Chapter One for Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone
ONE
Moving Outside Your Comfort Zone as a Source of Growth and Well-Being
OVERCOMING THE ANXIETY-RIDDEN DEMANDS OF LEADERSHIP
Today, leaders face unique challenges. They inherit a restless workforce. They respond to the competing demands of stakeholders. They exercise judgment with limited information. They offer their personal lives to public scrutiny. They wrestle with the gaps between organizational and individual values. They become the screen onto which others project their emotions. Leading requires moving outside your comfort zone at every moment.
This chapter compares the challenges leaders faced in two organizations at different times. Leading at Netflix, a contemporary company, requires resilience, learning, and self-awareness. In contrast, leading at General Electric in the 1980s and 1990s focused on power, resources, and authority. Comparing these two companies highlights common leadership myths. Leaders often fail because they continue to hold onto these unproductive myths, which were relevant in the past but no longer provide a true basis for guidance. Holding onto these myths will prevent you as a leader from meeting contemporary leadership’s challenges, resulting in learning the wrong lessons.
The chapter outlines four myths: the belief that leadership skills are only needed by those at the top of an organization, that only new leaders need to learn, that leading relies mainly on leveraging power and resources, and that leading for resilience is primarily about overcoming traumatic experiences. Taken together, these reinforce the myth of the heroic leader. The chapter then outlines the real challenges of contemporary leadership: leading a changing and restless workforce, exercising judgment in the face of shifting and competing demands, building self-awareness and accepting public review, and leading toward consensus and the well-being of self and others.
LEADING NETFLIX VERSUS LEADING GENERAL ELECTRIC: THE CHANGING NATURE OF LEADERSHIP
Netflix began as a promising business upstart; it provided a mail-order DVD rental service, a mail-in version of the Blockbuster video rental chain. Then, broadband internet service replaced dial-up. The large amounts of data that could be delivered directly to homes and businesses threatened the very existence of the DVD format. The company’s leaders saw the threat. At first, the path to navigate this change was unclear, so the leaders offered Netflix up to its biggest rival, Blockbuster. However, Blockbuster declined to buy the struggling mail-order company.1
Blockbuster’s decision to ignore Netflix turned into one of the most ironic failures in corporate history. Netflix transitioned from a mail-order DVD rental service to a full-fledged production studio, while Blockbuster, once its potential financial lifeline, filed for bankruptcy. Investors became so optimistic about the transition at Netflix that analysts valued it alongside top technology firms such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. Taken together, these companies were known as the FAANG stocks, the most valuable companies in the world.
But things started to change after the COVID-19 pandemic. With viewers no longer stuck at home, the number of subscribers to Netflix’s streaming service began to fall. As a result, the high stock price, relied upon by its leadership to fund the production of elaborate films and TV shows, began to wane. While recruiting and retaining new subscribers proved difficult, navigating the social landscape proved just as challenging. Leadership became mired in controversies. Leaders at Netflix were lauded for offering a significant amount of diverse content but found themselves facing a situation that seemed beyond their control. The concern was that some of its content went too far and was offensive. Some employees staged a walkout in protest. One employee was fired for interrupting a meeting and making demands that leaders saw as unreasonable. Many customers threatened to cancel their subscriptions if Netflix did not drop certain content they saw as offensive. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings publicly defended Netflix’s content but backtracked after the backlash began. Sarandos admitted to having “screwed up” in his response and reflected on the need for more “humanity” moving forward.2
These co-CEOs were lauded as one of the world’s most influential corporate leadership teams just weeks before and were now embroiled in a public relations crisis. But in the current environment, even seasoned leaders like Hastings and Sarandos needed to adapt to the quickly changing situation. Sarandos expressed a desire to learn and consider the positions of multiple stakeholders. Even more critical, he publicly recognized the need to validate the emotions of these various stakeholder groups.
These leaders survived because, as co-CEOs, they were committed to learning.3 This helped them develop the resilience necessary to navigate the unpredictable business landscape. The challenges at Netflix illustrate how leaders face new and ever more challenging demands from multiple stakeholders.
