Jeff Kindler Shows How Not To Do It

In a time when the world is full of good advice about corporate management and leadership you have to make a special effort to ignore all of it.

According to Fortune, the former Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Jeff Kindler, seems to have done just that.

One does not like to belabor failure. Yet, Kindler’s tenure as the chief honcho of Pfizer is so full of unforced errors and dumb mistakes that it seems destined to become a primary case study in how not to do it.

You have to wonder how the Pfizer board could have elevated someone who was so unsuited to the job. How did it imagine that a litigator-- Kindler’s background and training-- could run a pharmaceutical firm? How did it fail to notice that Kindler had neither the temperament nor the character required in a leader?

Did they simply confuse the rule of law with the rule of lawyers? What is it in our culture that convinces people that a law degree qualifies you to manage and lead a major American corporation?

Anyone who cares about executive mismanagement and misleadership would do well to study the Fortune article. Link here.

What Makes Us Do What We Do?

Today's question concerns motivation. What motivates us to do what we do? What is the best way to motivate others to do what you want them to do or even to do what they want to do?

Therapy and coaching, as well as management and public policy, are directly involved with the question of motivation.

A therapist might show you that you are choosing to date the wrong people because you were traumatized in childhood. Whatever interest you might have in choosing a suitable mate is being overridden by the aftershocks of trauma.

You are choosing the wrong people because you need to relive the trauma in order to get it right this time, or because, as a victim, you do not feel worthy of a good relationship. Another therapist might say that you are self-destructive or that you are addicted to pain.

Therapy wants you to understand why you are getting things wrong; it wants you to understand your motivation. It assumes that once you understand why you are getting things wrong, you will start getting things right.

In some ways, coaching begins where therapy leaves off. Coaching is about how you can go about getting things right. In principle, it does not ask why you were getting things wrong, because it does not believe that your errors were necessarily an expression of bad motives.

Sometimes people freely choose a course of action that is wrong for them and for others because they have made a mistake. They have chosen freely and chosen wrongly. It happens.

Discovering an antecedent does not change the decision and does not free you to make a good decision in the future. Especially when it seems to be telling you that you did not act freely in the first place.

We can spend a lot of time arguing about this, but I would suggest that therapy has offered us a somewhat skewed version of the problem. In business, as in much of everyday life, the more important issue is: how do you motivate other people?

How does a manger get the best and the most out of his staff? So asks Steve Tobak in an article I was reading this morning. Link here.

Tobak does not begin with an isolated individual making poor choices. He begins with a group of individuals, your staff, that is doing poor work because it is unmotivated. This means that your staff does not much care about what it is doing; it does not care about doing a great job; it does not care what is best for the company; it has become a band of slackers.

Only, it is your band of slackers.

Tobak says that if that is what your office looks like, then your staff is being poorly managed. If the office environment is chaotic, then you can change the situation by improving your management technique.

Not always, Tobak makes clear. Not for all people, he says. But for most of the people most of the time. You want and need to have your office run efficiently. For that to happen everyone has to be motivated. Whether or not this is the case depends on you, their manager.

The same applies to family situations, to relationships, and to any situation where your job is to influence someone else to do something, and to like doing it.

In truth, you cannot know how to motivate yourself if you do not know how to motivate other people.

How do you motivate other people, and what does it tell us about human motivation in general?

First, as every book on executive management states, a good manager sets a good example. If you want people to work hard, they have to see you working hard. If you want them to be dedicated to their job, you must be dedicated to yours. If you expect them to be civil and decorous, you must begin by being civil and decorous.

This means that you would not want to prescribe rules for the staff that you are not going to be following yourself.

If you constantly get to work late, you cannot impose a rule that requires everyone else to get to work early. But if you get to work early yourself, you do not have to impose a rule that requires everyone else to do the same.

Anyone who abuses the privilege will need to be warned and perhaps even excused from his job.

So, if you ask why you are going out of your way to behave well, your motivation is that you want to see the same thing manifesting itself in your office.

Next, a good manager defines everyone's job clearly. Each staff member must know what his responsibilities are, what goals he is expected to meet, and how his work contributes to the greater good of the company.

A good manager allows each employee to determine how he goes about achieving goals. He motivates people by allowing them some latitude to determine the way they do their work. 

A good manager offers guidance and support and encouragement. He does not criticize and place blame.

As Tobak says, and as many other consultants have explained, a good manager shares the credit when things go well and takes the blame when things go wrong.

This advice makes certain basic assumptions about motivation. It grants people a full measure of freedom and assumes that a properly managed staff will most often make the right decisions. It does not motivate by either carrots or sticks.

It does not assume that people are inclined to be irrational and emotional and impulsive that thus that they must be strictly controlled and regulated.

By now I hope you can see that this slightly dry discussion of motivation is at the heart of our current political debates.

When the financial crisis hit two years ago, many psychologists and behavioral economists concluded that the housing and mortgage busts had resulted from a fundamental human tendency to sin. We are a bunch of greedy and impulsive characters, motivated only by our desire to get rich, regardless of what happens to anyone else. This uncontrolled and unregulated greed caused the financial crisis.

Those who believed that irrational impulses and emotional overreaction were the problem were convinced that regulation and government constraints were the solution.

If you believe that you cannot trust people to do the right thing, you will feel bound to force them to do it, whether by threat or nudge or bribes.  Similarly, you will hold that they need threats and hudges and bribes to prevent them from doing what they really, really want to do... the wrong thing.

This theory holds that, left to their own devices, human beings are ravenous, rapacious creatures who cannot be trusted. Most especially, they cannot be trusted to exercise freedom and rational judgment.

Of course, the counterargument said that the housing bubble and the mortgage crisis occurred when the government got directly involved in the housing and mortgage markets.

Banks that are left to their own devices tend toward prudence. Banks that are forced by the government to do what the government thinks is the right thing tend to throw prudence under the proverbial bus.

The grand theoretical issue is not as simple as it seems. We might ask whether human beings are irrational seekers of excess, naturally prone to error and depravity, or whether they are rational seekers of what is best for themselves and their communities, motivated by a wish to be virtuous members of a virtuous community.

