The Birth of a Mindtrap

From an early age, Harry, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, strove to be perfect. At school, teachers saw mistakes as weaknesses to be eradicated rather than opportunities to learn. At home, Harry’s mother expected him to excel in everything he did, pushing him to fulfill the limitless potential she saw in him. Harry concluded that striving for perfect grades and number-one rankings would lead to elite universities. Elite universities would in turn pave the way to prestigious employers, where a perfect performance would be the ticket to a high-flying career. In short, striving for perfection was the road to success.  

This perfectionist mindset served Harry well. It motivated him to excel, and excel he did. By age 30, he’d made partner at a top strategy consulting firm. From his perspective, everything was going swimmingly. Then he went through a 360 assessment. Although he scored very well on many dimensions, his team’s engagement ranked lower than the firm’s average. Harry was shocked. How could that be? He didn’t know what to do with that feedback, so he ignored it. A few years later, after he’d become a senior executive in another company, another assessment again revealed that his team was not as motivated as the rest of the company. Again, Harry met the feedback with disbelief. The company was doing significantly better than a few years earlier, which suggested he was doing everything right. And if the problem was not with him, then it had to be with his team. Harry hadn’t yet realized that his relentless pursuit of perfection in himself and others meant that he often viewed others as obstacles, rather than partners. His mindset and behavior hampered human relationships and, by extension, effective teamwork and collaboration.  

A belief that had served him so well had become a limitation on his path to become a better leader. His mindset had become a mindtrap. Many of the beliefs, mindsets, or perspectives that our brains concoct are meant to serve us well. In fact, this is precisely why they take shape in the first place. Initially, these beliefs earn us approval, love, admiration, or acceptance. Who doesn’t want all that? These instinctive pulls are almost impossible to resist, particularly at a young age, and they influence our behavior and our choices. Children instinctively strive for their parents’ love and protection because it is vital for their survival and proper physical, psychological, and emotional development.    

When the Keys to Past Success Get in Your Way

As we grow up, we typically want to feel that we belong to a group of like-minded friends or allies, who provide protection, collaboration, and understanding. Many teenagers desperately want to conform to whichever “tribe” they choose. In high school, my client Tanisha, a senior executive, badly felt the need to belong and make friends with popular girls and have fun. Yet earning that acceptance and becoming part of that group was incompatible with being a good student, which wasn’t considered cool. But Tanisha wanted and needed to excel at school. To square that circle, she learned to show only part of herself: to her teachers and parents, she was the smart and successful student; and to her friends, she carefully hid her good grades and drive to learn so she could be the cool, friendly, and funny girl who, like them, felt that school was “lame,” and good students, hopeless nerds. Only when she graduated top of her class did her friends discover that she’d been one of these “nerds” all along.  

This instinctive need to belong extends far beyond family, friends, and colleagues. Our often-unconscious quest to fit in results in our absorbing collective beliefs and world views, such as social, cultural, national, or religious norms. Like the air we breathe, these norms are all around us, and they rule many aspects of our lives, from gender or family roles to work behavior.  

Whether we want it or not, they shape us by influencing our view of how we are supposed to behave or what it means to be a good friend, neighbor, parent, colleague, or leader. Star athletes like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and NBA player Kevin Love, for example, have said how social values about men in general, and male athletes in particular, have influenced their behavior. “For the longest time, I thought asking for help was a sign of weakness because that’s kind of what society teaches us,” Phelps says. “That’s especially true from an athlete’s perspective. If we ask for help, then we’re not this big macho athlete that people can look up to.” Love echoed the same sentiment. “Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act.” he said. “You learn what it takes to ‘be a man.’    

It’s like a playbook: Be strong. Don’t talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years of my life, I followed that playbook.” These collective norms determine how many leaders view their role and how they should behave. They also influence how we define success or failure, or even happiness. So, on the one hand, these mindsets we adopt are useful. They bring us love, recognition, a sense of belonging or the drive to succeed, among many other things. On the other hand, they can also bind us. The problem arises when our mind behaves like the horse in the fable at the beginning of this chapter. We, too, can get stuck, bound by invisible fences of our own making that prevent us from moving forward. This is when a mindset becomes a mindtrap.

Why does it happen? How can something that initially helps us become an obstacle? Whether suddenly or slowly, in big or small ways, everything and everyone changes—ourselves, others, and our environment. We become older; we change jobs; a new colleague joins our team; a pandemic spreads across the world; someone becomes sick or dies; children are born, grow up, and make their own lives. Yet the mental constructions that live largely in our unconscious do not always adjust. We keep thinking and behaving in the same way, or we cannot let go of old emotions. This is how mindsets that have outlived their purpose become mindtraps. What once served you no longer does. “I’m good at this” or “This is how I’ve always done it” turns into “It no longer works.”

Patrick, a senior executive in the insurance industry, was a math whiz who had built a successful career on his technical expertise, which propelled him from promotion to promotion. He spent his free time solving math problems and approached most challenges as equations to be solved. He was now being considered to head one of the group’s subsidiaries, which involved interacting with the board of directors and the media. The CEO of the group was hesitating, however, wondering whether Patrick had the emotional intelligence that the new required. Although he was impeccably charming and polite, he was also distant, keeping all interactions with his colleagues and his team strictly about work and carefully avoiding any whiff of conversation that might veer toward the personal. He managed his team as a group of variables to be organized in the right order to play their part and saw no need to communicate any sense of direction or purpose. In short, the technical competence that had underpinned his success and gave him a sense of pride and identity was no longer enough. Why? Because to succeed in his prospective role, emotional intelligence was far more important than technical skills.

As top executive coach Marshall Goldsmith puts it: what got you here won’t get you there. In fact, he has listed what he calls the “20 bad habits of leaders”—behaviors that often contributed to their success but are getting in the way of their becoming better leaders. These include traits like the need to show people how smart we are, not listening, blaming everyone but ourselves, the need to win at all costs and in all situations, or exalting our faults as virtues. Together with Sally Helgesen, he’s also identified 12 habits that more often stand in women’s way, such as a reluctance to claim one’s own achievements and overvaluing expertise.

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