Google recently conducted an internal study of 180+ active Google teams to find out what was the secret sauce of the most successful ones. They assumed it would be some particular combination of engineers, personality types and flavors of achievers, but they were dead wrong. It wasn’t about who was on the team, but how well they interact, structure their work and find meaning in their contributions.

This is no surprise to us at Learning as Leadership since we’ve worked closely with teams for nearly 30 years, but we’re always grateful to get confirmation. Even better, the most critical characteristic that separates the stellar teams at Google from the others is the core of what we teach in all our programs: the cultivation of psychological safety – the sense that team members can take risks without fear of retribution.

“Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.”

Two other traits of the stellar teams were that they feel the work is personally important to them and it’s making a difference in the world. LaL’s emphasis on training participants to be able to shift to an At the Source mindset and create a Noble Goal encourages them to find a connection to greater purpose that inspires and motivates them to contribute their best.

We’re delighted to share more data-driven science that backs up the power of cultures of professional vulnerability and inspiration!

Read about the study on Google’s re:Work blog here.

Check out our upcoming seminars here.

Read “Multitasking: Public Enemy #1 of the Strategic Leader” here.

That insight was the impetus for Shayne’s great new article in Chief Executive Magazine on three serious leadership problems CEOs may not know they have — and can cost their companies millions of dollars if left unchecked.

Shayne and Brandon are co-authoring the forthcoming book, The Leader, the Ego and the Organization, about that personal and organizational transformation that catapulted Encore to the top of its industry.

Read “3 Leadership Dysfunctions that Could Be Costing Your Company Millions” here.

The work we do at LaL is a daily reminder that many well-intentioned leaders have it backwards when it comes to motivating employee engagement and productivity. It’s not as much about rigid structures, stiff upper lips and knowing it all. The research shows that employees tend to respond more to authenticity, caring and, dare we say it, vulnerability. In my second article for The Good Men Project, I talk about five things bosses fear to say to their direct reports that, if they found the courage to, would help morale. Even if they just said one of these things, it could noticeably shift their relationships. If they did all five, they could improve their organizational culture – and the bottom line.

Read “Five Things Bosses Fear to Say that Would Help Morale” here.

It’s been three years since LaL did our no-email-for-a-week experiment and Forbes.com and NPR covered it. So I was surprised to get a call last week from MainStreet.com for an article. Evidently, email – like a Chinese water torture of constant demand – is still a huge source of pain, frustration and obligation for many.

While I don’t see email disappearing anytime soon, this lingering interest in the issue signals to me how strongly people are yearning for a different kind of work experience – for deeper, more authentic connection with their co-workers, a sense of meaningful productivity and feeling like they’re contributing to a larger purpose.

At LaL, we don’t follow all our resolutions from that no-email experiment perfectly, but we do often catch ourselves. Personally, I feel less invaded by email. Now, post-experiment, it’s a secondary component to work whereas before it was primary. What I discovered in the “emptiness” and slower pace of my day during the experiment was how much better I could focus on writing, strategic planning and creating new programs. I’m writing a book right now and I couldn’t do it in a fast-paced email mindset – that’s not the mental mode where I do my most insightful, innovative or productive work. The experiment helped me learn to create some detachment from email for what’s really important to me.

If you’re looking to improve your co-dependent relationship to email, I encourage you to focus less on just getting away from email and more on detaching from the email energy mindset. That shift in how you hold it might give you more impetus to turn email off when you’d rather do something that really matters to you.

Read MainStreet.com’s article, “Are We Headed For the Death of Email, Or Is That Just Wishful Thinking?”

What if setbacks were the birthplace of creativity and radical progress towards our goals instead of embarrassment to avoid at all cost?

In my first article for The Good Men Project, I look at the taboo topic of “failure” with a fresh perspective and offer a different way to think about it: as a starting point of inspiration, innovation and learning — for ourselves, our teams and our organizations.

Click here to read the article.

