by Craig Weber
There is a second reason that an affirmative bias is such a powerful aspect of the mindset: without it, you fail before you start, or worse still, you fail because you never start. “You don’t always win when you try,” says Alex Lifeson, “but you always fail when you don’t.”5 The awareness and skills don’t matter if you’re convinced the situation is hopeless.
What’s needed is an affirmative belief that a solution exists and that something positive will emerge. In fact this is a skill of the imagination . . .
—FRANK BARRETT
Steve personifies this balanced approach. He didn’t look at his circumstances and think, “This is a real mess, and someone should speak up. But I’m just the new guy here. There’s not much I can do.” He thought instead, “This is a real mess. But just because I’m the new guy doesn’t mean I can’t make a difference. But I’m not stupid. I know it won’t be easy.” Even more impressive, Steve maintained his affirmative stance while confronted with pessimistic points of view. Assuming it would go poorly, his fellow team members not only avoided the conversation themselves, they pressed Steve to do the same. One even referred to Steve’s intention as “career suicide.”
You don’t always win when you try, but you always fail when you don’t.
—ALEX LIFESON
While there’s no way Steve would have raised the issue with Phil without the belief that he could help solve the problem, Steve wasn’t blindly optimistic either. He recognized the risks and prepared for them. This is an important point: Without an affirmative bias Steve wouldn’t incur the risk of speaking to Phil; but without a realistic view of the situation he wouldn’t put as much effort into preparing for it. By holding a belief that the problem was solvable, while simultaneously accepting all the hard facts, Steve exemplifies the affirmative bias in action.
In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.
—DALAI LAMA
Mentally Tough Mentally Agile
Another indispensable characteristic is mental toughness. The word “fortitude” is close to this aspect of the mindset, but it’s not a perfect fit. The requisite mental stance is one of grit, determination, resilience, gumption, or a tenacious stick-with-it-ness.
Mental toughness is important in three ways:
• First, it gives you the strength to deal with the inevitable stresses, tensions, confusion, and frustrations of exercising leadership.
• Second, it gives you the strength to keep your mind centered on purpose and not let fear, ego, or discouragement knock you off balance. It takes mental strength to control your thoughts, direct your beam of attention, regulate your emotional reactions, and keep your behavior and your intentions aligned, regardless of circumstances. This is the key to living intentionally. Without mental toughness, your behavior is undisciplined and reactive. You’re doomed to living a life that is little more than one knee-jerk reaction to one circumstance after another. When you’re mentally weak you’re highly triggerable.
• Third, it is the key to more robust thinking. As tempting as it may be, you have the strength to avoid simple, easy assumptions about a situation. You’re not weak-minded. Your thinking is more rigorous and disciplined. Your baloney detection kit is in full use.
Strong minds suffer without complaining; weak minds complain without suffering.
—LETTIE COWMAN
In Japanese there is a word, ganbaru, that conveys this mentally tough stance. Loosely translated, it means “to stick with something difficult until it’s complete.” The common phrase ganbatte kudasai is often translated into English as “please hang in there.” But it actually has a far deeper and more intense meaning: “Be tenacious, stick with it even under intense doubt or pressure, don’t cave in—you can do it. I believe in you because I know you’ve got more strength than you think!”
Other languages share similar notions. Sisu, for example, is a Finnish concept that captures the essence of this mindset extremely well. Emilia Lahti, a native of Finland and a leading expert on the topic, explains it this way:
The small Nordic country of Finland has a cultural construct known as “sisu,” used to describe the enigmatic power that enables individuals to push through unbearable hardships. The term dates back hundreds of years and is a central part of Finnish collective discourse. Sisu is fortitude, perseverance and indomitable determination in the face of extreme adversity. . . . Sisu provides the final empowering push, when we would otherwise hesitate to act.6
To balance your mental toughness, you also need mental agility—the ability to adopt a jazz-like approach to novel situations, and to learn and adapt to unfamiliar circumstances with cognitive dexterity. “What we need to add to our list of . . . skills,” says my friend and colleague Frank Barrett, author of Yes to the Mess, “is improvisation—the art of adjusting, flexibly adapting, learning through trial-and-error initiatives, inventing ad hoc responses, and discovering as you go.”7
The ability to adjust your mental models to new information, ideas, or evidence gives you a far greater capacity for adaptive learning, enabling you to respond to unfamiliar circumstances and tough new realities in a flexible rather than rigid way. Intellectually nimble, you’re able to shape your thinking to fit the problem rather than frame the problem to fit your thinking. You’re curious, leaning into difference, and less attached to being right because you know you are smarter when you are open to other points of view and dumber when you’re trapped in your own.
You’re able to shape your thinking to fit the problem rather than frame the problem to fit your thinking.