Few leaders could have imagined that employees, let alone outside interest groups, would yield such power over a company’s future as they did at Netflix. Consider Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, an industrial giant and one of the most influential companies in US history. Welch may be one of the most influential business leaders of all time. His commitment to leadership development within the company produced many of the most significant corporate leadership development programs in a generation. He viewed leadership development as important at all levels, but it is unlikely that his approach would be successful today. He once complained about outside interest groups trying to hold GE accountable for billions of dollars of environmental damage. He minimized the influence of these “do-gooders” and insulted their approach. He even blamed the environmentalists for the loss of US competitiveness.4
Today, Welch’s sentiments about being a leader appear old-fashioned and unlikely to be persuasive. Welch personified the ultimate “command and control” leader molded in the Cold War image of a military leader ready for battle. For all his strengths, Welch’s approach would yield little success in today’s environment. Welch reigned when American manufacturing was waning. The US was losing manufacturing jobs at a historic rate and hundreds of thousands of jobs were moving overseas. During Welch’s reign, profit margins in GE’s notable industrial businesses, such as lightbulbs, appliances, and jet engines, were shrinking. It is no wonder that by the time Welch stepped down in 2001, a significant portion of GE’s revenues came from nonindustrial products. GE Capital, a financing arm of GE, overtook manufacturing as GE’s primary income source.
Jack Welch ranks unquestionably as a great manager, increasing GE’s value multiple times during his tenure. However, he based his decisions on assumptions about leadership that are no longer relevant. Welch made a name for himself as a leader by squeezing corporate margins but failed to create a resilient business model. Ultimately, he may have developed thousands of good managers capable of allocating resources, but he could not develop leaders who could imagine GE’s future. Welch successfully led GE during the significant shift from industrial to knowledge work. Still, even the best leaders, like Welch, struggle to build time-tested and resilient organizations. In the aftermath of Welch’s time as a leader, GE experienced a catastrophic fall in stock price, ran through several top leaders, and struggled to identify a successful strategy. The “GE model,” an essential case study once taught in business schools, disappeared from classrooms. The company was broken into three parts, and GE’s legendary training center in Crotonville, New York, a place that had developed a generation of leaders, was sold.
MYTHS ABOUT LEADING THAT HOLD YOU BACK
The reverence shown for Welch may be deserved, but we should not hold up post–Cold War leaders like Welch as examples of the leaders we want to foster now. The need for an authoritarian leader, who is always in charge, emotionally distant, and even resentful of stakeholders, is one of many leadership myths. These myths present a false sense of what it means to lead. The myths contributing to our oversized expectations about leading and responses to those myths are summarized in table 1.1 and discussed in more detail below.
Myth 1: Leadership Skills Are Only for Those at the Top
First, consider the myth that leadership skills exist primarily for those at the organization’s top. Leaders beyond those of the C-suite also require leadership development. As a professor, consultant, and coach, I meet with emerging leaders, mid-level managers, and top leaders at various levels of government, military, academic, business, and nonprofit organizations. These leaders may not face the same level of scrutiny as CEOs, but they experience leadership challenges with similar intensity. One leader was frustrated by being caught between upper management’s demands to meet increasing performance standards and employee demands for greater autonomy. Another leader struggled to bring new, cleaner technology to a small African village. Yet another leader in a university became despondent as she tried to implement new and innovative teaching methods in a system that could not see beyond narrow outcomes.
TABLE 1.1 Myths and Realities of Leading
Workers at all organizational levels can be leaders, and everyone can benefit from leadership development. While stories of top leaders such as Hastings and Sarandos are familiar, stories of leaders across every level who find themselves perplexed by the conflicting demands of leadership are just as important. Many leaders hold no direct reports but benefit from learning to be more resilient in their work, career, and lives. For example, at Netflix, several individuals questioned the company’s policies to stand up for an issue they believed in. They took a public stand that risked their careers for a greater purpose. Aren’t those who challenged the status quo at Netflix leaders, too?
