What works today may not work tomorrow – or in another place. Merely very good leaders can become prisoners of their own success: they cling on to a formula until the world changes and they become irrelevant. We should want to grow and improve, but our minds get trapped in one or more of four prisons that stop us growing. They are deadly, invisible prisons of the mind. So, how can you spot your prison?
This is the gilded prison. The more successful we are, the stronger the prison walls become. If you become a CEO with a good track record, you will not take kindly to an expert coming along and telling you that you need to learn how to improve. But then the world changes: you may have to move from growing to cutting. If you cannot adapt, you leave. If you want to escape your personal prison of success, you need to start preparing for your next role. Understand what you will have to do and the skills you will need to learn. Start preparing and adapting.
Most people let themselves slowly fossilise. We do not even realise that we are getting set in our ways. Think about your favourite music, films and books. The more we play our favourite music, the more we encode memories and emotions. But emotions are not a reliable way to remember or to learn. We are attached to the past, but the past is a poor guide to the future.
Performance means different things to different people. Here is one version: meet your targets; stick to the process; don’t mess up; give appraisals; ensure compliance; improve. This may not be the most inspiring culture, but it is likely to be effective. It will deliver and it will perform. But it may not help you learn or change – or outperform very well. Here is an alternative view of performance: Most of the world is moving from being stable to being dynamic, but performance requirements stop us moving, learning or improving. We get better and better at a way of doing things that is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Swathes of Western industry were decimated in the 1980s and 1990s by the Japanese. They succeeded in consumer electronics, cars, office equipment and more because they changed the rules of the game. The performance prison is beguiling. Focusing on performance sounds like what all managers should do. But in a dynamic world it risks making us redundant as competitors change the rules on us.
The prison of fear is the fear of failure, which even has its own name: atychiphobia. There are three sides to this prison: praise, perfectionism and competition. 1. Praise can be as damaging as criticism. Teachers know that if you praise the achievement of a small child, the child will keep on doing the same thing. If instead, the teacher praises the effort the child has put in, then the child will learn that effort gains praise. Effort is more likely to lead to growth and learning, rather than simply repeating what has worked before. To knock down this wall, praise the effort, not the achievement, and recognise that this is how you can also grow. 2. Perfectionism can be healthy: Michelangelo did not take any shortcuts in completing the Sistine Chapel or his other masterpieces. But there is a difference between high standards and extreme perfectionism – normal versus neurotic. Neurotic perfectionism leads to loss of confidence and self-esteem when you do not achieve perfection and avoidance of challenges.
The biggest ideas may lead to the biggest improvements, but often have the biggest obstacles
3. Competition – we do not want to lose and, what’s more, we like to think that we are better than our peers. So anything that tells us that we are not as good can be devastating. Corporate evaluation systems recognise this and routinely rate 80-90% of staff as above average. This is statistically impossible, but emotionally inevitable. The result is we avoid competition and often avoid learning. Knowing that these prisons exist at least alerts us to their risks. But to escape the prisons and to keep out of them, we need to establish positive routines for ourselves. We need to hone our growth mindset.
All mindsets are matters of habit and the growth mindset is no different. You can think of it as a cycle of growth with four steps: challenge, test, learn and adapt. The first step is to challenge yourself – not to climb Mount Everest necessarily. It is more modest, but absolutely constant. Ask yourself: how can I stretch to a new goal? How can I improve? How can I change? How can I try something new? Once you have your challenge, you need to find a way to meet it. You will look in vain to find a textbook answer to the ambiguous and messy challenges of life at work, so you have to discover a workable solution in practice. You may want to test different ways of dealing with a difficult boss, for instance. You might look at how other team members or colleagues interact with him or her. Start trying different approaches. Keep testing until you find a way that works consistently. The growth mindset is about constant learning, and the lessons we value the most are things we discover for ourselves. There are two questions we can ask ourselves at the end of any meeting, call or at the end of the day:
WWW is essential in good times and when things go awry. In the face of setbacks, it is natural to focus on what went wrong. That quickly gets into blame, which helps no one. Focus on silver linings that may help you in the future. EBI is the antidote to the normal inquest question of ‘what went wrong?’. It forces you to think about how you could do things better in future. There is not much point in learning unless you put your learning into practice and adapt. Knowing you will put your learning into practice puts a hard edge on your learning and debriefs with your team. So, when you have gone through your WWW/EBI, take your debrief to the next level and ask:
This sorts the wheat from the chaff. You may have a mixture of radical ideas and easy-to-do ideas. Take on the easy ideas anyway. Build your confidence by finding some early wins – actions that lead to improvement fast. The temptation is to put the radical ideas into a special file called ‘too difficult’ or the one next to it called ‘too risky’. That is a waste. The biggest ideas may lead to the biggest improvements, but often have the biggest obstacles: time, effort and risk. If you find a big idea, focus on it. Start by looking at all the benefits of the idea – if this idea works the way you want it to work, how much better will things be? Size the prize: if the prize is big enough, it is worth putting in the effort to make it happen.
Jo Owen is a leadership author, speaker and social entrepreneur. This article is taken from his book The Mindset of Success (Kogan Page, 2017) This article was taken from The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership