades, the employer itself has changed hands, direction, and focus multiple times. So my friend’s situation is even more unique in that he has stayed put for forty years while his employer changed around him.
Needless to say, my friend has been a faithful employee and invaluable to his employer, but that is not to say he has always been treated as such. Being invaluable has probably insulated him somewhat from the worst management behavior, but all that turmoil around him has taken its toll.
One challenge is that for years he has been forced to travel to job sites, often spending long periods far from home. These trips are not much fun. While he may have logged a good deal of time in Belgium, it was all labor and little lager. His downtime was minimal and afforded him virtually no opportunity to enjoy the sights. This kind of travel is just grueling and demoralizing.
When the pandemic was at its peak, like so many others, he had to work at home. Still, his employer sent him to distant sites even in places where the virus was then raging. As retirement age drew closer, he began to reassess this situation. The fact is, his employer was knowingly putting his health and the health of his loved ones in peril.
He decided to tell his boss, a relatively new manager, that he did not want to travel as he could in fact do the same work remotely. My friend cited some recent health concerns and an ailing father as his primary reasons, and this newbie boss, talking to an employee with four decades of service, in all his wisdom, demanded a doctor’s note.
Demanded. A. Doctor’s. Note.
What is more, my friend soon learned that this twirpy bosslette had discussed his request with colleagues — not other managers, but my friend’s co-workers. My friend then decided enough was enough. Originally he had planned to stay on for a few years, but the insult of the boss’s indiscretion on top of the injury of the boss’s ham-handed management style was too much after so many years of such nonsense. He announced that he would retire on his 65th birthday, about six months away. The boss then backed off the travel request and begged him to stay several more months. My friend agreed to stay on one extra week. This is that week.
Anyone who works would find nothing surprising in this tale except maybe my friend’s resolve. The elements are typical: a loyal employee of longstanding, a fickle employer that respects the work but not the person, and a feckless boss who only has one perspective — his own. Now my friend is retiring earlier than he intended, the company is out a valuable (if not valued) employee, and the manager will continue bumbling along his path of increasing ineptitude, intoxicated on his moonshine version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A little humility and a little humanity on his part would have avoided this whole thing.
I call this sort of management legacy bossing, in which a boss persists with the same-old, same-old practices in the face of evidence of abject failure. It is a consequence of a lack of imagination, common sense, and guts.
The D-Word
Yes, employers are having trouble with staffing because of all the reasons I listed in my opening paragraph. Some still hold out hope that things will go back to the old way now that the federal government has ended enhanced unemployment. Others are beginning to offer incentives like remote work, more vacation, and even more pay. Nonetheless, many workers do not seem to be budging yet. Why?
I think much of the answer is evident in my friend’s tale. He had done nothing wrong and yet was treated as though he were making an unreasonable demand. Even after the boss backed off, my friend never received the dignity that he deserved.
The dignity we all deserve.
I suspect that many people are not flocking back into the workplace — even when incentivized — for reasons just like my friend’s. It’s not about the money or the perks. To put it succinctly, they are tired of being treated like crap and are not going to take it anymore.
There is a lesson here if you are a boss or aspire to be a boss. Assure that you are a leader first. Effective leaders know how to handle people with the respect they warrant, not because they have been faithful employees for decades but because they are people. (This would be a good time to refamiliarize yourself with the Golden Rule.) With few exceptions, people want to be treated like people, not like interchangeable cogs, not like cattle, not even like hothouse orchids or prima donnas. Just people.
When your employees eventually make their ways back or when new ones come into the workforce, think about this fallow period. Then, recall your most miserable employment experience. What made it so bad? Was it the work itself, or was it something else, like the way you were treated? Think of the best boss you ever had (assuming you had at least one good boss, if not, you can borrow mine), and think of how that boss treated you. If that boss were in charge when you had that awful job — and my guess is that your best boss was not — would that job have been more bearable?
Now, go be that good boss, or, better still, be an even better boss. Be better than the best. You can get started by tapping into your own human decency.
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I feel a change coming on
And the fourth part of the day is already gone.
Bob Dylan
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Peter Drucker
People do not resist change when it is their choice. People resist being changed.
Michael Basch
The culture of any organization can seem immutable to those within it. That is certainly the case in higher education. Many colleges, like many organizations of all stripes, tend to view their cultures as almost sacrosanct, as though they can never, will never, and should never change. I know I lost out on several university dean jobs when, during my interview, I offered observations of culture and the need to innovate. I even had a slideshow on the subject to support my presentations to faculty and staff. People would nod along with my ideas, but I was told more than once that my so-much-as-mentioning change or innovation was too “scary” for people.
It’s not that the faculty, staff, and administrations of these institutions were oblivious to the often glaring need to alter their practices in order to move forward. In fact, that very criterion was frequently listed in the position descriptions. Once when I started as the chief academic officer (provost) of a college, the president flat-out told me that she wanted me to change their academic practices in order to improve the educational outcomes, but she warned me that I needed to “mind the culture.” Well, duh.
What I quickly learned, though, was that the prevalent culture of the administration and the prevalent culture of the faculty and staff were wildly divergent at that school. In fact, the faculty and staff were hungry for new directions and understood that their longstanding culture would need to adapt. Meanwhile, the president and her administration believed that somehow you could effect meaningful and lasting progress without altering the standard practices and assumptions that the administration perceived as the culture. In this way, the faculty and staff were far more realistic than the president and her closest advisors. That college did not deserve the faculty and staff it had.
Most evidently, strategic change of any value is not possible without cultural change. Not understanding this fundamental concept of organizational thinking is tantamount to repeating the same actions over and over and expecting different results. Insane. Not surprisingly, that college and I soon had to part ways, and, of course, that college continues to founder as its administration pits its own self-perceptions against reality.
I relate this tale not to tout my own competence. I made plenty of mistakes there that certainly hastened my departure. My point is that culture is a far more potent factor in the reality of an organization than strategy or even policy. This is why government and military reform is so hard to accomplish the way we usually go about it. We imagine that by changing the rules, the structures will change. The truth is that even if we manage to alter a few elements, the whole structure will ultimate continue to bend to the prevailing culture.
So what makes culture so formidable? Unlike structures, strategies, or policies, we internalize culture. Culture is a mindset, a habitual way of thinking. Culture creates paradigms in our minds, and soon those paradigms become personal practices. Similarly, organizational practices are always subservient to the culture. The only way to intentionally effect organizational change — to innovate, and to make progress if such outcomes are not part of the culture — is to alter the culture as it lodges in each individual and manifests in their interactions. That, obviously, takes time, care, and much patience.
The reality is that all culture can change, and it in fact invariably does — just not always at a sufficient pace or in a proper direction. Since culture is driven by people, the most obvious way to intentionally change a culture is to change the personnel or make some other drastic and sudden alteration. When that is impractical or undesirable — which is almost always the case — prepare for a long slog. Even when the current personnel desire a new direction or practice, it takes time and patience and openness to ween them from the familiar and move everyone in the desired direction. It’s just like teaching.
Any educator of any worth knows that quality learning does not take place when students are complacent and comfortable with the material. Students need to operate outside the conditions to which they have grown accustomed to absorb any new understanding. After all, you cannot learn something that you are already familiar with. The best teachers are expert at pushing students to push themselves — not just to work hard but to work different.
For instance, my oldest friend is a high school English teacher, and I have had the privilege and felt the joy of observing him at work. It’s like being at the circus and wowing at the highwire act. He moves his students by removing the net, and their engagement and excitement is evident. That’s how learning happens. His students are lucky. They never get to stagnate.
It is with learning as it is with culture. For an inert or misdirected organization to improve, its culture must change first, and real culture change can be a slow and arduous process, like reading a difficult piece of literature for the first time. But, as with reading literature, the payoff can be considerable. As a novel progresses, new worlds of ideas and insights can unfold to a mind that is receptive to them, and the same is true with a culture. As a culture progresses, minds change with it.
Note that in both the classroom and in the workplace, the teachers and the bosses have to be open to progress themselves and actively encourage it. These leaders also have to be willing to accept new directions they may not have ever conceived. For instance, my friend the teacher will allow his students to discover new ways of thinking he never anticipated, and he is skilled enough to shape those discoveries to keep the students on the right track. A good manager does much the same, remaining open to novel approaches, ideas, and even directions but able to focus still on the desired outcome.
Yes, change is scary, and — Halloween lore, haunted houses, and slasher flicks aside — humans tend to abhor scary. But beings, minds, and organizations that don’t change and progress are in fact dead or damn close to it. Change in any living organism or organization is therefore inevitable, so understanding how we change is critical. Step one is to willingly dip your toe in the unfamiliar. Step two, dip a second toe.
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Frank Sinatra scored a massive hit in 1969 when he recorded Paul Anka’s adaptation of a French song that Anka entitled “My Way.” Despite reports that Sinatra personally disliked the song’s “self-indulgent” lyrics, penned by Anka, and until Sid Vicious released the definitive rendition of the song nine years later, no song has ever been more identified with Sinatra the man and the singer. Whatever one feels about the song or about Sinatra — and I must say I have always found both cloying and bumptious — it is hard to ignore the power of his performance and the defiant stance of the lyrics.
The most combative words of the song arrive at the opening of the second verse.
Regrets, I've had a few
But then again too few to mention
I did what I had to do
I saw it through without exemption
Think of the arrogance of this passage. The song could be titled “My Way (or the Highway).” It’s a song that is befitting the patriarch of the oligarchic Roy family in the television satire Succession, or, for the more literary-minded, the general in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ exquisite and excruciating satirical novel Autumn of the Patriarch. (I recommend both.)
Nonetheless, Anka’s lines do raise an interesting question. What is the point of regret?
To make heads or tails of regret, we will have to differentiate regret from guilt. Guilt has to do with past action or inaction we had some choice or informed agency over whereas regret refers to past action or inaction that we could neither predict nor control. In fact, the song misuses the word regret. Anka seems to be referring to actions that were taken with full knowledge of their repercussions as the third and fourth lines of the second verse indicate.
I did what I had to do
I saw it through without exemption
Clearly Anka’s singer has not experienced regret but episodes of guilt — just a few, but then again too few to mention — which Sid Vicious’ video of the song (linked at the bottom of the essay) makes clear.
So, properly understood, regret has to do with consequences from past action or inaction that we had no control over and cannot correct. In this way it has much in common with its counterpart, worry.
In the U.S., we have witnessed the proliferation of a vast anti-worry industry staffed by an army of gurus, our greatest being not the inescapable Dr. Phil or even the ubiquitous Xanax but Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of MAD magazine and the ur anti-worrier. Neuman’s sage motto — “What, me worry?” — inspired generations of youth to release their niggling cares, relax, and read humor comics. We can learn much from him.
As Mr. Neuman’s astute bon mot suggests, worry can do absolutely nothing to improve tomorrow and only can ruin today. Like regret, worry addresses events we cannot control. My intense worry that my doctor’s appointment next week will bring bad news can have no influence over the outcome. If the doctor’s report is good, I may be flooded with relief, but I will also have wasted a week fretting for no reason. If the doctor delivers bad news, I will likely be overcome with dread — worry’s more onerous sibling — and thus my self-imposed misery increases and continues.
We may be tempted to accept regret and worry as “only natural,” which they are, but they are so as vestiges of a past that has not existed for thousands of years. Whatever evolutionary advantage they may have once provided to our distant ancestors, it is difficult to see what good they do us now. And yet, here they are, lurking in our daily lives and in our guts. Yes, they are part of our nature, but we can, with practice, consciously dispel them.
Note that worry has no agency over the future, so what, me worry? And for that matter, regret will not change the past, so why regret? Indeed, both regret and worry can overwhelm our capacity to correct negative experiences, as in the case of regret, or avoid them, as in the case of worry.
In the end, and with all due respect to the talented Mr. Anka, Mr. Neuman’s sentiment is the more sagacious. Anka’s lyrics coldly dispense with past error as a meaningless inconvenience while Neuman’s motto is more nuanced — a simple rhetorical question cum statement of resolve. Under Neuman’s schema, each of us can still look on the future, near and distant, while leaving room to address but not anguish over it. In contrast, Anka’s expression of non-regret cum guiltlessness does not allow for concern or correction at all. It is brutal in its irresponsibility and its disregard for the damaged world that the narrator is leaving behind.
Living a life without regret or worry is a worthy pursuit, but a life with no concern for consequences — past or future — is an empty one marked by emotional self-isolation and hard-hearted self-regard, all set to the accompaniment of a treacly melody. The choice really is simple: reject the vapid Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra/Sid Vicious bravado and its saccharine melody and embrace your inner Alfred E. Neuman. What, Me Worry?
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Who is the best boss you ever had? What made that person such a good boss? Or, was that person a good boss? After all, better is not necessarily good. Being the best of a bad lot is like being the half-empty McDonald’s container that perches at the very top of the city landfill. Sure, you have pride of place, but so what?
I am lucky in that the best boss I ever had was actually quite a good boss. I am unlucky in that — even taking into account my teenaged years — the contest for the best boss I ever had was not particularly competitive. We’ll call him “Fred.” Fred was a university president, and Fred ran away with the Best Boss title like a thoroughbred against a heard of goats.
To be clear, Fred was not perfect, which is not remarkable, given his persistent status as a human being. Most importantly, Fred was not a perfectionist. He did not seek undue control, nor did he expect an error-free work environment. Indeed, he was open to and capable of identifying error, even his own, in order to learn from it. Lordy be!
I want to be up front and confess that most bosses I have had would not identify me as an ideal employee. For one thing, I have never been a fan of authority, which maybe helped me be a bit of a better boss when I became one. Also, I have a bad habit of expressing impatience with hypocrisy, dishonesty, obfuscation, and incompetence, which all seem to be the congenital traits of the typical inhabitant of Bossyland. To be clear, I, being human and all that, am guilty of all these foibles and faults, but I aspire to identify and eliminate them from my behaviors. In short, I am a lousy employee because I refuse to put up with BS, even my own, and I abhor bullies. Bully-bosses are the worst.
So, aside from a healthy relationship with perfection and not being a bully-boss, what made Fred stand out?
Integrity: Why is this one so hard? Are we so flawed as a species that we regularly elevate and embrace leaders who feel obligated and subsequently empowered to cut corners, avoid responsibility, and promote their own interests first? If you want to know what made Fred stand out more than any other quality, it was his integrity, which was evident on even his worst days. All his other virtues flow from this one. I wrote about the importance of integrity to leadership and the achievement of excellence at some length, so you may want to revisit that essay.
Values: Undergirding integrity is a strong sense of values, the most important being a commitment to basic human decency. If you are not entirely sure what constitutes your workplace values, ask yourself these questions:
What motivates you to action and keeps you going?
What hill are you willing to fight for?
What hill are you willing to sacrifice for?
What hill are you willing to die on?
Note that not being willing to consistently fight or to sacrifice or to die to protect a particular hill is in itself an expression of values. And avoid rationalizations. Not being willing to be fired for defending your values because you “can do so much more good” in your current position may be more indicative of your personal interests and ultimate motivator than it is of your altruism.
Smarts: Yeah, Fred is a smart guy, but he also is natural-born student. As any educator worth two cents knows, intelligence is not predetermined and not set. Just as one can get stupider over time, one can get smarter over time, and the most effective way to do so is by continuing to learn. Ongoing learning need-not mean enrolling in adult courses. Learning merely requires openness, curiosity, and a willingness to change one’s mind. If you are amenable to learning, you will learn. Fred is a learner.
Honesty: It is a bit silly to separate honesty from both integrity and values, but I do so here because Fred is markedly honest. His honesty extends to all aspects of his practice including — as far as I can tell — an ongoing, forthright critique of self. I say “as far as I can tell” because I am not in Fred’s head, but his self-critique appears evident in his actions.
Commitment to Excellence: Again, a dedication to integrity inevitably leads to excellence, but Fred’s focus on excellence was always extraordinary. His leadership team knew not to rest on its past successes as we worked to continually improve. After all, in the deep and wide ocean of life, if you are not swimming forward, you are — at best — treading water … and see how long that might last.
Putting Mission before Ego: Fred’s commitment to excellence was a counterpart to his commitment to the institutional mission. Fred was a university president, and, sadly, many university presidents I have seen think that their interests and the institution’s interests are intricately intertwined if not indistinguishable — a manifestation of their rampant, bestial egotism. Whatever they profess, these preening narcissists would burn whole institutions down if they thought it would benefit them, and some of them do. We see these solipsistic creeps in politics too.
Willingness to Take Risks: This was probably Fred’s biggest shortcoming. You have to understand that Fred is a lawyer by training, and thus chronically disinclined to take many risks. A willingness to take risks — not to act recklessly, but to wisely approach unpredictability with a healthy caution mixed with forward motion — can be key to a leader’s success since the leader’s integrity will assure that his or her core is solid enough to overcome failure. To his credit, Fred may have been resistant to risk, but he was not entirely allergic.
As for all my other bosses stretching way back to my youth in the 1900s, the best of them ranged from okay but disengaged to okay but limited. The rest of them were out-and-out toxic and ranged from utterly inept to megalomaniacal — oh, the stories I can tell! Sadly, Fred and I worked together only for one year due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, but ever since, I have strived to be more like Fred, which is quite a challenge.
So, if you are a boss or a leader or aspire to be so, challenge yourself. Be like Fred.
If you have had a good boss, what made that person so good? Would you give them a Freddie?
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Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens
The epigraph here from the poet Wallace Stevens can be a little baffling to the uninitiated, so a quick explanation is in order. If you are familiar with this quote and its meaning, just jump ahead.
