Author: ACEC

  • Leadership Lessons You Should Learn Early

    By Jeff Boss

    View original publication on Forbes.com

    Leadership challenges are more complex today than ever before, and one leadership challenge that I see as an executive coach is the tendency to anticipate what might happen tomorrow while forgetting about what is happening today. In other words, leaders try to outthink and overanalyze the future. They anticipate all the possibilities that could happen, select the outcome most likely to occur and then mold their leadership style to accommodate it, only to find that Murphy has a full-time job and is apparently dedicated solely to them — and Murphy wins.The point is, tomorrow, next week or next year are all uncertain, so if you try to mold your leadership style to the “most likely” option to occur, then you’re not leading, you’re contingency planning.

    Leaders don’t just think about the future, they think in it. Once they have a clear picture of what they want to see, where they want to be—as an individual or as a team — and why, they begin to mold the world around them to achieve it.

    I learned a lot in the military about leadership and continue learning today by helping others with their “molding process” as an executive coach. Here are four more leadership lessons to share with you:

    Leaders have choices, but leadership is a choice.

    You can be promoted, “given” responsibility for a new project or authorized to make certain decisions, but none of that makes you a leader. These are just tools designed to test you, to be added to your arsenal of potential should you accept the challenge, but they don’t inspire others to follow you. You know you’re a leader when somebody follows you no matter what title you have, and they do so because you’ve made difficult choices that others have shied away from. That’s what leaders do.

    Leadership isn’t the problem, but it is the solution.

    It’s easy to blame “leadership” for the way things are because it takes the blame off oneself, but the only problem truly exists is how each person contributes to the problem. If you have a toxic leader, for example, it’s not up to HR to “fix” him, it’s up to every person around him to start leading! For every person who doesn’t challenge the status quo but complains about it, they’re contributing to the problem. For every person who wants to build more trust in their team but doesn’t speak candidly in meetings, they’re part of the problem. You get what you give, so speaking with candor yields trust. Asking questions calls for direct answers (“why is the sky blue?”) whereas making statements generally lead to more statements and ultimately turn into dead-end conversations (“there must be a reason why the sky is blue”). Poor leadership doesn’t exist because people are malicious but because nobody has taken the time to develop people as leaders.

    Leadership is hard to measure.

    One reason why leadership is hard to measure is that people have different definitions of what it means to lead. Without a shared definition of success, it’s difficult to ascertain whether success was ever achieved. I found one definition of leadership as operating along a spectrum, with persuasion and influence on one end and virtue and nobility on the other. I thought this was close, but it isn’t. Leadership isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It isn’t virtuous and it isn’t evil. History is full of malicious leaders. Hitler, Idi Amin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were all rotten to the core, but they were leaders nonetheless. That’s why leadership is neither good nor bad but a tool that serves as a guide toward intention. Leadership is authentic self-expression that instills value in others and compels them to act.

    Another reason leadership is hard to measure is that when it’s going well there’s nothing to measure. It’s much easier to identify something that’s not working well than something that is.

    Leaders don’t work alone.

    As “solo” as the concept of leadership seems, leaders rarely serve as lone wolf contributors. They know that extraordinary results don’t come from “me” but from “we;” from collective effort united toward a shared purpose. When you start a new business you don’t go it alone, you enlist the insight, advice and support of others. When actors receive an award they thank others for helping them make it happen (and I’m not saying that all actors are leaders but that their success is the result of collective effort). The point is, smart leaders are smart because of the people they surround themselves with.

    What are your leadership lessons?

  • Leading with the Power of Humility

    by Dan Rockwel

    View original publication on LeadershipFreak

    The seductions of arrogance wreck leaders, demoralize teams, and destroy organizations.

    “The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.” (Attributed to Albert Einstein.)

    Everything good in leadership begins with humility.

    Subtleties of arrogance:

    1. Taking offense at slights. A thin skin points to pride. “You deserve better.”
    2. Judging others by unspoken expectations. The “humble-arrogant” are better than others because they hold people to high standards that they don’t meet themselves.
    3. Searching for self-justification. Arrogance circles back on problems – not to find solutions – but in search of reasons it didn’t do wrong.

