Avoiding Vicious Cycles

The seven statements in the table correspond to personal traps into which new leaders can fall. Each of these traps can enmesh you in a vicious cycle, a self- reinforcing dynamic from which it will be difficult to escape. It is thus essential to recognize and avoid them. Pay particular attention to those for which you circled a 4 or a 5 in your self-assessment.

1. Riding off in all directions. You can t hope to focus others if you can t focus yourself. You can be busy and still fail every single day. Why? Because there is an infinite number of tasks you could do during your transition, but only a few that are vital . Perhaps you tell yourself, If I get enough things going, something has to click, and dissipate your efforts. Perhaps you overestimate your capacity to keep all the balls in the air. Every new leader has to do some parallel processing. But it is easy to reach the point of mental lock-up, where you find yourself pulled from task to task faster than you can refocus on each new one. Whatever the explanation, if important problems remain unaddressed, they could explode and suck up more of your time, leaving you even less time, and so on. The result is a vicious cycle of firefighting.

2. Undefended boundaries. If you fail to establish solid boundaries defining what you are willing and not 2willing to do, the people around you ”bosses, peers, and direct reports ”will take whatever you have to give. The more you give, the less they will respect you and the more they will ask of you ”another vicious cycle. Eventually you will feel angry and resentful that you are being nibbled to death, but you will have no one to blame but yourself. If you cannot establish boundaries for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you.

3. Brittleness. The uncertainty inherent in transitions breeds rigidity and defensiveness, especially in new leaders with a high need for control. The likely result: overcommitment to a failing course of action. You make a call prematurely and then feel unable to back away from it without losing credibility. The longer you wait, the harder it is to admit you were wrong and the more calamitous the consequences. Or perhaps you decide that your way of accomplishing a particular goal is the only way. As a result your rigidity disempowers people who have equally valid ideas about how to achieve the same goal.

4. Isolation. To be effective, you have to be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information. It is surprisingly easy for new leaders to end up isolated, and isolation can creep up on you. It happens because you don t take the time to make the right connections, perhaps by relying overmuch on a few people or on official information. It also happens if you unintentionally discourage people from sharing critical information with you. Perhaps they fear your reaction to bad news, or see you as having been captured by competing interests. Whatever the reason, isolation breeds uninformed decision making, which damages your credibility and further reinforces your isolation.

5. Biased judgment. Biased judgment ”a loss of perspective because of well-recognized weaknesses in human decision making ”can take several forms. ^[2] Overcommitment to a failing course of action because of ego and credibility issues is one version. Others include confirmation bias, the tendency to focus on information that confirms your beliefs and filter out what does not; selfserving illusions, a tendency for your personal stake in a situation to cloud your judgment; and optimistic overconfidence, or underestimation of the difficulties associated with your preferred course of action. Vulnerability to these biases is a constant, but you are particularly at risk when the stakes get higher, uncertainty and ambiguity increase, and emotions run high.

6. Work avoidance . You will have to make tough calls early in your new job. Perhaps you have to make major decisions about the direction of the business based on incomplete information. Or perhaps your personnel decisions will have a profound impact on people s lives. Consciously or unconsciously, you may choose to delay by burying yourself in other work or fooling yourself that the time isn t ripe to make the call. Ron Heifetz uses the term work avoidance to characterize this tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns, which results in tough problems becoming even tougher. ^[3]

7. Going over the top. All of these traps can generate dangerous levels of stress. Not all stress is bad. In fact, there is a well-documented relationship between stress and performance known as the Yerkes-Dodson curve, illustrated in figure 9-1. ^[4]

   
   Figure 9-1: Yerkes-Dodson Human Performance Curve

Whether self-generated or externally imposed, you need some stress (often in the form of positive incentives or consequences from inaction) to be productive. Without it, not much happens ”you stay in bed munching chocolates. As you begin to experience pressure, your performance improves , at least at first. Eventually you reach a point (which varies from person to person) at which further demands, in the form of too many balls to juggle or too heavy an emotional load, start to undermine performance. This dynamic creates more stress, further reducing your performance and creating a vicious cycle as you go over the top of your stress curve. Rarely, outright exhaustion sets in and the new leader burns out. Much more common is chronic underperformance: You work harder and achieve less. This is what happened to Kipp Erikson.

^[2] For an in-depth exploration of managerial biases, see Max Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, 5th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2001).

^[3] See Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers.

^[4] This was originally developed as a model of anxiety. See R. M. Yerkes and J. D. Dodson, The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit Formation, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18 (1908): 459 “482. Naturally, this model has limitations and is most useful as a metaphor. For a discussion of limitations, see How Useful Is the Human Function Curve? at http://www.trance.dircon.co.uk/curve.html.