The assertion appears twice in Wallace Stevens’ well-known poem “Sunday Morning” (1923). Perhaps you read the poem in a lit class. Most simply, Stevens is suggesting that in suffering loss, we discover what we have. In other words, if all the world were crammed with blooming flowers year round with no wilting or rot, we would cease to value their loveliness. Therefore, because death and rot are inevitable, we appreciate the aesthetics of what we have. It is a commonplace, but Stevens articulates it most succinctly.
Steven’s observation is in line with the Stoic concept of momento mori, a practice in which the contemplation of mortality leads to greater appreciation of that and those which we value. The Stoics, by the way, are not the joyless weirdos that our culture imagines. Stoicism, as practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, mostly emphasized the preeminence of virtue and positive emotions — such as happiness — over destructive emotions — such as anger or fear. The Stoics were not cold and indifferent as they are often conceived. They just preferred to experience the good emotions while avoiding the bad ones.
Philosopher William B. Irvine in his excellent The Stoic Challenge explains the concept of memento mori well.
I, too, will someday utter my last words; indeed, there is a long-shot chance that I have already uttered them. More generally, for everything I do, there will be a last time I do it. You might think these are dark and depressing thoughts, but they can have just the opposite effect. They can help us transform our ability to speak from something we take completely for granted into what it in fact is — something remarkable and precious.
So in that spirit, perhaps these here are the very last words I shall ever write.
Or maybe these.
…
Think of the last meal you consumed. What if you learned it was, indeed, your last meal ever? Would you be disappointed by the realization that a bowl of Cocoa-Puffs in milk may be the final food you ever gobble, or does the thought make you appreciate all that refined sugar all the more?
What else might you enjoy but take for granted? Walking, watching sunrises, sex? Some reading this essay may in fact not be able to do one or more of these things, a reality that warrants a little contemplation.
Yes, depending on your religious or cosmic beliefs, death will likely have an observable deleterious effect on your ability to indulge in physical pleasures. Alternately, in some afterlife, all physical pleasure will be persistently in such abundance that we remain perfectly, perpetually, and unspeakably satisfied. Stevens, in “Sunday Morning,” plays with this idea of “imperishable bliss”:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth.
In this vision of paradise — lush, magnificent, and permanent — heaven turns out to be a dreadfully dull place. If everything is forever and ideally wonderful, nothing can then fill us with wonder. Hence, “Death is the mother of beauty.”
Maybe contemplating death is a bit too heavy, so let’s take your inevitable demise out of the equation. When was the last time you traveled abroad for fun, the last time you turned on the lights to dissipate the darkness, the last time you freely petitioned or protested the government? What if each of these experiences was your last time ever despite a long life ahead of you? After all, the end of each is quite conceivable.
In the midst of a pandemic, we can see the unintended perils of international travel, which may lead us to reject it utterly or governments to discourage and restrict it.
In an age of massive weather disruptions as well as rampant cyber attacks, our electrical infrastructure can seem one incident away from total collapse. If you have ever been afflicted by a lengthy blackout, you know how debilitating that would be as your freezer defrosts once and for all.
In an moment when our very democracy seems in peril, we have witnessed chaotic responses to legal protests, sometimes from government actors sometimes from counter-protestors. How much more mayhem can we endure before we sacrifice our fundamental right and ability to peaceably assemble in order “to petition the government for a redress of grievances?”
If you knew your last time doing any of those things was the very last ever, would that change your perspective at all? I last traveled abroad in 2019 on a trip to Israel. As much as I enjoyed that visit, would I have tried to extract even more enjoyment from it if I knew I could never travel again? Would I have stayed longer, done more, visited more sites, eaten more shakshuka? I have no guarantee I will ever travel to other countries again, so the question is not academic. As it happens, simply imagining that was my last sojourn abroad renews my appreciation. Even writing this paragraph summons a sudden desire to look through the many photos I took there and recall the joy I felt at the sights and the sounds.
Momento mori is a powerful force.
The Stoics remind us that there is a last for everything in this life — a last time we will see a loved one, a last breath we draw. Contemplating the temporary nature of our earthly existence need not be morbid or self-indulgent, but just recalling and briefly contemplating our impermanence can be enough to spark renewed appreciation for life and all it offers. Indeed, “Death is the mother of beauty.”
Signing off til next time. If there is one.
By the way, if you are interested in reading more about Wallace Stevens, I recently published a piece on him and his literary conversation with my good friend Bob Dylan (note: we have never met) about, of all things, death. You can read it online in the summer 2021 issue of the Dylan Review.
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S. Elliot
Imagine a clock. Not the face of the clock, but the sound.
Listen carefully.
What do you hear? Is it a tick, tick, tick or a tick-tock? Is there a whir of an electric motor? Is there the ding of a bell or maybe the sound of a cuckoo? Perhaps you conjured a digital clock with no sound at all. What a buzzkill that is.
These are the sounds (or hush) of keeping time as we conceive it. Not so long ago, such precise mechanisms did not exist to reliably measure and mete out time. There was the sun and circadian rhythms and later some crude devices, but no timepiece directed all of our lives from moment to moment.
But now everything is clocks everywhere, the little dictators of our lives. We wear them on our wrists, consult them on our phones, and squint up at them as they tower over our towns. Think about it. A clock of all things, Big Ben, is one of the most potent symbols of Great Britain. And don’t get me going about Prague.
Years ago, when I taught English in college, I had a fairly small office that I outfitted with a humongous clock I bought from IKEA. This thing seemed to filled the wall behind my desk, and I loved students’ reactions when they first would see it. I had puckishly hung that absurdity as a lark, but I found it served to disrupt my students’ assumptions by becoming a running joke that helped to dissipate the stuffiness they had anticipated.
Usually during a meeting, a student might glance up to consult that massive clock, and I came to realize that knowing the time gave them an element of control over a situation in which they had the distinct disadvantage. Keeping time, it turns out, can be a comfort. So yes, the clock is a dictator, but in this other way it can also be a liberator.
Clock, the Dictator
Eventually I became a dean, and, in the natural pecking order of academia, I reported to a provost. My boss had only one clock in his large office, an unimpressive institutional timepiece that hung behind whomever he was meeting with — the reverse of my faculty office set-up. Unless you had the temerity to check your watch, only he knew the time at any moment, and whoever controls the time controls the meeting.
I doubt he had the foresight to deliberately position the clock behind his visitors for this purpose, but he certainly exploited its advantage. His manipulation of meeting times was one of the several ways you knew your status. If you were in his good graces, your one-on-one meetings with him would start promptly and linger well beyond their designated end while you chit-chatted about baseball. If you fell out of favor, your meeting might start ridiculously late and last only a few minutes, and then he would mostly just tell you about how he was in a rush to get ready for a lunch meeting even though it was only 10:30 AM. Without ever being told, you knew you were unworthy and unimportant.
Clocks, the Liberating Force
After I grew wise to how my boss used the placement of his clock to manipulate his underlings, I started scattering small clocks all over my office. I had learned that on Dean’s Island clocks are of more consequence than they are in Faculty-land. With my boss as an instructive negative paradigm, I decided that anyone who came into my office for any reason, no matter where they sat, could at the very least see the time.
It didn’t matter whether they were there for a friendly conversation, a demitasse of espresso, a formal one-on-one, a job interview, a yearly review, or even a disciplinary evaluation. They would have the same awareness of the passage of time as I did. A bunch of clocks did not level the playing field, but it was a subtle reassurance, one that certainly did not even register consciously for most. The clocks were a gentle, but effective liberating force, and I liked to think they helped me cultivate healthier relationships with my people than I ever had with my boss.
Clock, the Oppressor
It is difficult to conceive of the world as it once was, without clocks. The precision of time measurement can be a massive distraction and even an obsession. My father is approaching 90, and every conversation he asks me the date and the time, sometimes more than once. He grows anxious about getting ready for dinner hours beforehand. If someone is supposed to come by “in the afternoon,” he gives up on them by 2:30. Time, as measured by clocks, saps his life of its joy.
When I say time, I am not talking about aging. There is no reason that aging should be a joyless experience. In fact, there is considerable evidence that we generally grow more content as we grow older, and I imagine that it is so in some part because we do not need to be as beholden to the clock as when we were working.
But the insidiousness of the clock remains. It infects us and misleads us throughout our lives and can come back to oppress us gratuitously as it seems to have done with my dad.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can all agree that time is not the clock, nor is the clock time any more than the tape measure is length or the scale is weight. Time, really, is just a component of our experience, an element we move through, like air or political scandals. Or maybe time, being odorless, colorless, and ultimately toxic to our existence, is more like carbon monoxide — merely a byproduct of our propulsion through life.
Indeed, it’s the clock’s measurement of time that can be so oppressive, not time itself. Far from abandoning or renouncing the tyranny of the clock, though, we have gone ahead and added even more to our measurement regimes, strolling around with devices that record our heart rates and document our state of activity, even monitor our sleep! We are rapidly out-clocking the clock apparently under the ludicrous conviction that everything that can be counted counts.
Short of stranding on a desert island or some such thing, we can no longer escape the ceaseless tally of Clock, the Dictator. We are Clock’s servants, humble or otherwise, and Clock is a relentless overseer. So render unto Clock what is Clock’s, but keep time for yourself.
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Critical thinking is a critical buzzword among educators and others. I have no intention of offering a new definition of this often-abused term and defer to those who study the concept, which has long been explored in papers, at conferences, and in books. Indeed, entire organizations are devoted to understanding critical thinking, so no one needs to hear my meager musings on it meaning. Suffice it say that, from an educator’s point of view, critical thinking deserves all that attention. Students who are good critical thinkers not only excel in their education, but they also are more likely to succeed in life.
I want to differentiate critical thinking from what I call “thinking hard.” Both critical thinking and thinking hard require a degree of smarts and effort, but only critical thinking is rigorous in the truest sense of that word.
As it is, thinking hard is a major component of the proliferation of conspiracy theories on social media. Proponents of hard thinking profess to do their own research online, which unfortunately often results in getting caught in a bubble generated by the algorithms that power various apps or getting swept up in a self-affirming community. The quantity of the information and misinformation such people become exposed to is indeed challenging to process, and that difficulty mimics the more rigorous exertion of critical thinking. I am not going to get into the political aspects of the conspiracy theory world, but the impact of hard thinking on the current political divide is unmistakable.
Both critical thinking and thinking hard have clear markers. Some of these they share while others set them apart, which all-but demands depiction in a Venn diagram.
As I mentioned, an important marker of critical thinking is that it is rigorous. Merriam-Webster defines rigorous in this usage as “scrupulously accurate” or “precise.” I love the use of the word “scrupulously” in this definition, which itself conjures another marker of critical thinking. The critical thinker is scrupulous in the search for understanding, which is the ostensible goal of both critical thinking and thinking hard. The critical thinker is also open to ideas and evidence and does not start with a supposition that is so calcified that it resists scrutiny. In fact, the critical thinker regularly experiences self-doubt and is willing to reconsider and even abandon comfortable positions in the face of contravening evidence. Therefore, the critical thinker must maintain enough flexibility to adjust and adapt theory to fit fact. True critical thinking is rich in logic and data, even inconvenient data. Good critical thinkers, being human, make mistakes, are open to them, learn from them, and then apply that learning.
Thinking hard can be equally effortful and mimic critical thinking in terms of difficulty, but raw exertion is separate from rigor. Where the true critical thinker is scrupulous, a hard thinker is less concerned with scruples and more concerned with making a case. The hard thinker may be open at first but then becomes focused in only one narrow direction with a self-assurance that entertains few or no doubts. No adjustments of belief are possible, which means that evidence must bend to rigid theory rather than the other way round. Hard thinking is information rich, like critical thinking, which is why hard thinkers often crow about doing their own research, but it is resistant to logic and prone to fallacies.
Critical thinking is far from perfect, but it is a vital tool for getting at understanding. Hard thinking, by contrast, can be profoundly misleading and dangerous because of how it mimics critical thinking and fosters such devotion among its practitioners to its flawed conclusions. Critical thinking is not easily mastered, but it is necessary if we are to truly understand the world in which we live. Yes, it is a buzzword in education, but critical thinking deserves the buzz. 🐝
Here are a few other essays I wrote on thinking — critical and otherwise — in case you missed them.
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It shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.
Jonathan Swift
Look. I generally detest listicles and have resisted compiling them, with one exception: my spontaneous parody of the listicles that abounded in honor of the 80th birthday of my good friend Bob Dylan.
That said, enjoy the following listicle!
This one is on effective oral and written communication, but what I offer are not rules. They are more like guides, mere suggestions, helpful hints, noodgy nudges, and the like. After all, rules just beg to be broken. For instance, consider my personal rule that I don’t write listicles. So take that, rules!
The Lucky 13
- Clarity trumps everything.
In this statement, “everything” includes everything on this list. The fundamental goal of communication is to get a message across, and unclear writing axiomatically does not do so. Therefore, it is imperative that you eschew obfuscation and dispense with befoggery. Then again, virtually everything on this list has to do with maximizing clarity, so this listicle is merely an abundancy of redundancy.
By the way, if you write incoherently because you figure, “Tough nuts! I’ll communicate however I like because I’m the boss,” then be aware that, while you are successfully making that point, no other point is getting through.
- Know your audience.
Who is your audience? What do they look like? How do they dress? Are they nice? Do you think any of them might be willing to lend me some money?
Identifying your audience is key to how you will shape and tune your communication. If you are writing a blog that only a handful of friends will read, that is quite different than a blog that is open to the public and promoted on Twitter.
If you are not sure who your audience is exactly or if your audience is potentially very broad, a good trick is to imagine an audience that will absolutely and purposely misinterpret your communication. The fact is, they will.
- Know your genre.
“Genre” is fancy talk for format or type. Just like your audience, the format of your communication dictates many factors, including tone, length, style, etc. Writing an email is different than writing a letter, which is different than delivering a speech, and so forth.
Social media is a particularly perilous genre, especially for those of us who grew up thinking social was a word to describe disease and that telephones are utterly useless for taking photos. After all, where would you put the film? Even with that newfangled social media all the kids are into these days, though, these guides apply.
- Communicate the message you want to hear the way you would want to hear it.
This is the writing equivalent of the Golden Rule and is therefore a matter of empathy really. We have all had to suffer through poorly communicated material, usually due to a lack of clarity, so pity your poor audience and don’t try to wow them with quasi-profound obscurity.
Here is a simple exercise for mastering this Golden Rule of Writing.
Recall a piece of writing or other communication that you found baffling and confounding. If you ever had to read a paragraph over and over or asked the person sitting next to you, “What did she mean by that,” don’t assume the problem is with you. Instead, identify what made that communication so confusing and frustrating. Was it poorly structured? Did it use overly difficult language? Was it illogical?
Have you figured it out? Good. Now, don’t do that.
Here’s another helpful tip.
If you ever think to yourself, “oh, it’s okay. They will get what I mean,” you are wrong, just wrong. Rewrite. Partial (or wishful) communication is always miscommunication, and it’s your job to be clear. Don’t leave it to others to figure out.
- Sarcasm is a double-edged sword.
Go for it. Use sarcasm indiscriminately. You won’t regret it.
As a card-carrying Gen X sarcasm addict, I get cut by this one all the time.
- Mind your grammar and mechanics.
Know and respect grammar and mechanics but don’t obsess and don’t be slavish to the standards. Grammar is the rules for both oral and written language, such as how to use the parts of speech. Mechanics is the rules that apply only to written language, such as punctuation. Good grammar and mechanics usually aid communication, but reliance on the rules can also and should never hinder clarity or style.
For instance, you may wonder, “is it ever okay to break the rules and, say, use a sentence fragment or slang?” Sure nuff. Yup. Uh-huh.
And, while you are not obsessing over grammar and mechanics, don’t fall for bogus grammar rules. If you are not sure what I mean, go ahead and feel free to quickly look up “split infinitive.” I’ll wait.
Now look up “dangling preposition.” Got it? Good.
Now forget you ever learned about them. They are bogus rules.
And, one more thing. Fergodsake, spare us the confusion and just use the Oxford comma!
- Straight talk is a virtue.
Straight talk means getting to your point with as little fluff as possible. I wrote a whole essay on this once. You want to avoid passive aggressiveness, caginess, and over-wordiness, which lead to miscommunication.
One danger here is that straight talk can sometimes come across as curt and rude. Avoid being rude and turning off your audience unless you have reason to do so, such as they are all jerks. Also, be aware that emails are notoriously difficult to keep short and to the point without sounding impolite. I always try to include some pleasantries (“please,” “thanks”) and then sign off with an upbeat “best.” If you receive an email from me that does not include such courtesies, I probably just don’t like you.
Guides 8, 9, and 10 below are closely related but worth discussing separately.
- Go ahead, use cliches, but sparingly.
Don’t get your knickers in a knot over this one. Sometimes cliches are just the thing to get the job done. A wisely used cliche can be the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, and the right stuff. The heart of the matter is to make sure you use the right cliche at the right time so it’s not a fish out of water. And, bottom line, whatever you do, when it comes to cliches, don’t beat a dead horse.
- Euphemism is sometimes necessary, but it still flirts with miscommunication.
Euphemism is a way to avoid saying something directly, ostensibly to soften a blow, and that is a good thing. You wouldn’t say to a grieving child, “Hey, that sucks, your mom dying in that horribly gruesome way yesterday and all.” But euphemisms can also be purposely misleading. For instance, how might our views of war change if instead of using the euphemism “collateral damage” we straight up said “we killed innocents.”
- The same is true for jargon.
Jargon is specialized language that can aid internal communication in professional fields. Used externally, though, it is just showing off or, worse, participating in a conspiracy against the public. Lawyers are notorious for slinging jargon among civilians in order to wow and/or dumbfound the lay populace. My favorite legal phrase, by the way, is “to make whole,” as in, “my partners and I are confident that this generous settlement will be sufficient to make your client whole.” It just means “compensate totally.”
- Be bold.
