Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  “You know what, James? I feel like there’s quite a lot of control I’m going to have to give up in order to make this change successful. And guarantees of success are the first thing I have to give up. Let’s start with what you’ve been learning.”

  KEYS TO UNLOCK OUR NEED FOR CONTROL

  Often people hear about complexity and throw their hands up: if nothing can be controlled, how do we ever get anything done in the first place? And it is true that in a complex world basically none of the things that matter most to you are inside your direct control. No matter how much you practice violin, you might never play in the symphony orchestra. No matter how much you work to get your team members to collaborate, they might just stay in their cubicles. No matter how much you take care of your body, you might get cancer anyway. All of these are emergent properties of the system and can’t be under your—or anyone else’s—direct control. This doesn’t mean that you should put away your violin, give up on teamwork, and eat cookie-dough ice cream for dinner.

  Instead of craving control, in complexity we have to shift to thinking about influence. We will not be able to make things happen, but we can be thoughtful about how we support the emergence of the things we want. Want to raise a child that can support herself as an adult? You can influence some of her early experiences to make that outcome more likely. And because we cannot predict the future, we have to be careful not to have too narrow an outcome in mind. When you think about raising a child who can support herself, if the outcome you have in mind is that she will take over the family dry-cleaning business, you’re probably going to push too hard for a narrow destination and might possibly get the sort of perverse consequences from pushing toward too narrow a goal in a complex time. She might be a failure in the skills the dry-cleaning business requires but spectacular in abstract geometry. Instead of setting her up to succeed, you have set her up to fail.

  One of the quirks of control in a complex world is that a direction (like “more self-sustaining”) is way better than a narrow destination or target (“take over dry cleaners”). Increasing options while knowing what’s most important gives us more room for influence even as it relinquishes our (false) sense of control over exactly how it will all turn out.

  Key question: What can I help enable? What could enable me?

  One of the most helpful ways to shift away from thinking about outcomes to thinking about influence is to consider what seems to enable the direction you most desire. Thinking about enablers helps us resist thinking about causes—which is what our controlling minds want us to believe in. What caused her stroke? What caused young Johnny to drop out of high school and join a gang? What caused their team’s failure to meet that deadline? All of these are tempting but unhelpful questions, particularly if you’re using them to try to manage your health, your kids, and your team.

  Asking what you can help enable shifts your thinking and expands your view. What sorts of things are inside your control that might enable your team to work together more collaboratively? Well, you might be able to influence where they sit when they do their work—Google famously creates communal eating spaces for people to bump into one another and talk. You might be able to influence how well people know each other by creating time and space for people to talk about personal things. Or if you’re not the leader of the group and perhaps you can’t influence those things directly, you can use your own behavior to try to make a difference—by asking your colleagues out to lunch, or by moving your desk near people you’d like to collaborate with, or by gently asking people questions about their personal lives and volunteering information about your own. Showing pictures of your kids might not feel like it’s “controlling” the quality of teamwork, but with the right mind-set it might be attempting to enable it (unless you are just wanting to show off your kids, which might have perverse consequences on the quality of teamwork).

  You can also direct this question to yourself. What would enable you to have the life you most want? You might have an image of a particular destination in mind (“I just want to live in one of those beautiful houses on the river”). You can notice the craving for a destination that you think you should be able to control, and see if you can create a direction instead (“I want to spend more of my time surrounded by nature”). Then you can ask questions about what might enable that for you.

  Take Ayesha, who wanted a leadership position in the small nonprofit in which she was working. She had a particular role in mind and wanted to take up the position in the next six to nine months; she wanted, that is, to control the outcome of her unpredictable career path. Ayesha loved the organization and its mission, but there were very few leadership positions in existence in the first place—and none looked likely to open up soon. As she began to think about enabling a direction rather than creating a single outcome, she realized she wanted a sense of career progression and she wanted to enact more influence over the direction of the organization. Ayesha mused about what might support this, and she decided that simply taking part in the strategic conversations about the future of the organization would be helpful. She explained her direction to her boss and requested to be included in some of those conversations. Nine months later, Ayesha was still in the same position in the organization, but she was far more satisfied with her work and understood much more about what mattered to her as a young leader. And as so often happens, the system was changing around her. Her boss was so pleased with the quality of Ayesha’s strategic thinking that he was working on creating a new leadership position, tailored just for her.

  Our desire to be in control means we tend to search out the solution that creates the outcome we want. Ayesha wouldn’t have thought to create the outcome of her own specially created leadership position—that all looked impossible in her flat organization with its tight resources. Instead, if her eyes had been more focused on a particular leadership position, she might have become more political or tried to find a way to subtly suggest that she was a better candidate than either the incumbent or her colleagues. This might have had a devastating impact on Ayesha and on her prospects at the organization she loved.

