CHAPTER 13

RUNNING ME INC.

“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds. Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

—JOHNNY CASH, “I WALK THE LINE”

Several years ago I worked with the leadership team at a company whose headquarters was located in a rural area. One of the strongly held values of the company was community service, and the CEO encouraged employees to be involved in their town. Several of the senior officers regularly volunteered as chaplains at a nearby federal prison. During one of my visits to the company, the executives who volunteered at the prison asked me to attend a session with a group of inmates with whom they met several evenings a month. I gladly accepted their invitation. After a group session, a number of the prisoners came up to have individual conversations with me. A few shared their personal stories. One of the most poignant stories I heard that night was from a man who had served about half his sentence.

“Joe” told me that he was a highly recruited high school basketball player. He was so good, some had speculated he might go straight to the NBA; however, his parents insisted he first go to college. He had scholarship offers from a number of Division I university basketball programs all over the country, and had accepted an offer at a well-known basketball powerhouse not too far from his home. After high school graduation, Joe said good-bye to his coaches and friends and spent the summer working out and taking a math course to get ready for college. Just like his dad, Joe wanted to major in business. One night a friend invited him to a bar. Although he was underage, his friend assured him that it did not matter. They drank a couple of beers and then headed for the door. Joe wore a T-shirt for his college team, and as they were leaving, another guy at the bar made an insulting comment about the basketball team. Ignoring him, Joe kept walking, but then the guy grabbed him from behind. Joe reacted quickly, swung around, and hit the other guy squarely in the head. The other man dropped to the floor and died instantly. A jury found Joe guilty of manslaughter, and the judge imposed the mandatory minimum sentence of twenty-five years in a federal prison. One man dead and the extraordinary promise and potential of a young life extinguished in a microsecond.

This story is tragic on so many levels. Despite the hardening that twelve years of prison would produce in anyone, Joe still had the joy of the game in his eyes, but he also exuded learned helplessness, the blight of many in such circumstances. Joe said he did not even think about his action at the time. When the guy grabbed his shoulder and said, “I’m talking to you,” he simply reacted.

Although we cannot understand what it is like to be Joe, we all act on impulse at times. In a leadership team meeting I saw a young executive push back against a proposed organizational structure that the new CEO said she was considering for their company. To everyone’s surprise, he blurted out, “You’re wrong.” I honestly do not think there was much if any forethought given before the young executive made the comment. He may have been fully justified in his concern and courageous to express it, but his timing was terrible—it was the first meeting for the CEO with her new team. The member of the team who spoke out had no relational history and, metaphorically speaking, no deposits in the CEO’s trust account. A few months later the CEO asked her outspoken team member to leave the company. This story did not get reported on Fox Business, but the executive suffered a permanent loss of credibility and his position.

Like Joe and this uncensored team member, many of us act or speak without deliberation, contemplation, or forethought. We just act or speak. We sometimes regret things that we say in meetings and wish we had caught ourselves before the fateful words rolled out. “Why didn’t I just sit back, not say anything, and see where the discussion was going? But no, I had to jump in and now look like a moron.” An ancient king known for his wisdom said, “Fools vent their anger, but the wise quietly hold it back.”¹ The good news is that effective self-regulation frees us from the tyranny of our impulses.

[E]ffective self-regulation frees us from the tyranny of our impulses.

ARE WE ACCOUNTABLE FOR OUR REACTIONS?

A lack of self-regulation is at the center of many leader failures. Failure to regulate behavior inevitably undermines a leader’s aspirations to be strong and to have an enduring legacy.

Earlier in the book, I mentioned General David Petraeus, head of the CIA, who was forced to resign over an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. What was he telling himself about his relationship with Ms. Broadwell? We do not know. This is only conjecture, but it could have been along the lines of, “She is an extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful woman, and she’s fun to be with. I am really lonely because of the travel and demands of my job. She respects me for who I am. This is not hurting anyone. We won’t get caught.” One of the truly outstanding generals in U.S. history compromised his legacy by allowing self-deception to prevail in his core. When there is a breach in a leader’s core, there is a lie in there somewhere!

Could General Petraeus have resisted the affair with Broadwell? We cannot control the events or temptations coming our way, but we can control our thinking. Paula Broadwell is a beautiful and accomplished woman. That indisputable reality General Petraeus could not control, but strong leaders have moments of truth where they must regulate their actions. Contemplation of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate or using company resources to buy something for personal use or a million other possibilities should provoke a self-awareness moment.

What Petraeus could control were his beliefs about Broadwell and their relationship. Effective self-regulation involves having tough-minded, candid, and forceful conversations with ourselves to challenge the misbeliefs. What if the general had said to himself:

       She is an extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful woman, and she’s fun to be with. I am really lonely because of the travel and demands of my job. She respects me for who I am. It is incredibly tempting to go the next step with her, but I must not. Even though it’s been fairly common for men in my position to have affairs, the potential devastation to our families, our reputations, our careers, and maybe even national security are at stake. I must create some strong safeguards immediately to limit any further involvement with her.

Changing our beliefs to regulate what we are doing or contemplating doing often requires a self-induced wake-up call. It is like that foggy state between wakefulness and dreaming, when we start to realize the dream is not reality. We say to ourselves, “This was just a dream.” In that foggy state between contemplation of an action and the action, we have to speak directly to our core. It requires intense monitoring and managing of our beliefs—making sure that what we are telling ourselves is true.

