Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps

by Jennifer Garvey Berger

  Mark nodded again. “Exactly! None of our usual squabbling or desire to fight it out to see who has the best solution. Kendra came up with an excellent idea and I used the whole ‘What do we believe and how could we be wrong?’ to understand the objections of the rest of the group. Then I hit them with some ‘listening to learn’ about how they really did seem to be leaning toward Kendra’s ideas after all. Once they felt heard, they were able to put down their concerns and they really rallied around her excellent idea. It was the one-two punch of greatness and it totally worked! Leroy, you’re a genius!”

  “You ‘hit them’ with listening to learn?” Leroy asked, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Perhaps that wasn’t the best phrasing,” Mark explained. “What I meant was that I could hear the alignment underneath the objections, so I just snuck in some good listening so they could hear it too.”

  “So you listened so that they could learn,” Alison pointed out, helpfully.

  “Exactly! And they did!”

  “I think that’s called ‘listening to fix’ or maybe even ‘listening to win,’” Leroy pointed out.

  “No way! I was just listening so that they would be able to hear each other better and . . .” Mark trailed off. “Crap. I was totally listening to fix. Or win.” He slumped back in his chair, crestfallen. “But Leroy, it worked so well!”

  “Leroy was just beginning to tell me about the mindtrap of agreement,” Alison said, smiling. “Now I think he’ll have an even easier way to describe it.”

  THE SEDUCTION AND DANGER OF AGREEMENT

  Humans are drawn to agreement as a sense of connection. It’s deep in our systems as an early force of our survival. We have evolved as fangless and clawless creatures who cannot run as fast as either our predators or our prey, and yet we have found ourselves at the top of the food chain. Our capacity to collaborate in groups makes up for our physical deficiencies; in order for humans to be willing to sacrifice their own best interests for the greater good, humans needed to be wired for connection. The neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman’s groundbreaking research shows that our brains make us particularly sensitive to social interactions. Lieberman found that social pain—from the biggies like heartbreak and rejection to the more daily pain of thinking people don’t like you or that you’re being left out—is experienced in the brain in exactly the same way physical pain is experienced. Just take that in for a minute. Thinking as Mark does, in the second chapter, that your work friends are leaving you out or talking about you behind your back causes the same sort of pain you’d get if you broke your ankle.1 No wonder we are so anxious for everyone to get along! Lieberman writes of our “Faustian evolutionary bargain” that allows humans to have such large brains and the capacity to communicate and work together in large groups, but that “requires us to pay for it with the possibility of pain, real pain, every time we connect with another human being who has the power to leave us or withhold love.”

  This drive is a piece of the puzzle about why disagreements at work are so difficult to handle well. You can see how our aversion to social pain (even when we do not consciously notice that we are averse to it) could push us toward a sort of false agreement if we feared being rejected in some way. This can be even more frustrating when someone agrees with you when he’s with you but then agrees in the opposite direction when he’s with folks who believe the opposite. (This is particularly challenging when a leader agrees with her boss when she’s with her boss and then agrees with her direct reports when she’s with her direct reports.) It turns out that we are wired to have some unhelpful ways of dealing with agreement. These are mindtraps when we believe that agreeability is a virtue and that disagreement should be fixed with compromise. In this case, the trap swings both ways. We are desperate for agreement with people we associate with. But if our disagreement becomes entrenched (generally with one group lining up against another group), we tend to polarize. Both our agreement and our polarization are a trap in complexity.

  We believe that agreeability is a virtue

  It is hardwired into us that getting along with one another is a good thing. When a couple is first dating, they automatically cycle through various parts of their lives and find areas of agreement, and when they hit on one of those areas their brains release dopamine. It literally feels good to agree just as it literally feels bad to face social pain. At many of the organizations I work with, the idea that people are genuinely good people who get along (often “like family”) is a highlight of the culture.2 In fact, Daniel Coyle found in the high-performing organizations on whose cultures he reports in The Culture Code that the word “family” was the most common descriptor.3

  And yet our family instincts, no matter how pleasant and useful, leave us at a disadvantage in complexity. Psychologists have been watching groups interact for years and trying to figure out why groups tend to ignore the fullness of the ideas and the data they have and instead simply cycle over what has been agreed on already. Researchers have found that we are more likely to talk about data other people have already talked about and we’re sure they will approve of, even if it means withholding vital information. So hard is it, psychologically, to bring up something that goes against the general opinions of the group that psychologists call the withholding of new information “social loafing” (excellent term, right?).4 That is, if Quinn and Arnee both talk about how customers are complaining about the new season’s products, Janet is more likely to do some “social loafing”—to share her experience with customer complaints even when she has also experienced customers who love the products. This means that rather than understanding the whole of a topic or issue—including those pesky pieces of data we might disagree about—we home in on what we think other people will like.

