The head and hand circles of Figure 4.1 make up our personal competences. We need to be developing our strengths—even if not encouraged by our employers! This chapter is intended to encourage some reflection on how we can do this.
Satisfaction and Success
Thus far, I have tried to avoid making arguments that aspiring to virtue is likely to make us more successful, or even to feel better. The main reason is that we aspire to obtain the virtues for their intrinsic value, not for incidental reasons like success and happiness. One of the other reasons is that we cannot guarantee success. Another reason is that feeling successful and happy requires different methods. In this section, therefore, we now turn to finding satisfaction and happiness.
In their research, Hall and Chandler ask whether the arguments made for a vocation or calling are really just ex post rationalizing—by older people when they see what they have achieved. While rationalization does occur, they confirm that there are those who do live out a life in which they have set out and reached difficult long-term goals. They confirm that there is much psychological satisfaction in setting goals, in working toward them—particularly in a community—and obviously in achieving them.
Achievement
We should not underestimate our need for a sense of achievement. John Perry has written an amusing little book on procrastination, where he tells how he writes a list of trivial tasks the night before: get up, get dressed, have coffee etc. He finds satisfaction in crossing them off when he gets down to work. I find the same—our emotions are peculiar.
The obverse of this is that setting ambitious long-term goals can lead to personal unhappiness if they take too much time to complete. We need to turn long-term vocational aspirations into achievable shorter-term goals. Without them, we get depressed. Bandura’s work on self-efficacy says:
The most effective way of creating a strong sense of efficacy is through mastery experiences. Successes build a robust belief in one’s personal efficacy. Failures undermine it, especially if failures occur before a sense of efficacy is firmly established.
If people experience only easy successes they come to expect quick results and are easily discouraged by failure. A resilient sense of efficacy requires experience in overcoming obstacles through perseverant effort. … After people become convinced they have what it takes to succeed, they persevere in the face of adversity and quickly rebound from setbacks (1998, 624).
This applies at home, school, and workplace. For home and school, it ties in with Erikson’s virtues of purpose and competence. For workplace, you need to work where your bosses or colleagues appreciate you and your contribution.
Bullying and Stress
The worst of bosses to work for are those who are cruelly critical. They undermine your self-esteem and performance, not least because you spend so much emotional energy defending yourself. Bandura writes about managing the emotional energy:
… ‘You cannot prevent the birds of worry and care from flying over your head. But you can stop them from building a nest in your head.’ Perceived self-efficacy to control thought processes is a key factor in regulating thought produced stress and depression. It is not the sheer frequency of disturbing thoughts but the perceived inability to turn them off that is the major source of distress (1993, 133).
He suggests therapy and exercises in achieving mastery to deal with this type of stress. I find shouting, singing, and praying all work! Getting professional help can be a good idea. Getting out of the situation is another. It is wise to prepare yourself by not becoming too dependent on the income from the job.
Criticism from your boss is a real source of stress. It can help to recognize it as bullying. If there are no protections within your workplace that you feel you can use, it may be possible to respond firmly in a way that discourages the bullying. In a fight with a school bully, I gave him a bloody nose: no skill, pure accident. He did not return for another fight. Twice I have found the metaphorical equivalent. Pick a fight you can win and fight it hard. On both occasions, it occurred when a boss criticized me and copied his e-mails to one of my subordinates. I made it clear to them in private that they were entitled to criticize me, but that it was unacceptable to undermine me at the same time. In both cases, they kept their distance thereafter. This approach may not always be possible. If not, resign or get a transfer. Do not be ashamed to get psychological help.
