Chapter 5
Modulate Comfort
There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy
I started my career in organizational development facilitating team-building programs. Having spent seven years as a member of the U.S. High Diving Team, I was able to incorporate my own experiences (and frustrations) as a team member into the facilitated sessions. Before long I had facilitated some five hundred team-building workshops for teams of all shapes and sizes. My experiences as a team member and as a team-building facilitator have taught me that bored teams are in far worse shape than those that are overworked. Rustout is worse than burnout when it comes to performance.
I once led a team-building workshop for an information technology project team of a large communications company. The team was responsible for maintaining the software of the company’s antiquated billing system. As a regulated entity, the company was ridiculously bureaucratic. The budgeting process alone was a nightmare. Most budgets weren’t approved until at least six months into the year for which the budget was created. This meant that “critical” IT projects that were slated to begin in January couldn’t get started until at least July, regardless of how urgent the project. Most project-completion dates, however, did not change. So project teams were in an impossible whiplash position. For the first six months of the year they’d sit on their duffs. But once the budget was approved, they’d work like firefighters at a gas explosion. Such was the case with the team I got called in to work with, except that I got them during the duff-sitting period.
Now, I think I’m pretty good at what I do and always strive to keep my clients “edutained.” As someone who gets bored easily, I am keenly aware of what it takes to keep people engaged during executive-development workshops. To keep things interesting, I use a blended-learning approach, which includes content “lecturettes,” engaging breakouts, and experiential problem-solving activities. But I’m here to tell you, there was nothing I could do to spark this team out of their funk. They were comfortable to the point of erosion. One participant spent the session flipping through a fishing magazine! Another fell asleep. Ouch.
Finally, I stopped what I was doing and said, “Okay, clearly this workshop is not working for you. What gives?”
“Don’t worry, man,” the fisherman said, “it’s not you. We’re just in our hibernation season.”
The Season of Hibernation
The workers just mentioned were at the far edges of comfort. It’s a place where lethargy replaces energy, avoidance replaces initiative, and apathy replaces passion. When workers start hibernating, everything slows to a crawl. Lunches linger. Conversations wander without aim. Work gets perpetually pushed off “until tomorrow.” Worse, the skills and mental acuity of hibernating workers get dull. They make more mistakes (and care less when they do). As a manager, you need to know that the comfort part of the comfeartable phenomenon is just as detrimental as fear in causing declines in performance.
The problem with comfort is that it is so danged comfortable. Comfort has a settling effect. When comfort settles in for too long, workers begin to lower their standards. They “settle” for less. They become less conscientious, less attentive, and less ambitious. Some also become less loyal. Workers who are comfortable to the point of boredom are flight risks. The more bored they are, the more likely they are to leave. At least the smart ones will. They’re the ones who still have enough self-respect to pursue more challenging jobs somewhere else. The lazy ones, the ones who are too settled, will stay and bog things down.
Your job as a manager is to keep comfort from getting too comfortable.
The Zone of Discomfort
After years of research, I’ve yet to find out who came up with the term comfort zone. Whoever it was deserves credit for having coined a term that has become one of the most popularly used expressions in the English language. Comfort zone is used to explain everything from pleasant contentment to entrenched stubbornness. Often we use the term to spur workers toward greater growth and development, such as when we encourage them to “stretch” their comfort zone. Other times we use the term derisively, like when we complain about working fossils who are so encrusted in their own ways that they lack the guts to move beyond the confines of what they know. Such people, we say, are “stuck” inside their comfort zone.
Comfort is something we simultaneously (and contradictorily) strive for and guard against. We talk about performing better within our zone of comfort, but we also know that if we become too comfortable, our skills start to curdle like expired milk. Thus comfort ranges on a continuum between contentment and apathy, the former bringing strong feelings of security and the latter prompting feelings of resignation and defeat. After a while, comfort can become very uncomfortable. The silver lining: The more discomfort that comfort causes, the more likely we are to change and, potentially, grow.
The key for you as a manager is to modulate between comfort and discomfort by intensifying and de-intensifying the work challenges you parcel out to your staff. When they are nestled in their comfort zone, your role is to provide them with challenges that move them into a zone of discomfort. When they become too uncomfortable, your role is to bring them back to a place of confidence. This modulating between comfort and discomfort is exactly the process we used as high divers to stretch our capacity for doing harder (and higher) dives.
Acrobatic dives are the skills of the diving trade. There are basic skills, called requireds, that all divers are required to know. Front dives and back dives, for example, are required dives. Required dives are the foundational dives that all other dives build off of. The front dive, for example, leads to a front double, which leads to a two-and-a-half, and so on all the way up to a front four-and-a-half somersault! Few divers in the world will ever perform a front four-and-a-half, but all divers will do front dives. Most divers will also eventually aspire to do dives with higher degrees of difficulty. No diver will be satisfied knowing how to do just a front dive. Once you learn that dive, your coach starts nudging you to do harder dives, which you want to do anyway. You see the other divers doing the harder dives, and you don’t want to be left out. But learning more difficult dives means, at least for a little while, accepting all the discomfort that comes with it. Diving is a trial-and-error sport. Learning harder dives nearly always means doing a bunch of screaming belly whompers on your way to a new dive. Welts come with the territory. Divers struggle with a constant tension between perfecting the dives they already know and attempting new dives they’ve never done.