You can probably guess that I am going to side with the latter. But that still leaves us with a question, one that makes the issue more complicated.

If I want to deny that human beings are fundamentally depraved, and thus in serious need of constraint and control, then how does it happen that rational creatures become prey to irrational emotions like greed?

And this feels more like a philosophical issue than a question for behavioral economics?

How can you tell whether human beings merely have a potential for excess or whether their will toward depraved and irrational behavior is their true nature?

Perhaps the only way to solve it is to create a set of practices that will test each theory and see which one motivates people better.

If Tobak and the management consultants are right about the best way to motivate your staff then my view would seem to be correct. If those who believe that we need to submit to the most strict behavioral controls, lest we become consumed by greed and even lust, are right, then we should embrace the approach that has been motivating the current administration.

How to Cure Narcissism, Hubris, and Arrogance

In one sense narcissism, hubris, and arrogance are just different names for the same thing. They come to us from different worlds, but they all refer to an excessive love of self.

Despite the fact that narcissism comes from the myth of Narcissus, it is generally considered to be a psychiatric disorder. It has its own personality disorder, and is occasionally called pathological and malignant.

Some clinicians have said that there is a good kind of narcissism, but people who have one of the bad kinds are clearly being labeled as sick. If the culture decides that your problems fall within the category of illness, then you will require medical or paramedical treatment.

Before he gave his name to an illness, Narcissus starred in his own myth. Enthralled by the image he saw in a pond he tried to get too close to it and drowned. His was not a happy ending.

Before Freud pronounced narcissism a psychological condition, the term was used by psychiatrists to refer to a special kind of sexual perversion. Narcissists were people who took their own bodies as the objects of their sexual interest.

For further detail consult Richard Krafft-Ebing's: Psychopathia Sexualis.

Naturally, Freud would have been comfortable with the notion that narcissism contains a libidinal component. It's not just that narcissists love their image; they are sexually attracted to it.

As far as treatment goes, psychiatrists and therapists have always had a great deal of difficulty making progress against the ravages of narcissistic personality disorder.

This should not be too much of a surprise. The disorder comes from a story that has an unhappy ending. There is almost a narrative pull toward a bad result.

Hubris comes to us from Greek tragedy, or, more precisely, from Aristotle's: Poetics. The tragic hero finds himself at the pinnacle of society until his excessive pride (hubris) leads him to self-destruct.

Like narcissism, hubris brings a narrative with it. Clearly, the tragic hero is not enthralled by his mirror image, but he too suffers from excessive love of self. As with the narcissist, he is condemned by his narrative.

To me this says that if you insist on seeing people as characters in a narrative that ends badly, you should not be too optimistic about your ability to help people.

Arrogance differs from both narcissism and hubris because it has its place in ethics, not narrative. Thus, does not refer to a persona, but is a human being's character flaw.

If we understand and analyze them correctly, character flaws can be corrected.

So says John Baldoni in his column about the way he works to cure overconfident executives. Link here.

Baldoni does label their problem as "hubris," but clearly he is not working within the worlds of fiction, myth, and tragedy.

Baldoni begins by identifying the behaviors that characterize an arrogant executive. Then, he proceeds to show how they can be replaced by more constructive behaviors.

Many therapists would consider arrogant behavior to be the expression of an underlying mental defect or unresolved issue. Baldoni is treating these behaviors as bad habits that can be corrected by being replaced by good habits.

Is he thereby ignoring the underlying cause? Not at all, because, there is no underlying cause.

A person who has enjoyed great success in business might well become overly confident in his judgment or decisions. And he might also believe that the instincts that serve him so well in business will also serve him well in bringing up his children or conducting his marriage.

I would not say that his arrogance is enacting some childhood problem. I would say that he has simply made a mistake, an error of judgment, an error of self-evaluation.

He is a human being. He possesses free will. He has the right to make a mistake without having anyone think that his decision was determined by his drunken father, his abusive mother, his nasty sister, or the Devil himself.

His arrogance is not a meaningful symptom and it will not be resolved by making it into one.

So, Baldoni begins by identify the bad habits that arrogant executives develop. First, he counts the propensity to rely too much on one's own judgment, to refuse to take others into his counsel, and to fail to seek anyone else's advice.

Next, an arrogant executive will wall himself off from his customers and clients. He will only interact with a few of his closest associates, the ones who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear, and will ignore the rest.

It is easy to surround yourself with people who never criticize you, and it is just as easy to identify that attitude in your staff once you have been alerted to it.

Finally, an arrogant executive will be more interested in placing blame than in solving problems. He directs his energy toward the care and maintenance of his persona, not toward dealing with real world problems.

Once you have identified the bad behaviors that constitute your arrogance, you are ready to take the next step: to correct them ... by seeking out the advice of others, by getting out of your office and meeting the staff, by arranging lunches with different people, by encouraging everyone to speak openly and forthrightly about their concerns, and by ridding yourself of sycophants and flatterers.

I will leave the next question for another day, but let's at least raise it. Do these same principles apply to someone whose arrogance does not manifest itself in his behavior as an executive? If so, how?

On the Road to Excellence

In his latest column executive coach Tony Schwartz offers some great advice. Link here.

That is: if you want to improve at whatever you are doing, if you want to advance on the road to excellence, the key is: hard work.

The harder you work at it, the better you get. Whatever skill set you are trying to improve, practice will get you to be better at it. That means increased repetitions, sticking with it no matter how unpleasant the experience, and persevering.

To this excellent advance I would offer a caveat. Schwartz seems to believe that innate talent is of no real consequence. On that point, I would disagree.

If you believe that talent will out, no matter how hard you work, then clearly you are placing excessive importance on the existence of talent.

But still, a man with superior musical talent who never practices will not become a great concert violinist. Similarly, a woman with extraordinary athletic coordination and aptitude will not become a champion volley ball player unless she works harder than everyone else at developing her talent.

As I once said, it is easier and more fulfilling to become great at what you are good at than to become good at what you are mediocre at. 

