Bill Treasurer's Blog, page 25

Fear of the Unknown

A lot has been written about the natural tendency to fear the unknown. In my opinion, the first (and perhaps best) description of this phenomenon comes from the 4000-yearold masterpiece of Plato. In The Republic, Socrates (an early Right Risk-taker) describes fear as being a function of knowledge versus ignorance. He draws an interesting parallel between the nature of dogs and humans, explaining that a dog will bark at a stranger regardless of whether the stranger has ever harmed him, but will be gentle with someone he knows, whether or not he has received kindness from him. Socrates notes that “knowing and not knowing are the sole criteria the dog uses to distinguish friend from enemy.”

Humans, too, will bark at what is foreign. What we are ignorant of, we are often afraid of. Consequently, the most unfamiliar things are often first viewed as a threat, and we put up our defenses. One way to reduce fear (i.e., ignorance) is to increase your exposure to the feared object or situation so that you gain knowledge of it. Psychologists call this the “mere-exposure effect,” meaning that we can grow more comfortable with something just by spending time with it.

When we acquaint ourselves with our fears, their debilitating effect on us dissipates.

For example, I have a relative who is prejudiced. He grew up in New York where communities are tightly segmented by ethnic sections (Little Italy, Spanish Harlem, Chinatown, etc.). A few years ago he came to visit me in Atlanta. At the end of his visit, I took him to see the tomb of Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps Atlanta’s most famous hero. We also toured the house where King was raised as a child. What started out as a whim turned out to be a profoundly moving experience for my relative. Having grown up during the tumultuous era of the civil rights movement and having witnessed race riots and looting in New York, he thought of King as a troublemaker and inciter. But standing in King’s home, seeing where he ate, bathed, and slept made King more relatable. King the man was more accessible than King the provocative political figure. A simple tour of King’s home did more to reduce my relative’s prejudiced views than any finger-pointing on my part could have done. Seeing the ordinary man behind the extraordinary hero helped convert my relative’s ignorance into knowledge.

As Socrates suggested, and as my relative experienced, fear changes from an enemy to a friend to the extent that you move from a condition of not knowing to knowing. And it is hard to know things you keep at a distance. Instead, relishing your risk requires that you spend time “merely-exposed” to your risk. Thinking about starting a business? Take a weekend apprenticeship in the same field. Thinking about moving overseas? Take an extended trip abroad. You will remain hampered by fear of the unknown only as long as you remain loyal to your ignorance.

Interested facing your fears? Learn more about Giant Leap Consulting’s leadership programs: http://giantleapconsulting.com/services/leadership-development/

The Day I Wasn’t Courageous

Morning weddings are more vibrant than those held in the afternoon. In the morning, flowers radiate with more intensity, people smile wider, and the sun is more forgiving. In Jacksonville, Florida, where summer temperatures can reach into the 90s before noon, getting married at any other time of day would be sheer insanity.

The Club Continental is one of Jacksonville’s most popular wedding venues. Built in 1922 by the heir of the founder of the Palmolive Soap Company, the Mediterranean-style mansion overlooks the expansive St. John’s River. Set among magnificent 200-year oak trees, draped with Spanish moss, Club Continental was the perfect setting for the nuptials of David, my nephew, and Christy, his beautiful bride.

What makes the unexpected terrifying is how it intrudes itself, often violently, on the comfort of the moment. I had just settled down to a full plate of prime rib and tomato salad, when I heard my father urgently say, “Something’s wrong with Toby!” My eyes darted over to my mother who was gasping for air, desperately waving her hands as if begging for help. My mother was choking to death.

I can’t tell you much of what happened next. I can only offer you confused snapshots, flickering words and images that the grace of my memory will only parcel out in bearable morsels. I know I am behind my mother now. I’m thrusting upward against her diaphragm, the way I had learned decades ago when I was a lifeguard. I feel her ribs against my forearms, and think, “That’s too hard, her bones are old.” There is commotion in the room; utensils are clanking to the floor. People are out of their chairs, pensive. I hear screaming voices, but only the frightening words are registering with me; “Choking!”…“Heart attack!”…“Oh my God!”…“Call 911!” I know things are critical, she not getting any oxygen. I can’t tell if she’s conscious. I’m thinking, “Don’t die. For God’s sake, don’t die!”

