Jewish World Review

Can You Learn Not to Be a Jerk? Yes!

By Louise Witt

Answer Central

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (KRT) A couple weeks ago, I wrote a column about highly successful entrepreneurs who also happen to be hypomanics. These business owners can be hard-driving visionaries, but they can also be short-tempered, overconfident, impatient, dismissive, and even abusive to those whom they work with. Is there any hope for them? Yes, says Dr. Michael Freeman, an executive coach in Kentfield, Calif., who works with entrepreneurs and FORTUNE 500 executives who have bipolar characteristics.

Bipolarity, Freeman explains, is a general term for a condition that encompasses a spectrum of emotional states. On one end, someone can be an avid optimist who is simply thrilled to be alive; on the other end, someone can have a full-blown manic-depressive disorder and be extremely happy at one point and suicidally depressed at another. Hypomanics are on the mild end of the spectrum and aren't diagnosed with a medical condition. These people can be inspiring, motivating, and creative, but also reckless, impulsive, and aggressive.

Freeman, who is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco's Medical School, realized that many entrepreneurs have some bipolar condition when he worked with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and ran his own healthcare start-up in the 1990s. "When I was a CEO, I had 300 corporate clients and what I discovered was that about one-third of the entrepreneurs and business founders had bipolarity. Because they were my customers, I had to work with them very closely, and the more I had to work with them, the more I figured out what was going on."

Freeman says people who have bipolar conditions are usually very successful. "On the one hand, they are very valuable for value creation and wealth creation," he says. "But they also create value wipeouts and value loss by alienating their customers, board members, staffs, and peers."

Entrepreneurs will typically contact Freeman, when they realize that their personalities are creating problems and endangering their companies. "They'll recognize their blind spots," he says. Sometimes an entrepreneur will conclude that he has to change his behavior, because other ventures have failed—or his marriages have ended in divorce—and he doesn't want to repeat his past mistakes.

Freeman says that hypomanic entrepreneurs can't change their personalities, but they can learn how to modify their behavior. The first step is assessing the entrepreneur's strengths and weaknesses. Once that is completed, Freeman can come up with a solution. For instance, if a business owner is apt to make snap decisions, Freeman will suggest that he create a "kitchen cabinet" of advisors who vote on all courses of action. Or perhaps the entrepreneur has to get two good nights' of sleep, before he can make a decision.

Freeman also works with hypomanics on recognizing that they don't have the best interpersonal skills and that they can be extremely moody. An entrepreneur can be charismatic and engaging one day, but insulting and dismissive the next. If the business owner realizes that he's in a bad mood, he can tell his subordinate that he'd like to discuss the matter with him another time. "I help people set a thermostat for their own temperaments." Freeman says.

Of course, the first step towards working out a solution is for an entrepreneur to recognize that he may be a hypomanic. Freeman says that some of the characteristics are talking fast, covering a broad range of topics in conversations, being a workaholic, having big ideas for future projects, and, of course, being irritable and short-tempered. Freeman says that it's important that we learn to work with hypomanics—and vice versa—because they are often the ones who come up with the next big ideas.