Unemployed Millennials

By now the story feels old. And this is not a good thing. Members of the millennial generation-- between 18 and 29-- are suffering an excessively high level of unemployment. We have heard about this so often that it is almost becoming a new normal. As I say, this is not a good thing.

We know that young people cannot get jobs, and that, when they can, the jobs on offer are far beneath their educational achievements.

And we also know, as Louis Uchitelle chronicles in the New York times, that the: "American dream is elusive for new generation." Link here.

Beyond those new realities lies the fact that this generation has not been prepared to adapt to hardship. Millennials are full up with confidence about the future. Many of them are still living in a mindset that promises hope and change. They are, I daresay, casualties of the self-esteem movement.

Uchitelle's article recounts the problems that Scott Nicholson, recent Colgate graduate, is having find a job. He compares Scott's experience to that of his father and grandfather.

Apparently, Scott was offered a low level job as a claims adjuster at an insurance agency. Finding it well beneath him, he turned it down. Now, with nothing else on offer, he is beginning to have second thoughts about his decision.

As Uchitelle explains, the last Great Depressoin "damaged the confidence of the young, and that is beginning to happen now...."

Surely, this is a sobering thought. I would not say that the next Great Depression is going to cure the millennials of their high self-esteem. As Uchitelle points out, it will surely damage their confidence, and that involves the confidence that they have earned as well as the confidence that has no basis in reality.

When Uchitelle says that their confidence is "beginning" to be damaged now, he is suggesting that we are at the beginning of another Great Depression.

Since most people seem to believe that we are beginning to exit the Great Recession, his is not a very comforting thought. In fact, it is downright frightening.

If that were the whole story, I would not be posting about it again. The part of Scott Nicholson's story that struck me was the following:

"Scott Nicholson almost sidestepped the recession. His plan was to become a Marine Corps. second lieutenant. He had spent the summer after his freshman year in 'platoon leader' training. Last fall he passed the physical for officer training and was told to report on Jan. 16.

"If all had gone well, he would have emerged in 10 weeks as a second lieutenant, committed to a four-year enlistment. 'I could have made a career out of the Marines,' Scott said, 'and if I had come out in four years, I would have been incredibly prepared for the workplace.'"

As it happened, the Marines discovered that Scott had had childhood asthma, so he could not enlist.

Despite the self-esteem training that he had probably received through his education, Scott Nicholson had enough good sense to know that his academic credentials and the work habits he had acquired in college would not make him a very desirable employee. He understood that military training would have not only allowed him to sidestep the recession, but would have greatly enhanced his future career prospects.

I've made the same recommendation before. Many people took great offense at the notion. They do not think that it is a serious option, because they maintain the view that the military is just about killing.

Young people who have been taught that it is morally wrong to eat bacon and eggs are not about to rush toward the nearest Marine recruiter.

It would be useful for all of us to understand that people do not join the military because they like to kill. They join because the military provides them with psychosocial skills that are not very readily available in our current culture.

When society is going through a socially chaotic period, more and more people are drawn to a culture where things are in their proper order, where everyone knows what his job is, where people value patriotism and loyalty, where success is rewarded with the kind of self-esteem that you can take with you into the business world.

Good Advice for Job Seekers

It may be a sign of the times, but every once in a while I run across an article offering a list of what you should or should not do during a job interview. If you are currently looking for a job, you would do well to pay close attention to these articles, most often compiled by journalists from interviews with hiring managers.

Today's is by Sarah Needleman, from the Wall Street Journal. Link here. It looks at eight ways to mess up a job interview. Admittedly, I prefer more positive lists, but this one is excellent for its emphasis on character.

If you show bad character, behave disrespectfully, act indecorously, assert yourself unreasonably, you will surely not be getting the job. Good character involves good habits, good people skills, and a willingness to stifle your high self-esteem and winning personality in favor of being the kind 0f candidate who can work with others, take orders, devote himself to a project, and get along with other people.

It's not really too much to ask, is it?

Coaching Lessons: Go Out And Have Lunch

Sometimes an executive will offer rather simple advice. This is what happened when Tony Schwartz was working with a very senior executive at a Fortune 500 company. Once he discovered that this man worked a full workday without taking more than a few minutes to have lunch at his desk, Schwartz recommended that he set aside a half-hour or so every day to walk out of the office and to take a lunch break. Link here.

Schwartz also recommended that this man return to his thrice weekly workouts.

Again, this is rather easy advice. It was easier said than done, but the executive did manage to start working out again, and to go out to lunch twice in a week.

The larger issue is simple. Who owns your time? Does your job own you or do you own your job? Are you the prisoner of your desk or can you freely walk away from it? As Schwartz put it: "Taking back your lunch is the first step in taking back your life."

I have written about Tony Schwartz in the past. He and Jim Loehr wrote a great article called, "The Corporate Athlete," which explains how executives can improve, even optimize their performance at work. Link here.

His advice is simple and direct, but it also has the virtue of being actionable and effective.

Why does it matter that you break up your day, walk away from your desk, and have a moment of respite at lunch?

Schwartz explains that it helps to clear the mind, to refresh the spirit, and to allow a more energized look at problems and issues. Sometimes when we look at a problem over and over again, without a break, we miss the obvious. Solutions yield to hard work, but hard work does not necessarily mean nothing but work.

As I have occasionally suggested, it often happens that you need to step back from what you are doing and look at it through someone else's eyes. This happens with writers and it happens with executives. When a writer is so thoroughly involved with his work that he cannot find anything wrong with it, he is clearly not working at his best.

And, if an executive does not know how he looks to others, then he cannot manage or lead effectively.

One good way to get some perspective on a problem or on your work is simply to step away from it, to engage in a meaningful social ritual, clear your mind, and then return to it with fresh eyes.

How to Lead

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about leadership. It is all the more important when our leader-in-chief is such a poor leader.

As of now, this is not partisan sniping; it is the general political consensus.

Criticism might warn you not to emulate President Obama, but it does not tell you how to lead effectively.

