Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  Or she might discover something wonderful. And therein is the rub. Not believing we’re right can lead us to vacillate and falter—or to explore and learn new things. Believing we’re right leads us to march confidently in a determined direction—which might be off the edge of a cliff. To add to the difficulty, even if we look for data to make a decision, our automatic sense of rightness shapes what we find.

  Our experience of rightness kills curiosity and openness to data that proves us wrong

  The trap about our feeling of rightness is that it’s often a self-fulfilling prophesy. We are sure we’re right, and so we don’t notice (or we discard) any data that might suggest we’re wrong. As I was drafting this chapter, US president Donald Trump tweeted, “Any negative polls are fake news.” This is what our brains are mostly tweeting all the time to us. We dismiss things that contradict our sense of rightness because they feel, well, wrong to us.

  This as you can tell is the death of curiosity. “Certainty is a cruel mind-set,” Ellen Langer tells us. “It hardens our minds against possibility.” While it feels good to be right, it actually shuts us down to some of our best human traits—openness, curiosity, wonder. If our simple stories shape the data we notice and the way we package it to ourselves, our automatic feeling of rightness creates a lock-down in our information search. Just imagine the difference between wondering whether the capital of New York state is New York City and knowing that it is. If you wonder, you might ask (and find out the capital is Albany). If you’re sure, you’ll just keep saying it and not even notice that you’re wrong. This is obviously connected not only to our search for information but to how we talk with others.

  Science is filled with examples where knowing something was right meant that people ignored the ways they were wrong—often costing lives in the process. One of my favorite examples of this is the discovery of the benefits of hand-washing in 1847 by Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis, a doctor in a maternity hospital in Vienna, was captivated by the question of why women were dying so frequently from “childbed fever” at one hospital in town and so much less frequently in the other. He didn’t fully believe the myriad causes of childbed fever that other doctors seemed to believe in, and his investigations led him to find that careful washing of hands and equipment would cut down the deaths of these women dramatically. Unfortunately for him and the pregnant women of Vienna, his colleagues were so certain that they were right about childbed fever that they ignored his data and his findings. The frustration of that literally drove him crazy: he ended up dying in an insane asylum. Today of course the idea that doctors should wash their hands is totally obvious—and has saved millions and millions of lives—but back then it was absurd.

  Our experience of rightness changes the way we treat other people

  Imagine you’re in a meeting with the executive team and you’re presenting the final recommendations of a piece of work your team has been engaged in for the last month. You’ve been over every last piece of the data and you know exactly what should be done, and now you’re just informing the team and getting their approval. A new colleague, who has joined the team since the last time you’ve presented on this topic, begins to ask questions no one has raised before. Your emotional reaction is

  1. Defensive but confident. You and your team are the experts. You know how to lob answers back to all these tricky questions. He’s probably just trying to make an impression on the boss.

  2. Annoyed and offended. Who does this guy think he is to march in here and waste everyone’s time with immaterial questions? He’s so arrogant to think that he could have things to add with no knowledge about this at all.

  3. Open and curious. How great that you could have thought about it so much and still have someone who had questions you hadn’t thought about before! What a helpful addition this guy will be to the senior team with such an unusual perspective and a curious mind!

  Here’s the thing: no one ever says the third response. That’s because our sense of rightness not only changes what we think; it changes how we behave. If you’re open and puzzling about something and someone comes along and asks you questions about it, that seems like a great benefit (in fact, you might even pay someone to do that because it’s so helpful). If you’re sure about something and someone comes along and asks you questions about it, that seems like an annoyance. And how you show up with that person will change dramatically based on your mind-set.

  We have given a case study to leaders around the world asking them to give a small piece of feedback to someone in a role play and then listen to what the person says. The small piece of feedback (about how “Sam” behaved in an unexpected way during a meeting) tends to create a whole back story in someone’s mind (and of course, it’s a simple story). Then, when Sam gives her perspective, the person playing the boss is supposed to listen. But because the boss’s perspective is so shaped—and so closed—by the tiny bit of information about Sam, these leaders from around the world simply cannot listen to Sam. They find her perspective a distraction or a mistaken view and they try to get her back onto the subject at hand: what she’s done wrong and how to fix it. They are trapped by their rightness, even knowing the entire scenario is fake! Sam generally leaves the meeting feeling unappreciated and unheard. And she’s right: her important new perspective is generally ignored.

