The Two-Edge Sword of Drive and Passion

My Dad was discharged from the Army by 1946 and returned from Germany to reunite with my Mom and resume ranching.  Two years later they had me.

Ranching never really slows down but during the winters he found time each week to head 20 miles from our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho up into Targhee National Forest to snow ski at Bear Gulch.

He continued to ski into his 70s.

Bear Gulch is long gone now, but in 1938 when my Dad was in high school and just two years after the creation of Sun Valley, it became Idaho’s second ski area.

While I was growing up, there were remnants of one of two old chair lifts there,  which had been two big, 5’ x 16’ flat-bottomed sleds that together carried up to 14 skiers seated side-ways.

Very cool but by the time I was coming up “the Bear” only had a T-bar and a Rope Tow, at least until I was in high school.  When I was 10 years old, a day pass cost $2.50 and a full season no more than a good steak dinner does now.

By the time I was two or three years of age, so I am told, I began appealing to him to take me along.  So the winter after I turned 4 years old he insisted that if I was to go I had to learn to snowplow first.

Late one afternoon, after we had used a huge, horse-drawn sleigh to take feed out to our cattle, Dad took me to the steep hill that abruptly rose across Sand Creek just behind our horse barn.

Across a narrow gully, I could see the Ora Cemetery where many of my ancestors are buried, an inhold-commons carved out and given by my great-grandparents to the county.

Until well after dark, I remember marching repeatedly up that hill, skis and poles bundled in my arms, and then repeatedly trying to learn to snowplow down to the bottom.

It didn’t go very well.

My Dad, who was still in his 20s at the time, only knew one reaction to a range of emotions, whether fear, sadness, frustration, or anger.

And that was intensity.

I learned to ski that day and got my wish, but it would be ten more years before I would finally learn to love it like he did.

My mom, who was not yet 25 years old, was furious that night when we finally stomped the snow off our boots on the back porch after that first lesson out behind the barn.

Both parents had good reason to try and breathe fire into me.  Food allergies after birth had meant moths of projectile vomit and crying. Doctors feared my condition was failure to thrive.

I weighed less than I did when I was born a healthy 8+ pounds, when during a vicious snowstorm, my parents couldn’t find my formula and soon discovered that whole milk agreed with me.

But I am sure the trauma of those first six months lingered and may have led them to become intense whenever it came to teaching me to work through challenges.

My youngest sister, who came along when I was six, still kids me that as she was growing up, I would often put her through the lessons I had learned in R.M. Bowman boot camp (smile.)

This may be one of the reasons my middle sister retreated to her room so often when we were growing up.

The ability or willingness to work through challenges may have been my parent’s greatest gift to me, although I often gave them reason to worry well into my 20s.

It is one of the handful of skills known as “executive functions,” which act as an air traffic control system for others. They are crucial to learn by the time you are five or six and one of the hallmarks researchers have found that separate achievers from those who struggle or give up.

It is also one of the five attributes that Gallup, after more than 15 years of study, finds that distinguish those in the workforce who are more engaged from those who are less engaged:

• loyal to the organization
• willing to put forth discretionary effort
• willing to trust and cooperate with others
• willing to work through challenges
• willing to speak out about problems and offer constructive suggestions for improvements

Based on my four decades as a CEO and a few prior as a supervisor, it would be impossible to argue with this research or to rank them in any order.  They are also very hard to teach to adults, although the organizations I led had some success inculcating the last attribute into our culture.

Working through challenges includes the ability to persevere through disappointments.  My parents may have breathed a bit too much fire into me as a preschooler because one of the things I had to work hardest to hone during my career was how to convey disappointment to coworkers.

At my most proficient, I doubt I reached more than a 5 or 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 but I did learn to hire a second who had that gift.

Throughout nearly my entire career, the consultants I found most useful to both me and the organizations I led were specialists in organizational behavior.

Dr. Wes Harper, then an RHR consultant based in Portland, was an organizational behavior psychologist we used during my 1980s stint in Alaska.

Then in my mid-30s, he gave me an invaluable insight: to be more aware of the impact I had on people in my presence.

Still striving as though I was that 4 year old going up and down that hill behind our barn, I was unaware that my incredible drive could be a two-edge sword.

Peter Bergman is a similar consultant whose writings I find enlightening, even in retirement.  He posted on HBR.org this week that, “If you’re a high-performing, impatient leader, supporting others during tough times can be particularly hard for you to do.”

He continues, “It’s hard because your natural, knee-jerk response to underperformance is anger, directed at yourself and others.”  Read the post, but his point is that while accountability is important, if these employees are high performers, “awareness and accountability aren’t their problems.