As a man, I found the video of Ray Rice hitting his wife deeply troubling. The fact that they were apparently screaming at each other, and she spit in his face right before he hit her, doesn’t excuse his violence. I’m supportive of the tougher suspension given to Rice, and to the NFL’s overdue increase in consequences for domestic abuse.

And all of us, men and women, need to examine how we fall prey to the cycle of powerlessness and rage that overwhelmed Rice that night.

Although I have never hit my wife or children, I am all too familiar with anger. I was a raging, reckless teenager before I was a stressed out, over-achieving husband and father. At its core, rage is a visceral reaction to powerlessness and vulnerability. When I feel incompetent, unloved, a failure, alienated, criticized or just plain inadequate — and I don’t face it — I lash out. I have no idea what Ray and Janay were arguing about that night, but it undoubtedly cloaked vulnerable feelings they were unable to admit to themselves or each other. As they defended themselves with anger and blame, they said things that increased the pain and vulnerability of the other in unbearable ways. Like a runaway nuclear reaction.

(Almost) all of us struggle to let ourselves experience and share these feelings. Those of you that have anger problems know that irresistible wave of anger that blows everything up. But I’m also talking to those of us that numb. Alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, withdrawal — all the tricks of the trade to avoid the acute, vulnerable pain of feeling hurt or inadequate. Same problem, different strategy.

Just yesterday I spoke with a female client who had ended a romantic relationship. The man often criticized her for wanting to “process” interactions, claiming she was emotionally needy. He rarely had issues to discuss. His solution involved staying up late drinking whiskey and scribbling in his journal. She was the problem.

So make no mistake — we all have varying amounts of Ray Rice in us. It doesn’t condone him, but it also shouldn’t make him a pariah. He is a symptom of our cultural difficulty to embody true manhood: standing undefended in moments of inadequacy or hurt, and leading with empathy, learning and co-responsibility. It is the only path I know of that can transform our hurt into healing.

So, try this “Ray Rice” self-reflection and see what happens:

1. What’s your vulnerability avoidance reaction? Do you blow up or shutdown? List the behaviors you fall into when you’re triggered/threatened.
2. What experience of weakness feels most intolerable to you? Do you hate feeling weak? Inadequate? Unwanted? Take some recent examples and search for the fears and feelings that cause shame. These are your “hot buttons.” Push yourself to actually feel the sensations. I get a burning fire in my sternum. This is what your rage or numbing protects you from.
3. Share these feelings out loud with your partner or a friend. That’s right, time to man up! Anger is a sign of weakness. Authenticity in moments of vulnerability is transformative strength. The goal is not to control your anger, but to release the emotions underneath it. Create a context in your relationships where you, your partner, and your entourage can identify and say what is really going on. If you get it out early, it won’t build up in ways you’ll later regret.

When Dan, a former two-star U.S. Navy Admiral, now COO of a $500 million company, publicly berated a VP during an executive meeting, it was the last straw. Having taken this abuse one too many times in less charged settings, the VP quit on the spot, becoming the catalyst for Dan to finally reassess his approach.

While it was clear his harshness was hurting morale and transparency in his organization, Dan’s directness was also a strength — people always knew where they stood with him. When asked to look at his harshness and take stock of its unintended impact, he resisted. “Hold on a second,” he said. “I need to be strong. If people don’t perform, I have to hold them accountable. I don’t want to become a wimp!”

Corporate leaders often attribute their success to their drive, ambition, being a “hardass” and doing whatever it takes to get the numbers. Like Dan, who believed his ego was his strength, they fear that changing this will make them lose their edge.

Here’s the scoop: They’ve been successful despite their ego, not because of it.

When someone like the VP didn’t perform to Dan’s standards, he got impatient and harsh, even bullying, which distracted from his message. People were afraid to bring him bad news or admit mistakes, so issues didn’t emerge until they became crises. With little constructive mentoring, his direct reports ended up making the same mistakes repeatedly.

What made his strength of directness become a liability?

