Chapter 3
Introduce Challenge

Having confidence in ourselves and encouraging it in team members helps to build a base of trust but is not enough to lead teams to continual innovation and growth. Our next small act is to introduce ourselves, and others, to challenging circumstances and projects to build and maintain high- performing teams.

By having the confidence to overcome small challenges in our daily lives, we are more ready to meet the larger challenges we face at work and in the rest of our lives. And if we can do that, we can influence those around us to also accept challenges that will lead to learning and growth.

Often, the difference between teams that are successful and those that are not is in the way we measure success. Focusing on performance, rather than learning, is common, but that emphasis is misplaced. What is important is not how many sales we make or how many innovations we come up with, but what we learn and how we embrace that process that keeps us on the path to innovation and success.

To maintain a challenging environment, we, as leaders, have to be on guard against complacency, an innovation killer. We also need to keep the fire lit under our team, reaching out to all members to make them feel they belong—that they are valued and we trust them to move us forward to success. And that also means embracing failure when it occurs in the face of meeting new challenges and trying new solutions. We should treat failure not as a character flaw but rather as a character builder.

Failure often ultimately leads to success, and helps build grit and resilience in those who face it and grow from it. Sometimes it’s not the smartest person but the one who hangs in there despite all obstacles who wins and adds the most value to a team.

In building the best teams, and ultimately the best organization overall, we need to attract the top talent. Research has shown that, despite what some organizations think, employee engagement is not just about the money being offered but rather the chance to do meaningful, challenging work in an environment that encourages that and allows for failure. In offering such an environment, we are sure to attract and retain the best professionals, and ultimately build a successful organization.

Challenging Our Fears

What’s one of your biggest fears? Spiders, maybe? Public speaking? Annual performance reviews?

Let’s say it’s snakes. Many people are terrified of snakes. Picture one now in your mind. Imagine that you are being asked to stand next to the snake. Now you are being asked to touch it, or even hold it.

Dr. Albert Bandura is ninety years old now and widely considered one of the greatest living psychologists today, and among the greatest ever, standing alongside B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget. Bandura still practices in his office at Stanford.

More than forty years ago he began experimenting with helping people overcome their phobias, starting with people who were afraid of snakes.¹ These were people who had such a profound, paralyzing fear of snakes that they were terrified of even walking in a park or garden lest they come across one. Their phobia of snakes had truly become a limiting factor in their quality of life.

Bandura would bring the patient into his office and tell him that there was a snake in the next room, behind that door, and that he was going to go in there and touch it. You can imagine the reaction. Most patients told Bandura what he could do with that idea! There was no way on earth they were going in there. Ever.

First Bandura would have the patient stand behind a one-way mirror facing the adjacent room and look at a snake being held by a veterinarian. Patients would often panic, believing that the snake was going to suddenly attack and strangle the veterinarian. But instead, the handler held the snake comfortably and lazily.

Next Bandura would ask the patient to put on thick leather gloves and even a protective mask, if he wished, and stand in the same room as the snake. And finally, Bandura and his patient would gradually approach the handler and the snake. Over time, using this slow approach he called “guided mastery,” his patients developed the ability to touch the snake with a gloved hand and ultimately even hold the snake in their bare hands—or, amazingly, allow the snake to crawl in their laps, with their hands idly at their sides. And just like that, the patient’s phobia would be gone.

Bandura checked in with his patients in the days and weeks after they left his offices, and, universally, he discovered that their phobias stayed gone. One patient, long after her session with the snake, recounted having a dream in which a friendly boa constrictor helped her wash the dishes. Another patient was able to wear a necklace for the first time in her life. And another dramatically increased his real estate sales because he was no longer afraid to show rural properties.

In interviews after they’d overcome their fear of snakes, Bandura's former patients also revealed something more profound. Many reported that, once they had been cured of this debilitating phobia, they started trying other new activities. Some started doing public speaking, or taking more audacious risks in their professional work. One patient started horseback riding. In general, Bandura’s patients reported feeling more free, less inhibited by fear.

Bandura’s conclusion from his research was that, by destroying one fear in their lives, these people had begun to develop the mindset that they could change other paralyzing aspects of their lives as well.

When we begin to understand that we can challenge, and overcome, limiting ideas in our lives, we begin to strive for learning challenges instead of performance goals. Let me explain . . .

