So let’s talk about igniting your Third Factor and becoming a leader with a strong developmental bias who is very effective at growing and developing others. If this interests you, what’s blocking you? What do you need help with? Is your biggest block around what to do and how to do it? Then you’re in the right place; showing you how is the primary purpose of this book.
Caring is at the heart of really good leadership. To quote the message I once saw on a billboard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, “. . . people want to know how much you care, before they care how much you know.”
Any journey is difficult without accurate maps. This book provides you with the maps you will need to begin the process of becoming a leader who not only is very good at developing others but derives personal satisfaction from doing so. It’s an endeavor of the highest order.
Editor: A rousing start, but there must be more to the concept of the Third Factor than you’re disclosing here.
Author: Yes, a lot more in terms of Dabrowski’s theory of moral and emotional growth, which he called the Theory of Positive Disintegration. He believed that if people had certain, what he called “over-excitabilities”— intellectual, emotional, sensual, psycho-motor, imaginative—they had the inner capacity to transcend their upbringing and culture and move to higher levels of development. The disintegration is positive: although the person temporarily disintegrates, questions what they are going through, and experiences what Carl Jung called “the long, dark night of the soul,” they reintegrate at a higher level as a result of those over-excitabilities.
Editor: That’s out there. How did he arrive at such a theory?
Author: Oh, that’s a very long story. The short version is that he looked at the lives of those who most would agree had evolved to very high levels morally and emotionally, and saw that they had all gone through this process of temporary disintegration and then a higher level of integration. He wrote numerous psychological developmental biographies on such people as Kierkegaard, Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Editor: That’s interesting. Tell me more about the over-excitabilities.
Author: Dabrowski had another term for over-excitabilities. He called them “tragic gifts.”
Editor: Why so?
Author: He called them gifts because, for example in the case of emotional over-excitability, these people really feel the world. They are in touch with all the joy and the suffering; they experience at an emotional level all that they and others are going through. He called them tragic because the world was not yet ready for people who felt at such a deep level.
Editor: When I was younger I read a book called There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves.
Author: I know the book, and it’s a beautiful example of what we are talking about. Now tell me: how do you feel about what we have covered so far?
Editor: There is hope.
Author: On that ringing endorsement, let’s move on.
1 Developing a Developmental Bias, or a 3 a.m. Wake-up Call
Editor: So where to now?
Author: I thought I’d talk a bit about how this focus on developmental bias evolved and led to the five “rings” we’ll be discussing in the book, and why this is important in the business world.
Editor: Hmm . . . I’ve been thinking . . .
Author: Oh-oh! Every time Sandra, my wife, says “I’ve been thinking” I know something is about to happen or change for me.
Editor: That’s because wives often have a strong developmental bias as far as husbands are concerned, and that’s what I was going to point out. The wife thinks: “I see so clearly where he needs to get better. Why doesn’t he get it?”
Author: I want to point out that getting married does not often lead to the type of developmental bias of which I’m speaking. Sandra, for example, has clearly identified countless ways for me to be better. Observing my many and obvious flaws, she sees my need to be better in an increasingly wide variety of settings. I would suggest, however, that most of it is more connected to the fact that when we’re out in public together, she doesn’t want in any way to be associated with, or embarrassed by, any quirky behavior on my part.
Apparently this is quite a common pattern. Peggy Baumgartner, head of our training division, recently asked her husband, Richard, to write a selfassessment, an exercise we use in many of our workshops. When Richard scored low on the “self-critical” scale, Peggy couldn’t understand, given his many and obvious faults, how he could be so blind. His response, she tells me, was that he had no need for such self-reflection, since she pointed out his flaws and shortcomings with some frequency!
Editor: I don’t know Peggy but I sure can see her point. At any rate, perhaps my way of pointing out my husband’s shortcomings could use some work. Let’s hear if there’s anything of value in what follows.
Author: Quit buttering me up . . .
You could have cut the tension with a knife. The finalists for the 100 meter hurdles at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens were in the blocks. The world champion and gold medal favorite, Perdita Felicien, was in lane 5, and the hopes of a nation were riding on her. The gun sounded, and Perdita shot out of the blocks toward the first hurdle. She hit the hurdle, went down onto the track—and in a second her dream was shattered, along with the dream of the woman in the next lane, who fell over her.
I was asleep in my bed in the Olympic village by the time my roommate, Gary Winckler, returned from the track events of the evening. He tried not to wake me as he fumbled around in the dark, but I rolled over and muttered, “What a bummer, Gary.”
“Yes,” came the reply, “but it will make us stronger.” Gary was Perdita’s coach.
In my role as a sport psychologist, I have worked with and coached hundreds of coaches. Gary, who is also the head coach for women’s track and field at the University of Illinois, is an example of one of the exceptional ones. A scant few hours after what could have been a careerdefining disappointment, he had already reframed the situation and was laying the necessary groundwork for recovery. His strong developmental bias—evident in his quest to ferret out the possibilities for growth in a bleak situation—was already in play.
Coaches come in all shapes and sizes, and with a range of personalities. But what the very good ones all have in common is that they operate on a similar set of beliefs and principles. Beneath the different personalities and the widely varying situations in which they work, the five characteristics of a developmental bias are very much in action. The same is true of exceptional business leaders and parents. A strong developmental bias underscores everything these people do. Their view of the concept of performance is much broader than athletic prowess, quarterly sales figures, or good grades. It is concerned with the