PART FOUR People

Goal achievement within a large organization immediately presents difficulties for those with a high fear of failure that go way beyond enduring a bad boss. In many ways dealing with a bad boss is preferable to having no ready excuse for our lack of progress. Without such barriers, who or what do we blame as we watch those with high achievement motivation rise to the top?

We blame ourselves, of course, because High-FFs are capable of developing strong techniques for making progress within a large (or not so large) organization. If you stop listening to the monkey on your back and instead start looking at the people you work with and the organization you work for – and start aligning yourself with their needs – then headway is assured or, at the very least, you are in the right frame of mind to make progress, or move to an organization where progress is possible.

According to psychotherapist Barton Goldsmith in Emotional Fitness at Work (2009), high achievers have many traits in common, including confidence in their abilities and a trust in their instincts. Lifelong students, they are voracious readers pursuing knowledge in diverse areas. They tend to research answers to problems, asking many questions. And they are good at delegation – surrounding themselves with bright, energetic, talented peers, says Goldsmith. Finally, they live their lives according to their inner moral compass: defining, setting and achieving realistic goals.

The last part has been dealt with and the first part – regarding confidence and trust in your instincts – will come with time and the progress possible when small victories start to add up. But what about being lifelong students and researching answers to problems? This may well be an area the High-FF has neglected, perhaps because we perceive that the organization we work for is not deserving of our intellectual commitment.

This may be true, which means we should find an organization that is. Indeed, one of the first decisions you have to make when starting on the road to goal achievement is whether you are in the right organization. Are you standing at the bottom of the right ladder, as Stephen Covey would put it? If your conclusion is that you are on the wrong ladder, then your early Box 3 research should be focused on finding the right organization as well as on calculating how to get in the door.

Understand the Organization

But what if you are in the right place? Then your research should be on that organization. What’s stopping you from understanding the history and current structure of the company or organization you work for? It is almost certainly all available to read. You should be interested in the chief executive and the other senior managers – wanting to know their backgrounds and experiences. Not only will it make fascinating reading – as anything immediately relevant to us should – it offers a strong insight into where the organization has come from and where it is heading.

However, you should widen your interest from just the organization. What about your sector? Every industry sector has its own history with its own pioneers and celebrities. You should find out about them and be interested in their views. Also, who are your rivals and peers within the sector and how do they operate? What are their histories? Which organization is the organization for the sector? How did they get there? Meanwhile, who’s in crisis? And where does your organization stand in such a league table?

All sectors will have specialist magazines that can help us, although we should use such publications like text books – taking notes and revising the information – rather than as something to browse and forget.

And if you read the above and think: “you know what, I just can’t be bothered to find out about the history of the Birmingham widget industry and its rivals in Germany and China. I’d rather read my motorcycle maintenance magazine” then you might just have answered the question about whether you are at the foot of the right ladder, as well as what ladder might be the one to seek out.

When Opportunity Knocks, Open the Door

All this research should give you strong ammunition to strike when opportunity knocks, usually in the form of the office crisis. As Goldsmith says, the office problem – as well as its big brother the office crisis – are major opportunity moments for any worker. Suddenly we are in the right place at the right time – on hand with the hose to douse the flames. Yet we must know that it’s the hose we need, and be able to handle it. Otherwise we are a long way from being in the right place at the right time. We are simply in the way.

Having said this, not all of the problems are of the “fire, fire!” sort. Many are positive moments of opportunity for the organization: how best to market a new product, or take advantage of a crisis at a rival firm, or deal with your line manager’s new post-promotion responsibilities.

Become the Boss’s Adviser

In Why Should the Boss Listen to You? (2008) strategic adviser James Lukaszewski sets out the traits required to get ourselves on the fastest known conveyor to goal achievement within any organization – to be the CEO’s (or anyone senior’s) trusted adviser.

“What matters to leaders is success,” writes Lukaszewski. “They will pay attention to you if they think you have a good sense of what they need to achieve that success.”

To succeed as an advisor to the senior executives, says Lukaszewski, you must get involved in projects that appeal to them – providing solid ideas as well as small suggestions. You must not be selfish. Your aim should be to aid their needs rather than nakedly advance your own. Yet you must be curious – identifying, investigating and mastering new and perhaps misunderstood information. And you must keep your ego in check.

High-FFs and Delegation

Delegation is another key requirement for progress, and is another one of those traumatic areas for those with a high fear of failure, especially when in a junior role. Many junior High-FFs fear delegation because they are suspicious of the motives involved – both of your boss who has instructed you to delegate, perhaps to undermine you, and of your colleague, who may seem overly keen to learn your job and take over. We may also fail to see training others as your role. We have a full workload and are unlikely to be assessed on how well we “make ourselves redundant” (to use the unhelpful phrase adopted by one of my seniors).

It’s massively self-defeating to assume the worst. If it’s true, it’ll happen anyway. Perhaps being outmanoeuvred and “let go” is just what we need at this stage. We have our long-term goals in place and we were clearly on the wrong path or, at the very least, working for the wrong boss or organization. Yet by assuming it is true and behaving accordingly it is, yet again, self-fulfilling.

And by effectively delegating to others you are showing confidence in yourself, as well as freeing up your time for more important work, although you mustn’t make the common mistake of retaining the grunt work while delegating the more creative and exciting stuff because the results are less certain or “it’ll save time.” Being able to delegate means you’ve done your time on the grunt work and you’re on your way up, so if you hand over the creative stuff you’ve just anchored yourself to the floor while sending your colleague up the ladder.

