Do Business Well

As you might expect, conventional wisdom tells a rather different story. First, it spins us this tale: You can be anything you want to be if you hold on to your dreams and work hard. The person you feel yourself to be every day is not the real You. No, the real You is deep inside, hidden by your fears and discouragements. If you could free yourself of these fears, if you could truly believe in yourself, then the real You would be released. Your potential would burst out. The giant would awaken.

This is a tale of transformation, and we love it. It is just so uplifting and so hopeful, who wouldn’t root for the hero who confronts his demons and transforms himself into everything he always knew he could be? Well, surely we all would.We love all these stories of transformation, not least because they imply that all of us have the same potential and that all of us can access this unlimited potential through discipline, persistence, and perhaps some good luck along the way.

Softened by conventional wisdom’s first installment, we are easily persuaded by the second: To access your unlimited potential, you must identify your weaknesses and then fix them. This remedial approach to self-perfection is drummed into you from your first performance appraisal. You are told that to advance your career, you must “broaden your skill set.” You must become more “well-rounded.” During each subsequent appraisal there may be a few words of congratulation for another year of excellent performance, but then it’s into the nitty-gritty of the conversation—how to improve your “areas of opportunity.” Your manager brings up, yet again, those few areas where you struggle— where you have always struggled—and you and she then cobble together another “developmental plan” to try to shore up your weaknesses once and for all. By the time you reach the end of your career, you have spent so much time fixing yourself that you must be well-nigh perfect.

The best managers dislike this story. Like all sentimental stories, it is comforting and familiar, but strangely unsatisfying. The hero, diligently shaving off his rough edges, seems sympathetic and noble, but somehow not . . . real. The more you ask these managers about this story, the more vivid their criticisms become. Listen to them long enough and they will peel back its cheery surface completely to reveal the rather sinister messages hidden beneath. This is what they told us:

First, its promise that each of us can “be anything we want to be if we just work hard” is actually quite a stark promise. Because if we can all “be anything we want to be,” then we all have the same potential. And if we all have the same potential, then we lose our individuality. We are not uniquely talented, expressing ourselves through unique goals, unique capabilities, and unique accomplishments. We are all the same. We have no distinct identity, no distinct destiny. We are all blank sheets of canvas, ready, waiting, and willing, but featureless.

Second, there’s the message that if you keep working away on your nontalents, your persistence will pay off in the end. On the surface this is a solid, if clichéd, morsel of advice: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Yet the most effective managers reject it. Why? Because if the focus of your life is to turn your nontalents, such as empathy or strategic thinking or persuasiveness, into talents, then it will be a crushingly frustrating life.

Persistence is useful if you are trying to learn a new skill or to acquire particular knowledge. Persistence can even be appropriate if you are trying to cut a thin path through some of your mental wastelands, so that, for example, your nontalent for empathy doesn’t permanently undermine your talents in other areas. But persistence directed primarily toward your nontalents is self-destructive—no amount of determination or good intentions will ever enable you to carve out a brand-new set of four-lane mental highways. You will reprimand yourself, berate yourself, and put yourself through all manner of contortions in an attempt to achieve the impossible.

From the vantage point of great managers, conventional wisdom’s story, no matter how optimistic it may appear on the surface, is actually about fruitless self-denial and wasted persistence.

Third, this story describes a doomed relationship. The conventional manager genuinely wants to bring out the best in the employee, but she chooses to do so by focusing on fixing the employee’s weaknesses. The employee probably possesses many strengths, but the manager ends up characterizing him by those few areas where he struggles. This is the same dynamic that often proves the undoing of other failed relationships.

Have you ever suffered through a bad relationship, the kind of relationship where the pressures of each day sapped your energy and made you a stranger to yourself? If you can stand to, think back to how you felt during that relationship and remember: A bad relationship is rarely one where your partner didn’t know you very well. Most often, a bad relationship is one where your partner came to know you very well indeed . . . and wished you weren’t that way. Perhaps your partner wanted to perfect you. Perhaps you were simply incompatible and your weaknesses grated on each other. Perhaps your partner was a person who simply enjoyed pointing out other people’s failings. Whatever the cause, you ended up feeling as though you were being defined by those things you did not do rather than those things you did. And that felt awful.

This is the same feeling that many managers unwittingly create in their employees. Even when working with their most productive employees, they still spend most of their time talking about each person’s few areas of nontalent and how to eradicate them. No matter how well intended, relationships preoccupied with weakness never end well.

Finally, at the heart of this story lurks its bleakest theme: The victim is to blame. Less effective managers cast themselves in the mentor role. Blind to the distinction between skills and knowledge—both of which can be acquired—and talents—which cannot—these managers relentlessly point out each employee’s nontalents in the belief that he can fix them and become well-rounded. “You can become more persuasive, more strategic, or more empathic if you just work at it,” or so their story goes. Their implicit message is that you, the employee, can control the outcome by “working at it.” You can take classes, modify your reactions, censor yourself. The responsibility is yours. Therefore when you fail to achieve the impossible, to turn your nontalents into talents, the invisible finger of blame is left pointing at you. You weren’t persistent enough. You didn’t apply yourself. The fault is yours.

By telling you that you can transform nontalents into talents, these less effective managers are not only setting you up to fail, they are intrinsically blaming you for your inevitable failure. This is perverse.

For all of these reasons, great managers reject conventional wisdom’s story. Their rejection does not mean that they think all persistence is wasted. It simply means that persistence focused primarily on nontalents is wasted. Nor does their rejection mean that they ignore a person’s weaknesses.

But it does mean that great managers are aggressive in trying to identify each person’s talents and help her to cultivate those talents.

This is how they do it: They believe that casting is everything. They manage by exception. And they spend the most time with their best people.

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