“What is?  Regaining enough confidence to take necessary risks to succeed after failure.”  When addressing “underperformance,” one of the four tips by Bergman, is to do what is important to any crucial conversation and “decide on the outcome you want” as well as the relationship going forward.

As tough as my Dad seemed through the eyes of a cold and wet 4-year-old on that makeshift ski hill, he and my Mom obviously also understood how to help me regain enough confidence to take the necessary risks to succeed after failure.

Unfortunately, 70% of adults at any stage in the workforce are simply disengaged, nearly 20% of whom are actively disengaged according to Gallup.  This also applies to managers.

Good management can tweak engagement but it can’t overcome mindset.  Even praise can cause someone with a “fixed” mindset to freeze up even more.

But the real answer is good parenting about two decades before they reach the workforce.

I never had the opportunity to be much of a parent but I sure had two incredible examples and I see one in my daughter.  As a society, if we really want to instill those five Gallup attributes above, the point of intervention is not school, but in those first five years of parenting.

I was lucky.

The Pivotal First 36 Months

Studies I’ve been reading on “rearing” have made me reflect on my own as well as how much they should inform solutions to problems in today’s headlines.

I was destined to be a fifth generation Idaho rancher and based on the fact that my mother dropped out of school when she was 16, it wasn’t likely I would go to college.

A mother’s education level is usually a strong predictor of a child’s educational aspiration, attainment and occupational success.  Still in her mid-twenties my mother taught herself to type and worked her way up to managing the practices of two doctors and two dentists.

She is a bit of an anomaly as that predictor goes, because she dropped out of high school to elope with my dad as he headed into WWII, staying near Camp Roberts, while he was training for a tank battalion and then spending the time he was overseas working in Denver.

I got off to a rocky start when I came along three years after the war due to an allergic reaction to formula that wasn’t resolved until I was six months old when during a blizzard my parents gave me whole milk.

It was an inauspicious start for my then fifth-generation rancher destiny as the only son of an only son.

So maybe that is why my fourth generation rancher father tried so hard from then through my preschool years to “breathe fire into me,” something I would also futilely try to do during my now concluded career for some co-workers.

Throughout my career, no one ever accused me of not having enough fire, but trying to “breathe fire” into someone never works, regardless of the education level.

People who aren’t ambitious or passionate or growth-oriented by then, also lack what the Japanese call Kaizen, a drive for continuous and never-ending improvement that may trace to their first 36 months of life.

Still in his 20s, my dad - whether he realized it or not – was trying in his own intense way to give me the “scaffolding” necessary to instill the handful of life-skills that must be largely inculcated during those first 36 to 60 months including rising to challenges and learning from mistakes.

My mom, who was in her early 20s, had a different type of intensity but in her own way also helped erect this “scaffolding,” especially through music.

It is clear that my parents incorporated many things into their parenting style.  The examples they set offset my mother’s lack of educational attainment, including a relentless focus on effort over talent and perseverance in the face of obstacles.

They weren’t what today we call “helicopter parents,” preferring a balance of unstructured play, especially in nature, to organized activities.  Nor did they ever tolerate a second of entitlement.

I can see now how much attention they also gave to learning from criticism, persistence, and embracing challenges.  All of these factors have now been confirmed by researchers in psychology to lead to high performance.

I am not aware of a statistical breakdown of adults in society with executive function and self-regulatory deficits (beyond attention-deficit) but I’ll bet kindergarten and elementary school teachers could give an educated guess.

Regardless of class status, today’s parents spend far too much time either making excuses for their children’s educational or work performance or greatly overestimating and placing too much emphasis on their intelligence vs. their effort and performance.

K-12 teachers are slightly more “engaged” and slightly less “actively disengaged” than Americans as a whole, but parenting may be partially responsible for why those who are not engaged miss 2.3 million more workdays annually than teachers who are.

As an aside, officials concerned with creating jobs such as Governor Pat McCrory in North Carolina, where I live, would do well to study Gallup’s reports on worker engagement.

Engaged workers report twice as much job creation as well as good customer ratings, profitability and productivity as well as lower turnover, fewer safety incidents, less theft, absenteeism and defects.

North Carolinians are not as engaged as we think we are.  Unfortunately, the Governor must deal with the fact that engagement among members of the General Assembly is no better than workers overall, fewer than 1-in-3 there with nearly 1-in-5 at cross-purposes even within his own party.

In my mother’s lifetime (my dad passed away shortly after 9/11,) she has seen her children and seven grandchildren leap from the working class backgrounds of my grandparents to middle and upper middle class.

Three have undergraduate college degrees, one a law school degree and another just accepted into top tier law schools, one with a Master’s and another with a PhD, and one who leapt directly from community college to a career in IT administration for the world’s largest video game concern.

