The Education of a Devil’s Advocate – When Personality Clashes With Culture

Written with Kristine MacKain, Ph.D

Joe, a senior executive in a large financial institution, typically speaks his mind and has no trouble challenging the status quo. That quality has been both the bane as well as blessing of his professional life. It has got him to the top of his organization but it has also has backfired on him at times.

Joe grew up in a family of academics in New York. As a young child he had vivid memories of mealtimes in his home. The debate around the table, encouraged by his parents, was vibrant and at times boisterous. No topic was sacrosanct. Religion, politics, sexuality all came under the microscopic scrutiny of four keen minds. “Question authority” was the family’s mantra. Consequently, from an early age, Joe learned to be a devil’s advocate.

Fast forward to his professional career in the financial industry. In his early career, Joe managed a small financial institution near New York City. The culture was entrepreneurial and the communication style with colleagues and customers alike was direct and frank — a perfect fit with Joe’s personality. After ten years of consistent promotions in different financial institutions, he was recruited to a large financial institution in the Midwest that had a very conservative, traditional culture.

Joe liked the pitch he got when he was recruited because it seemed like a good match with his personality: “You are just the type of executive we need. We really want a diverse workforce and also people who can challenge the status quo.”

When he began work, Joe soon discovered that challenging the status quo was an aspiration of the new CEO but not the reality of the long-standing, traditional corporate culture. He quickly learned that what had worked for him so well in the past — communicating directly and bluntly, and playing the devil’s advocate in meetings — was met by discomfort and resistance.

What changed? The behaviors that were acceptable, even celebrated, in one culture were seen in the new culture as inappropriate.

Specifically, Joe’s directness was perceived as brusque and rude.  His strong opinions came across as arrogant. Playing devil’s advocate by challenging authority was seen, in this traditional culture, as disrespectful to authority. Soon, Joe started receiving feedback from management:  “You are a great leader but you really need to work on your people skills.”

Joe was confused because his direct, challenging approach had worked so well for him in his other positions at other companies. He was also flabbergasted because “people skills: was one of his signature strengths. Soon, he was sent for executive coaching to clip the wings of the devil in advocate.

Over the next few months Joe learned about different cultures at work and the importance of adapting to them. He made significant changes in his communication style. He learned to be less direct and backed down from his confrontational role in meetings.

Here are some pointers for entering a different culture:

1. Take time to carefully observe the new culture and their behavioral style before you assert yourself.

2. Find out what the rules of engagement are in the new culture (e.g., do people defer to authority? Are they conflict avoidant?)

3. Develop communication tools that help you adapt your message to your new audience (e.g., use probing questions rather than assertive statements).

4. If your direct style is not working in the new culture, remember that it is not “wrong”; rather, your approach is simply not as effective as other approaches.

5. Keep speaking truth to power (the culture) but do not excessively consume the corporate Kool-aid.

In today’s world, a career (or careers) entails making transitions to different work environments. Everyone wants to fit into a new work environment. However, if your communication style is in conflict with the cultural norms, you can quickly set up barriers with others. By becoming more self-aware, you will quickly learn whether or not your style meshes with the style of the new culture. By learning the new culture’s rules of engagement, you will understand how you need to adapt your style to facilitate communication. In becoming more flexible and adaptable, you can build solid relationships early on in the process and make a more successful transition.

What happened to you when you went through a situation similar to that of Joe?

How have you seen culture clash with personality?

Your comments are valued.

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Stop Talking and Act Decisively

Written with Kristine MacKain, Ph.D

Have you ever been around people who, in meetings, seem to talk endlessly about an issue, then walk away without resolving the problem or acting decisively? Frustrating? Yes. Productive? No.

We have to assume that people want to solve problems—after all, that’s why they are at the meeting. So why is it that people stall and how can a leader change the direction of such a group?

 When Talking Replaces Doing

Sometimes talking about an issue is a substitute for doing something about it. Why?

1. The meeting has no clear agenda, focus, and/or stated deliverable. As a result, people “chew the fat” and the meeting is a terrible waste of everyone’s time.

