you can’t do “the inside job.” embrace it.
The hilarious, healing, real real honest Anne Lamott has a great bit in her book Almost Everything about what she calls “The Inside Job.” (Not the movie). It’s the set of things, unfortunately large, that extrinsic stuff cannot accomplish or deliver for you. And that you, as an extrinsic entity to the people around you, cannot do for them.
“You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity. Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune, or whether your partner loves you. Horribly, what this means is that it is also an inside job for the few people you love most desperately in the world. We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.”
-Anne Lamott
Big-hearted, industrious leaders often ignore Lamott’s wisdom. This is unfortunate. They think through empathy and grit they can create a workplace, or a mission, or a manager-direct report relationship that can achieve practical and spiritual harmony in the lives of their people.
Another class of leaders knows this isn’t possible, but they feel guilty about it. They waddle around apologizing for the fact that the organization can’t relieve its people of their spiritual burdens, or single-handedly unwind the worst snares of capitalism, or transcend in all respects the deficits of the culture it has arisen within. These leaders often preclude growth in their people for fear of challenging them, a fear rooted in a deeper fear of losing them.
Smart people, most people, the people you want to be working with - they see through both charades.
What they see on the other side of the scrim is either a bullshitter or a boundary-crosser. The bullshitter is insincere; they overpromise and they know it. The boundary-crosser is ignorant, even dangerous; they tread where they should not.
The people you want to work with will sneeze at these species of pretender. Their allergies will act up. They’ll stop believing you and believing in you.
The list of “Things Not to Attempt to Do FOR Your People”, the components of the Inside Job, includes but is not limited to:
Eliminating anxiety
Making your people’s lives, on the whole, feel harmonious and worthwhile to them
Creating a space of immaculate psychological safety
The perfectionists and the folks who are afraid of being caught as impostors, play a self-defeating game. I’ve played it so many times. It goes like this: If I can’t achieve the summum bonum, why even try? If I can’t windmill dunk, why jump or do squats? If I can’t write a NYT Bestseller, why do my morning pages or write at all?
This is a self-defeating, starf*cking approach to life. I don’t recommend it in general. It’s particularly unhelpful for leaders.
Just because you can’t do someone else’s Inside Job for them, doesn’t mean you should shut down your pursuit of a transformative culture and badass mission.
My suggestions are these:
Don’t try to do people’s Inside Job for them.
Don’t tell them or pretend that you’re going to.
Don’t use your irrelevance to all the Inside Jobs around you as permission to quit on the marvelous things you can do and deliver for your people.
The news I carry from my own time in the world of Doing Something that Matters with a Diverse Group of People is that those marvelous things tend to be quiet, counter-cultural, and awkward.
Gallup data and Seth Godin and intuition will likely tell you:
People want to do sh*t that matters…
with people they care about.
They want to be good at it…
and recognized for it.
And all of that matters more to them, over the long haul, than pay, title, perks, and other “extrinsic” stuff. In some cases, I’d say, this list matters more than job security. We tell stories; we make meaning; we want to matter. Even the hard-bitten “i’m just doing this to put food on the table so I can retire at age x” person is running a script to make sense of what he’s up to.
You can’t force a script on people. But you absolutely can provide or at least facilitate the things in the Gallup/Godin list. As a leader or founder of any kind, you have the greatest influence on that list.
You can’t do The Inside Job. Embrace that.
Then do your actual job, which, as it turns out, is pretty stinking meaningful.
