However, setting high expectations for people and repeatedly putting them into challenging situations can be exhausting or unsettling for them. You may have experienced these feelings yourself. Effective leaders need to be sensitive to this reality and put support systems in place to help people overcome the psychological barriers that can arise.
There are several psychological models to look out for in these settings. First is impostor syndrome, in which someone is plagued with the feeling that they are an impostor, fearing being exposed as a fraud, even though in reality they are not. Surveys indicate that 70 percent of people become inflicted with impostor syndrome at some point in their careers. Have you?
Dunning-Kruger Effect
When people fall victim to impostor syndrome, they dismiss their successes as luck or deception and focus on their failures or fear of failure. This constant focus on failure can lead to high stress and anxiety, and negative behaviors like overexertion, perfectionism, aggression, or defeatism.
You can take the following steps to help people overcome impostor syndrome:
Highlight its prevalence (“Everyone’s felt this way before; I’ve felt this way before”).
Explain that small failures are expected when you are operating out of your comfort zone. This explanation can help people recharacterize mistakes as learning opportunities.
Connect them with other peers or mentors who have faced impostor syndrome.
A second model to consider is the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. This model describes the confidence people experience over time as they move from being a novice to being an expert.
You usually make a lot of progress when you start out learning something, because there is so much new to learn. For example, you can learn to juggle three tennis balls relatively quickly. This quick progress up the learning curve propels you to have high confidence in your abilities. However, you may trick yourself into thinking that this must be a really easy skill, when in reality you are not yet fully grasping everything you don’t know about the skill and how you could be better.
Your confidence plummets and, as you learn more, you start to realize everything you don’t know, and see how much effort it will take to truly become an expert at the skill. For juggling, trying to juggle more than three balls or switching to different objects quickly drives this point home. Then your confidence gradually builds back up as you put in that effort and gain meaningful experience.
As a coach, you should keep in mind the Dunning-Kruger effect and be aware of where your team members are along the curve. When you are working with people who have less expertise, help them properly recognize their level of abilities so they don’t become overconfident, but at the same time praise their learning progression so they don’t become discouraged. It’s a balancing act. As they get closer to the middle of the curve, they will need more and more encouragement as their confidence plummets. And don’t forget to also keep the model in mind when you are learning a skill yourself.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect explains what happens psychologically across the whole learning curve, it is often used to refer to just the first spike, i.e., the phenomenon where low-ability people think they are high-ability, unable to recognize their own skill level (or lack thereof) in a particular area. This is really the opposite of impostor syndrome: instead of thinking they are much worse than they are, they think they are much better than they are.
A third mental model about psychological barriers was proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow (of Maslow’s hammer fame) in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” and is now known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow says that to reach your full potential (a state he calls “self-actualization”), you first need to satisfy basic psychological and material needs: physical (food, water, etc.), safety (shelter, freedom from fear, etc.), love (relationships, support, etc.), and self-esteem. He represents these categories of needs as a hierarchy, with self-actualization at the top.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow suggests that you can focus on self-actualization (the top layer) only once all of the more basic needs are met (bottom layers). Through the lens of this model, impostor syndrome reflects an unmet need in the esteem part of the hierarchy, since you feel somehow undeserving of success. Thus, it is preventing your growth into ultimate success at the top layer.
A couple of other examples: If you’re in the middle of a tumultuous personal relationship (like breaking up), then the middle-layer needs (love/belonging) may be unmet. Or children who live with food insecurity or in a violent environment may have trouble learning due to their safety-layer needs being unmet.
Critics have raised questions about whether Maslow’s hierarchy differs across cultures or circumstances, or even if there is an actual hierarchy at all. Nevertheless, thinking about this model can help you identify why you or others are not reaching full potential.
Finally, let’s suppose you’re coaching someone and together you have been able to work through all their psychological barriers. You are helping them engage in deliberate practice. You are actively providing actionable feedback on a regular basis. When you are helping them analyze past situations to give such feedback, you still need to consider another psychological phenomenon: that sometimes your memories of the past, even the very recent past, can be biased or distorted.
We covered some of these biases way back in Chapter 1 with availability bias and the like. One other mental model to consider is hindsight bias, where, after an event occurs, in hindsight, there is a bias to see it as having been predictable even though there was no real objective basis on which it could have been predicted. Monday morning quarterbacking and hindsight is twenty-twenty are formulations of the same concept.
