How to set realistic goals and expectations
A major pitfall on the path to leading and living with more purpose is doing what we think we “should” do. This “shoulding” may be based on what our colleagues, neighbors, or family members do or on what they told us, directly or indirectly, that we should do.
Shoulding is often heavily influenced by mass media. And we see plenty: ads are the form of media most closely tracked, and the average number of ads we see a day is rising exponentially, from about 500 in the 1970s to as many as 10,000 in the early 2020s, with no slowing in sight. Some ads directly tell us what advertisers think we should do. Others include professionally developed fictional and real-life stories that may be less obvious but are very effective at influencing our choices about how we invest in each of our spheres. Just think about the images of “family” depicted in advertisements for coffee, pasta sauce, or minivans or the images of a “professional” in laptop or broadband ads. I’m guessing that the people, activities, and/or values reflected don’t necessarily match your image of your best self.
The brilliant writer Margaret Atwood advises, “Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.” Until we manage to banish should to another dimension, we can at least get better at recognizing shoulding and building strategies to avoid its grip. Shoulding is a We-dimension issue. The notion of something we should do can arise only from groups. Sometimes the group presents the notion of what we should do; sometimes it’s just our imagination or interpretation of group norms. A lot of good comes from being part of and identifying with groups, whether a neighborhood, work or sports team, religious association, horoscope network, or otherwise. But the downside to any of these group affiliations is a narrowing of what we see as possible or desirable. Indeed, “groupthink” is a recognized psychological phenomenon by which groups accept suboptimal decisions simply to maintain harmony. The group-based origin of shoulding is important to recognize as we prepare ourselves to resist it when it counters our purpose-aligned behavior.
Why We Fall Into Shoulding
Let’s consider why these group-generated ideas of what to do can have such sway over our choices. Hint: it’s no accident!
Organizations are designed primarily to align action by a group of people, and alignment is easiest to maintain when there aren’t changes or discord in pace or direction. So organizations tend to encourage, reward, and even demand that we do nothing different from what we did yesterday or what our colleagues are doing. You might recognize this as “Because we’ve always done it that way” syndrome. Different organizations certainly suffer from (or enjoy) different strains of this ailment, but even the most innovative and fast-moving must have some norms to shape their members’ behavior.
Purposeful “unconsultant” Meighan Newhouse, CEO and cofounder of Inspirant Group, recalls working with a client on a transformation project. As always, they had started with the process at hand and were reviewing the team’s steps in a certain business activity. One particular step jumped out as cumbersome, so Meighan asked why it was done that way. The client team was quiet, and then one person said, “[A former colleague] told us to do it that way.” Before Meighan could ask more, another member of the client team exclaimed, “[That former colleague] hasn’t worked here for five years!”
This type of shoulding is incredibly pervasive once you start looking for it. And not surprisingly, shoulds are often incredibly unhelpful! Try to identify and undo them whenever you can, and as quickly as possible. A particularly explicit form of shoulding comes in performance metrics, such as sales targets, output expectations, or quality standards. But it also shows up outside the workday in the form of our phones telling us to walk more, our spouses pushing for a spending limit in our households, or a volunteer board requiring us to raise a certain amount of money. There are also explicit but less measurable expectations we’ve integrated from childhood, such as “work hard” and “be generous.” These expectations not only constrain the way we invest our time, energy, and attention (often without our awareness) but also account for a narrow range of outcomes, which can lead to overemphasis on certain quantitative elements of our inputs and results.
Responsible-luxury fashion entrepreneur Vanessa Barboni Hallik feels the pressure of these shoulds, saying, “It’s hard because collectively we still measure results in a narrow way. I’m conscious that my team’s well-being, suppliers’ living wages, and customers’ delight at our products have very direct bearing on our survival and profitability. But the vast majority of investors merely want to see a downward trend in unit cost and accelerating progress toward profitability.” These bottom-line measures are important, to be sure, and pur- pose-driven leaders are clear that the shoulding that aligns with their desired impact is more nuanced than the black-and-white financial indicators we tend to focus on. There are also sociological, evolutionary, and psychological reasons we’re subject to shoulding.
Tribal Shaming
As well as explicit and implicit forms of shoulding from organizational forces, our peers also work to keep us “in line”—often unknowingly. Clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez leads the thinking about tribal shaming. This concept is basically the idea that people use shoulding to protect a shared group by maintaining its norms and discouraging deviance.
In practice, tribal shaming shows up in the comments from friends, colleagues, or the devil-in-an-angel-costume on your shoulder when you take action to lead purposefully. Your spouse remarks, “You seem so tired since you started getting up to meditate. Are you sure you’re getting enough sleep?” A colleague comments “Congratulations on that new hire. Good for you for finding someone qualified who didn’t go to an Ivy League school!” These observations are rarely intended to be mean or devalue your investment in positive change, but their effect in discouraging your courage is undeniable. Your new behavior doesn’t fit the established group norms, and that creates discomfort for people in the group who haven’t yet changed.
Humans Tend to Conform
Before moving on to the risks of shoulding, let’s recognize our role in these group-driven pressures. Shoulding comes from groups, and as social beings we’re inherently susceptible to it. If we are to survive as a collaborative species, we must have some interest in meeting the expectations of the various groups to which we belong.
Research has shown that we learn from our peers to like or fear things even without having direct experience with them ourselves. Whether it’s our preference for bananas or apples or the way we run a meeting, we follow what we see others doing rather than experimenting and coming to our own conclusions. This social learning is the root cause of “Because we’ve always done it that way” syndrome. It’s very helpful in building and maintaining culture, but it conflicts directly with change, including the change required for purposeful leadership to become the norm.
Further, most humans (not all, allowing for neurodiversity) have an innate desire to please, be liked, and perform well. We want to meet the expectations that our groups set out for us, even when they aren’t in line with our desired impact. Particularly in fast-paced, high-stress, and hybrid or remote organizational settings that elicit and reward continuity, all of this means that we’re unlikely to make the choice to do something new or different.
Shoulding Ourselves
Beyond the formal and informal shoulding put forth by our various groups, we also create our own from images in the media, examples set by our parents or other mentors, and other abstract inputs we encounter beyond the confines of any specific group. These can often be the most dangerous forms of shoulding, because we make them up ourselves and they are thus difficult to trace or uproot.
Shoulding sometimes reveals itself easily by the presence of the word should in a thought or statement. But it can also hide in the form of what we accept as consensus reality, or simply “how I do things.” I’m a perfect example. It took me 10 years to undo the belief that I should spend my career in the not-for-profit sector if I wanted to have an influence on the way opportunity is distributed. No career counselor or measurement tool told me this; I just absorbed it from my cultural surroundings, which say (particularly loudly, in the 20th century) that not-for-profit is the place to do work that’s good for the world.
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