The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
—Don Juan, Mexican shaman
“Sorry I’m late. My other meeting ran over.” How many times have you used this excuse?
Tacitly, you are saying, “Don’t blame me. If my previous meeting had finished earlier, I would have been on time.” Such a justification may be true, but it’s disempowering. Why? Because to claim that being late isn’t your fault, you have to claim that it was not in your power to be on time. The price of false innocence is impotence.
The fact that the other meeting ran over is just that, a fact. It didn’t make you late; you made you late. You made either a deliberate or an unconscious choice to stay put rather than leave. You may not be responsible for the meeting running over, but you are accountable for your choice when it ran over.
“It’s not my fault!” you might say. “I stayed at the previous meeting because it was more important to the company than the later one. Saying that the previous meeting ran over is just a polite way of saying that the second meeting was not as important to me as the previous one.”
I am not saying that it’s your fault. Nor am I saying that you made a bad choice or that you should have left the previous meeting to be on time. I can think of many circumstances in which I would rationally make the choice to be late. What I am saying is that it’s a matter of choice, and if I want to establish a culture of accountability, I need to fully own my choice. As a leader, I need to be the example of what I want to see.
Moreover, I need to take responsibility to minimize the negative consequences for those who expected me to fulfill my commitment. In this case, I may have a reasonable justification for being late; for example, that I was in a crucial meeting with the CEO and the leadership team of the company. But it’s much harder to find a reasonable justification for not sending a quick message to the people who are waiting for me in the following meeting. As we’ll see in Chapter 10, sometimes you need to break a promise and make a mess, but you can always let people know immediately, apologize, and clean it up.
It’s tempting to appear as a “victim” to duck from responsibility and avoid embarrassment, but the price of an excuse is high. If you want to be a transcendent leader, you need to accept full accountability for your actions in any circumstance, even in circumstances that are not of your doing. This means consciously choosing your response to events, rather than telling a self-justifying story in which events drive you. If you want your organization to control its destiny, you must lead from the front. Instead of seeing and presenting yourself as a victim of forces beyond your control, you must see and present yourself as a player responding to a challenge. Only then will you have the moral authority to demand that everyone else do the same.
Once, when I was climbing a mountain with Leslie, a colleague who’s also an Outward Bound instructor, we found ourselves in a storm. I cursed the bad weather. Leslie laughed and shared her favorite saying: “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear.” The saying makes me think of other times I’ve complained about things that are beyond my control—and how fruitless that is. The storm doesn’t care whether I am happy or sad, or whether I live or die. The storm is just a force of nature. It is what it is, exactly as it is, and perfectly so. It is up to me to dress appropriately and to deal with it. Since that day with Leslie, I’ve adopted a new practice. When I’m dealing with a “difficult person”—someone who poses a challenge to which I don’t know how to adequately respond—I switch into “Outward Bound” mode. I see the person as a force of nature. He is who he is, exactly as he is, and perfectly so. It is up to me to act appropriately in dealing with him.
I’ve also realized that there are no such things as hard problems, only situations I am unable to resolve. If I can’t lift a certain weight, it’s not because it’s heavy, but because my muscles are not strong enough to do it—at least not yet. There are certainly weights that are too heavy for anyone to lift—now or ever, but that doesn’t contradict the point I’m trying to make. My argument is that it’s always more empowering to tell the story of the player: when I fail, it’s because I don’t yet know how to effectively respond to the challenges I face. And the same is true for you—or it can be true if you are willing to eschew false innocence as the price you pay for power.
Response-ability is the foundation of transcendent leadership. Consider two ways in which the people in your organization can explain a delay: (a) “The project was too hard. There were too many difficulties, and nobody helped us.” (b) “The project was challenging and we didn’t know how to deal with those challenges effectively. We failed to ask people for help in a way that would elicit their commitment. And we were so focused on finishing on time that we didn’t let people know of the delay with enough time to minimize the disruptions we caused.”
In this chapter I will show that what I call absolute “response-ability” and accountability are an effective philosophy of leadership, business, and life. By exemplifying response-ability as a leader, and holding people accountable for their own response-abilities, you can turn defensive behaviors into creative ones, and negative feelings like resignation and resentment into genuine enthusiasm and commitment.