Turn on the TV after any major event to see hindsight bias in action. Talking heads will explain why something occurred, and yet, if you had watched coverage before the event, you would not have found many predicting it ahead of time. Think of the 2007/2008 financial crisis or the U.S. 2016 election cycles.
Hindsight bias arises in many other situations: judges weighing evidence in court cases, historians analyzing past events, and physicians assessing earlier clinical decisions. For example, in negligence cases, for guilt to be found, it must be shown that the person who committed the negligent act would have known that their actions would endanger others. When experimental subjects are presented with various negligence scenarios, they typically rate an outcome as more foreseeable the worse the outcome is, even when the negligent act is the same. In other words, the worse the outcome, the worse the hindsight bias.
In the context of leadership and learning new roles, hindsight bias can keep you from learning from past events. If you believe an event was predictable when it was not, you may take away that you made the wrong choices leading up to the event, when in reality you may have made the right choice given the information available at the time.
For example, if you make an investment in a new technology or even personally in a stock or startup company, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good bet at the time. The odds may have been in your favor, but the luck of the draw simply didn’t go your way. The questions to ask are how accurate your risk assessment was at the time, and whether it could have been any more accurate given the time and resources available. Answering these questions moves you away from black-and-white thinking (the event was totally predictable or not) and into more nuanced thinking (considering how predictable it really was).
Counterfactual thinking (see Chapter 6) can reduce hindsight bias because it forces you to consider other ways events could have unfolded. Ask yourself how things would have changed if you had done X, Y, or Z instead. Another related model is survivorship bias (see Chapter 5), which, as applied here, tells you that when looking to see what past failures had in common, you should consider that past successes might have also had these things in common. For instance, when anal
yzing past investment decisions, you need to look at how your decision-making criteria applied to the winners and the losers as a whole, and not just to one of those subgroups, or else you may take away the wrong message.
Another way to counteract hindsight bias is to take notes as events occur in real time. That way you have a more objective record of what happened and are not relying solely on potentially compromised recollections. Of course, literal recordings are the most objective record and are increasing in popularity. Some organizations record some meetings or produce structured notes, journalists record interviews with sources, and police are increasingly using body cams to document encounters.
It is important to realize, though, that hindsight bias can affect you only in instances where the outcome could not be foreseen. Hindsight bias is not a factor when you are reviewing the many instances of predictable errors out there. The key is distinguishing between the two situations. Self-serving bias (see Chapter 1) suggests that you will be more inclined to say that your own or your group’s mistakes could not have been predicted (“Who could have known?”) and you are more likely to apply hindsight bias to be critical of others.
The mental models from this section can help correct psychological mischaracterizations (e.g., impostor syndrome), artificial roadblocks (e.g., fixed mindset), and misinformation (e.g., hindsight bias), all in the service of helping people, including yourself, think objectively about current performance and ways to improve.
TOGETHER WE THRIVE
So far in this chapter, we’ve covered the mental models that help people reach their full potential and thrive as members of 10x teams. There is another set of mental models, however, that can dramatically increase (or decrease) the likelihood of creating these special teams—those related to the makeup of organizational culture.
Every group of people has a culture. Often described on an ethnic, national, or regional level, culture as a concept also applies to smaller groups: organizations, immediate family units, extended families, groups of friends, and offline and online communities built around common interests. Culture describes the common beliefs, behavioral patterns, and social norms of group members. For example, different families have different norms for resolving disputes: some talk openly about emotions, some hardly ever; some have heated discussions, some much less so. What is the norm in your family?
Similarly, two highly functioning organizations can have widely different norms and processes for information control (open versus need-to-know), communication delivery (spoken versus written), how new ideas get proposed (ad hoc versus formal), punctuality (always on time versus flexible), and many other dimensions.
In any group setting, it is important to understand the culture, including whether it is one that prefers high-context or low-context communication. A low-context culture is explicit and direct with information, preferring that you be real and tell it like it is. You need a low amount of context to understand low-context communication, because most everything you need to know is clearly expressed.
High-Context/Low-Context Continuum
At the other extreme, in a high-context culture, information is conveyed much more indirectly, less confrontationally. For example, how things are going in a project or role is communicated less explicitly. You need a high amount of additional context to fully understand such high-context communication, appreciating the nuances of nonverbal cues, voice intonation, and adherence (or lack thereof) to usual processes as clues. In other words, what isn’t said is just as important as what is said, if not more so. This high-context/low-context continuum applies to all cultures, from small-group ones all the way up to the cultures of whole countries.
