I came to appreciate George’s counsel and wisdom. He helped me think more strategically and to be patient with the board. He always seemed to take a long-term approach and didn’t get rattled by short-term fluctuations. The one thing I could never figure out is why he bothered with simple things like the board package. One day I finally asked.
“It’s not that the old format didn’t work,” he explained. “But I wanted to give visibility to the broader leadership team. The new format and my request that you speak less were designed to give the board more comfort around your leadership, not less.”
“Not following,” I responded.
“Since I joined the board in 2007, you were the only one who answered when questions arose. That gave the board two fundamental questions: Is he the only one with any answers? And how can somebody know everything? By giving more of a voice to your team, we addressed both concerns.”
We talked more about how I could better understand Encore’s place in the overall perspective of my board members. Too often, I came at issues solely from my perspective without taking into account what they were balancing.
“You’ve got to remember that they all have day jobs and other investments that demand their attention. They can only spend a fraction of their time on Encore. You, on the other hand, have one priority. The more time you spend understanding their other priorities and any associated challenges, the more you can be an effective partner.”
As usual, his feedback was clear, well reasoned, and spot-on. He was never trying to “steal the spotlight” from me. In fact, he consistently went out of his way to help me improve the areas where I needed to grow. He challenged me to be more visible outside of Encore and to make sure we were well-known within the communities where we did business.
I had initially hated the board’s decision to appoint George as executive chairman. I had silently resisted and focused on how useless he was. But without me saying anything to him, and without him changing, I discovered that he was a key resource I needed to listen to in order to grow and succeed as CEO.
SHAYNE
Without realizing it, George went through a metamorphosis during his first months as Encore’s executive chairman: from useless deadweight to key strategic partner. What happened?
The critical attitude Brandon held toward George was similar to other struggling relationships at Encore: the self-fulfilling prophecies that Brandon had with Dave, Fritz, and the directors; the Finance vs. Operations Us vs. Them; the undermining of the India strategy. In each case, people experienced their frustration as true, when in fact they were unconsciously focusing on the negative in others. Worse, when we do this, our mindset and behaviors actually influence others to be less than their best selves, either because they don’t feel safe or because we simply don’t allow them to participate. We limit their potential. At LaL we call this “making others bad.”
Most of the dysfunctions outlined in this book, including those mentioned above, are examples of making bad. Whenever we are in our reactive state or at the mercy, our protective behaviors have negative, undermining consequences on others. We feel like victims but are simultaneously the victimizers. Brandon felt hurt and undermined by George’s presence at Encore, and yet his behaviors sought to undermine and exclude George. Brandon wanted Encore to succeed, and yet he was acting to minimize George’s usefulness. No one, including Brandon, gets up in the morning and goes to the office planning to make his or her colleagues bad. But we do it all the time. Even being intellectually aware of our ego triggers is sometimes insufficient, as Brandon’s struggle with George illustrates.
The point is not whether George had flaws, but rather where Brandon was putting his mental focus. When we recognize we’re in a making bad mindset, we open the door to a different path forward.
At the heart of transforming ourselves, our organizations, and our lives is the empowering decision to “make others good.” It is an indispensable step in shifting from at the mercy to at the source.
Making good is not becoming responsible for changing other people, nor guaranteeing their success.
Nor is it making people feel good, being nice, or sucking it up and never complaining. It is not holding in our frustrations and criticisms until we burst.
It is not relinquishing our point of view and sweeping our disagreements under the rug.
And no, making good is definitely not blindly trusting that others will do the right thing.
At its essence, making good is taking back our creative power.
It starts with a “never again” decision: a refusal to blindly continue our own egosystem behaviors. Our never again is rooted in our awareness of how our ego triggers cause us to act out, to shut down in destructive ways, or to devalue others. We saw this moment with Brandon, when he recalled his commitment to never again allow his ego to negatively affect the employees and families of Encore. He didn’t know what was really going on for him, nor had he yet changed his opinion of George. He started by not accepting being destructive toward others in order to protect his ego.
Just as making bad is a mental orientation, making good is also a mindset—to be the starting point of your experience and growth, regardless of outside circumstances. If you examine your life you will notice that whenever you feel at the mercy, you are making others—and likely yourself—bad. When we make good, we take back our power. We take ownership for how we internalize people and external circumstances. In doing so, we stop perpetuating an egosystem-driven culture.
We have seen many examples of making good in Brandon’s and Encore’s story. When Jim walked the floor at the Phoenix call center, being emotionally present for people’s pain and acknowledging them as equally vulnerable human beings. When Brandon responded to Jonathan’s angry questions about India in the town hall meeting by searching with empathy to understand what people in the room were feeling. He acknowledged their fears as legitimate while not letting go of his intention for them and the organization, nor changing the India strategy. When Brandon and his team violated conventional wisdom to give high-quality accounts to Encore’s Indian collectors, they broke through the invisible ways they were undermining their colleagues’ full potential.
