Last updated: 5 Jul 24 03:19:43 (UTC)

Self-Esteem at Work, by Nathaniel Branden

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My Notes

Chapter 1 - 21st Century Workplace

By self-esteem I mean being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness. This means trust in your ability to think, learn, make appropriate decisions, and respond effectively to new conditions. It also means confidence in your right to experience success and personal fulfillment - the conviction that happiness is appropriate for you.

Businesses cannot avoid psychology because it cannot avoid the question of what must be done to motivate people to give their best.

It is very difficult for people to act beyond their deepest vision of who and what they believe themselves to be.

Negotiators with poor self-esteem tend to ask for too much or too little.

Consciousness is the basic tool of survival.

The capitalist system that emerged with it was characterized by free markets and open competition, in which good and services were produced for profit, labor was performed for wages, and the means of production and distribution were privately owned.

Self-reliance and self-responsibility.

A great innovation was to analyze production tasks into simple, discrete, easily mastered steps, which no one had thought of doing before, and which allowed you to work “smarter” rather than harder.

Challenging us to do better and better and to think and respond faster and faster, and challenging our belief in our competence to do so.

Self-management, personal responsibility, self-direction, a high level of consciousness, and a commitment to innovation and contribution as top priorities.

Function as self-respecting, self-responsible professionals.

The ability to think for oneself, to look at the world through one’s own eyes.

Autonomy is intimately linked to self-esteem.

Cultivate lightness, lack of encumbrance, swiftness of response, constant alertness to developments that signal new opportunities, reducing bureaucracy and freeing units to operate entrepreneurially.

High self-esteem confers an competitive edge.

As mind becomes more important, self-esteem becomes more important.

Knowledge and new ideas count for almost everything.

You chief economic strength is your ability to think.

Chapter 2 - The Dynamics of Self-Esteem

There is no value judgement more important, no factor more decisive in your psychological development and motivation, than the estimate you pass on yourself. It has profound effects on your thinking process, emotions, desires, values, goals, and ways of interpreting the meaning of events. It is the single most illuminating key to your behaviour. If you know in what you invest in your self-esteem, and what you do to protect it, and how the level of your self-esteem affects your choices and responses, you have attained a high level of self-understanding.

Self-esteem is the disposition to experience yourself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness. It is made of two components: Self-efficacy and self-respect. Self-efficacy is confidence in the efficacy of your mind, in your ability to think; by extension, it is confidence in your ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change. Self-respect is the experience that success achievement, fulfillment - happiness - are right and natural for you.

When self-esteem is high, the action dispositions are to move toward life rather than away from it, to move toward consciousness rather than away from it, to treat facts with respect rather than denial, to operate self-responsibility rather than irresponsibility.

To face human relationships with a benevolent, non-arrogant sense of your own value is to enjoy an important advantage: self-respect tends to inspire respect from others.

If you deny your problems, you sentence yourself to being stuck in the very pain you wish to escape.

Our life and well-being depend on the appropriate exercise of the mind - and that process is not automatic. It represents an act of choice.

We are free to think - or to avoid thinking. We control the switch that turns consciousness brighter or dimmer.

The level of your self-esteem has profound consequences for every aspect of your existence: how you operate in the workplace, how you deal with people, how high you are likely to rise, how much you are likely to achieve.

Self-esteem makes the path to achievement easier and more likely. Healthy self-esteem correlates with rationality, realism, intuitiveness creativity, independence, flexibility, ability to manage change, willingness to admit and correct mistakes, benevolence and cooperativeness.

What is decisive for your future is not the defeat but the state of mind with which you greet it.

If you have good self-esteem, your communications are likely to be open, honest and appropriate.

High self-esteem individuals tend to be drawn to high self-esteem individuals.

One of the advantages of self-esteem is that you do not tend to escalate small frictions into major problems. You are not easily thrown off your center. You are not touchy - not overly sensitive. You do not quickly fall into defensiveness or reactive hostility. You tend to focus on solutions, on resolutions, rather than on self-justification.

Generosity toward the achievements of others is emblematic of self-esteem.

Elimination of negatives does not produce self-esteem.

What nurtures and sustains self-esteem is how we ourselves operate in the face of life’s challenges - the choices we make and the actions we take.

