Good Intentions versus Deep Commitment
How to succeed in spite of ourselves
Whether it’s losing a few pounds or becoming a successful CEO or top team, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s not that we don’t want to succeed; in fact, it’s just the opposite. And yet, we lack the discipline to put in the sustained effort to accomplish our goal. What gets in our way?
This isn’t a trivial question and answering it for yourself may hold the key to success in your career. Why? Because so much of what CEOs and executive teams do requires sustained commitment in the face of setbacks. For example, new strategies are vital but never perfect, so that as they are implemented, parts of them don’t work as expected right out of the box. Some amount of rethinking is needed, but trying again takes energy in the face of manifest doubt. Breakthrough strategies succeed when an absolute commitment to their success outweighs fears of failure.
If an acquisition is made, even good due diligence may fail to reveal deeply hidden problems. When these problems appear, the acquisition will fail if leaders don’t deal with them rather than walking away.
When a key person is promoted, they will need time to learn how to deliver at the same level as the person they replaced. A rush to judgment regarding their fitness for the role may prevent them from becoming the superstar they have the potential to become. Deeper commitment to their success may see them through.
Life at the top is full of challenges of all kinds. Many of them involve difficulties that require perseverance. Losing a few pounds can seem easy in comparison. What do you do now to follow through on your intentions until you succeed? Is it enough? If you are reading this, you have probably accomplished a great deal already. Will the habits that got you this far continue to suffice? What more can you do to ensure that you will be just as successful going forward?
That’s where Katy Milkman’s research may come in handy. She studies what successful people do to get to where they want to be. She offers strategies for ordinary people that, with a little imagination, can be put to good use by senior executives running large, complex organizations.
As a good scientist, she begins by saying that every challenge is unique and no strategy for managing ourselves during change is universal or foolproof. If you try one of her ideas and it doesn’t work for you, don’t say you weren’t warned. If you care to venture forth anyway, here are some examples based on her work.
Not getting started. Whether you’re at the top of a large, complex organization or leading a startup, you’ve got a lot on your plate. If you are like many of your counterparts, you feel like you are always behind, leaving undone things that need to get done in the worst way. You hope that the kindness of fate will grant you another day or another week to complete something that should have been completed yesterday. You aren’t exactly looking for more to do. Nevertheless, you know that progress demands that you tackle new challenges as well as getting around to fixing some things that have been crying out for attention. Still, you have trouble finding the time to get started. Milkman sees this as natural. To overcome this challenge, she recommends that you use a built-in “fresh start” date to restack your priorities to make room for what’s most important. It can be the first of the quarter, the beginning of the annual budget cycle, or the first of the year. If you make reviewing your priorities a practice on that date, and that practice includes stepping back to look at those things that aren’t getting done but should be, you may overcome your inertia.
Letting the urgent drive out the important. You probably read about this in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits book as well. Even though we set important long-term goals for ourselves, we become overtaken by distractions. We keep pushing out the work we need to do to reach our long-term goals as we crowd our calendars with trivial meetings or responses to urgent calls for help from our people. Milkman notes that short-term reinforcement of our importance and competence is addicting. We settle for a small “fix” of feeling appreciated or like we’ve achieved something instead of the far greater possible delayed gratification. Her advice here is radical; to place painful penalties upon ourselves if we continue to fail to put in the effort needed to accomplish our long-term goals. An example is that we have to make a contribution to charity, and one that is large enough to hurt. Or, we have to give up a trip we had planned and instead use that time to do the work we promised that we would do. For a top team, it might mean forfeiting a percentage of team member’s annual bonuses. Pretty soon, we learn to do the work we should be doing continuously rather than pushing it off.
The work isn’t fun. Some goals require performing tasks that just aren’t fun. Avoiding fines by filing our taxes on time is an example; riding an exercise bike in a gym for an hour may feel the same for some people. Milkman suggests that we use our creativity to bundle unpleasant tasks with things we enjoy. Combine riding a bike with reading a book, watching a television program that’s strictly for fun, or working out and then having coffee with a friend afterward. Another variation on a work project would be to throw a celebration each time a small step is achieved, especially if other people are involved. Make the fun worth the pain and soon you’ll find that everyone is looking forward to heading to the gym.
I just forgot. It’s funny how we forget to do things we aren’t deeply committed to doing. For example, how many times has the end of the quarter rolled around when you are reminded by HR that you promised to meet with each of your people to have a performance conversation? To address our natural tendency to suppress the unpopular items on our to do lists, Milkman recommends that we remind ourselves by “habit-stacking.” By this, she means combining the performance of a task with something we do on a regular basis anyway. For example, if you schedule a weekly executive team meeting, add a half hour at the end to meet with one of the team members. Or, if you do a quarterly business review, use it as a reminder to schedule lunch with a key customer.
As you can see from these examples, we almost have to trick ourselves into doing things that we have already convinced ourselves are important to do. Sometimes, we need to use our creativity to succeed in spite of ourselves.