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When I first became a manager, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I know it wasn’t what I ended up with - reorgs and process improvements that worked against my team. In the midst of all of the newness of the role and the confusion, my goal was to look like I had it all put together. I used to go into a back room of the office to sit in the dark to get away from it all. I kept chasing more, though - higher profile projects, opportunities to train others - anything that would appease the voice in my head telling me that doing more was the only way to prove my value. What should have felt like a win didn’t anymore.
The Voice That Got You Here
The voice that kept telling me that my accomplishments were the only things that proved my value was a Saboteur, a thought pattern that disguises itself as helpful while working against you.1 There are ten in all, and we all have them in some combination or another. The question is whether or not they get to call the shots. The Saboteurs are genuinely trying to be helpful. They think they are using your strengths to protect you from your deepest, darkest fears, but they can’t tell the difference between a masked intruder and a slack message from your boss.
This time around, it’s the Hyper-Achiever, who relies on external achievements to define their worth. The Hyper-Achiever is protecting you from the fear that you aren’t worth keeping around if you aren’t producing exemplary results. It can be a remarkably deceptive Saboteur because on the outside, people can only see your success, not the way you bullied yourself to get there.
Companies build and reward Hyper-Achievers by promoting the individual contributors who keep all the plates spinning. In reality, the exact thing that gets promoted is the thing making you lose sleep at night wondering if you’re enough. The rules changed, and no one notified you.
When the Hyper-Achiever is controlling your thinking, your value depends on constant achievements, each more impressive than the last. But in the chase for validation, you neglect yourself. You tell yourself that happiness will come after this project is done. You find ways to bend your values to fit the situation at hand. Eventually, you come to believe that you can only accept yourself if you are receiving praise from others and you end up becoming a bottleneck for the team that you want to uplift.
The Hyper-Achiever runs the same circle over and over. You achieve a goal and feel a rush, but eventually, that rush wears off and you feel empty. Feeling empty causes you to raise the bar higher than your last goal and push even harder. It’s a brutal cycle.
Your Team is Watching
Your team also falls victim to your Hyper-Achiever cycle. As soon as they finish a challenging project, you’re on to the next challenge. Your team never gets to celebrate their accomplishments, let alone get a break. You can’t acknowledge their work because you don’t recognize yours either.
The perfect example of the Hyper-Achiever running the show is found in Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls. (I am a girl of my time, after all.) While there are dozens of examples of Paris being the quintessential Hyper-Achiever, the one that stands out to me is her work on the Yale Daily News. Paris was the best reporter on staff and a clear choice for editor, but once she got there, her standards were so high that she tried to produce the entire paper herself. She ended up in a newspaper fort, cooking soup on a hotplate, and the paper came close to not getting published at all. She believed it wasn’t worth doing unless it could be done flawlessly.
You would never hold your team to the standard you hold yourself to. You don’t have to. They watch how you work and draw their own conclusions. Since the standard is never voiced, it doesn’t get examined by the team, just de facto accepted.
You think the voice bullying you is only in your head, but your team can hear it, too.
The Sage and the Hyper-Achiever
There is another voice whispering in your ear, the Sage. This is the part of your brain that is discerning and deliberate. The Sage assesses the situation at hand and your strengths and chooses a way forward that benefits you and those around you. While the Saboteur will try anything to remove your fear, the Sage is solving the actual problem at hand.
You’re in a meeting, and a project is mentioned. This is a high profile project and no one is jumping to claim it. Silence is filling the space, and you feel the need to take it on before you’ve fully understood the request.
The urge to take on the project isn’t a bad one, but you do need to question what caused it. The Hyper-Achiever would have you take it on to prove your skills and your worth, but the Sage has a different reason. To tell the difference, ask yourself - if someone else got to this before I did, would I be disappointed or relieved?
Relief signals that you didn’t really want to take on the task. You only jumped in to end an uncomfortable silence. Disappointment that someone else will get the credit is the Hyper-Achiever. Disappointment that you won’t get to run an interesting project is not. If you would take on the project even without your name on it, you wanted the work.
Say that you wanted the work and took it on. The Sage can clearly articulate the reasons for doing it. You have the time and skills; you have people on your team who have never had the chance to do something similar and this is an opportunity for them to learn.
At this point, everything looks the same from the outside. Whether you were motivated by the Sage or the Hyper-Achiever, you took on the project. What happens six weeks later?
The Hyper-Achiever has kept the project. There wasn’t really a choice; handing it off to someone else is tantamount to admitting that you aren’t good enough. Instead, you keep all the hardest parts for yourself while your team gets the safe parts. All the work routes back through you to ensure standards. You wind up exhausted, your team is cast aside, and the cycle restarts the next time a high profile project comes up.
The Sage has also kept the project. But after assessing your bandwidth and your team’s skills, you’ve decided on a different approach. You give the hardest parts to your team and coach them through it, allowing them to grow and gain recognition. You’ve cleared the way for others.
The question to sit with is: do I want to do this, or do I want the recognition that comes from being the person who did it? If it’s only recognition, you may do a good job, but you will make yourself and probably everyone around you miserable doing it. Sometimes the answer is I want both. Having both is fine. The question is which one is driving when the two pull in different directions.
Reflect and Act
Reflect. The people around you have already decided what good enough looks like on your team. They figured that out by watching you and learning your standards. How would they describe your standards if asked? (What would they actually say, not what you hope they say?)
Act. Review the work that you are doing this week and choose one thing that you or your team is working on. Tell your team what your expectations of them are for this project and their work. How will you and the team celebrate when those standards are met?
Curious about the Sage, the Saboteurs, and how they impact your leadership? Email me for a free assessment for more insight into your own patterns.
Saboteur, Sage, and Hyper-Achiever come from Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence framework. Chamine names ten Saboteurs, the Hyper-Achiever among them, and the Sage as the part of us that counters them. See Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours (Greenleaf Book Group, 2012). The terms are his. The examples are mine.