CHAPTER 12

DETONATE FALSE BELIEFS

“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

—GEORGE COSTANZA

Anne has been in the art business for many years and represents about thirty artists whose works are on display in her gallery. After I arrived home from work one afternoon, a friend called and said, “Is that Anne’s gallery on channel five? The sky copter is looking down on her store.” I had no idea what she meant and quickly switched on the TV. There was her store’s awning with Anne Irwin Fine Art emblazoned on the front. Just as the sound and image came on the screen, the TV announcer reported, “We have a bomb threat at Anne Irwin Fine Art in Buckhead. Numerous law enforcement agencies are on the scene.”

My jaw dropped. Just as I turned to run to my car, Anne called. “We’re all fine, but every law enforcement known to man is here—the Atlanta Police, the Atlanta Bomb Squad, Homeland Security, and the FBI to name a few. The street is closed and no one is allowed to enter or to leave the area. Now was the first time they would let me call you! I hope you will come down, but you may not be allowed on the street.”

Fortunately, when I arrived, I was able to park nearby and walk to where Anne was standing on the sidewalk. It was bedlam. Several sky copters hovered overhead. Ten police cars were parked in haphazard fashion around the street with blue lights flashing, and a specially equipped ambulance waited nearby. Fire trucks with red lights flashing and firefighters were everywhere, and their water hoses crisscrossed the street. A gigantic bomb squad truck waited near the gallery entrance and a mechanical robot stood at attention on the sidewalk.

Visibly shaken, Anne showed me a photo on her phone of a box that had been delivered to the gallery earlier that afternoon. The major delivery services routinely deliver and pick up art all day long, but this box arrived from a well-known fashion retailer. Anne’s gallery manager had ordered a purse for her sister’s birthday. When she removed the purse, she saw that underneath were three long tubes with something white on the inside. Wires connected the white tubes to some kind of digital control panel. Anne took one look and called the police, who arrived within minutes. The police examined the box and quickly backed away, telling everyone to clear the building.

The head of the bomb squad explained to Anne that for safety reasons they routinely detonate anything that looks like a bomb in a special water tank on the truck. The robot carried the package to the truck, placed it in the tank, and blew it up. The tank is so well fortified that they can conduct carefully controlled detonations of even significant bombs. They then attempt to reassemble the device to understand its true nature. This is a painstaking effort that the “lab guys” undertake to determine the type of explosive and its origin. How did the detonator work? Was it an amateur effort or more advanced in its design?

A variety of officials interviewed Anne and her gallery manager. “Did they have any enemies? Was anyone recently fired from the company?” No one had any explanation, and no one from any of the agencies was talking. A few days later, a Homeland Security official stopped by and reported that they had concluded the package had nothing to do with the gallery. The experts were not even positive it was an improvised explosive device, although everyone agreed it looked like one. They speculated that terrorists may have been testing the package delivery system, but otherwise the authorities were very tight-lipped. Anne took some comfort from the fact that everyone with whom she dealt in the law enforcement community was incredibly competent, concerned, and highly professional.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE WAY YOU THINK?

In the last chapter we looked at the consequences of false beliefs and self-deception. It is quite normal to hold beliefs that are completely false or even just half-truths. These misbeliefs result in actions that are ineffective at a minimum, and in some cases downright dangerous. Most leaders with a breached core have lied to themselves about something. The issue for us is how do we identify those misleading beliefs, and then what do we do about them.

In the case of Anne’s gallery, the authorities from the Atlanta Bomb Squad were able to execute a controlled detonation to deal with the device safely. When we discover false beliefs in our core, we, too, must find a way to bring about a controlled dismantling of that belief so that it does not influence our behavior in a harmful direction. It is also a useful exercise to consider how we adopted the false belief in the first place.

Recently, I was trying to get home from a trip to attend a wedding party for a friend. The gate agent told me that my flight was cancelled due to a mechanical problem in Atlanta. He said he would get me on the next flight an hour-and-a-half later. Although it is a bit embarrassing to admit this, I experienced a torrent of negative self-talk.

       That gate agent is lying like a dog. That’s such a lame excuse. They just didn’t have a full load, so they’re saying it’s a mechanical problem, when they just don’t want to fly a half-empty plane up here. He’s crazy if he thinks we’re only going to be delayed ninety minutes. I’ll get into town just in time for Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. Anne and I will have to race back across town in traffic to get to the party. We’ll be incredibly late. I’ll go to bed at a ridiculous hour and won’t get to do some critical things I’ve got to get done early in the morning.

