If their goal is to drive change inside a company, then they have to learn to play office politics and pretend to be each of those five species when needed.
If their goal is to move into a different quadrant, then I’d probably reduce the importance they assign to work and limit the exposure to the rooms where decisions get made. On the one hand, they see fewer imperfections; on the other, they spend less time obsessing over them.
If their goal is simply to be happy at work… then this is probably my most genuine piece of advice: make peace with the idea that work will never fully provide that, because that’s not what work is for. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Maybe it’s just resentment talking, but I increasingly feel that millennials were sold this idea that the job should be an extension of yourself, a core part of your identity. I’m no longer convinced that’s the only, or even the healthiest way to think about it.
Having learned the term a while ago, I’m sitting again with the term “overfunctioning” as I think - with great support and compassion - about your border collies. Most especially about their internal talk track to stop trying to herd everyone. Because perhaps the herd will always need herding - at least by degrees - and perhaps herding is precisely what they are encoded to do. If so - and regardless, from a place of care - my advice to collies is to make sure they’re taking care of themselves, resting when they can, fuelling themselves healthfully, because their job is an endurance sport, and they’re going to be running, again, tomorrow …
I love this article because having just read Pfeffer's "Power", this seems like a practical representation of the dynamics (or maybe I now have a hammer and all I see is nails). At different points in my career, I would have given different advice to Border Collies, but now I think it boils down to: which game are you playing, Border Collie? If it's "making the next rung on the ladder", the advice will look very different than if it's "build [some product / team] to be objectively the best by [some standard]". And we assume that in big organizations both are one and the same, but research shows they are not, which the purists can't see.
My advice would be diagnostic rather than behavioral, because I think Border Collies burn out on the wrong problem.
Kickoff incoherence comes in two kinds that look identical from the floor. Sometimes leadership hasn't done the work, and the fog is a defect. Sometimes leadership has done the work and is choosing not to say it out loud, because saying it commits them to a tradeoff they want to keep reversible. There the fog is the product, and it is doing a job for someone.
The Collie instinct treats both as the first kind. That is where the energy goes.
A cheap way to tell them apart: ask a question whose answer would cost nothing if a real strategy existed. Not "what is our strategy," which just re-runs the performance. Closer to "if we're behind in Q3, which of these three do we drop first?" Where a strategy exists and is merely unstated, someone answers you privately within a week, because the answer costs them nothing and buys your alignment. Where nothing exists, the question gets deferred or converted into a workstream to go define it.
Then you know which game you're in. A defect responds to being named, and you will usually find one ally with real power. Deliberate fog does not, because naming it removes someone's optionality, and no amount of tact gets around that.
Which makes herding locally right more often than it feels. It isn't the compromise option. It's the correct response to a problem you have accurately diagnosed as not yours.
To the border collies: You're burning the most energy, and getting paid the same. If you don't manage that, it will burn you out; and worse, the longer you stay here, the thicker the glass ceiling becomes. You can't go back to being a golden retriever, because you've already established the reputation, and now you're blocked from becoming a fox because you'd disrupt their happy little system. You'll end up vacillating between the terriers (a dark place), and the house cats (an okay but risky place). It's going to be the same at nearly all corporations, no matter how much you probe during the interview process and are assured things work great. Once this culture has set in, it becomes endemic, and is nearly impossible to change because structurally its set up to protect itself. Options are to build it yourself the right way, or join someone or something small who shares that mindset.
As a border collie who just did the step to leave that organization that was draining my energy because of confusing strategy, for a smaller company that seems to have the mindset I'm looking for, can confirm that seemed like the only solution
As a professionally diagnosed Nomadic Border Collie (is that a real thing?) - I wish I had cleaner advice. I’m still figuring this out every day.
When I can see the confusion coming, not stepping in feels irresponsible. If I can translate the strategy into something my team can use, to keep good work from dying in the ambiguity, why wouldn’t I?
That instinct is part of what makes me good at my job. It’s also how I’ve ended up with a fervent belief that emails do indeed hunt people for sport.
I’m trying to learn that care doesn’t require me to absorb every contradiction. I ask myself whether stepping in will leave people better able to navigate next time, or whether the work will just keep depending on me to hold it together.
Because if it only works while I’m holding it, I haven’t fixed the system. I’ve become its workaround.
So I don’t think the answer is to become a Fox or stop caring. Maybe it’s to make what you see visible, build a few fences, and notice when your competence is allowing the organization to avoid dealing with its own incoherence.
Being a nomadic Border Collie myself, I can confirm it’s a real thing! And becoming the workaround is the real trap for Border Collies - that’s where they need to develop a 6th sense before it’s too late.