    The brother of arrogance is disdain.

    All you can do is coerce those you look down on.

    Practice humility:

    Humility is a practice not a destination.

    #1. Acknowledge the subtlety of arrogance.

    Humility begins when you acknowledge arrogance.

    You have puddles of humility and oceans of arrogance, but you judge yourself by the puddles. My own arrogance makes me skeptical of any other option.

    #2. Pursue growth.

    “An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person.” Leo Tolstoy

    Everyone who develops their leadership knows what they’re working on.

    What leadership behavior will you practice today?

    Practice is intentional repetition that includes reflection and course adjustment.

    #3. Pick up the trash.

    Don’t simply tell people to pick up the trash. Pick it up yourself.

    No job is menial to the humble.

    Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, was famous for picking up trash. “Every night you’d see him coming down the street, walking close to the gutter, picking up every McDonald’s wrapper and cup along the way,” former McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner told author Alan Deutschman. “He’d come into the store with both hands full of cups and wrappers.” (Daniel Coyle in the Culture Code)

    What are the subtitles of arrogance?

    How might leaders practice humility?

  • 10 Small Things Successful People Do Every Day

    Image Designed by Freepik

    By Lolly Daskal
    View original Publication on LollyDaskal.com

    Every day, we’re surrounded by life lessons–little self-contained bits of truth that can help each of us to be a more successful manager, a greater boss, a superior leader, a better person.

    It’s easy to dismiss these ideas because they’re packaged in such small bites, but they can be a great way to positively connect with some of the world’s great wisdom.

    Here are 10 of my favorites:

    1. You have to start somewhere. The first step to getting anywhere is deciding you’re not willing to stay where you are. The least helpful thing you can do is to wait for perfection before taking action. Start where you are, use what you have and do what you can to succeed.

    2. There is always a demand for your supply of respect. Base your attitude in life on how you want to be treated and show respect even to people who don’t deserve it. How you treat others is not a reflection of their character but of yours.

    3. You win when everybody wins. Prepare to win and expect to win, but remember that to be a real winner you must also make winners of those around you.

    4. If your presence doesn’t add value, your absence won’t be felt. The secret to success is no secret at all–it’s finding ways to add value to people’s lives. If you want to be rich in the truest sense of the world, it cannot be about you–it has to include adding value to the lives of those around you.

    5. Focus your attention on what is important. Learn to be disciplined about what you respond to and react to. Not everyone and everything deserves your time, energy and attention. Make conscious choices about what you want to pay attention to and what you want to let go.

    6. All the confidence you will ever need comes from the capabilities you’ve honed. Here’s something I always tell my clients: Confidence comes from believing you are able but competence knows you’re able. Believe in yourself and your possibilities, but know what you are already a master of.

    7. Love what you do or find something else. If you don’t love what you do, you’ll spend the rest of your life being miserable. It’s really that simple. Love what you do and it will never feel like work.

    8. Identify your limits and leverage your fortitude. You will never know your limits unless you push yourself beyond them. The only way to change yourself is to challenge yourself–if you never push, you have direction but no destination.

    9. Know when to forge ahead and when to slow down. The faster we live, the busier we get–but the slower we take things, the deeper we can go. We need both action and reflection in the right balance.

    10. To learn the best, learn from the best. Everyone you meet knows something you don’t. Learning is a treasure, so connect with the expertise of those around you at every opportunity,

    The biggest difference between successful people and not successful people, are the successful people know that taking small daily actions will lead to big results.

  • Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature

    By Jeffrey Pfeffer

    View original publication on McKinsey.com

    Management books and commentaries often oversimplify, seldom providing useful guidance about the skills and behavior needed to get things done. Here’s a better reading list for leaders.

    The almost insatiable demand for leadership studies is a natural outgrowth of the all-too-frequent leadership failures in government, business, and nonprofits. Few people trust their leaders, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer surveys, among others.1 Gallup data show low levels of employee engagement worldwide, while the Conference Board finds job satisfaction at a low ebb and executive tenures decreasing.2 Other research consistently indicates that companies give their own leadership-development efforts low marks. Leaders aren’t doing a good job for themselves or their workplaces, and things don’t seem to be improving.