Shifting Goals from performance to Learning

A performance goal is an aspiration to perform well. We want to shine. We want to be brilliant. We want people to applaud. We want to be amazing. We want the medal around our neck and the beaming joyful praise from those around us. A performance goal is tied to our ego.

A learning goal, in contrast, is an aspiration to learn something new or improve at a particular skill or task. Learning something new requires experimentation, hard work, long study, or new ways of collaborating. Learning goals are hard to achieve.

Sometimes a learning goal involves staring intently at someone else who is more skilled in order to visualize, and then develop, a particular skill. And sometimes a learning goal involves spectacular failure while attempting something new.

Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset, led a fascinating study in which she and her colleagues worked with 128 fifth graders (78 girls and 50 boys) and gave them a series of tests—mostly puzzles—then praised them in two different ways with just a few words.² The kids first were given a test that all of them did very well on. The researchers were confident before the test that these kids would do well.

Afterward, the researchers praised a third of the kids for intelligence, saying, “You must be smart at these problems.” The next third of the group was praised for effort: “You must have worked hard at these problems.” And the final third, the control group, was given no explicit praise for either hard work or intelligence.

The first word set praises intelligence and innate talent or skill. This is similar to the way many parents and coaches talk about kids. This is sometimes the way we speak to kids in performance situations. We tell them how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. We tell them they play piano like Mozart or paint like Picasso.

The second word set praises effort, determination, and hard work. After delivering two different kinds of praise, the researchers were interested in how the kids viewed their own abilities and what kinds of challenges they would choose for themselves.

In the next phase of the study, the researchers gave the kids another round of puzzles. But this time the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. As we might expect, the kids praised for hard work chose to attempt harder problems. After all, they were just told they did well because they worked hard. Why not try for the harder problems?

The kids praised for their natural talent and innate brilliance selected the easier problems. Why? Because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes she has special talent and is expected to perform well, then the thought of failing becomes scary. Therefore, to protect ourselves as “gifted and talented” individuals, we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance. After all, no one wants to be revealed as an impostor.

In the next part of the study, all of the kids were given harder problems. And all of the kids performed poorly, although the kids praised for hard work spent more time on the test and did a little bit better. After the test, the scores were given out, and the researchers asked the kids to share their results with their classmates. After all, it was just an experiment. It didn’t really count as part of their schoolwork. Who cares, right?

In sharing their test scores, the kids praised for talent lied just a little bit about them. They told their friends they did better than they actually did. Presumably, this was to maintain their social status as “talented.”

However, when the kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, a much smaller percentage of them exaggerated their performance, feeling no loss of self-esteem when they did poorly on difficult problems.

“What’s so alarming,” Dweck says, “is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”

After the third round of difficult problems, the researchers asked the kids how willing they were to continue after such a hard test. They asked the kids to select, on a scale of one to ten, how willing they were to take another test.

As expected, those praised for intelligence were the least motivated to continue, and those praised for effort were most interested in continuing, with the control group falling somewhere in between.

In conclusion, Dweck and her colleagues looked at the choices the kids made after receiving the two different kinds of praise. I’ll skip right to the punch line:

• Sixty-nine percent of the children praised for intelligence preferred performance goals.
• Eighty-eight percent of the children praised for hard work preferred learning goals.

That’s right—when we praise for intelligence, we reinforce a predisposition to protect a “gifted and talented” status by choosing tasks at which we are more likely to perform well. And when we praise for hard work, perseverance, tenacity, and pluck, we reinforce the notion that learning is a good thing—that choosing difficult tasks for the sake of continuous improvement is something to be sought after.

A more recent study reveals that those who have a “fixed” mindset and believe they have a finite amount of intelligence also tend to overlook or ignore mistakes they have made.³ In contrast, those who possess a “growth” mindset are more likely to correctly identify their own mistakes and consciously attempt to correct them.

When we see excellence, we should praise the effort, grit, patience, and hard work it must have taken to get there. We’ll not only be rewarding excellence but also reinforcing the idea that continuous growth and learning is a good thing, and that challenges are to be embraced, not feared. Constant growth and learning is one of the key ingredients to building resiliency and overcoming difficult situations and setbacks.

