Rules of Engagement

It’s All in Your Head

If you’re focused on performance, you’re thinking about the wrong things.

March / April 2009 by E. L. Kersten

Being a leader is difficult. You are expected to be technically competent, financially savvy, visionary, inspiring, tough, empathetic, decisive, and emotionally intelligent. You must live with the pressure that your performance will impact the lives of many people: Whether you’re leading a department or an entire company, people depend on you. Sure, somebody else could have stepped into your role, but there was something about you that inspired confidence. You are often told that you were the standout candidate, the best person for the job. Therefore, it’s common for you to want to prove—both to yourself and to others—that you really are the right person.

Ironically, it may be this very aspiration that causes you to stumble. A great deal of research has shown that focusing on proving the adequacy of one’s talents and skills leads to a host of negative consequences, including poor decision-making, burnout, and strained interpersonal relations. Consequently, the intensity of your desire to succeed may actually undermine your ability to succeed.

Why is that? Because you may have a mindset that circumvents your capacity to grow and adapt to complex and changing circumstances.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has been studying mindsets for more than thirty years. She and her colleagues have found that people tend to approach situations from either a growth mindset or a performance mindset, the consequence of which has a profound impact on how they will respond to difficulties and setbacks. Those with a growth mindset believe that they develop their skills through effort, practice, trial and error, and adaptation. For them, obstacles and setbacks are not just normal—they’re an essential part of expanding their capacity.

In contrast, those with a performance mindset view their abilities as inherent traits that they possess to one degree or another. As a result, when they are working on tasks that require these skills, their goal is to prove that they have them in sufficient quantities in order to succeed. One of the more crippling features of this mindset is the assumption that struggle and hard work are signs of low ability. Therefore, unexpected effort, obstacles, and setbacks threaten their perceptions of competence—whether they’re evaluating themselves or others.

As a result, in situations that are complex or novel, leaders with a growth mindset have an advantage, since they are much better at handling complexity and ambiguity, likelier to persevere in the face of difficulties, and more apt to learn from obstacles and setbacks. Though they’re not immune to profound disappointment, they have a greater capacity to bounce back from failures. Meanwhile, when the going gets tough, executives with a performance mindset often get frustrated and discouraged. They also have a harder time regulating their emotions when they’re under pressure, so it’s not uncommon for them to get angry and lash out at others. Not surprisingly, when confronted with failure, they’re more likely to look for a scapegoat to blame than for a root cause to address.

Given the immense, constant pressure to perform in the business world, it’s no surprise that many leaders end up adopting a performance mindset. Indeed, many executives find success with such an outlook. But that shouldn’t imply that there isn’t a better way of thinking—for a performance mindset can easily become an Achilles heel that ultimately undermines an executive’s effectiveness.

I saw this happen to a very talented IT executive whose performance mindset derailed his career. Jeff was technically competent, charming, and good-natured. As a result, he was respected and well-liked by his peers and subordinates, often praised by his boss and generally considered a rising star. When his boss abruptly decided to leave the company, he recommended that Jeff take his place. Though Jeff was younger and less experienced than his cohorts, everyone agreed that he was the right person for the job. In his new role, he was now responsible for setting the company’s IT strategy, overseeing the development and implementation of several IT systems, and responding to the IT needs of various business units. Many of these tasks were novel for Jeff, but this was his dream job, and he was confident he could succeed.

Jeff started out fine but quickly ran into trouble. The legacy projects he had inherited were fraught with problems that were only just then coming to light, and various quarters of the company blamed him. He also had a difficult time getting his key reports to step up and assume leadership roles. Despite these setbacks, most people judged him an improvement over his predecessor . . . but he felt as though he was failing miserably. He believed that he should have been better able to motivate his employees, solve the pre-existing problems, and stop the complaints. But he couldn’t, at least not as quickly as he’d expected, and he confided in me one day, “This is no longer fun, and I’m losing interest. I know myself. When I lose interest, I don’t last long.” And he didn’t. Jeff left the company about six weeks later and took a job at a much smaller firm. His response was typical for someone with a performance mindset: He backed away from a difficult challenge and decided to do something in his comfort zone so that he could restore his sense of competence.

Of course, retreating from a situation is not the only way in which people with a performance mindset choose to respond to threats to their self-perceptions. Sometimes they fight back. I saw a chief technology officer attempt to humiliate a colleague as an act of revenge. What had the colleague done? He reported the negative business impact of a failing technical system that was the responsibility of the CTO’s division. The CTO was unaware of the problem and embarrassed, but rather than try to learn more about the problem to resolve it, he denied that it existed and attempted to undermine the credibility of the colleague who reported the issue. Not surprisingly, this type of response was part of a pattern for this CTO, and the company eventually pushed him out. He was a genuinely smart and charismatic individual, but his performance mindset prevented him from acknowledging and addressing his missteps, and it transformed his colleagues into combatants.

Fortunately, you can change your mindset. Those with a performance mindset can make efforts to focus on skills rather than traits, and reinforce the idea that obstacles and challenges are essential to developing abilities. They can also resist obsessing over setbacks and concentrate on steps to prevent them in the future.

Just as important, adopting a growth mindset encourages others to do so, too. Mindsets beget mindsets, so if a leader demonstrates a performance mindset, it’s highly likely that those who work for him will adopt one as well. In a situation where the work is easy and routine, a performance mindset is not much of a barrier to success, but in a challenging situation that is marked by complexity, a performance mindset can limit growth, stifle innovation, reduce motivation, and prompt a variety of maladaptive responses: wasting time on irrelevant but non-threatening activities; outbursts of anger, backbiting, and revenge; passive-aggressive resistance.

On the other hand, a growth mindset that focuses on the expansion of one’s capacity is more likely to facilitate growth and boost performance. In short, it may be time for many of today’s leaders to hit their minds’ reset buttons.

 

E. L. KERSTEN E. L. Kersten is co-founder and COO of Despair Inc. and author of The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company’s Least Valuable Asset—Your Employees.