December 27, 2024

Leaning into Weakness

A common strategy for avoiding discomfort and personal growth.

My management style has evolved a lot over the years, but one constant I’ve kept from the beginning is to coach the best possible performance out of my players. That seems like an vacuous management platitude, but it’s not: doing this requires tremendous patience, brutal-yet-sympathetic candor, and an ability plus willingness to tolerate really intense, sometimes very emotional, push-back from the subjects of coaching. None of these come easy to most people.

Management blogs are usually full of HR-approved happy-talk that makes managing full-grown adults sound more like cajoling toddlers to finish their chicken nuggets. You will not find that here.

In this post we’re going to talk about a common obstacle that occurs not just in managing people at work, but in getting anyone to agree to do anything outside of work too: people leaning into their weaknesses as a means of avoiding discomfort and thereby, personal growth.

Personal Growth: Becoming Comfortable with the Uncomfortable

As I outlined in “The High Price of Comfort:”

Most people aren’t “minimum effort” people, but they are “low effort” people. They’ll put slightly-more-than-minimum effort into selective areas because they prioritize some needs ahead of others. But you’re not going to see these people running marathons or winning industry awards any time soon. At work, they’re often the type won’t invest in their co-workers or employers, treating them as merely a means to end… And yet, they’ll still have the audacity to whine and complain about mistreatment at the hands of their employers. They rationalize and defend their lack of achievement as though it’s driven by external circumstances, not internal choices and the overarching desire for comfort. If minimum effort people take, low effort people settle.

The common through-line between minimum and low effort people is that life is something that merely happens to them; not an active experience they lead and direct.

Comfort is the antithesis of purpose and achievement.

Our brains have a high degree of plasticity - our experiences, our habits, and our actions have the ability to transform how our minds work.

This is the basis for psychotherapy treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy - if a given patient has a psychological distortion like social anxiety the long-term solution for the problem is to gradually expose the patient to more and more social contexts such that the brain eventually stops producing feelings of fear or dread, having now become adjusted to social exposure as a normal thing.

In a more pedestrian context this is also true. When someone is asked to take on a new responsibility at work, many are going to have an anxious disposition initially:

Personal growth in a work context is the same as it is outside of work: becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable.

When People Lean into Their Weaknesses

There are various ways someone might react to being asked to do something uncomfortable - but the specific one I want to touch on today is “leaning into weaknesses” as it’s probably among the more difficult.

Leaning into weakness

Leaning into a weakness is a way of saying “no” without actually saying “no.” It can take the form of:

If you’re trying to grow your organization and bring the best out of people, accepting these excuses and others like them is a surefire way to cripple both your ability to delegate and to elevate people who work with you. This is where some grit, candor, and understanding (the one I struggle with most) are going to be required.

Most of the lines above are spoken sincerely - they’re excuses that also happen to be true. What we want to try to coach for is that the speaker’s feelings are real, but the reality created from their feelings is not - it’s a distortion created by anxiousness, in other words.

Insincere Inabilities

A small caveat: in some cases when the excuses are uttered above, they are lies, and this is when the speaker has a non-anxious motivation for not doing what’s asked of them.

Typically that’s going to be combination of being uncomfortable with just saying “no” or ulterior motives, such as laziness.

Hiding behind an “inability” is a form of conflict avoidance, if you consider telling someone “no” to be a conflict, which it should not be.

In either case, sincere or insincere - we’re going to manage the objection, appealing to inability, the same way. It’s not our job to read minds or cross-examine our co-workers, relatives, friends, etc. We’re trying to be effective, not “right.”

Responding to insincerity with sincerity and then proceeding accordingly will either flush the truth out, so we can address the true objection, or it’ll get the job done.

Resolution

When someone offers an inability as a reason why they can’t do something - they’re yielding to an external locus of control; they’re not telling you “no,” but there’s some immutable external force out there that prevents them from doing the thing.

The judgement call you have to make is: how confident are you that this person is up to the task, even if they didn’t object?

Rating that on a scale of 1-10, here’s how we address situations where people lean into their weaknesses:

1-3 out of 10: They Really Can’t

A saying from a mentor of mine: “if you try to get a pig to tap-dance, all you’re going to end up with is shitty dancing and a pissed-off pig.”

If you have a brilliant software engineer who is great at diagnosing problems and running thorough engineering investigations, but utterly terrible at speaking extemporaneously - you probably shouldn’t have him leading a sales call addressing deal points. This isn’t an instance of someone “leaning into weakness” - this is asking the wrong person to do the wrong job.

4-6 out of 10: Need Training and Confidence

If our internal measure of the objector’s ability puts them in the middle of the field then we’re not 100% sure they’re up to the task and neither are they. Before we can proceed - all parties need to get onto the same page.

There are two approaches I prefer for handling this scenario:

  1. Do it with them - you don’t have to do the entire job with them, but you must do enough to get the ball rolling. If you have an engineer who has the raw capabilities but maybe not the familiarity with the code base, pair them with someone else who does have the knowledge and coach them both through the problem engineer A has to solve. If you have a marketing manager and she’s new to using your email marketing automation platform, have her prepare a set of operational questions (i.e. how do your tags work?) and go through those together before she does her first campaign.
  2. Deep end of the pool - sometimes you don’t have time to do it together. If you have a lot of direct reports or if you run a small company where you’re directly responsible for a great deal of things (my situation) - you don’t always have time to hold hands and take the plunge together. Sometimes you must simply toss your team member into the deep end of the pool and have them sink or swim. The key to doing this though: you must de-risk sinking - if you’re asking someone to prepare an investor presentation for you, make sure you give them time to show it to the executive team first or a simple outline before they even do that. Use bulk-heading to make sure the team member can’t bark too far up the wrong tree before a critical decision point or deadline approaches.

You will need to do this multiple times as you build your team-member’s confidence and gradually help show them that they can do it.

You will probably also need to invest in some systems, such as a basic check-list, that will help your team member keep themselves accountable and organized while taking on new responsibilities - this will help build their confidence over the long run.

But this is the real end goal: give your team members a chance to prove to themselves and to you what they’re really capable of.

7-10: There’s Another Real Excuse

In some cases, you can get a person who is an 7-10/10 and will still say they “can’t do it” and the answer is usually due to a genuine lack of confidence or familiarity. You can address that using the same steps as 4-6.

However, in most cases - the “leaning into weakness” by a person with this level of ability is a facade to hide something else. It could be a simple matter of preference and conflict avoidance, i.e. a reluctance to say “no.” It could be laziness. It could be a number of things.

Work with these folks the same way you would the 4-6/10 people and either the truth will come out or the job will get done. An acceptable outcome in either case.

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I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..