Introduction for Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone
INTRODUCTION
Rising to the Outsized Demands of Leadership
Leading in an age of anxiety is demanding. Existing leadership training is not adequate for the task. Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone provides a framework to help leaders learn and grow from experience in the face of adversity. This adversity-embracing approach helps organizations move beyond tired leadership models and instead focus on resilience, growth, and well-being. It provides a long-term solution that helps leaders find purpose and direction in their work. The strategies in this book will help leaders at all levels excel in the face of growing demands.
Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone emerges from research on the psychology of resilience, growth, and well-being. These areas have been largely overlooked by organizations, but their application to developing leaders can be transformative, both for leaders and for employees.
Your resilience, growth, and well-being are largely determined by your capacity for learning in the face of anxiety, doubt, or frustration. More than any other process, learning generates forward movement toward goals and emotional stability. Learning results in developing new neuroconnections, combating negative psychological states such as depression, and fostering personal and professional growth. Learning improves overall job satisfaction and well-being by fueling purpose, motivation, and social belonging. When leaders learn, they grow.1
Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone offers tools to address our contemporary leadership challenges. Workers report record levels of burnout, express a lack of motivation toward work not seen in decades, and openly lament that their jobs lack a sense of purpose. Employees around the globe express a profound sense of loneliness in their lives and at work, and stress levels have reached unprecedented levels. Well-being and motivation are spiraling downward. These trends pose significant challenges to leaders.2
Too many remedies offered to leaders provide short-term relief without addressing the underlying problem. This book offers a novel solution: reverse the downward spiral in worker motivation and well-being by learning to lead outside your comfort zone. In the process, you will build resilience and support growth and well-being for both you and your team.
AWAKEN YOUR NATURAL DESIRE TO LEARN
Early insights into the nature of learning and growth came from the psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He proposed we learn when we push ourselves out of our immediate comfort zone. To paraphrase Vygotsky, moving outside a comfort zone awakens our natural learning abilities. When a student becomes interested in a topic, the pressure of learning becomes a source of positive stress. Likewise, a leader who takes on a challenging project becomes motivated and engaged. For Vygotsky, this was the purpose of personal growth: we learn not by seeking comfort but by moving outside of our comfort zone.3
To awaken our natural learning ability, Vygotsky introduced the “zone of proximal development,” which describes the optimal learning situation. I call this the “learning zone” for short. Learning occurs as we seek to resolve tensions, solve problems, and respond to challenges. We enter the learning zone when we experience just the right amount of tension to activate learning and growth but not so much stress that we recoil into unproductive anxiety. Moving too far beyond your comfort zone shuts down both learning and performing.
Leading Outside Your Comfort Zone outlines three critical zones or experiences associated with leading as depicted in figure 0.1
1. The comfort zone. Leaders’ work is easy here, and they experience pleasant emotions and success. Despite its pleasantness, the comfort zone lacks the necessary tensions that encourage learning. It is also “the complacency zone,” as improvement often stagnates.
FIGURE 0.1 The Comfort, Learning, and Anxiety Zones
2. The learning zone. Leaders move outside their comfort zone and experience the tensions associated with learning and growing. Stress feels manageable as learning and productivity improve. The tensions inherent in learning are optimized.
3. The anxiety zone. Leaders move beyond the learning zone to a place where too much stress inhibits improvement. Emotions become overwhelming, learning and performance suffer, and productivity declines.
We all have an optimal learning zone. This is where you thrive, learn, grow, and improve. The challenge: this book will help you find your optimal learning zone . . . if you’re willing to lead outside your comfort zone.
WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK
Leading outside your comfort zone has a dual purpose: helping yourself and others. First, lead yourself. The book will start by asking you to evaluate how prior experiences have shaped you as a person and a leader. You will identify how mentors and role models have influenced you and how you have integrated their values into your leadership. This will help you learn to rely on your values in difficult times and exercise judgment regularly. Good leaders develop the confidence to make decisions and act amid ambiguity and uncertainty about the consequences.