In short, all leaders, formal and informal, experienced and novice, can benefit from developing the skills associated with leading outside their comfort zone. Learning to be more resilient helps them navigate the daily challenges of leadership. As an organization grows, expands, deals with crises, and transitions to new business areas, employees need to understand the dynamics of these changes and learn to thrive in the changing environment.
Myth 2: Only New Leaders Need to Learn
A second myth is that only new or inexperienced leaders must learn new skills and acquire knowledge. One executive I worked with, Bill, believed that only new managers deserved leadership development. Bill ignored the fact that all the leaders in his organization faced a changing workplace, a constantly evolving set of regulations and customer demands, and emerging technology that could alter the course of the organization. Bill overlooked the problems that arose when employees transitioned from individual contributors to leading others. This critical period often makes or breaks one’s professional career, but unpleasant emotions, such as self-doubt, fear of failure, and anxiety, are shared by leaders across the organization. Bill failed to understand that leaders need resilience across the organization and at every level.
Further, the myth persists that learning occurs mostly in the classroom and is a formal process. Learning conjures images of sitting in a lecture hall, late nights studying, and excruciating exams, but learning also occurs as a continual process of accepting and processing new information. Learning involves adapting to new situations, developing new skills, and acquiring and refining habits. Learning and increasing awareness of the learning process become imperative, as learning is required everywhere and every day.
Myth 3: Leading Relies Mainly on Leveraging Power and Resources
The third myth posits that leadership mainly relies on power and resources. However, leadership depends on understanding oneself and using power and access to resources for the common good. The best source of power is the power to act. Consider, once again, the protesting employees at Netflix; despite having no formal authority or resources, these individuals brought their viewpoints to the forefront of discussions about employee involvement. Their resources arise from their conviction and ability to influence those in power, but they do not require formal power.
Resources still matter, but expertise, knowledge, creativity, and personal power are even more critical. The rise of information technology, social media, and the interconnected world allows new voices to rise to power. Once housed in monasteries, libraries were the gatekeepers of knowledge, but information has become more democratic. Aspiring leaders hold access to significant resources requiring little more than a smartphone. Ironically, the retired Carnegie libraries, once hubs of information in cities across the US, have been converted into stores that sell Apple iPhones!
Myth 4: Leading for Resilience Is Primarily About Overcoming Traumatic Experiences
The fourth myth suggests that resilience is about overcoming traumatic events or hardships. Indeed, many such situations require resilience. However, Heidi Brooks, from the Yale School of Management, coined the term everyday leadership to emphasize leaders’ daily challenges. Leaders address novel and challenging situations regularly. Brooks teaches her students to face the complexity of leadership and helps them gain insights into their leadership style, values, and abilities. These everyday leadership challenges, setbacks, and frustrations prove more common and are just as likely to derail leadership efforts as trauma and crisis. Leading requires constant resilience.5
Since resilience no longer applies simply to overcoming trauma and is no longer confined to medicine and psychiatry, its expanded definition is broader and more immediate. Resilience reflects the ability to engage natural learning processes and acceptance that setbacks are inherent to leadership.
Myth 5: Leaders Are Heroes Who Sacrifice Their Well-Being for the Sake of the Organization
The previous four myths can be summarized as the myth of heroic leadership. Too often, leaders ignore the need to improve their self-awareness and instead embrace myths associated with self-control and courageous action. Being the hero requires demonstrating great personal sacrifice for the sake of the larger organization. The myth relies on a mistaken belief that neglecting one’s well-being somehow translates into organizational success. Being a hero may make leaders feel good about themselves, but these sacrifices will not likely impact the organization positively. More likely, these heroic actions will have a detrimental effect on leaders and followers.6
Heroic leadership can result in many dysfunctions: excessive work hours and demands, a rescuer to save the day, a single person who can solve all your problems, and a dramatic change that puts others at significant risk. One example of the excesses of heroic leadership arose when Elon Musk called for “production hell” as Tesla was ramping up production of its autos. Production hell resulted in long hours of exhausting work. Musk sacrificed sleep and when he did sleep, it was on the production floor. He would later try to instill this same view of self-sacrifice into his employees at Twitter when he purchased the company, proclaiming that only the “hardcore” would be spared layoffs—pictures of Twitter employees folding out makeshift beds under their cubicles circulated on social media. The show of self-sacrifice came in the service of corporate production.
