Friday Reflection (No.39) Motives and Decision-making Part 3 - Achievement

September 23, 2022

“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, sometimes I get a good feeling, yeah
I get a feeling that I never never never never had before, no no
I get a good feeling, yeah” -Good Feeling, Flo Rida

This Flo Rida track could easily be the anthem for achievement-dominant leaders.¹ They tend to pursue that next crowning win, because it creates in them a good feeling. At the same time, the pursuit of this good feeling can be what trips them up in certain decision-making situations.

This week’s reflection continues on the topic from the last two weeks on motives and decision-making. Last week, we explored decision-making watchouts and techniques for affiliation-dominant leaders.

Let’s look at achievement-dominant² leaders this week.

Watchout #1: Choosing the ‘safe’ path. Achievement-dominant leaders tend to fear making mistakes, which often means they are more risk averse.³ They’d rather go for the “sure” thing. The challenge with this decision-making approach is it comes at a real cost. One analysis suggested that organizations could improve their performance by over 30% by reducing risk aversion.⁴

Technique #1: Worst case scenario planning. Imagine the worst case scenario of what happens if a decision fails. Then compare this worst case outcome to the costs of inaction (i.e., what do you miss out on if you don’t do this?). In nearly all cases, the worst-case scenario is easier to rebound from than we think and the cost of inaction is much higher than we think. From there, plan a set of actions that can help you or your organization rebound from a potential failure. In many cases, you won’t need these mitigation plans, but you’ll feel more confident taking the decision knowing that you’ve planned for the failure.

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Watchout #2: Deferring to hierarchy. Achievement-dominant leaders often owe their success to following the rules of authority and winning according to those rules. As a result, they can at times be too quick to defer to a “senior” person even when they privately think that senior person is wrong.

Technique #2: Anticipate resistance. Prepare as if your boss or the board will be skeptical of your decision. Spend time thinking about their personal agendas and motivations. Then develop a mini script for how you will appeal to these agendas and/or motivations if they initially see things differently than you. By visualizing this resistance AND preparing your mind (including the literal words you will use to confront it in a constructive way), you will be less likely to capitulate as quickly.

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Watchout #3: Analysis paralysis (especially in uncertainty). When all the facts are known, achievement-dominant leaders tend to be strong decision-makers. Analysis paralysis kicks in when there are high degrees of complexity and uncertainty. In these situations, achievement-dominant leaders often want “one more piece of data” or “one additional analysis” before they feel comfortable moving forward. This “one more” syndrome can persist for weeks and even months, which ultimately delays the decision significantly.

Technique #3: Develop an “uncertainty” decision-making process. Consider a process that relies less on churning on analysis and getting to the perfect solution. Instead, create a process that emphasizes experimenting and continuous learning. One process you could adopt also comes from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive. They call it W-R-A-P:

1. Widening your options: Open the dialogue to ensure you have a broad enough set of potential solutions to achieve the goal of your decision.

2. Reality test your assumptions: Consider practical ways to run small tests on different potential solutions. This step is particularly valuable because it enables you to experiment and learn.

3. Attain distance before deciding: Evaluate the outcomes of each of the small tests you ran in step 2 against the desired goal of your decision. To do this step as effectively as possible, it is helpful to have prepared 3-4 specific success criteria in advance. Another way to attain distance is a technique I described for affiliation-dominant leaders called 10/10/10.⁵

4. Prepare to be wrong: Create an timebound alert for your team to re-evaluate a decision if specific underlying facts change. For example, you can use monthly team meetings to look at progress on 1-2 simple metrics to determine whether the decision is having the desired impact.

While the right decision in these uncertain contexts may end up going against your instincts, having process "certainty" (even if outcome is uncertain) can help achievement-dominant leaders feel increasingly comfortable with uncertainty and avoid analysis paralysis.

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For those of us that are not achievement-dominant leaders, there is a high likelihood that you have people on your teams that are. In fact, I hope you do, because as individual contributors, achievement-dominant individuals are amazing to have on your team. These watchouts and tools can be effective for helping them become even more effective in decision-making and can serve as one arrow in their leadership quiver to help them elevate from individual contributor to team leader.

Some questions I reflected on this week:

1. What are some upcoming decisions where these watchouts may show up for me?

2. Who can hold me accountable for implementing one of these techniques and sticking to the insights that come out of it?

3. Who else would benefit from coaching on some of these techniques?

1. Like many of Flo Rida’s songs, I didn’t know exactly what he was rapping about in this track until I read the lyrics more closely for this reflection, because whenever it came on I was too busy dancing to listen to the words beyond the chorus.

2. McClelland defined achievement as the desire to excel and succeed based on a set standard of performance. It is tempting to view achievement motivation from a western capitalistic lens and crown “achievement” as the “best” dominant motivation (see what I did there).

The reality is that these profiles are neither good nor bad just the result of our experiences growing up. The point of these reflections is to better understand some of the potential “dark” sides of each motivation profile when it come to decision-making.

3. A skeptic would say “Isn’t everyone afraid of making mistakes?” To some degree, yes. For example, even those with the highest risk tolerance aren’t exactly jumping for joy when they make a mistake. That said, achievement-dominant leaders often have an even higher aversion to mistakes, because growing up, so much of their self-worth was tied up in validation for the goals that they achieved.

4. See this compelling article here. One of the authors is Daniel Kahneman who is one of (if not the) pre-eminent thinker on decision biases.

5. You can read about it in more detail in last week’s reflection.