And
why do others often fail to be effective, or as
successful as they should be?
In their book, Maximum
Success: Changing the Twelve Behavior Patterns That
Keep You From Getting Ahead, James Waldroop and
Timothy Butler identify twelve behavior patterns
— what they call "Achilles' heels" — that
can harm, or seriously hinder, a person's career
development. In their roles as consultants and
executive coaches to many Fortune 500 companies, they
offer invaluable job-saving advice on how readers can
modify their behavior to get things back on
track.
Behaviors That
Can Hold You Back
Here are five behavior patterns
that can be highly destructive to your career. Please
note that the following stories of real-life
individuals illustrate a "pure case" of the behavior
in question. Although these stories are actually quite
interesting, please do not make the mistake of
comparing yourself to those worst case
examples.
Chances are, you aren't in half
as much trouble as some of these people. But even the
occasional display of some of these behaviors —
especially as you move upward in an organization
— can do substantial damage to your ultimate
career success. Although the book identifies twelve
behavior patterns, here are only five of the
behaviors, starting with...
1) Never
Feeling Good Enough
"In a world overpopulated with
enormous egos, 40-year old Paul seemed to be an
anomaly," begins the first of Waldroop and Butler's
twelve case studies. "He actually had an ego that was
too small for his considerable abilities and new
position as head of the Mexican arm of an
international bank based in Dallas, Texas.
"Although he had never been a
manager, Paul had considerable know-how as a banker
and Latin America was his specialty. Moreover, Paul
had succeeded at everything he had ever done and had
been a top student in both college and graduate
business school. But in his new position, Paul was
suddenly a misfit — or so he felt. He was
self-conscious and awkward, and unable to speak with
authority. Instead of strolling through the offices in
comfortable command, Paul scurried down the halls with
an intense, inner-directed gaze that signaled to
everyone that he was in trouble. His body language
broadcast concern, discomfort and even isolation. His
discomfort soon began to show, and his clients and
subordinates also began to get quite edgy
themselves."
Paul's actions and feelings fall
into a pattern that Waldroop and Butler describe as a
kind of career-related acrophobia. Paul's insecurity
was born of his innate belief that he was incapable of
surviving at the heights he had somehow scaled. He
felt in his heart of hearts that he didn't deserve to
be where he had been placed, which is a feeling a
surprising number of people have to a greater or
lesser extent.
How can someone like Paul who
habitually feels and acts this way acclimate and learn
to love the heights? As Paul was counseled, it became
clear that he would have to learn to carry himself in
a way that reflected his ability and the capacity for
command he had inside. He was coached to adopt the
look of someone who is full of confidence, even if he
didn't feel that way inside. They coached him to walk
slowly, to talk slowly and even to eat
slowly.
Those simple gestures seemed
superficial at first, but coupled with some other
interventions, they actually worked. Over a period of
months, Paul's clients and employees began to see him
as a relaxed, confident leader, and Paul responded by
developing even more self-assurance.
2)
Seeing the World in Black and White
"Sometimes the world behaves in
wonderfully rational ways," say Waldroop and Butler,
"but most of the time, it doesn't. We see this every
time someone gets a job because of 'connections,' or
children of alumni in many private schools get
preference over other applicants."
Despite the fact that most of us
learn about these things at an early age, some folks
apparently never moderate their faith in the perfect
rationality of the world. Waldroop and Butler refer to
these people as meritocrats — people who blindly
insist that virtually everything in life must be
judged strictly rationally on its own inherent merit,
refusing to see even shades of gray. Emotions,
politics, sentimentality, loyalty and favoritism play
absolutely no part. Meritocrats, write Waldroop and
Butler, consistently talk about the way things "should
be," not the way things actually are. It's almost as
if the meritocrat lives in a remote parallel universe,
but unfortunately it is a world that exists only in
his or her mind.
Meritocrats almost always
undermine their own careers by continually "fighting
the good fight" at work until they exasperate their
peers, supporters and superiors. For example, one
client named "Dan," went to work in a family business
straight out of college — someone else's family,
not his. He knew from the beginning what the situation
was and that he would never get a share of the
business. Moreover, he knew that the several members
of the family his age and younger would have a much
greater say in how the business was to be
run.
Dan, who was a very hard worker,
had bought into this arrangement with open eyes, but
he couldn't help himself from pointing out to anyone
who would listen about how unfair the whole situation
was. One day, he confronted his boss with his
perspective on the situation. The owner's response was
that he understood how Dan felt, but he was still
going to hand the family business over to his sons,
and if he felt that strongly about it he should leave.
If only Dan, a consummate meritocrat had understood
himself and his needs better, he probably never would
have accepted that job in the first place.
People who are extreme
meritocrats are relatively rare in business and are
rarely very successful in that forum, because business
dealings almost always involve a compromise with
perfection. The authors argue that people who exhibit
strong meritocratic tendencies are better suited to
careers such as science or engineering, where black
and white quests for perfection are generally better
tolerated.
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3) Doing Too
Much, Pushing Too Hard
"As far back as she could
remember, Stephanie made extraordinary demands on
herself. It wasn't enough that she was an A student
from as far back as she could remember, she insisted
on extra-credit work as well. She was also class
president, a member of the debating team, a devoted
gymnast and head of the drama club.
