Welcome back to the second in a series of blogs
on People. In my previous post (4 Nov, 2009) I introduced the 6 basic needs
that our brain has intellectually: certainty, uncertainty, significance, love
and connection, contribution and growth. Understanding the 6 basic needs is key
for leaders to manage their people and for the individual to better understand
their relationships. Lets focus on the first two needs in this post, the need
for certainty and the need for uncertainty.
For my work, I regularly speak and give
presentations, and often introduce the 6 basic needs to help the audience with
their people-specific challenges. Most of us lack simplicity in our perspective,
and this over-complication causes a lack of understanding when dealing with
people often leading to under-achievement or outright failure, personally
and/or professionally. I believe understanding the 6 basic needs are
fundamental to living a simple, healthy and fulfilled life no matter what your
chosen path. So, often I will get the audience involved by asking them to guess
what the 6 basic needs are, and discovered an interesting recurrence. They
almost always come up with 5 of the 6 basic needs, but they always miss the
same one – the need for uncertainty.
I find this trend very revealing about the nature
of man. The need for certainty is fairly simple to comprehend – human beings
spend their entire life looking for and blanketing themselves in the protection
of security which itself is a derivative of certainty. Think about the concept of
insurance, warranties or hedging. Financial instruments like certificates of
deposit, municipal bonds and treasury bonds are all generally ‘safe’ investment
options for those of us who prefer the guaranteed outcome of lower returns. These
are all products and concepts created to cater to people’s need for certainty.
Similarly, whom do we turn to when things don’t go right? Mom. The certainty
that mothers provide their children serves as a beacon of safety, security and
certainty throughout our lives. And the fetal position complete with thumb in
mouth is just another great symbol of our primal need for certainty.
But certainty is also something we seek in the
day-to-day aspects of life. People want to feel in control of their world. In
our jobs we are usually very forceful about maintaining control and order,
especially the higher we rise in the corporate org chart, or the more
responsibility we have. I once worked for an entrepreneur who was so paranoid
about his employees stealing from him that he monitored all e-mail activity and
planted cameras in various parts of the office to watch his people
clandestinely. There is no doubt he broke some laws in the process, but the
need for control (and the distrust) were extreme in this individual. Had he
spent more time actually understanding his employee’s basic need for job
security, trust, and feeling appreciated, he may have been successful today.
Similarly, in our personal lives we have a
burning need for certainty too. Whether its knowing that someone is waiting for
you when you get home, or that you have some place to be, we all need certainty
in order to know where we come from, where we are and where we are going. For
some people its about the routine of their lives, having a cup of coffee each
morning or reading a Sunday paper, calling a friend to chat or falling asleep
next to the one you love. For others its staying in their comfort zone, the
place they know best, familiarity, close to home. This is all man’s need for
certainty. We absolutely need this certainty, no matter how trivial or small it
may be. Without it our inner compass gets lost and we fall apart.
But man is not a simple animal. On the flip side
of this need for certainty is the need for uncertainty. The first time I heard
the need for uncertainty I had to let it sink in. My initial reaction was to
disagree, even resist the notion that I ‘need’ uncertainty, but the more I
thought about it the more I realized it was true. We are taught to pursue
certainty from a very young age, but human nature suggests we equally seek
varying degrees of uncertainty throughout our life.
Our need for uncertainty usually comes in some
form of risk taking, thrill seeking or exploring the unknown. Whether its
playing the lottery, the stock market, bungee jumping, skiing a black diamond,
or taking a trip overseas to a foreign country, we feed our need for
uncertainty at varying degrees depending on where we are in life and what our
appetite for uncertainty is. Michael Schumacher, the former World Champion in
Formula 1, said of his career that the turning point in his rise to fame was
when he got married. As a bachelor with no family or responsibility to anyone
other than himself, Schumacher didn’t hesitate to put the pedal to the metal as
he broke records winning F1 accolades for several years. But once he was
married an interesting thing happened. Michael’s track times all lost a second
or two from his best performances. That loss of speed Schumacher claimed had to
do with the new responsibilities in his life that comes with family. In other
words, a little more certainty became prevalent over the uncertainty of being
Formula 1 Champion.
Point in hand, the Lottery. People who play the
Lottery are chasing the dream of financial security, however the justification for
playing a game with odds that make slot machines look like conservative
investments is the thrill of how
close you come each week to the grand prize. That thrill of picking your
numbers, that anticipation of watching the numbers come up one by one, that gut
feel of ‘can it happen to me?’ are all forms of uncertainty that we seek,
sometimes crave. And it doesn’t stop with the Lottery. Think about the
athlete’s need for competition, the entrepreneurs’ need to give up the
‘comfort’ of a paying job to start a business, the graduate who takes a year
off to travel to far off places to ‘find himself’, or even a child’s joy for
riding a rollercoaster at an amusement park. There are many more examples that
would apply, but the basic point is we all seek some level of uncertainty to
fill our basic human need at some point in our lives.
If you are still not convinced then consider how
others are playing to this need. Television shows have evolved significantly
over the last 3 decades from the early days of Dallas and Dynasty, although the
‘Who Shot JR?’ gimmick changed television forever by playing to the audiences’
burning need to find out who the hell shot the most hated man on television at
the time. I am told the show Lost (disclosure: I have never watched an episode
of Lost) is a prime example of people being entertained by the element of surprise and what happens next? Millions of people each week watch the X-Factor
(American Idol UK version) to be entertained, but also to see who gets voted
off the show? Reality shows take this to another level, using the
unpredictability (and often stupidity) of human nature to keep audiences
engaged through an element of the unknown. Surprise, shock, the unknown,
unpredictability, fear, extreme emotion, thrills, drama…all play to the basic
human need of a degree of uncertainty. The question we should be occupied with
is how much uncertainty?
And it is exactly this level of understanding
that people managers need to have about their teams in order to achieve stellar
results. The art of leading and leveraging the troops is an under valued, under
‘talked’ element of what makes some leaders great. One of the key questions I
ask myself about every person who works for me, with me or even above me, is
how much uncertainty can they handle? What is their tolerance for the unknown?
How far out of their comfort zone will they go? If you lack this understanding
about your people then you risk losing in the long run. Its that simple. I once
hired an individual with little tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown to
account manage one of our biggest customers. Within 2 months I had to remove
the individual from the account and the team, an experience that stayed with me
for a long time because I should have done a better job understanding the
mismatch in personality.
Similarly, many individuals pursue careers in
Sales because they want to make a lot of money, but their personalities are not
geared towards the uncertain world of sales. Sales is a cutthroat world of
quotas, sales metrics and commission chasing. Anyone who cannot operate outside
of their comfort zone with some level of, well, comfort, should not cross the
line into the world of Sales. Early in my career I watched several colleagues be
lured away to sales posts by their desire to make more money, but the honeymoon
period didn’t last long and they found themselves out of favor with management,
and then out of a job for non-performance. They didn’t understand that in sales,
opportunities rarely come to you, but you have to find them. And that means
dialing the phone, talking to as many people as you can each and every day, and
mining the complex business world you operate in to find that one opportunity
that could be the difference between Ivy League and Community College for the
kids.
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