This morning I was reading some great columns by Robert Sutton about what makes for a great boss. Link here.

Sutton arrived at his leadership principles by interviewing effective leaders and the people who work for them. His ideas are generated from the bottom up.

There are far too many good ideas in his article to cover in a single post. For today I will examine the first quality that makes for good leadership. Which Sutton calls: knowing what it feels like to work for me. He elaborated on this point in a further column. Link here.

Clearly, Sutton is not telling leaders that they need to go around feeling everyone's pain. If this had been yet another call for empathy it would not merit my or your attention.

Since every leader knows that he sets an example for others, thus, that his mood and attitude become the gold standard for his company, he takes time and care to present the qualities that he wants to see more of.

People emulate their leaders. Good leaders know it and behave accordingly.

But that is not exactly what Sutton is getting at here. He has something else in mind: Good bosses, he says: "... devote real energy to reading expressions, noting behaviors, and making constant adjustments to help their people think independently and express themselves without reservation."

This is not just a great leadership skill; it forms the basis for all effective interpersonal communication.

A good leader, Sutton is saying, will constantly adjust his conversation, his attitude, and his comportment in order to be sure that his staff, his employees, even his colleagues always feel that their views are respected. He might have added... to be sure that all those who work for him will be motivated to do their best work.

If you are a leader and no one is willing to give you bad news or to offer new ideas, the chances are very good that you have created the wrong kind of atmosphere in your office.

If a staff member has difficulty talking to you or expressing himself fully then you are probably doing something to make him feel that his views are not respected, and thus, that you simply do not care to hear what he has to say.

Just as conversation is not about expressing your feelings or thoughts willy nilly, regardless of how they will affect anyone else, so leadership is not about giving orders and telling people what you think regardless of how they will affect your team.

You want your team to function optimally, so you care more for the reactions you are eliciting than how it feels to get things off your chest.

Evidently, person-to-person, face-to-face conversation facilitates this aspect of leadership. When you are in someone's presence and are looking him in the eye, you can more quickly tell how well you are doing. If you see that you are losing him, or that he is starting to feel intimidated, then you must quickly revise your conversational tactic.

People who are good at public speaking try to develop this facility. They are constantly reading the audience reaction; counting the number of people who are nodding off or heading for the exist. If they see that they are losing their audience they shift gears, go off script, turn off the teleprompter, and try to engage their audience before it is too late.

Anything less than face-to-face conversation adds degrees of difficulty. It is easier to read the panoply of gestures that you can witness when you are talking with someone directly than it is to grasp the reaction of someone who is talking on the phone, or via email, or texting.

Remarkably, Sutton's advice flies in the face of the kind of conventional wisdom that the therapy culture has been purveying.

Where the therapy culture tells us not to concern ourselves with how we look to others a good leader is constantly aware of how he looks to others.

Where the therapy culture has tried to teach people, under the guise of free association, to say whatever comes to mind regardless of the effect it will produce on others, good leaders are constantly adjusting their speech in order to ensure that their listeners feel respected and valued.

Which means that many forms of therapy are going to undermine your leadership skills... in a very serious way.

So, Sutton tells both actual and potential leaders to ask themselves to ascertain how it feels to work for them. He is not concerned with the leader's knowing how it feels to be in charge, to be on top, to give the orders... but, how it feels to be one of those who is reporting to the boss, who is receiving the orders, and who has just been put down for offering an opinion in a meeting.

This is easier said than done. It reminds me of the experience of editing your own writing.

Bad writers tend to believe that however they feel while they are doing the writing is a sign of how good or bad it is.

They develop a form of self-delusion, in the sense that they ignore the effect their writing might or might not have on an outside reader.

A good writer always edits his writing. He does so by first putting it aside. He needs to break out of the mindset he was in while he was writing. Then, after a time, he can hopefully return to it with fresh eyes. A good writer is a good editor, and being a good editor means being able to read as though he were someone else.

Knowing what it is like for someone else to read your writing strikes me as similar to knowing what it is like for someone else to work for you.

It is an interesting psychological state, an ability to get out of oneself, and to put one's hopes and feelings to the side. And it also involves a considerable level of humility, to say nothing of an ability to tolerate considerable psychological pain.

If you start asking yourself what it feels like to work for you or what it feels like to read your writing, then I promise that you will have to tolerate many moments of pure and utter embarrassment.

Call them cringe-worthy moments, if you like. They are times when you read something that you wrote and say to yourself: How could I have written such a thing? Or, what was I thinking?

When you are a leader, and you start asking yourself how it feels to work for you, you will have many moments when you become positively horrified about how bad you look to outside observers and about all the difficulties you have place in the path of your best employees.

Looking for a Job is Still a Job

I have occasionally emphasized the point that when you are out of work and looking for a job, you should approach the job search as a job. Links here and here.

Today I came across Gary Starr's article on this topic at CFO.com. Therein Starr shows the steps he took in his job search and how he saw his job search as a job. Link here.

Coaching Lessons: Why Didn't You Tell Me?

Making good decisions requires information. As long as you do not have so much information that you cannot make any decision at all, having more information is an essential good.

Managers acquire information by reading and studying reports... in detail, down to the last semi-colon. You may recall that Michael Burry was one of the first to see the problems with subprime mortgages, because he was one of the few who read all of the prospectuses contained in the packages the banks were selling.

No good manager relies only on prepared reports. He wants and need people who will provide him with clear, accurate, and comprehensive information. Sometimes he will receive it via email, but on other occasions he knows that he will acquire more information by talking directly with staff.

A manager cannot be everywhere, and should not try to be. Frenetic activity is disconcerting to those who witness it and should be avoided.

A manager must create an atmosphere where people will present him with what he needs to know when he needs to know it... not too much and not too little.

Every manager and every coach has had the experience of analyzing a problem based on information provided. He will draw up a plan to address the problem and present, or even begin to implement, the plan. At some point in the planning process someone will interject that the plan is not feasible because someone forgot to communicate one small, but vital, piece of information.

If you are the manager, you will be tempted to exclaim: Why didn't you tell me?

