May 4
Things that are hard:
– Saying “I’m sorry.”
– Saying “I was wrong.”
– Saying “I am wrong” when you are mostly right.
-Not saying “I told you so.”
– Narrowing the gap between what you say and what you do.
– When in the middle of a complex, complicated and constantly changing “mess,” trying to figure out what is going on.
-When attacked, deciding not become defensive and choosing to walk away.
– Listening to what others say about you and your behavior when you would prefer not to.
– Hitting a baseball with a skinny piece of wood when the ball is thrown at you at almost 100 miles per hour by a skilled athlete who isn’t too concerned about hitting you in the head with it.
– Deep multitasking where you are juggling family, career, health, financial pressures, serious conflicts with key people, and serious disappointment all at the same time.
– Learning to “suffer fools gladly.”
A Student’s Question
This review of things that are hard had its origin in a student’s question from a number of years ago. I was teaching an Executive MBA class titled “Advanced Leadership: Grappling with Wicked Problems” and the discussion turned to difficult things we had struggled with in our own lives. “What was the most difficult problem you ever faced?” the student asked me.
Her question led me to reflect on the difficult challenges and troublesome problems that I have faced in my life and what I ended up doing about them.
What came to mind were not specific problems but Projects: sets of problems, challenges and opportunities packaged into a program. The most difficult project that I struggled with was getting through graduate school. Even now, many years later, it remains the single biggest obstacle that I ever climbed over. Like all projects that are important to us, it contained literally hundreds of difficult problems, most of them wicked. Over the years I often remarked, “If had known at the beginning what it was going to be like, I never would have started it!”
The student’s question is worth examining in depth. If you were asked the question, “What is the most difficult task – assignment, responsibility, project – that you have faced in your life?”, most of you would answer as I did, with the name not of a problem but of a project. When we talk about our lives we occasionally focus upon a specific event or problem – “I had polio when I was eleven years old” – but most of the time we use project language – making marriage work; raising children to be productive and happy members of society; finding and keeping a job that is both satisfying and rewarding; ensuring financial security; establishing and sustaining meaningful relationships; finding meaning and purpose in life – all these are challenges that include literally hundreds of separate problems. Once we have identified a project, it is then we often share a specific event or problem situation that we faced within that project.
What is The Most Difficult?
In spite of the worthiness and difficulty of each of the project mentioned above, my belief is that the hardest task faced by a human being is successfully providing leadership to a large organization or system. Given the way leadership is defined and structured, it is extremely difficult to be adequate to this challenge, let alone skillful and successful at it. In many ways it is “impossible work.” “The general manager has a predicament unlike any other,” claims Robert F. Bruner, Dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. “This person is subject to immense pressure from others…must analyze carefully and comprehensively, [and yet always] under conditions of incomplete information…must have a bias for action.”
The pressures on the person at the top are not only immense but relentless. He or she must try and satisfy different groups of stakeholders, none of whom will ever be satisfied: The shareholders want more dividends; the employees want higher salaries and more benefits and to be treated with respect and consideration; customers want high-quality products at reasonable prices, and services that meet or exceed their expectations; community leaders want active participation in community events together with increasing taxes; local governments expect corporations to be good citizens; and the Federal Government expects the company to comply with all of its rules and regulations. While it may be possible for a general manager to excel at one or two of these demands, meeting them all at a level of excellence is impossible.
Further complicating the life of the general manager are the Big Questions that must be answered, and then, as times change, answered again and again:
- What are the goals that we should hold, and how are we to set them?
- How should we organize ourselves in order to reach them?
- How should we allocate our always limited resources?
- How should we assess our progress and measure our success?
- How should we distribute rewards and offer recognitions to those who are successful?
Among the most difficult of all is finding and managing an appropriate and productive method for arriving at answers to these questions, none of which have correct or final answers.
But the most difficult task of leadership is a meta-project: Struggling with an endless series of wicked problems that can never be completely understood, can never be “solved,” and can never be delegated to others. This requires leaders to make high-risk decisions about complicated issues without time enough to gain sufficient information to understand the complexities of the situations they face. They must face these challenges with no opportunity for a “mulligan,” a do-over. While they may be given some slack in the beginning, the leader at the top is expected to achieve whatever is required and to do it relatively quickly: Complete the turnaround; “fix” the morale problem; gain market share; return to profitability; make the merger successful. Yet in a very real sense, they only have one chance to show what they can do. When it comes to wicked problems, there is no right to be wrong. And finally, all leaders know where it is that the buck stops.
The Struggle
People who have spent time at the top understand much of this. They have, after all, lived through it. Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, has a name for the time spent trying one’s best to lead a company forward. He calls it The Struggle. Here are some of his insights:
- The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.
- The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.
- The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head…and don’t believe that you should be CEO.
- The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.
- The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone.
- When you are in The Struggle, nothing is easy and nothing feels right. You have dropped into the abyss and you may never get out.
The Bottom Line
But despair and desolation are not the end of this story. It is only in the The Struggle, says Horowitz, that the most important lessons can be learned. In sharing his experiences with The Struggle, Horowitz leads us directly to the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that I have used in earlier essays: I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. By working our way through The Struggle, we discover, as did Horowitiz, that the simplicity that matters and that makes a difference is to be found on the other side of complexity. Here are five of the truths that he discovered on the other side:
“This is not checkers. This is motherf***ing three-dimensional chess!” The nature of organizational life is that everything is always changing, always moving. “The underlying technology moves, the market moves, the people move…everything moves.” It’s white water, all of the time.
“Don’t put it all on your shoulders!” You didn’t cause it all, and you can’t take care of it all. Find others to help. “Share every burden you can,” says Horowitz. “Get the maximum number of brains on the problems.” When Horowitz’s company seem to be losing every competitive deal, “I called an all hands and told the whole company we were getting our asses kicked, and if we didn’t stop the bleeding, we were going to die. Nobody blinked. The team rallied, built a winning product, and saved my sorry ass.”
“Play long enough and you might get lucky!” Horowitz learned how to hang on. Working in the rapidly changing world of technology, he discovered that “tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.”
“Don’t take it personally.” Making mistakes is what CEO’s do. It is to be expected. It is also, Horowitz believes, the only way to learn the most important lessons. “Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn’t help.”
“Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls.” It is The Struggle, and all that that requires of a leader, that leads to greatness. “If you want to be great, this is the challenge.”
“A Predicament Like No Other”
We return to the question with which we started. “What is the most difficult challenge of all?” One answer, of course, is that it is the one we are facing at the moment! From a more dispassionate perspective, however, a strong case can be made that it is providing leadership to a company or organization. The Work of Leadership is wrestling with a succession of intractable, messy, wicked problems day-in and day-out. What this means is clear: The most important asset for all leaders is the ability to work successfully with problems, especially wicked ones. Ian Mitroff in Smart Thinking for Crazy Times, in a quote I cited earlier, gets it just right: “The ability to spot the right problems, frame them correctly, and implement appropriate solutions to them is the true competitive edge and will separate the successful individuals, organizations, and societies from the also-rans.”
What can be done in the face of the “predicament like no other?” Find the right problem, get others involved, define it in ways that leads to the development of an action plan that when implemented makes things better. And keep doing it.