As with personality traits, there are many dimensions that sociologists use to describe culture. Some other commonly cited dimensions besides low context versus high context include the following:
Tight (many norms and little tolerance for deviation from those norms) versus loose: In a loose organizational culture, you might see people doing the same thing (like organizing a project) in many different ways, whereas tight cultures develop stricter rules and procedures.
Hierarchical (lines of power are clear) versus egalitarian (more shared power): You will see more consensus and group decision making in an organization with a more egalitarian culture.
Collectivist (group success is more important than individual success) versus individualist: Performance-ranking systems like stacked ranking (where managers are forced to rank their direct reports) occur in individualist organizational cultures.
Objective (favoring empirical evidence) versus subjective: Organizational cultures that are more data-driven fall on the objective side of this spectrum.
In any case, when you recruit new members to your organization, it may take significant time for them to adapt to its culture. For example, someone who is used to extremely low-context environments will expect you to be very direct, whereas someone used to extremely high-context environments may be offended by your directness, and such low-context communication could potentially hurt their morale.
While new hires can grow accustomed to a new culture, they may be resistant initially. So the more up-front you are about the culture of the organization, the better. In fact, being explicit about your cultural norms is one of the most high-leverage activities you can do as an organizational leader (see Chapter 3). It can help prospective team members figure out whether your organization is a good fit for them. Strengthening cultural norms also helps existing team members work together more efficiently.
It’s sometimes said, “Culture is what happens when managers aren’t in the room.” It’s what people do when they’re left to their own devices. And that’s exactly why it is so high-leverage to develop and reinforce culture: You can’t look over people’s shoulders all the time. It takes time and energy that is usually best spent elsewhere. If your team makes progress in the way you want only when you’re scrutinizing them, then they won’t get very far in the direction you desire.
Additionally, if you don’t shape your organization’s culture, it will shape itself, and may develop in ways you don’t want. Some organizations, such as Uber, were at one time infamous for having a toxic culture. Characteristics of a toxic culture include preoccupation with status, territorialism, aggression, poor communication, fear of speaking up, unethical behavior, harassment, and general unhappiness.
Fortunately, there are many straightforward ways to positively shape culture:
Establishing a strong vision—“Our north star, our vision for the future, is X” (see Chapter 3).
Defining a clear set of values—where your organization sits along the various cultural dimensions, e.g., “Our organization values taking calculated risks, even if they fail.”
Reinforcing that vision and those values through frequent communications—including at all-hands meetings and through team-wide broadcasts.
Creating processes that align with that vision and those values—such as how you decide on hiring new team members.
Leading by example—making sure leaders adhere to the norms and values you want everyone else to adhere to.
Establishing traditions—gatherings that celebrate stated values, such as holiday celebrations, group volunteer events, or recurring award ceremonies.
Fostering accountability—e.g., reviewing previous experiences for lessons learned in post-mortems (see Chapter 1) or giving honest feedback on performance reviews.
Rewarding people for exhibiting exemplary cultural behaviors—giving them promotions, awards, etc.
Taken together, these techniques clearly express cultural norms to everyone in the organization and show that they are taken seriously. They also convey that a person who aligns with the organization’s vision, values, and related cultural norms and processes is more likely to excel within the organization.
Winning hearts and minds is a related mental model. It was first introduced in 1895 in a military context by French general Hubert Lyautey as part
of a strategy to counter the Black Flags rebellion along the Indochina–Chinese border. It is a recognition that making direct appeals to people’s hearts and minds through communication can effectively win them over.
In relatively recent history, the U.S. has led hearts-and-minds campaigns that directly explain its perspective to the populations of foreign countries like Vietnam and Iraq. In a business context, the concept has been successful when upstarts like Airbnb have made direct appeals to citizens to contact their representatives and lobby against regulations that would negatively impact consumer (and business) interests.
Establishing and communicating a shared vision, values, and cultural norms helps organizations win the hearts and minds of its members, and thus intrinsically motivates them to reach their full potential. Otherwise, motivation tends toward the extrinsic, such as compensation and title.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson uses the idea of loyalists versus mercenaries to explain the way members view an organization. According to a June 23, 2015, blog post, he believes loyalists are devoted to an organization even in the face of adversity. Mercenaries, by contrast, are in it primarily for the money, and are much more likely to leave for greater rewards elsewhere. Wilson explains some factors that draw more loyalists:
Leadership. At the end of the day, people are loyal to a leader they believe in. . . .
Mission. People are loyal to a mission. I’ve seen super talented people walk away from compensation packages 2–3x what they currently make because they believe in what they are working on and think it will make a difference in their lives and the lives of others.
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