by Jane Perdue | Creativity
It’s a department staff meeting. You lead the department, and you are being peppered with questions. How do you react?
Do you answer every single question yourself, or do you deflect some of them to those on your team who are subject matter experts on the topic in question?
If you feel compelled to answer every question, that’s being trapped in “vending machine leadership,” i.e., someone asks you a question (inserting the coins) and out pops the correct answer (like the candy bar or bag of chips).
Sometimes, we get trapped in vending machine leadership by a company culture that rewards us for being the “answer person.” Other times, our ego does us in. Every once in a while, it’s a mash-up of both, fed by a lack of curiosity.
It seems that organizations are claiming to value curiosity, but still discouraging its expression. They promote innovation yet punish failure. They cling to legacy structures and systems that emphasize authority over inquiry and routine over resourcefulness. ~Todd B. Kashdan, scientist and professor, George Mason University
If you wonder how curious you are, pause for a moment and reflect on your answers to these questions:
- Do I feel uncomfortable when there’s ambiguity?
- Do I make statements rather than ask questions to save time and keep things on track?
- Do I reward consistency and conformity because they are the expected norms of behavior?
- Do I label those who ask too many questions as disruptive and difficult?
- Do I look for facts that support my position and ignore those that challenge my position?
- Do I want answers given to me fast, clear, and unequivocal?
- Do I tell the boss what he wants to hear?
An absence of curiosity at work
A “state of curiosity” survey conducted by Harris Poll shows curiosity is absent from most of the leadership landscape:
- 39 percent of workers report that their employers are either extremely encouraging or very encouraging of curiosity
- Only 22 percent describe themselves as curious at work
- Two-thirds report facing barriers to asking more questions
- 60% say their workplace throws up barriers to integrating curiosity into their work
- 10% strongly agree that their leader preferred new and unfamiliar ideas
Answers are more valued than inquisitive thought, and curiosity is trained out of us. ~Hal Gregersen, Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center
How being curious makes you a better leader
Curiosity—that’s desiring knowledge beyond what you know—is an important leadership skill. A deficit of curiosity and a surplus of conformity make it challenging to lead in today’s complicated world. It contributes to bias and lack of diversity, too.
Curiosity delivers multiple personal and professional benefits that include improved performance, mental retention, and happiness. Being curious also improves social interactions and interpersonal relationships because it allows for “comfort with uncertainty, unconventional thinking, and a tendency to avoid judging, criticizing, or blaming other people.”
Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It’s accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know. ~David McCullough, author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
10 ways to be a more curious leader
Provided you have self-awareness, curiosity—filling the gap between what you know and want to learn—is a skill that can be developed.
To be a curious leader, you need to:
- Stop making statements that shut down creativity and start asking more questions that begin with “why” and “how.”
- Probe for hidden or missed insights in the conflict, incongruity, contradictions, and uncertainty the bubble up at work.
- Reframe your definition of failure to allow room to experiment, explore, and learn.
- Be mindful of being too quick to judge or criticize a person, thought, idea, etc.
- Stop insisting on certainty and accept a measure of uncertainty and ambiguity.
- Give yourself permission to play, have fun, and break the rules.
- Listen more closely; ask clarifying questions. See what’s churning beneath the surface.
- Watch the labels you use to categorize people and situations; they can be barriers to learning and inquisitiveness.
- Probe for unfamiliarity within the familiar; look for what’s different and/or what’s limiting in what’s familiar.
- Don’t get too comfortable with what you know; seek out facts that challenge what you believe to be true.
What will you start doing to be more curious?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | DEI
“Tia, you make me crazy. Can’t you do anything without planning it to death? This work needs to go out now.”
“Hunter, this project isn’t ready to go. If we release it now, there’s going to be rework and more rework. Not to mention all the complaints we’ll get.”
“Time is money, Tia. All your dithering over getting it right is costing the company money. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Time spent on rework wastes money, too. Hunter. I don’t get how you can’t see that.”
“What I see, Tia, is you holding everyone up because of your ridiculous obsession with planning and perfection.”
“I’m not worried about perfection, you moron. I just want things to work right.”
Tia and Hunter’s raised voices had drawn the attention of their boss, Alonzo. It wasn’t the first time their disputes had disrupted the office. He called them into his office.
After a lengthy and passionate conversation, the three of them emerged with a plan—and peace.
Alonzo was a gifted leader who understood how to manage people through, and around, the perils, pitfalls, and polarization associated with binary either/or thinking, which leads to a lack of diversity in thinking and doing.
3 ways to champion diversity
Alonzo knew these three actions would help Tia and Hunter see beyond their “my way versus your way” thinking so they could work together to get the job done.
1) Always keep the end goal and what you need to accomplish in mind.
Both Tia and Hunter were passionate about their project. They believed they were doing purposeful work that would benefit employees and customers. However, in their zeal in promoting their personal vision for how the work should be handled, they got bogged down in details and lost sight of their over-arching purpose.
Alonzo helped them see how taking sides and pointing fingers only slowed their progress in reaching the common goal they shared.
2) Recognize there’s usually more than one way to get something done.
Tia was a methodical planner; Hunter was intuitive and spontaneous. Tia wanted to work out all the details in advance. Hunter saw work elements that could withstand a little risk-taking and could be released sooner. Instead of addressing the merits of what the other was proposing, Tia and Hunter fought over whose approach was right and whose was wrong.
Alonzo helped them appreciate how both of them were right but for different reasons. Some of their work did require thoughtful planning and testing to avoid unnecessary issues; other parts didn’t require such meticulous attention. Alonzo guided them in dividing their work into phases that could be released at different times.
Alonzo used the metaphor of taking a road trip to enlighten Tia and Hunter about using multiple approaches. He asked them to name what route they would take to visit a big city. Hunter said he would use the freeway. Tia wanted to travel back roads. Alonzo asked them if it mattered what roads they traveled as long as they reached their destination. Both Tia and Hunter agreed it didn’t.
3) Appreciate that standing up for what you believe in doesn’t mean being uncompromising or intolerant about other perspectives.
Convinced that their approach to their project was the right one, both Tia and Hunter had asserted their preferences as incontrovertible truths. Either/or thinking (and hubris) does that to people. They assert the rightness of their position, the wrongness of those who see things differently, and lose sight of the big picture.
Alonzo helped Tia and Hunter realize their inability to see possibility in each other’s position. He encouraged them to take a step back and think critically before jumping in, especially when they were so passionate about something. Alonzo helped them see that absolute and unyielding certainty is a flashing red sign signaling a lack of appreciation for diversity of thought.
Life, love, and leadership don’t lend themselves to cookie-cutter solutions. Understanding that diversity and inclusion play a key role in leadership helps us create and execute plans that produce better outcomes because the input was diverse and well-rounded.
Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world. ~Pearl S. Buck
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Paradox
If you knew a replacement part would add an extra 90 cents in costs and yield only ten cents in warranty savings, would you authorize use of the more expensive part?
Probably not. Managers would crunch the numbers and find the spending increase unjustified since only a correlation exists between the increased costs and accident prevention.
If you ran Starbucks, would you have made the decision to close 8,000 stores, put 175,000 employees through racial bias training, and forego an estimated $16.7 million in lost sales?
Both/and or either/or?
The leadership team at GM focused on costs in making their decisions.
Those at Starbucks measured both costs and benefit (which has yet to be determined)—they practiced the business of business as BOTH watching the bottom line AND doing the right thing.
Some are passionate that the sole responsibility of business is making money. Others say business should measure a triple bottom line, focusing on environmental and social dimensions as well as financial ones.
Friedman’s focus on economics is measured by profit and loss, which is fairly clear-cut and unambiguous. Elkington’s push for the triple bottom line is more complicated. As he says, “success or failure on sustainability goals cannot be measured only in terms of profit and loss. It must also be measured in terms of the wellbeing of billions of people and the health of our planet.”
Friedman’s approach can work with mostly an either/or style of thinking; Elkington’s requires the use of both/and paradoxical thinking. Either/or thinking is less complicated and more explicit. Both/and paradoxical thinking is more involved and requires deeper analysis.
Managing a paradox requires managing conflicting yet complementary forces, dynamics like cost and benefit, results and relationship, competition and collaboration, and so on.
Today’s successful business leaders will be those who are most flexible of mind. An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader’s premier trait. Further, the challenge is for a lifetime. New truths will not emerge easily. Leaders will have to guide the ship while simultaneously putting everything up for grabs, which is in itself a fundamental paradox. ~Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos
4 ways to be a better thinker
In “Learning to Thrive on Paradox,” Peter Stroh and Wynne Miller outline four ways to manage a paradox, all of which require moving beyond the simplicity of either/or thinking. Here’s how they describe the four methods:
“Managers must continuously brainstorm the question: “How can two incompatible values be true?” For example, increasing quality in the long run requires a short-term investment; therefore, improving quality costs money while it saves money.”
