“Exploding the biggest myth of all: that human beings are rational.” I was so pleased to be part of this important documentary series by filmmakers Kristin Pichaske and Danny Alpert on conspiracy thinking, which explodes in times of turmoil, when people feel unprotected, overcome with unsustainable levels of novelty, uncertainty, insecurity. You can join the the conversation with @WorldChannel and the filmmakers, August 27th, 2020 @ 7pm Eastern.
I enjoyed talking with Max Zheng on his Human Prosperity Podcast. We discussed empathy and how it differs from compassion (both are necessary for capable leadership). And then we segued to one of my favorite subjects, sensation seeking. This is a more or less inborn personality trait defined by psychologist Marvin Zuckerman that helps each of us identify where we stand in terms of our tolerance for sameness versus novelty, our need for stimulation and variety, our interest in or distaste for thrill seeking. You will be much happier at work if you match your job and career to your need to seek or avoid stimulation and novelty. You can read more about this personality variable in my Forbes.com post here.
Max has conversations about leadership from the perspective of maximizing happiness and prosperity. I’ve wondered a lot about the place happiness has in human goals and priorities so I’m looking forward to our conversation.
I’m looking forward to rejoining the Human Prosperity podcast on September 17 to talk more about the psychology of leadership.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2018. It is the first of a series of blog posts that will reflect the work I am very excited to be doing on a forthcoming book, Starting Older.
Ask any successful, engaged 65-year-old, “Are you ready to withdraw from life?”
The words “retire” and “retirement” derive from the French retirer, meaning to withdraw. The common definition of retirement today is to leave your job and stop working. Words shape our vision and thinking. As long as we keep using the word retirement or any derivative such as “the new retirement,” that whiff of withdrawal, of closure, of endings will linger. And so will visions of what the word evoked a generation ago: retirement as the time to stop working and, hopefully, enjoy yourself—travel, play golf, hop on an RV, pursue hobbies. At least until aging and infirmity catch up with you or your partner.
I want to get rid of the word altogether. The reason is that retirement has come to be used to refer to much more than an event—the day you leave the corporation or law practice—but to a phase of life. A life stage that usually begins in a person’s mid-sixties and is associated with the end of productive work.
Psychologically, knowing which phase of life one is in provides structure, orientation and meaning. A “young adult” automatically gets the idea that she needs to find work and relationships that sustain her economically, socially and emotionally. A mid-life adult understands that his role is to fulfill significant responsibilities—support and grow a family, a business, a community. After mid-life, post-middle-age, but before infirmity, what are a person’s role and purpose? Pursuing leisure until we face illness, death and the end of life doesn’t work for the vast majority of 65-year-olds. But “retirement” does a remarkably poor job, even a destructive job, of describing the phase of life that today’s 65-year-old is entering. I call it “starting older.”
Each person needs to understand the challenges and opportunities of this new phase of life, “starting older,” in order to live it with vitality, creativity and contentment. Though “retirement” doesn’t capture the experience or needs of individuals in this phase of life, most people in their mid-sixties do either need or want to make a major change in the type of work they are doing. These changes involve the nature, setting and type of productivity they will pursue in the decades ahead.
This new stage of life didn’t exist a generation ago. We’re living a little longer now—four years on average—and that might contribute to the change. But the main factor is that during the expectable 20 years after age 65, we are more likely to be healthy and want and need to continue to be productive.
Consider two composite case examples:
A multi-generational family business is led by a rather patriarchal 67-year-old. Members of the next generation, now in their forties, are eager to assume leadership of the company and frustrated by waiting. The patriarch has actually agreed that it’s time for him to step down. But every time a plan is proposed, “something happens” to subvert it. The family keeps reminding him that it’s his turn to relax, to step back and enjoy the fruits of his labor. “Travel, play golf, spend time with Mom.” All the things he’s postponed or deferred over a lifetime of work. The more the picture of a stress-free retirement is filled out, the more the patriarch’s resistance to stepping down grows. He creates additional obstacles, offers new excuses, even stirs up conflict within the family. Why does the promise of a stress-free life of leisure backfire?
A founder left the corporate world and started a company that she has grown over 25 years into a solid, thriving enterprise that reflects her character, her intellect and her creativity. Simply put, it’s her baby. Unlike her two children, now in their early thirties, the business hasn’t moved away and started its own life. She has been approached by a range of both strategic and private equity buyers and has embarked on serious negotiations with eight potential buyers over the last three years. Each deal has fallen apart at an advanced stage, usually over her dissatisfaction with the final terms and numbers. However, all of the offers would have provided her with at least twenty million dollars in net profit. And she admits to being tired of the unending stress of feeling responsible for every aspect of her business. Her team of advisors wants her to sell. The market for her company’s service in five years is unpredictable. Additionally, she’ll then be in her early 70’s and a less attractive bet for buyers who want her knowledge and network to help the business grow for the initial period after the sale. Why does she resist selling?