The Six Pillars

Living consciously: respect for facts; being present to what you are doing.
Self-acceptance: the willingness to own, experience, and take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and actions without evasion, denial, or disowning.
Self-responsibility: realizing that we are the authors of our choices and actions.
Self-assertiveness: being authentic in your dealings with others.
Living purposefully: identifying your short-term and long-term goals and the actions needed to attain them.
Personal integrity: living with congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.

There is no mystery about what creates trust. It is a matter of congruence, that is, integrity.

Work can be a vehicle for personal development.

Chapter 3 - The High Self-Esteem Leader

The primary function of a leader in a business enterprise is to persuasively convey a vision of what the organization is to accomplish, and to inspire and empower all those who work for the organization to make an optimal contribution to the fulfillment of that vision and to experience in doing so that they are acting in alignment with their self-respect. Thus, a leader must be a thinker, and inspirer, and a persuader.

A healthy ego asks, “What needs to be done?” An insecure ego asks, “How do I avoid looking bad?”

To be effective a leader must be well aligned with reality - open and available to all facts, knowledge, information, data, feedback that bear on the success of the mission of the organization. Openness to facts, pleasant or unpleasant, goes to the heart of what it means to live consciously - and the practice of living consciously is both a source of self-esteem and an expression of self-esteem.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, good leaders are open. They go up, down and around their organization to reach people… They make a religion out of being accessible.

Real communication takes countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It means listening more than talking.

Seeing the world as it is rather than as you wish it were. A sense of reality - a respect for facts.

Leadership begins with:

a vision to which he is passionately committed (goal)
a specific and concrete agenda (game-plan)
unrelenting focus on results (actions)

Sometimes we need to do things that scare us. Sometimes wee need to look at things that are painful.

There is an intimate relationship between integrity and the ability to inspire trust. People can and will perform extraordinary feats for leaders whom they trust. It is a matter of congruence between words and actions. One tells the trust. One keeps promises. One honors commitments. One’s behaviour manifests one’s professed values. One deals with people fairly and justly.

They do not realize how closely their smallest moves are notes and absorbed by those around them, not necessarily consciously, and reflected via those they influence throughout the organization. Trust is inspired by consistency and predictability.

Leaders are teachers and their first obligation is to be clear.

The focus can’t be “who’s right?”, but “what’s right?”.

To invite everyone’s feedback does not mean that everyone has equal authority regarding the final decision. Having a say differs from having a vote. After deliberation, “This is what we’re going to do.” That is a leader’s job. They trust in their own ability to think, chose and make appropriate decisions. They also manage their any desires they may have to be liked or approved of.

A leader’s job is to guide the organization to the fulfillment of it’s mission, and not to indulge in personal catharsis at the expense of this primary commitment. A leader’s job is to do what he or she honestly thinks is right for the organization.

It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to give away power to welcome and embrace the talents of others, never to steal their responsibilities, and to be relentless in communicating one’s belief in their potential.

Respect for the individual, treating people as resources rather than costs, talking less and listening more, building consensus rather than flinging orders, making the needs of the customer entral, and the like.

Effective leaders need confidence in their own judgement, perseverance in their vision even when others do not yet share it, ability to tolerate misunderstanding, opposition, and aloneness, and a passion to fulfill that vision that overcomes difficult obstacles. And by being fully as much the student and learner as the teacher.

It is defensiveness, not openness, that reveals insecurity.

Problems should be solved by the people who created them.

A brilliant leader is not someone who produces solutions. It is someone who inspires other people to produce the brilliant solutions.

Under pressure we tend to regress to older, more primitive modes of reaction. The strong our self-esteem, the less likely this regression is to happen.

A commitment to creating as many leaders as possible throughout one’s organization is a strategic imperative. Leaders who are secure in the knowledge of their own value are more likely to nurture and support potential leaders rather than feel threatened by them.

Chapter 4 - High Self-Esteem Management

John D. Rockefeller would pay more for the ability to manage people than for any other talent.

To inspire and facilitate the resourcefulness of others.

A self-esteem anchored in trust in your mind and its operations is infinitely more reliable than one anchored merely in your status or possession of a particular set of skills.

Attracting and keeping high-quality people. A business culture that supports and nurtures self-esteem.