  All of this means that we withhold contradictory data so necessary to finding good solutions in complexity. We drive disagreement underground. At organizations where people most want to belong, the fear of not belonging is amplified. Here people whisper, “Folks around here are trying so hard to be nice to each other that they’re not willing to be honest about anything anymore.” This desire to be agreeable can sap us of our courage—to say hard things, to experiment (and risk failure), to surface conflict in the face of the seeming agreement of others. The disagreement is still there even when we don’t talk about it, so it leaks out in small ways: in the noncompliance with a decision the group seemed to make together, with the meetings before the meetings to get people lined up on your side, the meetings after the meetings to deconstruct what happened and decide what to actually do, and so on.

  This way of operating is obviously time-consuming because we have to have many more meetings and often the decisions we make don’t stick because they weren’t genuine agreements. But time isn’t the biggest wasted resource of the mindtrap of agreement. Without the clashing of perspectives, we get far fewer options for action. In fact, we try to merge our perspectives and compromise.

  We believe that our disagreement should be fixed with compromise

  We are taught as small people that when we disagree, we should compromise. You give a little, I give a little, and eventually we meet in the middle. We see this at work and at home. It doesn’t seem fair for one side or the other side to win, and so we are drawn to having each side lose a little so that we can come together on a legitimate solution. Lieberman has studied fairness extensively as well, and notes that when we think something is fair, it lights up the dopamine receptors in the brain—exactly the same ones that light up when we have a pleasurable physical experience like eating chocolate. This leads Lieberman to conclude, tongue in cheek, that “fairness tastes like chocolate.”5

  This means we are built for compromise. Study after study have shown that we will work against our own best interest as long as we believe it would be more fair (or rather less unfair)—and fairness seems to look quite a lot like compromise to our brains. This makes sense evolutionarily, when we were needing to live in communities and figure out ho
w to work together, share the spoils from a hunt, and begin to trade with one another. In simple situations, compromise may well be the best option. If I want to buy a pair of shoes from you for four chickens and you want to sell them for six chickens, then maybe five chickens is the right trade. But if I want to expand our product offerings to include seven-to-twelve-year-olds and you want to expand them to include forty-five-to-sixty-year-olds, it’s probably not particularly helpful for each to give a little and focus on thirty-one-year-olds.

  So while compromise might feel fair, in complex situations it’s often the wrong way to go because compromise tends to merge two options into one. In complexity, having more options is always better, because you can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually pay off. So the urge to compromise in complexity takes you from two viable options to one potentially mediocre one. Not a win, even if it does taste like chocolate to our brains.

  When we cannot compromise, we polarize

  There’s another piece to this agreement mindtrap about how our reflexes are not suited for a complex world. And because we are humans, this one pushes us in exactly the opposite direction. If we cannot find a compromise, our tendency is to abandon compromise, collect a group around us, and polarize.

  This tendency is all too real to us after the big upsets of Brexit and Trump. But in most intractable and complex conflicts, it turns out that our pattern is to oversimplify the issues (you’ve seen this mindtrap before) and then believe that people who think like us are right and people who think another thing are the enemy. Peter Coleman, who studies intractable conflicts, reminds us that “the press for certainty and coherence is a basic tendency in life greatly intensified by conflict. . . . And it often contributes to our total misreading of events.”6

  This misreading means that hearing counterevidence about a thing we believe in deeply actually serves not to loosen our opinions to allow for new possibilities, but to reinforce our certainty in what we believed before. Hugh Mackay calls this the phenomenon of data “strengthening our cages,” keeping us locked in our previous positions and in more entrenched ways. It also makes us a little paranoid, thinking other people or groups are out to get us. For example, Robert Vallone and his colleagues gave self-identified pro-Arab and pro-Jewish Stanford students a series of news clippings relating to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.7 Each group was frustrated by the bias in the articles that disadvantaged their group and unfairly promoted the views of the other side. The hook, of course, is that the articles were the same for both groups.

  “Thai food again?” Marcus asked as he walked into the conference room. “You didn’t even yell at us.”

  Mark gave his crooked smile and dipped a spring roll into sweet chili sauce as his teammates sat down. “I was trying to be disarming,” he said with his mouth full. “How’d I do?”

  “Not enough vegetarian options. Again,” said Kendra. “Ooh, but you remembered that lemongrass tofu was my favorite!”

  Mark wiped his hands and picked up a whiteboard marker. “Okay, the reason I’ve called you all together again after yesterday’s incredibly successful—”

  “And fast!” Marcus broke in.

  “And fast meeting is because actually I think we were agreeing too much, and I want to just see if we can get more ideas on the table.”

  “Did you say you think we agreed too much?” Kelly asked. “Um, are you sure that’s just soy sauce you’ve just poured all over your Thai basil chicken?”

  “Yep,” Mark said. “I have been talking to Leroy again—”

  “Yay for Leroy!” Kendra cheered.

  “And Leroy has noted that perhaps we came to convergence a little early yesterday. It’s not that Kendra’s ideas aren’t spectacular, but perhaps we should have just checked to see whether there were other ideas as well.”

  “Urgh, are you suggesting that we go back to the drawing board?” Kelly groaned. “Why are you torturing us? We never make decisions as fast as we did yesterday!”

