Escape From Excellence

I recently spoke with the members of the senior management team of a global industry leader, all of whom described the team, each other, and even themselves, as all but paralyzed by fear. The fear of being called out by the CEO, criticized by the CEO, thrown under the bus by the CEO (or each other), of making alliances, of taking a stand, of not knowing something, of the person below them who wants their job. As with any senior management team at a successful company, this is a group of highly accomplished, well compensated, confident players with strong personalities and a take-the-hill mindset, individually and collectively. So what the hell is going on? Labeling the CEO a tyrant is most likely true, but it’s a cop out. Why? Because masters have no fear. If there was ever a group of people trapped in excellence and back-sliding into mediocrity and failure, this was it.

We are all hardwired for fear, as a way to protect ourselves. This is good. But in a business setting, strategic acumen is too often replaced by crippling fear. Not good. Let’s take a look at fear from the perspectives of failure, mediocrity, excellence, and mastery. Only mastery has no fear.

For the failure, fear takes over. The fear of a failure is terror. Terror paralyzes us into inaction, and defeats us. We become weak in the face of fear, choosing a flight response. The actions we do take are desperate, leading nowhere. Metaphor: the Deer, frozen in the headlights.

For the mediocre, fear manifests in swagger or bravado, which only denies fear and overcompensates with a fight response. The mediocre person rallies themself and blusters their way into a fight. Their actions are misguided and wasteful. They are aggressive and mercurial, and at times violent. But it is only themselves they are hurting. Metaphor: the Stinging Bee.

In the excellence trap, we see bravado evolve into bravery. Bravery is good insofar as it draws upon our internal character to find the strength to face fear. Excellent people do what they have to do, despite fear, and they work hard to do it well. Metaphor: the Adventurer. The problem is that they are still in fear, and fear takes a toll. No person functions at a peak level in fear, whteher they face it or not. No leader innovates, makes wise decisions, and holds a vision at a masterful level when in fear. They can only hope to maintain or, at best, grow just a little. Any it appears that many excellent leaders are in fear much of the time.

In mastery, the leader has no fear. He or she doesn’t give in to it, attack it, or even face it; they simply don’t have it! A leadership master reframes fear as an illusion and rejects it. Everyone else around them is either shaking in their boots, lashing out, or living with a knot in their stomach, but not the master. He or she replaces all this fear with trust: in themselves, their resources, other people and their ability to work with the best in people, and in life itself. This is not a naive trust, but rather a wise equinimity or unflappability in the face of challenges or imagined dangers. Masters know that fear is a con. Metaphor: the Acrobat. They use all that the absence of fear leaves them with to soar high, dazzle, and inspire.

So when a wise sage says, “Have no fear,” they mean exactly that! They didn’t say “Be brave,” as admirable as that is. Instead, they called us to change the game.

So I ask the terrified and terrorized managers: what’s worse? getting your ass handed to you by a tyrant, or losing your mojo? Being embarrased, and maybe even punished, or sacrificing the best of you on the alter of  mediocrity and failure, at best pushing the boulder uphill while stuck in the excellence trap? ”Hey, I want to keep my job and get promoted so I can be good to my kids” some of them might protest. Give me a break! No kid wants or needs a compromised and fearful zombie dressed up as an exec for a parent. And no wise CEO will promote one. No, better to work toward mastery, so fear simply goes away. Masters ALWAYS flourish. And a group of Masters in one place is unstoppable. I recommend that this management team work to that goal, and I work with all of my clients to exactly that goal. I must say, maybe the CEO isn’t a tyrant. Perhaps he is challenging them to get past fear, however clumsily (Hmm..can there be a zen tyrant? Probably).

Here’s an exercise. Try this at home, or during a commute or trip. Make an inventory of everything you have decided in the past day, week, month, year, decade, or lifetime (focus only on bigger decisions as the timeframe expands). Be brutally honest, and then put each decision into one of two columns. Column one represents the House of Fear, and column two is the House of Faith (or Trust). Bluster and bravado will only screw it up, so put that aside if it shows up. And bravery, while excellent and admirable, carries a cost. Be honest.  Do any decisions seem masterful, truly fearless? Put them in the House of Faith column. Let’s work for more of that!

