Because they’re trained not to!
In our society’s system, most people are beaten down and critical of themselves as they emerge from young adulthood and enter the workplace. Their teenage years have been a blizzard of anxious criticism from worried parents and teachers fearful that their kids would not “turn out,” and therefore embarrass them. Then the young people enter the workplace only to get mismanaged by people without any real leadership skills, and their resentment builds. Finally, they are so unable to forgive and forget and move on that they can’t see their own abilities anymore. They’re already obsessed with how they are being judged and treated by others. So their potential stays hidden under all of the criticism and the “shoulds” they’ve been living up to all their lives. Is it any wonder that they turn to approval-seeking as their only focus? Rather than focusing on their work, how to fall in love with it and be excellent at it, they are always trying to win approval, score points, make impressions, and criticize others so that they get approval by comparison.
But where is the good work in all of that? We have taught our young people to be aggressive, cynical politicians instead of true craftsmen and masters of their work.
So the real job of our leadership is to give these people back to themselves.
When they are mere approval-seekers they live in fear of criticism. They swing between severe anticipation and imaginary fear. They try to score inner-office impressions instead of pleasing the customer. They think the competition is the person down the hall, not the company making a similar product. And then they wonder why the other company took their customer.
Soon their stress causes them to convert fear of anticipated criticism into self-criticism. Not consciously, but subconsciously the programming may go like this: “I’ll criticize myself so that you can’t criticize me.” Or, “I’ll get to me before you can!” Self-criticism and low self-esteem become a defense mechanism. (You will see this in the people you sit down with when you take over a new team. If you’re the first hands-off manager they have ever had, it will be like entering a war-torn province.) The worker’s subconscious mind says, “If I’m already skeptical of the work I do and who I am in the workplace, then at least I’ve beaten you to it.”
It isn’t just managers and parents who miss this opportunity to give people to themselves. Sometimes even professional success coaches and consultants miss it—the very people you would think were there to reverse the process. Rather than coaching you into becoming the best of who you are, they look for the best of who they think you should be. That makes the coaching relationship less than supportive, and keeps alive the client’s sense of “I can’t do this.”
Without hands-off management and mentoring that is compassionate and visionary, leadership generally defaults to this philosophy: “The world would be a better place if only everyone would operate as I do.” That’s an alarmingly narcissistic perspective, and because of that, it’s not functional. We are interconnected beings, not isolated egos.
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When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
—Douglas Noel Adams
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A computer programmer we worked with named Jared was letting his stressful beliefs get in his own way. He was little more than a collection of thoughts about his own weakness. So he lived in fear and set out to make sure his every move won someone’s approval. His focus was on his own frightened ego.
There is a mistaken perception in our society that confuses ego with high self-worth. Ego is really the opposite of that. Ego fearfully asserts itself. So, paradoxically, Jared could lose his ego and increase his inner confidence and sense of worth at the same time. Fortunately he had a hands-off manager who saw that.
Jared redirected his focus to the work, realigned with the work he loved most, and soon got so into his work that approval-seeking was no longer necessary. He realized the ultimate: Love what you do and you won’t need anyone’s approval.
The hands-off football coach
When the University of Texas football team won the national championship in the 2006 Rose Bowl, it was largely due to their star quarterback, Vince Young. Young had become a well-rounded, complete player in his junior year, and many were calling him the best college quarterback of all time. When his coach Mack Brown was asked how all those improvements in Vince Young’s game occurred from one year to the next, Coach Brown said, “We just stopped coaching him. We just got out of his way. We saw what was emerging in him, and we decided to let it come forward without a lot of old coaches messing with it.”