The Star Performer

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger we never really wanted to meet. (Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)

Enneagram Three executives are the ultimate example of the focus on results so valued in American business. They're often expansive, risk-taking go-getters who ensure high productivity for their organizations; consequently, they tend to be found at top levels in the hierarchy.

Here's how Charlotte Owens was described by others: "She's someone who can keep a lot of balls in the air -- a high achiever who's willing to challenge the status quo, and very ambitious. Everything she touches turns to gold."

In Beyond Ambition: How Driven Managers Can Lead Better and Live Better, Robert Kaplan defines the expansive executive as vitally concerned with gaining mastery over her environment (he focuses on Ones, Threes, and Eights). True to Kaplan's description Charlotte said about herself, "I'm an expansionist. I like seeing success breed upon success. I've built this part of the business from $20 million to $120 million since I came here. A lot of people made it happen, but I drove the vision and drove it faster, sometimes at a breathless pace!"

While Charlotte was a formidable model for others, she was also perceived as "aloof," "independent," and "focused too little on the team." "I think sometimes I'm intimidating," she admitted. "I want to be a good leader and an example for others, but I'm not sure how good I am as a nurturer or consensus builder."

There seemed to be no end to Charlotte's energy -- in addition to maintaining high-level accountability in her organization, she was the star performer on a community basketball team.

Physically fit, attractive, and well-groomed, Charlotte met me in the hall one day and said: "Mary, look at this suit -- I've never worn it before and I've got a big presentation before the Board this morning. Do you think it's O.K.?" Because the suit was a compelling blue I thought she needed reassurance that she wasn't too glamorous for a business meeting. I told her she looked great (the truth). "No, look again," she said. "This skirt is at least an inch too long!"

Charlotte spoke poignantly when asked about her inner life. She said she'd always been obsessed with the parable from the Book of Matthew about "a house built on sand" and never knew why until she was introduced to the Enneagram ("The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash").

A superior athlete in high school and college, Charlotte discounted these efforts by saying she had a "room full of empty trophies." She vividly recalled her mother watching from the sidelines at basketball games. "She told me before a key game I had to rack up at least 30 points on my own. By half-time I'd only made two baskets, but I saw her looking at me as we ran back onto the court, and somehow I made up the difference in points. I don't think my feet ever touched the ground!"

She recalled a double message as a child: "Be the best, but don't stand out." Because of this Charlotte was surprised to be perceived by her peers as "a showboat." An Executive Vice President at the time of our initial consultation, she had outshone all of her peers in getting new customers, was an active and positive representative of the company in the business community, and was considered a real strategic partner by the CEO, to whom she was the heir apparent.

However, the CEO was told by Personnel that Charlotte's peers were not so keen on a future where she was their boss. She was doing all the external work with customers and getting most of the visible credit for new accounts. Her peers believed their behind-the- scenes support had contributed equally to the results she was getting, and they didn't feel appreciated. She didn't particularly discount the others' efforts -- she just didn't think about including them, in part because she was so busy "working the angles."

When asked how she felt about something, Charlotte would characteristically answer with her thoughts ("I feel that..."). "I'm not used to looking at myself," she said. "And when I'm asked what I'm feeling, I freeze. I don't know what I'm feeling; I don't even know what's appropriate to be feeling!"

She reflected further, "I married a very outgoing man who does my feeling for me. Recently we came home from a party and he asked, 'Weren't you angry over what so-and-so said?' And I honestly had no reaction at all. I was more focused on the potential of interesting that person in a business deal."

Not surprisingly, Charlotte's feedback from subordinates and peers was that she didn't pay sufficient attention to their needs. Described by them as "serious," "reserved," and "unsmiling," their observations ranged from, "She's cautious about revealing her own feelings," to "Where her feelings are concerned, it's a 'black hole.'"

"She has difficulty getting close," said one subordinate. "I think it's because she lacks intuition about people." "She can be warm but it doesn't seem genuine," said another. "She can give you a gift that seems really appropriate to the moment, but she's not self- disclosing, and this lack of reciprocity affects my ability to trust her."

She didn't experience herself as needing approval. "It bothers me when my boss says I'm ego-driven, because I don't really want to have admiration or strokes to my ego. I want people behind me to do well, too," she said. "My perception of what I need and what employees need are two different things; they seem to need pats on the back and I don't."

Her boss said, "It's the 'I can do it all' attitude -- she focuses on her career and points out her value to people above her. It looks like she's seeking glory." Charlotte's explanation: "I like being able to influence my environment and I don't do it to get positive reactions from others; I do it to feel good about myself."

Neither did she agree with the assessment of her as a name-dropper. Others said: "She's extremely political." "She searches out the most prominent people at sales conventions, even if they're no fun." "She always introduces customers by their title." Charlotte explained it this way: "I never thought of it as reflecting on me. I just assume that others must be proud of their accomplishments and would appreciate the recognition."

Charlotte was asked to work with me because she'd pulled off a major financial coup which involved bankers, competitors, and politicians, as well as skillful manipulation of the media. She set all this up without involving her boss, then unveiled it in public with her boss present. "He went along with it as if he were part of it," she said, "but later he threatened to fire me because I 'acted outside the bounds of my authority.' At the time I was confused over his anger. I couldn't see what his problem was, given the results we got!"

This situation was colored somewhat by the fact that Charlotte's boss was a former peer with whom she felt competitive, and also by their differences in conceptual style -- he was a more concrete, factual thinker (an ISTJ on the MBTI), while she had a more innovative, free-flowing way of thinking (an ENTP). She had rationalized excluding him from the process because "his attention to minute detail would have killed the project before it got off the ground." For her, success was everything.

The Center for Creative Leadership has published some interesting research on "The Lessons of Experience" which are predictive of leadership success. One of these is the opportunity to learn from failure.

Charlotte described herself to me as "pathologically self-confident." She went on to say, "There's a fine line between defining failure as success and learning from failure. For example, I'll recognize some sort of 'failure' and then engage in a lot of fancy thinking in the guise of analyzing what could have been done better or differently, and then turn it into a learning experience. It's not so much a distinction between a failure and a lesson learned; it's the shifting so quickly over to the lesson learned. I'm now aware there's a little pathology in this."

As a postscript, when Charlotte turned fifty she left her corporate position and parlayed her substantial savings into a million-dollar retirement plan, then left everything behind and went to Africa with the Peace Corps.