The Barbenheimer phenomenon is redefining the meaning of the cliche “opposites attract”. What was once a simple comedic observation about a shared release date has become a full-fledged viral meme moment as we moved into opening weekend for these two movies. On the surface, the Mattel-branded and bright-pink Barbie from Director Greta Gerwig and the dark historical drama Oppenheimer from Director Christopher Nolan could not have a more unique audience or a further departure on theme and tone. That very disparate nature has put cinema fans into a full roar of excitement in the weeks leading up to what has become, for many, a two-ticket weekend. The internet craze is translating into real results for theaters. Estimates from the National Association of Theatre Owners suggest that as many as 200,000 people have purchased tickets for both movies for this opening weekend.1 Oppenheimer opened its Thursday premier to $10.5 million, the largest opening for a Christopher Nolan original film ever.2 On the weekend, Barbie is pacing to reach over $155 million in ticket sales with Oppenheimer contributing another $77 million, marking the first time the box office has seen one movie open to over $150 million with a second movie opening to more than $50 million.3 The blockbuster weekend marks a welcome moment of good news and levity in a troubled film industry. The Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild are both on strike as studios struggle to regain post-pandemic momentum and the two sides fight over the future of content in the midst of the growing capabilities of generative artificial intelligence. Spreading further, the Barbenheimer phenomen feels like a point of universal goodwill as movie-goers celebrate the achievements of both movies rather than taking a divisive and demeaning view of their differences.
With further inspection, there is something deeper that we see at play here. The Oppenheimer bio-pic looks at the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist considered to be the father of the atomic bomb, and explores the internal conflict between his aspirations of delivering the bomb faster than Germany in the midst of WW2 and the later reckoning of fully understanding the horror he delivered to the world. Barbie is also a movie revolving around internal conflict as our protagonist faces an existential crisis as her perfect and independent life is interrupted by thoughts of mortality and as she is confronted with her role in creating unrealistic and shallow beauty standards for young girls. The two movies, which seemingly could not be more different, actually could not be more similar. Each fixates on how our uniquely individual strengths can also create our uniquely individual difficulties.
For many people at work, July and August is the mid-year review season. It marks the point where we receive feedback on what is going well and where we need to improve in order to set us up for success and promotion at the annual review cycle. As with Barbie and Oppenheimer, it is often the case in these reviews that we learn how our most core strengths can also create unintended negative consequences that become opportunities for us to improve. Here, we will look at some examples of our dichotomous nature and discuss tactics for driving improvements against our opportunities that do not come at the expense of our strengths.
Seeing Our Two Sides - What Does This Look Like
For Oppenheimer, his unparalleled intelligence drove his success and ability to deliver the Manhattan Project. That same intelligence devastated Oppenheimer for how he enabled the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gave him tremendous indecision over whether to continue pursuing the Manhattan Project and the later hydrogen bomb, and ultimately filled him with regret that cratered his career.4 For Barbie, her unparalleled independence and self-confidence drove her success in careers and relationships. That same independence cast doubt as she began to cope with mortality and her self-confidence ultimately forced her to directly confront the dire consequences she had for the self-esteem and mental health of young girls.5 But what might this look like for us?
While not universally true, it is often the case at work that our strengths and opportunities represent two sides of the same coin. For example:
- You might be someone who is highly organized, diligent, and receives positive feedback for your ability to clearly scope project requirements and move individual activities through to completion with tremendous clarity. On the other hand, you might receive critical feedback that you need to improve your ability to balance multiple priorities simultaneously rather than fixate on high-quality delivery of a single project. Or perhaps you are told that you need to improve your flexibility to take-in new requirements that emerge midproject flight.
- You might be someone who is a highly empathetic manager and receives positive feedback for your ability to develop psychological safety in your team and to take advantage of your teammates’ strengths. On the other hand, you might receive critical feedback that you need to provide more critiques to your team and do more to highlight and correct their shortcomings.