  “Okay, but here’s the question,” Mark continued. “I’m not suggesting that we not carry on with Kendra’s idea. I’m just wondering whether any of the rest of you had ideas that you didn’t tell us about, or perhaps disagreements that you might have felt bad surfacing once the tide was turning toward Kendra’s idea. And I’m not asking so that we pull apart the decision, or even change our minds about working with this idea, but so that perhaps we could add to the decision a couple of little experiments which might be derivations of her idea or might even head off in a different direction altogether. See, I think we have so often let our disagreement tie us up in knots that we haven’t learned how to use it to enlarge our set of possibilities.”

  “But you looked so happy yesterday!” Marcus said.

  “Yeah, and Kendra hasn’t looked so happy in ages as she did when we went with her idea,” Kelly added.

  “That’s the thing,” Mark said, nodding. “I think we have confused agreement with liking people or making them feel good, and I know I’ve been confusing disagreement with stuff that I need to fix or make go away. I guess my question now is about whether we can find a way to have our different ideas and still make fast decisions without necessarily piling on in agreement with each other? Wouldn’t it be cool if we believed that disagreement would actually help us find a bunch of good options? I think that sounds better than pitting ideas (and maybe people) against each other and trying to get one or the other to win. Are you willing to just give it a go?”

  KEYS TO UNLOCK OUR SIMPLE AGREEMENT

  I love agreement, myself. I’ve never been a fan of conflict. Yet I’ve seen through the years the way that my desire for agreement and dislike of conflict gets me (unhelpful) compromise solutions when dealing with complex situations—or worse, gets me totally stuck when I polarize. While I understand how vital it has been, evolutionarily, for us to find ways to figure out who was with us and who was against us, that has now become a trap we have to escape.

  The keys to unlocking this mindtrap are to remake what agreement means, what conflict means. I’m not talking about the way some organizations ask you to remake your connection to your ideas so that when your precious proposal is shredded by the group, you will buck up and take it well. I’m not talking about developing a tougher skin or carelessly telling people what we really think. I’m suggesting that we could understand conflict (carefully handled) as a way to deepen our relationships with one another, and disagreements (carefully handled) as a way to broaden our solution set.

  Key question: Could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?

  One of the most helpful questions I’ve ever heard in the conflict space comes from executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald.8 Her question for helping clients deal with conflict was not about whether the client would win the conflict or whether the conflict itself was worthy; it was about the effect on the relationship. And it wasn’t about ruining the relationship (like, “Are you willing to risk the relationship on this conflict?”). It was about deepening it. “Confront only to deepen,” she used to say. Or, Could this conflict serve to deepen your relationship?

  This idea is revolutionary to me and others like me who struggle with their deep thirst for agreement. It is a challenge to make conflict about resolution rather than winning. Resolution is about understanding one another more deeply so that you can come to a third way together, a way neither of you had considered before. A conflict that you truly want to resolve is a force for good in relationships.

  If we are going to have conflicts that serve to make things better, though, we will have to change our approach. We’ll have to “listen to learn” to fully understand the other person’s perspective. And we’ll have to offer our perspective cleanly and without judgment. We’ll have to really hold on to the idea that other people can disagree with us and still be right. And we’ll have to wade straight into the storm instead of dodging around it or pretending that it doesn’t exist.

  Take Jamal, who was really struggling
with a member of his team. Matthew was not delivering on his promises and used a lot of the executive team time to air his set of grievances about how Jamal and others had treated him. Jamal really liked Matthew and didn’t want to hurt him, but eventually he realized that his efforts to just be agreeable with Matthew were getting in the way. Jamal knew that he needed to have the courage to be straight with Matthew. They had a conversation where Jamal explicitly announced that he would be attempting to deepen their relationship and that he was going to do that through surfacing the conflict he knew was underneath the surface: that he had complaints about Matthew and that Matthew had complaints about him. And then Jamal tried to offer his complaints—as free of judgment as possible—by saying what he had seen Matthew do and how he felt about it. When Jamal asked Matthew to do the same back, he listened deeply to understand not only what Matthew was upset about, but also why he was upset, why these things mattered so much to him.

  With their concerns on the table and with both of them listening, they came to the conclusion that the job Jamal needed Matthew to do was simply not the job Matthew wanted to do anymore. Matthew decided he would leave the organization, and Jamal put his full effort into finding Matthew a job that he would love. Their capacity to air the conflict and listen to one another saved them from what they had both predicted would be twelve months of a kind of passive-aggressive conflict, with Matthew hating his job and Jamal not getting what he needed from a member of his team. Instead, their relationship deepened, with both of them reporting a new trust and admiration for the other, even as they went their separate ways.

  Key habit: Disagree to expand

  Just as we can engage in conflict in order to deepen our relationships, we can disagree with one another in order to expand our possibilities. In predictable situations, coming up with the right answer is possible—you can research what others have done and just do that. But in unpredictable times, coming up with an answer that has been tried before is not that helpful because who knows how it will go this time.