Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  The first is naming our emotions with nuance and granularity. As Todd Kashdan and his colleagues found, this turns out to be a skill, and an incredibly important one. People who can name their emotions in nuanced ways (“I’m anxious about this job interview but also excited and energized!”) have surprisingly better outcomes in a wide variety of places than those who lump everything together (“I’m super nervous about this job interview!”). It turns out that people who name emotional nuance are better able to recover from setbacks, can better manage their anxiety and sadness, and generally cope better with the unexpected difficulties of life (even drinking less, and acting out of their anger less).5 Watch how having a simple story about your own emotions creates the trap. We want to have complex stories about both our inner and our outer lives.

  The second is understanding that the fullness of our emotions is data. A mindfulness practice of some sort allows us to notice emotions, feel for the granularity in them, and then watch our judgment about them, which is probably connected to our need for control. Is anger an emotion to be pushed aside as “negative” or “childish”? Or is it a helpful clue that something important has been violated? Is sadness the millstone that will drag you down? Or is it a doorway toward our connected humanity? There are emotions that are more or less pleasant, but trying not to make sense of emotions as inherently good or bad is awfully helpful in a complex world.

  Our nervous systems were designed for a much more predictable, slow-moving world. The pace and rate of change will surely activate our nervous systems, telling us that there is danger and threat all around us (and flooding our bodies with cortisol, a hormone that is very helpful when running from lions but potentially toxic when we have large doses of it, day after day).6 The more we can see and make sense of our emotions—rather than acting out of them—the more easily we can escape all of the mindtraps of complexity.

  Vimla had an ego she protected under the guise of a constantly happy person, and she pushed away or denied any hint of sadness, anger, or fear. Whenever one of those less acceptable emotions crept in on her, she tried to control her situation or her reaction (or both), cracking a joke, changing the subject, or if neither of these things worked, simply walking away from the thing that was causing her distress. As a team manager, she was ruthless in maintaining good cheer in her team and she wouldn’t allow anything that seemed like disagreement in their weekly meetings, coaxing and cajoling people into apparent agreement. When a doctor told her that her blood pressure was dangerously high and her body was stressed beyond belief, she sought help for stress and found out that she was trapped by her need for control and agreement. Her counselor taught her to hold negative emotions as a facet of life that was as vital and important—if not as fun—as the positive ones. As she began to see the subtleties of her emotions, she saw that she could still be an optimistic person, but one with more nuance than before. By having a more complex sense of her own emotions, Vimla was increasingly able to handle disagreement among her team members, and she was able to be a better friend, a better mother, and a better manager, as she was more present for those around her who were in grief or anger or fear themselves.

  Practice: As you notice a strong emotion, imagine that it is braided together by many different colors of emotions. See if you can begin to just unpick the braid, laying out the colors alongside one another. Anger over negative feedback might unbraid into shame, indignation, gratitude, and the seeds of connection and change. It will help you deal better with each of your emotions (particularly the darker ones) if you can see all the shades that have created it. Unbraiding these emotions and allowing them to simply be will let you climb out of the simple stories, let go of your need for control, and generally find your way out of the mindtraps.

  Connecting with compassion for ourselves and others

  The first three rungs of our ladder connect us to vital parts of ourselves. The fourth rung also connects us to one another. If connecting to our own passion to make the world a better place is supportive of our health and well-being in an increasingly complex world, then compassion—literarily, passion with—is the fabric of our social connection.

  Each of the mindtraps is a quirk of our human condition that is so deeply wired into our bodies and our brains that we will never fully escape. If we hold these quirks as faults in ourselves or others, we’ll be massively frustrated. Frustration and learning don’t go together well and will get in the way of our even noticing that we have fallen into the traps—much less escaping from them. If we see them as a core and often-helpful part of our humanity, we face one another with compassion.

  This also happens when we look in the mirror. Self-compassion is a relatively new field of study, but research in the field is beginning to show the vast and varied impact of self-compassion on things we all care deeply about. Our ability to look at our own flaws with forgiveness and kindness is associated with “emotional wellbeing, motivation, health behaviors, personal responsibility, coping, and better interpersonal relationships.”7

  Compassion for others helps us connect to them without judgment and with open, curious kindness. Compassion for ourselves does the same thing—only it connects us to ourselves with open, curious kindness. This creates the conditions for us to learn from the mistakes we inevitably make rather than feel shame about them (which is so unhelpful when we are trying to learn).

