The Golden Mean

The Golden Mean is the idea that every virtue, every quality, every habit worth admiring sits on a spectrum, and the same quality turns into a vice when it’s underdone and a vice again when it’s overdone. Most of us know it as Goldilocks: the porridge that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right. A quality worth living by is easy to drag into a vice on either side, by deficiency to the left or by excess to the right.

The Golden Mean applies all over your life. Too much exercise and you hurt your body; too little and you’re overweight, choking down green smoothies, or in a hospital bed far too early. Even sleep can be overdone and underdone.

The skill is spotting where the virtue actually sits on the spectrum from deficiency to excess. So many debates get collapsed into a binary: plan or don’t plan, interview or don’t interview, spend weeks defining a role or never write one down at all. A virtue can lose an argument because someone frames it as one of its vicious adjacencies. The work is to find the admirable, beneficial behavior in the middle, the one so easily dragged toward either pole.

A hilarious one to pick on is HR. Is HR good or bad? You have to take it aside and pick a team, and once people pick a team they start to identify with it, and it turns into a competitive thing. Ask instead: at what moments is HR virtuous, and at what moments is it excessive or deficient? The answers are suddenly obvious. HR plainly acts in excess in some places and sits in deficiency inside a lot of teams. The funny part is how often the argument was fake to begin with. The way we frame these things puts us on teams, competing, talking past each other in the least productive way available, when there is another way to live that is so much more pleasant, effective, and useful.

This matters most in performance management. Someone is usually overdoing something or underdoing it, and it’s easy to hand back blunt feedback: you’re doing too much, you’re doing too little. What helps is painting the appropriate level, the virtuous level of the thing. Most behaviors need three levels, not two: deficiency, virtue, and excess.

So much of management gets framed as a moral question, good or bad. The Conscious Leadership Group writes about how much of our energy goes into being right, into a commitment to being right rather than curious [1]. I’ve always heard an echo of that in the word righteousness: it’s right to believe you’re right, and from there you become righteous, as in righteous indignation. Next thing you know you’re on a soapbox telling people they deserve to be eternally tortured in the fiery pits of hell if they put two spaces after a period.

A surprising amount of our conflict with other people runs through that morality. The virtuous spectrum is a much more compelling alternative. It asks not which of these is wrong, but which is effective, admirable, worth becoming. Thinking in Aristotelian virtues leaves room for more nuance, and it paints a truer picture. Every time you look at a competency, work out what its excess looks like and what its deficiency looks like. You see how easily you can slip into either one.

When you’re running a company, founder or executive, the demands on your time never stop, and it’s easy to tell yourself a story about why you can’t do something. That story is how you slip into deficiency. At the same time, plenty of people love to overthink and overdo, pouring effort into something long after the returns have flattened into an asymptote, because it feels good. The Golden Mean is a pressure test for the moment you’re in: am I in deficiency, in virtue, or in excess?

Accountability is a clean example. Its excess feels like a boot camp, miserable to be inside. Its deficiency is a free-for-all where no one is ever held to anything. Run it as a diagnostic on whatever is in front of you: is my behavior in deficiency, in excess, or in virtue?

Reach for it in two ways. The first is specific: every competency in Management Craft carries its own Golden Mean, a virtue with a deficiency and an excess named on either side, so when you’re working to get better at one, the mean is right there to study. The second is general. Any time something is broken, it’s a fast diagnostic: am I overdoing this or underdoing it, and what would each look like? It helped me when I filled out the “knowing what great looks like” competency. The excess turned out to be perfectionism; the deficiency was abdication, crossing your fingers and hoping.

A few of Aristotle’s other means are worth keeping in view, and more will surface as I write the Golden Mean into each competency. Honesty is one. Too little and someone is secretive, withholding rather than lying outright; too much and they’re oversharing, the wordy, talkative person we’ve all desperately hoped to be rescued from.

Feedback is another natural trigger. Any time someone tells you to change, hands you a chance to improve, or tells you outright that you suck at something, it can help to ask yourself if the kernel of the feedback is that you’re deficient or excessive in some behavior or thing.

There’s a reason the virtues are worth aspiring to at all. They help us live a good life. They’re pleasant to embody and pleasant to be around: a good friend, someone funny, someone who can get angry without turning cruel. Virtues tend to be effective as well as pleasant, and that’s finally why they’re virtues: because they work.

What we’re all aiming at, as leaders and as people, is to get better at securing what we want for ourselves, for our families, and for the teams and companies we build for our customers and the world. The virtues are a signal toward the behavior we need to change to get there, and toward being more at home in our own skin while we do.

The concept is Aristotle’s, from the Nicomachean Ethics, where he casts each virtue of character as a mean between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency [2]. The name isn’t his. “The golden mean,” aurea mediocritas, comes from the Roman poet Horace, in the Odes [3]. For the idea, Aristotle, thank you. For the better, more memorable label, Horace, thank you.