September 5, 2010
The Levels in Action
Why I Left the “A Team” After I Saw What the “A” Really Stood For
There’s a saying that goes, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” When you’re stuck in a Level 2 outlook, every talent and gift you possess starts to look like a weapon. Your intelligence, your authority, your bank account, beauty, or brawn can all be picked up by the butt-end and used as a cudgel for pounding competitors into submission.
To make matters worse, you can do this with almost no awareness that you’re doing it. You can pretend you use big words or highly technical terms for the sake of precision, when in fact it’s your favorite way to say, “I’m smarter than you, so defer to me.” You can share an amusing anecdote, ostensibly for a laugh, when the details are really contrived to inspire envy.
In Level 2 organizations, this weaponization of skills may even be encouraged; it is how you show you are worthy to join the leadership class, and how you convey your membership. I learned this lesson vividly 10 years ago, when I moved from a fairly aggressive, Level 2 culture to one much closer to Level 3.
My move came after my East Coast employer purchased another large company, and in doing so took possession of a Midwest site with 2500 employees. The newly acquired site didn’t have a communication department, so I offered to relocate for six months to help build one. At the time, it seemed the epitome of self-sacrifice.
As a native East Coaster, I had absorbed a vague bias about the Heartland: The land was flat, the culture meager, the people wholesome and pleasant but dull, etc. These were casual, not strongly held opinions, and they were so quickly dispelled by actually living in the Midwest, I decided to stay here.
The difference that won me over was the friendliness of people. At work, they’d say, “Let me introduce you to someone who can help you.” At church, I’d hear, “Are you new in town? Would you like to have dinner next week?” It was wonderfully Level 3, but I didn’t know the Four Levels back then, so I used words like “easy-going” and “down to earth” to describe it. This was how I imagined myself, but I was wrong.
Anatomy of a Culture Clash
The Easterners saw themselves as the company’s A Team, while the whole Midwest site was treated like the B Team. (In fact, we were the A Team, only the A stood for something other than what we imagined.) |
It took about two months before it finally occurred to me: I was looking down my nose at my new colleagues and underestimating their talents. This point was driven home to me by “Jill Brown,” who served on an advisory group I had formed.
Jill was quite plump and wore comfortable clothes, like mom jeans and floral sweatshirts. She was pleasant, unassuming, and seemed to know everyone on the site. For all these reasons, I got it into my head that she was a secretary.
One day, I made my assumption clear in front of a roomful of people by asking Jill if her “fellow admins” might be willing to work on some project. After about 10 seconds of awkward silence and darting eyes, Jill responded graciously. “Not that it’s a really big deal, but I’m actually a manager,” she replied. “And technically, it’s Dr. Brown because of my Ph.D. But I prefer Jill.”
Eventually, it occurred to me that the same mistake I was making was fairly endemic among my former East Coast colleagues. For reasons I’ll discuss below, the Easterners saw themselves as the company’s A Team, while the whole Midwest site was treated like the B Team. (In fact, we were the A Team, only the A stood for something other than what we imagined.)
When a light bulb finally went on, I wrote an essay/full confession, which shared my unique perspective as someone who’d actually worked at both sites. The essay pointed to something I had failed to notice earlier – that East Coast leaders and those who aspired to lead were prone to “externalize” their authority.
To climb the ladder [back East] you need to be fluent in management lingo. You have to leverage scale, align goals, capture learnings, and know your burn rate and actuals. You have to upgrade your wardrobe and grooming; you don't see any slouches in The Suite, do you? You have to be able to generate PowerPoint slides at the drop of a hat, and give long, thoughtful replies to simple questions. … In short, it’s not enough to have knowledge, competence, and authority. You have to exude knowledge, competence, and authority. If you can’t display these traits through subtle but unambiguous signals, people are apt to doubt you actually have them.
By contrast, the Midwest site had a culture that prided itself on wearing authority lightly, and it frowned on the sort of posturing that helped one climb the corporate ladder back East. Since Midwesterners didn’t externalize talent in the way we had come to expect, we leapt to some unflattering conclusions.
Perhaps I'm just projecting my own guilt across the whole organization, but people from our East Coast office tend to underestimate Midwest colleagues. I know I've done it, and not because people here have behaved in ways that suggests they are stupid. They just lack the gloss that serves as an outward marker for talent back East. Over time, I’ve come to see that some of these “B Team” players are brilliant – savvy enough to recognize condescension when they see it. Which means that their first impression of me was, "Who is this arrogant jerk?" Ouch.
My main point was that the two sites had a communication problem. Once East Coast employees understood the Midwest culture better and vice versa, relations would improve significantly. The leadership of both sites found this observation useful. I got tons of email and an offer to stay in the Midwest and run a department. But again, I was wrong.
It wasn’t a mere communication problem; it was a Level 2 culture versus a Level 3 culture problem. To be more precise, the conflict arose from the Level 2 temptation to weaponize one’s talents and status and use them to dominate. (“We’re the smartest guys in the room, so we get to make the important decisions.”)
As I settled into my new job and site, I found the Level 3 culture a blessed relief. It was wonderful not feeling the need to feign competence I lacked, and to have the freedom to say controversial things like, “I don’t know.”
I still had a Level 2 streak a mile wide, which was called into battle on business trips back East. But in normal times, I didn’t feel the need to be aggressive or defensive. There’s no sense lugging a sword and shield around when your work with disarming, Level 3 colleagues.
–John Keenan, Editor
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Last changed: Apr 21 2010 at 10:59 AM