Surprise your audience. Thrill your reader. Assault their comfortable assumptions. Don’t be afraid to take risks in your writing to get people’s attention and your point across. That last phrase, by the way, was a slick use of zeugma, which has nothing to do with Zumba, which has nothing to do with Roomba, which has nothing to do with rumba, which is a vacuum cleaner. No, wait. That one is a dance, or is that rhumba?
Anyway, don’t be ordinary.
- Remember COP — Clarity, Organization, and Precision.
This is a handy mnemonic acronym like FAN BOYS (for the coordinating conjunctions) or ROY G. BIV (for the colors of the spectrum).
We have thoroughly contemplated the virtues of C: Clarity. If you have already forgotten, go back to 1. And get that memory thing checked out by a professional.
O: Organization has to do with logic, and there is a really handy rule of thumb here: be logical. Can it be easier than that?
P: Precision is saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Be careful not to confuse accuracy and precision, though. Accuracy is always precise, but precision is not always accurate. Saying “it is now twelve, noon, on New Year’s Day” is precise but would be inaccurate if the real time were one in the morning sometime in July.
- Read. Listen. Mindfully.
I considered listing this one first because it is so important, but I made it last instead so it would stand out and linger in your recollection like the first time you woke up in bed next to a dead kangaroo or like a McDonalds jingle.
The best communicators are the best audience members first. Every communication you read or listen to is an opportunity to hone your skills. If something strikes your fancy (which is fancy talk for “you dig it”), try to determine why. Can you make that part of your repertoire (which is fancy talk for “stuff”)? In contrast, if someone’s attempt at communication vexes you (which is fancy talk for “pisses you off”), figure out why. How can you avoid doing the same thing?
—
Here’s hoping you find something useful here. If you take away one thing from this listicle, let it be that rules, guides, suggestions, and the like are supposed to enhance your communication. Never let them hinder your communication. And let me reemphasize 11: Be bold.
I know that I missed your favorite communication tip, so let me know your additions by email or, preferably, in the comments. If you disagree with anything here (and I’m sure some do), let me know as well. I look forward to the conversation.
—
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The human species is both blessed and cursed with an impressive power of recall. Recall allows us to review the past, searching for wins to replicate and losses to learn from. When we contemplate the present and future, sequences — the order of things — are difficult to ascertain or predict with any accuracy, but in scanning the past we can often easily see connections that escaped us at the time. We may notice that action B resulted from action A or that more activity in this particular venue at a particular time would have prevented this particular outcome. The power of recall is an important and mostly positive skill, but recall can also cripple us with regret and the subsequent need to overcompensate in future endeavors.
By recalling past information we can discern patterns (another human skill) and sometimes predict future events based on present choices, which generally is a good thing. Recognizing patterns kept our ancestors safe and fed by allowing them to understand when and where predators tended to lurk and when and where prey was likely to be about. Similarly, pattern perception teaches us to stay off Facebook when our boss is most likely to to stop by or to know which day of the week the grocery shelves are best stocked.
A problem arises, though, when we rely too much on that 20-20 hindsight and try to control, rather than just anticipate and perhaps shape, the present and future with what we have learned. Because we like to find patterns we imagine design even when none is there. We shake our fist and wonder, “Why does it only rain on weekends when I plan to barbecue outside?” Or, we discern figures in random clouds: “Look at that! It’s a donkey!” These patterns are, of course, nonsense, driven by wishful thinking and psychological quirks like selection bias.
But what about when our hindsight combined with our ability to suss out patterns causes us to overcompensate for past errors? Don’t get me wrong. Reviewing the past is vital so that we may identify mistakes, determine their causes, and learn from them. However, an important lesson we often overlook is that, except with the benefit of hindsight, some errors we identify may not have been preventable or avoidable. In other words, sometimes all we are left with is saying with a flourish, “it happens.”
Typically, when people react to past error, they tend toward a lock-down mentality. They want to establish more control so that errors cannot arise. All this brings to mind a former colleague of mine who convinced our boss that we could mitigate error by having all work and decisions reviewed by an array of individuals. Her preferred method? Forms! Forms soon abounded, and we even hired someone, this woman’s relative in fact, to develop more and more forms for us to use.
Employees started joking that we would soon need forms to access other forms, and, sure enough, in time, that’s exactly what happened. Such redundancy became the norm, and I came to understand that redundancy is micromanagement on steroids. Almost every form required multiple signatures to be obtained in a strict sequence from various authorities, and each signature line had a little checkbox next to it. If someone signed the form out of sequence or did not check the box next to their signature, the form was considered incomplete. No one was ever able to explain what the checkbox indicated, but it had to be checked. Maybe it was her analogue version of a captcha challenge test.
As we have seen in a previous essay, the more we try to control, the less we control, and increased control is rarely a useful strategy for problem solving let alone problem prevention. As we clamp down, we often generate more errors and lots of useless work, such as forms to access forms and signed approvals on top of signed approvals. As with all attempts at control, while certain errors may be avoided, redundancy primarily spawns new mistakes and much waste.
Generally, the rise of more errors and wasted resources causes control freaks to suffer a severe cognitive dissonance. They reason that because they have maximum control, errors and waste either do not exist or are due to others’ failures. Control freaks are driven to clamp down and then clamp down again by their belief in their own superiority and a pathological fear of failure, the former being untrue and the latter unwise. All too often, control freaks act like freaks because of the one reality they cannot control or extinguish: it happens.
Control freaks imagine they can constrain the future by constraining the present. They do not know how to predict the outcomes of their decisions and non-decisions, though, and they struggle to account for the inevitability of both the dullish it and the outlandish it happening.
This is not all to say that laissez faire approaches to management are the answer. Although sounding tritish, “it happens” can be a powerful invocation but is not a magic formula to shirk a reasonable effort to quash it from happening. But, we also must, in retrospect, accept that sometimes, beyond our ability to anticipate or vanquish, it happens.
Perhaps you will find some wisdom in this essay as you finish it. You may wish it longer or shorter or have thoughts to burnish it. Still, no matter how much you try to avoid or abolish it, no matter how much you pull or push, “it happens.”
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Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down
Robert Johnson
The great Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a revolutionary guitarist with a wicked way with words. While he still has a living stepsister who published a captivating memoir last year, much is not known about his life and death. Johnson’s prodigious musical powers in combination with his short life and enigmatic biography have naturally generated much lore, one tale being his visit to the crossroads.
Early in his brief and brilliant musical career he reportedly struggled to learn his instrument. He allegedly left his home in Mississippi and returned a transformed and transformative artist, capable of extraordinary musical feats — an innovator with fathomless potential. Thus began the legend of the crossroads.
The tale is that a young Johnson went to a mystical crossroads where he met the devil. There, as one does at a crossroads, he chose his path, cutting a deal that would see him become a musical legend. All he had to do was forfeit his eternal soul.
The story is bunk, of course, since everyone knows that the devil does not truck in retail but only in bulk, but it is a juicy tale. A similar myth has been attached to my good friend Bob Dylan, who, legend has it, himself visited with the devil shortly after leaving his home state of Minnesota.
As for Johnson, his two recordings of “Cross Road Blues” did nothing to dispel the myth of how he procured his prodigious talents.
So, what does this lore tell us about, well, anything? Is it a cautionary tale about how we should not wish to rise too fast and risk flaming out? Is that old saw — the one about how young stars who burn bright will die young — still even worth regarding? After all, if true, how can we explain the longevity and still-active careers of Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and even The Monkees?
The crossroads myth is about life choices. Stay on the straight path or take a turn. Rarely are the choices so stark as the temptation to go with the devil or not. In fact, most life choices, even the really momentous ones, may look as innocuous as picking a direction at an actual crossroad. The problem is, we can never really know what or whom our choice serves in the long run.
It is a truism that every choice has consequences, intentional or not, foreseen or not. While this may seem an obvious platitude, we often don’t connect our choices and their outcomes, whether as individuals or as a species. Even our innocent or seemingly innocuous choices can have unintended effects. For instance, buy local berries that happen to be packaged in a convenient plastic box, and you are — however minutely — supporting the fossil fuel industry and contributing to climate change. Purchase a newly renovated house in a revitalize neighborhood, and you may be participating in gentrification and the displacement of poorer residents. Contemplating and accepting personal responsibility for the consequences of our choices can make us uncomfortable, and too many people just cannot abide even the prospect of discomfort.
Part of the challenge of understanding the impact of our choices stems from our tendency to portray choices as binaries: right or wrong. You know the image: there is an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. You come to the crossroads. You can turn or travel straight on. But, even right choices can go wrong. Someone rushing an injured neighbor to the hospital (a right choice) may accidentally hit a pedestrian (a bad outcome). The effort to eat a plant-based diet (a good option) may increase demand for food transport and storage (a bad ramification). The desire to improve opportunities for the prosperity of the planet’s people (a worthy cause) ends up relying on activities and industries that destroy that planet (a bad effect).
So, then, perhaps the best thing to do is to make no choice at all. That option would be effective if not for the fact that, making no choice at all, standing still as the world passes by, is as much a choice as any, and one with usually undesirable consequences.
Once you have made a few wrong turns (or right turns that have turned out wrong), it is difficult to ascertain and understand how you arrived where you are and how to get back on your preferred track. We can really only forge ahead with more choices and more consequences.
Frankly, I sometimes wish it were all as cut and dry as Robert Johnson standing with the devil at the crossroads. Here is good, and here is bad. Here are the consequences of each choice: either flame out quickly in a life of decadence and musical genius or enjoy a long life albeit in utter obscurity. Be Achilles, the hero of epic poetry, or be some guy who sailed straight home from Troy without incident to work his farm and raise his kids. Choose.
Personally, I love binaries and find their clarity of selection both easy and satisfying, at least initially. You could look east or you could look west, as Johnson puts it. Over time, though, it gets pretty boring when every choice is a simple this or that with predictable outcomes: this thing is good and this other thing is bad. Reality, as it turns out, is much messier, featuring choices not as a series of uncomplicated crossroads and discernible directions but as a multitude of interwoven highways across an abundance of land leading to the vast uncertainty ahead. No, I guess the way things are— messy as they be — ultimately suits me better, at least that is, to quote Dylan, “most of the time.”
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Have you ever worked with a liar? I mean someone who just could not resist the urge to exaggerate, fabricate, fib, and prevaricate throughout the day. I am not talking about someone who has a diagnosable condition that compels them to lie. Nor am I concerned with someone whose grasp of reality is so tenuous that they cannot distinguish it from fiction. I mean someone who chooses to lie so much that it becomes almost an instinct, a mindless habit, like nail biting or Facebook.
Like you, I have worked with such people, and, probably also like you, have worked far, far too often for such people. For instance, I once had a boss who was such an inveterate liar that she would often forget she lied to you and then would later tell you the truth. Other times it was the other way around. She would also tell different people different versions of her lies. Her staff was aware of her hyper-mendacity, and some of us (the ones we could trust) would occasionally compare her latest lies in an effort to come to some consensus on what might be real.
Perhaps, and I hope this is not true, you have had a similar experience.
In an effort to distill limoncello from this rotted fruit, I chose to make a close study of Ms. Mendax (let’s call her) by trying to trace some pattern or find some purpose in her lies. After all, I reflected, she could be okay sometimes. Once I would even have called her a friend. And while I always knew she had an untrustworthiness buried deep, she also could be kind and even empathetic. So what caused Ms. Mendax to come to lie with such abandon, and why did the sheer quantity and audacity of her lies seem to increase over time? I mean, some of her whoppers were real knee slappers.
I could go into all the gory details of Ms. Mendax’s life, professional and otherwise, including her messy relationships, but I will strip my observations down to the core to keep things simple. Bear in mind, though, that these things are never quiet so clear cut.
Here are a number of my observations and conclusions.
Ms. Mendax obviously had been a liar long before I ever met her, and quite an accomplished one at that, but her lying saw an exponential increase at a particular crossroads in her life that I got to witness. It started small, innocently almost, with untruths about minor personal matters and activities, such as where she went for lunch and who with. Why the subterfuge? I will leave it to trained psychologists and licensed plumbers to determine why her mental sewage pipe sprung this leak. I only know that it did.
Conclusion 1. Lies don’t spontaneously generate, but they often start minutely, and the more self-serving they are, the more self-replicating.
For Ms. Mendax, her subsequent lies seemed to come even easier to her. Each lie lubricated the bowel through which the next lie would pass, and soon she could not help herself. Yes, when it came to lying, Ms. Mendax was incontinent. Smart people have actually studied this phenomenon. In the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers found evidence that due to a biological impulse the more you lie, the more and more you lie. So don’t blame the liar. It’s biology! I would add that not only does each lie make it easier to tell the next lie, but the need to cover up those earlier lies may make generating subsequent lies a necessity. Ms. Mendax often told lies to conceal her previous lies and then lied to cover up those lies, and it was off to the races from there.
Conclusion 2. Small, self-serving lies, infrequently told, soon grow larger and more frequent due to neurological propensities and practical necessity.
In addition to the neurological lubrication that her lies received and the need for subsequent lies to cover the initial lies, Ms. Mendax seemed to enjoy lying, particularly when she saw the consequences of her lies were fairly minimal. Ironically, her lies were a success not because her staff (the ones we could trust) believed her but because we could do nothing about them as she was the boss. Her lying put her on a wild power trip.
Conclusion 3. When people get away with lying, their success will embolden them to lie more.
Ms. Mendax came to revel in her ability to use information to manipulate her people. In the middle of a private meeting, she would say, “just between you, me, and the walls,” before serving up a large slab of baloney, a flagrant attempt to draw people into a corrupt intimacy that would have been laughable if some of her staff (the ones we could not trust) did not fall for it. Soon enough, she devolved into a full-time gaslighter.
Conclusion 4. Lies are ultimately a form of abusive manipulation and a means of control. If you capitulate to the lies, you become part of the corruption, but you resist at your peril.
Ms. Mendax’s lies served nobody, not even her most of the time. They accomplished nothing. They had no lasting purpose and only existed for the sake of existing, like a Kardashian. They became like a giant snowball rolling wildly down a mountain slope, gaining mass and momentum with no objective other than certain destruction at the bottom of the abyss.
Conclusion 5. Unfettered lying, like all corruption, is ultimately self-destructive and nihilistic.
Let’s call this accretion of lies the Snowball Effect. I have seen it play out with many others aside from Ms. Mendax, most notably her staff (the ones we could not trust). Even the smallest of self-serving lies, if unchecked, will tend to generate and accumulate more lies and rapidly grow out of control.
In the end, although Ms. Mendax ruled by fear and manipulation, she retired as a laughingstock, hated by her peers and her employees, and, as both a liar and a yelled, she has a snowball’s chance in hell of staying out of hell.
I relate this experience and my conclusions not to garner sympathy — let’s face it, it is hardly unique — but to serve as a caution. It’s the little lies, the convenient deceptions and concealments, that get you started on the runaway trip down that slope.
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Welcome to my first Ted talk.
Two types of politics pervade most workplaces. One is the politics of possibility, the idea that, through sheer persuasiveness and appeals to values, people can be recruited and motivated to work together for good. That their passions and their intellect can be encouraged to join forces in common cause for the betterment of all.
The other is sadly much more pervasive, the politics of power, which centers on the ego and the zero-sum game and relies upon the machinery of personal destruction. In this brand of politics, the we is never evoked but in service to the I. Accomplishments remain singular affairs. Even collaborative effort is merely the coming together of individuals in support of their individual interests. Practitioners of this political philosophy are the type who tend to claim most or all the credit no matter their contribution. For them, the betterment of the organization has no purpose but as a means or byproduct of the betterment of the self.
As a recovering academic, I have too much experience with the politics-as-a bloodsport crowd and the untold damage they inflict on individuals and institutions. Unfortunately, in most industries, the same politics of winner-take-all overwhelmingly dominates. Individuals seek to position themselves to protect their interests at the expense of their organizations, their clients, and even their missions. The ignoble and petty politics of ego and personal gain flourish and prevail with sometimes devastating consequences. For an object lesson, look no further than the many and mighty deep and wide travails of higher education.
So how about the politics of possibility, of getting things done, of maximizing and sharing the win? How can we assert the power of such politics in our organizations?
Talkin’ Ted: Ted Lasso vs Jamie Tartt
(With occasional translations for those whose first language is American)
In the first season of the television series Ted Lasso, two characters evoke two different world views for getting things done. On the one hand is Jamie Tartt a young football (soccer) star, noted for his brashness — hence the name Tartt. His idea of how to win games is to take control of the ball and charge toward the goal. The fact that he is a cracking (supremely talented) player means that his approach is relatively successful even if he is a bit of a prat (arrogant fool). When he scores a goal (point), he celebrates his accomplishment as a singularly personal event that just happens to benefit his club (team).
In the clubhouse (locker room), he is a self-interested bully who demonstrates his lack of respect for his club mates (teammates) through his nonstop expressions of self-regard. He does not encourage his club mates, nor does he celebrate their successes since, in his zero-sum mind, their success somehow dulls his luster. For Jamie, the team is merely an accessory to his glory, a means for a winner like him to take all. If the team wins, it is because of him. If the team loses, it is despite his dazzling and lone(ly) play. Jamie will even throw a wobbly (have a temper tantrum) at his club mates in order to deflect blame.
In the politics of the clubhouse, Jamie dominates by inspiring a bold mix of fear, hatred, and admiration in his mates (colleagues). If they do not openly adore him or, worse still, if they show him up, they will face his considerable wrath. His is the politics of power, ego, personal destruction, and self-promotion. For him, the club only exists to serve his needs. Elsewhere I have written of the overall deleterious effect of such beasts in the workplace.
