This week, I went back to reading some portions of the book The 48 Laws of Power for a writing project I’m working on. And I stumbled across my favorite law of the bunch: “Always say less than necessary.”
Apart from the fact that it’s not an evil law, I always appreciated how applicable and effective it is in real life. Silence is a choice. And more often than not, our success at work and in our personal lives comes not from what we say but from what we choose not to say. A little digging over the internet led me to the perfect story to bring this idea to life.
Why humility is as important as being good at what you do, how to train your mind to listen to others, and how to be worthy of your talents: that’s what this week’s newsletter is about.
Growing up in a small town called Levittown, New York, David Pottruck had a pretty normal childhood. Being the son of a hardworking machinist who worked more than one job all his life, Pottruck learned very early in life about how hard it is to earn a buck.
Money didn’t come so easily for them.
But by high school, he discovers something unique about himself that would help him to break free from the lifestyle that he was born into: his innate talent for sports. As a budding athlete, he was showing real promise in both football and wrestling.
In 1966, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania on a full, need-based scholarship, easing the financial burden on his family. Now that he was a part of one of the country’s best universities, not only could he support his family, but also he was in a really good position to discover his true potential in sports.
And he proved to be not just good, but the best of the best. By his senior year at Penn, David Pottruck was named the most valuable player on both Penn’s football team and its wrestling team. He was named one of the top 10 players in the country and won the gold medal in the 1973 Olympic Games in Greco-Roman wrestling.
At the end of the senior year at Penn, armed with such stellar achievements and the sheer confidence that came with them, Pottruck was more than ready to move on to his next chapter in life. In 1981, Pottruck joins American Express—one of Wall Street’s largest brokerages—as senior vice president of consumer marketing and advertising.
And he was the right man for the job.
Not only is he good at it, but he loves his job wholeheartedly, which fuels his determination to get even better. “I was really good at marketing and I loved it,” Pottruck says in an interview. “I loved advertising, I loved promotion, I loved ringing the cash register and I loved every time we made a sale.”
His work eventually catches the attention of Charles “Chuck” Schwab, founder and CEO of the brokerage company with his own name. In 1984, Chuck Schwab welcomes Pottruck to the company as head of marketing. Everything seems to be looking up. And he continues working to get even better at what he does. “Early in my career I was very focused on competence,” he recalls of this period in his professional life. “I wanted to be really good at what I did, and I worked hard at it.”
But, quite the contrary, things did not go the way he planned at Schwab. Something was terribly wrong. His colleagues did not seem to appreciate the work he was putting into the company. They did not appreciate the way he presses his points at meetings and pushes past their objections, and they sure didn’t appreciate him winning all the arguments. Pottruck was confused by all this.
Why do they resent his efforts?
“I thought my accomplishments would speak for themselves,” he later recalls. But it was far from the case. How he carried himself came across as deeply untrustworthy and distant. He wouldn’t involve his colleagues in decision making, and there was no room for them to express themselves. Once, a colleague would tell him: “Man, you’re high maintenance—and you are painful.”
Finally, his boss, Larry Stupski, confronted him about this behaviour: “Dave, your colleagues do not trust you.” Pottruck was shocked by this remark and deeply hurt. “That feedback was like a dagger to my heart,” he recalls. “I was in denial, as I didn’t see myself as others saw me. I became a lightning rod for friction, but I had no idea how self-serving I looked to other people. Still, somewhere in my inner core the feedback resonated as true.”
Around the same time, he starts to see similar problems in his personal life. “After my second marriage fell apart, I thought I had a wife-selection problem,” Pottruck says, reflecting on his personal struggles. But his counselor points out a blind spot: “The good news is you do not have a wife-selection problem; the bad news is you have a husband-behavior problem.”
Pottruck came to realize that his own confidence was holding him back in both his professional and personal lives.
It’s hard to believe that you’d hit a dead end like this in your life while you seem to be at the top of your game. But that’s exactly what happened in Pottruck’s case. If you look at these events in order, though, he was the perfect victim. He had the basic—and hard-earned—quality needed for something like this to happen: extreme competence. Had he not been this good at what he did, there’d have been no reason for him to end up in a situation like this. He wouldn’t have made all the good points in meetings, couldn’t have won all the arguments with his colleagues, and nobody would care enough to hate his guts. As contradictory as it sounds, competence, by itself, can be quite the obstacle to someone’s success in a social setting.1
So, what’s the solution for this?
Being…less competent?
Of course not.
Competence, in Pottruck’s case, was just the face of the issue; the crux of it was how he went about showcasing it. For example, on one occasion, when the company wanted to decide on a new call center location, Pottruck firmly believed that it should be located in Indianapolis, but others wanted to establish it in Sacramento. Pottruck won this debate, and Schwab opened its Indianapolis call centre in 1990.
He got what he wanted.
But not all his colleagues were on board with it.
In his pursuit of competence, he had unwittingly overlooked something equally important in business: empathy. “I was really focused on this competence part and much less focused on the connection part,” he says. “It was hard for me to get beyond myself to focus on the connection part, which is often about listening, not about talking.”
People who often get punished aren’t incompetent; they’re openly overcompetent.
After finally realizing what was holding him back, Pottruck took immediate steps to put things right. He would resolve the arguments and disagreements that followed—especially with his boss—only on a one-to-one basis. In meetings, he would lay out his case and let others carry the discussion, allowing them to come to conclusions on their own. He started to listen more and more and speak less and less.
Two years later when the time finally came to choose another call center location, he was a completely different person. He still had his own preference: Denver.
But this time, he listened.
“Instead of spending all of my mental energy preparing my arguments for Denver, I listened to her rationale for Sacramento,” he says. “What I heard was that Sacramento really wasn’t a bad idea; it was actually a very good idea. While I still thought Denver was better, my attitude was different and I had listened so much better; my demeanor was totally different.”
The committee members now felt that their views were being valued. By day’s end, everyone said, “Let’s go with Denver,” including the executive who had favored Sacramento two years earlier. “Everyone felt heard,” Pottruck writes in Clicks and Mortar, “[they] felt comfortable, and felt passionate about going forward with a decision that we could all get behind.”
From this point onwards, Dave Pottruck would continue to climb the corporate ladder. He would spend 20 years at Charles Schwab, from 1984 to 2004. In January 1998, he became co-CEO alongside Chuck Schwab, and became the sole CEO in May 2003. During his tenure, the company’s assets grew from roughly $5 billion to more than $1 trillion.
“You don’t become a leader by having the loudest voice,” Pottruck says in an interview. “… You have to be worthy of being followed. And you have to be able to be trusted. This comes from two things—competence and connection. You need both.”
And he adapted this new attitude to his personal life, too. As a happily re-married husband, a father of three, Pottruck says that he “listens carefully when his wife offers constructive criticism.”
- Kim, E., & Glomb, T. M. (2014). Victimization of high performers: The roles of envy and work group identification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(4), 619–634. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035789 ↩︎
