Drinking the poison slowly
Why we fail to change
I was listening to a Dan Harris podcast the other day; Harris is the host and energy behind his Ten Percent Happier podcast, which focuses on helping everyday people access and improve their meditation practice. The podcast I was listening to was entitled How to Stop Worrying About What People Think of You. His guest was Dr. Michael Gervais, a high-performance psychologist to elite athletes and notable figures. The podcast started off noting the tight relationship between high performance and its primary barrier, fear of what others think about us or the fear of other people (FOPO).
I have often discussed this phenomenon with my clients, boiling it down to the essential question: Why aren’t they changing? They want change, and I’ve equipped them for it. Yet, something remains in their way. Why do they often get in their own way?
Gervais argued that in the casee of the pursuit of high performance or even the peaceful life, “…we are drinking a poison every day and that poison is excessive worry, this rumination, are we OK in the eyes of others?”
While FOPO may be part of it, I wonder if the phenomenon is just a smidge more broad. We are often our worst enemies when it comes to making changes for our own good. In my case, I show executives and other strategic leaders a better way through transformational operational excellence: one that leads to a positive organizational culture and high team performance.
But that last bit—as a team—creates a social context that immediately throws a curveball to most humans, especially Westerners. The exception is within sports, where society has conditioned us to expect teamwork. When non-sports leaders in the West frame up leadership in their minds, they mostly see it as a single leader-follower relationship; they perceive it as one-to-one or one-to-many.
When the Operational Excellence transformation forces leaders into a construct requiring teamwork at the highest level, many of them fail to cross the Rubicon. Instead of playing as a team in the day-to-day (instead of just when they are in crisis mode), they drift into isolation in their minds. My wife, who is my business partner, and I were discussing this just today. She made me think a little harder: perhaps it is the team environment that triggers our fears.
The fear of what other people think (FOPO).
The fear of failing (FOF)
The fear of getting fired (FOGF)
The fear of looking “less-than” (FOLLT)
They drink the poison of fear.
While that poison hasn’t killed us, it’s still poison. We take it in small daily doses. Occasionally, it builds up in our systems and spills out in bad behavior or underwhelming performance: imagine the ball hog on the court or the quarterback who can only find a favorite receiver. We eff things up, but we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, dust ourselves off, and keep pressing on, doing the same things as if they’d result in change (taste the lure of the poison yet?)…alone.
Gervais and Harris conclude that FOPO slowly kills high performance. Maybe novice OpEx leaders fear what other people think about them because they are surrounded by a group looking for individual instead of team success. Perhaps that, and the different fears I noted, are exacerbated when the effects of their leadership potentially overlap and affect other leaders in their group. Regardless, they may never change if they don’t put down the poison.
Almost always, the chief executives I work with ask me: will so-and-so cut it? My answer is always the same, “Are you changing?” In most cases, especially in the West, the top leaders set the tone and the pace for the change. As I’ve written earlier, what they emphasize and how they structure the change matters immensely. After sussing the chief executive’s belly for change (huh: that’s a catchphrase for courage, the phenomenon where, despite fears, we move past them), I move on to the team: are you forcing them to behave like an authentic team (are you forcing them to deal with their fears)?
Katzenbach—the contemporary sage on how teams behave—suggested that executive teams rarely behave as a true team. While this observation is sharp, I argue in a different direction. Executive groups must act as a team daily to achieve a positive organizational culture and high performance.
If the top executive is aligned to and making the change and has structured to force their “team” into a true team context, the only remaining factor is an individual leader’s mindset about the change: the fears they face when confronted with the change.
If some individuals within the team can’t stop drinking the poison, they should start looking for another place to drink it: a place where Western rugged individuality is a precious characteristic of leadership.
If they work on courage—if they make changes slowly but sometimes fall back into fear-conditioned behaviors—they can improve: they have the potential to change. And, within that potential, they can make the organization’s daily experience unique and quite fulfilling.
So, leader: what are you drinking daily?