How Our Deepest Fears Shape Our Approach to Business

David articulates five fears that tend to shape management style and impact decisions principals make for their firms.

Links

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition

“Moving from a Scarcity to an Abundance Mindset in the Creative Field” by David C. Baker

Transcript

Blair Enns: [laughs]

David C. Baker: Was that a start, or was that just a laugh?

Blair: [laughs] This is how the sausage gets made, people. That's me thinking about how I'm going to pounce on you with the opening. I don't know why I have this deep-seated need to surprise you with something or wallop you right at the beginning.

David: It's because I am so good at interviewing you. You're trying to raise your game.

Blair: I'm pretty sure that's not it. Our topic today is how our deepest fears shape our management style.

David: Oh, that sounds like a title I wrote. It's so succinct and it just seems like beautiful lyrics.

Blair: It's always tapping into fear or some sort of horrible thing. If anybody listening has seen your photography, you are quite an accomplished amateur photographer. You like to shoot death and decay.

David: [laughs] Yes.

Blair: Industrial death and decay.

David: Yes, I'd like to have a permanent parking spot at a morgue somewhere, that would really feed my photography itch.

Blair: Pre-COVID you were going to go to Chernobyl on vacation, right?

David: Yes, with my oldest son, Jonathan. We had all the arrangements made. That obviously didn't happen.

Blair: Okay, so let's get into our deepest fears and how they shape our management style. Where did this idea come from?

David: I was talking with a couple of clients and noticing how, if I just pulled it apart a little bit and saw, "Oh, wow, there's one significant." I could say the same thing for myself. This isn't a hottie statement, but their compass isn't really calibrated. They have a particular approach to life, and that shows up, it nudges all of the big decisions they make, in a certain way.

I just backed away from that a little bit and started to think about myself. What is it when I see the blood pressure rising in myself, is there a pattern around why that's the case? Or when I try to pull apart some of the decisions that I make around my business or in my personal life, is there evidence that? If somebody didn't even know me, but they looked at the decisions I made, could they make some assumptions about what's driving those decisions?

Blair: Yes, they could, and here they are.

David: You're so excited for that opening into my life, right?

Blair: Go on.

David: I just thought, "Okay, wouldn't it be interesting if we just talked about this?" The goal, in my mind, this isn't maybe a massive goal, but it's a worthwhile goal, would be to begin to recognize that in ourselves. I had a conversation with a client that I'm working with nowadays and I said, "Hey, could I speak with you, just between you and I after this phone call?" She said, "Yes." Then I said, "I feel like a lot of your decisions are shaped by this particular thing."

Then we work through this, and she didn't say anything for a while, which is usually not a good sign, but in this case, she was just thinking about it, and she agreed that, "Oh, yes, that's really true. I appreciate you saying something." That got me thinking a little bit more seriously about this, and I texted you and said, "Hey, is this a worthwhile topic?" Fully prepared for you to say, "No." Usually, it's just a no without much explanation, but you thought it was worth pursuing, so I just put a few notes together.

Blair: For clarity, I don't respond with no, I respond with, "What else have you got?"

David: Or your classic phrase is you could do better. That's usually what you say.

Blair: I know what I hate and I don't hate this.

David: Yes. [laughter]

Blair: You've articulated five fears that tend to shape management style, and you said, " Okay, is this a good idea?" I said, "Yes, I like it." Then you said, "Anything you would add to it?" I thought you're missing a few, and I started to list them, and I realized, "Oh, they're all subsets of what you've identified." I think you've nailed the macro category. Do you want to just give us the five fears that shape our management style? Then we'll dive into the first one, but do you want to list them all first?

David: Sure. The first is fear of conflict, so somebody who is conflict-averse, we say. Fear of irrelevance and that one took me a little while to phrase, I'm not even sure that's the right way to say it, but fear of irrelevance in the business community. Fear of poverty, that one doesn't need much explanation. Fear of an earlier role, so going back to a role that you've shed and don't ever want to go back to. Then fear of public perception. Those were the five and maybe as we go through here, we'll rephrase some of them, but those are the five.

Blair: Yes, I think they're great fears to dive into and some alternative labels jump to mind, but let's get into it. Fear of conflict, we see this a lot.

David: Even in sales, you mean?

Blair: Yes, I've just finished writing a big lengthy piece on this, basically trying to inspire people by getting them to fast forward to the of their the career and think of the change that they were not able to affect in their career, doing a premortem on a failed career, and have them look back and say, the reason you're likely to net out in this lukewarm place, is because you passed on every opportunity to help others transform.

