Help star performers prepare for future setbacks

Today I read a very interesting piece by Sarah Green in the HBR Blog Network. Entitled "Star Performers Need Extra Affirmation After a Setback," it references a study by Jennifer Carson Marr of Georgia Institute of Technology and Stefan Thau of London Business School, which studied baseball players who lost their salary arbitration hearings. The study finds that the performance of star players suffered after the ruling, even though they had plenty of incentive (playing for next year's salary) to succeed. The analogy is that star performers in business can suffer the same pitfall after a career setback, such as a failed project.

The analogy makes sense - business stars don't fail very often, and tend to be showered with praise along the way. An objective failure, therefore, can feel devastating since it's so out of step with the norm.

Green recommends affirmation for star performers and their managers to help them deal with these situations. I'd also add some tough love - before the fact. As part of the career development process, managers should work with stars to expose them to low-risk failure situations - i.e., a small project that faces significant obstacles - to practice managing adversity and resourcefulness. An example would be applying to a conference to do a speech when the organizers are looking for more-senior executive speakers.

If the employee wins the assignment, it's a significant achievement. If she is rejected, the downside is very low, and the lessons of adversity and failure are experiences. When the bigger failure inevitably comes, she will be better prepared to handle it.

Story: don't pretend to be something you're not

This brief story was related by Dolf van den Brink, chief executive of Heineken USA, and was published in Adam Bryant's Corner Office column in the New York Times:

One big mistake I made came from listening to a lot of the advice I heard before I took the job. People told me: “Dolf, you need to be strong. You need to command respect because this is a tough environment.” I was 32, and I probably looked 28, so I tried to behave and look older than I was. After three months I was losing weight, we weren’t getting any traction, and I was drained. My wife said to me: “Just be yourself. Stop pretending.” I started wearing casual clothes and just started being myself.

From HBR - how to recover from being fired

This post from John Beeson on the HBR Blog Network has some good advice on bouncing back from losing your job:

You've just received word that you've been fired. Or perhaps the company has gone through a re-structuring and eliminated your job — and you've been told that none of the managers you've worked with over the years have a position for you on their team. This comes as a shock to your system, especially if you've enjoyed a record of success up to this point in your career. While there are some practical things to attend to — negotiating your severance, signing up references, and agreeing with the company on a storyline about the reason for your exit — your most important action item is managing your own attitude to the situation....

As you dust yourself off, think through those parts of the situation you need to own. In a highly emotional state, it's too easy for you to curse the darkness: "I had a bad boss." "The place was rife with organizational politics." "My colleagues were non-cooperative and had it in for me." There may be some truth to this, but you also need to ask yourself, "What do I need to accept about the experience to avoid making the same mistakes so I can succeed in the future?"

Losing your job is a very particular type of failure. It's likely the most emotionally painful event of your career. Analyzing your role in the situation is not natural; you will want instead to lash out and place blame on others (as Beeson writes, this may very well be the case), or to fall into a funk of despair. But to bounce back, better to "own" the outcome and figure out what lessons you can take into the rest of your career.

Steve Martin learned performing through documenting & reflecting on his own work

Steve Martin's memoir "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life" is a great document of a performer's growth from novice to superstar. The most fascinating sections deal with his teenage years, when, through experiences working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, Martin decides to pursue a career in show business. These are also the most fondly-remembered parts of his life (as opposed to his decidedly mixed view of the last six or seven years of his standup career, when he sold millions of records and sold out arenas across the country).

Martin's systematic desire to improve struck home with me. Even in his midteens, as he was honing his magic act, he had already developed a practice that most of us (at any age) could benefit from:

Following the advice in "Showmanship for Magicians," I kept scrupulous records of how each gag played afer my local shows for the Cub Scouts or Kiwanis Club. "Excellent!" or "Big laugh!" or "Quiet," I would write in the margins of my Big Indian tablet; then I would summarize how I could make the show better next time.

The habit of self-review continued as he shifted to comedy and became a small-time headliner in California clubs. And, in another lesson we can all learn from, he acted on what he learned, for example in this mistake story:

In case I ad-libbed something wonderful, I began taping my shows with a chintzy cassette recorder. I had a routine in which I played a smug party guy with a drink in his hand. When the bit started, the waitresses brought me a glass of wine that I would use as a prop. When that glass was empty, they would bring me another. One night I listened to the tape and could hear myself slurring. I never had a drink before or during a show again.

