B State: A New Roadmap for Bold Leadership, Brave Culture, and Breakthrough Results

Schoolwork didn’t come easily for me. I was a B student, and I had to work for those grades. I never considered myself a great student, even when I went to university for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. For me, school was a means to an end. I couldn’t wait to stop being a student and get a job.

When I got into the workplace, I knew I was prepared to be an expert based on my educational instruction and knowledge. I was perfectly ready for one of my first assignments: a very-tight-deadline project given to me by my CEO.

I knew I only had two months to get what really should have been a three-month project ready to present to a government agency in Sacramento, California.

But I also knew—in my school-based logic—that if I needed any help, I had the right to use the resources around me. After all, this project was for the CEO!

So I went to three of the vice president’s assistants and asked them to help me, in exchange for pizza. I’d buy.

I took them and the pizza up to a conference room on the second floor, and we nailed the project. I was thrilled. For once, I was going to turn in exactly what was expected—exactly on time.

It never occurred to me that their bosses—and mine—had no idea where we all were. The next day, all three vice presidents called me into an office to confront me for “stealing” their assistants.

They weren’t. They were really angry. I had crossed a line that I hadn’t known existed.

I was scheduled to present the results of this two-month project to my CEO on a Thursday. That Wednesday—just one day before my appointment—I happened to run into her in the hallway.

“By the way,” she said, “let me know if you need any help or resources to complete that project.”

“It’s finished! I thought I had to deliver tomorrow! Why did you give me a hard deadline if there was no actual urgency?”

“Well, because no one completes their assignments on time. I figured you’d be late, like everybody else.”

I was just out of grad school, but in my innocence I wanted to already be comfortable enough with my knowledge and experience to not make mistakes. Those feelings always seemed to elude me. I hadn’t yet learned there would always be more I had to learn!

I’d forgotten that as a little boy of four or five, I loved to learn. I would pretend I was an adult. I had “play” adult conversations. I was an astronaut, a fireman, and a policeman. I wanted to learn everything: to ride a bike, to swim, to play ball. I never cared when I made mistakes.

But as I got older, comparing myself to others contaminated that fun. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, my teachers, or even my friends, who all seemed to judge everything I did. I learned to judge myself, too—even more harshly than everyone else did.

And so, learning stopped being exciting and fun. It became an almost painful chore.

We’re all meant to continue learning, growing, and expanding throughout our lives—it’s supposed to be a lifelong condition for humans. After all, the world continues to change and evolve; life never stays the same. We’re constantly confronted with new challenges on all levels: physically, mentally, emotionally, societally, politically, financially, and even spiritually. We always have two choices: we can become ever more fearful with each new challenge or change, or we can use those experiences to grow stronger, gain greater perspective and awareness, and help others.

Ultimately, I realized my expertise comes from always remaining a student, always staying in a learning mode. It isn’t comfortable, and there is always more to learn, but it keeps me in the game of exploration, expansion, and transformation.

Twenty years of experience, or one year of experience repeated twenty times?

—Leandro Herrero

We all want to feel comfortable in our relationships, at our jobs, and with our health—but, at the same time, we also want to continually experience greater loving, peace, and joy. And those two aspirations are in direct conflict. The process of growth and improvement—taking risks, making changes, learning new skills, letting go of past mistakes—is uncomfortable. Yet being comfortable means being complacent, and complacency doesn’t allow for growth or change or improvement.

Stuck in a bad relationship. Stuck in an unfulfilling job. Stuck with bad personal habits that injure our health.

“When we finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, we will make the necessary change,” said the author and public speaker John-Roger Hinkins.

But will we? Changing gets harder the more we resist—and the more time we waste trying to avoid the change, the stronger our resistance becomes.

Organizations face the same issues when they need to change and evolve—and they always have. I heard the following story decades ago:

Before computers became ubiquitous, management enrolled the senior clerical staff at a top California university in a training program to transition them from electronic typewriters to word processors. But the clerical pool banded together to resist going to the program: “We’re incredibly effective on our typewriters. Why should we waste our time on these new-fangled machines?”

Management, in its attempt to keep its employees comfortable and happy, bent to their will. No one went to the training program.

By the end of the year, the university replaced all its typewriters with computers—and fired the entire clerical staff.

In another example, a billion-dollar corporation continued recording all their sales manually, years into the twenty-first century, because management couldn’t agree on the “perfect” electronic system. Consequently, they couldn’t effectively track their inventory, and their staff used work-arounds when they couldn’t figure out the proper item number. They couldn’t do any analytics on their sales to leverage their resources—so they didn’t adjust to the market fast enough; they lost their competitive edge and stunted their own growth.

Comfort stunts employees’ growth and can make them obsolete—but management’s comfort stunts the organization’s growth and can put it out of business.

Sloppy success is better than perfect mediocrity.

—Alex Mandossian

In the ultrafast-paced twenty-first century, examples of resistant employees, managers, owners, and companies are too numerous to count. That’s one reason why managers want their employees to feel comfortable. They want them to like their jobs, to feel good about their organization, and to get along with and respect their boss. They want people to feel a sense of autonomy within their own work space: they can decorate their area any way they want; they can solve their own problems; they can express themselves in their own style.

Even when someone doesn’t perform, managers still want to make them feel comfortable. No one wants to upset someone else or cause a conflict, so at first they say nothing, hoping the employee will discover and correct their own mistakes.