The set-up of the series is that the new gaffer (coach), Ted Lasso, is a hyper-amiable American whose experience is limited to coaching American football (football) at a uni (college) in Kansas. Ted, of course, knows nothing about football (soccer). He, in fact, has unwittingly been brought in to fail and to scupper (destroy) the team.
As it turns out, though, Ted knows nearly everything about leadership and about clubhouse politics. His approach is relentless positivity enhanced by a distinctive cheekiness (slight irreverence), as he introduces the players to the power of possibility and ropes them in through sheer persuasion — hence the name Lasso. Eventually, instead of a team built in service of individual players and their performance on the pitch (field), these lads (men) begin to coalesce in service to the club. Ted’s approach confuses and frustrates Jamie, to be sure, but it also fascinates him.
Ted also knows that building a team is not about just collecting individual stars and sending them out onto the pitch. Instead, he slowly persuades those individual players that they are best when they work together in service to the club. His political approach is informed by his inherent human decency as it advances the art of the possible.
Ted Lasso’s clubhouse politics is expansive and optimistic, a world in which everyone can be a winner. Jamie Tartt’s is insular and self-serving and only allows for one winner. In life, the most brilliant (very good) leaders are builders, like Ted. They are patient and consistent and are not overawed by raw talent and drive. Armed with fortitude, courage, and resilience, they serve the team or organization and never the other way around.
In a world that demands quick results and instant gratification, the Ted Lassos are all-too rare. Rarer still is the environment that allows them to flourish. Instead, we most often see the Jamie Tartt philosophy of zero-sum individualism receive all the praise and resources despite its vapid and decidedly nihilistic outlook.
The politics of possibility can be challenging to implement and even harder to maintain. Such a political approach is marked by inclusiveness, collaboration, and personal humility. Society’s immediate rewards perversely go to the rugged individualist who gathers glory as though glory were a finite resource. Think about that. The politics of personal power, being a zero-sum game, regards glory and winning as finite. If you win, I lose, therefore…
How obviously and utterly dozy (wrongheaded)! Yet, we insistently and persistently laud such counterproductive behavior.
The politics of possibility is the antidote to the toxicity of personal destruction. Bad being stronger that good, it can be hard to break through by practicing the art of the possible, but the alternative is unacceptable. We need to be builders like Ted Lasso. Otherwise we will continue to live in a world overrun by gits (dipshits) like Jamie Tartt.
Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
Click here for an exceedingly gratifying four minutes of television.
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Leaders at every level need to understand that an individual’s perception is reality. This statement is not the same as “everything I believe to be true is true,” which is just lazy, fanciful thinking. Nor is it a license to insist that everyone share your perceptions, which is bullying. Indeed, the failure to grasp this last point or, more cynically, an effort to exploit this last point has led this nation to the cultural-political precipice where we teeter at this moment.
Wise leaders both recognize and respect that their people’s perceptions are their people’s reality. This fact is particularly acute when crossing cultural divides, including (but decidedly not limited to) race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and even organizational rank. Again, we are not here contemplating a license for people, whether leaders or followers, to impose their perceived reality on others or to do as they please. In fact, it is quite the opposite. This essay is a call for leaders to credit others’ different points of view and to supply a heuristic razor for doing so: perception is reality.
In every venue of our society we sort individuals, including ourselves, into identity groups. This inclination and the hierarchies that can ensue will often generate friction and dissonance and significantly contribute to intractable dysfunction in organizations. A wise leader will have tools for resolving such challenges. For instance, a Black, female employee may explain to a White, male boss that she contends with discrimination in their workplace. The boss can have no direct access to her experiences and perceptions and may subsequently not discern any offense, so it behooves him, rather than dismiss her concerns, to listen carefully and defer to her point of view unless and until evidence demonstrates she is in error.
This way of thinking, that others experience events and reality that is different from and perhaps not accessible to us, is patently obvious yet somehow regularly escapes our grasp. Some people are even hostile to this basic notion, a stance that stems from ignorance driven by a dangerous solipsism.
Since you cannot walk in another’s shoes, it is smart to accept their perceptions as their reality. You need not adopt it wholesale as your reality, of course, but you must give other’s perceptions wide berth to stretch and flex while tempering your assumptions. All too often as leaders we immediately want to instead constrain the perceptions of others and impose our own, particularly when they are outside of or challenge our perceptions or foil our designs. Reminding ourselves that our own reality is based entirely on the vagaries of our own perception is helpful here.
So I am introducing a heuristic razor, a tool for getting at the heart of a problem and making decisions. Again, as with all heuristic razors, it is a great tool to start with, but it cannot be your last or only tool. Let’s call it the perception-reality razor.
In longhand: Always assume that another’s perception is valid unless and until evidence demonstrates otherwise.
In shorthand: Perception is reality.
To be sure, sometimes your experience with a person will provide sufficient evidence to conclude otherwise. For instance, if that person has proven time and again to be unreliable for whatever reason, then it would be foolhardy to assume the next time will be different. But, let’s face it, those situations are vanishingly rare. If you are a boss, it is vital to apply this razor liberally by starting with the default that an employee’s perception — sometimes articulated as a complaint or criticism — is valid.
Admittedly, something inside us tends to resist the truth of this razor. One challenge is that we naturally struggle to perceive things in any other way but our own. Good leaders, though, can and must do so in order to remain effective. If it helps, consider this a form of cognitive empathy.
In cases where an accusation is made, this razor may seem opposed to our culture’s sense of justice, which is built around the idea that all individuals are innocent until proven guilty. In other words, the proof of an offense is the burden of the complainant not the alleged offender, who need not prove their innocence because it is assumed.
Superficially, defaulting to another’s perception that they have been wronged may seem counter to this principle of presumptive innocence, but not so. First, the default to innocence is an important and noble concept and can and should inform our decision making, but it is primarily a function of the criminal justice system and does not apply so neatly to other areas.
Second, default innocence, though a vital part of the criminal trial system, does not preclude accusation and investigation of suspects. In fact, when law enforcement investigates a crime, they primarily try to prove guilt rather than search for exculpatory evidence and even make arrests based on their suspicions. When bosses deal with a workplace accusation, they are at first more like law enforcement than judges. Later, as circumstances warrant, they may have to pivot to the more neutral stance of the judiciary.
Wielding the perception-reality razor can be difficult to master since it calls for a leap of trust and often puts us at odds with our own perceptions, thus requiring humility and resilience. It also often involves delicate matters of human identity and demands a dose of empathy. Finally, being all about human perceptions, it runs against all manner of behavior, including irrationality and dishonesty. In short, it sucks, but in a wide world of things that really, really suck, like facing workplace discrimination or bullying, applying the perception-reality razor entails a pretty minor exertion.
Pro Tip: Remember, as a heuristic tool, the perception-reality razor — perception is reality — can clarify quickly, but it is only a tool of first resort.
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Since you are reading this, I assume you are competent at your job. Good for you!
We all admire people who “get results” — the type of people who always seem to achieve their personal goals or the goals of their organizations — and regard them as supremely competent. Usually this admiration is perfectly apt. Think of a baseball star who consistently launches home runs, the kind whose value used to be measured by appearances on Wheaties boxes.
But what if that is not enough. In fact, what if the “getting results” is despite or even the consequence of abject failure. Think of a baseball star who slams home runs but relies on drugs to do so. We deride such a player as a fraud and disgrace. Or one who hits home runs but leads the league in strikeouts and errors and commands the lowest batting average. No Wheaties for you!
True competence is an overall achievement, not a matter of a few data points clustered around specific categories. It is one of the greatest fallacies in leadership that value is achieved simply by reaching a goal. How you get there, why you want to get there, and what else you do along the way matter.
In an essay entitled “Don’t Do Good by Doing Bad,” I have already addressed the issue of the ends not justifying the means in decision making, including a handy three-part test for the rare occasions when they just might.
So how does this concept play out in our assessment of performance and leadership?
Simply put, failure is failure, even when it results in a visible win. To begin, we need to distinguish failure from mistake. An individual mistake is a setback, an error that can usually be corrected and/or learned from. Mistakes are inevitable and can even be beneficial if they become the impetus for improvement. For this to happen, first acknowledge the mistake and then try to understand it. Doing so requires temerity and can take some fortitude. Once it is understood, can it be fixed? What lessons can be derived from it? Finally, fix it if possible and learn from it no matter what.
In the workplace and in life, mistakes are moment-by-moment occurrences. An employee forgets a meeting, or a boss forgets to send an email. These individual incidents are often no big deal in the grand scheme, but sometimes the consequences are considerable, such as when an employee misses an important deadline or the boss misreads the budget numbers. In a healthy workplace, everyone — including and especially the boss — can and will readily acknowledge mistakes so that everyone can help fix them and learn from them. If a mistake, though, is the result of a more endemic problem, something that is easily avoidable and too often repeated, it is probably a failure.
The nature of failure is more fundamental to the person or institution. It is systemic. Like a mistake, failure can sometimes be fixed and can certainly be learned from, but failure, being fundamental, is frequently overlooked or concealed and, after being acknowledged, requires fundamental reform.
An all-too common failure is the failure of a boss to foster a healthy workplace to begin with. A workplace where employees are not free to admit mistakes or in which the boss does no wrong is a failed workplace. It does not matter if the workplace seems productive. Just as a baseball player who can hit home runs but is otherwise useless would be considered substandard (or a designated hitter in the American League), a boss who relies on concealment and deception to succeed is definitionally incompetent.
The worst workplace failures stem from those who are most powerful and influential — bosses and star or favorite employees — but who intimidate, belittle, and bully others. They imagine their status and ability to produce put them in a separate class with license to behave as they please. Bob Sutton’s critical work The No A*e Rule exposes the fallacy of their thinking. Sutton cites studies that show the broadly deleterious effect of “a****s” in work environments, including when those jerks are star performers.
The classic case involves a super salesman who lords his prowess over his colleagues. His employer knows he is bad for morale and a horrible human, but look at his numbers! How can I get rid of such an amazing salesman? Sutton demonstrates that removing that salesman from the workplace would, in fact, increase overall productivity and more than offset his lost sales numbers.
In other words, whatever his sales success, by being a jerk, the super salesman’s behavior suppresses aggregate numbers and is detrimental to the workplace. He is, therefore, incompetent. The boss, by the way, is also incompetent for keeping the jerk around and allowing him to lower productivity. Simple.
If you have ever seen the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross or the 1992 movie made from it, you will have a ready example of the harm workplace jerks can do. They are incompetent.
In baseball and other sports, the ruinous effect of star jerks is well known. Teams avoid otherwise productive players who are “bad clubhouse guys” because they know such jerks reduce team spirit and team success.
The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that the incompetent tend to overrate their abilities. After all, not everyone can be above average. It is, therefore, axiomatic that those who question their own competence in order to improve are often quite capable. The rule is, if you think you are wonderfully competent, you probably are not. On the other hand, if you doubt your competence and strive to excel, you are probably sufficiently competent or at least on the path to competence.
Mistakes, by contrast, are not necessarily a sign of incompetence in themselves. The failure to address mistakes, on the other hand, is. When a boss fails to address the frequent and systemic commission of errors, that boss is, by definition, incompetent. When a boss bullies or harasses others or does not protect others from bullies and harassers, that boss is a failure no matter what the numbers say. Don’t be that boss. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo offers a contemporaneous and pertinent object lesson as he resigns from office. The proverbial “getting results” ain’t all that. Process matters, and a proven and sound system will always yield the best and most consistent results. Everything else is failure.
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Vulnerability is strength.
That sentence sounds outright Orwellian although, unlike the dystopian slogans George Orwell invented for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (“War is peace.” “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.”), it is profoundly true and uplifting.
So let’s extol the virtues of intentional frailty, of showing the soft underbelly, of standing down when others stand rigid, of letting it all hang out, of looking the fool, of wearing it on your sleeve.
Does all that sound kind of wimpy, a little too touchy-feely? Might makes right, right? Only the good die young, right?
Mindfulness instructor Tamara Levitt identifies the unyielding attitude expressed in these phrases as offering “the illusion of emotional security.” In our society we laud the sentiments of such phrases as “standing strong,” “toughing it out,” “brooking no compromise.” Often the expressions are flagrantly gendered: “acting like a man,” “being manly,” or, more vulgarly, “having some balls” and “not being a pussy.” These, we assure ourselves, are the mottos of flinty warriors and hardened veterans — those who win through sheer grit.
But what if Levitt is correct? What if such outward red-meat utterances offer only the appearance of emotional strength? What if something else lurks underneath? Think of a hard candy that, after some resistance, suddenly yields to the crushing pressure of your molars before melting into a sweet gooey center that then disappears down your throat. Compare that hard candy to chomping into soft taffy and you get the idea. The former will resist a bit before utterly yielding while the latter is just as likely to yank a filling from your head before you get the best of it.
Emotional security is not represented by a slogan. It is not an attitude. It is not a public stance. Emotional security is entirely intrinsic to the individual and marked by a firm confidence tempered by human decency.
On July 27, 2021, four police officers testified in front of a House select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol. All four were men, all seasoned officers, a couple of whom had served in the military. While testifying, they each grew emotional and some even cried. Two congressmen (one an Air National Guard officer) also shed tears. The backlash from certain quarters was predictably vicious, calling them any number of names (usually from within the safe space of anonymity or from positions of unassailable power) for showing their humanity while recounting episodes of inhumanity.
Think of what it takes to live and work in the still-hypermasculine worlds of law enforcement and the military and to be willing to show your emotions — yes, anger, but also sorrow and fear — on the national stage. Indeed, their emotional responses made their testimony all the more powerful as it exemplified and emphasized their sincerity. Their display of vulnerability required temerity and fortitude. Their apparent vulnerability was a show of courage and strength.
Similarly witness the near-simultaneous travails of Simone Biles, the greatest of all gymnasts. She dropped out of the (2020? 2021?) Olympics just when she was to make her boldest and final mark on her sport. We soon learned that she made this difficult decision in response to suffering a mental confusion — the twisties — that gymnasts and some other types of athletes are susceptible to. We mere mortals will never know what it is like to propel our bodies through the air, rapidly twirling and flipping, only to suddenly lose our orientation. Rather than plod on and imperil her physical and mental well-being, she just stopped.
Consider in this context 1996’s Kerri Strug, a gymnast who is most famous for one thing, continuing an Olympic routine with a broken ankle, a choice that won her accolades and a gold medal but ended her career. We cheered her moxie, a tiny eighteen-year-old wincing in agony but standing tall. She was a symbol of America’s can-do spirit, but we ignored her humanity and the price she was paying for that moment and that medal.
The comparison between Biles and Strug is inherently loathsome as we contemplate which woman showed more strength. Was it the one that plowed ahead heedless of the consequences to herself and her career, or the one who stepped back heedless of the opprobrium that the brutal set would heap upon her? I am not sure of the answer or even if there is an answer that matters, but I recall and respect the wisdom of the proverb “discretion is the better part of valor.” Sometimes it is best to hold back to fight another day. Strug was heroic. She earned her medal and her time in the spotlight. Then that moment of glory, along with her career, was largely over before her nineteenth birthday. Biles has preserved her ability to return in whatever form she chooses: active athlete, retired champion, anything.
Purposeful Vulnerability: A Source of Strength in Our Lives.
Levitt observes that intentional vulnerability allows us to “let go of who we think we should be in order to step into something better” and helps us “tap into our common humanity.” To be vulnerable is to access humility and empathy in its best sense — not mawkish wallowing in the appropriation of another’s suffering but the opportunity to adopt another’s point of view and to grasp its meaning and its truths.
In our typical models of leadership, vulnerability is out of place. But, as Levitt so eloquently and insightfully puts it, “When we are brave enough to be vulnerable, we often speak for those who aren’t brave enough to speak for themselves.” That is exactly what those four police officers were doing, speaking for those who had been silenced either by society or death. That is what Biles is doing as well, making it safe for others to admit their flaws, and, impressively, athletes of all stripes are seeing themselves in her and speaking out. She is the greatest gymnast of all time, and even she has flaws. Imagine.
The best leaders are the ones who embrace their vulnerability rather than fear it.
Leadership is not just a matter of pointing and going with the hope that others will follow. True leadership requires a self-confidence that can only be borne of candid self-awareness and a drive for learning and self-improvement. Such leaders are both resilient and adaptable — not rigid and immutable. They neither bend in a light breeze nor break in a gale.
Vulnerability is much the same, demanding resolve and resilience, and the more you exercise those qualities, the stronger you get. Choosing to be vulnerable also requires self-confidence. As a feature of the best leaders, manifest vulnerability engenders trust and loyalty. A vulnerable leader, after all, is a human leader, and evident humanity is the most vital quality of any truly successful leader.
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Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, in the beginning
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, long time ago.
Bob Dylan
Perhaps you are reading this because you are naively curious, having never experienced a bad boss yourself. If so, I am deeply envious (and, yeah, a little incredulous). Throughout my working life across four decades, I have had a couple okey-dokey bosses, and only one who was truly superb. All the rest you can meet in much of what I write throughout my blog.
If, though, you are like most of humanity, you have had a bevy of bad bosses in your past and present. If you are a boss, chances are that you are a less-than-stellar boss to some degree. Sorry. It’s not me, it’s statistics, but feel free to defy the stats. Someone has to be above average, and according to the report I linked, women are more likely to be so than men (but not always, so don’t rest on that either).
Among the myriad effects bad bosses have on their organizations is the tendency of the employees to sort themselves into dysfunctional classes in order to protect themselves and advance their interests. Most of us as employees, whatever our titles, have occupied more than one of these classes in response to changing jobs and circumstances.
Perhaps you can locate yourself on this list. Or maybe I missed a category. I’d love to hear from you whatever the case. Feel free to leave a comment.
If you are currently a boss, try to see how your employees settle into these classes. Pro Tip: if such categories are easily identifiable, rigid, and widespread, you have some work to do as a boss. If, on the other hand, as a boss you cannot identify these classes among your employees, look again and look again and look again. Self-deception is all too easy.