Sometimes making others good requires having an explicit, uncomfortable conversation, like when Brandon had a conversation with Dave or with the board members, implementing the five aspects of constructive communication LaL refers to as VEDEC: being vulnerable, empathetic, direct, exploratory, and caring. On the other hand, sometimes no overt conversation is needed. Brandon didn’t raise his frustrations with George. He simply began viewing and interacting with George with a different intent. He accepted the vulnerable feelings of perceiving himself as less than George, which allowed him to appreciate and learn from him.
In relationships or situations that are very difficult, making good may seem impossible. I get it.
A decade ago, my firm engaged a consultant to work with our own team. The first year was very helpful, but the relationship blew up in year two. The atmosphere in our company became quite negative, and the consultant and another employee quit and pursued our largest client.
I found myself trying to pick up the pieces. I had every reason to judge this person. I even had a trump card that justified limitless righteousness: Her attempt to steal a client from us was absolutely unethical.
Trust me, I blamed, I churned in the middle of the night, I vented. All of that made me feel like the good guy—and completely at the mercy. How in the world could I make that good?
Making her good wasn’t accepting that she was right or faultless, nor was it condoning her actions. But in seeking to make that whole experience good for me, opportunities presented themselves. First, it reconnected me with the many ways in which she was initially immensely helpful. Changes that still exist today and that I don’t want to lose. Making good also pushed me to confront how I helped bring about the crisis in the first place—ways in which I wasn’t taking responsibility for the leadership
of the firm. And being on the receiving end of a destructive consultant taught me to be more vigilant about how I work with my own clients.
None of this was accessible to me as long as I was in a making bad mindset. Who really pays the price when we fill our brains with blame instead of learning? If Brandon had continued to make George bad, it was his own growth that would have been damaged.
Making good also forces us to take a hard look at our view of reality. The perception gap between Brandon and George during those first months was fascinating—and points to the power of our egosystem to deform our perception.
“I was very careful to only interact with the Encore team through the Executive Committee that Brandon, Paul, and I formed,” George explained later. “I didn’t want to undermine Brandon’s authority in any way. More than anything, the change in my role was aimed at making me the point person for the board, not a co-executive of Encore.”
While Brandon felt threatened by the board’s apparent decision to carve up his role, George had neither mandate nor interest in supplanting him. What Brandon criticized as George’s lack of commitment— not actively managing Encore’s business functions—George consciously chose not to take on in order to support Brandon’s authority as CEO. “I know that intent was said clearly,” George recalled, “but Brandon just couldn’t hear it.”
This highlights another danger of making bad—when our mental faculties are devoured by ego fears and fault finding, it disrupts our fundamental ability to assimilate contradictory information. Brandon’s lack of understanding had nothing to do with his obvious intelligence. I have seen this phenomena dozens of times over the years in very senior executives. He simply could not integrate that George’s intentions were different from what he feared. Not I, not Brandon’s YPO members, nor other colleagues or friends were able to make more than a small dent in Brandon’s conclusions.
The question I asked Brandon, “If he worked for you, what skills would you want to leverage?” wasn’t a rhetorical trick. I was searching for a perspective that would bring Brandon back to a mindset where he was the starting point of what he wanted to create at Encore. As long as Brandon was at the mercy of his perceptions, George would remain an albatross rather than an invaluable contributor.
I find it fascinating that Brandon’s shift did not come from challenging his assumptions. Instead, shifting his orientation from making bad to making good allowed his mind to discern a more accurate perspective. Reconnecting with what he wanted to create, regardless of external circumstances, allowed him to see and use George in a completely different way. Brandon had found his inner compass again.
Being willing to learn from George also meant accepting to not be #1, sharing the spotlight, and acknowledging weaknesses he still had as a CEO. Over the next few years, his breadth of effectiveness expanded as he learned skills from George that weren’t accessible to him as long as he was in unconscious competition with him. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” Brandon later said, “and I wasn’t able to see what George had to teach me until I began making him good.”
CHAPTER 7
WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT
“THAT” (MEET AMY ANUK)
BRANDON
A key leadership change during 2009 was the promotion of Amy Anuk to vice president of Business Development. Over six years, Amy evolved from an entry-level analyst to one of the most important executives in the company. Her team was charged with identifying and negotiating all portfolio purchases. If they were ineffective, Encore was unsuccessful. The board of directors unanimously approved her promotion, and she had the firm support of the management team. I knew she was up to the job. The sky was the limit for her.
