The Worst Advice I've Ever Received and how I've Learned to Use it

When you play a game, you have one goal, and, no, it's not to have fun. You play to win! There can be only one winner, and everyone else? Losers by definition.

This Machiavellian way of thinking is all well and good in board games and friendly competition, but when you start applying it to real life things can get pretty dark pretty quickly. This came up for me in a management class that I took my senior year of college. Our big project was actually kind of awesome; we played a business simulation game over the course of the second half of the semester. The game put us in the role of executive teams, and each team was running an athletic footwear company. All of us competed against each other in the game, but the gaming microcosm (typically games by definition have no bearing on the real world) was broken by one harsh reality. Only the team that won, only the team that outperformed all the others and pulled the biggest profit, nabbed up the biggest market share, only they could get an A on the assignment.

You may find this to be a clever incentive and lesson, fine. However, it's hard to ignore its severity. If there were 2 valedictorians in that class, one or both of them would probably have their record destroyed; this was a significant portion of the grade, and there was no way around a grade drop for all but one team. What was the instructor's justification for this? Well, he presented it in a metaphor: something that, for years I have considered to be the worst advice I've ever been given.

"If you're not the lead dog, the view is always the same."

Given the context, I pictured a dog race: greyhounds running on a track, where there could be only one winner and a whole bunch of losers. Even at the time, I remember thinking about how cruel that advice was. I was totally fine accepting that only one person could be the best, but did that have to mean that everyone else's life /work was little more than "dog butt?" Did it mean that if I succeed, I'm consigning some other human to a life of "dog butt?" My sense of connectedness, empathy, and, indeed, basic self-preservation immediately compelled me to reject this dog race übermensch philosophy.

But wait, maybe you've heard that quote before. It was, after all, first said by American writer and comedian Lewis Grizzard (not my management professor). Maybe when you heard it, you didn't think of a dog race at all, but as a sled team (the original intention). I'll come back to that later, but whether it was my professor misusing a clever quote or my 21 year old brain unwavering from the bias of whatever image occurred to me first, the sled team analogy was lost on me.

The Advice I Thought I Got... And why it's Terrible

If the dog adage describes competition, it's pretty much only applicable to poker and Super Mario games. Again, I know the dog race isn't the actual intended imagery, but it seemed to fit the competitive situation better. Furthermore, it does represent some negative phenomena that we see in our world of business all too often: an unhealthy obsession with winning, seeing colleagues or all other humans as competition, and even the glorification of business and material success over health and happiness.

If you're a fan of Clifton Strengths, you may recognize the term Connectedness: a talent theme that helps us feel connected to the rest of the 'human tribe' and that highlights the deeper meanings behind people and events. As a subscriber to Strengths, Connectedness is one of my top five, but you don't have to be a Strengths fan to understand why I take issue with the dog race adage. When you tell me that there is a finite amount of success or leadership in the world, you're going to make me less eager to strive for it, not more. Why? Because my first thought is going to be for whoever I'm inevitably depriving; what other human with a story and desires that I'm consigning to "dog butt."

It's a broken and, frankly, unsustainable way of looking at things. It feeds into the immediate gratification drive that spreads through our culture and economy: our incentive is to please our shareholders today, even at the cost of profit, the environment, or people tomorrow.

Pragmatically, it's intuitive and practically common sense that trust is one of the key ingredients to success in good teams (and that teamwork is a key ingredient to success in good performance). This Highlander-esque "There can be only one" nonsense is pretty much a non-starter for establishing trust. If everyone is out to win and climb over each other to do so, where is any individual's incentive to work well or play nice with their colleagues? You've probably been in a workplace like that; was it very functional?

The Advice I can Actually Use... A Little... And Carefully

Believe it or not, the actual metaphor, the intended one of the dog sled, wouldn't occur to me until 7 years later when I started learning about leadership. You see, if that adage describes a dog race, I believe that there is no good in it, that it wreaks havoc on whatever individual or society in which it imprints itself. However, applied to a sled dog team, maybe there is some use to it. It's still an analogy we should be awfully careful with, given that it continues to consign people to "dog butt," but there is actually a pretty useful lesson to it.

Essentially, that lesson is this: if you're not leading, you're following. Are you doing what you're best at, or are you wasting your talents? Are you making decisions for yourself, or accepting those of others?

That in mind, it's still not a great metaphor, not in my philosophy of leadership anyway, as it still establishes a strange power dynamic that there can be only one leader, only one that's answering those questions productively. However, if I ignore that and focus more on the questions themselves, it can be a good reminder to think for myself and to challenge myself to use my unique strengths to chart a path forward, rather than just wanting someone to lead me there. The thing is, we can all do this; there is room for us all to lead. If you're not the president, CEO, or director of your team, you still have the power to be intentional about your way forward and how it affects the team; you still have the power to lead others, to make them feel seen and appreciated, to provide constructive feedback, to develop your own ideas, etc. When you're using your unique perspective and talents well, you're leading; you're taking on the role of "lead dog," and you're not consigning anyone else to the "dog butt."

Bad or good, how else do I use this advice? Well, it does help me to better understand those who are different than me. A lot of people out there have different motivators and value systems than I do. As a matter of fact, when my professor told us that "top dog" stuff, it probably energized and motivated a lot of people. Don't get me wrong, I still take issue with it, but it helps me empathize and understand those who are more conventionally ambitious, we'll say, than I will ever be.

Conclusion

There are some good ideas in the metaphor of the dog sled. There's even a book that takes its title after the phrase (it's not by Grizzard). However, here there be dogs, and here there be danger; the metaphor inevitably pushes us into a very dated and problematic "superman" view of leadership that leads more to quarrel than to quality. But hey, that's just my perspective. I haven't actually read that book, so maybe there are some things in there that I'm missing in my analysis of the dogsled leadership analogy. I'd love to hear your thoughts and whether this phrase and/or the book that it inspired has been helpful for you!

Notes:

This article might have made me seem very empathetic and connected, (and I kind of am, I guess), but I should point out that this does not extend to board games. If you play a game with me, you'll see more Art of War than Philosophy of Kindness; just a heads up. Games aren't real life; in the microcosm world of the game there actually is only one goal, to win.

If you were wondering, my team got second on that project by investing in quality control (kind of a six sigma equivalent). Also, I should point out that the instructor backed down on that "there can be only one A" thing, so getting an overall A in the class was still possible however your team performed on the game. He made the reflections and paper about the project a larger chunk of the grade to offset it. So... what does that say about the legitimacy of the dog race image? You tell me!

Grizzard's original quote: Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.