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Tag: leadership

  • Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    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.

     The Capacity to Inspire Trust

    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:

    • Create a shared understanding which is necessary for organized and strategic action.
    • Count on members of a team to fulfill expectations.
    • Delegate.
    • Maintain confidentiality throughout the organization.
    • Develop a cohesive team.
    • Build morale.
    • Absorb feedback, acknowledge errors and correct them.
    • Grow and develop leadership skills in followers.
    • Create a climate of respect and fairness.

    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:

    • Failure to attend to clues suggesting malfeasance or dishonesty.
    • Negligence and poor oversight.
    • Confirmation bias takes hold.
    • Vulnerability to being fooled by someone on whom the leader is dependent.

    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

  • Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 1/25/18

    You might assume that “capacity to think” is something you don’t have to worry about if you’re in the process of selecting a new leader, whether it’s a new CEO or the founder of a company you’re investing in.  You’d be wrong.  Surprisingly, great credentials, a record of success and an impressive education do not guarantee that someone has the ability to do the high-level thinking required of a leader whose decisions have fateful consequences.

    Every search committee looking for a new CEO or organizational president and every investor evaluating the strength and promise of a business’ founder should include evaluation of the capacity for judgment and critical thinking as part of the vetting process when deciding to put the fate of their company in the hands of a new leader.

    How can someone even get close to a position as CEO or leader of a great organization without these fundamental cognitive strengths?  It happens all the time. Charisma, connections, luck, canniness, creativity and vision can all propel someone into a position of power.  It doesn’t mean their judgment is up to snuff.

    Elsewhere I’ve written about five core character traits and cognitive abilities that every leader who is responsible for the fate of an enterprise and its people absolutely must have.  Perhaps the most vital of all is the capacity for critical thinking and judgment. Which is not to minimize the importance of the other four:  empathy, trust (both the ability to trust others and inspire their trust), self-control/discipline and self-awareness.

    This model of the fundamental requirements for a leader is distilled from two broad sources—my own 35 years’ experience as a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and organizational leader, using the long traditions of thought and research in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a remarkable document (itself based on the same theoretical and empirical foundation), the Army Field Manual on Leader Development.

     Good judgment depends on the ability to think critically and strategically.  This can be broken down into multiple essential functions, including the ability to plan ahead in a way that is thoughtful and organized, the ability to organize information into a coherent and logical narrative and the ability to understand cause and effect.

    To my mind, the most important aspect of critical thinking is the capacity to anticipate consequences.  At the basic level, this is linear–what are the immediate, mid-term and long-term consequences of a decision?  But the best leadership mind anticipates consequences more expansively, perceiving a multidimensional outcome and, immediately, the range of complex secondary and tertiary outcomes that will spin off in response to each level of change.

    A leader’s thought process needs to be dominated by reason and facts, not emotion.  But it’s equally important for a leader to know the effects stress and emotion have on his own thinking and be able to discern when irrational forces are overtaking dispassionate logic.  This is harder than it might seem since we are all subject to unconscious mental forces that can distort thinking without revealing they are at work.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to compare current situations to similar ones encountered in the past, using the richness of previous experience with problems to inform present assessment.  But this necessary use of past experience has to be tempered by alertness to unconscious biases and fears.  Doctors are taught to beware of the “last grave error syndrome”–the tendency to overcompensate because you screwed up last time.  Just because you missed a case of heart disease doesn’t mean every patient you see now needs excessive cardiac testing.  In investing, just because you left a short position too soon and lost a mint doesn’t mean you should stay in your current short positions.

    The leader who can think clearly is able to set aside his own ego and self-esteem as he evaluates a situation.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to approach a problem with an organized assessment process:  knowing what information to gather, considering alternative explanations and points of view, actively seeking contrarian opinions and perspectives, identifying gaps in information and knowledge and identifying a process to fill them.

    Since problem-solving is dependent on thinking and judgment,  these capacities can be assessed by observing how the leader organizes her response to a crisis, an unexpected situation or a stalemate.