Bandura offers a surprising word of comfort to those more prone to stress:
People who experience much distress have been compared in their skills and beliefs in their capabilities with those who do not suffer from such problems. The findings show that it is often the normal people who are distorters of reality. But they display self-enhancing biases and distort in the positive direction. People who are socially anxious or prone to depression are often just as socially skilled as those who do not suffer from such problems. But the normal ones believe they are much more adept than they really are. The non-depressed people also have a stronger belief that they exercise some control over situations.1
Overconfidence
He then goes on to suggest that social reformers and business innovators must be optimistic of their chances of success. Without “a tenacious self-efficacy,” they will not have the perseverance to overcome obstacles. He then provides examples of people with an enormous confidence, who have succeeded against long odds. This is a version of the common view that “you can do anything you want.” This is probably not true. It is not enough to know the successes of those who are overoptimistic; we also need to know the failures or we fall prey to survival bias. I am afraid that it reminds me of the joke that the definition of a social scientist is someone who thinks that data is the plural of anecdote.
While there is much to learn from anecdotes and more expansive stories of success (and failure), we need a deeper analysis. The research2 suggests that optimism in business is more likely to end in failure than success. Donald Duchesneau and William Gartner find that, when compared with less successful start-ups, successful entrepreneurs were more aware of the risks beyond their control and so worked harder and more carefully. When the optimism leads to hubris (pride), then the likelihood and consequences of failure are likely to rise. Enron, the Equitable, HIH in Australia are all recent examples.
On a mundane level, the research also brings out the way in which individuals who are more certain of themselves can have greater influence—and thereby dominate those who have a more realistic grasp of the situation, and who understand the uncertainty. My most vivid experience of this was how we elected our platoon captain during my basic military service. We had to select a leader on the first evening, before we had come to know anyone else in the platoon. Predictably, we elected the loudest and the most confident individual. He was, however, useless as a leader, and had to be replaced before a week had elapsed.
Of course, like this anecdote, studies are stories from a particular time and place, and not necessarily useful for predicting what might happen in another environment. If we are to value our integrity, we want a sober measure of our abilities. If we are thinking of attempting a project, we need to weigh up the potential benefits as well as our chances of success, and then put in the hard yards. Clarity as to our real strengths and abilities is more likely to increase our chances of success than mere confidence.
How do we go about identifying our specific strengths? For those in or emerging from your education, your results will provide a first guide. Careers counselors will provide further guidance. They will use various tests, such as those found at strengthsquest.com, which look at how you think; relate to others; and the environments that stimulate you. Like personality tests, some of these will be context specific, but some insights will resonate.
Once your career has begun, the scientific approach is to reflect on activities that you have especially enjoyed or found particularly successful. On this topic, Peter Drucker tells what he learnt from his study of history:
I found that two European institutions had become dominant forces in Europe: the Jesuit Order in the Catholic South and the Calvinist Church in the Protestant North. Both were founded independently in 1536. Both adopted the same learning discipline. … Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance—making a key decision, for instance—he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later he traces back from the actual results to those anticipations. … I have followed that method for myself now for 50 years. It brings out what one’s strengths are—and that is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out areas where improvement is needed and suggests what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out things an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do.3
It takes time. It may be painful because we may not have even the basic talents necessary to succeed in things on which we have set our hearts. Albert Einstein apparently wanted to be a great violinist!
For me, it was relatively clear by my late 20s that ideas were my stock-in-trade, but explaining them was not. It took a little longer to find ways of taking smaller steps in my explanations, and to stop exploring new thoughts aloud when lecturing. I am afraid that my students still find me confusing—initially at least! I also prefer working on my own or in smaller groups, but again it took time to appreciate that people have been surprisingly willing to help when you ask. It remains a big and pleasant surprise to find collegiality—even if everyone has his or her own agenda!