For this analysis I am calling on help from my good friend Bob Dylan and his weird Old Testamenty kids’ song, “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” In it, Dylan sings about “man” (presumably Adam) encountering different creatures in order to assign them an appropriate moniker, albeit in English. I present the verses here out of sequence to suit my purposes, but you can read the complete lyrics here.
He saw an animal leavin’ a muddy trail
Real dirty face and a curly tail
He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big
“Ah, think I’ll call it a ___”
PIG
I start with the pig class because they are the most productive and seemingly functional employees in a dysfunctional environment. They are pigs not because they are covered in filth and reek, though that may be, but because as pigs, they toil relentlessly and often mindlessly it seems.
This class consists of those who’s work ethic itself is a dodge of workplace dysfunction. They put their heads down and rut through the daily muck hoping no one will bother them. When talk of workplace politics breaks out around them, the pig’s response ranges from reluctant acknowledgement to contemptuous denial, but they will always take the first opportunity to scramble back to their rutting. Ironically, their very dedication gives cover to their crappy boss, who just takes them for granted.
Next animal that he did meet
Had wool on his back and hooves on his feet
Eating grass on a mountainside so steep
“Ah, think I’ll call it a _____”
SHEEP
Similar to the pigs are the sheep class. Both groups use denial and avoidance to cope with a dysfunctional workplace, but sheep appear to be allergic to negativity. Some may even deny the obvious and pretend that everything is wonderful, smiling and blithely bleating in the presence of brutal dysfunction. They often display a woolly-headed cognitive dissonance that renders them barely effectual as employees and barely tolerable as colleagues. They would happily follow the flock to slaughter.
Nonetheless, their seemingly amiable demeanor, rounded out by their perpetual simper, protects them from the scrutiny of their overseers who tolerate and use but rarely respect the sheep class. A not unlikely outcome is for the sheep to get shorn.
He saw an animal that liked to growl
Big furry paws and he liked to howl
Great big furry back and furry hair
“Ah, think I’ll call it a ____”
BEAR
The bear class can be mighty and fierce seeming, but bears tend to flee uncomfortable situations after their big show of ferocity. Bears would rather run than fight or even just stand there and witness. At a great distance, a bear can easily be mistaken for a sheep and may even, through the magical power of deep denial, transmogrify into one, but as bears they threaten loudly before stealing away from the dysfunction roiling around them. The only time a bear may deign to put up a resistance is when someone threatens something they value, and even then it is mostly just bluster and posturing.
A bear will be most excellent at pretending to be valuable and productive but really could just disappear into a cave for months, and no one would notice.
He saw an animal that liked to snort
Horns on his head and they weren’t too short
It looked like there wasn’t nothin’ that he couldn’t pull
“Ah, think I’ll call it a ____”
BULL
Pity the bull class. Workplace bulls may be few in number, but they are far from elite. These are the employees who save every email, take notes to memorialize meetings, and keep their resume updated in order to protect themselves although at times they may foolishly put themselves at risk to protect others. Bulls fancy themselves the most clear-eyed denizens of the workplace, able to see through the BS, but in reality their depth perception can be quite limited.
A bull’s productivity will vary, but they can be highly effective when they are devoted to their work. Unlike pigs, though, they frequently charge up their own paths to progress, which adds another source of friction.
Of all the workplace fauna, the bull is the most likely to get roasted.
He saw an animal as smooth as glass
Slithering his way through the grass
Saw him disappear by a tree near a lake
SSSSSS
The snake class is ubiquitous in the dysfunctional workplace. Every sucky boss fosters the flourishing of at least one scurrilous, slithering snake. This small and supercilious class constitutes the collaborationists. Snakes flick their tongues to lick up to the boss or do so by selling out those who may menace or are simply bothersome. They use sycophancy, self-praise, snitching, and slander to please the boss. The most insidious snakes will slither into a singular intimacy with their simpleminded boss so as to foster a constrictive codependency.
Snakes may be constructive employees but usually in extremely deleterious ways. Still, they almost always assert their status as the hardest-slaving, most indispensable employees, but their results never match their self-hype. If you run across a self-sainted and supercilious workplace martyr, you are usually in the presence of a snake.
In return for the snake’s insidious service, the boss provides them with outsized license and praise. Snakes, in contrast, harbor a secret scorn for the boss, hissing behind their back and ready to strike in every direction.
As I mentioned before, employees sort themselves in order to protect their position or advance their interests in the face of rank dysfunction. Needless to say, though, all this bestial sorting and behavior distracts from and severely limits productivity and employee wellbeing. Fortunately there is a solution, a way of eliminating these categories from your work life and preventing them from ever plaguing your workplace again. It is remarkably simple, elegant even, in its economy.
If you are a boss, be a better boss.
If you are the victim of a bad boss, one way or another, get a good boss. Better yet, become your own boss. I did.
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Last week I sought to reframe our perception of transparency and its opposite, opacity, not as something we merely should do but as a matter of foundational principle. True transparency in a leader is not an action or state but is the result of a values choice, a personal standard to live by. Opacity, though, seems easier and is a much more common, almost universal, move among leaders. This popularity is probably due to the superficial (and illusory) simplicity of opacity.
Simply put, transparency is a commitment to honesty while opacity is a commitment to dishonesty.
To extend the logic, since dishonesty has no purpose in a workplace and can cause great harm, anyone who operates dishonestly or fosters a culture of dishonesty, particularly a boss, is definitionally incompetent. Therefore, opacity, as a form or source of dishonesty, is a manifestation of incompetence.
As I noted previously, there are legitimate reasons for bosses and administrations to withhold or conceal information, but these are small in number and should occur infrequently as well.
And the benefits of honesty and transparency are evident: trust, collaboration, innovation, improved well-being, increased morale, staff stability, and so on. The simple fact is that good bosses partner with their people in order to lead sustainable, scalable, productive, successful, and healthy organizations and thereby maximize their effectiveness as they fulfill their organization’s mission.
So why, then, do so many bosses resist true transparency and choose opacity, which, as we now all must certainly agree, is a form of deceit? Let’s call it the rapacity of opacity.
Some employers understand the value and benefits of transparency and gesture toward it but lack the necessary integrity to implement and maintain such a culture. After all, transparency can be hard, particularly at first. These quasi-enlightened bosses end up faking it to the point where they may even deceive themselves into believing their own ruse. The thing is, even with such a self-deceiving boss, the employees will still catch on rather quickly. Imagine (or perhaps recall) how demoralizing it is to work in such a place for such a boss. Think of how much is lost by misleading employees, who are potentially full of great insights and bold ideas. A boss who wastes potential and good will is incompetent.
Of course there are other bosses who are even more conniving and intentionally use opacity as a means to obscure their activities in order to gain control and to manipulate employees and their organization, often by regulating the movement of information. As I have written elsewhere, control is a fool’s pursuit, but oh-so many bosses cannot resist its allure. Clearly, the illusion of control is the opioid of the boss class. By contrast, transparency is, on its surface, a relinquishing of control since it encourages the free-flow of information.
Beastly bosses will make all sorts of excuses why they must conceal information to protect the organization, but in reality, their opacity is strictly for their personal benefit, the organization be damned. You will see these creatures slither up the ranks or pounce from organization to organization — always improving their own lot. Perhaps you are wondering, if passive or semi-conscious deceit and opacity are incompetence, then what is it called when a boss intentionally chooses deceit and opacity for personal benefit?
Corruption.
The Audacity of Opacity
The cost of fostering an opaque workplace culture is high. If transparency is based on honesty, then, as we have seen, its opposite, opacity, is based on dishonesty. Needless concealment is not honest. Period. Employees can grow used to such a culture, even thrive to a degree (and usually for the wrong reasons), but they are rarely content, and their lack of contentment leads to mistrust, lowered productivity, resentment, and turnover. Worse still, it is axiomatic that if you work in a fundamentally dishonest culture (and that is exactly what an opaque culture is), you are likely to relax your own principles regarding honesty. Corners then get cut, and soon people are lying or acting out just to protect themselves. In response, instead of reassessing and readjusting, bad bosses will just redouble their commitment to concealment, and it all escalates from there. The habit of opacity is a blackhole, and organizations with opaque cultures dance on the event horizon.
Contrast that situation with a workplace truly committed to transparency, where benefits will flow. Yes honesty can be challenging, particularly for bosses who must then face criticism from employees and others. That’s what the big bucks are for, remember? Workplace transparency enriches the culture the same way honesty in a personal relationship can strengthen that relationship, particularly over time. Transparency removes barriers and alleviates concerns, thus freeing the minds of employees and bosses to focus on pursuing and achieving the organizational mission.
Opacity, being fundamentally dishonest, does the opposite, sowing distrust and worry, which distracts from everyone’s ability to address the mission and do their job properly. Opacity is audacious in the worst sense of the term — arrogant and contemptuous. Of course, you could probably think of organizations that lack honesty and transparency but continue to function. Maybe you work for one. But let’s face it. They are broken, insipid things compared to what they could and should be. Imagine their potential if they were not so hampered by dishonesty.
Opacity, like its kissing cousin, control, is popular among bosses because it seems easier at first. It requires little commitment or effort, but, again, like control, it’s superficial ease is an illusion. In short order, opacity will spread distrust and paranoia. Transparency, by contrast, takes guts, resilience, and stamina, but it generates gobs of goodwill and can contribute to employee dedication, productivity, and a spirit of common purpose. Competent bosses commit themselves to transparency because transparency best gets the job done. Opacity is the enemy of truth, trust, and teamwork. Opacity is the enemy of veracity. Therefore, bosses who embrace opacity are, simply put, bad at their job.
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Let’s reframe how we think about transparency, and its opposite, opacity. We usually think of workplace transparency as a form of enhanced communications or a way of keeping people in the loop. Although those two benefits of transparency are evident, the true practice of transparency has to do with an organization’s ethos. As much as transparency is about doing this or not doing that, at its core, it must be a principled commitment to personal and organizational honesty and integrity.
We can start by acknowledging the fact that there is some information that bosses must conceal from their organizations for legitimate reasons, such as privacy concerns, proprietary agreements, and so forth. But — need it be said? — these circumstances should be very much the exception, and frankly it is usually pretty easy to be forthright about why certain information must be concealed without spilling any proverbial beans. Other excuses that bosses frequently cite to cover up information are more dubious and include reducing scrutiny, evading responsibility, tamping down unrest (often disgracefully labeled “panic” or “disloyalty”), or just good old-fashioned kicking the can down the road.
Note that all the dubious reasons are forms of deception — not out-and-out active lying, but strategic omissions meant to misdirect employees and others or to keep them wallowing in ignorance and to keep the boss operating with impunity. An opaque culture, therefore, is a dishonest culture.
True transparency, by contrast, is honest. Openness to the truth can be painful for all, particularly the boss, but it frees the minds of all, particularly the boss. In a transparent culture, employees can observe and understand decisions and the decision-making process. A wise leader will also assure that the employees can contribute their perspective to decisions, which is vital, and even maximize their opportunities to make decisions for themselves. Thus, transparency requires and demonstrates respect. For their part, employees will generally appreciate being treated like professionals and adults.
Sometimes, though, a boss’s reward for transparency is blowback from employees, from boards and other overlords, and even from outside entities. Good. Nothing worth doing ever comes easy. Bosses in these situations must exercise their integrity, courage, and confidence, and, as we know, exercise increases strength. The more you practice honesty and transparency, the more resilient and able to withstand blowback you will become. And, let’s face it, any boss who lacks the temerity and fortitude to withstand criticism, mild or harsh, should not be a boss at all.
Furthermore, a good boss will welcome feedback, even difficult feedback, listen to it, and respond appropriately. There is much more to learn from staff blowback than there is from just tuning into that little personal advisor yakking inside your head or, worse still, that sycophant on the other side of your desk.
Of course, no boss is perfect. I know I have sometimes reacted to criticism with inappropriate anger and sarcasm. It happens. After all, those who strive to be good bosses are humans too. Still, even in those situations, I have tried to welcome employees’ perspectives and to learn where they are coming from. If you cannot face employees in an open and honest way while minimizing your own vitriol and bullying, then resign. You are incompetent. If you yell at employees, then go to hell. A toasty little nook is all set for you down there.
Also, of course, being themselves human, some employees can be most unreasonable in their reactions, trying to play gotcha with bosses or hoping to relitigate lost issues. Even then, though, a good boss will seek to learn from the blowback, which is usually an indication of buried or festering grievances, individual or otherwise. It is better for both employees and bosses to know and understand the bad along with the good than to molder in ignorance, no matter what emotions are evoked. And, rest assured, it is always best to deal with negative emotions up front than to allow them to metastasize.
Transparent workplace cultures thrive on ideas and innovation by fostering an environment of mutual respect. If, as the Bard says, “you got no secrets to conceal,” you and your team can face and conquer challenges together. Transparency has to do with truth, and, as they say, the truth will set you free.
Next Week
The Benefits of Opacity (Just kidding! There are none.)
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Are you or have you ever been a boss or been someone who has a boss? Chances are, the answer is yes. If so, then this series of essays is for you.
Way back in March 2021, a Twitter user who goes by “Angry Staff Officer” (@pptsapper) posted a pithy and insightful list of “Rules for Army Leaders.” As I am sure you have already surmised, these rules, though specifically addressed to Army leaders, readily apply to any military leader, such as Navy leaders or Space Force leaders (though Space Force rucksacks may be weightless), but did you guess that they also apply just as well to any leader in any walk of life, including civilian bosses?
Over the past weeks and concluding today we have taken a look at each of these rules in turn and applied them to your experience with daily bossing, be you a bosser or a bossee. Find the previous installments here.
Rule 5
Always Train Your Replacement Since You Will Be Replaced
This one is particularly addressed to the bossers, but you bossees should find much to divert and delight you.
Leadership development among staff is often neglected in organizations of all types and sizes. One reason is simply that people are too busy. Bosses and leaders have too many distractions and responsibilities to worry about frills such as staff training, and staff members have too much on their plates to worry about their greater role in the present and future of the organization. In addition, many bosses themselves are not good about seeking the ongoing leadership training they need to remain agile and effective leaders.
Worst of all, many leadership programs are abysmal. You, like me, have probably sat through more than your share of misguided leadership trainings featuring speakers whose canned talks were so generic as to resonate with no one or so banal as to lull everyone into a stupor. As I age, I really, really wish I could have all those hours back. Then again, some of those talks included a fine selection of unripe sliced fruit, rubbery cheese cubes, and weak coffee, so there’s that.
Nonetheless, there are many reasons why leadership development for both bosses and staff is vital for a healthy workplace. I may sound self-interested here since this is the very service I offer to mission-driven leaders and their people, but, then again, I may just know what I am talking about for that precise reason. Leadership skills revolve around human skills, what are sometimes called soft skills, and these are necessary to function successfully in any workplace, a topic I have discussed elsewhere.
Angry Staff Officer, though, offers another compelling, even preordained, reason to develop staff leadership. If you are a boss, one way or another, you won’t be some day. If you care about the future of your organization and its mission, you will assure that someone is waiting in the wings, prepared to take your place when you accidentally step in front of a speeding bus — in other (duller) words, succession planning. Need convincing?
A Selection of Reasons Your Bossdom Won’t Last Forever Despite Whatever Deal You Cut with the Devil to Become a Boss
(To help these these scenarios go down more smoothly, try visualizing a loathsome boss of your own, past or present.)
Some of the Most Common Reasons Your Bossdom Will Someday Cease
Retirement: This just in! You will get old… unless, of course, you suffer the only proven alternative. (Hint: not Botox) You may even be old right now. It is healthy to consider taking a permanent break at a certain point in life from the hustle and bustle of toil and trouble and to leave it all to the next generation to muck up. Some bosses never want to retire, which is universally unhealthy. No one, no matter how much they protest, wants you to never retire. Trust me. Except maybe your spouse.
The Alternative: Whatever the means, if you don’t get to reach retirement age, and I hope this will not be the case, it is axiomatic that you will then no longer be a boss. If, on the other hand, you are one of those codgers who hangs onto work with a death grip, it is also axiomatic that your death grip will be relaxed someday — ironically by death.
Firing: This one sucks overwhelmingly although you may find some joy in your sudden release from a horrible situation. As traumatic and humiliating as being fired is, you can always take great comfort in knowing you no longer have to deal with that nonsense, those idiots, that backstabbing colleague, … You get the idea.
Resignation: This may take place for a variety of reasons. You may find another job or just not want to be a boss anymore. Note that your “resignation” may not be a voluntary resignation at all, a circumstance traditionally signaled by the euphemism, “I want to spend more time with the family.”
Illness: Not quite as bad as death usually, but again I do not wish it on you. It happens though.
Some Slightly More Exotic Reasons Your Bossdom Will Come to an End
Coma: Related to illness and heartbreaking for your loved ones but maybe not so bad for you if you are lucky enough to be fully unconscious and blissfully unaware or are even luckier to be semiconscious and able to eavesdrop on the drama of the medical staff. Then again, it could be you are actually in a comma, in which case it is probably just a typo.
Kidnapping: This one sucks, particularly if it means you don’t get to go back to your bossdom because, you know, the ransom was delayed or not paid or things “went sideways” or something. There is one other option here. See Patty Hearst.
Elopement: An elopement could be a pleasant turn of events and a cause for celebration, particularly with a hale, young trophy spouse. Then again, if your elopement is the very reason you must leave your job to flee the state, perhaps you should have actually finalized (or even initiated) that divorce with your first spouse before getting hitched to another. Happy trails, bigamist!
The Heartbreak of Psoriasis: See illness.