2. The group is not asking the right questions. For instance, the discussion is focused on a new customer’s expressed need for a new technology that your company has not yet produced. The group, responding anxiously to the challenge, may ask, “What are our competitors doing in this area?” when a better question would be: “What is our customer’s real need and how can we find out?”

3. The key stakeholders are not present in the meeting. As a result, people don’t feel empowered to make a decision.

4.  Key members of the group have already decided on a course of action. In this instance, there is an illusion of collaboration but, in fact, the decision makers are letting the group talk while they wait for them to eventually rubber stamp the decision.

5. The group is part of a risk-averse culture. In this case, members are not willing to commit to action for fear of being blamed if the effort fails.

 Talk followed by Decisive Action – Becoming a Decisive Leader

 The ‘”talk too much” culture often stems from a failure in leadership. The manager/executive can turn this around by:

1. Deciding on an agenda and distributing it before the meeting.  Address important questions and empower the group to act.

2. Insuring that key stakeholders are either present or represented in the meeting.

3. Giving each member of the group different degrees of responsibility and ownership for the outcome.

4. Clarifying, changing, or asking better questions to maintain focus and get the job done.

5.  Prioritizing and assigning action items to individual members.

6.  Conducting a thorough root cause analysis, if appropriate, before discussing strategy or action plan and challenging assumptions or accepted wisdom.

These suggestions may sound very familiar as they form the basics of effective meetings. But too often we fail to implement them, resulting in meetings that are a waste of everyone’s time. If you find yourself leading a meeting where talking is replacing doing, it’s time to ask yourself, “Why?”

Have you ever thought “this meeting is a complete waste of time”?

Any thoughts why? 

Your comments are valued.

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The Slob Who Wanted to Please (The Case for Self-Regulation)

This post was written with Kris MacKain, Ph.D

Joe was a self-described slob who wanted to please. Everything around him was chaos — his house, his thoughts, and his relationships. However, this tendency to create a muddle out of everything perplexed him greatly since what he desired most was to please the same people that he constantly irritated with his inability to organize himself or his life.

Joe can be viewed as a classic illustration of the divided self.

All of us have competing personality and behavioral tendencies that produce varying degrees of internal and/or external conflict. Let’s consider some familiar examples:

Perfectionists who procrastinate on tasks they so want to complete for fear that nothing they do is ever good enough.

Highly empathic people who want to take care of themselves and others but, instead, they over-care for others and neglect themselves.

Oppositional personalities who repel those they want most to connect with and, consequently suffer when others avoid them.

All these people experience conflict between their aspirations and their actual behaviors. These examples may ring true because, to some degree or another, we all have conflicting aspects of ourselves that play out in similar ways.

How then can we live without the different aspects of ourselves bumping into each other and creating suffering? How can the slob start to clean up his act?

The answer can be found in Self-Regulation.

Making changes involves three consciously choreographed steps, which can be captured by three simple words: stop, think, act.

 Stop

We all need a good set of brakes. Stopping before we act is an essential aspect of self-regulation, which Daniel Goleman, among others, has argued is a key component of emotional intelligence and effective leadership.

To hit the brakes:

o  Learn what situations, people, or comments tend to trigger noxious and/or unproductive behaviors.

o  Learn to flag these triggers and stop before you act.

o  While tabling your emotions, give yourself a breather to think of a more productive, less reactive response.

o  Remember that the price is too high for not controlling one’s emotions.

Think

Our unproductive emotional responses are more often than not based on faulty thinking. As Shakespeare once wrote, “The fault… is not in the stars, but in ourselves.” Learning not to always believe one’s thoughts or to be a prisoner of one’s perceptions is important. To do this:

o  Challenge your beliefs. Ask yourself, “Does this situation really warrant such an intense response? What is causing my negative emotion? For example, is it simply a sour look on the boss’ face or is it my interpretation that her sour look is directed toward me?

o  Put your negative response on hold until you have more evidence. Is the boss’ sour look triggering a past unresolved conflict with someone else or is it really something between the two of you?

o  Do not judge yourself for aspects of your personality that are unacceptable to you. The word “slob” is a harsh self-judgment.  Many of us are inclined to be tough on ourselves and then on others. Backing off judgmental responses and learning self-compassion is key to thinking about ourselves in new, more highly functional ways.