Here is a situation where it is best not to yield to temptation. The question is accusatory and will provoke a defensive response.

If the employee comes to feel defensive about his error, he might be motivated to share more information, but his anxiety might also make it more difficult for him to know what is pertinent and what is filler. If he decides he must provide you with a mountain of useless information you will not have accomplished your goal.

If you need to respond to a negligent employee, why not phrase it differently, not with a question, but a statement: I wish you had told me sooner.

This places some of the onus on the employee while not casting blame. It also offers a sliver of credit for having communicated the information: better late than never.

A recent post from the Harvard Business School blog offers a further analysis of this problem. Link here.

The post makes the salient point that if a manager's staff does not speak up, does not provide useful and vital information, then the manager must ask himself how he has created the wrong office environment.

As the authors note, it is obvious to everyone that a bullying or threatening manager will receive less accurate information. If everyone is afraid of you they will tailor their communications to forestall punishment, not to contribute to the company good.

Other managers give the impression that they are either overwhelmed by work, and thus, do not really want to be disturbed, or are perfectly happy with the status quo, thus, do not want to hear any information that would cause them to question or to change it.

Then the authors add the most salient, and probably the least noted point: namely, that many staff members do not communicate their ideas or information because they have come to believe that their managers are simply not interested in hearing it.

So, how does a manager go about convincing his staff that he wants their input? That is the question.

This is difficult because the cues we give are often very subtle indeed. A dismissive glance might persuade your assistant that you do not want to hear what he has to say. A clear focus and direct expression of interest will obviously tell him that you are happy that he has spoken up or provided you with new information.

If information comes to you via email, you have better control over your response. You should always respond graciously and with gratitude. And you should explain how helpful it is to receive the information. If the information leads to action, you would do well to keep the employee in the loop.

If your reply reads like a form letter, your employee will come away thinking that you do not care. If it reads like you have thought through his proposal or found his information useful, then he will know that you do.

It is always challenging to know how to respond when a staff member raises a difficult issue during a meeting, when he explains that something has been going wrong, or that the results you had hoped to see do not seem to be feasible.

When hearing bad news, the first thing to do is to thank the person who reported it. Then, be sure not to try to find out who is at fault, who should be blamed.

Upon hearing bad news the correct response is to shift focus to contingency plans or mid-course corrections.

All recommendations for future action should be received respectfully. That means restating the idea in slightly different words, the better to show that you are mulling it over. You must recognize the good will that went into formulating it.

You are not going to follow every suggestion that you receive, but you should, as a competent manager, make all of those who offer suggestions feel like their contribution is valued.

People rarely have a vital interest in whether or not their ideas are adapted. They do have a vital interest in whether or not they are respected.

Coaching Lessons: Reputation Recovery

I doubt that it is possible to have too much advice about how to: recover your reputation, restore your good name, and earn back respect. Once people start respecting you less, your ability to lead, to interact, even to function on the job, or in any other group, will be seriously compromised.

Recovering your reputation or regaining the respect of your colleagues is a complicated process. It is one thing to puff up your self-esteem; many therapists can help you with that. It is quite another thing to manage the complex of human relationships in an office where you have suddenly lost the respect of your colleagues. As I have said before, and as I do not mind repeating, it is a far more complicated and difficult process than everyday self-puffery.

So, here is a link to an enlightening article on this topic by Susan Cramm from the Harvard Business Review, via Bloomberg. Link here.

Most importantly, Cramm advises, as I have, immediate and effective action. If your reputation has been compromised, perhaps for reasons you do not even understand, the worst thing you can do is hesitate, delay, and introspect.

Best is to attack the problem, first by working to discover what went wrong, and next by acting to set things right.

Cramm adds that it is best to understand that recovery requires patience. It does not, and cannot, happen overnight.

To give a taste of her excellent analysis, I would offer the following passage: "It doesn't really matter that you are in trouble. What matters is how you rebound from adversity and demonstrate resiliency. An occasional visit to the doghouse won't derail your career unless you are defensive, can't play well with others, continue to fall short of expectations, or refuse to learn from your mistakes."

"How to Make Better Career Decisions..."

If life coaching means something, it must involve seeing life as a game. This in contrast to therapy that most often sees life as a drama.

As some of you know, I presented the difference between coaching and therapy in these terms on my website.

Today, I read an interview that Meridith Levinson of CIO.com conducted with Nathan Bennett, a professor of management at Georgia Tech. Bennett has just published a book about how you can use game theory to learn how to make better career decisions. To consider what you are doing as moves in a game, to develop strategy and tactics, to evaluate the other players and their goals... all of this is obviously complicated.

Nonetheless, if you would like to have a preliminary run through a game-theoretical approach to career management, I recommend Levinson's interview with Bennett. Link here.

Coaching Lessons: When Everyone Is Watching You

When you imagine that everyone is watching you your first thought is not very positive. It sounds like you are being exposed, are being spied on, or are being subjected to intrusive surveillance. When Jeffrey Zaslow wrote that we live in an age of humiliation, he was describing a culture where social media have made offered up far too much of our private lives for public consumption. Sometimes, without our consent. The upshot is that we are living in a culture of shamelessness. Link here.

Someone once said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so it seems just that young people, who led the way in exposing too much of themselves, would be starting to discover the value of privacy. As the New York Times describes this morning, the "tell-all generation" is learning to keep personal details out of the public square. One can only wish it is a burgeoning trend. Link here.

(I will mention in passing that I prefer the label, "tell-all generation" to gen-X, gen-Y, and millennials.)

Today I want to take this notion of being exposed and place it in a very different context. Writing about reputation management-- always a great subject-- Prof. Daniel Ames of the Columbia Business School said this about the role of executive: "For leaders and managers, who are almost always highly visible and under scrutiny, even a small and seemingly unforgivable slip up can be judged harshly. It reinforces the need for managers to be mindful that they are always on stage." Link here.

This sounds a bit strange. By definition, leadership involves being watched by large numbers of people. Leaders are constantly being scrutinized, but they are also being emulated. Once you become a leader you will become a role model, and once that happens, your good character traits, to say nothing of a few of your quirks and foibles, will be imitated, for better or for worse.