Time has come to a near standstill, as if I could walk around each suspended frame of memory in some three-dimensional matrix. A relative is frantically dialing his cell phone. A bridesmaid is holding her open mouth. A woman, holding her toddler son in a tight embrace, turns his face away from the scene. The room is frantic. My eyes catch what would become my most vivid memory of the entire episode, the terrified and confused face of my 3-year-old daughter. The cuff-linked hand of my brother squeezes my shoulder. He urges, “Turn her to her side.” I follow the instruction. My brother gets close to her face. “She’s breathing. She’s breathing again! She’s okay everyone.”

The moments after my mother’s choking episode were full of relief and decompression. Everyone began processing what just happened, including my mother who, after spitting up, was perfectly fine though terrifically embarrassed. Later, people came up to me complimenting me for taking swift action. A few of my closest relatives, who knew I had begun writing a book on courage, commented how ironic it was that I got a firsthand experience in what I was writing about.

But here’s the thing, and this is important, saving my mother’s life WAS NOT COURAGEOUS. I am not saying that out of some false humility. I’m saying it because it is true. I know what courage is. I have had courageous experiences, and unclogging my mother’s throat wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t courage that caused me to come to my mother’s aid. It was the fact that I was sitting across from her. It was because I knew what needed to be done, and I had been trained with the skills to do it. It was because she was my mother. Given those set of factors, anyone else would have done the same thing.

Here’s how I know it wasn’t courage: I acted before I knew I was afraid. In fact, I’m not even sure I was afraid during the entire episode. I experienced it almost robotically, registering memories matter-of-factly, like “Oh, my mother’s dying. I should do something about this.” The people around me were more terrified than I was, probably because they were witnessing it as a continuous event. My brain had gone into some sort of hypnotic coping sub-state, like when your computer goes into hibernate mode to protect itself from a power surge.

Courage involves a premeditated confrontation with fear. Courage is something you contemplate, plan for and execute on. “Instant Courage” is a rarity if not a downright falsehood. When you react to something before the fear sets in, you aren’t engaging with fear, and engaging with fear is the signature mark of a courageous act. Courage and fear have a mystical relationship; situations that are devoid of fear are also devoid of courage. Courage is not fearless. In fact, it is fearful. Courage is acting on what is right despite being afraid.

How to Manage Your Boss

In my work as a leadership development professional, I am fortunate to work with a lot of young leaders. I’ve noticed that when emerging leaders move into management positions, they often fret about how they will manage and motivate their direct reports. Sometimes they forget another group of folks who need to be managed: bosses.

If you want to be a great manager, you’ll need to do more than “manage down” (to your direct reports). You’ll also need to be good at “managing up”. This may sound manipulative, but managing up is a critical part of leadership.

Here are five suggestions I share with budding leaders to help them “manage up”:

KNOW WHAT MATTERS TO YOUR BOSS: You have to be able to speak your boss’s language, and that means knowing your boss’s priorities and goals. Take the time to get to know what matters most to your boss, even if it means asking him or her directly.

GET ON THE BOSS’S AGENDA: Too many people wait for their boss to tell them what to do, like hungry baby birds. A better way is to approach your boss directly. When you meet with them, be crystal clear about what information you want from them, and what information you want to leave them with. Use the boss’s time wisely and sparingly.

MAKE YOUR BOSS SUCCESSFUL: Never forget that making your boss successful is one of your most important jobs. Spend time thinking about how you can do that. Use your natural talents to help your boss with the things they are not so good at. If you are a detailed person, for example, and your boss is not, offer to proofread their client correspondences before they get sent. Not only will it show your boss that you’ve “got their back”, but it will also give you a chance to let your talents shine.

PROTECT YOUR BOSS FROM HARM: Bosses are people too, and they’re capable of making dunderheaded mistakes. Get upfront agreement from your boss that part of your job is to tell them uncomfortable truths that they may not always want to hear. Then honor that agreement by telling your boss things they may not want to hear but need to know.

BE COURAGEOUS: Forcing yourself to deliver difficult messages may be tough, but think of it as an opportunity to exercise your courage muscles!

Great managers are able to manage their direct reports while at the same time leading their bosses. Share a time when you successfully managed up in the comments.

Learn more about Giant Leap Consulting’s leadership programs here: http://giantleapconsulting.com/servic...

5 Strategies to Address Conflict as a Manager

Part of being a leader is dealing with conflict. Conflict is inevitable. Members of your team will disagree with you or with each other. Conflict can be actually be an impetus for change if handled correctly. It can offer opportunities for change and for team members to know each other better.

