Ego Free Leadership

by Brandon Black

  My son Aidan was born in mid-July. Dana was adjusting well to being a full-time mom, and Trevor was a very engaged big brother. Encore muddled through its key initiatives, but somehow our stock price actually rebounded nicely. It allowed me to feel a little less frantic when I arrived in Sausalito in November for LaL’s leadership seminar.

  This time, I came with three new Encore executives. While the location was the same, my approach was different. Instead of looking for reasons to disengage, I focused on tackling my shortcomings.

  We spent the first few days working through exercises designed to identify the causes of our unproductive behaviors. Sometimes, these exercises asked us to reflect on our childhood. I quickly identified important moments, but I couldn’t connect them with specific feelings. It was frustrating.

  One behavioral issue was beginning to stand out: my inability to deliver critical feedback to people in a constructive way, even if I knew they would ultimately fail without it. Because I was outspoken and thrived on debate, I had never perceived myself as avoiding conflict. Over the past year, however, as I sought to stop using sarcasm, I realized I had a lot of unexpressed criticisms. Instead of delivering the feedback to my team, I rationalized that people would get defensive or weren’t capable of changing. I discussed this with Shayne.

  “If you were struggling,” Shayne asked, “would you want your boss to bring it up and help you identify a path forward?”

  The obvious answer was yes. “I want to tell them what I think,” I explained, “but I worry it will hurt their feelings.”

  “That’s a common feeling. It may feel like it’s about the other person, but underneath, the root cause of these behaviors is ultimately about you and your self-worth. How would hurting their feelings be a threat to your ego?”

  I thought out loud, “Well, if they feel hurt, they might shut down or get defensive—”

  “And so, how would that make you uncomfortable or threaten you?”

  I paused, thinking about my CFO, Paul, with whom I now had a warm relationship and increasingly strong collaboration. There were certain leadership behaviors I didn’t raise with him because I didn’t like the awkward silence that fell between us. “The threat to my ego would be that they wouldn’t like me.”

  “And what would be the danger of that?”

  I felt tension in my chest as I pictured it in my mind. “Separation. Rejection.”

  “Can you feel that discomfort now, as you say that?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s your key. That underlying fear of separation is what’s stopping you.”

  I challenged myself to remember when I had felt that same discomfort growing up. It dawned on me that I’d frequently felt it during visits with my mother’s parents.

  I always loved being around my maternal grandparents, especially my grandfather, who took me fishing and taught me how to play golf. Time with them at their home in Florida was often the highlight of my summer. But the relationship between my parents and my mother’s mom and dad was tense, and long periods passed when they didn’t speak with one another. On one visit, they had a huge argument. In the middle of the night, my parents woke up my brother and me, packed the car, and drove us back to New Jersey in a rage.

  My parents didn’t speak with my grandparents for months. It wasn’t the first time they had severed a family relationship, and usually I didn’t care. But I was much tighter with my grandfather than with my other relatives, and feeling cut off from him was scary. I could see my mom wanted us on her side, and I felt caught in the middle. I finally wrote my grandparents a letter stating that if they didn’t apologize I wouldn’t speak to them again. Somehow, I sensed they would give in first. They did, and we went about life like it never happened.

  I hadn’t thought about those events in decades. I didn’t know if my recollection of the facts was completely accurate, but I knew this memory was meaningful. I realized I couldn’t remember a single example of a conflict leading to a useful outcome. Mapping these experiences on one of LaL’s charts helped me identify conclusions I was still holding on to: “conflict leads to separation”; “you can be disposed of at any time”; “my most important relationships can just end.”

  Was it possible that my unwillingness to give feedback to my coworkers was tied to something that happened twenty-five years earlier? From the beginning of my relationship with Shayne, I had stayed skeptical of the notion that my past could impact my present in a dysfunctional way. Shit, I thought, maybe they’re right.

  SHAYNE

  Brandon didn’t need me to tell him to provide clearer developmental feedback. He knew it was important. So why wasn’t he doing it?

  Any time we know intellectually what to do, but our actual behavior is inconsistent or in contradiction, it is a sign we are being short-circuited by our egosystem. These behavioral derailers come in many forms: conflict avoidance, procrastination, defensiveness, people pleasing, shutting down, being argumentative, just to name a few. Upon examination, these ingrained knee-jerk reactions invariably prove to be predictable and recurrent.

  Many of us can feel powerless—we see our unwanted behavior but feel unable to change it—because these behaviors seem like a fixed part of our personality. This is partially true, because these reactions are symptoms of deeper triggers. If we don’t address their cause, they won’t change. But when we understand why these reactions started in the first place, they become quite malleable.

  Young Brandon experienced lots of conflict and arguing over the course of his childhood. He remembered some moments and forgot others. The particular fight between his parents and his grandparents stood out as significant.