Transformation does not come without struggle. The reason you passed is, what you've identified here, it's a fear of conflict. If you keep avoiding those moments of conflict, those struggle, you never get the rewards on the other side of the struggle. In the end, it'll be a career of unfulfilled potential.

David: I see this so much. I think to be complete, I'd to talk about fear of conflict, A, that's inducing or having a difficult conversation with somebody. Most people don't have a lot of struggle with that. Fear of conflict, B, would be a conflict that involves me personally. I think I'm one of the best people around at approaching difficult conversations in a way that doesn't make people defensive. When it comes to my activity, or my attitude, or something, I'm very defensive, and here, I'm talking about that part of it, fear of conflict. The way this shows up is not so much a problem with the antennas that people have. I see people not missing the signals.

In other words, the issues that would best be solved with a little bit of difficult conversation along the way, they know what those are, but they choose not to engage with those. The pressure builds because something isn't being dealt with, whether it's a client who's, I don't know, not being a good client, or whether it's an employee or a manager or a partner or anything like that, whatever it is. It could be dealt with quicker, and it isn't dealt with until that pressure builds.

At that moment, you start to see all of the negative impact that can come by just being averse to conflict, because people around you look to you and say, "Wait a second, I thought this is when a leader was supposed to step in and do something, and you aren't, why aren't you? Is it because you don't see it?" Again, I don't think that's usually the issue. It's because you're trying to avoiding it, hoping that either it will go away, smooth itself over, or somebody else will deal with it, or in a passive-aggressive way, you send the signal and it's a very clear signal, but it's a passive signal and you're hoping that somebody will change their behavior without you having to come right out and address it.

It builds on itself. This is one of those challenges that if it's not addressed fairly promptly, it gets worse and worse, and if it's not addressed early, the amount of conflict is much worse, much greater down the road, and so the sooner it's dealt with, the better, as long as you're not being over-reactive. The flip side of this is I've now talked with 20 some thousand employees of the firms that are being run by the people who listen to this podcast.

Universally, they will say they want you to address things. They want you to deal with things. They want your leadership. They generally trust you. They just wonder why the silence is there. That's maybe why I thought about this one first. There's some good books on this, too. I think you've read at least one of these, one of them is called Difficult conversations, the other one's called Crucial conversations, that's the one that I read.

Blair: We've talked about this before, I read the book and then I had this crucial conversation with my wife in the car. I thought, "Wow that went great," and I looked over, and she was quietly crying. The first fear is a fear of conflict. I see this a lot. I really like the idea that you broke out these two different types of conflict, the ability to have difficult conversations with others. Then the not wanting somebody to have that difficult conversation with you. Those are two different things. I appreciate your vulnerability and pointing out that you're not so good at the second because the first type of clearly is a superpower of yours. They don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, do they?

David: No, they don't. That's probably an eternal struggle for me, is just thinking through this. It took me about three days to relax about something that came up last week. Finally, I started to see the light after that after sleeping on it for a few days. What does the environment look like when a leader is conflict-averse? What happens is that-- Well, nothing happens really, that's the point.

There's a leadership vacuum, and leadership vacuums are never left unfilled and so somebody is going to lead your firm, and it might be a good leader or it might be a bad leader, and you don't want to be a conflict-averse leader, because then you'll just be along for the ride, you'll be reacting instead of leading, you'll be passive instead of active.

It doesn't show up right away, but over time, you'll end up realizing, "Oh, my goodness, I feel this tension all the time and I feel like I'm having to constantly make adjustments to where this company wants to go and I'm either being dragged along, or I'm not being very clear about where we want this to be."

It just holds an organization back, it just doesn't move forward, because there isn't clear direction and because-- Like you said at the beginning, we really are not making any great progress without this sort of conflict. Conflict is really good, as long as it's dealt with appropriately but if conflict is left unaddressed, the organization is simply going to wallow and that's what we're trying to avoid.

Blair: All right. Second, on your list, I think was fear of irrelevance. I've got some thoughts on that but walk us through it.

David: Do you remember an episode where you and I were talking about our greatest fears, you and I specifically about our greatest fears? If I recall, it was both of us jumped on it and said, fear of not learning anymore or not getting this?

Blair: Yes.

David: This is so different to look at than the first one because the fear of conflict is such an obvious character flaw. The fear of irrelevance is not something we usually-- We wouldn't criticize somebody and say, "Yes, he's like-- I've known him forever, and such an asshole. He's so afraid of being irrelevant." [laughs]

Blair: Yes, it doesn't show up that way, does it?

