Not Lazy, Not Unqualified, Still Stuck

Why Positive Intelligence matters for middle managers

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As a middle manager, I often found myself switching between high-level conversations with leaders and being in the weeds of day-to-day work with my team. Some days, it was hard to reconcile my priorities with the expectations being placed on me by others. Middle managers are constantly being forced to switch between deferring to their leaders and making decisions for their team. This can happen dozens of times a day. Researchers Anicich and Hirsh have shown that the very act of switching between these two contexts leads managers to freeze and pull back from taking decisive action under pressure.¹

The voice in my head had a field day with this, telling me that I should be able to do all the things - my stuff, my team’s stuff, and the new stuff that was dumped on my plate at the last minute. If I couldn’t do all the things, then I was just lazy or unqualified.

But neither is true. I’m not any lazier than the next person, and I am good at what I do. Just like you are. And yet, there is a gap between what I know how to do and being able to rest in that knowledge, quieting the voice in my head. Filling the gap are thought patterns that can turn your strengths upside down.

Those thinking patterns are the Judge and other Saboteurs that we’ve talked about over the last few weeks as we’ve been examining Positive Intelligence (PQ).² Saboteurs are thought patterns that started out as something semi-useful and kept running long after they stopped helping you. There are ten in all, and we all have them in some combination or another. Finding a way to quiet the Saboteurs is essential for middle managers as they navigate the squeeze.

The Judge and The Sage

The Saboteur that shows up in all of our heads and gets to lead the other nine is the Judge. The Judge is the voice in your head that runs a performance review on everything you do. But it doesn’t stop with judging you. It also passes judgment on those around you and the very circumstances you find yourself in.

The Judge tends to show up at the worst possible times, and it’s sneaky. Last week, I found myself looking at someone else on social media and thinking - this person is amazing; how are they so organized while I sit in a house of chaos? It would be easy to say that I was complimenting this person. But in reality, I was looking at one slice of their life and passing judgment on them and me in the process.

The Judge also shows up at work. You send a message to your boss, you see that they opened it but no response. Your brain goes into overdrive trying to decide if you did something wrong.

The Judge rarely works alone; it recruits one of the other Saboteurs. You say “yes” to every special project so that people will value you. Or you are restless and come up with more ideas than your team could possibly execute.

For a long time, the Judge was the loudest voice in my ear. Maybe it is for you as well. Now, I’m learning to listen for the voice of the Sage, the voice that is curious and empathetic. The Sage sees things as they really are and envisions a better outcome. In my social media situation, the Sage challenges both my assumption of the other person and the supposed chaos I’m surrounded by. It asks me to consider what I really value at home - perfectly clean and well put together or a safe place for people to be themselves. It is possible, I’m told, to have both of these! But I’m focusing on the latter in my current season of life.

To be able to hear the Sage more consistently, I had to practice. One practice is learning to stop and take a breath. Positive Intelligence calls these PQ Reps. Just as you go to the gym to strengthen your body, you can do PQ Reps anywhere to build your mental fitness. My favorite one is closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths while scanning my body for any tension I may be holding. You are looking for ten seconds of full attention on one physical sensation. As I have done this more in moments of calm, I’m getting better at doing it in times of chaos.

Both the Saboteur and the Sage are already at work in your mind. PQ gives you the language to name the patterns and shift them.

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.

What happens in your head doesn’t stay there

You may be thinking - this all sounds good for me as a person, but will it really change anything about the way that I do my job? For an individual contributor, changing their mindset may not change their work much. But as a manager, your work gets done through other people. How you handle stress shapes how your team does their jobs.

A 2014 study, The Value of Bosses, looked at 23,878 workers over a span of about 5 years.³ It showed that variation between bosses in output per hour was more than three times the variation between workers. This means that the gap between a strong manager and a weak one is more than three times the gap between a strong worker and a weak one. The study also showed that swapping one of the weakest managers for one of the strongest raised team output by about as much as adding a tenth person to a nine-person team would.

That seems good, but what does it mean in the real world?

• A manager cannot and will not delegate. The team under them stays junior and the manager becomes a bottleneck.

• A manager avoids difficult conversations, so the team member that is a problem, stays a problem for a year.

• A manager says “yes” to everything while their team struggles to deliver on their promises.

• A manager rewrites every proposal their team submits and wonders why they can’t just do it right.

Which one is closest to you on a bad day?

You are the biggest influence on your team’s success. What happens in your head today doesn’t stay there for long.

It worked - for a while

Having Saboteurs is not a character flaw or defect. The Saboteurs formed because the thought patterns worked for you at some point in the past. The Stickler got you promoted. The Pleaser kept you employed under a bad boss.

But that protection is getting expensive. The Stickler is now making you a bottleneck. The Pleaser bulldozes the boundaries you’ve set for yourself and your team.

Your Saboteurs are not just bad habits. They are fighting to protect you, but they can’t tell what you need to be protected from. They’re a reflex, not a decision. Willpower alone will not change a reflex.

Learning to name your Saboteurs doesn’t make them magically go away. But it does give you the power to stop obeying automatically.

Reflect and Act

Reflect. What is a pattern that helped you get to where you are today? What does that pattern cost you this week, and who is paying that cost?

Act. One thing this week: take the Saboteur Assessment and write down your top two. Don’t act on them yet. Carry them into your next meeting and notice which one shows up.

1. Eric Anicich and Jacob Hirsh, 'The Psychology of Middle Power: Vertical Code-Switching, Role Conflict, and Behavioral Inhibition,' Academy of Management Review 42, no. 4 (2017). https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.2016.0002

They call the back and forth vertical code-switching. What it produces is role conflict, which shows up as behavioral inhibition, the technical name for freezing and pulling back from a decision.

2. Positive Intelligence is the work of Shirzad Chamine, who developed the Saboteur framework and the assessment.

3. Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw and Christopher Stanton, 'The Value of Bosses,' Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. 4 (October 2015). The study followed 23,878 workers matched to 1,940 bosses at a large services firm over five years, roughly 5.7 million daily productivity observations. The standard deviation of boss effects on output was 4.74 units per hour against 1.33 for workers. Free working paper version: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Bosses%20Lazear%20Shaw%20Stanton%204%208%2014_b7b0b4a1-a52c-428f-867a-70f986ce886a.pdf