On a bright November morning in 2010, Qantas Airways Flight 32 took off from Singapore en route to Sydney. Just before reaching eight thousand feet, passengers heard a loud boom and then a crashing sound. One of the engines had caught fire. The ensuing explosion tore fragments through the underside of the plane. A red alarm flashed on the pilot’s control panel. A siren shrieked in the cockpit. The plane started shaking. Suddenly everything started to fail—fuel pumps, electrical systems, hydraulics. Twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled.
The pilot, Richard de Crespigny, turned the plane back to Singapore. On the emergency descent, the computer system sounded, “Stall! Stall! Stall!”; de Crespigny ignored the automated voice and stayed focused on his task.
The runway was just long enough for the plane to land—if the captain overshot the asphalt, the plane would crash into sand dunes. One hundred meters short of the dunes, the plane skidded to a stop. That’s when de Crespigny turned on the PA system and said to the passengers, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday, November 4, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.”
Investigators later said that Qantas Flight 32 was the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. De Crespigny was declared a hero.1
In my workshops, I ask people to imagine that they are flying with me in this same plane, and suddenly we hear the explosion and see pieces of the engine fall away. A minute later we see the pilot coming out of the cockpit and taking a seat in the cabin. Freaking out, we ask him what’s going on. He responds that there’s an uncontained failure in one of the engines. “Then what the hell are you doing here?” we ask him. “Why aren’t you in the cockpit?” To our shock, he replies, “Because fixing this problem is not my job; this is a maintenance problem.”
At that point I ask participants, “What would you tell him?” After some discussion, the group always concludes that it doesn’t matter who or what caused the problem. What matters is the captain’s absolute responsibility for the safety of the passengers and crew. Anything that happens on the captain’s watch is his or her responsibility.
I’ve had to apply this hard lesson many times as the captain of my fifty-foot sailboat, Satori. Everything that happens during the sail is my responsibility. If a storm surprises me, I didn’t look at the weather carefully enough. If something breaks, I didn’t inspect it carefully enough. If one of my crew does something unsafe, I didn’t train her well enough. If one of my passengers hurts himself, I didn’t brief him thoroughly enough or check that he understood and was able to execute my instructions. Everything that happens on my boat is on me.
If you want to be the captain of your business and your life, you must accept full responsibility, accountability, and ownership for everything that happens in it. Rather than being a victim of external circumstances, you must be the master of your actions—the one who makes choices and produces consequences with ultimate response-ability.
In the play called “Your Business and Your Life,” you are onstage as the central character. You are not a spectator; you are the writer-director-actor. You contribute to bring events about, and you contribute to shape the future—always. As a player, you are in the game; you affect the result. As a victim, you are out of the game; you are at the mercy of those to whom you have surrendered the field. What kind of leader do you want to be? More important, what kind of leader will you choose to be?
I define response-ability as the ability to choose one’s response to a situation. It’s about focusing on the aspects of reality that you can influence, instead of feeling victimized by circumstances that you cannot. It’s about being the main character of your own life. Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?,” a person who is response-able asks, “What can I do when this happens?” Response-ability means you don’t take anything personally. It doesn’t rain on you; it just rains, period. Instead of blaming the rain, you carry an umbrella to stay dry when it rains. And if you get wet, you know it’s because you didn’t bring an umbrella, because you were not prepared.
The same applies to your team and your organization. You and your colleagues have the ability to choose your response to any situation. You can focus on what you can do instead of on what is out of your control by asking, “How are we going to accomplish our mission in spite of this challenge?”
Many people confuse the ability to choose a response with the ability to choose an outcome. Response-ability does not mean success-ability. There is no guarantee that the actions you and your team take will yield the results that you want. The only guarantee is that you can respond to your circumstances in pursuit of your goals and in alignment with your values. That’s the best we can do as human beings—and it’s not a small thing. Our response-ability is a direct expression of our consciousness and free will. To be an effective leader, in fact to become fully human, you need to become fully response-able.
When you play cards, for example, you have no control over the hand you are dealt. If you spend all your time complaining and making excuses for your cards, you will feel disempowered and most likely lose the game. But if you see yourself as having a choice in playing your cards, your feelings will change. You’ll have a sense of possibility. Even if you don’t win a given hand, you can always do your best with the cards you’ve been dealt, play fair, and improve your odds of winning the overall game.
