It's a line from the TV series, The Americans. In season 3, episode 3 FBI agent Stan Beeman is asked about his past undercover work where he infiltrated a white supremacist group. The colleague asks him how he was able to succeed in that assignment. Stan tells him you just keep on telling them what they want to hear, over and over and over again. Then he utters the great line, "People love hearing how right they are."

Years of coaching people -mostly high performers 'cause they're the ones most focused on getting better - have shown me how true it is. I've had a few non-high performers who resisted the process of coaching because they mostly wanted to hear how good they already are. Well, they thought they did until I challenged them to look more closely in the mirror and stop making excuses.

When we hear how right we are, we can avoid thinking about how wrong we might be. So I get it. The urge to constantly feel good about ourselves is real. It sure beats feeling bad about ourselves. But that's the trouble with modern culture - the assumption that it feels bad to realize we can do (or be) better! It's a lie though and most of us likely know it because we've felt tremendous pride in growing and improving ourselves.

Not Everybody Finds Value In Being Challenged - No Matter How Much Care Is Displayed

In 2007 a book was published that provided one of the biggest challenges to me - Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. I loved that book because it challenged many things for me. It was invigorating. Immediately I started viewing business - the business I was operating - through a different lens. My curiosity soared, which is saying something because I was already driven by questions.

My experience with that book helped me better understand what had - up to that point - been a lifelong pursuit of seeking challenges. Challenges to my assumptions. Challenges to my perspectives. Challenges to what I had already learned.

It had begun from years of studying with older men about the Bible. Working hard to derive whatever wisdom could be passed on. Asking questions. Looking for areas where I could grow and improve. Turns out there weren't any areas where I couldn't grow or improve. ;)

In my 20s I developed a habit that was foreign to the industry where I worked. The business plan. I wasn't involved in the startup world. I was mostly involved in more turnaround work - taking an existing enterprise from one level of success to a higher level. I began to write detailed, in-depth business plans to answer questions I'd ask about the organization I was involved in. I'd spend hours digging for the truth - looking for facts and evidence from which to draw conclusions.

3M was a premier company at the time. Not that they're not today, but I knew some employees of 3M and it was clear their company was on the bleeding edge of innovation and fact-finding. These were the days of Jack Welch's General Electric, and I became a big fan. Those two enormous companies - 3M and GE - were very instrumental in my quest to challenge myself.

This was my professional life in the early 80s.

By 1982 I was beginning to gain some insight into how others viewed being challenged. I was forming my own leadership philosophy - and my own business viewpoints on how to best build, organize and grow an organization. The more people I hired the more apparent it became that the ideal candidate for my style of leadership were people who most enjoyed being caringly challenged. Heavy on the descriptor, caringly. Which in my mind didn't mean soft-pedaling, but meant you had to have the other person's best interest at heart.

I learned the hard way that sometimes it didn't matter how much I cared. The other person sometimes had no interest in being challenged. I sought answers to find out why. Sometimes it seemed the other person simply had little or no experience with the sensation. Sometimes I could explain. Sometimes I couldn't.