I live for Leadership Mastery, and I invite you to experience it. But what is it?

Let’s start with mastery itself, and what it is not. Mastery isn’t the pinnacle of excellence. You don’t reach it by being most excellent, in Ted-speak. That will only keep you out of mastery. Mastery is different from excellence not in degree, but in kind. Every master knows this; but nobody else seems to be in on the secret. As Charlie Parker said, “Learn all this stuff (to be excellent) and then forget it (to be a master).”

So what is it? Mastery is when performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. That bears repeating. In mastery, performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. It accounts for how the best athletes, performers, artists, sages, and even warriors can blow our minds with what they do, inspire us, and serve as iconic frames of reference, while making it look easy, with grace and style. It is what differentiates the best from the rest, decisively.

 But what is Leadership Mastery? This used to be a tough question because, unlike athletes, performers, etc., leaders have not had a vision or path to mastery. So most have been trapped in excellence. The only exception would be if a leader had achieved mastery in another field and translated it somehow to his or her own leadership in an organization. This is extremely rare because most people, if they are masters in a field (for example golf, acting, painting, music, thinking, or inventing) stick to that field; it is their identity.

Like all mastery, Leadership Mastery is defined by exponentially increased performance and dramatically reduced costs. In organizational leadership we see more innovation, alignment, efficiency, sustainability, focus, capacity, integrity, return, growth, and vision, and less struggle for that extra increment of performance, as well as dramatically less of the financial and human costs that characterize the merely excellent organization. The masterful leader aligns more, inspires more, gets it right more often, sees more, creates more, and keeps himself or herself whole in mind, body and spirit in a way that is remarkable to all who observe, follow, or compete with them. They soar high, while appearing relaxed and ready for more. Leaders in Mastery put incremental growth and marginal change, achieved at a high cost, behind them once and for all. And so do their teams, organizations, and partners.

It’s not magic, not a put on. It’s not superhuman. It’s not the result of cutting a deal at the crossroads. But it is rare. And it is teachable and reachable because leaders now have a path to mastery. This blog, my keynote speaking, workshops, and work with clients all focus on doing exactly this. If you are tired of seeing excellent people and organizations pay a high price for incremantal growth and marginal change, you’ve already taken the first step. So welcome!

We’ve all experienced the joy of watching a young child develop a passion. We see them bonding with one particular toy, banging on a drum without ceasing, dressing up like their hero, playing air guitar, or appearing to be glued to a tennis racket or baseball mitt. Eventually, one parent says, “For Pete’s sake, sign that kid up for some lessons!” Soon after, and usally as a card is about to be swiped, the “discipline talk” happens: “Well junior, (insert hero’s name here) had to work to get where they are. It’s wonderful that you love it, but it takes hard work, mastery of the fundamentals, practice, and discipline.” If the passion is real, the youngster takes this crucial advice to heart and begins the long journey to excellence.

Ah, but once inside excellence, as an adult, the relationship between discipline and passion is reversed. We’ve got the discipline, but passion can be in short supply, particularly when “vocation” and “career” are rarely the same thing. Think about it: We are surrounded by disciplined people who hold both themselves and others accountable to high standards and to an admirable work ethic. And the occasional junior or middle manager will even make quite a show of saying, “I have a passion for (insert business category here). ” But who really believes it? Ninety nine percent of the time it’s a put on, a crock, BS on toast. It fools no one, except maybe them. Many people trapped in excellence, meaning most of us, can say “I love my job” but then fantasize about exit strategies, seek compensatory rewards, and play the lottery anyway!

