Escape From Excellence

We see it all the time. Hardworking, achievement-oriented, capable, and experienced people experiencing the pain in the Excellence Trap. This means enduring the Five Costs of Excellence that add up to the largest hidden cost in business (and in life): Depletion, Compromise, Incrementalism, Misalignment and Egoism. No one likes this very much, so humankind has developed five popular strategies for dealing with it. The problem is, they all fail to deliver us from excellence. In fact, they only make it worse. We call them the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence and will discuss them in detail below.  The good news is this: if you are experiencing the limits of these strategies, you’re ready to escape from excellence and experience Leadership Mastery.

The Five Failed Strategies are these: Denial, Toughness, Acceptance, Escapism, and Balance. Let’s discuss each of them…

Denial says “tune out.” It ignores the reality of the limits, corruptions, and costs experienced in the excellence trap and merely treads water. This is the strategy of the weak.

Toughness says “tough it out.” It merely confronts the problem rather than solves it. Unlike denial, it accepts the reality of the challenge, it just ignores its impact. This is the strategy of the strong but foolish.

Acceptance sees “no way out.” It accepts defeat and diverts attention to focus on future fantasies, exit strategies, and lowered expectations. This is the strategy of the dreamer.

Escapism wants to “drop out.” It leaves the game rather than working to change it. This is the strategy of the quitter.

Balance is a “cop out.” It is the mother of all failed strategies, but very popular these days. If you are “seeking balance,” stop now! You have been sold a bill of goods. Balance juggles everything and accomplishes nothing. It seeks to manage the situation rather than change the game. This is the strategy of the duped.

We can spend a lifetime working with these failed strategies, but the only way to get past the costs of excellence is to escape from excellence, by making the qualitative shift to Leadership Mastery.

Let’s talk about the crucial idea of the Falling Point. This is where the rubber meets the road, or really more like where the poop hits the fan. This explains just how and when the Excellence Trap gets us.

When we surpass the built-in limit of any of the Virtues of Excellence, which inevitably occurs, we reach the Falling Point. When this happens, our lifelong upward arc gradually takes a new direction, and at first we don’t even notice. This is the great irony of being excellent; eventually it bites us, and we don’t know why. But, like a subatomic particle or distant star, we can’t see it directly; we can only “see” it by its effects.

These effects include all the costs and challenges that we observe confronting those hardworking, well- intentioned, capable, successful, and excellent people we mentioned earlier: struggling to achieve the extra 5%, sustain peak performance and innovation, while confronting merely incremental change, marginal outcomes, limited advantage, and inconsistent inspiration, focus, and alignment with values and goals.

The Falling Point is sort of like the point of diminishing returns, except that it is really more like the point of incurring and accruing hidden and unnecessary costs. Big difference.

The moment we reach the Falling Point, on any one of the Virtues, the Corruptions of Excellence set in and the Costs of Excellence come racing behind. This explains why good people aren’t enjoying a life of mastery. And this is precisely what forces the choice between 1. falling back into mediocrity or 2. ascending to mastery, if you’re even fortunate enough to make the choice; most driven people just stick it out in excellence, not knowing what hit them, until the costs become too high. In the meantime, they ride the roller coaster, play the odds, and try to beat the clock, all the while wasting time with the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence.

But take heart, every master was there once. Then they escaped from excellence.

 Remeber this: We don’t cross the Falling Point because we have failed in any way. Quite the opposite. We only cross it if we are excellent! And that is how excellence traps us, every time.

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!

Let’s stipulate that you, and most of the people you surround yourself with, can rightly be called excellent. As a basic definition, we’ll say that an excellent person is someone did or has had most of the following things:

• Good schools, good grades
• Good jobs
• Top companies
• Strong track record
• Powerful resume
• Significant responsibility
• Hard work
• Wise choices
• Terrific skills
• Commitment to success
• Good opportunities

Here’s the question: if this is so, then why is it that most of these same excellent people still struggle daily with a multitude of limits and a series of vexing challenges? These include sustaining productivity, consistently innovating, maximizing relationships, articulating a differentiating vision, leveraging competitive advantage, keeping it fun, and experiencing exponential increases in business outcomes and personal rewards. Add your own. Why do we settle for incremental change and marginal gains?

Is it just the way things are? Is it just the human condition? I say no! I say something is very wrong with this picture. We know that excellence isn’t enough, and we know that excellence, by its very nature, has built-in limits and unavoidable dynamics that actually contribute to the problem. That’s what makes it a trap. It’s like a Greek tragedy where the audience knows where this is leading, and it isn’t good. Well, the perspective of Mastery is like the audience. We see the trap that excellent people are in, but unlike a Greek audience, we can do something about it.

Here’s a bonus question: Is the entire industry devoted to maximizing success (including leadership development, management training, corporate shrinks, etc.) making a qualitative difference? Obviously not. The limits, challenges, and problems still exist, and the industry designed to help remains in place. Why aren’t the problems solved and the helpers out of business? We believe that it is because until now no one has understood how, why, and even that excellence is a trap, and no one has created a specific path out of the excellence trap and to mastery, specifically for leaders. We have, and we share all of our insights and knowledge about it on this blog. Look for our upcoming e-book, and if you want to access the tools that will help you, your team, and your enterprise make the change from excellence to mastery, you can visit us here.