Two Creators Working Together Are Better Than One

Famous Mentors Can Be a Blessing and a Curse

By Daniel Butcher

Students and young professionals who get well-respected, or even famous, mentors gain can gain skills that help put their careers on promising trajectories. But mentees’ identities and reputations becoming connected with prominent mentors can provide both benefits and challenges.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that, on the positive side, relationships and connections with prominent mentors can improve mentees’ opportunities. On the negative side, the entanglement of an individual’s career with a prominent mentor can also lead to being taken for granted, having their contributions underappreciated, and feeling overshadowed. She and her coauthors of an Academy of Management Review article refer to this as the “paradox of promise” that complicates mentees’ building meaningful career narratives.

“We were looking at mentorship in a creative context, and all of us were able to draw from our experiences as well, but our research findings apply to any place where there is a strong mentor figure where you learn by doing and being around somebody who is experienced and renowned in their field,” Rouse said. “This paradox of promise can happen—we know that working with very prominent people in the field is useful; it can help you get connections, and you learn a lot.

“This person is well-known, because they are very skilled at what they do, and so you can see that happening, where you’re learning very easily from this person, because they have a lot of knowledge to give you, but at the same time, you have the shadow over you when you go out and try to make a name for yourself,” she said. “You’ll often be referred to in context with your mentor, and so it’s very hard to break out and establish your own identity, because people assume—maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—that basically you are just the output of this other person and haven’t really established a voice on your own.

“And so that can be very challenging for people, especially if you are driven, as some of our informants were, to really make a name for themselves and separate themselves from their mentor.”

It can be difficult to craft your own career narrative in the way that you’d like if most people know you based on the work that you’ve done in the shadow of a successful, celebrated mentor. That said, some mentees embrace their association with such a figure.

“There are other people in our study that were much more comfortable to build on the legacy of that mentor and feel that they were the next stage of that—helping that legacy to live on, contributing to that legacy was really important to them, and they were able to find meaning from that,” Rouse said. “This is really about what you are trying to get out of your own creative career as a protege and thinking about the different ways to find career success.

“An interesting thing about our study is we found that all people found a way to craft a career narrative and find meaningfulness,” she said. “They just took different paths for doing that.”

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.”

Why Some People with Mental Disorders Thrive as Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

Symptoms and traits associated with certain mental disorders, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, dyslexia, and autism, may help entrepreneurs and other businesspeople succeed, noted Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that conditions that might be seen as a negative, particularly in employment, can sometimes be an advantage in entrepreneurship.

“Some mental disorders are perceived to negatively impact reliability in traditional nine-to-five employment but can actually be an asset in entrepreneurship,” Shepherd said. “Research has found that people with dyslexia tend to have weaker aspects in their left hemisphere of their brain, but their right hemisphere is stronger, and so therefore they can enter entrepreneurship and be successful in it.

“We have the statistics to say that the people with dyslexia are more likely to become entrepreneurs than the general population—in fact, it’s true for many groups who feel like they’re constrained in being promoted in corporate employment turned to self-employment or entrepreneurship,” he said.

“That includes minorities, marginalized groups, and people with all sorts of disabilities, for example, women and immigrants, because they feel like they have constraints or face discrimination in the workplace and that they don’t have those as much in entrepreneurship.”

Research has found that people with ADHD are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

“People with ADHD are more prepared to engage in risk taking, they’re more proactive, and they’re more innovative, and we also found that people with autism are actually getting used by companies engaging in software testing, because they have some advantages in being able to test software,” Shepherd said.

“Entrepreneurship may cause some mental disorders through high stress or loss when a business fails, which can be an important point to consider when deciding on your career path, but people with disorders are also drawn to entrepreneurship,” he said.

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.”

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.”

Entrepreneurs’ Taboo F-Word

By Daniel Butcher

There’s an F-word that used to be taboo among entrepreneurs and researchers who study them: failure.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that when he was a doctoral student at Bond University in Australia teaching entrepreneurship to undergraduates and MBAs, the assigned texts on entrepreneurship rarely mentioned failure.

“On the one instance that one of them did, the textbook said, ‘Entrepreneurs don’t fail—businesses do, but entrepreneurs are just motivated to try again,’” Shepherd said. “Then one day, I got a phone call from my father, and the family business that he’d created and run as long as I’d been alive was failing badly, and I said, ‘You have to close it down,’ and that caused him and me great distress and anxiety.