It's very easy to let moments pass, especially when they may be embarrassing or tell us something we'd rather not know. But in those moments, Martin shows us, are the data that tell us how to get better at what we do. "Born Standing Up" shows that substantial careers start small, and improve day by day over years - but only if we mine our ongoing experiences to learn and adapt.

Bill Marriott: "They looked at me, and didn't follow the recipes"

This story is from Bill Marriott, chairman of Marriott International, from Adam Bryant's "Corner Office" series.

I was in the Navy Supply Corps on an aircraft carrier. I eventually took over the officers’ mess. I had worked in my dad’s restaurant when I was in college, and I had all the recipe cards sent to me because I didn’t like the food they were serving on board.

I went to these Navy stewards and said, “I want you guys to follow the recipes.” And they looked at me, they didn’t say much, and they didn’t follow the recipes. I came back a few weeks later and said, “You’ve got to start following these recipes.” And they didn’t follow the recipes. They were all World War II veterans, they’d been everywhere and they had learned not to pay attention to all these green, young ensigns.

In later years, I realized I’d failed to get them on the team. I had walked in and said: “Here, do it. I’m an officer. Salute and do it.” They ignored me and didn’t do it, and we still had lousy food when I left the ship. I realized that I should have sat down with them and said, “What do you think we can do to improve the food?”

Anna Wintour: take criticism with grace, and learn from what doesn't work

Vogue Magazine editor Anna Wintour, praising fashion designer Zac Posen, who is now rebounding from a career lull:

He made that move to Paris, which obviously he wanted to do and probably wasn’t the smartest move for him. But he takes criticism with very good grace and he learns from what doesn’t work as well as he learns from what works.

Entrepreneurs discuss a common side effect of a failing business - "chasing losses"

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Kai Ryssdahl, host of NPR's "Marketplace," and Megan Larson, the show's producer, profile several entrepreneurs whose early attempts ended in failure ("Following Your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff"). [Note that the web URL hints at an earlier, more interesting title: "The Painful But Liberating Lessons of a Career Failure."]

One theme of the piece is that failures are often made worse by our tendency to "chase losses" - meaning to stick with a failing proposition for too long and therefore lose more than was necessary. This concept is covered nicely in Tim Harford's book "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure." Here are a few observations from Ryssdahl and Larson on chasing losses:

But even when the future looked grim, [boutique owner Michelle] Tyree hung on. In fact, she dug in. She bought more inventory for the racks and threw celebrity-fueled parties at the store to generate buzz.

"Your gut says this could be a problem, but your head overrides it because you have just put in this huge investment," she said. "You are hanging on to not just the dream, but you are hanging on to the sweat equity and what you put into it financially."

Human beings, by nature, don't like to turn their backs on what are called "sunk costs," said Craig Fox, who teaches decision-making at the University of California, Los Angeles. When a lot of money is put into something - the dream of a small business, stocks or even an education - and it can't be recovered or is otherwise "sunk," few of us can just walk away....

Back in the '90s, when [Michael Dearing] was fresh out of Harvard Business School, he, too, sank a lot of money into his dream of owning his own store.

The Industrial Shoe Warehouse had five outlets in Los Angeles that sold work boots (think back to the Dr. Martens craze). "It had a vibe of, like, Urban Outfitters - concrete floor, high beam ceilings, all the stock was on the floor," said Mr. Dearing. "We had a really good business for awhile."

But, in the end, he said, "It was what you would call a splat-against-the-wall failure."

Mr. Dearing said the economics of running a shoe store were tougher than expected. Plus, the business grew too fast. Then Mr. Dearing's business partner wanted out.

He struggled to keep the business afloat because, he said, it felt dishonorable to let it go. "I personalized the outcome to a degree that it was unhealthy," he said. "I thought failure was total and permanent - and success stamped me as a worthwhile business person."

I discuss a way of managing the urge to chase losses - the concept of "affordable loss" - in Chapter 5 of the Mistake Bank book. If you're going to put your heart and soul into a project, you would do well to establish and manage to an affordable loss, so that your commitment and ego don't cost you in the event of a failure.

Arts executive's key lesson: How to fail

From the New York Times interview of Francesca Zambello, director of the Glimmerglass Festival. The interview was conducted by Adam Bryant.