Act

The final step is to consciously change our behavior from emotionally reactive to rationally deliberative. To do this:

o Emulate best practices of those who have overcome similar tendencies; for example, the employee who adopts the practice of refraining from blurting out, “What’s wrong?” to his boss and, instead, asks others for the causes of the boss’ perceived foul mood while taking direction from the boss and completing his assignment.

o  Practice the behavior until it becomes habitual. In this way, we “act” our way into a new way of thinking that is automatic and consistent.

At the end of the day, there is hope for the person with conflicting personality tendencies if he or she raises self-awareness and applies self-regulation. When people try to change, others often notice and give credit for their efforts. Small behavioral and attitudinal changes really stand out. While old habits may die hard, die they do with repeated practice and good outcomes.

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A Broken Heart – Prelude to a New Life

Artist Manuel Vasquez Cruz in Oaxaca Mexico poignant sculpture after he had a heartbreaking experience.

The new person emerges from the old as a result of the painful experience. He lovingly cradles his heart in his hand as he undergoes his metamorphosis.

Most of the productive change in our lives grows out of deeply painful experiences.

A picture is worth a 1000 words.

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(Photograph by Kristine MacKain)

The Limits of our Knowledge

Written with Kristine MacKain, Ph.D

The other night at supper our waiter told us that he had a Ph.D in quantum physics. Part of us wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but the other part was skeptical so we asked, “What was the topic of your dissertation?” When he hemmed and hawed, then quickly found an excuse to leave our table, we knew he was putting us on.

Aside from those who make dramatic, false claims about themselves, there are others who will gladly take your time spouting off with authority about this topic or that. Often, you find out later that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Consequently, you have to be careful who you can trust. Even with Google, a topic search can give you false information, leading you down a rabbit trail.

So what should this tell us?

1.  Be cautious of people claiming to be “experts” without a credible knowledge base. Retain a healthy skepticism even to a blog like this one.

2.  Adopt an open mind: challenge your most cherished opinions and consider contrary points of view.

3.  Appreciate that with greater knowledge comes the realization that one still has so much to learn. The more we know, the more we come to understand how little we know.

4.  Recognize that people who hold themselves up as authorities may have hidden agendas such as the need for certainty, to be right, to be superior, or to have status in or respect from their social communities.

If we find ourselves with these impulses, how can we approach interpersonal communication in a healthier, more productive way?

1.  Humbly let go of the need to be right and listen carefully and engage people in dialog.

2.  Define yourself as a student rather than an expert; continually challenge your knowledge and remain open to learn, even from unlikely sources.

3.  Defer to those who are more knowledgeable in an area but at the same time question authority.

4.  Don’t reveal ignorance by speaking with confidence on topics where one really knows very little about the subject. This is especially true when we make authoritative pronouncements about other people. A fool and his/her words are soon parted.

This does not mean we should refrain from being assertive about expressing a position, decisive about an action, or confident about a knowledge base we have acquired.

However, we need to achieve balance by expressing a humility that recognizes the scope and/or limitations of our own knowledge and a self awareness that understands and monitors our underlying drives, such as the drive to be right.

An excellent article on this topic is “Beware the Everyday Expert” by Daniel Gulati in the HBR Blogs.

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Self Awareness 101

“We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”  Talmud

We are often quick to prejudge a situation through the negative lens of our own state or projections.

Consider some of the following distorted situations.

The disgruntled traveler who sees the locals as weird.

The unhappy partner who views intimate relationships as a lost cause.

The fearful person who views risk taking as too dangerous.

The greedy person who views the world as filled with scarcity.

The conflict avoidant employee who sees a confrontation with the boss as dangerous.

How do we get beyond seeing things as we are?

1. Seek out and embrace accurate feedback about our distortions and thank the people who lovingly tell us the truth.

2. Approach any situation with the question “What’s good about this person/place/or issue?

3. Do not judge ourselves for our distortions but use a mixture of self-compassion or self-deprecating humor to right size our perspective.

So when I am inclined to live the words of the old ditty

“Everyone is weird,

save me and you.

And sometimes I think

you weird too.”

Will someone please encourage me to question my perspective and consider an alternative like a positive disposition?