David: No, it doesn't. Sometimes there's something about this, I feel like, in a few years from now, I'll probably understand this better, but the way it shows up is people constantly reaching, changing, experimenting, they're latching on to trends and books and speakers, even consultants of the week, and I feel that sometimes we're, "Oh, I'm just the next person in this chain of people and in two months, they'll forget about me, it'll be somebody else." It frustrates the team sometimes because they aren't really given enough time to percolate and work things out and establish a new bulkhead that's going to really work for years and years.

There's a little bit of fear of irrelevance that is very healthy, but at some point, it tips a balance into something else where you're just never balanced, you're just always off-balance, you're stumbling around. I'm interested in your thoughts on this one, I almost didn't put it on the list, do think it's worth thinking about?

Blair: I think it's a great one and it's really timely for me. Personally, I was talking to a friend the other night and among the various things we talked about, he was commenting on an acquaintance of his who was saying some really stupid things on social media to do with the Black Lives Matter Movement. This is somebody who was well-known within certain circles and lost their platform. My observation was, well, I didn't say fear of irrelevance, but it's like trying to get their platform back, trying to get some status. Peter Drucker, the great author, and I guess, godfather Management Consulting, he said that people without status or purpose see conspiracies everywhere.

When I read that, I was really struck by it because one of the things I'm fascinated by is, I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorist, I'm like what is it about people that draws them to sometimes outlandish conspiracy theories and when I read that statement by Drucker, I thought that explains it all. If you feel like you have no place, no power, no authority in the world, it feels like everything is aligned against you.

I think people who are operating from a fear of irrelevance, they act out, they misbehave, they're trying to get attention, they're experimenting with trying to get a point of view or some sort of content or subject matter, mostly a point of view that will resonate with people that will make them relevant, and if they're not able to do that, they just feel like the forces of the universe are aligned against them and they're more prone to those conspiracies in search of an explanation for why they feel irrelevant.

David: Yes. This has got to have lots of subparts to it that would be fascinating to think through some more but this fear of irrelevance. What's particularly strange about it is that it's motivated by the right things, but the right things in too big a dose of the right things makes you just guaranteed to be irrelevant because you're so concerned with being relevant. Behind all of this, I guess is a little bit of distaste in my mind for the personal branding that you and I have talked about, where you see some individuals who are so desperate for an audience that they'll be intentionally provocative when that's really not necessary, and social media has exacerbated that as well.

I doubt that a lot of principals suffer from this, but you can see this in conversations with principals, I'll see this anyway, where it's never enough. They're just, they're making money, they've got a decent culture, their clients are pretty happy, but they're always wanting to reinvent everything. It's hard to even say that because it's not a bad thing in itself, a large amount of that needs to happen all the time. We need a psychologist on here. 

Blair: [chuckles] Instead of one of us.

Blair: We're talking about how our deepest fears shape our management style. We've addressed, number one, fear of conflict. Number two, fear of irrelevance. Number three is fear of poverty. I've heard you reference this quite often. I don't think of it that way. Maybe because it's not like my family had a lot of money growing up. My father was a cop, my mother was a nurse, but we were comfortably middle-class. I've never really had that fear of poverty, but you grew up in different circumstances entirely. Do you think you're more affected by this? Then after we get done psychoanalyzing you-

[laughter]

-we'll talk about how-

David: You don't even know how to spell poverty.

Blair: [laughs] I thought you were going to say it's psychoanalyze. You should be right on both. I can spell poverty.

David: Well, the reason I say you can't spell poverty's because you could picture yourself, this is something you and I haven't talked about, but you could picture yourself being successful in lots of different ways. You have a pretty deep-seated amount of confidence in your ability to work hard and to find opportunity and deliver value and so on. This never shows up for you because if this were true, if you were afraid of property, you wouldn't take many of the risks that you take. You feel like, "If it doesn't work out, it's fixable. I'll go to the next thing."

Somebody whose fear of poverty, who operates more from a scarcity mindset is, "I've got to hang on to this. I can't let go. I've worked really hard incrementally to get to this point. I don't want to upset the apple cart." These folks their risk-taking band is pretty narrow. They're not driven by massive gains because they don't want massive losses as well. You could think about this in an investment portfolio as well. It's not just about money. I've used the word poverty, but I don't really mean just about money. It shows up more likely around how you interact with people. You are holding these bigger decisions closer to the vest.