But how do you address conflict well? Here are 5 strategies to address conflict well.

DISCUSS PROBLEMS OPENLY: It does no one any good to let the problem fester. Get the problem out in the open. Address the conflict. Begin the discussion so that you can define the problem.

IDENTIFY DIFFERENCES AND POINTS OF AGREEMENT: Once the problem is defined, identify the points that you agree on. Finding common ground will help you to work together. Follow that with by identifying the differences in your perspectives. That way you delimit what the conflict is actually about.

BUILD UNDERSTANDING FOR OPPOSING POINTS OF VIEW: After you have identified differences and points of agreement, state back exactly what you believe the point of view of the other person to be. Then make sure they do the same. Doing so ensures that each side understands where the other is coming from and can often offer opportunities for further clarification.

REDUCE DEFENSIVENESS: Throughout the whole process, be sure to keep cool, stay calm, and keep your emotions out of it. If necessary, take a break so either side can calm down.

BEGIN MUTUAL PROBLEM SOLVING: After you’ve gone through all the preceding steps, identify a list of alternatives that is satisfying to each of you.

Conflict isn’t always easy, but it is part of leadership. What is more important than whether you have conflict is how you handle conflict as a leader.

What other strategies have you found to be effective in dealing with conflict?

The Case Against Intuition

By Nat Greene

The following is an original blog post, based on lessons and concepts in Nat Greene’s new book Stop Guessing

When facing tough problems, many leaders encourage their team’s ideas to spring forth in the hopes that one or two really powerful ones will emerge. Whether it’s brainstorming, ideating, or some other form of creative problem solving, leaders often use some sort of structure to stimulate their team’s intuition; using intuition is also encouraged for individual contributors that are stuck trying to solve a hard problem they’re tackling solo. This is based on the idea that a team’s intelligence and experience combine to bring about sparks of insight or intuition, leading to an elegant solution.

While using intuition is simple, and for a team it can be highly stimulating, there is little evidence to suggest it will help you solve your hard problem. To understand why, let’s first understand what “intuition” means. There are two definitions:

“The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
“A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.”

Why Intuition Doesn’t Work

Using “intuition” suggests everything you need to know about a problem is already in your head. Instead of a structured investigation into a problem, “using intuition” means, in the end, you’re just guessing about the solution, the root cause, or the next step.

The reason guessing doesn’t work is that you don’t know everything you need to know in order to solve a hard problem. A system with a hard problem can have hundreds or thousands of levers that control its behavior; the problem may have hundreds or thousands of possible root causes. Trying to guess the right one with intuition is simply highly unlikely to work. Studies from MIT show that using intuition, rather than a structured problem-solving approach, leads to lower-quality solutions, and doesn’t even bring them about faster. As a leader, you shouldn’t stand for this.

The False Dichotomy

The reason leaders advocate for using “intuition” is that they believe in a false dichotomy. If we refer back to the definition, intuition is stacked against “conscious reasoning,” which suggests that conscious reasoning is the alternative method by which one can solve a problem. Sitting around trying to just reason through a problem isn’t going to get you far, either.

But problem-solving shouldn’t be done in isolation in your brain, or in a conference room. Don’t ask your team to depend on intuition or conscious reasoning to solve your problem, any more than Sherlock Holmes would sit around thinking in order to crack a case.

The alternative is to encourage them to out there and investigate the problem. Here are 3 behaviors that you can coach your team to use to solve problems much more effectively:

Embrace Your Ignorance: Help your team understand that they don’t yet know enough, even collectively, to solve the problem. They need to ask questions–especially questions that sound “stupid” and challenge collective wisdom–in order to learn the information they need to solve the problem.

Smell the Problem: Some of the questions your team needs to ask revolve around understanding the nature of the problem itself. Have them ask questions that reveal objective, observable facts about the problem–questions that don’t allow assumptions to be baked in. Lead them to determine the pattern of the problem–when it does and doesn’t happen, and under what circumstances.

Dig Into the Fundamentals: The other questions your team needs to ask revolve around the system itself. What scientific forces control the problem? For the problematic system, how is it designed to control whether a problem exists or not? Help your team overcome their fear of becoming intimately familiar with the system and the science behind it. Understanding what’s really going on inside the system is critical to solving the problem.

To help your team solve hard problems, don’t coach them on using intuition, or set them up with creative exercises. Coach them instead to get out there and start asking some great questions, and to adopt problem solving behaviors that will help them get results.

