Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge

by Henry Cloud

In the end, as a leader, you are always going to get a combination of two things: what you create and what you allow.

As a psychologist, I know that there are two kinds of people in the world. People whose circumstances overcome them, and people who overcome their circumstances. As the psychologist, I did not just hear “I will find a way to get the surfboard back.” I heard something automatically coming from her innermost being, from the operating system that made her who she was—the kind of person who says, “I will find a way.”

As a leader, you won’t have to worry either, so long as you are setting a strong boundary on negative thinking and building a “find-a-way” organization. You can put your head on the pillow at night and know that things are going to be OK. Why? Because you can know that your people, no matter what the market is doing or the circumstances might be, will find a way.

You will have made sure of that because you would have built a culture of optimism and proactivity. They will think that way because of what you have created and what you have not allowed. You will only hire those who think that way, you will train others, and you will make it impossible for those who don’t to continue to think that way within your walls. You will set boundaries on any kind of thinking that says, “There is nothing we can do,” in all of the subtle ways that it appears. You will not allow the “three P’s” to exist, in any form. Instead you will proactively build an optimistic organization that believes it will succeed.

If learned helplessness is about losing the initiative and the grit to persevere, optimistic control is its opposite. It is about regaining proactivity, resourcefulness, and perseverance. In the next chapter, we will look at bringing optimism and a sense of control together. It is the formula for overcoming negative helplessness.

Instead of being a control freak by controlling other people, leaders must turn into control freaks about letting others be in control of what they should be in control of that drives results.

First, take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of the page, creating two columns. In column number one, write down all of the things that you have no control

over that are making your business difficult, such as the economy, the stock market, your customers’ finances, the banks, your boss, the parent company, the health care cost increase, the company’s overall budget, the board, the elections, the newscasts that hurt your business, etc. Those are the things that you have no control over that truly are affecting you. Get everything in that column that you can think of. Next, I want you to REALLY worry about these items, even as a group. Obsess over them. Ruminate. Dwell. Think it through over and over . . . FOR ABOUT FIVE OR TEN MINUTES. Then, I want you to set the list aside until the next day when you can do the same thing all over again. The reason I suggest that you do this is that you need to! You need to worry about this stuff, and get into “ain’t it awful!” for a few minutes because it is! It is really bad stuff. I do not want you to be in denial. Besides, your brain needs to complete the loop of making sure that you know how bad it is. Otherwise, it will continue to remind you of it, probably in the middle of the night or every time you have some good idea. So, focus on it. BUT . . . only for about five or ten minutes. Next, after you have had your “worry time,” I want you to draw a circle around that time block and stop thinking about that column. Quarantine it. Put a boundary around it. If you find it helpful, put a red STOP sign on it. No more thinking about

Do this with Kristin as part of brainstorming 2019!!!!

those things. Next, and most important, let’s go to the second column. In this column I want you to write down everything that you DO have control over that can drive results. This need not be a final list. You can always add more activities as they occur to you and your team, as they probably will change as time goes on. But once you have the list in the initial form, I want you to focus on it every single day. Make prioritizing and doing those activities the primary focus of every day. Work the list.

What makes this simple exercise so powerful is that it speaks directly to our brains’ executive functions and our desire to have control. The brain begins to “attend” to the actual activities that it can control (hold on to the football), and it “inhibits” the thoughts, behaviors, and information that interfere with positive actions (worrying and focusing on stadiums and voodoo ladies). The process of doing this, individually and collectively, builds up working memory and creates those positive, action-oriented behaviors...

It has to do with the simple practice, backed by research, of observing, logging, and refuting three P’s thinking patterns: Observing Logging Refuting The way to turn around the three P’s habit is to become aware of your own thinking patterns, first through self-observation, and then by writing these thoughts down in a log, journal, or notebook. Next, review each of the thoughts in the log and identify specific counterarguments and actual facts to refute them, one by one. If you think, “This call is not going to help anything,” and you are feeling powerless to make it, refute it with a counterargument that says, “While not all calls lead to a win, many do, and the only way to find the good ones is to make the call. And if it doesn’t go well, that isn’t bad, either. I will have learned something. It is not horrible.” In other words, write down the negative thoughts, and then write down a counterargument to dispute negative thoughts and statements, one by one. Grasp the counterargument and take action.

Change requires energy, and producing it is one of a leader’s greatest jobs. Learned helplessness, and its concomitant negative thinking, suck energy right out of an organization. A leader must set very strong boundaries against helplessness and negativity; he must also provide the fuel to get people moving. Getting people to attend to what they can control that affects results, while inhibiting activities and thinking that don’t, is one of the most powerful ways to create energy where there has been stagnation.