    How can you identify inadequacies in a potential leader’s critical thinking and judgment? Look for these specific signs of deficiency. Many of these I’ve extracted from the Army Manual, which does an invaluable job of operationalizing what otherwise would be abstract and difficult to assess capacities:

    • Signs of disorganization in thinking or speech.
    • Over-focus on details; inability to see the big picture.
    • Lack of clarity about priorities.
    • Inability to anticipate consequences.
    • Failure to consider and articulate second and third-degree consequences of an action or decision.
    • Inability to offer alternative explanations or courses of action.
    • Oversimplification.
    • Inability to distinguish critical elements in a situation from less important ones.
    • Inability to articulate thought process including the evidence used to arrive at a decision,  other options that were considered and how a conclusion was reached.
    • Unable to tolerate ambiguity/over-certainty.
    • Difficulty outlining a step-wise process to solve a problem or implement a change.
    • Thinking that is driven by emotion or ego.

    Besides recruitment and promotion, this conceptual model provides a useful framework in other contexts.

    Leadership coaches can use it to identify areas a client needs to attend to and strengthen. Mentors and managers developing leadership potential in individuals they’re working with can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.

    Anyone in a leadership position herself or who aspires to one can also use this model, with its breakdown of the components of critical thinking, as a self-assessment and capacity development tool to identify personal deficiencies and look for ways to improve in this essential area.  Each of us has a unique hard-wired and learned set of cognitive tools and none of us has a toolkit that isn’t missing a few pieces.

    Critical thinking and judgment are among the most advanced and sophisticated cognitive skills, demanding difficult and fluid mental processes of synthesis, discrimination and complex analysis. Even the best thinker will lapse to a lower level of cognitive functioning at times of enormous stress, emotional overload, illness, sleep deprivation or fatigue.  Knowing when one’s capacity for critical thinking is sub-par is just as vital as being able to do it well.

    Additional reading:  The Unexamined Mind Doesn’t Think Well: Why Self Awareness Is A Fundamental Leadership Capacity and Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

  • Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Originally appeared on Forbes.com 12/26/17.

    I get tired of hearing about “soft skills,” even when it’s acknowledged they are important. No less a hard-muscled body than the U.S. Army, in its Army Field Manual on Leader Development (one of the best resource on leadership I’ve ever seen) insists repeatedly that empathy is essential for competent leadership.

    Why?  Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached.  It allows you to predict the effect your decisions and actions will have on core audiences and strategize accordingly.  Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a new generation of leaders.  You will not inspire followers or elicit loyalty. Empathy is essential in negotiations and sales:  it allows you to know your target’s desires and what risks they are or aren’t willing to take.

    Elsewhere I’ve proposed a short list of 5 essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader who assumes great responsibility must have.  Empathy is one of the core five.  (The others are self-awareness, trust, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.)

     Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experience, perspective and feelings. Also called “vicarious introspection,” it’s commonly described as the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.  But make sure you are assessing how they would feel in their shoes, not how you would feel in their shoes.  This is the tricky part.

    I remember my husband taking me cross-country skiing for the first time early in our marriage. He was sure (putting himself in my shoes) that I would love the sport as much as he did.   From the minute the skis were strapped on me,  I absolutely hated it.  Being generally clumsy and lacking good balance, the sensation of non-stop instability was anything but fun for me—in fact, it made me miserable.   My husband kept insisting I would love it if I just gave it a chance.  Naturally athletic and graceful, he couldn’t imagine the experience I was having in my shoes—now strapped tightly to long slippery sticks!   It took years for me to convince him that my experience on cross country skis was utterly different from his.  Fortunately, I discovered the pleasure of tramping around on snowshoes. The solidity and certainty gave me a chance to enjoy winter woods while he continued to enjoy sliding around on icy snow.

     Like the practice of self-awareness, empathy involves scanning large sets of data, sorting out what’s noise and what’s essential information.  The process is not so different from what a stock analyst does when scanning the market and looking for signals, anomalies and novel patterns that jump out and make him take notice, realizing something important is going on.

