Grit Has an Address (TPL Insights #330)
By Rob Andrews
Wharton professor Angela Duckworth built a career on grit. Passion plus perseverance. She argued that the people who win are the ones who keep going, and that the rest of us can learn to keep going too. I bought it. So did most of the CEOs I know.
Her new book, Situated, adds to what she clearly considers more than a footnote. In a recent Harvard Business Review interview with Alison Beard, Duckworth argues that grit depends heavily on who you are with and where you are standing. Same person, different situation, different output. She goes further and calls the situation the highest-leverage place to start, ahead of mindset and willpower.
That is a generous thing for a researcher to say about her own signature idea. It should also make anyone who rates people for a living a little uncomfortable. I evaluate people for a living.
Duckworth names the culprit: the fundamental attribution error. When we explain someone’s behavior, we credit or blame the person and largely ignore the circumstances. Social scientists have documented this for decades. Corporate America has institutionalized it. I have sat in talent reviews for decades. I have heard “lacks executive presence” far more often than I have heard anyone ask who the person reported to.
The nine-box grid has a box for performance and a box for potential. It has no box for “spent four years working for a jerk.”
This cuts both ways. Since 1994, I have studied more than 5,100 failed executive placements. About half of executive hires fail within 18 months, and roughly half of those failures trace it back to cultural misalignment. Put that in Duckworth’s terms. We took capable people, moved them into situations that worked against them, and then concluded the people were the problem. The search spec described the candidate in detail. It almost never described the room.
The other direction costs more and gets noticed less. High potential in a bad situation can look like an average performer. Sometimes a tired one. Duckworth cites Christina Maslach, the Berkeley professor who coined the term burnout: exhausted, detached, powerless. In one of her last published pieces, Maslach argued that organizations try to fix the person when the job assignments, team structure, and incentives are what is broken. Now walk that burned-out high potential into a calibration meeting. Someone will say “plateaued.” Someone else will nod. Nobody will mention the incentive plan.
I worked under a man named Don Gates at Safeway. Don spent ten years in produce in Los Angeles before anybody moved him. Then he ran stores, districts, then came to Houston in 1970 and built the division from three stores to ninety. Then he set performance records in five different divisions and exported more leaders than all his contemporaries combined. Ten years in produce told you a lot about Safeway’s promotion process and very little about Don.
Don’s story is ordinary. Gartner found that only 3% of organizations have an effective method for identifying high-potential leaders. The survey numbers I use in my book are worse: 70% of organizations say self-promotion drives advancement, and 90% admit their quiet leaders get overlooked. Read those numbers as situational, and they get more interesting. A company that rewards self-promotion has built a situation. That situation brings out the best in self-promoters. It also does a fine job of bringing out the worst in everyone else, including the humble, competent people who assumed the work would speak for itself. I call the result the narcissist premium, and it compounds.
One line in the interview stopped me. A leader told Duckworth, “Sometimes fit looks a lot like grit.” I would add a corollary for anyone running a high-potential program. Sometimes misfit looks a lot like low potential.
This is why VantagePoint exists. It started as a research question during my graduate work at UT Austin: why do organizations so reliably miss their best leaders? The assessment measures twelve attributes, among them Humility, Recognition, Ownership, Discernment, Composure, and Trust. Look at that list through Duckworth’s lens. Several of those are exactly what a bad situation suppresses. Humility in a self-promotion culture reads as
passivity. A person who hands out credit gets marked down for lack of ambition. Discernment looks like hesitation to a boss who rewards speed over judgment.
So, a VantagePoint profile is evidence about the person, collected in a particular situation. I read everyone with two questions next to it. What situation has this person been operating in? What would these attributes look like in a better one? Skip those questions, and you are running the fundamental attribution error with better math.
Duckworth’s best-case study is Toby Cosgrove at the Cleveland Clinic. As CEO, he gave patients the parking spaces closest to the front door and moved the physicians farther out. He rearranged offices and org charts so specialists who needed to collaborate actually sat together. He built a mentoring program that has outlasted most corporate initiatives. When his patient experience chief asked for a half-day empathy exercise that would cost $11 million, Cosgrove said yes. Most CEOs I know would have asked for a pilot. In one building. On a Tuesday.
Duckworth turns his example into a short set of questions for leaders. Have you set up your people’s physical space? Have you picked their peers? Have you made mentorship the norm? Have you backed the people who carry the culture? Those are situation questions. Very few high-potential programs ask for any of them.
Here is the practical part. Before you write someone off as a solid performer with limited upside, change one thing about their situation and watch what happens. A new boss. A different team. A mentor from outside the company, which is what Cosgrove went looking for when he moved from surgeon to CEO. It costs less than a failed external hire, and I have seen what those cost.
I recognize that an executive search firm telling you to look inside first is questionable business strategy. Look inside first anyway. Some of your best leaders are standing in the produce department.
Rob Andrews
Chairman & CEO
Allen Austin
1800 St. James Place, Suite 510, Houston, TX 77056
713.301.6130 | randrews@allenaustin.com | allenaustin.com
Rob Andrews founded Allen Austin in 1996 and is a former top performing operator with P&L responsibility for 516 locations, $2.4 billion in revenue, and 10,600 employees. He serves as Affiliate Faculty in Leadership and Ethics at the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin and is completing an Executive Ed.D. in the College of Education. Over the past 30 years, he has developed five proprietary frameworks, including FORESIGHT (his retained search process), Total Performance Leadership, VantagePoint (a 12-attribute high-potential assessment), Vanguard Leadership Dynamics, and the Next Gen Organizational Health Index. He is the author of two books, High Performance Human Capital Leadership and Organizational Health: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. He has advised boards and C-suites across multiple industries throughout his career.
