Assume Best Intentions

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A young woman is waiting in a busy airport. She has some time to kill so she buys a little bag of cookies and sits down with her book to read. Pretty soon a young man comes and sits beside her and starts reading a magazine. They keep to themselves and after a couple minutes he reaches into the bag between them and takes a cookie.

She can’t believe it. But she’s too astonished to say anything. So she takes a cookie and keeps reading her book. Time goes by and she keeps reading and eating her cookies. But every couple minutes this strange guy keep reaching in the bag and taking a cookie until there’s only one left. Then he takes the last cookie, breaks it in two and offers her half. She can’t believe his guy! She stands up, and without a word to him, walks away and boards her flight.

Sitting in her seat on the plane she takes a deep breath to calm down. Then she reaches into her purse to get her book and finds the bag of cookies she bought earlier.

The moral of course is to be careful with our assumptions. Or better, always assume the best intentions of others.

Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.
– Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of Pepsi

To sharpen your ability to assume the best intentions of others, try these few things each day:

  • Practice mindful listening: Waiting to talk isn’t listening. You’ve had these conversations. You say something and instead of acknowledgement or affirmation you get back a completely different agenda because the other person was simply waiting for their turn to talk. Listen, then reiterate back in your own words. It will deepen the conversation, and the relationship. The other person is likely to say, “Yes, exactly!”
  • Focus on behaviors, not people: Instead of describing a person as (abrasive, fun, mean, weird, interesting…), describe their behavior. People are complex, and the days are filled with stresses and joys. To yourself and to others, describe the behavior of others, instead of belittling them with stereotypes. Moods change.
  • Honor differences and disagreements: We often having meaningless small talk conversations because they are easy. We all show up in the world with our own history, predispositions, and beliefs. And we know if we express those ideas we might create conflict and disagreement. It’s OK. There’s a difference between disagreeing and offending. When we set our defaults to listen and understand, we are more likely to honor and learn from the differences between us.

Sounds simple enough, but there is often a big gap between what we know to be the best thing to do, and actually doing it. Remember to assume the best in others. It can make a world of difference.

Change starts one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Signs of an Impending Bozo Explosion

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It’s true that often those who are the most assertive in their own promotion and compensation get what they ask for. But their promotion doesn’t necessarily make them more effective leaders.

According to Jean Twenge, Ph.D., co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, “People who are narcissistic want to be leaders. They don’t necessarily make better leaders, but they want to do it, so they’re more likely to end up in those positions.”

Often those recently appointed to a position of higher authority succumb to what’s known as the Power Poisoning Effect. It’s a term coined by researcher Deborah Gruenfeld to mean literally poisoned by power. In her research she found that those newly elevated to positions of power often exhibit these symptoms:

  • Give greater value to their own ideas and initiatives
  • Give lesser value to the ideas of those around them
  • Think that the rules no longer apply to them
  • Have greater difficulty controlling their own impulses

Sound like any corrupt politicians or exiled executives you know of?

Leadership that can’t be questioned ends up doing questionable things.
– Jon Acuff

It turns out that grandiose bosses who demand attention, take credit, possess little empathy, and belittle team members, are more likely to deliver worse results than leaders who support and nurture their teams. Unfortunately this same group of self-aggrandizing attention-seeking blowhards are also more likely to be paid more than their peers who seek advice, and give praise, support and resources to their team members.

That’s right, It’s an odd paradox to discover that the least effective and most toxic leaders are also the same ones who are financially rewarded the most. These are leaders and managers who often consistently refuse to hear negative feedback and build teams of stooges. It’s a sure sign of an impending Bozo Explosion.

In their study entitled “The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy,” Kelly See and her colleagues discovered that those leaders who consistently ask for the opinion of those around them often do have less personal confidence in their own decision-making but are viewed by others as better leaders precisely because they ask for opinions. And because they ask for the advice of those around them, these leaders are more likely to make better decisions.

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Seek out, and work for, those leaders in the organization who actively ask for opinion or dissent, and then are willing to act on that advice even if it contradicts their own initial impulses.

How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives

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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
– Annie Dillard

Does this sound like you?

