Scarcity or Abundance Mindset? How Scarcity-Minded Leaders Undermine Team Culture and Potential

“What [people] call knowledge is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.”~ Sri Aurobindo

Everybody loves an attorney or legal professional who delivers great legal or legal-related results, such as on-point advice or deliverables, favorable dispute or transaction outcomes, or high revenue growth. This is true in corporations, law firms, and solutions providers, where success largely depends upon the deft navigation of challenging situations, generation of revenue and profits, and the like.

A common scenario occurs in many organizations: A colleague known for consistently delivering excellent tactical results is asked to begin managing other colleagues. For instance, a talented IP attorney who functioned as an individual contributor is promoted to a manager role by business or legal executives. Such executives may assume that a colleague with legal or business proficiency naturally is an effective manager and leader. Alternatively, they may be uncertain how the colleague actually will perform, but think it’s worth a try in light of departmental needs.

Unfortunately, meaningful vetting of individuals’ suitability and performance as managers and leaders sometimes is virtually nonexistent. The glow of tactical work seems to distract savvy executives from asking fundamental questions about the fitness of these individuals for leadership roles. Indeed, executives may be oblivious to what life is like for team members under a manager’s supervision.

C-suite executives should look behind the curtain of tactical excellence to ensure that managerial positions are held by highly effective managers and leaders. Absent such scrutiny, executives may aid and abet the perpetuation of toxic culture, stifled professional development, suboptimal decisions, and unpreparedness for the future.

To ascertain whether a manager is the right or wrong person for the role, one useful exercise is to determine if, and to what extent, the manager operates with a scarcity mindset or an abundance mindset. These dramatically different paradigms have highly consequential implications. A scarcity mindset is destructive, while an abundance mindset is productive.

Armed with these insights, executives can take proactive steps to minimize scarcity and actualize abundance and, in so doing, establish optimal conditions for achieving excellence in their organization.

Scarcity and Abundance in a Nutshell

A person with a scarcity mindset (also termed scarcity mentality) sees the proverbial glass half empty. Conversely, someone with an abundance mindset (or abundance mentality) sees the glass half full.

Those with scarcity inclinations operate from a place of fear, defensiveness, self-protection, and pessimism. In stark contrast, abundance-inclined persons operate from a place of courage, rootedness, focus on others’ needs, and optimism.

Importantly, an executive’s interactions with a manager in the context of tactical matters or one-on-one, manager-led personnel briefings aren’t likely to reveal the manager’s prevailing mindset. An intentional, holistic assessment may be required to gain insights. As part of that assessment, an executive can watch for symptoms and effects that offer strong clues as to what’s driving the manager’s managerial and leadership approach.

Scarcity Mindset: Symptoms and Effects

Managers driven by a scarcity mindset may exhibit the following propensities:

1. Guarded personality. Coming from a place of insecurity, some managers are uncomfortable opening up to team members and others in reasonably transparent, relational ways. Their preoccupation with executing tasks serves as a defense mechanism to prevent them from getting too close. Such managers may be perceived as introverted, secretive, or unduly detached. Therefore, they may have trouble building and sustaining enriching workplace relationships, the kind that bind teams together and rally them around a shared vision.
2. Us/them mentality. Scarcity-driven managers also may habitually—and without objective basis—see their organizations as comprising factions with highly divergent interests. For example, managers in large companies may view sister divisions, affiliates, or parent entities with guardedness and suspicion. As such, they may withhold information, prefer isolation to collaboration and cooperation, and otherwise act territorially and defensively as if their peers pose threats.
3. Low emotional intelligence. Fixated on self-interest and self-protection, managers may demonstrate low self-awareness and emotional intelligence regarding core aspects of their department and people. For instance, they may be clueless regarding the morale of their team or may fail to appreciate the implications of their words or chosen courses of action. Consequently, they may fail to modify direction to better empower, curate, and grow their team for maximum success.
4. Poor delegation skills. Scarcity-minded managers often view leaning on others as a sign of weakness that may threaten their job security. Thus, they may struggle to let go of work and trust in others to share the load through delegation. For example, they may keep their hands in work that falls within a direct report’s job description. By not observing appropriate boundaries, they may confuse internal clients, undermine the authority and credibility of team members, and deprive team members of learning and growth opportunities. Moreover, their penchant for doing others’ work becomes an excuse for not attending to essential leadership functions, such as conceiving and implementing broader strategies and developing team talent.
5. Fear of asking for resources. Counter to the best interests of their team or enterprise, scarcity-driven managers may fail to advocate to executive management for necessary resources, such as additional headcount to ease the load on team members and serve client needs, or increased budget to assure fair compensation for team members. This may stem in part from self-manufactured fears of being perceived as an empire builder or a conviction that leanness and frugality will be commended and keep the department beneath the radar of finance leaders. Such managers also may cite onerous, perfectionistic criteria as grounds to veto or stonewall their team’s resource requests.
6. Rigid and unimaginative frame of mind. Through their lenses of limitations and restrictions, certain managers may become mired in conventional thinking and approaches related to bigger-picture strategy, people, and operations. They also may be skeptical of, and resistant to, outside-the-box, visionary ideas offered by others, delaying or preventing their acceptance and actualization, rather than embracing and helping to refine them.
7. Unrealistic expectations of employees. Managers with a scarcity mindset may narrowly define what constitutes a competent employee, even expecting employees to be a near clone of themselves. They also tend to wield the metaphorical stick, not the carrot, in matters related to employee performance, and are highly critical of others, obsessing over flaws. Instead of figuring out how to leverage team members’ strengths, such as by shaping or modifying roles to align with such strengths and with reasonable expectations, they may withhold titles, recognition, or other motivating actions. Anyone less than a so-called superstar performer essentially is on probation; the scarcity-driven manager lurks in the shadows, awaiting another misstep to validate the manager’s unfavorable opinion of the subject employee.
8. Transactional approach to external providers. Managers with a scarcity mindset likewise are often quick to see the faults in outside counsel, service providers, and the like. They commonly are long on judgmental views and short on loyalty, and may gravitate towards doing business with individuals who similarly are task- and transaction-oriented. This may inhibit the building of vibrant, longstanding external relationships that are mutually beneficial.
9. False bravado. Ironically, despite operating from a place of fear, and prone to behaviors noted above, scarcity-minded managers may speak to executives with unwarranted conviction, painting a picture of departmental reality that is distorted, incomplete, or missing proper nuance. Also, at times they may seize moments to score points with executives, throwing others under the bus in the process. Perhaps their projection of “confidence” and “strength” functions as an unconscious shield to deflect from weaknesses in their leadership approach. Regardless, such behaviors can be highly destructive to peers and to sound decision-making.

The potential negative effects of placing someone with the above scarcity propensities in a management role are significant and troubling.

Indeed, departments led by such managers may achieve incremental progress and make limited impacts beyond essential tactical work, such as patent and trademark prosecution, IP clearance, and triage of defensive disputes. They may struggle to implement highly sophisticated protection and monetization strategies for critical technologies, and to adopt and fully exploit state-of-the-art IP and legal operations tools and methodologies. These departments also may suffer from chronic understaffing and team member stress and disillusionment.

As team members increasingly feel undervalued and trapped by the manager’s limiting capacities, a demotivating or toxic culture may take root. This is exacerbated when, in larger teams, the manager places weak or toxic managers in charge of a subset of the team, and, through ignorance or disregard, permits them to further perpetuate the status quo and reinforce bad behaviors. A natural consequence of bad culture is that the department may experience high attrition or be vulnerable to departures of team members who grow ever more frustrated.

By the manager’s words or actions, collaboration also may be discouraged, oppositional thinking may become pervasive, and opportunities to team up with others may be missed.

And when the manager speaks from a flawed perspective and executives believe what they’re hearing, unwise organizational decisions may be made.

Overall, a scarcity-minded manager constrains group and individual potential and impairs sound decision-making, due to a lack of vision, openness, and clarity, and a failure to channel energies into empowering and fully developing team members.

To avoid such dangers and help IP and legal departments thrive, executives should place individuals with an abundance mindset into manager and leader roles, as we will explore in a subsequent article.

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