The Accidental Psychologist
Whenever I am asked to give my opinion regarding some workplace event or proposal, I can almost always give a convincing response, but I know that I won’t have a truly meaningful answer until the next morning. In fact it is only by giving myself space and time to reflect that I can ever say that I understand something.
This might sound like a serious handicap for someone newly promoted into a technical management position at one of the world’s biggest media companies and in fact, I felt that way myself. But the events of the last three days have caused me to question my assumptions about being an introvert, a highly sensitive person and also an effective leader. As I sit in the morning sunlight with my cup of coffee, I’m beginning to wonder if this could be something I could do, something I that I might even love?
But let’s start at the beginning, or at least as far back in my life that I can remember. I was never what anyone would call a “people person”. As a child I was happiest losing myself in books or sitting by myself drawing, writing stories or just daydreaming up situations in my head that frequently made me chuckle out loud, much to the confusion of anyone sitting nearby!
When I was 12 years old my parents bought me a computer, a Radio Shack Timex-Sinclair 1000, with 2K of onboard memory, a black and white graphics card, and an audio taperecorder to store data on. I felt like it was the most advanced culmination of magic and technology ever invented. (For reference even the dumbest smart phone you could buy today will have about a thousand times more computing power than that!) I was enthralled.
In those days there was no Web, and if you wanted to acquire a cool new computer game, it wasn’t uncommon to find the source code of one printed in a computing magazine. A couple hours of copying that program, character by character, into a BASIC terminal, and you were playing your own copy of “Alien Invasion” or “Super Maze”. Of course if you missed out a single character, or–God forbid–if you bumped the memory expansion unit on the back of the computer the wrong way, it was all for nothing. It didn’t take long for me to learn to get every keystroke right and to sit very still while doing so!
There was a word for kids like me in those days: nerd. It wasn’t exactly a compliment; in my case it was applied to anyone who didn’t wear the right clothes (Izod short-sleeve polo shirt with official Alligator logo) or enjoy the right hobby (American Football at my school, although Lacrosse was also acceptable). But I couldn’t conceive of any reason to pay attention to those things when I had the power to witness an Alien Invasion or to find my way out of a Super Maze. I definitely was a nerd.
Looking back I can recognise that it was more than just games or even technology that drew me into the world of computers: computing was a socially acceptable way to sit, alone, and actively daydream. I wonder if that surprises anyone who has not experienced it, but if you haven’t I would explain that it’s not like television, or movies or even books–all of which I would classify as passive–unlike any of those, programming is a creative act. By itself my Timex Sinclair 1000 offered me nothing but a blank screen. However, if one were willing to learn their way into its world, it would reflect back to them all the ideas and algorithms they could put into it, and it could do so in the blink of an eye, without any ambiguity and with complete predictability.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and the World Wide Web was changing everything about how we communicated and interacted with one another. If you’ve ever done that “text someone when you could more easily have just called them” thing you know what I mean. It suddenly became possible to socialise without social interactions. This was interesting to my Introvert self, and not only that but I knew how to build these web page things! The Age of the Nerd had arrived and damn it, if I weren’t present and ready to ride this wave into a long term career. More or less this is exactly what I did. I enjoyed success as a Web Developer for the next 15 years, working for a variety of great media brands: MTV, HBO and the BBC. You might say I’d accomplished exactly what I wanted, and in a way that was the problem.
As years and experience in a job accumulate there is an expectation that, with seniority, you will take on greater responsibility, and certainly I always needed new challenges in order to feel engaged. Slowly up the ranks I progressed, until the only remaining untried opportunities were in leadership roles. And there I hesitated. If you are familiar with the Peter Principle (the theory that employees are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, where they then stay) you’ll know why I wasn’t eager to take on any job that I was so poorly equipped to do well. I had reached some limit, after which I imagined a door labelled “Socially Adept Only”.
I am not socially adept. I’m too blunt, too withdrawn, too self-obsessed to get through most days without offending at least someone in ways that I can’t generally understand. Unfortunately this can be a self-reinforcing cycle. It’s fair to say it takes a bit of work to build a friendship with me! After many years, this all culminated in a disastrous way: by the age of 40 I had a good job, a wife I loved more than anything and two beautiful children, yet I genuinely believed the best thing I could do with my life would be to end it. When I found myself making plans to do so I became terrified, and my wife convinced me to go immediately to see a doctor.