Agoraphobia: This is the fear of public places, and, more precisely, the people therein. Agoraphobia may keep you from heading into the office, but there are workarounds. See claustrophobia.
Mid-life Crisis: See elopement, add a red sports car.
Incarceration: The good news here is that, even in this age of mass incarceration, if you are some lucky combination of rich, prominent, or white, you likely will never have to deal with being incarcerated no matter how heinously you have behaved. On the other hand, if you are not the appropriate combination of these qualities, your chances of incarceration increase significantly no matter how innocently you have behaved.
Some Ultra-exotic Reasons for Terminating Your Bossdom
Alien Abduction: Some say this never happens while others say it happens all the time. Given the prevalence of invasive probing in accounts of alien abduction, this one may be most unappealing to some. It really comes down to your individual taste, I suppose.
Ascension/Divine Intervention: This bears a superficial resemblance to alien abduction. I have never witnessed it, but some books reference it. Ascension may add another alternative to getting old. See Deus ex machina.
Demonic Possession: All in all, this one could be fun depending on the demon.
Stranding on a Desert Island: However unlikely you are to ever be castaway, it is still a good idea to hone your survival skills, such as how to make a fire with two sticks or how to make a radio out of coconut shells. Bon voyage, Gilligan.
Witness Protection: There was a time when I considered this a pretty attractive option. The government takes control of you and your family, gives you a whole new identity, and whisks you away to a distant locale to live out a totally different life. Sound great! Let’s go! Then I saw the ending of Goodfellas. Given the choice between egg noodles smothered in ketchup and the vengeance of the mob, I will take my chances with the mob.
So there you have it. You can see that there are many reasons why your bossdom will come to an end, so best to prepare your organization for a future without you by training your people. It is not enough, though, just to teach people the day-to-day aspects of the job. They will also have a critical need to know how to lead, a skill you and all leaders must hone continually as well. And be vigilant. Your future departure may be lurking right around the corner in the form of a highly localized quantum singularity or an errant scooter driver.
Having perused all these possibilities, perhaps you still feel I have not sufficiently convinced you of the fleeting nature of bossdom and the need to prepare your organization and successors, so let me add one more reason. Even if you don’t feel it at the moment, some day you really will want to spend more time with family — despite their objections.
Query of the Week
The Leadership Development Challenge
How do you prepare colleagues and employees for future leadership? How do you assure that you are continually honing your leadership skills?
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
Let me know what you think. I welcome your comments and questions.
Please click on the button below or, if you prefer, email me at jim@jimsalvucci.com.
Post this essay on social media or send it by email to someone you want to intrigue/annoy.
Subscribe to receive my weekly newsletter and special editions directly to your mailbox.
You can improve your ability to achieve your mission of your organization.
Visit my website and reach out to me to learn how.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com
Are you or have you ever been a boss or been someone who has a boss? Chances are, the answer is yes. If so, then this series of essays is for you.
Way back in March 2021, a Twitter user who goes by “Angry Staff Officer” (@pptsapper) posted a pithy and insightful list of “Rules for Army Leaders.” As I am sure you have already surmised, these rules, though specifically addressed to Army leaders, readily apply to any military leader, such as Navy leaders or Space Force leaders (though Space Force rucksacks may be weightless), but did you guess that they also apply just as well to any leader in any walk of life, including civilian bosses?
Over five consecutive weeks we will continue to take a look at each of these rules in turn and apply them to your experience with daily bossing, be you a bosser or a bossee.
Rule 4
Knowing When to Leave Is More Valuable than Never Quitting
A Narrative Written in the First-Person Dysfunctional Voice
They say you always remember your first time.
Do you remember the first time you chose to quit something? I remember mine.
I was in fifth grade when it was announced that some local boys track team was looking for runners. I have never been much of an athlete, but my big brother was. I guess I wanted to be more like him, but I was a small kid and young for my grade. I may not have cut an impressive figure, but I was pretty fast. When we played tag in the schoolyard, I could evade being “it” effectively, much to the frustration of my older, bigger classmates. When we raced, the longer-legged kids could beat me, but not by much.
So, track, why not? I loved to run. Running was fun. What could ruin running?
I went to the first evening practice in a park by the school and had the distinct impression that I had missed a few meetings. The coaches (I have no idea who these guys were) had already divvied the boys into the runners and the others. The head coach was a crotchety old guy with a stogie and a hip flask named Cranky McGrump. Okay, perhaps my memory is embellishing one or two details, but you get the idea. He was not a people person, which may be why he chose to hang around a bunch of preteen boys. After a half glance at my skinny frame, he banished me to go stand with a handful of kids far away from the actual runners.
My small group consisted of the non-athletes, the youngsters, the wiry small kids, the nerds, the losers. We weren’t JV. The JV kids were with the runners, the older kids, the tall kids with antelope legs and an athletic bearing, the ones that looked the part.
The coaches put the real runners through several drills before they remembered my forlorn group. One luckless young coach, Short Straw we’ll call him, was assigned to work with us. Coach Straw had us run a few sprints to see what we could do and showed admirable restraint by refraining from burdening us with any hint of actual coaching or commentary or enthusiasm. Then he set us up for a half-assed relay. After a few minutes of this, he had had enough and abandoned us to continue our awkward standing around. We never had a chance.
Over the next weeks, Short Straw led us in a few more lame practices, which always consisted of a single, non-competitive relay. This method meant we each got in a bit of a practice run before he turned back to the real athletes. The only instruction we ever received was on how to pass the baton, which Coach Straw had us drill a lot.
At some point I was handed a uniform kit of shorts and a tank top. That made it official I suppose, but the whole affair was disheartening. Quitting, though, was not on the table. It was a matter of commitment, or so my well-honed fifth-grade sense of pride told me.
Finally the day of our first meet arrived. The head coach, Cranky McGrouch, asked if any of our parents could drive, and I guess I volunteered my mom to carry a load of kids to some school track.
The meet was awkward and uninteresting. We sat together as a team, but the difference in status was evident even in how we piled onto the bleachers. The athletes clustered together close to the track, supporting each other and showing off despite the fact that they performed poorly.
In the meantime, my little group sat up at the top of the bleachers goofing off, barely engaged in the proceedings and more interested in the thrilling crack of the starter pistol. Toward the end of the meet when we were longing to go home, old Crusty McGrump, the head coach, chomping on his stogie, suddenly called my name in his best Burgess Meredith voice: “Rocky!” He clearly had no idea who I was as he scanned the bleachers, and he certainly had never once seen me run. I raised my hand, and he told me to get into the next relay.
I had worn jeans over my shorts against the fall chill and struggled to pull them over the white hightop All Stars I stupidly had not removed. A couple of my fellow outcasts had to help me defeat my pants. We wondered why I was the only one of us who was selected to run, and they concluded, wisely, that it was because my mom drove, which obligated Old Crabby to have me appear in an event. Full of all the enthusiasm that revelation inspired I stumbled onto the track for the first time in my life.
The other runners on my relay team were all athletes, of course, and had had some instruction in stretching and running. For my part, I had learned my single lesson well. I knew how to handle the baton. Someone directed me toward the third leg of the relay where I could do the least damage to the team’s chances.
As we got into position, Mr. McGripe, Short Straw, and the other coaches offered advice to my fellow relayers. No one said a word to me. My role was clear. Don’t fall down and don’t drop the baton.
The pistol fired, and the relay began—my first competitive race. I watched anxiously as the baton loped relentlessly closer.
I prepared for the transfer as my teammate lurched toward me, but he loosened his grip on the baton too soon, which made it droop before it reached my outstretched hand. It was a rookie error if there ever was one, and his sloppy delivery cost me a moment before I could secure the baton. As luck would have it, all my intensive practice in baton handling gave me the wherewithal to recover from his blunder.
And I ran. As best I could I ran. I had no technique. I had no preparation. I had no idea what to do or even where to look. I just ran. Hard. Wanting to do my best to support a team that had done nothing but fail me. All I had was instinct and spirit and a stupid baton, which, by the way, was significantly more solid than the one we practiced with. I realized then that our practice baton was probably just a piece of broom handle wrapped in tape.
By the time I passed the baton to the next runner, cleanly by the way, I just wanted to go home. I had put more heart into this race than this team would ever deserve.
After the race, which we lost, the athletes in the lower bleachers started loudly asking who “that kid in he middle” was who “lost ground” and cost them the race. They meant me. I was solely to blame for that one loss even though none of them had won a race all day. My fellow outcasts assured me that I did fine, but I wanted to cry. I found my mother in the stands, and she comforted me, saying that I had held my own.
None of the coaches, not old Crankshaft or even Mr. Straw, so much as looked at me after that. As far as they were concerned, my mother had provided transportation for some kids and had gotten to see her wimpy son run. Transaction complete.
A few days later, it was time for our next practice in the evening after dinner. I was sick to my stomach with anxiety, and I sat there picking through my food. My parents wanted to know what was up, and I told them, in my best fifth-grade articulation, how much I hated being on that track team, what a horrible experience it was, how humiliating and pointless. They had had no idea, so I guess I had hid it well. My mom asked, “why don’t you quit?”
What an absurd question. “I am not a quitter,” I declared, looking to my dad for support.
My dad was no good. He stated flatly, “if you are so miserable and hate that track team so much, just quit.”
I could not believe my ears. Quitters! I came from a family of quitters! So far as I was concerned I had never quit anything! Who were these people?
My parents persisted, though, and I must admit that the idea grew on me—rapidly. I went and gathered my little track kit, and my dad drove me to the park where we practiced. We arrived a little late since it didn’t matter now.
I guess to preserve a semblance of self-respect, I chose to do the deed myself. I walked up behind Coach McGruff as he presided over the runners. I could see my fellow outcasts in the distance as usual, tossing the baton back and forth for entertainment. I would not miss their company. I was nervous, tears welling in my eyes. It was scary to quit. I called Coach McGrinch’s name, and he turned on me. I am sure I heard the liquid in his hip flask slosh. He stared at me with incomprehension and was clearly wondering who this little boy was.
I told him bluntly that I was quitting and handed him the uniform.
I wish I could say he was gracious. Hell, I wish I could say he was contemptuous. I wish I could say he insulted me, called me a quitter, berated my cowardice. Instead, he silently accepted the uniform with perfect indifference. I was nobody, and this was nobody’s uniform once and again.
Despite the final indignity of old Cranky McGrump’s apathy and despite the humiliation and despair I felt as I handed him my kit, the instant I spun around to head back to the car, my tears dried and my heart lifted. A great weight rose from my shoulders on angel wings and fluttered into heaven forever. I could make out the distant chords of a celestial chorus, and the warmth of the sun poured over me despite the fact that it was a brisk autumn evening. I was giddy with relief, the first time I ever felt such a pure release as a full rainbow appeared in the cloudless sky, not with the normal eight colors but with nine or ten. I swear I spied a band of chartreuse and maybe magenta among the rest.
In that moment, I realized that sticking it out in such a dismal situation held no virtue. There was nothing on that team for me, no character to build nor any chance to really run. We didn’t even have a decent baton.
I learned then that quitting is neither good nor bad in itself. Knowing when to quit, though, is a vital skill and a great virtue. I have not always recalled this lesson perfectly, having stubbornly stayed with hopeless situations far too often. Still, whenever I have applied it, I have avoided much heartache and wasted time. As a fifth-grade track washout I imbibed perhaps my first bit of life wisdom. It is better to choose to walk away than to stick with the misery of never quitting.
Next Thursday: Rule 5, “Always train your replacement since you will be replaced.”
Query of the Week
The Quitter’s Challenge
When was a significant time you quit? What were the results?
Share your thoughts on this topic or participate in a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
Let me know what you think. I welcome your comments and questions.
Please click on the button below or, if you prefer, email me at jim@jimsalvucci.com.
Post this essay on social media or send it by email to someone you want to intrigue/annoy.
Subscribe to receive my weekly newsletter and special editions directly to your mailbox.
You can improve your ability to achieve your mission of your organization.
Visit my website and reach out to me to learn how.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com
Are you or have you ever been a boss or been someone who has a boss? Chances are, the answer is yes. If so, then this series of essays is for you.
Way back in March 2021, a Twitter user who goes by “Angry Staff Officer” (@pptsapper) posted a pithy and insightful list of “Rules for Army Leaders.” As I am sure you have already surmised, these rules, though specifically addressed to Army leaders, readily apply to any military leader, such as Navy leaders or Space Force leaders (though Space Force rucksacks may be weightless), but did you guess that they also apply just as well to any leader in any walk of life, including civilian bosses?
Over five consecutive weeks we will continue to take a look at each of these rules in turn and apply them to your experience with daily bossing, be you a bosser or a bossee.
Rule 3
Always Carry Your Own Ruck
I wrote an essay back in December 2020 called “Stuff Your Ego in a Sack and Throw It in the River,” which will have some pertinence here. This time, though, rather than a container for self-conceit, the metaphorical sack is a burden to bear, a military rucksack. I am not sure why both Angry Staff Officer and I settled on wildly divergent metaphors involving sacks to argue for suppression of the ego, so I will leave that observation for others to contemplate.
Speaking strictly as a chronic civilian here and with all the knowledge and authority that status conveys, I imagine that in the military the ruck represents both burden and sustenance. One would not want to undertake an extended adventure on foot without one’s ruck and all it bears, but the more plentiful and indulgent its contents, the heavier it gets. In saying “Always carry your own ruck,” Angry Staff Officer’s point is that Army leaders should take responsibility for and bear the burden of their own needs and conveniences.
Same goes for leaders in any walk of life. We all know the stereotype of the overbearing, self-important boss who will not even deign to make his (yes, his) own coffee. The type is a standard in movies and television. His secretary is supposed to drop all her (yes, her) work and fetch him his beverage—“Don’t forget this time, that’s two sugars and some cream, and would it kill you to get me a cruller?”
Perhaps, though, those days are long past.
(Pause for laughter.)
Whether you perceive that scenario as Paleolithic or as immediate, most bosses are not so directly demanding, yet they still regularly insist that their people do their fetching. I am not focusing here on the worst-case jerks, the ones who have their staff members pick up their dry cleaning or walk the mangy mutt they insist on dragging to the office. What about the more mundane indignities bosses inflict on their underlings, such as dumping difficult work or even their dirty work?
Now, sometimes it is necessary for bosses to delegate their dirty work to an employee so that the boss can rise above the politics of a situation. For instance, a boss may have an underling deliver minor bad new of the your-office-will-be-downgraded variety. I have had to deliver that news, and the effect was such that the employee blamed me and not my boss, which was probably good for the organization at that moment. Other times, perhaps not so much.
But some bosses use their employees as shields, which is precisely the opposite of what a boss should do as the first installment of this series argues. Bosses who avoid confrontation (a mark of rank incompetence) or who are just plain lazy (a mark of rank laziness) will dump that nasty business on others indiscriminately. One great example of this is the CEO who decides on a major and unpopular policy shift but leaves it to middle management to present to staff. Neat. I say if you are so committed to your new direction, you should want to crow about it, right? Otherwise, if you broke it, you own it.
That’s the thing about bosses and rucks. Bosses not only should carry their own ruck, but they also own what’s in it. If you filled it with garbage, then that’s your garbage—carry it. If you stuffed it with your gargantuan ego, then toss it in the river.
And make your own damn coffee. Oh, and here’s an idea, serve it to others. I knew a boss who had an espresso maker and would serve espresso at meetings. Afterward, his people, usually hyped-up and wild-eyed with caffeine, would offer to wash the cups, but he would just tell them to leave the dishes. Some assumed his assistant would clean them up. After hours, though, you could find him in the office kitchen doing dishes, and when asked why, he would explain that it was his daily reminder that he was not all that. Doing dishes gave him a a brief respite from his sense of self-importance and a wee bit of perspective at the end of the workday. The dirty espresso cups may have been a small item in his ruck, but he made a point of carrying them.
Importantly, carrying your own ruck has nothing to do with effective delegating. Good leaders delegate wisely, with an emphasis on that qualifier—wisely. Delegating is not dumping work. Delegating is a way to involve employees and develop new talent. It is also a way to innovate and learn for both the boss and the employee (assuming you are not already working them to death, and shame on you if you are). I will leave my thoughts on delegation for a future essay.
Carrying your own ruck, though, is entirely different. Your ruck contains your stuff, the stuff you should handle. It’s your burden to bear, not your people’s. Perhaps you have had to carry your current or previous boss’s ruck, and you think that is how it is done. After all, you get more respect (however grudging) if you are too important to carry your own ruck, right?
Don’t be a jerk. Respect is earned. It is not an imposition. Employees who truly respect their bosses are going to be more productive and loyal. Esteem is grown organically, not dropped like manna or meteors from on high. Employees who have to carry their boss’s ruck may do so out of fear or in order to kiss up to the boss (bosses beware!), but they don’t respect the boss. This point should be obvious, but it escapes so many.
So, carry your own ruck, and if you think it is too heavy for you, stuff your ego in it and see what real weight feels like. Now march. If you find your ego is too much to bear, go throw it in the river.
Next Thursday: Rule 4, “Knowing when to leave is more valuable than never quitting.”
Query of the Week
The Rucksack Challenge
What’s in your ruck? Who carries it? Why?
Share your thoughts on this topic or open a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
Let me know what you think. I welcome your comments and questions.
Please click on the button below or, if you prefer, email me at jim@jimsalvucci.com.
Post this essay on social media or send it by email to someone you want to intrigue/annoy.
Subscribe to receive my weekly newsletter and special editions directly to your mailbox.
You can improve your ability to achieve your mission of your organization.
Visit my website and reach out to me to learn how.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com
Are you or have you ever been a boss or been someone who has a boss? Chances are, the answer is yes. If so, then this series of essays is for you.