Responsibility is not about assuming guilt. You are not responsible for your circumstances; you are response-able in the face of your circumstances. To take an extreme example: You are not responsible for poverty. You didn’t create it; it’s not your fault; you’re not to blame. Poverty exists independent of you. It was there before you were born and it will be there after you die. In a reasonable sense, poverty is not a problem of your doing. You are, however, able to respond to poverty. If you are born into poverty, you can work hard and look for avenues that will lead you out of poverty. If you care about the poverty you see around you in society, you can make it your problem. Poverty is a brutal fact—you can learn about it, study how to ameliorate it, donate time and money to the right causes and organizations, you can start your own organization or volunteer for the Peace Corps. You can, if you wish, devote your life to helping the poor.
We are not automatons. Rather, we are “autonoms”—self-guiding beings. External facts are information, not stimuli. We don’t answer the phone because it rings. Rather, we choose to answer the phone when it rings, because we decide it is better to answer the call than not to. External circumstances and internal impulses influence our behavior but they don’t determine it. They may tempt us, but they don’t “make us do it.” We are human; we are conscious; we are free.
Most people define freedom as the ability to do whatever they want. They want to be “free from” constraints. This kind of freedom depends on factors beyond their control. Freedom does not mean doing what you want without limitations or consequences. Such “freedom” is an impossible fantasy. True freedom is your capacity to respond to a situation by exercising your conscious will. This is your birthright. True freedom is a basic feature of human existence. You always have the power to respond to situations as you choose. You cannot make reality different than it is or choose whether your actions will be successful. But you can choose the response most consistent with your goals and values.
When you express this response-able freedom, you inspire others to be response-able as well—within your organization and beyond. A transcendent leader exemplifies the power of conscious choice in a way that empowers the whole organization to exercise it.
In Conscious Business, I made a distinction between a “victim” and a “player.” In the ten years since its publication, thousands of people have told me that the distinction brought clarity, power, and control to their lives. Effective, transcendent leaders are players. So I’d like to introduce a central concept of that book to you (or reintroduce it, if you’ve read my previous work). Although the distinction is very simple to grasp, it’s quite difficult to apply—especially when it counts the most.
A victim pays attention exclusively to factors he cannot influence, seeing himself as passively suffering the consequences of external circumstances. The victim wants to avoid blame and claim innocence. Since he believes he has nothing to do with the problem, he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s contributed to it or can contribute to solving it. When things go wrong, the victim seeks to place blame on anybody or anything but himself. Consequently, since he is not part of the problem, he cannot be part of the solution.
For the victim, life is a spectator sport. His favorite place is on the sidelines, not the field. He loves to criticize those who are in the game. But his opinions crowd out his actions. This makes him feel safe because, although he can do nothing to help his team, he cannot be blamed when his team loses. He tends to blame the players, the coach, the referees, the opponents, the weather, bad luck, and everything else. Although his explanations may be technically correct, they are disempowering. What he blames, he empowers.
For example, one summer day as I was working on this chapter, I felt thirsty. My wife, who was working next to me, asked me if I wanted something to drink. “Yes,” I told her, “some soda water, thank you.” She said she’d bring it to me, “Right away, as soon as I send this e-mail.” As I waited for her to get something for me to drink, I felt a deeper sense of thirst and a tinge of frustration. I realized that I was blaming her for my thirst; I was stuck in my chair, feeling sorry for myself. Then I thought, If I’m thirsty and want water right at this moment, why don’t I get up and get the water myself? So I did. When I returned, my wife asked, “Why didn’t you wait for me to finish?” I explained my victim mind-set—and my need to get myself out of it. I let her read this paragraph, and we both had a good chuckle.
Human beings seem predisposed toward victimhood, just as we are predisposed toward sugar. Both of them give us short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term pain. In their early years, my children would complain when “the toy broke.” I never heard them say, “I broke the toy.”
Just like little children, we choose to adopt the “it’s not my fault” victim stance when we want to protect ourselves from blame. It is not uncommon in organizations to hear that “The project got delayed,” or “The customer was unreasonable,” or “They started it.” We want to look good, to project an image of success—or at least to avoid the blemish that comes with failure.3 Victimhood is an attempt to cover up our failures so that we look more capable than we really are. Whether or not we like to admit it, many of us depend on other people’s approval. Thus, we expend a great deal of energy building an “unblamable” public identity.