You rush around in the morning, get the kids off to school, and hustle to get to work on time. You commute twenty to forty minutes every day. You have your own cube, but it feels like assigned seating. There is stark overhead fluorescent lighting. You attend at least two meetings a day (sometimes more), both of which you didn’t need to attend, and could have been resolved in twenty minutes. But they drone on for an hour, only because they were scheduled to.

Your boss is well-intentioned, but he is so busy appeasing his own boss that your ideas are ignored. There’s no clear guiding vision that you can fathom, other than to fix problems, put out fires, and figure out how to charge the customer more. Meanwhile you watch your colleagues kiss your boss’ ass anyway to get ahead, and try to look more valuable.

Information comes late and loud. You frequently feel like you are the last person to learn about new initiatives. By the time you get the news, it’s presented to you as a “bag of snakes” and you are given a stack of responsibilities to get it on a “glide path” you didn’t know even existed at the beginning of the day.

You feel like half most of what you do is busy work. The emails keep piling up, and you keep hearing expressions like “do more with less.” You get meeting invitations you feel you can’t decline. So you keep working. In fact, if you are like most working Americans, you worked 365 hours last year in unpaid overtime, and didn’t take all of your vacation.

You are stressed. And you feel guilty because you haven’t taken time to exercise and deal with your stress. So you go for a run, and then feel guilty about taking time to exercise while the dishes pile up and the kids sit home and watch Netflix.

Or does this sound like you…

You work from home, coffee shops, or where ever you happen to be at the moment. You go in to the office when it matters to meet colleagues, not to punch a clock. You are invited to conference calls and kept in the loop, but attend only the ones relevant to your projects – the ones you are most interested in and can make the biggest impact.

You take time to sleep, and to exercise. Maybe you are the 5am boot-camp type, but you don’t have to be. You can go for a run at 11am if you want to. You just block that time. You also take time to volunteer at your child’s elementary school. You don’t hide that either. The idea never occurred to you.

You have a great relationship with your boss. You don’t dread interactions with her. Quite the opposite, you call her up anytime you have an idea to share, or need an opinion or support on a project. You always leave those interactions encouraged – even emboldened. She makes you feel like anything is possible. She generates energy in everyone around her.

Every time you sit in on a meeting with your boss, and your boss’ boss, they are constantly giving credit, and constantly giving the limelight, while meanwhile accepting accountability for anything that goes wrong. The COO asks, “We got a big customer win?” Your boss says, “Yes, but it wasn’t me. It was this team that made it happen.”

There’s no gossip, no trash-talking about management over beers on Friday. No fear of your job getting “bangalored” (outsourced to India). You live in a culture that is focused on outputs, not inputs – results, not volume of email noise.

You have friends at work. You do things with each other’s families for fun. You create quality products, and you know it. You take pride in your work, and your colleagues do too.

What’s the difference between these two stories?

The difference is the leadership. In life story #2 the leadership has flipped the culture. It’s a style of leadership that is generous of credit, inclusive of ideas, highly communicative, and purpose-driven. But these people also expect excellence, and have high expectations of the people in the company. And you understand this is a compliment. When remarkable people also expect remarkable results from you, that’s a compliment.

The people who lead companies in life track #2 are creating the biggest innovations, attracting the most sought-after talent, and driving the greatest value impact in the world.

Here’s the big idea: In these stories, who are the leaders? It’s you and me. We get to lead by example. Don’t tell me, “But my boss…” No, it starts with each one of us, and the attitude and action we take every day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Giving Leadership: Why Influence and Inclusion Matter More Than Ever

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Paul Hiltz, President of Mercy Healthcare, might be the toughest interview I’ve had recently. But for reasons you might not expect.

It’s not because he isn’t articulate. He is widely praised for his ability to clearly communicate a compelling vision of the future. His mind is sharp. His ideas are clear. His voice is calm and assuring.

It’s not because he’s too busy to talk to me. He answers all of his email personally and promptly, and gave me his personal cell phone number and encouraged me to call with any questions. I called him once without a scheduled meeting, and after we said hello he asked me if I had a couple minutes to talk. I called him, and he asked me if I had a few minutes to spare.

It’s not because he conceals key parts of his business which he can’t share. Not at all. Paul is known as constantly initiating projects of transparency, and building education campaigns to ensure that everyone clearly understands how the business works. He once hired financial consultants to conduct workshops to teach everyone how the healthcare business works.