    There is a significant business cost when leaders lack empathy.  Just ask United Airlines which earned the dishonor of having committed “one of the worst corporate gaffes” ever, according to Bloomberg’s Christopher Palmeri and Jeff Green, when a physician was dragged off a plane to empty his paid seat for an employee.  It took United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, three tries before his public response showed any empathy. Munoz’s first and woefully inadequate statement, “I apologized for having to re-accommodate these customers,” seriously missed the mark in attempting to relate to his customer’s experience.  In his second statement, Munoz compounded the error by blaming the victim—describing the passenger as defiant, belligerent and disruptive.  Only with his third try, when Munoz said, “I promise you we will do better,” did he demonstrate an empathic understanding of his current and future customers.

    Lack of empathy is a major contributor to the tsunami of sexual harassment incidents that have dominated recent news and led to the departures of accomplished leaders.  Commenting on an employee’s body or, worse, grabbing her, requires a failure of empathy.  If a boss were able and willing to put himself in the employee’s shoes and understand how she would feel when subjected to his actions, he would be far less likely to do what he’s doing.

    Can empathy be learned?  To some degree. The capacity for empathy is an innate human trait, and like all of these, there is a spectrum of strength and weakness. Some people are more naturally gifted at quickly sensing other peoples’ experience.  In fact, some of my clients have to be taught to put up an “empathic wall”—too much awareness of other peoples’ feelings cripples their ability to make decisions that lead to disappointment or bad feelings.

    Very successful business leaders are often extremely fast information processors.  With my clients who do not “suffer fools gladly,” I recommend taking a moment to deploy a bit of empathy—what’s behind a colleague’s wish to propose what immediately looks like a dumb idea? Follow with an empathic comment along the lines of “I can see why you got excited about that because it’s an important issue, but unfortunately it would raise compliance problems so we can’t pursue that route.” A 90-second investment of time can prevent the employee’s feeling humiliated and disaffected in the long-term.

    If you’re naturally low on the empathy scale, at least know you have this deficiency and that there is a cost to it. You can learn to check yourself and do what does not come naturally: before you act, school yourself to think of the people who will be affected and what your action will mean to them.  And try to remember to not just recognize but care about that impact on others. You can also make sure you have a trusted advisor who fills in the gap in your skillset.  That advisor must be empowered to stop you if you’re forgetting that there are other people in the world and that their feelings and agendas are not the same as yours—and that these matter.

    Whatever your natural endowment for empathy, your capacity for empathy and skill at deploying it waxes and wanes with your own physical and mental state.  If you’re ill or tired, it’s hard to have empathy for anyone but yourself. If you’re in the throes of creative excitement, it’s disruptive to consider the perspective of others.  And that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t last too long and you know to check back in with the human beings around you.

    Don’t confuse empathy with making people happy or being nice.  Sometimes you’ll suss out another’s perspective and feelings and purposefully ignore them.  Or even use it to gain an advantage.  Essentially empathy is a neutral data gathering tool that enables you to understand the human environment within which you are operating in business and therefore make better predictions, craft better tactics, inspire loyalty and communicate clearly.

  • Want To Avoid A Catastrophe When Hiring A New CEO? Try Using This Simple Checklist

    Want To Avoid A Catastrophe When Hiring A New CEO? Try Using This Simple Checklist

    This post was originally published on the Forbes online Leadership Blog on 11/29/17.

    What are the fundamental cognitive capacities and character traits that a person absolutely must have to fulfill a leadership role when lives and fortunes are at stake?   I became interested in developing a simple tool that defined these fundamentals.   My search was initially prompted by curiosity about the language of the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment, much in the news lately, which states, in Article 4,  that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet can remove a President from duty if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

    I started to wonder how the Vice President and cabinet members would actually critically assess “ability to discharge the powers and  the duties of the office.”  What standard could they use?  A little searching led me to conclude that there really wasn’t such a standard readily available.  But as a psychiatrist, I knew about “ego functions” and “executive functions”, two sets of ideas that together describe in detail the specific mental and emotional components that go into the creation of  a high functioning, reliable adult.

    A little more searching led me to a remarkable document, the Army Field Manual on Leader Development (AFM). In over 130 pages, the AFM lays out the U.S. Army’s expectations regarding core capacities for leadership.  In fact, the AFM is based on the same well-founded psychological knowledge about adult development and functioning that I was familiar with.

    I distilled the AFM’s core leadership competencies, integrated it with my psychiatric knowledge and experience and created a five-point checklist for determining ability to serve in a position of high responsibility.