Besides disempowering us from acting appropriately in the face of reality, the victim story prevents us from learning. As long as our problems are not our fault, we tend to wait for others to change or solve them. As a leader and as a player, you need to ask yourself what you need to learn in order to better respond to the situation or to better avoid this situation in the future.
Victimhood is like a drug that simultaneously relaxes and excites us. It relaxes us because whatever has happened is not our fault. It excites us because we feel that we have the right to blame others. The righteous indignation of the innocent victim is as addictive as heroin. But it stops us from looking in the mirror and asking ourselves: What do I need to do in order to stop cocreating this?
Rather than asking, Who screwed up? Who wronged me? What should they have done instead? Who should pay?, ask yourself what you can do to solve the problem or prevent it from occurring again. Blame obscures who and what is contributing to cause the problem. When things go wrong between people, each individual owns a piece of the mess. But this is not how most of us assess things. As the saying goes, “Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”
The truth is that each of us contributes to a bad situation. We are all response-able for finding a way to make things right. It will be much easier to address the situation if all those involved become players and acknowledge their contributions. I call this “200 percent responsibility.”
Leaders are players. The player pays attention to the factors she can control. She doesn’t deny that there are many things over which she has no power, but she chooses not to focus on these things, precisely because she cannot control them. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by external circumstances, she sees herself as someone who can respond to them. Her self-esteem is founded upon doing her best, expressing her values, and learning how to be ever more capable. If something beyond her control happens, her explanations focus on her own participation in the event, since she realizes that she is the defining factor in the outcome. “If you want to be a part of the solution,” she reasons, “you have to see yourself as a part of the problem. Unless you recognize your contribution to a bad situation, you won’t be able to change that situation.” She chooses self-empowering explanations that put her in control.
For leaders and players, the world is full of challenges that call on them to respond as what the shaman Don Juan would call a “warrior.” The player does not feel omnipotent, but she faces challenges squarely and realistically and manages her emotions with equanimity. The player always describes herself as a significant part of her problems. She is willing to take the hit of accountability because it puts her in the driver’s seat.
Because players feel empowered, they carry themselves and speak with a moral authority that inspires confidence in others. And the choices they make—even when the outcome isn’t perfect—pay off in one way or another down the road. By behaving in a response-able way, they bring an extra measure of goodness into their lives and the lives of those who follow their lead.
Taking the stance of the player is not without cost. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. But if you own your actions, you can be asked for your reasons for your decisions and held accountable for their consequences. The price of power is accountability.
“My mind was racing,” SEAL commander Jocko Willink recalled in his account of the most important leadership lesson he ever learned, and the unbearable price he almost had to pay for it. “This was our first major operation in Ramadi, and it was total chaos.”
Four separate SEAL units in various sectors of the city were working with U.S. Army and Iraqi forces to clear out an entire neighborhood of heavily armed insurgents, building by building. In total, about three hundred American and Iraqi troops—friendly forces—were operating in the same hotly contested area of the city. The fog of war “was thick with confusion, inaccurate information, broken communications, and mayhem.”4
Willink’s command post had received two calls for help, one from U.S. advisers embedded with the Iraqi army, the other from a SEAL sniper team. Both were involved in firefights against heavily armed insurgents. Willink decided to respond first to the Iraqi army position. When he arrived, a gunnery sergeant was coordinating an air strike to wipe out what was believed to be a group of hard-core mujahideen in a nearby building. “I’m working on getting some bombs dropped on ’em,” the sergeant told him.
Willink had a bad feeling about this. Something didn’t add up for him. They were very close to where the SEAL sniper team that had also asked for support was supposed to be. In addition, the Iraqi soldiers had entered the area before the SEALs had a chance to “deconflict” it—that is, to determine their exact location and to communicate it to all the other friendly units in the operation. Willink was not sure whether the firefight was with the actual enemy or with the SEAL sniper team.
“Hold what you got, Gunny,” Willink ordered the sergeant. “I’m going to see who’s in that building.” He approached the door to the compound, which was slightly open. “With my M4 rifle at the ready, I kicked the door the rest of the way open only to find I was staring at one of my SEAL platoon chiefs. He stared back at me in wide-eyed surprise.”
