Leading with Uncommon Sense: Slowing Down, Looking Inward, Taking Action [1st ed.] 9783030419707, 9783030419714

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Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership Series Editors: Satinder Dhiman · Joan Marques

Wiley C. Davi Duncan H. Spelman

Leading with Uncommon Sense Slowing Down, Looking Inward, Taking Action

Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership Series Editors Satinder Dhiman School of Business Woodbury University Burbank, CA, USA Joan Marques School of Business Woodbury University Burbank, CA, USA

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15772

Wiley C. Davi • Duncan H. Spelman

Leading with Uncommon Sense Slowing Down, Looking Inward, Taking Action

Wiley C. Davi Bentley University Waltham, MA, USA

Duncan H. Spelman Bentley University Waltham, MA, USA

ISSN 2662-3080     ISSN 2662-3099 (electronic) Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership ISBN 978-3-030-41970-7    ISBN 978-3-030-41971-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a joy. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity. Our precious friendship has deepened, we had countless hours of stimulating conversation, and we laughed—a lot. Many people made this project possible. Smart and caring friends read early drafts and provided much genuine support: Marcy Crary, Tim Hall, Jennifer Gillan, Beth Grady, Craig Jones, Michele L’Heureux, Michael O’Halloran, Kathy Sheehan, Elissa Spelman, and Taylor Valentine. These people and many more often thought to ask, “How’s the book going?”, reminding us that we were not in it alone. Colleagues and friends at Bentley offered a wide range of resources for our work. Undergraduate and graduate students in our classes pushed our thinking and reeled us in when we went off the deep end. Kathy Sheehan and Susan Capolino-Cocuzzo furnished expert and loving administrative support. The staff of the Bentley Library, and especially Matt Van Sleet, supplied skilled and patient research support. Joy Uyeno and Joanna Howarth helped us get our earliest ideas out to audiences, thanks to their marketing expertise. The university gave us not only the opportunity to teach about this material in a variety of venues but also financial resources to attend conferences at which we developed our ideas. Our long-time Bentley colleague and friend, Earl Avery, deserves special mention as he was a particularly significant part of this process. We worked together on many, many projects that informed our thinking about leadership, and our in-depth discussions growing out of our team teaching led directly to the writing of this book. We had opportunities to present some of the ideas we explore here at workshops in the United States and abroad. Rosa Lee Hunter, Dianne Bevelander, and Deb Pine made many of these opportunities available to us, for which we are very thankful. We appreciate the many ways in which workshop participants stretched our thinking and encouraged us to keep going. The professionals at Springer, including Joan Marques, Satinder Dhiman, Nitza Jones-Sepulveda, and Faith Su, provided positive and helpful input and guidance throughout the writing process. They made it as easy as possible for us. Finally, our families. Duncan’s contingent—Beth, Elissa, and Quentin—supplied not only valuable insights about leading with uncommon sense but also ­endless v

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encouragement and love from beginning to end. And to Wiley’s two biggest fans: her mom Dottie cheered her on from day one, and her spouse Michele spent countless hours as a sounding board, served as our in-house graphic designer, and kept Wiley laughing.

Contents

1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     1 The Practice ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     4 Pause����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     4 Introspect����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     5 Act��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    10 Adopting a Learning Stance��������������������������������������������������������������������    10 The Difficulty in Taking a Learning Stance����������������������������������������    11 Overview of the Book������������������������������������������������������������������������������    12 About this Book ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    14 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    16 2 Pause��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    17 An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Pause��������������������������������������������������    17 Pausing: Being Choiceful About Our Attention����������������������������������    19 Resources for Pausing��������������������������������������������������������������������������    20 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    27 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    28 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    29 3 Introspect: Be Humble����������������������������������������������������������������������������   31 An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Humble������������������������������������������    32 The Power of a Picture: The Johari Window ��������������������������������������    32 Who’s in Control?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    34 Problems with Our Efficient Brains����������������������������������������������������    36 Building Capacity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    41 Resources for Humility Introspection��������������������������������������������������    43 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    46 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    49 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    49

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4 Introspect: Be Emotional����������������������������������������������������������������������    51 An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Emotional��������������������������������������    52 The Power of a Picture: The CBT Triangle ����������������������������������������    53 What Do Emotions Do? ����������������������������������������������������������������������    54 Building Emotional Capacity��������������������������������������������������������������    60 Resources for Emotional Introspection������������������������������������������������    67 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    73 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    74 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    74 5 Introspect: Be “Impolite”����������������������������������������������������������������������    77 An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be “Impolite” ������������������������������������    79 What Are Social Identities? ����������������������������������������������������������������    79 Why Social Identities Matter ��������������������������������������������������������������    79 Building Social Identity Capacity��������������������������������������������������������    90 Resources for Impolite Introspection��������������������������������������������������    99 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   103 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   104 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   105 6 Introspect: Be Uncertain ����������������������������������������������������������������������   109 An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Uncertain��������������������������������������   111 The Power of a Picture: The Ladder of Inference��������������������������������   111 Our Certain Brains ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   113 Building Uncertainty Capacity������������������������������������������������������������   117 Resources for Uncertainty Introspection ��������������������������������������������   121 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   126 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   129 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   130 7 Act������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   133 The Need for Action��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   134 Uncommon Principles for Action��������������������������������������������������������   136 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   150 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   151 8 Conclusion: Going Forward��������������������������������������������������������������������  153 Developing Uncommon Habits����������������������������������������������������������������   155 How Habits Work��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   155 Breaking Common-Sense Leadership Habits��������������������������������������   158 You’re Not Alone ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   161 Commencement ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   163 Lucia’s Case: Part 1 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   164 Lucia’s Case: Part 2 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   165

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Lucia’s Case: Part 3 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   166 Lucia’s Case: Part 4 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   166 Good-bye��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   167 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   167 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  169

Chapter 1

Introduction

Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat. —Albert Einstein

We, as leaders, face daunting challenges. Most days confront us with an impressive mix of issues with which to deal. Ideally, as leaders, we have many moments of satisfaction, even exhilaration, and if we do, we have earned them. Consider these two leaders, Marie and Brennan, trying their best to be effective in very different situations but, in these moments, feeling quite some distance from exhilaration. Marie quickly closed the door to her office and collapsed into her chair. She felt awful—incompetent, embarrassed, and exposed. She had just wrapped up her first staff meeting in her new position as head of the department. As she replayed in her mind what now felt like a disaster, she realized that in her haste to respond like she thought a real leader would respond, she had gotten way out over her skis. She had given answers that suggested she had more information than she actually had, and she offered opinions that were premature at best and just plain wrong at worst. Marie was not only new to her position but also new to playing any kind of formal leadership role. She was highly educated (a PhD), but when it came to being an official leader, she was operating from instinct and common sense. As she waded into her new responsibilities, she unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, tried to fit the image of a person who is comfortable with being a leader—decisive, rational, unemotional, fair, and certain. Her “followers” were a mix of people, younger and older, high status and low status in the organization, and expert in a wide variety of fields. She especially wanted the old heads in the group to see that she was up to the job. One specific goal she originally had as she assumed the leadership position was to make sure her nontraditional gender appearance and identity would not affect her ability to lead. Now, as she brooded about her first public performance as department head, she was laughing at herself for thinking that she could be a genderless leader. A few department members had made comments after the meeting that demonstrated that her gender identity was far from a nonissue—one was an expression © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_1

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of excitement that she was in a position of authority and the other a snarky observation about whether she would be too narrowly focused on who people are rather than what they can do. Marie was seriously doubting whether she was cut out for a leadership position. Brennan’s circumstances were quite different from Marie’s. He had had significant academic training in leadership and management and had been in his leadership position for several years. For the most part, he felt good about how he had functioned in the role, and he had received very positive feedback from both the people in his department and his bosses. Yet he found himself reeling during a one-on-one conversation with a member of his department. The person had arrived at Brennan’s door unannounced and clearly upset. He was extremely unhappy with the assignments he had been given by Brennan and proceeded in full-attack mode. Before he knew it, Brennan was embroiled in a very hot interaction with charges and countercharges flying. As his visitor stomped out of the door, Brennan could feel his pulse racing and his adrenaline pumping. He couldn’t really remember much of what he or his coworker had said. As he calmed down, he checked his email and found an alarming message. A woman of color in a different part of the organization, for whom Brennan, as a white man, had advocated very strongly with an upper-level manager, had sent a flaming memo to several key people in the organization, making unfounded accusations and displaying a total lack of respect. Brennan realized that, unfortunately, this was not the first time she had done this. Brennan found himself wondering when he had forgotten how to be a leader. Here he was, stumbling and ineffective. As the authors of this book on leadership, we are very much engaged ourselves in the search for solutions to the puzzles that we face as leaders. Marie is actually Wiley, early in her leadership career; Brennan is Duncan struggling to regain his balance. (Please don’t tell anybody!) Wiley was attempting to use what we call “common-sense” leadership as she took on her new responsibilities. Common-sense approaches are based on popular wisdom about how leaders need to behave and maybe even on some of the techniques that are presented in programs like those in which we teach. Typical commonsense leadership involves doing it now, being strong and decisive, not getting emotional, keeping social identities out of the picture, and projecting certainty. Many of the leaders who capture our imagination through popular culture embody elements of common-sense leadership—the superhero for her ability to swoop in at the moment of crisis and rescue the victim; the NFL quarterback who maintains composure as 300-pound defenders attack from all sides; the fair and sensitive boss who during your orientation urges you not to pay attention to people’s race, religion, or gender but rather to “treat everyone the same”; and the military leader in the war room making life-and-death decisions without self-doubt. However, we do not live our lives as superheroes, NFL quarterbacks, or war-­ room decision-makers. Common-sense approaches to leadership very often do not result in the outcomes we seek or help us avoid sleepless nights.

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Leading with Uncommon Sense offers a different approach: slowing down, engaging with our emotions, paying close attention to social identities, and embracing complexity. This style of leadership is less evident in the flow of everyday life because many of its most important aspects involve interior work by the leader—looking inward and examining self rather than focusing on influencing others. For example, because we’re not superheroes, we need to proceed carefully and follow the advice of a CFO in one of our executive education workshops who said, “I wish I held my decisions more lightly because I’ve come to realize how much I don’t know.” For those of us who are not NFL quarterbacks, rather than being focused on maintaining our composure, we are well served by stepping back and examining our emotions. Rather than trying to keep any discussion of our social identities out of the workplace, we can follow the lead of the boss who explicitly uses words like “white,” “gay,” and/or “Muslim” to bring into awareness how our social identities operate at work. Should we face life-and-death decisions (and even if we don’t), our model should be leaders who consider multiple perspectives and question their own certainties. Leading with uncommon sense is based on a more complex understanding of leadership and is based on thinking about how we think and carefully observing how our brains work. We do not pretend that leading with uncommon sense is easy. In the example above, Duncan (Brennan) thought he was following many of the tenets that we will describe in this book. Even though he believed in engaging with his emotions rather than suppressing them, he was not able in this incident to use his emotions productively. His desire to pay attention to social identities, rather than act as if they don’t exist, backfired when he supported a colleague based only on her social identities and did not carefully assess her capabilities. The two examples from our own leadership histories may seem quite different from the challenges you face, but maybe some of these experiences are familiar: • Tossing and turning in the middle of the night as you obsess about a difficult work situation. • Replaying a conversation, wishing you had been able to say something very different. • Trying to understand why a decision blew up in your face. • Feeling overwhelmed by the volume and pace of the demands you must address. And what about some of these thorny challenges? • • • •

Giving feedback to underperforming employees. Managing your difficult boss. Navigating through the complexities of hiring. Supervising cross-functional task forces composed of members with very different worldviews. • Mediating across powerful fault lines among people in your department. Our hope is that the ideas we present here will speak to a wide variety of leaders, with a wide variety of backgrounds, seeking to succeed in a wide variety of leadership situations.

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The Practice To help you lead with uncommon sense, we offer what we describe as a practice. Like any practice—meditation, yoga, or exercise—it’s important to engage in the practice on a regular basis in order for it to have the greatest effect on your leadership capacities. As French psychiatrist Christophe André observes: We seem to imagine that, unlike our muscles, our brain has no need of training and can’t be developed. Yet we accept that our body needs training. We know that physical exercise develops our breathing and muscles, that appropriate food is good for our health, and so on. But we are less convinced, or perhaps less well informed, about the similar needs of our mind ... Our psychic abilities generally obey the rules of learning—the more we practice, the more progress we make [1].

Making such a commitment is not always easy. We keep in mind the introduction to meditation practice offered by an experienced teacher. He said, “I meditate for an hour a day unless things get really busy; then I meditate two hours.” The practice involves three components: pause, introspect, and act (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1  Leading with uncommon sense: the practice

Pause At the core of the practice is the need to slow down. As a leader, it often feels like we don’t have the time to pause. We feel compelled to produce answers to challenging questions immediately. Who should I promote to senior management? Why did our revenue numbers fall short of our predictions? How should I respond to an aggressive comment from a coworker? The commonly held image of the leader is someone who confidently answers such questions or handles difficult situations without flinching. Any brief moment of hesitation is often read as a sign of weakness, lack of clarity, or inadequate skills. Our fight or flight instinct often pushes us to act now rather than pause. The practice we advocate highlights the benefits to you of pausing—both in the moment when reacting to a difficult situation and in a planned, proactive way to prepare for challenges and harvest learnings. We argue that pausing, rather than a sign of weakness, provides access to important information and greater insight.

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Just as we pause a television show in order to grab a snack, we need to freeze frame our lives on a regular basis in order to access resources and gather information. In an age of multitasking, such advice seems counterintuitive. However, we argue that in order to be a competent leader, you need to be able to step back and survey the landscape of your thoughts and feelings. You can pause in a variety of ways, for example, consciously taking a breath when things heat up, setting aside time to debrief at the end of meetings or important decision-making processes (ideally with trusted colleagues who will ask tough questions), building in time at the end of the day or week to reflect, using mindfulness practices such as meditation, or scheduling retreats for yourself or your team. We will explore these approaches and others in detail in Chap. 2.

Introspect By pressing pause, we give ourselves time. This time could be used to collect more data about the situation, learn more about the other players involved, or seek out additional resources. We recommend that you use it first to look inward, that you introspect. Introspect is not a very commonly used word. It refers to the process of examining one’s own thoughts or feelings (Google it!). Interestingly, there are very few words in our everyday vocabulary that capture this activity. This reflects how uncommon it is, especially for leaders, to look inward and carefully investigate what is happening with their thinking. We have worked for years, now decades, with a wide variety of leaders—experienced and novice, young and old, and CEOs to leaders of student organizations. We have found that most of these leaders share the belief that a leader’s most important task is to understand the people they are leading and with whom they are working. While it is certainly essential for leaders to appreciate and connect with their coworkers and colleagues, we are suggesting another focus of attention first. Introspecting as a component of leading with uncommon sense involves looking inward, examining oneself before attempting to figure out the other. In other words, we recommend doing your intrapersonal work in the service of becoming more interpersonally effective. We contend that efforts to understand others without understanding yourself are destined to produce partial success at best. Common Traps and Tools to Avoid Them Looking inward provides the opportunity to detect and avoid traps that we as humans commonly encounter. The traps are aspects of our thinking that routinely get us into trouble, specifically: 1. We frequently fail to recognize how much of our brain’s activity is out of our control.

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2 . We resist listening to what our emotions are telling us. 3. We often don’t appreciate the deep importance of identity differences like race, gender, age, etc. 4. We fail to notice how we oversimplify in our desire for certainty. Questions and Reminders Leading with Uncommon Sense provides four questions and four reminders for leaders to use during the introspect process with the aim of avoiding these common traps. The four questions that we urge leaders to ask themselves to bring these dangers into relief are: 1 . What is out of my awareness? 2. What are my emotions telling me? 3. Am I neglecting identity differences? 4. Am I too sure? And the four reminders are: 1 . Be humble (because so much is out of our awareness and control). 2. Be emotional (because our emotions provide important information and cannot be suppressed). 3. Be “impolite” (because we are often taught that it is not polite to notice race or religion or other identity differences, but ignoring our own and other people’s differences causes us to miss problems and to squander resources). 4. Be uncertain (because if we’re too certain, we’ve probably oversimplified). The questions and reminders are two routes to the same destination—leading with uncommon sense. Individuals may use them based on personal style or the demands of a particular situation, but they offer multiple defenses against falling into thinking traps that reduce our leadership effectiveness. Let’s look at the introspect questions and reminders in a little more detail (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2  Leading with uncommon sense: questions and reminders

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What Is Out of my Awareness? This question highlights that much of your thinking goes on outside of your conscious control and, therefore, your behavior is often influenced by processes of which you are not aware. Unconscious brain activity has a significant say in what you decide to eat for lunch, who your friends are, and leadership decisions you make on promotions, strategic initiatives, and organizational restructuring (as well as whether or not to take the corner office). Recent research coming out of neuroscience is helping us to better understand and accept just how influential our unconscious minds—what National Public Radio commentator Shankar Vedantam coined, “the hidden brain”—are in our day-to-day experiences. (By the way, this is not Freud’s unconscious; we’ll discuss the differences in detail in Chap. 3.) While we can intellectually say, “OK, the unconscious plays a role in my life,” it is much more challenging to use that understanding to make us more effective leaders. Hard as we try, we can’t ever be completely aware of how our brains are operating out of our awareness. It takes humility to say, “I don’t know if my perception is correct” or “I don’t really know all of what brought me to this decision.” Think about how these statements are unsettling, especially if a leader is supposed to be confident and self-assured. Asking yourself what might be out of your awareness can lead you to hold your ideas and positions more lightly and be more open to making adjustments, to be humble. We will discuss this question and reminder in Chap. 3. What Are My Emotions Telling Me? Asking this question helps you to embrace a somewhat unconventional understanding of the place of emotions in leadership. At least as far back as Plato, emotions have often been seen as dangerous and even animalistic. You may have been taught, implicitly or explicitly, to keep your emotions out of the workplace or to contain your emotions so that they do not interfere with rational decision-making. Although a long tradition of research has now demonstrated that efforts to suppress emotions are both unsuccessful and unwise, many of us still seek to follow the rule, “don’t get emotional.” [2] Emotions can provide you with crucial information, if you are able to access them and make sense of what they are telling you. This is not easy, especially if you are constantly reminding yourself to not be emotional. Many organizations are now providing resources to help their people develop emotional intelligence, which can help to counteract the common-sense belief that emotions are a problem at work [3]. A crucial component of introspecting is to Be Emotional—check on your emotions, consider what information they are providing, and examine how they are interacting with other elements of your thinking processes. Chapter 4 will explore this question and reminder.

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Am I Neglecting Identity Differences? Many of us have been taught to live by and lead by the Golden Rule, which tells us to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” Implicit in this directive is the assumption that others are like us and want what we want. Another way in which this view manifests itself is in expressions such as “I don’t see race, and you shouldn’t either.” The Platinum Rule questions this assumption by recommending, “Treat others the way they want to be treated.” It recognizes that people are different from each other and that those differences make a difference. The Platinum Rule also calls into question the common-sense leadership instruction to be “color-blind” as you deal with the complex realities of racial differences, and, therefore, “treat everyone the same.” Leading with uncommon sense says the opposite of treat everyone the same. It encourages us to be “impolite,” by paying careful attention to others’ and your own identities. This is impolite because we are often taught, implicitly and explicitly, that noticing identity differences is bad manners. Of course, the intention behind the instruction to not see such differences is admirable—to avoid discrimination—but the unintended consequences of this approach are usually very negative [4]. Social identities, all the groups of which we are members based on factors such as ethnicity, professional specialty, and (dis)ability status (as well as race, gender, religion, and many others), are powerful and important aspects of who we are at work and in life [5]. They matter because: • Our own social identities influence our perceptions—what we see and hear and how we make sense of the world. • Others’ social identities influence our perceptions as well—how we see them and how we interpret their behavior. • Our social identities influence others’ perceptions of us and our actions. • Others’ social identities affect their experiences of the workplace. All of these dynamics are potent factors in what happens as people work together. Choosing to ignore these forces will inevitably lead to significant problems. While leaders must certainly do everything possible to minimize the negative effects of social identities in the workplace, you can’t accomplish that by pretending that the differences, yours and others’, don’t exist or don’t matter. You need to understand how your differences and your colleagues’ differences are influencing your work together. Also, not paying attention to identities prevents you from valuing and benefitting from the differences that people bring to the workplace. Chapter 5 will delve deeply into the important role of social identities in effective leadership. Am I Too Sure? Asking yourself this question emphasizes the importance, while introspecting, of watching for the brain’s sometimes dangerous drive toward certainty. Neuroscience has identified pattern-seeking as one of the key functions of the automatic, unconscious functioning of the brain [6]. Our brains invisibly look for predictability and

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coherence in the environments around us. They seek simple cause-and-effect relationships, and we “believe” the stories that they develop, based on limited data, to explain the worlds in which we must operate. Without realizing it, we think we know more than we actually do. We develop what neurologist Robert Burton calls an involuntary “feeling of knowing.” [7] Many of us have had the experience when traveling in unfamiliar cultures of extrapolating from interactions with a few people to broad judgments; for example, we come back from our travels and describe “how nice they are,” making sweeping statements. While this characteristic of your brain’s functioning is valuable and important in many, many circumstances (e.g., when a car is speeding toward you), it can also be problematic for you as a leader. Your brain’s drive for certainty can cause you to oversimplify, to avoid complexity, and to reach closure prematurely. It can also result in your digging in your heels and believing much too strongly in conclusions you have reached [8]. Unfortunately, common-sense leadership often suggests that leaders must exude confidence and certainty. To lead with uncommon sense, we must be uncertain. As recommended in connection with the first question, “What is out of my awareness?” we encourage leaders to hold their positions lightly and to carefully consider whether they are too certain. In Chap. 6, we examine this powerful characteristic of our thinking in much more detail. Limitations of Introspection It’s important to highlight some limitations of introspection. While it is essential to examine one’s own thoughts and feelings, it is also crucial to recognize what we can and cannot achieve through this process. Our favorite description of introspecting comes from the psychologist Timothy Wilson who says the process results in a personal narrative, a story about our lives, much like a biographer would create [9]. The term narrative implies that there are many ways of telling the story; there is not one true or accurate version. Hopefully, introspecting produces insights that will help us function more effectively as leaders, but it is important that we remember that our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories are always incomplete and distorted, especially when they relate to ourselves. Leading with uncommon sense requires supplementing our narratives about ourselves with input from trusted colleagues and carefully collected information from the systems in which we operate. While we are advocating for introspection as a crucial component of leadership practice, we recognize that we cannot introspect continuously. Our automatic brains will drive many of our activities and decisions, and the press of daily tasks will not allow us to reflect 24/7. When the stakes are high—big successes, big failures—or when interpersonal conflict is causing you pain, or work demands are keeping you up at night, introspection is an important leadership competency to employ.

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Act The first two elements of the practice of leading with uncommon sense, pause and introspect, distinguish this approach from typical, common-sense leadership. The third component, act, is more familiar as an aspect of leading. Any leader who doesn’t act is in big trouble. Unfortunately, pausing and introspecting do not make acting easier although, ultimately, they should make the actions chosen more effective. Slowing down and engaging in self-reflection actually make things messier. And yet, you must take action, you must move forward. You cannot allow yourself to be paralyzed by the complexities you discover as you pause and look inward. Effective leaders have the courage to make decisions and take action, even in the face of partial information, strong emotions, complicated identities, and significant uncertainty. Action based on uncommon sense enacts leadership principles that can seem unusual or even misguided: • Push yourself to really consider the full range of options available to you rather than quickly settling on the obvious “best” solution. • Discuss the undiscussable. • Distrust yourself. • Proactively take significant risks. • Revisit moments when you disappointed yourself. • Go to sleep. Hopefully, some of these principles seem goofy enough that you’ll want to keep reading. In Chap. 7 we will take a fresh look at leadership action, as informed by the insights gained by pausing and introspecting.

Adopting a Learning Stance As we said above, leading with uncommon sense is not easy. Engaging in the practice of pausing, introspecting, and acting is challenging. Common-sense approaches are supported not only by tradition and training but also by powerful dynamics in the ways our brains function. Pausing, introspecting, and acting require consciously adopting what we call a learning stance, a non-defensive posture that welcomes new information [10]. If taking the time to look inward is to produce new perspectives on how best to act, we must be open to what we find when we look there. The following scenario highlights how difficult adopting a learning stance can be. Three months ago, the head of a project team decided to leave the company, and Chris was promoted to the leadership position. Two other members of the team were interested in the position, but Chris was chosen. Chris was given permission to hire a new team member to bring the team back to full strength. Chris tried to conduct a careful search for the new team member. The members of the team were involved in creating the pool, reviewing the candidates, and arriving at the final recommendation. While there was some disagreement among

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the team members about who should be selected, Chris was confident that the right person had been chosen. During the weekly team meeting, Chris announced who had been selected as well as the start date for the new team member. To Chris’s surprise, one of the team members had a strong negative reaction to the announcement. Duke, the only person of color on the team, expressed frustration that the African-American finalist had not been chosen and observed that the team continues to be “shockingly undiverse.” Chris, who is white, tried hard to not react emotionally to this challenge, outlining the outstanding qualifications of the new team member and explaining that race had nothing to do with it.

Chris’s challenge in this situation is not unusual. Most of us could react quite similarly if we found ourselves surprised by a negative response to a decision we have made. We often seek to explain ourselves and convince others of the rightness of what we have done. Adopting a learning stance would be quite different. It would mean considering the possibility that we might have missed something, that we might have been motivated by factors of which we weren’t aware, and that there could be other more valid ways to see the situation. We argue that a moment like this provides the opportunity for leaders to be informed about how their ways of operating do not have the results that they seek. This is a chance to pause and introspect and then move forward in a more productive way. However, that can only happen if one adopts a learning stance rather than a defensive posture. Nancy Koehn, a renowned historian of leadership, observes “Leaders that can’t reckon with themselves about their own mistakes are inevitably doomed to be less than they might,” going on to say, “Being chastened by your own conduct, by mistakes you’ve made, by setbacks you’ve encountered are some of the most important classrooms in the making of great leaders.” [11] She highlights how American political giants, including Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., learned from particularly painful errors they made.

The Difficulty in Taking a Learning Stance Some quite specific characteristics of our thinking processes make it difficult for us to adopt a learning stance. They reduce the likelihood that we’ll pause and introspect and, therefore, respond in a more productive way. The “self-serving” bias, widely studied in social psychology, includes our tendency to attribute negative results connected with our leadership to external factors [12]. If things go wrong, we focus on our unreasonable bosses, limited budgets, backstabbing colleagues, restrictive government regulations, unmotivated employees, or poorly defined project guidelines rather than on how we might have contributed to the problems. It’s not that these external factors are not part of the picture, but we humans tend to let ourselves off the hook. Feel familiar? It does to us. We are fighting this powerful bias when we try to adopt a learning stance. Unless we consciously attend to the

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likelihood that we’ll do this, we cannot get access to the learning that will make us more effective, more engaged leaders. Brain research has discovered another reason why taking on a learning stance is hard. We know that the amygdala, located in the temporal lobe of the brain, is crucial in helping us react to any threats. It helps to trigger the fight-flight response. More importantly, recent research reveals that this same structure in the brain signals threats to strongly held beliefs just as it would signal a threat to our personal safety [8]. If the brain activates the same primal physiological processes when someone questions what we believe to be true as it does when we feel physically attacked or our survival is at stake, we will find it very difficult to react with openness and a willingness to consider other perspectives. Reminding ourselves of these characteristics of our brain’s functioning, which operate largely out of our awareness, is a gateway to adopting a learning stance. It is important for those of us in leadership roles to be mindful of how we unknowingly prop ourselves up and resist challenges to our firmly held beliefs. Research also provides reason for hope. Studies of people who engage in “actively open-­ minded thinking” characterized by deliberately seeking out criticism and disagreement demonstrate improved decision-making [13]. If we are to engage in the practice that undergirds leading with uncommon sense, we must actively and consciously counteract common thinking processes and choose to adopt a learning stance.

Overview of the Book The remaining chapters of the book are as follows:

Chapter 2: Pause We introduce the first component in the practice of leading with uncommon sense. We explore why pausing is important for leaders and offer a range of suggestions for how to actually go about pausing. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 describe four aspects of the second aspect of the leading with uncommon sense practice: introspect. This process of examining one’s own thoughts and feelings provides access to crucial information necessary to recognize the unintended consequences of common-sense thinking and move toward employing uncommon sense.

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Chapter 3: Be Humble We investigate thinking processes that are out of our awareness and the profound implications for leaders of this aspect of how our brains work. The reminder to be humble highlights that we should hold our beliefs lightly and defend our actions carefully because our perceptions are so incomplete, and there is much that we don’t know about why we behave as we do.

Chapter 4: Be Emotional This chapter presents and explains the argument that rather than trying to keep our emotions out of our leadership, it’s best to recognize our feelings as an essential and unavoidable element of our decision-making. Replacing the long-held view that emotions are dangerous with a willingness to investigate what they are telling us is an important and challenging component of leading with uncommon sense. The reminder is to be emotional.

Chapter 5: Be “Impolite” We explore why it is essential to resist the very common admonition to be “polite,” that is, to try to ignore social identity differences. The chapter considers how leaders can think most productively and sensitively about the wide variety of identities and backgrounds that the people they work with bring to the workplace and how leaders might factor in how their own identities affect how they lead. The goal is no longer to treat everyone the same. The reminder be “impolite” emphasizes that social identities such as race, gender, age, religion, etc. are most productively handled not by trying to ignore them but by deeply investigating their impact.

Chapter 6: Be Uncertain The final Introspect chapter examines why it is important for leaders to resist the common-sense leadership approach of acting with certainty. It emphasizes the importance of understanding that our brains naturally seek to simplify and to make our worlds seem more definite than they are. To the extent that we allow our feelings of certainty to go unchecked, we neglect elements that should be considered and settle for mediocre solutions. The reminder is to be uncertain.

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Chapter 7: Act In this chapter, we discuss the third element of the practice, act. Pausing and introspecting are central to leading with uncommon sense, but they are not sufficient. The danger is that analysis-paralysis could set in. Leaders cannot just analyze; they must move forward and take action. We present several principles for leadership action, based on uncommon sense and using the insights gained through pausing and introspecting.

Chapter 8: Conclusion—Going Forward In the concluding chapter, we will examine how we can break the habits of leading with common sense and turn the practice of leading with uncommon sense into new habits. We will also consider why the practice we recommend is not enough. And, finally, we will pull the pieces of leading with uncommon sense together by exploring a complicated case of leadership challenges.

About this Book This book is for leaders, for those who are highly experienced, and for those just getting started. It is for those who hunger for ways to deal with the challenges of guiding, inspiring, and supporting their colleagues and moving their organizations forward. We believe the ideas presented here are relevant to leaders in all kinds of organizations—private sector, nonprofit, and government; large, medium, and small; old and new; and formal and informal. The goal of this book is ambitious. We believe that improving leadership is a powerful objective because the impact extends beyond the individual leader. As leaders become more effective, they will become healthier and more satisfied, less harried, more grounded, and more fulfilled in their lives and work. Very importantly, the network of people with whom they interact as leaders will also benefit significantly from improved leadership. The pain and turmoil that colleagues experience because of poor leaders are familiar and dispiriting components of organizational life. Enhanced leadership will also make organizations themselves healthier. As decision-makers function more effectively, organizations will achieve their goals more efficiently and with greater quality. Ultimately, this results in a healthier world. Organizations of all kinds are central to the functioning of our society; leadership deficits cause those organizations to be less able to make the crucial contributions on which the world depends. Forgive us if we have fantasies of changing the world a little.

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When leaders rely on the common sense that they have been taught explicitly or implicitly, the results are often not good. Resources are needed that offer alternatives to typical leadership and that highlight new ways of thinking about how individuals can lead effectively. Literally thousands of books, articles, and online materials attempt to provide such resources. Many of these add value, but more continue to view leadership through old, familiar, and not very effective lenses. We do not promise to make leading simple; in fact, we argue that effective leadership depends on a more complicated understanding of the underlying dynamics than is usually presented in common-sense approaches. Leading with Uncommon Sense offers fresh insights about leadership by integrating ideas from several diverse sources, including such fields as neuroscience, behavioral economics, literary fiction, mindfulness, cognitive psychology, emotional intelligence, implicit bias research, and management decision-making. Bringing these heterogeneous streams of thought together to explore how to lead effectively is uncommon and challenging. What we describe in these pages comes from years of work we have done together and separately consulting in the nonprofit, private, and public sectors, teaching an MBA course on leadership and an undergraduate course on intercultural competence, and serving as organizational leaders ourselves. Our professional homes have been in an English Department and a Management Department, both within a business university. We value deeply the very different perspectives our intellectual traditions bring to the challenges of leadership. In particular, we believe the liberal arts speak powerfully to issues that sometimes are seen as the province of schools of business or public administration alone. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker observes in describing the contribution that one element of the humanities could make to our understanding of leadership, “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them.” [14] Reading literature is one of the tools we will recommend below for leaders to develop their uncommon sense. Wiley is convinced that it would help Duncan become a more effective leader if he were to follow her example and learn the Middle English in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—for example, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” (“When April with its sweet-smelling showers/Has pierced the drought of March to the root) [15]. Duncan is not making much progress on that agenda. The engagement with literature that we’ll suggest will not be quite so challenging. We also call on personal, nonprofessional experiences. While the ideas in this book are clearly focused on leadership experiences in the workplace, we know that they also have real value in the challenges of day-to-day living. As we have worked on fleshing out and explaining the ideas presented here, we have found ourselves using the approach much more often in our personal relationships with partners and friends. They actually work! For example, we have become more inclined to pause and introspect, which results in better connections and deeper understandings. And

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when we forget to slow down and look inward, we are likely to find ourselves in the soup. While we believe, based on feedback from a wide variety of audiences, that the ideas we present here offer a new and valuable way of thinking about leadership, we do not consider ourselves to be “experts.” We recognize that our perspectives are limited by the particular cultures in which we are embedded. For example, we know that our worldview is powerfully shaped by our location in the United States. Our false steps, lost opportunities, and frustrations, in both our professional and personal lives, have informed much of what we present, and these stumbles continue. We also reflect on our successes as sources of learning [16]. We invite you to join us in exploring how to lead with uncommon sense.

References 1. André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York, p 238 2. Caruso D, Salovey P (2004) The emotionally intelligent manager. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 3. Caruso D, Salovey P, op. cit.; Goleman D (1998) Working with emotional intelligence. Bantam Books, New York; Leary K, Pillemer J, Wheeler M (2013) Negotiating with emotion. Harvard Business Review (January–February, 2013) 4. Ely R, Meyerson D, Davidson M, Rethinking political correctness, Harv Bus Rev, (September, 2006) 5. Steele C (2011) Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do. W.W. Norton, New York; Johnson A (2005) Privilege, power, and difference. McGraw-Hill, New York 6. Kahneman D (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York; Mlodinow L (2012) Subliminal: how your unconscious mind rules your behavior. Pantheon Books, New York; Wilson T (2004) Strangers to ourselves. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA 7. Burton R (2005) On certainty: believing you are right even when you’re not, vol 3. St. Martin’s Press, New York 8. Kaplan J, Gimbel S, Harris S (2016) Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Sci Rep. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39589 9. Wilson T (2002) Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. Belknap Press, Cambridge 10. Stone D, Patton B, Heen S (2010) Difficult conversations: how to discuss what matters most, 10th edn. Penguin, New York 11. Herndon AW (2017) Trump has ushered in an era of political shamelessness, Boston Globe, September 4, 2017, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1935051781/B23199244BE142BA PQ/34?accountid=8576 12. Myers D (2015) Psychology, 11th edn. Freeman Worth, Boston 13. Haran U, Ritov I, Mellers B (2013) The role of actively open-minded thinking in information acquisition, accuracy, and calibration. Judgm Decis Mak 8(3) 14. Pinker S (1997) How the mind works. W.W. Norton, New York, p 539 15. Chaucer G (1987) “General prologue,” The Canterbury Tales. In: Benson LD (ed) The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, pp 1–2 16. Cameron K, Dutton J, Quinn R (eds) (2003) Positive organizational scholarship: foundations of a new discipline. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

Chapter 2

Pause

As a culture we are not in the habit of respecting, honoring, or even acknowledging the pause. —Alice Walker

Steve Jobs, the iconic leader of Apple, was quite famous for his compelling presentations in front of large audiences. Typically, he was the master showman in those settings, seemingly in complete control and able to evoke exactly the audience response he sought. However, in an atypical moment before a large group in 1997, Jobs displayed an uncommon approach to leadership, utilizing the first component of our uncommon leadership practice—he paused. Jobs was in front of Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference when an audience member asked a question embedded in a scathing insult, attacking Jobs’ knowledge and competence. For about 10 seconds, he said nothing, a highly unusual moment in such an event, after which he was able to respond to the substantive issues raised by the questioner without getting hooked by the personal attack [1].

An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Pause This chapter explores the value of pausing, not just as a reaction to the kind of situation that Jobs faced but also proactively and routinely as we function in a leadership role. Pausing is not a particularly complicated notion. The idea of stopping, stepping back, and reflecting is familiar to all of us. In Chap. 1, we offered the analogy of using the remote to pause a television program so that we can get something to eat. However, as leaders, we often do not implement this crucial leadership competence. One major factor in our tendency to neglect pausing is the influence of common-­ sense messages that we have received during our formal and informal training as leaders. As the pace of work and change increases, we are often taught that leaders need to act quickly, confidently, decisively, and without hesitation. Efficiency, © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_2

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2 Pause

speed, and rapid responses are highly valued; after all, time is money. While this is frequently true, leaders also need to know when the situation calls for a pause and a bit of contemplation. If we don’t recognize the importance of pausing, we greatly reduce the chances that we’ll adopt a learning stance (as discussed in Chap. 1), and we preclude the chance to introspect, which will be described in the following chapters. As Fig. 2.1 below depicts, leading with uncommon sense begins with pausing, which allows for introspection, and ultimately for a more informed and considered choice about what to do, a more effective action. Fig. 2.1  The practice: pause

Just as leaders develop other essential capacities such as analyzing data, mediating conflict, and strategically scanning the environment, we can learn how to build pausing into our set of leadership skills. As we discuss how to pause, we will expand beyond pausing in the moment (as Jobs employed) to consider planned pauses that can be longer and deeper. Examples include taking the time to reflect on a particularly challenging or successful meeting, building in time at the beginning of the week to anticipate the upcoming events that will make particular demands on you emotionally and intellectually, scheduling retreats for yourself or your team to step away from the day to day, and negotiating a sabbatical for any length of time—a month or, at best, a year—to recharge, retool, and refocus. We will also recommend ways to support this element of the practice through your relationships and with organizational practices. Colleagues and friends can remind you to pause and make your reflection more productive as can work systems that you put into place. It is reasonable to ask whether leaders can afford to pause. We are not suggesting that leaders engage in intense navel-gazing before taking any action. In many cases, the pause can be little more than a beat. The crucial change is to adopt a mindset that recognizes the value of shifting out of our unexamined path. Longer pauses can be built in when possible and necessary. Also, it’s important to realize that we all pause frequently, although often without clear intention. We routinely interrupt the flow of events to take a bio break, refill our water bottle, or discuss Netflix binging with our neighbor. These are all good. The important part of this aspect of leading with uncommon sense is to pause consciously, taking control of your attention.