    But it occurred to me that the President of the United States is far from the only person to whom we entrust our lives or fortunes—the checklist would be useful in a Board’s search for a new CEO, a university’s search for its next President, or even your search for the next nanny you are going to trust with your children’s lives. VC firms considering an investment would be wise to  ensure a company’s CEO possesses these essential capacities.

    In assessing a potential leader, you can’t expect perfection.  But you should expect a leader to be acutely aware of any personal shortcomings and have a positive, ongoing plan to improve and compensate for weaknesses.

    Possession of these core competencies does not guarantee leadership success. It’s the reverse. Serious deficiencies in one or more of these capacities can predict significant problems or failures.

    Five Core Cognitive Capacities And Character Traits A Leader Must Have

    Here is a brief introduction to the five core cognitive capacities and character traits a leader at a very high level of responsibility needs:

    Trust—This includes both the ability to inspire trust and the ability to trust others. The leader lacking in trust can’t form functional teams, is drained of energy by habitually feeling beleaguered and consistently blames others. Mutual trust is essential to the maintenance of an ethical climate in an organization.

    Discipline/Self-control—A leader must have the capacity to contain himself in the fact of strong negative emotions and not resort to angry outbursts, blaming, or impulsive action. Self-control is necessary for a powerful leader to resist temptation, wait for additional information, think before acting, and avoid the abuse of power.

    Critical Thinking/Judgment— The abilities to assess, plan, strategize, problem solve and analyze are all dependent on critical thinking, perhaps the highest level mental function. The capacity for critical thinking allows a leader to anticipate far-reaching consequences of actions, gather and synthesize opinions and data, remember past experiences and use them to inform but not imprison current thinking.

    Self-awareness— A leader lacking in this trait is blind to her weaknesses and biases and therefore unable to compensate for them or grow in capacity. She cannot assess her impact on others and as a result her communications are confusing.  Because she is unable to monitor her own emotional states she is vulnerable to plowing into obstacles or creating crises. Without self-awareness, a leader is dangerously blind to what she doesn’t know.

    Empathy—Empathy is the capacity that allows a leader to understand the perspectives and feelings of others and foresee the impact of his actions and events on them. Effective communication depends on empathy. Without leader empathy, team morale is fragile.  The leader lacking in empathy is driven by his own needs and blind to or indifferent to the needs of others.   Empathy is not the same as compassion, or caring about others’ needs and experience.  Manipulative and authoritarian leaders can be adept at intuiting other peoples’ vulnerabilities and exploiting them.  Adding the capacity to care about—not just perceive—the experience of others creates a beloved leader.

    The search for the traits of great leaders permeates business literature, both popular and academic. What’s different about this model?  Most attempts to identify the traits of great leaders look to real-life examples.  For example, what made Jack Welsh, Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller etc. transformative business leaders?  The five core competencies model starts in the opposite direction.  Based on a solid century of psychological and psychoanalytic research and theory, the model describes the fundamental capacities of a strong, mature, wise, trustworthy, healthy adult human being.  Let’s start there in selecting our leaders.

  • When Leaders Share A Goal But Differ On Strategy–What Do You Do?

    When Leaders Share A Goal But Differ On Strategy–What Do You Do?

    This post was originally published on Forbes online on 10/29/2017.

    Leadership requires some tricky navigating when you share the same final goal with others but disagree about tactics or strategy. This isn’t the most frequent leadership dilemma (except in a partnership where it can be more common) but when it does arise the potential for conflict, rancor and estrangement is significant. How do you negotiate the situation?How do you proceed?

    I recently found myself in this kind of dilemma.In thinking about it, I realized it’s not the first time in my leadership career. My suspicion is that some of us more often find ourselves disagreeing with the larger group. Maybe we’re more contrarian, or maybe we’re more apt to be lone wolves in our thinking.

    I distilled a handful of guiding principles and repetitive patterns during a recent iteration of this dilemma. Observing my own experience as well as those of clients, I also have some suggestions for a meta-strategy (a strategy about strategy) to help in navigating same-goal-different-strategy conflicts.

    Principles And Patterns:

    • Even when we agree on the end goal, it is too easy to see those who have a different strategy as opponents. They’re not.

