Famous Mentors Can Be a Blessing and a Curse

Two Creators Working Together Are Better Than One

By Daniel Butcher

There are many examples of creative and productive partners, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Coen brothers, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, William Procter and James Gamble, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; the list goes on and on.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that people who create together engage in intimate creative interactions that lead to a shared interpersonal boundary—“I created it” becomes “We created it.” This shared interpersonal boundary influences creativity by forming a closed, safe space in which duos can explore divergent ideas and navigate creative blocks.

“We know a lot about team creativity, and we know a lot about individual creativity, and one of the things I was really interested in exploring is this idea of two people working together and the balance that happens in that space,” Rouse said. “You look at a lot of successful, creative people in the world, and they’re often working in pairs, and it’s either a very explicit pair or a well-known person who works with a shadow person.

“It might be a husband and wife, or it might be a more dominant person and a secondary person who are working together,” she said. “That creative space is really special, because you can challenge that person and they’re trusted, and it’s in this bounded space where you develop the sense of a shared interpersonal boundary, where you feel very connected to this other person, and so they’re able to challenge each other and get some of the benefits of having an outsider voice.

“Yet the trust and the support are built into the relationship as well, and that seems to be a really powerful dynamic for developing really high-quality creativity and sustaining it over time.”

An example that Rouse cited in an Academy of Management Review article is from Michael Lewis’s book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, on social psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

“They were social psychologists very well known for doing their work together, and Lewis does a really good job of fleshing out the sorts of tensions in that kind of relationship, but they’re also a very powerful example of two people collaborating and working together successfully and bringing out the best in each other over time,” Rouse said.

Why Mentees Should Highlight Similarities with Mentors

By Daniel Butcher

While high-quality mentorship boosts protégés’ careers, a mentor who is disinterested or unmotivated doesn’t provide value to mentees. To maximize mentors’ networking help and advice, mentees should highlight similarities with their mentor to strengthen mutual identification.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article with Beth Humberd of the University of Massachusetts Lowell on this topic, said that the effectiveness of mentoring depends on the mentor identifying with a mentee to form a close relationship.

“It has been interesting to watch the shift of people understanding more about this network structure and broader constellation of developmental relationships,” Rouse said. “One of the big pieces of advice that a lot of people would give is don’t look for the be-all and end-all of a mentor that’s going to do all of these different functions for you.

“It’s really diversifying networking and career-development efforts and understanding that different people have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to professional relationships,” she said.“Some people are much better at psychosocial support, the trust and friendship part of a mentoring relationship, whereas some people are much better at the career side of it and giving sponsorship opportunities or challenging you or reading your work.

“Those benefits of mentorship can come from a range of different people.”

Talking about pastimes cultivates identification

People enjoy talking about their pastimes and things they have in common with each other. Mentors are no exception.

“Think about not only how we are similar in terms of our work experience or where we want to go, but also commonalities as simple as like hobbies—if you find somebody who plays tennis and you play tennis, use that as a conversation-starter,” Rouse said. “Think about how you can develop an easygoing relationship that then can build into a mentoring relationship.

“You shouldn’t underestimate those various forms of connection that you might use for networking and relationship-building, and think about doing those in small doses, rather than thinking, ‘I’m going to find my mentor today’—it’s establishing a good rapport with potential mentors,” she said. “There’s a whole body of literature on positive work relationships and high-quality connections—ask yourself how you can build smaller connections into bigger relationships.

“Especially as an introvert, thinking about having those particular strong, high-quality connections is what ends up building into those valuable mentoring relationships.”

The “Lone Genius” Myth Overshadows One of the Partners

By Daniel Butcher

Professional creative partners—such as Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Coen brothers, and Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David provide evidence that the pair is the primary creative unit. But countless examples show when one of a pair gets more credit than the other—think Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Dave Chappelle and Neil Brennan, Simon and Garfunkel, as well as whoever was the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that many organizational stories feature duos who create together:

• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak propelled the personal computer revolution.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page provided new ways to find information through Google.
• Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield shifted our expectations about ice cream with flavors such as Cherry Garcia and Phish Food.

Such creative pairs often start their own companies, but when they work within organizations, they change them.

“We have this very this myth of the lone genius—this is woven through the creativity literature where we really want to assign credit to one person,” Rouse said. “This idea can be very rupturing to a creative dyad, if somebody’s trying to assign more credit to one than the other or saying, ‘This is really that one person’s idea—that other person didn’t do very much.’

