Tipping Sacred Cows

Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues

Jake Breeden

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118345917
• eBook ISBN: 9781118431924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Strategies for overcoming the "sacred cows" that hold people back at work

We all know the "sacred cows" at work?the conventional wisdom to try your best, work well with others, and produce excellent work. But these cherished nuggets of advice, in practice, have a dark side that can lead to career-limiting unintended consequences. Based on Jake Breeden's experience coaching thousands of leaders in 27 countries, and the latest scientific research in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, Tipping Sacred Cows reveals how to overcome the dangerous behaviors that masquerade as virtues at work, and how to lead with fewer self-imposed limitations and greater results.

• Identifies the seven most common sacred cows at work, including balance that turns bland, creativity that conceals narcissism, and passion that becomes obsession
• Offers simple steps for recognizing and overcoming the potentially career-limiting effects of each of the most common sacred cows
• Written by Jake Breeden, a faculty member at Duke University's Corporate Education program, rated by Businessweek and The Financial Times as #1 in the world

Tipping Sacred Cows shines a light on the hidden traps that lie between good intentions and great results, clearing a path so leaders can finally realize their full potential at work.

Take this quick 21-question survey to find out which of the seven sacred cows are standing in your way at work.

Chapter 1

Meet Your Sacred Cows

I get paid to do my two favorite things: travel and teach. I love my work. Over the past ten years I've been to twenty-seven countries, working with some really smart, successful leaders at exciting companies. But there's something I love even more than my job—Emily, Clara, and Margaret, my three daughters.

I go into withdrawal if it's been too long since I've seen them. And there's one absolutely sacrosanct rule for me: never miss a birthday. Despite the intensity of my international travel, I made it through my oldest daughter Emily's first twelve years, my middle daughter Clara's first nine years, and my youngest daughter Margaret's first five years without ever missing a birthday, a perfect twenty-six for twenty-six. And then came Clara's tenth birthday.

I had to teach a two-week leadership development program in Dubai. I hated it, but I decided teaching the program and missing Clara's birthday was the only responsible thing to do. I sat down with her to discuss what I could do to make amends, knowing this was a negotiation I was bound to lose. I showed up with a heart full of guilt, ready to do whatever it took to placate my middle child. “Clara, I'm going to be out of the country for your birthday,” I said.

“My double-digit birthday?” she asked.

“Yes,” I swallowed. “That one.”

And then came the sobs. I hugged her. “Daddy?” she asked through muffled tears. “Will you do anything I ask you to, to make up for missing my double-digit birthday?”

I hesitated before asking a dangerous question: “What do you want?”

“Daddy,” she said, drying her big blue eyes as she pulled away from me. “I want you to promise me that you'll miss Emily's thirteenth birthday.”

I had expected to be looking into the price of Justin Bieber tickets. I was ready to give Clara something special, not take away something special from her sister.

Clara said I should miss Emily's birthday “because it's fair.” I was missing a special birthday for her, and I needed to make up for that by missing a special birthday for Emily. The way to make amends was to even the score.

Unwilling to start an endless chain reaction of missed birthdays, I took Clara to a theme park—one of her favorite and my least favorite things to do. When I stepped off the roller coaster quivering with nausea, Clara finally felt the score was even. Someone had to pay, and that someone was me.

None of us wants to be treated unfairly. From our earliest days, we, like Clara, have a sense that life should be fair and we protest or seethe when it's not. To even the scales, we demand something for ourselves. Failing that, we deny something for others. To be sure, fairness is a virtue, but when it's a virtue that trumps reason, it can backfire.

As it turns out, Clara's response was not unlike the typical responses of well-meaning adults. When they waste precious emotional energy fretting over relative office size, bonus packages, or mentions at the annual meeting, or when they demand that a junior employee go through the same trivial grunt work and dreadful schedule that they did, even if there's a better way, leaders make the same mistake as Clara. Sometimes worrying about who gets more than their fair share is a lot like tearfully asking your father to miss your sister's birthday.

Fairness is only one of several leadership virtues whose pursuit can reap unintended, injurious consequences. The truth is that many workplace values that seem beyond reproach actually do hidden damage. These are values that on the one hand give us life and direction, and on the other hand can steal our energy, effectiveness, and success. Like rocks in a river channel, these unexamined values can get in our way, impede our efforts, and even capsize us. Some leaders, however, become fully aware and steadily mindful of the downsides of their and their companies' most cherished and unquestioned virtues, and, in the process, renew their spirits, get more done, and enjoy more success.