Way back in March 2021, a Twitter user who goes by “Angry Staff Officer” (@pptsapper) posted a pithy and insightful list of “Rules for Army Leaders.” As I am sure you have already surmised, these rules, though specifically addressed to Army leaders, readily apply to any military leader, such as Navy leaders or Space Force leaders (though Space Force rucksacks may be weightless), but did you guess that they also apply just as well to any leader in any walk of life, including civilian bosses?
Over five consecutive weeks we will continue to take a look at each of these rules in turn and apply them to your experience with daily bossing, be you a bosser or a bossee.
Rule 2
Trust Lasts Longer than Ammo
Perhaps you are thinking, “Gee, Jim, I lead an agency that that provides affordable housing to lower income families. I can’t think of why we would have a need for ammunition.”
Yes, perhaps that is true in a boring literal sense, but have you considered the exhilarating experience of figurative tropes?
For the armed forces, ammunition is a quantifiable, finite resource that is indispensable to the military’s ability to fulfill its core mission. A military without ammo will not be particularly effective as a defensive or expeditionary force. For our purposes, though, ammo can be any quantifiable, finite, and vital resource that you need to fulfill the mission of your organization. Call it an analogy if you will, which you should because it is.
So, metaphorically speaking, what is your ammo? Money? Time? Equipment? People? Puppy kibbles? Information? What item or items, physical or disembodied, are fundamental to the completion of your goals? Think about it.
Sure, you probably use computers and telephones and would struggle to do your work without them, but are they absolutely essential? Maybe you would have been able to meet your mission, albeit greatly scaled down, in a time before computers and telephones. Maybe others did. To identify your ammo, dig to pinpoint those resources that are truly key to your core mission, and keep in mind that your ammo may be hiding in plain sight. Hint: it’s not those Post-Its on your desk.
Have you determined your ammo? Good. Let’s get back to Angry Staff Officer’s main point regarding trust.
Being an abstraction, trust can but never has to run out, and it is at least as vital to any mission as ammo (again, metaphorically). Without trust, nothing worth doing is possible. Trust holds organizations together and builds community. To fulfill your mission you will need some combination of trust among employees, leadership, board members, clients, and the larger community at the very least.
Even the production and consumption of this essay requires trust. I trust you to read it fairly and respond accordingly (please) and share it with others (pretty please). You trust me to deliver something worth reading to the end if only to disagree with me or just to confirm that my head truly consists of one large knuckle. Whatever the case, the relationship between you and me — the relationship this essay fosters and mediates — is all about trust.
When the logic of this essay has played itself out, when I am out of ammo, I trust that you will continue to consider my ideas and perhaps comment and share my link. If I have delivered enough here, you will trust me to deliver much the same level of engagement in my next essay. And so on.
Therefore, as vital as ammo is, trust is more precious because it has more staying power. Also, while we must obtain new ammo from outside to keep ourselves supplied, trust is internally generated and, when tended properly, self-renewing.
I have been a part of organizations where trust was lacking, and I imagine you have too. Sure, given ample ammo, such institutions may still limp along, usually on the plentiful resources and, yes, limited trust they have, but they can never fully live up to their potential nor their mission. Their shortcomings are usually abundant and apparent to all. Whatever its resource level, a trustless organization is a dysfunctional organization.
In your organization, think of whom you must trust in order to do your job and make your mission work. Think of who trusts you. How do you nurture those relationships? Are they scalable? In other words, if the scope of your mission grew, would the trust relationships you share now be enough to stay on mission, or would you need to develop new relationships?
Maintaining your ammo supply is absolutely critical, to be sure, but good leaders will be even more focused on fostering trust with and among their people. Otherwise, even with plenty of ammo, you will have no cohesive sense of purpose. Ammo is necessary, but only trust will keep you on mission.
Next Thursday: Rule 3, “Always carry your own ruck.”
Query of the Week
The Trusty Challenge
Think of an organization you are aware of that seems to lack trust. How do they get anything done? How would the organization function if it had plenty of trust? How would it achieve that goal?
Share your thoughts on this topic or open a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
Let me know what you think. I welcome your comments and questions.
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Are you or have you ever been a boss or been someone who has a boss?
Chances are, the answer is yes. If so, then this series of essays is for you.
Way back in March 2021, a Twitter user who goes by “Angry Staff Officer” (@pptsapper) posted a pithy and insightful list of “Rules for Army Leaders.” As I am sure you have already surmised, these rules, though specifically addressed to Army leaders, readily apply to any military leader, such as Navy leaders or Space Force leaders (though Space Force rucksacks may be weightless), but did you guess that they also apply just as well to any leader in any walk of life, including civilian bosses?
Over several (uh, five) consecutive weeks we will continue to take a look at each of these rules in turn and apply them to your experience with daily bossing, be you a bosser or a bossee.
Rule 1
If You're Not Always Fighting for Your People, You're Wrong
If you are a boss or any sort of leader, whether you are aware or not, a big part of your job is protecting your employees and colleagues. Some days, most days, doing so is the most important thing you can do. You fight to actively promote your people’s ideas, work, and wellbeing, and you fight to protect them from outside menaces, including your own boss(es) and … wait for it … yourself. Good bosses put themselves out there for their people, and yeah it is hard. But that is why you get the big bucks right?
If you are bossed, you have every right to expect to be championed and protected so long as you reasonably uphold your end of the bargain as an employee. Consider this essay and its successors a guide for what to expect from your boss. If you are doing your job up to snuff, and your boss is not fighting for you, get a better boss.
Some time ago, I wrote about the debilitating effects of bosses who point fingers as a habit. Good bosses, I wrote, seek to solve problems first, and casting aspersions most often is neither necessary nor wise. Fighting for your people means not impulsively pointing fingers at them, but it also means standing between your people and anyone else who would unduly point fingers at them, even your own boss. I call it being a human heat shield, and, trust me, it can be painful. If it helps you bear the suffering, imagine instead all that harm being endured by someone even more helpless. Not serving as a heat shield, to quote a common but trenchant phrase and to confoundingly mix my metaphors, is throwing them under the bus. Don’t.
In another piece I advocated for always starting with yes. Bosses who approach their people and their ideas with positivity increase job satisfaction and, in my experience, get a lot more done better. Fighting for your people also involves fighting for their ideas, supporting and advocating, and giving sufficient credit where it is due.
Above all, though, bosses need to be most diligent in protecting their people from themselves. All employees must recognize that everyone, even the boss, is entitled to be in a bad mood, a funk, a dark place. Everyone is entitled from time to time to be under the weather, under water, under the gun. It is called being human, and it is inevitable. A good boss, though, will actively monitor his or her behavior and check any nascent bad habits. One of the best ways to do this is to observe how others behave around you. For instance, if you notice that your people or colleagues are acting overly cautious in your presence, you might want to explore why. Are you behaving badly? Almost certainly, yes. Are you yelling? If so, then go to hell.
Another trick for checking yourself is to ask trusted employees and colleagues to observe your behavior. By trusted, I mean the ones who have seen you at your best and worst and are most likely to speak the truth directly to your face. The ones you regularly turn to for advice. If such an empowered employee sets a mysterious meeting with you, be sure to wear your thick skin to work that day, but also be sure to allow the truth to enter your thick skull. Pettiness, knee-jerk defensiveness, and vengeance are never appropriate, and less so when a trusted employee intrepidly approaches you with constructive criticism or just to vent. Times like these are primed for you to stuff your ego in a sack and throw it in the river.
Milquetoast or Toaster
Bosses who don’t fight for their people tend to come in two categories. The first is more rare: the milquetoast boss who is afraid to upset or confront anyone, who thinks the best course of action is to pretend that everything is just a-okay all the time. These feckless bosses, though they mean well and are personable, inevitably expose their people to all sorts of harm from others to the extent that they may as well just commit the harm themselves.
The other type is far more and far too prevalent. These beasts land somewhere on the spectrum between superficially nice but wholly about self-preservation to just plain mean. Whatever space they occupy on this spectrum, they are mere bullies even if they outsource their bullying to other employees. And, as we know, workplace bullies are definitionally incompetent.
So that’s the morality of bosses fighting for their people, but what of the practicality? What is the benefit? Bosses who fight deserve loyalty and respect and tend to get them, but they should not expect them. Yes, such bosses foster workplaces where trust, job satisfaction, dedication, creativity, and high productivity often prevail. But for the boss, it needs to be all about the doing, not the what for. Good bosses who fight for their people have one primary goal, one guiding philosophy that shapes their every move. There is one purpose to their treatment of their people and one treatment their people deserve, and achieving it significantly advances the likelihood that everyone will do great work.
Just be decent.
Next Thursday: Rule 2, “Trust lasts longer than ammo.”
Query of the Week
The Fight for Your People Challenge
Have you ever experienced a boss protecting you? If so, what did it do for your morale? Have you ever had a boss not protect you? What was the result?
Share your thoughts on this topic or open a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
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I’m an enemy of the unlived meaningless life.
Bob Dylan
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Just to roll stones?
Bob Dylan’s 1997 song “Not Dark Yet” offers a keen observation undergirded by profound wisdom. Actually, it offers many keen observations about life and aging while the entire song is undergirded by profound wisdom, but I want to look at just one couplet and the second line of the couplet in particular.
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
In these lines, the singer lets us know that his consciousness can never escape the pull of his origins, that his end will be a return to his beginning. No matter how much he does, no matter how far he goes, his life will end as it began — in opacity, in mystery, even, perhaps, in nothingness. All that movement that fills his life, and he will just end up where he started. Dylan’s view of life is nearly Sisyphean, that is if Sisyphus rolled his boulder up a steep incline just the once, scrambled after it as it tumbled back down, and promptly expired upon reaching the base of the hill.
Dylan’s lines encompass the entirety of each of our earthly existences, but we experience this frenetic inertness — this spinning-top activity — on a daily basis. As any entrepreneur or anyone else who has undertaken a difficult and complex project can tell you, this idea of standing still while appearing feverishly active is a given. We are all the children of Sisyphus, his little Sisyphi/ae, rolling our stones up our steep inclines only to see them roll down again and again.
Depressing, eh? Maybe discouraging? Perhaps you are thinking right now, “Geez, Jim, way to kill my buzz. Why should I even get out of bed in the morning? After all, I am just going to end up in bed later tonight.”
True enough.
Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’. Keep them doggies rollin’
The French-Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus suggests some relief for our Sisyphean existence by reconceptualizing Sisyphus as rolling his rock to the peak and then heroically, enthusiastically bounding down the hill after it, excited to get back to work.
Absurd, yes?
But there is a difference between the seeming Sisyphean nature of our day to day experience and the eternal torture Sisyphus suffers, and there is a reason, as Camus suggests, for bounding after that rolling stone. Sisyphus had offended the gods by, well, doing lots of things. He was a man too clever by half who outsmarted the gods on a couple of occasions, but he was also just an all around arrogant bad guy. His punishment, then, was fitting since it involved mindless, pointless labor and futility — the opposite of guile and cleverness and a proper comeuppance for arrogance.
In fact, it is that very lack of mental stimulation and autonomy that makes tedious, repetitive work so soul crushing, which is why bosses who regard their employees as nothing more than expendible automatons should spend eternity pushing stones.
But I digress.
I was about to offer some solace in in the midst of our Sisyphean existence. The difference between most of us and Sisyphus is that for us, on occasion, whether at work or in other aspects of our lives, that rock doesn’t quite roll all the way down to the bottom of the hill. Sometimes it establishes a new base, a bit higher than the old base. And sometimes, just sometimes, we can push that rock just a little further, an incremental improvement that we can build on.
I am not being a Pollyanna here. Whatever the case, we still are pushing a rock most of the time, even when we are enjoying ourselves or are making modest progress. It’s just what we do.
We try and we try and we try,
And when we stop,
We die.
Anonymous
My point is that we are not at essence Sisyphuses, not just yet. We can and do make progress no matter how futile it all seems. Then again, one could argue, and I may just argue myself, that, yes, we can achieve things while we live, but as Dylan suggests, don’t we all just find ourselves back where we started in the end? Don’t we come from Idunno and end in Idunno? Whatever your religious convictions on the subject, as a matter of earthly existence and human consciousness, the answer is yes. If you believe in a great beyond, that is a different plane of existence. Even if you believe in reincarnation, it is all a repetition of this plane of existence but not the same experience. Our conscious arrival on this plane is shrouded in mystery as is our departure.
Merry Christmas, you wonderful old building and loan!
Sure enough, we are just rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, but maybe there’s a little more to it. If you have seen Frank Capra’s treacly Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), you may know where I am going with this. In the movie, George, a small-town moneylender, falls on hard times and, after unwisely mixing his treacle with alcohol, wishes that he had never existed. An angel grants his wish, and George gets to see what the world (or at least his town) would be like without him. It is sort of a twist on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” but with a doofus angel and nice-guy Jimmy Stewart at the center of the action. What George witnesses in this world without him is a town in disarray, and he realizes his life has had meaning in that he had improved the lives of his loved ones and his entire community. And, in a triumphant tear-jerking finale, he is also awarded a leg lamp.
Now had he been a hotdog vendor in New York City rather than a small-town banker, the drama of his non-existence would be dwarfed and dampened enough to ruin the plot, but that does not mean that a hotdog vendor in New York City cannot live a meaningful life. The hotdog vendor’s epiphany just doesn’t make as good a basis for an emotionally manipulative movie.
Existential Neutrality
What I am pushing toward here is a sort of existential equivalent of carbon neutrality. The idea of carbon neutrality is that you offset what ever carbon your behavior releases into the atmosphere. So, as your car spews carbon monoxide on your daily drive to work, you then would plant enough carbon-absorbing trees (11,603?) to counterbalance your pollutant output. In my scheme of existential neutrality, at the very least, you would do enough good in the world in terms of the benevolence you generate, the positives you produce, and the uplift you provide others that it offsets the harm that we all do. In fact, ideally, you would move beyond neutrality and leave the world improved. This improvement has little to do with how many kids you have or whether you have kids at all or how much money you give to charity. It is not about numbers but is a matter of weighing values, contribution, and selflessness. When you reach the top of that hill with your boulder for the last time, what sort of hill do you leave behind? Will you have achieved existential neutrality? Will you have surpassed neutrality and contributed to the betterment of the hill or perhaps its besting?
When all is said and done, when the deal goes down, when it comes time to shed this mortal coil, during your final memorial service, will people attend merely out of obligation, or will they attend out of profound regret for what the world has lost? Or will it be to gloat and to make sure the b*d is really dead?
Each of our existences can be Sisyphean in the extreme, contributing no more (or even less) than we take and reducing or maintaining rather than enhancing the good in the world. Or we can push that boulder a little further each time. Yeah, we will lose ground frequently, but just a little more upward mobility and perhaps we, like George, can finally rest secure in the knowledge that our existence has left the world somewhat better off than how we found it.
Query of the Week
The George Bailey Challenge
What do you think is required of individuals if we are to leave the world better off than how we found it?
Share your thoughts on this topic or open a discussion by leaving a comment below or by contacting me directly by email:
Let me know what you think. I welcome your comments and questions.
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A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?
Bob Dylan
One of my longtime mantras has been “hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and expect something in between.” That philosophy has stood me in good stead as the extremes — absolute good or absolute bad — occur only rarely and are usually nowhere as good or bad as we imagine.
As obvious as this approach may seem, it is all too easy and even natural to assume the best or the worst of any situation while overlooking the most likely scenario. When we approach a choice, we establish a continuum between devil-may-care fatuousness and doomsday preparation. On one side frolics the happy-go-lucky grasshopper driven by FOMO, roaring, “YOLO!,” and exalting in a seemingly eternal summer. On the other side toils the frenzied ant shrieking, “OMG!,” and slogging indefatigably all through the beautiful season, fixated only on the coming winter.
There are leaders who innately identify with the grasshopper, perhaps wary of crying wolf (to mix my fables) or of spreading malaise among the masses. In some cases, this tendency manifests as an aversion to appearing risk adverse. Many more leaders, though, innately identify with the ant, perhaps wary of being unprepared for some future crisis. In some cases, this tendency manifests as an aversion to appearing reckless.
We can see these inclinations at work in the reaction to Covid 19. Some otherwise rational grasshoppers imagine that the potential harm of the disease is slight and even exaggerated. Some otherwise healthy ants, in the meantime, see death and disease everywhere, refusing to relax a bit even after vaccination.
At either extreme, the fear is of making a mistake, of overreacting to a phantom danger or of failing to anticipate an impending doom. And both are almost always wrong. We can confidently expect something in between.
Frankly, no matter what choice you make, mistakes will occur, both avoidable and unavoidable. In fact, the very choice between trying or not trying something can itself be an error. I have always been fond of the aphorism that anyone who has never made a mistake has never attempted anything, but I must note that it is a bit misleading. Very often not attempting anything at all is itself the very worse mistake, and here lies another important truth about decision making: trying is almost always better than inertia.
So much of decision making is about curating risk. In my experience, most formulas for making decisions and assessing risks are so vague as to be meaningless or so specific and complex as to be useless. For typical everyday assessments of risk, a simple cost-benefit analysis combined with an estimate of probability is all that is needed. Is the good of a particular choice worth the cost? What is the most likely scenario if you take a risk? Certainly consider the best case and the worst case outcomes, but what is the most likely? Something in between.
Below is what I pretentiously call the “Risk Curation Matrix,” but really it is just a simple quadrant tool for decision making.
When available, trust the data to make decisions regarding risk. When reliable data is unavailable, seek it out. Data can eliminate both bias and noise in decision making. But don’t overdo it. Data is but a tool and only one tool at that. Be sure to weigh data against other sources of information and wisdom, including experience.
As appealing as the extremes on our continuum may be — to party with the antic grasshopper on one side or to prepare with the no-nonsense ant on the other — it is best to expect something in the middle since that is where almost all consequences fall. If it helps we can assign the middle position its own insect, such as a tick or a dung beetle. Pick your favorite creepy-crawly, and proudly declare, “I expect something in between. I am a moth!”
