Once upon a time, there was a university dean who became troubled, as deans are apt. She started wondering how she could honestly know what sort of boss she was. While there was an annual evaluation system available, it was poorly designed and offered inadequate means to assess her performance as a supervisor.
So she asked one of her faculty members, a good friend and a very wise and erudite psychologist, how one knows that one is not self-deluding. How, she wondered, could she appraise her own performance and be assured that she was not just fooling herself? After all, by definition, a delusion is an inability to process the world as it is. It is a deceit. How could she know that she was not deceiving herself? How could anyone in a position of authority be truly self-aware?
Her friend thought for a few long minutes before replying, “By asking that question.”
It’s not the most satisfying answer — I’ll grant you that — but it is a good answer. Someone who is self-deluding would be unlikely to sincerely question, well, anything for fear of bursting the bubble of delusion.
She resolved then to continue to check in with herself by regularly wondering, “are you fooling yourself?”
Of course, her perspective is as limited as anyone’s, so she also implemented several other techniques for knowing and monitoring herself.
Listening: She embarked on an ambitious effort to gather information to assess her performance by becoming a more active listener and a less judgmental observer. She also gauged others’ reactions to her. Here’s a pro tip: if your people suddenly grow quiet when you enter a room and/or grow boisterous as soon as you leave it, something is likely amiss.
Studying: She started reading a lot, attending leadership conferences, and participating in trainings to improve her skills as a manager and leader. Continually absorbing and applying the wisdom of experts takes real commitment, but it is an ongoing and necessary process.
Disseminating: But it is not enough to simply study helpful material. It must be disseminated to everyone to establish guiding tenets for bosses and employees alike. Two of the most instantly transformational books she read (many times) were The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, both by Bob Sutton. She purchased stacks of these books and would hand them out freely. Faculty and colleagues got a copy of the first, department chairs got both. She conducted a training for faculty on the No Asshole Rule and constantly referenced its precepts. Eventually the people around her got the message as they collectively put Sutton’s clear principles into action.
Gathering: She still needed honest feedback, though, so she put together an extensive evaluation survey of her work and sent it to all her people. When the anonymous results came in, she reviewed them with her faculty and staff. It was not the most pleasant process for her, but she discovered much about her people’s perceptions of her and grew as a direct result of that evaluation.
Acting: Collecting all that information is a critical but meaningless process if you do not act on it. First, you must understand yourself from others’ perspectives — and there is always more than one — and then you must apply the Golden Rule combined with radical empathy. The steps may be clear, but implementing them requires a vulnerability that most people, especially bosses, instinctively eschew. This part is not to be skipped, though. There is no fudging vulnerability.
Empowering: Even armed with all this knowledge and the will and means to put it into practice, she was not satisfied. No matter how much you look within or try to see yourself from without, it is challenging to monitor yourself and apply what you know on a daily basis, which is why she went one step further by ordering her lieutenants to call her out (candidly and privately) if she ever crossed a line. The most important line was between being a decent person and being an asshole, as Bob Sutton defines it.
One of her proudest moments as a dean was the first time one of her direct reports said to her, “You know, that email you sent yesterday made you sound like a bit of an asshole.” She praised him privately and then again publicly for his candor and apologized sincerely to the email’s recipients, all of whom, it turns out, had just written it off as no big deal.
To be sure, there were many, many times she crossed the line or failed as a boss, but her goal in all things was not perfection but constant improvement. Her efforts at dispelling delusion made her realize that self-awareness is perpetually fleeting, which is why she developed such a large and multidimensional net to capture it. No one thing will keep that old boss-ego and its consequent self-delusion in check, so you need to do them all some of the time and some all the time.
Policing and assessing your own behavior can be daunting and exhausting. Choosing self-delusion is decidedly easier — at least in the short run. Quickly, though, delusion — as with all deception — will undermine your integrity and erode your effectiveness. Delusion is a form of corruption. The trust that self-awareness engenders in others and in yourself, in contrast, can be positively and permanently transformational for yourself, your people, and your organization. Dispelling delusion is a perpetual effort, but is vital for upping your boss game.
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