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Our Hurried Lives

“I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date!

No time to say Hello! Goodbye!

I’m late! I’m late! I’m late!”

 The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland

Last night I slept like a baby. All night. Surprisingly.

I was contrasting my activities of the last week with the newly restored balance and relaxation I was experiencing here in Southern Mexico. Recently I had taken on a new consulting project and my days were jammed with phone and Skype appointments. My frustrations were heightened with failures in technology. I was moving so fast that at times I felt as though I hardly had time to breathe. My nights where short and restless and I needed more than my normal quota of coffee to get going each day.

All this made me reflect on why our lives become so hurried.

Of course there are huge differences as to why people get busy. Some reasons are productive and others are quite dysfunctional. Also there are huge individual differences between people on energy levels, social needs, professional demands, ways they take care of themselves, and the stage they find themselves in life.

At the root of hurry, beyond the fact of time management, there are two basic questions we could ask:

1.   What might you be running from?

2.   What might you be moving towards?

 Running From

People who are unconsciously driven by past demons often spend much of their lives running from them. This hurried flight can be explained in part by the following statements.

1.   “I am inadequate!” Our perceived lack of value may be pegged to insecurities related to personal appearance, lovability, intellectual capacity, social status, and so on. Driven by deep feelings of inferiority we pack our lives with activities that we believe will compensate for our felt sense of inadequacy.

2.   “I don’t have enough!” Here we literally become greedy for whatever we believe will fill that vacuum in our lives. So the more friends we accumulate, possessions we acquire, social events we attend, steps we climb on the corporate ladder, or business commitments we make, we believe that they will fill the empty bucket of our lives. But the trouble is the bucket is never filled because it has a gaping hole at the bottom. Hence the activities we pursue never seems to fully satisfy.

3.   “I love this busyness”. The adrenaline rush keeps us feeling alive to the point of becoming an addiction. We reach the point where we cannot do without the hurried life. As a result our lives are so out of balance that our health and relationships suffer. We literally become hooked on how important we feel when we are busy.

4.   “I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.” Sometimes we are suffering from hurts or unresolved psychological issues and attempt to avoid them by keeping busy. As long as we distract ourselves and don’t allow ourselves to be quiet and reflective, we think we can eliminate our suffering.

But busyness is not always a bad thing.  Busyness can be productive when we are…

Moving Towards

People may be busy for positive reasons:

1.   The Drive to Make a Contribution. This impulse is seldom found in a person compensating for a felt sense of insufficiency. Rather, it comes from a vision of a deep human need, an innovative challenge, and a sense of the significant contribution one can make to serve the greater good.

2.   The Impulse of the Soul. In our heart of hearts, our very essence or soul, we are kind people with the impulse to do good. In order then for the soul to thrive it has to grow in the soil of personal awareness, balance, presence, and the practice of living as fully in the moment as we can.

3.   The Sense of the Oneness of Everything. The more I travel and experience other cultures I sense that we have more in common with each other than the differences that often divide. It is these common bonds that drive us to ever be students and celebrate common ties. The appetite for more of this oneness ennobles the human spirit.

Activities that arise from moving towards contribution, soul, and oneness are regenerative. These build us up and contribute in positive ways to others.

Activities driven by the forces of the ego are based on inferiority, greed, and addiction. These break us down, rob us of our vitality, and hurt others in the process.

Both forces are ever present in our lives. Both require that we stay awake to their presence, treat ourselves with compassion, be less judgmental of others, and require that we take intentional steps to feed the soul and starve the ego.

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Most Read Postings for the Last Quarter

1. What is Forgiveness?
2. The Character of Highly Successful Leaders
3. Developing Your Leadership Brand
4. So You Want to be an Executive?
5. My Purpose in Life Is?
6. When Your Slump is a Blessing
7. 10 Steps to Make Your Leadership Brand Shine
8. The Meaning of Work – A Cultural Perspective
9. Be Generous
10. Managing Your Fears

Top Views by Country for the Last Quarter

1. United States of America
2. United Kingdom
3. India
4. Philippines
5. Mexico
6. Canada
7. Israel
8. Singapore
9. South Africa
10. Hungary

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Chicken Living or the Soul

Consider the following parable by Anthony de Mello in the book “Song of the Bird”

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of barnyard hens.