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Pausing: Being Choiceful About Our Attention Much of the time, we have the potential to control where our attention is directed. To pause, as an element of leading with uncommon sense, is exercising that control, being choiceful, for the purpose of gathering information that will help fill in holes, uncover mysteries, or correct mistakes. Of course, there are moments when we cannot control where our attention is focused. When something in our environment becomes crucially important, “bottom-up” attention takes over, and our awareness is focused for us—a skunk crosses our path, a deluge of rain blinds us while we’re driving, and a baby cries. During the normal flow of daily life, we can exercise “top-­ down” attention; we can choose what we attend to; we can pause [2]. In leading with uncommon sense, we are advocating that leaders pay particular attention when pausing to their internal processes, to what they are thinking and feeling, and to what might be going on with them of which they are unaware. Since common-sense leadership often emphasizes, almost exclusively, analyzing interpersonal exchanges, facts, and figures, leading with uncommon sense foregrounds the internal dynamics that may be having powerful effects on our leadership behavior. Our recommendation is to pause and look inward; doing so allows us to introspect, which will be discussed in the following chapters. When we pause, we can inquire into the common traps described in Chap. 1 that often impede our effectiveness as leaders: out-of-awareness processes, unrecognized emotions, neglected awareness of social identities, and a drive for certainty. Christophe André talks about this type of reflection as “recentering, re-­inhabiting, regaining contact with ourselves” [3]. Redirecting our attention in this way is particularly powerful because it creates a stark contrast to the frantic flow of daily life. It allows for a sense of greater inner space and enhanced clarity. Pausing, as an essential component of leading with uncommon sense, has much in common with mindfulness, which has become increasingly visible as an element of healthy living [4] and effective management [5]. Mindfulness is a broader concept than our version of pausing, calling for attention to both external and internal phenomena and emphasizing a nonjudgmental, accepting orientation. The kind of pausing and mindfulness we recommend highlight the importance of paying attention, on purpose, in the current moment. This focus on the present is particularly important for leaders because so much of their daily lives involves analyzing what went wrong (or right) in the past, as well as planning for the future. Truly paying attention to what’s happening now can sometimes be neglected as a result. Many of the approaches to pausing that we discuss below are also mindfulness practices. At its core, pausing is recognizing that you need to interrupt the flow of events and choose what you will pay attention to, what you will be aware of. The intense surround in which we operate as leaders often makes such interruptions particularly important. The danger of information overload has become increasingly evident, as the surging stream of details, facts, and opinions to which we subject ourselves threatens our ability to pay attention to crucial issues [6].

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In particular, the technology in our pockets calls to us, providing second-by-­ second dopamine hits that distract us from our current activities [7]. Matt Richtel’s A Deadly Wandering [8] provides a powerful account of the tragic effects of texting while driving, a cautionary tale of what can happen when our attention gets hijacked by the constant temptation to harvest the latest fascinating tidbit of information from the outside world. Researchers and clinicians are taking on the challenge of assisting individuals with a variety of behavioral addictions to the Internet, technology, gaming, and the like [9]. For example, investigators are seeking to understand the dimensions of “nomophobia,” the irrational fear of being without or being unable to use your cell phone, a malady seemingly affecting more and more of us. Pausing is not the normal process for attending to the leadership situations we face, and we can’t be in pause mode constantly, but it is an essential step to take when we require a different perspective or additional data or when we need to refocus in the face of competing demands for our attention. It is an essential preparation for the introspecting that will ultimately make it possible to for us lead with uncommon sense.

Resources for Pausing As we have said, pausing is not a revolutionary concept, but how do we build pausing into our leadership repertoire? How do we remember to take control of our attention and allow ourselves to investigate how our personal thoughts and feelings are affecting our approach to leadership challenges? One useful starting point is to distinguish between pausing in the moment as events unfold and pausing proactively in a planned way. While both in-the-moment and planned pauses are important, we will explore planned pausing in greater depth. Being able to cope with the immediate crisis is crucial but developing leadership routines through which we actively manage our attention is even more important. In-the-Moment Pausing To begin our consideration of pausing in the moment, join us in thinking about this situation faced by Angie (not her actual name), a participant in a session we led. Angie was the leader of the fundraising team at a medium-sized university. She and one of her team members, Luis, were meeting with Dan, an alum who had been a generous donor. Luis had been nurturing the relationship with Dan for several months, and Angie decided to attend this meeting in hopes that they could get a commitment for a truly major gift. Ideally her presence (as the boss) would signal the importance of the meeting to Dan. After some small talk and celebration of recent victories in athletics, Dan commented on an article in the current issue of the alumni magazine about the university’s efforts to

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support students with learning disabilities. The piece described the work of the counselors who supported these students and mentioned some of the accommodations that were provided, including extra time when taking exams for students who were officially diagnosed with a need for such a resource. Dan said he was strongly opposed to these policies because they created an unfair advantage and encouraged students to take the easy way out or game the system. Angie was shocked by Dan’s comments. His opinions hit her personally because one of her children had struggled with learning disabilities and was now thriving with the support of a program similar to the one to which Dan was objecting. Angie could feel herself getting warmer and her heart beating faster, but she worked very hard to stay composed. Before giving it much thought she said, “You know, Dan, these kids need encouragement, not criticism.” Dan seemed taken aback by Angie’s remark and Angie scrambled to change the subject after an awkward silence.

While this scenario is specifically about university fundraising, the dynamics are similar in other types of organizations as well as in sales and other customer relations situations. Leading with uncommon sense relies on building the capacity to deal effectively with high-pressure moments like this. Had Angie been able to pause in this situation, she might have developed a more productive response (and a new university building would be named after Dan). A key component of developing the capacity to pause in the moment is recognizing when a moment has become precarious. Our bodies often signal that we are becoming uncomfortable, upset, or even overwhelmed. A fast heartbeat, churning stomach, or a flushed feeling are worth paying attention to. Unfortunately, rather than using these feelings as a cue to pause, Angie chose the common-sense approach of trying to stay composed. When our bodies send us these kinds of messages, pausing becomes a particularly important and productive reaction. Let’s explore some of the techniques we can use to pause in these fraught situations. Take a Breath Take a breath is often used as a synonym for pause; when things get hot, friends will often urge us to “just take a breath.” Interestingly, we are coming to understand that actually paying attention to and controlling your breath can be an effective mechanism for calming your nervous system and increasing your alertness. Slow, steady breaths seem to send our brains the message that things are OK [10]. Breathing is central to many mindfulness/meditation practices. Typically, the goal of attending to the breath is not to make the uncomfortable issues go away but rather to investigate what is happening [3]. Had Angie been able to employ this pausing mechanism, she may have unobtrusively gathered and calmed herself. Using the breath to decrease the stress she was experiencing might have allowed her to look inward and collect valuable information about her internal processes—to introspect.

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Move Physically moving can sometimes help in these challenging moments. Asking for a bathroom break or a drink of water or just getting up to stretch your back (many of us have bad backs!) can provide the opportunity to pause and check in with yourself. Even in a brief interaction like Angie’s, there are ways to change your physical position to help redirect your attention to your thoughts and feelings in the moment. Give Yourself Time An effective pausing mechanism is to remind yourself that you can often choose not to solve the problem right now. Angie could have chosen not to acknowledge Dan’s comment without engaging with the substance of what he was saying. Then, at a later time she might have revisited the issue and find ways to stimulate a deeper conversation about the challenges facing students with disabilities. Very often in leadership situations in which we feel on edge, we also feel compelled to respond quickly and decisively—this is common-sense leadership. We don’t give ourselves permission to take the time we need to respond effectively. Of course, some emergencies may require an immediate response, but we often underestimate our degrees of freedom to say, “I’ll get back to you” or “Let’s sleep on this before we decide.” Asking questions can be a useful way to give yourself time. Gathering more information will not only slow the process but it can also help you to understand the challenges more completely. Similarly, taking the time to paraphrase what you are hearing can slow the pace, give some space, and increase the chances that you are comprehending the full dimensions of the issues. Planned, Proactive Pausing While pausing in reaction to moments of turmoil or heightened tension is a crucial leadership capacity to develop, it is even more important for leaders to build proactive pausing into their leadership routines. Intentionally taking control of the focus of your attention and, in particular, directing your attention to your internal processes are potent mechanisms in leading with uncommon sense. In this section, we present specific approaches to planned pausing, describing first techniques that you can employ during day-to-day work, then pausing strategies outside of daily work, and finally methods of pausing that involve resources beyond yourself. Of course, these categories are merely suggestive, and the techniques can spill over from one type to another.

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During Day-to-Day Work Schedule Pauses One of the simplest tools to help us pause at work (which we often forget to employ) is to block off time in our schedules. Most leaders must and do attend carefully to their calendars. Building in moments dedicated to pausing increases the likelihood that we will remember to take control of our attention and disengage from the flow of events. Scheduled time to pause can be used in a number of ways [11], depending on what most facilitates your looking inward. Scheduling time before important activities can be particularly useful. Being still and attending to your breath can provide a moment to check in with yourself. Another possibility, borrowed from mindfulness practice, is to create a breathing space for yourself on a regular basis—consciously take 20 breaths, thereby accessing the same benefits that we discussed earlier. Another option is to schedule 5 minutes each day to ask, “Where am I now?” Posing direct questions about your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations can get you in touch with what you are bringing to the leadership challenges you face. Locate Prompts in Your Environment Another simple method to stimulate yourself to pause at work is to locate prompts in your environment [12]. These can be physical items such as post-it notes, or other attention-demanding objects (a wacky paperweight on your desk?), or events such as logging in to your computer at the beginning of the day. You can also set the alarm on your phone. The idea is to consciously identify these prompts as a reminder to pause and ask yourself what is happening with you internally—what are you thinking about and what are you feeling? What could affect your perceptions and behaviors as you take on your leadership role? It may be important to update your prompts regularly (as reminded by an entry on your calendar) so that once noticeable stimuli don’t disappear from view or awareness. Adam Alter talks about his desire to invent an alarm clock that would ring whenever a person was about to make an important decision, a reminder to pay attention now [9]. He describes a high-tech company named MOTI that is working to develop a device that could do just this. It’s a simple animal-like gadget that tracks behavior over time. There’s a small button on the front of the device, which you push when you’ve done the right thing. Leaders with uncommon sense could push the button when they pause. MOTI flashes a rainbow of colors and emits a series of happy chirps when you do the right thing; when you leave it unattended for a while, it flashes red and chirps and buzzes less happily as a reminder. Unlike passive apps, MOTI sits on display. You can’t ignore it—and early testing suggests that people form a bond with the device, so they don’t abandon it. While not yet widely available, MOTI suggests some interesting possibilities for building pause prompts into our environments.

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Pause in Anticipation We often have the ability to predict what events on our calendars will be demanding in one way or another. Whenever possible, we do the prep work required to enter those situations as well-informed as possible, to be on top of the data. We don’t always give the same attention to investigating the thoughts, feelings, and personal concerns that we are taking with us into those moments. Pausing and introspecting in anticipation of such formidable interactions can equip us to lead more effectively. Pausing in anticipation can occur at the beginning of the week, the beginning of the day, or immediately before the event. One approach to this kind of pausing, which utilizes meditation, one of the “outside of work” techniques that we will discuss more below, is Monique Valcour’s “10-minute meditation” [13]. She recommends taking time before a stressful meeting to meditate as a means of increasing your ability to deal effectively with the complicated human dynamics ahead. The meditation is designed to enhance your awareness of yourself and how you interact with your coworkers. It can also deepen your curiosity about and compassion for people with whom you anticipate challenging exchanges. Pause After the Fact Just as we can often anticipate work events that will be particularly taxing, we frequently know when something has happened that is less than satisfying or successful. We also know when we have been part of a big success. Taking the time to pause and debrief not only the facts of the situation but also how your own personal dynamics were involved is crucial to leadership effectiveness. Sometimes this can be on your calendar because you know in advance that it will be necessary (e.g., at the end of a project). Other times you will need to create the time because what transpired took you by surprise. For example, in Angie’s situation above, she could certainly benefit by pausing after she finishes her conversation with Dan. You can also do after-the-fact pausing to take a broader and longer view—in this case, not just about a single event but about the overall flow of work for a month or quarter or year. The crucial characteristic of this type of pausing is that it investigates not just the external, “business” questions but also who you were as a leader and how your perceptions and behavior affected what happened. Seek Genuine Support Sometimes pausing in anticipation or after the fact will be done alone. Other times, you will want to pause with other people. It’s important to seek out colleagues who can provide what Robin Ely, Debra Meyerson, and Martin Davidson in their Harvard Business Review article call “genuine support” to enhance your pausing [14]. Genuine support is one of the most powerful components of leading with uncommon sense, and we will mention this frequently as we describe the practice. Genuine support is different from the type of backing we often receive (and seek) from colleagues when things get tough. Colleagues providing genuine support question our

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assumptions and ask probing questions rather than merely reinforce the analysis and approaches that we bring to them. They facilitate our deep introspecting. A very effective way to pause is to seek out members of our network who will push us to look carefully at how we are making sense of the situation and how we are behaving. Outside of Daily Work Meditation One of the best-known techniques for pausing is meditation [15]. While this term refers to an enormous range of techniques and practices, a central component is the slowing of the daily stream of thoughts and feelings so as to pay closer attention to one’s automatic patterns of thought and preoccupations. A usual goal is to diminish the amount of inner chatter and “stabilize” the mind. While meditation is more typically done without a direct connection to current workplace issues (even if it is done in the physical setting of work), it can also be linked to work dynamics as in a 10-minute meditation before a stressful meeting mentioned above [13]. One popular approach to meditation is to sit quietly and direct your attention to your breathing—constantly bringing the focus back to the breath when it wanders to thoughts or feelings. An image that many meditators find helpful is to think of those uninvited thoughts or feelings that float through your consciousness as clouds. The goal is to observe them and then allow them to move out of your awareness. This provides the opportunity to better understand the things that are weighing on you, as they disrupt your meditation momentarily. A significant body of research on meditation, including hard science based on brain scans and other neuroscientific methods, has now accumulated [16]. This research has revealed positive effects on our emotions, thought processes, and overall well-being. Meditation can be an effective pausing mechanism, providing the opportunity to introspect and carefully examine our personal thoughts and feelings, our consciousness, and our subjective mental states. Solitude and Silence [17] Building solitude and silence into our lives can be a helpful way to pause. Finding solitude, being alone with your thoughts and feelings, means consciously retreating from outside stimuli that are so often elaborate excuses for running away from ourselves. Solitude need not be without activity. Concentrated work, deep reading or, some would argue, even time with intimate friends, may support the escape from external distractions that characterizes solitude. The crucial element is to be away so that you can be with yourself. Similarly, silence can help us tame the information overload to which we are so often subjected (as we discussed above). Silence can counterbalance the calls for constant connection and hyperactivity [18]. We find silence by actively shutting out the din of the world, even if we do not locate an environment without any noise.

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The most important silence is not outside but within. Often external silence cannot be found, and we must create our own internal silence by paying attention inside. Finding silence and seeking stillness means consciously sitting with the questions and issues that arise rather than escaping to the smartphone, television, or a new task. It sometimes means facing the fear of getting to know ourselves better. For many of us, being in solitude or silence is not easy. Research has shown that we often prefer any kind of activity to being alone with our thoughts; for example, as University of Virginia professor Timothy Wilson and his colleagues tracked this tendency, they wondered just how far we would go to avoid ourselves [19]. Ultimately, they gave people the choice of spending 6–15 minutes by themselves with nothing to do but think and reflect or interrupting that time alone by administering painful shocks to themselves. Two-thirds of the men and one quarter of the women in the study chose to shock themselves rather than do nothing but be alone with their thoughts and feelings. In distracting ourselves, in avoiding silence and solitude, we block access to important information about who we are and why we do what we do. We preclude the ability to introspect. As Erling Kagge says in Silence: In the Age of Noise, “I tend to think about silence as a practical method for uncovering answers to the intriguing puzzle that is yourself” [7]. Sleep Just as “take a breath” is a synonym for pause, “why don’t you sleep on it” is a frequently heard recommendation to step back and consciously pay attention to how we’re handling a conflict or challenge —to pause. Sleep researchers have found that sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health [20]. Sleep has many benefits for our brains. It refreshes us emotionally, which we’ll discuss in detail in Chap. 4. In addition, sleep helps us learn from our daily experiences and put them in context. Specifically, dreaming during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep contributes to our remembering the details of our experiences and integrating them with what we already know and who we are. It also helps us to diminish the painful emotions that can be associated with memories [20]. Amazingly, sleep also flushes out toxins that develop in our brains while we’re awake, literally clearing the mind [21]. For many of us, the challenge is much greater than reaping the benefits of good sleep. The World Health Organization reports that there is an epidemic of sleep deprivation in our society. Two-thirds of adults in developed nations do not sleep the recommended 8 hours per night. Thus, the issue is not just to proactively and positively pause for sleep, but rather to break bad habits of neglecting sleep and failing to pause in this essential way. We have long known that sleep deprivation has many negative effects on cognitive functioning, including emotional regulation [22], attention, reasoning, learning, and memory [23].

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However, habits in developed cultures are robbing many of us of the sleep we need. Increasing evidence of the negative effects of screen time before sleep has not prevented 95% of adults from using an electronic device that emits light in the hour before bed [9]. More than half of adults check their emails overnight [9]. Not only is this a powerful indicator of our inability to escape from information overload, but it also represents a potent reason why so many of us have inadequate sleep. Sixty percent of adults keep their phones next to them when they sleep [9]. We would all be wise to focus on sleeping well as a highly effective way to pause. Life Changes In addition to taking planned pauses on a day-to-day basis as we have been discussing, we can proactively arrange larger-scale, longer-term pauses. Scheduling retreats for yourself or your team as a maintenance activity, apart from any particular project or disaster, can allow you to pay attention to the larger themes of your work life. Sometimes, leaders might want to consider taking a longer pause from their particular job responsibilities by arranging a sabbatical or leave of absence or deciding to change jobs.

You’re Not Alone Much of leading with uncommon sense involves looking carefully at yourself. While it is essential for effective leaders to be highly skilled at scanning the environment and understanding the people around them, it is the self-examination, our introspecting, that allows leaders to move beyond common-sense leadership. This self-exploration does not, however, occur in isolation. The people with whom leaders are surrounded and the organizational systems that support their work are crucial sources of information, especially about how leaders actually behave. Relationships: Build Your Network for Genuine Support In the discussion above, we described the importance of finding genuine support, input from people who share their perceptions and reactions forthrightly rather than telling us what we want to hear. It is extremely valuable to have access to colleagues who can provide information about how our behavior looks from the outside—to supplement our internal view. A vital aspect of planned, proactive pausing is to work on building a network that can be mobilized for genuine support. It is important in building this network that you consider the diversity of resources that your network contains. People who bring different perspectives based on their backgrounds, experiences, and

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demographic characteristics are essential. A useful technique is to create a list of the people in your network on whom you can count for genuine support and then examine the extent to which their personal characteristics resemble yours. If most of your network is like you, it’s time to seek out additional relationships. Building your network also means working to deepen your relationships so that authentic interactions and genuine support are possible. Leaders can also make genuine support a component of their planned pausing by scheduling time with their network of trusted colleagues. Creating regular opportunities for conversation with and feedback from these people will allow self-­ examination and our ability to introspect outside of crisis situations. Organizational Systems Leaders can proactively create systems that help them to pause effectively. By consciously instituting mechanisms that routinely present them with data about the results of their behavior, they can increase their exposure to information that can disconfirm their self-serving beliefs. For example, ensuring that we receive detailed information about our personnel decisions—who we hire (and fire), promote, or assign to key projects—can force us to examine whether or not we actually enact our espoused commitment to fairness. Many aspects of leaders’ normal responsibilities can be structured to generate information that will allow them to learn about dynamics that could otherwise be beyond their awareness [24]. Such information can be a very valuable resource in the kind of after-the-fact pausing that we described above. Another organizational resource that can support pausing and then introspecting is training and development. Leaders can seek out learning experiences that push them to examine their own internal processes. A popular example of this kind of resource is the implicit bias training now being offered in many organizations. Proactively pursuing such opportunities rather than waiting for the announcement to appear in your inbox can support the development of your leadership competence.

Conclusion Pausing—consciously directing your attention to your internal thoughts and feelings that may be affecting your leadership choices—is an essential element of leading with uncommon sense. This requires interrupting the normal flow of events and reconnecting with yourself. It means creating the time and space to explore how common traps that humans often experience in their thinking may be getting in the way; this exploration is introspecting. In the next chapter, we will begin looking at the introspect component of the practice by asking what could be out of our awareness as we go about our day-to-day work of being a leader.

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References 1. Bariso J (2017) 20 years ago, Steve Jobs demonstrated the perfect way to respond to an insult. Inc., July 26, 2017. https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-demonstratedthe-perfect-w.html 2. Gallagher W (2009) Rapt: attention and the focused life. The Penguin Press, New York 3. André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York, p 92 4. Kabat-Zinn J (1990) Catastrophe living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Bantam Dell, New York 5. Dane E (2011) Paying attention to mindfulness and its effects on task performance in the workplace. Journal of Management 37(4):997–1018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310367948; Hochman D (2013) Mindfulness: getting its share of attention. New York Times, November 1, 2013; Schaufenbuel K (2014) Bringing mindfulness to the workplace. UNC Kenan-Flager Business School Executive Development. https://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/~/media/Files/ documents/executive-development/unc-white-paper-bringing-mindfulness-to-the-workplace_ final.pdf 6. Begley S (2011) The science of making decisions. Newsweek, February 27, 2011 7. Kagge E (2017) Silence in the age of noise. Pantheon Books, New York 8. Richtel M (2014) A deadly wandering. William Morrow, New York 9. Alter A (2017) Irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Publishing Group, New York 10. Alderman L (2016) Breathe. Exhale. Repeat: the benefits of controlled breathing. The New York Times, November 9, 2016; Kozub S (2017) Take a deep breath—no really, it will calm your brain. The Verge, March 30, 2017; Brown R, Gerbarg P (2012) The healing power of the breath. Shambhala Publications, Boulder 11. Marianetti O, Passmore J (2009) Mindfulness at work: paying attention to enhance well-being and performance. In: Alex Linley P, Harrington S, Garcea N (eds) Oxford handbook of positive psychology and work. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 189–200; Hart T (2004) Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. J Transform Educ 2(1):28–46 12. Marianetti O, Passmore J (2009) Mindfulness at work: paying attention to enhance well-being and performance. In: Alex Linley P, Harrington S, Garcea N (eds) Oxford handbook of positive psychology and work. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 189–200; Personal interview with Elissa Spelman, December, 18, 2017 13. Valcour M (2015) A 10-minute meditation to help you conflicts at work. Harv Bus Rev. https:// hbr.org/2015/04/a-10-minute-meditation-to-help-you-solve-conflicts-at-work 14. Ely RJ, Meyerson D, Davidson M (2006) Rethinking political correctness. Harv Bus Rev 84(9):78–87 15. Kabat-Zinn J (1990) Catastrophe living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Bantam Dell, New York; Hart T (2004) Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. J Transform Educ 2(1):28–46 16. Ricard M, Lutz A, Davidson R (2014) Mind of the meditator. Sci Am 311:38–45; Prochnick G (2010) In pursuit of silence: listening for meaning in a world of noise. Doubleday, New York 17. Deresiewicz W (2010) Solitude and leadership. The American Scholar, March 1, 2010. https:// theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#.XNcjvtNKjow; André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York, p 92 18. Kagge E (2017) Silence in the age of noise. Pantheon Books, New York; Prochnick G (2010) In pursuit of silence: listening for meaning in a world of noise. Doubleday, New York 19. Wilson T et  al (2014) Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind. Science 345(6192):75–77 20. Walker M (2017) Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner, New York

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21. National Institutes of Health (2013) Brain may flush out toxins during sleep. News Releases, October 17, 2013. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-outtoxins-during-sleep 22. Berinato S (2016) “Sleeping on it,” doesn’t lead to better decisions. Harv Bus Rev 94(5):30–31 23. Diekelmann S (2014) Sleep for cognitive enhancement. Front Syst Neurosci 8:46 24. Bohnet I, Works W (2016) Gender equality by design. Belknap Press, Cambridge

Chapter 3

Introspect: Be Humble

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. —Ursula K. Le Guin

For 16 years, Tom Ashbrook was the popular and successful host of the nationally syndicated NPR radio program “On Point,” through which he reached 2 million daily listeners. The show was born in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and became a platform for serious investigation of political, social, and cultural issues. In early 2018, Ashbrook was fired following an investigation of complaints from people who worked for him about an abusive work environment. As many as 23 employees reported that Ashbrook had engaged in intimidating and demeaning behavior. One news account of the climate on the show said people were coached to, “never interrupt Ashbrook, never challenge him, and only answer yes, no or I’ll check on that” [1]. Ashbrook was seemingly taken by surprise by the accusations. In an early response to the charges, he said, “Yes, I could be a tough boss, and yes we sometimes had editorial discussions that included sensitive topics. However, these new allegations suggest behavior that is totally contrary to the way I try to live my life every day and treat those around me” [1]. The investigation ultimately concluded that he had, in fact, created conditions that were harmful to many employees. In a Boston Globe interview following his termination, as he began to sort out what had happened, Ashbrook seemed to be engaging in useful introspection, and he offered that his primary learning from the experience was that he needed “more workplace humility” (along with more empathic imagination) [2].

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_3

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An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Humble We argue that the lesson Ashbrook says he learned is an important one for all leaders. Our leading-with-uncommon-sense reminder is be humble. In suggesting that leaders need to be humble, we are not focused on an unassuming personal style. Rather, we are emphasizing that leaders should hold their perceptions, opinions, and decisions lightly. After pausing, which affords us the time to choose what we pay attention to, we are wise to ask ourselves the introspect question, “What is out of my awareness?” (See Fig.  3.1) Here we are highlighting the importance of noticing that our conscious awareness is partial and imperfect. As we mentioned earlier, one of the common traps we fall into as humans is failing to recognize that much of our brain’s activity is out of our control. An especially crucial moment to pursue humility is when we are convinced that we’re right. In times like that, it is in our best interest to step back and investigate what we could be missing.

Fig. 3.1  The practice: be humble

Common-sense leadership does not emphasize being humble or exploring the limitations of our conscious awareness. Questioning what your senses seem to be telling you and the drivers of the conclusions you have reached is much less important than charting a clear, definite direction. This chapter describes just how much of our thinking is not under our control; common-sense leadership highly values control. We will explore some of the key things leaders should know about how our brains operate, particularly how much of our brain’s functioning is out of our awareness. We will consider three specific brain processes—perception, memory, and decision-making—that are particularly significant for leaders. After examining why the limitations of these processes call for leaders to be humble, we will describe ways that leaders can put humility into practice so as to minimize the damage caused by our limited awareness and take maximum advantage of the marvelous capacities of our brains.

The Power of a Picture: The Johari Window In explaining the practice of leading with uncommon sense, we will use some simple visual models developed mostly by other writers that capture important aspects of our approach. The first of these visual models is the Johari Window (Fig. 3.2), a

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simple yet profound framework that has been used for many years for team building, development of interpersonal skills, and self-awareness [3]. We find it particularly helpful in connection with the be humble reminder.

Fig. 3.2  The Johari Window

As you can see, the Johari Window is a two-by-two matrix that sorts aspects of ourselves into four quadrants based on whether we and others know about them. • The shared quadrant contains characteristics of ourselves that we know and others know, such things as key aspects of career or family history, effectiveness in public speaking, and technical competence. • The hidden quadrant has elements of ourselves that we know about but others do not because we hide them. In this quadrant could be things like personal ambitions, a history of mental illness, and deep discomfort with a particular coworker. • The blind quadrant, which we will come back to below when we discuss the importance of people in our networks, contains pieces of ourselves that we do not know about but others do. Close coworkers or family members may notice that particular kinds of comments or dynamics trigger intense emotional reactions from us, for example, when our competency is questioned or we are accused of acting insensitively. • Finally, the unknown quadrant holds those aspects of ourselves that neither we nor others know about; they are in our unconscious. The contents of this quadrant are the many things we will discuss in this chapter that we do not consciously control yet drive our behavior. For many leaders, keeping in mind this simple picture can be a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of important information, particularly about ourselves, that we do not have access to as we face leadership challenges. Research suggests that the four quadrants are not of equal size; the unknown segment is certainly the largest. Our discussion below outlines the extent to which the functioning of our brains can be out of our awareness and how difficult it can be to remember and/or accept

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that this is true. Posting a copy of the Johari Window above your desk or scheduling a monthly email to yourself containing the window may provide a reminder of how much you don’t know and why you need to remain humble.

Who’s in Control? “I don’t believe in the unconscious,” one of our MBA students said matter-of-factly when we asked during a class discussion about the influence of unconscious and out-of-awareness forces on our behavior as leaders. Several students chuckled awkwardly, probably assuming that the instructors expected acceptance of the idea that consequential activity goes on in our brains without our knowing it. The “right” answer should have been something like, “Of course I’m having thoughts that I’m not aware of and they have a big impact on how I behave.” One of us asked the student to explain his thinking a bit further, to which he responded, “I am in complete control of my thoughts and actions at all times. I take pride in this.” This was not the first time we were confronted with this opinion. While it may represent an extreme position, it captures a challenge—a common trap—that we all face in believing that there are things happening in our own brains that are out of our awareness and out of our control. It is a leap of faith to accept that there are parts of the brain that influence our conscious thoughts without our knowing it. Some of us who are willing to concede that such dynamics exist greatly underestimate the power of unconscious factors. We may admit that something beyond our conscious awareness makes us pull our hand away from a flame before being badly burned but refuse to acknowledge that our attraction to a significant other could be influenced by something beyond our conscious awareness. Consider a fascinating study showing that people marry someone who shares their family name three to five times as often as people with other names [4]. One of our favorite metaphors describing unconscious processes comes from psychologist Jonathan Haidt who suggests the image of a rider on the back of an elephant to capture the relative power of the conscious and the unconscious [5]. We could have begun the discussion of introspecting with any of the four questions/reminders depicted in Fig. 3.1 above. The issues of unconscious influences, emotions, social identities, and drive for certainty are deeply interconnected and overlap in many ways. We will refer to this throughout our discussion in the next four chapters. We chose to begin by looking at processes that are out of our awareness and call on us to be humble, because this aspect of who we are as humans is fundamental. Until we can accept that there is much that is beyond our awareness and out of our control, we will continue to be constrained by the limitations of common-sense leadership. A large body of research, conducted over decades, demonstrates that most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control [6, p. 4]. Still, it feels like we decide what goes on in our minds and how we behave, and so giving

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up the notion that we’re in charge is extremely difficult [7]. As neuroscientist David Eagleman says, accepting this reality knocks us from our perceived position at the center of ourselves [6, p. 12]. As psychologist John Bargh observes, “We all hold dear the idea that we’re the captain of our soul, and we’re in charge, and it’s a very scary feeling when we’re not” [8]. In the end, we must accept that we will never know much of what is going on with ourselves. This requires us to make judgments and to act with humility, given that we cannot be 100% sure how we came to our judgments. For those who embrace the common-sense idea that confidence and conviction are central to leadership, such humility is an anathema. A Peek Inside Our Brains In trying to come to terms with all that’s out of our conscious control (and to be humble), it’s useful to know something about how our brains work and why so much goes on out of our awareness. One estimate is that our five senses and our unconscious mind can receive 11,000,000 pieces of information per second, but our conscious brain can deal with only 16–50 pieces per second [9]. We are constantly bombarded by a stream of stimuli from the outside world, most of which we are unaware. One of the essential functions of our brain is to sort through all this information to create a world in which we can operate. Without cognitive processes that are outside our awareness, we would be overwhelmed or paralyzed by this onslaught of stimuli from our environments. The cognitive functioning that happens outside of our awareness is essential. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, when we form thoughts, we are relying on two systems within our brains: one that is fast, automatic, intuitive, and out of our awareness and one that is slower, analytic, deliberate, and in our conscious awareness [10]. To illustrate the difference between the two systems, think of two math problems: if we ask you to add 1 plus 1, with no effort at all two pops into your mind. However, if we ask you to multiply 14 times 87, you must pay conscious attention to the task. The result of your first calculation emerged from your unconscious cognitive processes. In contrast, you were aware of the work you did to find the second answer. We rely on our unconscious brain processes for the vast majority of our mental tasks, thereby saving time and energy and allowing us to get more done. Much of what our brains do out of our conscious awareness is an evolutionary adaptation, allowing us to make sense of our environments quickly and choose behaviors that allow us to deal with the challenges of living [10]. Our stream of perceptions, our memory, much of our decision-making, and many other fundamental cognitive functions occur mostly out of our awareness [11]. When confronted with an incomplete picture in our environment, our unconscious mind fills it in so that the ­conscious mind can see something as a whole. When things don’t quite add up, we rely on our brains, operating out of our awareness, to help us make sense of a situation [10].

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In this way, our brains can even give us a good laugh. For example, think about one of Groucho Marx’s famous quips, “This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know.” Our brain deals with Groucho’s first sentence with no problem. We assume, usually correctly, that the elephant was not in Groucho’s pajamas. The second sentence is funny because it points out that our brain reached a conclusion out of our awareness; that conclusion could be accurate, but if it is, something crazy is going on. You may be aware of Freud’s notion of the unconscious, a repository of a person’s primal urges and past traumas—evils just waiting to erupt into a person’s consciousness. The modern understanding of unconscious cognitive functioning that we are discussing here is obviously not Freud’s unconscious. Freud was, however, early to recognize that we are often incapable of understanding what drives us and that we are not in control of all of our own behavior [12]. Included in the brain activities that occur outside our conscious awareness are both truly unconscious functioning, which we cannot access, and cognitive functioning that is going on in the background as we pay attention elsewhere. Our brain activities involved in driving are an example of the latter. Most of the time we are not consciously aware of the calculations and decisions we are making in operating a car, but a sudden thunderstorm immediately focuses our attention on those judgments and behaviors, bringing them very much into conscious awareness.

Problems with Our Efficient Brains Clearly, the brain activities that are out of our awareness are absolutely essential, but as leaders, we must be aware that these activities can also create significant problems. Leading with uncommon sense means we will seek to stay humble as we remember how much is going on beyond our conscious control. While the unconscious work that our brains undertake (11,000,000 bits per second) is efficient and often effective, it is also quite crude and sometimes includes mistakes [9]. This incident may well feel familiar. A young woman was passing the time in line while boarding an airplane making small talk with an elderly couple. She asked where they were going and the older woman said, “We’re flying to Amsterdam because we are taking a cruise that leaves out of Rotterdam.” The younger woman said, “How wonderful. I can’t wait until I’m retired. Life must be so wonderful,” to which the older woman replied, “Oh, we’re not retired.” Out of her awareness, the younger woman’s brain had filled in missing information and created a story, which was certainly plausible, but also quite incorrect. We’ll consider the dangers that brain activities out of our awareness present for three processes that are particularly important for leaders: perception, memory, and decision-making. In exploring the things that can go wrong, we hope to make the case for leaders to hold their positions lightly and be humble.

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Perception Fig. 3.3  Shepard’s two tables [13]

You may well have seen and been confounded by the image of the two tables shown in Fig. 3.3. At first glance, the tables appear to be quite different sizes; the one on the left appears longer and narrower, while the one on the right seems to be shorter and wider. However, if you were to make a photocopy of this page and cut out the tabletops (we’ve actually done this), you would discover that they are exactly the same size. The relative orientation of the tables and the legs distort how we make sense of the image. More important than the potential value of this illusion to wow your friends is what it tells us about our perceptions. Our lived experience of the world can be quite inaccurate. It’s easy to feel like our perceptions, what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, are simply a report of what’s happening in our environment; however, this is not at all what is happening. Our brains are not passively recording an external reality, as a video camera might [6, p. 82]. Rather, beyond our awareness, our brains actively construct a subjective, personalized picture, eliminating ambiguity in order to create a coherent image. We sort, interpret, and hypothesize without knowing we’re doing it. Relying on information such as past experiences, cultural beliefs, and context, our unconscious cognitive processes create a reality for us to deal with. However, if we unquestioningly believe our perceptions, we do so at our peril because there’s so much going on behind the scenes. As neuroscientist David Eagleman says, “The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true” [6, p. 53]. Memory In some ways, memories are quite similar to perceptions. Just as we usually feel like our perceptions are simple reports of what’s happening in the world around us, much of the time we feel like our memories are straightforward recordings of past

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events, which we can access when we need to. Of course, it is not uncommon to struggle to remember some person, event, or piece of information, but once the memory snaps back, we often don’t question how accurate it might be. Like other processes that go on out of our awareness in our brains, most of the time and for most purposes, our memory is a marvelous resource, invisibly supporting our daily activities with speed and efficiency. Still, problems can occur that threaten our effectiveness as leaders, and it’s in our interest to remember that our memories are not perfect; they are highly personal and subjective [14]. It’s important to be humble about our memories. If we reflect on what’s going on as memories are formed and recalled, it becomes quite obvious that we couldn’t possibly remember all of what happens to us or all of what is happening in a particular situation. Leonard Mlodinow offers this entertaining example: When we hold a baby’s birthday party in the park, we experience two hours of sights and sounds. If we crammed all of them into memory, we’d soon have a huge warehouse of smiles, frosting mustaches, and poopy diapers … The challenge that the mind faces, and that the unconscious meets, is to be able to sift through this inventory of data in order to retain the parts that actually do matter to you [14, p. 63]

As a result of this sifting that necessarily takes place, and usually serves us very well, there are times when we don’t remember important pieces, or we remember inaccurately, or we fill in gaps with things we make up (and then believe) [14]. Research has given us a deeper understanding of how our memory retrieval process works and why we need to be careful about how much of our memories we believe [15]. Our brains extract key elements from our experiences and store them, as in the birthday party example above. When we access a memory of an experience, we don’t retrieve a copy of that experience; rather, we recreate the experience, building on the stored pieces. In this reconstruction process, we often add information we obtained after the experience. As a result, we can be affected by biases such as the consistency bias, which causes us to rewrite our past feelings and beliefs so that they resemble what we feel and believe now or the egocentric bias through which we remember the past in a self-enhancing manner [15]. For decades, Wiley believed that she chose to attend the University of New Hampshire instead of Sarah Lawrence College because of the difference in tuition between the two schools. In the late 1980s, UNH was less than half the price of Sarah Lawrence. She also recalled that she had been influenced by the weather. It was raining the day she and her parents visited Sarah Lawrence, while it was sunny when they went to Durham, NH. In fact, she remembered people on the quad outside of UNH’s Hamilton Hall playing hacky sack and hanging out on blankets. But one day when she was talking with her parents, Wiley was startled by what her father shared with her about her college decision. She had commented on her frivolous reasons for choosing one school over another, and her father said, “Wait, you don’t remember what you said after we visited Sarah Lawrence? On the drive home you said you didn’t want to go to a school with so many lesbians.” As someone who identifies as genderqueer, Wiley was stunned by what her father said. She had absolutely no recollection of that exchange in the car. As she reflected on this

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glitch in her memory, she realized that it had been a time in her life when she was working very hard to stay deep in the closet. Her saying something homophobic at the time was likely part of her attempt to hide her sexual orientation, and now her reconstructed memory was made to fit with who she had become. Decision-Making: Using Shortcuts We make thousands of decisions a day. Consider how many choices you might make just within the first few minutes of your day: whether to hit the snooze button on the alarm to get a few extra minutes sleep, whether to roll over to get up out of bed or to sit up and turn, whether to put on a sweatshirt or turn on the heat, or whether to go to the bathroom before letting the dog outside. The list seems almost endless, and all of this takes place before your first cup of coffee. Decision-making is a central component of what we do as leaders as we choose among options on issues mundane and profound—where the organization’s picnic should be held to whether a billion-dollar merger makes sense. Decision-making, like perception and memory, often operates out of our awareness. While we certainly make some decisions consciously, many others happen without our even knowing it. As with perception and memory, our brains generally serve us very well as they hum along out of our awareness making decisions that allow us to function quite effectively. If we had to take the time to consciously consider every decision we face, we would quickly be overwhelmed. Once again, our unconscious brain is an efficient time-saver. Generally, any shortcomings in the decisions our brains make out of our awareness are outweighed by the savings in time and energy. However, significant problems can occur in our decision-making, just as they do with our perceptions and our memories, and our leadership results can suffer. We, as leaders, are well-advised to remember our limitations as decision-makers and be humble about the decisions we make. We need to remember that decision-making processes are going on behind the scenes and out of our conscious control. Our out-of-awareness brains can make decisions so quickly and efficiently because they rely on shortcuts. An exciting body of research has investigated the details of these shortcuts, exactly how they operate, and the dangers they present [16]. Here are some of the shortcuts we all use on occasion and examples of the kinds of issues they can create for us as leaders. Using Only the Obvious Information Our brains sometimes reduce the processing requirements related to a decision by paying attention to the information that is most easily available and neglecting the rest [17]. The information may be available because it is particularly vivid, easily imagined, and specific, or we have been exposed to it frequently or recently. As with all the shortcuts, the time-saving benefits are obvious but contemplate the potential

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problems as shown by this example. You are deciding which of two people to promote. One person’s office is next to yours, and, therefore, you have lots of “available” information about her or him. The other person’s office is in another building and, therefore, you don’t have nearly as much easily accessible information. The uneven knowledge about the two candidates could lead to a poor promotion decision if your unconscious brain uses this shortcut. Over-Relying on Previous Experiences Sometimes our brains narrow the choices involved in a decision by relating the situation to previous experiences that seem similar [18]. Unconsciously, we look for characteristics of the present moment that correspond to beliefs we have developed earlier. This shortcut can lead to problems; those pre-existing categories into which our brains slot this decision are often stereotypes. For example, if our past experience is that people who are effective managers are extroverts who approach conflict by competing, we may struggle to accept a more introverted, collaborative style because it doesn’t fit our stereotype of what a manager is. We will explore the dynamics of stereotypes, one of the negative consequences of mental shortcuts, in detail in Chap. 5. Limiting the Possibilities Another common shortcut that our brains use is to shrink the number of options to be considered rather than considering every possibility [18]. This may be efficient, but it can lead to less than optimal decisions. For example, if you designed the evaluation system for people in your department, it can be a challenge to consider significantly different approaches to assessment as opposed to minor tweaks. A range of options just won’t emerge during the decision-making process. Not Questioning Our Gut One more shortcut that our brains often use, out of our awareness, is to trust our gut reactions without taking the time to reflect on all the relevant factors [19]. In Chap. 4, we will look in depth at the value and challenges of emotions for leaders. We know that emotions are an essential component of decision-making, so the message here is not that emotional reactions are bad. However, decisions driven purely by unexamined feelings can sometimes be problematic. For example, if you have a history of emotional run-ins with a particular coworker, it can be difficult to approach a joint project with enthusiasm, unless you investigate the roots of the conflicts and determine what your emotions are telling you about the relationship, including your role in the problems.