Identifying a Company's Mindset

Companies, like individuals, have mindsets, and those mindsets can pervade the companies’ cultures. The key to recognizing whether your organization’s culture has a fixed or a growth mindset is to pay attention to the language the people in it use. In an interview, Carol Dweck described the importance of recognizing the focus of attention and the language we use to describe ourselves and others.⁴

If the culture in the organization focuses on how smart or brilliant a person is, then the culture is reinforcing fixed mindsets. On the other hand, if people in the company are talking about who is enthusiastic or who is passionate about her work, that’s a clue that the company is reinforcing a growth mindset.

Dweck also emphasized listening to the way people talk about failure, mistakes, and feedback. If they are hiding mistakes and only sharing them privately, that’s also an indicator of a fixed mindset. Another indicator is being defensive about receiving feedback.

Turning a Fixed Mindset into a Growth Mindset

We absorb and adopt the mindset of the setting we are in. If we are immersed in an organization with a fixed mindset, we start to adopt that orientation ourselves. But there are ways to turn this around. We should start, Dweck suggested in the interview, by acknowledging the voice of the fixed mindset within us all.

Dweck recommends that if the voice of a fixed mindset inside our head is telling us, “You can still get out of here, or blame that guy for your failure, or hide your mistake” when we face challenges, we should acknowledge and respond to it. A constructive response to that voice in our head might be, “Well, you know, maybe I don’t know how to do this, but all these people I admire have taken risks and they’ve come back from setbacks.”

“I think it’s really important for people to know that almost all of the great people that they admire, fabulously successful people, have had major, even monumental, setbacks that they’ve had to overcome,” Dweck went on to explain. “And that that is part of the human condition, it’s not part of being incompetent.”

Dweck added that, when we talk back to ourselves with a growth mindset, we can come to the realization that adopting either a growth or fixed mindset is indeed a choice, and we have the power to make such a choice between the two.

This value of overcoming setbacks, and becoming more resilient by doing so, is demonstrated in the next story.

Making the Comfortable Uncomfortable

I coach lacrosse with my friend Pete Senger. Coach Pete, who played college lacrosse back in the day, certainly looks the part. Big, fast, strong, and possessing a booming voice, he seems like the kind of guy who would intimidate the new kids on the team, and only the seasoned players would dare to push his buttons or have the audacity to slack off during drills.

It’s just the opposite. The new kids find him approachable, inviting, and encouraging as a coach. Yet the kids who have been playing with Pete for a few years find that he is sometimes demanding and expects excellence. He pushes those experienced players the hardest.

Pete has a coaching philosophy worth borrowing: “Make the comfortable uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable comfortable.” What he means is that the new kids are already moderately intimidated by trying a new sport, developing new skills, and immersing themselves in the fast and often chaotic game of lacrosse. They are already on edge, perhaps even overwhelmed, and a bit past that learning state in which positive pressure creates excellence.

When the challenge and chaos of the game exceeds their skill and ability to deal with it, they feel overwhelmed and move from a state of thriving and learning to a state of retreat. They close down. They drop a pass, take a hit going to pick up a ground ball, and can’t figure out the confusing offside rule. The game suddenly isn’t fun.

Inversely, the kids who have played the game for a few years have their posse, their attitude, and their predictable set of moves. These are the ones who need to try new things—who need to cradle and shoot with their nondominant hand, play a new position, and work on the face-offs that start the game. They need to get out of their comfort zone. They will learn to see more of the game and become better players.

Coaches like Pete are emotionally fluent leaders—those who can read people at their current comfort level and present just the right amount of challenge to let their skills and capabilities evolve. Sometimes, to accelerate excellence, circumstances need to be chaotic by design—intentionally unstable.

Working in a world of constant change is half the fun of it. Deadlines shift, goalposts move, budgets shrink, markets evolve, new competition emerges, perceptions alter, stakeholders clash, and, just when you are ready to deliver, your product is antiquated. After all, it takes a storm to make a rainbow.

Applying Grit to Our Work and Life

Long-distance competitive cycling is an actual sport. It’s for a fairly small, and possibly loony, population of athletes, but it exists nonetheless. In May 2011, Juliana Buhring decided to ride her bicycle around the world.⁵ She wasn’t a cyclist, and she certainly had never been around the world. In her own words, she says she never intended to become a cyclist, she set out to cycle around the world.

On December 22, 2012, when Buhring completed her journey and checked in at her home in Naples, Italy, she hoped to have logged the fastest ever female time around the world. It turned out, according to Guinness World Records, she was the first and only woman to do it.⁶ Since then she has ridden her bicycle in races from London to Istanbul (the Transcontinental), and Oregon to Virginia (the Trans Am) each time finishing as quickly as the top male competitors.