As Steve worked with Phil to address the challenge in their team, he knew it would be difficult and he prepared accordingly. He was courageous in giving it a go, humble in how he prepared, strong in his determination to make a difference, yet flexible and learning-focused in how he handled it.
Passionate Compassionate
Driven by a deep sense of purpose and driving passion to spark constructive progress, you throw yourself into the work of creating a stronger team, organization, or community. You have a wholehearted ambition to make a difference.
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.
—YO-YO MA
But while passionate about inspiring change, your strong conviction is tempered with empathy and a genuine concern for others. You’re aware that change is hard, and that others may feel threatened, insecure, or afraid of the changes you’re advocating. You realize that even constructive adjustments to the status quo are hard for some people. So, your passionate enthusiasm and hard-nosed dedication to the cause is balanced with empathy, understanding, concern, and warmth.
I find that compassion is closely associated with personal awareness and humility. The more aware I become about my own weaknesses, emotional reactions, and cognitive errors, for example, the more compassion I have for others. I’m less judgmental when I see others behaving poorly because I’m all too aware of how often I behave poorly.
Serious-Minded Light-Hearted
You don’t just rush into important situations with your thought process half-cocked, making decisions in a casual, half-assed manner. You respond in a rigorous, serious-minded way. You’re disciplined, deliberate, and careful as you strive to make useful sense of the predicament you’re facing and how to address it.
But at the same time, you remain lighthearted and humorous. You focus on the funny moments, not just the frustrating ones. “There’s a humorous side to every situation,” said George Carlin. “The challenge is to find it.” With this in mind you pay attention to the ironies and absurdities in a situation, not just the irritations and dysfunctions.
Most important, you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself or at the predicament you’re in. This is a vital balance to strike when you’re doing adaptive work. Humor lowers defensiveness, and when directed at yourself humor is a powerful guard against arrogance, se
lf-deception, and narcissism. Able to hold both attitudes in your mind at once, you simultaneously recognize the gravity of an issue and still laugh at how you and others are responding to it. This balance fosters an atmosphere that lowers defensiveness and increases learning—and, in an adaptive context, learning is the key to progress.
As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL
It’s for this reason, I’ve found, that people and groups with high conversational capacity tend to laugh more. Less ego-driven, uptight, and self-protective, and more purpose-driven, vulnerable, and self-possessed, they’re able to remain light-hearted and learning-focused even when things go sideways. This means their conversations and meetings are not just more effective—they’re often more fun.
Persistence Patience
With unflappable focus and realistic expectations you’re raising issues no one else will raise and working hard to resolve those issues productively. Like a hiker ascending a steep mountain pass, you continue pushing forward, one step at a time, even in the face of resistance or setback. You’re persistent and tenacious even as you pursue change.
Persistence is probably the single most common quality of high achievers. They simply refuse to give up. The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist the more likely your success.
—JACK CANFIELD
But at the same time, you’re bright enough to know that making constructive change is more like a long trail run than a short walk to the mailbox, so you’re patient. You pace yourself. You don’t expect instant change. You’re willing to take two steps forward and one step back because you know that if you’re smart, persistent, and patient, progress is not only possible, it’s probable.
Action-Oriented Learning-Focused
Motivated to make a productive difference, you operate by a core set of ideas:
• A problem won’t get solved unless you solve it.
• An opportunity isn’t an opportunity until you take it.
• An obstacle isn’t an obstacle once you overcome it.
With these ideas in mind, you don’t just sit back and observe, analyze, research, and plan, and then once you’ve got things all figured out, finally jump in and take action. You’ve got an action mindset. You want to make change and you’re active in pursuing it. You’re engaging problems, confronting nonsense, raising issues, asking tough questions, and suggesting improvements.
But you’re not just jumping in on blind impulse. You’re acting intelligently. You know that the best way to learn about a situation is to try and change it. Put differently, you’re holding your theory of change—your idea for what needs to happen and why—like a hypothesis that you test and revise as you go along. “I took some action,” you say to yourself. “What did I learn about the problem? What new information did I gain? What differing mental models of the situation did I encounter? What insights did I spark, and how might these fresh insights make my next action more focused and effective?”
Acknowledging all this, you adopt a curious, “learn as you go” attitude. Viewing action as an essential part of the learning process, you use your interventions to pry open the doors of discovery. As Frank Barrett, an expert on jazz sensibilities and leadership effectiveness, puts it, much like a jazz musician, you’re performing and experimenting at the same time.8 This approach prevents you from getting stuck in analysis paralysis—endlessly holding off action until you have a clear way forward—but it also keeps you from being rigidly attached to your initial perspective and plan.
To some people, the idea that learning and action are so closely related seems contradictory. To their way of thinking, you’re supposed to formulate a strategy and then execute it. You plan and then you do. But while this might work for simple problems, in an adaptive context—where there is no obvious solution and learning is the key progress—they’re actually two sides of the same coin. Learning with no action and you’re an armchair academic. Action with no learning and you’re a crash-test dummy.