Like divers, most workers naturally aspire to learn more challenging tasks. Inherently they know that acquiring new skills is good for their careers. They know too that gaining these new skills requires doing things that are outside of their comfort zone. This is the case at pretty much every level of the organization. Even the guy sorting mail in the mailroom is eventually going to want to learn how to use the newfangled automated tracking system. Your job as a manager is to provide workers with skill-stretching assignments that have a higher degree of difficulty than their current skill sets. That means purposely making workers uncomfortable, at least for a short period of time. Then, when they master those challenges and regain their comfort, you start the whole process all over again. In a sense, your role is compensatory to theirs. When they are comfortable, you provide discomforting challenges. When they are too uncomfortable, you let them settle in with the newly acquired skills long enough to become comfortable again. You become like a life-sized metronome regulating the intervals of time between comfort and discomfort.
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Your job as a manager is to provide workers with skill-stretching assignments that have a higher degree of difficulty than their current skill sets.
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The psychological dynamic at play here is called the mere exposure effect. The more people get “merely exposed” to the situation that is making them uncomfortable, the more desensitized to its effects they become, until they become comfortable again. What starts out as uncomfortable eventually becomes comfortable. When it does, people become capable of being exposed to even greater discomfort.
Notice that there’s more being modulated than comfort. You’re also modulating the amount of courage that people are using. Each time you expose people to greater levels of discomfort and each time you intensify the challenges they face, you are, de facto, causing them to be more courageous.
Methods of Modulation
To modulate means to vary the frequency or volume of a thing. As it relates to workers, you’re varying the intensity of the challenges they face (and thus the comfort they feel). With that in mind, here are three ways of modulating comfort:
• Provide energy-creating challenges.
• Practice lead-ups.
Answer the Holy Question
It’s funny—in all my years as a consultant, I’ve never heard a front-line worker say, “I can’t wait to make more money for our shareholders today!” It doesn’t matter what your company peddles, increasing shareholder value, or company market share, or worker productivity, just doesn’t jazz the average worker. Grasp that concept. There is often a huge disconnect between what is important to a company’s executive body and what is important to front-line workers. What matters to the average worker are career opportunity, meaningful work, a balanced life, a fair wage, and being treated with respect. Not increasing output. As a middle manager, you have to attend to the goals of your bosses and to the career aspirations of your workers. Too many managers focus solely on the former.
It only takes four words to understand the career aspirations of your workers. But they are among the most important words in the English language. Together they constitute what I call the Holy Question: What do you want? Answering those words, in my opinion, should be required of every job candidate, every worker, and every executive on up the line. The answer to those words should be reviewed during every performance appraisal, succession-planning session, and employee-ranking process. Why? Because when you know what people want, you are in a far better position to match their aspirations to the company’s goals. When company and worker goals are aligned, people pursue organizational goals with the same dedication and passion as they do when driven by self-interest.
How does this relate to modulating comfort? It has to do with goals. It’s easier to get people to perform courageous (and uncomfortable) tasks when those tasks tie in to the attainment of their personal goals. By knowing what people want to get out of work, you can give them stretch assignments that connect project tasks to their own goals. So if your boss’s goal is to “repurpose our existing product assets to create new revenue streams and optimize our market dominance on a go-forward basis,” you can tie your boss’s goal to your employee’s own career aspirations by saying, “Hey John, you said that you want more opportunities to use your creativity. Create ten new business uses for this product by next week.”
The point is this: Before getting workers to carry out uncomfortable tasks in pursuit of the company’s goals, you have to understand what is important to them individually. Getting each person to answer the Holy Question, with specificity, will help you to know the goals for which they are willing to be courageous.
Provide Energy-Creating Challenges
Few things generate as much positive energy as a worthwhile challenge. At best, comfort conserves energy. At worst, it shuts it off altogether. But challenge does just the opposite. The greater the challenge (as long as it’s truly attainable), the more energy it inspires. When John F. Kennedy set forth the challenge of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he explained, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… .”
Executives often talk about the desire to tap into people’s passion. Passionate employees work with more gusto than their dispassionate peers. The interesting thing is that the word passion doesn’t just mean energetic dedication; it also means having a willingness to suffer. The word itself comes from the Latin passio, which literally means “to suffer” (as in the Passion of Christ, seen in passion plays during the Christian holiday of Easter). A world-class pianist, for example, will suffer through years of after-school practice, forgoing the creature comforts enjoyed by her schoolmates, in order to earn the right to play on the world stage. Your job, as a manager, is to provide each of your workers with challenges that they would willingly suffer through in order to attain their own career desires. As Kennedy noted, doing so organizes the best of their energy and skills.