- You might be someone who is a subject matter expert who adeptly and accurately highlights problems with processes and new project proposals in order to make them stronger. On the other hand, you might receive critical feedback that you need to be more open-minded when discussing potential opportunities and do more to proactively share proposals instead of solely identifying flaws in those provided by others.
- You might be someone who is a strong technical expert that can capably and consistently deliver quality work autonomously that is error free. On the other hand, you might receive critical feedback that you need to do better at communicating project status and collaborating with other team members to either help their learning and development or improve their context of production systems.
- You might be someone who is highly analytical and comfortably leverages data to drive their decision-making. On the other hand, you might receive critical feedback that you need to better balance insights or strategy where access to data may be lacking or fall short. Vice versa, you could even be someone who is praised as a strategic thinker but is frequently told to improve your use of data.
In all of these cases, it should be plain enough to see how the critiques highlighted are simply the result of an overriding strength. For example, autonomous behaviors that create value due to their productivity can also create problems due to how they silo information.
It is critical to note that in each of these cases, it is the exact same behavior. We are not looking at examples where someone has one set of behavioral strengths and then a wholly separate set of behavioral weaknesses. Instead, there is one, common behavior that simply represents the way they are. From that common source, we find both the good and the bad. To better understand this, we can explore the drivers behind why we get these divergent outcomes from a root source and how to minimize our opportunities while simultaneously maximizing our strengths in response to each of these drivers.
Too Much of a Good Thing
The first driver we see is behavior-in-excess. People and their personalities are incredibly complex. In most cases, individual behaviors are balanced against other individual behaviors or motivations that help to moderate them. I will refer to these off-setting behaviors as counterbalancing control measures. In effect, these can help a behavioral strength from going off the rails. In the case of a behavior-in-excess, we have a strength that is way over-indexed versus the average person. And, in these cases, the counterbalancing behaviors are overpowered and fail to moderate the individual strength.
Let’s dive into our example of an autonomous technical contributor who needs to communicate their work out and collaborate more effectively. Most people are able to act autonomously at work. These well-balanced contributors can take a set of requirements and project details to make decisions and handle troubleshooting on their own in order to move work forwards. However, it often happens that at critical decision points a well-balanced contributor will seek out additional perspectives from across the team in order to reach a more well-rounded opinion. This is an example of a counterbalancing control measure having impact. This check-in behavior could be the result of a number of different behaviors - ranging from high self-awareness of an individual’s knowledge gap, to humility and wanting to get more perspectives, to a motivation to build a collaborative environment. In a separate circumstance, a well-balanced contributor will actively seek to keep others informed of project progress as work is underway. This controlling measure could be driven by the individual’s motivation to not be an individual contributor long-term. However, this behavior could also be created by organizational structure; perhaps team rotations happen regularly, making communication outwards a requirement. To control for a behavior-in-excess and for the sake of development, we should follow three steps.
Tactic 1: Identify the Over-Indexed Strength
The first key is obviously awareness. When receiving feedback on opportunities, take some time to reflect on how it relates to known strengths. In a formal review process, this can be easier because we can look at related feedback on things that we do well and if there is a correlated behavior underlying both. Otherwise, a helpful exercise can be to think of whether there might be situations where the highlighted negative behavior could actually be useful.
Tactic 2: Strengthen Counterbalancing Behaviors and Motivations
Our strengths come naturally to us. Often, they take no work or effort on our part to realize the benefits. However, that does not mean that they always align with our motivations. In this example, a highly autonomous individual may not want to sit in an individual contributor role long-term. Their strength in acting autonomously is actually problematic because, if unhindered, it moves them further from their goals of management. The key here is to realize this disconnect between strengths and goals. By identifying the discrepancy, we can contextualize the negative unintended consequences of our behavioral strengths. In doing so, we increase the counterbalancing power of our motivations and their related behaviors to give them a fighting chance against our over-indexed strengths.