Q. Other broad insights you’ve gained over the course of your career?

A. You have to learn how to fail. You have to understand that in any position where you’re at the top, you will fail, and if you don’t fail, you’re probably not that good. So you have to learn how to cope with that. The more you get knocked down, the more you learn how to pick yourself up. It’s like a boxer. In your 20s, you’ll feel devastated when somebody fires you. I’ve been fired a number of times in my life and then rehired by a better company or given a better job. In a way, one of the things I respect the most about businesses is that when they fire somebody, they’re gone the next day. One of the problems you sometimes see in the arts is that they fire leaders but it drags on.

Former Campbell CEO Conant learns lessons from his long-ago firing

Douglas Conant, the recently-retired CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, posted on the HBR Blog Network last week about his early-career firing and what he learned from it. He describes in devastating language the feelings of that moment:

I was greeted by the Acting Vice President of Marketing and asked to step into his office. Our company had recently changed ownership and things had been a little chaotic, but I still felt good about my ability to contribute. But once I was in the Vice President's office, I learned that my position had been eliminated — and that I needed to pack up my belongings and leave the building immediately. In other words, I was fired. Ten years of my career was over in a snap. I was devastated and I was bitter. I went home to my wife, my two very small children, and my one very large mortgage... feeling every bit the victim.

But like us all, Conant possesses the ability to bounce back. Now, decades after the event, he sees how that process was a turning point, and he points to one reason - the outplacement counselor he worked with after his firing became an important mentor and teacher:

Neil was a wonderful, crusty New Englander who didn't tolerate a "victim" mentality for a minute. With Neil's guidance, losing my job became a valuable learning experience about what leadership should be. For some, these thoughts may constitute a "blinding glimpse of the obvious." But I have found them extraordinarily powerful in their simplicity.

First, I learned the power of connecting with people by being fully present — in every moment. Neil's first words to me were "How can I help?" During every one of our meetings, he listened so intently and earnestly. He wasn't trying to guide the conversation and he was not at all judgmental. His interest clearly came from a genuine desire to understand and to help. Neil was fully present in every moment, in a sincere and earnest way....

[Second,] before I was fired, I had kept my head down and on my work. As a result, I was sadly disconnected to the business world beyond the company. I felt remarkably alone.

Neil told me to build a network of people to solicit ideas and advice for my job search. Then I was to cultivate that network with the hope of identifying some job opportunities and using some of these people as my references. The time to build a network is always before you need one. It took me an extra six months to find a job because I had to build a network from scratch before I could really ramp up my search for a job.

These are powerful lessons that I've had to learn myself (much like Conant, the hard way). I wish I had read this ten years ago!

A misunderstanding redirects a career

Mistakes can take you to new places. That's a theme of the upcoming Mistake Bank book, and it was underlined in a New York Times interview of Blair LaCorte, CEO of XOJets, an executive jet airliner. LaCorte explained how he first got into high tech:

My dad had advised me to work for people I wanted to learn from. I always remembered Eric Herr, who had been a managing partner at the Michael Allen Company, a consulting firm where I had worked one summer in business school. I contacted him and he mentioned a position at Sun, which I assumed meant Sun Oil. I told him I'd take it, that I trusted him and that I didn't need to know any more. I told my friends I was taking a leave from consulting to work at Sun Oil for a year. When the offer letter arrived, however, it was from Sun Microsystems.

That misunderstanding changed my life. For the next 12 years, I worked at a variety of technology companies. I loved the innovation in this industry; merging my business skills with colleagues' technical skills allowed us to move very quickly.

Another idea is proved in this story: always take your dad's advice.

"Regrets are about the things you wanted to try and didn't"

From the New York Times "Boss" column. This is JuE Wong, CEO of skin-care products company StriVectin:

To me, regrets are not about failures; they’re about things you wanted to try and didn’t. Because I never felt guilty about my choices and my husband was behind me, I was able to do my best.

A poignant note to this quotation is that Wong's husband, died suddenly just after she had reached the CEO level in 2009, at a prior company. Her career success has clearly been a team effort.

"Failure is not the opposite of success"

This quote is from Dean Shepherd's book, "From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes." Shepherd is a professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and studies decisionmaking and cognition, focusing on learning from experimentation and failure.

Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure at specific projects occurs on the way to overall success - success in kindergarten, school, career, and life. The key is to learn and keep trying.

Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro finds his career-long theme via a mistake

This is from the New York Times profile of Robert Caro, written by Charles McGrath, published in advance of Caro's fourth volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson." McGrath's article points out that many turning points in Caro's career came as a result of mistakes:

There was never a plan," Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. "There was just a series of mistakes."