    This consuming interest in leadership and how to make it better has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks, and commentary. Unfortunately, these materials are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement. Maybe that’s one reason the enormous resources invested in leadership development have produced so few results. Estimates of the amount spent on it range from $14 billion to $50 billion a year in the United States alone.3

    The limits of morality tales

    Despite the many shortcomings of leadership instruction, some books and articles do provide fruitful guidance on how to be a better, more effective leader. And there’s scattered information about what skills and behavior are needed to get things done and how to develop them. Sadly, and for a number of reasons, there’s a scarcity of useful material. Here’s why.

    The first and maybe most pernicious problem is that thinking on leadership has become a sort of morality tale. There are writers who advocate authenticity, attention to employees’ well-being, telling the truth, building trust, being agreeable, and so forth. A smaller number of empirical researchers, contrarily, report evidence on the positive effects of traits and behavior such as narcissism, self-promotion, rule breaking, lying, and shrewd maneuvering on salaries, getting jobs, accelerating career advancement, and projecting an aura of power. Part of this discrepancy—between the prescriptions of the vast leadership industry and the data on what actually produces career success—stems from the oft-unacknowledged tendency to confuse what people believe ought to be true with what actually is. And underlying that is an associated confirmation bias: the tendency to see, and remember, what you’re motivated to believe.

    Second, this moral framing of leadership substantially oversimplifies the real complexity of the dilemmas and choices leaders confront. An essay on the 500th anniversary of the writing of Machiavelli’s The Prince noted that it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results.4 Not surprisingly, then, some of the most successful and admired leaders—for example, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy—were above all pragmatists, willing to do what was necessary to achieve important objectives.

    As such, each of them (and many other renowned leaders) changed their positions on decisions and issues and behaved inconsistently. They dissembled and engaged in strategic misrepresentation, not always disclosing their full agendas and plans, in part to avoid provoking opposition. At times, they acted in ways inconsistent with their authentic feelings. Human beings are complex and multidimensional, so not only do bad people do good things and vice versa but the whole idea of good and bad can also be problematic when you consider the knotty dilemmas leaders face deciding whether the ends justify the means.

    Finally, the division of leaders and their actions into good and bad seriously oversimplifies a much more complex reality and continues to reinforce a problematic, trait-based, and personality-centric view of human behavior. As social-psychological research has made clear for decades, people are not only shaped by their enduring traits but also profoundly influenced by cues and constraints that vary by situation. So they adopt different types of behavior and even personas, depending on the circumstances and the various roles they play. Leaders may behave differently within their families and religious institutions than they do at work, to take one example. When individuals are promoted to management, their perspectives change and so too does their behavior. McKinsey research also suggests that the effectiveness of various types of leadership behavior varies with the health of the organization in which they are practiced (see “Leadership in context”).

    Characterizing leaders’ behavior as somehow dependent on inherent traits provides an easy excuse for avoiding the sort of behavior and strategies that may be required to get things done. To take a simple example, people sometimes tell me that they are not networkers, as a way of explaining their reluctance to build the social relationships so necessary for success. I remind them that they were not born walking or using the toilet either. Networking behavior and skills, like all such behavior and skills, can be learned, as University of Chicago sociologist Ronald Burt has nicely demonstrated.

     

     

  • Decoding leadership

    What skills and behaviors make a good leader effective? Here are the traits that matter.

    Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford Graduate School of Business says that “This consuming interest in leadership has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks and commentary [that] are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality, and as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement”.

    McKinsey found that 4 out of 20 behaviors explain 89% of the variance between strong and weak leaders.Here are the traits that matter

    Click here to view on Mckinsey

  • Putting an End to Leaders Self-Serving Behavior

    by Morela Hernandez

    View original publication on MITSloan

    Although we might hope that leaders in business environments will embrace their decision-making responsibilities with a clear head and an open heart, empirical research has shown otherwise. Instead, business leaders are often selfish. Access to resources in many organizations is a moving target, leaving many managers feeling protective of what’s theirs. And when they take more than their fair share — extra resources for themselves at the expense of others — they often do it because they honestly think they are entitled to these resources and believe they have earned the right to take more.