Leggo my Ego

Stored in Dan’s unconscious was a set of insecurities — failure, judgment, ridicule — that stemmed from painful experiences in his childhood. Our brains are wired to protect us from reliving such pains, and so are on hyper-alert to those triggers, which have become unconscious “ego-threats”. When our ego feels threatened, we have a fight-or-flight, knee-jerk reaction — such as lashing out.

Dan realized a strong ego-threat for him was appearing incompetent. Each time an employee made a mistake, he was unconsciously afraid it would reflect poorly on him. Thus he’d react with a self-protecting behavior — lash out to ensure the employee corrected his mistake immediately. Only no one wanted to work for him.

So, why are harsh people successful if this behavior isn’t effective? The illusion of benefits. Directness, for example, can get things done. Add an edge to it and it becomes abrasive and can create a culture of fear. The leader misreads that he’s admired, respected and liked. He got away with harshness in previous roles as an individual contributor, maybe even as a middle manager, but not as an executive, where leaders are expected to attract and grow talent, inspire and collaborate. If you’re a bully, your people won’t want to go the extra mile for you. You’ll inhibit innovation.

Coming to understand this, Dan’s greatest insight was that he’d been successful despite his ego, not because of it. And that was the impetus for him to change.

Why Change?

Here’s one good reason: If you’re leaving too many dead bodies behind, you won’t get the next promotion.

Senior executives frequently discover through in-depth feedback assessments that they need to collaborate better with their peers. Most have plateaued in their careers because they rub their colleagues the wrong way. Their bosses don’t promote them because they don’t create collaborative teams or work across silos, which is what’s needed in today’s complex, matrixed global companies. Executives must learn to lead by influence, not always by direct authority.

Most reasons executives have for not working on their egos is the fear of losing their “success edge”. But Dan didn’t lose his directness, he just quit over-reacting to his ego threats and stopped belittling others in unconscious self-defense. As a leader, he was able to use his strength in a much more powerful way. Direct reports could actually hear his feedback and act on it. So everyone became more effective. If you do the work, you won’t lose what’s good about your leadership, only what’s holding you back from growth.

How to tame your ego and get out of your own way

1. Stop seeing it as black and white. People tend to think, either “I’m a hardass that leaves dead bodies behind, but I deliver the numbers, so I can climb the ladder,” or “I’m a ‘wimp’ people like but I don’t deliver and won’t get promoted.” Not true. It’s just your ego justifying continuing the knee-jerk reaction.
2. Have the courage to truly look in the mirror and face the impact of your habitual behaviors. Get a 360-degree feedback assessment (interview-based not online) that focuses on your behavior and impact.
3. Be willing to look honestly at the costs of your behavior. With the unvarnished feedback, let yourself really feel the damage you’ve created. It feels counterintuitive at first, but push through it — it will provide a powerful motivation to change.
4. Search for your particular ego-threats that lie beneath the behavior you want to change. Each time you feel that impulse to react unproductively, ask “how is my ego feeling threatened? How am I afraid to be perceived?”
5. Choose your response. Once you know the ego-trigger, make a conscious choice how to respond. Be guided by what matters most to the situation and organization.
6. Work with a coach on how to let go of your ego-protective patterns. It’s not easy to make the unconscious conscious or let go of old, entrenched behavior, so get some support.
7. Connect with who you really want to be as a leader. Someone who can step into a deeper conversation with direct reports to grow and inspire them? Embraces learning from errors? Is an example of trust and partnership across teams? Initiates generative conversations about conflict? Wants everyone to succeed around them?

Though it was too late to bring back the VP, Dan’s shifts in perception and behavior fundamentally improved his other relationships. The CEO now can hear Dan’s differing opinions since they’re presented thoughtfully. The company’s top customer is no longer wary of him, but open and receptive. And he even decided to create a formal coaching/mentoring system inside his company; now he’s the most in-demand mentor.

To learn more about how to forgo your ego, attend one of Learning as Leadership’s Personal Mastery seminars. The next one is February 18-26, 2015. For a free needs assessment with one of our Executive Coaches, click here.