One very clear takeaway is for leaders to keep in mind that this 2x2 is the audience to which we have to communicate the vision and strategy.
If our very first feedback loop can be to test out the strategy with a fairly representative set of people who fit different profiles, we'll have a better chance as we iterate on it wider.
I am a border collie. Over time, I've come to a few pieces of advice which relate to some of your other recent posts, like "How To Thrive At Work When You Think Too Much."
Detaching (I prefer the term Untethering based on the book The Untethered Soul from Michael A. Johnson) your worth and identity from the work is critical, as it drives clarity.
While border collies have seemingly endless energy, humans do not, so we need clarity to be able to discern when to fully be the border collie - when to invest our energy. Make no mistake, we'll always be a border collie at heart, but in order to sustain ourselves we need to know when to fully manifest into our herding state and when we can conserve energy - perhaps developing tolerance for certain things as a terrier or playing like a fox.
I've found over time that by practicing this patience and more intentional herding, we develop the awareness of how people are herding themselves. For instance, if a strategy (or lack thereof) is lacking, there may be opportunity to let the leaders feel the pain of it in order to drive the necessary changes in themselves. Rare, but I've seen it happen, especially with good leaders. If the situation truly compromises the safety/job security of the business, then it may be time to herd.
More than anything, be intentional about what environment you put yourself in, and ensure that it doesn't lead you to trap yourself in fox form, or any other. The best environment will one where you can be a border collie as much as possible, but with positive feedback and different sheep wandering off each time (variety of problems, willingness to experiment and solve).
"Detaching ... your worth and identity from the work is critical, as it drives clarity"
Olivia, I very much agree with this being important for clarity. The challenge, especially for those who lean border collie, tends to be their attachment their worth and identity to work tends to be most common, because it often comes from a place of care. They might see detachment as disengagement or even a betrayal of sorts, which it doesn't need to be.
It's funny, I do fluctuate between areas of reaction to incoherence but I tend to be a Collie, unless I am to exhausted. The Border Collies are always at risk because it drawns their energy eventually. Timebox tidying time, finding allies and doing what is counter-intuitive to deal with burn-out: reframe thinking(trying to be a cat at times), doing pleasurable physical activity (I fence every now and then).
At the end some people will see the new clothes of the emperor, some other no, and will be confused if someone tells them otherwise.
Interesting post as always. Great identification of the different types hearing the message and I have seen, and likely been most of these at different times. I think generally people become more battle hardened as time goes by.
I am taken to a yearly company get together or quarterly all hands where afterwards people go ‘what was that’ or ‘oh, we have changed direction again’.
Some reflections, have never understood why those giving these pitches don’t sense check the approach earlier with those on the ground and you start to lose faith if the direction changes every quarter or even multiple times within the same quarter.
Some advice to the collie, resist the urge to go fox and be more cat. Get back to the team you do your daily work with, have a discussion / bark out loud as a team, then get back to business as usual. That is where you do your best work, have control and can make the greatest impact.
I probably fit that border collie role, and many of my best product leaders have been collies too. I'd remind them that their work / strategy / impact is vitally important, and at the same time it's an elaborate, multi-layered game we are all playing. It's not real life. And yes, some aspects will never make sense. Our job is to push as hard as we can to fix, and sense make, and build. But we also need to be OK with the fact we are just players in an elaborate game that nobody has the rulebook for. And we need to find the space to breathe, to have fun, and to find wins along the way despite this
Try some foxtrot once in a while, border collie. You might enjoy it more than you think without falling into any trap (you're too smart for that). And - or but: don't lose the joy of following your own belief and truth in the daily weeds of human interaction. You know it's your solid guiding star that makes you an authentic herding dog.
Back channel (challenging the stated vision in public doesn’t tend to go well. Private talks work much better, and saves people face) and explain to your team. For the rest of the company, I’d say “not your problem”: save the energy and focus on things you can impact. Also, spending too much effort on things far from your work can affect your performance (lowering your influence) and might not be received well
I started out in my working life as a terrier. "Matured" into border collie. Tried my hand at fox and failed miserably. I am trying to cultivate my inner cat to combat an increasing sense of bitterness and despair over the feeling that my herding is useless. I think border collies who want to increase coherence in lasting ways have to be willing to incorporate a certain amount of foxiness.
By virtue of "can't tolerate", it would seem neither of those archetypes are places you can sustainably stay. You can only fight the feeling for so long. You leave or you become one of the "can tolerate" archetypes.
I think it depends on what they’re aiming for.
If their goal is to drive change inside a company, then they have to learn to play office politics and pretend to be each of those five species when needed.
If their goal is to move into a different quadrant, then I’d probably reduce the importance they assign to work and limit the exposure to the rooms where decisions get made. On the one hand, they see fewer imperfections; on the other, they spend less time obsessing over them.
