“I know what the problem is, and I’m still stuck.” Sound familiar?
I’ve heard multiple versions of this recently:
One person, working in a service industry, talked about how the work they do goes unnoticed because the people they serve don’t really know the skills or amount of work it took to get things moving.
Several have talked about being able to do things for the company or organization they work for, but then being unable to use those same skills in their personal life.
I’ve also heard a lot of people saying that they aren’t as good/smart/efficient/fill-in-the-blank as they should be.
These are all composites of different people I’ve been working with. People are struggling with their inability to be accountable to themselves while building structure for those around them. They all have different Saboteurs, different jobs, but they’ve ended up in the same place.1 Each person can see the problem in front of them and name the Saboteur that is responsible for it, but then they are stuck. Recognizing and naming the Saboteur is a huge leap of a first step, but then what?
The Judge Changes Tactics
Learning to recognize the Judge and the Saboteurs takes a lot of work. It doesn’t come naturally to many of us, and on top of that, the Judge is sneaky, changing up tactics and accusations. One day you hear it say - You’re behind; you’ll never catch up! And the next day you hear - If my team would leave me alone, I could catch up on all this work!
Once you start catching the Saboteurs in the act, you start to feel like you’re making progress. But then, you have a hectic day and the Judge starts to run the show again. It becomes a shame spiral as you recognize that, once again, you’ve failed to stop the Judge.
A lot of us stop here. We learned to recognize the Judge and the Saboteurs, and it didn’t make a difference in the long run. But what if naming the Saboteur was never meant to be the last step of the process?
Another Voice
Under the influence of the Judge and the Saboteurs, we can only see what they choose to allow us to see. They narrow our focus. Stopping at naming the Saboteur prevents us from examining the situation that got us here in the first place.
The counterpart to your Saboteurs is your Sage. It is the part of you that is able to look at four urgent requests and say out loud that two of them can wait a week without causing further calamity. Yes, you’ll have to carry some disappointment from the people who thought they should be a priority, but the Sage enables you to recognize their disappointment in the situation without reading it as you being the disappointment.
The Sage has five moves to counteract the Judge and the Saboteurs: empathize, explore, innovate, navigate, activate. In Positive Intelligence®, these are called powers, but I like to think of them as moves, because they are actions that I want to see myself taking instead of just qualities to aspire to.
Most of us draw conclusions, devise solutions, or take actions before we’ve adequately understood the situation through exploring it fully.2
The Sage move, Explore, helps us gain a full picture of our situation. This is the move to use when you need to know more to really understand what is going on - inside and outside of yourself. It’s the move that we need when we’ve learned to name what’s in front of us, but have no idea what to do with it.
Curious about the Sage, the Saboteurs, and how they impact your leadership? Email me for a free assessment to give you more insight into your own patterns.
I don’t have time for this
You’ve reached this point and you’re thinking - I don’t have time to explore; I have to make a decision right now! I get it. If someone told me to go on an exploratory hike when I just need a map to the store, I’d be pretty annoyed.
Exploration feels like a time luxury we don’t have because we’ve all watched people stall things in the name of discovery. We’re afraid to make the final decision. Maybe because we’re afraid that people will be upset about the choice or we’re afraid that it won’t be the right decision, either way, the fear keeps us endlessly circling the same evidence hoping for fresh insight and direction.
Exploration is different from being on an endless loop. When the Sage explores, there is an endpoint in mind and a clear question that needs to be answered. There are four urgent requests on my plate and room for only one. I know which one is the loudest request, but what does each person really need? That’s worth a few emails to nail down so that I can move in the right direction. If you can’t name what you need to find out, you’re stalling.
What happens next?
The strategy used in Positive Intelligence® (PQ®) to help with your exploration is called the Fascinated Anthropologist. (After years of working cross-culturally, I love this strategy as it lets me draw on old skills in a new way.) With this strategy, “you become a keen observer and discoverer of what simply is, without trying to judge, change, or control the situation.”3
I’ve worked for a number of people who were great at creating ideas for every problem under the sun. Sometimes, a plan would be half-implemented and a new idea would come along, restarting the whole implementation process. Of course, my Judge had a verdict at hand: they can’t stick with anything long enough to let us finish it! The Judge was convinced it was right, no need to ask for any more evidence, case closed. But this only led to frustration, both my own and (I’m sure) the leader’s. I needed to try something different.
So, I started asking questions like someone who was completely new to the situation. I wanted to tap into curiosity instead of annoyance. What problem do you see that you are working to solve? What makes now the time to implement that change? What will happen if we don’t? Etc.
More often than not, the answers helped me to change my thinking. In one instance, the leader had a view of all of the teams (senior leaders tend to have that!); proceeding with the original plan would have put the fundraising team at a significant disadvantage. What I had perceived as wishy-washy was really just seeing the big picture and putting the brakes on when a negative outcome was apparent. In the end, we were able to develop a plan that addressed the problems of both teams - once we all knew that was the goal.
Of course, there were still times when I asked the same questions and found out that my suspicions were correct. The key difference was that I had taken the time to know instead of making assumptions. This allowed me to make my case using the examples and reasons that the leader was thinking of instead of using my frustration as a foundation for my argument.
After years of learning how open questions work, and from asking a lot of bad ones along the way, I’ve learned that the trick to being the Fascinated Anthropologist is to avoid “Why?” questions. Most of us hear a why question loaded with judgment and activate our own Judge before we can answer. It gets the defenses up before finding out if defenses were really needed.
Wrap-up
None of this makes the Judge disappear (unfortunately). Mine still turns up on hectic days with the verdict already decided upon. What changes is that I can stop treating the verdict as the end of the discussion and start treating it as the thing I need to know more about.
You’re also doing the hard part - learning to catch the Judge in the act. That takes effort and time. Remember, it isn’t the finish line. You know who’s talking; now, it’s time to explore the situation around you.
Reflect
Pick a situation that you’re in right now. (Probably the one that first came to mind when you started reading.) What is your Judge assuming about the other person’s motives? What has actually been said by them? Is there a difference in those lists?
Act
Choose one situation that is replaying in your head or one person whose behavior gets under your skin. Become the Fascinated Anthropologist. The next time it happens, write down one question you don’t know the answer to, take a deep breath and do a PQ Rep,4 and ask your question out loud before you react.
Curious about the Sage, the Saboteurs, and how they impact your leadership? Email me for a free assessment to give you more insight into your own patterns.
The Judge, the Saboteurs, the Sage and its five powers all come from Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence® (2012), along with the PQ® assessment I use with clients. POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE® and PQ® are trademarks of Positive Intelligence, LLC. The framework is his. The conversations and examples are mine.
Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2012), p. 86.
Chamine, Positive Intelligence, p. 87.
In Positive Intelligence®, a PQ Rep is ten seconds of your full attention on something physical, like the weight of your feet on the floor or your chest moving up and down as you breathe.
Tapping into curiosity instead of annoyance is going to be my new “to-do” when I get into sticky situations. Thank you, such an insightful read