Unexamined Virtues at Work

No detail escaped Julian Fletcher's watchful eye. As the COO of a small but growing consulting firm, he counted every penny, balanced every budget, and demanded that his employees operate with the same ruthless efficiency. And though Julian was successful in his role, he was often frustrated by the cavalier attitude of his boss, the CEO. When the CEO was recruited away to run a larger firm, Julian was promoted to the top position, and without wasting a second, he eagerly set out to tighten the ship.

First, he eliminated several client entertainment events at expensive restaurants. Next, he ended the firm's policy of giving away free consulting to prospective clients. Then, he slashed the firm's liberal expense policy and stopped the practice of wooing new recruits with large bonuses.

At first, Julian's results were impressive. The company's costs dropped, which in turn made profits rise. But over the next several months, signs of damage emerged. Clients and employees began to disengage. A few workers jumped ship to other companies. No new clients signed on, deals from existing clients began to dry up, and the flow of talented new hires ceased. By the end of Julian's first year, profits began to sink.

In an act of near mutiny, a few of the firm's employees reached out to the former CEO, begging her to come back and offer Julian advice. Out of loyalty to her former company and colleagues, she agreed. And out of desperation, Julian reluctantly acquiesced to meet with his former boss.

“Julian,” she said, “when you took over after I left, the company was growing rapidly in spite of some obvious inefficiencies. You acted with the best of intentions as you tried to eliminate some of the waste you saw. But in the process of cutting the loss, you've also destroyed the growth. Now, the firm has gone from growing inefficiently to shrinking efficiently.”

Julian's belief in efficiency was his sacred cow—a virtue he revered without question—and with good reason: it is a core business value, and he fostered it with zeal. Leaders like Julian often end up baffled. The very virtues that helped them succeed earlier in their career betray them as they move up the ladder. It's smart to rely on your core beliefs at work. But thriving in the corporate world, in any role, requires the ability to recognize, on a personal level, when your greatest assets turn into career-limiting liabilities. On the organizational level, successful leadership requires being able to see when unexamined virtues have actually become, or are masking, unsuspected vices.

My own understanding of the unintended consequences of conventional workplace wisdom is grounded in my experience working with executives all over the world and informed by surprising research in psychology and economics on how human nature, social norms, and corporate culture can all pull us toward the territory of unexamined virtues. A growing body of research indicates these supposed virtues can wreak havoc on the careers of leaders and the results of organizations. Experiments by economists in The Netherlands have demonstrated the dark side of fairness;¹ a French-Canadian psychology professor discovered how passion for work can become an unhealthy obsession;² and a political science professor researching the marksmanship of female marines showed how aiming for excellence can backfire.³

Researchers aren't the only ones who challenge convention. Successful business leaders increasingly reject sacred cows at work. The insights and solutions I offer here are informed by my experience with executives all over the world, helping them discover and learn to avoid some of the most common, destructive, and invisible ways that business virtues and values backfire. Because in the world of work, when virtue backfires, it can lower performance, waste time and energy, damage morale and retention, and ruin careers.

The Peril of Sacred Cows

My teaching travels have taken me throughout India, to Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Calcutta, and elsewhere. Between leadership trainings, I've vacationed on the stunning beaches of the Indian resort town Goa. The first literary reference to Goa from the Mahabharata refers to the city as Gomanta, which means “region of cows.”⁴ “Go” means cow in Sanskrit, the primary liturgical language of Hinduism. It's no surprise, then, that cows are plentiful in Goa.

Although I was warned about the cows beforehand, it still shocked me to see them milling slowly down busy streets, lovingly adorned in handmade necklaces and bright orange strings of marigolds. They roam leisurely until they are brought back to their homes at the end of each day to rest and provide for families. These cows, givers of milk, are literally sacred objects of sincere reverence. “Sacred cow” is a Western figure of speech that takes its cue from the literal holy cows of India. It's an idea, custom, or institution that has real virtue, but that we hold beyond question or criticism—often unreasonably so. In the workplace, the danger of sacred cows is that in not approaching them with a healthy dose of mindfulness, we become blind to the ways these virtues sometimes hurt us. We fail to learn from our mistakes, and we stay stuck. And sometimes we stray badly off course.

Powerful, often invisible behavioral, social, and cultural forces can cause leaders to espouse the infallible importance of unexamined virtues in their ascent to success. One of the mightiest of those forces is the advice passed down from successful leaders, who attribute their success to such virtues. Ask leaders what gave rise to their wins and they might point to their high standards. But Clay Christensen's research, starting with The Innovator's Dilemma, shows that sometimes “good enough” is better than excellent.⁵ Other leaders celebrate collaborating with others effectively, but Morten Hansen, the U.C. Berkeley business professor who literally wrote the book on collaboration (called Collaboration), uses rigorous research to show that “collaboration can just as easily undermine performance.”⁶ Hansen's tougher examination of success reveals the occasional but critical role of less obvious and celebrated factors like hunkering down to take care of your own work and being open and ready to act on good luck.