With teammates, we do well to talk through issues of what we can trust each other to do and what we can’t—and then to help each other rise to higher capabilities over time. It is OK to talk openly about what we really think we, or someone else, is able to pull off and deliver. You can say that, if both of you know that you are “for” each other. Is your team specific about their fears about each other’s capacity? Can you have enough trust to say “I am not sure that falls into your strengths, Terry. Let’s talk about how that is going to work.” And does Terry have enough trust to know that your intent is “for” him and the team and the organization when you say it? Can he thank you for giving him that gift? When a team has this kind of trust to enter into capacity discussions, they find the gaping holes in their teams and put an end to long-standing patterns.

Kristin

Trust Grows When Someone Has Built a Good Track Record

Sarah O. Difficulty trusting due o track record.

WE MAKE INVESTMENTS WHEN WE FEEL TRUST When you think about it, that is what we are looking for in life. Investment. We want people to invest their hearts, minds, and souls with us. We want our teams to be invested in what we are trying to build. We want individuals to be “all in.” We want friends and loved ones who are invested.

Define Operating Values and Behaviors That Will Get You There Make sure you are clear on the shared objectives for this team. In terms of values, ask your team a few questions: What is this team’s collective purpose? What do you want this team to accomplish? If that is what you want to accomplish, then what does this team need to look like in order to pull that off? How does it need to operate? What values will bring that vision to reality? How do those values relate specifically to the vision, goals, etc.? How will they drive them? What behaviors will demonstrate and drive those values? How do we need to behave to make sure it all happens?

The interesting thing is that depending on the business and the objectives, different teams can have very different values. For example, one team may need “high connection” as a value to get their job done. Another might have to have “high autonomy” to get their job done, and too much connection might hamper them. Some might need “innovation” and “risk tolerance.” Others might need “security” and “high-risk management.” That is why I talk about getting specific to finding out what values and behaviors actually drive the results you are looking to produce.

the higher you go in leadership, the fewer external forces act upon you and dictate your focus, energy, and direction. Instead you set the terms of engagement and direct your own path, with only the reality of results to push against you.

So since your direction depends much upon you, and with so much hanging in the balance, there’s a question that becomes very important to answer: How are you leading yourself? Here is the physics problem in a nutshell. Too many times leaders, in the absence of someone looking over their shoulder, allow the reality of the mission or the circumstances to lead and to shape them. They get into a reactive mode, always responding to external forces and problems, and quickly losing sight of their larger role and purpose. The crush of urgent crises, to-do lists, squeaky wheel people, and distracting details takes over. It can feel very much like it is a war “out there” that requires shooting and ducking every waking hour of every day. In this flurry of activity, too many leaders forget that they also need to manage themselves, since no one else is doing it; they fail to put into place key boundaries of self-leadership that the sheer volume of work and responsibilities can obscure.

When I say “isolated” I’m talking about the unnecessary risks leaders take when they don’t seek out any form of support or input and are shielded. And I would go further and say that leaders need more input and more support than the kind that is available inside the organization or from the board of directors. Most leaders have a mentor or a boss inside the company who acts as an important sounding board, but that is still a “closed system.” What I’m talking about is outside support and input—support from people who can be objective, who don’t have a vested interest in outcomes, other than their care for the leader and his personal and professional growth. That should be their one interest—wanting to help the leader do well for himself and for whomever his stakeholders are. Sometimes these inputs are needed to help a leader refuel or develop, stay motivated, get through a valley, or overcome obstacles. Sometimes they are needed to protect the leader from his own worst instincts. At other times, they provide new ways of doing things in the business or new models of leading for a particular circumstance. Leaders need outside voices to provide emotional and functional support, not just so they can avoid mistakes but also so they can grow as leaders.

The fact is that we all get subjective and do not see the whole truth, about ourselves or about others. We need outside eyes to help us. We need another set of ears to hear what is going on. To not recognize that is the height of arrogance. If you have not set boundaries to prevent yourself from being an isolated leader, then all you have is your own eyes and ears to rely on. Or perhaps you can call upon someone within your closed system, that tiny universe made up of so-called advisers who sometimes want nothing more than to further their own agendas. And in doing that, they often won’t be honest with you.

Being an open system means, basically, that you are not arrogant enough to think that you have all the answers, or that your organization has all the answers, or even that you should. You know that there is experience and energy outside of what you bring that can add to your personal and organizational infrastructure, and you open yourself up to it. In my experience, when there is a real problem in an organization at the top, one of the issues always in the picture is a leader who cannot take objective input or who is arrogant. They have corporate boards comprised of “yes” people, and they surround themselves with others who do not tell them the truth out of fear. Or there are those who do tell them the truth and are marginalized.