Amy’s story is a great example of what was possible at Encore. We prided ourselves on hiring and promoting people based exclusively on their capabilities, not their resume, years of experience, or other such factors. We had a true meritocracy, with no biases.
Or so I thought.
In the years since her promotion, I learned that she didn’t perceive her rise to the top as quick or anything like the smooth trajectory I saw. It made me question whether all Encore’s employees were truly given an equal chance to succeed. The answer isn’t straightforward, and her story taught me a lot.
Our Egosystem’s Biases and Blind Spots
AMY
My name is Amy Anuk. Early in my employment at Encore, one remark changed the course of my career.
It was mid-2003, and my supervisor sat me down to talk about my career options.
“You have three paths you could go down,” he said. “Transition into marketing, join IT as a business analyst, or pursue a career in business development.”
Three choices?! I was thrilled. I had only joined Encore for a specific media project. Now, I had someone helping me explore my options.
“Given your skill set, I think the best bet is business development. When I was talking it over with the CEO, however, he was concerned that a woman couldn’t be effective in this role. Still, I think you have real potential.”
I kept smiling as the conversation continued, but inside I was fuming. Can’t be effective? How dare the CEO tell me I can’t do this?! Whatever questions I had about what I wanted to do with my career evaporated as one thought burned through me: prove him, them, wrong.
I threw myself into learning the ropes of business development with single-minded determination. The role entailed being responsible for securing and developing sales relationships as well as creating, negotiating, and leading portfolio purchase transactions. It was an externally facing role in an industry where newcomers had to earn respect from “industry veterans” before they were taken seriously. The key decision makers at the banks were predominantly men who had been doing business with the same people for a very long time.
Despite my overwhelming determination to succeed, I had doubts in the back of my mind about whether I could build enough rapport with people in this tight network. Immediately I began identifying senior leaders at Encore who had influence, and I studied people across the industry I needed to establish a strong relationship with. Since I didn’t fit the expected demographic, I concluded that I needed to get their attention by delivering results and outperforming everyone else. I needed to shine.
I set three objectives: (1) always exceed expectations; (2) don’t let anyone see my flaws or weaknesses; and (3) keep my personal life separate from my professional life—all business, all the time.
Over the next several years, I outperformed and received promotions. Then, in 2005, my manager and a colleague resigned from the company within the same week. I was the only person left from a three-person team.
Brandon, by now the CEO, called me into his office. “Amy,” he said, looking at me, “we need you.”
His words were all I needed to hear. It was my time to prove I was ready and capable of leading the department. For the next year, reporting to Dave, our head of Operations, I acted as Encore’s Business Development leader and performed well, delivering on expectations.
One day, out of the blue, Dave pulled me aside.
“You’re doing a great job, Amy,” he said, “but we need someone with more experience. We’ve begun recruiting for your new boss. I didn’t want you to find out through the grapevine. You’ll be on the interview panel, of course,” he added as he walked away.
The decision blindsided me. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t failed. I was getting plenty of praise and recognition. I delivered everything asked of me.
No one sat down with me to discuss why I wasn’t getting the job, and I didn’t hear a justifiable, logical reason for being passed over. Dave’s transactional exchange with me felt callous and insensitive. Not wanting to appear weak or give them anything to hold against me, I bottled up what I felt and vowed to be even more capable—to be so perfectly outstanding that they could not deny me.
I eventually bought into the idea of working for someone from whom I could learn. As we went through the intervi
ew process, one candidate with comparable skills to mine seemed a good fit for our team, but not as the leader. Dave and I agreed to offer him a job at my level, senior manager. Several weeks later, however, I returned to my desk to find an envelope sitting on my chair. I opened it and discovered the offer letter to him from Encore—for a more senior, director-level position making significantly more money. HR must have left it for me because I was the highest-ranking (and only) person on the Business Development team. I stormed into Dave’s office seeking an explanation.
“Amy, people get paid different amounts for different reasons,” Dave explained. “In this case, we had to pay the market rate to get the person to accept. In addition, he was already at the director level, so we needed to keep his title consistent. It isn’t personal. Why are you so agitated?”
Market rate? If that was what people should be paid, why was my salary so low? Didn’t I deserve to be paid “at the market”? Not wanting to be labeled as high maintenance, I decided to let it go. I was promoted to director shortly thereafter.
A few months later, we finally hired a new SVP. Although I supported the choice at the time, it quickly became evident there wasn’t a big gap between his capabilities and mine. I didn’t see what I was going to learn from him. Not wanting to undermine the hiring decision, though, I kept quiet. The longer he stayed in the job, however, the clearer the underlying message seemed to be. Even though I was capable, I didn’t “fit” the mold of who they were looking for in a senior leader. I was ready to leave Encore.
Ego Free Leadership Page 15