What is stopping these highly accomplished, smart, creative, driven individuals from letting go of their positions or their businesses? Some of the reasons are individualized and personal. But there are some general truisms that apply as well:
The patriarch and the business owner in the examples above are likely to be experiencing great anxiety about what their lives will be like after the sale or succession is complete. Yet their advisors rarely talk to them about what they will do next. Someone who has not spent considerable time planning for a productive future may only see a black hole ahead and will unconsciously resist changes that on the surface seem both logical and desirable.
I’d like to see everyone who is rounding the corner of age 60 begin to think about the next phase of their productive life. By the time they sell, or step aside or “retire,” they should have a pretty clear vision and plan for fulfilling the psychological necessities that all of us gain from work—a sense of having an impact, making a contribution, being connected, being creative.
Copyright Prudence Gourguechon 2018.
This is the first of two posts related to trust, one of the five essential capacities of cognition and character that a leader who shoulders great responsibility must have. These were originally published Forbes online. This post explains why trust is a crucial capacity, how it has to be regulated and what happens when it is absent. The next post offers suggestions on the assessment of trust.
The capacity for trust—both to trust others and to inspire trust—is a fundamental character trait every leader with great responsibility must have. But it’s tricky. A leader dependent on praise and affirmation or one who is overwhelmed by his duties can be too trusting. Charismatic leaders excel at inspiring trust but can use it to manipulate their followers in ways that can turn malignant. In fact, even the greatest leader—and each of us—sometimes trusts unwisely or lets down those who have trusted her.
In this era of #metoo, “fake news,” “alternative facts,” integrity failures at businesses both old (Wells Fargo) and new (Uber) and Russian bots responding to our posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter, few would dispute that we are embroiled in a crisis around trust in the workplace and the wider culture.
A quick Google search of “leadership and trust” yields links to dozens of articles on how to build trust, quizzes for self-assessment of how trustworthy you seem to be (with tips on how to improve your score) and numerous consulting firms offering their services to help your company build a culture of trust.
This article looks at trust from a different angle—as a fundamental personality trait that needs to be part of a comprehensive evaluation of a potential leader.
Elsewhere I have written about a model of leadership assessment and development that proposes five essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader must have. Trust is one of the core five. (The others are self-awareness, empathy, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.) The model was derived from an unexpected but happy marriage of two bodies of thought—psychological studies of ego functions and executive functioning and the U.S. Army’s vision of leadership described in its remarkable Field Manual on Leader Development.
In the case of self-awareness, critical thinking and discipline more is generally better. Trust and empathy are a little different, as an excess of either can lead to problems. A great leader needs to get it just right.
A leader’s capacity to inspire trust in others–that is, to be trustworthy–is essential in motivating and inspiring members of his team. It’s also essential in helping everyone involved endure crises and manage difficult situations.
The Capacity to Trust Others
Trust in human relationships goes in two directions. The idea that a leader must be trustworthy is familiar. That he also needs to have the capacity to trust others is less intuitively obvious, but the capacity to trust is essential. It’s a psychological predisposition learned in early childhood.
The leader lacking in trust is unable to form effective relationships and functional teams. Habitually feeling beleaguered and unfairly treated, he is drained of energy and focus and unfairly blames others, further creating a fragile, demoralized and suspicious environment.
The capacity to trust others enables a leader to:
What Occurs When a Leader Trusts Others Too Much?
Ideally, a leader possesses a general disposition to trust others but knows when and how to temper it with realism and diligence. When a leader is not discerning enough in his trust of others, blind spots flourish and, paradoxically, people in the organization feel unsafe. Inappropriate trust may occur because a leader is too dependent on the approval of others or overwhelmed by his duties. Here are some of the potential consequences:
When is a Good Thing too Much?
Trusting Others
Ken McCracken, head of Family Business Consulting at KPMG UK, writing about trusted advisors to family businesses, alerts us to the dangers of “affinity fraud,” a concept as applicable to corporate and organizational leadership as it is to family enterprise.
Affinity fraud occurs when trust is automatically greater for those who are “like us” or part of an in-group.McCracken cites the case of infamous investor Bernie Madoff:
Madoff “exploited his social connections to court investments from individuals and institutions among the Jewish community. Some of his clients seem to have relied on their shared background with Madoff to overcome any doubts they had about the barely believable financial returns that were promised. Investors it seems were persuaded that it was plausible that someone from the same community, or in-group, could be trusted to give them a great deal that would have sounded too good to be true had it been offered by an outsider without such ties.“
However, having a tilt towards trust is not a bad thing. McCracken also identifies a group he calls “optimists”— those who have the disposition to trust people including those who are different and outsiders. Optimists count competence as more important than affinity.
The intrinsic optimism in this attitude usually means that setbacks involving breach of trust … are absorbed without … sacrificing the view that people are generally trustworthy and that this attitude is the right way to live and conduct the affairs of the family business.
Inspiring Trust
Charismatic leaders inspire trust based on the force of their personality and the magnetism of their vision. Their followers are prone to ignore information that would weaken the comforting idealization of their leader. Charismatic leaders create a regressive psychological situation in the groups they lead where emotion holds sway over rational thought. It’s best to think of the trust evoked by charismatic leaders as a very powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. The wise charismatic leader will understand that the degree of trust his followers have in him is out of proportion to his merit and is careful not to exploit it.