Unfortunately, heroic leadership may boost the leader’s self-esteem but does little to build their self-awareness. Many of the employees at Twitter described Twitter’s version of “production hell” as unsustainable, and many more were fired. Other leaders left the company out of frustration. In the end, heroic efforts such as these prop up the leader’s self-image but come at the expense of the individual and the organization, negatively impacting long-term performance and mental health.7
In other cases, leaders might embrace extreme measures to demonstrate their level of self-care. Young leaders find this a potent force as they adopt public personas around self-care as self-deprivation. Tech start-up cultures appear particularly vulnerable to leadership from a self-deprivation angle. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, publicizes his self-care regime, which includes fasting, cleansing, and self-imposed exiles, where he refrains from speaking for days at a time.8 These actions go beyond focusing on self-care and often move into public displays of self-sacrifice that reinforce the notion of heroic leadership. But heroic leadership as self-care ignores well-being and lacks staying power. Self-care effectively relieves stress in the short term, but the benefits of these practices are often fleeting without a focus on long-term resilience and learning. Leaders must concede that self-awareness does not equal self-care or self-sacrifice. Instead, leaders should focus on improving self-awareness, which can result in profound insights into how actions impact the organization.
Holding on to these myths gives rise to false confidence about leading. Leading today involves more than being the hero, acquiring power, or holding formal authority. Leading requires resilience, growth, and a focus on well-being. Leading requires adjusting to change, exercising judgment, and acting in the face of competing demands.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF LEADING
Leaders face a daunting set of challenges. Russ Vince, professor emeritus at the University of Bath in the UK, suggests that unpleasant emotions like anxiety remain pervasive in leaders.9 Vince advocates that leaders understand leading in the context of these emotions. Recognizing these emotions allows leaders to thrive, providing challenges and opportunities for leading, which are summarized in figure 1.1
Leading a Changing and Restless Workforce
To begin with, leading requires facing an increasingly restless workforce and changing demographics. Leaders face fundamental challenges in the demographic makeup of the workforce, such as an aging population in developed economies, fewer entrants into the workforce, a backlash against immigration in Western countries, slowing birth rates, and increasing retirement rates among older workers. Leaders must find creative ways to address worker shortages that may extend for decades.
FIGURE 1.1 Challenges and Opportunities of Leading
It’s not just the demographics of the workforce that require attention; it’s also how workers value work. The relationship between workers and their work has changed. Work-life balance, work identity, and employee burnout are some factors that require more thoughtful leadership. Leaders must create meaningful work where employees can pursue their own goals and purpose. Employees no longer value longevity and loyalty to their employer like they once did. Employees demand more than just a place to work; they are asking for leaders to make work more fulfilling by creating cultures that support well-being. Employees want a workplace that will improve their daily lives beyond work. At the same time, they demand higher pay and better working conditions.
Leadership in organizations requires understanding well-being in an increasingly complex environment where crises and threats are everyday events.10 Leading requires identifying ways to support others by becoming purposeful partners and working alongside employees to create an environment of growth and well-being. Leaders are called to develop policies that accommodate workplace well-being trends and assist employees in finding their larger purpose and goals, not just at work but in all facets of their lives. Leaders are asked to build a more equitable and flexible workplace and to find ways to support the entire person, not just work-based identity.
Leaders must accept that employees struggle with well-being, mental health, and burnout. Well-being plays a central role in supporting organizational effectiveness. For example, the World Health Organization recently classified burnout as a global concern, and the U.S. Surgeon General called burnout a moral issue that devastates workers. Leaders must address challenges associated with workers’ focus, additional work and home pressures, anxiety, concerns over finances, and mental well-being. In particular, the need for resilience has escalated among college students and the Millennial generation due to the challenges these groups face with mental health such as stress, anxiety, fatigue, and depression.11
Exercising Judgment in the Face of Shifting and Competing Demands
Leading outside your comfort zone requires judgment despite competing stakeholder demands. Leaders rarely hold access to complete data, the data they possess often needs to be revised, and deep analysis takes precious time. In situations like these, leaders rely on their accumulated experience. They count on their judgment. Judgment is developed through experience and requires acting in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt.