But it’s not her speed on the bike that distinguishes Buhring from her (mostly male) competitors, it’s her perseverance in the saddle. She doesn’t take as many breaks. It’s like the story of the hare and the tortoise. She is simply willing and able to be tenaciously persistent in her task to ride her bike from point A to point B.

Buhring’s mentor in developing her strategy was an endurance cyclist named Mike Hall. Hall told her she didn’t need to ride fast, but simply take fewer breaks.⁷ As with cycling, and many other aspects of life, speed doesn’t necessarily pay off as much as sheer persistence and gritty determination.

Angela Duckworth and her colleagues have been studying perseverance and consistency as it relates to success and happiness in life. They have been quietly doing this research on “grit,” a characteristic we introduced in the last chapter, at the Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Years ago she and her colleagues started investigating why some people have greater success than others, without having greater intelligence or greater access to resources. Surveying the available research regarding traits beyond intelligence that contribute to success, Duckworth and her colleagues found it lacking in addressing the influence of grit, which they defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”

“Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress,” they write. “The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.”⁸

The researchers developed a gauge they call the “Grit Scale,” intended to measure “grittiness”; respondents rate statements such as, “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” or “I finish whatever I begin.”⁹ Through their work, the researchers at the Duckworth Lab have discovered that higher levels of grit correlate with higher levels of education, greater employment success, and even longer marriages. The results also showed that grit tends to increase with age, and that individuals with high levels of grit also tend to have fewer career changes.

Demonstrating how much of an effect grit can have on performance, the researchers found that those people identified as possessing high levels of grit often had high grades in school yet scored relatively poorly on Standard Achievement Tests, suggesting that, despite lower scholastic aptitude, their perseverance and tenacity yielded stronger overall academic results.

In a more recent study, Duckworth and her colleagues examined the correlation between grit and job retention.¹⁰ Historically, studies have shown that job performance and retention is associated with five big predictive markers: emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and, to a lesser degree, extroversion and openness to new experiences. Duckworth and her colleagues followed more than 1,100 sales representatives and found their level of “grittiness” directly correlated with their employment longevity.

When it comes to facing challenge in the workplace or at home, perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, plus a willingness to remain tenacious in the face of adversity, can make all the difference.

When we develop a growth mindset, we also become more resilient in the face of adversity and setbacks. The following story is just one great example.

Building Resilience Through Challenge

Considered one of the greatest speed skaters of all time, Dan Jansen was favored to win the gold medal in both the 500-meter and 1,000-meter races at the 1988 Olympics. Just a week before the Olympics, Jansen was on top of the skating world when he won the World Sprint Championships. He was fit and prepared.

As the day of the first Olympic race drew closer, Jansen’s sister Jane was getting sicker and sicker, battling leukemia. In the early morning hours, the day of the 500-meter race, Jansen’s sister died in a hospital surrounded by loved ones. Jansen was shocked and stunned as he deliberated whether to race. Believing his sister would want him to compete, he went to the track to warm up.

He said later that, in those moments he was warming up, he didn’t even feel like it was himself inside his skin. He felt he had forgotten how to skate. In the 500-meter race, he lost an edge and went down just after the first turn. A couple of days later, in the 1,000-meter race, he again lost his feel for the ice, slipped, and went down.

Four years later, in 1992, in Albertville, France, Jansen was again on the ice ready to compete in the 500-meter and 1,000-meter races. Just two weeks before the Olympics, he had set a world record. He said he was superconfident he would win, and at the starting line he felt completely calm, without anxiety or nerves. Of his Olympic opportunities up until then, this was Jansen’s time to shine. He knew there was no other competitor who could beat him that day. In the 500-meter race, Jansen took fourth place. In the 1,000-meter race, Jansen came in twenty-sixth.

Later, he couldn’t explain his performance. He didn’t fall. It was just as if he was skating as someone else. He wasn’t nearly as fast as his recent times would have predicted.

In 1994, the Winter Olympics were held in Lillehammer, Norway. Jansen was at the peak of his physical health and his training, and this would likely be his last shot at an Olympic medal. Over the two years since the last Olympics, Dan had posted the five fastest times in history and was the only speed skater ever to break thirty-six seconds in the 500-meter race.