Learning with no action and you’re an armchair academic. Action with no learning and you’re a crash-test dummy.
Steve’s approach to working with Phil illustrates this duality. He didn’t wait until he understood the problem completely before talking with Phil. He recognized that the only way he could figure out the problem was by talking with Phil. The information he gained from his conversation inspired entirely new ways of framing the problem, and, as a result, a more integrated way of addressing it.
Willing to Go It Alone Prefer Working with Partners
You’re prepared to take action alone if necessary. You’re neither waiting for permission, nor for someone to back you up before you act. You’re willing to perform solo. But at the same time, you have a strong preference for partners—people with similar convictions and concerns who might work with you to address the issues at hand. You realize that leadership is rarely a solo act. It tends to come from a team.*
And not just any partner will do. You specifically seek out people who share a common purpose, but also expand your horizons; people who will give you sharp feedback and provide strong support. Dean Williams explains this in his book Leadership for a Fractured World:
You need people around you who can help expand your boundaries rather than reinforce your boundaries. You need people to partner with you in the creative exploration of ideas and strategy—people that push you, challenge you, and help you grow multidimensionally as a change agent and as a human being. If you are going to provide leadership . . . you personally must value the power of interdependence in the form of partners and collaborators in increasing your leadership capacity.9
In addition to expanding your boundaries, Williams shares another key attribute of the cohorts you’re pursuing:
In seeking partners, look for people who bring a unity of purpose and complimentarity—that is, they share the greater mission or higher purpose you are championing. Although their styles and perspectives might be different, people with a shared purpose can play off one another to produce something that is distinctive.
Partnering with such people is like playing jazz. As Frank Barrett puts it, “Jazz involves jamming with people who don’t see things exactly the same way.”10
So, while you’re willing to fly solo, you’re seeking partners who share your sense of purpose, expand your thinking, complement your style and skills, and provide support. That’s a tall order.
There is still another important variable. They need to be stalwart: “Creative work is messy work, so you need a collaborator who has a stomach for it and who is not going to flee when the going gets tough or when you are feeling raw and vulnerable,” says Williams. “It can be painful at times as you must explore numerous pathways to discover what works, even if that entails going down paths that may turn out to be dead ends. A good partner understands that this is a critical feature of the creative process, and, therefore brings patience and persistence to the relationship. They support you in your leadership journey.”11
Again, Frank Barrett reinforces this idea:
Jazz players don’t innovate by isolating or breaking off from others. They don’t wait for inspiration. They don’t think of themselves as creating something out of nothing. They innovate by being tightly coupled to a diverse group of specialists, noticing the potential in people, ideas, and utterances. In a sense they are engaged in constructive [dialogue].12
Open-Minded Critically-Minded
This characteristic takes you right back to your mental workshop, so there’s no need to spend much time on it here. Suffice it to say that you’re pooling perspectives and leaning into difference to expand and improve your thinking, but at the same time you’re vetting and evaluating the information you’r
e taking in. You’re open and inquisitive, but your B.S. detector is on high power.
The Ball Is in Your Court
In this chapter, I’ve dramatically expanded what it means to work in the sweet spot by sharing a suite of characteristics that will help you exercise more effective leadership, do more engaging work, and foster more useful change. The ball is now in your court. Given the kind of leadership you want to exercise and the issues you want to address, what characteristics do you need to cultivate?
Given the kind of leadership you want to exercise and the issues you want to address, what characteristics do you need to cultivate?
It’s not a casual choice. Building this mindset—this deliberate way of thinking, of seeing, of being—is not easy. There is no magic pill. There is no optical device you can surgically implant that allows you to see the world in a different way. If you want to adopt this mindset and strengthen it, you’ll need to do the work. What is that work, you ask? That is the focus of Chapter 9 in which you’ll learn how to cultivate this mindset and put it into action.
* See “Real Leadership Rarely Comes from Just One Person,” on pages 193–195 of Conversational Capacity.
THE LEADERSHIP MINDSET
Taking Responsibility and Being Constructive
. . . the productive person animates that which he touches. He gives soul to that which surrounds him.
—ERICH FROMM
In this chapter, we’ll explore the leadership mindset, an indispensable mental stance for anyone yearning to wield more constructive influence. But before we do, it’s important to remember a key point I made in the Introduction: Real leadership isn’t about stepping in and taking charge, armed with all the right answers. And it isn’t about your position, expertise, or authority. Real leadership comes from the kind of work you’re doing. Leadership is about helping people and groups solve tough problems by spurring integrative learning. When you take responsibility for inspiring and effecting adaptive change, no matter your station, you’re exercising leadership.
