Pavlos’s Thoughts

When it comes to performance there are two personality types. We’ll call them achievement focused and risk focused. These two types of people approach success and failure in almost opposite ways and it’s good to realize this and know which type you are, as well as recognize these categories in the other stakeholders of your projects.

Risk focused people see success as a bar that they have to reach.

The best example of a risk focused professional is an airline pilot. The pilot has to get the plane and the passengers to the destination airport, safely. That’s a complete success. Nobody is going to thank the pilot for flying further, higher, faster, visiting a new city on the way, or doing acrobatics. Rather, the pilot has to look out for everything that can go wrong during the flight and avoid or recover from that situation. They’re risk focused in the sense that they are constantly looking at risk, or potential failure, and try to avoid it.

Other examples of risk focused people are accountants, business managers of stable organizations, project managers, film producers, civil engineers, security and military officers, criminals, surgeons, mountaineers, and unfortunately many parents.

Achievement focused people assume a baseline level of success and strive to maximize value from there.

The purest achievement focused person is an artist. Every artist, once competent, will succeed in applying paint to canvas, delivering a song, or remembering their lines. Artists are not concerned with reaching this baseline but with how far they can go from there. Is it new? Is it inspiring? Is the audience ecstatic? Can it be better? Can the work or the artist push new boundaries? Artists are always focused on achievement, and by definition this focus always has to be ahead of what they can at any time reach.

Other examples of achievement focused roles are entrepreneurs, other growth-oriented managers, scientists, product managers, film directors, architects, most doctors, misfits and agitators, athletes, and all kids.

It’s not helpful to label achievement focused people as risk takers and risk focused people as risk averse. In risk focused eyes, an entrepreneur who takes on some big idea is at risk of failing. That same startup CEO might think that the pilot who flies them to a meeting takes on an impossibly greater risk. A better description is that achievement focused people set up their projects to limit or externalize risk in the first place. If a startup fails or a movie flops, the investment is lost but nobody dies. Risk focused people are good at taking on unavoidable risk, managing it during their project, and discharging it safely. Once an airline crew takes off or a surgical team opens a person they enter a period of elevated risk that they have to control and back out of once the task is done.

When you’re running or are otherwise a stakeholder in a project you’ll encounter some combination of these two personality types in different roles. The project itself will also have an orientation, in other words it’s being run as an achievement focused or a risk focused project, either because that’s the personality of the leader or because it’s the culture of the organization.

It’s important to recognize all of these and map them out, to avoid friction between people who misunderstand this difference of focus and to know what you’re getting into or what to expect from others. I’m achievement focused and run projects that way whenever the organization allows it. I once tried to enlist two of our best software engineers for my new project. One, who was achievement focused, eagerly joined and performed better than anyone else I’ve worked with. The other, equally brilliant, guy declined because he thought my project was too risky, by which he meant that success was not well-defined. He was clearly risk focused. Failing to see these differences when you set up teams is likely to lead to tension and disappointment.

That is not to say that teams should only have one personality type, or that one of them is clearly better. If your whole team is achievement focused, maybe you could do with a risk focused project manager to ground you. That’s why films have a producer. If your organization is getting slow you might want to hire an achievement oriented product manager to create something new. If the appointments are good, the friction and stress that these two personality types create in the project are healthy.

There’s a time and a place for each approach. If a mountaineering expedition is not risk focused, they’ll probably lose people. Science has to be achievement focused, but may require large risk focused projects to build accelerators or spacecraft. Startups are created by achievement focused people, but blue-chip companies are run by risk focused accountants. When, and whether, to make the transition is crucial. Transitioning to a risk focus merely because the company has grown large is a mistake, as it will by definition limit growth. A massive product introduction, such as a new aircraft or operating system, can be managed with a risk focus but at some point this reaches diminishing returns. The overall initiative to bring such a thing to the market and make it as attractive as possible is achievement focused. On the other hand a great public work such as construction of a new bridge is fundamentally risk focused. It has to stand. Achievement focused architecture is welcome in such projects, but is contained.

Your kids are achievement focused. Remember that’s their achievements, not yours. As a parent you have to keep them safe, and in times of fear or hardship that may make parents risk focused. It’s important to go beyond this and maintain an achievement focus, so that you can show your kids how to have dreams and not to give them up or run out of them.