9
Manage Yourself
SHAWN WILLIAMS found himself facing an unanticipated challenge just two months after taking on an assignment as director of a new organization established to implement the provisions of a recently enacted program to improve drug-manufacturing safety. Essentially a start-up, the new organization was not only operating in a politically and legally sensitive environment, but it had a high public profile as well. Shawn had established himself as an aggressive leader in his previous positions and now was eager to show quick results; he dove into the task at hand with high energy and a sense of urgency.
By the end of just his first month on the job, he had established a set of priorities for the organization, made key personnel appointments, and testified before two legislative committees. He also began a program of town hall–type appearances before interest groups where he endeavored to articulate the organization’s mission and assure key constituencies about the impact of his program on the availability and cost of new drugs.
Soon, however, Shawn began to get bogged down in myriad administrative matters involving internal budgeting, IT procurements, personnel issues, and acquiring needed office space. Even as pressure on his time grew, he remained reluctant to delegate many of these matters and instead tried to juggle everything at once. In short order, some of his highest-priority initiatives began to stall, as subordinates had to queue up to get Shawn’s OK before moving ahead. At the same time, Shawn’s public appearances had heightened media interest in his proposals. Some of his remarks made under confrontational questioning by town-hall participants—especially his optimistic estimates of the time required to implement the program’s provisions—had ignited a hostile political reaction by the administration’s political opponents.
As he entered his third month, Shawn began to realize that, despite his best intentions, he had made too many independent promises and had undertaken too many initiatives at once. He had not taken the time to establish an organizational operating system that could accommodate all that needed to be done. His failure to seek advice and counsel from a number of trusted colleagues both inside and outside the organization only deepened the chaotic spiral he was being sucked into.
So, he stepped back, reassessed the way he was leading, and—now in conjunction with his direct reports and his bosses—developed a more systematic, team-based approach to implementing the new program, one with better focus on priority issues and challenging but reasonable timetables. The changes he introduced included weekly meetings with his direct reports, during which he was briefed on their respective administrative responsibilities and challenges and offered to get involved only when a problem clearly needed him to step in. Furthermore, he had given his direct reports discretionary spending authority that required his approval only for major expenditures. By relying more on his direct reports to oversee the administrative side of the organization, Shawn had more time to pursue his chief priority of introducing the public to the new organization.
Avoiding Common Traps
The life of a leader is always a balancing act, but never more so than during a transition. The uncertainty and ambiguity can be daunting; often, you don’t even know what you don’t know. Amid all this turmoil, you are expected to get acclimated quickly and begin to make positive changes in your new organization. For these reasons, keeping your balance is a key transition challenge.
Our research on failed transitions suggests that there are some common traps into which new leaders fall. Each of them enmeshes you in a vicious cycle, a self-reinforcing dynamic from which it will be difficult to escape. It is, therefore, imperative that you, like Shawn, are able to recognize when you are at risk and to take corrective actions. The seven most common traps include:
1. Diffusion. You can’t hope to focus others if you can’t focus yourself. There are an infinite number of tasks you could do during your transition, but only some are vital. Perhaps you may overestimate your ability to keep all the balls in the air. Every new leader has to do some parallel processing. But in doing so it is easy to reach a point of mental lockup, where you find yourself pulled from task to task faster than you can refocus on each new one. If important problems begin to go unaddressed, they can explode and consume more and more of your time. The result is a vicious cycle of firefighting.
2. Undefended boundaries. If you fail to establish clear boundaries that define what you are and are not willing to do, the people around you—bosses, peers, subordinates—will take whatever you have to give. The more you give, the less you will be respected and the more will be asked of you. If you cannot establish boundaries for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you.
3. Brittleness. The uncertainties inherent to transitions can breed rigidity and defensiveness, especially in new leaders with a high need for control. The likely result? Overcommitment to a failing course of action. You may make a call prematurely and then feel unable to back away from it without losing credibility. The longer you wait, the harder it is to admit you were wrong and the more calamitous the consequences. Or perhaps you decide that your way of accomplishing a particular goal is the only way. As a result, your rigidity disempowers people who have equally valid ideas about how to achieve the same goal.