Commit to the Organization

One thing we must do is commit to the organization we work for or find one we can commit to and do whatever it takes to get in the door. This could include initially doing the wrong job for the right organization. In the bank, for instance, I noticed that many of the female executives had started as PAs and many men and women had joined at 16 as lowly branch cashiers. And my first post-university job was selling classified ads for The Independent, simply because I wanted to work on a national newspaper.

I hated the work less than I thought – in fact was surprisingly good at it (and have used the sales training ever since) – and meanwhile looked for editorial opportunities, despite being told such a move was impossible. These came in the form of articles on the environment for the youth section and, soon enough, a full-time opening came, although with a much reduced salary and the requirement to learn some editorial production skills (which I have also used ever since). Whatever the compromises, it was a great thrill to win my first ever payslip as a journalist, finally feeling that I was at the foot of the right ladder.

Yet I still gave everything to the classified ads job in an attempt to enhance my reputation within the organization – knowing that being judged well was crucial, no matter what the task. According to management academic Charles E. Watson in What Smart People do When Dumb Things Happen at Work (1999) superior performers put service to others before self-interest, especially as – according to Watson – every organization is constantly involved in a weeding out process, continually separating those who produce meaningful results from those who simply go through the motions.

Of course, throughout this you should stay laser-focused on the short – and medium-term goals that help you meet your long-term objectives. Judge every task, every meeting, every project, every evaluation, every interaction – and definitely every day – on the basis of whether you are moving towards your objectives. Yet be flexible. You have 10 years to meet your ultimate goals so a compromise today may position you well for tomorrow, while intransigence may set you back years.

“Thank God It’s Today”

Richard Carlson is also very relevant in coping with the work environment – so relevant he wrote a specific book on it entitled Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work (1998). Key homilies include “never, ever backstab,” “remember to appreciate the people you work with,” “ease off your ego,” “don’t sweat the demanding boss,” “learn to say no without guilt,” “strengthen your presence,” “make friends with the receptionists” and “don’t let negative coworkers get you down” – all of which make total sense without much need for additional thought.

One – called “join my new club: TGIT” – perhaps requires further explanation. This is an attack on two sorts of worker – the Thank God it’s Friday gang that live for the weekend, hate Mondays and are likely to have empty work lives; and the Thank God it’s Monday gang that have no life but their work, hate the weekends and consider the “demands” of their family or friends an intrusion.

“Needless to say,” says Carlson. “Members of both clubs think the members of the other club are completely nuts!”

He invites us to join the Thank God it’s Today club in which we bask in the uniqueness and beauty of each day of the week.

“As simple as it seems, the desire to maintain a membership in this club can make a substantial difference in the attitude you carry with you to work and in fact all life,” says Carlson.

A final Carlson recommendation worth noting is to “make the best of your non-creative position,” which suggests you have a choice regarding any job you may consider something of a drudge. You can dread the tasks, or you can decide to enjoy them and make best use of them.

He used two bricklayers as an example – one resentfully piling bricks on top of each other “in the hot sun” while the other marvelling at the “beautiful structures” he was creating, although it reminded me of the Detroit car workers who used the mind-numbing hours on the production line to invent and test the tunes and lyrics that became the Motown sound – proving that even the most soul-destroying work is anything but if we adopt the right attitude.

Case Study 14 – The Poor Delegator

Joseph worked in design. He thought he was very good at it, as did his employers. He informed me of this in a long email after reading the first edition of What’s Stopping You? In fact, he was seen as so good, he wrote, that he needed virtually no supervision from the agency owners after just a few months at the company. And before long he was running important accounts on his own.

So why was he writing to me? Because he couldn’t delegate, and he was concerned it had cost him his career.

The company had taken on a junior and asked Joseph to mentor him. At first, he saw this as a compliment – that he’d been trusted to nurture new talent. Yet he had no patience to help the new designer, so found himself saying: “don’t worry, I’ll do it,” whenever there was a difficulty or something needed presenting to the client in a particular way.

Instead, he gave the designer the “blue sky” projects that required his full creativity – leaving Joseph with the routine work simply because he knew how to do it and thought it was more efficient to “get it done.”

Of course, Joseph could see his mistake – rooting himself to the floor while allowing the junior to rise through the ranks on “get noticed” projects. And he wondered if his troubled South London upbringing – with a single mother battling poverty and an abusive and estranged biological father who had another family in a different part of London – had made him distrustful of others: hence the enquiry to me.

Indeed, the new designer soon won public praise, which made Joseph irrationally angry. Yet rather than battle his own negative and self-sabotaging responses to the need for nurturing a team, he sought a way out. He resigned in order to go freelance.

Joseph being Joseph brooded on this decision – for a while seeing it as self-sabotage: a cop out, perhaps, or running away from responsibility. Yet the work flowed in and, after a time, he realized that nurturing others was just not his thing.

“Freelancing is great because I can focus on the bits of the work I like and leave the bits I like less to others,” he said.

Joseph was also keen to pursue other interests, potentially going back to college. That said, he seemed well aware of the damage poor delegation had inflicted on his more formal career pursuits, although was managing to rationalize his thoughts and actions.

“I had to make a decision regarding what I was prepared to do and what I wasn’t,” he said.