You will also help others as they move outside their comfort zone. The book will give you strategies, skills, and support systems for teaching resilient values to others. As a leader, you will play multiple roles, including coach, consultant, mentor, role model, and sometimes final decision-maker. Those who will benefit from this book include:
■ Leaders interested in improving their performance, especially when facing the daily frustrations, stresses, and challenges of management
■ Leaders concerned about their well-being and that of their employees
■ Individual contributors seeking to assume a leadership role
■ Emerging leaders seeking to build their resilience in the face of everyday frustrations and challenges
Others who will also benefit from reading this book include:
■ Human resource and education professionals who want to increase their knowledge and capacity to improve the performance-driven well-being of others
■ Coaches of all types seeking new tools to develop themselves and others
■ Internal and external consultants conducting leadership development efforts
■ Instructors and facilitators supporting leadership development
■ Researchers seeking a better understanding of how to measure and study resilience
■ Managers leading change in their organization
THE FIVE OUTSIZED PSYCHOLOGICAL DEMANDS OF LEADING
Leading has never been easy, but today, leaders face outsized psychological demands. Fortunately, leaders can draw on evidence-based solutions. The psychological demands leaders face include:
Demand 1: Leaders Avoid or Overreact to Unpleasant Emotions
The single biggest challenge that leaders face arises from unpleasant emotions. Unpleasant emotions lead to negative consequences if not adequately addressed. Procrastination, avoidance of conflict, and anxiety emerge. These result in poor performance and poor mental health. If unpleasant emotions are allowed to linger for too long or suppressed, the result is burnout, chronic stress, and disengagement. Too many leaders fail to realize their full contribution as leaders because they suffer at the hands of their unpleasant emotions.
Solution: Build Positive Emotional Engagement with Your Work and Your Team
Building positive engagement means generating curiosity, interest, and excitement. Building positive emotional engagement draws on the power of learning, generating positive feelings and a sense of purpose and growth. When positively engaged, leaders build resilience to navigate the complex emotional territory beyond their comfort zone.
This does not mean acting cheerful when you feel bad. The term toxic positivity has emerged to describe how you may be doing more harm than good if you suppress negative emotions and fake a positive attitude. Instead, building positive emotions facilitates finding and reengaging excitement, pursuing genuine interests, and enjoying learning. Don’t ignore unpleasant emotions, learn from them.
Demand 2: Leaders Stay in Their Comfort Zone
When leaders stay in their comfort zone, they fail to reap the rewards that lie beyond. They turn to old methods and rely on existing skills. But following old patterns can be disastrous. When you’re leading outside your comfort zone, old patterns and solutions no longer work. Complacency will fail you.
Solution: Be More Creative in How You Solve Problems
Leaders must seek new ways to learn and grow to overcome complacency. Being creative means taking chances and accepting new approaches to solve problems. The critical factor is resilience, the ability to continue learning despite short-term setbacks. Resilience requires self-awareness and the confidence to move forward in the face of frustration, fear, and anxiety. Leading outside your comfort zone can motivate you to seek new answers and push you to new areas of understanding. Approaching problems with creativity means being comfortable with challenges and accepting the positive role that unpleasant emotions play in creating the tensions necessary for learning and growth.
Demand 3: Leaders Overemphasize Performance—at the Expense of Growth
One reason leaders remain hesitant to be creative is the fear of failure. Focusing on performance and avoiding failure is the norm in the leadership playing field. Performance means demonstrating skills with ease and consistency. But when leaders stay in the comfort zone of their current performance, they can overlook the need to develop new or refine old skills. Some leadership skills may be innate, but most are learned.
An overemphasis on performance leads to performance plateaus. This can be disastrous when demands increase or situations change. Over time, when leaders focus too much on performing, they become risk-averse and fail to grow.
Solution: Build a Learning Identity
Long-term success in a competitive environment requires a learning identity—the courage to focus on improvement, progress, and change. A learning identity requires accepting short-term setbacks as a natural part of success and an inevitable part of leading. Responding to peaks and valleys in performance becomes natural while leading. A learning identity involves accepting setbacks as temporary. Leaders with a strong learning identity show confidence in their ability to progress even during the worst times.
Demand 4: Leaders Become Rigid Due to Fear, Anxiety, and Frustration
Leading necessitates putting yourself into new, challenging situations and constantly developing and refining your skills. Meeting new challenges involves uncomfortable emotions like fear, anxiety, and frustration. Leading outside your comfort zone comes with changes, uncertainty, and ever-increasing complexity. Leaders may find that turmoil leaves them exhausted.
Solution: Be More Flexible
As a leader, you must develop new capabilities to meet the oversized challenges of leading. Leading requires making judgments and adjusting to further information as it becomes available. As one saying goes, today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems.4 You must develop competencies and implement strategies for flexibility for yourself, your team, and your organization.