The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarecely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The eagle looked up in awe. “What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle the king of the birds” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth – we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

Some Questions

1. What is it that you think you are? How does that limit you or let you wake up to who you really are?

2. How can you realize your own “eagle” nature in a world that keeps wanting you to conform to its view of what you should be?

So what can you imagine for yourself?

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My Purpose in Life is?

Is there just one purpose for our lives? And where does this idea come from in the first place?

Here is a partial answer. We have,

1.  Some stellar talent or ability that others view as our great contribution to life. My hair stylist told me last week that she was born to do hair. She was emphasizing that she loved her job, was naturally good at it, and, at a deeper level, that it gave meaning to her life. It is quite easy then to say that this was her purpose in life. Maybe people have told you, “You are a born artist” or “You are destined to become a CEO”

2.  A drive to find meaning for our lives. As humans we attempt to ferret out meaning in just about everything we do. Usually we hone in on a career or a compelling passion to express ourselves. We look for one focus to help us make a good choice and define our purpose.

But do we, like my hairstylist born to do hair, view our purpose as one thing? Just as the acorn is destined to become an oak, do the seeds of our calling clearly emerge as one thing?

Here are some problems and challenges about viewing our lives through the prism of one fixed purpose.

1.   We risk becoming reductionistic.

We live in a shrink it down culture. We reduce complex issues to their simplest terms in order to wrap our minds around them. So we hear people saying, “Oh you are an introvert or a depressive or born to be an artist”. As if one adjective, personality category, or professional identity can capture the essence of a person. We are far more complex than that.

How can we reduce the wonders of the universe to one star or even galaxy? How can we boil down a person’s achievement or personal skills or passion to one manifestation of the self? Such reductionism violates the mystery of our person and makes our life’s journey too simplistic.

2.   We can never predict the future.

When I was in my 20’s I would never have dreamed up the configuration of my present life. I was a boy living in a backwater small town in a country then called Rhodesia, limited by my cultural and religious heritage. Breaking frame and immigrating to the USA, training to be a psychologist, leaving the religious heritage of my childhood, having a child who was disabled, marrying Kris, having a global consulting business, embracing new friends, and moving to Mexico have influenced my evolution in ways I would never have dreamed possible. Was this what I would have predicted for myself in late middle age? In no way, shape, or form.

As with any journey we can plan on and imagine our destination. However, all the guidebooks can never prepare us for the surprises and challenges that we will actually experience when we are there. And so,

3.  We cannot reduce the journey of a life to one goal.

The other day I met a staff person at the FedEx store that had an obvious passion for design. In fact I mentioned to her “You have the design gene in you.” She agreed with me and mentioned that she had been enrolled in a school of design but had to drop out for unstated reasons. Will she ever go back to that path? I don’t know. However, does that mean it’s the end of the line for her finding a calling in the years ahead? Who knows where the stream of her life will flow? She was obviously a multi-talented person. A whole journey lies ahead of her full of mystery and adventure.

So too you may have imagined one goal for your career and relationships. You invested all your energy and hopes into that quest. But life happened and you were knocked off course. So is that it for you? No more options? Well if you were destined to do or be one thing you are out of luck. You are then destined to live on the bench and never get back in the game.

The truth is that there are many options for our lives as we position ourselves to open up to new possibilities. But we only discover this truth when,

So if the notion of “one thing for our lives” is unworkable here are some preliminary ideas on how we can experience a sense of purpose in life.

How to Experience a Sense of Purpose

1.  Remain flexible and learn to improvise. Surrender the illusion of control.

2.  Realize that there is more to you than you can begin to realize.

3.  Develop a sense that you are attached to something larger than yourself especially by serving the common good.

4.  Demonstrate kindness to others and the self on a daily basis.

5.  Listen to and live according to the prompting and poetry of the soul.

6.  Embrace the adventure of life in whatever way it presents itself to us.

7.  Be as fully present as we can be with others and ourselves.

How would you describe your purpose?

This posting was made after reading the excellent article by Daniel Gulati “Diversify Your Dreams” in a recent blog on the Harvard Business Review

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