“Our societal and organizational incentives—both financial rewards and recognition—are generally not aligned well with this idea that we actually do creativity as a very social process,” she said. “It isn’t just in entertainment and business; also in medical fields, an important question is, ‘Who came up with what discovery?’ and we’ve gotten a little looser on attribution of credit, being able to say, ‘This team of people came up with this discovery,’ but often you will hear people still continue to pick apart who did what and say, ‘That was really this one person’s idea, and this other person was just helpful.’

“I don’t think we’ve figured out a very good way of rewarding or acknowledging the power that happens in a group or particularly in a dyad around creativity—we still really want to assign ownership or credit to one person.”

In some cases, different personality types determine which half of a duo is more celebrated by the media.

“You definitely see these examples where there’s one person in a duo who becomes a media darling, and sometimes this is by choice, when one person likes being in the spotlight more than another person, and they’re willing to fly under the radar, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,” Rouse said.

“You can think about social dynamics there, and in some situations, one person loves being in front of the camera and getting those kinds of accolades, and another person would prefer to be in the background,” she said.

“But sometimes it isn’t an individual choice—that is, there are other factors that come into play that shape who we pay attention to.”

Taming Toxic Workplaces

By Daniel Butcher

If you work for a bad boss at a dysfunctional or toxic organization, you can either find a new job or learn to cope with stressful conditions. But if you can get middle managers on your side, then you might even be able to start changing the toxic culture.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College, who coauthored an Academy of Management Journal article with William Kahn of Boston University on this topic, said that toxicity appears in organizations as intolerance, bullying, narcissism, and other forms of destructiveness that demoralize employees and undermine organizational success. Senior leaders often perpetrate toxicity or fail to stem destructive behaviors.

“How do the people working underneath these intolerant, narcissistic, or destructive leaders respond in these toxic situations?” Rouse said. “It isn’t uncommon for me to talk to somebody who feels like they have one of these toxic leaders that they’re working under, but they don’t always have an idea of how to handle it.

“One option is to just leave, but we don’t always have that option to just leave, so then we think about, ‘How do we want to be? What kind of middle manager, if we’re in that position, do we want to be?” she said. “Do we want to be somebody who protects ourselves and has that toxicity cascade down the organization, or do we want to be somebody who buffers our employees and makes them feel protected?

“There are different ways of thinking about coping with a toxic workplace; we talk about this as workarounds for how you think about responding to those toxic leaders.”

Toxic organizations drain workers’ personal agency, undermining their capacity to act independently and make choices.

“Leaders’ toxic behaviors such as intolerance, bullying, narcissism, and destructiveness are all red flags, and we can be good leaders without having those behaviors,” Rouse said. “What we saw in that study was that these weren’t bad people—they were driven by anxiety about a lot of external challenges that were happening in the organization, and they just managed that anxiety by belittling other people and diminishing them.

“Obviously it wasn’t the most effective way, but that was their way of dealing with that pressure, and then we also found that that stayed in place because the senior team colluded around that, essentially, and no one stepped up and said, ‘We can’t keep behaving this way,’” she said. “It was actually the middle managers, those people who were better at shifting from absorption to differentiating among team members, which ended up challenging that structure in that type of toxic organization.

“Especially when that that top leadership team has become very insular and supporting of one another in a way that there are no new voices coming into that senior team, then the middle managers are left to have to do that that work of changing the toxic organizational culture.”

How Teams Achieve the Coveted State of “Group Flow”

By Daniel Butcher

Too often, teams in sports, music, and business fail to gel for many reasons. Sometimes, though, teams achieve “group flow,” when interactions seem effortless, and team members contribute ideas and complete tasks in synchrony to reach peak levels of collaborative performance.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that team members contributing swiftly and additively—extending a prior contribution, is crucial for creating a sense of momentum. Increasing momentum, in turn, influences changes in emotions, thought processes, and behavior that result in group flow.

“The delicacy of group flow makes it very hard to maintain,” Rouse said. “When we’re theorizing about it, we’re really careful about this idea of coming in and out of group flow, and that it is very hard to sustain over time.

“When you’re thinking about it in the context of a group at work, in particular, it’s helpful to think about things like, ‘How do we focus our attention on each other and keep that momentum going?’—so you could imagine that a lot of interruptions are problematic in that sense,” she said.

“If somebody is interrupting you, or you don’t have dedicated space, it’s going to be very hard to get into that sense of group flow.”

Rouse and her research colleagues theorize that a lot of the factors that contribute to good group functioning, such as feeling comfortable in the workplace and feeling trust from senior management and colleagues, help get individuals and, by extension, teams in that flow.