Developing the picture requires reflection more frequently than nine month intervals. The Jesuits’ daily examen looks not so much at fruitfulness, which is long term, but at our feelings of what they call consolation and desolation. The examen4 involves reflecting on each activity of the day, and our emotional responses both now and at the time: anger, disappointment, frustration etc. It then requires us to make an appropriate response to the emotion—after reading a passage about Jesus. Such responses include repentance at inappropriate actions, letting go our obsessions, and finding a sense of forgiveness for those who have wronged us. I cannot say how others will find the approach. Similar processes may well appeal to Muslims and Jews. Others will need to develop a suitable metaphor for the presence of God, and perhaps make other adaptations. The practice of honest reflection on our feelings, and responding to them appropriately must, however, be emotionally healthy and contribute to developing peace with ourselves, others, and the world. Chris Lowney (2010), having experienced both the Jesuit training and 17 years working for J. P. Morgan, writes convincingly of the Heroic Leadership he sees as having been developed by the former.
Developing Expertise
There are no short cuts to expertise, and while wisdom is more than knowledge and expertise, one cannot be ignorant and make consistently wise decisions.
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman (the Economic Nobel winner) and Gary Klein have written a delightful paper on their different approaches to claims of expertise. They agree one can only become expert in a field that displays “a regular environment and an adequate opportunity to learn it as preconditions for the development of skills.” They also agree that experts need humility. They observe that:
… professionals exhibited genuine expertise in some of their activities but not in others. We refer to such mixed grades for professionals as ‘fractionated expertise,’ and we believe that the fractionation of expertise is the rule, not an exception (2009, 522).
Like Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan, they identify finance—investment management particularly—as a field where it is difficult to develop and identify expertise. Expertise in finance can have two sides to it. The first is knowledge based, Bent Flyvbjerg writes:
Common to all experts, however, is that they operate on the basis of intimate knowledge of several thousand concrete cases in their areas of expertise. Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity (2006, 219).
The second is skill—mathematical for some, legal for others, programming for yet others. Expert skills require practice. Experts in the development of expertise, such as Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness, suggest that one needs 10 years of:
individualized training on tasks selected by a qualified teacher as deliberate practice … Unlike play, deliberate practice is not inherently motivating; and unlike work, it does not lead to immediate social and monetary rewards (1994, 738).
This example given by Albert Carr encapsulates what I am attempting to say:
An executive persuaded his company’s management to make a major advance in its antipollution policy. His presentation on the alternatives, on which he had spent weeks of careful preparation, showed, in essence that, under his plan, costs prove to be substantially less than the potential costs of less vigorous action.
When he finished his statement, no man among his listeners, not even his most active rivals, chose to resist him. He had done more than serve his company and satisfy his own ethical urge; he had shown that the gap between the corporate decision and the private conscience is not unbridgeable if a person is strong enough, able enough, and brave enough to do what has to be done (1970, 64).
If Chesterton is right that strength comes from courage developed by the weak, and passion comes from directed self-control, expertise comes from hard work and practice rather than innate skills.
Blind Alleys and Defeats
There is no pleasure without the potential for pain
No truth without the risk of hypocrisy
No faith without doubt
No courage without fear
No reward without risk
No life without death.
The more ambitious your vocational goals, the greater will be the risk. I finish this chapter, however, with some words meant for encouragement in times of defeat. Even if the risks were carefully calculated and failure not your responsibility, such times are difficult. They are even worse when we know we are partly responsible, or at least cannot stop blaming ourselves. We therefore come back again to the need for forgiveness to give us the strength to move on. Recovery is possible, for the story of our vocation is not complete until we are being remembered!
Chapter summary: To develop our strengths we need to reflect—deeply—on what we are good at, and set goals that we are capable of achieving. Expertise does not come without practice. Everyone has to pick themselves up and carry on at times.
1Accessed August 30, 2014. http://web.stanford.edu/∼kcarmel/CC_BehavChange_Course/readings/Bandura_Selfefficacy_1994.htm.
2See for instance Hmieleski and Baron; Lovallo and Sibony; and Ucbasaran et al.
3From My Life as a Knowledge Worker, http://www.inc.com/magazine/19970201/1169.html.
4The Irish Jesuit website http://www.sacredspace.ie/provides an outline of the steps with some helpful hints.