We all know “Joe.” He’s the guy who leaves his coat on his chair so the boss thinks he worked all night. He boasts loudly in the break room about how much time he spends zigzagging the planet for work. He pretends to listen to you while he’s jabbing away at his BlackBerry. He worries why his office isn’t as big as Jenny’s. And he blames others when he screws up.
Joe is an HNAP, or a high-need-for-achievement professional, according to Harvard Business School professor Thomas J. DeLong, who explores Joe’s world of driven, ambitious, goal-oriented hyper-achievers in his new book, Flying without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success.
“At the end of the day what I’m suggesting is that vulnerability in context is the most powerful thing you can have.”
DeLong believes the tendency to be a high-need-for-achievement type is embedded in the DNA, an addiction that spans across socioeconomic groups. Instead of experiencing happiness or well-being, HNAPs seek “relief in the accomplishment of tasks.” Moving immediately to the next task on the list, they never savor accomplishments for long, he says. This creates a vicious cycle marked by a feeling of little or no real sense of purpose and a “flatness”in career and in life. They often go through patches of life without creating or enhancing meaningful relationships, and even lack strength to deal with life’s failures.
A former chief development officer and managing director at Morgan Stanley who now teaches organizational behavior and leadership at HBS, DeLong has worked alongside hundreds of HNAPs. He calls himself a card-carrying group member, albeit in recovery. Recovery, to DeLong, entails confronting and getting control of four characteristics or traps that define an HNAP: comparing, busyness, worrying, and blaming. “By reading [the book] they have already begun the intervention,” he says. “They begin to entertain having a different type of conversation.”
The seed of his book, which DeLong worked on for five years, came while he was completing postdoctoral work at MIT during the late 1970s. “I began to ask myself why I didn’t feel more satisfied even though I’d reached these goals and experienced these milestones after graduation. I also began
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