Category Archives: Careers

How Promising Managers Sometimes Derail Their Careers…and How to Prevent It

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According to The Centre for Creative Leadership almost 1 in 2 of the managers who have the makings of success fail to reach their potential. They ‘derail’ and are either demoted, fired, plateau or opt for early retirement (William A Gentry).

There seem to be some key problems that cause this derailment:

  • Failing to build effective interpersonal relationships
  • Showing poor team leadership
  • Having problems adapting to changes in the environment
  • Lacking growth and development in the face of the changing demands of their role
  • Failing to meet business objectives (due to either failing to follow through or being overambitious )
  • Maintaining a narrow focus, so that they aren’t able to supervise outside of their area of functional expertise

What seems to happen is that these managers are defensive in the face of challenging feedback, don’t learn from their mistakes and don’t identify and address their weaknesses.

Why do they do that?

I suspect that they lack self-compassion. Self-compassion makes it easier to be open to difficult feedback; learn from mistakes and admit failings. Self compassion can probably be increased*.

These managers also need to get better at noticing when their approach is ineffective and then quickly adjusting their behaviour. A starting point here may be to learn to become more mindful and psychologically flexible.

So, if you are a beginning manager, it might be good to focus on becoming more mindful, flexible and compassionate.

* For readers based in Brisbane, I am running a low cost public workshop on self-compassion on Sunday 6th May 2012.

Care with Labels – Lessons for Talent Management

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Be careful with labels.  That’s what Julian McNally warns in his excellent blog post: “Labels, including diagnostic ones, are only useful to the extent they enable constructive action”.

This got me thinking about labels within organisations.  One of the most common is the label ‘talent’.  This is the idea that organisations have a small number of workers who are ‘talent’ – as first decreed by Mckinsey’s in their 1997 paper The War for Talent.

Identifying the top 5 or 10% of performers  allows organisations to focus their resources on developing a small number of people and to groom them for senior leadership positions.

But what else results from assigning the ‘talent’ label?   This is only my view – but based on my own experience of both being identified as ‘talent’ and not, this is what I observed:

  1. When I was first selected as talent, I thought it was tremendous.  I did some great training courses and it gave me a confidence boost.  But the effect of this enhanced confidence was like monetary inflation.  I simply had more to say about subjects I knew too little of.
  2. Because talent was a label assigned to me, not my behaviour, I assumed that my talent was permanent.  It became my formula for success,  dressed up in the weasel words of ‘strengths’.  This made me far less likely to question the workability of my approach and far more likely to cling to being ‘right’.
  3. As a result my job became one of impression management.  I did not pay attention to performance but rather the appearance of performance.
  4. The first rule of impression management is to avoid mistakes.   Especially in an organisation of very bright people.  But trying to avoid mistakes is not a great recipe for creativity, learning or improving performance.
  5. Finally, being labelled as talent encouraged me to persist in goals which had nothing to do with my values.  I climbed the ladder, only to find it leaning against the wrong wall.

Overall, therefore, I would say being labelled as talent hindered my performance.  And in my next post, I am going to describe the effect of not being labelled talent…

What is Meaning in Work?

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When I retrained to become a psychologist, my research centred on meaning in work.  That’s because my work to date (as a management consultant) had been pretty meaningless, but I did not reallyknow what to do about it.

So my research questions were:

  • What is meaning in work?
  • How can I find it?

I wanted to create and test a model of meaning which would be scientifically valid but which would also be usable for people who wanted to identify meaning in work for themselves.

In this post I want to deal with the first question, what is meaning in work?

There’s a lot of confusion even in academic circles about what meaning is, and I spent months sifting through these definitions.  Eventually however I came to a clear conclusion, via a brilliant psychologist called Eric Klinger, who argued (1998) that meaning can be seen from an evolutionary perspective.