In the following excerpt, McGrath explains how Caro first became interested in the subject of getting and wielding political power, a theme that he has carried through five massive books over more than 40 years of writing:

In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as "something like $37.50 a week." The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper's chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. "One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control," Caro recalled. "I still think about it. It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the - meekness isn't the right word - the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt."

The fascination and revulsion Caro found in that scene, in the privileges and unwritten rules of power, made a lifelong mark. Soon after that, Caro fixated on the behind-the-scenes opoerator Robert Moses, initiator of many 20th century New York public works projects (Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, Cross Bronx Expressway, etc., etc.). That led to Caro's first book, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and, then to his 40-year study of another power broker, Lyndon Johnson.

Get promoted, don't change your behavior - a mistake

This story is from "What to Ask the Person in the Mirror," by Robert Steven Kaplan, which discusses how to manage the complexities of senior leadership - not the complexities of business, but those of interpersonal skills, mentoring, communication and role modeling.

The CEO of a large consulting firm wanted advice regarding certain pressing strategy and leadership issues. He had spent thirty years at this company before recently being promoted to CEO. I had known him during my own career in investment banking, and had advised him at various points during his upward career climb. I liked him very much. He was always very bright and insightful. He had a very dry, sometimes off-color sense of humor. He had always been a bit of a cynic, but that was a humorous and generally appealing part of his personality.

The company was very large and - give its size and place in its industry - very high profile. The CEO called me one day and got right to the point. He was off to a "rough start" at the company, he said. First, he had done an in-person meeting with institutional investors and sell-side analysts, and he didn't think it had gone very well. In addition, he wasn't sure he had been approaching his direct reporters and company employees in the right way.... He asked whether, as a favor, I would meet with two or three of his direct reports and ask how they thought he was doing....

What I learned was that these direct reports had been thrilled that he had been named CEO. Having said this, they had expected him to recognize that he needed to behave differently now that he was CEO. The cynicism they used to enjoy now seemed inappropriate, and they wished he would stop it. For example, they didn't want him using the company town hall meetings as an opportunity to make cynical comments. They wanted their own subordinates to be idealistic about the company, and that required the CEO to show he was a "true believer." Even if it was only a role, they told me, they expected him to play it!

There was more - mostly variations on the theme of his new role. They wanted him to drop the off-color jokes, even in private settings. They thought that he needed to get in earlier in the morning. True, he had always been a late arriver - it had been the subject of much friendly banter, over the years - but they believed that because he was now the CEO, his tardiness was sending a bad signal to employees.... They suggested that he should think about driving a less flashy car to work and be a bit more mindful of his dress, even on casual Fridays. In short, they wanted him to look and act like the CEO of a conservative company.

When I sat down with my friend and relayed all of this news to him, he was both amused and perturbed. He explained that, for the past thirty years, he had never gotten any such feedback; now, all of a sudden, everybody had an opinion of how he dressed? He confessed that he thought the comments were off base, even ridiculous - and besides, how was he supposed to change his act at this stage in his life?

We had been friends for several years, so I felt free to talk to him in a fairly blunt way. He had to realize, I said, that he had made a major transition: from a 180-pound senior executive to the 800-pound gorilla the embodied the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of thousands of people. Like it or not, his every move would be closely observed, for the rest of his career. His statements would be parsed internally and externally. His moods would be observed, tracked, interpreted. How he behaved in restaurants, how he talked to the custodial staff, how he dealt with employees across the company - all would be closely scrutinized henceforth for clues to his character.

In short, he had become "role model in chief," and - I told him - this was part and parcel of accepting the job as CEO. Sure, he might feel the same as he did four months earlier, but to everyone around him, he was not the same. His words and actions all had more weight. Yes, he needed to be himself, but he also needed to recalibrate his behavior, taking into account his new weight and strength....

The good news is that, over a period of time, he took all of this feedback on board and eventually became quite comfortable with his new reality. But it definitely required a change in his mind-set.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from "What To Ask The Person In The Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential," by Robert Steven Kaplan, Copyright (c) 2011 Robert Steven Kaplan; All Rights Reserved.