  When we are children, moments of disconnection, fear, and pain are scary for us, and our natural survival instinct is to prevent them. So we draw conclusions about what happened and how to avoid dangers like this in the future. Without this ability, we wouldn’t survive long in the world. If we burn our hand in boiling water, our brain retains the memory of that pain, and we learn to not do it again.

  The problem lies in the quality of the lesson. As children, we usually lack perspective and maturity, causing us to draw incomplete, even limiting conclusions. Worse, we are rarely explicit, even with ourselves, about the conclusions we make. In Brandon’s experience, conflict and arguments were linked with rejection, separation, and out-of-control communication. Fear of reexperiencing this became one of his egosystem’s “hot buttons.” When he perceived that a sensitive comment might not be well received, his instinctual impulse was to move away from it. Over time, this avoidance pattern became so routinized he didn’t think about it.

  Part of what causes us to continue these behavioral patterns, even though we’d often prefer they go away, is that they provide us with perceived “ego” benefits. In Brandon’s case, by not engaging his colleagues in uncomfortable developmental conversations, he escaped, in the short term, his egosystem’s fear of separation, rejection, or feeling wrong about his point of view. Why bother talking about an issue if you know it’ll only make things worse?

  But these reactions also carry costs. By avoiding these conversations, Brandon didn’t help his colleagues grow. Over time, he drew judgmental conclusions about them, fell into sarcastic humor to relieve his pent-up frustration, and decided they simply couldn’t cut it at Encore. His colleagues sensed that judgment and were more quickly on guard or defensive with him. Several executives left. In the end, Brandon’s reactions produced the very outcomes he most wanted to avoid: separation and damaged relationships.

  THE STRUCTURE OF A PATTERN

  As I face certain life events, I interpret it through the lens of my FEARS. These anxieties come from CONCLUSIONS I draw from CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES, and automatically trigger predictable KNEE-JERK REACTIONS. All this happens in my unconscious: My experience is that “I’m just responding to the situation,” when in reality my action is at the mercy of my fears. When I examine the impact of this pattern in my life, I realize that th
e short-lived BENEFITS are look-alikes, because they mainly seek to reassure my ego. The long-term COSTS are that I create exactly what I fear or least want. Each time I play out this pattern, it reconfirms my childhood conclusions, putting me in a heightened state to reinterpret my fears in the future.

  This is not a coincidence, and it is a crucial takeaway in examining your own patterns of behavior. For example, when I was younger, I was a “pathological” procrastinator. I thought my lack of discipline was a personality flaw and felt powerless to change it. Underneath this story, however, were fears: of being stupid, incompetent, and not measuring up. I would put assignments off until the last minute, then crank them out in a flurry of stressed-out productivity. I turned in decent work, always on time—but not at the level of excellence I wanted. This behavior had a highly addictive ego benefit: My laziness was to blame for my poor results, not my intelligence. But the pattern also confirmed my suspicion that I couldn’t do excellent work. I was creating exactly what I most feared. All of this, like for Brandon, was completely hidden from me until I examined the egosystem fears behind my reactions.

  Although Brandon’s example is about avoidance, these egosystem mechanisms function identically for leaders who are aggressive, argumentative, or abrasive. Knee-jerk reactions that overpower others can help us maintain feelings of control or invulnerability. Upon examination, these “fight” behaviors have ego threats—such as being wrong, appearing weak, or being hurt—similar to those for avoidance behaviors.

  Because our reactive behaviors stem from painful childhood experiences, trying to use willpower to change them is like instructing ourselves to put our hand back into the boiling water. No matter how much we tell ourselves to just have that conversation, or ask for help, or not overreact, it seems too dangerous. Our ego hot buttons have made our level of tension disproportionate to reality; we experience the danger as more threatening than it is. Being explicit about his fears helped Brandon revisit his past experiences with adult eyes and challenge his limiting conclusions. He would ultimately begin to test the “boiling” water and discover it was lukewarm at most. This is the first step in the shift.

  What Matters More Than Our Ego

  BRANDON

  On the third evening of the seminar, we were organized into teams so we could give feedback to one another. I had tried to get peers to give each other feedback in the past, and it always went poorly. People were either too vague or somebody got defensive and the conversation created more tension.

  At the outset of the process we were instructed to share our fears about how we might be judged and what our goals were for each other. Hearing each team member’s concerns made us feel closer. Rather than focusing on our opinions about each other, we outlined the challenges facing Encore and identified skill gaps and counterproductive behaviors each executive needed to address to achieve our goals. It was a chance for me to put the last few days of reflection to the test.

  To my surprise, the discussion rapidly became incredibly specific, but in a constructive way. One executive told another he had a hard time following his explanations and, as a result, worried about his ability to give clear direction to his team. Another member described behaviors he thought undermined his peer’s ability to drive results. Instead of reacting, the team sought to understand each other’s perspectives and how they could be better leaders. I challenged myself to offer all my feedback with the intent of helping them grow. We developed a powerful sense of being “in it together.”