The diagnosis was Clinical Depression, and in my case it was a life-threatening condition (the highest rate of suicide in the UK is among men aged 40 to 44). But having a diagnosis, being able to say it’s not that I’m bad, it’s just that I have this bad thing happening to me, was a relief in its own right. And knowing that this is a condition that can be treated gave me something I had very little of before: hope. Since then I’ve learned a great deal about my inner self, medically, emotionally and psychologically. I know now that I suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder, that the constant overwhelming stress of simply being in everyday social situations can exacerbate my depression, and quickly turn into a spiral of darkness from which I literally do not know if I will come out of alive. I’m careful now, and I know I need to be honest with myself and those around me about the limits of what I am capable of. I’ve had to become my own psychologist and to always be on alert for any signs of imminent breakdown in my patient.
With treatment, I was fairly stable for the next eight years. There were setbacks and challenges of course, but in general I managed to get through the usual minefield that life lays out before each of us without any serious injuries. However I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t growing very much either. Personally I tried my hand at a few things I’d always been interested in, I took up writing and had a couple of short stories published. I started playing classical guitar with more seriousness and earned my first graded certificate. But my career was very much pressed up against a barrier across which I assumed no introverts–and now we can add in “socially phobic” and “clinically depressed” to the list–people were allowed. That, I reasoned, was just the way life was; not everyone is born with the natural abilities required to lead, so if I know I am not a Type-A social butterfly, then I will just have to accept that career stagnation is the price I have to pay.
And then my role at work was made redundant. I was told I could either move to a new location and job or accept (a very generous) redundancy package and move on. I was torn. I genuinely loved working for the company I was in, yet I couldn’t ask my family to just pack up and relocate to a new part of the country. I started looking for a compatible opening within the company that would allow me, and and my family to stay. It ended up being the best possible thing to happen to my career. Through a series of wrangles and good fortunes, I ended up working for the same company, but at an office closer to my home, and still doing the software engineering work I was now an old-hand at. Or so I thought.
It turned out that in all of those changes a small but crucial miscommunication had laid a trap for me. I ended up accepting a role that, although not explicitly stated, required me to line-manage a small number of more junior Web Developers, and eventually a Designer as well. I half considered backing out. This was pretty much the exact situation I had actively tried to avoid for all of my previous career. Confirming my worst fears, I had some initial failures. In more than one case I had been left baffled over why some social interaction had left a co-worker in tears or furious with me. Suddenly I was back in high school again, and I wanted nothing more than to return to the nearest computer terminal and start typing in a Super Maze program. Luckily a coworker noticed my thinly veiled and growing sense of panic and recommended me for a new Leadership Training program that was being trialled at our company. Seeing no better option I agreed and four days ago now, I arrived at a room with 19 other new managers and leaders for the opening session. I wasn’t convinced that this was going to work.
Considering that this was a first-time for all of us–even the trainers–the course was extremely well thought-out and it was obvious that this was a supportive and safe environment. But I had heard too much of this sort of thing before: Myers-Briggs Personality Types, Emotional Intelligence, Transactional Analysis, I had already become familiar with and then inured to this kind of gobbledygook as I’d struggled with my own mental health challenges over the years. It was unlikely these people would say anything that I hadn’t already heard before. As it turned out, I was right.
But it wasn’t their words that had the transformative impact on me that I eventually experienced. What made the difference, I believe, was their passion and their actions. By that I mean they treated each of us with the exact same respect and care that they were describing in more analytical terms on the course curriculum projected on the wall behind them. And while there literally was a Type-A (Royal Marine, no less!) motivational speaker presented to us, he was careful to mention that even he needed time out to be alone and recharge his social batteries during a workday. He confided that his leadership challenges were as much directed inward towards himself as they were to those under his command.
And then we practiced. And by that I mean something completely unexpected to me, we acted out the things that effective leaders do. As if it were just some learnable skill rather than an inborn ability which you either have or you don’t. And that, they explained, was because it is. This blew my mind: leadership is a learnable skill. You can analyse and measure it, it can be practiced and improved and it can be openly and honestly added to your usual working relationships a little at a time as you are comfortable doing so. Hell, almost all of this was about Psychology which, last time I checked, was a proper science.
I can do science. I can do analysis and measuring. I can do learning. Maybe, just maybe, I can do leadership.
As I look back on the past three days, I’m filled with a sense of excitement at the opening of that previously closed door in my career path, but I’m also filled with trepidation, based on my own journey to get here. Is it possible to be a highly sensitive person and an introvert and also a good leader? Can anyone manage a team effectively if they are filled with anxiety over everyday social interactions? Can I be true to myself and my own personal values and still take on the role of a leader? After the last three days, and for the first time in my life, I think the answer might just be yes. But how that will happen and what the journey will be like is something I can’t yet guess. But in that regard I have received an invaluable gift: I am hopeful. And for that I am also very, very grateful.