I noticed something of this issue in my own experience, when I was hired as a senior executive in a tech company some years ago. I soon learned that the time I arrived in the morning became a subject of discussion around the office. My first reaction was to point out that I was usually the last one to leave except for the night operations team. But the point was that people looked to me as a role model. In this company, people arrived at 8am, and a VP arriving at 8:30 or 8:45 was notable.

The transition from individual contributor and manager causes the same need to recalibrate. You are allowed to criticize management, strategy, direction, etc., when you are an engineer. It's part of the camaraderie of the workplace. But when you are promoted, you are management. The same criticism sends a very different signal - that of disloyalty or lack of commitment. Take it from a cynic!

So, if you like the way you are, and you get moved up into a new level of the organization, prepare to change anyway.

"Kitchen Confidential" Anthony Bourdain about the cost of not paying your dues

From Newsweek's "My Favorite Mistake" series. This story is from chef-author-TV host Anthony Bourdain.

I was lucky enough to go to the Culinary Institute of America in my 20s, and my big mistake was that I was offered a chef’s job very quickly after I graduated, and I took it. I did that rather than going to France—or even staying in New York, but taking a low-level position at a great restaurant and putting my nose to the grindstone. Once I started down that path, years later I was still working in a procession of not-good restaurants. The lowest of the lows is cooking food for people you hate in a restaurant you hate, with no pride.

I was about getting the biggest paycheck then, so I could see music, smoke expensive weed, do cocaine, that kind of life. It was less important to me that I would get good at my craft. I deluded myself into thinking I was good. And by the time it occurred to me that I’d never worked for a three-star chef, I didn’t have the skills. It was late in the day....

A lot of young cooks who have read Kitchen Confidential ask me for career advice. I tell them if you’re serious about cooking and your craft, do the opposite of what I did. [But] I learned a lot of important skills from my mistake that served me well in both publishing and television. I think the skills I learned as a junkie are skills of determining if this person is full of shit or not.

This is important: from something Bourdain regrets, from something he urges others not to do, he learned "important skills that served [him] well."

Steve Blank: "In Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience"

This story is from Steve Blank's 2011 Commencement speech to the graduates of Philadelphia University:

After I left the military, I ended up in Palo Alto, a town south of San Francisco. Years later this area would become known as Silicon Valley.

For a guy who loved technology, I was certainly in the right place. Endlessly curious, I went from startups in military intelligence to microprocessors to supercomputers to video games.

I was always learning. There were times I worried that my boss might find out how much I loved my job…and if he did, he might make me pay to work there. To be honest, I would have gladly done so. While I earned a good salary, I got up and went to work every day not because of the pay, but because I loved what I did.

As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…
With every startup came increasing responsibility. I reached what I then thought was the pinnacle of my career when I raised tens of millions of dollars and became CEO of my seventh startup… a hot new video game company. My picture was in all the business magazines, and made it onto the cover of Wired magazine. Life was perfect.

And then one day it wasn’t.

It all came tumbling down. We had believed our own press, inhaled our own fumes and built lousy games. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t buy our products. The company went out of business. Given the press we had garnered, it was a pretty public failure.

We let our customers, our investors, and our employees down. While it was easy to blame it on others…and trust me at first I tried… in the end it was mostly a result of my own hubris—the evil twin of entrepreneurial passion and drive.

I thought my career and my life were over. But I learned that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience.

In fact, unlike in the movies, most startups actually fail. For every Facebook and Zynga that make the press, thousands just never make it at all.
All of you will fail at some time in your career…or in love, or in life.

No one ever sets out to fail. But being afraid to fail means you’ll be afraid to try. Playing it safe will get you nowhere.

As it turned out, rather than run me out of town on a rail, the two venture capital firms that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually asked me to work with them.

(Hat tip Maura)

Great leaders must "own their missteps"

I've been reading Justin Menkes' book "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others," and it's the best business book I've read this year by far.

I have to confess that I wasn't initially sure I'd love it. "How to be a CEO" studies have gotten boring. But Menkes' focus on personal accountability (rather than CEO self-aggrandization, swagger or getting power) has been a real surprise and very helpful for this site.

His idea of a "sense of agency" is a real revelation. (From the book: "Sense of agency...refers to the degree to which people attribute their circumstances and the outcomes they experience to being within their own control.") Leaders with this sense do not feel that issues are someone else'e problem or out of their control. They are not defined by their circumstances. They find a way to make their circumstances better.

And they are not afraid to make mistakes. But rather than seek to offload blame on others, they, in Menkes' term, "own their missteps," even if they weren't 100% responsible for them.

