The Hidden Demons of High Achievers

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. If you’re a goal-oriented, type-A overachiever, then you and your secret anxieties and the ways you could be sabotaging your career are the subject of this week’s interview. We’re talking with Tom DeLong, Harvard Business School Professor and the author of the new book Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success. Tom, thanks so much for taking the time.

TOM DELONG: My privilege.

SARAH GREEN: So the book is about, and for, a group of people that you call high need for achievement individuals. What are the characteristics of this type of person?

TOM DELONG: I think the first thing is that they’re very, very smart. And they’ve learned at an early age to leverage that characteristic. I think that they are highly competitive. I think they’re impatient with other people and themselves. I think that in most everything they’ve done, they’ve been very successful. I think that they’re hungry for feedback, and mainly positive feedback. And they traditionally have overloaded agendas.

And the challenge– I can give you an example of a high school principal, a headmaster of a school who basically became so overloaded with his agenda that he basically gave up. And he came up to me, 43 years of age, and said, Professor DeLong, he said, when you talk about these attributes, this is me. And then he said, but I’m so miserable in my job that all I’m working for is retirement. And that comes in 12 years. And when I hear that, the worst part of that story, what really saddens me, is that he has 1,600 students.

And one of the dilemmas and the characteristics of these individuals is that when everything’s going fine, everything’s going fine. But when they hit a blip or they feel overloaded or they can’t do things in terms of the quality that they want to do them, rather than saying well, I just can’t deal with these, what happens is they overreact and start to say very, very negative things to themselves about why did I choose this job, I’m failing at this, my home life isn’t what I wanted it to be, I’m not living in the city. So they really create a kind of a catastrophic picture. And clearly, this 43-year-old headmaster had done that. So the dilemma is once they get stuck and feel that way about themselves, clearly what they do is they manipulate their environment to get some positive feedback. And then they jump right back to where they were before.

SARAH GREEN: So once that does happen and someone gets overloaded to that extent, what goes on inside them? What happens then?

TOM DELONG: What worries me the most, and the psychological term of what happens, is role overload or interrole conflict. And when these individuals begin to realize that they can’t do everything that’s on their agenda and they can balance everything, what happens is they start to experience ongoing guilt. No matter what they’re doing, they feel like they should be doing something else. So it gets very difficult to concentrate. There is never enough time, never enough time. And so often they abandon one role for another. And in the work setting, we know what they do is they focus on getting that one task done. And relationships suffer in the process. But this notion of ongoing guilt, it becomes chronic, it becomes a way of life. And I’m hopeful that the book has some answers for that.

SARAH GREEN: So in the book, you run through a checklist of some different characteristics of this subset of folks. And one of them that I thought was really interesting was when you mentioned the need that these type-A people have to compare themselves to others. And the chapter that’s on that is actually subtitled How to Break Your Heart Every Time, which is sad but I think is so true. Why is that a temptation for this subset of people?

TOM DELONG: Well, I think early on, they figured out that they had this drive. And I think they began to leverage it. And they also began to compete. And it’s not just to be number one once or twice, but it’s to be number one all the time. And so what happens gradually is that the external criteria for success becomes the norm. So we’re not looking at our own talents and saying, how have I grown and developed these talents that I’ve realized over the years? What I do is I say, well, when I go to this five-year reunion, how am I going to compare with all those people that I competed with? And so it’s that success is only defined in terms of how I do based on other people. And that, in itself, becomes addictive and becomes its own pattern.

SARAH GREEN: It sounds like to some degree what you’re saying is that their strengths end up becoming weaknesses. Things that helped them achieve early on then become weaknesses.

TOM DELONG: I couldn’t agree more. These individuals basically were born with this need to achieve and to be task driven. And they accomplish a great deal. And they work very, very hard. But as I say– and I give a number of examples about this– is that over time, they don’t even realize that their ambition and their need to achieve really becomes an addiction. And they don’t even realize it until they hit some flat spots or they hit a rough patch and aren’t able necessarily to adapt the way that they would like.

SARAH GREEN: Well, let’s talk about some of those adaptations. Because that’s actually what a lot of your work has been about, is how to change and do things better. One of the things you mention is that we need to start learning to do the right thing poorly. Now, explain to me how doing something poorly could actually help me be more successful.

TOM DELONG: This is surprising to me. And that is when I talk with executives, when I talk to very, very smart individuals and I tell them that one of the challenges of the high need for achievement personality is that when they try something, they want to do it perfectly the first time. And so therefore I tell them over and over again. There is no way that you can do the right thing perfectly the first time. The only way that you can change behavior, the only way that you can learn how to play golf, learn about algorithms, learn a new language, is that you’re going to stumble and bumble at the very beginning. And that is the fear that so many of these high need for achievement personalities have, is that in that process, they’re going to look bad, they’re going to feel exposed, and they’re going to feel silly. And that is what frightens them more than anything else, is losing their image of competence.

SARAH GREEN: So is that why you write that these people only take, quote, safe risks? What’s a safe risk?

TOM DELONG: A safe risk is I’ve run a marathon in four hours. The next time I’m going to run the marathon in three minutes and 58. Or when I’m creating a new product for the organization, I’m going to check it and I’m going to check it and I’m going to check it over and over again. And I’m going to over analyze it, because I’ve got to make sure that it succeeds the very first time rather than letting the process go. And so the goals that they set are often reasonably easy to reach, because the last thing they want to do is fail and not reach it.

SARAH GREEN: You know, my dad actually has a saying that seems applicable to this group of folks, which is that very smart people can make very smart excuses. What are some of the excuses that we make for ourselves or some of the obstacles that we put in our own way to sort of keep ourselves from changing?

TOM DELONG: Well, I think one thing we do that we’ve already talked a little bit about is that we compare ourselves with one another. And this can, in some ways, cause paralysis or it can cause some anger. And I think another thing that we do is that we can blame other people and say, well, the reason that I can’t achieve is because of my boss, or it’s because of my environment, or it’s because of my significant other, or it’s because I studied the wrong thing in school. So the list of issues, the list of things that we can bring up to manipulate our environment and manipulate ourselves so that we don’t look inside, there’s an infinite number of those things that we could bring up.

SARAH GREEN: Well, so to that end, I know in the book there’s a lot of advice of different checklists and tools and things that people can use. Can you give us one thing today that listeners could take away with to help them make a change, or to start to think about the kind of change they want to make?

TOM DELONG: I believe firmly that unless we create specific agendas– real simple agendas, zero to six months, short term, six months to 18 months, medium term, 18 months and longer, with no more than three or four bullet points under each one of those time frames– that unless we create a specific agenda that becomes dynamic and part of the change process, then I don’t hold out a lot of hope that people will do anything really different.

What I mean by that is this agenda goes on the mirror at home. It’s in the car. It’s given to your significant other. It’s given to your subordinates. So that when you interact with these individuals, you know that they know that you are working on particular items. But one of the difficulties that the high need for achievement personality has is that when they take in information and they’re processing that information, they have a very difficult time differentiating between urgent and important. For them, everything is urgent and everything is important. And once that happens, then these individuals often will focus on the task, will forget about relationships, will forget about the human capital dimension, or they’ll forget about the long-term goal. And then there’s a problem. And so the agenda helps us focus. It helps us differentiate between the urgent and the important.

SARAH GREEN: Tom, thanks so much for talking with us today.

TOM DELONG: It’s been my privilege.

SARAH GREEN: That was Harvard Business School’s Tom DeLong. The book is Flying Without a Net. For more, go to hbr.org.