No, in business, we are mistaken if we assume that we and our people generate and sustain passion by looking forward to our paycheck, benefits, perks, prestige, and even our generalized passion for winning. That’s the Excellence Trap in action. Passion has to come from somewhere deeper, and Leadership Mastery unleashes it. A leader in mastery will overcome the narrow and shallow focus on discipline (and effort, skill, etc), to realize that the true driver of greatness for a leader, a team, and an entire enterprise, is the kind of passion that comes from the gut, the core, the soul. And this from each person, from the culture, and even from the market and the brands. As senior leaders, we need to connect with that passion, and help others to do the same. Otherwise, leadership mastery, enterprise mastery, and market mastery will elude us, and we will struggle for marginal advantage inside the Excellence Trap. So here’s to passion, and to profits. And here’s to finding both!

Daniel Plainview, the character brought to life in a staggering performance by Daniel Day Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s celebrated new film, There Will be Blood, is an outsized character of mythic proportion. So, while we are unlikely to meet someone like Plainview in real life, he presents a lesson, example, archetype, or “plain view” that speaks to all of us. I saw the movie recently, at the precise moment when I was searching for an easy way to communicate what the Excellence Trap is like, and how we come to be ensnared in it. Enter Daniel Plainview.

Daniel Plainview fancies himself a leader, a self-made man who will create something huge, create jobs, make history, and maybe even start a movement. When we first meet him, prospecting for oil, he embodies the Five Virtues of Excellence: Effort, Proficiency, Commitment, Expertise, and Acumen. He displays vision, tenacity, a willingness to take risks, and an admirable individualism and determination. Failure and mediocrity are simply not on his radar. At first, I like this guy, until he opens his mouth, 15-20 minutes into the movie, and we meet the monster he will become. While most people trapped in excellence are in no way monstrous like Plainview, he does show us, on a grand and mythic scale, what we are bound confront if we aloow ourselves to think that excellence is the end of the road. If we are excellent, we are unlikely to turn into the likes of Plainview, but we will confront the same dynamics, each in our own way. You can bank on that in the same way Plainview banks on himself and his oil.

Plainview’s problems set in when he reaches the Five Limits of Excellence, those built-in ceilings which undermine the positive aspects of excellence:

• His Effort is limited by his physical limits: he is merely a man and, to drive the point home, he is hobbled for life by an on-the-job injury. He reached this limit early on.
• His Proficiency won’t set him apart. He knows this, and so looks with seething rage upon anyone who has a measure of proficiency in his chosen profession of “Oilman,” from the executives of Standard Oil to, eventually, his own adopted son.
• His Commitment saps his strength, and in Plainview’s case, his soul as well. His mono-mania about success cuts him off from other people almost completely, he is often drunk or at the verge of rage, and he subjects himself and others to unnecessary hardships and dangers, far beyond any practical reasoning or benefit.
• His Expertise lacks vision. Early in the film, he appears possibly to have the makings of a visionary. But his ego, fear, greed, and paranoia cause him to miss opportunities or to see the larger picture. His isolation increases with each major episode in the film, as he manages to sucker people into his plans, but fails to attract anyone to a vision, because there is no vision to be seen.
• His Acumen reduces strategy to tactics. His obsession about competitive jockeying takes over his entire person, and he ends up bitter, alone, and un-admired (he calls his butler his “closest associate”). He has no allies, defenders, zealots, partners, and no lasting legacy other than violence, deceit, and hatred.

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A recent short article in the January, 2008, Special HBR Centennial Issue devoted to Leadership and Strategy is an unwitting example of the Excellence Trap in action. And it gives us a great opportunity to dispel a few myths floating around in the self-limited world of excellence, using the content of the article only as a jumping off point. The article is called Love and Fear and the Modern Boss, by HBS Prof. Scott A. Snook, and can be summarized like this: ever since back before Machiavelli wrote The Prince, leaders have wrestled with the difficult either-or choice of whether it is better to be loved (the soft style) or feared (the hard style). For a long time, fear won. In recent decades, however, there has been an established trend among top thinkers and leaders that favors love rather than fear as a management style. However, the author concludes, the successful leader will know how and when to use each, and will seek stretch assignments that help them develop untapped strengths. End of article.