In that race, Jansen lost an edge on the final turn and slipped badly—not falling outright, but effectively losing the race. Now in his fourth Olympics without a medal, he was stunned and baffled, but not despondent. He later said he was confused, but he didn’t despair. In his failure, he was disappointed but motivated. Instead of resignation, he felt inspired to succeed.

Jansen said that, when the gun went off for the final race of his Olympic career, he felt “incredible.” He said that time slowed down, and that his efforts felt easy and instinctive. He felt as if he were in slow motion, with plenty of time to be hyperaware of his surroundings. Glancing up at the split times on the clock during the race, he saw that he was skating faster than he had ever before, in fact faster than anyone had ever skated. And he still had more in the tank. He won that race, and set a world record doing it.

He said the first thought that went through his mind at that moment was, “I finally skated to my potential at the Olympics.” He had no idea yet if it was worth a medal or not. And he didn’t care. On his victory lap, he carried his daughter Jane, named after his sister.

That final race was the culmination of years of preparation, resolve, and resilience. We need to remember to never be defined by a moment. Each event, and each day, is but another opportunity to meet challenges and fall forward.

Attracting the Best Talent

While we, as leaders, should always work to build up our teams by offering them challenges, we also should be on the lookout for the best talent we can add to those teams. Whatever industry we’re in, our company faces competition from other companies. And the bigger and more successful the business is, the more likely it is to face competition. While the product we offer may be slightly different from similar products, with slightly different pricing, what makes brand X different from brand Y is the people in the company.

I recently started a new business building beautiful e-learning courses specifically so thought leaders, authors, and speakers could give greater reach to their ideas. I thought my idea was unique, one of a kind—that no one had ever thought of this before. Of course, I was wrong.

I only had to start talking about our new company to someone in the industry, and, sure enough, he would say to me, “Oh, that sounds a little like so-and-so. Have you heard of them?” And it’s true, we do have competition, but our secret sauce is our people. Attracting and keeping the best people means continually offering them challenge, and the right environment in which to meet it.

According to research by the Harvard Business Review, 95 percent of high achievers near the age of thirty leave companies after only twenty-eight months.¹¹ Why? “For millennials, it is more a matter of career exploration than climbing the traditional ladder,” says Emily He, chief marketing officer of the talent management company Saba.¹² It’s about opportunity—the opportunity to find a workplace where we can reach our greatest potential and experience our greatest successes.

According to a new survey by Ernst & Young, of 9,700 full-time employees in the world’s big-eight economies—the United States, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, China, and Japan—the top reasons (rankings varied slightly by country) are the following:

• Lack of opportunity to advance
• Minimal wage growth
• Excessive overtime
• A work environment that doesn’t encourage teamwork
• A boss that doesn’t allow flexibility¹³

It’s the first item on the list I want to address here. Clearly, the data is telling us that talented professionals the world over are seeking career-development opportunities. Career development involves— often requires—challenge, and employees are citing professional growth among the top three requirements they need to stay at a company.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the data suggests that retaining top talent is actually more complicated than simply giving aggressive pay raises, installing Ping-Pong tables, or offering to pay for night classes. None of this counts much if an organization’s employees are constantly under stress. And these days, the entire professional business environment is stressful around the clock. From the time we wake up to check e-mail on our bedside smartphone to our marathon meetings and our search for a little “me time,” we are under more duress today than ever before.

Consider, almost half (46 percent) of managers globally are working more than forty hours a week, according to the Ernst & Young survey. Millennials (64 percent) and gen Xers (68 percent) have the largest numbers of spouses working full-time as well— doubling the stress related to balancing home and child obligations.

Almost 70 percent of millennials and gen Xers claimed that “getting enough sleep,” “finding time for me,” and “balancing work and home life” were becoming problematic, according to the survey. And it’s not just the American white-collar worker who is under stress. The survey results show that things are even worse in Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany.

I had an interview in June 2015 with Tom DiDonato, chief human resources officer at Lear Corporation. He says attracting and retaining top talent takes constant tweaking, and that there is no magic formula for balancing pay, flexibility, special benefits, educational opportunities, and early-release Fridays.

There is only one secret weapon, DiDonato says:

When we grow the greatest leaders from inside the organization, and keep them by offering them challenge and meaningful work, the strongest talent will come knocking at our door to work for them.