Can Fish Climb Trees?
A second driver behind behaviors being dichotomously good or bad is the situational construct. Often misattributed to Albert Einstein is the quote that “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The concept rings true here. Sometimes a behavior is only bad because of where or when it occurs. In a different context, the same behavior would be beneficial. In that case, we should look at the environment in which our behaviors take place to better understand how our individual operating models interact with our environment around us.
Continuing to look here at our autonomous individual contributor, there are many situations where that behavior, even in the extreme, is desirable. If the person is a subject matter expert assigned to a highly urgent project, their ability to move through the task independently both improves speed to delivery and ensures that the project will meet all quality requirements. Here, high autonomy is a good thing. And, even if some degree of greater collaboration is needed, there is not a large disconnect between the person’s behaviors and the team requirements. In that case, we can account for a potential opportunity area with some work process or structure changes.
Tactic 3 - Change the Structure
Sometimes our counterbalancing behaviors and motivations need additional support. In these cases, we can design our environment to help. By changing the way work gets done, we can create counter-forces inherent to the day-to-day that help contain over-indexed strengths at risk of running away. In this example, we could rotate role responsibilities every few weeks or months in order to require individual team members to be better about communicating progress while a project is in flight to ensure a seamless future hand-off. Similarly, we could require decisions to have a secondary review prior to moving forward. Software teams apply this via “pull requests” which ensure that all code changes get additional reviews before they go into production.
However, we should also recognize that - in some cases - there is simply a core disconnect between someone’s inherent behaviors and the work responsibilities they have been assigned. This requires us to ask the broadest and most meaningful question - is that person in the wrong role? Do we believe that the feedback that is being shared should be fixed or might we be better off seeing it as a symptom that highlights the person is in the wrong spot.
Tactic 4 - Change the Role
There are cases where changing an opportunity behavior would be too hard, would diminish the behavior as a strength, or would decrease individual motivation. In these cases, we should look to change our environment completely. The misfit between behaviors and role needs may be unresolvable and the best course of action is to put ourselves into a new environment that better takes advantage of our natural tendencies and strengths. For example, our highly autonomous technical contributor may operate too independently to be effective as a manager. However, in a team environment where they can be hands-on in delivering work while contributing ad hoc to team L&D may be a perfect fit.
Conclusion
A key here is that none of these counter-balancing control measures is focused on decreasing the power of the behavioral strength by moving it closer to average. As we seek to improve, we want to make sure that we are not putting the benefits of our strengths at risk. We want to continue to realize their full potential benefit and additionally account for controlling for their downside. Note, this is not at all a recommendation to ignore critical feedback or to simply reframe problems as actually good things.
On the surface, Barbenheimer seems to be a meme-driven tongue-in-cheek craze. Given the word-of-mouth success, we can expect studios to try and recreate the impact in the future with co-release dates of similarly different movies. That will be a mistake. When we look deeper, it is not the differences between these two main characters that brought cinephiles out in droves. Rather, it is the universal nature of their individual struggle that resonated with us and the expert and artistic handling by Nolan and Gerwig of that conflict that has driven strong reviews. When we struggle with our own development, it can often feel that we are facing uncommon situations on our own. We should let this cultural moment remind us that, while the specifics of our situation may be unique, the reflection and work we must do to realize the best of ourselves means we have to accept our individual characteristics. We certainly should play up and take advantage of our strengths. And we have to see how those same strengths create opportunities that we must manage. With proper integration and acceptance of ourselves, we can fully realize our maximum potential.
References
- Movie fans hit the multiplexes for 'Barbenheimer' | Reuters
- The Barbenheimer Cometh (yahoo.com)
- ‘Barbie’ Box Office Towers Over ‘Oppenheimer’ With Record Opening – The Hollywood Reporter
- Oppenheimer (film) - Wikipedia
- Barbie (film) - Wikipedia
Share your work-related questions and dilemmas with us for upcoming blog post consideration.