If their goal is simply to be happy at work… then this is probably my most genuine piece of advice: make peace with the idea that work will never fully provide that, because that’s not what work is for. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Maybe it’s just resentment talking, but I increasingly feel that millennials were sold this idea that the job should be an extension of yourself, a core part of your identity. I’m no longer convinced that’s the only, or even the healthiest way to think about it.
Having learned the term a while ago, I’m sitting again with the term “overfunctioning” as I think - with great support and compassion - about your border collies. Most especially about their internal talk track to stop trying to herd everyone. Because perhaps the herd will always need herding - at least by degrees - and perhaps herding is precisely what they are encoded to do. If so - and regardless, from a place of care - my advice to collies is to make sure they’re taking care of themselves, resting when they can, fuelling themselves healthfully, because their job is an endurance sport, and they’re going to be running, again, tomorrow …
Beyond that, I’d offer up Honey Dacanay and her in-development Field Guide to (better) represent answers: https://honeydacanay.ca/field-guide.html.
Cheers for another thoughtful and provocative post, John. That one hit rather hard.
I love this article because having just read Pfeffer's "Power", this seems like a practical representation of the dynamics (or maybe I now have a hammer and all I see is nails). At different points in my career, I would have given different advice to Border Collies, but now I think it boils down to: which game are you playing, Border Collie? If it's "making the next rung on the ladder", the advice will look very different than if it's "build [some product / team] to be objectively the best by [some standard]". And we assume that in big organizations both are one and the same, but research shows they are not, which the purists can't see.
My advice would be diagnostic rather than behavioral, because I think Border Collies burn out on the wrong problem.
Kickoff incoherence comes in two kinds that look identical from the floor. Sometimes leadership hasn't done the work, and the fog is a defect. Sometimes leadership has done the work and is choosing not to say it out loud, because saying it commits them to a tradeoff they want to keep reversible. There the fog is the product, and it is doing a job for someone.
The Collie instinct treats both as the first kind. That is where the energy goes.
A cheap way to tell them apart: ask a question whose answer would cost nothing if a real strategy existed. Not "what is our strategy," which just re-runs the performance. Closer to "if we're behind in Q3, which of these three do we drop first?" Where a strategy exists and is merely unstated, someone answers you privately within a week, because the answer costs them nothing and buys your alignment. Where nothing exists, the question gets deferred or converted into a workstream to go define it.
Then you know which game you're in. A defect responds to being named, and you will usually find one ally with real power. Deliberate fog does not, because naming it removes someone's optionality, and no amount of tact gets around that.
Which makes herding locally right more often than it feels. It isn't the compromise option. It's the correct response to a problem you have accurately diagnosed as not yours.
To the border collies: You're burning the most energy, and getting paid the same. If you don't manage that, it will burn you out; and worse, the longer you stay here, the thicker the glass ceiling becomes. You can't go back to being a golden retriever, because you've already established the reputation, and now you're blocked from becoming a fox because you'd disrupt their happy little system. You'll end up vacillating between the terriers (a dark place), and the house cats (an okay but risky place). It's going to be the same at nearly all corporations, no matter how much you probe during the interview process and are assured things work great. Once this culture has set in, it becomes endemic, and is nearly impossible to change because structurally its set up to protect itself. Options are to build it yourself the right way, or join someone or something small who shares that mindset.
As a border collie who just did the step to leave that organization that was draining my energy because of confusing strategy, for a smaller company that seems to have the mindset I'm looking for, can confirm that seemed like the only solution
As a professionally diagnosed Nomadic Border Collie (is that a real thing?) - I wish I had cleaner advice. I’m still figuring this out every day.
When I can see the confusion coming, not stepping in feels irresponsible. If I can translate the strategy into something my team can use, to keep good work from dying in the ambiguity, why wouldn’t I?
That instinct is part of what makes me good at my job. It’s also how I’ve ended up with a fervent belief that emails do indeed hunt people for sport.
I’m trying to learn that care doesn’t require me to absorb every contradiction. I ask myself whether stepping in will leave people better able to navigate next time, or whether the work will just keep depending on me to hold it together.
Because if it only works while I’m holding it, I haven’t fixed the system. I’ve become its workaround.
So I don’t think the answer is to become a Fox or stop caring. Maybe it’s to make what you see visible, build a few fences, and notice when your competence is allowing the organization to avoid dealing with its own incoherence.
Being a nomadic Border Collie myself, I can confirm it’s a real thing! And becoming the workaround is the real trap for Border Collies - that’s where they need to develop a 6th sense before it’s too late.
Thought provoking as always John!