“And so it felt funny going back into the classroom and trying to encourage everyone to become an entrepreneur and not be able to say, ‘There is a chance that it’ll fail,’ and also not give them the tools to say that, if you do fail, this is how you cope with it,” he said. “I waited for quite a few years before I wrote a paper about it, and I went into the psychology literature on bereavement and grief, because there, psychologists had tools to help people overcome grief.

“And I thought, ‘My dad’s reaction wasn’t as bad as losing a loved one, but in some ways, it’s still grief, where grief is the negative emotional reaction to the loss of something important.”

Some entrepreneurs even call the business they start—or help launch—their baby. Their ventures are entwined with their own identities.

“When people ask them, ‘What do you do?’ they say, ‘I’m an entrepreneur,’” Shepherd said. “Are you still an entrepreneur once your business fails?

“And so the psychology literature really gave us some good tools to say that maybe you do a bit of grief work; you talk it through with someone, and as you come up with a story for why it failed, then it makes it a little less painful,” he said. “The negative emotional reaction can diminish.”

Resilient Entrepreneurs Don’t Shy Away from Failure

By Daniel Butcher

Some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make are focusing too much on past successes, pretending that hard work always results in success, and not learning from failure, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that the shocking closure of his own father’s business was what inspired him to study the effects of entrepreneurial failures. He described loss orientation as communicating about the disappointing or traumatic event and restoration orientation as thinking about other things, including next steps.

“It was a family business in residential construction formed around 1965—I am not sure how large it was, but [it built] maybe 100 houses per year, and there were no full-time employees; my father used a lot of sub-contractors,” Shepherd said. “It started to experience some difficulties approximately one year before he closed it down.

“He was very much a restoration-orientation person, so he refused to talk about it, just like a typical Australian male, and he and I never discussed it,” he said. “He never engaged in loss orientation, [grieving the] loss of his business; he never oscillated between loss orientation and restoration orientation, and so he suffered for a long time as a result of that.

“I did research on scientists working in Germany, and when their projects failed, those that were able to oscillate between the two, loss orientation and restoration orientation, were the ones who were most successful at processing the setback or loss, bouncing back, and moving forward.”

Shepherd cited the work of Eric Ries, an entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, as emblematic of a strain of entrepreneurship that doesn’t shy away from failure but actually highlights the need for it to inform the organization’s plans, budgeting, and initiatives.

“A lot of entrepreneurs now, including the author of The Lean Startup, are trying to think about different projects like real options, so they’re probes into an uncertain environment, and if we have many of them, then we gain information, and as we get that information, we can kill some projects and redeploy the resources to the ones that show promise,” Shepherd said. “That’s a way to try and manage the uncertainty, and it really has failure as part of the process, because we must terminate those initiatives that don’t show promise in order for this strategy to work.

“If we have an anti-failure bias and we choose not to terminate them, or we take longer to make the decision to discontinue them, then the downside losses actually start to increase,” he said. “The best examples are my dad, who struggled to process failure, and the studies of the German scientists, some of whom were able to deal with failure in a productive way.”

Successful Entrepreneurs Leverage Knowledge and Motivation

By Daniel Butcher

Successful entrepreneurs focus on what they know best and care most about when brainstorming and evaluating business ideas, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

“Entrepreneurs often say, ‘Where do I look for an opportunity?’ Now, I always try and say, ‘We’ll look internally first at your own history,’” Shepherd said. “‘What is unique about you? What unique knowledge do you have?’

“My path is unique, just like every person’s path is unique, and it’s given me knowledge that other people don’t have,” he said. “If I can think about things from that perspective, then I’m more likely to come up with an opportunity that other people haven’t thought of in the past.

“In thinking about it that way, I’m more likely to see opportunities related to my motivation, something that I’m passionate about, and so opportunities are often identified at the intersection of my knowledge and my motivation.”

People who are knowledgeable in a particular field are better equipped to spot signals of potential opportunities in that area. Experienced entrepreneurs can also gauge the chances of success of a particular idea, even if it’s just a rough estimate, to decide whether it’s worth pursuing.

“If I’m highly motivated by certain things, then I’m more likely to see signals in the environment that relate to that motivation, and so it’s the combination of those two that allows me to identify opportunities,” Shepherd said. “I also evaluate opportunities in a similar way.

“I say to myself, ‘Do I have the knowledge, the skills, and the ability to be able to execute this opportunity? Is it feasible?’” he said. “And I also asked myself, ‘Is it desirable? Is it something that I want to do? If I do it and exploit this opportunity, does it give me the things that I want to have?

“And so it’s really that intersection of knowledge and motivation that is the how do we identify opportunities, and also whether we want to exploit those opportunities or not and what would be required to do so.”