Author: Amy D'Annibale

So here’s my confession. I’ve spent a lot of my work life fairly certain that my boss didn’t like me. Not that I needed my boss to like me, I mean, that’s their loss right? Right?

Don’t get me wrong, I work at a great company and I’ve been blessed with tremendous managers. But you know, org charts change, people move around and reporting structures are often a shifting landscape.

So, many times, I’ve been unsure as to where I stood with regard to my boss. Once, I was completely convinced that my soon-to-be new boss absolutely did not like me. I just knew it in my bones. And that? Was scary.

Being part of the tribe and knowing our standing within the tribe is one of those life or death things. We’ll take serious risks and work very hard to maintain our standing and feel secure in our position and when that position is unclear – my friends, you can find at yourself with a good old fashioned case of anxiety.

Good thing feeling anxious is a really great way to be productive at work. (Not.) Better yet, once we’re anxious, our performance slips and we really do have something to worry about.

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But what if there was another way?

Demoralized and worried, I talked to my coach. She asked me if I thought I could control what my boss’s opinion of me was. I’ve been around the coaching block a time or two so I didn’t take the bait. We can’t control other people. Full stop.

OK, so stop worrying about what you can’t control, she said. And then, she suggested a radical new idea. I should start taking action on what I could control. My new boss might not like me, but I, for sure, could like my boss.

I’m pretty sure I just blinked at her. What did that even mean? I was the underling. How was this a solution?

Trust me, she said. Can you like your boss?

I thought about it. Sure, I could like my boss. I like just about 98% of the people I meet. What would that get me?

Here’s the deal – when we like other people, we get to think nice thoughts about them. When we think cool things like – my boss is well respected, understands a lot about some areas I find interesting, has a great sense of humor, is a decent human being and has a lot to manage, we start to feel – friendly. We start to look forward to meeting with that person, we look for ways to help, we’re open and enthusiastic and we stay positive when we’re around them. Soon, we’re just having a good ol’ time and who cares if they like us or not? How could we tell? We’re just busy having fun.

And guess what? Who doesn’t like to work with a person who behaves like that? See how that works? It’s a no-lose situation.

But if we tie how we’re going to feel to how we imagine someone else feels, we’ve lost all control. Because we have no control over how other people feel and now we’ve attached our own feelings to something we can’t control. NO FUN.

Emotional adulthood is when we decide to assume the mantel of command, and take charge of our own emotional navigation. It’s when we take responsibility for how we feel and let other people worry about themselves. Emotional adulthood is available to all of us, right now.

So that’s what I did. I really did like my new manager, and I was able to focus on all the positive qualities this person had. I stopped worrying about what my manager thought about me. I focused on my work and the fact that I was working for a manager I was determined to like. Guess what? My anxiety went away and to this day, I have a big, expansive feeling inside when our paths cross. Who knows if that manager likes me? I sure as hell like them.

And that? Is just good to know.

There’s an argument to be made for dedicating some part of each business week to self development. Clay Christensen’s article How will you measure your life? made this idea tangible to me. You can catch his great Ted talk here. Two ideas in that article that caught my attention. Achievement bias and marginal cost thinking.

Marginal cost thinking for the purposes of his talk is when, in order to maximize profits, you discount your sunk costs and preferentially undertake tasks that rely on your existing infrastructure rather than building out new capabilities. This means that established companies naturally become tied to undertakings that rely on those structures. New upstarts don’t have existing structures to leverage and so they innovate faster. Achievement bias, which is my own term for a concept he introduced me to, takes the basic short term pleasure construct and adds a new twist.

We all know that we’re wired to be efficient, which basically means we prefer to take familiar, dopamine-driven actions like tackling our email instead of working on our projects, hitting up the office candy bowl instead of going to get a salad for lunch, chatting with office mates instead of doubling down on our work. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you know that much of our control in life comes from being aware of these patterns and getting our prefrontal cortex in charge of things inside our heads.

Christensen ups the ante on this by pointing out that it’s worse than we think.