My first impulse was to complain to the agent and say a few unedifying things, but instead I sat in the gate area and sulked for about fifteen minutes, replaying the same catastrophic sequence over and over, feeling sorry for myself. This was a really great response for an experienced organizational psychologist who writes books about how to be an effective leader!

What were the beliefs that were in play? One belief was that airlines don’t tell the truth and do not care about inconveniencing their passengers. A second belief was that I would be very late, and there would be all kinds of negative consequences.

Fortunately, I remembered that I was writing this book and began to have a different conversation with myself. The first thing I said was, “This is something I cannot control. Even if the airline is lying about the reason for the flight cancellation, the gate agent, the pilots, and the flight attendants had nothing to do with that decision. There’s no sense in being annoyed with them. There is really no way to confirm the reasons for the flight cancellation anyway.” I also did the math on the time: “I may hit some rush-hour traffic, but even in worst-case scenario, we probably won’t be more than thirty minutes late for the party. I can also get some calls made and e-mails sent while I’m sitting here at the gate.”

I felt a bit better and actually got some work done. Hopefully, I added a few hours to my life by not going into an artery-clogging negative emotional spiral! The good news is that my re-engineered self-talk proved to be about right and we were not that late for the party.

EXPLODE FALSE BELIEFS

My flight example above is trivial compared with the beliefs that get us in real trouble and compromise our ability to lead, but the process for how we identify and arrest those false beliefs is pretty much the same. If we listen carefully to our self-talk, we can often ascertain our beliefs. To listen carefully, we have to be quiet and eliminate as much of the noise as possible. Even though I was at a noisy airport in my previous story, I was able to find a seat in an empty section of chairs. This helped me close out some of the distractions and be reflective. The end goal is a controlled demolition of false beliefs. In many cases we can simply identify and then challenge or dispute the false beliefs heard in our own inner dialogue. We can then replace those false beliefs with ones that are true.

The process looks like this:

       1.  Ask, “What am I telling myself?”

       2.  Determine what belief(s) your self-talk reveals.

       3.  Consider the behavioral consequences of that particular belief—what are your resulting conduct and feelings?

       4.  Ask yourself, “Are these beliefs true? Which beliefs need to be disputed and changed?”

       5.  Conduct a controlled detonation of the false beliefs—tell yourself that these beliefs are simply not true.

       6.  Tell yourself the truth and put those new beliefs into your core.

       7.  Finally, act on the basis of the new beliefs.

WE ARE COMPLICATED

This short seven-step process is not as easy as it might seem. Our behavior is often highly nuanced. We have strongly ingrained beliefs that do not disappear at the flip of a switch. We tend to be skilled at engineering our beliefs to be compatible with what we really want, and those beliefs become well-defended.

Our misbeliefs are not always easy to identify, particularly when there may be some half-truths present. Those half-truths can be as hard to spot as a sniper in camos hidden in natural terrain. The especially challenging aspect of a half-truth is there is likely some truth in there somewhere—just distorted. Ken Lay’s half-truth was based upon the conviction that “We have to take care of our stockholders, many of whom are employees with their entire nest eggs tied up in Enron stock.” That part was a true statement and very good camouflage for the lie that followed: “We will get our books in order next quarter.”

Although some problems, like my bad attitude at the airport, may be resolved quickly, our more enduring patterns and habits require heightened vigilance and determined perseverance to change. It is good to cure ourselves of annoyances over routine inconveniences like late flights, but there are far more consequential issues we must address. As leaders, we can impact thousands of lives, as Lay did at Enron. Effective leaders must be ruthlessly intolerant of any self-deception.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

Let’s look at one of the Lies Leaders Love from Chapter 10: “I’m the smartest person in the room.” You just might be the smartest person in the room. Maybe you went to a prestigious university and graduated with honors. Maybe you worked for a prominent firm before going to a top-ten business school. Maybe you did not even finish college, but like Bill Gates, you are known as a brilliant person who has a tremendous ability to keep multiple ideas in play at the same time. Maybe you have been involved in some spectacular successes at your company and everyone sees you becoming the CEO in seven or eight years. Maybe you are the CEO. Even if these statements are true, here are some dangerous self-deceptions that may flow out of a foundational belief like “I’m the smartest person in the room”:

       ♦  I am more important than everyone else.