More importantly, they are all hard workers and thrive in the workplace, engagement that is never guaranteed by educational attainment.

Americans believe in the individual-centered American Dream.  It is rooted in the belief that “all men [and women] are created equal” but science shows that there are many other more powerful influences that shape individual aspiration, none more important than those detailed in the book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.

According to the study, “two-thirds of society ultimately reproduce their parents’ level of educational attainment while about one-third take another path.”

But it is purely arrogant for those of us who transcended to delude ourselves into believing that it is due to our own willfulness.

A few months after I retired, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign identified something of a paradox regarding willfulness and willpower.

As an aside, nearly all of the campus is located in Urbana but Champaign was added to placate Champaign boosters-sound familiar?  A toxic sense of entitlement can invade communities as well (smile.)

It turns out that people willing to ask questions and those who question whether they will succeed, perform better than those who are convinced they will or who spend too much time on self-affirmation.

By the time we reach the ages of 3 to 5 years old, we learn the handful of building blocks needed for success in life known as “executive function and self-regulation skills.”

Dimensions of these skills include:

• “The ability to hold information in mind and use it.
• The ability to master thoughts and impulses so as to resist temptations, distractions, and habits, and to pause the think before acting.
• The capacity to switch gears and adjust to changing demand, priorities and perspectives.”

Self-regulation is the ability to override one response or behavior and replace it with a less common but more desired response.

The researchers who discovered the paradox of will power have already turned to the study of how what we say to ourselves “shapes the course of our behaviors,” the essence of self-regulation.

Parents such as mine gave me the “scaffolding” for developing these skills by challenging me and then stepping back and letting me try to manage things on my own and learn from my mistakes as well as helping me talk and think through what worked and what didn’t work.

I owe them everything.  We may all be “created equal” but those of us who think we are living the American Dream were fortunate enough to have these influences in those first few years.

We have an obligation to help those who didn’t, but the real solution is to focus society on remediation for kids between the years of 3 and 5 before it is too late.

I ran into more than a few people in responsible positions during my career with deficits or even dysfunction in one or more of the three skills noted above, some with high IQs.

Other than being irritating to those who had to work with them, they imposed a lot of lost productivity and long-term contributed to some very poor outcomes, but they were functional nonetheless.

None of us demonstrate mastery of executive function skills 100% of the time.  But our jails and prisons are populated by individuals who never learned them or were never given the chance to learn them because their parents never learned them.

A meta-analysis of studies published a few months ago by neuropsychology and criminology researchers in Amsterdam and led by Jesse Meijers found “a robust relationship between antisocial behavior and executive function deficits.”

In studies published in 2004 and 2008, researchers have determined that “impoverished rearing conditions” actually alter brain functions responsible for executive functions.  To many, we should be looking at rearing and parenting for solutions rather than law enforcement or the justice system.

For children in that 36 month window, reading this simple little 16-page guide is a way today’s new parents can learn how to teach them.  However, the guide won’t teach someone how to show by example or instill them in parents who missed out when they were young.

The more I live and learn, the more I realize how lucky I am and how unfortunate many are.

Maybe the American Dream is really about humility.

Risk Takers Are Typically Also More Rational

During the first week of the year 2000, Sam Schmidt, an Indy Car race driver who was favored for the upcoming season, slammed into the wall on turn two during testing at Walt Disney World Speedway, leaving him a quadriplegic.

He fought back, got an MBA, bought his father’s company and with a  partner fielded Schmidt Petersen Motorsports, inspiration enough given the risks of racing.  But a new study shows that race drivers are actually more rational than the general population.

Fourteen years after his accident in the days leading up to last month’s Indianapolis 500, Schmidt drove a souped-up Corvette Stingray for several laps around the historic oval.

Using a semi-autonomous technology so he could handle the car with head movements, he hit 100 m.p.h.  Click here to see how it works.  Essentially he bites down to brake, tilts his head left or right to steer and tilts his head back to accelerate.

The development is part of a US Air Force-funded research project, but a new study shows that even amateur race car drivers are actually much “more rational” about choices than the average population.

Like motorcycle riders now who, on average, are in their 40s compared to the average of 24 during in the 1980s, the researchers found it isn’t risk they are immune from.  They are just better immune to “possibility bias.”

This is the overweighting of low probabilities that keep people from trying new things.

Instead they are less likely to overemphasize low-probability events including failure.

The latter fall on the risk-adverse “small-t” part of the T-Personality Spectrum refined by Temple professor and researcher Dr. Frank Farley over the last three decades.

Those who are immune to “possibility bias” are the “Big-T” or “T-Positive” personalities who take risks because they are motivated by intensity and innovation.

