The age-old challenge of leadership is balancing confidence with an authentic desire to learn and a realization that you don't, in fact, know it all. This starts to get tricky once you have succeeded in something, built a team, and strive for efficiency and scale. When you become recognized as an expert - whether it be among your colleagues or more broadly - people will depend on you. Your challenge will be to act upon your strengths and successes while also grounding your confidence with a sense of humility. The key is self-awareness and sensitivity to what goes on around you.
- Scott Belsky
An age-old question that small business owners face all the time is, "Why do intelligent people make stupid choices?" Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior examines the reasons for such behavior and provides the ways people can avoid dumb decisions. This an interview with one of the book's authors, Ori Brafman.
Question: How can a company turn around a bad reputation - i.e., when powerful negative sway factors already exist?
Answer: The best thing to do is to own up to what went wrong and start off on a new path. There's nothing worse than avoiding the big elephant by not addressing prior bad acts. You saw Netflix do great with this a couple of weeks ago when their delivery system collapsed. They immediately took responsibility, alerted their users, and offered a refund for those affected. We all make big blunders from time to time, and the best thing to do is to step up and own responsibility. It's just like on the basketball court: You throw a bad pass, you point at yourself and say, "My bad," and then others can trust you.
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Question: How do you tell a Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or Bill Gates that you think they're making a mistake?
Answer: The best thing to do is to get into their brain. Where are they coming from? What's their blind spot? And then you can point it out to them: "You're thinking of doing x, y, and z because you're assuming that a, b, and c are in play. But actually I don't think b is going to turn out the way we expect it to. And so we might be better off doing u, v, w instead." The more articulate and specific I can be, the easier it is for others to follow my way of thinking. If I don't take the other person's perspective into account, and I just say something like, "I think you got it all wrong," I might be 100% accurate, but psychologically I'm going to make them feel defensive. "How does he know he's going to be right? Why is he attacking my plan?"
Research has shown that it usually takes people at least thirty days to accept a new paradigm or way of thinking. We need to get adjusted to it. So if I offer a totally different take and I want the person to take me seriously and not be defensive, I need to meet them half way - not by watering down my opinion - but by understanding where the other person is coming from and to meet them there. To let them know I see things from their perspective.
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Question: How can we prevent - or at least reduce - the amount of dumb things that we do?
Answer: Don't take risks based on emotion. If you're feeling worked up - tense, angry, impatient, ecstatic - take some time before you send off that email or make that crucial decision to go with a product or project. Ask yourself, "Could I possibly regret this a day from now or a week from now?" And if the answer is yes, it's better to wait.
People also make dumb mistakes because they don't think of the big picture or don't take all the data into account. During hard times, a company can cut down on marketing, even though it needs marketing more than ever - but the loss associated with the expenditures takes over rational planning.
Another thing that happens is that people continue to make the same mistake over and over again because "that's the way we've always done it." It's the fallacy of staying committed to a course and believing it's the best one just because it's been the chosen course in previous times. The antidote is to stay open-minded to emerging possibilities and to ask yourself, "If I had to start clean today, would I still be choosing the same path?" If not, then it's worth your while to re-examine your decision.
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Question: It seems there's a fine line between anarchy and enlightenment: How do you know when you should respect authority and just do as told versus be a devil's advocate and disagree?
Answer: Most of us, when we disagree with a group, keep quiet. Why make a fuss and ring alarm bells? And besides, maybe we're wrong. When you speak up and go against the opinion of the group, you risk getting branded as a loner who's not a team player. But dissent is a crucial ingredient in a successful team. When I interviewed Justice Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, he explained to me how dissent makes the Court's opinion stronger.
The Supreme Court structured dissent into the process. When an opinion is assigned, the majority keeps on having to answer questions and objections from the dissenting side. The process is obviously professional, but it's also a pain. You have to go back and forth going over points time and again. It's easy to imagine how the process can be exhausting, and in fact former Chief Justice Rehnquist believed in having a more unified voice and basically not airing the court's dirty laundry. But dissent brings about the best possible decision because it forces you to address all points. Imagine if every company went through a dissent process before arriving at an important decision.
It can get frustrating to listen to and incorporate the questions of a dissenter, but by doing so you explore all the different angles of an issue. Even if the dissenter is completely way off, exploring his or her viewpoint leads to a more accurate and nuanced perspective.
Airline pilots know this firsthand. The FAA mandates that every pilot gets trained in Crew Resource Management (CRM), a method of learning to utilize others' perspectives, encouraging them to speak up when they disagree with you, and questioning your own position when others raise red flags. A truly enlightened team is one that knows it's strongest not when there's unanimity, but when there's mutual respect and tolerance for each individual's perspective.
- Ori Brafman, The Art of Resisting Irrational Behavior
