CHAPTER 8

WHAT DO YOU
REALLY BELIEVE?

“For as [a person] thinks within himself, so he is. . .”¹

—ANCIENT PROVERB

My wife, Anne, has a primordial fear of bugs. I do not know how she developed this fear, but her terror persisted over the years despite my best attempts to cure her. She believed that bugs would do something dreadful to her. No bug has ever, in fact, assaulted her, but her unbridled fear remained. When I was finishing graduate school, we lived in a rented home that had seen some better days. She would enter a dark room, flip on the light, see a bug on the floor, and let out a Hollywood-quality, blood-curdling scream.

Our four-year-old son watched her reaction several times, and one night I saw him have the same response to a bug. His scream was identical down to the note. The quality of reproduction was stunning. Anne and I agreed that her passing this fear to our son was not a great parental legacy, so for his sake, we needed to quickly change his emerging beliefs about bugs as objects of fear. She changed her behavior because she realized that if she did not change, our son was going to become a bug-fearing, neurotic wuss (this was my formal clinical diagnosis). Being a “good mother” is a strong motivator, so she had a reason to change to help her son.

To change his beliefs about bugs, we adopted a biological curiosity approach, like, “Wow, look how many legs he has. What do you suppose she’s doing with those antennas?” We tried to catch bugs and put them in glass jars for further study. This technique actually worked, and today our son is a world-famous professor of entomology. Just kidding. He is actually a commercial real estate developer, but he is not afraid of bugs.

Anne saw bugs as a threat—in reality, the bugs were not going to hurt her, but because she believed they would she acted in accordance with her belief. When she saw one, she felt afraid, screamed, and ran. Her belief about bugs (“They are going to hurt me”) drove her actions (running) and her feelings (fear and revulsion). However, her “I need to be a good mother and role model” belief supplanted her “Bugs are going to hurt me” belief. Our son was starting to react the same way until we fostered different beliefs in him, which, in turn, resulted in very different behavior—curiosity, amusement, etc.

Anne is still not a big fan of bugs, but she has done a lot better at controlling her fear. I thought she might revert to her old self when our sons went off to college, but she handles the occasional bug pretty well. Ralph, her bug guy, also does a good job of keeping them out of our house in the first place.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU BELIEVE

The bug example is a simple, personal illustration of how beliefs determine our behavior, both our actions and our emotions. The exact same principles apply to leadership. Our beliefs play a tremendous role in determining how we act as leaders. I often ask leaders what they believe about the people who work in their organization. Although they may use less offensive words, some leaders believe that followers are fundamentally lazy, trying to do no more than necessary to keep their jobs, and as a result require close supervision. “Workers do not do what you expect, but only what you inspect.” For these leaders, threat and coercion are primary management tools.

Contrast these leaders with the ones who believe that most followers are self-motivated, generally conscientious, want to do a good job, are fundamentally well-intentioned, and driven to fulfill the mission of the organization. Given the right conditions, followers will be largely self-managed and seek positive outcomes. These leaders say, “If they have the necessary information and training, followers will usually make good decisions and require only broad oversight from management.”

I have met many leaders in different industries with one or the other of the two sets of beliefs mentioned above. It becomes apparent that if we believe the first view we will treat followers one way. If we believe the second view we will treat followers quite differently. Our beliefs play a vital role in determining our actions as leaders.

A REASON TO ACT

In a previous life as an adjunct psychology professor at a state university, I taught “Theories of Motivation.” After years of study and reflection, I concluded that the idea of motivation is fairly simple—to be motivated a person needs a reason to act. Behavioral scientists call this a stimulus or precipitating event. Our reason to act can be simple or complicated. Sometimes the reason is external to us, for example, our car is dying, so we buy a new one. Sometimes the reason is internal, such as longing for meaning and purpose in our lives. In every case, a person’s action begins with a reason to act. Our reason to act passes through a belief, which then determines the actions we take.

Our belief system is critical to our behavior. We constantly form beliefs about one thing or another, and we keep those beliefs in what we can metaphorically call a “belief file.” This file, which resides in our core, catalogues our many beliefs on many different topics. Once filed away, a belief waits to be applied to a particular stimulus (e.g., the sight of a bug automatically retrieves the most relevant belief in the file, in Anne’s case, “Bugs are harmful.”). Figure 8 illustrates how all this works.

Figure 8

A reason to act passes through a belief. That belief determines our action, which results in an action or an emotion or, most likely, both. Of course, this process happens almost instantaneously, and it tends to happen unconsciously. In some cases, there are competing thoughts flying around inside our core, but we are most aware of the stimulus and our action. Because this process happens so quickly, our awareness of how a specific belief intervenes is limited to nonexistent at the time our actions occur. When Anne saw a bug, she did not stop and thoughtfully consider her belief about bugs. She just screamed and ran.