Think about the last time you really longed for some positive in your life — an event or an outcome. Even if you were lucky enough to get what you wanted, was it really all you had dreamed? Kids offer a great object lesson here. Kids obsess over the prospect of receiving a toy for a holiday or birthday. How long does that preoccupation last, though, once they have the object in hand? A week? A day? How long before they abandon it to go play with the box it came in? Sure, hope for the best, but don’t expect it to be all that. Ants may be a drag at a picnic, but they don’t waste time with idle longing.
Now think about the last time you were really worried about something. Did it come to pass as you feared? Chances are, even if it was bad, it did not conform to the worst-case scenario you had conjured. Sure, prepare for the worst, but don’t obsess over it to the detriment of the present. Worry does nothing to protect us from future harm, but it is guaranteed to ruin the here and now. Grasshoppers may be a slovenly class, but at least they have fun.
We all constantly assess risk, weighing this against that, and we must make our choices, including the choice not to choose. A realistic approach — one that shoots for the best-case scenario, accounts for the worst, but settles on something in between — will alleviate pointless anxiety while mitigating avoidable harm. Otherwise, if you choose to behave like either the grasshopper or the ant, life may just squish you like a bug.
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I’m reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I got the blood of the land in my voice
Bob Dylan
Today marks the latest installment in my aggressively occasional and profoundly informal Bad Bossing in Literature Series.
James Joyce published the short story “Counterparts” in his 1914 collection, Dubliners. Perhaps you have read it. If not, I suggest you check it out although you will not need to do so to follow my argument here. The opening of “Counterparts” is set in the small legal office of Crosbie & Alleyne located in Dublin, naturally enough. Mr. Alleyne is the managing partner, and Farrington, the main character, is one of his clerks who reproduce legal documents by hand, a meticulous and horribly tedious job in a time before digital scanners and photocopiers or even electric typewriters and correction fluid.
Mr. Alleyne is a short bald, vainglorious man from the northern part of Ireland, which, in parochial Dublin, makes him a highly suspect outsider (read: Protestant). Farrington is a bulky Dubliner, prone to violence and vainglorious in his own way. He is also given to drink, which is an old-timey euphemism for his acute compulsion to consume sizable quantities of alcoholic beverages throughout the day. When he cannot consume them, he literally daydreams about consuming them.
Farrington is a dreadful employee, sneaking out for a midday pint, shirking his work, lying to his boss, and being all around insubordinate. But the fault is not entirely with him. Mr. Alleyne is pompous and overbearing. He has plenty to complain about with Farrington, but he goes too far, humiliating the man in private and in public. Alleyne has many flaws, including a nonprofessional interest in a client, Miss Delacour. Partially to show off to her, Alleyne abuses Farrington in front of the whole office, concluding with the unwise rhetorical question,
Do you think me an utter fool?
Farrington, still a little juiced from his midday nip, cannot resist a witty retort.
“I don’t think, sir,” he said, “that that’s a fair question to put to me.”
Alleyne becomes irate, Delacour is visibly amused, and Farrington must apologize under the threat of immediate dismissal. The scene is vivid, with the tiny boss raging shrilly and shaking his fist in the face of the larger man:
You impertinent ruffian! You impertinent ruffian! I’ll make short work of you! Wait till you see! You’ll apologise to me for your impertinence or you’ll quit the office instanter! You’ll quit this, I’m telling you, or you’ll apologise to me!
Even back then, the use of the phrase “impertinent ruffian” spoken in a squeaky voice and accompanied by a feeble fist shaking was pretty funny.
At this point I need to pause to beg your indulgence as I prepare to make a rather audacious statement but one I believe warranted by the evidence.
In my most humble opinion, the office work environment of the Dublin law firm of Crosbie & Alleyne is somewhat dysfunctional.
Let’s explore why. First, whatever his flaws (his own bullying ways, his laziness, his anger issues, his alcoholism), Farrington is still just one lowly employee. The lynchpin of the workplace dysfunction is Mr. Alleyne, the managing attorney. If Alleyne were literally punching Farrington, he would be punching far above his weight, but he figuratively punches down, well below his class. And this abusive behavior is not reserved for Farrington as we learn a bit later in the story that he “had hounded Little Peake out of the office in order to make room for his own nephew.” Mr. Alleyne is not a man who values his employees, but he does relish bullying them.
Nonetheless, Alleyne’s small stature symbolizes his weakness and ineffectiveness as he rages indiscriminately and lands few blows. The story opens with a bell ringing “furiously” and a “furious voice” yelling at Miss Parker through the tube. Note that Miss Parker is simply the one charged with relaying a message to Farrington so that Alleyne’s mistreatment of her only demonstrates the haphazard and gratuitous nature of his bluster.
Toward the beginning of the story, when Farrington attempts to excuse his poor performance by blaming the chief clerk (“But Mr. Shelley said, sir—“), Alleyne impersonates Farrington, and then adds, “Kindly attend to what I say and not to what Mr. Shelley said, sir.” In one stroke, he not only humiliates an employee, but he undermines the hierarchy of the workplace. If he thinks Farrington is lying about what Mr. Shelley said, then Alleyne should confront that issue directly. If he thinks Mr. Shelley is possibly at fault here, he should broach his concerns (in private) with Mr. Shelley. Instead, he renders his chief clerk immaterial while perhaps letting Farrington get away with a lie. In addition this game of asking a question and then immediately mocking the answer is apparently an Alleyne family favorite, an old bully’s trick meant to blame and demean, not to correct behavior or fix a problem.
Alleyne repeatedly wields only one weapon of any puissance: ”I’ll lay the matter before Mr. Crosbie.” Every time he utters this craven threat, though, Mr. Alleyne reinforces the fact that he has no actual power or authority, which is why, despite his incompetence and open contempt for his workplace, Farrington manages to continue in his job.
In addition to his evident impotence, Alleyne’s open and inappropriate flirtation with Miss Delacour telegraphs to his employees that he selectively adheres to professional standards while strictly enforcing them in others. Even Delacour is onto Alleyne. She smiles at Farrington’s retort and thus reveals her own contempt for Alleyne, her hypocritical little big man.
Later in the story we learn that Alleyne may have a longstanding resentment against Farrington due to a slight: “Mr. Alleyne had overheard him mimicking his North of Ireland accent to amuse Higgins and Miss Parker.” This revelation further bolsters the observation that the thin-skinned Alleyne has lost the respect of his employees, who mock him behind his back.
To be fair, irrespective of Alleyne’s many flaws, Farrington is a disastrous employee — lazy, drunken, dishonest, and rebellious. He deserves severe disciplining or even firing, but Mr. Alleyne clearly has neither the fortitude nor the authority to do so. Farrington is feckless as an employee, and Alleyne is just as feckless as a boss. These counterparts deserve each other.
Alleyne’s ineffectiveness amply demonstrates that authority, leadership, and command do not flow from a title, a position, or a hierarchical structure. They must be earned and cultivated, even by the big, bad boss. I am sure that you, like me, have had bosses who imagined their title alone was ample demonstration of their consummate competence, as though getting a job is the same as doing the job. These overbearing Mr. Alleynes shake their tiny fists and rant and sometimes even hurt or fire people, but such arrogance and bullying is the very manifestation of their ineffectiveness and the detriment they represent to their employees and organizations.
If you are a boss, don’t be like Mr. Alleyne. If you are an employee, don’t be like Farrington. But, if you do decide to act like either one (and, yes, it is a decision), just as with the characters in the story, you deserve each other.
PS: My analysis here addresses just the first portion of “Counterparts,” which goes on to follow Farrington into his night at the pubs and then home to a most devastating conclusion. I urge you to read or reread this fantastic story if you have not done so recently. In the meantime, “I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa.”
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com
It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I can’t work up to you
You’ll have to work down to me someday
Bob Dylan
Anyone who has taught on just about any level has heard a student or twelve whine some version of “but I worked oh-so very hard on it” after turning in a poor assignment. The student’s assumption is that putting in a great effort is tantamount to producing good work. They imagine that, upon hearing their woeful tale of travail, you will immediately raise their grade in the belief that indiscriminate exertion is the primary measure of quality.
And, let’s face it, we have all thought or said that the key to success is to work harder, but that claim, however heartfelt, is misleading.
99% PERSPIRATION - 1% INSPIRATION < GREAT SUCCESS
Here is the worst-kept dirty secret you already know. Effort, as quantifiable as it may be, is in no way a measure of quality. Certainly, effort can improve quality, but there is no objective assessment of quality that can be ascribed to effort. Work is good or bad no matter the quantity of effort input. Michelangelo spent about three years shaping his David. If the massive figure took only two years to sculpt, would we admire its beauty more? What if it took four years?
Surely you have seen work that has taken an impressive amount of time and sweat that is still not up to snuff. Perhaps you have produced such work. I know I have. I have been working my tail off to learn ukulele, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that I have reached the level of “makes your ears bleed” in terms of my playing and aspire to plateau at the level of “doesn’t anger anyone” some time before I die. Pity my family and neighbors. Maybe next I’ll pick up the bagpipes.
When I was in graduate school, one of my buddies decided he wanted to master the art of drawing. On top of writing a doctoral dissertation in literature, a massive undertaking by itself, he started attending drawing classes and studying books on artistic technique. He particularly wanted to learn to reproduce the human figure in pencil, and, judging from his considerable output, he was most keenly concerned with the female nude, preferring to skip a night at the pub with his friends to score more studio time with a model posing au naturel.
He worked oh-so hard at his craft, and his drawings, which he proudly displayed, were distressingly perfect, executed with mathematical precision, prosecuted by the numbers according to preordained proportions. And that is where it ended, with the aesthetics of a machinist. So far as he was concerned, because he had struggled so long to memorize and reproduce a formula of human proportions, he had attained mastery although he manifested all the artistic grace of the caliper. Content with his achievement, he stopped drawing and turned to learning the mandolin with similar results.
NOT EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE COUNTED COUNTS
I'd been so fascinated by the motion that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth.
Ralph Ellison
The same phenomenon and its associated self-delusion is commonly in play in the workplace. Look around you. Many of the hardest workers are objectively the least productive relative to their effort. Yes. They toil endlessly, almost heroically, and get a lot done, but what is their true productive value given all their noisy grinding? Perhaps you and I are like them.
Observe for your edification Betsy down the hall laboring away well into the late evening. Maybe you even stay behind longer than necessary just so she can’t claim to always be last in the building. I’ve done that. How dumb am I?
Yes, Betsy works hard, but does she accomplish more or do better work than I do? In competing with her and staying late, am I producing more and better work? Possibly more, but better? My goal should be to produce the best work I can, not just work the most hours. And yes those two are often mutually exclusive, for there is always a point of diminishing returns of both quality and quantity.
GET SMART
You have, no doubt, heard the dichotomy between working hard and working smart. It has become an annoying cliché, but don’t roll your eyes just yet. For all the dichotomy’s banality, it is no less true. At the risk of committing a heresy against one of our most sacred cultural assumptions, I will assert that working hard ain’t all that.
Of course I am not arguing against hard work. Hard work is generally good and frequently necessary. I am, though, arguing against hard work as an end unto itself. Hard work is not inherently virtuous, and too much of the hard work we exalt in the workplace is just pointless or even bad, like my buddy’s drawings, or worse, like his mandolin playing, or worst of all, like my ukulele playing. The effort cannot be the end itself, nor does it always give way to a positive result. We must learn to work smart, to calibrate the effort required to produce the best work without assuming harder is better.
Of the two compliments below, which would you rather receive?
My, you really are a hard worker!
My, you really do good work!
If these compliments represented two candidates who were applying for a job with you, which one would you be inclined to hire?
I once had a colleague who frequently and effusively praised her staff’s hard work in public, but I never once heard her comment on its quality. Over time, I noticed that her people sagged incrementally with every commendation of their drudgery—the precise opposite of what I expected to see. They looked more worn and beaten each time she lauded their effort, and it dawned on me that they wanted to hear, just once, “what a good job” rather than “what a lot of work!”
By the way, late Millennials and Generation Z-ers may already have an advantage over us old-timers. Among them there is a valuing of quality personal time and a sense that a job or career is not life itself. Perhaps this attitude is driven by the spirit of no-one-ever-lamented-on-their-deathbed-that-they-should-have-spent-more-time-at-the-office. Or maybe it is the result of watching their boomer parents slog in a world of increasing demands and shrinking rewards. Or maybe they’re all just a bunch of lazy, candy-ass ne’er-do-wells. Whatever the reason, I am all for it. They are right. Labor union activists a century ago did not fight and even die so that we could just squander the weekends, 40-hour work weeks, and vacation days they won for us.
Over the past decades, American productivity has increased and wages have largely stagnated. In addition, Americans more and more forego earned vacation time or do work during their vacation. Why? Does working longer with less rest make us more productive? Absolutely not! If you doubt me, the opening chapters of Daniel Pink’s 2018 book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, will swiftly disabuse you of that canard.
The formula is rather simple. Work better not just harder, or, more precisely, work better and only harder when it contributes to better. You will improve your life and your work.
PS: You may feel the urge to criticize this piece, but before you do, please bear in mind that I really worked really really hard on it!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com
Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon
Bob Dylan
An apocryphal story about the early days of NASA’s Apollo program has long made the rounds. Perhaps you have heard it. Many versions feature President John F. Kennedy touring a NASA facility, but that one seems too contrived. I will tell my preferred version with a good deal of embroidery.
Once upon a time, during the early days of Project Apollo, a group of reporters was touring a NASA facility. Remember that at this time NASA was primarily focused on landing humans on the moon. Every mission, be it the Mercuries, the Geminis, or the early Apollos, no matter how Earth-bound, was a step toward that goal.
These lucky reporters had the rare privilege of being let loose for a day to ask NASA personnel whatever they wanted, but they found themselves out of their element in the novel and highly technical NASA environment. It was difficult to communicate with the jargon-prone NASA personnel. Exasperated, the newsmen resorted to simply walking up to NASA employees and asking what they did there, but even then the answers were hopelessly specialized and utterly baffling to these hapless scribes. Every interview followed the same irksome pattern and ended with the NASA technician falling back on a standard formula: “Well, sir, I guess you could just write down that I am helping to put a man on the moon.” That response was at least sincere and accurate if journalistically useless.
One reporter was feeling particularly vexed. He was the seasoned lion of the group, a tough old cuss with a booming voice and boisterous style, and the others deferred to him readily. He wore an old brown fedora and chewed on unlit cigar stumps constantly, looking every bit the part of the grizzled newshound. Having long worked a police beat, he was an ace interrogator who could always rely on the combination of his disarming wit and intimidating arrogance to squeeze information from his marks. That day, the veteran newspaperman had pulled out all stops, at first applying humor to lighten up the NASA geeks, and, failing that, turning to intimidation to soften them. No dice. They were unflappable. What could he do with all this technical mumbo-jumbo they fed him? Where was the story? The engineering boys at NASA sure seemed to know what they were doing, but they were terrible at explaining it to a layman.
After a long day of asking over and over “and what do you do here” and hearing a pile of technical jargon followed by the same canned but heartfelt response—“helping to put a man on the moon”—the veteran reporter convinced his colleagues it was time to blow that joint and head to an early happy hour down the road. Everyone was delighted, but he was still miffed. As they moved toward the door, our old newshound spied a small stooped man working a mop up the hallway. The reporter, ever eager to punch below his class, thought it a fine opportunity to blow off some steam and to show off his waggish humor for his buddies. The man with the mop was surprised when the gruff old reporter approached him and asked one last time, “And, you sir, what do you do here?”
The old reporter’s colleagues snickered at the gag, particularly when they saw the anguished confusion on the janitor’s face. The tough old coot questioning him looked as formidable as ever without even a hint of a smile. How would the janitor react? Would he mumble in embarrassment and shame? After all, he was the lowliest worker among all the NASA hotshots. Or, would he respond rudely at being the butt of a joke, a big mistake considering the fearsomeness of his interrogator?
The custodian, a humble man by nature, quickly gathered his wits. He used his mop handle to push himself up straight, squared his shoulders, and looked his would-be antagonist right in the eye. He thrust out his chest, and through a thick foreign accent said as boldly as he could, “Why, sir, I am helping to put a man on the moon.”
Whether the questioner be a hardened reporter or the President of the United States, this story is likely an urban legend, but it is still a wonderful illustration of the power of organizational mission focus. If any institution ever had such a focus, it was NASA in the sixties, but even for NASA the degree of mission-focus described in the story seems implausible.
Whatever its precise veracity, this tale is a fine parable for the the power of mission focus.
The leaders and employees of most mission-driven organizations typically will support their mission to some degree, but that support needs to pervade every aspect of the organization. Everything needs to be soaked in it. If your organization’s mission is to feed the hungry, then everyone ideally needs to understand that each piece of the operation is there to feed the hungry. Obtaining food is just as key as drawing up the budget, which is just as key as distributing that food, which is just as key as copying informational flyers, which is just as key as marshaling volunteers, which is just as key as maintaining your computers. If some activity does not to some extent support that mission, you need to reassess its value. If any part of the operation is not optimal, then the operation is not optimal.
A quick caveat: naturally, top-to-bottom mission focus is never a license for not doing right by your people. Mission is never an excuse for worker exploitation. In other words, don’t do good by doing bad.
Getting everyone to understand their role in fulfilling the mission and to focus on that is challenging but vital. Doing so will help transform people’s relationship with the organization and the work. It will also reveal those at every rank who may not fully support the work or the goals of the organization. In the end, such an all-inclusive mission focus will aid you as you pursue the moonshot of your own mission. You cannot afford to miss.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimsalvucci.substack.com