    Where does this kind of entitlement come from?

    As I’ve tried to reconcile current political events — such as the European Union’s reaction to Brexit, the continuing global refugee crisis, and the ongoing debates in the United States about tax and health care reform — with scholarly work on ambiguity and decision-making, I’ve come to think that feeling entitled to a larger share of a resource might come not from objective assessments of reality but rather from what social scientists call motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning occurs when people “selectively notice, encode, and retain information that is consistent with their desires.” People use this kind of reasoning to reach conclusions that help them support their self-serving beliefs. After all, reasoning, it has been said, “was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

    Understanding the effects of self-serving beliefs is a tricky business. In the last decade of research in behavioral ethics, for instance, scholars have moved away from a “bad apples” approach in which only people with poor moral characteristics are deemed likely to behave unethically. Instead, researchers have examined how people can engage in self-serving behaviors while convinced of the rightness and fairness of doing so. Few studies, however, have explored the circumstances in which this type of selfishness — one that comes with a sense of entitlement and justification — is likely to arise.

    Working alongside my colleague Laura Noval of the Imperial College Business School in London, we sought to understand how organizations enable self-serving behavior. Specifically, we investigated how certain contextual and individual characteristics can facilitate motivated reasoning aimed at justifying self-serving decisions.

    We explored this issue through two experimental studies, one using a hypothetical business decision-making scenario (in which 395 people participated, 52% women) and the other using a behavioral task in the laboratory (in which 239 people participated, 52% women). In both studies, we assigned participants to conditions in which they received either identical performance information with respect to another party (strong, unambiguous context), or in which they and the other party were favored by different performance criteria (weak, ambiguous context). In the latter case, participants could use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their own performance criterion was more relevant for the task at hand, thereby convincing themselves that they deserved larger shares of the resource.

  • A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful

    By Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat, Raffaella Sadun

    View original Publication on hbr.org

    What makes a CEO effective? The question has been studied extensively, of course, including in HBR. Yet we still know fairly little about how CEOs behave day-to-day and how their behavior relates to the success or failure of the companies they run. Previous studies have typically had limitations. Some have been of small samples, or relied heavily on the researchers’ interpretation to classify different “types” of executive.

    In new research, we use survey data from over 1,000 CEOs across six countries and the financial performance of their companies to explore these questions. And our evidence suggests that hands-on managerial CEOs are, on average, less effective than leaders who stay more high-level.

    Our data set includes every activity a CEO undertakes in a week, as well as whether it was planned ahead of time and who else was involved. We used machine learning to determine which differences in CEO behavior are most important. In effect, we asked the algorithm: If you had to explain CEO behavior by dividing them into two types, how would you do it?

    Although the algorithm is completely agnostic, the classification it generates closely resembles John Kotter’s distinction between “managers” and “leaders.” The first type of behavior — managers — includes relatively more plant visits, interactions with employees in supply chain management, and meetings with clients and suppliers. The other type — leaders — includes relatively more interactions with C-suite executives, personal and virtual communications and planning, and meetings with a wide variety of internal functions and external stakeholders. Our data doesn’t insist on classifying CEOs strictly as one type. Instead, we use an index that classifies each CEO as a mix of the two types.
    What Do CEOs Do All Day?

    On average, about one-quarter of CEOs’ days are spent alone, including sending emails. Another 10% is spent on personal matters, and 8% is spent traveling. The remainder (56%) is spent with at least one other person, which mostly involves meetings, most of which are planned ahead of time. About one-third of the time CEOs spend with others is one-on-one; two-thirds is with more than one other person. (This data includes a CEO’s entire workday, not just time in the office.)

    The most common departments for CEOs to meet with are production (35% of time spent with others), marketing (22%), and finance (17%). The most common meetings with outside functions are clients (10%) and suppliers (7%).

    But CEOs vary considerably on each of these, and our model divides CEO behavior into the two groups mentioned above — leaders and managers — and then scores each CEO as being degrees of each.
    Which CEO Type Is Better for Companies?