  Alison could feel the irritation rising as her lunch guest took a quick gulp of air before continuing his tirade about her proposed changes. It was these most senior guys who were the most defensive about the status quo, she knew, and James was a dinosaur. But he was an important voice among the senior partners, and she had been hoping to get him on her side. Twenty minutes into their one-hour lunch, though, he had talked almost without pause, his salad untouched in front of him. Alison had done a good job listening, she thought, as James yammered away, and she had eaten her salad purposefully, hoping that he would eventually run out of steam. But so far, no luck. At this point, it would be time for her next meeting before they even served the main course. Alison’s phone buzzed and she saw it was from home. Naomi was sick today and Mark was working at home and looking after her. Alison excused herself from the table for a moment.

  “Hey, Mark, is everything okay?” she asked, a little anxiously.

  “No. I can’t find the rice. She only wants rice and I can’t find it anywhere,” Mark answered, a little harried.

  “So Naomi is or is not okay?” Alison asked, an edge of irritation in her voice.

  “No, she’s sick. And whiney like mad. She wants the same book over and over and I can’t get anything done. And she wants rice pudding the way you make it. And I have no idea how that is and I can’t even find the damn rice!”

  “You really can’t call me out of a lunch with a vital senior partner and ask me about recipes,” Alison hissed. “Google ‘rice pudding.’ And look in the canister in the pantry that says ‘Rice’ on it.”

  “I hope you’re listening to your vital senior partner better than you’re listening to me!” Mark snapped. “Looks like that openness and curiosity crap we worked on this weekend was a waste of time.”

  Alison heard a tearful “Daddy, I want rice pudding now!” in the background and the line went dead. She nearly dialed Mark back to tell him what a great listener she was to people who were sensible and thoughtful, when she caught herself. This was the trap Leroy had warned them about—the trap that said it was our own sense of rightness that made us think someone was sensible and thoughtful or not. Agree with me, and you’re right! Disagree with me, and you’re complaining and difficult. No wonder James had been yammering on and on about the same points all during lunch. He felt like she wasn’t listening to him. And while her ears were present and she was making umm-hmm noises, he was right. She wasn’t genuinely listening at all. Alison took a deep breath. What were the keys for getting out of this trap? She hoped she could find them before the main course arrived.

  KEYS TO UNLOCK OUR RIGHTNESS

  Of course, it isn’
t that feeling right is always wrong. Feeling right feels great—we feel confident and on top of things and know what to do next. The only reason it’s a mindtrap is because that feeling of rightness is unfortunately unconnected to whether we are, in fact, right. This means that sometimes you’ll feel right and be right and sometimes you’ll feel exactly the same way but be exactly wrong. I think of this as the rightness hangover: it feels great in the moment but not so good the next morning. To see whether you’re in the rightness trap and to climb your way out, here are a couple of keys for your ring.

  Key questions: What do I believe and how could I be wrong?

  I collect questions. I’ve written about the power of asking different questions and have been on a constant quest for the most powerful and useful questions around. You’ll see throughout this book that I orient to questions as ways to help us out of traps; I’m certain about the benefits of curiosity! Two of the most useful, most transformative questions in my tool kit are also the most helpful ones here in the trap of our rightness: What do I believe? and, How could I be wrong?

  What do I believe? is an important question for two opposite reasons. The first is that without it we often believe things without noticing we have a belief; it feels like noticing the truth. Those shoes are ugly. That politician is lying. That new direction for our company is the only way to go. Those feel like statements of truth and not statements of belief to us. But noticing them as beliefs puts just a tiny bit of daylight between what we believe and our sense that it is objectively true. I believe those shoes are ugly. I believe that politician is lying. I believe this new direction for our company is the only way to go. Naming these as our beliefs opens up the possibility that we or others could have other beliefs and not simply be wrong.

  The second reason is the opposite. Sometimes we really don’t know what we believe. We spin around, bouncing between possibilities, and lose our way. In this case, What do I believe? can be incredibly grounding. Even at a time when the way is unclear and the various forces push in one direction and then another, there are at least some things you believe. Naming them can be like dropping the keel in place on a little sailboat—suddenly you’re not quite so buffeted by the wind as you were before.

  Either way you use it, this question is most helpfully combined with How could I be wrong? It is perhaps the question I have found most useful of all because it busts me out of the trap of rightness. This question has opened up new strategic possibilities in organizations and new career possibilities in executives. One senior leader was just about to retire and was pondering his next steps. As he thought about his postretirement, he was working himself into a frenzy, meeting with potential new colleagues and clients and sketching out his next steps. When he asked himself, What do I believe? he noticed he was working from an assumption (which felt like the truth) that he needed to have a clear plan for how he’d spend his time in this next chapter of his life. As a man who had had a full diary for the last forty years, he was dreading the idea that he might have an empty diary and was actively seeking to fill his time. The question, How could I be wrong? stumped him for a while—he was just so sure that figuring out today what he would be doing next month was the right choice.