Demand 5: Leaders Think They Must Act Alone
Leaders think they need to act alone for two reasons. First, many leaders have learned to trust their judgment. Their early leadership experiences revolved around self-sufficiency and individual efforts, so it is natural to think that leading is an individual activity. Second, leaders may have been lured into the myths associated with heroic leadership—that a single leader is responsible for success or failure. This myth is perpetuated by media and popular culture, which tend to praise or blame individual leaders.
Solution: Build a Coalition of Social Support
Leading is not a solo activity. Successfully leading depends on others across teams and organizations. Although success is often attributed to a single leader, every leader who has accomplished great things has relied on a team of experts who offer support, advice, and implementation. Even though leaders depend on others, successfully leading outside your comfort zone comes with the expectation that you, as a leader, must be prepared to lead.
THE NECESSARY STEPS FOR LEADING OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE
Leading outside your comfort zone results in—resilience, growth, and well-being—as shown in figure 0.2. These are developed through four steps:
1. Cultivating novel experiences. Moving outside your comfort zone starts by cultivating new experiences that generate tensions and challenges. Seek out novel experiences as you move from stagnation to growth. Initiate new experiences, face new challenges with an open mind, and discover untried solutions.
2. Accepting unpleasant emotions. A range of pleasant and unpleasant emotions will emerge when leading outside your comfort zone. Learn to become aware of, accept, and act in these situations.
3. Implementing learning strategies. Identify strategies to improve self-awareness, enhance learning, and improve. Each chapter in this book offers evidence-based strategies for learning and helps you identify your strategies.
4. Motivating yourself to learn. Lead by initiating, sustaining, and increasing effort toward learning.
FIGURE 0.2 How to Lead Outside Your Comfort Zone
ORGANIZATION AND CRITICAL INSIGHTS OF THE BOOK
Throughout the book, you will encounter surprising ideas about leadership. These counterintuitive ideas emerge from neuroscience, psychology, and leadership studies research. Some of these insights will challenge your current beliefs about leading. For example, you may believe that only pleasant emotions can motivate learning, but research tells a different story. Unpleasant emotions play a valuable role in learning. Another counterintuitive insight is about resilience. You may think you are born with resilience, but research shows resilience is a competency that can be learned. Further, although following popular goal-setting methods is essential for leading, you will see that many tried-and-true goal-setting techniques fall short in contemporary leadership.
The book is organized into three sections:
Section 1 offers foundational insights into leading beyond your comfort zone. Section 1 maps the challenges of leading in a complex, changing world and explains how these challenges place new demands on leaders.
Chapter 1 shows how leaders at Netflix, a contemporary technology company, must address different and more challenging problems than business leaders in past decades, such as Jack Welch at General Electric. A key difference is that leading in contemporary organizations requires a focus on resilience, growth, and well-being for the leader and their team. The chapter outlines five myths associated with leadership: (1) leadership skills are only needed by those at the top of the organization, (2) only new leaders need to learn, (3) leading relies mainly on leveraging power and resources, (4) leading for resilience is primarily about overcoming traumatic experiences, and (5) leaders are heroes who sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the organization. These myths are embedded in a false dependence on heroic leadership, the belief that a leader is all-powerful and must sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the organization. The chapter discusses four new ways to think about the demands of leadership: dealing with a changing and restless workforce, exercising judgment in the face of shifting and competing demands, building self-awareness and accepting public review, and leading for the well-being of self and others.
Chapter 2 explains how the growing use of the language of resilience informs everyday leadership challenges. Resilience primarily focuses on adapting to significant adversity, such as trauma and hardship. Still, leading with resilience is more than dealing with situations involving trauma and severe hardship. This is called positive resilience, which includes seeing resilience as initiating, sustaining, and increasing effort when faced with the everyday challenges of leadership. Lessons learned from resilience research include strategies to respond to and recover from setbacks, the need to develop a positive outlook on the future, and the value of a mindset that sees opportunity in obstacles. Resilience research also reveals the importance of building a network of economic, social, and psychological support.
Chapter 3 describes a central challenge of leading outside your comfort zone—balancing learning with performing. Learning involves taking chances and gaining new insight and skills. In contrast, performing entails demonstrating existing knowledge and skills while minimizing the chance of failure. Leading outside your comfort zone requires balancing the interplay between learning and performing. The goal lies in reaching optimal improvement. The chapter advocates developing a dual mindset that embraces learning and performing. The chapter offers insights on how to build confidence for learning but also cautions that excessive reliance on confidence can be harmful because it detracts from learning.