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Hopefully, these brief introductions to the crucial processes of perception, memory, and decision-making make clear the importance of our first introspect question, “What is out of my awareness?” and the corresponding reminder to be humble. Because our unconscious brains are so central to these processes, we must remember to question what seems obvious and hold our conclusions lightly. Leading with uncommon sense means embracing questions and humility rather than relying on the common-sense leadership approaches of firm answers and (unjustified) confidence. The next section will suggest some ways to build your capacity to be humble.

Building Capacity Living with the reality that so much goes on out of our awareness is challenging. Here are some ways to increase your personal capabilities for humility. Know the Science This is a particularly exciting time to increase our understanding of how our brains operate. The amount, breadth, and depth of neuroscience research is quite extraordinary and growing all the time. We do ourselves a disservice if we rely only on knowledge that we gained even a decade ago. The material we presented above barely scratches the surface of the topics we have raised, and new developments unfold almost daily. We are fortunate that there is a large and growing research community that is increasing our awareness and understanding about both the strengths and limitations of our cognitive functioning. Leaders are wise to make a conscious effort to stay abreast of this new information. We are less likely to forget how much is out of our conscious awareness if we engage with the latest science. Of course, most of us will not have the time to follow even a bit of the original research, but luckily many sources, such as podcasts, websites, and blogs, are available to translate the latest science into information that leaders can use. For example, as we write this book, two NPR radio programs/ podcasts, Hidden Brain and Invisibilia, deal with the kinds of out-of-awareness dynamics we have discussed in this chapter in a format that is accessible, entertaining, and substantive [20]. They may well be gone by the time you read this, but uncommon leaders are wise to seek out similar sources. Many of us make it our business to keep current on medical and health issues that could affect us personally even though we certainly don’t have the scientific knowledge to comprehend the details. As leaders depending on our perceptions, memories, and decision-making in order to be effective, it makes sense to expend at least the same level of energy and the same level of care in choosing your resources, to understand the latest in brain and psychological science [18].

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Meditation In Chap. 2 during our discussion of pausing, we mentioned meditation as a proactive way to take control of your attention. Meditation can also be thought of as an effective tool for humility because it can bring into awareness thoughts and feelings that have been present but unnoticed in the background. While meditation cannot truly access the unconscious, it can help us notice important information that has been beyond our attention. For example, by engaging in a regular practice in which you come to stillness and focus on your breathing, paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that pass through your consciousness, you can become aware of some of the many messages in your brain that have been outside of your awareness. Contemplation during meditation can allow us to observe thoughts and feelings that are invisible during the flow of daily life, buried under activity [21]. Consider the specific case of anger. Meditation can allow us some space from our anger so that we are not blindly immersed in it but rather able to accept it and notice how it is affecting our behavior. Meditation need not be the prototypical activity that many of us picture—sitting cross-legged on the floor in a silent room for an extended period with Buddhist bells to mark the beginning and end of the practice. While such a traditional approach, and its variants, is of great value, it’s also possible to capture some of the benefits of meditation in briefer moments during the course of the day. Pausing to pay attention to our breath, taking a minute to gather ourselves, and refocusing our attention as we ride the elevator to a meeting are all mechanisms that can remind us of all that is out of our awareness. Sleep In Chap. 2, we highlighted the value and importance of sleep as a proactive mechanism for pausing. This normal human process also helps us cope with the challenges discussed in this chapter related to brain functioning that happens out of our awareness. Research shows that sleep enhances our memory in a variety of ways. It can also strengthen our decision-making. In particular, during sleep, our brains test out and build connections among disparate pieces of information that we have stored there, making links that were not obvious when we were awake [22]. Many times, during the writing of this book, we have awakened to find ourselves making connections and solving problems that we had been struggling with before we retired. You may be wishing that we had gotten even more sleep, but we consciously used our nightly slumber as a mechanism for moving our writing process forward. Before going to sleep, we would intentionally review puzzles about leading with uncommon sense that were perplexing us, hoping that insights would develop overnight. Often, our sleeping brains rewarded us.

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Resources for Humility Introspection In each of the introspection chapters, we will suggest resources you can use to ask questions of yourself. This chapter’s set of resources addresses ways to look inward and check whether you are staying humble and considering what could be out of your awareness. An overarching approach to humility introspection is to monitor our cockiness. When we are convinced that we’re right and feeling particularly sure of ourselves, a red flag should go up. We don’t want to undermine confidence or the joy of competence, but the vast amount of brain activity that occurs outside of our awareness requires that we hold our positions lightly, if we are to function effectively as leaders. The general need to ask ourselves whether we’re being overconfident can be focused more specifically on the areas of perception, memory, and decision-making that we highlighted earlier in the chapter. Check Your Perceptions Hopefully, we’ve persuaded you that our perceptions do not constitute some type of absolute truth. Instead, they are subjective, personalized pictures that our brains have created to help us cope as effectively as possible with the swirl of stimuli and experiences in which we’re embedded. Therefore, a crucial aspect of being humble is to routinely check our own perceptions, leaning toward the acknowledgment that we’ve distorted or missed something important in our surround. One useful way to check our perceptions is to ask over and over again, what’s my evidence? By backing off from our conclusions, opinions, and judgments to examine what concrete information supports how we’re seeing (and hearing) the world, we provide the opportunity to consider the limitations of our current perceptions. For example, we can experience coworkers as disinterested or even hostile if they yawn or check their phones while we are making an important presentation. This assessment could significantly influence our behavior toward those colleagues in the moment and in the future. We might confront or write off people who do this. Rather than accepting our perception without question, we have the option to engage with the person and gather more evidence, thereby checking to see if our perception still makes sense. Maybe we’ll learn that the person has a sick child at home, has lost sleep, and must check for emergency messages coming in on the phone. We will revisit this notion in Chap. 6 when we investigate how to counteract the drive for certainty that is such a powerful component of the ways in which our brains operate. Question Your Memory Of course, not only are our perceptions unable to be trusted, but our memories are faulty also. (Nobody said this was going to be easy.) Therefore, as we’re examining whether our perceptions fit with the evidence, it also makes sense to question

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whether the memories on which we’re basing important commitments are robust enough to support what we’re doing. We are wise to keep in mind that our memories are recreations of past experiences, based on sifted pieces of information, that have been re-formed to support our current view of ourselves. Maintaining a healthy skepticism about the accuracy of your recollections is essential. Referring to records of the past, ideally as neutral as possible, and asking other participants what they remember can support such skepticism. Questioning your memories can be difficult. What we remember often “feels” like facts [23]. An interesting stream of research on so-called flashbulb memories of emotional moments reports that that these memories are frequently not particularly accurate but nonetheless very strongly held. Researchers with access to accounts written by people just after incidents like President Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9/11 attacks found that when the same people were asked a year or more later to describe where they were and what they were doing the later reports very often diverged significantly from what they had recorded at the time of the incidents. However, people had no doubt about their memories [23]. Of course, not all our memories are of this intensely emotional kind, but all our memories are incomplete and idiosyncratic. Part of leadership humility is to work hard to keep these characteristics of our memory in our awareness and, therefore, routinely question our memories. Examine Your Decision-Making The third leadership process addressed earlier that is powerfully affected by all of the out-of-awareness work our brains do is decision-making. The many shortcuts our brains use in the interest of efficiency usually result in satisfactory choices, but many of the problems we face as leaders are caused by those same decision-making shortcuts that operate beyond our conscious awareness. Putting uncommon sense into practice calls on us to ask this fundamental question about our decision-­making: What am I missing? This question can help surface the shortcuts described above— using only the obvious information, over-relying on previous experiences, limiting the possibilities, not questioning our gut—as well as the many other shortcuts that we now understand can result in troublesome decisions. Another useful question to ask to maintain humility as you make decisions is— what could go wrong? An organizational resource to help us keep humble that we will describe in greater detail below is a premortem [24]. The idea is to explore what could go wrong before a final decision is made, rather than after the fact as in a postmortem. We can utilize a more limited version of this technique on our own as we make important decisions, retreating from the momentum of a decision that is gaining steam and being hard-nosed with ourselves about all the factors that could be out of our awareness and could result in failure rather than the success that is beginning to feel inevitable. A final resource to support humility introspection about your decision-making is the checklist [25]. Organizations can implement checklists to make sure everyone is

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paying attention to the crucial steps in decision-making or implementation, but we can also do that individually as a mechanism to counteract decision-making shortcuts that could cause us to miss significant factors that are outside our awareness. For example, at the end of Difficult Conversations, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen provide a “Difficult Conversations Checklist” with detailed but manageable reminders of the key steps in handling a challenging interaction [26]. It reminds us that there are many components to a conflictual exchange, such as the facts, the emotions, the identity issues, our purposes for having the conversation, our story, the other person’s story, and the differences between our stories. As part of the final step of the checklist, we are prompted to “invent options,” a direct remedy to counteract the decision-making shortcut of limiting the possibilities. Having such a checklist in mind (or on our phones) can help us avoid making decisions that are based on incomplete or distorted information. Track Behavior Patterns In addition to checking in with yourself about your perceptions, memory, and decision-­making, you can facilitate your humility introspection by paying careful attention to how you actually behave. This means putting aside what you believe you believe, or what you intend, and observing what you actually do. This requires fighting through the smoke screen of our conscious theories, an important activity because our ideas about our motivations are usually strikingly incomplete [11, p. 133]. We like Timothy Wilson’s suggested response that people could use when asked to explain the reasons for their behavior, “I’ll do the best I can, but keep in mind that my list is undoubtedly incomplete and that some of the things I put down are probably wrong” [11, p. 168]. Since our explanations and rationales are so limited, we are well-advised to look at how we act. A be humble question we can ask ourselves after a particular event, a week’s work, or a lengthy project is “What did I actually do; how did I behave?” This requires being brutally honest with ourselves, and it’s not easy. Below, we will discuss how we can supplement our self-questioning with input on our behavior from colleagues and the systems in which we function. We leave a trail of our behaviors behind us, which we seldom examine to deepen our understanding of who we are as leaders. Our calendars provide a record of how we’ve chosen to spend our time (even if many of those appointments are required of us). Our sent mail captures what we’ve actually said in our interactions with others. Our postings on social media provide another source of information about our actions. Other similar records can be accessed to look for patterns in how we behave. Beyond these naturally occurring records of our behavior, we can proactively gather data about our actions. Many of us have had the humbling experience of watching a video recording of ourselves giving a talk or teaching a class, an experience that usually allows us to discover much that was concealed in the blind quadrant of the Johari Window. Listening to audio recordings of meetings in which we’ve participated can be similarly enlightening, highlighting what we actually said

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as opposed to what we remember saying or intended to say. Some leaders like to keep a journal of their activities and reflections. We recommend a two-column format in which the left column is as close as possible to a description of what a video camera would have recorded in the situations. Ideally, this column does not include interpretations, internally experienced emotions, or analyses; those elements are written in the right column. Even though it will not be completely accurate, the left column becomes a valuable resource for tracking how you behaved, what you did.

You’re Not Alone As we mentioned in Chap. 1, the specific techniques for leading with uncommon sense begin with mechanisms we can use individually, but they do not end there. Leaders need to do the personal work of introspecting, but they can also utilize colleagues and organizational systems to help deal with the challenges outlined in this chapter. Your Relationships Our network of colleagues can prompt us to remember that powerful forces affecting our leadership behavior are out of our awareness and, therefore, that we need to hold our perceptions, memories, and decisions lightly. We have mentioned the value of genuine support [27] previously, that is, building into our lives input from people who share their perceptions and reactions forthrightly rather than telling us what we want to hear. However, as Robin Ely, Debra Meyerson, and Martin Davidson say, “Unfortunately, most of us seek help from the wrong people, seeing those who challenge our point of view as threats and those who reinforce it as allies” [27]. Thus, we must consciously go after genuine support. Hopefully, the relevance of genuine support to this chapter is obvious; if significant aspects of our cognitive functioning are occurring out of our awareness, it becomes essential to have sources of information about dynamics that are happening outside of our view. An added bonus of this tool is that the very process of asking for genuine support requires at least a bit of humility. Trusted colleagues offering genuine support can provide looks into the blind quadrant of our personal Johari Window, reporting what they observe about us that we cannot see. Other people are not the only way we can learn about the blind quadrant. Sometimes other elements of the environment shift what is in our awareness, as with the bottom up attention discussed in Chap. 2. But the people around us, especially those who are willing to level with us, are invaluable sources of information. Of course, we are not suggesting that the genuine support we receive is some kind of absolute truth; it must be considered along with other input available to us. However, it does have the value of taking us beyond the limitations of our own perspective.

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A particularly important component of the genuine support we can receive relates to tracking behavior patterns, discussed above. Often, our blind quadrant includes how we have actually acted, as opposed to what we intended to do or believe we did; we can be amazingly unaware of our own actions. Members of our network can offer insights about our behavior that we are unaware of. Leading with uncommon sense includes proactively seeking genuine support, not just being open to it when it becomes available. Again, as with other leadership techniques we have discussed, setting aside time on your calendar can provide useful discipline. Making the necessary arrangements to receive unvarnished input increases the likelihood that you’ll actually have the opportunity for this learning. Pursuing perspectives beyond your own is important both when stuff is hitting the fan and when things seem to be going well (and you might be feeling a little cocky). Asking allies for genuine support, and thereby contributing to your humility introspection, can be quite straightforward. Among the questions a leader might ask of colleagues who will be frank in their input are the following: • “My intention in that situation was ______. What did you see me actually doing?” • “What did it seem that I was missing in that moment/process/relationship?” • “As you have observed me in a variety of situations, have you noticed patterns in my behavior? For example, when I’m in conflict situations or when I’m giving feedback or leading meetings, what patterns do you observe in the way I behave?” • “I’m trying to step back and evaluate my overall effectiveness as a leader. Here’s how I would describe myself as a leader. Help me to see what I am missing.” A crucial element of maximizing the usefulness of this tool for humility is building a rich and diverse network of people to provide you with genuine support. As we mentioned in Chap. 2, people who bring different perspectives are essential. We know that diverse teams have the capacity to make more innovative and creative decisions than homogeneous teams. Similarly, your network will be more valuable if it contains a wide range of ideas and understandings. Completing an inventory of the set of people in your life who will level with you, examining whether their world views are different enough from your own, is a useful way to sharpen this tool. Other less special relationships than those that include genuine support are also important for being humble. As we have mentioned, asking for input from coworkers about your perceptions, your memories, and your decision-making processes permits you to bring into awareness information and perspectives that remain inaccessible to you if you go it alone. Your Organization Leaders generally have many resources to aid their humility introspection provided by their organizations. Daniel Kahneman suggests that organizations are better than individuals in avoiding errors because they naturally think more slowly and can

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require orderly procedures [10]. Leading with uncommon sense relies on those organizational characteristics to maintain the humility that is appropriate given how our brains work. Some of these organizational tools can provide discipline as we make decisions, solve problems, and address challenges. One such tool is the checklist, as we mentioned above and is described in detail in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. Checklists in the surgical suite and in many other organizational settings can make it possible for leaders and coworkers to deal with the overwhelming amount of information coming at them—and be reminded of important issues that are out of their awareness [25]. We also talked previously about the “premortem” a tool used by some organizations that can help us keep humble [24]. A premortem riffs on the familiar idea of a postmortem, in which a careful analysis is done of why a patient died or a project failed. A premortem occurs as an organization nears a commitment to a project or decision. The leader begins the premortem by announcing that we are now in the future and the project has failed miserably. Each person is asked to write down as many reasons as possible for the failure. As the participants share and discuss their reasons, they are likely to uncover important factors that had been out of their awareness during the decision-making process. Leaders should also think carefully about how they manage meetings and try to implement processes that will help them be humble in these settings. The very common practice of presenting an agenda item and then opening the floor for discussion can feel inclusive but often prevents unusual ideas from entering the deliberations. To the extent the meeting participants “read” (consciously or unconsciously) the leader’s opinion on a topic, the likelihood of dissenting perspectives decreases. Obviously, this results in dynamics that are out of the leader’s awareness remaining out of awareness. Having meeting participants write their thoughts before the discussion begins and gathering those thoughts for everyone to explore can help make the leader and others aware of things they were missing [24]. We have already used hiring and promotion processes as examples of leadership decision-making that can easily go astray. The range of influences that are beyond our control and awareness that can affect who we choose is very broad. So many factors that are invisible to us can shape how we react to a job applicant. Accordingly, using hiring and promotion systems that force us to ask ourselves what we might be missing or what biases we might have is particularly important. Rigorously defining the relevant job characteristics and then collecting and tabulating non-interview data related to those characteristics can force us to introspect before the dangerous job interview happens, a setting in which we can so easily believe we are gaining an accurate read of who the person really is [10]. Organizations also routinely provide resources for humility introspection in the form of regularly collected data, if we are willing to make use of it. We can track our behavior patterns much more effectively if we look carefully at the information our organizations record about what we’ve actually done. For example, organizational data can probably allow you to discern patterns in who you hired and fired, who you promoted, how you spent money, and where you placed your priorities.

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Ideally, tracking behavior patterns will be a tool that involves individual reflection, genuine support from trusted colleagues, and organizational data.

Conclusion The first element in the practice of leading with uncommon sense that we discussed is to pause. Pausing provides time and focus. The second component in the practice is to introspect, using that time and attention to ask ourselves about our own thoughts and feelings. In this chapter we explored one valuable introspect question, “What is out of my awareness?” It helps us avoid the common trap of failing to recognize how much of our brain’s activity is out of our control. Because of the necessary limitations of what our brains can do, it is essential to not cling too intensely to a belief that we are in control or that we know why we behave and react as we do. Accordingly, we recommend that leaders hold conclusions lightly, with a willingness to reconsider and adjust. The reminder we offer is be humble. In the next chapter, we will consider a second introspect question, “What are my emotions telling me?”

References 1. Beibinger M (2018) More allegations made against “on point” host Ashbrook and WBUR.  WBUR News, February 14, 2018. https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/12/19/ more-allegations-ashbrook 2. Leung S (2018) Ashbrook: point taken: longtime radio host talks about the loss of his job, his behavior, and his future, February 17, 2018, A.10 3. Luft J (1969) Of human interaction. National Press Books, Palo Alto 4. Jones JT et al (2004) How do I love thee? Let me count the Js: implicit egotism and interpersonal attraction. J Pers Soc Psychol 87(5):665–683 5. Haidt J (2005) The happiness hypothesis: finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Basic Books, New York 6. Eagleman D (2012) Incognito: the secret lives of the brain. Vintage, New York 7. Nosek B (2007) Understanding the individual implicitly and explicitly. Int J Psychol 42(3):184–188 8. Bargh JA (ed) (2007) Social psychology and the unconscious: the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychology Press, New York, p 1 9. Zimmermann M (1989) The nervous system in the context of information theory. In: Schmidt RF, Thews G (eds) Human physiology. Springer, Berlin, pp 166–173 10. Kahneman D (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 11. Wilson T (2002) Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. Belknap Press, Cambridge 12. Eisold K (2010) What you don’t know you know: our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else. Other Press, New York, p 49 13. Shepard RN (1990) Mind sights: original visual illusions, ambiguities, and other anomalies, with a commentary on the play of mind in perception and art. W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, p 48

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14. Mlodinow L (2012) Subliminal: how your unconscious mind rules your behavior. Pantheon, New York 15. Schacter DL (2001) The seven sins of memory. Houghton Mifflin, New York 16. Tversky A, Kahneman D (1974) Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science 185(4157):1124–1131 17. Tversky A, Kahneman D (1973) Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cogn Psychol 5(2):207–232 18. Bazerman MH, Moore DA (2012) Judgment in managerial decision making, 8th edn. John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken 19. Banaji MR, Greenwald AG (2016) Blindspot: hidden biases of good people. Bantam, New York 20. Vedatam S. Hidden Brain, podcast series. NPR. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hiddenbrain; National Public Radio. Invisiblia, podcast. NPR. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/ invisibilia 21. Hart T (2004) Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. J Transform Educ 2(1):28–46 22. Walker M (2017) Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner, New York, p 132 23. Tepper F (2014) Where were you when the challenger exploded? Why your memory might be wrong. The Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2014. https://www.csmonitor.com/ Science/2014/0128/Where-were-you-when-the-Challenger-exploded-Why-your-memorymight-be-wrong 24. Klein G (2007) Performing a project premortem. Harv Bus Rev 85(9):18–19. https://hbr. org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem 25. Gawande A (2011) Checklist manifesto: how to get things right. Picador, New York 26. Stone D, Patton B, Heen S (2010) Difficult conversations: how to discuss what matters most, 10th edn. Penguin, New York 27. Ely RJ, Meyerson D, Davidson M (2006) Rethinking political correctness. Harv Bus Rev 84(9):78–87

Chapter 4

Introspect: Be Emotional

I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. —Oscar Wilde

In the spring of 2018, Emma Gonzalez emerged as one of the most compelling leaders among the group of students from Parkland, Florida, who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. She and her schoolmates sparked a national movement focused on stopping the wave of gun violence in the United States. Gonzalez was 18 years old, Cuban-American, and out about her bisexuality—and she was well-known for her shaved head [1]. While not necessarily fitting the traditional image of a leader, she demonstrated a powerful capacity to access and communicate her emotions as she influenced literally millions of people. While we do not know much about the methods Gonzalez used for other aspects of leadership, we have evidence of her uncommon approach to leading through her public remarks. Enacting the reminder around which this chapter is organized, Be Emotional, she used her feelings to inform and motivate her message to her listeners. Soon after the shooting, she delivered a tearful eulogy for the victims [2]. Her speech at a rally in Washington, D.C., about a month later became one of the best-­ known public addresses in recent history. During the 6 minutes that she appeared before the crowd—which she explained was the time it took the gunman to kill 17 people in her school—she remained totally silent for more than 4 minutes, an eternity in a speech before hundreds of thousands of people. During the silence, she lifted her eyes and stared into the distance, allowing tears to run down her face. She offered what The New Yorker described as a “potent combination of composure and fury.” [3]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_4

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An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Emotional Gonzalez’s unique presentation grew directly from the profound emotions she was feeling about the loss of her schoolmates and teachers. By tapping those emotions, she touched and inspired millions of people who shared the silence with her. The common trap that we fall into as humans is to resist listening to what our emotions are telling us. This chapter argues that effective leadership depends on our accessing, understanding, and using our emotions rather than following the common-sense rule of suppressing or avoiding our feelings. The common-sense notion about emotions has deep roots. Beginning at least as far back as Plato, reason and emotion have been seen as separate aspects of human functioning with the affective realm often viewed as primitive, animalistic, and dangerous [4, p. 111]. As a result, many of us believe, consciously or not, that it is actually wrong to have feelings [5, p. 91, 95]. Only relatively recently has there been broader recognition that there is an indispensable collaboration between feeling and thinking and that emotions are an essential aspect of effective relationship building, decision-making, and other key human processes [6]. It is still common to hear implicit or explicit calls for emotions to be excluded, repressed, or controlled in order to allow logic and reason to achieve optimal results. Think how often you have been in a meeting when the leader has intervened to say, “Let’s not get emotional—let’s stay on track.” Many people continue to presume that proper thinking is affectless [7]. Our social identities (gender, race, religion, age, etc.) are an important factor in how other people and we ourselves react to our expression of emotions. For example, showing feelings other than those related to anger has traditionally been labeled as feminine, a significant reason for many men to avoid exhibiting such emotions [8]. What’s more, women attempting to be seen as credible in leadership positions will often steer clear of revealing their non-angry feelings because they know leadership has customarily been associated with masculinity. If women express anger, they are usually criticized or punished [9]. And think about the dangers for African-­ American or Arab men of expressing anger [10]. We will explore the complexities of social identities and emotions in the next chapter. While feelings are neither universally beneficial nor universally disruptive, we ignore or dismiss them at our peril [11, p.  11]. Unexpressed feelings can diminish our ability to listen and contaminate our communication. Feelings are too powerful to remain bottled up [12]. They will express themselves either surreptitiously or explosively [5]. Our lives and sensibilities are impoverished when we exercise hyper-control or overprotect ourselves from our feelings [13, p. 68, 71, 72, 75]. As in the previous chapter, the focus in this chapter is on how to best use the time and attention you gain by pausing. We recommend using that time and attention to

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introspect, to examine your own thoughts and feelings. In Chap. 3, the introspect question was “What is out of my awareness?” and the reminder was to be humble. In this chapter, we propose that after pausing you also ask yourself, “What are my emotions telling me?” You might remind yourself to be emotional. By asking ­yourself this question and following this reminder, you can reduce the frequency with which you fall into the common trap of not listening to what your emotions may be saying. Emotions provide crucial information, so bringing them into our awareness whenever possible is key [14]. However, emotions do not provide certain answers, and our interpretations of what our feelings are telling us need to be held lightly (just as we recommended in the previous chapter about our perceptions, memories, and decisions). The relationship between our feelings and our thinking is neither simple nor straightforward [15]. Nonetheless, listening to our emotions is a central component of leading with uncommon sense (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1  The practice: be emotional

The Power of a Picture: The CBT Triangle In Chap. 3, as we explored how to be humble, we presented the Johari Window, suggesting that sometimes a conceptual model, especially if it can be captured visually, can be a useful aid. For the reminder be emotional, we offer the CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) Triangle as such a model (see Fig. 4.2). The CBT Triangle can help us remember the inevitable connections among our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors and, therefore, prompt us to engage with our emotions rather than suppress them or believe our conscious thoughts and remembered behaviors are the whole story. Just as we recommended placing a copy of the Johari Window in a discrete spot or sending yourself a monthly email with it, it could be valuable to put the Triangle in your view to cue yourself to be emotional.

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Fig. 4.2  The CBT Triangle

What Do Emotions Do? Emotions make us do things, as the name suggests (remove the first letter from the word). They motivate our remarkable achievements, incite us to try again when we fail, keep us safe from potential harm, urge us to accomplish rewarding and beneficial outcomes, and compel us to cultivate social and romantic relationships. [16, p. 147]

It’s curious that emotions often have such a bad name. Maybe their power to do all of what Berkeley sleep researcher Matthew Walker outlines above, and more, scares us. When we take a moment to step back and consider all of what emotions contribute to our lives, we realize that we wouldn’t be safe, smart, effective, or human without them. Just as the unconscious functioning of our brains is essential (as we discussed in the previous chapter), our lives depend on emotions. They make living worthwhile and possible. Take emotions out of our lives, and we would be not only robotic but also incapable of making decisions [17]. Emotions play a central role in protecting us from danger, a capacity developed over centuries of evolution. Our survival as a species has depended on our ancestors having their emotional antennae up constantly [12]. Surrounded by deadly predators, natural disasters, and countless other life-threatening forces, early humans needed to rely on their emotional instincts to thrive and reproduce. The alertness we feel when walking alone at night, compensating for the reduced visual information available to us and the security of other people, makes us ready to deal with threats that may come at us. Our emotions signal us to jump out of the path of a vehicle speeding toward us. Consider the phenomenon of hysterical strength, as demonstrated when people have rescued loved ones from such calamities as being trapped under a car that has fallen off a jack. All these moments show the life-saving function of our feelings. Emotions are so powerful that there is evidence that people can die of heartache. Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that “stress-­

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induced cardiomyopathy,” or what we commonly refer to as having a “broken heart,” is quite real [18]. The study describes the cases of 19 patients, with no prior history of coronary disease, suffering from heart failure precipitated by emotional stress. Similarly, in a study published in Epidemiology, scientists show a correlation between hopelessness and heart disease [19]. Of course, feelings of happiness, joy, and fulfillment are another essential aspect of life. We had the pleasure of working for a boss who fostered positive emotions in the workplace by focusing on accomplishments and injecting enthusiasm. He was wise enough to recognize that difficult emotions must also be recognized and managed, but he counteracted the unhappy dynamics that infect too many jobs and make it unpleasant to go to work. He was a jolly, challenging, and supportive leader. Emotions Shape Our Perceptions and Experiences In addition to the crucial role of emotions in our physical and psychological well-­ being, our feelings shape our experiences and perceptions, provide us with important information, and are essential for us to make decisions [20]. Each of these functions is of particular significance to leaders. In many cases, emotions are a result of or reaction to something we have experienced. In a minute, we will consider the importance of such emotional reactions for leaders’ decision-making. However, emotions can also shape other key aspects of our lives as leaders—our perceptions, our experiences, and our understanding of those experiences [20]. As renowned psychologist Joseph Forgas observes, “affect is not an incidental, but an inseparable, part of how we see and represent the world around us; how we select, store, and retrieve information; and how we use stored knowledge structures in the performance of cognitive tasks.” [11] Emotions can be thought of as the first screen to all information we receive [12]. Our feelings can have an important impact on how we actually take in information; our emotions affect our facial expressions, which, in turn, influence our perceptions. For example, when we are surprised, our eyes expand, which widens our field of vision. When we experience fear, our visual perception is enhanced [21]. Beyond this immediate, physical effect on what we perceive, emotions can powerfully affect our experiences of the world. We have had the pleasure of traveling with students from our US university to Ghana as part of a course on leadership and interpersonal communication. Typically, when we exited the Accra airport terminal, a number of Ghanaians surrounded the students and very enthusiastically offered to help them with their bags and give them a ride in their taxis. For many of the students, this experience was quite startling and shaped their general perceptions of Ghanaians. We discovered, in debriefing this experience with the class, that many students thought Ghanaians were untrustworthy. What we knew, from our previous trips to Ghana, to be entrepreneurs looking for customers, the students took to be thieves trying to take advantage of them. In our conversations, one student said that she had never had anyone be so bold as to put his hand on the handle of her suitcase like that. She had been in airports where taxi drivers tried to encourage you to choose them, but she was “frightened” by one man’s hands on her personal effects. The impact of

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this experience on the students was particularly intense for our white students (the majority of the group), many of whom were on the ground in a predominantly black country for the first time. The students’ emotions were raised by the initial experience, and, in turn, those emotions shaped how the students began to experience and understand the social setting in which they found themselves. Emotions Are Essential in Decision-Making We cannot make decisions without emotions [22, p. 129]. They are often not just a useful factor but an essential factor to guide our behavioral choices [23]. This may seem like a very strong statement and inconsistent with our life experiences. However, research on people who have suffered damage to parts of their brains that are key to the processing of emotions demonstrates that these unfortunate individuals have profound difficulty making decisions, including about such seemingly simple issues as which restaurant to pick for dinner [24]. The impact on their lives is devastating. They perceive all options as equally good and, thus, cannot make a choice [25]. Emotions do not emerge only in reaction to a current provocation. They happen because something of importance to us is occurring, either a new event or one that reminds us of previous experiences [26]. We remember not only the facts of our life experiences but also the related feelings—whether we enjoyed the person or task or whether the food or the music was good or bad. When we experience an emotion, it often is reminding us of previous experiences that resemble this moment, and our feelings encourage us to pursue the opportunity or escape. They contain essential information. Emotions can contain wisdom developed over time about what we like or don’t like and what is rewarding or punishing for us [27]. Without emotions, we cannot choose [4]. Ignoring our emotions makes us less smart and less satisfied. Most, if not all, of us have had the experience of sitting in a meeting and realizing that we have a knot in our stomach or our heart is beating rapidly or our breathing is fast. Interestingly, these emotional responses may have actually affected our behavior and decision-making even before we became consciously aware of them [28]. Frequently, we ignore these emotional signals, at least consciously, for some time before we begin to pay attention and then ask ourselves what’s wrong and why we’re feeling as we are. Leading with uncommon sense involves noticing such warnings earlier and earlier and asking, “What are my emotions telling me?” We are not looking for a single, right answer to that question; emotions are complex, but we investigate what important information our emotions contain.

How Do Emotions Work? Thinkers and scholars have investigated the dynamics of emotions for decades, if not centuries or millennia. We will not attempt to summarize or explain this rich and fascinating body of work. We will, however, highlight a few aspects of how emotions work that are particularly relevant to leaders.

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It’s important to keep in mind that emotions can be salient in a wide variety of work situations. Of course, emotions are always present in our lives, even when we are not particularly aware of them. Taking a quick inventory of the circumstances in our organizational lives when emotions can become particularly significant calls attention to why leaders are wise to pay attention to what they are feeling. Emotions can be powerful in face-to-face interactions—interpersonal, team, or large group. They can surface in written communication or in response to such communication—memos, text messages, and social media postings. We can experience noteworthy feelings during interactions happening now or, asynchronously, during interrupted “conversations” with colleagues or clients—voice mails, emails, and meeting notes. Of course, our emotions can be an important aspect of our reflections about work events, rumbling around inside our heads and bodies as we debrief what has happened. In all of these contexts, leading with uncommon sense means asking what your emotions may be telling you. What Are My Assumptions? In exploring what your emotions could be saying, it’s useful to appreciate that emotions often emerge when our assumptions are violated [29]. If our expectations are disrupted by how we see others behaving, we often experience negative feelings and see those people as incompetent or unethical. Consider the minefield of performance appraisal conversations. These discussions can be difficult and packed with negative emotion, whether we are on the giving or receiving end, if the assumptions of one party are violated by the feedback being presented by the other. On the other hand, should the input we receive in a feedback session match our sense of ourselves, our assumptions about ourselves, the result can be feelings of pleasure and joy. In either case, our feelings are powerfully affected by the beliefs we bring to the interaction. When we experience strong emotions, it can be useful to ask ourselves how our assumptions are at play. Happiness Isn’t Everything Imagine that you are in your office completing final preparations for a meeting with your department heads when you receive an email from your boss notifying you that the budget has been cut drastically on one of the major projects for which you are responsible. Would you expect this news to have any impact on your behavior in the upcoming meeting, even if the cuts don’t directly affect the participants or today’s agenda? What if the email from your boss is an invitation for you to apply for a promotion to a position you have coveted for more than a year? Might this news affect how you act during the meeting with your department heads? Emotions can relatively easily be categorized as positive or negative, and making this distinction can be of value when thinking about leadership. While the two categories are not completely clean and we often experience mixed emotions, it’s

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g­ enerally possible and reasonable to separate our feelings into those that feel good and those that feel bad. Researchers have long been intrigued by the effects of positive and negative emotions on behavior [11]. Of particular interest for our purposes is the impact of positive and negative feelings on task effectiveness. What could the impact be on our behavior of receiving good or bad news just before heading into a meeting? Most of us prefer feeling good to feeling bad, and most cultures value positive affect more than negative. The field of positive psychology has become an important and influential perspective on human behavior [30]. Nonetheless, for some tasks and in some circumstances, negative feelings can lead to better results [31]. In fact, both positive and negative emotions can have positive and negative consequences. As psychologist Joseph Forgas observes, “Neither positive nor negative mood should be regarded as having an inherently beneficial or deleterious effect on thinking.” [32] Positive feelings often encourage creativity, cooperation, integrative thinking, and successful negotiations. However, feeling good can also lead to complacency and inattention to significant details and important threats. Productive consequences of negative emotions can include higher levels of motivation, more persuasiveness, greater attention to detail, and a lower likelihood of making errors of judgment [33]. Not surprisingly, negative emotions can be associated with negative conflict and frustration and, therefore, harm task performance. The crucial point for us as leaders with uncommon sense is to engage with our emotions, positive and negative. This includes not only the moods we bring into meetings or conversations but also the feelings that arise during our interactions. By asking ourselves what our emotions might be saying to us and considering how they might be influencing and influenced by our thoughts and behaviors, we increase the likelihood that our emotions will contribute to our effectiveness rather than cause us trouble. Am I Contagious? Let’s return to those pre-meeting emails from your boss, one cutting your budget and the other suggesting that a promotion may be in your future. Examining your emotional response to these emails isn’t important only because of the impact they might have on your own thoughts and behavior; your feelings could also affect your colleagues. For leaders, a particularly important element for of how emotions work is the phenomenon of emotional contagion. Sometimes emotions being felt and enacted by one person can trigger similar emotions in other people in the situation; teams are especially susceptible to this dynamic. While people who “catch” the emotion in such circumstances may sometimes be aware that it’s happening, often the emotion spreads without people being consciously aware of it [34]. Both positive and negative emotions can be contagious.