Willink and the SEALs in the building quickly figured out that they were in the midst of a “blue-on-blue,” or friendly-fire situation. Willink was shocked. “I felt sick. One of my men was wounded. An Iraqi soldier was dead and others were wounded.”
Blue-on-blue is the worst thing that can happen, according to Willink. “To be killed or wounded by the enemy in battle is bad enough,” he noted. “But to be accidentally killed or wounded by friendly fire because someone screwed up is the most horrible fate.”5
When the SEALs completed the last mission of the day, Willink went to the battalion tactical operations center where he had his field computer set up to receive e-mail from higher headquarters. “I dreaded opening and answering the inevitable inquiries about what had transpired,” he remembered. “I wished I had died out on the battlefield. I felt that I deserved it.”6
As he began gathering information for the ensuing official inquiry, Willink discovered serious mistakes made by many individuals, both during the planning phase and on the battlefield during execution: “Plans were altered but notifications weren’t sent. The communication plan was ambiguous, and confusion about the specific timing of radio procedures contributed to critical failures. The Iraqi army had adjusted their plan but had not told us. Timelines were pushed without clarification. Locations of friendly forces had not been reported. The list went on and on.”
Not all the errors came from the Iraqis. Willink’s own SEAL troop made similar mistakes. “The specific location of the sniper team in question had not been passed on to other units. Positive identification of the assumed enemy combatant, who turned out to be an Iraqi soldier, had been insufficient. A thorough SITREP (situation report) had not been passed to me after the initial engagement took place.”7
Willink put together a presentation summarizing his findings. The information was all there, but he felt something was still missing. He still hadn’t identified the single point of failure that had led to the incident.
“Then it hit me. Despite all the failures of individuals, units, and leaders, and despite the myriad mistakes that had been made, there was only one person to blame for everything that had gone wrong on the operation: me. I hadn’t been with our sniper team when they engaged the Iraqi soldiers. I hadn’t been controlling the friendly Iraqis that entered the compound. But that didn’t matter.” The lesson Willink learned was that as the senior leader on the ground in charge of the mission, he had to become responsible for everything that happened and take complete ownership of what went wrong. “That is what a leader does—even if it means getting fired.”8
Willink presented his conclusion to his commanding officers in a formal review, as is customary, attended by all his soldiers. Despite the tremendous blow to his reputation and his ego, he took full ownership of the situation and apologized to the wounded SEAL. Doing this not only preserved the trust of his officers and the respect of his troops, but it helped him keep his job. It also allowed everyone to learn valuable lessons to avoid repeating these mistakes. These lessons were later incorporated in the training drills for all SEALs.
“There are no bad units, only bad officers,” wrote Willink later. “This is a difficult and humbling concept for any leader to accept. But it is an essential mind-set to building a high-performance, winning team.” He concluded that on any team or in any organization, the ultimate responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. “The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win. The best leaders don’t just take responsibility for their job. They take ‘extreme ownership’ of everything that impacts their mission.”9
I agree with the spirit of Willink’s conclusion. And I would like to make a different point. In addition to the leader taking total responsibility for anything that affects the performance of the unit, every team member needs to take total response-ability in the face of any circumstance that affects the mission. Each person is accountable for the way in which he or she prepares, responds, and learns from the challenges that he or she has to confront. There is no blame for events that depend on factors beyond one’s control, but there must be full accountability for preparing and dealing with them with effectiveness and integrity.
“We got screwed,” complained Stu. “We announced this product as the hottest thing since sliced bread, but after we sold it to our best customers, the product and finance people realized that it was not as profitable as the earlier version. So they withdrew it from the market. Now I’ve got a lot of pissed-off clients who have lost their trust in us.”
Stu is a sales executive at an enterprise software company I advise. Several months before, the company had launched a much-anticipated new version of their flagship product. The company had touted its upgraded system to its best customers while it prepared to launch a sales campaign to acquire new customers. The salespeople had worked hard to sell the new version to their existing customers, who had proved eager to adopt it.
But the product had proved significantly harder to use than anybody had expected. The heavy demands for training and technical support made it uneconomical. The support costs eroded margins to the point that the previous version was much more profitable. So the company decided to withdraw it. This decision was made without the participation of, and even without giving information till the last minute to, the sales organization. For Stu, this felt like a terrible double whammy. Not only did the salespeople look terrible to customers as representatives of the company, but they also looked stupid for being out of the loop of what was happening or, if they were in the loop, malicious for being unwilling to communicate the problem to their customers until the very last minute.