4. Isolation. To be effective in the public sector, you have to be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information, both of which can change quite quickly and frequently. It is surprisingly easy for new leaders to wind up isolated because they either overrely on a few people or on official information for feedback and insight. Isolation also happens because you unintentionally discourage critical feedback or you are seen as being captured by competing interests. Whatever the reason, isolation breeds uninformed decision making, damaging your credibility and further reinforcing your isolation. Isolation in the public sector can also put a new leader at risk for leading with a mandate that is no longer supported at the top. It is important, therefore, for public-sector leaders to reestablish their mandates with any major leadership changes in positions above them.
5. Biased judgment. Biased judgment can take many forms. Overcommitment to a failing course of action because of ego and credibility issues is one version. Others include confirmation bias, the tendency to focus on information that confirms your beliefs and filters out what does not; self-serving illusions, a tendency to let your personal stake in a situation cloud your judgment; and optimistic overconfidence, or an underestimation of the difficulties associated with your preferred course of action. Vulnerability to these biases is a constant, but you may be particularly at risk when the stakes grow, uncertainty and ambiguity increase, and emotions run high.
6. Work avoidance. You may have to make difficult decisions early in your tenure, perhaps on personnel or budgetary matters or on how to remedy a controversial issue. Consciously or unconsciously, you may choose to delay such decisions by addressing other, more comfortable, issues instead—that is, falling into “work avoidance.” The trap, of course, is that it only makes tough issues tougher.
7. Overload. Each of these traps can generate dangerous levels of stress. But not all stress is bad; there is a well-documented relationship between stress and performance known as the Yerkes-Dodson curve.1 Whether stress is self-generated or externally caused, you need some—in the form of positive incentives or the consequences of inaction—to be productive. As illustrated in figure 9-1, your performance improves as you stress increases, at least at first. Then you reach a point, which varies from person to person, at which further demands, in the form of too many balls to juggle or too heavy an emotional load, begin to undermine your performance. This dynamic only increases the stress, reducing your performance level and creating a vicious cycle as you experience stress overload. You, like Shawn Williams, will find yourself working harder and achieving less.
FIGURE 9-1
Yerkes-Dodson stress-performance curve
Gauging Your Reaction to Stress
Before proceeding further, take a few minutes and complete the assessment shown in table 9-1. For each statement, circle the response that best represents your reactions to stress. Think about periods in the past when you have experienced extreme personal or professional stress. What were your characteristic reactions in such situations? If you have someone you trust and who knows you well, make a copy of the assessment and have him or her do an assessment of you too.
Assessing Your Reactions
The assessment is designed to give you scores on three stress-related indexes:
• Physical. The impact of stress on your physical well-being.
• Cognitive. The impact of stress on your ability to think.
• Emotional. The impact of stress on your emotional state.
Follow the instructions in table 9-2 to calculate your three scores.
Now take a look at these scores. Lower scores are better. In which of these three areas are you most affected by stress? Is the overall impact of stress on you 2.5 or greater? If so, you may be at risk for stress-related degradation of your performance.
Assessing Your Coping Behaviors
The diagnostic also gives you a score for your coping behaviors: the things you do to release or deal with stress. Follow the instructions in table 9-3 to calculate your score for coping behaviors:
Once again, a lower score is better.
Finally, take some time to think about how you could better identify when stress is becoming too great and what you can do to alleviate it.
TABLE 9-1
Stress assessment
Do not turn the page before completing the table.