And it’s not because he is inaccessible tied up in the boardroom, or in meetings. Quite the opposite. Paul spends almost the entirety of his time in the hallways, having lunch with patients, or families of patients. The staff describe him as constantly visible both in the hospital, and in the greater community.

The real reason Paul is such a tough interview is because most of the time when I ask how he led a big process reinvention, or developed a remarkable financial turnaround, or constructed an entirely new service roll-out in the hospital, he tells me I should talk to this department head, or that nursing administrator, or the other communications director. Every time he tells me it was really their doing. Paul tells me, “She took the lead on that.” Or, “He made it happen. Talk to him.”

So I talk to them. I interview the people Paul points me to, and they all tell me the same thing. Yes, they were part of the equation, part of the team, but they all point back to Paul. It’s Paul’s leadership, they say.

They say everyone in the hospital is simply rallying around his clear vision of a comprehensive and high quality healthcare environment – a healthcare system fully integrated with the greater community. Everyone understands the goal, and everyone is committed to the mission. One of the doctors in the hospital system described Paul as “a healing leader” – a leader who is able to heal wounds of distrust, heal the lacerations of broken communication.

Welcome to a new style of open leadership – a leadership style that believes in:

  • influence not coercion
  • collaboration instead of individual heroism
  • treating employees they way we want customers treated
  • continuous, not episodic, habits of learning
  • giving, not taking, credit
  • assuming accountability, but giving autonomy
  • building inclusive, not homogeneous cultures

Paul Hiltz represents the epitome of a 21st century effective leader who guides not directs, influences not commands, and encourages instead of threatens. He has managed to galvanize the entire organization around a higher goal by constantly giving credit, and constantly giving the spotlight to someone else.

The 8 Sources of True Confidence

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Whether you think you can, or you can’t — you’re right.
– Henry Ford

Confidence. That elusive je ne sais quoi quality. It’s like art, you know it when you see it. You know it when you feel it. The thing is, confidence isn’t summoned on demand from the heavens. Confidence isn’t brought on by clenching your fists. Although you can strike a power pose and allow a burst of dopamine to create a burst of confidence, true and profound confidence comes from …

Preparation
One way you can step up on the field, on the stage, or at the meeting with strong confidence, is if you have done the work that will set you apart. Being prepared ranks as one of the highest confidence measures among professional athletes. Competence is almost always a strong predictor of confidence.

Visualizing Past (and Future) Performance
Recollecting past positive performances can give you a confidence advantage. When you take a moment to recollect a time in which you were previously successful, you’ll fuel a sense of confidence that you can repeat that success. Just as powerful is visualizing future success. Common among high performing professionals and athletes is visualizing the events unfolding in the most positive light. Wayne Rooney does this before every soccer match:

“Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what color we’re wearing — if it’s red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life… you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game.” (David Winner interview)

Great Coaching
There are many aspects to great coaches that can instill confidence, but the greatest coaches have the ability to be honest, specific and positive all at the same time. Honest, in that they don’t ignore the behavioral or performance weaknesses of the people they coach, but instead address weaknesses head on. Great coaches provide correctional advice that is both specific and positive.

For example, if you are practicing a presentation and constantly turn your back to the audience and read bullet points, your coach might say, “You know your content. Turn and face your audience and smile. They can read your bullet points on their own. Or even better, tell your audience a story that illustrates the bullet points on the slide.”

Innate Advantages
If your team is simply bigger, faster, and stronger, you will likely show up with more confidence. Just don’t let confidence become arrogance. If your firm simply has more capacity and resources than the competition, your team will likely enter the proposal negotiations with more confidence.

Social Support
First-time parents, exercise clubs, cooking classes, and OCD groups all get together for one purpose: to support each other through a specific change, or toward a specific goal. When you feel a little lost or unsupported, that’s a good time to reach out to those in your work or community who are experiencing the same pain point. You aren’t as unique as you think, and you can bet someone else is going through the same issue. Asking for help is the first sign of strength.

Competitive Advantage
The sun is in their eyes, the field is tilted, their lane is full of gravel, or the competition simply has a crappy internet connection. Recognizing a competitive advantage is a valuable source of confidence. The key is you have to do the diligence to recognize the advantages you might have. This is when competitive sleuthing can be valuable to help you both recognize, and articulate clearly to the customer what your advantages are.