       ♦  I have the keenest insight and know better than others.

       ♦  The company should implement my ideas without question.

       ♦  Although there are some good “doers” on this team, I am the best “thinker.”

       ♦  My judgment about most matters is superior to others.

The behavior we would likely observe in the person who holds these types of beliefs would include dismissiveness, arrogance, impatience, and diminishment of others, to name a few. As the person is given more responsibility and power in the organization, he or she tends to give even fuller expression to these qualities. The self-talk of someone whose beliefs are like those above might sound like:

       Well, I have to sit through another tedious leadership team planning meeting today. . . these things are boring and nothing but a pooling of ignorance. I told them three months ago what we should do, and now we’re about to conclude that’s exactly what we will do. When I get the top job we’re going to dispense with these time-wasters.

Although others may respect the person’s brilliance, they are not going to follow an arrogant person wholeheartedly. They are not going to invest in that leader’s vision and will find themselves subtly resisting and maybe even sabotaging the leader’s initiatives.

Effective leaders pay attention to their self-talk. They challenge those subtle misbeliefs and half-truths that they carry around in their core. They recognize that a certain tone or gesture conveys arrogance or dismissiveness. They recognize that this type of behavior breeds resistance to our ideas in others.

We must challenge and reject some of our long-held beliefs and substitute new ones such as:

       ♦  Every member of this team has an important role and a valuable contribution to make.

       ♦  I have good insights but different perspectives tell the whole story.

       ♦  Many of my ideas are insightful, but sometimes I don’t have all the facts.

       ♦  An effective team will always outperform any group of individuals.

       ♦  The team values my judgment, but I must offer my insights with humility and deference to be well-received.

       ♦  I may not have all the facts, so my ideas need to be challenged.

As we go through this process, we must remain vigilant in self-examination. We must ask others for feedback. We must deal sometimes forcefully with our belief system and speak directly to our core with conviction, saying, “I must stop viewing others as inferior and start affirming their unique perspectives.” When we hear one of those false beliefs creeping back in, we can say, “Stop. . . . that is not true. Although I do have a significant talent, others are uniquely gifted as well.”

EARLY-WARNING SYSTEM

Having an early-warning system can keep false beliefs from lodging in our core. Senator John Edwards had a plethora of early warnings from others, but he ignored them. He either insisted that he was not having an affair or he promised he would stop. It is now public knowledge that Edwards had the affair and fathered a love child with his mistress. He survived a civil trial in which he was charged with misusing campaign funds to pay her.¹ Although we do not know what types of alarm bells might have been going off inside his core, there were bound to be some present. Ignoring the early-warning system left his campaign and his life in shambles.

Whether the early-warning signals come from inside or outside, we need to learn to heed them. Misbeliefs can be sticky and hard to dislodge over time. They become familiar and well-practiced. It would be like getting rid of an old friend. In some instances, we must draw on the resources of others such as an accountability relationship—the subject of an upcoming chapter.

I worked with a senior manager who was a perfectionist. No one liked working for her. Meetings meant obsessing over the smallest details. She displayed self-righteous glee when she found mistakes in others’ work. Her peers called her a “sick puppy.” The CEO of the company told me that earlier in her career, she had been coached countless times to ratchet down the obsessiveness and perfectionism but had ignored the advice. Although talented and smart, she exercised an excessive attention to detail that made her a micromanager. Over time, her style and conduct became career limiting. She and I had lunch one day, and I asked her where her attention to detail came from. She said, “Someone who does not seek perfection in all they do is not a good person.” When I asked her where that perspective came from, she attributed it to her deceased father, a highly regarded actuary who worked at the same company years before. I left lunch convinced that her views had the strength of moral conviction and was immovably lodged in her belief system. Six months later, the company downsized, and, with strong urging, she took early retirement.

Although there are many background factors that strongly influence our beliefs, I firmly believe that we do not have to live under the determination of what we learned earlier in our lives, as did the woman in my illustration above. We can certainly achieve escape velocity from any belief no matter how strongly entrenched it might be.

Essentially we must ask, “Are we telling ourselves the truth?” We must ask if the narrative revealed in our self-talk is who we really want to become—our legacy. How we ensure that the right beliefs are fully lived out in our behavior is the topic of the next chapter.