As you can imagine, not everything we believe is accurate—most bugs, for example, are not going to hurt us. If the belief governing a behavior does not accurately reflect reality, our resulting action will also be off track. Many beliefs are downright false. If an inaccurate or false belief is stored in our belief file, it will result in a misguided action.

Ideally, we make sure that our beliefs are true and grounded in reality. Because our belief file resides within our core, we must carefully guard our core to be careful about what gains access. We must thoughtfully decide which beliefs remain in our belief file as well as which presently stored beliefs need to be reconsidered or jettisoned. All kinds of influences act upon our beliefs. Not all those influences foster accurate or true beliefs, so we must learn to detect errant beliefs and to challenge their authenticity. We need a way to keep those errant beliefs out; we also need to challenge existing beliefs that may not be true.

Consumer products companies spend countless billions to influence our thinking. Those efforts are measured in terms of “impressions,” and for many products, the impressions run into the millions in any given year. These marketing experts are masters at shaping our beliefs, and we act on those beliefs by buying their products. The ads are so effective that we even see them as entertainment during the Super Bowl. A battle rages 24/7 to influence our beliefs, and the other side is well-funded. Ads about perfume, razors, and cars foster beliefs that govern our behavior. There is tremendous effort on the part of many to shape not just our beliefs about consumer products, but also politics, social attitudes, and many other areas. In addition to ads, social media holds immense power to influence individual and collective beliefs. Many feel that we have only begun to see the impact of social media in shaping what people believe.

It has always been of interest to me how certain catchphrases enter our speech. If you like the media personality Larry the Cable Guy, you have probably used his catchphrase, “Git-R-Done!” In the last six months, I noticed how many people have begun to start their statements with, “So.” Our high school grammar teacher would seriously frown on starting a sentence with a conjunction, but this speech pattern has worked its way into the common vernacular. Just as these popular speech patterns unconsciously work their way into our own vernacular, beliefs also work their way into our belief file.

This unconscious adoption of a speech pattern or, more important, a belief is even more likely when prominent figures who we admire espouse certain beliefs. I am surprised at how often we let others do our thinking for us. For example, a Hollywood figure supports a particular political candidate. We admire the actress, because she is brilliant on-screen. “If she is voting for this candidate, so will I” is the quiet, almost imperceptible inner dialogue. We do not stop and challenge the validity of her belief. In reality, the actress may be outstanding at her profession but have no depth of understanding in domestic or political matters. Also, her beliefs about life, personal values, faith, money, etc. may be dramatically out of step with our broader beliefs. We will unpack this phenomenon more in Chapter 12, but the key takeaway is that we must be careful to vet the beliefs that work their way into our belief file, especially the subtle ones that lodge themselves in our core with little to no conscious awareness on our parts.

ERRANT BELIEFS/ERRANT ACTIONS

Many of our beliefs are rational and well-founded, while others are not. Fairly routinely as I work in various organizations, I discover that conflict among executives is rooted in false beliefs about one another. I met with a national sales manager recently who was steaming because one of her peers was going straight to people in her part of the organization to get information. I asked the leader what about this upset her. She responded, “I don’t like her going around my back, and it upsets my people that she seems to be questioning my judgment.” I happened to know that the marketing manager, who was new to the organization, was actually trying not to bother the sales manager by asking every time she needed to know something to get her job done. I encouraged them to talk about the problem. The new marketing manager had come from an organization where she was expected to know everything about the product and her previous organization’s culture was not to observe any organizational boundaries when asking questions. These two leaders ended up agreeing that the marketing manager, out of courtesy, would tell her peer what she needed to know and find out the best way to get it. The real breakthrough occurred when the sales manager admitted that she had attributed negative motives to the marketing manager—she owned her misbeliefs. In fact, the new manager was not questioning her judgment, but rather trying not to bother her colleague unnecessarily. The sales manager changed her belief about her new co-worker, and over the following year, their trust level grew. They now they work together famously.

A LEADER WHO NEEDED A BETTER BELIEF FILE

Dennis Kozlowski is now serving time for misusing company funds at Tyco International, the huge security products company. He dipped into company coffers for a lot of personal stuff; for example, he bought a $6,000 shower curtain for his Manhattan apartment.² He apparently had some very expensive and exotic tastes, because from my bachelor days, I remember a shower curtain costing about twenty bucks, ten for the liner and ten for the curtain, including the locking plastic rings.

How does the model in Figure 8 explain Kozlowski’s behavior? Kozlowski’s apartment needed a shower curtain (Reason to Act). I am only conjecturing here, but maybe he was so busy, he asked his designer to buy and install a suitable shower curtain. When Kozlowski received the bill from the designer he thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of money, but I’ve done so much for the company over the last two years, I think the company should pay for that. I’ll also probably entertain some business prospects here” (Belief file). Based upon the errant belief, he paid the bill out of the company’s entertainment budget (Action).