Think about your ancestors.  What di their survival depend on?  Foraging for food?  Avoiding the woolly mammoth?  Right on.  Humans evolved problem solvers, moving and adapting to meet new challenges and goals.  We survived by being able to respond to our environment and meet a succession of context-dependent goals.  All of our goals relate to survival, at least at the genetic level.

The interesting bit comes when we consider how we evolved to do this.  The cognitive processes we developed (i.e. our senses, thoughts and emotions), all evolved to help us do one thing: understand the potential dangers and opportunities that come our way during the pursuit of our goals.  It is understanding that enables action to be taken in the pursuit of goals.  And successful pursuit of goals = survival.

Klinger argued that the role of human cognition is to manage the process of comprehension, working to sort out “the ambiguous or confusing stimuli…until they can be dismissed as irrelevant, or channelled into the emotional / motivation / action systems” (p31).

What does that mean?  It means that at the heart of the human operating system is an absolute imperative to understand the world around us.

This is not a ‘nice to have’.  Without understanding we feel uneasy (it’s not for nothing our greatest fear is the fear of the unknown).  Conversely, understanding brings relief.  Think about the ‘aha!’ moment when you figure a problem out. It is pleasant because this is a relief from the burden of not knowing, even if the news is unpleasant.  (Think about how a diagnosis of a mystery illness brings relief).  That’s because with understanding we are able to act with purpose.  Without it we are unsure and lack direction.

Meaning is therefore simple.  It is about comprehension, whether that be for small things (like comprehending a word in a sentence) or very large things (like the meaning of one’s work).  With meaning, we know how to respond in terms of both emotion and goal-directed action.  As Baumeister (1991) argued, meaning in life is therefore a process of sense-making which connects an individual’s existence to a wider understanding of the world.  When we have meaning we understand ourselves in context, and that has always been essential to our survival.

Today, meaning often is not linked to survival.  But the inate drive remains the same.  Without a sense of meaning our lives can feel as though they don’t make much sense.  Our life’s events do not seem to fit any narrative.  We begin to feel uneasy, and feel less and less agency over our place in the world. A pretty fair summation of my time as a management consultant!

Conversely, with meaning we understand ourselves and our place in the world. We know how to relate to others. Whilst wee still experience difficult emotions, we understand why we are experiencing them and we generally know what to do about them.  And that’s a fair summation of my life as a psychologist.

In the next post, I’ll explore how meaning differs from purpose and why it’s diferent to happiness, before going on to consider how to actually achieve meaning in work.

What is Psychological Flexibility?

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The main focus of ACT is to increase something called psychological flexibility.  But what is psychological flexibility and why is it important?

Of all the psychological phenomena that we have studied, this is the one that is of by far the most help to the people we work with in organisations.  Becoming more psychologically flexible helps people not just cope with stress but to do more of what it is they really value.  So what exactly is it?

Psychological flexibility has been defined as “the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being and to change, or persist in, behavior when doing so serves valued ends” (Biglan, Hayes, & Pistorello, 2008).

‘Contacting the present more fully’ means willing to be present with difficult thoughts and emotions and to accept ourselves as we are, not as we think we should be.  This is a critical difference, because research shows that trying to get rid of our difficult thoughts and emotions increases their frequency, strength and duration (Wegner, 1994).

It also helps to understand psychological flexibility’s opposite orientation—experiential avoidance (EA).  EA is the tendency to avoid or control unpleasant thoughts and feelings, even when doing so creates problems for a person.  For example, someone who has the thought that they “are stupid” may avoid situations (e.g., a classroom) that might embarrass them.  However, this strategy has the effect of systematically narrowing one’s options in life.

It’s easy to see how EA can be a problem in career change, but empirical evidence also associates EA with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, poor work performance and chronic stress.  Conversely, becoming more psychologically flexible allows people to cope with life more effectively and to derive wellbeing as a consequence of valued living.

Being psychologically flexible doesn’t make life easier or more pleasant.  But it makes it more vital and  values-directed.  And that, incidentally, is what most of our clients want from their career change; a life worth living.