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Emotional contagion is especially relevant for leaders because they often have more influence than a regular team member [35]. Of course, it’s also quite possible for leaders to be on the receiving end of emotional contagion. By engaging with their emotions—by being emotional—leaders increase their chances of noticing whether their emotions are spreading or whether they are being “infected” themselves by others’ feelings—and what the consequences are. Leading with uncommon sense would include monitoring your reactions to the pre-meeting emails from your boss and remembering that your mood might have a significant impact on the people around you. Of course, your feelings could also be influenced by events during the meeting itself, and contagion could result from those emotional reactions that you have. And Yes, Emotions Can Cause Problems One final issue to discuss about how emotions work is that our feelings can, in fact, cloud our thinking, paralyze us, or distract us [36]. We have purposely left this issue for last because this is the common sense that we usually are taught about emotions, and it’s the reason leaders are often told to suppress or ignore their feelings. The central notion of this chapter is that effective leaders should engage with their emotions, rather than avoid them or tamp them down. Nonetheless, it’s important to recognize that our emotions not only inform us and help us make good decisions, they can also get in our way and contribute to less-than-effective behavior. We’ve all had the experience of boiling over and saying something we wish we hadn’t after the underperforming coworker complained just one too many times or finding ourselves unable to come up with the appropriate response, or any response at all, when a client makes a blatantly racist or sexist comment—only to know an hour later exactly what we should have said—or realizing we’ve missed the last 10 minutes of the discussion at a meeting because we’ve been preoccupied with our hurt related to a problem at home. Emotional reactions can prevent us from functioning at our best. Leading with uncommon sense means experiencing such emotions fully and exploring what they are telling us rather than chastising ourselves for having those emotions and resolving to not let them intrude again into our work lives. Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence, probably best known from the writings of Daniel Goleman, has become a popular idea for leaders and for the society more broadly [37]. It highlights the importance of emotional competence to supplement IQ, technical competence, and other drivers of success that have traditionally been valued. While our call to be emotional has some overlap with emotional intelligence, it is not the same thing. Goleman describes four basic competencies of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. The first

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two of these share our focus on looking inward to understand and manage ourselves, although they cover much different ground. As we have argued above, such self-­ examination is often neglected in guides to leadership effectiveness in favor of analyzing, motivating, and appreciating the people we are leading. Again, we do not dismiss the importance of interpersonal competence for leaders but are encouraging intrapersonal work to make that interpersonal competence possible.

Building Emotional Capacity Having considered some of the essential functions that emotions serve and a few of the important aspects of how they work, we will now explore how we can become more aware of and accepting of our emotions and how we can engage with them. We will also examine how to engage with the thoughts and behaviors that accompany our emotions. Remember, the messages that most of us have received about emotions being bad have sometimes crippled our capacity to be emotional. Men may be particularly limited in this regard, given what they’ve learned about what it is to be a man. Many of us need to learn how to recognize our emotions and realize that the sensation we’re feeling is not just acid reflux from a bad burrito at lunch. As we begin the discussion of how to build our emotional capacity, we invite you to reflect on your reactions to two earlier segments of the book. In Chap. 1, when we discussed the limitations of our memory, Wiley came out as gender nonconforming. At the beginning of this chapter, we described the public-speaking approach used by Emma Gonzalez, a gun control advocate. These examples contain politically charged issues. While we weren’t intentionally provoking an emotional response, do you remember having strong feelings as you read either of them? You may not have had an emotional response, but if you did, what thoughts accompanied those feelings? Did you do anything, like stop reading, or refer back to the author biography for Wiley or Google Emma Gonzalez? When we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, we wade into the engagement required to be emotional. Engaging with Our Emotions Central to building our emotional capacity is remembering that our emotions are always there and choosing to engage with them. Our stream of thoughts is paralleled by a stream of emotions [13]. We don’t, however, always tune into our emotions, especially if they are subtle, complicated, or undesirable [5]. As we emphasized in Chap. 3, leading with uncommon sense includes bringing into awareness aspects of our internal lives that many times are out of our awareness. Many of us attend to our emotions only when they feel out of control, those moments that give emotions a bad name. Several other factors can impede our engagement with our feelings. Frequently, we are blinded to the mix of emotions we’re feeling, including conflicting feelings,

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because one strong feeling dominates our experience [5]. Also, we sometimes struggle to identify what we’re feeling because cultural or personal prescriptions are telling us what we should be feeling [22]. Our brains can disguise emotions that we are uncomfortable with as feelings that are more acceptable to us. We often unconsciously transform emotions into thoughts in the form of judgments, accusations, and attributions toward those around us [5]. We lose contact with the feelings that arose originally as we focus on indicting others. As we engage with our emotions, the primary goal is curiosity. Ideally, we ask ourselves: How am I doing? What is my level of emotional intensity? Which way are my emotions pushing me? The point is not to make the emotions go away or decide immediately whether to believe or reject what the feelings seem to be saying [13]. There can be value in appraising whether the emotions feel positive or negative (or both), assessing their intensity, and relating them to other feelings that are important to us [26]. We can deal with our emotions more easily if we acknowledge and accept that we have them [13]. If we remain unaware of them or attempt to deny them, we are much less likely to learn from them or prevent them from taking us off track. Periods of Calm Interestingly, a good place to begin in developing your capacity to engage your emotions is in periods of calm. Taking the time to pay attention to what feelings are flowing through us in restful moments builds our competence at being emotional. For example, checking our emotions when we find ourselves between activities begins to develop the habit of engaging with our emotions [13]. When we later find ourselves in challenging circumstances when feelings are more intense, we are more prepared to engage with the emotions we are experiencing. Solitude and Silence Similarly, as we discussed in Chap. 2, finding solitude and silence can help you to engage with your emotions [38]. Consciously retreating from outside stimuli allows you to be with yourself and your feelings. Minimizing the external distractions and sitting with the sensations and emotions that emerge inside you provide the space to grow your capacity to benefit from the energy and information that those emotions contain. Emotion Charting Charting your emotions is a valuable technique for increasing your awareness of what you are feeling and how your emotions intertwine with your thoughts and behavior. By keeping a record of your significant emotional reactions, you not only

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heighten your sensitivity to your emotional reactions but also deepen your understanding of how your emotions affect what you think and do and vice versa. In addition, charting your emotions allows you to notice patterns in how you react emotionally. We will discuss below how knowledge of these patterns will help you prepare for what is to come and schedule your days so that you can engage most productively with your emotions. Many online instruments, paper and pencil forms, and apps are available to assist you in creating a record of your emotions. We worry that most of these ignore key aspects of how our brains function that were discussed in the previous chapter. Self-­ report data, especially if even short amounts of time have passed since the emotional moment, will be significantly affected by the limitations of our memory, by our capacity to fool ourselves about our true motivations, and by our emotions disguising themselves if they are socially unacceptable or uncomfortable for us. When charting mechanisms call for too much specificity about what emotions you were feeling and particularly about why you were feeling those emotions, they are very likely to be at least misleading if not risky. We recommend, when charting your emotions, that you focus on when you are having an emotional response that has taken you off of your baseline. It is useful to record whether the emotions were positive or negative or both, what their intensity level was, where you were, what you were working on, who you were with, and how those emotions might have affected your behavior. Table 4.1 shows a simple form for recording your emotional moments. It can be used as a paper and pencil or computer document or easily adapted for your phone so that you can chart your emotions as they emerge. The information contained in the table is taken from Wiley’s emotions chart. It presents only two moments when her emotions were more intense than normal. Of course, she would want to have many more entries before beginning to identify patterns that could be taken into account when exercising her leadership. If you wish to collect information about your feelings more routinely, you can set your alarm to remind you to check in with yourself and record what’s happening emotionally using a mechanism like Table 4.1. This approach would gather details about not only times when you have moved off of baseline but also during moments

Table 4.1  Emotions chart Date/time Positive/negative Intensity 1–10 Situation Where Who What Body Behavior

Sept. 25 09:00–11:00 + 4 Meeting with DS His office Just the two of us Discussing the book Energy Leaning forward, engaged

Sept. 26 14:00–16:00 – 8 Team meeting Conference room 15 team members Budget projections Tight stomach Crossed arms, looking down, nervous questioning

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of calm. Again, it’s valuable to review the information you collect to identify patterns in your emotional responses. Keeping a journal in which you record significant events that occurred during the day or week and, very importantly, your emotional reactions during those events is another simple, less-structured approach to charting. Reviewing your journal will allow you to identify the kinds of situations that evoke intense emotional reactions, as well as themes in your emotional life. Emotions in the Body A particularly valuable tool for engaging with our emotions is paying attention to physical sensations in our bodies [13]. Most of us have been required to do public speaking at some point in our careers. While some of us master this skill and even come to like it, many others never stop suffering when faced with presenting to a crowd. Very commonly, we experience our emotional reactions to this task physically: dry mouth, pounding heart, knocking knees, and sweating. It’s interesting and valuable to explore what our feelings are telling us in these moments. Consistent with the overall theme of this chapter—to be emotional—one recommendation from experts for coping with the symptoms of our nervousness when speaking in public is to tell the audience about our anxiety. Rather than trying to hide our feelings, we are often better off engaging with them and, thereby, freeing ourselves up to perform more effectively. Emotions express themselves in a variety of ways in our bodies: the rate of our breathing and heartbeat can change, our muscles can tense or slacken, and we can feel hotter or colder. Often, we feel emotions in particular parts of our bodies—our stomach, chest, axilla, throat, face, and spine. We, again, recommend meditation as a leadership development tool, in this case to increase our capacity to notice our emotions and understand how they operate within our bodies. Below, we will flesh out the value of meditation as a tool for being emotional beyond the basic awareness of emotions. The goal is to learn your own body and develop the ability to recognize what it is telling you about and through your emotional reactions. Engaging with Our Emotional Thoughts Being emotional as a component of leading with uncommon sense calls on us to not only engage with our emotions but also to engage with our thoughts that accompany those emotions, especially during those moments mentioned above when our emotions diverge from baseline. While exploring the tone and intensity of your emotions during those moments, it is productive to ask what you were thinking when your feelings were awakened. As the CBT Triangle (Fig. 4.2 above) depicts, our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors affect each other; they are inextricably connected.

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Unconscious Thoughts Some of the thoughts we have at those times we cannot engage with because they operate unconsciously, functioning in the ways we described in the previous chapter. Not forgetting that some of our cognitive activity will be inaccessible to our conscious awareness encourages us to be humble, because we never have the full picture. The existence of these thoughts also makes it crucial that we be uncertain, the reminder to be discussed in detail in Chapter 6. Conscious Thoughts On the other hand, some of our thoughts that accompany our emotions will be relatively easy to access. Our analysis of why we’re feeling emotional and our immediate plans for responding to those emotions will often be in the front of our minds at an emotional moment. It’s crucial that we keep in mind that these thoughts are only part of the story and will often be distorted, and as we mentioned in Chap. 3, pursue humility as we think those thoughts. Consider, for example, the experience of being complimented by someone and feeling very good about yourself—and the other person—as a result. It would not be uncommon in this circumstance to agree to a request made by the person who has complimented you. Enjoying the positive emotions related to the compliment, you are aware of the person’s wisdom in recognizing your admirable characteristics and naturally decide that the person will be good to work with. Later you might come to realize that the person was manipulating you with the compliment and is not the productive colleague that you had imagined. Self-Talk A third category of thoughts, in addition to unconscious and easily accessible, that coexist with our feelings at emotional moments is the self-talk that floats in the background as our emotions are activated (and at other times) [39]. This automatic, reflexive type of thought tends to occur out of our awareness but can be brought to the surface if we remember to do so [40]. These thoughts operate as a kind of soundtrack to our experiences. Much of the time, we do not notice them; they’re just a natural-feeling conversation with ourselves. Importantly, this self-talk can often be quite distorted and unproductive as we experience intensified emotions. For example, if we experience a negative feeling like sadness or anger, we might think and say to ourselves, “I can’t let anyone know I’m feeling this because others will see me as weak or difficult.” As these thoughts fly by in the background, they cannot only keep us from expressing our feelings but also make us try to tamp down the feelings themselves. Table 4.2 presents a few of the negative self-talk scripts that often run through leaders’ heads, as well as positive self-talk messages that we can learn to replace them [40].

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Table 4.2  Leadership self-talk Negative self-talk Catastrophizing This is going to be a disaster Jumping to conclusions I know why my client acted that way Being perfect My reputation is ruined because I didn’t do well on that presentation Defenses up I need to defend myself to make sure people think I’m competent

Positive self-talk Keeping it in perspective How big an issue is this, really? Find out more I can ask my client why s/he did that Self-forgiveness I made a mistake; everybody does. How do I move on? Learning The more open I am to others’ input, the more I’ll learn and the better I’ll be.

A particular topic of self-talk that can get us into trouble as leaders relates to assertiveness [41]. Sometimes the background message we say to ourselves when we experience others behaving in ways that are problematic for us is, “I don’t have the right to say what I think or to defend myself.” We choose to be submissive. Our underlying fear can be that we’ll be seen as unreasonable or aggressive if we stand up for ourselves. Ideally, we can replace this type of automatic thinking with a new version that says I have the right to express myself and can do so in a way that also protects the rights of others. This new self-talk would welcome the emotions we are feeling rather than fear them because we tell ourselves we can’t act on them. Another way in which we as leaders can mishandle assertiveness is to go to the opposite extreme. Rather than not speaking up for ourselves—being submissive— we sometimes adopt the approach of a traditional, authoritarian leader whose message is my way or the highway. Demanding that people who report to you behave as you say without any concern for their rights or needs is aggressive behavior that certainly will not achieve positive results in the vast majority of situations. In Chap. 7, we will describe some specific ways of behaving assertively, rather than submissively or aggressively. Such behavior becomes possible after a new version of self-talk has been embraced. Learning new, more assertive versions of self-­talk demonstrates that the soundtrack can welcome our emotional responses and push us to explore what information they may contain, increasing our ability to lead effectively. Engaging with our thoughts in emotional moments gives us the chance to replace a counterproductive soundtrack with one that facilitates our being emotional [42]. We can replace thinking reflexively with thinking reflectively.

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Engaging with Our Emotional Behavior Imagine this situation that Duncan experienced as a leader interacting with several members of his organization. During an informal lunchroom conversation, Joe, one of the members of the team, was discussing his relationship with a very good college friend. He described an extremely close connection but made sure those present didn’t misunderstand, explaining, “no homos.” Duncan responded very forcefully by telling Joe that he found the comment offensive. Joe apologized instantly, and the conversation shifted quickly to another topic. This incident demonstrates not only that we are leaders in both formal and informal interactions with our colleagues but also that strong emotions are very often accompanied by actions. We can increase our leadership effectiveness if we engage with the behaviors that occur when our emotions are raised. If Duncan had this situation to do over again, he would respond quite differently, seeking to react with a comment that would deepen the conversation rather than stifle it. In retrospect, however, he realized that his negative emotions, connected to hearing what he perceived to be a homophobic comment, pushed him to focus on stopping the behavior rather than creating a discussion that others and he might learn from. He also now realizes, based on patterns he has observed in his own behavior, that his response was not atypical and, therefore, an area for personal development. This is the third component of the CBT Triangle. Since our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors affect each other, we need to engage with all three elements. By engaging our emotions and noticing the moments when our feelings are intense, we create the opportunity to learn not only about our thinking at these times but also about how our behaviors relate to our emotions. This process also can operate in the opposite direction, investigating what emotions are involved when we behave in surprising or extreme ways. The goal is again to search for patterns in the interactions between emotions and behaviors (and thoughts, of course). Beginning to notice these patterns makes our leadership more effective as we learn what we need to anticipate and pay attention to. Learning to Engage with Emotions Through Literature In our leadership development work, we often ask people to read works of fiction, such as short stories and novels that contain intense emotional content. Then, as we encouraged you to do at the beginning of this section in relation to Wiley’s coming out and Emma Gonzalez’s gun control advocacy, we guide people in engaging with their emotional reactions, thoughts, and behaviors. For those of us not accustomed to being emotional in the way we are discussing here, we advocate reading literature as a way to test the waters. Having strong emotions about a character in a novel or short story will have many fewer repercussions in one’s life than getting angry at one’s boss. Spending a bit of time engaging with your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors while reading few pages of a short story can provide a low-risk way to practice your engagement skills.

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Some questions you might ask yourself during and after your reading: • What are the strongest emotions that came up for me? • What thoughts did I have related to those emotions? • Did I do anything when I felt those emotions? Two favorite readings of ours upend readers’ expectations, and in doing so, elicit emotional responses. In The Hitchhiking Game, by Milan Kundera, a couple’s playful game of role-playing, while on vacation, takes an unexpected turn, and in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character’s struggle with and treatment for postpartum depression trigger a wide range of emotional responses [43]. We offer these two examples not to dictate your emotional response but rather to illustrate how literature has helped others practice paying attention to emotions. Many of the people who have read these and similar stories in connection with our leadership sessions report having felt quite frustrated or angry with some of the characters. Some of this emotion has related to social identity issues, which we will address in detail in the next chapter. For example, men in both stories behave oppressively toward women in their lives, stimulating strong reactions from many readers, both female and male. Students have also reported thoughts that emerged in connection with their emotional responses. They have often wondered why we would suggest readings like this for a leadership discussion. Frequently, people’s behavior will be affected in these moments. It has not been uncommon for people to stop reading, sometimes coming back to it later and sometimes not. After exploring your emotions related to reading such literature, we suggest looking for parallels in your work life. Can you recall times when you felt similar feelings? What thoughts and behaviors accompanied those feelings? For example, have you felt frustrated with a colleague or client and chosen to disengage, just as you decided to stop reading the upsetting fictional piece? Reading provocative pieces of literature can provide a rich opportunity for honing your ability to engage with your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, all three components of the CBT Triangle.

Resources for Emotional Introspection In the previous section, we have been considering how we as leaders can increase our capacity to be emotional and how we can become more aware of and accepting of our feelings. By growing our overall ability to engage with our emotions, we prepare ourselves to introspect during the flow of our work as leaders. With enhanced capacity we are ready to learn more when we ask ourselves, “What are my emotions telling me?” In this section we will explore some of the resources that are available to us in those potential moments of introspection. What can support our looking inward and benefiting from our emotions?

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Manage the Energy of Your Emotions As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, emotions often put us in motion and make us active. Of course, they can also paralyze us and make it almost impossible to act. We experience emotions in our bodies, and they mobilize or shut down energy inside us. Thus, one of the issues we face in being emotional is to manage our energy effectively so that we can ask ourselves what information our emotions are carrying. Many of the mechanisms that we suggested in Chap. 2 for pausing are in essence ways to manage emotions as they arise and, thereby, allow ourselves to introspect. Pausing is often important because our bodies have been energized and switched on; we are having an emotional reaction. We need to use the energy to increase our understanding of ourselves. Breathing intentionally, physically moving, and giving yourself time (slowing things down), which we described as ways to pause and choose the focus of your attention, also allow you to engage with your feelings and introspect about what your emotions are telling you. We won’t revisit moving and giving yourself time here but will suggest some additional ideas about breathing. To benefit from breathing, one needs very little time. In fact, one vice president at Google centers herself in roughly 6 seconds by taking what she refers to as one “mindful breath.” Physiologically speaking, slow, deep breaths reduce stress, as well as blood pressure and heart rate. During emotionally charged moments, two other breathing techniques can come in handy (pun intended). Finger-tracing breathing and finger-tap breathing help you focus on your breath through a sensory experience without anyone being aware that you are managing your emotions in these ways. To “trace” your breathing using your fingers, spread one hand out wide; this is the hand you will trace. Using the index finger of your other hand, begin at the base of the thumb of the outstretched hand. As you move your index finger up one side of the thumb, breathe in. Breathe out as your index finger moves down the other side of the thumb. Continue this by tracing each finger: breathe in as you move up the index finger and breathe out as you move down the other side of the index finger. Finger tapping can be done with one hand. Again, it connects your awareness of your breath to each tap of a finger. Breathe in as you tap your index finger with your thumb; breathe out as you tap your middle finger. Breathe in as you tap your ring finger; breathe out as you tap your pinkie. With both of these techniques, you can repeat them as many times as needed until you begin to feel calm and more able to harvest the information that your emotions are offering you. Check Your Perceptions In Chap. 3, we discussed the squishiness of our perceptions, highlighting that our brains do not record a verbatim, photographic account of the external reality that surrounds us. Rather, our brains actively construct a subjective, personalized p­ icture,

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eliminating ambiguity in order to create a coherent image. We pointed out that if we unquestioningly believe our perceptions, we do so at our peril. This is of real significance when considering our emotions. Usually our emotions become intense in response to something we perceive; we see or hear something that has meaning in our lives and feelings emerge. As we notice our emotions moving away from baseline (we notice because we’ve become expert at engaging them), it makes sense to check the perceptions that are connected to our emotional response. Asking ourselves what we think we saw or heard and seeking additional information to confirm or upend our perceptions increase the likelihood that we will learn from our feelings. One specific technique for checking perceptions is the well-known practice of reflective listening. If we think we’ve heard a coworker say something that has triggered a strong emotional response (particularly a negative one), we can reflect back to the person a paraphrased version of what we heard and ask whether we got it right. Similarly, asking yourself the simple question mentioned previously, “What am I missing?”, provides a reminder that perceptions are far from perfect. Clarifying your perceptions can allow you to then explore the emotional components of the situation. You can also ask others present about their perceptions, after describing what you have seen and heard. You may receive more or corrected information that could alter your understanding of what your emotions are saying. As we have mentioned several times previously, input from other people can be an important resource for leading with uncommon sense. Having a rich network of people, especially those who will provide genuine support, is a key resource for being emotional. We’ll say more about this below. Put Emotions on Your Calendar We have already mentioned the value of using your calendar to support your efforts to lead with uncommon sense. Many, if not most, of us structure our lives through our schedules, which therefore have a profound impact on what we actually do. Understanding the patterns in our emotions makes it possible for us to manage our schedules to get the greatest benefit from our emotions and minimize negative consequences from our feelings. Our colleague Butch routinely charts his emotions using a process like the one we described above (Table 4.1). This has helped him to identify patterns in his emotional responses, which he now keeps in mind in managing his calendar. For example, he is required to participate in many meetings at which organizational politics are quite serious. From his charting, he is now very aware that he often has intense negative emotions during these meetings, experienced in part as a mobilized fight/flight response. While these emotions support his efforts to represent his piece of the organization effectively, they also take a toll. After becoming more aware of this pattern, he now does everything possible to give himself breaks after such meetings and not schedule too many on any given day.

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On the other hand, Butch’s emotion charting also discloses that his emotions during collaborative meetings with a close colleague, when the two of them convene to work on projects, are usually moderately intense and positive, supporting the creative work that they’re trying to accomplish. Butch is now mindful of scheduling such meetings as a counterbalance to some of the other meetings that he must attend which tend to be characterized by negative emotion. You can use your schedule to support your emotional introspection by blocking off time on your calendar to check in on your emotions. This chapter focuses on asking yourself in those pauses what your emotions are telling you. The idea is to make awareness and management of your emotions just as important as the “normal” tasks with which you fill your calendar. During these scheduled times, you might chart your emotions, use a breathing technique to calm or energize yourself, or meditate. Anticipate Your Emotions Pausing and introspecting about your emotions are particularly productive in anticipation of meetings, events, or projects that you expect to be accompanied by strong emotions. As we suggested in Chap. 2, we routinely prepare in advance of demanding work events but often neglect to include emotional preparation in that pre-­ work [44]. For many years, Duncan helped facilitate diversity workshops for his own organization and for external clients. Typically, he was part of a four- or five-person staff, mixed by race and gender; often he was the formal leader of the team. Almost always he was the only white man. These intense, multiday sessions focused on the painful dynamics related to race, gender, and other differences in US society and what organizations and individuals can do to reduce the negative consequences of racism, sexism, and other isms. The workshops were always powerful emotional experiences for Duncan for a number of reasons: the topics are emotional in and of themselves; the participants in the external workshops often included highly placed individuals, and he never had prior knowledge of the people present; the sessions in his own organization always included people with whom he had worked and would work on other projects; and his particular role as a white man always seemed complicated as he often felt that he had to justify his knowledge of diversity issues while also being open to the ever-present likelihood that he would miss important dynamics because of his membership in society’s favored groups. In anticipation of the workshops, Duncan was aware of his nervousness and knew that his emotions would become even more intense. When he started doing these sessions, his response to these feelings was to tell himself not to be nervous and to just calm down. He also redoubled his efforts to prepare the materials for the workshops. After doing many sessions, he realized that he was not getting any less nervous, despite becoming quite experienced in the work. He looked for a different approach to his emotions. He continued to do his homework on the content for the workshops, but he also began to find time to sit quietly and accept his feelings of

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nervousness while breathing slowly and deeply. He also began to talk with his colleagues before the sessions started to report his feelings, describing the anxiety he was feeling. He found that these approaches to his feelings as he anticipated the intense emotions to come were much more effective. He was increasingly able to use the energy and information that his emotions provided during the workshops to facilitate the discussions productively. Reflect on Your Emotions Just as it’s productive to pause and anticipate your emotional responses before something significant happens, it’s important to take the time after intense emotional moments to reflect on what has occurred. As we just mentioned, sometimes we’ll know ahead of time that a particular event is likely to include strong emotions. In this case, it makes sense to schedule time to debrief the event alone or with relevant colleagues. The purpose is to explore what feelings, thoughts, and behaviors you experienced. Other times, strong emotions (positive or negative) will occur unexpectedly. Making time to reflect on what happened will increase your capacity to be emotional and possibly identify follow-up actions that make sense. One mechanism to facilitate reflection is a journal, which we discussed in Chap. 3. We introduced the idea of a two-column format in which the left column is as close as possible to a description of what a video camera would have recorded in the various situations that you are writing about. Ideally, this column does not include interpretations, internally experienced emotions, or analyses; those elements are written in the right column. Even though it will not be completely accurate, the left column becomes a valuable resource for tracking how you behaved and what you did. The right column is of particular relevance to this chapter because it contains unspoken feelings and thoughts that you experienced. This type of journal helps you to step back and gain a better vantage point for identifying emotions that may have gone unnoticed initially. You are also able to investigate how your emotions may have interacted with your thoughts and influenced what you said or did. Using a journal or some similar mechanism, you can reflect not just about a single event but about the larger themes of your work and personal life, focusing particularly on your emotional life. Exploring such larger themes can also be done through retreat-­ type activities specifically designed to reflect on your emotions and related thoughts and behaviors. Meditate You probably have the sense by now that we’re fans of meditation; we’ve mentioned it multiple times. That’s true, but please don’t assume that we’re experts or that you need to be one in order to use it as a valuable piece of leading with uncommon sense. We fidget, create our shopping lists, and analyze the health of the room’s

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HVAC system as much as anybody when we attempt to meditate. But we also have productive and important meditation experiences. Just as meditation can be a tool to help you pause or to help you consider what might be out of your awareness, it can assist in your efforts to be emotional. In particular, meditation can support your quest to become aware of your emotions and then facilitate your accepting those emotions and working with them more effectively. Imagine that you settle into a meditation session in which you come to stillness and focus on your breathing, paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that pass through your consciousness. Noticing your feelings is a crucial first step; we so often are not aware of the emotions that are operating within us. An important next step, at the core of many meditation practices, is to accept whatever emotions you are feeling, not judge them as good or bad or try to deny that they are there but just acknowledge that they are something that is happening at that moment. Accepting your emotions actually provides you some distance from them, freeing you from the sense that you are your emotions. This permits you to more effectively use the information your emotions offer. You can more easily answer the question, “What are my emotions telling me?” You are less likely to feel embedded in your emotions or overwhelmed by them. As you stay with your meditation, you can often experience your emotions coming into perspective. And the breathing that is central to many meditations frequently calms the body and decreases the intensity of the emotion. Sleep In Chap. 2, we discussed the powerful importance of sleep and the dangers (and prevalence) of sleep deprivation. Sleep is particularly significant in our emotional lives and, therefore, one of the key ways we can support our emotional introspection. Neuroscience research tells us that sleep allows us to wake with a cleaner slate emotionally, making it possible to take on new emotional challenges with less baggage. As sleep researcher Matthew Walker says, “With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex) . . . Without the rational control given to us each night by sleep, we’re not on a neurological—and hence emotional—even keel.” [16] Sleep also helps to diminish the painful emotions that can be associated with memories [16]. Sleep deprivation prevents us from being effectively emotional and from learning what our emotions are telling us. It results in our emotions being out of whack because our amygdala overreacts when we are sleep deprived. Our brain goes back to a more primitive model characterized by inappropriate reactions and an inability to place events in context [16]. Research shows that a sleep-deprived brain does not only overreact with negative emotions but also to rewarding, pleasurable events. In contrast, when we have sufficient sleep, the amygdala reacts in a controlled,

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­ oderate way. We are wise to remember to sleep, an obvious but often neglected m element of our lives, which can be very helpful in our goal of being emotional.

You’re Not Alone While emphasizing that pausing and introspecting are central to the practice of leading with uncommon sense, we have also stressed that the people around us and the organizations in which we operate can be important contributors to our efforts to lead in uncommon ways. Your Relationships The people with whom we work, and especially our network of close colleagues who will offer us genuine support, are essential if we are to be effectively emotional. Engaging with our emotions, managing their energy, and harvesting the information they offer can be challenging personal work. It often helps to have company as we wade into the intense world of our feelings. Good, honest friends can support our efforts to be with our emotions and explore them fully. The two of us often discuss the emotional reactions we had to situations in our work lives. These conversations result in new perspectives as we offer each other new eyes and ears on the situations. They also provide the opportunity for us to hear ourselves describing what we felt and thereby discover more about what our feelings were telling us, and it just feels good to have a friend join in this very human activity. People around us with whom we don’t have particularly close relationships can also be valuable sources of information as we try to make sense of what our emotions are saying to us. As we mentioned earlier, when we were discussing the importance of checking your perceptions, asking other people present what they saw and heard at times when your emotions are raised can help you sort through your reactions. While the people you ask may be close colleagues on whom you depend for genuine support, they may also include coworkers who are not quite as close but are present at the same place and time and, therefore, able to provide useful data. Of course, you are not required to accept others’ input as truth, but it can help you be humble as you are being emotional. Your Organization The particular organizational culture that characterizes the workplace in which you live can either support or discourage being emotional. As we discussed, many segments of society and, therefore, many organizations tell us to not be emotional. If you find yourself in such an organization, you might think about polishing up your resume and beginning the search for a work setting that will facilitate your leading

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with uncommon sense. As a leader, you often have the opportunity to shape the culture of at least your part of the organization so that it encourages people to engage with, express, and learn from their emotions. We know of an organization that has a bowl of small red flags in the middle of the table in every conference room. The organizational practice is that people will grab a flag from the bowl and put it on the table if a comment is made that elicits an intense emotional reaction (negative or positive). The clear message is that everyone should be paying attention to their emotions and injecting the information these emotions offer into the deliberations that are taking place.

Conclusion The practice of leading with uncommon sense involves pausing frequently to redirect our attention and look inward—that is, to introspect. In this chapter, we have explored the second introspect question, “What are my emotions telling me?” This question and its reminder to be emotional are essential because we are so often instructed to ignore or suppress our emotions and to not be emotional. We so often fall into the trap of not listening to what our emotions are telling us. As a result, we squander valuable information and energy that can make us more effective leaders. In the next chapter, we will move on to a third introspect question, “Am I neglecting identity differences (including my own)?”

References 1. González E (2018) Parkland student Emma González opens up about her fight for gun control. Harper's Bazaar, Feb. 26, 2018, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a18715714/ protesting-nra-gun-control-true-story/ 2. Weissman J (2018) Sound of silence. Forbes, March 26, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ jerryweissman/2018/03/26/emma-gonzalez-sound-of-silence/#4ae7658760b8 3. Mead R(2018) Joan of arc and the passion of Emma González. The New Yorker, March 26, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culturalcomment/the-passion-of-emma-gonzalez 4. Eagleman D (2012) Incognito: the secret lives of the brain. Vintage, New York, p 114 5. Stone D, Patton B, Heen S (2010) Difficult conversations: how to discuss what matters most, 10th edn. Penguin, New York 6. Leary K, Pillemer J, Wheeler M (2013) Negotiating with emotion. Harv Bus Rev 91(1-2):96–103 7. Demasio AR (1994) Decartes’ error: emotion, rationality, and the human brain. Putnam, New York 8. Ashby Plant E, Hyde JS, Keltner D, Devine PG (2000) The gender stereotyping of emotions. Psychol Women Quart 24(1):81–92 9. Williams JC, Dempsey R (2018) What works for women at work: four patterns working women need to know. NYU Press, New York 10. Wingfield AH (2007) The modern mammy and the angry black man: African American professionals’ experiences with gendered racism in the workplace. Race Gender Class 14(1/2):196–212

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11. Forgas JP (2001) Introduction: the role of affect in social cognition. In: Forgas JP (ed) Feeling and thinking: the role of affect in social cognition. Press Syndicate, Cambridge, UK, pp 1–30 12. Nicholson N (1998) How hardwired is human behavior? Harv Bus Rev 76:134–147 13. André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York, p 69 14. Goleman D (2006) Emotional intelligence. Bantam, New York; Mayer JD, Salovey P, Caruso DR (2004) Emotional Intelligence: theory, findings, and implications. Psychol Inquiry 15(3):197–215. 15. Forgas JP (2008) Affect and cognition. Perspect Psychol Sci 3(2):94–101 16. Walker M (2017) Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner, New York, p 247 17. Walker, Why we sleep, 247; Eisold K (2010) What you don’t know you know: our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else. Other Press, New York, p. 25. 18. Wittstein IS, Thiemann DR, Lima JAC, Baughman KL, Schulman SP, Gerstenblith G, Wu KC, Rade JJ, Bivalacqua TJ, Champion HC (2005) Neurohumoral features of myocardial stunning due to sudden emotional stress. N Engl J Med 352(6):539–548 19. Anda R, Williamson D, Jones D, MacEra C, Eaker E, Glassman A, Marks J (1993) Depressed affect, hopelessness, and the risk of ischemic heart disease in a cohort of US adults. Epidemiology:285–294 20. Jensen E (2005) Teaching with the brain in mind, 2nd edn. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria 21. Kelley NJ, Schmeichel BJ (2014) The effects of negative emotions on sensory perception: fear but not anger decreases tactile sensitivity. Front Psychol 5:942. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pmc/articles/PMC4141522/ 22. Wilson T (2002) Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. Belknap Press, Cambridge; Martin, The Opposable Mind, 31 23. Wilson, Strangers; Demasio, Decartes' Error. 24. Demasio AR, When emotions make better decisions, YouTube video, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KYtBcsK5c7s 25. Demasio AR, Decartes’ error 26. Mayer JD, Caruso DR, Salovey P (2016) The ability model of emotional intelligence: principles and updates. Emotion Rev 8(4):290–300 27. Pizarro D (2000) Nothing more than feelings? The role of emotions in moral judgment. J Theory Soc Behav 30(4):355–375 28. Damasio AR, Tranel D, Damasio HC (1991) Somatic markers and the guidance of behavior: theory and preliminary testing. In: Levin HS, Eisenberg HM, Benton AL (eds) Frontal lobe function and dysfunction. Oxford University Press, New York 29. Athos AG, Gabarro JJ (1978) Interpersonal behavior: communication and understanding in relationships. Prentice Hall, New York 30. Seligman ME, Csikszentmihalyi M (2000) Positive psychology: an introduction. Am Psychol 55(1):5–14 31. Forgas JP (2017) The role of dysphoria in social thinking and behaviour. Australian Psychol 52(1):18–20 32. Forgas JP (ed) (2001) Feeling and thinking: the role of affect in social cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, p 397 33. Forgas JP (2017) Can sadness be good for you? On the cognitive, motivational, and interpersonal benefits of mild negative affect. Australian Psychol 52(1):3–13 34. Schoenewolf G (1990) Emotional contagion: behavioral induction in individuals and groups. Modern Psychoanalysis 15:49–61; Hatfield E, Cacioppo JT, Rapson RL (1993) Emotional contagion. Curr Direct Psychol Sci 2(3):96–99. 35. Sy T, Côte S, Saavedra R (2005) The contagious leader: impact of the leader’s mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. J Appl Psychol 90(2):295–305

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36. Goleman D, Davidson R (2018) Whiteboard session: this is your brain on mindfulness, Harvard Business Review, Whiteboard Sessions (February 14, 2018), https://hbr.org/ video/5733892615001/whiteboard-session-this-is-your-brain-on-mindfulness 37. Goleman, Emotional intelligence. 38. Deresiewicz W (2010) Solitude and leadership, The American Scholar, March 1, 2010, https:// theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#.XNcjvtNKjow 39. Zell E, Warriner AB, Albarracín D (2012) Splitting of the mind: when the you I talk to is me and needs commands. Soc Psychol Personality Sci 3(5):549–555 40. Mothersill K (2016) Enhancing positivity in cognitive behavioral therapy. Can Psychol 57(1):1–7 41. Speed BC, Goldstein BL, Goldfried MR (2018) Assertiveness training: a forgotten evidence-­ based treatment. Clin Psychol Sci Pract 25(1):e12216 42. Ingram RE, Wisnicki KS (1988) Assessment of positive automatic cognition. J Consult Clin Psychol 56(6):898 43. Kundera M (1999) The hitchhiking game. Laughable Loves, trans. Suzanne Rappaport. Harper Perennial, New York, pp 77–106; Gilman CP (1995) The yellow wallpaper. In: Shulman R (ed) The yellow wallpaper and other stories. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 3–19. 44. Valcour M (2015) A 10-minute meditation to help you conflicts at work, Harv Bus Rev, (April 27, 2015). https://hbr.org/2015/04/a-10-minute-meditation-to-help-you-solve-conflicts-at-work

Chapter 5

Introspect: Be “Impolite”

The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black. Second, you must never forget that I’m Black. —Pat Parker

These are the first two lines of Pat Parker’s poem For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend [1]. They capture the complexity that leaders face in dealing with social identities, all those differences of race, gender, age, class, sexual identity, religion, and much more that their coworkers, clients, competitors, and they themselves bring to the workplace. The opening line of the poem, “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black,” offers the common-sense leadership approach to this complicated issue. Many of us have been taught to be “colorblind,” to pretend that we do not see race (or other differences), to not notice identity differences. While this method of managing differences intends to avoid discrimination, it is incomplete and results in many unintended consequences [2], many of which we will explore below. Leading with uncommon sense calls on us to add the advice of the next line, “Second, you must never forget that I’m Black.” This approach requires that we embrace complexity and contradiction: we must commit to not discriminating against people on the basis of their identities while also attending carefully to the very different experiences that individuals have because of those differences. Babson College Professor Tina Opie suggested the addition of a crucial third line to us, “Third, you must never forget that you are White.” Only by appreciating people’s identity differences, including our own, can leaders reduce the barriers that people face because of their identities and fully utilize the resources their identity differences represent. The trap that we often fall into is failing to take into account how centrally important these differences are. The reminder at the core of this chapter is to be “impolite,” with impolite in quotes because we are using a very specific and somewhat ironic meaning of the word. Many of us are taught that it is not polite to notice race or religion or other identity differences. Consistent with the admonition to be colorblind, we are encouraged to not think about such differences because bringing them to our awareness © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_5

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will inevitably lead to discrimination. We argue that rejecting this version of politeness is essential to good leadership. Effective leaders are “impolite;” they notice identity differences and ask themselves about how they react to those differences and how people experience the world differently because of their identities. We invite you, as you read this chapter, to pay attention to how your own social identities might be affecting how you experience what we have written. We expect that your gender, age, sexual orientation, and other social identities could have a significant impact on your reactions. Not only the fact of your identities but also how you think and feel about those group memberships are likely to influence your response to the material we present. You may well believe that we have not captured what you have lived; it might feel like we’ve understated or exaggerated the significance of social identities. We recommend that you buy several more copies of the book and distribute them to friends whose social identities are different from yours and then discuss this chapter over a cup of tea or a beer. (Just kidding; we’re not that mercenary.) We recognize that our own social identities shape how we understand these issues and how we write about them. For your information, here are just some of our social identities that we know influence how we think about these issues; we are both white, able-bodied (at the time of this writing), middle-class US citizens. As we suggested earlier, Wiley identifies as genderqueer, meaning she resists traditional categories of gender identity. Duncan identifies as straight and cisgender, which means that he was male at birth and identifies as a man. Wiley was born in 1968, Duncan in 1950. Undoubtedly, other of our identities affect how we frame these issues in ways that we’re unaware of. As we explore the idea of being impolite, we are addressing the third of the introspect questions: “Am I neglecting identity differences?” To review, the first element of the practice of leading with uncommon sense that we discussed is pause—give yourself time and focus. The second aspect is introspect—look inward at your thoughts and feelings. We have already suggested asking two introspect questions: “What could be out of my awareness?” and “What are my emotions telling me?” Now we recommend a deep look at the possible effects of your social identities and those of the people around you as you try to be the most effective leader possible. We seek to avoid the common trap of not appreciating the deep importance of identity differences (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1  The practice: be “impolite”

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An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be “Impolite” What Are Social Identities? What are these social identities that you should notice, think about, and take into account as a leader? A simple way to explain what they are is to distinguish among three aspects of our lives as human beings: • First, there are some ways in which we are like nobody else. These include the unique aspects of who we are—our fingerprints, personal histories, and probably most importantly our personalities. • Second, there are some ways in which we are like all other humans—things like our need for water and food to survive and our right to be treated with respect. • Third, and most importantly for our discussion of social identities, there are ways in which we are like some other people. These are the various groups of which we are members, chosen or unchosen, visible or invisible, groups we know we’re members of, and groups that others put us in without our knowledge. Some of the groups are quite significant and have an important influence on our life experiences. These include groups defined by race, gender, nationality, age, profession, and many other factors. These groups that matter in our lives are generally what we mean by our social identities. (It’s also possible to identify groups that we are members of that don’t really matter much. For example, we could define groups based on whether you prefer original Froot Loops, Wild Berry Froot Loops, or Froot Loops with Marshmallows as your breakfast cereal.)