    When we analyzed CEO type and companies’ financial performance, accounting for other variables including industry, country, and firm size, we found that CEOs who tilt more toward “leader” than “manager” run more-productive and more-profitable companies. And, to our surprise, these previously ignored behavioral differences across CEOs have quite a large association with firm productivity, about one-fifth as big as the impact of a firm’s capital inputs (machinery, equipment, buildings, and so on). Do leader CEOs just happen to work at better companies? We looked at before and after data for firms where a new CEO was appointed, and we found that the appointment of a leader CEO was followed by higher productivity. The effect showed up three years later, which suggests that leaders are doing the hard work of changing companies.
    Is One CEO Type Always Better?

    So far, you might conclude that the best CEOs don’t get too bogged down in the details of day-to-day management, and instead focus on higher-level leadership tasks, such as convening the heads of the different functions and communicating strategy and vision.

    But the picture painted by the data is actually different from this one-size-fits-all approach. Leaders tend to be more prevalent in larger firms and in industries that are, on average, more skill-intensive and complex, while managers tend to run smaller and, to some extent, simpler organizations (i.e., industries characterized by a greater intensity of routine tasks). And plenty of manager CEOs in our data set do run successful firms.

    These observations led us to hypothesize that the performance differentials we captured in the data might instead be due to imperfections in the CEO-firm fit. Some companies need great in-the-weeds managers as CEOs, and others need high-level, vision-setting communicators. But, because the market for CEOs is far from perfect, sometimes managers — who are more abundant in our sample than leaders — end up in a leader role, and thus negatively affect the performance of the firm they run.

    In support of this hypothesis, we saw that places with less-effective labor markets for CEOs were typically associated with a greater disparity in the performance of firms run by managers, relative to firms run by leaders. Although we can’t say exactly what might drive these allocation frictions, empirically they are important and suggest that the fit between company and CEOs’ behavioral traits really matters for firm performance.

    Leaders who set the vision, convene key functions, and communicate effectively can, overall, have a meaningful impact on firm performance, when the setting requires these skills. But just as important is understanding and finding the right fit between the CEO’s leadership style and what the company actually needs.

  • Executive coaching: New framework for evaluation

    Evaluation research has struggled to keep up with the popularity of coaching, as measures of its effectiveness are challenging to standardize, particularly when coaching executives. Similar to interpersonally based interventions in other fields such as counseling and psychotherapy, coaching takes the form of a fluid, humanistic process, whereas coaching-evaluation standards strive to be consistent with a standardized, scientifically based method.

    To read more: APA_Exec_Coaching

  • What CEOs Get Wrong About Vision and How to Get It Right

    By Dan Ciampa

    View original publication on MIT Sloan

    When a leader must implement a new strategy, especially one that requires new systems, processes, and perhaps people, it is the start of a new era. Success requires more than the right combination of capital and technology; it also requires a critical mass of employees to adopt new behaviors and ways of thinking. But too often, CEOs and boards in these situations think through the capital and technology issues much more carefully than those involving behavior and attitudes. That imbalance is a primary reason new strategies fail. And, in addition to disrupting a company, failure can derail a promising executive career — especially if a CEO took over to guide the company in a new direction.

    When new behavior and new ways of thinking are required, an essential step is for the CEO, the board, and key managers to have an image in their minds of what the organization will look and act like after achieving its strategic goals. Just as great athletes are guided by a mental picture of the perfect jump shot or golf swing, key players in the organization need a consistent picture in their minds of what success will look like. That’s where a vision comes in.

    The term “vision” is used often in business; companies frequently talk about “our mission, vision, and values.” The trouble is that most of the time, the word “vision” is used incorrectly. When CEOs say they’ve defined their company’s vision, I ask them to explain it to me. Many respond with something like, “Our vision is to be the most innovative, agile company in our industry.” To which I reply, “That’s a mission, not a vision.”

    In cases like these, the so-called vision merely repeats what is already in the strategy, and, worse, does nothing to emotionally engage the people who are being asked to implement it. A leader’s vision — particularly if that leader needs to bring about significant change in the organization — should start as a vivid, credible image of an ideal future state. The clearer a CEO is about what people should do differently to achieve new, challenging objectives, the greater his or her chances of achieving the changes necessary for success. New behavior doesn’t come from missions, however aspirational, but from deep, emotional commitment to doing things differently.