  Doug was the CEO of a company that had made a big bet on a piece of technology, and that bet failed in a public and humiliating manner. The teams responsible had treated the world as simple and had fallen into the mindtraps of rightness and simple stories on the way to the launch of what they just knew was the next great advance in their industry. Once the technology failed, they continued to speak from the depths of the traps; they fell into the mindtrap of control, believing that someone else should have been more in control of those things that had gone wrong. The teams that had previously been trapped by agreement suddenly flipped to self-protection and polarization, and their simple stories tended to be about how others should have made different choices that would have inevitably changed the outcome. Blame and shame became the hallmarks of their interactions. Doug realized, “I needed to find a way to help these people find compassion for themselves and for one another, or else in addition to the money we lost when the product flopped, we’d also lose the learning that was available.” Doug talked to members of the team, listened well to them (to learn, not to fix). He noticed the mindtraps they were falling into and gently pointed them out, reminding them all of their humanity and of the difficulty of predicting and controlling in a complex world. Through emphasizing compassion for themselves and others, he helped them replace their simple stories with more complex ones, let go of their need for control, and see that their failure was not an embarrassment but a piece of continually trying to stay at the cutting edge of their field. His compassion helped them climb out of the mindtraps as he supported them to shift their sense of failure from shame to learning, reinvigorating the disengaged team.

  Each of these connections—to our purpose, to our bodies, to our emotions, and to our compassion for ourselves and others—supports us to climb out of our trap-laden reflexes and into a bigger version of ourselves. There’s no way to escape the traps entirely; they have been too useful for too long. But we can build the ladder with our daily practices to help us scamper out of the traps as soon as we begin to tumble in. As we engage in these practices, we find the next versions of ourselves, increasing our compassion for our human frailties while gaining in human wisdom. (See Table 2 for a summary.)

  TABLE 2

  Building the Rungs of the Ladder

  Mark said goodbye to the last of his team members and came back into the living room, where Leroy and Alison were polishing off the last of a fine New Zealand pinot noir while their sons slept on the couch around them. The girls were playing some game in the basement that resulted in the occasional outburst of giggling.

  “So what do you think, Lero
y,” Alison asked quietly. “We’ve been talking about the ladder tonight and about staying out of the mindtraps, but I still think we’re missing something somehow. What do you think is the most important thing for us to remember about these mindtraps, anyway?”

  Leroy, unusually serious, stared out into the middle distance for a few minutes, sipping his wine and pondering the question. “I think the most important thing is that we remember that we are bigger than we seem. In a more predictable world, only the very powerful really had a chance to have great influence; the vast majority of people simply lived and worked and died without leaving many fingerprints behind—other than the children who eventually became our ancestors. But now that things are so interconnected and move so fast, each of us can have an influence on the world that’s so much bigger than just our family.”

  “Haven’t people always had an impact that was bigger than their families?” Mark asked curiously.

  “Yes, of course, sorry,” Leroy said. “But truly massive impact was reserved for those with the most power. As you’re seeing in a small way at AN&M, Alison, small shifts in some people can lead to pretty dramatic outcomes.”

  “That’s true,” Alison agreed. “I can’t believe how well it’s going, to be honest. I’ve found that some of the smallest experiments are the most powerful—like the one where we put bowls of fruit in the common kitchens with signs that said, ‘Please eat me here and not at your desk.’ People have taken to standing around, eating fruit and the other snacks that have appeared alongside the fruit bowls, and those common kitchens have become social gathering places in a strange new way. I’d never have imagined that would happen.”

  “And that’s the thing, right?” Leroy said, his eyes sparkling now. “We focus on complexity and uncertainty when it brings us bad things—a sudden market downturn, a surprise layoff, a shocking illness. But actually, complexity and uncertainty bring us delights we couldn’t have predicted, as well as horrors. Just as these mindtraps can keep us feeling small and protective, escaping them liberates us to do extraordinary things: listen deeply, empower others, create the conditions for more wonder and creativity. I have no idea how this next chapter of our human story will turn out, and I’m afraid about that sometimes. But I’m also so hopeful, because I know that just as a small number of people can create a disaster, so too can a small number of people create a new movement for bringing beautiful things into the world.”

  “I agree,” Alison added. “I think these practices have not just made me more successful, but also made me more kind, more compassionate, more empathic. I think they make me a better leader and a better mom to my kids. And I’m happier.”

  “Ah, if it only came in a pill,” Mark muttered.

  “You’ve been wanting this in a pill from the very first moments I told you about the mindtraps!” Leroy said, raising a pillow threateningly.

  “I was just kidding!” Mark said, cowering in fake fear. “I would have taken it in pill form then, but it turns out that I can change—and my work gets even better.”

  “Not to mention your marriage,” Alison reminded him.

  “Not to mention my marriage,” Mark repeated obediently.

  Just then, the two girls, tired of their game downstairs, raced into the living room singing “Baby Beluga” at the top of their lungs. The boys were startled awake and into tears. Tate sat up so quickly that Mark ended up spilling red wine all over both of them, which made Tate cry even more—and then made Naomi cry, because she was tired and ready to be in bed. Various children were scooped into various grownup arms and comforted; towels and sparkling water were brought to soak up the wine and lift the stains; and tutus were changed for jeans and sneakers.