When I am under great stress, I …
1 = Strongly disagree
2 = Disagree
3 = Neither agree nor disagree
4 = Agree
5 = Strongly agree
1. Have more difficulty sleeping. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
2. Feel sharper mentally. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
3. Become more domineering. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
4. Suffer more aches and pains. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
5. Pay more attention to personal relationships. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
6. Become more forgetful. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
7. Feel more isolated. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
8. Feel very focused. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
9. Eat more than usual. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
10. Feel paralyzed by indecision. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
11. Become more judgmental. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
12. Pay less attention to personal grooming. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
13. Feel more energized. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
14. Act more impulsively. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
15. Get “down” more easily. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
16. Exercise more frequently. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
17. Become more patient with others. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
18. Have more difficulty concentrating. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
19. Turn to friends for support. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
20. Feel more anxious. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
21. Get tired more easily. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
22. Drink more than usual. |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
TABLE 9-2
Calculating your stress level
| How to calculate | Your score | |
|---|---|---|
| Physical | Add your scores for questions #1, #4, #12, and #21. Subtract your score for question #13. Then add 6 and divide the result by 5. | |
| Cognitive | Add your scores for questions #6, #11, #14, and #18. Subtract your scores for questions #2 and #8. Then add 12 and divide the result by 6. | |
| Emotional | Add your scores for questions #3, #7, #10, #15, and #20. Subtract your score for question #17. Then add 6 and divide the result by 6. | |
| Overall impact | Add your scores for physical, cognitive, and emotional as calculated above and divide by 3. |
TABLE 9-3
Scoring your coping behaviors
| How to calculate | Your score | |
|---|---|---|
| Coping behaviors | Add your scores for questions #9 and #22. Subtract your scores for questions #5, #16, and #19. Then add 18 and divide the result by 5. |
The Four Pillars of Self-Efficacy
How can you avoid these traps? Instead of creating vicious cycles, how can you create virtuous cycles that build momentum rather than sap your strength? We will call the equilibrium you should aim for self-efficacy, a state that is built on a foundation of these four pillars:
1. Adoption of the transition success strategies presented in the previous eight chapters
2. Self-awareness concerning your style and its match to the situation, and the use of complementary teams for dealing with mismatches
3. Enforcement of some personal disciplines that increase your efficacy
4. Creation and use of support systems, at work and elsewhere, which help you maintain your equilibrium
Pillar 1: Transition Success Strategies
The strategies spelled out in the previous eight chapters represent a template for how to learn, set priorities, create plans, and direct actions to build momentum. As you see these strategies work and achieve some early successes, you will feel more confident and energized by what you are accomplishing. As you progress through your transition, think about the challenges you are facing in light of the core challenges summarized in table 9-4, and identify chapters to which you want to return.
Pillar 2: Complementary Teams
Why do leaders fail to make successful transitions? Many misdiagnose their situations. But new leaders can understand the situations they face and still fail because their style is a poor match for the situation and the type of organization they are in. Shawn Williams’s lone ranger approach in a start-up organization operating in a highly participative and consultative environment damaged his credibility early on. If he had been leading a law-enforcement organization that required fast action, a highly participative leadership style could have been equally as damaging. You must, therefore, understand your style, its match to the situation and organization as a whole, and the potential vulnerabilities that result. Only then can you take action to compensate for them.
Style consists of the distinctive ways you tend to make sense of the world and interact with others in leadership roles. Important dimensions of your leadership style include how you prefer to:
• Learn in new situations
• Communicate with others
• Influence and be influenced
• Make important decisions
TABLE 9-4
Transition strategies
| Core challenge | Diagnostic questions |
|---|---|
| Clarify expectations | Are you figuring out what is expected of you? Are you engaging your boss in conversations about situation, expectations, style, resources, and personal development? |
| Match strategy to situation | Are you diagnosing the type of transition you are facing and the implications for what to do and what not to do? |
| Accelerate your learning | Are you figuring out what you need to learn, from whom to learn it, and how to speed up the learning process? |
| Secure early wins | Are you focusing on the vital priorities that advance long-term goals and build short-term momentum? |
| Build your team | Are you assessing, restructuring, and aligning your team to leverage what you are trying to accomplish? |
| Create alliances | Are you building a base of internal and external support for your initiatives so you are not pushing rocks uphill? |
| Achieve alignment | Are you identifying and fixing frustrating misalignments of strategy, structure, systems, and skills? |
| Avoid predictable surprises | Are you taking measures to identify and therefore avoid and or respond quickly to predictable surprises? |
Style doesn’t reflect your capabilities. Rather, it reflects your preferences. Your preferences are in part in-born and in part the result of your personal and professional experiences. Different styles can be effective at certain times and in particular situations. You likely have a preferred style that you feel most comfortable with. By understanding your preferred leadership style, you can figure out when to use it most effectively—and when you might be better off employing a different approach.