  Key habit: Experimentation at the edges

  There is a lot of writing these days about being more experimental so that we can innovate our way to a better product, service, mate, future. Let’s face it, though, many of our “experiments” are kind of like the ones we did in high school science. We believe that we can tell beforehand just what’s going to happen, and if we don’t achieve that outcome we figure we did it wrong.

  When we open our horizons to direction rather than destination, and to influence rather than control, we can begin to think about genuinely experimenting—trying something where we really don’t know what might happen next to see if it helps us travel in the direction we seek. We also want to experiment at the edges rather than at the very center of the issue. In complex systems the center is the most resistant to change, so it’s best to stay away from it.

  Gerhard was wanting to take a more systemic approach to managing his team. He had noticed that he was always the center of the wheel and that individual team members came to him with their issues. While he liked problem-solving with them, he was finding it was taking more and more of his day and he needed them to be working more with one another. At first he thought about creating team-based goals, but he quickly realized that that solution was at the heart of the problem and would likely get a lot of resistance from his team—they didn’t know one another well enough to even know how they could collaborate. So he looked for a smaller experiment that was at the edges rather than the center.

  He decided he would take five minutes at the beginning of each week to note down some aspect of the interconnections between his team members that he might look for. One week it was “common connections outside our team”; another week it was “similar problems with customers.” Then he put that on a Post-it on his laptop, and as people came in to meet with him, he was tuned to look for that particular issue. He
figured in this way at least he’d learn more about the interconnections, even if his team didn’t. Some weeks he didn’t find much. But other weeks the issues popped out with massive connections, which excited him. In the past, Gerhard’s attention would have been more focused on actual solutions, and when a team member came with a similar problem he would have provided the solution again and perhaps forgotten who else was wrestling with this issue. With this experiment, he was tuned to think about the connections and he often forgot the solution itself. This meant he had to direct his team members to one another around those issues. “Romi found a fabulous solution to that problem,” he’d tell another team member. “You might go see what she did.” In two months, his tiny experiment (five minutes and a Post-it!) had worked very differently than he had expected. Yes, he had learned more about the team interconnections, but that was only a small part of the outcome. The much bigger outcome was that his team was actually collaborating more, and not going to him with their problems so much.

  Basically, Gerhard was doing what Peter Coleman, who uses complexity ideas to make progress on intractable conflicts, urges us to do: “Alter patterns, not outcomes.”5 We need to notice the patterns that are creating the circumstances we dislike and then experiment at the edges to change those patterns (and of course we can notice patterns we do like and experiment to amplify those patterns). Then we will find ourselves learning about the system and also influencing it in ways that might just move us in directions that turn out to be better than the destinations we had in mind in the first place.

  6

  TRAPPED BY EGO

  Shackled to who you are now, you can’t reach for who you’ll be next

  “Okay, how about this one?”

  Mark turned around from the counter, a knife with almond butter poised in the air. “Nah, too sexy.”

  “Urgh,” Alison let out a sigh of dismay, “you said the last one was too corporate!”

  “Do you want me to be honest, or do you want me to just tell you what you want to hear?” Mark asked, turning back to the task at hand and cutting an almond butter sandwich into triangles for Naomi’s lunch box.

  “I wish I didn’t have to choose—I wish you could be honest and tell me I looked perfect!” Alison said, unbuttoning the third blouse she had tried on that morning. “I just want to get this right. I haven’t ever had a presentation that was this high-stakes before.”

  “Yes, you have,” Mark told her (listening to win). “Remember when you were first starting NumberSense and you had that meeting with the venture capital guys? Your whole future was in the balance then too.”

  “Geez, thanks for pointing that out,” Alison sneered. “Now my morning will be better for sure.”

  “What’s the big deal about your outfit?” Mark muttered. “Wear what you wore then.”

  “I was twenty-six, Mark! I don’t even own those clothes anymore. I might never have owned those clothes, in fact. I think I borrowed them from Kathrin.” Alison stomped back to the closet to see if she could find anything that might inspire confidence from her board. “Nope, nope, nope,” she muttered to her clothes. “Too fanciful, too casual, too flirty.” She knew this was stupid but she was so frustrated she might cry. How would she get them to take her ideas seriously if she couldn’t even dress herself?

  “Hey, Babe, how about if I try one more time to really listen to you?” Mark had come into their bedroom, his apron still on. “The lunches are made, the kids are glued to PBS Kids, and we are miraculously twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule because of daylight savings time.”

  Alison sat down on the floor in her closet. “I can’t see how listening is going to help. I wish you could just supply the perfect outfit now.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re feeling really anxious about today, and like you’re worried that if you don’t look the part, the board won’t listen to you and you won’t be able to make the pivot you want. That’s putting a lot of pressure on you—and on this one meeting, eh?”