“When we think about this state of flow at the group level versus the individual level, the idea that this is something like improv is instructive—responding to a team member by saying ‘yes, and…’ contributes to the idea that you’re building on each other,” Rouse said. “You actually want to be there for that purpose, and you want to build on other team members’ ideas.

“And this can be difficult in the context of organizations, because we have political motivations; we have our own agendas,” she said. “We have different things we’re doing at work that hopefully are related to the work assignments or objectives but may be actually getting in the way of you feeling that necessary trust and willingness to build on other people’s ideas.”

Your Skills, Not Your Jobs, Are Part of Your Identity

By Daniel Butcher

Rather than focusing on job titles or specific industries during a job search, candidates who imagine how their skills and experience could translate to a variety of roles are better able to bounce back after career setbacks and transition from one professional identity to another.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research he conducted on disabled veterans found that some of them did well in transitioning to new careers after leaving the military, while others did poorly.

“The ones who did poorly looked at superficial links between their previous jobs in the military and the civilian jobs they were considering: ‘I was a sniper in the army; we don’t need anyone to be a sniper in in civilian life but the police use weapons’ or ‘I used to drive a tank. What can I do in civilian life? I can drive a bus,’” Shepherd said.

“But other people—the ones who did well—looked at it more structurally and said, ‘In the military, I learned discipline; I learned to be able to attend to important responsibilities for an extended period of time; I learned how to follow orders and execute those things at a structural level, which means that in entrepreneurship, I can do X and Y,’” he said.

For example, the newspaper, magazine, and publishing industries have been disrupted by the transition from print to digital advertising, the availability of free content, the rise of social media and AI, and other factors, which has lead to a structural decline in the number of jobs in those areas.

“This concept relates to the media landscape; if you lose a career in journalism, you could say, ‘Okay, I could find something that superficially matches my professional identity, such as PR [public relations] or media relations, or maybe journalism means other things: ‘I’m an investigator’ or ‘I’m a writer who’s a subject-matter expert on these things—what could that lead to?’” Shepherd said.

“And it might lead to something that on the surface looks like something very different but that structurally uses the same skills that you used in your previous career,” he said.

“The advice is to try and look at things not just superficially but rather at a deeper level and consider how your skills can transfer to a different career and professional identity.”

Want to Bounce Back from a Setback? Try Identity Play

By Daniel Butcher

People who can approach job searches with a flexible mindset about their professional identity are better able to bounce back after devastating job losses or even injuries that affect the types of jobs they’re able to do.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that if people get fired or laid off, butt heir job is not a critical part of their identity, then they can often recover relatively quickly. But many people’s self-image is intertwined with their career.

“If you can find a job that’s kind of related to that identity, then you’re probably going to be fine, but if it was a strong part of your identity and you’re unable to capture a job that represents that identity, then you can fall a long way,” Shepherd said.

“But the interesting aspect is that when you hit rock bottom, it’s actually quite freeing—it’s like freedom when you hit the bottom, because you say, ‘It can’t get any worse,’ and suddenly, when you hit the bottom, you actually start to think more freely and can engage in this identity play,” he said.

Research on musicians and dancers who have experienced traumatic events uncovered surprising findings about self-reinvention and reimagining one’s professional identity to achieve growth in a new career.

“Professional musicians and dancers who have an injury and can no longer perform those roles that they’ve been performing their whole life and was a strong part of their identity, and also people who get injured and have become paraplegics or even quadriplegics, after a while, they can actually perform well in a different career, and they look back and say, ‘The best thing that ever happened to me was getting that injury,’ Shepherd said. “It wasn’t at that time, of course; it was devastating, but it allowed them to go and pursue something else, and that something else became what they felt was actually something better than what they were before.

“In some ways, maybe it’s better, or maybe they’re just telling themselves it was better, but either way, that’s a good thing that happened or at least a silver lining,” he said. “So I suppose that’s the advantage—when we hit rock bottom, then we can start to really pursue something else—we can play with these different identities and find something that may actually lead to an outcome that’s better than what would have happened if we had never lost that original career in the first place.”

Of course, for some, there’s a sad side to that kind of story.

“Some people engage in chronic dysfunctional behavior and take drugs and remove themselves from society and their own way of thinking after suffering a professional setback or injury,” Shepherd said. “But if you can engage in this identity play, then you can maybe find a better version of yourself.”

Disabled U.S. Veterans Are Finding Success as Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

A higher percentage of disabled U.S. military veterans become entrepreneurs compared to the general population due to their experiences both before and after getting injured, according to research by Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues. Most of the disabled veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq who became entrepreneurs did so for two main reasons.

