Escape From Excellence

Imagine two successful leaders. Let’s call one leader S, and the other C. At this time, S is trapped in excellence, while C is in mastery. If excellence and mastery are like apples and oranges, these two will have very little in common. But not so fast; they’re both fruits, both grow on trees, and both start out life similarly. So it is with our two leaders. They share much in common, up to a point. But after that point, S became ensnared in the Excellence Trap, while C evolved to Leadership Mastery.

After the break, an article length case study follows that outlines in detail what the Excellence Trap and Leadership Mastery can look like in the real life of two CEO’s. Both pursued excellence. One became ensnared in the excellence trap, while the other achieved Leadership Mastery.

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This post shares a personal anecdote to make a point about Leadership Mastery, specifically the results of leading from vision in mastery, vs. managing in excellence. We recently moved to a new house that we are remodeling and renovating. The entire project gave me an opportunity to overcome my personal bad side (controlling, micro-managing, worrying), and gave me a chance to practice what I preach. An example of Leaderdship Mastery in action?

Background: We live at home, and we also work at home. In addition, we exercise at home, and my audio recording studio is at home. We’ll do pod and video casting from home. So it’s not just a house, it’s headquarters. Upon moving in, we immediately needed: a new kitchen, a new mudroom, a new roof and roofline, two new offices and a meeting room. We also needed a master plan for improved deck, patio, planting, bathrooms, and for a fourth floor media room. Also, the offices and studio would need acoustic treatments for soundproofing. My wife Michele and I collaborate on everything, and we really enjoy design. But the stakes are high and the budget is never high enough! Plus, we’ve already got a lot on our plates. Would this put undue strain on us? It’s a very enlightening micro-case study.

Managing from Excellence would have had us set big goals regarding scope, timing, and costs, do extensive due diligence, assemble and vet a crack team, closely manage the details, require hard work, seek efficiencies, confirm quality, confront unexpected crises, acknowledge emotional needs, and manage all of this against strategic goals based on our desired outcomes (multiple usage, business growth). Had we taken this approach, perhaps the team (architects, vendors, contractors, and sub-contractors) would have respected and admired us in the end, and maybe they would have feared us. We’d meet our contractual obligations, always act professionally, and maybe tip a few people. Either way, the job would be done on time, on budget and well. And it would have nearly killed me, and everyone who had to deal with me! The Excellence Trap would have extracted its inevitable hidden costs.

Instead we chose Leadership Mastery, leading to an experience in which the ”only-do-it-if-you-have-to-because-it’s hell” of remodeling turned out to be a piece of cake, a delight, with better results at a lower price, and at a lower personal and business cost. How did we do it? By leading from vision; by inviting, enthusing, and inspiring everyone we worked with to participate in that vision; by encouraging them to bring their vision to the project; and then by getting out of the way! More specifically, we made the Five Shifts of Leadership Mastery.

Here’s the story, as briefly as I can tell it: (more…)

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.