Senior executives with a short attention span who constantly scan for new stimuli and boldly bet their careers on new opportunities may accomplish great things in part because of their lack of focus and follow through. But rather than advise their people to behave in this way, they often advocate unrelenting focus and concentration on the task at hand. I don't suggest the executives mean to mislead. Just as a bird isn't an ornithologist, a leader isn't a behavioral scientist. The best leaders don't sit back and study their success—they're too busy achieving it.

When Stephen Jay Gould died in 2002, American Scientist remembered him as “an extraordinary figure in paleontology and evolutionary biology … [who] initiated and shaped some of the most heated and productive debates of the second half of the 20th century.”⁷ Gould attacked human chauvinism, the tendency to view evolution as a long march from the simple to the complex, leading up to humanity as the apex of evolution. Gould called bullshit on this view and used a massive body of statistical evidence to question the prevailing notion that evolution is a systematic march of progress. Instead, he showed it's more of a random, “drunkard's walk.” Questioning the march of evolution toward complexity was the modern-day equivalent of Galileo suggesting that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. Galileo used data to show we're not the center of the world, and Gould used data to show we're not the point of evolution. Gould was a great tipper of sacred cows and I admire his courage and hard work to support his points of view with evidence. My favorite Gould quotation, from his book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, nicely sums up one of the key themes of Tipping Sacred Cows: “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.”⁸

Think about the stories you know best. There's one story I imagine you know especially well: the story of how you got where you are. And you've probably shared some of the lessons of your stories with others, as teaching is a natural act of leadership. We tell ourselves—and each other—stories that explain our own progress through life so often that the lessons of those stories become our truth. I think it's time to scrutinize and question those stories.

In addition to the well-meaning stories we tell ourselves, another trusted source pushes us to overvalue virtues like fairness—our brains. As reported in “The Sunny Side of Fairness,” an article from the April, 2008 Psychological Science, our brain's reward circuitry is activated when we receive an offer we perceive to be fair.⁹ And scholars have shown how mirror neurons in the brain encourage primates, including us humans, to feel what others feel.¹⁰ We're social animals programmed at a deep level to empathize, help each other, and generally ensure things end up fair. Helping others is indeed a real virtue reflecting a real human need. But not everyone wants what we want, and our brain can too easily be fooled. If you yearn for a little more attention and acclaim at work, your neural reward circuitry lights up when you give someone else attention and acclaim—even if the other person would prefer to be left alone. Your brain's reward circuitry can't peer into someone else's brain. So we can confuse sameness with fairness and give others the rewards we seek. Or worse, we may even arbitrarily sabotage others to bring them down to our level, because it feels better for us to maintain a personal sense of justice.

Our own internal drives extend beyond fairness. We have, for example, a powerful, natural urge to finish tasks once we start them. Even when it might be wiser to abandon work, we have an urge to push through to completion. This phenomenon was established in a series of studies decades ago: nearly 100 percent of those tested in studies in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s demonstrated a strong desire to return to interrupted tasks such as completing a puzzle.¹¹ Our natural desire to finish a task we start helps us see things through to the end, but it hurts our ability to recognize the times when the smartest decision is to quit.

But it's not just the advice of well-intended leaders or the urges of our well-intended brains that cause us to fall into the trap of blindly following seemingly virtuous traits. The silent pull of our organization's culture also convinces smart leaders to blindly obey sacred cows. For example, when a company claims it values excellence in everything, the culture can inhibit exploration and quick prototyping. Or, if it's not safe to show and share half-baked ideas, the company misses out on some really great fully baked new ones. On the other hand, cultures that lionize creativity may shift a leader's focus away from pragmatic innovation toward newness for the sake of newness, or for the sake of ego and attention. And finally, a culture that idolizes balance may pull leaders to make bland compromises instead of st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: Meet Your Sacred Cows
• Chapter 2: Bold Balance
• Chapter 3: Accountable Collaboration
• Chapter 4: Useful Creativity
• Chapter 5: Outcome Excellence
• Chapter 6: Process Fairness
• Chapter 7: Harmonious Passion
• Chapter 8: Onstage Preparation
• Chapter 9: Extinguish Your Backfires
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index