Self-awareness,
Contrary to the old wisdom of positive self-talk such as “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” using positive questions is much more powerful as a confidence booster. If instead you say to yourself, “Can I do this?” you will have to answer the question in your mind and be specific about how you will overcome the obstacle, win the debate, or conquer the challenge. Be both positive and explicit in your self-talk is much stronger than simply repeating “I think I can.”

Trust
Could be the biggest factor here in team settings. I once watched a dynamic, high trust youth soccer team crush a team of hand-picked all-stars. The all-stars been told that each of them was amazing, so they played like that. The kids passed the ball as little as possible and selfishly worked for their own glory. The other team was a team – a team that had built the strength, experience, and trust of each other over years of working together. They were never told that individually they were great. They had built their wins by always relying on each other.

There are those who do the work. And those who take the credit.

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who do the work, and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group. There is less competition there.
– Indira Ghandi

Lisa Fischer might be the greatest female vocalist working today you have never heard of. When she tours with Sting, her voice is so powerful, Sting will often nod to her during shows and let her open up and take a lead. She will improvise beautiful lengthy passages of melody. Her voice is astonishing in range and power.

Lisa has also been the lead female vocalist on every single Rolling Stones tour since 1989. Not only in the background, but sometimes prowling the stage with Jagger and singing lead on Gimme Shelter. She claims when she is emotionally and vocally in harmony with Jagger, the audience vanishes and she feels as she and the band are the only ones in the stadium. You’ve never heard of her.

Judith Hill was in rehearsals with Michael Jackson when he died. She has been singing backup for years for Jackson, Stevie Wonder and numerous others. You’ve never heard of her either. Luther Vandross sang backup on David Bowie’s hit Young Americans. You know Luther. Luther made the big time. But many do not, and nor do they aspire to.

“Some people will do anything to be famous. And there are other people who just sing. For me, it’s not about anything except being in a special space with people. And that, to me, is the higher calling.”
– Lisa Fischer

I’m working with a CEO named Mark (not his real name) right now who is so generous with attribution and credit, that I’m having a hard time interviewing him directly. Every time I ask him a question about how he accomplished this or that project or initiative, he talks about someone else. He says they made it happen. He tells me I should go interview them. So I go talk to that department head or vice president, and every time they tell me it was Mark’s idea, his vision. They tell me they are just executing on the CEO’s idea.

Mark has managed to galvanize the entire organization around a higher goal by constantly giving credit, and constantly giving the spotlight to someone else.

Next time you have a great idea. Give it away. Give it to someone who can deliver on that idea even better than you might be able to.

A Trick to Building Inclusion: Lessons from the Playground

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On the playground at our daughter’s elementary school, there is something called the Buddy Bench. According to Annie, it’s where you can go and sit if you don’t have any friends to play with.

Then, if you see someone sitting there, alone on the Buddy Bench, your job is to go over and invite them to play with you.

My first reaction to the thought of the Buddy Bench was that it sounded a bit like the No Friends Bench, and that the act of sitting there was sad and lonely, and that by walking over and inviting someone to play was an act of generosity and kindness. And that the whole scene of walking over and sitting there would be like social abandonment. If you did have the courage to walk over, in front of the world to see, and take their hand, and invite them to play with you, the two of you would be quietly ostracized playing in a corner of the playground. At least that’s the way it played out in my mind. Maybe I’ve watched too many come-from-behind underdog Disney movies.

But the way our daughter describes it so matter-of-factly, there’s nothing odd or strange or uncomfortable about either going to the bench to sit, or walking over and inviting someone sitting there to play with you. The way she describes it, by sitting on the Buddy Bench, it’s almost as if you are announcing that you are available to play. It seems the gesture of sitting there is more of an invitation. It’s like raising your hand and saying “Hey, I’m free for something new. Anyone?”

There doesn’t seem to be any stigma associated with it. It’s all very straight-forward. If you’re not sure what to do, sit on the Buddy Bench and pretty soon someone will come over and invite you to play. Annie says people don’t sit on the Buddy Bench for very long. Almost immediately kids get scooped off the Buddy Bench by some kid or a group of kids, and run off immersed in an activity.