There are basically four areas of leadership style—learning, communicating, influencing, and decision-making. Each has a range of behaviors associated with it. You will likely lean toward one end of the spectrum for each. Take a look at “Diagnosing Your Leadership Style” for some insight into your preferences.
Different leadership styles have associated strengths and weaknesses that vary with the STARS situation you face. In turnarounds, for example, a hard-data and experiential learning style can be a good match. You have to diagnose the fundamentals quickly but can afford to make some small mistakes. The same learning style, however, can be a bad match for a sustaining-success situation, where much of what you need to learn concerns culture and politics, and where an experiential approach can make you look undisciplined and even dangerous.
A consult-and-decide decision-making style is likewise a good match for start-up situations, where the key is to create some direction and get the foundations in place. But it could be disastrous to adopt the same style in a realignment situation, where the key is to move people from denial to awareness of the need for change. Efforts on your part to make the call on key issues can easily backfire by stimulating the organization’s immune system and unnecessarily stiffening resistance.
To avoid potential problems, you need to know when and how to adjust your style to fit a particular situation. The starting point for doing this is self-awareness about your style and its associated strengths and weaknesses. You then can combine this awareness with your diagnosis of the situation—using the STARS model—to identify potential vulnerabilities.
What do you do if your style is not a good match for the situation? There are essentially two ways to compensate. First, you can act against your preferences—focusing hard on resisting your preferential ways of doing things. If you prefer to make decisions through consensus building but are entering a turnaround situation, you should bias yourself in the direction of consult-anddecide. Second, you can put together a team that includes people with styles that are a better match to the situation. If you are in a sustaining-success situation and you have a hard-data, experiential learning style, for example, you would be well advised to have people on your team with soft-data and conceptual learning styles.
Pillar 3: Personal Disciplines
Knowing what you should be doing is not the same as doing it. Ultimately, success or failure emerges from the accumulation of daily choices that either propel you in productive directions or move you down the wrong path. This is the territory of the third pillar of personal efficacy: personal disciplines.
Personal disciplines are the regular routines that you enforce on yourself. The specific disciplines you choose to develop depend on your strengths and weaknesses. Though you may have a great deal of insight into yourself, you should also consult others who know you well and whom you trust. Some 360-degree feedback can be useful for learning what others see as your strengths and—importantly—your potential weak spots.
Here are some disciplines to stimulate your thinking about routines you need to develop.
Plan to Plan. Do you devote time daily and weekly to a planwork-evaluate cycle? If not, or if you do so irregularly, you need to be more disciplined about planning. At the end of each day, spend ten minutes evaluating how well you met the goals you set the previous day and planning for the next day. Get into the habit of doing this. Even if you fall behind, you will be more in control.
Judiciously Defer Commitment. Do you often make commitments on the spur of the moment and regret them later? If so, you must learn to defer commitment. When pressed to make a commitment that you are uncertain of, begin with saying, “Let me think about it and get back to you.” If pressed for an immediate answer, say, “If I have to decide now, then I must say no. But if you can wait a bit, I’ll give it more thought.” Begin with no, as it is easier and less damaging to your credibility than saying yes and then changing your mind. Ask yourself whether the “future you” will be unhappy with the “present you” for saying yes. If the answer is yes, then decline the commitment.