 

Nathaniel Greene is the co-founder and current CEO of Stroud International, and author of Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem-Solvers. Nat has a Masters of Engineering from Oxford University and studied design, manufacturing and management at Cambridge University, in addition to executive education coursework in Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program.

 

Getting to Acceptance

Over the course of your career, you’re bound to have a few startling setbacks. In my new book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, I explain why setbacks and failures often provide valuable lessons that can actually enhance your career. The trick is learning to accept the lessons that setbacks can provide, instead of rejecting them. What follows are some tips for doing just that.

 Answer the holy question. Here are the four most important words in the English language: What do you want? Think of your answer in lifelong terms. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of ideals do you want to stand for? What kind of mark do you want to leave on the world? When you see your butt kicks as events that can actually move you closer your desires, they become less threatening.
 Be courageous. Initially, your butt kick will make you feel raw and vulnerable. It takes courage to allow yourself to feel these feelings. Courage is not found in comfort. Be courageous by embracing the discomfort your butt kick causes.
 Control what you can. Much about a butt kick is beyond our control. We don’t get to choose, for example, the timing of the kick, who kicks us, and how hard the kick is. But how we respond to the butt kick is entirely within our control. For example, after getting fired, Pete, our IT director, could have control of writing his resume, lining up job interviews, working with an executive coach to process his kick, and more. Acceptance is easier when you have some semblance, however small, of control.
 Reduce judgment, increase honesty. When your butt kick comes, don’t waste time obsessing about all the ways you’ve let yourself down. Instead, get out a piece of paper and list all the ways you may have contributed to the kick. Be rigorously honest. Identify the lessons you’ll carry forward to prevent similar kicks in the future.
 Surrender. Nearly all of life’s greatest lessons come down to these two words: let go. Only by releasing your tight grip on how you wanted things to be can you fully accept things as they are. Let go of the condition that existed before the kick, so you can grab hold of the better leader you can be after the butt-kick lessons take root.

Career setbacks can cause funky feelings of embarrassment and humiliation. Growth is often an outcome of painful experiences. The end result, though, is that good and rewarding things can grow out of that pain, provide that you accept the lessons that your setbacks can provide.

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting. He is the author of the bestselling books Courage Goes To Work and Leaders Open Doors. His newest book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, focuses on the crucial importance of leadership humility and is now available on Amazon. » Learn More.

The Four Stages of a Career Setback

Over the course of your career, you’re bound to have a few startling setbacks. In my new book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, I explain why setbacks and failures often provide valuable lessons that can actually enhance your career. Career butt-kicks share a four common stages, each of which is described below.

Comfortable oblivion: Prior to the setback, you are blind to your own behavior. Life is going swimmingly and you are blithely unaware of the impending insult. Oftentimes you are full of confidence. You can quickly marshal the facts that support the value you’re adding to the organization you serve. You view yourself as competent, aware, and deserving.
Startling sting: Ouch, that hurts! Setbacks assault our comfort and, thus, are painful events. As a rule, the more oblivious you are prior to the butt-kick, the more painful the kick will feel. Most commonly, setbacks provoke emotions of fear, anger, rejection, or depression. These emotions often result in defensiveness and self-righteousness— How dare they kick my butt this way!
Change choice: After the sting starts to subside, you are left with a choice. Broadly defined, your choice comes down to accept or reject. This is the most critical stage in the setback process.
Humility or arrogance: Depending on the decision you make in stage three, stage four will result in either deeper arrogance or genuine humility. If you double down on your conviction that your setback was an undeserved injustice, you’ll fortify your sense of righteousness. If you take the lumps the insult brings and make changes based on the information that it provides you, you’ll exit the setback event with a view of yourself that is more grounded, sober, and humble.

The next time you suffer a career setback, consider these tips:

Focus on the long game. A setback is just a momentary speed bump on your longer leadership career. The spike in pain will eventually yield to worthwhile lessons and changes. Focus on where you ultimately want your career to end up, not the detour it may have taken.

Remember, discomfort = growth. Comfort may be comfortable, but it’s also stagnant. You don’t grow in a zone of comfort. You grow, progress, and evolve in a zone of discomfort. The more uncomfortable the setback feels, the more growth can result.

Don’t be oblivious to yourself. How much might it be costing you to remain loyal to your ignorance? Self- exploration and discovery can be painful, but what is more painful in the long run is being a stunted human being, incapable of acknowledging, assimilating, or shoring up your shortcomings.