"At first, Stephanie's obsession
with taking on more and more responsibility, and
working harder than anyone around her, was a source of
amusement to her friends. But later in college, and
when she entered the world of work, the smiles began
to fade." Stephanie had developed what Waldroop and
Butler refer to as a "hero" behavior pattern, and by
the time she'd reached her mid-20's, virtually no one
could stand to be around her.
Waldroop and Butler stress that
setting goals and working hard to achieve them is
never a bad thing. But, in their view, heroes tend to
bite off more than they can chew, and are never
satisfied with what they've accomplished.
Heroes, they say, may find a
decent fit as a management consultant or some other
type of independent contributor, but they will never
succeed in a traditional slow-growth company where
teamwork is highly valued. This is because heroes
never seem to understand that the people who work
around and under them sometimes need a rest, and in
doing so they often drive people away, which can be
deadly for an organization.
That said, of all the Achilles'
heels discussed in the book, the hero probably has the
greatest potential for enormous career success. The
world needs heroes but only those who have learned to
slow down once in awhile, and be compassionate and
understanding of others. Otherwise, they may find
themselves mortally wounded like the original hero
Achilles himself, undone by their very acts of
heroism.
4) Avoiding
Conflict at Any Cost
A peacekeeper is someone who is
determined to avoid conflict at any cost. In doing so,
peacekeepers believe that they are both protecting
themselves from harm, and preserving the orderly
functioning of their organizations. On both counts,
say Waldroop and Butler, peacekeepers are terribly
wrong. In fact, they argue that peacekeeping is an
insidious behavior that can ultimately undermine
relationships and destroy organizations.
Anger and its resolution are
essential components of the human experience. The cost
of suppressing one's emotions may not show up early in
a career. When you're first starting out, you're
expected to watch, listen and learn. But, inevitably,
getting to the top of an organization requires a
willingness to take risks and battle rivals. And once
on top, a leader sometimes has to require subordinates
to do things they don't necessarily want to
do.
When Waldroop and Butler coach
compulsive peacekeepers, they have two goals: to
desensitize them to conflict, and to build their
skills at handling conflict. With this approach, they
help their clients to become stronger until they are
able to take on the toughest situations at work and in
their personal lives. Being able to deal with conflict
effectively is both an essential survival skill, and a
sure-fire ticket to career success.
5) Bulldozing
the Competition
"Most of us learn early on to
play nicely with the other children," write Waldroop
and Butler, "but some of us don't." Extreme examples
of such people who never learn to get along with
others are called bulldozers. Like an offensive
lineman in football, the bulldozer's goal is to
flatten people, and to run roughshod over them as
necessary.
Although bulldozers love to
think of themselves as irresistible forces, ultimately
they run into a real immovable object, something they
cannot plow through, and because they never learned
the skill of moving around resistance, they are
defeated. Of the twelve behavior patterns Waldroop and
Butler describe in their book, eleven of them are as
likely to be women as men. But not the bulldozer.
Although a few women do fit this pattern — women
such as Margaret Thatcher and Leona Helmsley —
bulldozing is a condition that is almost exclusively
male.
According to Waldroop and
Butler, bulldozers view any and all situations as
zero-sum games and adversarial in nature. They focus
only on how to get the biggest piece of the pie —
if not all of it. Some bulldozers manifest their
behavior by monopolizing air time in meetings and by
instantly squashing any opposition. Others achieve
their goals through simple intimidation — using a
domineering physical presence or a steely glare to get
their way.
Fortunately, the world has
evolved in a number of ways over recent years to
render people who exhibit this behavior pattern
increasingly obsolete. Bulldozers might have been okay
people to have around in a manufacturing based economy
where assignments are generally clear and
straightforward. But bulldozers generally fall down in
face-to-face service relationships with customers
where they have to read what people are thinking and
adjust their tactics accordingly.
Like the other Achilles' heels,
bulldozing is a correctable flaw, but it takes a lot
of work. The motto of the recovering bulldozer must
become "do unto others as you would have them do unto
you" — the Golden Rule or the Law
of Reciprocity.
Because the fatal flaw of the bulldozer is a lack of
empathy, taking the time to think about and understand
how other people feel is the only way out of this rut.
On the other hand, because of their energy and
tenacity, a reformed bulldozer can actually be a
valuable asset to any organization — but it's
rare that people who exhibit these traits are ever
able to stick around long enough to get a second
chance.
Putting It All
Together
In the cases of Paul the
acrophobic banker and Stephanie the hero, who were
briefly profiled above, their Achilles' heels were
nearly their undoing. But having potentially fatal
flaws, as they did, does not have to result in career
stagnation or termination. In fact, Waldroop and
Butler would argue that we all have Achilles' heels of
one sort or another. It's just that some of us have
learned to manage them successfully, while others of
us allow them to hold us down.
Executive coaches can provide
their clients with some of the tools that Paul and
Stephanie didn't have. Learning to recognize the ways
you — and all of us — engage in behaviors
that create our own "glass ceilings" will enable us to
break through them and achieve the success we
deserve.
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