So, think about this question: How much do you open up to outside sources of information, feedback, support, energy, expertise, etc.? Your answer might reveal why you feel stuck and why the laws of physics have been working against you. The closed system you’ve created is winding down and getting messier. So what can you do? My advice is to plug in to sources outside of yourself and your organization. Get coaching, join a leadership group or forum, avail yourself of continuing education, attend a leadership conference, and so forth. The best leaders and organizations I know make use of outside sources for coaching and lifelong learning in a very organic fashion. One of my client companies, for example, regularly sends its upper level leaders to experiences like Harvard Business School’s executive programs. They also require and fund outside leadership coaches for their executives. Open system change is integral to their culture, and you can see it working. They are growing every year—not just their business, but the leadership talent as well. And that is what is driving the business growth. The physics are clear: close down, and get worse. Or, open up and get better.

If we see feedback as dangerous, we will bristle and fight it. But if we perceive feedback as an unexpected windfall, like winning the lottery, we will seek it out and be open to it, and sometimes even pay for it. That is what good character does . . . it hungers for feedback. To be the best you can be, you must develop a hunger for feedback and see it as one of the best gifts that you can get. It is part of being an open system and has incredible value not only to you but also to your people.

What is your appetite for feedback and receptivity to it? Do you get defensive, or reactive? To the extent that you see it as adversarial, your brain will fight it or move away from it. But if you can make receiving feedback part of your value system, if you can frame it as one of the best gifts that you can ever have, then you will become an open system for change. You will move toward it. You will seek it. You will even pay someone to give it to you. When you do that, there is no limit to how much you can grow.

Set very, very strong boundaries with yourself against any tendency you might have toward defensiveness, blame, or denial when given feedback. The weakest leaders are threatened by feedback, and often completely closed off to insights that are so easily seen by others. Strong leaders embrace feedback, seek to understand it, and put it to use. Even when they may disagree, they don’t become defensive; instead they engage in dialogue and honest inquiry to figure out where the gaps between their intentions and others’ perceptions come from. The feedback may be wrong, but they embrace it to understand it nevertheless. You can embrace and not agree at the same time. Move toward it.

Earlier when we talked about the three P’s, we were looking at making sure your people were not infected with learned helplessness thinking patterns. But remember, you can be subject to the same disease. Ask yourself these questions: Personalizing: What event or other person has made you begin to question yourself and your capabilities? What or who has the power to make you go negative? What outcome have you been personalizing to your detriment? Pervasive: What outcome or person has had the power to make you begin to feel bad about more than that one event or outcome, that is, you begin to feel like everything is going south? You begin to question the company, the industry, or more? Permanent: What outcome or person has had the ability for you to feel like it is never going to be good? What is making you see the future negatively?

I make it personal. Need to Learn to be objective.

But as long as you don’t confront those uncomfortable feelings, your emotions will control your actions. Grow past the fear! Look at what you are afraid of and get to the bottom of it. Is it failure? Is it loss of approval? Is it fear of confrontation? Is it fear of causing someone distress? Is it fear of change?

So, feel your fear, name it, accept it, talk it over with those you trust, and then choose to do the right thing, no matter how uncomfortable you feel. People are waiting on you! Lead! Who cares how you feel?! Do what is needed and work through the feelings later.

Another resistance to change is the desire to “make sure everyone is on board,” or “we reach consensus,” which is sometimes code for “I want to make sure everyone is going to like it.” Just as it’s essential to get good information, it’s also important to align key people around the proposed change. At the same time, getting absolutely everyone on board may take forever, and making everyone happy with your decision is highly unlikely anyhow. Sometimes, after everyone has been heard and understood and has been able to have their input considered, you might have to make a decision that all are not happy with. That too is leadership. Sometimes you may even have to ask your team to “disagree but commit.” But you cannot wait around for everyone to get happy, which leads to yet another key boundary that leaders must address: boundaries with the forces that resist change.

The second group is the skeptics, who will not be so quick to come on board. With skeptics, their concerns are often legitimate and well intentioned, so you must engage them and address their issues.

The process of staying in touch, whether with those above you, below you, around you, outside the organization, or the customers, should always be in the spirit of service.

So, do the audit. When you find that the clear priorities that you have set for yourself are not getting the best of your time and energy, ask yourself why. Where are the leaks? Who are you having difficulty saying no to? Is it a lack of planning? Whose crises are you always solving or whose work are you doing instead of your own? Who is the squeaky wheel getting all of your attention? Set some boundaries. And remember the “big rocks first” rule. If you put the big rocks in a jar first, you can also get the little rocks in, then the sand, and then the water. But if you do the smaller stuff first, the big rocks will never fit. Your time is like that. What is vital to achieve your vision? Are those getting on the schedule first? Give them first priority, but assign them a time and place, so that they actually get done.