Be your own project. Lots of people lead projects better than they lead themselves. Think about what it takes to lead a great project. You start by identifying your desired outcomes, you put together a timeline and pinpoint critical milestones, you marshal the resources the project will need to be successful, and you identify metrics to track progress. Guess what? You can manage your career recovery the exact same way.

Stay present. Rather than try to avoid all that surfaces for you during and immediately after the humiliating event, fully immerse yourself in the experience. What feelings come up for you? What fears are at work? How might your feelings and fears serve you once the entire experience plays out? What are you learning and how can you put those lessons to good use?

Ultimately, if you let it, a humiliating career setback can be the entry point for a richer, fuller, and more complete understanding of yourself, as a professional and as a human being. Armed with that knowledge, you’ll be better able to use your strengths— and actively mitigate the shadows your strengths sometimes cause—so they better serve you and others. Abraham Maslow sums it well: “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting. He is the author of the bestselling books Courage Goes To Work and Leaders Open Doors. His newest book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, focuses on the crucial importance of leadership humility and is now available on Amazon. » Learn More.

Now, Make 2017 Your Best Year Ever

Now that your New Year’s resolutions have come and gone (for many of us), it’s time to take a fresh look at the year. I’ve described this previously as the Etch-a-Sketch effect. Some of you don’t know what an Etch-a-Sketch is. It’s a toy that allows you to draw anything you want, then shake the device and the picture disappears, leaving your canvas clear for your next masterpiece.

There’s at least one major flaw in this story. Unless you and I do something differently, the next picture we create will have striking similarities to the last one we drew. Here is our reality: although we do have the opportunity to start a new year, our outcomes are unlikely to change unless we change.

Volumes have been written on becoming the best version of yourself, and I’ll not attempt to summarize that work here. However, as Samuel Johnson famously said, “What most people need is to be reminded more than they need to be taught.” With this in mind, I want to remind you of three ideas you’ve undoubtedly heard before. Each, independently, could help you make 2017 your best year ever as a leader.

Find Your Focus – You are in the midst of a war for your time, attention, and resources. Never before has there been more opportunities, all vying for your attention. And we all know, as leaders, as careful as we are, our time is not really our own. There is always something or somebody demanding your immediate action. Although this is inevitable, our response to these demands is still our decision. Are your personal priorities clear? Are the priorities of your team equally clear? One strategy for maintaining focus is to be crystal clear regarding the activities you are saying “yes” to; and then, by default, the “no’s” are easier.

Live with Intentionality – After your focus is clear, how can you be more thoughtful, strategic, and calculating with your time and resources? Intentionality without clarity is an illusion. I would also suggest you enlist others to help you be more intentional. If you are among the fortunate few who still have dedicated administrative support, enlist your assistant. Ask him or her to map your activities to your key roles/priorities. Try actually allocating time based on what’s important. Because in the final analysis, where we invest our resources determines what we really counted as important.

Build Genuine Community – This is a big idea. Human beings are made for community – a deep sense of personal belonging to a group. Unfortunately, many adults aren’t experiencing community in the workplace. The impact is staggering. An absence of this “doing life together” sentiment may be preventing your team from experiencing full engagement and the resulting performance dividend. What’s your role in this process? Cast a vision for community; nurture it; and when it emerges, celebrate. Once you’ve seen community in action, my prediction is that you’ll fight forever to make it your ongoing reality.

I am still working to make 2017 my best year ever. How about you?

 

About Mark Miller

Mark Miller is the best-selling author of 6 books, an in-demand speaker and the Vice President of High-Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A. His latest book, Leaders Made Here, describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from the front lines to the executive ranks and outlines a clear and replicable approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.

 

Leadership Sunshine and Shadows

There’s been a lot written about “strength-based” development approaches in recent years. You’re better off building on your natural strengths and talents, research suggests, than trying to improve your weaknesses. The usefulness of the strength-based approach explains its popularity. It makes good sense: put yourself in situations where your gifts and talents can be put to good use, and you’ll increase the likelihood of being successful. As the great motivational theorist Abraham Maslow said, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.”

Building on your strengths works best if you have a realistic hold on what your strengths actually are. Pinpointing your strengths takes a careful assessment of the totality of your makeup, and that includes acknowledging what you’re not actually good at. The challenge is that our self-perception is often rosy or cloudy, causing some people to highlight the brighter aspects (while minimizing the darker elements), and others to do the opposite.