This is the kind of thing that salespeople, to say nothing of the customers, deeply resent. The resentment manifests as a loss of trust in the brand and in the people who represent it. In particular, salespeople can be bitterly angry toward the product development people, seeing it as a betrayal.
When I ran a workshop on “becoming a trusted adviser” for the sales executives of this software company, the participants took the position of victims. They felt justified in their feelings. They were mad as hell and felt miserable. “The product people screwed us. There was nothing we could do about it!” they complained.
They got mad at me when I interrupted their complaints. “I disagree,” I challenged them. “There is always something you can do about it, and even more things that you could have done before it. But to see the things you could have done, you must give up your victim story and take the position of the player.”
Here’s an account of the dialogue that I had with Stu, the most vocal of the victims:
Stu: The product people screwed us. How can customers trust us anymore?
Fred: Obviously, unless we address this issue, calling a salesperson a customer’s “trusted adviser” is dead on arrival. Do you have any ideas?
Stu: Sure! If a decision to pull something off the market is being considered, we should be involved in the discussions. And if the decision is made, we should have a strategy to announce this to customers with plenty of time to let them adjust with minimal consequences.
Fred: That all sounds good to me. Can you do it?
Stu: No. It’s not up to me. This is something that Product should do. Right now, we sales executives have no say in these matters.
Fred: Your idea seems reasonable, but you can’t implement it. So where does that leave you?
Stu: Up shit creek without a paddle.
Fred: Is that where you want to be?
Stu: Of course not.
Fred: So then why stick to that story? It gives you a justification, but it doesn’t give you a solution.
Stu: What’s the alternative?
Fred: Consider the situation as a challenge that you are facing, rather than as something someone is doing to you. Can you describe the essence of this challenge?
Stu: The challenge is that I’m trying to build a relationship with customers based on trust, where they believe that I have their interests at heart and that I will take care of them, while other parts of my organization are destroying this trust by discontinuing products that I sold to my customers.
Fred: Excellent. Now comes a really hard question. How have you contributed, by doing or by not doing, to create this situation?
Stu: What? Are you saying this is my fault?
Fred: No, Stu. I’m saying that you are part of the system, so you must have been involved in some way in cocreating this. If you want to be the solution, you have to place yourself as part of the problem. This is not about your faults but about your ability to influence things.
Stu: OK. I’ll give it a try. If I was going to blame myself…
Fred (interrupting): Please don’t blame yourself, Stu. I am asking you to empower yourself.
Stu (laughing sarcastically): If I were going to empower myself, I would say that I sold the product to the customers, making an implicit commitment that we would continue with it for some time. I never discussed this openly with them, but it’s an obvious assumption that we all made. I didn’t check this assumption with the product organization. In fact, if I were going to be really hard on myself, I’d have to admit that this is not the first time that something like this has happened. So in the back of my mind I was worried that this product would not make it. But I didn’t say anything to my customers, or to the product people in my company…Shit, I feel terrible saying this.
Fred: I get it, Stu. It stings. But you’re doing great. This is the price of power. You can do something about the problem and perhaps regain the customers’ trust. The next question is, Could you have done something to prevent this from happening?
Stu: Clearly, yes. I could have negotiated with Product some conditions about maintaining the product for a certain time. Or if I couldn’t do that, I could have told the customers that this product was in a testing period and that we couldn’t guarantee that we would continue to support it. I could have negotiated some conditions with the customer—maybe they could test it with a discounted price, or be reimbursed if we discontinued the product, or something. I don’t know if my boss would have let me do any of this, but I could have raised it.
Fred: Did you ask?
Stu: No. I guess I was too eager to sell the new product. And I was afraid that I’d get chastised for not being a team player.
Fred: Since we’re practicing here, let’s take it to the limit. Let’s say Product doesn’t budge and the company doesn’t allow you to negotiate any conditions with the client. Is there anything you could do to preserve trust with your customer?