Wanting to be a leader involves believing that you can be a very good role model. You believe that if people emulated your behavior they would be bettering themselves.

As young people discover that it is best to keep their private lives private, one must hope that they do not conclude that they do not want to be subject to any scrutiny at all, that they never want to be looked at or looked up to.

This view of leadership implies that a leader must exercise rigorous discipline. A leader is identified entirely by his role. Since his private thoughts, feelings, and experiences are irrelevant to his leadership function-- in fact, were they known they would detract from it-- he is obligated to keep them to himself.

As Ames pointed out in his article, it does not take a lot for a leader to compromise his good name and reputation. A slip-up, a gaffe, a momentary lapse in decorum can make it vastly more difficult for a leader to establish his credibility.

How has the therapy culture viewed leadership? Have its values and precepts prepared you to assume the role of leader?

In large part, this culture has convinced people that discipline involves repression, and that you can only actualize your true self when you let it all hang out. Anyone who buys this value system will have forfeited his leadership potential. And he will also have gone a long way to forfeiting the respect of his friends and family.

The therapy culture did everyone a disservice when it undermined the value of discipline in favor of the values of spontaneity and creativity.

(A side comment on discipline. A recent study of 8th graders found that self-discipline is a better predictor of academic success than IQ. Via Simoleon Sense; link here. Obviously a child with a very high IQ and low discipline will still outperform a child with low IQ and high discipline, but the study does explain why some very promising children do not perform well while other students who do not score as high on IQ tests do better than expected. The difference is the level of discipline, and the adherence to a strict work ethic.)

Leadership involves being in uniform. But it also means that you can become your role. If a general's uniform is stained, if his tie is untied, if his cap is on backwards... then everyone who sees him will think that something is wrong. They are going to direct their concern to his person and away from his leadership. When your troops start asking what's the matter they are going to be less motivated to follow your orders, no matter how good they are.

When your appearance and decorum express a lack of discipline they are telling your troops that you might be making decisions based on your personal needs, and not the needs of your soldiers. Even if your decision is for the best of the group, your personal appearance will say otherwise.

It is not enough for a general to present a proper public appearance. He must be thoroughly comfortable in his uniform. He must look at though he is wearing the uniform, not that the uniform is wearing him. His public face must be who he is; it must not seem to be a mask.

In a culture of shamelessness people obey different values, those that are most fitted to celebrity. Whether or not therapists know it, when they encourage people to express their feelings openly and honestly, to become part of a tell-all generation, they are encouraging them to become like celebrities.

The difference between a general and a celebrity is that a celebrity does not get noticed in the tabloids unless he exposes some intimate or private matter. Celebrities draw attention to themselves by making inappropriate or idiotic remarks, or by showing more of their anatomy than discretion allows. They attract the eye of the paparazzi because they might at any moment be caught off guard. And since celebrities are notoriously undisciplined, both on and off screen, they are very likely to oblige.

What then does it take to be a leader?

First, a willingness to be in the public eye... even if the public is your staff.

Second, the discipline to maintain decorum at all times in all public situations.

Third, the knowledge that good conduct will promote social harmony.

Fourth, the confidence to be fully comfortable in a public role, to identify with that role.

Fifth, the conviction that the public role is not a mask but is who you really are.

How to Rescue a Job Interview When It Starts Going Wrong

This piece must count as one of the best I have seen on how to handle a job interview. Written by Meridith Levinson for CIO.com, it is entitled, "8 Ways a Job Interview Can Take a Turn for the Worse." Link here. While the article appears on a site that is addressed to IT professionals, everything about it will be useful for any job candidate.

However well you prepare for your job interview, the chances are very good that something will happen that throws you off your game. How you deal with a curve ball or with an unexpected slip up will often spell the difference between getting the job and not.

Jobs are a lot like life. Much of your success will hinge on how you overcome your own mistakes.

Thus, reviewing the points that Levinson outlines and preparing for dealing with them will be well worth your effort. It is good to anticipate being caught off guard by an awkward question or situation. As with other aspects of job performance, this one will require preparation.

Good luck.

Coaching Lessons: How to Respond to Criticism

The day before yesterday I wrote a post about persuasion in psychotherapy. Link here. Today I was reading John Baldoni's article on how best to respond to criticism in business, and I saw again that those of us who do coaching or therapy have much to learn from business coaching. Link here.

Baldoni is talking about leadership skills. He wants to help people develop theirs and to learn how to recognize them in other people. If we recognize that coaches and therapists also exercise leadership skills, we will have taken a step forward. And if we compare the right way to lead and to manage, then we will also understand why psychoanalysis has set such a bad leadership example.

Baldoni does not just address the way an executive or manager leads. He is thinking of the staff member who presents a new idea or plan in a meeting and receives a good dose of criticism. How he handles the criticism will show everyone whether or not he is ready to advance up the ladder of executive success.

Baldoni's point is simple: a good leader knows how to handle criticism. He can defend his idea without being defensive.

In his words: "Maintaining an even keel in the face of skepticism or even criticism is a vital attribute to leadership presence, the kind of aura you need to radiate if you ever hope to instill followership."

Everyone knows that you do not just lead by giving orders. You need to instill followership, the willingness of others to follow your lead. You project the aura that tells everyone that you are in charge by retaining your equanimity when being criticized.

Of course, being criticized is not the same as being insulted. Criticism casts doubt on your proposal; an insult attacks you. You must respect those who disagree with your ideas; you should not respect people who are trying to diminish your person. For now I will leave the question of dealing with insults aside and limit myself to the terms of Baldoni's article: you are presenting a new proposal and others disagree with you.

A good manager expects his staff to disagree, to criticize, and to challenge his proposal. An aspiring manager should show that he is comfortable hearing criticism. Without an exchange of opinions a manager will never be able to inspire others to do their best when they are called on to implement the new policy. If the staff or your colleagues do not participate actively in formulating the policy they will not have a stake in its successful implementation.