To me, this represents the epitome of environments of inclusion. An environment in which no one is permitted to be a pariah. The school has created a mechanism in which if you feel lonely or lost, or simply unsure of what to do next, you make a gesture. That gesture of sitting on the bench says to the entire community you are feeling left out or simply disengaged, and the whole community sees this visual cue and reacts immediately.

It’s also a culture in which a call for help has no stigma associated with it. In fact, the inverse is true. Regular rotation through the Buddy Bench is perfectly normal and healthy since that kid is going to get picked up by a new group and have new experiences.

But there are unwritten social rules that it is unacceptable for anyone to remain on the Buddy Bench. I imagine that the presence of someone lingering on the Buddy Bench would be an unconscious cue that the community lacks leadership, or courage. The social contract would be broken if someone were left there hanging. Annie says it never happens.

If you’re concerned about a lack of engagement, or professional isolation in your work environment, I encourage you to be proactive about it. Start with the assumption that they are at your company for a reason, that they deserve to be there. Then recognize the cues: lack of contribution at meetings, unanswered emails, missed deadlines, lack of initiative, half-ass work. Then pick up the phone, or walk over to their cube and invite them. Invite them for coffee. Invite their opinion. Invite them to contribute to your most valued project.

Invite them to play.

Check out our new series Small Acts of Leadership to pick up small habits you can practice every single day.

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I founded Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Good Things Happen When You Live Your Values

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livevaluesOn Monday, August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made it’s third and most devastating landfall with sustained winds of over 125mph. Inside the headquarters of Hancock Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, Katrina’s 30 foot storm surge had driven 4 feet of water throughout the ground floor and destroyed the elevator system.

A tornado had ripped out 1300 windows on the face of the building and blown glass, furniture and debris throughout the interior. The bank had a 1-inch steel roof that had been peeled off by the gale winds, exposing the interior of the 17-story building to the storm and deluge. And in the basement, the central data center was being flooded and blasted with falling sheet rock as the interior walls crumbled and fell.

In the shelter of a nearby building COO John Hairston managed to call Security IT Manager Jeff Andrews sitting in Chicago. With the winds howling outside, John yelled into his cell phone,

“Jeff, the building’s a total loss. You’ve got 4 days. Bring up the systems, get it current. I may not be able to talk to you again for a while…If we cannot get the systems up, we don’t have a company.”

The following morning, the bank executives huddled over the hood of a car in the parking lot. It was Tuesday, August 30. Payday. Most of their customers would be getting paid today, many by direct deposit. They needed those funds desperately for basic food, shelter and clothing. Credit cards would be useless. The region was devastated, the infrastructure flattened. With sporadic electricity available, cash would be critical to sustaining people’s lives.

Serving customers from Texas to Florida, Hancock Bank was one of the primary banking providers in the region. But without power at their banks or ATM facilities there was no way their customers could get access to funds to buy basic needs. Fifty of their regional bank branches were offline, with no power or access to customer account information.

Those executives in the parking lot of Hancock Bank then did something remarkable. Reminded of the original charter of the bank to serve communities first, profits second, they asked their branch managers to open no matter what. Without power or lights, and some without doors or windows, that afternoon 10 locations opened for business. Several of those locations served customers from card tables in front of the shattered bank. Within three days, 30 locations opened for business, and invited people in.

In exchange for an IOU on a post-it note, with only a name and an address if they had no identification, each makeshift bank provided $200 cash to anyone who asked for it. That’s right. In the critical week following Katrina, without requiring either proof of identification or verification of account information, Hancock Bank pulled cash from destroyed ATM machines, dried it out, and put $42 million into the local economy.

According to bank CEO George Schloegel, Less than $200,000 was not returned. And in the five months following the disaster, 13,000 new accounts were opened, and bank deposits grew by $1.5 billion. Yes, billion. Hancock Bank had definitively become the people’s bank of the community.

That’s the power of knowing the right thing to do, and actually doing it. That’s what happens when you cross the bridge between the knowing-doing gap.

When to Let Others Fail on Their Own

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Favorites from my 365 Project.