Judgment requires learning how decisions affect the well-being of stakeholders since each will see the choices differently. Leaders need to understand multiple viewpoints, even those appearing in polar opposition. Judgment does not require giving up one’s perspective and embracing both views. Instead, judgment requires engaging others in decision-making and understanding the consequences of decisions. Consensus building replaces direct authority as the key factor in judgment. Terry Price, a professor of leadership at the Jepsen School of Leadership at the University of Richmond, described how leaders often fail to consider the opinions of others when making decisions and often miscalculate the implications of their choices. In addition to including multiple stakeholders in crucial decisions, he recommends that leaders be flexible and willing to shift or modify their decisions after they see the results. Flexibility is a hallmark of good leadership. Judgment requires updating perspectives based on new information and always being ready to adapt.12
Leaders face new and increasingly complex challenges. We expect leaders to be resilient despite ever-increasing potential failures and setbacks. For example, the newly appointed Disney CEO Bob Chapek found himself the target of negative publicity by both progressives and conservatives for his response to a new Florida law that targeted how gender identity could be taught in schools, only to be relieved of his position after eleven months. Decisions made seemingly in private become public fodder. Consider Vishal Garg, CEO of Better.com, who fired over nine hundred employees on a Skype call, only to see his message posted on online chat boards. Despite the negative publicity, he returned to ask another group to quit weeks later.
Leading requires diving head first into new challenges that hold uncertainty. Successfully navigating these challenges requires taking risks and acceptance of an unclear path. For example, Lisa Su, appointed CEO of chip maker AMD in 2014, spent her first year dodging bankruptcy. Su diligently brought the company back to life and positioned it for a revival as the demand for computer chips soared. However, this revival was not certain when Su took the helm, but leaders must search for opportunities in uncertain circumstances.13
The challenges of competing stakeholder demands are evident in the embattled university president. University presidents, a once highly sought-after leadership role, hold one of the most challenging leadership roles in the US as they navigate issues of student mental health and generational change, calls to unionize various arms of their workforce, external stakeholder demands, and budget woes. University presidents face calls to step down and even receive death threats. Changing societal expectations put university leaders in a bind: they have little power over faculty who often hold lifetime employment through tenure or long-term contracts, but stakeholders, such as politicians, donors, and even faculty, call for change. University leaders show no leader is insulated from the stressors of their job and that resilience is needed more than ever, as leaders experience the same challenges to well-being experienced by others in the workforce.14
Building Self-Awareness and Accepting Public Review
Increasingly, leaders serve as the public face of their organizations. Because their actions can reflect on the organization, leading requires greater self-awareness. Leading requires understanding how others will perceive values, strengths, and weaknesses. The link between leading and self-awareness is measurable among business leaders. A survey of nearly a thousand CEOs from nineteen countries found that 80 percent strongly agreed that they, the CEO, needed to change and focus on self-improvement for their organizations to succeed. According to the study, the key to effective self-improvement was greater self-awareness, developing the next generation of leaders in their organizations, and seeking feedback from others.15
Individual actions can have significant consequences in a highly connected world. As leaders become public-facing figures, their actions remain under constant scrutiny. When Ursula Burns took the CEO role at Xerox, she was the first woman of color to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company. She was also the first woman to succeed another woman in the role! She quickly learned that her actions reflected on Xerox. Every action she took and word she said was seen through the company’s lens. As a result, her self-awareness became a key to her success. She noted every action and how it reflected on her leadership and the company.16
Leading for the Well-Being of Self and Others
Ursula Burns, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and others reveal a tension between personal values and organizational needs. Leading requires accepting that individual goals may conflict with organizational goals. There often comes a time when leaders must make tough decisions about their values.
