Preface
My leadership journey began with an unexpected phone from deep within CIA Headquarters. The Spymaster—or Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)—runs worldwide clandestine operations, and he needed to see me immediately.
The call puzzled me. An uneasy feeling flashed through my mind. Had I done something wrong? I left my desk and dashed down the navy blue carpet to the DDO’s suite at the end of the corridor.
When I entered the room, the beleaguered Spymaster looked up. At the time, fighting raged in Kosovo and Kashmir, Russian President Yeltsin had named Vladimir Putin Prime Minister, and an errant NATO air strike in Belgrade had killed three Chinese embassy employees.
That was the moment he sprung a question that changed my life:
“Mike, why is it—when I pull the levers, nothing happens?”
I reeled. Based on our previous discussions, I figured that “levers” meant reward systems, measurements, communication, and other standard management practices, but maybe it was a metaphorical question. I was not prepared to answer this. I was stunned. How could someone in one of the most powerful jobs in the world feel so helpless?
My shock turned to embarrassment. I was his senior advisor, yet my Harvard Business School training, small-business experience, and years at General Electric (GE) had not prepared me for such a fundamental question.
I stammered something about bureaucracy getting in the way. That was partially true. I had seen firsthand how delays, bottlenecks, and conflicting objectives impeded pre-9/11 CIA operations. Yet even as the words left my lips, I knew bureaucracy was not the real cause. My instinct told me there was more to the answer than garden-variety red tape.
We grappled with the issue for close to an hour, but I failed to come up with a satisfactory explanation. As I went about my day, I obsessed over the question. I thought about the data I had collected showing that CIA contained a mix of highly effective, energized units, alongside units with low morale and poor productivity. If red tape was to blame for the levers not working, it should affect all units equally. What I termed “The Spymaster’s Dilemma” gnawed at me.
Over the two-decade course of my journey, I often doubted if it would all come together—that I could offer a cogent answer. Ten years into my journey, I thought the answer was “human nature.” After all, traditional management approaches agonizingly grind against the change resistance inside all of us. Our desire to cling to the status quo is a documented psychological state, an anxiety felt personally and emotionally, as well as one embedded throughout the workplace.
I continued my research and experimenting for another ten years. I discovered a new and easier way to lead, which bypasses many of the human instincts, cognitive biases, and drives that managers fruitlessly push against. When I synced leadership actions with human nature, I discovered less painful ways to implement change, spark creativity, and give and get feedback. These easy-to-apply techniques shared one thing in common: They increased certainty in the minds of employees, team members, and subordinates.
Perhaps you are on a similar journey to improve as a leader. If you’re a manager, there’s a good chance you have often thought about leadership; after all, leading—getting others to change—is a major part of your job. Maybe you’ve tried issuing orders—barking at the air—or you’ve balanced threats with rewards.
At this point, you may be hoping to speed up your leader ship odyssey. Is there a magic elixir—besides coffee, which only gets us so far—that could fix your managerial problems?
In essence, there is. It resides inside the human mind. And I’ll show you techniques to unleash that potential. No matter where you sit in the management structure, you can use a range of Mental Prompts to harvest the best of human nature, inspire employees, and improve workplace culture.
Best of all, almost all of these techniques can cascade down the organization; they answer the Spymaster’s questions about how you get those levers going. Using my mental prompt techniques and a slew of others will help you lead in a simpler and radically different way.
How? We’ll start by gaining a better understanding of human nature. Most evolutionary psychologists tell us that our minds have not significantly evolved since the Stone Age. Even if we are in offices, behind computers, and living in the modern world, our brains are still hardwired for primeval life. In fact, in Part I, we have a prehistoric man come along for the ride.
In 1991, a pair of Alpine hikers made one of the century’s greatest archeological finds—a frozen 5,300-year-old body. The ice remarkably preserved the man, dubbed Ötzi, along with his clothing and equipment. Looking inside Ötzi’s head, we can, using neuroscience and psychology, track the brain wiring that still underlies some of our basic instincts and human drives today.
Understanding a few brain and behavioral basics will help us develop easier and more effective ways to relate to and lead employees. Let’s go back five millennia and check in with Ötzi.