Why Social Identities Matter Why is it important for leaders to pay attention to social identities? Isn’t it safer to see everybody as the same and avoid any hint of discrimination or favoritism? Doesn’t it cause more harm than good to notice these kinds of identity differences? Our social identities matter because they profoundly influence: 1 . How we fit in society 2. How we see others 3. How we see ourselves It will become clear in our discussion that these three reasons are by no means mutually exclusive and overlap in significant ways. Hopefully, they point to the range of reasons why leaders need to notice and engage with social identities.

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How We Fit in Society Consider a social identity difference that doesn’t typically get much attention— handedness. About 90% of us are right-handed; the remaining 10% are left-handed or ambidextrous (although truly ambidextrous people probably make up only about 1% of the population [3]). We would certainly not argue that handedness matters as much as some other social identities (gender, age, race, etc.), but a closer look, especially by those of us who are righties, will uncover that the experience of being left-handed is quite different, and more challenging, than the experience of being right-handed. Being a member of a social identity group that is more powerful because of numbers (as with handedness), wealth (as with socioeconomic class), or military might (as with colonizing groups) provides access to resources and opportunities that are not available to people in less powerful groups. The social standing or ranking of our various identities can significantly affect our lives. Being left-handed can create barriers both practical and existential. Left-handers often struggle to find tools that work for them—scissors, golf clubs, and spiral notebooks. Many implements of daily life are less available and more expensive or must be adapted for use by lefties. What’s more, left-handers have historically been seen as abnormal, inferior, and even dangerous. The Latin word for left is sinister [4], which has come to mean evil in English. On the other hand (pun intended), the Latin word for right is dexter, the root for the English word dexterous, meaning skilled especially with your hands. Many religions see right as good (sitting at the right hand of God) and have connected left-handedness with the devil. Some cultures consider the right hand to be the clean hand and the left hand to be the dirty hand, not to be used for eating, shaking hands, or handing something to another person. We’re not aware of cultures that reverse this labeling. Many of us know of left-­ handed children who were forced to become righties as they learned to write and complete other tasks. Another important difference between being a member of a social identity group that has societal power and one that is marginalized has to do with our awareness of such group memberships. This is the fish-in-water phenomenon [5]. When we are members of a group that society deems “normal,” we usually don’t think about it because we don’t need to, just as a fish doesn’t think about being in water (if fish think at all). As righties, we almost never think about being right-handed, unless we are seated at the dinner table next to a lefty who keeps bumping our elbow while eating (of course, we’re not bumping their elbow). This is significant for us as leaders because our lack of awareness of the ways in which the environment is hospitable to us if we are members of high-power groups can make us oblivious to the ways in which that same environment can be inhospitable to members of other identity groups. Members of marginalized groups are frequently quite aware of their group memberships. Lefties are often reminded that they are different as they must search for one of the few desks in the classroom that is designed for a left-hander or reset the mouse on the computer they are borrowing. Because the worlds in which they operate are not constructed for people like them, marginalized group members are

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f­ requently required to adapt. To do so, they must understand the dominant culture to which they must adjust. They end up being bicultural, adept at navigating both their home culture and the controlling culture. While they cannot become fish in water, they do become amphibious. We invite you to use handedness as a metaphor to help remember the kinds of ways in which social identities matter. Figure 5.2 summarizes some of the key differences which operate across all kinds of social identities, including those that have more significant consequences than being right-handed or left-handed.

Fig. 5.2  The experience of social identities

As real as the consequences of being left-handed can be, many other social identities carry significantly more powerful costs. Consider these facts about the United States: • Race—The unemployment rate for African-Americans is generally twice as high as for whites in the United States [6]. • Gender—Women in the United States earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by men [7]. • Sexual Orientation—Lesbian, gay, and bisexual children are three times more likely than straight children to attempt suicide at some point in their lives [8]. • Ability—People with disabilities earn less than 70% of the amount earned by people without disabilities [9]. • Religion—In 2016, there were 684 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in the United States. By comparison, there were 15 hate crime incidents against people who identified as one or another Protestant denomination [10]. • Age—The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received almost 21,000 complaints of age discrimination in 2016 [11]. • Nationality—Despite workplaces becoming more diversified, legal immigrants still face significant discrimination [12]. Societal-level consequences such as these are not the only ways that our social identities can impact our lives. The emotional and psychological costs to us personally are often substantial. When people are members of groups with lower social ranking or standing, they often must try to diagnose how that membership is affect-

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ing their experiences—and it’s usually very difficult to tell. Am I getting the cold shoulder just because that person is a jerk (or thinks I am), or is it because I’m LGBT or an immigrant or a woman or Latinx? The fish-in-water members of high-­ status social identity groups don’t think about such questions, or, if they do, it doesn’t really matter. The costs of these day-to-day chores for lefties can add up. They are one consequence of what is commonly referred to as microaggressions [13], which are experienced by members of marginalized groups: microaggressions are everyday slights, insults, or snubs, whether they be verbal and nonverbal or in the environment— intentional or unintentional—that convey messages that can be received as hostile. Ironically, another painful diagnostic challenge for marginalized group members is to determine whether they have actually been chosen for an opportunity because of their social identity. For example, we advised a highly talented young African-­ American man who was suffering over whether to take a job offer or not because he feared that he was receiving it as an affirmative action hire, baggage he did not want to carry with him into the organization. Affirmative action programs can be highly effective mechanisms to counteract the ill effects of past discrimination based on social identities, but people who deserve to benefit from such programs can be faced with complex psychological dynamics, nonetheless. Another familiar cost of social identities is that members of groups that are underrepresented in a particular setting will often be called on to represent their group—be the spokesperson, the committee representative, or the mentor to younger colleagues from that group. Speaking for the entire group is not just uncomfortable but impossible. Filling the unofficially designated seat for your group on another task force can sometimes be a valuable opportunity but can also be a time-­consuming burden with unhelpful visibility. Working with junior colleagues to help them navigate the challenges of being an outsider can be very satisfying, but it often goes unrewarded by the organization. Members of powerful groups also pay a price for their social identities. In particular, the fish-in-water phenomenon results in a lack of awareness, an obliviousness that detracts from personal development and organizational effectiveness. As a friend who inhabited many high-status groups said to us, “I don’t like being clueless, and I don’t like hurting people.” When the environment in which we operate is too good a fit, we are not called upon to pay enough attention. How We See Others The intense dynamics that we’ve just discussed, which stem from society’s unequal valuing of identity groups, affect not only how we fit in society and, therefore, what we experience but also how we perceive those with whom we interact. (These dynamics also affect how we see ourselves, which we’ll address below.) Not surprisingly, when the society in which we live locates social identity groups as more or less powerful, more or less normal, and more or less desirable, it significantly affects how we see members of those groups. We inevitably take others’ social

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identities into account, both consciously and unconsciously, when we evaluate who they are and what they are doing. Very importantly, our own social identities also affect how we see those around us. To begin to understand how leaders’ perceptions of others are influenced by social identities, we need to return to the central message of Chap. 3, that there are things happening in our own brains that are out of our awareness and out of our control. While our conscious thoughts about social identities are certainly important, they are much less challenging than what’s going on unconsciously. And the fact that so much is going on out of our awareness makes it essential that we pay attention to and think about social identities, be impolite, rather than pretend that it’s better to ignore them because that will keep problems from happening. Many of the ideas that we have about the people we deal with develop out of our awareness. As we said in the Be Humble chapter, we depend on unconscious brain functioning in order to cope successfully with the flood of stimuli, the multitude of decisions, and the many tasks that confront us in our daily lives. However, these processes that operate out of our awareness can also have harmful effects, especially because we don’t know they’re happening [14]. Let’s examine some of what’s going on inside our marvelous heads. 11,000,000 → 16 One of the most important functions of our unconscious brains is to map the settings and situations in which we operate, identifying both perils and opportunities. Our brains organize and simplify the information coming to us about our environment, “chunking” [15] that flood of data by combining bits into wholes, filling in gaps, and eliminating fuzziness. Remember what we said in Chap. 3: our sensory system can send our brain 11,000,000 bits of information per second, but we’re able to actually process only 16–50 pieces of data [16]. Our brains create chunks about objects, people, experiences, and even ourselves. And this happens without our conscious intent and without our awareness of what has occurred [17]. Children learn that a four-legged furry animal is a dog and they can apply that chunk to a wide variety of breeds. (Of course, there can be some confusion when they first encounter a cat or even a horse or a cow.) We could not get along without this cognitive work. It not only makes the volume of data manageable; it also provides the patterns that our brains depend on in order to choose how to behave. We unconsciously want a clearly organized mental landscape so that we can decide how to cope with it. We’ll consider this quest for certainty in much more detail in Chap. 6. Sometimes this chunking is based on our own personal experiences. We learn early on from a hopefully minor burn that the burners on top of a stove can cause pain, and, therefore, we approach future stoves with care. But we inherit many if not most of the chunks that guide our behavior from the culture in which we are immersed. Without being conscious of it, we learn categories and conclusions that are operating principles in the society around us. Specific cultures contain very

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different rules about a wide variety of things—for example, how emotions should be expressed, a person’s place in the family or work group, what activities are appropriate for what kinds of people, and much more. Dangerous Chunks Chunking is often helpful because it simplifies the overwhelming complexity of our environments, but it can also be dangerous. When we are not consciously choosing the chunks, we don’t know what we have taken on board, and what we learn from our culture can often be distorted and misleading. Compounding the danger is that distortions in our chunks are less and less likely to be corrected over time because our default procedure is to accept information that reinforces the patterns we have learned and reject new data that would call them into question [18]. This danger is especially important in connection with social identities. These groups are some of the principal categories that societies use to organize information. As we evaluate and predict other people’s intentions and likely behavior, identity group memberships provide an easy, available, and familiar set of filters for assessing who people are and what they will do [14, p. 52]. However, social identity groups also carry powerful baggage in the form of assumptions and prejudices that societies attach to them. This baggage is responsible for some of the most persistent and damaging problems that face [14, p. 55] us as a civilization—racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, religious intolerance, ageism, etc. Consider, for example, that growing up in the United States, a child is exposed to thousands of negative messages about African-Americans, a much greater number than positive messages [19]. Even if their parents and families are not overtly prejudiced against African-Americans, it is likely that children will learn negative associations about members of this racial group, without knowing it’s happening. Importantly, these associations can occur for African-Americans themselves as well as for members of other racial groups. Such distorted and misleading messages that we learn about social identity groups are often referred to as stereotypes or prejudice. As we meet and work with people, we pigeonhole them without knowing we’re doing it. Very often social identities are among the most powerful factors determining what pigeonhole we choose, and the corresponding stereotypes and prejudices are activated. As we’ve said, it’s essential that we organize the data we receive from the world around us into themes and categories, identifying patterns that guide how to behave most effectively. However, stereotypes and prejudice related to social identities represent failures of categorization. The assumptions or beliefs that we unconsciously apply to individual members of a social identity group are certainly overgeneralizations and often wildly inaccurate. For several years, we had responsibility in our organization for dealing with some of the issues that arose related to discrimination based on social identities.

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At one point, there were two members of the organization who had recently come out as transgender, one staff member and one student. As we looked for ways to make the system more responsive to their needs and experiences, we decided it would be helpful for them to meet to discuss their situations. After all, they both identified as transgender, and they were dealing with the same institutional setting. It was a disaster! They (and we) quickly realized that their personal issues as transgender people were completely different as were their experiences in the organization because of their different roles and histories. They felt that we were not seeing them as individual people, and, as a result, they became more alienated from the organization. The category we relied on in these circumstances was ill-­ conceived and actually set back our efforts to improve the situation. It made sense for us to be impolite, to think about their social identities, and to talk with each of them about the impact of this powerful social identity on their lives, but we were clumsy in choosing the particular strategy to respond to what they were experiencing. Negative stereotypes and prejudice that significantly affect people’s life experiences almost exclusively target members of lower power groups (left-handers). Negative stereotypes about people in powerful groups very seldom matter because the settings in which they operate are intentionally and unintentionally constructed for their success. For example, a common stereotype about rich people is that they are interpersonally cold [20]. Of course, as applied to any particular person, this prejudice could easily be incorrect because it is, after all, a stereotype. But, more importantly, this bias about people with money is very unlikely to materially affect their life experiences, unlike stereotypes about members of lower power groups that can significantly impact their opportunities. It’s important to recognize that stereotypes and prejudice related to social identities can be positive as well as negative. We can inaccurately believe that members of particular groups are superior to others. Accordingly, we can be prejudiced in favor of people from specific groups, just as we can be prejudiced against. While these positive stereotypes generally attach to members of the powerful identity groups (righties), we also frequently have positive stereotypes about members of our own groups, whatever they may be [21]. The term unconscious bias has become popular to refer to the stereotypes and prejudices that infect our thinking and influence our behavior without our awareness [22]. Prejudice can exist at both the explicit and implicit levels [23]. It is often difficult for us to believe that we harbor biases that we’re not aware of when our conscious thoughts and our intentions are explicitly to be not prejudiced [24]. Neuroscientist David Eagleman points out, however, that we have many neural subpopulations which make it very possible to have, for example, “both racist and nonracist parts of the brain” [25, pp. 59–61]. He explains that there is “an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior” [25, p 107]. We will revisit this issue of implicit prejudice below when we consider ways that we can explore our personal attitudes about social identity groups.

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Fault Lines In one of the courses that we taught together, our students stayed in a motel for a couple nights in connection with a service-learning project. We had four or five students per room in order to save money. When we arrived at the motel, we allowed the students to sort out who would be in which room. After dropping off our own luggage, we went to the students’ rooms to make sure everyone was settled in. We found that the three women of color in the class were in a room together. They told us that the five white women had immediately chosen a room with each other, without involving them in the decision-making. The women of color seemed shocked and upset at how quickly this had come about. When we pointed out to the white women what had happened, it seemed that the racial dynamics of room choice had been totally out of their awareness. They appeared genuinely surprised that this had occurred and that it was noticed by the women of color. (That the women of color had noticed is an example of the bicultural awareness of marginalized group members that we mentioned above.) This incident demonstrates that the dynamics related to social identities often operate unconsciously. We knew that many of the white women who made this choice were vocally committed to counteracting stereotypes and prejudice. The course in which we worked with them focused on diversity and social identities, and we had spent the semester studying how to address racism, sexism, and similar societal problems. The women seemed authentically concerned about working to minimize the negative impact of the baggage we carry related to social identities, yet when faced with a real-world moment, they appeared to be driven by other forces. This experience also demonstrates another crucial element of how social identities affect the way we see those around us. In groups and teams, “fault lines” [26] often exist based on social identities such as age, professional specialty, gender, race, and other differences. Team members often connect more strongly with other members who share social identities. When we present the left-handed, righthanded analogy in workshops on leadership, we often hear from lefties that they quickly notice who the other lefties are when joining a new group. (This is generally not true for righties.) We must repeat, handedness is a relatively less powerful social identity. Fault lines create the likelihood of subgrouping within the team, usually a negative influence on productivity and satisfaction, unless the subgroups are discussed and managed. Leading with uncommon sense calls on us to pay attention to potential fault lines, noticing the social identity differences that exist on teams we’re leading. In addition, we need to pay attention to how fault lines are affecting our own reactions to people with whom we share teams. To whom are we attracted based on social identity similarities, and with whom might we have more trouble connecting [27]?

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How We See Ourselves The powerful dynamics we have just discussed—disadvantages and advantages based on social identities, chunking, stereotyping and prejudice, and fault lines— affect not only how we fit in society and how we see others but also how we see ourselves. Our self-perceptions are significantly influenced by the forces operating in the various settings in which we’re immersed. It’s interesting and important to acknowledge that we are quite different selves from moment to moment, situation to situation, and that the importance of our various social identities fluctuates. Activated Identities One of our favorite ways of demonstrating how the salience of our various social identities ebb and flow is to begin a session on social identities and leadership by saying “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” after which we ask what we have done with our greeting. This allows us to highlight that we have activated everybody’s gender identity (except those on their phones) [28]. As psychologist and philosopher Cordelia Fine explains, “gender can become salient in the environment in so many ways: an imbalance of the sexes in a group, a commercial, a comment by a colleague, a query about sex on a form, perhaps also a pronoun, the sign on a restroom door, the feel of a skirt, the awareness of one’s own body” [28, p. 235]. Innocent words or actions can switch on a specific identity such that it consciously and unconsciously influences how we make sense of the information and activities that surround us. Of course, not-so-innocent input can also trigger particular identities. Among the multiple, overlapping social identities that we all possess, different ones become central at different times depending on the context. The familiar social identities such as race, gender, nationality, and class are among those that become activated most frequently, but many other social identities can also be activated and wield significant influence. We often are unaware that a particular identity has been activated [28], and we frequently cannot control which social identities will be activated in any given moment. When we took student groups to Ghana, several of the students were African-­ American. As they anticipated what the experience would be, it seemed that typically their racial identities were activated; they expressed excitement about being in the part of the world from which their ancestors came and about being in a predominantly black country. It was often disappointing to them when Ghanaians saw primarily the American part of their identity rather than the African component. Many times, the word abruni, literally translated as white, was used by Ghanaians to refer to all of us in the group, including our African-American members, a difficult label for those students to accept.

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We mentioned above that there are positive stereotypes and prejudice in favor of an identity. Similarly, activated identities can empower as well as diminish. A person hired after a significant organizational calamity is likely to feel a bit of a ­self-­esteem bump during conversations revisiting the crisis, knowing that they were not part of the mess, but rather are a blameless newcomer. We need to watch for activated identities that puff us up as well as those that cause us concern. When a certain social identity becomes activated, we filter our experiences in part through the lens of that identity. Stereotypes and prejudices that we carry related to that social identity affect what we see, hear, and experience. They shape not only how we see those around us but also how we feel about who we are. As a result, we often experience ourselves differently and alter our behavior based on how we think we are being perceived [28, p. 10]. Imagine, for example, that a team leader who is white is having lunch with several members of the team, all of whom are also white. One team member is in the process of buying a house and asks about neighborhoods. A colleague observes that one particular area is a “bad neighborhood” and should be avoided. The team leader knows that the neighborhood in question is predominantly Latinx and feels quite certain that the “bad neighborhood” label was based on a stereotype and was an indirect way of saying that a white coworker wouldn’t want to live there because of race/culture. The team leader’s racial/cultural identity has now been activated. She may choose, consciously or unconsciously, to question the stereotype or may adopt the all-too-common approach of remaining silent as the person who made the statement assumes that such coded commentary is acceptable when only white people are present. In any case, the team leader’s activated social identity affects how they perceive themselves and the situation and how they decide to act. Stereotype Threat Consider how this lunch situation could be if the team leader were Latinx and faced with deciding how to respond. A whole different set of issues arise when you are a member of the group about whom stereotypes are in play. Moments that are seemingly the same for everybody are, in fact, different for people from different identity groups. One particularly important phenomenon is stereotype threat [29], which occurs when we know that others could be responding to us out of negative stereotypes about one of our social identities. An extensive and growing body of research demonstrates that in such situations, we often unintentionally focus on the negative stereotypes about our group, which can cause our performance to suffer and our choices to be distorted. Our unconscious concern that we’ll prove the negative stereotype about our group to be true actually impedes us. The other people involved need not be acting in an overtly prejudiced way in order for us to worry about confirming a negative stereotype. When Duncan began doing diversity work as a member of facilitator groups that were mixed by race and gender, he was much quieter during workshops than he would have been in most professional settings. He unconsciously and sometimes

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consciously feared that he would confirm the stereotype of white men being racist, sexist, and insensitive; therefore, he chose not to speak and risk proving the ­stereotype true. His concern about confirming the stereotype made him less effective overall and especially ineffective at supporting colleagues and participants from marginalized identity groups, one of his primary goals in doing the work. While stereotype threat had an impact on Duncan as a white man, it was certainly less significant than the stereotype threats faced by members of societal groups that endlessly face negative stereotypes. People from such groups face the threat routinely rather than in isolated situations. Stereotype threat can operate in a wide variety of circumstances. It can arise during discrete events such as when African-Americans take a standardized test and are affected by their awareness of the stereotypes about their group’s intelligence [30]. The threat can also play out chronically in stereotype-soaked settings, such as the environment women often face in science and engineering organizations [31]. The groups that could experience the threat are almost endless: older people vis-a-vis mental alertness, white people about athletic ability, Muslims in connection with terrorism, and many, many more. Of course, all people do not respond the same to stereotype-threat situations. In some cases, knowing that others have negative expectations of you can be motivating [32]. However, we know that the dynamics of stereotype threat are very often powerful and problematic. The damage done by stereotype threat results from several aspects of who we are as humans being compromised: our attention, thinking, emotions, motivation, and physiology. Our blood pressure goes up; we have elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline; we feel overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, worried, and fearful; our self-­control is depleted; our working memory is impaired [33]. Together the impact on these multiple processes hurts our performance and our participation in organizational life. Stereotype threat affects our effectiveness on a wide variety of tasks including negotiation, management and leadership, and decision-making [34]. It can also impact our openness to feedback, career aspirations, sense of belonging, and desire to seek support [35]. Avoiding interactions and fields of work where we fear stereotypes are operating can stunt our development and exclude us from potentially satisfying careers. It appears that stereotypes related to social identities can also enhance performance, as indicated by initial research on stereotype lift and stereotype boost. Stereotype lift may occur when people are aware of negative stereotypes about other groups (not their own) and, therefore, feel more confident about their own abilities [36]. Stereotype boost may result when positive stereotypes about a person’s own group are relevant to the situation [37]. While it is important for leaders to be aware of the potential impact of stereotype threat on their own performance and choices, it is also essential for us as leaders to consider our responsibility for minimizing the possible effects of stereotype threat on the people working with us. Part of being impolite is thinking about what stereotypes may be in the air in your workplace and taking steps to counteract their negative consequences. In Chap. 7, we will consider some specific remedies that leaders might use.

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Building Social Identity Capacity Because our social identities matter so much and because we have often been taught that it’s impolite to pay attention to or think about them, it’s crucial for us to build our capacity to engage actively with our own and others’ identities. As we introspect, social identities should be one key focus for questions we ask ourselves. Before considering specific mechanisms for increasing our comfort with and understanding of social identities, we’ll examine some important characteristics of social identities. It’s helpful to keep these characteristics in mind as you build your capacity to be impolite because social identities are complicated. We are much more than any official government list of identity categories. The danger of oversimplifying how you think about social identities is real. Characteristics of Social Identities A Long List When we do pay attention to social identities, we often think of a relatively short list. In the United States, for example, our thoughts about social identities frequently focus on such elements as race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, (dis)ability status, age, class, and nationality. These are clearly highly significant groups, and we should not lose sight of them. Of course, significantly different categories would be relevant in other cultures. Wherever we are located geographically, we must also be aware of a much longer list. The particular context in which a leader is operating will define many additional group memberships that can generate the important dynamics we have described above. For example, in our organizational home, a university, it really matters whether someone is a faculty member, a staff member, or a student—and then what faculty rank (tenured, tenure-track, lecturer, adjunct) and in what field, what type and level of staff member, and what class of student—commuter or resident, athlete, or artist. The role of social identities that could be salient is almost endless, depending on the situation: political affiliation, relationship status, organizational function, educational background, tenure in the organization, and on and on and on. Not all of the identities on the list are equally important, but we are smart to pay attention to the wide variety of identity categories that may be affecting what people experience and how they behave. Fuzzy Definitions The vast majority of social identity categories are social constructions, meaning they result from cultural forces rather than biological roots [38]. For example, we have a long history in the United States of not really knowing what we mean by

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race. Not only have we struggled as a society with how to define who is black (i.e., the-one-drop-of-blood rule [39]), but we’ve seen Irish immigrants, who are now routinely seen as white, as not white [40]. We’ve grappled with whether being Jewish is a racial identity, and today, we often include in the Latinx “racial” category people who have extremely light (white) skin as well as people with very dark brown skin and every shade in between. Babies with ambiguous genitalia are assigned one of two gender categories at birth (male or female) [41]. As we mentioned earlier, many people who identify as genderqueer resist any of the traditional categories of gender identity that exist in the societies in which they live. Thus, we are unwise when we engage with social identities to accept categories attributed to people without question and, especially, without finding out whether those people identify as those identities themselves. Fluid Not only are the definitions of social identities frequently fuzzy, but also many of our own and others’ social identities are not particularly fixed. At different times of life, we would respond quite differently to an “Are you …?” question, the most obvious example being our age social identity. We also know people’s sense of themselves on other aspects of their identity can change quite significantly. For example, frameworks describing racial identity development provide sophisticated pictures of such changes [42]. We also now know that a person’s sexual orientation is often not permanently established but rather can shift significantly over time. Also, as with the long-list discussion above, our identities can differ from situation to situation; the context can matter. Consider this account from our close colleague, Dr. Earl Avery, of his social identities in flux: I was facilitating a workshop on diversity with three colleagues. Our team was diverse by race and by gender. We had an engaging workshop with a diverse group of participants, and, in the end, we were feeling very positive about our effort. Our workshop ran slightly over time, and, thus, we were a little late attending the next workshop. The focus of that workshop was women at work, and it was being facilitated by a number of distinguished female scholars. My two female colleagues asked if I was going to join them. I said, “yes,” and we proceeded to the room. My colleagues entered before me. As I entered, I noticed that almost all of the audience were white women. I immediately made a hard stop, my heart started racing, and I began to back out the door. Before I could complete my exit, a couple of women on the panel invited me to stay and offered me a seat up front. It was only after I sat down that I was able to understand in a conscious way why I had reacted with such a level of anxiety. When I was working with my teammates, my social identity included being a black man and a presenter. In the role of presenter, I shared control over the situation with my colleagues. In the second workshop, my identities of gender and race were in the minority, and as a participant, I was in a subordinate role.

Thus, it is important for us to pay attention to how our own social identities fluctuate and to not expect others’ social identities to remain constant. We need to allow ourselves and others room to move.

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The Same but Different Understanding the ways in which a particular social identity operates can offer a window into the dynamics of other social identities. In particular, the left-handed/ right-handed analogy that we discussed above is a useful lens for sorting through the many ways that social identities affect where people fit in society. The advantages and disadvantages that attend to membership in favored groups and excluded groups can be found for most social identities. Getting smart about these power dynamics for one social identity can make us smarter about other differences. However, this doesn’t mean that all social identities are the same or that we can automatically assume that the experiences or the consequences are the same across differences. One important difference among social identities highlights this. Some of our social identities are generally somewhat visible (age), some are generally invisible (sexual orientation, religion), and some are frequently ambiguous (gender identity, race). The particular issues that people face in managing those social identities are correspondingly different. For example, for social identities that are invisible or ambiguous, people can face the issue of coming out. When and how to disclose one’s social identity are complicated terrain to navigate, and, often, it must be dealt with over and over again. A straight white man would be unwise to believe that the increasing disadvantages he faces as he ages give him a thorough understanding of a colleague’s experience who is dealing with being gay in a predominantly straight organization. His changing status may provide a glimpse, but there is so much that is different. Overlapping and Interacting Everyone inhabits multiple social identities simultaneously. As we discussed above, different identities are activated at different times, but we never completely jettison key social identities, even when they temporarily recede in importance. There is good reason for us to intellectually investigate the dynamics of individual social identities. However, it is crucial for us to remember when we are leaders on the ground that we are never a single social identity. We need to ask how various of our identities interact and complicate our own and others’ experiences. The concept of “intersectionality” has emerged as an important reminder that our social identities do not operate independently of each other [43]. Consider, for example, how much we’d be missing if we were exploring the significance of race for an organizational policy and failed to ask the follow-up question about how the experiences of Asian women were different from those of Asian men— or of young, lesbian, Asian women as contrasted with older, straight, Asian men. Sometimes our group memberships interact in ways that increase our power and opportunities. If you combine two right-handed memberships, it’s likely to increase your assets, material, and other—white men generally have more resources of all kinds available to them than white women or men of color. Having multiple ­marginalized memberships can increase your disadvantages; think women of color

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who are lesbian or elderly people with disabilities. The intersections of our group memberships can also be a complicated mix. In workshops on social identities, we have often experienced some white women as very perceptive about gender issues but somewhat insensitive about race. The intersections among social identities can continue to expand, and we seldom have the time to dissect all the permutations, but we isolate individual social identities at our peril. Social Identity Profile Keeping in mind these complicated and sometimes confounding characteristics of social identities, let’s talk about some ways to build our capacity to engage with these group memberships that are so significant for us as leaders. First, we suggest developing a social identity profile, which explores what your social identities are, how others see your social identities, and how these identities affect your life. We’ve adapted this approach from an idea originated by Sandra Sucher at Harvard Business School [44] (Table 5.1). Table 5.1  Social identity profile Group membership(s) as Social identities self-identified Gender Race National origin/ ethnicity Citizenship First language Sexual orientation Religion Socioeconomic status Age (Dis)Ability status Body size Marital status Parental status Education Industry/firm Job function Other

Group membership(s) as perceived by others

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The initial step in creating such a profile is to identify what your group memberships are, both as you define them and as other people may see them. One crucial aspect of being sufficiently impolite as a leader is to recognize that the perceptions others have of what groups you belong to can be different from how you define yourself. A colleague of ours is a Southeast Asian but often is seen in the United States as Latina. Duncan has sometimes been assumed to be Jewish (almost exclusively by non-Jews) because his last name is Spelman, and “man” is a common ending for Jewish surnames. Of course, it’s also important to remember that your perceptions of colleagues’ group memberships may not be the same as how they identify themselves. How others behave toward us can be perplexing if we don’t consider the possibility that they are putting us in different categories than we use for ourselves. We’ll walk you through a process of creating your social identity profile. It will involve filling in your group memberships for the social identities listed in the left column of the chart. Before describing the specifics of doing that, we want to say a word about the list of social identities that we provide in the chart. As we mentioned above, the list is long because all of us have many, many group memberships, whether we think about them regularly or not. It’s really important to pay attention to social identities beyond the most obvious ones and how they may be affecting human interactions. Also, even though it’s long, the list is incomplete. There are other identities we could have included; there are undoubtedly identities we have failed to think of, and relevant social identities change when you change settings. Feel free to add (or subtract) social identities to the list in the left column. It’s your profile! We do encourage you to be careful about removing social identities from the left column if they don’t seem immediately relevant to you. Sometimes we overlook identities that are very important to some of our colleagues, especially if they do not cause problems for us. Back to filling out the chart. In the column titled “group membership(s) as self-­ identified,” indicate how you think of your own group memberships for the social identities in the left column. This is how you define yourself in relation to each social identity. Then, in the column labeled “group membership(s) as perceived by others,” indicate how you think others see you for each social identity. It’s probably easiest to fill in the self and other columns for one social identity before moving on to the next one. You may want to fill in more than one group membership for some social identities. We have provided examples from Wiley’s profile for her self-defined groups and for how she thinks others see her group memberships (Table 5.2). The group memberships we have included in Wiley’s “others” column demonstrate how those around us can see us differently from the way we see ourselves. Wiley would describe her own group membership for gender as genderqueer, but many people question whether she is a woman or a man. For national origin/ethnicity, Wiley identifies as Portuguese/Italian-American but is often seen as simply Italian-American. For sexual orientation, Wiley sees herself as genderqueer but is often labeled by others as lesbian. Regarding religion, Wiley is a practicing Roman Catholic but is often assumed to have no religious affiliation. For marital status, Wiley is married, but it seems that others often wonder. Wiley, at the time of the

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Table 5.2  Wiley’s social identity profile Social identities Gender Race National origin/ ethnicity Citizenship First language Sexual orientation Religion Socioeconomic status Age (Dis)Ability status Body size Marital status Parental status Education Industry/firm Job rank Other

Wiley as self-identified examples Genderqueer White Portuguese-Italian-American

Wiley as perceived by others examples Woman/man??? White Italian-American

United States English Queer Roman Catholic Middle class 50 Currently able Average Married Nonparent Ph.D. Higher Ed Associate professor

United States English Lesbian None Middle class 50s Currently able Average ??? Nonparent Ph.D. Higher Ed “Professor”

writing of this book, is an Associate Professor, but most would likely see her as a “professor” (i.e., occupation rather than rank). If we had provided Duncan’s self and others columns, there would be almost total alignment between how it seems others see him and how he sees himself. People with marginalized or complicated group memberships often expend significant energy managing the gap between others’ perceptions of them and their sense of themselves. People with powerful group membership need not expend such energy. The next step in building your profile is to consider how you experience these social identities and group memberships. You might begin by thinking about which of your group memberships you tend to pay attention to. We invite you to take a few minutes and make some notes to yourself about these and the other questions below. (No writing in the margins if it’s a library book.) • Which of your self-defined group memberships are you most aware of? Which are you least aware of? • Which of your group memberships as perceived by others are you most aware of? Which are you least aware of? Your awareness of particular group memberships may be affected by the specific contexts in which you live your life. They also may be affected by whether your membership is a right-handed (advantaged) or a left-handed (marginalized) category. Not surprisingly, we tend to be more aware of group memberships that create challenges for us. And, dangerously, we tend to be less aware of the group memberships that make us the fish in water. To the extent that we do not pay attention to

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group memberships that provide us with advantages, we may overlook that people with other group memberships are having very different and more difficult experiences. Some other questions to consider related to how you experience your group memberships are: • Which of your self-defined group memberships are most comfortable for you? Which are least comfortable? • Which of your group memberships as perceived by others are most comfortable for you? Which are least comfortable? • Which of your self-defined group memberships are most important to you? Which are least important? • Which of your group memberships as perceived by others are most important to you? Which are least important? All of these questions about how you experience your group memberships can help you become more in touch with how social identities are operating in your life and more able to track how they may be affecting you. The “be emotional” reminder from Chap. 4 applies to our experiences of our social identities. For all the reasons discussed above, this is an essential aspect of our lives, and we are wise to pay attention to our emotional responses to what our social identities do. Having identified your group memberships (both as defined by you and as defined by others) and having explored how you experience those memberships, the next step in fleshing out your profile is to examine how they affect your life. As we detailed earlier in this chapter, our social identities matter. They influence what choices we have available to us—career opportunities, options for responding to challenges we face, and people we have to support us. • Which of your self-defined group memberships increase the choices that are available to you? Which decrease your choices? • Which of your group memberships as perceived by others increase the choices that are available to you? Which decrease your choices? Ultimately, it’s important to attend to how your social identities affect your day-to-­ day work as a leader. • Which of your self-defined group memberships affect your approach to leadership the most? Which affect your leadership the least? Why? • Which of your group memberships as perceived by others affect your approach to leadership the most? Which affect your leadership the least? Why? A final step in developing your profile is to consider how your various social identities interact with each other. We mentioned these interactions above when we were discussing the characteristics of social identities. Having populated your social identity profile with specific information about your group memberships, you can now investigate how the different components of your self can combine to shape what you experience and how you can function.

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Hopefully, you have now created a rich and complex profile of your social identities. Ideally it increases your awareness of what your group memberships are, how others may see your group memberships, how you experience your group ­memberships, and how they can affect your life and your functioning as a leader. Your profile can provide the groundwork for your being impolite in the right ways. IAT The social identity profile, which we have just discussed, is primarily a mechanism to engage with our own social identities. It can also be used productively as the basis for discussion with others about their group memberships. The profile focuses principally on our conscious thoughts about social identities. This is only part of the story. When we talked above about how social identities affect the way we see others, we mentioned the phenomenon of unconscious bias. This bias mobilizes the stereotypes and prejudices we carry outside of our awareness. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) [45] provides information about this hidden realm and, therefore, facilitates deeper engagement with how our leadership can be influenced by others’ social identities. The IAT is available on the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/). As the website explains, one of the fundamental ideas behind the test is that “we may not be aware of some of our own attitudes.” Often, the most powerful attitudes and beliefs are those that are not explicitly taught but rather implicitly learned. The test results often suggest a divergence between our explicit attitudes (what we say and think we believe) and implicit, unconscious, or automatic beliefs that operate below our awareness. Many of the stereotypes we hold about social identities—others’ and our own—operate at the unconscious level [28]. The IAT presents simple computer-based tests, focusing on attitudes about social identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and age. The test-taker identifies associations between categories of people (e.g., women/men, black/white, gay/straight) and stereotypes (e.g., athletic/clumsy) or evaluations (good/bad) by pressing the e or i key on the computer. The IAT score is based on how long it takes a person to respond with their associations. For example, “We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words when Thin People and Good share a response key and Fat People and Bad share a response key, relative to the reverse” [45]. Not surprisingly, we can be troubled by and resistant to the results of the IAT. The suggestion that our implicit beliefs may be inconsistent with our explicit attitudes is unsettling. For example, Wiley routinely receives results on the Gender-Career test that suggest she has an unconscious bias linking females with family and males with career. This outcome is strongly at odds with Wiley’s conscious commitment to increasing women’s career opportunities. One response to the test that we have heard frequently dismisses the possibility that the methodology could possibly disclose anything about a person’s values or beliefs. Also, people often believe that they can “trick” the test and manipulate the

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results. The FAQ’s section of the website provides detailed information about the common questions that are raised about the test methodology. Given the quality and breadth of research supporting the IAT, we believe it’s unproductive to focus on these issues. Instead, we recommend examining why we resist what the IAT is saying. We are back to the challenge described in the Be Humble chapter of believing that we are not fully aware of what is happening in our own brains. Read a Book In the previous chapter, we tried to talk you into reading fiction to build your emotional muscle. We argued that engaging with literature that contains strong emotional content is a low-risk way to develop your capacity to track your feelings. We’re back at it, recommending that you add a social identity layer to your emotion-­ focused reading. Most good literature is replete with complicated social identity dynamics. Try testing your ability to discern how characters’ group memberships are affecting the story line. See if you can sort out how your reactions to the plot and people are influenced by your social identities and theirs. In Chap. 4, we mentioned two of our favorite emotion-provoking pieces of fiction, The Hitchhiking Game [46], by Milan Kundera, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper [47]. Many readers of both stories believe male characters behave horribly toward women in their lives. These moments provide rich opportunities to explore how you react when your gender identity is activated. In addition to the gender issues, The Hitchhiking Game often triggers intense reactions among men who are parents of daughters because of the difficult circumstances faced by the young woman in the story. Age, parental status, and gender combine to arouse strong feelings and demonstrate how our social identities overlap and interact. Another piece of fiction that works well to test your social identity chops is the book Letter from Point Clear by Dennis McFarland [48]. The story is a rich stew of race, class, region, sexual orientation, gender, and other social identity dynamics. A thorny moment, in a post office line when the gay, wealthy, white protagonist confronts a working class, white (straight?) man who has made a racist comment, challenges us to untangle the threads of multiple group memberships and question our own biases and commitments. We have used it frequently in leadership workshops to challenge all of us to introspect more deeply about social identities. Here are some questions you might ask yourself to guide your introspection about this excerpt of Letter from Point Clear: • Which social identities of the key characters seem to be most important at this moment? • How do your own social identities seem to be affecting your reactions to the characters and the events? • What questions might you ask the protagonist (Morris) to help him explore how social identities are playing out in this situation?