  • The Confidence Trick

    By Jules Goddard

    View original publication on London Business School

    Some of the saddest words that a human being can utter are these: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Yet, according to Bronnie Ware, a palliative nurse, this is precisely the sentiment that, more than any other, sums up the main regret of people nearing the end of their lives.

    Confidence is the antidote to this kind of regret; it is the surest defence against the abdication of our sense of our own agency. When we give up authorship of our own lives, or resign ourselves to living through the eyes of others, we are effectively surrendering our personhood. It is a reflection of the notion that people are the product of their circumstances rather than the decisions they make.

    Avoid becoming a slave

    There are many forces in today’s world that are encouraging this kind of “second-hand living” to which Nietzsche gave the name “slave mentality”. For example, ideologues, whether of the left or right, have tended to view people as means to a utopian end and have therefore had a vested interest in encouraging people to think of themselves as subjects or victims, and to place their fate in the hands of others. A confident society is one that is immune to these dangers. Indeed, the late Lord (Kenneth)Clark, the art historian, defined civilization in a single word: confidence.

    “The most beautiful thing you can wear is confidence”

    David Bowie

    Confidence is more than self-assurance. It is a form of licence. It is the right that we grant ourselves to become the person of our own choosing. At root, confidence is the conviction that we are of most value to the world when we are true to ourselves.

    Confidence is the right that we grant ourselves to become the person of our own choosing

     

    David Bowie was the archetype of a confident person. In his 69 years, he exemplified what it is to be a truly autonomous individual. His versatility was prodigious. He excelled as a singer, composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, painter and actor. “I feel confident imposing change on myself,” he said. He didn’t believe there was a self to discover, only a persona to be endlessly re-invented. It was as though he imagined himself to be a work of art on which he never ceased working.

    But Bowie’s confidence did not come easily: “As an adolescent, I was painfully shy and withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.” Ziggy Stardust was perhaps his most famous disguise, but it was only one of many. He learned the art of confidence by treating it – at least to start with – as a façade behind which he could play at being confident.

    But Bowie’s confidence did not come easily: “As an adolescent, I was painfully shy and withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.” Ziggy Stardust was perhaps his most famous disguise, but it was only one of many. He learned the art of confidence by treating it – at least to start with – as a façade behind which he could play at being confident.

    Imagine yourself courageous

    This recalls Aristotle’s theory that if a particular virtue such as courage or confidence does not come naturally, then the solution may be to stop worrying about how it might be acquired. Instead, the individual should imagine what a courageous or confident person would actually do in the circumstances – and then do exactly that. In other words, act your way into becoming confident. No one is born confident. We acquire confidence as we mimic those whom we observe to be exemplars of this particular trait.

    This mimetic theory of learning – becoming a person we are not by imitating a person who is – was brilliantly applied by Bowie. He did not believe his mastery of artistic skills was an expression of innate talent; he preferred to believe that it was an act of will, a kind of continuously imaginative self-reinvention: “Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life”

    Bowie chose to see himself as the sole author of his own life. He recognized early on the dangers of living his life through the eyes and expectations of others: “I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.”

    Act your way into becoming confident

    He said: “All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get selfish about it”. This chimes with one of Bronnie Ware’s epithets: “Self-love is essential to truly serve others well.” This is a powerful (and provocative) version of the oblique principle: namely, that society is stronger when individuals feel free to put their own needs first. It is a message that sits uncomfortably in today’s world of ideological posturing, virtue signaling, and other forms of what Barbara Oakley has called “pathological altruism”. Bowie was his own person: “Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.”

    Leaders liberate

    Leadership, a close ally of confidence, is not about creating followership or compliance or passivity. Quite the contrary. The leader liberates others to invent or re-invent themselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “the only person you are destined to be is the person you decide to be”. Leaders encourage those they work with to make self-defining decisions.