Could Joe have “coached himself” out of the spot he was in at the bar? Probably, but it would have required that he draw on some belief he already had nurtured in his core. Most athletes have to develop self-control to stay in the game, or at a minimum, to not get penalized or ejected. During intense competitive events, many athletes lose composure and shove or hit an opposing player; however, the best athletes learn restraint. Their self-talk says, “Don’t react. You will hurt the team if you take out your frustration this way.”

We might think that we “just reacted—things happened so fast,” and we couldn’t help it; but, in reality, there is always a belief in there somewhere that directs our actions. Joe might have felt insecure in the bar because he believed it to be a dangerous, threatening place. He might have been on edge because he believed he would get in trouble with his strict parents for drinking. He might have believed the only way out was physical confrontation—that he simply could not walk away because of ego reasons. I cannot say what he believed, but what appeared to be an impulsive, senseless act actually came out of a flawed belief. His unsound decision about how to handle the situation bore that out.

Most people who regret impulsive acts or decisions actually had restraining self-talk going on during their misguided action, but the stress and noise of their circumstances drowned out their quiet voice of reason. The executive I mentioned earlier in this chapter reacted because the proposed new organizational structure diminished his position and created another reporting level above him. He was flooded with feelings of concern that he and his team would lose standing in the organization, which is why he blurted out, “This won’t work.” With enough presence of mind, he still should have said to himself, “Sit on this. Build a relationship with her and then state your case when she knows that you support her in the position.”

It takes time and discipline to self-regulate, but it is not enslaving. In fact, it is the opposite. Self-regulation frees us from the tyranny of our impulses. Self-regulation is like the pressure regulator in my home. For some reason unknown to me, the water pressure is excessively high on the street where my home is. To address this, a plumber installed a pressure regulator in my basement, near where the water supply pipe enters from the street. The regulator controls and reduces the pressure so that our appliances and plumbing fixtures are not damaged. In the same way, we need a personal regulator that governs what we do and say, so that any excessive pressure or stress does not damage critical relationships and our credibility as leaders. So how do we create such a regulator inside us?

HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY

I am reaching way back, but I recall from high school biology that a semipermeable membrane is a barrier that allows certain substances to pass through while blocking others. A membrane of this type serves as a protective mechanism. We need a personal semipermeable membrane around our belief file, so that we are very selective about what we allow through and what we block out. Figure 13 illustrates this how this works.

Leaders need to be especially careful about the beliefs they allow to lodge in their belief file. We must also carefully examine the ongoing conversation we have with ourselves that reveals the beliefs we have already passed through the membrane. Periodically re-vetting our exiting beliefs is a healthy, regular exercise. We must take ourselves in hand to ensure that the beliefs we allow entrance to our belief file are true.

Figure 13

As we have seen in so many examples mentioned earlier in the book, power and arrogance erode our core and weaken our ability to make good judgments about what is true. The more power we acquire as we move up through the ranks of our organization, the more careful we must be to protect our core from the Lies Leaders Love.

Sometimes we have to speak forcefully to ourselves to overcome the “noise” around us. We have to be thoughtful about flawed cultural norms that we unconsciously absorb. We live in a Jersey Shore/Kim Kardashian reality TV culture, where some role models of behavior are absurdly flawed. Reality shows may be entertaining in a mindless way, but by any standard of behavior, do we want to live like these people? The risk emanates not from wanting to be like these twenty-first-century jesters, but rather from the subtle influence on our personal beliefs. When we find ourselves using TV entertainment figures as moral plumb lines such as the hapless monk in the cartoon below, we are in trouble.

Although many influences seem absolutely harmless on the surface, they actually have great power to shape our beliefs. Whatever we allow to go into our core unfiltered and unthinking is a cause for concern. Friends know that I really like movies, but I make a conscious effort to think about the message of any movie I see. What are the beliefs the movie espouses, and do I agree? What are the messages the producer, director, and screenwriter want me to hear?

Media exerts a powerful, often unconscious effect on our belief systems, and leaders are not immune to these cultural influences. Because the actors in movies are usually attractive, competent, and cool, we naturally want to be like them. At some level, who does not want to be like James Bond? Have we ever rooted for the bad guy? Of course we have. They may be ruthless killers who have killed and maimed countless good people, but the power of the visual narrative can have an impact on our beliefs in some elusive way. Although we are not gunning down innocents, we may inadvertently absorb a belief in a subtle tenant of moral relativism that gets played out in our actions in totally unexpected ways.

Movies and other media often portray the beauty, freedom, and joy of infidelity. When I watched a news report of a broken Paula Broadwell and her husband carrying their children to a waiting car in Charlotte, North Carolina, this incredibly gifted leader did not look all that beautiful, free, and joyful. I wondered about what sort of legacy she has now lost.

In the marshmallow study described in the sidebar of this chapter, Mischel said the most interesting group he studied were the children who demonstrated no ability to retrain their impulses but who later became very accomplished. It offers great hope to us who at times may have exercised poor judgment. We, too, can grow in our ability to self-regulate.

In many respects, self-regulation is simply a convergence of all the disciplines that we have talked about up until this point in the book. For example, intentional introspection and self-awareness lead to self-regulation. One way that strong leaders buttress their ability to manage themselves involves being highly accountable to others for their behavior. This powerful tool is the subject of the next chapter.