It's hard for you to trust other people because you don't want the mistakes that they might make. You're looking at the decisions, you're approving the decisions, you're trying to provide really careful guidelines. It affects who you hire as well. You're more driven to hire people who are more blank slates, and you fill them with your own philosophy, your own perspectives about this. You tend to throw up all kinds of reasons why something shouldn't be done, and discount all of the advantages that might come from success.

This is not as common as it used to be in the past. It will be a fascinating experiment to see how this economic downturn will impact certain people. I don't have any of this, maybe because I've experienced it and lived through it. You don't either because of your confidence in doing some of this. I do see it out there in firms who they're not unhappy at all, they just don't want to rock the boat too much.

The longer they've been in business, the less likely they are to change things up. It's almost as if their current success is the biggest implement to even greater success. They've figured out by tweaking the dials, how to get here, let's not upgrade to this new piece of equipment. Yes, I know what could happen if I do it, it'd be so amazing, but this is good enough. That's what I mean by fear of poverty. 

Blair: Yes, money going out is almost always an expense rather than an investment. There's a limbic response to risk where it's like an emotional reaction, "Hold onto what you have instead of sowing seeds or investing in a greater future." I think you alluded to this. It's not as common as it used to be, because I think it's functioning, in part, in what economic environment you grew up in and also, you're shaped by your parents' mindset, whether it's scarcity based or abundance-based and some of us just react or we're the opposite from our parents, but I think on this front where we're largely shaped by their experiences, especially if they're recent, especially if we've had a taste of them.

I think I recognize how fortunate I am not to be hampered by this position, I just feel like no matter what happens is a lot of money in the world and if the money that I have now goes away, I'll just go get some more, but that's a philosophy and I think it's a philosophy that served me well. If it's a ridiculous mistake, I don't want to hear it. I want to hold onto my illusion.

David: Well, in a time like this, where the environment around us is so disruptive to our businesses, somebody who is fearful of change or has a scarcity mindset, this is good for them because it's forcing lots of change, it's nudging them to make some big changes that they'll look back on and be very grateful that they were forced to do because otherwise, whatever that benefit on the other side of this journey looked like, it wouldn't have been enough of a benefit to cause deep change at firms. The conversations I'm having with principals, I'm not having conversations with terrified people. I'm having conversations with people who they're wide-eyed, they're listening really carefully, they're willing to change.

They're a little bit confused about what they should be doing differently, but they're welcoming this environment and it's almost like they woke up after a deep sleep and the weather changed and all of a sudden, it's really cold outside and they step out of the tent and there's this clear air, no idea what's happening today, but it's good to still be alive and to have at least the foundation that you've built over all these years, you still have that to work with and what's coming, what's exciting around the corner.

Blair: You've written about the difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset so we'll post the link to that in the show notes. Fear number four of the five deepest fears that shape our management style, fear of an earlier role. I'm smiling, do you want to unpack that one?

David: Yes. We don't even think about this when we start our firms. We're so excited about other things being our own boss, stabbing a culture surfacing, and eventually monetizing our IP, so many things that we're excited about doing. Then after some of that excitement wears off, we start to pause, look around and see, "Oh, I'm working downstream of where I'd like to be and I'm good at it, I enjoy it, to some extent, but I'm looking forward to the day when I can comfortably reliably delegate this to somebody else who will handle some of this nonsense, some of this noise in the signal that I'd rather not do."

You hire people, that's where not just the middle layer, but the first layer of people and they come along and it's just great. They handle it maybe even better than you did and you're just luxuriating in this role that you have that resembles the role that you envisioned for yourself. You're leading a firm and you're not having to do all the things that other people are pretty happy to do, but then something happens to the firm and maybe the firm needs to be downsized.

Maybe it's a time like 2020 or 2008, '9, 2001 or maybe it's not even that. Maybe there's a performance issue, an attitude problem from this person who has enabled you to put that role down and move on to something bigger and better for the firm like new business or strategy or thought leadership or whatever and instead of doing the right thing, which in this case would mean that you've got to step back and do something that you have been so grateful to get rid of, you just hang on to that person or you don't make the tough decision or whatever that looks like.

The whole attempt is really to protect you from going back to the way things were. You see a little bit of this, when you overhire, when you hire somebody who doesn't want to get their hands dirty, they've worked in a much bigger firm, you're excited about the leadership they'll bring to the table, but what they don't realize is that this is a smaller firm that they're working at, and you got to get your hands dirty. Your job description isn't two things, it's seven things, and they only want to do two things, and they put off the other five things, you see that, it's the same thing happening.