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Crossing Boundaries It also makes sense in building your social identities’ capacity to consider and shape what information gets into your mind in the first place and, therefore, what biases may be taking root. We are more likely to develop stereotypes about groups with whom we have limited contact; our knowledge is disproportionately based on misinformation floating around in the society. We are wise to examine our social networks and actively work to make them more diverse if they provide little exposure to some groups. Also, it matters what we read, listen to, and watch. Consciously exposing ourselves to counter-stereotypical examples of identity group members can help to increase the accuracy of the chunks that our brains are using to make sense of the world [49].

Resources for Impolite Introspection “Am I taking account of my own and others’ social identities?” This is the question that we can ask ourselves to help us be impolite. Hopefully, the previous sections of this chapter have heightened your awareness of social identities and prepared you to attend to them in the questions you ask yourself when you are introspecting. Remember the arenas in which those identities are so significant: how we fit in society, how we see others, and how we see ourselves. Recall the characteristics of social identities discussed above: a long list, fuzzy definitions, fluid, the same but different, and overlapping and interacting. This knowledge about social identities equips us to ask ourselves the important questions as we exercise leadership. Look Through a Social Identity Lens We have suggested the contrast between being right-handed and being left-handed as a guide for understanding the important differences that social identities make in how we fit in society. It matters whether our social identities carry power and advantage or marginalization and disadvantage. In order to make this understanding useful in our role as leaders, we must ask ourselves whether we are occupying positions of a left-hander or right-hander in any given moment and ask about the people with whom we’re interacting. This means developing the habit of introspecting through a social identity lens, asking yourself how both your own and others’ social identities are operating. You can pose these kinds of questions to inject social identities into your introspection: • Am I noticing how many people from various social identities are in the room, on the task force, being hired? • Do I know what the social identities are of people in upper management, in custodial roles, and in plum assignments?

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• Am I tracking by social identities who is talking, who is interrupting, and who is interrupted? Who gets credit, and who gets ignored? Who seems comfortable, and who seems uncomfortable? • Am I mentioning social identities? • Am I considering people’s multiple identities, or am I reducing people to single dimensions? • Am I aware of microaggressions that are occurring based on social identities? • Am I asking others to represent their social identity group? Am I being asked to do that? • Are there ways in which I’m the fish in water, unaware of my group memberships? • Am I examining how my experiences may be different from others’ based on social identities? Fight Your Stereotypes Seeing the world through a social identities lens helps us ask ourselves valuable questions about how group memberships affect where people fit in society and, therefore, how people’s experiences may differ. It’s also important to ask ourselves how social identities may be influencing the way we perceive others. In particular, our introspection is more useful if we remember that our unconscious biases, stereotypes, and prejudices related to social identities may well be in action. One introspection mechanism to combat our unconscious biases is to develop the practice of routinely asking ourselves how our stereotypes might be operating in a given situation. If you have taken some of the Implicit Association Tests discussed above and wrestled with the issues they raise, you can appreciate the importance of not assuming that you are assessing the world without prejudice [49]. You might enter a tickler into your calendar every month or quarter or year to revisit the IAT so as to provide yourself with a booster shot of appreciation for the power of unconscious biases. Finally, we can reduce the power of our unconscious biases by slowing down. The important practice of pausing once again helps us lead, increasing our chances of introspecting effectively and, thereby, decreasing the potential negative effects of our stereotypes and prejudices. Taking time allows us to investigate the situation and our reactions to it more carefully, and it reduces our cognitive load—the demands on our mental processing—making it less likely that implicit biases will control our perceptions and our behavior [49]. Watch Out for Fault Lines We described above how teams can develop fault lines based on the social identities of group members. People can connect more strongly with other members who share their social identities than with team members whom they perceive as ­different.

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As we introspect about how social identities may be affecting how we see others, questioning ourselves about fault line dynamics can be valuable. In Duncan’s teaching he has learned, after some experiences of goofing up, to monitor himself to reduce the likelihood that he is relating more closely to (and therefore favoring) students who share social identities with him that are distinctive in the classroom they share—natives of Ohio, college basketball fans, and vegetarians. A couple key questions to ask ourselves [50]: • Am I identifying more strongly with some group members than with others because I believe we share social identities? • Am I considering the possibility that problematic dynamics among members of one of my teams may be based on fault lines? Am I failing to take sufficient account of the possible significance of social identity group memberships? These latter questions highlight that effective leaders ask themselves whether they are paying enough attention to fault lines when counterproductive subgrouping occurs in teams for which they are responsible. On first blush, subgroups can seem to be about personality differences, but leaders are wise to ask whether they have paid enough attention to how social identities may be operating, including identities that are not the most obvious. Ask Which Identities Are Activated In addition to asking ourselves questions that can increase our awareness of how social identities influence how people fit in society and how we see other people, we can ask ourselves questions about how we see ourselves. One aspect of this is to focus the social identity lens that we discussed above specifically on which of our own social identities are activated in any given situation. It’s useful to ask ourselves: • Which identities are activated for me right now? • How is this likely to affect how I see myself? • How is this likely to influence how I behave toward others? As we’ve mentioned, our various discussions don’t fit within neat boundaries. While we’re revisiting the topic of activated identities as we consider how we see ourselves, it’s also useful to ask what identities are activated for those around us and how that may be affecting how we see them. Similarly, we’ll next discuss stereotype threat in relation to how we see ourselves, but it can also be important in how we see others. Resist Stereotype Threat We have suggested putting on a social identity lens, and more specifically focusing that lens on activated identities, as a mechanism to support impolite introspection. It also makes sense to focus the lens on potential stereotype threats. If we can have

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our antennae up (sorry for the mixed metaphor), either in particular circumstances or more generally if the environment is characterized by intense stereotyping, we can reduce the potential impacts of stereotypes. Remember, stereotype threat occurs when we are concerned that people could be responding to us out of negative stereotypes and that concern impedes our performance or distorts our choices. Keeping the danger in mind makes us less prone to the negative consequences of stereotype threat. In some cases, the presence of stereotypes can actually be motivating [32]. Specifically, it helps to remind yourself of the inaccuracy of the negative stereotypes and affirm the aspects of your social identities that you value [51]. Examine Your Identity Abrasions A label we really like that captures what’s happening in moments when social identities are causing pain is identity abrasions [52]. In their Harvard Business Review article Robin Ely, Debra Meyerson, and Martin Davidson use the term to describe those situations when people feel like one or more of their social identities are under attack—the professional competence of a woman seems to be devalued, the intelligence of a person with an accent appears to be questioned, a white person is assumed to be prejudiced, and an LGBT person’s life seems to be reduced to issues of sex. If we ultimately determine that the offense reflects another’s bias or insensitivity, it may be important to confront the people responsible. However, the HBR article and we encourage leaders to begin by examining themselves, by introspecting. You might: • Examine the situation through a social identity lens—thinking about all of the relevant identities • Consider which of your social identities were activated and why • Ask yourself whether your own unconscious biases or prejudices could have been operating • Explore what your emotions could be telling you about the situation When you feel the rub of an identity abrasion, looking inward to scrutinize your own complicated cognitive processes is an essential first step before engaging interpersonally with other people involved. Investigate Your Inaction Introspecting involves us in examining our own thoughts and feelings. In a moment when social identities are particularly relevant, it is often important to ask ourselves why we are doing or saying nothing. Of course, inaction will not always be our approach, depending on who we are and what the situation is. But because our common-sense training tells us to not wade into social identity issues for fear of hurting feelings or discriminating, we often do not engage when social identities are crucial. It’s not “polite” to discuss such issues, so we often walk on eggshells.

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However, we encourage you to ask yourself why you are not acting and why you are remaining silent. Of course, social identity issues need to be addressed with skill and sensitivity. Failing to speak or act often reinforces the negative dynamics related to group memberships that make inequities, biases, and stereotypes potent sources of problems. Wiley and her partner Michele were having dinner at a local bar and became engaged in conversation with a man at a neighboring bar stool. They had quite a pleasant exchange for a while, but then his comments became expressly anti-­Semitic. Wiley and Michele did not respond to his prejudiced remarks. As they talked about the incident afterwards, they asked themselves why they had not said anything to the guy. Maybe it wouldn’t have accomplished anything and maybe it would have triggered a nasty conflict—this is our common-sense way of thinking about these moments. Maybe it could have caused their companion to pause for a moment and realize that not everyone shares his views. Also, Wiley and Michele might have felt better about themselves if they had responded. Most of us have experienced such moments, socially or at work. Inertia often seems to hold us back from engaging. We advocate introspecting about the sources of our inaction and consider whether taking action might be more productive. Among the questions we might ask ourselves: • • • •

What might be keeping me from speaking or acting? Are my own social identities holding me back in some way? What am I worried about? If I say something and it’s not quite right, will that be terrible? Could I clean it up later?

Not infrequently when social identities are involved, we err on the side of being cautious. It would often be better to be a little raggedy, given what’s at stake. Sorting out what we’re thinking and feeling in those moments may help us act.

You’re Not Alone Your Relationships As with other aspects of leading with uncommon sense, we don’t need to do all the impolite introspection work on our own. Our network of relationships can be a very valuable resource to aid this introspection. In Chap. 2, when we introduced the idea of having a network of people who can provide you with genuine support, we stressed the importance of that network being comprised of a diverse set of people. Hopefully, it’s obvious that a mix of trusted colleagues is particularly significant when addressing the question “Am I neglecting identity differences?” If you were to rely on people whose social identities are basically the same as yours for assistance in asking yourself about your awareness of social identities, you would be very unlikely to develop a rich and useful picture of your effectiveness as an impolite leader.

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Once again, we recommend that you take a careful look at the makeup, by social identities, of the colleagues you’re depending on to stimulate your introspection. If necessary, seek out people who are significantly different from you to offer fresh perspectives. Remember, genuine support means this network is questioning your assumptions and presenting probing questions rather than merely reinforcing the analysis and approaches that you have been using. You want your friends to be impolite with you. Your Organization In addition to utilizing our network of relationships to help us be impolite, we can be supported by organization systems and processes. In many cases our organizations already collect statistics that track at least some social identities in relation to hiring, promotions, job assignments, pay, terminations, and other key aspects of people’s experiences [53]. Being regular consumers of this data and asking our organizations to broaden the scope of what they collect can make us more capable of reaping the benefits of social identity differences and reducing the negative consequences. Also, organizations are increasingly likely to offer educational opportunities focused on unconscious bias and other social identity issues. These resources can help us increase our capacity to fight the damaging impacts of our stereotypes and prejudices [53]. Organizations are also paying more attention to employment practices and other processes that could unintentionally inject bias into decision-making. For example, many symphony orchestras now use auditions in which the candidates are not visible to the evaluators so that issues such as race, gender, age, and body type cannot inappropriately influence the selections [54]. Many hiring practices now involve removing irrelevant identifying materials from application materials [55]. More careful and sensitive organizational practices can support our individual efforts to question ourselves about how social identities may be affecting our thinking and feeling.

Conclusion These organizational supports for our individual introspection take us back to the two lines of poetry with which we began this chapter. Organizational decision-­ making practices that exclude irrelevant identifying information about social identities correspond to the poem’s instruction, “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.” This can make good sense to reduce discrimination caused by biases, stereotypes, and prejudices, but as we argued in the introduction, this is not enough. “Second, you must never forget that I’m Black,” and, third, you should never forget that you are white. In many aspects of daily life in organizations, it is impossible to

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eliminate awareness of social identities. Therefore, it’s important to ask, as organizations and as individuals, about the impact of group memberships to collect data that shines a light on how the differences that we bring to the workplace affect our experiences. This chapter has focused on the third of the introspect questions “Am I taking account of my own and others’ social identities?” And the reminder is to be “impolite”—notice and think about identity differences and ask yourself about how you are reacting to those differences. The goal is to avoid the common trap of not appreciating the deep importance of social identity differences. Seeking to ignore social identities is not only impossible, it also neglects powerful dynamics related to how we fit in the world, how we see others, and how we see ourselves. In the next chapter, we will consider the final introspect question “Am I too sure?” and explore the reminder to be uncertain.

References 1. Parker P (2000) For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend. Callaloo 23(1):73. Project MUSE. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2000.0051 2. Fryberg SA, Stephens NM (2010) When the world is colorblind, American Indians are invisible: a diversity science approach. Psychol Inq 21(2):115–119; Forman TA (2004) Color-blind racism and racial indifference: the role of racial apathy in facilitating enduring inequalities. In: Krysan M, Lewis AE (eds) The changing terrain of race and ethnicity. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, pp 43–66 3. Price M (2009) The left brain knows what the right hand is doing new research explores how brain lateralization influences our lives. Monit Psychol 40(1):60. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/brain.aspx 4. Casasanto D (2009) Embodiment of abstract concepts: good and bad in right- and left-handers. J Exp Psychol 138(3):351–367 5. Johnson AG (2005) Privilege, power, and difference, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York 6. Shulman S (1991) Why is the black unemployment rate always twice as high as the white unemployment rate? In: Cornwall RR, Wunnava PV (eds) New approaches to economic and social analyses of discrimination. Prager, New York, pp 5–38; United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS reports. www.bls.gov/opub/reports/race-and-ethnicity/2017/home.htm. Accessed 1 Mar 2019 7. U.S. Census Bureau. Current population survey, annual social and economic (ASEC) supplement: table PINC-05: work experience in 2017 – people 15 years old and over by total money earnings in 2017, age, race, hispanic origin, sex, and disability status. https://www.census.gov/ data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-05.html. Accessed 5 Jan 2019 8. SAFE: Suicide Awareness Voices of Education. Suicide facts. https://save.org/about-suicide/ suicide-facts/. Accessed 2 Apr 2019 9. Bialik K. 7 facts about Americans with disabilities. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/27/7-facts-about-americans-with-disabilities. Accessed 1 May 2019 10. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2016 hate crimes statistics. https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate crime/2016. Accessed 20 Feb 2019 11. Terrell K (2017) Age discrimination goes online. AARP Bulletin, November 7, 2017. https:// www.aarp.org/work/working-at-50-plus/info-2017/age-discrimination-online-fd.html; Lipnic VA (2018) The state of age discrimination and older workers in the U.S. 50 years after the

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30. Steele CM, Aronson J (1995) Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African-Americans. J Pers Soc Psychol 69(5):797–811 31. Shapiro JR, Williams AM (2012) The role of stereotype threats in undermining girls’ and women’s performance and interest in STEM fields. Sex Roles 66(3–4):175 32. Block CJ, Cruz M, Bairley M, Harel-Marian T, Roberson L (2019) Inside the prism of an invisible threat: shining a light on the hidden work of contending with systemic stereotype threat in STEM fields. J Vocat Behav 113:33–50. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/ pii/S0001879118301088 33. Arnsten AFT (2009) Stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nat Rev Neurosci 10(6):410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648 34. Hoyt CL, Murphy SE (2016) Managing to clear the air: stereotype threat, women, and leadership. Leadersh Q 27:387–399; Block CJ, Cruz M, Bairley M, Harel-Marian T, Roberson L (2019) Inside the prism of an invisible threat: shining a light on the hidden work of contending with systemic stereotype threat in STEM fields. J Vocat Behav 113:33–50. https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001879118301088; Casad BJ, Bryant WJ (2016) Addressing stereotype threat is critical to diversity and inclusion in organizational psychology. Front Psychol 7:8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00008 35. Casad BJ, Bryant WJ (2016) Addressing stereotype threat is critical to diversity and inclusion in organizational psychology. Front Psychol 7:8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00008 36. Walton GM, Cohen GL (2003) Stereotype lift. J Exp Soc Psychol 39(5):456–467. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00019-2 37. Shih MJ, Pittinsky TL, Ho GC (2012) Stereotype boost: positive outcomes from the activation of positive stereotypes. In: Inzlicht M, Schmader T (eds) Stereotype threat: theory, process, and application. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 141–156 38. Berger PL, Luckmann T (1966) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Doubleday, Garden City 39. James Davis F (1991) Who is black? One nation’s definition. Pennsylvania State University, University Park 40. Ignatiev N (2008) How the Irish became white. New York Routledge, New York 41. Michala L, Liao L-M, Wood D, Conway GS, Creighton SM (2014) Practice changes in childhood surgery for ambiguous genitalia? J Pediatr Urol 10(5):934–939 42. Helms JE (ed) (1990) Contributions in afro-American and African studies, no. 129. Black and white racial identity: theory, research, and practice. Greenwood Press, New York 43. Crenshaw K (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. Univ Chic Leg Forum 1989(1):8 44. Adapted from Sucher SJ (2007) Social identity profile. Harv Bus Sch Exerc (Revised September 2010):608-091 45. Project Implicit. https://implicit.harvard.edu/iimplicit/iatdetails.html 46. Kundera M (1999) The hitchhiking game. In: Laughable loves (trans: Rappaport S). Harper Perennial, New York, pp 77–106 47. Gilman CP (1995) The yellow wallpaper. In: Shulman R (ed) The yellow wallpaper and other stories. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 3–19 48. McFarland D (2008) Letter from point clear. Picador, New York, pp 104–110 49. Staats C (Winter 2015–2016) Understanding implicit bias: what educators should know. American Educator. https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2015-2016/staats; Allen BJ, Garg K (2016) Diversity matters in academic radiology: acknowledging and addressing unconscious bias. J Am Coll Radiol 13(12PA):1426–1432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2016.08.016 50. These four are from Gratton L, Voigt A, Erickson T (2007) Bridging faultlines in diverse teams. MIT Sloan Manag Rev 48(4). https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/bridging-faultlines-indiverse-teams/ 51. Stroessner S, Good C.  Stereotype threat: an overview. Reducing Stereotype Threat.com. Reprinted and adapted with permission by R.  Rhys; Walton GM, Murphy MC, Ryan AM

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Chapter 6

Introspect: Be Uncertain

Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd. —Voltaire

The most successful art forger of the twentieth century was Han Van Meegeren who, among other dastardly deeds, created and sold six fake Vermeer paintings in the brief period between 1937 and 1943 for the equivalent of 30 million of today’s dollars. Adding to the intrigue of Van Meegeren’s crimes was that one of his victims was Hermann Göring, the second most powerful monster in Nazi Germany. Johannes Vermeer, the artist who Van Meegeren impersonated on canvas, is one of the best known and most beloved painters of the Dutch Golden Age, probably most famous today for his “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Vermeer lived from 1632 to 1675 and produced only 35 or so paintings that are known today. The scarcity of his work adds to its value. What makes this story distinctive is that it is almost impossible today to believe that Van Meegeren’s “Vermeers” could have ever been seen as the work of the Dutch master. As author Edward Dolnick says in The Forger’s Spell, his fascinating account of the scam, “he is perhaps the only forger whose most famous works a layman would immediately identify as fake.” [1, p.16] Among the list of egregious problems described by present-day scholars are heavy-lidded eyes with raccoon-­ like shadowing, overly fleshy lips and noses, bag-like garments, and distorted anatomical structure and volume [1, p.16]. This incredible chapter in art history carries some important lessons for us as leaders. It demonstrates that the normal functioning of our brains can get us into trouble if we fail to pause, introspect, and ask ourselves if we are too sure about what we think we are seeing and what we have come to believe. The role that experts played in unintended support of Van Meegeren’s schemes is particularly instructive about the dangers of too much certainty. Experts were key actors in allowing the deceptions to unfold. The leading Vermeer expert of the day observed that the master had outdone himself in one of the forgeries and asked, “Why was there never again a canvas where he expressed © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_6

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so deeply the stirrings of his soul?” [1, p.16] This about a piece that no one would mistake for a Vermeer today. Experts were quick to reach conclusions when they thought they had discovered clues to the identity of the artist. And they made their judgments swiftly because they sought to prove their depth of knowledge. They believed hesitation would reveal uncertainty (and lesser expertise) rather than prudence. Once they decided that the forgeries were genuine, they clung to their conclusions tenaciously, mustering their persuasive powers to convince others and avoid losing face [1, p. 16]. Unfortunately, the behavior of the experts, which had outsized influence on potential buyers and the public, is a focused example of how all of our brains can work. Based on bits of information, we quickly discern patterns in the world around us, seeing what we expect and want to see. We jump to conclusions, overestimate our knowledge, and resist changing our minds [2, p.  3, 5]. The common trap to which we succumb is failing to notice how we oversimplify in our desire for certainty. Critical thinking and science teach us to withstand such tendencies, but such discipline does not come naturally. We are much more likely to seek certainty and cling to it once we feel it. Thus, our reminder for this chapter is to be uncertain. As we investigate the importance of being uncertain, we are addressing the fourth of the introspect questions, “Am I too sure?” To review, pausing as a component of the practice of leading with uncommon sense gives you time and focus. We recommend using that time and focus to introspect, look inward at your thoughts and feelings. We have already suggested asking three introspect questions: “What could be out of my awareness?”, “What are my emotions telling me?”, and “Am I taking account of my own and others’ social identities?”. Now we recommend a deep look at how we can over-pursue certainty and thereby make ourselves less-effective leaders (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1  The practice: be uncertain

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An Uncommon Leadership Idea: Be Uncertain Our suggestion to be uncertain flies in the face of some key tenets of common-sense leadership. Organizations—and people—want certainty [3]. We tend to be taught and to teach that leaders should be decisive and confident [4], quickly sort through complexity to develop a simple picture of what’s happening [5], and find the correct solution. We learn that leaders can’t afford to wallow in complications or suffer over too many possible explanations or options. These tenets reflect and reinforce how our brains work; our brains make us feel certain. As with other attributes of our cognition that we’ve discussed previously, the brain’s search for certainty is often very effective. But it can also get us into trouble as leaders if we do not attend sufficiently to our thoughts and feelings.

The Power of a Picture: The Ladder of Inference As with the Johari Window, the CBT Triangle, and the left-hand/right-hand graphic in previous chapters, a visual image can help us understand the phenomenon at the core of this chapter’s uncommon leadership idea—be uncertain. In his ongoing quest to understand why things often go wrong in organizations, Chris Argyris, one of the giants in the field of organizational behavior, described the “Ladder of Inference” that we frequently climb, unknowingly, from concrete information to abstract conclusions and actions [6]. The Ladder is a simple model of how the mind works in everyday life [7]. It describes how our feelings of certainty commonly solidify as we move from particulars that we perceive to beliefs that have little connection to that initial data. This process transpires, in the words of consultant and psychologist Robert Putnam, “at the speed of thought,” [7] typically out of our awareness. We add meaning, make assumptions, and draw conclusions without knowing that we have done it. Very often, this serves us well as we quickly and efficiently analyze information and make decisions. However, we can lose sight of our original sources of that information and of all the information we lack. Very importantly, the beliefs and conclusions that we create drive our behavior. Ultimately, we often don’t know why we believe what we do and what is motivating our behavior (Fig. 6.2).

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Fig. 6.2  The ladder of inference [8]

Let’s imagine that you are having a conversation with one of your direct reports, Rory, about a new initiative that your department is about to get under way. As you describe the basic idea of the initiative, Rory asks a number of questions, and you begin to wonder whether she/he thinks it’s a bad idea. Your wondering is based at least in part on your overall sense that Rory tends to be pretty negative, frequently looking for reasons not to try a new idea rather than getting excited and thinking about how to make something work. As the conversation and the questions continue, you become more convinced that Rory is not on board with the concept, and you decide you won’t include Rory on the task force that will be pursuing the initiative, an assignment that will be a visible and exciting opportunity for its members. Analyzing this interaction with the Ladder of Inference in mind raises some important questions about whether your brain’s speedy work resulted in leadership choices that were not ideal. If you did not slow yourself down and pay attention to your thought processes, you probably climbed the Ladder extremely quickly and, without knowing, progressed from limited observations to assumptions, conclusions, beliefs, and decisions that were supported by sparse information. You never asked Rory directly how she/he feels about the basic idea, and, yet, you have now decided to withhold a valuable opportunity. The Reflexive Loop on the Ladder, depicting how our beliefs affect what data we select and how we add meaning to that data, might well have had a significant influence on this interaction. Your previous sense that Rory tends to be negative could well have caused you to interpret Rory’s questions as resistance rather than genuine inquiry. As the conversation continued, you became more convinced of your beliefs (more certain) as the Reflexive Loop continued to feed your data selection and meaning-making. Pausing and introspecting allow us to climb back down the Ladder and investigate how we may have arrived at beliefs and actions that are not getting us what we want. We can think back to the original experiences that triggered our thought pro-

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cess. We contend that there is actually no such thing as purely “observable data” (the first rung on the ladder graphic) because past experiences will always activate the Reflexive Loop. The Loop then shapes both what data we select from the deluge of information coming at us and how we make meaning of that data. If we descend the Ladder, we can ask ourselves whether our beliefs are well-founded and our behaviors are justified. We can question our certainty. Leading with uncommon sense means slowing down when we are less than effective and asking ourselves how our minds took us to where we are.

Our Certain Brains The Ladder of Inference as a picture of how our brains can sometimes operate to make us overly certain is supported by research and knowledge from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and other fields. (Cordelia Fine uses the charming term “pigheaded brain.” [9]) We’re certain (!) that you remember our discussion in Chap. 3 of the two systems within our brains described by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. To review, one system is fast, automatic, intuitive, and out of our awareness, and the other is slower, analytic, deliberate, and in our conscious awareness. We rely on our unconscious brain processes for the vast majority of our mental tasks, thereby saving time and energy and allowing us to get more done. Kahneman describes the automatic brain in words that sound almost exactly like the Ladder of Inference, saying it “provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions.” [10] In Chap. 3, we used the image of the unconscious, automatic brain as the elephant and the conscious, deliberate brain as the rider to convey the relative strength of the two brain systems [11]. Leading with uncommon sense requires that we remember to use the slower, deliberate system to question the certainty that we feel. This is not easy and natural. Depending on our automatic brain is the path of least resistance, and our deliberate brain tends to be lazy and reluctant to get involved. Becoming Certain The fast, automatic system pursues certainty to make it as easy as possible for us to act. By identifying patterns, coherence, and simple cause-and-effect relationships [12, p. 190] in the world around us, our brains reduce the potentially overwhelming complexity in which we’re immersed and prevent us from becoming paralyzed [13]. The automatic system reduces the number of relevant choices for how we should behave [5]. Our unconscious brains claim more certainty than they can justify [14], but usually that’s OK because the occasional mistakes that result from oversimplification are acceptable in the interest of efficiency [15]. Our suggestion in this chapter to be uncertain relates to those moments when our simplifying, overly certain brain leads us astray, when we fall into this common trap.

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Consider an experience Wiley had that demonstrates how the automatic brain can produce erroneous conclusions and potentially harmful actions. As you know, Wiley identifies as genderqueer, and people are sometimes confused as they seek to decide whether she is a man or a woman. On many occasions, people have expressed their confusion and their assumptions through angry questions, insults, homophobic and transphobic slurs, and physical threats. One day, Wiley and her partner Michele were waiting in the jetway to board a plane to return home when a passenger who was in front of them in line repeatedly looked back questioningly at Wiley, not an uncommon experience. Wiley was particularly tired at this point in their journey and said to Michele, “I can’t take this guy hassling me today; I just want to get on the plane and go home.” Michele encouraged her to just avoid eye contact so they could board the plane without incident. As luck would have it, when they took their seats, the curious passenger was just one seat ahead of Wiley on the other side of the aisle. He continued his investigation of Wiley with several glances over his shoulder. Wiley reports that, finally, she leaned forward, rolled up her sleeves, and did her best John Wayne impression, saying, “May I help you with something?” In response, the person pointed to Wiley’s t-shirt and said, “I noticed your school tee-shirt. I used to be headmaster there.” The quick work of Wiley’s automatic brain fortunately did not result in more than a somewhat brusque comment, which she wished she could take back. Based on painful previous experiences related to her gender social identity, it’s not surprising that Wiley’s fast brain prepared for a potential attack. Wiley’s level of fatigue probably reduced the likelihood that the slower, deliberate brain would join the interaction. Our automatic brains can and do make mistakes. The quest for certainty as undertaken by our fast brain is important to us. If we are unsure, we seek resolution. Psychiatrist Christophe André contends that uncertainty causes us to feel anxious; in fact, he claims that all forms of anxiety can be ultimately brought down to an intolerance of uncertainty [16]. We experienced this relationship between anxiety and uncertainty/certainty several times when we took student groups to Ghana. Students in their late teens and early 20s traveling from a predominantly white, affluent, suburban US university to a poor, black African country not surprisingly seemed quite anxious about what was in store for them. Commonly during our reflection session on the first evening after our arrival, many students would comment at some length about how Ghanaians were so nice, so warm, and so welcoming. Of course, they had met only a tiny sample of the country’s residents and had very brief interactions. We suspect they were creating certainty for themselves, reaching a quick conclusion that everything was going to be OK and, thereby, reducing their anxiety. Similarly, the Zeigarnik effect in psychology describes how incomplete experiences occupy our minds far more than completed ones [17]. We also know that our brains constantly look for order and reason, even when there is none. Despite the importance of chance and random forces in our lives, our brains have a hard time accepting that such factors are in play [12, p. 190]. If there are holes in the information available to us, our brains make stuff up, take a best guess, or answer an easier question, all out of our awareness [18].

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Staying Certain Interestingly, we unconsciously protect ourselves from the anxiety of uncertainty. Our brains produce what neurologist Robert Burton terms an involuntary “feeling of knowing,” [2, p. 3, 5] a mental perception that happens to us even when our certainty is not supported with adequate evidence [19]. Research demonstrates that we are routinely overconfident, feeling a degree of certainty that is unwarranted given the actual accuracy of our opinions [20]. Overconfidence is the bias Daniel Kahneman has said he would eliminate first if he had a magic wand [21]. Once we have reached a conclusion or formed a belief, we unknowingly reinforce our certainty by favoring information that supports our views and by rejecting contradictory input [22]. As educator Lisa Delpit says, “We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.” [23] The Reflexive Loop on the Ladder of Inference represents the dynamics through which our brains cause us to stay certain. We unknowingly select information that reinforces our beliefs and then make meaning of it so as to maintain our confidence that we know what’s going on [12, p. 190]. Such selective perception is demonstrated by an ingenious video created by psychologist Daniel Simons [24]. The viewer is challenged to count the number of times that a group of players pass a basketball back and forth. As observers become deeply engaged in their counting, they often fail to notice that a person dressed in a gorilla suit enters the scene, beats her/his chest, and exits. Over time, much of the power of the video as a teaching tool was lost as it became somewhat famous and as word spread about the gorilla. When workshop leaders presented the recording, many people proudly reported that they had spotted the hairy intruder. Simons then upped the ante to demonstrate that we see what we focus on and expect to see. He created a new version of the video in which the players passed the ball and the gorilla intervened, but this time, the background curtain changed colors, and one of the players exited the scene. Once again, viewers’ attention was too narrow, and the added elements were missed. It seems likely that the effect was even more powerful because observers knew the secret of the gorilla and were quite certain about what they would see. (Sorry, Dr. Simon, about this spoiler.) Similarly, letting go of a conclusion we have reached can be very challenging. Robert Burton offers the following riddle: A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance [2, p. 3, 5].

While you may not immediately realize that the description is of a kite, once you know the answer, it is extremely difficult to come up with a different solution. Our certainty tends to persist.

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Our perceptions are powerfully influenced by what we want to be true. Researchers have demonstrated that through wishful seeing or motivated perception, our brains present our environments to us in ways that align with our desires [25]. For example, psychologists Emily Balcetis and Dave Dunning conducted a taste test in which some participants would receive freshly squeezed orange juice and others would be given a “gelatinous, chunky, green, foul-smelling, somewhat viscous concoction labeled as an ‘organic veggie smoothie.’” Both drinks were placed in front of the subjects, and the experimenter told them that they would be randomly assigned by a computer to drink one or the other. Half of the participants were told that a number would appear on the computer screen if they had been assigned to drink the orange juice, a letter if they were to drink the disgusting smoothie. The other half of the participants were told the opposite: number = smoothie, letter = OJ. When the figure appeared on the screen, eighty-six percent of the subjects were happy. The figure was ambiguous, a hybrid of the number 13 and the capital letter B. Because the subjects wanted a result that would give them a pleasurable rather nauseating experience, they saw what they wanted to see. The Costs of Certainty Hopefully, as you read about how our brains create and sustain certainty, you worried some about the danger this certainty can represent for us as leaders. Jumping to conclusions, resisting new evidence, and not being willing to change our minds can obviously get us into trouble as we go about our daily business of pointing new directions for our organizations and working as productively as possible with our colleagues. Particularly in the context of work environments that are increasingly VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—there are many times when unwarranted certainty can create problems [26]. Psychologist Timothy Wilson, whose work we discussed in Chap. 3, warns that our tendency to “jump to conclusions, and to fail to change [our] mind in the face of contrary evidence, is responsible for some of society’s most troubling problems, such as the pervasiveness of racial prejudice,” [27] obviously a crucial aspect of social identities, as we discussed in the previous chapter. Unfortunately, as our beliefs become more certain, they not only become more durable but also have greater influence on our behavior [28]. Frighteningly, our certainty is quite open to manipulation. In a Harvard Business Review article, Zakary Tormala and Derek Rucker describe four “levers” that companies can use to build certainty in consumers and, thereby, brand loyalty and spending—consensus, repetition, ease, and defense. We become more certain of our opinions when we believe they are shared by others. Repeating our opinions actually reinforces those opinions. The more easily an idea comes to us, the more certain we are of it (think advertising!). Finally, we feel more certain of our opinions when we must defend them. If marketers can use these levers to increase certainty in consumers, we are smart to recognize when and how they are operating in our own thinking and

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d­ ecision-­making processes as leaders. These levers point to a kind of certainty autopilot. In the following section, we will explore how we can build our capacity to be uncertain and, thereby, turn off the autopilot when necessary.

Building Uncertainty Capacity If our brains are pushing us toward certainty and this sometimes results in our behaving in ways that are less than ideal, it’s in our interest as leaders to increase our capacity to resist this push and embrace uncertainty. This means tempering the processes of our automatic brains by calling on our slower, deliberate brains—pausing and introspecting. Feel the Tug Toward Certainty We were pleased with how one of our former students, Tom, engaged with uncertainty. Our leadership module in the MBA program encouraged students to pause, introspect, and engage with uncertainty as we are outlining in this chapter. Our module was followed by one on creativity and innovation and then by a unit with lots of numbers and spreadsheets. One of us ran into Tom in the parking lot (not literally), and he reported that he found himself very unsettled by the somewhat unbounded module on innovation and much more comfortable with the spreadsheets and numbers. He said, “I now see how my need for certainty made me very uncomfortable with the discussions about creativity and much more comfortable dealing with concrete numbers and answers.” Tom was engaging in the kind of self-­ inquiry we recommend and noticing his emotional reaction to uncertainty. If we pay attention, we can sometimes feel ourselves getting more certain, nailing things down, eliminating uncertainty. If we can remember to be emotional, as we discussed in Chap. 4, we may be able to track our discomfort in moments when we don’t understand, when we feel uncertain [16]. Maybe we can notice the feeling of satisfaction that emerges when we reach a conclusion, whether that conclusion is warranted or not. In our work on leadership development, one of the ways we encourage people to feel this tug is through a Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) exercise [29]. We invite an “authority” on art, someone who is both a gallery director and a practicing artist, to lead the process. The artist asks the participants to look carefully at a couple paintings. She asks what they see with questions like, “What is going on in this piece?” and “What else can we find here?” As people offer up their interpretations, the artist expertly paraphrases their comments, but does not give any additional insights. We spend roughly 20 minutes closely examining each piece in this manner. At no point during the VTS does the artist provide any “answers,” and then the artist leaves.

