CHAPTER 13

Write Your Models
for Leadership
and Emotions

When the company I cofounded nearly went bankrupt in 2003, the investors squeezed me out. It was emotionally painful and humbling, but I had a mortgage and needed to eat, so I couldn’t dwell on it. I had to find a job.

Graduate school and starting a company hadn’t taught me how to find one, so I did what I figured everyone did. I worked on my résumé and sent it everywhere. Luckily, a friend of a friend’s company was hiring. They were in education and technology, areas I valued and had experience in. After a few interviews they offered me a job in product development, where I figured an inventor like me could enjoy himself and contribute to making the world a better place. I started enthusiastically.

Within months, I disliked working there. My work didn’t challenge me. I felt stuck working on small projects that others created. I wanted meaningful work. I wanted to feel ownership. You probably know the feeling.

I suggested ideas to help the company, but no one acted on them. I tried moving to other groups in the company, but doing anything besides grunt work was hard. I couldn’t figure out why. I finally gave up when they promoted someone hired after me to manage my team, including me. I felt snubbed and outraged that they didn’t give me the job.

Still needing the money, I stayed but disengaged, not for lack of my wanting to engage but for no one there caring about me. I worked enough to earn my pay, but minimally. I did only what I had to, avoided responsibility and accountability, padded estimates of how long tasks would take, and so on. I looked for work elsewhere, caring about money more than what work I’d do. I felt defeated, but if working in a field I expected to like was disappointing, what difference did the field make? I might as well get paid more.

I also started to develop my ideas for myself instead of suggesting them to the company. A few seemed promising and didn’t conflict with the company, so I began to develop them independently. Eventually I left to work on one.

Conscious that my lack of business training likely contributed to my first company’s near bankruptcy, I applied and went to business school first. There, I learned a phrase that Michael Feiner created that summarized my frustration with my job more succinctly and effectively than any I’d heard: “People join good companies and leave bad managers.” Nearly everyone I say this phrase to reacts with looks of “I learned that lesson the hard way” and “I wish I knew that earlier.”

A lot of people tell me, as a coach, why they don’t like their jobs. They complain about their managers more than their work, hours, or anything in the job description. Sadly, when I ask how long they’ve wanted to leave, many tell me “years.” They want to change things but don’t know how. They are looking for a solution outside the company for a problem inside it or themselves. They seem to feel like I did—helpless and resigned to believe that work means misery.

I believed that my choice of field would determine my job satisfaction and that my managers wanted or knew how to make me happy at work, or at least interested. I didn’t understand what created satisfaction. I couldn’t identify what made a job or manager good or bad.

Business school classes awakened me to what I was missing—relationships and emotions—but mainly in principle, not practically. My experience leading Tom, the CEO in Adopt a Challenging Belief, showed me I could lead people without relying on authority. Coaching developed it more, from seeing and helping others face the same challenges. I soon saw that you could lead more effectively not relying on authority, instead leading through emotions using empathy and compassion. So why don’t people use emotions? Many only vaguely understand them, especially in business contexts. They see them as irrelevant to leadership.

I found the most effective way to start learning about emotions practically was to have people clarify what they knew. I came to see that people joined good companies and left bad managers because of fundamental misunderstandings about relationships; emotions; and what creates liking, disliking, emotions; and MVIP. Ignorance about emotions, motivations, and relationships led to incompetence using the basic emotional skills of empathy, compassion, and self-awareness.

The Write Your Models for Leadership and Emotions Exercise

We’ll pause from the interactive exercises with an introspective one to clarify some concepts.

What to Do

Write two essays on the concepts below. I recommend writing them, not just thinking about the concepts, even if you plan to keep them confidential. Writing leads to deeper and more thorough thinking. It also tends to lead you to talk more about what you write about, attracting more leadership-minded people.

ESSAY 1: What Is Leadership?

We’ve approached only personal leadership so far—developing skills to lead yourself and avoid being reactive. Before we work on leading others, reflect on what leadership means to you now. Some questions you might consider include the following:

What is leadership?

How have my views on leadership changed over the exercises so far?

What leadership experiences have I had so far?

Who are my leadership role models?

What do I consider success or failure in leadership? Good or bad?

ESSAY 2: What Are Motivation, Emotions, and Self-Awareness?

We’ve discussed emotions, motivations, and self-awareness without defining them. You’ve talked about them in this course and elsewhere. Since Plato and before and in many cultures, people have connected emotional awareness and skill with effective leadership.

Some questions you might consider and answer are the following:

What is motivation?

What are emotions?

What is self-awareness?

Why do they matter?

How do they manifest in my life?

I recommend reviewing the questions a few times and letting the questions simmer in the back of your mind a day or two before writing your thoughts. After writing the essays, I recommend sleeping on them and editing them, even if you don’t plan to show them to anyone else.

Post-Exercise

I have found the observation that people join good companies and leave bad managers to be insightful, with implications as broad as any other in leadership.

It shows the value of taking responsibility for your job (and career) and how you feel about it instead of depending on your managers for it. Several clients who desperately felt they needed to leave their companies no longer did after learning the perspective. Instead, they took responsibility and led their managers. Once they learned how to lead independently of authority, which we’ll cover in Unit 4, they stopped feeling helpless. They started developing the skills to lead their managers to manage them how they wanted. They led themselves to create more MVIP in their work.

Next, it shows that your relationships with coworkers determine your day-to-day satisfaction more than your choice of field. It shows the incomparable importance, when interviewing for a job, of asking your interviewers about the culture and people you’ll work with. Asking about the job description pales in comparison. Meet them in person. Ask why the person before left, what the rate of turnover is, and other questions about what working there will be like—with the people you’ll work with, not just in general. Most people are afraid of asking questions like these, but they show interest and experience. Not asking shows desperation and neediness, among the most repellent qualities you can show.

Interviewers commonly ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” Most people respond by showing off how much they researched about the company or interviewer. They say things like, “I understand the firm recently acquired Company X. I wonder if you could describe how the post-merger integration is going,” or something similarly impersonal or showing off. You could learn more, make a meaningful connection (which we’ll cover in Unit 4), and show that you have more experience by asking about the people and management. How many jobs do you want to start blind to one of the main reasons people leave?

Next, when interviewing candidates to hire, you can learn about how they interact with others, not just validate their résumé, which will improve morale and reduce turnover.

Next, it tells you to focus more on relationships at work. Consider Toyota compared to the U.S. carmakers in the 1980s and 1990s. Toyota’s cars were more reliable, more efficient, needed fewer recalls, and so on. The U.S. carmakers saw adversarial labor-management relations and perpetual costly labor disputes. Where did Toyota’s advantages come from? Better technology? Technology doesn’t come out of nowhere. People create it. Better people? Toyota’s managers and workers weren’t smarter, stronger, or faster, nor did they have more hours in the day. Better systems? Systems don’t come out of nowhere, either. Technology, productivity, and systems come from relationships between people and ultimately leadership.

Becoming more like Toyota and less like the U.S. carmakers in the 1980s and 1990s means learning more about people and our emotional systems and unlearning other things.

Next, it shows the importance of leading your managers. When you learn to lead people independent of authority or status (Unit 4), you can lead anyone. As it turns out, leading based on emotions is more effective than leading based on authority. It also creates MVIP and passion.