    • It is incredibly easy to waste energy and time fighting about strategy and tactics and lose sight of the goal.

    • Outsiders (with a different goal) will lump you together, not caring about the strategic differences that you think are so important and only noticing that you share the same goal. These are your real opponents.

    • Emotional attachment to our own strategy idea can cause any of us to lose sight of the goal and forget who are ultimate allies are.

    • Emotions can be very high in these situations, so it’s worthwhile to back off repeatedly from your own passionate advocacy and go through an analytic process (see below).

    • Anxiety is a big (and often unrecognized) part of the problem. Any way you can find to relax or help your “strategic opponents” to do so will help. Ultimately, follow your own path and let your colleagues follow theirs. You can’t control them and their action doesn’t reflect on you. Nor do you have to give up your identity or beliefs.

    What Can You do? You Need A Meta-Strategy

    The solution is a little different depending on whether the disagreement on strategy is occurring within a clearly defined organizational hierarchy versus a loosely knit group of peer leaders or an equal partnership.

    When disagreements occur within a hierarchy, in some ways it’s easier. A CEO or organizational president can, in the end, say, “We’re going to do it my way.” Lacking ultimate decision-making authority, a subordinate can argue her position and then yield when she must.

    But problems can arise here too. If the CEO uses her power to chose a strategy that others disagree with, she risks the disaffection or lack of enthusiastic investment by her team. She even runs the risk of unconscious sabotage if people are angry enough. On the other end of the power dynamic, the subordinate leader who argues her case for a certain strategy and “loses” may be a realist and yield but not be comfortable with the outcome. She has to ask herself then if she can live with the winning strategy. If it’s against her personal ethics or character, she may face a tough decision about leaving the organization.

    When there’s no power hierarchy, as in a group of co-equal professional leaders, the calculus is a little different.

    Dealing effectively with this kind of daunting and draining situation begins with some self-reflection and analysis:

    • Think about the strategy you want to pursue. What are the reasons you’re committed to it? Why do you think it’s going to work?

    • Analyze the strategy of those who agree with you on the ultimate goal but differ on strategy. What’s your objection to their strategy? If your feelings about the “wrongness” of their approach are intense, spend some time thinking about what’s behind that intensity. Do you have a stylistic problem, an ethical problem, or a tactical problem?

    Next take some time to think about the possibilities in your relationship with the person or group you disagree with.

    • Is compromise possible? If everyone stripped away their emotional attachment to his or her strategy (this means you too!) would there be an opportunity for compromise?

    • Can you convert the others to your position?

    • Could you give up your preferred strategy and join them — allow yourself to be converted? Are you holding on to your position out of stubbornness or narcissism, or do you really believe it is the best or most ethical way to proceed?

    Going through this process, it’s important to be realistic about your own personality. Some people are more temperamentally suited to compromise than others. You may be more or less gifted at persuasion — converting others to your point of view. For others, being “converted” and giving up their own position is just too uncomfortable. If you’re not temperamentally suited for compromise, persuasion or conversion, the best path ends up being peaceful co-existence. Know what your talents, skills and predilections are and proceed with that in mind.

    If you’ve considered and rejected or exhausted these three options — converting your allies to your strategy, finding a viable compromise or yielding and joining them, it’s time to go your own way.

    Try to maintain cordial relations with your allies whose strategy you oppose. This can be tricky when the controversy is public. I’ve been put on the spot in a TV debate where I was asked point blank what I thought about my colleagues’ position. I scrambled to say I admired their passion, disagreed with their tactics but agreed on the goal. I was impressed and grateful that my counterpart was very gracious and complimented my work even though I had made it clear that I thought his approach was not just wrong for me but wrong.

    For me, solving this leadership problem is a work in progress, so I’ll close with an inspirational quote.  According to biographer Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson’s political genius lay in his “building contingent majorities and pressing ahead and cutting deals.”

    NY Historical Society

    He was totally devoted to the survival and success of the American experiment, and he would do almost anything to serve that end. He was not at all handcuffed by ideology; if he believed it would serve the American cause, he would do just about anything … And I think that’s what great politicians do. They are committed to a philosophy but are willing to part from dogma to make great things happen.