“Managers must strive to create conditions that allow simultaneously for the emergence of contradictions through creative tension. Examples are loosely coupled structures, controlled entrepreneurship, and conservative innovation. The idea is to make personal values explicit by inquiring into both the positive and negative qualities of two seemingly contradictory paradigms and to develop a synergistic solution or a synthesis.”
- Expanding the construct space and time of a paradox
“When profits are down, managers tighten controls, and when sales are up and profits are soaring, managers increase responsiveness to customers. Thus, current market conditions require that managers simultaneously use belt-tightening and creative responses. Similarly, expanding the time frame should help managers optimize the management of paradoxes by concentrating on aligning short term with long term goals.”
- Neither/nor thinking or choosing a third option.
“Paradoxically, this way of thinking replaces “both/and” by focusing on the outcome instead of the choice. Should management base its product development decisions on existing organizational technologies or on customer needs? Sometimes companies understand what will best serve customers before the customers know it themselves. In these cases, technology pushes the company. The paradoxical forces of both “technology push” and “market pull” help drive the company along the road.”
Either/or thinking will always have a place in our management practices. However, it shouldn’t be the default method for critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving.
The art of managing and leading organizations today lies in embracing incompatible forces, rather than choosing between them. Organizational leaders must learn to deal with ambiguity and paradoxes through a new mindset; one that combines and optimizes rather than splits apart and differentiates. ~Alan T. Belasen, management professor SUNY
Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be. ~Gary Hamel, Professor, consultant, and Director of the Innovation Lab
Ready to expand your styles of thinking repertoire and make better decisions?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Bias
Once upon a time there was boss who was an extrovert and who preferred working with extroverts. He liked people jockeying to make themselves heard and found the quiet, reflective ones annoying. Over time, he quit adding introverts to his team and weeded out those who had joined the team before he took over.
He was shocked when a class action discrimination charge was filed against him.
It’s estimated that somewhere between 50 and 74 percent of the population are extroverts. This boss preferred working with talkative, high-energy, action-oriented people. He loved having a team of outgoing individuals who didn’t hesitate to share their opinions, even if they had to talk over each other to do so. This boss believed reflective and thoughtful individuals who weren’t johnnie-on-the-spot with a loud opinion weren’t qualified to work in his department.
This boss let his preference—his bias—morph into prejudice, which resulted in discrimination.
Let’s take a look at how this hierarchy of harm unfolds:
Bias: a tendency to favor or disfavor that prevents neutral consideration.
Prejudice: a preconceived opinion, prejudgment, or attitude that negatively impact one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions about a group or individual.
Discrimination: unfair, inappropriate, unjustifiable, and negative behavior toward a group or its members.
Having a bias for extroverts didn’t make this boss a bad person. What made him a poor leader though, was that he failed to control for his bias.
He’s not alone. Even though people like to think they’re unbiased, they’re not!
Our brains facilitate biased thinking:
-
- Psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it “System 1” thinking, an “effortless, often unconscious process that infers and invents causes and intentions, neglects ambiguity, suppresses doubt, and uses similarity rather than probability.”
- Author Malcolm Gladwell calls it “the power of thinking without thinking.”
We all occasionally go on autopilot, especially when under pressure or experiencing something new, and rely on the mental pairings we make when we fold things into our memory. Being an effective leader. though, depends on whether or not we tame our biases or let them control what we do.
5 common workplace cognitive biases
Biases are everywhere.
“Cultural biases are like smog in the air,” says Jennifer Richeson, a Yale psychologist. “To live and grow up in our culture, then, is to ‘take in’ these cultural messages and biases and do so largely unconsciously.”
Some biases bubble up more frequently than others. Think about where you work. Have you seen any of following common biases happening there?
Anchoring: the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions.
Confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.
Groupthink: the psychological phenomenon for alignment that occurs within a group of people because of the desire for, and/or pressure to, have harmony or conformity.
Halo effect: the tendency for someone’s overall impression of a person, either good or bad, to be influenced by how they feel and think about the other person’s character.
Overconfidence effect: the tendency for someone to believe subjectively that his or her judgement is better or more reliable than it objectively is.