Stu: I have to answer yes to your question. Man, I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of this before…If worse came to worst, I could have told the customer the truth. I could have discussed the potential for any new product to not become what we call “commercially viable” and being discontinued summarily. Once a product has been out for a year or so and it becomes part of our core, we are very careful about any changes in it, but until it proves its worth it’s at risk. If a customer doesn’t want to take that risk, I would advise them to not buy it, at least right away. Right now, that disclaimer is, literally, in the small print that nobody reads.
Fred: How would you feel about doing that?
Stu: Like I’m betraying my company.
Fred: It sounds to me like you’re being responsible and acting with integrity. If the company is not willing to back the product, and even puts that caveat in small print in the contract, it’s not a betrayal for you to be straight with your customers. You know that their assumptions about the continuity of the product are mistaken. Alerting them about the truth is what a trusted salesperson would do. My next question is: What can you do now?
Stu: I can talk to my customer and own up to the fact that we were not as transparent with them about the product as we should have been.
Fred: We?
Stu: Sorry, I wasn’t as transparent as I should have been. But before I do that I need to speak with my manager and clear it. And I also want to ask my manager and my teammates to join our voices to discuss this matter with Product. And if we can’t get satisfaction, then we can take the matter to the CEO.
Fred: What lesson do you take from the experience, and from this conversation?
Stu: It is much easier to be the victim in a situation like this. But the only way to solve it is to be a player.
The Japanese proponents of total quality management say that “a defect is a treasure.” In the same way that a fever alerts you that something is wrong with your body, a defect alerts you that something is wrong with your business—or the domain of your life in which the defect appears.
The defect is often buried under the surface. To find it, it’s necessary to avoid the temptation to just fix the problem without looking for the root cause. If you lower the fever with medication, you’ll suppress the symptom, but you’ll never find the underlying infection. Treating symptoms instead of the cause can have serious consequences, the least of which is that the real cause of the problem continues to create trouble. To find a cure you have to diagnose the source of the fever and then prescribe a treatment for it.
The total quality recommendation is to “ask five times why.” Under this scrutiny, the defect reveals its source. If you find and address this root cause, you will improve the system at a fundamental level. You will not only solve the specific problem that caught your attention, but many potential others that an out-of-control process could produce. For example, when LinkedIn users or customers report an error, our engineers don’t just rush to fix it. They go “under the hood” to debug the system.
A defect, more generally, is any gap between what you desire and what you get, between your vision and your reality. The tension between these two poles is like that between the two poles of a battery. The difference in charge between positive and negative generates the electricity that can energize a circuit. Action springs from dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the current state drives your effort to shape a different future.
Before you can prescribe, you need to diagnose. Before you take effective action, you need to find the root cause of the problem. When you get a result you want to change, first ask yourself why it happened. Too often our first impulse is to attribute causality to factors beyond our control. As I’ve argued, this may be part of the truth, but it’s the truth of the victim. This explanation discharges the battery and makes us unable to improve anything.
An essential step in shifting from victim to player is to change your explanation of events. Instead of saying, “The meeting made me late,” say, “I stayed late at the meeting.” Here are some examples of player statements: “I didn’t back up the file”; “I missed my deadline”; “I lost track of time and stayed too long”; “I could not find a way to reach our profit targets”; “I did not establish rapport with the client”; “I couldn’t convince senior management to support the project.”
Even when unexpected things happen, use the language of the player. Instead of focusing on the event, acknowledge that you did not anticipate the possibility. You can say, for example, “I did not prepare for such a traffic jam,” “I did not foresee that the weather could turn nasty,” “I didn’t think that our suppliers wouldn’t deliver on time,” or “I underestimated the risk of the project.”
The specific words are less crucial than the frame of mind. Consider the difference between the first and the second statements in the following pairs of sentences:
| VICTIM | PLAYER |
| It’s impossible. | I haven’t found a way yet. |
| Someone should have done it. | I didn’t check on it. |
| I couldn’t do it. | I chose not to do it. |
| You shouldn’t do that. | I ask you to not do that. |
| I’m being kicked out of the room. | I need to free up the room. |
The victim sentence of every pair argues that “I’m not in charge.” The player claims that “I’m making a choice.”
In my workshops, I help people understand this shift from victim to player through the following exercise:
“Consider a bad experience you had, or are having right now: an ineffective meeting, a harsh conversation, a business or personal problem. Choose a situation you think was brought about by people or forces beyond your control. Now answer the following questions from a victim’s perspective.” The questions to elicit the story of the victim are:
What happened to you?