15 conditions to bring out the best in people:

People feel safe. Secure that they will not be ridiculed, demeaned, humiliated, or punished for openness and honesty or for admitting, “I made a mistake” or for saying “I don’t know but I’ll find out.”
People feel accepted. Treated with courtesy, listened to, invited to express thoughts and feelings, dealt with as individuals whose dignity is important - treated, in effect, as volunteers.
People feel challenged. Given assignments that excite, inspire, and test and stretch their abilities.
People feel recognized. Acknowledged for individual talents and achievements, and rewarded monetarily and non-monetarily for extraordinary contributions.
People receive constructive feedback. They hear how to improve performance in non-demanding ways that stress positives rather than negatives and that build on their strengths.
People see that innovation is expected of them. Their opinions are solicited, their brainstorming is invited, and they see that the development of new and usable ideas is desired of them and welcomed.
People have easy access to information. They given the information and resources they need to do their job properly.
People have authority appropriate to what they are accountable for. They are encouraged to take initiative, make decisions, exercise judgement.
People work with clear-cut and noncontributory rules and guidelines. They are provided with a structure their intelligence can grasp and count on and they know what is expected of them.
People are encouraged to solve as many of their own problems as possible.
People see that their rewards for successes are far greater than any penalties for failures.
People are encouraged and rewarded for learning.
People experience congruence between an organization’s professed philosophy and the behavior of it’s leaders and managers.
People experience being treated fairly and justly. They feel their workplace is a rational world they can trust.
People are able to believe in and take pride in the value of what they produce.

Six Pillars

#1 Operating Consciously:

Provide easy access not only to the information people need to do their job.
Create an open, interactive environment in which people can share ideas, excitement, and wild fantasies - stimulating everyone’s imagination.
Offer opportunities for continual learning and upgrading of skills. Stress the value of study and skill acquisition. Send out the signal in as many ways as possible that yours is a learning organization.
Allow adequate time for ideas to develop and mature, recognizing that minds have their own timetables.
If someone does superior work or makes an excellent decision, invite him to explore how and why it happened. Do not limit yourself simply to praise.
If someone does unacceptable work or make a bad decision, practice the same principle. Do not limit yourself to corrective feedback. Invite an exploration of what made the error possible.
Avoid over-directing, over-observing and over-reporting. Excessive managing (micromanaging) is the enemy of autonomy and creativity.
Plan and budget appropriately for innovation.
Stretch your people. Assign tasks and projects slightly beyond their known capabilities. Keep handing responsibility down, projecting confidence in people’s ability to think and solve problems on their own.
Give creative people the opportunity to take as large a part as possible in overall decision-making.

#2 Self-Acceptance:

When you talk with your people, be present to the experience. Make eye contact, listen actively, offer appropriate feedback, give the speaker the experience of being heard and accepted.
Maintain a tone of respect. Do not permit yourself a condescending, superior, sarcastic, or blaming tone.
Keep encounters regarding work task-centered, not ego-centered. Never permit a dispute to deteriorate into a conflict of personalities. The focus needs to be on reality - What is the situation? What does the work require? What needs to be done?
Describe undesirable behavior without blaming. Let someone know if his or her behavior is unacceptable; point out its consequences, communicate the kind of behavior you want instead, and omit character assassination.
Let your people see that you talk honestly about your feelings: if you are hurt or angry or offended, say so straightforwardly and with dignity.
Recognize and accept difference in individuals. Do not demand that everyone be made from the same mold.
Develop in yourself greater tolerance for the frustration of mistakes and errors.
As much has possible, reward success and ignore failure - except insofar as the latter can be used as a source of learning.

#3 Self-Responsibility:

Give your people space to take the initiative, volunteer ideas and expand their range.
Set clear and unequivocal performance standards. Let people understand your nonnegotiable expectations regarding the quality of work.
Elicit from people their understanding of what they are accountable for, so as to assure that their understanding and yours is the same. Elicit that their understanding and yours is the same.
Teach perseverance. Encourage people to come back to an unsolved problem again and again. Spread the philosophy of “If not me, who?”
Allow as much freedom as possible for individuals to guide their own work - and communicate your confidence in their ability to do so appropriately.
Continuously look for ways to give away power to your people.
Promote on the basis of merit rather than seniority, thus sending out the signal that an individual’s future lies to a significant extent in his or her own hands.
communicate that you are interested in solutions, not excuses, alibis, or blaming.