Consider Natasha Harrison, the top attorney at a leading New York law firm. Harrison was appointed deputy chair, the second highest position in the firm, in December 2020, the height of the COVID pandemic. She navigated the firm through a difficult time. But leading what many consider one of the world’s top trial law firms proved unsatisfying. Harrison wanted to change and reimagine how law firms do business, so she left to start a new firm. She recognized that law firms’ traditional model of charging clients by the hour was a significant factor in burnout and dissatisfaction, especially for younger attorneys. In an interview for the Financial Times, she noted that the model created a perverse set of incentives, where attorneys wanted to keep a case open to bill more hours while clients were suffering through an issue, hoping to make it as short and painless as possible.17
Rather than try to reform an old-school law firm, she took what, for many, would be a counterintuitive action. Starting a new firm allowed her to focus on employee well-being by changing how law firms paid their employees. This meant abandoning the goal for a certain number of billable hours, often exceeding two thousand hours a year. Instead, Harrison was reducing the hours in her new firm so attorneys could work on cases they found energizing and engaging. In many situations, this meant working pro bono. She would have struggled to make this change in her old firm. While reducing the billable hours may impact the bottom line, Harrison believed that reducing the hours would decrease burnout and turnover and make the work more fulfilling, ultimately leading to a more substantial and fulfilling career for attorneys.
Harrison represents the emerging trend of leading with a focus on well-being. A leader in this movement was Helena Morrissey, the mother of nine children and former fund manager at firms like Newton Investments. She was Britain’s model working mother through the mid-2000s. But, noting her difficulties in seeking work-life balance, she reevaluated her role-model status and corporate role. She formed the 30% Club, a project to ensure that women represented at least 30 percent of corporate board members. She later questioned her goals and influence, asking whether she perpetuated the myth that leaders can do it all. But trying to do it all reinforced the myth of heroic leadership at the expense of well-being. Harrison and Morrisey represent two leaders refocusing their careers and leadership on well-being.18
MOVING OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE
As you embark on your leadership development, reaffirm your commitment and capacity to learn. Reaffirming your self-worth, appreciating your current skills, and building on past successes can help support resilience. The changing leadership landscape brings emotions to the forefront of leading. Anxiety and other emotions can derail leadership goals. Leaders who affirm their commitment to growth and well-being are better equipped to address the challenges. Begin the affirmation process by completing Exercise 1: Affirming Your Commitment to Learning as a Leader. Affirmations such as these support successful change across several activities, such as weight loss, academic performance, anxiety reduction, and general well-being.19
In addition, identify two or three individuals who can support you through this process. The individuals can come from work, personal life, or other areas, but they must be people whose opinions you trust and whom you believe will work in your best interest. These are your change coaches. Richard Boyatzis has spent decades studying the benefits of formal and informal coaching and the impact of social support on effective change. He confirms that leadership development is most effective when we work with others. Seek feedback, support, and inspiration from others, including family, friends, peers, mentors, and other leaders who have blazed the trail you seek to pursue. Peer coaching groups can also be a form of social support in these change efforts. Ask others for their opinion and input. Undergo a 360-degree feedback process to understand how others view you. Observe others who have already achieved what you aspire to achieve.
Embarking on a leadership development effort means acquiring a beginner’s mind. This involves accepting that you don’t have all the answers, being open to the opinions of others, and being open to being wrong in your own opinion. Keeping a journal of daily thoughts and actions and paying attention to the physical aspects of health and well-being are good tactics for gaining a beginner’s mind. Journaling helps clarify values as well as refine future aspirations as a leader.20
Moving outside your comfort zone becomes a common aspect of leading and is accompanied by anxiety and other unpleasant emotions. To accept the challenges of leading, leaders must abandon the old myths about leading or risk failing to develop the skills, insights, and resources necessary for leading in this environment. Successful leaders will embrace the challenges of leading a diverse and ever-changing workforce, learning to adapt and change, and working toward building well-being in themselves and others.