One very clear takeaway is for leaders to keep in mind that this 2x2 is the audience to which we have to communicate the vision and strategy.
If our very first feedback loop can be to test out the strategy with a fairly representative set of people who fit different profiles, we'll have a better chance as we iterate on it wider.
I am a border collie. Over time, I've come to a few pieces of advice which relate to some of your other recent posts, like "How To Thrive At Work When You Think Too Much."
Detaching (I prefer the term Untethering based on the book The Untethered Soul from Michael A. Johnson) your worth and identity from the work is critical, as it drives clarity.
While border collies have seemingly endless energy, humans do not, so we need clarity to be able to discern when to fully be the border collie - when to invest our energy. Make no mistake, we'll always be a border collie at heart, but in order to sustain ourselves we need to know when to fully manifest into our herding state and when we can conserve energy - perhaps developing tolerance for certain things as a terrier or playing like a fox.
I've found over time that by practicing this patience and more intentional herding, we develop the awareness of how people are herding themselves. For instance, if a strategy (or lack thereof) is lacking, there may be opportunity to let the leaders feel the pain of it in order to drive the necessary changes in themselves. Rare, but I've seen it happen, especially with good leaders. If the situation truly compromises the safety/job security of the business, then it may be time to herd.
More than anything, be intentional about what environment you put yourself in, and ensure that it doesn't lead you to trap yourself in fox form, or any other. The best environment will one where you can be a border collie as much as possible, but with positive feedback and different sheep wandering off each time (variety of problems, willingness to experiment and solve).
"Detaching ... your worth and identity from the work is critical, as it drives clarity"
Olivia, I very much agree with this being important for clarity. The challenge, especially for those who lean border collie, tends to be their attachment their worth and identity to work tends to be most common, because it often comes from a place of care. They might see detachment as disengagement or even a betrayal of sorts, which it doesn't need to be.
It's funny, I do fluctuate between areas of reaction to incoherence but I tend to be a Collie, unless I am to exhausted. The Border Collies are always at risk because it drawns their energy eventually. Timebox tidying time, finding allies and doing what is counter-intuitive to deal with burn-out: reframe thinking(trying to be a cat at times), doing pleasurable physical activity (I fence every now and then).
At the end some people will see the new clothes of the emperor, some other no, and will be confused if someone tells them otherwise.
Interesting post as always. Great identification of the different types hearing the message and I have seen, and likely been most of these at different times. I think generally people become more battle hardened as time goes by.
I am taken to a yearly company get together or quarterly all hands where afterwards people go ‘what was that’ or ‘oh, we have changed direction again’.
Some reflections, have never understood why those giving these pitches don’t sense check the approach earlier with those on the ground and you start to lose faith if the direction changes every quarter or even multiple times within the same quarter.
Some advice to the collie, resist the urge to go fox and be more cat. Get back to the team you do your daily work with, have a discussion / bark out loud as a team, then get back to business as usual. That is where you do your best work, have control and can make the greatest impact.
"Remember, it's just a game".
I probably fit that border collie role, and many of my best product leaders have been collies too. I'd remind them that their work / strategy / impact is vitally important, and at the same time it's an elaborate, multi-layered game we are all playing. It's not real life. And yes, some aspects will never make sense. Our job is to push as hard as we can to fix, and sense make, and build. But we also need to be OK with the fact we are just players in an elaborate game that nobody has the rulebook for. And we need to find the space to breathe, to have fun, and to find wins along the way despite this
Try some foxtrot once in a while, border collie. You might enjoy it more than you think without falling into any trap (you're too smart for that). And - or but: don't lose the joy of following your own belief and truth in the daily weeds of human interaction. You know it's your solid guiding star that makes you an authentic herding dog.
Back channel (challenging the stated vision in public doesn’t tend to go well. Private talks work much better, and saves people face) and explain to your team. For the rest of the company, I’d say “not your problem”: save the energy and focus on things you can impact. Also, spending too much effort on things far from your work can affect your performance (lowering your influence) and might not be received well
The most fundamental question is why that annual strategy meeting is done that way.
It could be the same for the involved internal ones as you described to the leader in their position to the organisational external ones.
The over awarding of destructive dark triade gets an explanation when changing it that way
I started out in my working life as a terrier. "Matured" into border collie. Tried my hand at fox and failed miserably. I am trying to cultivate my inner cat to combat an increasing sense of bitterness and despair over the feeling that my herding is useless. I think border collies who want to increase coherence in lasting ways have to be willing to incorporate a certain amount of foxiness.
By virtue of "can't tolerate", it would seem neither of those archetypes are places you can sustainably stay. You can only fight the feeling for so long. You leave or you become one of the "can tolerate" archetypes.