In my new book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, I describe how strengths can be taken too far, and how the overuse of our strengths often turns them into weaknesses. The leader who is comfortable speaking in public may come to hog attention. The leader who is a gifted critical thinker may become overly critical of others. The leader who is great interpersonally may place too much emphasis on subjective criteria when making decisions.

Every leader needs to be keenly aware that strengths can become overly potent, sometimes toxically so. The strength of drive can give way to dominance, which can become the weakness of intimidation. Likewise, the strength of confidence can slip over into the weakness of arrogance. Every leader is made up of sunshine and shadows. Paying attention only to the shiny parts of your leadership causes your shadow to grow, which sets yourself up for an ego-bruising event. Focusing solely on your strengths, and ignoring the dangers of their overuse, practically ensures a kick in the saltshaker.

By all means, focus on your strengths. But stay very aware of how their overuse can have diminishing returns. Everyone is made up of sunshine and shadows!

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting. He is the author of the bestselling books Courage Goes To Work and Courageous Leadership. His newest book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, focuses on the crucial importance of leadership humility and is now available on Amazon. » Learn More.

Ain’t That a Kick in the Pants

Isn’t it funny how obvious and oblivious are so close?

— Author unknown

My work with leaders sometimes involves inviting the leader’s direct reports to purposely kick him or her in the emotional keister. One of the most effective ways of doing this is having the leader go through a 360-degree feedback process, where the people they are leading rate the leader’s style and performance. The raters often include the leader him or herself and the leader’s boss(es), peers, and direct reports— hence a “360-degree” view. The feedback uses an anonymous survey consisting of quantitative data and qualitative (open-ended) questions. The idea is that people are likely to give more honest answers if they don’t feel threatened that the leader will retaliate against them for their honesty. A leader’s self-perception can be quite biased, so involving the broader perspective of others can be a useful development tool. While 360-degree surveys aren’t perfect, having administered hundreds of them over the years, I’ve seen them result in positive leadership change. Sometimes dramatically so.

The challenge is, some leaders do everything they can to justify or explain away the feedback they get. In my new book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, I describe a headstrong leader named Bruce rejected his feedback and harmed his career in the process. Bruce is a headstrong senior executive in the construction industry. He is physically imposing (six foot four) and socially dominant. He is the proverbial bull in the china shop, viewing nearly every interaction with clients, subcontractors, and direct reports (“subordinates”) as a competition to be won. While Bruce has developed a strong track record of taking on the toughest and most complex projects, he also has a well- earned reputation as a controlling hard- ass who has left a trail of human wreckage in his wake.

A lot of pentup frustration spewed forth from Bruce’s direct reports in his 360. Though he rated himself nearly perfect on every leadership question (giving himself nines and tens on a ten- point scale), the people rating him gave him ones and twos. The qualitative comments were just as bad, including one from his boss, who called him “petulant” and “irrational.” One direct report called him a “blockhead,” and another said he was a “brute.” So what did Bruce do? He blew it off, dismissing the feedback as sour grapes from midcore performers.

For a controlling and hardheaded guy like Bruce, all that mattered were the financial results he brought in to the company. Why should he care what people thought of him? He had built the biggest and most profitable projects in the company. From his perspective, his exceptional results proved that he was a good leader. But in rejecting the feedback of the people who had directly experienced his leadership, Bruce was making the deliberate choice not to grow. Choosing otherwise would mean chipping away at his blockhead and cracking open a deeper truth about his successes; the money he made for the company had come at a great cost in human suffering. Yes, Bruce had made a lot of money for the company. But he had also cost the company a lot of money in the form of low morale, high turnover, and lost leadership potential. Not admitting that hard truth was easier than changing. Eventually, by choosing to remain oblivious to himself, combined with his intimidating ways, caused Bruce to get fired.

To be sure, it takes courage to subject oneself to a leadership 360. The feedback can be raw and hurtful. In rare instances raters will use the process as a way to get back at a leader they don’t like. But mostly the feedback is helpful because it allows the leader to illuminate blind spots that may be blocking his or her effectiveness. All it takes is an open-mind and a willingness to value the perspective of other’s.

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting. He is the author of the bestselling books Courage Goes To Work and Courageous Leadership. His newest book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, focuses on the crucial importance of leadership humility and is now available on Amazon. » Learn More.