Author: Kathleen Doyle-White

Good day, team,

David Brooks has been writing for The New York Times editorial section for more than 30 years. He’s a conservative, and although I don’t often agree with his political opinions, I do appreciate a great writer when I read one, and he fits the description.

This past week, he wrote a very interesting article, “The Rank-Link Imbalance,” describing a trait he often sees in people in power: “People who have all of the social skills to improve their social rank, but none of the social skills that lead to genuine bonding. They are good at vertical relationships with mentors and bosses, but bad at horizontal relationships with friends and lovers.” He could have called the article “The Sad Sagas of the Supremely Successful.”

He describes how this happens:

“Perhaps they grow up in homes with an intense success ethos and get fed into the Achievetron, the complex social machine that takes young children and molds them into Ivy Leagues valedictorians. They go through the oboe practice, soccer camp, homework-marathon childhood. Their parent-teacher conferences are like mini-Hall of Fame enshrinements as all gather to worship in the flame of the incipient success. In high school, they enter their Alpha Geekdom. They rack up great grades and develop that coating of arrogance that forms on those who know that in the long run they will be more successful than the beauties and jocks who get dates.

“Then they go into one of those fields like law, corporate management, medicine or politics, where a person’s identity is defined by career rank. They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference; the willingness to stand too close to other men while talking and touching them in a manly way.

“And, of course, these people succeed and enjoy their successes. When Bigness descends upon them, they dominate every room they enter and graciously share their company with those who are thrilled to meet them. They master the patois of globaloney—the ability to declaim for portentous minutes about the revolution in world affairs brought about by technological change, environmental degradation, the fundamental decline in moral values.

“But then, gradually, some cruel cosmic joke gets played on them. They realize in middle age that their grandeur is not enough and that they are lonely. The ordinariness of their intimate lives is made more painful by the exhilaration of their public success.

Brooks goes on to describe some of the stupid things these powerful, emotionally adolescent people do to fix that loneliness. How many times have you seen the corporate executive get drunk at the company Christmas party and make a sloppy pass at one of the pretty young things in the crowd? Maybe they turn to prostitution, as we saw in the recent headlines about the governor of New York, because transactional relationships are something they understand. How many managers do you know who claim that they work as hard as they do because they value their families most, and yet they travel most of the time and are hardly ever with their families?

This entire phenomenon creates middle-aged professionals who end up emotionally bankrupt due to their inability to experience any genuine intimacy in their lives. They carry on inauthentic relationships until they suddenly realize that their lives are made up of empty successes without any real connection or heart. They feel a lack of integrity since their external actions don’t match their internal state and often find themselves acting out in undignified ways.

I remember working with someone years ago who always looked and acted the part, but never seemed happy doing it. He couldn’t give anyone else his full attention and would often start working on his computer in the middle of a conversation with someone on the team. This inability to really connect with anyone was filled instead with a false personality that liked to act as though he always had it together and didn’t really need anyone else to help him out. He was cool and smart and always had the same kind of smile for everyone. We called him “Teflon man”: nothing ever stuck. He was so smooth and seamless that it was almost scary to watch him, because he seemed so inhuman.

When his wife walked out on him one morning after 24 years of marriage, he looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t like who he had become. He came to work a week later and announced to all of us that he’d hit a wall in his life and that he knew things had to change. He asked each of us to write a small paragraph about who we thought he really was, and started the process of unraveling the false personality he had so carefully woven over the years. The person who emerged was a really nice guy who wasn’t going to be the next president of the company, but was a pretty darned good manager and friend.

Your challenge this week is to try being true to your self and authentic in your interactions with others. If you’ve been living up to someone else’s idea of who you should be or some company’s idea of what a successful person looks and acts like, ask yourself if this is who you really are and if you want to continue to support that false personality you’ve created to fit in.

As Shakespeare wrote, “This above all, to thine own self be true, and…thou canst not then be false to any man.” Try finding out who that true self is and allow it to come to the forefront. You may just find that others respond in kind and your work and personal relationships are far richer because of it.

Have a great week!

Good day, team,

There are two ways for an organization to kill a good idea. One is with bad management. The other? Good management.

So writes the author Jane Linder in her new book, “Spiral Up.. and Other Management Secrets Behind Wildly Successful Initiatives.” We frequently see cases of bad management that kill great ideas boldly and blatantly. But we often don’t recognize how management teams can also kill a good idea, because they fear it won’t get approval, would be too hard or expensive to execute, or doesn’t fit an existing plan.

In fact, most innovative teams perform much better when they “fly under the radar,” meaning they escape scrutiny and get a lot done precisely because they don’t have to ask anyone else’s opinion or approval. Management’s role is to plan, budget and execute. The very functions that make for good management can kill a new idea before it ever gets off the drawing board.

The best ideas are explorations. Consider Lewis and Clark going before a management committee. “How long will it take?” “Don’t know.” “How will you get there?” “Don’t know.” “What will you find of value to the government of the United States?” “Don’t know.” They couldn’t even imagine what they would eat or how they would survive, and yet they persevered and became two of the greatest explorers who ever lived.