Early on in my career, when I was starting out in the field of organizational development, my goal was to become a consultant. My boss’s goal, however, was to grow the consulting business. He also wanted to make sure that I knew every aspect of our company’s consulting products before letting me consult with clients. Doing so would enable me to offer them a full breadth of consulting solutions beyond my own knowledge, which at the time was limited to what I had learned in graduate school. So he tied his goal (to grow the consulting practice) to my goal (to be a consultant) by challenging me to first spend time in a sales role before becoming a consultant. He knew that the move would challenge my comfort. After all, sales was far afield of my educational background. Asking prospective clients for their business would take the kind of gumption that they don’t teach you in graduate school. But my boss also knew that the challenge would tap into my passion. I’d be willing to suffer through all the rejection that comes with a sales job because doing so would help me to acquire skills that would make me a better consultant. My boss knew that consulting, like sales, is about accurately defining clients’ needs and then providing solutions that fill them. So instead of dreading the sales role, I was excited by the challenge. I saw it as a chance to sharpen my skills at unearthing clients’ true needs, skills that would ultimately benefit me as a consultant.
Practice Lead-Ups
As a manager, you have two primary jobs: leave the company better off than you found it, and leave people better off than you found them. The former is achieved through the latter. Thus you have to keep sight of each person’s potential, because in helping them to actualize their potential, you help the company to succeed. Often you’ll have a richer understanding of people’s potential than they themselves have. The temptation is to push them to the edge of that potential too quickly, giving them challenges that eclipse their preparation. Modulating comfort is a better approach because it allows you to give workers incrementally more difficult challenges that groom their skills in a measured way. In the sport of diving we called this process doing our “lead-ups.”
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You have two jobs: leave the company better off than you found it, and leave people better off than you found them. You get the former through the latter.
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Lead-ups are the building blocks of complex assignments, and using them greatly enhances people’s level of preparedness. If you bypass all of the little skills that lead up to the complex tasks you want your workers to achieve, you lower their chances of being successful. No high diver in his right mind, for example, would jump off a hundred-foot high-dive platform without first doing hundreds of jumps at lower levels. Indeed, the path to becoming a high diver starts by doing endless jumps off the side of the pool deck, about two feet off the water.
To illustrate how lead-ups work, let’s say you’re managing a team that’s responsible for generating data reports for the company’s senior executives. Your boss has started to complain that the reports seem like little more than “data dumps,” requiring her to interpret too much data herself. Going forward, she tells you, she wants your team to interpret the data and make recommendations for actions that the senior executives should take. In essence, she is asking that your team members stop thinking of themselves as data analysts and start seeing themselves as business consultants.
In this case, the temptation is to expect your team members to instantaneously make the shift from analyst to consultant just because you said so. The reality, however, is that making the transition requires gaining a deeper understanding of the business and its goals. It requires developing strategic-thinking skills and the ability to shift between line-item details and big-picture implications. More challenging, it requires changing each worker’s self-concept from a provider of data to a provider of advice. For an advice giver the risk is higher, because if a worker’s advice proves faulty after the senior executives have agreed to follow it, the impact to the business is much more consequential than when the worker just provided raw data. Because all of these reasons conspire to make such a transition extremely uncomfortable for employees, the situation is ripe for using a lead-up approach. Modulating comfort in an incremental way makes all the changes associated with the transition more absorbable.
How might lead-ups be used to modulate comfort in the case above? You could start by informing the team about the reasons behind the shift in their roles, tying it to the company’s goals and to how the new skills will benefit them as professionals. Then you could ask them what excites them about the job shift and what concerns they have. Maybe you could then offer them training on strategic thinking, or on major trends impacting the business. Next, you could take an old data report and have them brainstorm recommendations they would have made, had they been business consultants and not data analysts. Then you could have them run a sample report and present recommendations to you for your feedback. Finally, you could have them do what the whole process was leading up to: creating the report and recommendations that your boss is looking for. Using lead-ups to modulate comfort helps get workers to do uncomfortable things that in the absence of an incremental approach they might not have done. With each lead-up, the employee is exercising more courage.
After the Courage Foundation Is Built
Jumping first, creating safety nets, harnessing fear, and modulating comfort are management tools for setting a foundation that supports and encourages courageous behavior. Part 2 of the book, chapters 6 through 9, provides stories and examples of what can happen once the foundation is built. These chapters explain, in greater detail, each aspect of the TRY, TRUST, TELL framework. Having a way of categorizing courageous behavior allows you to pinpoint the exact type of courage that each individual worker may be most in need of building. Courage really goes to work when managers build a strong foundation of courage and then provide courage-building assignments that are specific to the individual needs of each worker.
Questions for Reflection
In what ways are your workers too comfortable? In what ways do they play it too safe?
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How would you answer the Holy Question (What do you want?)? How would your boss answer it? Your customer? Each of your direct reports?
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What work challenges would simultaneously tap into each worker’s passion and serve the goals of the business? What lead-ups could be used to make the challenges bearable?
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