Trophy or Atrophy: It’s Your Choice
One of my favorite books and one I probably recommend most to executives that I coach is Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman. I’m currently listening to her follow-up work, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work and my fandom of Wiseman and her work continues to grow.
In short, Multipliers is all about how we get the best and most out of the people around us through engaging and releasing their talent. Rookie Smarts is about getting back to the spot where we actually demonstrated stronger leadership behaviors because of our lack of experience/expertise. Wiseman’s observation is essentially that once we achieve a level of mastery, we begin to rely more on our knowledge and muscle than what we can continue to learn.
Her idea of moving from “trophy to atrophy” is such a powerful one and something I bump into regularly with the executives with which I work. As leaders, when we are initially on the road to success, we ask more questions, are open to others’ insights: from our team, the market, and even our rivals, and have a certain fire to perform. And at some point, “the trophy” is ours. We made it!
What happens next, though, and too often, is complacency. (Think Rocky III and “Eye of the Tiger”.) Complacency is the door to either (or both) of two behaviors. The first is, and the most common in my experience, is simply crowning ourselves the expert, relying more on our experience, our insight, our gut and becoming less interested in what we can learn. This disinterest keeps us idle, failing to look outside, ahead, and certainly not around the corner. Our new posture is closed and we are less apt to listen to even our truth-tellers.
The second behavior could be labeled as protectionism, and while less frequent, it can be the root of equally devastating impact. Once we find that success, complacency can morph into an ego that breeds conservative thinking – where risks, even slight ones, take on a disproportionate weight and we think that our trophy: our market position, our valuation, our personal or company reputation, is too much to put out there. We think small and we think about yesterday and today at best. Tomorrow…. don’t even go there!
The best leaders and most accomplished executive I’ve known in my career demonstrate a consistent, even insatiable appetite for growth. Not growth of their company or their bank account, but their personal growth. They remain curious – what Collins calls “productive paranoia”. They are incessant askers of questions and seekers of feedback. They are stimulated, not threatened, by someone else’s success and humble enough to apply notes from someone else’s playbook.
Perhaps most importantly, these leaders realize it’s up to them, so they take initiative. It’s why they seek out mentors, retain a coach, or join peer advisory groups. They are not threatened by not being the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, that’s the point! The advantage these leaders gain is access to the best minds and gifting that will help keep them and their organizations on the leading edge.
John Wooden famously said: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Trophies do not have to lead to atrophy. In fact, if you take on Wooden’s mindset, they can lead to more trophies, as they did for him.
The choice of mindset, initiative and exercised discipline is really up to you.