That’s it? We’re to do both fear and love well, and balance them skillfully? Where does that leave us? Putting aside any of our beliefs about the benefits of either management style, it leaves us with three popular myths to dispel:

Excellence Myth 1: When you confront an either-or choice, you must choose wither A or B.

Leaders trapped in excellence are smart to consider both sides of the classic big choices. Unfortunately, most people, most of the time, look at whatever A and B represent and consider these to be facts, realities, limits, something we must work within and choose between. This isn’t true, and can only be thought to be true by people trapped in excellence and ignorant of mastery. Mastery knows better. Mastery knows that 99% of all either-or’s are false. Just ask everyone from Captain James Kirk to philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (he wrote three big books to make a similar point point. I’m saving you the trouble of reading them). Mastery doesn’t ride roughshod over facts and ignore reality. Rather it transforms reality. Real masters survey the landscape and rewrite the map. Warning: don’t try to do this from a place of ego; it’s not the same thing. The macho leader will be tempted to shout, “Do both!” But that’s a pose and is doomed to fail (and in the case of using soft and hard styles, will get you labeled passive-aggressive, and just for the record, the recipients of passive-aggressive behavior can go a little nuts). It’s not about choosing one or doing both. It’s about making something new.

Excellence Myth 2: When you confront an either-or choice, you must balance A and B.

Nope. Balance is one of the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence, all of which try and fail to overcome the Limits of Excellence and mitigate the Costs of Excellence. (We’ll discuss all of this in detail in later posts. For now, the other failed strategies are Denial, Toughness, Acceptance, and Escapism). Balance is a cop out, or to quote myself in what I hope becomes a classic, “Balance is bullshit.” Balance is an energy-sucking juggling act that compromises everything and achieves nothing. Again, mastery looks beyond A and B, and creates a new reality. It discovers, discerns, and creates what people trapped in excellence fail to see and act upon. And then it leads.

Excellence Myth 3: Leadership is about greater skills and better application.

Hell no! Skills enable action, they don’t take action, and they sure don’t make choices or create possibilities. Skill is a jumping off point, a means, not an end. I know for certain that the last thing on the mind of a master when in the arena, in the game, on the stage, on the battlefield, or in the boardroom, is skill. Failure says, “I have no skill.” Mediocrity says, “I have to improve my skills.” And Excellence says, “My skills are excellent.” But Mastery says, “I can rely on my skills, but if I become conscious of them even for a moment, I am lost.” Instead, Mastery is in flow, mastery is un-self-aware, mastery improvises.

These myths exist in the Excellence Trap, but are nowhere to be found in mastery. Let’s face it, a leader can go far even if he or she stay in excellence; in fact, it’s necessary to pass though excellence; you can’t skip it. Excellence is excellent for a reason. The issue is this: can you have exponentially higher innovation, energy, sustainability, alignment, advantage, and success than you have now, then your competition, over the long haul? Not within excellence, not inside the Excellence Trap.

Oh yes, what about hard and soft management styles? It’s not either-or, and it’s not both-and. It’s funny to remember those job interviews where the interviewer asks the appilicant to navigate an either-or, a tough choice they are likely to confront on the job. The prepared job-seeker, pursuing excellence, proclaims, “Do both! It’s a both-and! In balance!” Impressive. They seem excellent. They get hired. “Great success,” to quote Borat. But later, when they pass the Limits of Excellence and incur the Costs of Excellence, and struggle for marginal advantage and incremental growth, they might then make the leap into mastery and realize that great leaders are neither hard nor soft; that’s the wrong question (hint: either-or’s are usually the wrong question). Masterful leaders focus on their vision, and the vision of others. They engage, inspire, and align. They look for the greatness that drives the great idea, and they create the conditions for it, daily. They do whatever it takes to ensure that the highest number of people will have, with stunning regularity, implementable, sustainable, differentiated business ideas that drive short term success and long term advantage. And for leaders in Mastery, that’s easy. They can’t not do it.