#4 Self Assertiveness

Teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning.
Let your people see that it’s safe to make mistakes or say, “I don’t know, but I will find out.”
Let your people see that it’s safe to disagree with you: convey respect for differences of opinion and do not punish dissent.
Aim your people - and get out of the way. Let them know that you are available if needed but do not impose your presence or involvement gratuitously. Remember, that your business is to inspire, coach, and facilitate, not to cater to any impulses you may have always to be center stage.

#5 Living Purposefully

Ask your people what they would need to feel more in control of their work - then, if possible, give it to them. If you want to promote more autonomy, excitement, and a strong commitment to goals, empower, empower, empower.
Give your people the resources, information, and authority to do what you have asked them to do.
Help your people understand how their work related to the overall mission of the organization, so that they always operate with a grasp of the wider context.
Encourage everyone to keep measuring results against stated goals and objectives.
Teach the gospel of converting goals into purposes.
Find out what an individual’s personal purposes at work are and try to match assignments and projects to those purposes.
Arrive at an absolutely clear statement of what the problem or goal is, and encourage others to own the problem and to make its innovative solution their personal mission.

#6 Integrity

Exemplify that which you wish to see in others. Tell the truth. Keep promises. Honor commitments. Let there be perceived congruence between what you profess and what you do.
If you make a mistake in your dealings with someone, are unfair or short-tempered, admit it apologize
Invite your people to give you feedback on the kind of boss you are. Set an example of non-defensiveness. Uphold standards of honesty, integrity and fair dealing.
When mistakes are made, let the appropriate people take full responsibility for them. Everyone can manifest integrity when it’s easy; the test comes when it is not easy. Show people the moral behavior you expect of them.
Operate a thoroughly moral company.

Think of each employee as a consultant. Think of the impact on self-esteem and on the motivation to contribute of being treated in this manner.

Focus on strengths. Managers should on focus on people’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. Make their shortcomings irrelevant.

Why Managers Fail

Some people don’t like managing people, they like managing technology or finance or logistics or anything but human beings. Another is that they lack emotional intelligence - that is, lack emotional self-awareness, do not know how to manage their own feelings, are not sensitive to others’ emotions and needs.
The biggest single cause of failure was poor interpersonal skills: inability to inspire; poor listening; doesn’t give or receive criticism well; fearful of conflict, there for avoids confrontation and the raising of important issues like to produce agitation.
An inability to change, to let go of strategies that are no longer adaptive. Rigidity is a characteristic of a mind that lacks confidence in itself. Poor self-esteem clings to the security of the known; high self-esteem see change as an opportunity and even an adventure. We cannot lead others where we are afraid to go ourselves.
A preoccupation with self-aggrandizement or turf-protection at the expense of the needs of the organization. Nonstop self-absorption, narcissism, or grandiosity - all signifying absence of objectivity - are not expressions of self-esteem but evidence of it’s lack.
A fear of making decisions and taking action.
Lack of resilience and the ability to rebound from adversity and setbacks. The level of our self-esteem has a great deal to do with how we are likely to react to them.

Chapter 5 - Rising to Challenges

You must develop a culture of accountability and innovation.

If we cannot manage ourselves, we are unfit to manage others.

If we do not have the discipline to keep ourselves task-focused, we will not be able to inspire that focus in others.

If we cannot keep our own spirits up in the face of adversity, we cannot sustain hope and courage in those who look to us for leadership.

If we do not exemplify integrity, we cannot inspire it in others.

Do my actions embody the principles that I wish to see exemplified in those I manage.

Change

Any significant change constitutes a challenge to our confidence in our resourcefulness.

A resistance that is respected is far easier to dissolve than one we simply try to bull our way through. Once an individual sees that his fear (resistance) is not ridiculed or dismissed but is treated with empathy, the mind relaxes and opens to considering alternative ways of responding. A resistance that is condemned grows stronger; one that is accepted begins to weaken.

Only when one feels understood and accepted on his own terms does his mind relax and open to considering other possibilities.

It is imperative that the reasons for the changes - their necessity - be made abundantly clear. Questions need to be treated respectfully - and answered patiently.