Let's face it, for anything bigger than tripping on a crack in a sidewalk, very little that happens wrong is 100% our fault.

Menkes' lesson, one that I think is embodied in the stories on this site, is that when things go wrong, the strongest leaders look inside, say what they could have done differently, learn those lessons, and improve their work going forward. As he writes, there's a stage of every senior leader's career when she is catapulted out of her comfort zone and into the unknown. For example, a VP of Engineering is asked to take over the company's sales function. At that moment, her long-nurtured expertise (as stated in Milton Glaser's fabulous video) is not helpful to her development.

Menkes writes, "leaders adjusting to a significant increase in responsibility invariably make many mistakes. Those who ultimately excel recognize and own these missteps quickly and use the experiences to grow into their positions of elevated authority and increased complexity. But for this learning curve to occur, it is absolutely crucial that they accept their role in these mistakes. If they have a low sense of agency, they cannot, and will fail."

Because at the end of the day, if you are the leader (even if you are merely the "CEO of your own job"), casting about for blame or deflecting criticism to others only serves to delay the fixing of the problem and to blur the important lessons you could have been learning.

This result happened to Jeremy (whose story was covered in this earlier Mistake Bank entry): for two years, his underperforming team continued to miss targets, and Jeremy continued to blame those he had hired, colleagues, everyone else but himself. And until he "owned the missteps," he wasn't going to make it.

From "Better Under Pressure," Jeremy's Story: Lacking a sense of agency

Another great story from Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others. This one is about "Jeremy," a high potential executive who was struggling in a stretch role. Menkes uses the term "sense of agency" to describe taking personal accountability and responsibility for issues. He defines it in the book this way:

Sense of agency...refers to the degree to which people attribute their circumstances and the outcomes they experience to being within their own control.

This would be the opposite approach of the villain Tom Chaney (previously discussed in this post) in "True Grit," whose catchphrase is, "Everything is against me."

Here's Jeremy's story:

Jeremy was being groomed for possible promotion to the CEO role. His past success in commercializing products and executing their successful launch had dramatically raised his profile in the company. He had come to be seen as a possible successor to the CEO, and to further stretch him, the company placed him in charge of one of its underperforming divisions. When I met Jeremy, he had been in this new role for two years, and for the first time in his career, he was struggling to delivery. Many around the company had begun to question whether Jeremy had been promoted over his head, and he was feeling tremendous mounting pressure to show dramatic improvements in the division soon or be replaced.

.... An in-depth look at his track record, feedback from colleagues, and direct interviews with Jeremy himself revealed that his exceptional marketing talents and intense professional drive had led to an extraordinary level of success very early. But when he had been given a leadership position of dramatically increased scope, his tenure became marked with missteps. This is very normal, as leaders adjusting to a significant increase in responsibility invariably make many mistakes. Those who ultimately excel recognize and own these missteps quickly and use the experiences to grow into their positions of elevated authority and increased complexity. But for this learning curve to occur, it is absolutely crucial that they accept their role in these mistakes. If they have a low sense of agency, they cannot, and will fail.

As I got to know Jeremy, it became clear that the exceptional qualities that led to his raid ascent in the compnay were indeed impressive. He had a keen sense of market conditions and consumer needs and a knack for connecting the dots in a way that revealed dramatic new market opportunities. These high-profile successes earned him an expansive, well-deserved reputation in the compnay. But thus far, he had been thriving within divisions that already had well-established world-cleass operations in place. In Jeremy's new position, he was being asked for the first time to turn a failing team into a strong one. It was an essential test if he was going to be a serious candidate for CEO, and it was one that exposed Jeremy's Achilles heel. 

When I asked Jeremy why he had missed his units's earning targets every quarter for two years, he immediately deflected responsibility for this critical problem. "This place was a mess when I got here," he said. "I'm doing everything possible to get this thing turned around quickly, but the people here expect miracles. I need more time." Jeremy went on to say he felt he was being judged unfairly by colleagues, that people saw him as a threat and were just waiting for him to fail. "They need to help make me successful, not criticize." 

When pushed, Jeremy acknowledged that at least some of his colleagues seemed sincere in wanting him to be successful. But he still blamed his incompetent team for most of the problem. He fired some of those people, but then he found their replacements - people whom he had hired himself - "incompetent" as well.... 