If the employee’s performance continues to decline, the manager finds ways to have repeated conversations about the issue rather than actually take corrective action. In large organizations, managers may get so frustrated that they transfer their nonperformer to another department, so it becomes another manager’s headache.

In smaller organizations, the entrepreneur will opt to hire a COO to take care of the problems rather than accept that some people just aren’t working out in the company—or that they, themselves, need to change, which is even more uncomfortable.

Few managers or supervisors want to take the drastic step of letting an employee go. I’ve even seen nonperforming managers promoted to higher management positions just so their superiors can avoid any unpleasant changes. Besides, “He was a good guy.”

I’ve seen this resistance go to ridiculous extremes. A manufacturing plant had to institute new safety procedures because people were getting hurt too often. The employees, of course, resisted the change, as people always do, but despite their complaints, the plant managers decided physical safety was more important than any temporary discomfort. They knew people would accept the new procedures as soon as they realized people weren’t getting hurt so often.

Unfortunately, the corporate office coincidentally ran a “climate survey” to assess employee satisfaction at approximately the same time.

The employees, of course, expressed their dissatisfaction with the safety procedures by giving management low scores. Corporate, upset by the employees’ discomfort, instructed the plant’s management to start “responding and listening to your employees”—which meant reversing the safety procedures!

Yes, you read that right: the organization actually put employee comfort above physical safety.

I prefer to march boldly in the direction of my dreams rather than to shrink in the shadows of my circumstances.

—Michael Nila, founder, Blue Courage

As much as management wants to keep people comfortable rather than alter the status quo, they cannot control the drivers behind organizational change: competitive threats, customer demands, technological advancements, a declining economy, new government regulations—the list is endless. Companies have to be flexible to stay in business and grow.

But, just like in personal situations, organizations as a whole often initially react with denial and resistance. People get angry; they criticize anything different as “unnecessary” or “the wrong move” that will “lead to disaster.” What’s more, “The whole thing is unfair”—a mind-set that quickly enrolls others into a “victim” story.

Consequently, organizations more dedicated to people’s comfort than to their growth often choose to slow down the change. They set up task forces to further analyze the situation. They engage employees with the hope of gaining their buy-in. They hire outside advisors and consultants to “do an assessment” and “make recommendations” that almost always end up reiterating what they already know.

But the uncontrollable circumstances don’t care about anyone’s feelings or resistance. They just keep on coming until the person or company is in so much pain they have to change to survive in the new reality.

Ironically, the enemy here is not the discomfort of the change. The enemy is denial and resistance, because change is actually a road map to freedom, liberation, and self-actualization.

Think about the last time you underwent a major personal transformation. Didn’t you gain a new perspective on life? Didn’t it add to your sense of well-being or confidence? Now think about this: Just before everything changed for the better, was your life going smoothly and easily? Or had you been brought to your knees by a challenge that made you question how you would survive?

Pretransformation pain comes from an instinctive fear of change or uncertainty. But not all pain is bad. Pain caused by the realities of life—not from abuse or punishment or someone’s judgment—is “clean” pain. It’s just life. So when we face rather than resist it, we almost always experience a positive transformation that wakes us up to new perspectives; and that awareness leads to greater innovation, creativity, personal growth, peace, and joy.

When we do things to make people “comfortable” rather than allow them to experience the transformative struggles of life—whether at work or at home—we rob them of the opportunity to gain greater competency, develop their self-confidence, and learn to navigate life’s challenges better. In fact, having the goal of making people comfortable is like issuing a death sentence, one that leads them to become obsolete as they hold on to old paradigms, antiquated skills, and an inflexibility to change as the world around them continues to evolve and grow.

The underlying problem is, frankly, a basic misunderstanding of life, which impacts organizations, families, and even casual relationships. The truth is, comfort does not lead to excellence. It leads to complacency and sets people up for disappointment and failure whenever a real-life change comes along to disrupt their contentment.

Yet today’s organizations—and parents and teachers and government—are obsessed with making people feel happy and secure. While it is true that people don’t perform well when they’re dissatisfied or unhappy, it’s not true that happiness fosters high performance. They may do better than when they’re miserable, but that doesn’t mean they actually do well enough to generate better results.

I worked with an organization in a tight-knit rural community where everyone had grown up together, socialized together, and generally thought of each other as friends or extended family.

They couldn’t iron out conflicts or solve problems—they swept any issues under the rug so no one got upset. The company’s operating costs were high; its efficiencies and customer-satisfaction ratings were low; and morale was mediocre.

That was the problem: they were all so friendly, they couldn’t be accountable to each other—or to the organization—because their lifelong focus had always been on maintaining close community relationships.

I see this in varying degrees everywhere I go. One company I worked with thought the way to change their culture was to take everyone out for drinks every Friday night! Senior management even reprimanded one of their highest-functioning vice presidents because, even though she had great relationships with her staff, she didn’t take her people out for happy hour every week.

Organizations are so focused on comfort, they get themselves into financial and operating trouble because no one actually feels safe enough to surface and address real issues. This sets up a destructive cycle, because when things get bad enough that leadership is backed into a corner and must do something to save the organization, they resort to drastic changes that so disrupt everyone’s comfort, the employees feel “punished.”

The managers lay people off. They restructure. They bring in consultants who dramatically cut resources and impose new procedures, policies, and benchmarks.

And while all this is happening and everyone is utterly panicked and stressed to the max, management reassures select people that—if they make it through all this—they’ll get to be comfortable again after the change is completed. Promise.

Effective or innovative change never occurs during periods of comfort or punishment. It just cannot happen.