In group discussions, people should be invited to examine and articulate their misgivings. If there are fears, they should be honored rather than ridiculed or dismissed peremptorily.

Accountability

Create a culture of self-responsibility and personal accountability.

Leaders and managers must exemplify that which they wish to create around them:

Being proactive rather than reactive.
Manifesting a high level of consciousness, focus, and purpose.
Taking responsibility for every choice, decision, and action without blaming or finding alibis.
Being fully accountability for all promises and commitments made.
Being clear on what is and is not within their power.
Being task-focused rather than focused on self-aggrandizement.
Being task-focused rather than turf-protecting.
Being able to bounce back from defeat, setbacks, or adversity and continue moving toward goals, rather than surrendering to despair.
Demonstrating an unmistakable commitment to facing reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Require clarity concerning what is expected. Be clear about what each individual in an organization is accountable for.

Review, redefine and gain agreement concerning each person’s area of accountability:

Seek information regarding people’s work goals. Give people all the responsibilities they can reasonably handle. Ask more of them and support them in asking more of themselves.
Be task-centered, not ego-centered. When we keep our encounters focused on reality and the objective needs of the situation, we support a climate of self-responsibility rather than permitting a dispute to deteriorate. What are the facts? What needs to be done?
Invite feedback on the kind of boss, leader, and manager you are. You are the kind of manager your people say you are. Let them know that if they have a grievance against you, you expect them to communicate it as quickly as possible - and set an example of open, non-defensive, listening. Convey that you have little tolerance for grievances that are never expressed but that fester privately into bitterness and resentment.
Give corrective feedback without blaming. If someone’s behavior is unacceptable, describe it, point out its consequences, including how other people are affected, and spell out the kind of behavior you require instead. Keep the focus on reality and avoiding put-downs or personal attacks.
Help people experience themselves as the source of their actions and tune them in to the why. If someone does superior work or makes and excellent decision, do not limit yourself to praise, but invite him to explore how and why it happened. Make sure the person doesn’t write off the achievement to luck but experiences himself as the responsible causal agent, and you thereby increase the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.
Establish clear and unequivocal performance standards. Nonnegotiable expectations regarding quality of work.
Let problems stay with the person who person who created them. When someone’s behavior creates a problem, ask him to provide a solution, if possible. “Now that we agree on the nature of the problem, what do you propose we do about it?”
Focus on finding solutions, not blaming. The question should not be be, “Whose fault is it?”, but instead, “What needs to be done?” Convey in every way possible that blaming is an irrelevant distraction. The name of the game is results, not accusations. Ask, “What are your ideas on how this situation can be improved or corrected?”
Give people the resources for self-responsibility.
Remember what your job is. A great leader is not someone who comes up with brilliant solutions but rather one who inspires his people to come up with brilliant solutions. He draws out the best in people but does not do their work for them.
Work at changing aspects of the organizational culture that thwart or frustrate self-responsibility.
Avoid micromanagement. Micromanagement is the enemy of autonomy and self-responsibility. If you want people to operate self-responsibly, avoid over-directing, over-observing, over-reporting and over-managing. Let people know what needs to be done and leave them alone. Let people struggle. Let them take the initiative in asking for help if and when they need it. Do not step in unless absolutely necessary.
Find out what people want and need to perform optimally, and provide it. Ask, “What do you need to feel more in control of your work?”
Reward self-responsibility. Reward self-assertiveness, intelligent risk-taking acts of initiative, unsolicited problem solving, and a strong orientation toward action. If you want to create a culture of innovation and responsibility, look for opportunities to reward and celebrate it.

Successful business organizations know that to remain competitive they need a steady stream of innovation in products, services, and internal systems.

They need to think outside of the box, to ignore conventional or standard “sets” and to look at things in new and unexpected ways. Create an environment in which such minds can feel comfortable, valued and appreciated without ignoring or violating the basic structures and procedures that an organization legitimately requires.

Another challenge of management: keeping everyone mission-focused, task-oriented and integrity-focused, so that personal feelings of resentment are foremost, by the values of management upholds and exemplifies.

Give them freedom, give them resources, give them a stimulating environment - and give them an exciting and inspiring mountain to climb.

Work as a vehicle for personal development.

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