According to Farley, these “Big-T” personalities just have a much higher tolerance for uncertainty.  As nation’s go, over its history the USA has been a “Big-T” country according to Farley.

Over the course of its history, Durham, North Carolina has always been a “Big-T” community as are others who focus on being distinct.  “Big-T” is also why Durham’s destination marketing is more innovative than others.

While those who aspire to be “major league” by merely emulating others at the sacrifice of sense of place are probably “small-t” cities.

Farley also classifies gamblers and criminals as “T-Negative” personalities, a group that includes far too many business executives and government officials involved in “legal corruption” too.

When you take lessons to ride a motorcycle, you learn to sense your limitations, ride as though everyone is out to get you and always be alert to escape routes should a problem arise.

In general, motorcycle riders are expert at rationally calculating risk.

You also learn that the death rate for motorcyclists is 30 times higher than it is for drivers of motor vehicles overall, but that this rate falls dramatically depending on type of bike, e.g. sport bikes vs. cruisers like Harleys, and by speed and the age of rider.

I always wear a full-face, modular helmet because injuries occur more often to the jaw than the top of the head.  But ironically, 75% of the fatalities on sport bikes involved riders who also wore helmets of some type.

Interestingly, only half of those riding cruisers or standard motorcycles were wearing helmets when fatalities occurred, another reason perhaps that different types of bikes need to be differentiated for premiums.

But you don’t wear a helmet so you can take risks, you wear it because others who are less rational in vehicles of all type take them irrationally.  That may be why many race drivers feel safest while on the track.

Controlling speed, avoiding alcohol, staying alert and the wisdom of age bring the accident rate for riders down to near that of cars.  Overall, the fatality rate and crash injury rate for 100 million motorcycle miles traveled is 24.93 and 440 respectively.

The latter figure has fallen nearly 60% just since 1989 when I was just more than a third of the way through my now concluded career.

The biggest danger to riders is the same one it is for all vehicles: drivers of cars, trucks and SUVs who don’t pay attention.   And as we know from this assessment of what happened recently on Mt. Rainier, stuff happens no matter what you do to mitigate it.

Motor vehicle drivers are more likely than motorcyclists in my opinion to underestimate risk.  A new study by the National Highway Safety Administration computes that motor vehicle crashes costs society $871 billion annually, nearly $900 for each person living in the United States.

Nearly 70% of that comes from the lost of life as well as pain and decreased quality of life due to injuries. 

Nearly 75% of these costs are shouldered by non-participants through taxes, insurance premiums and congestion-related losses. Funny we don’t hear Tea Partiers whining about this!

The cost to society vs. the individual total $200 billion alone including nearly a fifth for direct medical care, another reason the new federal healthcare insurance requirement makes sense.

Here’s a thought for those obsessed with repealing this requirement: It may be your right to bang yourself up in a vehicle accident, but I shouldn’t later have to pay for it with my taxes or through other means.

Ride or drive stupid if you want, but insurance should be the minimum requirement.

The direct cost of a motorcycle fatality where failure to wear a helmet is involved is nearly $1.3 million alone.

But the direct economic cost to society for not wearing a seat belt is 11 times higher.

This failure results in killing 3,350 people and seriously injuring another 54,300 each year, costing society $13.billion alone, while using them prevented 12,500 fatalities and 308,000 serious injuries.

Using seat belts, which at one time was vigorously opposed by conservatives, saves society $69 billion in medical care, lost productivity, and other injury-related costs.

Two other new studies are disturbing.

One by University of Michigan researchers found that children of minority parents were far less likely to be given age-appropriate restraint while riding in a vehicle compared to the the children of white parents.

Other studies have often found that parents who are minorities, based on their own experiences, often try to counterbalance what they expect their children are going to face in society by being overly flexible, but this is one area where the requirement is a matter of life and death.

Motor vehicles are the leading cause of death and injury for children.

The other study, by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC,) finds something even more disturbing.  An ongoing pilot study finds that pedestrians who are black are passed by twice as many cars before someone yields at an un-signalized marked crosswalk.

Black pedestrians were made to wait 32% longer than white pedestrians.  Subtle forms of racism surface when information and decisions must be processed very quickly.  This may also lead black pedestrians to take more risk in crossing.

Another new study by researchers at the University of Texas and UCLA finds that “executive functions,” the set of skills so essential to success in life and should be taught and learned at a very young age, also play a major role in our assessment of risk.

These include attention (shedding distractions,) working memory and self control, especially the latter.  Too little perhaps and we underestimate risk, too much and we overestimate the possibility or risk, resulting in “possibility bias.”

Both are harmful, one leads to truly dangerous choices, the other to a life not led.