Chapter 4 argues that successfully leading outside your comfort zone requires seeing adverse events as opportunities for growth. Leaders can learn how to maintain well-being in adverse events beyond their control. This involves self-awareness of how you, as a leader, respond to certain emotional situations involving triggers, sensitivities, and transitions. Examples from US and European football show how external forces can shape performance and that many factors associated with leading may fall outside the leader’s control. Methods to respond to external events are presented.
Section 2 provides a deep dive into the specific process associated with leading outside your comfort zone, as described in figure 0.2.
Chapter 5 describes how leaders can cultivate novel experiences that support learning through: (1) common challenging situations and opportunities for growth, (2) the amount of practice and experience, (3) the underlying feelings of experience, and (4) stories of resilience. Methods to reflect and learn from these experiences are offered.
Chapter 6 advocates for learning to accept unpleasant emotions through enhanced emotional self-awareness. Accepting frustration and other painful emotions can lead to growth. It offers strategies to improve your understanding of emotions and shows why a better understanding of your emotions becomes vital to growing as a leader.
Chapter 7 presents five research-based strategies to support learning: building positive emotional engagement, creative problem-solving, developing a learning identity, enhancing flexibility, and building social support.
Chapter 8 outlines the benefits and mechanisms of learning and how they contribute to resilience, growth, and well-being while leading. Leading outside your comfort zone requires rekindling your natural ability to learn. Learning is an underlying mechanism of resilience, as learning helps leaders adjust, solve problems, and self-regulate in the face of unpleasant emotions.
Section 3 applies the insights from the previous sections to specific situations, including improved focus, leading teams and organizations, and goal-setting.
Chapter 9 describes ways to enhance focus under different conditions, ranging from time management to mindfulness and breathing exercises. The world is filled with distractions. Leading requires overcoming these distractions to meet short- and long-term objectives. The chapter outlines eight distractions or threats to focus: shifting between activities, multitasking, mind-wandering, rumination, timing, cognitive overload, off-loading, and time pressure.
Chapter 10 offers advice on applying ideas from previous chapters to leading a team. Leading teams provides a unique challenge. Teams are full of emotions, and leading a team requires effectively managing the emotions of self and others.
Chapter 11 recaps the lessons of the book for leading an organization. Leading an organization requires a unique set of competencies. Building resilience at the organizational level requires strategic thinking, communication, and other skills that go above and beyond those needed when leading at other organizational levels.
Chapter 12 offers tiered goal-setting as an alternative to traditional goal-setting processes such as SMART and stretch goals. By focusing on growth and well-being, tiered goal-setting involves setting three simultaneous and incrementally challenging goals and adjusting the goal based on self-guided feedback. A template for setting tiered goals is offered, and methods of assessing progress toward goals are suggested.
The conclusion summarizes the insights and tools presented throughout the book into three simple lessons for leading outside your comfort zone: moving, sleeping, and learning. Physical movement, adequate sleep and recovery, and the joys of learning form the basis of resilience, growth, and well-being and provide both a starting and an ending point for leading outside your comfort zone.
Notes
1. David Watson, Olga Tregaskis, Cigdem Gedikli, Oluwafunmilayo Vaughn, and Antonina Semkina, “Well-Being Through Learning: A Systematic Review of Learning Interventions in the Workplace and Their Impact on Well-Being.” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 27, no. 2 (2018): 247–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2018.1435529; information on burnout was reported at: https://www.gallup.com/394424/indicator-employee-wellbeing.aspx; World Health Organization, “Burn-Out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases,” press release, May 28, 2019, https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-pheno…; low worker motivation was from a survey found at: https://www.adpri.org/insights/employee-motivation-and-commitment-index/; the loneliness situation is described at: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connecti…; 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, https://doi.org/10.2196/28892.
2. 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, shorturl.at/tvU45; Megan Leonhardt, “44% of Older Millennials Already Have a Chronic Health Condition. Here’s What That Means for Their Futures,” CNBC Online, May 4, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/older-millennials-chronic-health-condit….
3. Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). The idea of a learning zone is also associated with Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation,” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18, no. 5 (1908): 459–82, https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.920180503; for a critique see Martin Corbett, “From Law to Folklore: Work Stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law,” Journal of Managerial Psychology 30, no. 6 (2015): 741–52, https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp-03-2013-0085. For empirical support see Kristen Joan Anderson, “Impulsitivity, Caffeine, and Task Difficulty: A Within-Subjects Test of the Yerkes-Dodson Law,” Personality and Individual Differences 16, no. 6 (1994): 813–29, https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(94)90226-7.
4. Attributed to Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency and Doubleday, 2006).