Conclusion
Trust is a matter of finding the right balance. It is essential that a leader has the capacity to trust others. She must also be alert to reality, open to the limitations of trust and the possibility that trust will be betrayed. She must be able to recover from disappointments in the realm of trust without a shift in basic attitude. A leader must also be able to inspire trust, but he needs to temper his followers’ trust with a crisp understanding of his limitations and the possibility of inadvertently evoking blind and inappropriate trust.
The single best measure of reliable and appropriately modulated trust for those assessing a potential leader is her capacity to admit errors, change course when new information comes in and welcome negative feedback and different opinions.
Further Reading: How To Assess An Essential Leadership Capacity: Trusting Others and Inspiring Trust
Originally appeared in Forbes.com 2/4/18.
Assessing other people as you interact with them is one of the most important tools you can utilize in your professional life. It’s to your great advantage to learn how to interpret and then use your subjective reactions to people.
Knowing how to read yourself and then what to do with you the information is a skill that takes some development and practice. But the investment is well worth the effort since your own responses to people will provide you with information about them that you can’t get anywhere else.
Take empathy as a prime example. As I’ve explained elsewhere empathy is absolutely critical to leadership—it’s one of five essential character traits and cognitive capacities a leader responsible for the fate of people and enterprises must have.
One source of data is the way the candidate talks about the human side of her past business experiences. Does she show awareness of other people’s perspectives, needs and feelings? Does she demonstrate an understanding that these are important? Can she talk about instances where her empathy failed and what she thought and did about it? These are self-reports about the person’s experiences—how they have operated in the world. Useful, but basically hearsay.
A different and deeper level of data can be gleaned during a get-acquainted conversation. When you’re in a meaningful conversation with another person, you are essentially creating a laboratory situation where the data is being created in real time, not just reported historically.
Here’s the secret sauce: If you’re trying to get to know a potential leader who lacks empathy, your own subjective experience is deeply telling. You’ll find yourself feeling frustrated and bored. Time will go slowly. You’ll search for questions. Because the answers you’re getting won’t satisfy you, you’ll keep looking for other ways to ask the same question. The conversation will feel like hard work. Why do you feel that way? Because the person across the table doesn’t have the capacity to connect with you. A connection can only happen when both parties have some degree of empathy. And without that empathic connection, a conversation lacks vitality.
In contrast, if you’re sitting with a person who does have the capacity for empathy, there will be more flow. You’ll feel invigorated; the conversation will have its own spark and creativity.
A client asked me to interview a candidate for a potential leadership position. The potential hire had tremendous technical skills. Reviewing the materials I received before the assessment, I learned about a corporate blunder in which the candidate had been involved in his previous position. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but I wanted to know how he viewed his role in the poorly led episode. After an hour of conversation, which had gone reasonably well (though I did have a bit of that feeling that time was moving slowly), I brought up the blunder. I said I wondered what his thoughts were about it. He immediately got defensive and dismissive, which startled me. I persisted, saying I really wanted to understand what he thought about what had happened. He made another excuse, looked away, seemed bored and changed the subject. I tried one more time but was unable to get him to engage.
I was annoyed and frustrated. I felt I wanted something from him and he wouldn’t give it to me! I didn’t care about the blunder itself. It was one of those unfortunate things that could have happened to anyone. But I wanted to talk about it. Beyond that, I realized, I was looking for him to show some regret or shame or ruefulness. I wanted him to say, “Yeah that was really awful, and I don’t ever want to be in that position again. “ He would have totally won me over with a sentence like that, showing some feeling about the matter and an interest in sharing the story — maybe because of, rather than in spite of, the fact it was painful.
So in that two-person interaction, I had a specific need — to hear a feeling-full story about the blunder. He was unable to read me successfully and either satisfy that need or tell me why he couldn’t. “It’s confidential, I can’t talk about it” would have worked too.
Contemplating a partnership? You definitely want to establish that your potential partner has the capacity for empathy. A professional colleague and I were considering a joint venture. We went to dinner with a contact of his who was key to our meeting the people we wanted to work with. My colleague spent much of the meeting describing my accomplishments and what I could do for clients. While on the surface it was complimentary and all about me, I felt uncomfortable and strangely invisible. Thinking about my internal reaction, I realized he made me feel like an object, not a person. If he had been in my shoes, I imagine he might have enjoyed the attention. But empathy requires you to know how the other person feels in their shoes, not how you would feel in their situation. I don’t like that kind of attention, and that’s not how I like to present myself to or get to know new acquaintances. Despite a superficially exciting and successful meeting, my subjective discomfort and feeling of invisibility made me realize that this was not a partnership to pursue.
Even in a business situation, you have subtle, personal and specific emotional needs and preferences for how you like to interact. Think of it as a unique personality fingerprint. If the person you’re assessing has the capacity for empathy, they will automatically detect that fingerprint and do their best to respond to it in order to facilitate a human connection.