CEOs tell me that the discipline of the quarterly offsite meetings is one of the most important structures that they have, once we have done it for a while. It makes certain that the vital work gets done.

boundaries on time, just like financial budgets, force us to prioritize good decisions. If we treat time like it is unlimited, we will say yes to a lot of things that really are not high value. And we lose our way. When you know how much time you have available, and that it is fixed, you will spend it strategically. It forces you to focus on what truly drives the business. So, in my audit, I have to make sure that I have allocated the right number of days for the strategic drivers I want to accomplish in any given period. If I don’t, none of them gets the right kind of attention or focus. Recently I had the executive assistant to the CEO of a $25 billion company ask me, “Can you help him learn how to say no to people? He promises more time to people than he has, and I have to be the one who says no later. He just does not get it that there is only so much time available and if he says yes to something, that means no to something else.” Well said.

Energy is a separate matter. Your energy is one of your biggest assets and must be managed. Figure out who and what drains yours.

BOUNDARIES ON PATTERNS Most people can see and solve a problem. But leaders must get above the problems that are not being solved and see that there may be more than a problem going on. Instead of a “problem” there may be a “pattern,” and patterns are what will end up ruining your business. There are two kinds of patterns that I want you to look at that might require some boundaries.

“Missing this deadline is not the problem. The problem is that missing deadlines is more than a problem. It is a pattern with you. So I do not want to talk about it anymore, as that does not help. I want to have a different conversation. I want to talk about the fact that talking about problems with you does not help, and we need to do something different to stop the pattern. I cannot allow myself to be exposed to this problem in an ongoing way anymore.”

It may be time that Joe gets some consequences to help him to deal with his pattern.*

I am referring to patterns that have to do with you as a person, such as being conflict-avoidant, or impulsive, or risk-adverse, or distracted, or overcommitted, or afraid of authority, or people pleasing, or resistant to making hard decisions, or fear of failure, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns that have to do with your makeup and have to be addressed, as they will render your strengths unusable. We are not expected to have all the gifts or strengths. But we are expected to have sufficient emotional intelligence to be able to make our gifts profitable. Character is not negotiable. If Michael Phelps developed a pattern of avoiding cold water in the morning because he did not like the way it made him feel, and did not address that pattern, his gifts would never bring success. That is a weakness, not a lack of giftedness. There is a difference. Get over the fear of cold water so you can win some medals using your gifts.

Here is the important distinction: problems, when addressed, are solved. Patterns, when addressed as if they were only a problem to be solved, remain. This is where many leaders get stuck, as they often are depending on someone’s performance to turn around, yet it continues to be the same. They just keep telling them to do better. They only address the problem when they really ought to be addressing the underlying pattern. And sometimes even addressing the pattern won’t change things. That’s when the boundary of a “necessary ending” (as described in my book of the same name) may be required. A consequence is needed to break the pattern.

Then there is the second group of patterns, which is the repetition of the same work. What I mean by this is that if there is something that only you can do, at least in the beginning, but then you find that you are doing that same thing over and over again in the same way, and you pretty much have it nailed, it might be time to turn that over to someone else. There is a pattern of work, a repeatable formula, to what you are doing, and that means it is probably transferable. Leadership demands that you move it down the organizational tree. If there is a known path of the work, and it is repetitive, it can probably be taught. And if someone else can be taught to do it, it might be time to delegate that work, so that you can get back to doing what only you can do: lead. At times, these repeatable patterns can even be pretty high-level activities, such as driving a merger or an acquisition. Sometimes, after you have done enough of those, the path is clear and the operational pattern for execution can be taught and handed over to someone else. Then you can reserve your time and effort for mergers or acquisitions (or whatever we are talking about) that are decidedly different or high stakes—and that require the leader’s deeper involvement. Figure out what the business needs from you and only you, and do that.

plan, right? What could possibly go wrong? The only thing that could get in the way is the failure to create a culture where brains can flourish, where people are inspired and empowered to do their very best work. The good news is that there is a lot you can do to create exactly this kind of culture. Remember, you get what you create and what you allow. There is a lot you can do to create a place where people love to work—and where you do, too. You can choose the kind of place you want to build. You can take charge and lead if you: Help people attend to what is important, inhibit what is not important or toxic, and remember what they are doing. Create an emotional environment that is free of the wrong kinds of stress. Build teams that are deeply connected. Help people to think optimistically and root out pessimism. Help people get in control of what they can control. Build great teams that are high performance. Lead yourself in ways that create great performance in others. Do all of these things, and you will have science on your side. More important, you will have people on your side, people who want to work for and with a leader who engenders an environment that attends to our strongest human desires: to connect, create, and grow. You want this for yourself too, and in focusing your attention on it, you make it possible for everyone to win. When you get better, everybody benefits. Be that leader.