    Thoughts on the life and personality of David Bowie – and the lessons that flow from them – sit uncomfortably alongside theories of confidence found in much social science research literature. Here are some of those findings, expressed as key factors in building self-confidence:

     

      • The company we keep: we are creatures of the expectations that others place upon us; therefore, we should surround ourselves with people who believe in us, and keep our distance from those who undermine our self-belief.

     

      • The effort we exert: in the pursuit of mastery, effort counts for more than innate talent; therefore, to strengthen self-confidence, we should measure ourselves by effort invested rather than result achieved.

     

      • The placebo we trust: lucky charms work. We ought not be so rational as to dismiss all sources of irrational assistance.

     

      • The wave we surf: success is rarely a solo achievement. It depends, at least in part, on being with the right people in the right place at the right time. Quoting Shakespeare, “there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” We should take note of the tide.

     

      • The rituals we adopt: certain things “get us into the zone” and boost our confidence before, for example, giving a speech or taking an exam. So we need to invent habits that settle our nerves and enhance our performance.

     

      • The opportunities we seize: business is a numbers game, as Tom Peters used to say. The “more times at bat”, the greater the chance of getting lucky and stumbling into success.

     

      • The setbacks we experience: if we see mistakes as lessons in life, our confidence will be benefit. We should think of failure as intrinsic to a life of achievement.

     

      • The emotions we draw upon: to overcome fear when faced by a threatening challenge, getting excited works better than trying to calm ourselves down.

     

      • The expectations we form: we can adopt one of two quite distinct strategies for managing our anxieties once we’ve settled on a risky course of action: “strategic optimism” or “defensive pessimism”; strategic optimists allay their fears by hoping for the best and setting aside negative thoughts; defensive pessimists choose instead to confront their fears by envisaging worst-case scenarios and thinking through the ramifications.

     

    • Research suggests that when we’re fearful, the unknown is more frightening than the negative. Therefore we should adopt the strategy of the defensive pessimist.

     

    The trouble with rules of success – and all self-help manuals – is that they invite us to treat our own life instrumentally. We objectify ourselves, reducing our own behaviour to a set of responses to a mix of self-imposed conditions. In effect, we become the victims of the science we choose to believe in. For example, we may manage our level of confidence by purposefully associating with different kinds of people, wearing a lucky charm, cultivating a pessimistic philosophy and so on. In this way, we cast ourselves in the role of inert material on which different causes will have different effects. Life becomes a process of choosing those inputs whose effects we most desire.

    Take control

    The anthropologist Mary Douglas has made a distinction between passive and active voice theories of human behaviour . As an illustration of this distinction, she draws upon Roy Schafer’s interpretation of Freudian theory to imagine an exchange between a psychoanalyst and his patient. The analyst may say to the patient, “Your chronic sense of worthlessness comes from the condemning voice of your mother”. This is a quintessential case of passive voice theorising. The patient is seen not as an active agent with beliefs, intentions and will, but as a passive canvas on which external forces make their imprint. An active voice reconstruction of this diagnosis could be: “You regularly imagine your mother’s voice condemning you, and you, agreeing with it, regard yourself as being essentially worthless.” This approach uses the less deterministic, more explanatory concepts of agency, meaning, and purpose. Active voice theorising places individual responsibility where it truly belongs – in this case, with the patient.

    Society is stronger when individuals feel free to put their own needs first

    Whenever psychology reverts to the language of physics and explains human behaviour in terms of causes, determinants and effects, it risks erasing the subject matter of its own inquiry: the human agent. The practice of management should not allow social sciences to dehumanize the true object of its interest: individual human beings.

    Bowie had no need for self-help manuals or textbooks on creativity. He experimented. He didn’t try to predict outcomes or worry about possible reactions. He acted on the world and, noticing the result, he formed a theory. To borrow an insight from Matthew Parris: “How little we know of ourselves until we notice what we do.”

    In business practice, we typically operate the other way round. Before actually doing anything, we feel we first need a theory from which to act, or a goal around which to organize, or a plan on which to deliver, or some rules by which to conform. The social science of confidence, by adopting an essentially passive voice approach, provides us with many rules of success but in so doing subtly undermines the Bowie-like confidence that we need to become the invention of our own imagination and courage.