  Although the discussions seemed to progress quickly, we suddenly realized it was 11:00 pm and we were the only group left in the room. I didn’t know if that made us the most in-depth team or the most screwed up. We agreed to finish in the morning before breakfast.

  I was the last person to receive feedback and I worried the group wouldn’t be as honest with me as they were with each other. I could recall very few times when somebody had the courage to give me critical feedback. Of the current executives, only Sharon seemed willing to do so. But the openness of the session had built trust among us, and they had no reservations.

  They had three areas of concern about me. First, they didn’t think I made tough personnel calls. It was clear to them that we needed to significantly improve performance on the executive team if we were going to reach our objectives and achieve consistency across departments. Second, they felt that too often I believed I was right and didn’t allow for open discussions. They wondered if I was willing to change my mind. And third, they felt that I hadn’t fully transitioned into the role of CEO because I wasn’t delegating to a broad enough group of people and empowering them to do their jobs.

  Unlike the year before, I found myself embracing the feedback rather than arguing. I was grateful for their candor and felt a measure of relief knowing they still respected my leadership despite these areas for improvement. I spent the rest of the seminar exploring these topics.

  As I left, I asked Shayne to help me continue the process of giving candid, respectful feedback to my team. A month later, he and I adapted the process from the seminar to create a vision for each direct report. Two of my direct reports weren’t performing well enough to continue working long term at Encore. For them to have any chance of succeeding, I needed their level of urgency around closing their skill gaps and eliminating counterproductive behaviors to match mine.

  Shayne and I had identified my tendency to back off or sugarcoat my feedback if the conversation got tense. I wanted to be thorough, so he had me prepare a written document to share with each person. Knowing I would give them a copy of the document at the end of the meeting took away my “exit door.” I was committed to addressing everything.

  My first meeting was with a direct report who was overly critical of his peers. He had never acknowledged how disruptive he was, and I was determined to break through his resistance. When he tried to disagree early in our discussion, I told him to stop talking and just listen.

  “You’re stubborn and arrogant,” I said, “and half the time you’re totally wrong about the points you argue!”

  Now that we were finally having the conversation, my pent-up frustration was released. When he raised his voice, I raised mine higher. When he tried to give his point of view, I told him I was tired of hearing his excuses. He left our meeting quite unhappy.

  “Well, that went great,” I said sarcastically to Shayne, who had been observing. “I can’t wait for the next one.”

  “How were you feeling when you started the conversation?” Shayne asked. “You looked tense.”

  I nodded. “He’s always defensive like that. Usually I tell myself life is too short, and let it go. This time, I was geared up to take him on.”

  “I wonder if it didn’t contribute to his reaction. You had an edge in your tone, and your language was fairly harsh. In his shoes, I would have felt judged.”

  “Maybe, but I just don’t think he is going to put in the effort, and he isn’t self-aware at all.”

  “We have two key lessons here. First, there’s an important difference between your observations and your judgments. Judgments are fixed in nature: Someone is ‘that’ way—incompetent, stupid, arrogant. ‘They don’t get it.’ Our judgments are vague and threatening and usually cause others to shut down or get defensive.

  “Observations, on the other hand, are what you see. Think about what a camera might record.” He reached for my feedback notes on the table between us. “Let’s take Dave. ‘Struggles to understand the financial drivers of the business, which leads to poor operational decisions.’ We’ve captured your evaluation in more neutral terms. But that’s not usually what you say about him, is it?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I tend to think, ‘He doesn’t get numbers,’ or ‘He isn’t analytical.’” I smiled ruefully. “That’s on a good day.”

  “OK, so I want you to practice expressing the issues you observe instead of your summary judgments of the other person’s capacity.”

  I nodded. “And the seco
nd point?”

  “Let’s come back to your edge,” Shayne said. “We’ve been focusing on the anxieties that cause you to avoid these difficult conversations. Did those anxieties go away when you were ‘gearing up’ for that last discussion?”

  “No. If anything, they were more intense.”

  “That’s a crucial insight. As long as your anxieties are at play, they’ll undermine your behavior. Either you’ll avoid the conversation, or if you do have it, you’ll be harsh or overbearing.”

  “So what’s the solution?”

  “Well, why do you want to have this conversation? What’s your goal?”

  “It’s my responsibility. I need to have it.”

  “That’s why you’re supposed to do it,” he pushed back. “But what is your intention for the other person? Why do you care?”

  I hesitated. I was mostly preoccupied with my concerns about having the conversation, and my frustration at not doing it. I realized I had lost contact with why it mattered in the first place.

  “They trusted me in coming to work at Encore. They need my honesty to grow.”

  I remembered my experience giving feedback in the seminar. The exercises and coaching pushed the team and me to put our fears aside and really focus on helping each other. The quality of our dialogue had been totally different. That was the mindset I wanted to re-create.