Who’s to blame for it?
What should this person have done instead?
What should this person do now?
What punishment does this person deserve?
I do this exercise in small groups. While one group member complains, I encourage the others to “help” him by sympathizing with expressions such as “I can’t believe they did that to you.” “That is so unfair.” “They shouldn’t treat you like that.” “Those people are so mean!” “You deserve better than this.”
Once everybody has answered the questions, I ask people to look around the room. Everybody is beaming and laughing. The mood is boisterous. As I’ve said, victimhood is a drug.
Then I tell the people in the workshop the hard truth. “Validating the victim’s helplessness is not friendly,” I say. “Just as you don’t really support an alcoholic by buying him another drink, you don’t really support a victim by telling him that he has been treated unfairly. Alcohol and victim explanations may soothe the person who consumes them, but they are ultimately destructive. Your drug dealer is not your friend. A real friend offers you long-term wellness rather than immediate gratification. He blends a compassionate acknowledgment of your pain with a fierce challenge of your self-disempowering beliefs.” At that point, people stop smiling and become quite serious.
In the workshop, I go on to the second round of questions. But let me put in a caveat before we continue here. In real life, if you are trying to help someone become a player, you can’t just ask these next questions. You must first validate the negative impact that the situation has on your counterpart while at the same time not buying into their victim story. (The best way to do this is through empathetic listening and inquiry, which I will describe in the next chapter.) Being a player does not mean being Superman or Wonder Woman. Problems do upset us when they are caused by others’ negligence or wrong behavior. Being a player doesn’t mean that you deny these painful facts of life; rather, it means that you don’t get stuck in them. Your feelings are the beginning of the story, not the end.
When someone has had a chance to express and release their grief and anger, you can invite him or her to answer the following questions from the player’s perspective. It is vital that you refer to the same situation. The facts remain the same; what changes is the story. The purpose of the exercise is to see how the player’s point of view illuminates opportunities for action and learning that were hidden before. The story of the player is not more truthful than the one of the victim, but it is more effective because it shifts the player from the passenger’s to the driver’s seat.
The questions to elicit the story of the player are:
What’s the challenge?
How did you contribute (by doing or not doing) to create this situation?
What’s really important to you?
What can you do now to accomplish that?
What can you learn from this experience?
These questions are as useful in personal as in professional situations. A manager can use them to help employees let go of the victim’s story, a spouse can use them to help a husband or wife, and parents can use them to help their children deal with challenges. The important thing to remember is that when you present these questions as a loving challenge, love—in the form of empathy and compassion for the other’s pain—comes first, and challenge—in the form of poignant inquiry to invite the other to own his power and accountability—comes second.
Andrés, an Argentinean who attended one of my workshops, returned to his home in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. He arrived around 6 p.m. and parked his car on the street. As he stepped out, two armed robbers assaulted him.
The thieves pointed a gun at him and ordered him to open the door of his house. Andrés told them calmly, “Listen, guys, my wife and daughter are inside. If I come in with you, they’ll freak out and start screaming. Nothing good can happen after that. You can take my car, my wallet, my phone, even my life, but you can’t take my family. I will not open that door.”
The thieves took all his valuables and ran away.
Andrés later told me what had happened. After expressing my sorrow and outrage, I asked him what he thought in that critical moment. He said, “I wasn’t going to open that door. I made it clear to them that they’d have to shoot me if they wanted to get into the house. I’m glad that they just robbed me. But even if they had shot me, I’d still feel I had done the right thing.
“If they shot me in the street just because I didn’t open the door,” Andrés continued, “God knows what they would have done inside to my wife and daughter. And if they shot me, the noise would have alerted the neighbors who would have called the police. I might have died, but they would have run away, and so I would have saved my wife and my daughter.” He laughed. “Not quite a happy ending, but not the unhappiest one, either.”
Andrés was more than a player; he was a hero. He was clearly victimized by ruthless thugs. He was innocent. He didn’t do anything wrong or bring this on himself. He faced a horrible threat with poise; he kept his cool and chose his response with courage and love—even though he had a gun to his head. He is a role model for me. Anytime you feel that you have no choice, I suggest you do what I do: remember Andrés’s story and realize that even though you may not like your options or their consequences, you always, always, have a choice.