Out, Blind Spot! Out, I say!

I was feeling the rush of pending triumph in a debate over the annual report with a notoriously stubborn co-worker. I had to win — I would win — even if that meant humiliating him! Suddenly, he checkmated me: “Rich, you can beat me in this and other arguments. Let’s go with your approach.” Surprisingly, I found myself mumbling a few words of stunned apology for … well … for being a jerk.

I hadn’t anticipated his surrender, and certainly not sincerity, and never his humanizing me by using my name. In two sentences, he had inadvertently broken me (at least temporarily) of what I realized was less about an issue – a soon-to-be-forgotten issue — than about my ego, ambition, and retribution.

What’s more, the incident was not a one-time tantrum; it was part of an evolving pattern of hardness that had been riding with me for years, unnoticed. It was in my blind spot.

A blind spot is that area of our lives where we put stuff we don’t want to deal with, where we can’t see it – stuff like low self-esteem, anger, greed, selfishness … common maladies. We refuse to believe we are anything but good folks. At work, we present ourselves as who we want to be or want to be perceived as: that is, even-tempered, loyal, open-minded, team players.

That’s certainly the persona during the first few months on a new job. Then, the boss’ unreasonableness, colleagues’ pettiness, and the realization that appearance matters more than results throw you into survival-and-attack mode. You start getting tight-jawed around your boss, cagey around your colleagues, and defensive about your work. And you believe that nothing about you has changed. Before long, some of what was black-and-white morphs into grayness. You begin forgetting who you were, who you want to be.

The bad boys of business (almost all have been men) – some now in prison, others at home with their riches – didn’t set out to be ogres, I suspect. In fact, they probably once were very likeable, even admirable.

We, too, didn’t plan to become street-fighters in our jobs; we used to be about empowering and collaboration. How did we get from niceness to nastiness without noticing? More important, how do we return to our former state?

3 PATHS TO NASTINESS

1 We ignore compounding
Compounding is that profoundly simple phenomenon that says that even something small can increase exponentially over time. That works well for financial transactions (excluding 2009), but sometimes not so well in human transactions.

A small offense by an equal from another department at work is brushed aside, forgiven by you. But others won’t let you forget it; they urge retaliation. They’re right, you begin to think: the offender deserves notice. Emotion turns into attitude, attitude turns to action. You become competitive, withhold information, fail to stop rumors. Your department converts to a silo, the organization suffers, and your professional life is on course for an eventual crash. In short, the unsettling person in your blind zone has appeared.

2 We succumb to group-think
Group-think is a form of compounding. One person believes or wills to believe a desired outcome and through power or persuasion recruits a batch of yay-sayers. One believer in a false cause creates a cult of followers.

Here’s an illustration. It’s generally known that the success rate of mergers and acquisitions is in the neighborhood of only 25 percent. Essentially, don’t acquire unless overwhelming evidence forces you to do so.

Yet, during almost every merger and acquisition process I have been involved in or watched over many years, the bulls run wild. I cannot remember a company walking away from a prospective acquisition that the CEO wanted to make.

In such a situation, to avoid being viewed as disloyal, we are apt to soften contrarian facts and, consequently, compromise ourselves. Objectivity, honest thinking, patience, and the will to say “no” to a bad idea too often get put aside. Ambition, sometimes disguised as entrepreneurism or pluck, slips out of the corporate blind spot. Two years later … you know what happens.

3 We get seduced by impatience
Admittedly, much of any job is repetitious, boring routine. For some, predictability is security; for others, it’s hell. For the latter, after awhile, impatience breeds dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction breeds a sense of superiority: we’re better than those around us. We begin taking credit where credit is not due. The “we” in our conversations, reports, and presentations turns to “I.” I am responsible for success, you are accountable for problems.

Letters to shareholders in annual reports illustrate the problem. Weak performance is due to economic and market conditions, not flawed judgment or, frankly, mistakes. However, record earnings are the result of management’s foresight and decisiveness, not to massive layoffs and plant closings – or to happenstance.

How do we prevent the incipient evil spirits from spreading and turning us into what we don’t want to be?

5 STARTERS

• Admit that you are capable of becoming the person you dislike.
• Unload your issues and justifiable complaints from work every couple of months on someone older and wiser, and let her or him repeat back what you said. Then go home bruised and better.
• Reconnect on FaceBook with your childhood friends and high school classmates. Swapping stories will remind you of who you used to be.
• Look in a mirror at the beginning and end of the day and say hello to yourself by name. Silly? Yes. But you may be amazed at the simple curative power of hearing your name from someone who knows you.
• Edit out as many “I’s” as you can from your writing and speech.

Richard Skaare 11.05.09
Photo credit: fellowapeman

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