Bias is tricky to manage. Why? Because it’s difficult for us to see our own biases.
We bump into the introspection illusion, “the assumption that our own golden rule of objectivity works well for ourselves—but others’ rules don’t work for them. The result is a blind spot that can lead otherwise careful people to exempt themselves from rules of behavior they would rigorously apply to others.”
5 ways to tame bias
So, how do leaders avoid the thinking without thinking trap that the extrovert-preferring boss fell victim to?
Leaders can five things to minimize the impact of biased thinking. They can:
- Be mindful of always listening to their gut. Quick decisions and first impressions can unconsciously be shaped by bias. Be curious and fact check before acting.
- Involve more people in the policy- and decision-making process. The trade-off in time involved is balanced by the emergence of fuller, deeper, richer, and more inclusive outcomes because we’re considering a broader spectrum of thoughts, opinions, and perspectives.
- Stop relying exclusively on memory—it isn’t as infallible, accurate, or impartial as most people think it is. Memory plays tricks on everyone. Biased impressions are folded into our memories.
- Recognize that not every decision is best served by using narrow either/or thinking. Sometimes, the right answer is both/and. Biased thinking is often at the core of polarization.
- Include contrarians on every team and listen to what they have to say. Their contributions in helping people see things from a different perspective are invaluable. They force us to inhabit a different way of thinking.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts. ~Bertrand Russell
What methods have worked for you in managing bias?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you
“Dave should have picked me to be on that special project team. He’s my boss. He should have known I wanted to participate.”
Should. Such a limiting word. It gifts us with frustration and anger.
“I should have been asked to lead the discussion group. They should have known that I’m good at that kind of work.”
Should…leads us down paths of disappointment and resentment.
“Kathy should have been smarter than to disagree with the boss. She should have known it wasn’t her place.”
Should…keeps the door to bias and stereotype wide open.
With its sweet smell and stickiness, flypaper attracts and then traps flying insects that land on it. Should is a piece of mental flypaper. Once we unfurl it, our thoughts get gummed up, and we get stuck in a place that’s usually not good for ourselves or others.
Sticky, limiting mental flypaper
When we think or say should, we’ve fallen into prescriptive thinking. That’s us defining the world and people by what we expect them to be and do. We ascribe our perspective onto others and judge them by our standards.
That method of flypaper thinking can get us into big trouble. How? We’re deciding after considering only one point of view—our own.
Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own. ~Paulo Coelho
Our thoughts, preferences, and perspectives make us unique. They’re our contribution to the endless smorgasbord of differences that make life fun and fascinating. That’s the plus side.
On the flip side, our preferences and tendencies can make our world small if we expect others to share them or to intuitively know them, like the words that Dave/they/Kathy should have known. Mental flypaper that gets us stuck.
5 bad things the word “should” helps us do
Whenever we think or say should, internal alarms need to ring because:
- We’re making judgments when we may have only a partial set of facts. The boss should have known I wanted that assignment. Unless we’ve specifically declared our interest, there’s a strong likelihood the boss doesn’t know.
- There’s the possibility we’re being close-minded, maybe even believing our own myth. They should have known I’m good at that kind of work. The spotlight effect bias is a tendency for people to overestimate the amount of attention people give to them. People may not know. Unless we’ve told him, we can’t assume they do.
- We might be displaying incivility toward people whom we’re expecting to behave in a certain way because of what we think the should know or do, and they aren’t.
- We may be marginalizing others because of unconscious bias or stereotype, which apply generalizations to individuals. She should have known her place.
- We might be frustrating ourselves immensely because no one is living up to the expectations we have about them that we never told them about!
Plus, there’s a good chance we’re displaying hubris, spreading negativity, hurting others, perpetuating unspoken expectations, sprinkling incivility, and unnecessarily working ourselves up.
Psychologist Robert Hogan notes that people have three needs: to get along, get ahead, and find meaning. When we ascribe our should be perspective onto others, it’s likely these three needs go unmet for ourselves as well as others. By building the should box, we eliminate the possibility of connecting, learning, or growing.
It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau
When we catch ourselves using should, let’s think of this insight from professor Peter Elbow,
“Our best hope for finding invisible flaws in what we can’t see in our own thinking is to enter into different ideas or points of view—ideas that carry different assumptions. Only after we’ve managed to inhabit a different way of thinking will our currently invisible assumptions become visible to us.”
That’s some powerful advice.
Ready to step out of the should box?