Exercise 1: Affirming Your Commitment to Learning as a Leader
Research shows that affirming your commitment to yourself and your value improves outcomes. In this exercise, you will create affirming statements about your ability to deal with complex and frustrating learning situations. Select a phrase from Section A (1 through 3), then choose one of the phrases in Section B to complete the sentence.
Section A
1. When learning and frustrated, I will . . .
2. When challenged by something, I will . . .3. When learning something new, I will . . .
Section B
4. . . . think about the things I value about myself.
5. . . . remember things that I have succeeded in.6. . . . think about people who are important to me.7. . . . think about things that are important to me.
Write the entire sentence by combining the sentence stem from Sections A and B.21
Notes
1. Steve Mollman, “Blockbuster ‘Laughed Us out of the Room,’ Recalls Netflix Cofounder on Trying to Sell Company Now Worth over $150 Billion for $50 Million,” Fortune, April 14, 2023, https://fortune.com/2023/04/14/netflix-cofounder-marc-randolph-recalls-….
2. Jordan Valinsky, “Netflix Co-CEO on Dave Chappelle Fallout: I Screwed Up,” CNN, October 20, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/media/netflix-dave-chappelle-ceo-reactio…; Matt Donnelly, “‘I Screwed Up’: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Addresses Dave Chappelle Fallout,” Variety, October 19, 2019, https://variety.com/2021/film/news/dave-chappelle-netflix-ted-sarandos-…; Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2020).
3. Hastings and Meyer, No Rules Rules.
4. Jeffery A. Sonnenfeld, “The Jack Welch That I Knew,” Yale Insights, March 2, 2020, https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-jack-welch-that-i-knew.
5. Heidi Brooks, “Everyday Leadership,” Yale School of Management, https://faculty.som.yale.edu/heidibrooks/everyday-leadership/.
6. Karl Weick was one of the first to challenge the myth of heroic leadership; see this review of his work, Dave Schwandt, “Karl E. Weick: Departing from Traditional Rational Models of Organizational Change,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, ed. David B. Szabla, William A. Pasmore, Mary A. Barnes, and Asha N. Gipson, 1415–31 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52878-6_62. See also for a discussion of the problems with heroic leadership, Hortense le Gentile, “Leaders, Stop Trying to Be Heroes,” Harvard Business Review, October 25, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/10/leaders-stop-trying-to-be-heroes.
7. For details on production hell see, Charles Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell,” Wired, December 13, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory. For a look at what it means to be extremely hard core see, Christopher Mims, “Are You ‘Extremely Hardcore’ or Not? How Elon Musk Is Dividing Silicon Valley’s Elite,” December 24, 2022, Wall Street Journal, accessed January 30, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-leadership-analysis-extremely-ha….
8. For more on Dorsey’s approach to self-care see, Laura Gesualdi-Gilmore, “Inside How Jack Dorsey Eats 1 Meal a Day and Goes to Silent Retreat with No Phone,” US Sun, April 25, 2022, https://www.the-sun.com/news/4168298/jack-dorsey-fast-silent-meditation….
9. Russ Vince, “Behind and Beyond Kolb’s Learning Cycle,” Journal of Management Educationhttps://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1177/105256299802200304 22, no. 3: (1999) 304-319.
10. Deloitte, “The Social Enterprise in a World Disrupted,” accessed January 13, 2024, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/6935_2021-HC…; A. Ozimek, K. Fikri, and J. Lettieri, From Managing Decline to Building the Future: Could a Heartland Visa Help Struggling Regions? (Economic Innovation Group, 2019), https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Heartland-Visas-Report.pdf; Lisa Taylor and Fern Lebo, The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).