Jeremy laid the blame for his division's poor performance on others - even those he himself had fired - showing a very low sense of agency, which is what I explained to him in our feedback session. Until he was able to take ownership of his situation and the central role he played in bringing it about, I told him, he was never going to gain from the critical learning opportunity that had been handed to him with this job. No one was expecting him to flawlessly turn around a situation that was indeed challenging, but Jeremy's problem was that he was showing no upward trajectory that could give his colleagues the confidence that he was learning from his mistakes and growing into the job.

pp. 91-93

Excerpted from "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others" by Justin Menkes. (c) 2011 Esaress Holding, Limited.

Jill Konrath audio story - "Mr. Prospect"

As a young Xerox sales trainee, Jill Konrath learned her sales demonstration script perfectly... perhaps too perfectly.

"Mr. Prospect" - 2:56


You can learn more about Jill and her work at JillKonrath.com.

Transcript:


When I first started my sales career, I was at Xerox Corporation and they had a wonderful training program. Every sales rep was expected, prior to having their own territory and making their own cold calls, to memorize a demonstration about a copy machine. And the demonstration was a multi-page script that included everything you needed to know about demonstrating a copier, from here's where you put paper in, to here's how you clear a jam, and here's how you do all these things.

And the script went, "Mr. Prospect, for years Xerox has designed copiers to satisfy the needs and requirements of all our customers. Our experience and success in the marketplace has shown that regardless of specific needs, four basic criteria that need to be met.” And then we listed the criteria and from there the demonstration flowed.

It took me a long time to memorize that script verbatim. But I did. I practiced and practiced. I drove in the car with the script in front of me on the steering wheel. I taped [my speech] as I was driving along. And finally I was able to pass the test with my boss. "Mr. Prospect, for years Xerox has designed...." And I went through it flawlessly. Which was great because I was finally released to go out to the real world and start cold-calling.

And very shortly after that I got my first prospect to come in and see my demonstration at the Xerox Demo Center. He came all the way in from across town. I was all set. I had practiced ahead of time religiously and I knew I had it nailed. When he came in, I gave perhaps the best demonstration of my life. I nailed that script. I took him from the very start to the very end.

At the end I asked if he had any questions or what he thought. And he turned to me and he said, "Jill, my name is not 'Mr. Prospect.'"

Now I don't remember if he ever bought that machine or not; all I know is that I was so embarrassed that I called him "Mr. Prospect" that I never made that mistake again.

Advice from Spectra Energy CEO Paul Anderson: "Bosses, choose your words carefully"

From The Mistake Bank.

[The Mistake Bank has received permission to publish excerpts from the Harvard Business School Press/50Lessons series "Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World's Top Business Leaders," The books are full of great stories, including some very useful mistake stories. This one is from Paul Anderson, Chairman of Spectra Energy]

As I progressed in my career and got into increasingly more responsible or powerful roles, …it was almost like my words took on the power of the position, and things that were casual before were no longer casual. I had my first example of this when I was a manager. It was fairly early in my career, and a woman named Sarah had come in. I was running a planning organization, and Sarah came in to me and said, “Look, I don’t have any background in planning—I’m from the IT group—but I would love to join your organization. I’ll work hard to learn what I need to learn to do a good job. I will strive to do anything you need done. Just give me a chance.”

I said, “Well, that sounds fair to me. Why don’t you join the organization? I’ll give you a year. At the end of the year you will either be a planner and contributing; or, if it’s not working out, you can go back to the IT group, and we’ll assume that it was a nice try but it didn’t work out.”

So she joined the organization and she was outstanding; she was the best new employee we had that year. She took on everything; she learned. She became the “go-to” person—everybody came to her with their issues. She was a star, there was just no question; she was doing an outstanding job.

And I thought, “Well, this has to be one of the best moves that I’ve ever participated in,” and I was quite comfortable that things were working out nicely. But at the end of a year, she came into my office, and she was in tears. I said, “Sarah, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why it’s not working out. At the end of a year, you said you’d tell me if it was working out and you haven’t told me that, so I must assume that it’s not working out and I’m going to have to go back to IT.” I was flabbergasted, and of course I told her, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!”

But it struck me that I’d made a casual comment: “…in a year we’ll know.” She had gone back to her office and marked her calendar, and, by God, at the end of a year she expected me to walk into her office with a decision. That casual comment was very powerful to her, and so insignificant to me, that it really struck me that I had to be very careful in making comments as I went along.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Managing Your Career. Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.