“The first reason is they felt that following orders were the things that almost got them killed, and what they wanted to do now was to run their own businesses where they were the boss and they weren’t following someone else’s orders,” Shepherd said. “There’s a mental aspect here that causes them to say, ‘I cannot work with someone who’s telling me what to do—I must have that kind of freedom and independence.’

“And in a related issue, they spent so much time in hospitals being told what to do by doctors and nurses that, again, they had this strong desire to become entrepreneurs because they could follow their own orders,” he said. “And the other thing was, because of their disabilities, they still had a lot of medical work that they needed to go on, but also sometimes they’ve had traumatic headaches and different symptoms, which meant that they couldn’t be regular about when they could attend and perform work.

“And under those circumstances, an entrepreneurial career gives them the freedom and flexibility about when they work, and they can work when they’re feeling good—they can work around their medical visits and things like that—and so that’s why entrepreneurship was a good career for those people.”

Immigration Debates Rarely Mention This Important Fact

By Daniel Butcher

Many immigrants—both legal and illegal—are willing to do the kinds of unglamorous, undistinguished, and downright dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame. He likens their psychology to that of Dalits, India’s most oppressed and stigmatized people, many of whom are garbage collectors who scavenge through slum trash dumps for items to sell. They’re commonly called “ragpickers.”

“In some ways, immigrants think like the ragpickers, because they say, ‘I’m doing this so we can eat tonight, but I’m mainly doing this so my children get educated, so that they can get a good job, so that they can marry well, and so that our family’s future generations are going to move forward,” Shepherd said. “And researchers have found that in a lot of immigrant communities, they place a high emphasis on the children’s education—and that’s the reason they’re willing to do dirty jobs.

“They come over to a new country, and they work very hard in order for their for their children to have a better education,” he said. “That’s why they immigrate in the first place, in order to have a better life for their family.”

In the United States in 2023, foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service, natural resources, construction, and maintenance jobs, as well as production, transportation, and material moving occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Foreign-born workers were less likely than native-born workers to be employed in sales, office, management, professional, and related occupations.

“We spoke to ragpickers and other entrepreneurs that live in slums, and we asked them, ‘What are your personal goals?’ and they almost don’t understand the question, because their goals are all to do with the next generation,” Shepherd said. “They don’t see much hope for themselves, because when we asked them, ‘What do you plan on doing after retiring?’ they told us, ‘What retirement? I’m never going to retire.’

“It’s all about future generations, and immigrants do the same thing,” he said.

Finding Meaning in Menial Work

By Daniel Butcher

Even if it’s a dirty job, somebody has to do it. It will probably make you miserable, though, unless you see it as a means to fulfill a purpose or achieving a goal.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research he conducted on poor people living and working in India’s slums shed light on how to find meaning in any job.

“When you’re at work and you aren’t having such a terrible day and you think, ‘but imagine if I was picking up trash in the slums of India—how could you find meaning in that? How could you be happy?’ because they describe their work as dirty,” Shepherd said. “They’re walking through effluent and rubbish and dead animals and picking everything up and getting the trash to a landfill or recycling it.

“But even then, they had made meaning, and they did it through a couple of ways: One was to look back at their [own and their parents’ job] history and say, ‘It was my destiny that I pursue these types of things; my family has done it for a long time,’ so it had meaning, because it put them in a historical context,” he said. “They also gave themselves a pat on the back in the present, because they say, ‘Because I’m doing this, we can eat tonight, and my children can go to school tomorrow,’ and then they would also think about the future to say, ‘It might take multiple generations to escape poverty—by me doing this, my children are able to go to school; if they go to school, they might get a good job, they might marry well, and they can move out of the slum.’

“So in some ways, they’re saying they cannot change their condition because it’s history; on the other hand, they say, ‘but I can change the history of my children,’ so in some ways, it’s a contradiction that they hold in a way that makes them feel better, because they think, ‘I’m helpless; I can’t blame myself for the situation, but I also have some ability to influence the future of my children,’ which actually also gives them meaning, so they have meaning coming from from both ways of thinking about doing a dirty job.”

That’s despite the fact that dirty work is stigmatized in India, as it is in many countries.

“When you know the person who’s engaged in dirty work, often they have intersectionality, which means if you if you come from a stigmatized family or class doing stigmatized work, you’re often from other stigmatized groups,” Shepherd said. “In this case, there was dirty work.

“They came from the lower caste, and they lived in the slums, and both of those were highly stigmatized, and in most cases stigmatized work, like being a mortician or a sex worker, is often tied in with other intersectionality, things like gender, location, place of origin, those types of things,” he said.

“So finding meaning in this work has a little bit of generalizability to other forms of dirty work and other stigmatized groups.”