  Alison came and sat next to him on the bed. “Yes, exactly. It’s that I’ve been pushing so hard for the massive org change—that’s what they hired me to do. And I see now that running a whole suite of experiments is probably better, but it sounds so loosey-goosey. They want me to make a big splash, and these all sound so little. I want to at least look sure of myself since I can’t actually be sure of myself.”

  “You’re feeling worried that they won’t take these ideas seriously? Like they’ll think you’ve lost your nerve and they’ll lose their confidence in you?”

  Alison smiled. “Sometimes I could just kiss Leroy for the change he’s made in you! In us, I guess. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

  “Hey! Lips off the best friend!” Mark laughed. Then he paused. “Can I tell you what I think, honestly?”

  Alison’s face crumpled in anticipation. “Okay.”

  “I think this is the time to be you, Ali. I think this is not the time to put on exactly the right armor and dazzle them. I think it’s time to share with the board what you’re learning and how it’s reshaping the way you’re thinking about this change. And I think you should wear the thing that you feel most comfortable in, most like you.”

  Now Alison’s eyes were wide with surprise. “You’re kidding. Go in jeans and let them know that I was misguided in my slash-and-burn approach, which they supported, and that now I want to try something else?”

  “Yep. These guys love you—you know that. They believe in you. You already have their confidence. Now just be human with them, and maybe they’ll be human with you.”

  “You say that as though it were easy, Mark! But really, it’s so much harder to just walk in and be real with them.”

  “No one would confuse easy with right, though. Seems like we might try to believe what Leroy is always telling us: in a complex world, what makes us human can be an asset rather than a liability, if we only know which things to trust and which things to mistrust. And you know that our desire to be polished and perfect is one thing to mistrust.”

  Alison stood up and walked back into the closet. She pulled on pants that were even softer than her jeans (but nicer looking) and a silky knit top that she had gotten at a secondhand shop years ago. They were a little worn, but they were professional and comfortable and very, very Alison. She tossed aside the heels she had been trying on and slipped on the flats that were so comfy she could nearly walk a marathon in them. “Okay, world,” she said to the serious face in the mirror, “here’s my experiment for today. No armor, all Alison.”

  THE SEDUCTION AND DANGER OF EGO

  One of the most interesting of the mindtraps is the way we are trapped by our egos—by ourselves, really. It turns out that the strongest trap is created by the person we are wanting to seem to be to ourselves and to others. We have each cultivated a particular way of being that works for us. We have changed enormously through our lives to grow into this person we are right now. Now we have arrived somewhere and we invest a surprising (and unseen) amount of our energy showing that person to the world and defending her from harm.

  Of course, we don’t do that consciously. Alison isn’t thinking, “I need to protect and defend my fragile ego.” She’s thinking, “I need to give those board members confidence in my ideas.” Part of our protection mechanism is the justification we use to believe that we’re doing it right in the first place.

  In one of the classic mismatches of our human system, our relationship to our own vulnerability is totally different to our relationship to the vulnerability of others. Sometimes in a workshop or a meeting, a leader will admit to something particularly threatening to his sense of identity. After the leader has admitted this thing that feels so icky to him, he feels terrible about himself. He’ll admit, “Now I feel ashamed, embarrassed, afraid that all of you will have lost your respect for me.”

  Others watching, though, have an opposite reaction. They say things like, “Now I’m more admiring, astonished at his cou
rage, wanting to reach out to him, feeling better about myself since I see a piece of my shame in him and I admire him so much.” This is the core paradox: we are ashamed of our humanity; others are drawn to us because of it.1

  In this chapter, we’re going to look into the trap that’s in the mirror and unpack the way that person is holding us back. We’ll explore our belief that we have changed in the past but now we have arrived and won’t change much in the future. We’ll notice the way holding on to our current self makes us turn away from learning and possibility, and we’ll look at a map of our own growth and development that might open up a new way forward.

  We believe we have changed much in the past but won’t change in the future

  We humans have the strangest experience of our own growth and development. We tend to have a stark differentiation between the growing, evolving person we were earlier in our lives and the grown, evolved person we are now. You see this in kids who resist the (obnoxious, patronizing) idea parents have that perhaps the choices you make at sixteen won’t really be the ones your twenty-six-year-old self will feel grateful for. But the surprise from all kinds of research is that we keep that same perspective throughout our lives. Ask a twenty-year-old whether he’ll change over the next decade the way he has changed over the previous one and he’ll tell you, No way! Twenty to thirty is smooth sailing! But ask a thirty-year-old that question and he’ll tell you he changed enormously over the decade from twenty to thirty. Now it’s over though: thirty to forty looks like just trying to maintain his weight and not lose too much hair. What does a forty-year-old say? You got it—the decade behind him from thirty to forty was full of changes but looking ahead from forty to fifty looks like it’ll be much more settled. And so on. This is true for all of us, at all ages. We know that we’ve changed so much in the past, but—phew—now we have actually settled down and won’t change anymore. And, er, we’re always wrong about that.2