Where did Kozlowski go wrong? His action was wrong, certainly, but the problem actually originated in his belief file. He needed a shower curtain—no problem there; however, in response to his need, his faulty belief system said, “You deserve this and shouldn’t have to pay for it personally.” He acted on that belief and felt good that he was not stuck with the bill out of his own pocket. The root cause of his problem was not his action but rather that a particular belief in his belief file did not reflect reality. The correct belief should have been, “This is a personal expense.”

What if Kozlowski had caught himself and said, “That’s a lot of money for a shower curtain. It’s tempting to have the company pay for it, but there is no way ethically to justify it. I either need to pony up the money personally or ask the designer to find a less expensive shower curtain.” If he had modified his belief about how the company should pay for the curtain and some other items, Kozlowski might have made a great impact at Tyco and be enjoying his retirement today.

OUR BELIEFS CAN BE INFLUENCED

An emerging leader’s beliefs regarding how to treat subordinates or how to advance in the company are often like an empty file. Other people become instrumental in forming the beliefs that govern how we act as leaders. This argues for picking our role models carefully, because a given leader may powerfully impact what beliefs guide us.

I do not know what influences formed Dennis Kozlowski’s beliefs. He may have had more ethically robust beliefs earlier in his career. As we observed earlier in the book, the acquisition of power can change our beliefs—power can corrupt our beliefs, which corrupts our actions. Power acts forcefully on our core. Ungoverned, it can do a number on our beliefs, twisting them into self-serving purposes. When we lie to ourselves, we create errant beliefs that we eventually adopt as true. In many cases, the adoption of these errant beliefs does not happen thoughtfully, but rather unconsciously. Consider the implications for a leader who believes, “I don’t have to follow the normal rules . . . my position is above that.” Leaders are especially vulnerable to this pitfall because they have more power. Power, by its very nature, potentially influences a leader to creatively engineer ways to justify their decisions even when the belief that guides their actions is errant.

Our beliefs are so controlling in their impact that they can even determine whether we live or die. Laura Hillenbrand’s fine biography of Louis Zamperini, Unbroken, tells the gripping story of three survivors when their B-24 crashed in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Louis Zamperini, Russell Allen Phillips (“Phil”), and Francis McNamara (Mac) struggled to stay alive for many days under a relentless tropical sun with no provisions in a flimsy raft surrounded by sharks.

Her description of their ordeal captures the power of beliefs and their impact on behavior:

       Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.³

Mac died quietly one night, and his two companions gave him a mournful burial at sea. He died largely because he believed his circumstances were hopeless. Louis and Phil spent forty-seven days on the ocean before the Japanese finally took them captive.

In most cases our beliefs do not determine whether we will live or die, but they will have a huge influence on whether we will be a strong leader who makes a great impact. We need to be intentional and thoughtful regarding what we believe. It is essential that we understand how certain beliefs make us effective as a leader, while others set up for cataclysmic failure.

We must be tough-minded in determining which beliefs we will allow into our belief file. Beliefs must be vetted. The ones we do not vet can get us into serious trouble. We must conduct a persistent, courageous, and introspective review if we are to access the beliefs and convictions that control our behavior as leaders. Every belief must be interrogated and put on trial for its life.

Every belief must be interrogated
and put on trial for its life.

WHAT DO WE REALLY BELIEVE?

Although we may entertain some theoretical beliefs that we share during casual conversations with friends, deep down in each of us is a set of real convictions that determine our actions and emotions—these are our core beliefs. In a great scene near the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,⁴ Indiana Jones, his father, and a cast of evil characters converge in a cavern carved out of ancient sandstone dimly lit with smoky torches. Both groups’ quests lead them to this desolate desert cave, which they believe to be the secure location of the Holy Grail. The villainous Donovan is certain that the Holy Grail is the key to eternal life and wants desperately to retrieve it for his own selfish ends. He sends a couple of soldiers into the adjacent passageway. After the vibrating metallic sound of a giant blade reverberates through the cave, two severed heads roll back to the feet of the group to a chorus of screams. Out of desperation, Donovan shoots Indiana Jones’s father to force Indy to enter the lethal gauntlet of obstacles to retrieve the Grail (the only thing that can save his wounded father). With a flourish of contempt, Donovan says to Indy, “It’s time to ask yourself what you believe.” Indy is now forced to consider whether the search for the Grail is an archeological abstraction or a reality able to heal his father’s mortal wound.

The next chapter provides some insight about how we actually discover the beliefs nested in the depths of our core.