  When he began to muse about how he could be wrong, he wondered whether his focus on the next chapter was foreclosing his joy at this current chapter. Furthermore, he wondered whether better opportunities would arise four or six months after his retirement that he would be unable to take advantage of if he had leapt without looking. He decided to experiment with not filling his diary and with answering people’s questions about his plans with “I’m not sure yet. I’m just enjoying this chapter as it closes.” And he found, much to his surprise, that he was really enjoying this chapter. A year later he realized that without those questions he would have missed out on one of the most gratifying parts of his career: the series of celebrations and conversations and goodbyes that marked the end of this time in his life. And he would have missed out on some interesting new possibilities that emerged in the months after his retirement. Asking what he believed and how he could be wrong changed his approach—and his life.

  Key move: Listening to learn

  If asking questions of ourselves is pivotal to escaping the rightness trap, the way we respond to others can keep us out of the trap over time. The most important escape move when we are trying to get out of the rightness trap is to change the way we listen. It turns out that much of the time we listen to win. You know, the kind of listening that tries to make you right and the other person wrong. Right now you might be reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wow, Jennifer doesn’t know me at all, does she? I’m a really good listener and I never make people wrong.” If you’ve got any of those thoughts in your head, you were just listening to win.

  This is not because we are necessarily trying to be belligerent or to have an argument. Often we listen to win for the nicest possible motivations. In person, it looks more like this: your colleague or partner will say, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute!” And you say, “I’m sure everyone is grateful for how good your work is!” That might be true—and sometimes it might even be helpful—but you’ve listened to what she said in order to negate it.

  The second most common form of listening we think about is listening to fix. You know this one too, I’m sure. It’s when someone comes to you and you think, “Oh, I can help you with that!” So when your friend says, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute,” you say something like, “Have you tried making a list of everything you’ve accomplished and letting people know?” That might be a good suggestion, and it might be helpful to the other person, too, but it’s not really listening to what is true for your friend right now.

  What these two forms of listening have in common is that they both start with our belief that we are right in some way. And we might be. But in a world where things are moving really fast and are more complex than our brains can easily handle, these forms of listening strengthen the rightness trap. What we need to escape the trap is listening to learn.

  Listening to learn requires that we watch our assumption that we are right (and we can either make the problem go away by winning or make it go away by fixing) and instead believe that the other person has something to say that we don’t understand and therefore can’t immediately help or make the problem go away. Listening to learn requires that we hold off and try to deeply understand for a few minutes. So when you hear, “I’m frustrated that no one really even notices how much I contribute,” you could try a listening-to-learn move: “Hmm. So it feels like you’re contributing a lot but you don’t get any recognition?” (You have to say this in an open and curious voice, like you really are wanting to learn, or else it can come across as snarky.) Then your colleague, partner, or friend might say, “Yes, totally!” or, “Well, that’s just it. I’m not even sure that I am contributing because I never get any feedback.” Or, “Kind of. I guess I’m wondering whether I rely too much on the feedback of others rather than really knowing in myself what good work looks like.” Or something else. The point is that if you are careful to mistrust the emotion of rightness from the beginning, you might find yourself hearing things that open up whole new possibilities for solutions.

  Believing we’re right narrows and closes down possibilities. And mostly we don’t even notice we’re doing it—that’s why it’s a mindtrap. But if we hold the possibility that we might be wrong, whole new vistas open for us. We become more curious, better listeners, and better problem-solvers.

  Back to Kathryn Shultz, who knows quite a lot about rightness (and wrongness). She tells us: “We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indiff
erence or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”4

  Escaping the rightness mindtrap might just make us better humans.

  4

  TRAPPED BY AGREEMENT

  Longing for alignment robs you of good ideas

  “Excellent news, team,” Mark said, bursting into the meeting room Leroy had arranged for a meeting with Alison. “I’m a little late, but not because my team meeting ran over. My meeting was smooth as silk today because we were totally in agreement about every single move. I think I’m really getting the hang of this complexity stuff—it was like a well-oiled machine!”

  Alison and Leroy burst into laughter.

  “What? Is there something between my teeth?” Mark stabbed at his teeth with his fingernails. “Or my fly . . . ?” he looked down.

  “No, we were just talking about the next mindtrap,” Alison told him, still giggling. “And, er, then you burst in so pleased with how you’d fallen into it.”

  “Impossible!” Mark said. “I was totally trapless at this meeting, I’m telling you! I questioned my simple stories. I asked what I believed and how I could be wrong. And, as a reward, the whole team fell into line!”

  “So you did all the things we have been talking about?” Leroy asked. Mark nodded happily. “And then there was so little disagreement on your team that the meeting felt smooth and easy, like a well-oiled machine with all the parts working together seamlessly?”