Growth in your role is good, especially during difficult times, don't be terrified of going back to that sometime. It's not going to kill you, it might even be refreshing, it might even give you a completely different perspective on what it's like to work at your firm. The lack of process, the lack of communication, whatever it is, and you'll have a chance to impact those areas like you haven't before. I see this a lot. It only happens with principals who have grown into a more suitable role, but those are the ones who sometimes when faced with the pressure, don't want to go back to that role because they've tasted what's on the other side.

Blair: I think that's a really powerful idea that you step out of this role, you delegate the rule, something you never wanted to do, you're happy in the new role, and then something happens and you have to step back in. I think, as long as you don't have to own that old role, once again, permanently. I think it's a really powerful learning experience to be able to step back in, and, as you pointed out, have a fresh perspective on that role, and maybe also have a new perspective on the other roles, the ones that you did occupy.

It's just this idea of sampling going back and forth. It's like putting yourself in other people's shoes, I think we should embrace that over the short term if it happens, and maybe I'm talking to myself, and in part, this podcast is for me to get free consulting from you. I've had to step back into some things this March when COVID hit that I really was happy to have delegated, and I'm really grateful for the chance to get back in and see some things that I want to change and how the role is done, but now I'm ready to get out of it again.

[laughter]

David: 30 minutes, and you're done. The test is over.

Blair: Yes. The fifth and final deep fears that shape our management style is fear of public perception. I find this one a fascinating one that I think about a lot. What were you thinking when you put this on the list as the fifth one?

David: Maybe it's more at the front of my mind, given what's happening in the world in 2020, and it doesn't usually show up when everything is going great for the firm. As an industry, we are still more consumed with what our peers think of us than what other professional service experts would feel about that, and I don't know why, I would sure love to know that.

Hanging on to staff that you don't need too long, or making a clean break with some service offering that's no longer profitable anymore. You know the right thing to do, but you check yourself because how the word will get out, as if word won't get out anyway. I just think your clients, that should be the primary focus here. Your clients are not generally going to be aware of those decisions that you make, you need to be making the best decisions for the firm over the long term. What somebody might think, how somebody might interpret something that you--

For instance, we're going to move into a different facility, and it's now not class A, it's class B or we're not going to be in Downtown or we are no longer going to support this such and such. Get over that, just what are the right decisions to make? Don't worry about the public perception game. Worry about what the right thing is, and don't spend a lot of energy trying to shape. The truth is your clients and your peers probably don't even think about you all that much.

[laughter]

Blair: The harsh reality. Really, it's not public perception, it's the perception among your competitors. That's what you're saying, right?

David: Right. Yes. What is it about this industry, where we're so consumed with what our peers, our competitors think?

Blair: Do you think it's all that different from other professional services firms?

David: I think it is. I haven't done a lot of consulting outside of it. I've consulted with plenty of consulting firms, management consulting firms, and a couple of accounting firms and several law firms, but just talking with people I know in those professions, they just don't think about it all that much. They don't get so excited about winning an award, about going to speak at some such and such about growth.

I don't know what it is, it could just be my imagination here. I know a lot of principals stop from making what the right decision should be because they're afraid of how it will be perceived. Those are the principals whose management decisions aren't getting made because of this public perception problem, and I think it's a mistake.

Blair: That Brene Brown idea of vulnerability and the best leaders are vulnerable. Just that willingness to have others in the market, see that you're downsizing, et cetera. I think that's a sign of vulnerability and we should be vulnerable about that. It's a little bit difficult now because so many people are going through some tough or at least uncertain economic times. If you find yourself in a situation at other times where it's like, "Oh, man, we just lost our biggest client, we really need some business."

If you say to your clients, and even your competitive field, "Hey, we could really use another client right now. Can you help me out?" Some people are listening to this in horror at the idea that they would ever put that message out to either their clients or their competitors. I've seen others do it and almost always get rewarded for it. There's just something that's really refreshing about that level of honesty and vulnerability where you're not worried about the negative messages. I think that sends a lot of confidence signals about that individual and says so many more good things than it could possibly send bad things.

David: I agree completely.

Blair: This is a good topic, David, how our deepest fears shape our management style. I'll just recap them. They are five, fear of conflict, fear of irrelevance, fear of poverty and I can spell poverty. In fact, I spelled it out on gold coins on my desk when you were talking. Fear of an earlier role and fear of public perception. Thanks for the statement.

David: Thank you, Blair.