Set Aside Time for the Real Work. Do you devote time each day to the most important work that needs to be done? It is easy to get caught up in the flow of transactions—phone calls, meetings, e-mails—and never find the time to focus on the medium term, let alone the long run. If you are having trouble getting the real work done, discipline yourself to set aside a particular time each day, even if it’s only thirty minutes, when you close the door, shut off the phone, and ignore e-mail so you can focus, focus, focus.
Go to the Balcony. Do you find yourself getting too caught up in the emotional dimension of difficult situations? If so, discipline yourself to step back and take another look at the big picture before reinserting yourself. Prominent authorities in the fields of leadership and negotiation have long praised the value of “going to the balcony” in this way.2 It can be tough to do when stakes and emotions are running high and you are emotionally involved, but with practice it is a valuable skill that you can cultivate.
Focus on Process. Do your good ideas often run into roadblocks with others? Does the way you make decisions seem to cause unnecessary dissention and disagreement? If so, discipline yourself to focus on process before plunging ahead. How are others likely to react to your ideas? How might you manage the process of consultation and decision making to increase your effectiveness? Remember: people will often go along with things they are not completely happy with if they perceive the process as fair.3
Check In with Yourself. Are you as aware as you need to be of your reactions to events during your transition? If not, discipline yourself to engage in structured reflection about your situation. For some, this means simply jotting down a few thoughts, impressions, and questions at the end of each day. For others, it means setting aside time each week to assess how things are going. Find an approach that suits your style, and discipline yourself to use it regularly. Work to translate the resulting insights into action. Consider adopting the guidelines for self-reflection listed in the box “Guidelines for Structured Reflection.”
Recognize When to Quit. Transitions are marathons, not sprints. If you find yourself approaching overload more than occasionally, you have to discipline yourself to know when to quit. This is easy to say, but hard to do, of course, especially when you are facing a deadline and one hour might make the difference. It may, in the short run, but the long-run cost could be steep. Work hard at understanding when you are at the point of diminishing returns, and take a break—whatever refreshes you.
Pillar 4: Personal Support Systems
The fourth pillar of self-efficacy is personal support systems. This means asserting control in your local environment, stabilizing the home front if you are relocating, and building a solid advice-and-counsel network.
Assert Control Locally. It is hard to focus on work if the basic physical infrastructure that supports you is not in place. Even if you have more pressing worries, you must move quickly to set up your new office, develop routines, and, if applicable, clarify expectations with your new assistant, and so on. If necessary, assemble a set of temporary resources—files, references, information technology, and staff support—to tide you over until the permanent systems are operational.
Stabilize the Home Front. It is a fundamental rule of competition to avoid fighting on too may fronts. For new leaders with families, this means stabilizing the home front so you can devote the necessary attention to work. You cannot hope to create value at work if you are depleting value at home.
If your new position involves a relocation, your family is also in transition. Your spouse may have to make a job transition as well, and your children may have to change schools and leave friends. In other words, the fabric of your family’s life may be disrupted just when you most need support and stability. The stresses of your transition can amplify the strain of your family’s transition. Also, family members’ difficulties can add to your already heavy emotional load, undermining your ability to create value and lengthening the time of your transition. So when a move is part of your transition, focus on accelerating the family’s transition too. There is no avoiding disruption, but talking about it and working through the sense of loss together can be helpful.
Even if your new position does not involve a family move, the natural stress and time requirements of your new position may prove disruptive to family routines. When Mom or Dad is no longer regularly there in the morning or at dinnertime, when frequent travel is required, or when games and recitals are missed, it is natural for children to be unhappy with the change. Similarly, when one spouse is no longer able to carry an equal share of work at home, marital strains can appear. Whether the transition takes six months or a year, keeping communication lines open about the various changes it may be imposing on familiar family routines and coming up with ways to share the burden is essential to weathering this perhaps difficult time and emerging at the end of it in good shape as a family and as an individual. See “Accelerating Your Family’s Transition” for some additional tips on how to speed your family’s transition to a new location.