It was getting out of hand. It was time for an intervention. Only a year earlier we had a 30 minute “screen time” media option in our house for our three kids. After homework, after chores, after mealtime together, and after checking in and sharing with us their daily activities, they could zone out on NetFlix, Instagram, TV, or whatever they wanted for 30 minutes. In fact, this turned out to be a rather enjoyable time for us as well. While kids blanked out on devices we could chat in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner.

A year later it had devolved into our kids leaping into one, then two-hour headphone-wearing journeys silently watching Parks and Rec, or lost in Taylor Swift albums, or bingeing on FIFA Soccer on XBox. All drifting quietly alone in corners of the house.

I’m all for music and movies, and sometimes throw dance parties with the kids in the living room, or have sessions of watching Forrest Gump, laughing together. But this had gotten out of hand. The rules had lost meaningful consequences, and often we were too exhausted to martial our efforts to stop it. It was time to break the habit.

It hasn’t been consistently effective, but instead of insisting, demanding or confiscating their devices, we have had some progress when we initiate playing with our kids like building a ski jump or playing soccer in the back yard, or assigning small jobs like setting the table or preparing parts of dinner, or simply explaining that staring at a screen near bedtime makes it hard to go to sleep. And when all else fails I quietly go into the basement and unplug the wifi router.

So how do we instill better decision-making in our kids? There are a few clues in recent studies from Brigham Young University in which researchers followed 325 families over a period of four years, examining the behavior of the families with kids between the ages of 11 and 14. After examining parenting styles, family attitudes and subsequent goals attained by the kids, the researchers concluded that three key ingredients consistently created higher levels of persistence, confidence, and higher performance in school as well:

  • a supportive and loving environment
  • a high degree of autonomy in decision-making
  • a high degree of accountability for outcomes

In other words, ensure that there is high trust and unconditional love and support. Then let them make their own choices in recognition of shared understanding of consequences. Believe me, this certainly doesn’t always work. In our experience, a 14-year old does not always make thoughtful and conscientous decisions when granted autonomy. That’s the understatement of the week, but it is the eventual goal because in a few short years he will be making many of these decisions without us around.

I had an interview recently with the CEO of a 6 billion dollar company and he told me that sometimes he knows a project or initiative of a junior team will fail. He has the experience and the insight to recognize that it’s likely to bomb. But he lets it unfold anyway. He believes that as long as it’s not a mission-critical failure, it’s more important to let people go through that learning experience themselves. They need to have the experience of understanding first-hand that a particular process or initiative won’t work.

When We Feel Pressure to Be Fake

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“Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you.”
– Brené Brown

When my Mom was first diagnosed with cancer, her first impulse was that she didn’t want to tell anyone. She thought maybe people would see her as vulnerable, frail or dying. I remember thinking That’s nuts!

But it wasn’t crazy. It’s a common first reaction. And she went on to have a very open and successful battle with lymphoma.

It’s quite common for people to conceal parts of their identity for fear of being stigmatized. At work people often hide their religion, political values, sexual orientation, health conditions, maybe their cross-dressing preferences. People even conceal quite benign things like parental obligations to fetch a sick child from school, or take them to a dentist appointment. All out of fear of being branded as not professional, or not dedicated, or most importantly not like everyone else at work.

It’s an effort to get along, to be part of the group, to fit in.

The fear is that if our true identities are known, we’ll be stigmatized, possibly ostracized from people at work. Understandably no one wants to feel rejected. The interesting thing about this expectation is that it’s completely false. In this fascinating study from Yale, researchers discovered that overwhelmingly people believed and expected that by concealing parts of their identity that were unique or counterculture, they would feel a higher sense of belonging to the group, and in turn the group would be more welcoming and more inclusive to others looking and acting like everyone else.

It turns out the opposite is true. When we conceal parts of our identity that are core truths about what we believe and who we are, we start to retract from homogeneous groups. And by hiding personal truths, and socially withdrawing from a group, people around you sense it and begin to withdraw from you as well. It’s a reinforcing cycle.

Not only that, when we start to conceal personal identity traits it makes it harder to honestly and genuinely connect with others. The result is we lose a sense of belonging, which is at the very core of this buzzword engagement.

If we to feel like we belong to where we work, we care more about the work we do. To bring out the best in people, we need a culture that not only allows, but actively encourages expression of self. And the very best bosses and leaders understand this by creating an environment of inclusiveness and acceptance.