Years ago, I was asked by the vice president of a large corporation to design a coaching program for a new team of managers he had inherited in an acquisition. This was long before coaching was accepted by large corporations; when people asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was a coach, they would often reply, “Oh, of what, volleyball?” So this was quite an unusual step for an executive of a fairly conservative company to take. He encouraged me to be as innovative as I could to help his team move forward.

For the first year, we developed a program that included coaching the managers and supervisors and assisting them in becoming better coaches themselves. By drawing on each manager’s previous experience and strengths, we empowered them to design and train each other in their areas of expertise. This allowed us to save money and to maximize everyone’s abilities.

In the second year, other people in the organization began to take notice, and obstacles appeared where they had not previously. I was contacted by the human resources department in the company and asked, “How does this fit into our regular training program?” or “Whose budget does this fall under?” or “We’ll have to review what you’re doing and make sure that it’s OK for our team members.”

Certainly, these were appropriate and important questions for the human resources department to ask, and you can see how, once they became aware of the coaching program, they felt it was part of their job to make sure it was managed appropriately. However, as other people scrutinized the program or attempted to merge it into the larger plan for professional development, little by little, the coaching program was whittled away and eventually disappeared altogether.

Employee surveys done at the time proved how well the supervisors were managing their people and how successful the business was, so it was clear that the coaching program had significantly affected the people and the business. Not only were the ratings up for each individual manager, but attrition was down and customer satisfaction had risen.

Your challenge this week is to look at the more innovative ideas that are bubbling up from your team and let them be. Try not to fit them into a tidy plan, or a tight budget, or a well executed plan. Understand that all new ideas are highly subject to failure and allow some room within your organization for things to fail. Try working with the idea that you’ll figure it out as you go and try not to manage these things from above, but rather, allow them to self-manage along the way.

Maybe you need to encourage some of your team members to do some “skunk works,” that is, to work on their innovative ideas in a more secretive fashion rather than in broad daylight where others can scrutinize what they’re doing. Or maybe it’s just as simple as encouraging a team member to explore a new idea without exposing it to the overall team for awhile, so the experiment can be free to succeed or fail without a lot of intervention.

Whatever it is, remember that with all experiments and explorations, you have to take not knowing as a given. This may be scary at first, but you may just find that although you’re not sure how a new idea will work, in the end, you’ll manage!

Have a great week!

Kathleen

Good day, team,

This week’s challenge comes from some thoughts on leadership that I read about in an MIT alumni magazine while visiting my father in Maine. People debate whether great leaders are born or made, and good evidence supports both sides of the argument.

Accordingly, some educational institutions have created programs and curriculum to build their own leaders. For example, the Leadership Center at MIT developed a Four Capabilities Leadership Model. These capabilities are sensemaking, relating, visioning and inventing.

Rather than teaching leadership, which everyone agrees is hard to do, the program teaches students to cultivate these four strengths: Using their common sense when making key decisions, creating strong relationships with others, making their vision a reality, and allowing themselves to be inventive (meaning not fearing to make mistakes or fail).

“Anyone has the potential for leadership, of course, but certain people have a greater set of skills and aptitude. Leadership starts with someone who wants to make a difference… . When people are truly motivated toward a goal or a vision, they will do it, even if they have to change themselves. In many ways, leadership starts with what’s important to you,” writes Professor Ancona of the Leadership Center at MIT.

Another course that has become part of the leadership program is improvisation. Daena Giardella, an executive coach and professional actor, writes about that aspect of the program.

“What we believe we are, or are not, limits how effective we can be as leaders. Improvisation forces you to break out of your habitual roles. You have to be ready to respond with dexterity to the moment… . You have to dare to make an impact in the scene without worrying about looking stupid or seeming silly. Improvisers learn how to manage the ‘inner critic’ voices that chatter in everyone’s head as we go through life. The inner critic might be saying, ‘Stay small, don’t get too big for your britches’ or ‘Give up, you can’t do this.’ Great improvisers and great leaders learn to play many roles and be adaptable scene to scene. In improvisation the goal is to make the other person look good and to bring out the best in the other person. An improvisation is destroyed if it’s all about me, me, me… and the same is true about leadership. Master leaders and master influencers know how to bring out the best in their teammates.”

Your challenge this week is to identify where you play the role of leader in your life and consider whether you need to improve your ability. Perhaps you’re excellent at creating a vision and translating that for others into realizable goals and objectives, but your relationship skills could use some work. Maybe you find that common sense comes quite easily to you and that you have a reputation for being street smart and pragmatic when making decisions. However, the practical aspect of your common sense may stand in the way of your ability to be innovative. What can you do to be more inventive in your approach?

More and more organizations are realizing that leadership is not just the domain of people at the top but of people at all levels. Our ability to lead has everything to do with how committed we are to our vision and to the people around us who will help us make it a reality. Don’t be afraid to examine how you lead others and what you’re prepared to do to achieve your goals. Leadership doesn’t just come naturally. It requires real work, and we all can stretch our ability to become better at it.

Have a great week!

Kathleen

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