Build Your Advice-and-Counsel Network. No leader, no matter how capable and energetic, can do it all. Just ask Shawn Williams. You need a network of trusted advisers within and outside the organization whom you can talk with about what you are experiencing and, importantly, who will give you honest feedback about what you are doing. Your network is an indispensable resource that can help you avoid becoming isolated and losing perspective. As a starting point, you need to cultivate the three types of advice givers described in table 9-5: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors.
You also need to think hard about the mix of internal and external advice givers you want to cultivate. Insiders know the organization and its culture and politics. Seek out people who are well connected and whom you can trust to help you grasp what is really going on. This is a priceless resource for any new leader, but especially so for the leader who is new to an agency.
At the same time, insiders cannot be expected to give you dispassionate or disinterested views of events. Thus, you should augment your internal network with outside advisers and counselors who will help you work through issues and decisions you are facing. They should be skilled at listening and asking questions, have good insights into the way organizations work well, and have your best interests at heart.
Use table 9-6 to assess your advice-and-counsel network. Analyze each person in terms of the domains in which they assist you and whether they are insiders or outsiders.
TABLE 9-5
Types of advice-givers
| Type of supporters | Their roles | How they help you |
|---|---|---|
| Technical advisers | • Provide expert analysis of technologies and strategy. |
• They suggest applications for new technologies. • They recommend strategies for implementation. • They provide timely and accurate information. |
| Cultural interpreters | • Help you understand the new culture and (if that is your objective) to adapt to it. |
• They provide you with insight into cultural norms, mental models, and guiding assumptions. • They help you learn to speak the language of the new organization. |
| Internal political counselors | • Help you deal with political relationships within your new organization. |
• They help you implement the advice of your technical advisors. • They serve as a sounding board as you think through options for implementing your agenda. • They challenge you with what-if questions. |
Now go to the balcony. Will your existing network provide the support you need in your new situation? Don’t assume that people who have been helpful before will necessarily be helpful in your new situation because you will be facing new kinds of problems. For example, the higher the level of responsibility of your new position, the stronger the need for a political counselor. (You also should be thinking ahead. Because it takes time to develop an effective network, it’s not too early to focus on what sort of network you will need for your next job. How will your need for advice change?)
To develop an effective support network, you need to make sure that you have the right help and that your support network is there when you need it. Does your support network have the following qualities?
TABLE 9-6
Assessing your network
| Technical advisers | Cultural interpreters | Internal political counselors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal advisers and counselors (Inside your new organization) |
|||
| External advisers and counselors (Outside your new organization) |
• The right mix of technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors.
• The right mix of internal and external advice givers. You want honest feedback from insiders and the dispassionate prospective of outside observers.
• External supporters who are loyal to you as an individual, not to your organization or unit. Typically, these are longstanding colleagues and friends.
• Internal advisers who are trustworthy, whose personal agendas don’t conflict with yours, and who offer straight and accurate advice.
• Representatives of key constituencies who can help you understand their perspectives. You do not want to restrict yourself to one or two points of view.
Finally, as you build your own support network, keep the following principles in mind:
• Trusted friends aren’t always the best counselors. Don’t assume that trusted friends will make competent political counselors or technical advisers. They may be loyal, but they don’t necessarily have the specific skills needed to help you in your job.
• Special competencies are not usually interchangeable. Don’t assume that a technical adviser can be an equally competent political counselor. Each type of supporter has special competencies that are usually not interchangeable.
• Past advisers may not be able to help you in the future. Don’t assume that someone who has been helpful in the past will continue to be helpful in your new situation. You will encounter different problems, and a former adviser may not be able to help you in your new role.
Conclusion
You will have to fight to maintain your equilibrium throughout your transition. Shawn Williams, fortunately, caught himself fairly early in the process. Ultimately, your success or failure will flow from the many small choices you make along the way. These choices can create momentum—for the organization and for you—or they can result in death by a thousand cuts. Your day-to-day actions during your transition establish the pattern for all that follows, not just for the organization but also for your personal efficacy and your wellbeing.