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Not surprisingly, people have a variety of reactions to the exercise. Some have a simmering sense of unease with the lack of answers, which they don’t really identify until the discussion afterward. For others, their frustration bubbles up earlier. During the first part of the session, they eagerly provide their interpretations of the work. However, as time passes and the VTS facilitator continues to paraphrase their comments without giving them any indication that one comment is more valuable or more accurate than another, their aggravation can become quite visible and audible with some people crossing their arms, others checking their phones, and others actually groaning. People will often look for clues that can help them know something concrete. During one VTS, an individual snuck behind the easel upon which the painting was sitting to look for information that might be on the back of the piece, and another left the group discussion to ask one of us if we “knew the right answer.” This question embodies much of what we are trying to get people to understand regarding the role of certainty in our lives. It suggests that there is one correct way to view a painting. Even after we have discussed the experience and explained why we have done it, some people will ask if the artist will be returning to explain the paintings. In making sense of the VTS experience, we encourage people to reflect on the uneasiness they felt. The frustration many people feel signals that their brains are searching for certainty. While they may be willing to give their interpretations of what is going on in the work, they get uncomfortable when the facilitator refuses to give them the “correct” interpretation. Resist and Embrace What does it mean to increase your capacity to be uncertain? It involves both resisting and embracing. Some of the elements of resisting include: • Resisting answers, especially if they are simple, or the only, or final [30] • Questioning rather than accepting our initial thoughts about an issue [31] • Being vigilant for our tendency to answer an easier question than the one that is actually vexing us [31] • Rejecting explanations of causation that propose only one cause or suggest that the world unfolds in a strictly linear fashion [5] • Holding out against our powerful inclination to be overly confident [32] • Fighting against our resting state being certainty [5] And the embrace of uncertainty includes: • • • • •

Embracing doubt [16] Living with and even desiring ambiguity [33] Welcoming complexity [5] Recognizing randomness as a powerful factor in human dynamics [31] Asking questions [34]

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• Seeking multiple readings and exploring multiple meanings in the phenomena we encounter [34] • Checking our logic, again and again [21] • Accepting our ignorance [31] • Enjoying when new solutions replace our established wisdom [5] The goal is to notice when our brains are leading us to too much certainty and, thereby, getting us into trouble. If we can live with our uncertainty in those moments—resist and embrace—we increase our chances of replacing common mistakes with uncommon discernment. A junior colleague of ours, Becky, demonstrated what engaging with uncertainty can look like. She was part of a work team that interacted regularly with a person from another department, Mark, who everyone on the work team found difficult. Much time in team meetings was devoted to complaining about Mark, labeling him as arrogant, sexist, and unreasonably demanding. After several sessions discussing Mark, Becky broke from the pack and began to ask questions of herself (and the group). She observed, “You know, I really don’t know much about Mark, and I’ve never asked him what’s behind comments that I and we find offensive. I wonder if I could be making assumptions that really don’t make sense.” The other members of the team were not very receptive to Becky’s reflections, and the group moved on to another topic. A couple meetings later, Mark’s name came up again, and Becky mentioned that she had had a pretty good conversation with him, and the working relationship had improved. She didn’t suggest that a Hallmark ending was imminent, but things were better. Her ability to replace her certainty about Mark with uncertainty had had positive results. The Uncertain Expert Common sense holds that leaders should develop expertise as quickly as possible and exercise that expertise frequently and confidently—but there can be dangers. We won’t bad-mouth expertise. There’s no question that the experience and knowledge of an expert are crucial leadership resources, and yet, there is an important relationship between expertise and certainty/uncertainty that we as leaders need to keep in mind. Remember the story that opened this chapter about the role experts played in making Van Meegeren’s art forgeries possible. The title of a recent book by science writer David H. Freedman highlights what’s at risk: Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them [35]. The book highlights the forces that push experts into mistaken conclusions and flawed advice. The potential pitfall is that as we become more expert, we also become more certain and less likely to engage with uncertainty as we described above, by resisting and embracing. The fine balance to be reached is to use all that we know while keeping in mind that our brains are often pushing us to be more certain than we should be. Our questioning of ourselves needs to become more sophisticated. Noted author Atul Gawande believes the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean

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by expertise. Given the increasing complexity of life, we need to acknowledge that experts need help and experts need to have the humility to accept this need [36]. Ironically, the more expert we get, the greater the danger that our certainty will get us into trouble. The reminder to be uncertain applies to experts, maybe even more than to those of us who are a little lacking on the expertise scale. The reminder from Chap. 3 to be humble is similarly important as is the suggestion to hold our positions lightly. Relatively new leaders can sometimes face another challenge regarding expertise. As we take on leadership responsibilities and are growing into the role, we can often feel like we need to look expert, to establish our authority, and to reassure our bosses that they made the right decision in choosing us. If we’re trying to look expert, even if we don’t feel it, we can push ourselves into acting more certain than we should. Unpacking the layers of certainty and uncertainty in the context of appearing to be competent leaders can be complicated. In addition, our emotions can influence our sense of certainty. In Chap. 4, we talked about the complicated relationship between emotions and task effectiveness. Both positive and negative emotions can contribute to or detract from task effectiveness, depending on the situation and the person. Similarly, it makes sense to examine how the tone of your emotions might be making you more or less certain. For example, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that a by-product of anger is that we “become more certain of our judgments.” [36] They write, “When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.” [37, p. 67] And it isn’t only when we are angry that we are certain. The complacency that accompanies positive emotions can make us inappropriately certain. On the other hand, feelings of sadness and fear can often make us less certain. Tracking the connections between our emotions and our level of certainty is an important component of leading with uncommon sense. Certainty and Social Identities In Chap. 5, we investigated how important it is for leaders to be aware of their own and others’ social identities. The significance of social identities intersects with the certainty/uncertainty dynamics we are exploring in this chapter. Consider this example, again from our travels to Ghana with our students. We were hosted at a quite amazing place called Mmofra Trom. It was a home for AIDS orphans and a school for those orphans and other children in the neighborhood. Olan Adjetey, the inspired thinker behind this project, had developed an innovative strategy that provided a quality home and educational setting in the midst of very significant stress and poverty. When we visited Mmofra Trom, we and our students enjoyed hanging out with the kids, and we volunteered to help with whatever projects matched our lack of expertise. Time and again, our students would almost immediately begin to describe what needed to be fixed and how best to fix it. For example, our young, newly arrived colleagues who had no background in education proposed steps to improve the

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c­ urriculum and the pedagogy in the school. It’s painful to admit that we more seasoned visitors would also fall into believing we had trenchant diagnoses and brilliant solutions for problems that we thought we were seeing. We knew that the students (and we) cared deeply about what we were seeing and spoke with good intentions. But it also demonstrated that our belief that our home country was more developed imbued all of us with a level of certainty about what was needed, despite an almost total lack of knowledge of the situation. When we are members of powerful, advantaged identity groups, it not only blinds us to the fish-in-water advantages from which we benefit, it also can cause us to become committed to our answers that are not supported by evidence and understanding.

Resources for Uncertainty Introspection This chapter’s question for introspection is, “Am I too sure?” as we seek to heed the reminder to be uncertain. As in previous chapters, we’ll offer resources to support this introspection. Hopefully the variety of materials includes some items that you find personally useful as you question yourself and attempt to find a productive balance between certainty and uncertainty in your approach to leadership. Diagnose Your Decision-Making An oft-used tool for leadership development is an exercise that challenges individuals or teams to choose which fictional characters will be retained and which will be jettisoned from a lifeboat, a dangerous river crossing, or a shrinking organizational department. Participants are provided with brief biographies on the basis of which they must determine who will survive and who will not. These exercises can stimulate valuable conversations about ethics, priorities, and decision-making. We have used an employee downsizing exercise, adapted from an activity developed by Professor Tracy Nelson, to encourage people to look at how they manage their certainty and uncertainty during a demanding leadership task [37, p.  67]. Here’s the setup we provide: You are the manager of a marketing department of a large company. You have been informed that due to the unstable environment and recent economic downturn, the company will need to make huge budget cuts in order to survive. You have been asked to eliminate four employees’ positions from your department of eight people. Because the downsizing will probably occur in three or four phases, you must determine which person will be released first, which second, etc. Here are your personal notes about the eight members of your department.

We won’t reproduce notes about all eight department members, but here’s one example to give you a sense of the task. Juan has been with the company for about five years and was placed in your department two years ago to support a previous organizational strategy. He is Latino and has a highly technical bachelor’s degree from a top university. He has a difficult-to-find skill set that is very

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valuable to the company. However technically talented Juan is, there have been complaints that he is not a team player and that he is very difficult to work with. Some of his co-workers have said he is disrespectful and rude. You believe that he may just be socially awkward and not skilled in communicating with others in a team. In his performance reviews, he has received outstanding ratings in areas relating to his technical knowledge, initiatives, and completion of projects. However, you have only rated him average in areas pertaining to teamwork and communication. You have not yet had the chance to work with him on his soft skills.

After people have made their decisions about who stays and who goes (we have them work in teams), we ask them to assess their decision-making processes, putting particular emphasis on how they managed the uncertainty that they faced. To guide this exploration, we have adapted ideas described by leadership thinker Roger Martin in his book, The Opposable Mind [38]. We recommend the concepts of salience, causality, wholeness, and resolution as stimuli for your own introspection. Salience One of the casualties of our brains seeking certainty is that we tend to narrow the range of factors that we consider salient or relevant in a decision-making situation. We oversimplify, avoiding complexity. In the employee downsizing exercise, many variables are significant, yet, often, people will quickly focus on just a few. In Juan’s biography (above), we are given information about tenure with the company, social identities, skill set, team skills, and (lack of) development opportunities he has received. Other biographies highlight such things as personal relationships with you (is this legitimately salient?), political connections, and likelihood of leaving the company. As we introspect to remind ourselves to embrace uncertainty, we are wise to ask ourselves whether we are taking a broad view of what is salient or falling prey to the almost natural tendency to oversimplify. Causality Similarly, when working on a problem, our brains lean toward simple explanations of causation, uncomplicated interpretations of why things are happening as they are. Single causes are settled on; linear patterns of cause and effect are assumed. Instead, leading with uncommon sense calls on us to explore multiple causes, with the cause-and-effect arrows pointing in multiple directions and the chart of the dynamics involved looking more like spaghetti than a simple pipeline. In the employee downsizing exercise, for example, it seems important to consider many causes for the reports about Juan’s teamwork problems. He may have a difficult personality, but he may also be marginalized within the team because he is Latino. He may be unaware of how he affects his teammates and, therefore, not realize that he needs to change his approach. He may be facing serious issues outside of work that shorten

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his fuse when he’s on the job. And many more possibilities exist. It’s productive when pausing and introspecting about your leadership challenges to ask yourself whether you have unknowingly and unintentionally developed a limited and incomplete explanation for why things are occurring. Wholeness As people work on the employee downsizing problem, they sometimes try to make life easier for themselves by focusing on a single component of the challenge and placing other issues on the back burner. For example, as we eavesdrop on the team discussions, we’ll hear, “Let’s just decide who the top performers are and forget about everything else for the moment.” While performance is obviously absolutely crucial, other factors such as those listed in the salience paragraph interact with this dimension, and the interplay must be considered. For example, potential legal exposure, political realities, and long-term prospects need to be part of the equation. It may be easier to look at issues one at a time, but it can result in simplicity and certainty washing out the complexity until it’s too late. Effective decision-makers will rise to the challenge of keeping the whole picture in mind rather than breaking the problem into independent pieces and working on them separately. As we ask ourselves the introspect question, “Am I too sure?”, we can strengthen our self-inquiry by questioning whether we are breaking the whole into parts in a way that will reduce the power of our decision. Resolution One of the greatest tests leaders face is to resist settling for a convenient solution that will provide certainty. Living with the tension of uncertainty and complexity until a creative resolution emerges is much harder than accepting the peace of a certain but mediocre compromise. Quite commonly as people struggle with the multitude of variables and challenging complexity of the employee downsizing exercise, they will become impatient with how complicated the problem is and choose to escape into a simple, almost random solution. Rather than digging deeply into all the salient factors and struggling to understand the multifaceted dimensions of their predicament, they will take the easy way out. A key introspection question to ask ourselves as we seek to avoid being too certain is whether we are abandoning our search for an inspired solution too quickly in order to make the discomfort of uncertainty disappear. We are hoping that someday a super-team will return at the end of the employee downsizing activity having redefined the task. If they brought back a set of questions to be answered and information to be gathered rather than a list of layoffs (as assigned), it would demonstrate a very healthy inclination to avoid moving too quickly to a certain answer. Of course, it would require a willingness to “disobey” the authority figures who are running the exercise, but that’s often a good thing, too.

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It would also stimulate a conversation about time management because one of the elements that makes this activity challenging is the limited time. (Although, it’s probably more realistic to believe the department manager would have some time to assemble relevant facts and details beyond the thirty minutes available in a leadership workshop.) In any case, our suggestion is that leaders are well served if they embrace uncertainty and don’t always color within the lines when seeking to resolve a problem. Monitor your Self-Talk In Chap. 4, we introduced the idea of self-talk, the automatic, reflexive thoughts floating in the background, mostly out of our awareness, operating as a kind of soundtrack to our experiences [5]. We suggested in that discussion that these conversations we have with ourselves are very significant in intensely emotional moments; they also occur when we’re on a relatively even keel. We revisit self-talk here because it often contributes to the brain’s drive toward certainty, causing us to prematurely bring closure to whatever issue we’re wrestling with. Our self-talk can make us more certain that we are correct, but it can also make us inappropriately sure that we are incapable or wrong. One goal of our introspection about certainty/uncertainty should be to bring our self-talk to awareness, asking ourselves whether the monologue in our heads has presented the world as more cut and dried than is actually the case. One of the varieties of self-talk we described in Chap. 4 was jumping to conclusions, the classic example of the brain arriving at a verdict before the evidence is adequate to support it. As we introspect in the service of uncertainty, it is valuable to ask ourselves whether we really know. One of the most effective results of this aspect of our introspection can be to replace “I know” with “I think.” Talking back to our self-talk can help us move off of our hardened positions to productive questions and inquiries. Use Personal Experiences: Unplanned and Planned Personal experiences, both those we stumble into and opportunities we create for ourselves, can provide excellent material for introspection about certainty and uncertainty. A colleague of ours recently completed his MBA in the United States and returned to his home country in Africa to help his family develop a school. Equipped with his shiny new degree and state-of-the-art expertise, he confidently led the process for building the new institution. However, contacts with potential students and their families failed to generate the interest and commitment that he expected, despite the plans for an exciting curriculum and excellent facilities. Luckily, our friend paused and introspected, asking himself what he might be missing and whether he was too certain about what was needed to fashion a successful school. He went back to the families, asking them what was most important to them. He quickly learned that no schooling could succeed if arrangements were not made

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for the students to get food when they arrived at school. Many of the children were quite undernourished and, therefore, incapable of focusing on their studies if they weren’t given something to eat. Experiences like this that don’t go exactly as planned give us excellent opportunities to introspect. Rather than following a natural inclination to explain the problems away or defend ourselves from criticism, we can allow ourselves to be humbled a bit and explore what we overlooked. In the context of this chapter, we can ask ourselves if we rushed to certainty, avoiding the complexity and challenges that were essential to consider in order to come to a satisfactory solution. We can also design experiences with the goal of immersing ourselves in uncertainty so that we can feel the discomfort and look inward to observe how we react. For example, you could create an art-based experience for yourself much like the VTS exercise that we described above. Rather than looking at art with an “expert” and a group of colleagues, you could make a museum visit on your own and try your best to avoid any explanatory information about the works you see, challenging yourself to resist the need for certainty and answers. Focus on what it feels like to not have explanations of what you’re looking at, who the artist is, and when it was done. Paying attention to the rub of uncertainty and the tug toward certainty can help us remember that it is sometimes important to slow down and ask ourselves some questions about what makes us so sure. Of course, travel can be an excellent way to confront ourselves with uncertainty. If we opt for destinations that are unfamiliar, with significant differences in language, customs, food, geography, and other elements, we can learn much about our drive toward certainty, assuming we take the time to introspect. Travel for relaxation and comfort is wonderful; travel that exposes us to difference and challenge can exercise our introspection muscles. Opportunities to plunge into uncertainty need not involve journeying to distant lands. We have routinely given our students a cultural immersion assignment, requiring them to spend time in a local setting in which they were the only person of their race or language or religion or gender. Even being in a nearby city with an unfamiliar subway system to navigate can supply an opportunity to observe how we react to uncertainty. We will once again happily recommend reading literature as a means of developing your leadership competence. Good fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter) often engulfs us in a world of confusion, illusion, and mystery. Our attraction to such work demonstrates that we can have something of a love-hate relationship with certainty. On the one hand, we seek certainty for all the reasons and in all the ways we’ve been discussing. On the other hand, we also look to inject uncertainty in our lives through the books we read, the horror movies we watch, and the new foods we eat. If we harvest the learnings from these exposures to uncertainty by examining how we feel about them and how we react, we can equip ourselves to deal more effectively with uncertainty as leaders. One piece of recent literature that we use to drench ourselves in uncertainty (and explore social identity issues very intensely) is Paul Beatty’s novel, The Sellout, winner of the Man Booker prize [39]. It is truly impossible to provide a brief

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s­ ummary of this rich, outrageous, brilliant story, but here’s just a taste from a review in The Guardian. It is certainly a book in which one gasps frequently—amid deeply uncomfortable laughter and, at times, tears. Nothing is sacred in The Sellout, in which the book’s narrator (surname Me) decides to reinstate segregated schools and reluctantly takes on a slave in his home district of Dickens, Los Angeles. All things, no matter how piously regarded, up to and including the US civil rights movement, are there to be punctured by Beatty’s fierce and fizzing wit [40].

The narrator who reinstates segregated schools and takes on a slave is black. We could read this incredible book ten times and still be swimming in uncertainty. Our larger point is to consider the value of reading material that is not directly related to your professional responsibilities. The abundant world of fine writing waits to stimulate your introspection.

You’re Not Alone As with the introspection questions discussed in the previous three chapters, we don’t need to carry the full weight of introspecting about certainty/uncertainty on our own. Looking inward and asking ourselves about where our brains have taken us are personal work, but we can find support from our relationships and our organizations. This support will only be effective if we actively adopt a learning stance in relation to the input we receive from our organizations and the people around us. If we are to descend from the Ladder of Inference and back off from premature certainty, we must be willing to really question what we thought we knew. As we discussed at the beginning of the book, this can be difficult because our tendency is to be defensive, looking to avoid any appearance that we’ve made a mistake. If introspection is to be productive, we must genuinely explore information that suggests we may have missed something. Your Relationships Hopefully, you have the sense by now that we’re big fans of having a network of close associates who will provide you with genuine support [41], authentic reactions to you and the world. Rather than sanding the edges off their comments so that you’ll hear what you want to hear, these colleagues respect you enough to tell you their truths. It’s easy, especially in challenging moments, to avoid genuine support and seek confirmation instead. Having a network of individuals that is diverse on many dimensions is essential if the support is to be maximally valuable. Genuine support is particularly valuable in connection with our struggle to be uncertain. Because our brains are often pushing us to be more confident and surer than we deserve to be, friends who will name our folly are precious. Ideally, your network of genuine supporters will include people who don’t hesitate to drag you

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back down the Ladder without being asked. As leaders with uncommon sense, we can also seek out such support. In Chap. 3, we suggested a number of probes to use with your network members to help you stay humble. Here’s a parallel list to facilitate your uncertainty: • I’m feeling pretty confident about my diagnosis of this problem. Could you walk through it with me and help me see what I might be missing? • I’ve just about decided on a course of action, but I wonder if I’ve neglected important issues. Please poke holes in my thinking. • I messed up on that decision. How did I get to the wrong conclusion? And remember not to ignore the value of people around you who are not members of your network of genuine supporters. Acquaintances, rivals, occasional collaborators, and even enemies can contribute to our introspection about certainty and uncertainty. If we remember to adopt a learning stance, these people can be sources of extremely valuable information, without even being asked. If we pay attention to the varying perceptions and perspectives of those around us, it can generate fertile new questions for us to ask ourselves to check on whether we’re being too sure. A group of coworkers that can be particularly helpful in helping you avoid premature certainty is newcomers. The longer we are embedded in an organizational culture and a specific set of issues and problems, the more likely we are to accept things as givens. People who bring fresh eyes and ears to a setting and a decision are often less inclined to feel certain about how things work. Leading with uncommon sense includes listening to newcomers with special interest, recognizing that they naturally question “realities” that we take for granted. Your Organization In Chap. 3, we mentioned that organizations are better than individuals in avoiding errors because they naturally think more slowly [42]. In other words, the workplaces in which we operate can force us to scale the Ladder of Inference somewhat less quickly or climb back down if we’ve arrived at the top without even knowing it. Thus, our organizations can help us to pause and introspect. As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, our organizations can also provide several kinds of resources to aid our introspection. Evidence At the bottom of the Ladder of Inference is data, concrete information that we take in from the world around us. Often by the time we have made it to the top of the Ladder, having reached conclusions and adopted beliefs, we have forgotten the data that started us climbing. One of the most valuable resources our organizations can provide to minimize the negative consequences of premature certainty is evidence: ideally extensive, carefully collected information about the problems with which we

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are dealing. We enrich our introspection when we access evidence supplied by our organization and ask ourselves whether we’ve taken it into account as fully as we should have. Organizational evidence can stimulate us to question our assumptions and, as appropriate, back off from decisions of which we’re too certain. Let’s return to the employee downsizing exercise described above in which the task is to decide which four members of an eight-person department are to be let go. The resources provided to participants in this exercise are the manager’s “personal notes” about the eight employees. In real life, a manager could probably have lots of organizational information about these people, input that could enhance the manager’s introspection process and reduce the chances of unwarranted certainty. Leading with uncommon sense means that we check ourselves by consulting information collected by our organizations, looking for the possibility that we have reached conclusions that make sense in our idiosyncratic view but don’t fit when we take a broader look. Practices Day-to-day practices in our organizations can, as Kahneman suggests, slow us down as we clamber up the Ladder of Inference, thereby improving our introspection process [31]. Our challenge is to be able to distinguish between organizational procedures that are needless bureaucracy and those that appropriately require us to back off from our overconfidence. In the context of fast-paced organizational life, it can sometimes be difficult to see the value in organizational systems that slow us down. We have already mentioned in earlier chapters several practices that can facilitate our personal introspection as leaders, including human resources approaches that support consistency and impartiality in hiring, promotions, and terminations. Similarly, meeting processes that support differences of opinion through careful attention to the agenda, encouragement of unpopular positions, and mechanisms to assure that every voice is heard can help leaders who are striving to question their own certainty. Premortems, introduced in Chap. 3, can enable leaders to embrace uncertainty as the team is asked to imagine a future in which the commitment they are about to make has failed, providing the opportunity to slow down and resist the brain’s drive for closure [31]. We can imagine an organization developing certainty/ uncertainty checklists [43] (also discussed in Chap. 3) that would remind decision-­ makers and teams to confirm that they have diagnosed their decision-making as discussed above to make sure salience, causality, wholeness, and resolution have been considered [43].

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Development Opportunities We expect that soon after this book is published, organizations will quickly develop and deliver curricula to introduce their people to the practice of leading with uncommon sense. (The view is excellent from up here on top of the Ladder of Inference.) Maybe that won’t happen, at least immediately, but the ideas of thinkers like Daniel Kahneman, Cordelia Fine, Roger Martin, and Atul Gawande are increasingly part of leadership development opportunities in organizations, bringing attention to the dangers of being too sure and highlighting the importance of pausing to introspect. Exposing ourselves to such ideas can help us develop a more robust set of questions to ask ourselves when we suspect we need to be more uncertain. If you haven’t already done so, you might investigate what your organization has to offer by way of developmental opportunities that will help you remember to ask yourself whether you are being too sure. Organizational Culture Just as the organizational culture in which you live your work life can support your commitments to being humble, emotional, and “impolite,” the culture can assist you in being uncertain. Do the unwritten rules permit or even encourage organizational members to voice their questions and misgivings, including about their own decisions, or is the clear message that you must be confident and certain? What does it really mean to be a leader in your organization? We have found that introducing the Ladder of Inference into the vocabulary of an organizational unit can sometimes create a new cultural element in which colleagues will observe, “I think I may be climbing the Ladder now,” or (more obnoxiously) point out to a coworker, “You’re climbing the Ladder.” But this only happens if the larger organizational culture values uncertainty and recognizes the dangers of too much certainty. As we said in Chap. 4, if your organization’s culture does not support your being uncertain, and the other uncommon-sense reminders, you might explore whether another organizational setting would better support your development and effectiveness as a leader.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the fourth of the introspect questions, “Am I too sure?”. The reminder is to be uncertain—notice and resist your brain’s tendency to push you to premature closure or overconfidence. The common trap we are trying to avoid is failing to notice how we oversimplify in our desire for certainty. We have now explored all four introspect questions. The role of leader may be feeling quite messy to you at this point. We have encouraged you to slow down, pause, and ask yourself a bunch of annoying questions. However, this isn’t the end of the process.

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Now, you must take all the information you have gathered and are continuing to gather and decide what to do. In the next chapter, we will consider how to approach the final component in the practice of the leading with uncommon sense—Act. Ultimately, leaders must take action, no matter how complex the circumstances. This requires insight, courage, and, of course, humility.

References 1. Dolnick E (2009) The Forger’s spell: a true story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the greatest art hoax of the twentieth century. Harper Perennial, New York, p 16 2. Burton RA (2008) On being certain: believing you are right even when you’re not. St. Martin’s Griffin, New York 3. Thompson J (2003) Organizations in action: social science bases of administrative theory. Routledge, New York; Kahneman D (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, p 63; Nurick AJ (1990) Beyond the facts: teaching what we do not know. Organizat Behav Teach Rev 14(4):54–62; Eisold K (2010) What you don’t know you know: our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else. Other Press, New York; Lewis M (2016) The undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds. W. W. Norton, New York. 4. Mintzberg H (2013) Simply managing: what managers do—and can do better. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Oakland 5. Martin R (2009) The opposable mind: how successful leaders win through integrative thinking. Harvard Business Review Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 44–45 6. Argyris C (1982) Reasoning, learning, and action: individual and organizational. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 7. Creelman D (2003) Interview: Robert Putnam, Applying Argyris, HR.Com (October 2003), https://actiondesign.com/resources/readings/applying-argyris 8. Adapted from Argyris, Reasoning and from Ross RB (1994) The ladder of inference. In: Ross PM, Kleiner A, Roberts C, Ross RB, Smith BJ (eds) The fifth discipline Fieldbook: strategies and tools for building a learning organization. Doubleday, New York, pp 242–246 9. Fine C (2008) A mind of its own: how your brain distorts and deceives, vol 105. W. W. Norton & Company; Repr, New York 10. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow, 58. 11. Haidt J (2006) The happiness hypothesis: finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Basic Books, New York 12. Mlodinow L (2012) Subliminal: how your unconscious mind rules your behavior. Pantheon, New York 13. DiSalvo D (2011) What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite. Prometheus, Amherst; T Wilson (2002) Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. Belknap Press, Cambridge; Martin, The opposable mind 14. Eisold K (2010) What you don’t know you know: our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else. Other Press, New York 15. DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy. 16. André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York 17. Alter A (2017) Irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Publishing Group, New York, p 194 18. Eagleman D (2012) Incognito: the secret lives of the brain. Vintage, New York, pp 31–33 19. Lewis M, The undoing project. 20. Fischhoff B, Slovic P, Lichtenstein S (1977) The appropriateness of extreme confidence. J Exp Psychol 3(4):552–564; Edward Russo J, Schoemaker PJH (1992) Managing overconfidence. Sloan Manag Rev 33(2):7–17

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21. Frick W (2018) 3 ways to improve your decision making. Harvard Business Review (January 22, 2018), https://hbr.org/2018/01/3-ways-to-improve-your-decision-making 22. Balcetis E, Dunning D (2006) See what you want to see: motivational influences on visual perception. J Personal Soc Psychol 91(4):612–625; Dunning D, Balcetis E (2013) Wishful seeing: how preferences shape visual perception. Curr Direct Psychol Sci 22(1):33–37. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0963721412463693; Lewis, The undoing project, 43 23. Delpit L (1988) The silenced dialogue. Harv Educ Rev 58(3):280–299 24. Chabris C, Simons D (1999) The Invisible Gorilla. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos. html 25. Alter A, Irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked (pp. 143–145). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 26. Bennis W; Nanus B (1985) Leaders: strategies for taking charge; U.S.  Army Heritage and Education Center (February 16, 2018). Who first originated the term VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity)?. USAHEC Ask Us a Question. The United States Army War College. Retrieved July 10, 2018; DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy 27. Wilson, Strangers to ourselves, 55–56 28. Tormala ZL, Rucker DD (2015) How certainty transforms persuasion. Harv Bus Rev 2015:96–103 29. Yenawine P (2013) Visual thinking strategies: using art to deepen learning across school disciplines. Harvard Education Press, Cambridge 30. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow; Martin, The opposable mind 31. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow 32. Frick, “3 Ways”; André, Looking at mindfulness. 33. Huber N (2003) An experiential leadership approach for teaching tolerance for ambiguity. J Educ Bus 79(1):52–55; Oblinger DG, Verville A-L (1998) What business wants from higher education. American Council on Education/Oryx Press, Phoenix; Stanley Budner NY (1962) Intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable. J Personal 30(1) (March 1962), https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1962.tb02303.x 34. L’Heureux M (2009) Artist’s Statement, Michele L’Heureux, www.michelelheureux.com, accessed 11 November 2009 35. Freedman DH, “David H. Freedman,” https://freedman.com/about-david-h-freedman/ 36. Gawande A (2011) Checklist manifesto: how to get things right. Picador, New York 37. Heath C, Heath D (2007) Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die. Random House, New York, p 67 38. Nelson TA, Critically thinking through reality: a classic exercise infused with real-world scenarios, Unpublished class design shared with author. 39. Mothersill K (2016) Enhancing positivity in cognitive behavioral therapy. Can Psychol 57(1):1–7 40. Beatty P (2015) The sellout. Picador, New York 41. Higgins C (2016) Turned down 18 times: then Paul Beatty Won the Booker…, The Guardian (26 Oct 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/26/ man-booker-prize-winner-paul-beatty-the-sellout-interview 42. Ely RJ, Meyerson D, Davidson M (2006) Rethinking political correctness. Harv Bus Rev 84(9):78–87 43. Klein G (2007) Performing a project Premortem. Harv Bus Rev 85(9):18–19. https://hbr. org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem

Chapter 7

Act

Action is character. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

King Lear, one of history’s most famous leaders, faces a big decision. As the 80-year-old ruler of ancient Britain nears the end of his life, he needs to make plans for the future of his kingdom. He creates a process for making the decision and he acts. Tragically, his actions turn out to be ill-advised, and Shakespeare’s tragedy concludes with a lot of dead bodies. Had Lear used some uncommon sense, things might have turned out differently. The decision-making approach that Lear chose was to divide his kingdom among his successors—his three daughters—giving the largest portion to the one who loved him most. (Maybe not the best criterion on which to base the decision, but anyway…) When he asked each to profess her love, his first two daughters—Goneril and Regan—responded to his question with disingenuous flattery. However, his daughter Cordelia, who was the only one who truly loved him, refused to participate in this competition: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty/According to my bond; nor more nor less” [1]. Lear misinterpreted her honest response and disowned and banished her: “Here I disclaim all my paternal care,/Propinquity and property of blood,/And as a stranger to my heart and me/Hold thee, from this, for ever” [2]. Then, Goneril and Regan are not nice and calamity results. At a pivotal moment in his compelling saga, Lear didn’t think about his thinking; he failed to lead with uncommon sense. Just as pausing provides the time and space to introspect, introspecting furnishes the perspectives that undergird more successful actions. We become aware of a different set of options for how to behave. Lear did not slow down, and he did not follow the introspect reminders discussed in the previous chapters or ask the corresponding questions. He fell into the common traps that characterize our thinking as humans. He was emotional, but not in the uncommon way we recommend. Cordelia’s unwillingness to play the game raised powerful feelings in Lear, but he did not © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_7

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investigate his anger and disappointment or explore what those feelings might be telling him and what the implications might be. It seems likely that Cordelia’s response is an example of genuine support, which we have discussed previously— not necessarily what Lear wants to hear but extremely valuable information for him to have. Nor did he consider the unwarranted satisfaction he felt in response to the nasty daughters’ insincere proclamations. He was certainly not uncertain, as leading with uncommon sense would prescribe. He quickly became very sure of his understanding of the situation and acted rashly. He did not ask himself what might be out of his awareness (e.g., what Cordelia’s response might really mean or what Goneril and Regan might be up to) and, therefore, was anything but humble. And he did not consider all of the social identity dynamics that were complicating the moment—father/daughter, sister/sister, man/woman, elder/younger, and ruler/subject. Lear didn’t pause, he didn’t introspect, and, therefore, his actions were ill-founded and, ultimately, disastrous. On a side note, before we travel too far from Lear and from last chapter’s reminder to be uncertain, consider the possibility that Lear’s creator, Shakespeare, might have been a woman. As you may know, many literary experts have wondered whether William Shakespeare was actually the author of the brilliant works with his name on them. There are good reasons to question whether he was. And there is evidence to suggest that one of the most influential “male” voices in human thinking may have had some connection to the marvelous brain of Elizabethan writer Emilia Bassano. Elizabeth Winkler’s article in The Atlantic might cause you to consider other possibilities about the gender of the author when you next read a Shakespeare sonnet or see one of “his” dramas performed [3]. Not surprisingly, Winkler’s article was not universally applauded. Some experts accused her of engaging in conspiracy theories, a serious concern in a time when such flights of fancy abound. We are not equipped to enter the specifics of this controversy [4]. However, we do appreciate the perspective presented by Sir Mark Rylance, one of the world’s great Shakespearean actors in response to the debate provoked by Winkler’s piece. He observed that being uncertain about how the works were created “has in no way endangered, diminished, or restricted in any fashion my love, my understanding, or my ability to make a living playing Shakespeare,” adding that in fact his uncertainty “has opened my consciousness to a much wider awareness of the universal beauty and multicultural, multidimensional appreciation of the work of Shakespeare that exists in so many different people in so many different ways” [5]. He says it much more eloquently than we did in the previous chapter.

The Need for Action Of course, all of the components of the practice of leading with uncommon sense depicted in Fig. 7.1—pause, introspect, and act—are essential. We’ve spent lots of time on the first two elements, pausing and introspecting, because they make it

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p­ ossible for us to act with uncommon sense and avoid the traps of common-sense thinking. Now it’s time to move to action. Without the action element discussed in this chapter, slowing down and self-reflecting would be almost meaningless. As Stanford psychologist John Flavell warns, “Think of the feckless obsessive, paralyzed by incessant critical evaluation of his own judgments and decisions” [6]. And Christophe Andre, one of our favorite resources about meditation, observes “We always return to action in the end. Meditation itself loves action, otherwise it goes around in circles. We meditate before acting, after acting and even while we are acting” [7]. Fig. 7.1  The practice: act

The approaches to pausing and introspecting that we have discussed in the previous chapters make life messier. Acting in the midst of the mess requires courage and risk-taking from leaders. Let’s return to your favorite woman writer, Shakespeare, who also created (in addition to Lear), a poster boy for navel-gazing paralysis, Hamlet. Lacking the capacity to move to action, he stewed in his own juices incessantly and gave us one of the most important soliloquies of all time. A key reason why we can get stuck in our introspection is that the act element of the practice of leading with uncommon sense adds the interpersonal onto the intrapersonal. Pausing and introspecting are primarily internal processes, happening within us. When we move to action, we almost always become engaged with others. We believe the interior work of slowing down and asking ourselves important questions is a crucial underpinning to effectiveness with those around us. But it is in our behaviors that we actually bump up against the reactions of our various publics. This can be daunting. One technique that can be helpful to nudge yourself from introspection to action is to publicly report results from your self-questioning. For example, you might reveal details about your perceptions, memories, and decision shortcuts that you discovered when you asked yourself, “What is out of my awareness?”. Or, as we’ve already suggested in Chap. 4, you might disclose the emotions you identified when you asked, “What are my emotions telling me?”. Your social identities introspection—“Am I neglecting people’s differences?”—may provide valuable insights that you could share about consequences that seem to be resulting from the identity groups to which you and others belong. And finally, you could divulge the tugs toward certainty that you recognized when you asked yourself, “Am I too sure?”, as well as your remaining uncertainties. Announcing what you learned, so far, from your introspection can help you bridge from intrapersonal to interpersonal work.

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Uncommon Principles for Action Leading with uncommon sense demands action. But what approaches to action can leaders use to reduce the likelihood that they will fall prey to the limitations of leading with common sense? We offer six principles for action designed to take full advantage of the pausing and introspecting that we have described in the earlier chapters: 1 . Be consciously powerful 2. Be impolite (sound familiar?) 3. Distrust yourself 4. Proact 5. Re-Act 6. Go to sleep Be Consciously Powerful Imagine that while you are managing a team meeting, a middle-aged man who reports to you steamrolls over a young woman team member, interrupting her mid-­ sentence and dismissing her idea as naive and silly. She responds to the intrusion by saying, with some emotion in her voice, that she would like to finish her thought. The offending team member offers a mock apology and tells his woman colleague not to be so sensitive. What do you do? A crucial principle of leading with uncommon sense is recognizing the power that you possess in your leadership role and using it effectively, based on a deep understanding of the dynamics at play. One of our favorite leadership ideas is discretionary power. We learned this concept from one of the pioneers in diversity and inclusion work, Dr. Elsie Cross, but others have explored the fundamental notion using different language [8]. In almost all situations, leaders have a range of options for exercising power; they have discretion. For example, in the scenario above, the following options for dealing with the less-than-ideal behavior of your team member might be available. In rough order according to seriousness, you could: • Do nothing • Say something after the meeting to the woman who was steamrolled, offering your support • Say something to the offender in private after the meeting, expressing your displeasure with his behavior • Say something immediately in the meeting, making clear that such behavior is unacceptable • Place this incident on the agenda for the next team meeting and raise your concerns about what happened

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• Meet with the offender and create a personal development plan to be implemented • Write up the offender and add the reprimand to his personnel file • Fire the offender In this situation, we would probably not recommend that you respond immediately, given how valuable it is to pause. Beyond that, choosing from the menu of options should be facilitated by asking yourself the introspection questions we have discussed in the previous chapters. Often leaders will not recognize such a continuum of choices. Common-sense leadership seems to depend on cutting to the chase. We often focus very quickly on one specific option for action. Settling quickly on one choice is our unconscious mind at work, using a decision-making shortcut as described in Chap. 3 to limit the possibilities in the name of efficiency. It’s also our brain simplifying the situation in the interest of certainty, as discussed in Chap. 6. Asking ourselves what might be out of our awareness and whether we’re too sure can help us identify the range of options available to us. The example of your steamrolling team member highlights that it is also important to ask ourselves what our emotions are telling us, the introspection question from Chap. 4. It would be especially important to track your own emotional response in this moment, given that the woman team member’s emotion was evident. It’s likely that your emotions are raised if hers are. Rather than employing a commonsense approach to emotions by ignoring or avoiding what is coming up for you, tracking your own feelings may well help you discover other options for action that are available to you in this moment. Social identities are always in play, increasing or decreasing your discretion and changing your choices. Asking yourself whether you are neglecting social identities, the introspection question from Chap. 5, can uncover important information about how your mix of identities gives you more or less power, as well as how others’ social identities may be affecting their experience of the situation. For example, in the flow of daily work, straight white men in many organizations can often speak up with less risk than can people of color, women, or LGBTQ people. Therefore, a straight white man might want to look for opportunities to advocate for colleagues who would face greater peril if they expressed their opinion [9]. But, and this is a significant but, that straight white man ideally pays attention also to the possibility that such advocacy could undermine the colleague he is trying to support, rescuing a person who doesn’t need to be rescued. In assessing the discretionary power that you possess in any given moment, it is crucial to examine the situation in which you are operating, keeping in mind that our perceptions of the circumstances are always subject to the limitations, distortions, and influences we explored in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6. We need to hold our diagnosis of the situation lightly, even factors that seem to be “facts.” Specific situational factors that might affect how you act include roles and relationships, timing and location, and appropriate decision-makers.