We are motivated as humans by the desire to learn and grow, have more responsibility and contribute to the tribe. In other words, we want to achieve.

Here’s the rest of the news – some of what we do in the name of achievement falls into the short term pleasure vortex.

What???

People who are drawn to achievement, which is basically all of us, will prefer to do tasks that help us hit short term goal markers over things that build out personal infrastructure.

Dudette. Did you see that coming? Me neither.

It’s marginal thinking on a micro-level.

This helps explain how goal achievement can be an avoidance tactic and an addictive practice all on its own.

Before you head off to get a cookie and check your email, let’s break down what our personal infrastructure is. It’s the systems that keep us running. The stuff we need to keep the lights on in this business we call being alive: family, friends, exercise, nutrition, sleep, relaxation, purpose, meaning, goals, thinking that processes your experience – whether spiritual or creative – you get the picture.

You have a personal work infrastructure, too. That’s your specialized knowledge, your personal networks, your industry knowledge, your skills, training, and experience. And for some of us, when we get a bit of spare time, we preferentially tackle some task that will give us immediate achievement instead of investing in these infrastructures.

This explains how come when we have a few minutes, we spend it cleaning or catching up with work, or fiddling with something rather than sitting down to plan out a family reunion next year, or reading up on the latest business trends.

It’s easy to notice when a company is letting its infrastructure get out of date and choosing short term profit over long term competitiveness. It’s also easy to notice when a programmer creates technical debt in the drive to bring a program to market.

But this pattern also shows up when we put off working on our development in order to meet our day to day goals, fail to attend training in favor of getting to inbox zero or insist on attending every meeting on our calendars instead of working through a self-study course.

If you’re like me, you’re not looking at emails, meetings and day to day work as short term pleasure-seeking. These behaviors trade short term gains for future payoffs. They are achievement bias built on marginal thinking at a personal level.

And that? Is just good to know.

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Look, you don’t know everything.

Anybody can see that’s true. You hardly know which breakfast cereal to choose. At least, that’s how I feel most of the time. We all let confusion and anxiety about what’s coming next push us around sometimes. Work is full of choices. We’re asked to know which project to tackle next, which email to answer first, where our attention is best focused.

It can leave us hamstrung, standing with our arms tightly wrapped around the one or two things we’re actually certain of.

Afraid to move ahead; clearly stuck.

The truth is, we really don’t know what the end result of most of our actions will be. The way we speak to each other, our tone of voice, the time of day or location a conversation occurs in can all impact the outcome we so desperately want to control. There are so many variables and we want to be perfect. Our concern about not knowing makes us feel vulnerable and keeps us stuck, looking at one more option, one more outcome.

We think of decisions like they’re skidding cars, sliding on ice. Once we decide on a course of action, the whole thing is out of our control.

So we delay the decision.

Ouch! Decision delay and fear of uncertainty – our brains just hate both of those things. Our brains are certainty machines. In fact, we’re so aligned with certainty that we will manufacture evidence for practically anything. This love of certainty means that as soon as we decide, we get a rush of relief. ( For more information on confirmation bias, check out lessons 5 & 6 here.) So we delay decision making out of fear and uncertainty, and our brain’s discomfort with the lack of a decision makes us feel even worse. Decisions are a beast!

Ready for the beauty part of this?

Don’t know.

Seriously. You actually don’t know, so why not own that?

Here’s how it works. When you’re facing uncertainty, rephrase it into a question and answer it with “don’t know.” Don’t know in the big sense. The sense that NONE of us know how ANYTHING will turn out.

Will your business people need the data in the next 90 days? Don’t know.

Should you confront your staff about talking too much during the day? Don’t know.

Your company wants you to predict the cost of a project with very little specifications. What will it cost? Don’t know.

What will happen in the next five seconds? Don’t know.

Because everything in life is interconnected, even if you have all the information, still the answer is – don’t know.

And – that’s OK.

Because a decision isn’t a car on ice. It’s a car in motion.

You have a steering wheel. You have a gas pedal, you have brakes.

The only thing you don’t have is a crystal ball.

And that? Is just good to know.

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