The Golden Mean

The first key to mastery is recognizing it exists. Take ambition, for example. Too little and people devolve into unhappy couch potatoes; too much and they become totalitarian zealots. Surely, those can’t be our only choices?

The second key to mastery is in allowing yourself to be open to the idea that many things you may reflexively associate with “badness” may just be versions of virtues that have been under-done or over-done. Micromanagement, for example, gets a good-for-nothing rap, but surprisingly, when done with skill and craft, can be a true management virtue. I know, try not to puke.

The third key to mastery is continual awareness. Without it, our habit of labeling behavior (and people) as good vs. bad leads us all to a conviction that we are right and they are wrong. Right, it turns out, is the root word of righteousness, as in the righteous indignation, which can pervade companies like a resentful tar jamming up a team’s gears.

Conflict is not good and it is not bad. Likewise, neither is judgment. All things can be overdone or underdone. The key is finding the virtuous mean. Except if you’re listening to music or a movie on a plane without headphones. That one is pure evil.

As a founder, executive, manager, individual contributor, or just plain human, we want the teams we work on to work. We want to make stuff that makes customers happy. When we make stuff that makes customers happy, we have money to pay our employees well and deliver a return on investment to our investors. Every link in that chain can be underdone or overdone. The Golden Mean is how you keep the chain holding.

When you’re spinning eighteen plates and the Slack notification sound haunts your sleep, the demands on your time are galactic in size, or so you tell yourself. Surely this thing or that doesn’t really need doing at all. And this story, friends, is how every single vice of deficiency starts.

On the other side, planning, thinking, and reflecting can all be wonderful ways to avoid Doing the Thing™. Eisenhower said planning is essential, but plans are useless [1]. What he was after, I imagine, is that thoughtfulness, craft, strategy, and carefulness all pay, right up until the returns flatten and another hour of planning buys you nothing.

So know that the things needing doing can be both underdone and overdone, and that the most adept managers can identify the “habitable zone” [2] of behavior that maximizes the chances our teams thrive.

First, the Golden Mean is a special kind of tool, because every single competency in Management Craft has its very own Golden Mean figure. Why? Because it’s one of those tools that, even to me, feels annoying to ask someone to always remember. So, in an effort to bring the amount of reflecting you have to do into the zone and out of excess, I’ve done the work to lay it out for you when you find yourself working on one thing or another.

Second, performance management, feedback, and time management are all areas where the Golden Mean can be especially useful. When delivering evaluative feedback, we tend to start with “You talk too much in meetings.” Talking in meetings, it turns out, can be both underdone and overdone. The key is not to stop talking in meetings, but to find the appropriate “just right” amount of speaking up. And when you’re on the receiving end, just start practicing asking yourself if you’re over- or under-doing something. Don’t think about it too much, your first impulse in your head is probably correct. You know your emails are too long, and you’ve always known, haven’t you?

Third, use it as a general rubric for thinking about character development. Use it yourself, for your team, your company, and even as a parent. I’ve laid a few out for you below that I’ve found helpful myself.

There’s a reason the virtues are worth aspiring to at all. They help us live a good life. They’re pleasant to embody and pleasant to be around: a good friend, someone funny, someone who can get angry without turning cruel. Virtues tend to be effective as well as pleasant, and that’s finally why they’re virtues: because they work.

What we’re all aiming at, as leaders and as people, is to get better at securing what we want for ourselves, for our families, and for the teams and companies we build for our customers and the world. The virtues are a signal toward the behavior we need to change to get there, and toward being more at home in our own skin while we do.

Aristotle deserves ultimate credit, from his Nicomachean Ethics, where he cast each virtue of character as a mean between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency [3]. The Roman poet Horace, in his Odes, two-hundred and fifty-ish years later, called it the aurea mediocritas, or “the golden mean” [4]. And Robert Southey, in 1837, wrote the fable [5].