How does a manager deal with criticism?

First, he does not take it personally. He does not take it as a personal insult. He does not take it as a rejection of him as a person. If he does, he will become defensive. Even if he does not believe that he is taking it personally, if he acts defensively, everyone will understand that he is taking it personally. This will tell everyone that he is thinking of what is good for him, not what is good for the company.

Second, he does not let them see him sweat. He maintains his composure. He does not act as though he has never considered alternate points of view. He must maintain his composure even when receiving strong, blunt criticism.

And he does not hide under the table. A manager who is struck dumb, who has nothing to say when faced with criticism, is not a leader.

As Baldoni says, a leader must first show that he is in control of himself. If he cannot do that he will never be allowed to control others.

Often we believe that when someone responds to us with passion, we must counter his passion with our own.

And yet, if you walk into a meeting and see that one person is calm and focused while everyone else is lathered up or scared, then you will know who is in charge.

Third, a leader does not dismiss criticism out of hand. If you imagine that disagreement is illegitimate you are producing dissension, not comity. If you imagine that disagreement is a sign of mental illness, you had too much psychoanalysis

Confidence that does not respect different opinions is arrogance. It will try to bully others into acquiescing, but will end up producing drama, not teamwork.

Fourth, a leader must be willing to modify parts of his proposal to reflect the good points that are contained in the criticism. You cannot say that you are a great listener if you never change your mind.

Now, how do you develop your capacity for leadership? Baldoni recommends: preparation, generosity, and patience. As he says, these involve character building, and they will easily serve you in different contexts.

First, be prepared. It is not sufficient to have a great idea and to believe passionately in your idea. You need to have considered the possible objections and you need to be prepared responses to them. You do not want to look as though you have never given any consideration to alternative points of view.

This means that you need to put in the time and effort, not only to develop your proposal but to consider all of the alternatives.

Second, be generous. I have often made this point, and it cannot be made often enough. When you hear criticism you should make it a habit to express appreciation and to find some value in the objection. If you dismiss it out of hand, if you consider it to be illegitimate, you are saying that the person who offered it is worthless. Insulting your staff and colleagues does not advance teamwork.

Third, be patient. Do not expect everyone to agree at once. If your idea involves a disruption of the normal way of doing things, you need to realize that we tend to gravitate toward the familiar and away from the strange. You must be willing to give people time to think through your proposal and to make necessary mental adjustments.

This process involves negotiation, but, then again, all effective leadership and management does.

Coaching Lessons: Really Great Advice

I am always on the lookout for great advice. And not just for myself.

From my experience counseling and coaching people, I have learned that often the difference between success and failure lies in a piece of great advice... offered at the right time to the right person.

Traditionally, therapy has never been in the business of giving advice. If you are looking for that one piece of advice that is going to help you to reorient your efforts more constructively, you should not bother with the musings of the grand poobahs of the therapy culture.

Even at their best, their province is the mind, not reality. Since they have never really wanted their work to be judged by whether or not it made a real difference in someone's life, they tend to offer empty nostrums.

I have found much better advice in the columns of Miss Manners, in the ethical principles of Aristotle, and in the work of a management consultant like Peter Drucker.

Management consultants are like coaches; they are in the business of giving advice. Their work is subject to a rigorous reality check. Consultants offer practical advice, advice you can use, apply, and test. Either it will work for you, or it will not.

For these reasons I was not surprised to come across a piece of great advice in a column by Michael Schrage. He is not a mental health professional, but is a research fellow at MIT's Sloan Center for Digital Business.

The title of his article says it all: "Making Your Boss Look Good (Without Becoming a Sycophant.) Link here.

If you are wondering: in whose eyes do you want your boss to look good... Schrage answers: in the eyes of his boss.

He recommends that you advance your career by advancing the career of your boss... which is not quite the same thing as the old Freudian saw which says that you are naturally drawn to try to replace your boss.

While Schrage focuses on office politics and career advancement, the same principle applies well to other areas of life. Good advice tends to have a broad application.

How can you make your boss look good? The easiest way, which Schrage seems to take for granted, since he does not mention it, is to do a good job. Be the employee your boss thought he was hiring.

If you do a bad job, if you distract your colleagues and make it difficult for them to do their jobs, if you act as though your job is beneath your skill level, then clearly, the person who hired you is not going to look good.

If you work hard, with good focus, and are attuned to the good of the group, then your boss will look good and his career will continue moving forward. Hopefully, you will move forward with him.

You should make it your business to learn all you can about your boss's boss. That is Schrage's key point. As he explains, when your boss's boss gives a talk somewhere, you should do as one young analyst did. You should look around the internet for comments about it. If you find some flattering appraisals on Twitter, you pass them along to your boss. He can then pass them on to his boss and look good in his boss's eyes.

Of course, this does not involve constantly flattering your boss by telling him that he is a genius. Gestures that appear to be self-serving provoke suspicion, especially when they are designed to cover up the fact that you are not doing your job.

The same principle can be applied to a marriage. How many couples have had problems when they are invited to the inevitable dinner with boss and boss' s spouse. It should be clear that when you go to such a dinner with your spouse, your role is to make your spouse look good in his or her boss's eyes. Keep in mind that everything you do at such a dinner will reflect on your spouse.

It is not the time to assert yourself, to be your ebullient self, or to talk about your own career.

Such events happen often enough in the life of a couple. People who do not handle them correctly rarely succeed in their relationships. When you become part of a couple, one of your first thoughts should be that from then on the way you behave will reflect on someone else beyond your self. If you imagine that your personal autonomy and independence must trump your concern for how you are making the other person look... well then, your relationship will quickly be on life support.

The Trauma of Extended Unemployment

Getting fired from your job is traumatic. Remaining jobless for an extended period of time compounds the trauma. The more time you are unemployed the more you will doubt yourself, the more you will start thinking that it is you, not them, who is responsible for your diminished state.

Yet, getting a new job is not necessarily an instant cure. As Joann Lublin reported in the Wall Street Journal, even a new job will not immediately erase the after-effects of the trauma. Link here.