11. World Health Organization, “Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases,” May 28, 2019, https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-pheno…; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Addressing Health Worker Burnout. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce, 2022; “Health Worker Burnout—Current Priorities of the U.S. Surgeon General,” accessed January 12, 2024, https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/health-worker-burnout/ind…; Mayo Clinic Staff, “Covid-19: How to Manage Your Mental Health During the Pandemic,” Mayo Clinic, July 22, 2023, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/men…; Dante L. Mack et al., “Mental Health and Behavior of College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Mobile Smartphone and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study, Part II,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 23, no. 6 (2021): e28892; American Psychiatric Association, “New APA Poll Shows Sustained Anxiety Among Americans; More Than Half of Parents Are Concerned About the Mental Well-Being of Their Children,” press release, May 2, 2021, https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/new-apa-poll-shows-su…; see also, Ece Yildirim, “Gen Z Could Overtake Boomers in the Workforce by 2024: This Has ‘Sweeping Implications’ Economist Says,” CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/05/gen-z-will-overtake-boomers-in-us-workf….
12. Terry L. Price, “Feeling and Dirty Hands: The Role of Regret Experienced by Responsible Agents,” in Judgment and Leadership, ed. A. B. Kayes and D. C. Kayes, 117–29 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839104107.00015.
13. Jason Aten, “The CEO Who Fired 900 Employees over Zoom Is Back, and Now He’s Asking More to Quit,” Inc., April 7, 2022, https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/the-ceo-who-fired-900-employees-over-zoo…; Clare Duffy, “From the Brink of Bankruptcy to a 1,300% Stock Gain: How This CEO Turned Around Her Company,” CNN, March 26, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/tech/lisa-su-amd-risk-takers/index.html.
14. Ryanard S. Kington, “Advice: Presidents Don’t Talk About Their Panic Attacks,” Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed January 13, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/presidents-dont-talk-about-their-pani….
15. EgonZehnder, “972 Global CEOs Share Their Perspective on the Future of CEO Leadership,” 2022, https://www.egonzehnder.com/it-starts-with-the-ceo.
16. Ursula. M. Burns, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are (New York: Amistad, 2021).
17. Kate Beioley, “Pallas’s Natasha Harrison: ‘I Felt Completely like an Outsider Going into Law,’” Financial Times, May 15, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/99d7656e-b67f-4184-97a1-f0b3383e89b4.
18. Justin Cash, “An Audience with Helena Morrissey: ‘100-Hour Weeks Are More Like Slave Labour,’” Financial News, December 1, 2021, https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/an-audience-with-helena-morrissey-mp-…; Helena Morrissey, “I Wish I Hadn’t Helped Create the Myth That It’s Easy for Women to Have It All,” Daily Mail, March 18, 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10628799/HELENA-MORRISSEY-wi….
19. References to weight loss: Christine Logel, and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “The Role of the Self in Physical Health,” Psychological Science 23, no. 1 (2011): 53–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611421936.
20. Reference to self-affirmation and academic performance: Shannon T. Brady, Stephanie L. Reeves, Julio Garcia, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Jonathan E. Cook, Suzanne Taborsky-Barba, Sarah Tomasetti, Eden M. Davis, and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “The Psychology of the Affirmed Learner: Spontaneous Self-Affirmation in the Face of Stress,” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 3 (2016): 353–73, https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000091. Reference to anxiety reduction: Patryk Łakuta, “Using the Theory of Self-Affirmation and Self-Regulation Strategies of Mental Contrasting and Forming Implementation Intentions to Reduce Social Anxiety Symptoms,” Anxiety, Stress, and Coping 33, no. 4 (2020): 370–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2020.1746283. References to general well-being: Geoffrey Cohen and David K. Sherman, “The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention,” Annual Review of Psychology 65 (2014): 333–71, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137; Philip M. Ullrich and Susan K. Lutgendorf, “Journaling About Stressful Events: Effects of Cognitive Processing and Emotional Expression,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 24, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 244–50.
21. Adapted from Łakuta, “Using the Theory of Self-Affirmation.” Research has shown that affirming one’s self-worth, skills, and past successes can help support resilience in a variety of activities such as weight loss (Logel and Cohen, “The Role of the Self in Physical Health”); academic performance (Łakuta, “Using the Theory of Self-Affirmation”); and anxiety (Łakuta, “Using the Theory of Self-Affirmation”).