  Mark helped Leroy to his car, carrying his daughter as Leroy buckled his sleeping son into his car seat. “Hey, Leroy,” Mark said, once both kids were safely buckled in, heads drooping heavily. “I really am grateful for all of this—the help at work, the friendship at home. I think we’re making a difference together.”

  “That’s the point of it all, isn’t it?” Leroy asked. “When we finally figured out that your purpose was to lighten the heaviness of people’s lives and make them a little happier, it all made sense to me—and I think you’re living into that every day.”

  “Next stop, meditation!” Mark said, smiling. “Right after I empty my inbox. Only 18,643 messages to get through until I read your mindfulness instructions.”

  Leroy rolled his eyes and got in his car. “You know, Mark, people can change,” he said, “but sometimes they don’t.”

  Mark was still laughing as the car drove off.

  FINDING OUR WAY THROUGH

  There is no way we will ever escape all of the mindtraps that complexity sets for us; the world is moving so much faster than our poor evolutionary systems can manage. We will always be dealing with the massive ambiguity and uncertainty in our lives with some difficulty. And perhaps that’s the point. Humans have long thrived on facing the impossible in order to push beyond it: to create fire, to craft cathedrals, to erect skyscrapers, to cure polio.

  What has changed lately is the size of the stakes. As Johnathan Foley, former director of the California Academy of Sciences, says, “For nearly all of human history, the planet was big and people were small.” The stakes through most of human history have been to support and protect a family, a village, a nation. “Now,” Dr. Foley tells us, “We humans are big and our planet is suddenly small and fragile.”8 For the first time, we are faced with the challenge of protecting and sustaining all life on the planet.

  This challenge means we need to find ways to avoid the traps that have become more common—and more dangerous. Whether we are building a business or raising a family, we are constantly faced with a world more complex than our inner wiring can easily handle. Our writing of simple stories, our sense that we are right, our desire to get along with others in our group (and rail against those not in our group), our wish for control, and our constant quest to protect and defend our egos will always be a part of us. These traits have been a part of our greatness, but without work to escape their difficulties, they will be a part of our downfall.

  Our biology sends us signals to simplify, to protect, to circle the wagons and keep ourselves safe. These reflexes are natural and helpful in a simple world of frightening foes and obvious dangers. But our world is now too interconnected, too complex, too uncertain to rely on these ancient drives. We stand at a moment in history when we are being called on to refuse those hardwired traps, to understand and tolerate complexity, to question our reflexes, and to love our humanity. We now need to choose a future that reaches beyond fear and into connection, beyond the safety of the simple and into the bounties and difficulties of complexity. Our ability to grow beyond our reflexes is likely to shape what happens next to us as a species as we reject simplistic reactions and find our bigger selves so that we can solve some of the most complex challenges humanity has ever faced.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. I am in the camp that thinks cilantro (or coriander leaves) tastes like soap—so please don’t add that ingredient to the soup when I come for dinner. But I happen to love the case that weaves through the book.

  CHAPTER 1: THE FIVE QUIRKS AND HOW THEY BECOME TRAPS

  1. K. Shultz, On Being Wrong: Adventures at the Margin of Error (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

  2. R. Kegan and L. Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2016).

  CHAPTER 2: TRAPPED BY SIMPLE STORIES

  1. Y. N. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

  2. By the way, the flag-loving man is Keith Johnston, my dear friend and the coauthor of Simple Habits for Complex Times. He is a quirky fellow who defies simple stories, and his high school principal fell into the mindtrap early. I am deeply grateful that the principal was unable to drag Keith into the trap too (though we know that m
any of us are unhelpfully influenced by the simple stories parents and early educators have about us).

  3. Here’s a comparison between Fukushima and Onagawa: www-bcf.usc.edu/~meshkati/Onagawa%20NPS-%20Final%2003-10-13.pdf. And here’s a comparison between the two Fukushimas: https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived.

  4. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/time-bandits-perlstein. He goes on to say, beautifully:

  The longing to assimilate the strange to the familiar is only human; who am I to hold myself aloof from it? But it’s just not a good way to study history, which when done right invites readers to tack between finding the familiar in the strange and the strange in the familiar. History roils. Its waves are cumulative, one rolling into another, amplifying their thunder. Or they become attenuated via energies pushing in orthogonal or opposite directions. Or they swirl into directionless eddies, with the ocean’s surface appearance as often as not obscuring grander currents just below.

  5. D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), http://science.time.com/2013/11/19/remember-that-no-you-dont-study-shows-false-memories-afflict-us-all/.

  6. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.

  7. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.

  8. P. Coleman, The Five Percent Solution: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

  CHAPTER 3: TRAPPED BY RIGHTNESS

  1. R. A. Burton, On Being Certain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

  2. Thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winning Kathryn Shultz for this question (from her TED talk) and for her fantastic book On Being Wrong.

  3. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.