The article is certainly timely. As more and more people spend more and more time unemployed, they are finding, when they get a new job, that they bring with them a recurrent anxiety about losing the new job, a lack of confidence, and an inability to fit in to the new culture.

Who should these people turn to? According to Lublin, they most often turn to coaches. Coaches help them to orient themselves in relation to the new job, explain what they should and should reveal about the old job, guide them to learning about the new corporate culture, and help them rehearse for potentially awkward situations.

Coaching helps these people to effect something that is, for many of them, a difficult and awkward transition. It does not label them neurotic; it does not consign them to the couch; and it does not pretend that they need to recover the memory of past trauma and express their repressed feelings.

For the purposes of this blog, these are fundamental issues. The contemporary approach has fully overcome the Freudian model where repressed trauma produces neurosis. It does not advise people to get in touch with their feelings. It does not assume that they are psychologically disabled, but that they do not know how to transition.

Many of those who have undergone the trauma of extended unemployment were never before out of a job. They never suffered the indignity of lying around the house with nothing to do. They never experienced the pained expressions on the faces of friends and family when their plight became known. And they were never in the position where they could not support their families as they would wish.

Extended unemployment produces feelings of anomie and rejection. When everyone around you is busy at work and you are not... anomie would be a normal reflection of your condition.

But then, the longer you are unemployed, the more your out-of-work routine will come to feel like the norm. And once it feels normal to play video games and watch soap operas, the transition to the new job will become increasingly difficult. First, you have to recalibrate your habits. Second, you need to have a way to answer the inevitable questions about what you have been doing these past several months.

Moreover, as Lublin suggests, the more painful the experience of unemployment, the less like you are to throw yourself fully into the new job. The more you reorganize your life around the new job, the more pain you will feel if you get fired. As many trauma victims know all too well, the only way you can be sure of never suffering the trauma of job loss is not getting a new job.

Is there a way to diminish the trauma of extended unemployment? I for one would recommend that when you are out of work, act as though you have a job. Get up in the morning at the time you would if you were working. Maintain the morning routines you had when you were working. Put on a suit and tie, or other work-appropriate outfit, eat your everyday breakfast, and go to your home office. Then, set about the doing the job of trying to get a job.

As I mentioned before, I got this idea from an article I read about former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. When Thain was fired from his job, he maintained his habit of getting up, getting dressed for work, and going to his home office. Some people ridiculed this tactic, but I, for one, found it eminently sensible. Link here.

"IT Careers: Can You Survive Unemployment?"

Ostensibly, Meridith Levinson wrote this article for IT professionals. I find that it applies well to anyone who is struggling with the trauma of unemployment. Link here.

As with the Levinson article I linked in my last post, the clear message is that if you are unemployed you need to develop a clear plan to deal with the problem, you need to follow the plan religiously, and you need to consider yourself involved in a struggle against depression.

Also, you will need to reach out to others and to take the good advice that will surely be offered you.

"Unemployed? 10 Ways to Fight Depression in Your Job Search"

At CIO.com, Meridith Levinson has just posted an excellent new article about how to fight depression when you are unemployed. Link here.

As you will discover, I was among those who contributed to this piece. Generally, all of the advice is useful and valuable. For those who are unemployed and fighting off a depression, they would do well to follow it.

And they should pay special heed to Levinson's use of the word: fight. It is exactly the right word and it conveys exactly the right concept. When you are unemployed, you are in a very serious fight and you need to approach it as a fight... by training for it, by attacking it, by surveying the situation, and then, by moving in for the kill.

Psychological Flexibility

The couple of times I wrote about "cognitive fluency" I remarked that if you just heard the term, without any explanation or definition, you would have no idea what it meant. Link here.

Ironically, because cognitive fluency means that a simple, direct, expression of a concept, one that is intuitively easy to grasp, is likely to be more valid and more persuasive than one that is complex, convoluted, and nearly impossible to understand.

Cognitive fluency remains an excellent idea; if only its authors had used their own cognitive fluency in naming it.

All that to introduce a new concept from the world of psychological research: psychological flexibility. It comes to us from the Melbourne School of Business. Thus, it addresses how best to exercise business leadership. Link here.

Can you guess what it could possibly mean?

It means: curb your anger. A leader who can control his anger, who can separate himself from his emotions and choose appropriate moments to express them will be more effective than his counterpart who is boiling over with anger or some other emotion.

In some ways this is a radical idea. It attempts to undo some of the damage we have suffered through the influence of the therapy culture.

Until very recently the therapy culture peddled the mantra: express your emotions, especially your anger. It believed, mistakenly, that expelling your toxic emotional gases was going to make you feel better.

The mantra comes down to us from Freud. One day Freud conjectured that depression was anger turned against the self. If that were true, therapists reasoned, then depression could be cured by teaching people to direct their anger outside of themselves.

This caused generations of therapists to lead generations of patients to get in touch with their anger and then to blurt it out at the most inappropriate moments. Throwing a tantrum became a sign of emotional authenticity. It also produced a cathartic release that made people feel better, at least, momentarily.

After several generations therapists finally discovered that it did not work. When you throw a tantrum or indulge an inappropriate expression of emotion you make yourself look like a fool. In itself, that will make you feel worse about yourself. It turns out that depression is about feeling demoralized and diminished; any actions that make you feel more demoralized and diminished feed the depression.

A tantrum might offer a momentary release. The aftermath, the moment when you become aware of what you just did, takes it away, and then some.

Anyway, the researchers from Melbourne have shown that a leader cannot function effectively by expressing his emotions willy-nilly.

A leader who can control his emotions will also be able to control his group. His emotional equanimity will set the standard for others in the group. It will diminish the possibilities for using drama to address differences and difficulties.

The less emotion is involved, the less the issue will be the torments of anyone's soul, and the more the focus will be on the task at hand.

So, I am happy to recommend psychological flexibility, and not just when you rise to the position of being a business leader. If anger causes you to lose focus and to incur the disrespect of others, it will induce you to commit errors... in business and in life.