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Roles and Relationships Roles and relationships are important elements of the situation when leaders are deciding how to use their discretionary power. Leaders may typically be aware of the most obvious formal roles that are relevant in a leadership moment—who’s the boss, who’s the team member, who’s the customer, etc. It’s less typical that we think about the informal roles that people inhabit. For example, is anyone an informal leader and, therefore, capable of exercising at least as much influence as we can as the formal leader? Is there a class clown present who needs to be taken into account? Is there a conscience of the group who needs to be supported in asking about the ethical implications? Similarly, leaders are wise to assess the web of relationships that exist in any given situation. Who are your friends, enemies, and advocates and what alliances exist among those involved? For example, in the steamrolling incident above, your available courses of action could be affected by whether the offender and the victim have strong supporters on the team and whether you do. Timing and Location Elements of a leadership situation also affect when and where we should act. What should I do now? Later? In the incident above, there may be good reasons not to stop the meeting to deal with the steamrolling moment, and yet not doing so could understandably lead others to believe that you do not see the man’s behavior as a problem. And it frequently matters whether an action is taken in public or in private. Private actions can allow others to save face and be more authentic, but public behaviors make clear statements about what norms are central to the culture. Appraising such things as who is present, what else is going on, and the emotional temperature in the room helps answer the when and where questions. Decision-Makers An important aspect of using discretionary power is deciding who, if anyone, should be involved in decision-making, besides yourself. The classic Vroom-Yetton-Jago model presents one approach to navigating this challenging terrain [10]. The model describes three basic decision-making styles: (1) autocratic, in which you decide alone; (2) consultative, in which you gather input from others before making the decision; or (3) group decision-making, in which you turn the decision-making responsibility over to the relevant team members. The model also specifies characteristics of the situation that should guide the leader in determining which approach makes the most sense. The situational factors include such things as time constraints, level of knowledge and commitment in the group, information available, and the importance of the decision. This is just one framework to assist leaders as they exercise their discretionary power, but it points to the larger importance of leaders considering whether they are being too autocratic in their decision-making

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or, alternatively, abdicating their responsibility in order to avoid accountability. And the model highlights the even more significant need for leaders to read the situational dynamics as they decide how to act. Be Impolite Our reminder in Chap. 5 was to be “impolite.” In encouraging you to introspect about social identities (yours and others’), we recommended that you increase your leadership capacity by rejecting the common-sense notion that it is impolite to notice and talk about things like race, religion, sexual orientation, and other social identities. We argued against the idea that it’s better to ignore social identities for fear of fostering discrimination or conflict. Such group memberships have a profound impact on how people perceive the world and are perceived by the world and, therefore, are crucial to factor into any situation. Now, as we consider uncommon principles for leadership action, we return to this advice, proposing that effective leaders are willing to behave in ways that many people would see as lacking common sense and even as bad manners. Failing to be a little impolite can significantly reduce the range of options a leader has to exercise discretionary power. In order to act impolitely, leaders must adopt a couple key attitudes. First, we must dare to make people uncomfortable, beginning with ourselves [9]. Some of us are quite comfortable with our own and others’ discomfort, but many more of us studiously or unconsciously avoid any whiff of interpersonal tension. For example, The Boston Globe, in an article on bias, introduced readers to Tram T. Nguyen, a Massachusetts State Representative, who is often misperceived to be a legislative aide. Nguyen said that when having to correct the mistake, “I try and reduce their embarrassment” [11]. We often observe students, from youthful undergrads to middle-­aged grad students, shying away from conflict in our classrooms seeming to feel that something must be wrong if people are disagreeing. Avoiding interpersonal discomfort reduces the possibility of our learning about all of the ways in which the limitations of our cognitive capabilities can get us into trouble. We encourage a mindset that engages with such discomfort. Related to this attitude of daring to live with discomfort is a second important orientation—eschew the path of least resistance. Rejecting the easy and obvious approach and opting instead for a path of greater resistance allow us to take actions that result in uncommonly good outcomes [9]. The path of least resistance often means remaining silent, doing nothing, and continuing business as usual. While there are certainly moments when these are the most desirable actions, it’s crucial that they be chosen consciously from the options on the continuum of discretionary power, rather than having them operate as a default choice out of our awareness. It’s worth asking ourselves if we are taking the easy way out to avoid disagreement or being seen as disagreeable. We might ask ourselves whether we tend to have a worldview that says don’t rock the boat, don’t look for trouble, or are we willing to make things more complicated when necessary.

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And we might reflect on whether we have social identities that give us power but also allow us to take the easy way out without significant personal consequences. By definition, the status quo favors those whose identities are seen as normal and valuable as opposed to those who are marginalized. Therefore, doing nothing can be useful to those with power. With these two attitudes as essential underpinnings—daring to make people uncomfortable and eschewing the path of least resistance—we offer these specific impolite leadership behaviors: name it; discuss the undiscussable; embrace disagreement, even conflict; and be assertive. These four types of actions are interconnected and interwoven. Name It One of the most productive actions leaders can take is naming what they see happening and not happening around them. Specifically, “calling” behaviors, activities, and decisions that may seem not quite right is an essential component of leading with uncommon sense. Naming those moments or patterns that strike you as questionable can bring to the awareness of all involved dynamics that have been operating under the surface or unconsciously. For example, expressing your discomfort with a colleague’s attempt at humor that seems to diminish a coworker may seem like a minor thing or even overly sensitive, but it could minimize immediate damage and uncover larger issues [9]. Of course, it’s important to adopt a learning stance (as discussed in Chap. 1) when naming what you see. If, instead, you appear to be holier than thou, correcting others and showing off your profound insights, you are likely to not only alienate everybody in the room but also lose the opportunity to gain an understanding of some of your own blind spots. When you name your perceptions and conclusions, you help others realize what they might have been missing, but also you can gather information about the holes in your analyses when others respond to your observations. Discuss the Undiscussable As leaders we can highlight the phenomena that we notice going on around us that could be problematic and name them. And we also get to put items on the agenda and, thereby, make the undiscussable a topic of discussion. Both of us have had the experience of leading a hiring process and managing a discussion of what qualifications the ideal candidate would possess. Often the polite approach to such conversations is to allow the assumption that we are looking for the best person, regardless of social identity issues such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. In fact, in many cases legal prohibitions seem to suggest that such issues cannot be considered. However, in several searches that we’ve managed, the current demographics of the organizational unit were badly skewed—no people of color, all men (or all women),

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and no people from religious minorities, despite the fact that the actual work being done by the unit related directly to such social identity issues. Typically, injecting such issues into the conversation has resulted in some tension and, frequently, overt disagreement. But ultimately the discussion has been more complete and clearer when such undiscussable elements are added. As we explored at length in Chap. 4, emotions can be another undiscussable. As an example of how these leadership actions intertwine, one opportunity for discussing the undiscussable is by naming emotions in the room or in a decision-making process that seem to be having an important but unspoken impact. We have probably all had the experience of seeing a coworker shut down during a discussion in response to a disappointment or a harsh comment from another person. Commonsense leadership tells us to keep emotion out of it, but leading with uncommon sense recommends that we discuss the undiscussable by carefully reporting your own emotional reaction to the person’s withdrawal (worry, distraction, annoyance) and investigating what might be happening with that person. The language we use as leaders can implicitly bring undiscussable issues into the deliberations. We can be better leaders when we routinely express our humility by saying “maybe”, or “I think that’s what I saw”, or by describing our emotional responses and inquiring about others’ feelings about what you’re doing or by naming the relevant social identities rather than avoiding any label that could be interpreted as discriminatory. Social identities remain undiscussable if we pretend they are invisible. And, finally, the language we use about our and everyone else’s level of certainty matters. If we say we’re feeling very sure and that scares us, or that the decision seems to be moving forward scarily fast, we may annoy our coworkers, but we may also make better decisions. Embrace Disagreement, Even Conflict It seems difficult to decide whether we, as a species, are doing a better or worse job of dealing with the disagreement and conflict that are an inevitable part of our lives together. The potential for conflict to be a productive component of organizational life (in addition to sometimes being a destructive one) has become a mainstream principle in leadership [12]. Our observation, however, is that many of us and many of our organizations operate more often from a common-sense belief that conflict is bad and to be avoided. For some of us, conflict aversion seems to be a component of our personality. It feels bad to conflict with other people so we do what we can to avoid such moments, and, when we find ourselves in them, we exit as quickly as we can, either actually or in effect. Superficial harmony is preferable to disagreement and conflict [13]. Embracing disagreement and conflict relies on the attitudes discussed above—daring to make ourselves and others uncomfortable and not taking the path of least resistance. In deciding how to behave when disagreement and conflict occur, it is useful to make a distinction between task conflict and relationship conflict [14]. Most research suggests that discord related to the actual work being done and how best to do it is

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often healthy and needed. On the other hand, personal conflict in organizations usually is counterproductive. Accordingly, leaders are usually well-served to wade into disagreement and conflict about the work, maybe even encourage it, even if doing so is seen as impolite by others. Leaders are also wise to do their best to manage and resolve personal, relationship conflicts that intrude into the flow of the day. What does embracing disagreement or conflict look like in action? You will not be shocked to hear that we think it begins with pausing and introspecting. Slowing down and asking yourself about the four introspection issues set the stage for action. Some specific leadership actions for encouraging productive disagreement and conflict are as follows: assigning a devil’s advocate role; supporting minority opinions, especially as a group is nearing consensus; asking seemingly impolite questions about the flaws in others’ arguments; and inviting feedback about the drawbacks of your own thinking. Wiley had an interesting conversation with a man who was following up on a workshop discussion in which the phenomenon of women often being interrupted or talked over in meetings was highlighted. He explained that he had a woman on a team he led who often derailed conversations with comments that were off topic. His dilemma was that he didn’t want to interrupt her and, thereby, contribute to the dynamic of women being disempowered, but he also didn’t want her to hijack the discussion in unproductive ways. Wiley asked if he had worked with her one-on-one to develop her capacity to reduce her unhelpful input. He said he had but that the situation had improved only slightly. Wiley’s next suggestion was that he wade into this conflictual situation even further by sharing his concern about cutting her off and diminishing her overall status on the team. We haven’t had a follow-up conversation to see if he implemented this recommendation and, if so, how it worked, but we’re hopeful it helped. Be Assertive In Chap. 4 when we were discussing emotions, we talked about being assertive, submissive, and aggressive [15]. The fundamental idea at the heart of assertiveness is that we have the right to express our wants, needs, thoughts, and feelings—in a way that respects the rights of others. Doing so is assertive behavior [15]. Not exercising your right to express yourself is submissive behavior. Expressing yourself without concern for the rights of others is aggressive behavior. Often our underlying fear when we choose to act submissively is that if we stand up for ourselves, we’ll be seen as unreasonable or aggressive. If we continually fail to speak up for ourselves, we can flip to the other extreme and lash out; we can become aggressive. We act without concern for the other person’s rights or needs. Imagine that you’re in a meeting with your boss and several colleagues at your level. One of your coworkers, Chris, presents a proposal for a new program that you believe will have a significantly negative impact on you and your department. It’s particularly frustrating to you because Chris presented the idea to you some time ago and you are confident that you clearly expressed your concerns. You wonder

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whether Chris is deliberately undermining you. The situation is even more complicated because your boss and Chris play Ultimate Frisbee together and seem to be good friends. A submissive response to this situation would be to say nothing and not express your worries and your irritation. An aggressive response would be to attack both the proposal and Chris personally, explaining that you have already detailed the negative consequences of the idea and questioning Chris’s intentions and ethics in bringing the proposal forward. An assertive statement in this situation would clearly and directly express your concerns about the proposal and its potential impact on you and your department. Ideally, assertive responses are “I-statements” that report your thoughts, feelings, and needs without making blaming statements toward others: “I believe this proposal has these specific downsides… and I am concerned that it will harm the people in my department and our efforts to do a good job,” rather than “You are advancing a proposal that is short-sighted and selfish, and you have failed to consider anybody but yourself.” It’s important to consider the organizational context when deciding to make an assertive statement. Some organizational cultures and coworkers are uncomfortable with direct, assertive expressions. They see assertiveness as rude. If you have chosen to behave submissively in the past, people may be taken by surprise by your being assertive. Individual conversations with colleagues to prepare them for your assertiveness may be useful. And, once again, social identities can be very important. Women, people of color, and members of other marginalized groups may need to be particularly alert to the potentially negative reactions they could receive to assertive behavior [16]. Having assertively expressed your thoughts and feelings, it is particularly useful to wrap up your statement by inviting input from the other people who are involved. Adopt a learning stance. Asking the same simple question that we suggested several times previously, “What am I missing?”, is a good way to solicit information that is beyond your awareness or at odds with your view of the situation. It also is a reminder to be humble and uncertain. All of these versions of being impolite—namely, discussing the undiscussable, embracing disagreement and conflict, and being assertive—can be uncommon approaches to leadership. When informed by pausing and introspecting, they can contribute to uncommonly good results. Distrust Yourself We don’t mean for the title for this third uncommon principle for action to be quite as harsh as it sounds, but we do contend that it’s important for leaders to not believe everything they think [17]. While we don’t want to undermine self-confidence, we do recommend guarding against the very common malady of overconfidence, which we discussed in Chap. 6. Being confident is a familiar component of common-sense leadership. But as we have said many times above, we think it’s important to hold your opinions and beliefs lightly. It makes sense to prepare to be wrong [18].

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Bias is another important reason to lean toward distrusting yourself. Especially in Chaps. 3 and 5, we explored how biases can affect our thinking. Decision-making shortcuts that function unconsciously and implicit biases related to social identities can reduce our effectiveness as leaders. And the more successful we become as leaders, the more dangerous our biases can become because we are being reinforced in our decision-making strategies and more likely to believe that we’ve got the knack. Our confidence that we’re in control and our certainty about our judgment can blind us to our cognitive limitations. In addition, it’s easy for our self-esteem to feel threatened if we open ourselves to the possibility that we’re biased—being biased seems like a moral failing. Hopefully, pausing to introspect can at least remind us that biases are inevitable. Our self-questioning can heighten our awareness of the dangers and sometimes even help us identify the specifics of those biases. Psychologists and decision-­ making researchers have coined the term debias to describe activities designed to reduce our biases [19]. (Kind of reminds us of delousing.) Not surprisingly, given all of the challenges we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, debiasing is extremely difficult. Typically, the best we can do is to discover traces of our biases and change our path before too much damage is done. Actually, eliminating biases is usually not in the cards or is a long and laborious process. We’ll suggest several specific behaviors that can help you distrust yourself: behave as if you believe it [20]; use checklists [21]; find the third story [22]; and adopt the outside perspective [23]. Behave as if You Believe It “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitudes and feelings” [20]. Social psychologist Timothy Wilson, whom we met in Chap. 2, offers this observation in contrast to the commonly held notion that we need to first change what we believe or how we feel if we want to change our behavior. This realization makes the act component of leading with uncommon sense even more important. Choosing new ways of behaving, even if they feel awkward or uncomfortable, can be the first step rather than a follow-on to a changed belief. And, this strategy can also help us to be uncertain, the reminder discussed in Chap. 6. If we opt to behave in a way that is inconsistent with our current belief, it necessarily calls that belief, and our certainty about it, into question. Let’s imagine that you want to enact the reminder from Chap. 3 to be humble— because so much is out of our conscious awareness. Many of us have had the experience of starting a promotion process with a strong sense (certainty, maybe?) of who the best person is to move up in the organization. It seems to make sense to choose the obvious person and move forward without wasting time. A humbler approach would be to carefully consider all the candidates in a systematic, structured way, a process that would recognize that there could be important elements of the decision

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that are outside of your awareness. Ultimately, this may actually save time because you avoid a failed promotion which could result in poor results or having to go through the process again. Using a humble approach in this situation could feel disingenuous and unnecessary. After all, you know who the best person is. However (and this is the crucial aspect of this technique), simply behaving humbly, even when not motivated by your genuine attitude or emotion, may begin to reshape your perspective. You can come to realize that your initial choice may not have been the best because you were not considering factors outside of your awareness. Behaving as if humility is the best approach to leadership can serve as a mechanism to move us toward actually believing that such an approach is best and making it a more natural component of how we lead with uncommon sense. Use Checklists Another behavior that can help as you remember to distrust yourself is to use checklists. We mentioned this resource in Chap. 3 as an aid to humility introspection, particularly around the danger of using decision-making shortcuts inappropriately. Checklists can also assist us as we pursue effective leadership actions. Checklists acknowledge that our brains are often overloaded, our memory is frequently faulty, and our decision-making can be unreliable. Gifted surgeon and social thinker Atul Gawande described the use of checklists in the operating room in his book The Checklist Manifesto [21]. He argued that checklists are necessary not because the professionals lack knowledge but rather because the complexity of the task environment can make application of that knowledge difficult. Think about the depth and volume of expertise required, the life and death stakes, the time pressure, and the highly sophisticated technology that create a setting that demands more than our brains can always handle. One simple way to build checklists into the practice of leading with uncommon sense is to use the four introspection questions discussed in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6 as guides not only for your self-questioning but also in decision-making processes with the individuals, teams, and organizations you are leading. The checklist questions to consider as you and your colleagues choose which actions to take could be: • • • •

What is out of our awareness? What are our emotions telling us? Are we neglecting people’s differences? Are we too sure?

Routinely addressing these issues as part of the processes that you and your people use to decide what to do can help to reduce the negative impacts of our brain’s limitations.

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Find the Third Story Among the many valuable ideas in their excellent book, Difficult Conversations, Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen highlight the importance of finding the invisible “third story” when you are struggling to find common ground with another person [22]. There is your story, there is the other person’s story, and there is the third story, which rings true for both parties who are straining to hear each other. The third story sees the validity in both of the contesting positions and appreciates the situation from the viewpoint of an observant outsider who doesn’t have a dog in the fight. The third story is not a solution to the dispute but rather a starting point that captures a full and respectful understanding of how both party’s positions exist concurrently. While serving in a departmental leadership role, Duncan found himself in a conflict with a colleague, Frank, over how best to communicate with an external person who was a potential resource on an upcoming project. Frank had originally developed a relationship with the outside person, but Duncan had also come to know her some. Frank was anxious to make contact to discuss the project because he wanted to do everything possible to nurture his valuable relationship with her. He worried that Duncan could mess things up. Duncan wanted to reach out directly to the external person rather than through Frank because he was concerned that using an intermediary could both compromise his role as leader of the new project and increase the likelihood of miscommunication about the details. He was annoyed that Frank was being a roadblock to progress. Ultimately, Duncan and Frank were able to have a conversation and write the third story together, which allowed them to understand each other’s concerns in the situation. They decided to get in touch with the external person jointly, which met both of their needs, and everyone lived happily ever after. A leader need not fully, or even partially, understand the other person’s story in order to begin bringing the third story into the discussion as a helpful tool. Simply saying that you know the other person sees the situation differently and you want to understand their position frees you up from the stalemate of the two conflicting stories. Of course, you can also use this idea when acting as a mediator between two colleagues who are locked in battle. A cousin to finding the third story is assuming a both/and perspective rather than allowing yourself to be stuck in an either/or position. Adopt the Outside Perspective We have often been entertained by the naiveté of friends who offer wildly optimistic predictions about how quickly home remodeling projects in which they are engaged will be completed. We’ve smirked as they have ignored the countless pieces of evidence making obvious that contractors will be juggling multiple jobs, new problems will be discovered, and suppliers will be behind schedule. Everybody except the people doing the project knows that it is likely to take at least twice as long as prom-

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ised. Wait! We’ve done the very same thing during our remodeling adventures and ended up cooking dinner for 12 on a hot plate in the basement. Why do we so often delude ourselves into believing that our case will be different? Once again, Daniel Kahneman comes to the rescue in explaining human folly. (You may remember that he has already taught us much in Chaps. 1, 3, and 6.) He and his colleague Dan Lovallo describe how such overly optimistic forecasts result from our taking an “inside perspective,” which focuses on the particular case at hand and ignores data about the large class of cases similar to the current one [24]. The “outside perspective,” in contrast, pays attention to the set of experiences of which this one situation is an example and, based on that collection of information, resists unrealistic optimism stemming from our personal desires. The familiar phenomenon of groupthink as well as the danger of emotional contagion discussed in Chap. 4 can help to push teams toward an inside perspective and poor decision-making. Kahneman tells the story of leading a project team that was designing a new educational curriculum. After the team had been working for about a year, he asked all members to write down independently how much longer they thought it would take to complete the task. The estimates ranged from 18 to 30 months. Kahneman then asked one of the team members, a distinguished expert in curriculum design, what his experience was with the many similar projects in which he had participated. The expert reported that 40% of the teams on which he had worked had never completed the project. The teams who did finish took no less than 7 additional years (and no more than 10). Kahneman asked the expert whether there was anything significantly different about this team that would predict a different timetable. The expert said no. The initial estimates from team members were the inside perspective. The expert offered the outside perspective. (We do wonder what he wrote down as his estimate initially!) As leaders we can encourage the outside perspective by explicitly asking about the category of phenomena of which the current circumstance is an example (as Kahneman did) and by pushing ourselves and others to explain why our current pet project should be different, and better, just because we want it to be. Proact Many of the challenges that leaders face require a response to events happening around them. But leadership is not only reaction. As we mentioned above when recommending that leaders discuss the undiscussable, we also have the opportunity to put items on the agenda. Some of these items are in reaction to the circumstances we find ourselves in, but we can also take initiatives and set directions that break new ground. While the line between reacting and proacting is often quite fuzzy, we leaders need to look for opportunities to use our discretionary power to blaze new trails. Thus, one of the uncommon principles for action is proact. We don’t contend that a common-sense approach to leadership argues against being proactive. However, common-sense proactivity tends to be cautious and

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s­ omewhat risk averse and does not rely on the uncommon principles for action that we’ve been discussing—use your discretionary power, be impolite, and distrust yourself. Examples of proactive actions a leader can take are developing a new policy or procedure; initiating a conversation about a topic generally thought to be too sensitive; placing colleagues in positions that people of their social identities have traditionally not held; or stimulating consideration of a service or product not typically seen as part of the organization’s identity. Pausing and introspecting cannot only help us respond effectively to what comes at us but also see openings for unexpected actions. Consider a few opportunities leaders might have to be proactive that relate to our introspect questions. In our discussion of social identities in Chap. 5, we explored the phenomenon of fault lines, when team members connect more strongly with other members who share important social identities with them. (And we raised the possibility that leaders themselves can be affected by such attractions.) Such fault lines often lead to subgrouping within the team, which can easily be a negative influence on productivity and satisfaction. We recommended watching out for fault lines and being ready to step in if they form. Leaders can also take a proactive approach to fault lines. Looking carefully at the social identities of team members and making task assignments accordingly is one way. Proactively discussing the undiscussable is another. Typically, team leaders do not raise the possibility of schisms occurring in a team, worrying that mentioning the possibility will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. But impolitely getting out in front of the hazard and making it discussable can often increase the team’s capacity to surface very human dynamics and deal with them productively [25]. When fault lines are effectively managed, the team can leverage the differences among the team members for greater success. A similar proactive leadership action is to build emotions into the routine activities of work. The simple practice of “checking in” at the beginning of a staff meeting to see how each person is doing can legitimize the expression of emotions and value what they could be telling the group. Such check-ins are much more likely to be effective if the leader models self-disclosure of feelings. We are not suggesting a therapy session but do believe that discussion of work-related emotions can have the benefits discussed in Chap. 4 and can be proactively built into daily work life. The premortem technique, discussed in Chaps. 3 and 6, is another proactive leadership behavior that can lead to uncommonly productive results. As an organization nears a commitment to a project or decision, the leader initiates the premortem by asking people to transport themselves to a time in the future when the project being considered has crashed spectacularly. Those assembled individually identify as many causes for the failure as they can. The ensuing discussion surfaces dangers that may have been overlooked and possibly forestalls disaster. Leaders can proactively create an environment in which everyone is supported in acting with uncommon sense as they go about their work. Providing time for people to pause, encouraging humility and uncertainty, recognizing the power and importance of emotions, and attending to the significance and value of social identities are

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not common ways of exercising leadership. Nourishing such an environment not only makes the leader more effective but also fosters a healthier climate for everyone else. In Chap. 8 we will consider in detail how leaders can facilitate such an environment. Re-act If you’ve never had the experience of being tongue-tied during a stressful interaction and then hours (or minutes!) later coming up with the perfect thing you should have said, we’d like to meet you. This seems like one of the most common human experiences, and it speaks very directly to the next uncommon principle for action—re-act. Very frequently we have another opportunity to act after we’ve failed initially, if we recognize it and take it. Having paused and introspected after a frustrating leadership moment, we are equipped to understand more of what was going on and choose a course of action that will clean up at least some of the mess. Sometimes common sense suggests that we shouldn’t cry over spilled milk or that it’s more important to move on than to revisit problematic moments that made us look bad. Let’s return one last time to the steamroller example described above. As you recall, during a team meeting, one of your male team members dismissed the contributions of a younger female member. One of the possibilities we listed for using your discretionary power was “Place this incident on the agenda for the next team meeting and raise your concerns about what happened.” This is an example of re-­ acting. We’re not claiming that this is the “right” answer from the list because there is not a single correct approach. It does remind us, however, that we often have a second chance and, often, we are better prepared to deal with unsatisfying choices we’ve made when we come back to them having self-reflected and sorted through what may have been happening and why. Go to Sleep We’re feeling a little worn out as we near the end of this chapter. Luckily, as soon as we finish this section, we’re going to head off to sleep. Our final uncommon principle for action is go to sleep, reprising our discussions in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 about the importance of sleep for leaders. (Are you tired of our discussing this?) In those earlier discussions, we recommended sleep as a way to pause, deal with our cognitive limitations, and manage our emotions. Here we want to highlight that the benefits of sleep are even broader. Sleep does help us get some distance from difficult decisions and, thereby, make better choices, but it also contributes to our overall well-being and our thinking capacity. The act of sleeping makes us more effective in our other leadership actions. In his outstanding book about sleep, Why We Sleep, researcher Matthew Walker offers this advertisement for sleep:

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AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested? [26, p. 107]

Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health [26]. Sleep refreshes us emotionally, contributes to our remembering the details of our experiences, and helps us integrate what we learn with what we already know and who we are. Sleep actually flushes out toxins that develop in our brains while we’re awake, literally clearing the mind [27]. And yet there is an epidemic of sleep deprivation in our society [28]. As mentioned in Chap. 2, two-thirds of adults in developed nations do not sleep the recommended 8 hours per night. Common sense seems to say that we can sacrifice sleep to work more hours or pack more into our days. Sleep deprivation has negative effects on cognitive functioning, emotional regulation [29], attention, reasoning, learning, and memory [30]. Many of us need to change our sleep habits significantly. (Check out the National Institutes of Health “Tips for Getting a Good Night’s Sleep” in the institute’s magazine MedlinePlus [31]). For example, despite increasing evidence of the negative effects of screen time before sleep, 95% of adults use an electronic device that emits light in the hour before bed. More than half of adults check their emails overnight. Sixty percent of adults keep their phones next to them when they sleep [32]. Getting a good night’s sleep has truly become an uncommon action.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored the final step in the practice of leading with uncommon sense—act. Previous chapters have emphasized the importance of slowing down and reflecting inwards, but this crucial work is meaningless if leaders fail to act. Self-knowledge that is not mobilized in leadership behavior is wasted. We have suggested six uncommon principles for leadership action: be consciously powerful, be impolite, distrust yourself, proact, re-act, and go to sleep. Our hope is that these approaches to leadership behavior can provide productive alternatives to common-sense notions of leadership that often fail to produce the results we want. In the next, and final, chapter, we will consider how leaders can break common-sense habits of leadership and implement uncommon habits. We will also look at the role of organizations in leading with uncommon sense, and we will challenge you with an extended case example of leading with uncommon sense.

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References 1. Shakespeare W (2015) The tragedy of ling lear. Mowat BA, Werstine P (eds), 1.1.100-103. Retrieved from http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org 2. Shakespeare W. King lear, 1.1.126-128. Retrieved from http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org 3. Winkler E (2019) Was Shakespeare a woman? The Atlantic, June 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/ 4. Shapiro J (2019) Shakespeare wrote insightfully about women. That doesn’t mean he was one. The Atlantic, June 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/ shakespeare-was-not-woman/590794/ 5. Rylance M (2019) Keep questioning Shakespeare’s identity: debating the authorship of the bard’s plays can only expand appreciation for his work, a Shakespearean actor writes. The Atlantic, June 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/ mark-rylance-keep-questioning-shakespeares-identity/590395/ 6. Flavell JH (1979) Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: a new area of cognitive-­ developmental inquiry. Am Psychol 34(10):910 7. André C (2011) Looking at mindfulness. Blue Rider Press, New York, p 138 8. Johnson AG (2005) Privilege, power, and difference, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New  York; Bourke J, Espedido A (2019) Why inclusive leaders are good for organizations, and how to become one. Harv Bus Rev. https://hbr.org/2019/03/ why-inclusive-leaders-are-good-for-organizations-and-how-to-become-one 9. Johnson AG (2005) Privilege, power, and difference, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York 10. Vroom VH, Jago AG (1988) The new leadership: managing participation in organizations. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs 11. Ebbert S (2019) On Beacon Hill, newly elected women are mistaken for legislative aides. Repeatedly. Boston Globe, January 31, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/ metro/2019/01/31/beacon-hill-newly-elected-women-mistaken-for-legislative-aides-repeatedly/v7O267Wxqx0hYQgc9h8U8N/story.html 12. De Dreu CKW, Van de Vliert E (eds) (1997) Using conflict in organizations. Sage Publications, London 13. Zhang Z-X, Wei X (2017) Superficial harmony and conflict avoidance resulting from negative anticipation in the workplace. Manag Organ Rev 13(4):795–820 14. McShane S, Von Glinow M (2018) Organizational behavior, 8th edn. McGraw Hill, New York 15. Speed BC, Goldstein BL, Goldfried MR (2018) Assertiveness training: a forgotten evidence-­ based treatment. Clin Psychol 25(1):e12216 16. Lease SH (2018) Assertive behavior: a double-edged sword for women at work? Clin Psychol Sci Pract 25(1):e12226 17. Kida TE (2009) Don’t believe everything you think: the 6 basic mistakes we make in thinking. Prometheus Books, New York 18. Heath C, Heath D (2013) Decisive: how to make better choices in life and work. Random House, New York 19. Bazerman MH, Moore DA (2012) Judgment in managerial decision making, 8th edn. John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken; Lord CG, Lepper MR, Preston E (1984) Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment. J Pers Soc Psychol 47(6):1231–1243. https:// doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231 20. Wilson T (2002) Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. Belknap Press, Cambridge 21. Gawande A (2011) Checklist manifesto: how to get things right. Picador, New York 22. Stone D, Patton B, Heen S (2010) Difficult conversations: how to discuss what matters most, 10th edn. Penguin, New York 23. Kahneman D, Lovallo D (1993) Timid choices and bold forecasts: a cognitive perspective on risk taking. Manag Sci 39(1):17–31

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24. Kahneman D, Lovallo D (1993) Timid choices and bold forecasts: a cognitive perspective on risk taking. Manag Sci 39(1):17–31. Published by: INFORMS Stable URL:http://www.jstor. org/stable/2661517. Accessed 18 Jan 2018 25. Gratton L, Voigt A, Erickson T (2011) Bridging faultlines in diverse teams. IEEE Eng Manag Rev 39(1):80–90 26. Walker M (2017) Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner, New York 27. National Institutes of Health (2013) Brain may flush out toxins during sleep. News Releases, October 17, 2013.https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxinsduring-sleep 28. Barnes CM, Drake CL (2015) Prioritizing sleep health: public health policy recommendations. Perspect Psychol Sci 10(6):733–737. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615598509 29. Berinato S (2016) “Sleeping on it,” doesn’t lead to better decisions. Harv Bus Rev 94(5):30–31 30. Diekelmann S (2014) Sleep for cognitive enhancement. Front Syst Neurosci 8:46 31. NIH MedlinePlus. www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/summer12/articles/ summer12pg20 32. Alter A (2017) Irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Publishing Group, New York

Chapter 8

Conclusion: Going Forward

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. —Mary Oliver

Finally, we have arrived at the final chapter! We have detailed the elements of leading with uncommon sense—pause, introspect, and act—highlighting the reminders to be humble, be emotional, be “impolite,” and be uncertain. We have suggested ways to avoid the common traps that snag our thinking (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1  Leading with uncommon sense: the practice

Hopefully, you’ve received the message that this approach to leadership, while worth it, is not simple. We begin this concluding chapter by exploring another challenge related to operating with uncommon sense as a leader. We consider how to make uncommon leadership habitual and how to break common-sense leadership habits that are counterproductive [1]. As we start to think about habit formation, consider this leadership moment.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4_8

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Kim, the director of a sales team who had recently been hired away from a competitor, was called into her boss’s office to discuss the most recent projected quarterly earnings. Her boss, who has been with the company for over a decade and who is 20 years Kim’s senior, started by explaining that he was disappointed with the numbers. “Something needs to change,” he said forcefully. Kim could feel herself flushing as her boss spoke; this was scary news. But she worked hard at keeping her cool and immediately suggested that her team take a new approach, one she had used at her previous company with great success. Her boss didn’t ask for details; he responded to Kim’s suggestion only by saying that if her team didn’t hit their numbers, there would need to be personnel changes. Kim felt even more flustered by her boss’s response to her proposal. She wanted to give him more details to convince him of its effectiveness, but she was paralyzed by the idea that members of her team or maybe even she would be fired.

Kim seems to have fallen into the common-sense leadership habits of acting quickly and being overly decisive. In response to the surprising news from her boss, she “immediately” suggested a solution to the problem he was raising. Rather than pausing, slowing down, and stepping back, she scrambled to project herself as a strong and certain leader. Taking the time to gather herself and track her reactions could have allowed her to develop a more nuanced and effective response to this unexpected situation. Ideally, she would have asked herself what might be out of her awareness and also checked to see if she was reaching conclusions prematurely. The negative consequences of her initial attempt to present herself as a strong leader seem to have been exacerbated by her also falling into the common-sense habit of suppressing her emotions. She received a physical signal that her emotions were running high (flushing), but she chose the very common response of trying to keep her cool rather than paying attention to what her emotions might be telling her. Had she looked at her emotional response rather than attempting to tamp it down, she might have realized that it was even more important to slow down because she was feeling intensely about her exchange with her boss. And she might have asked herself what that emotional response was telling her. Kim’s feelings seem to have escalated when her boss did not engage with her about the details of her new plan and raised the possibility of personnel changes. As she continued to ignore her emotional response, she became paralyzed, not a surprising result given her efforts to suppress what she was feeling. She probably felt threatened by the possibility that she would be fired or that she would need to fire team members. Had she been able to access the stream of emotions that were running through her, and possibly even mentioned some of those to her boss, she might have been freed up to problem solve more effectively. We also wonder whether Kim paid conscious attention to her social identities and her boss’s during this interaction. The conversation was between a woman who is new to the organization and is 20 years younger than her male boss, a veteran with the company. All of these identity differences (and possibly others that are not explicit) make it very likely that Kim and her boss experienced the moment very

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differently. Kim’s gender, age, and tenure with the company might all have increased the pressure that she felt to prove herself to her boss, to be a confident and competent leader. And these identity differences might have made Kim less likely to ask questions, advocate for herself, or push back on her boss. If she could have been consciously aware of the social identity dynamics operating in the situation, she might have been able to be more effective.

Developing Uncommon Habits Not surprisingly, Kim relied on common-sense habits for leadership. Our call to use uncommon sense when leading underscores that we often settle for familiar, comfortable methods (common sense) as we address leadership challenges. In many cases these have become habitual, even if they are not effective. Leading with uncommon sense will almost certainly require breaking old habits and developing new ones. Our brains naturally develop habits for coping with the challenges of life. Many of these habits are helpful and productive; some are not. Over time the mechanisms through which our habits are triggered and enacted become invisible to us; therefore, changing habits is no small matter. If it were, many of us would be slimmer, healthier, more patient, and better read [2]. In our lives as leaders, we would be more efficient, less worried, and better able to deal with unreasonable bosses and coworkers. One of the important aspects of leading with uncommon sense is bringing our counterproductive habits to awareness by pausing and introspecting so that we can begin to work on breaking or replacing them.

How Habits Work To begin our exploration of how habits operate and how we can begin to change them or create more effective habits, we invite you to think about one of your current habits that you have come to see as counterproductive. Ideally this will be a common-sense leadership habit, but it’s also fine to think of a habit in some other part of your life. Think of a habit that has some of the following characteristics: • • • • • •

You’ve tried to change it multiple times without success. It keeps you up at night. It is embarrassing to you. Your loved ones are unhappy about it. It brings you into conflict with coworkers. It seems to be stalling your career. Keep this habit in mind as we describe the anatomy of habits.

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The Habit Loop Where do habits like this come from? How do they operate to control our behavior? Why are they maddeningly difficult to change? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg provides a useful description in his “habit loop.” [3] He explains that habits are composed of three components: (1) cues or triggers; (2) behaviors or routines; and (3) rewards. Consider the process of a teenager becomes a cigarette smoker to illustrate how these elements work. Imagine an adolescent, Jamie, hanging out with a group of friends. Several of them light up cigarettes and offer one to Jamie, who until now has been a non-­ smoker. The friends’ smoking and offering a cigarette are the cue or trigger in what will become a new habit. Jamie chooses the behavior of accepting a cigarette and lighting up. The reward that Jamie anticipates in choosing this behavior is being seen as one of the group. Although there may be some unrewarding results from the behavior this time as Jamie coughs and sputters like many first-time smokers, the reward of being seen as cool is more significant. The habit of being a smoker begins to form. In future situations when friends light up, Jamie is much less conscious of choosing the behavior of smoking. The behavior becomes a routine that the brain directs automatically. As Jamie continues to smoke, physical rewards are added as the coughing and sputtering disappear and the pleasures of the nicotine hit are experienced. As with many people, Jamie actually becomes somewhat physically addicted to smoking as the routine is enacted time and time again. Over time, the habit becomes less rewarding. Jamie becomes concerned about the physical consequences from smoking and wants to stop. The benefits of being a member of the group are much less important as a 25-year-old than they were when Jamie was 15. As Jamie is unsuccessful in stopping, the smoking routine also results in painful costs for Jamie’s self-esteem; being a smoker is inconsistent with Jamie’s sense of self. The process through which Jamie becomes a habitual smoker and then wishes to break the habit is often paralleled by habits that leaders develop. Behaviors are consciously chosen in response to cues, and rewards are experienced initially. Over time, however, leaders come to realize that some of their habits are not effective, but by then the habit has become automatic and difficult to change. For example, new leaders often experience a knot in their stomach as they take on responsibilities and joust with political competitors for the first time. In many cases, new leaders respond to such triggers by working hard to stay cool, by choosing behaviors designed to prevent others from knowing that they are upset. They follow the common-sense leadership rule to not be emotional discussed in Chap. 4. Such behaviors are often initially rewarding as the new leaders congratulate themselves for not becoming emotional—because that’s what’s expected of strong leaders. However, after such behavior has become routinized and automatic, these leaders may come to realize that denying their emotions is not the most productive approach. (Of course, even if they don’t come to that recognition, they may still be

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less than maximally productive.) The challenge then becomes to replace the habitual behavior with a more effective choice. Pause now to consider the personal habit you identified above. Are you able to identify what originally triggered the habit? What rewards led to the behavior becoming routinized?

Habits in Action Most, or all, of us know from experience that habit loops can become powerful and persistent. Once the habit loop gets created, it’s difficult to break. To illustrate more fully the habit loop in a leadership setting, we will use Wiley as an example. After serving as leader of a department within her organization for almost a decade, Wiley was tapped for a promotion. She began to shadow the current occupant of the job she would be taking over while continuing to lead her department. After juggling the two leadership positions for a while, she found that she was constantly battling a cold. Just when she would recover from it, she found herself under the weather again. When not actively fighting a cold, she often found herself run down and fatigued. Weary and exhausted, Wiley paused and investigated her habits at work. Here’s what she noticed. Her work calendar showed a common thread that ran through the days when she felt the most exhausted and drained. On those days, she was being asked to serve in both her old and her new leadership roles, often flip-flopping from hour to hour. In other words, having to transition across leadership positions on the same day depleted her reserves. She realized that the demand to inhabit the different leadership positions had become a trigger to which she responded by pushing on through so that she would be seen as worthy of her promotion. She also realized that one aspect of pushing on through was to ignore the stress that this schedule caused. For example, she recognized that the stress caused her to be irritable and short with people, she would feel lethargic in the middle of the day, and she would sometimes feel completely overwhelmed by the mounting tasks assigned to her at each meeting. Wiley’s response to these signs of stress was simple—drink an additional cup of coffee. In addition, because she was receiving the reward of thinking she appeared competent, she didn’t change anything about her schedule, until she found herself out of the department sick for 10 days. In pausing and identifying the habit loop, Wiley was able to recognize the trigger, the routine behavior, and the initial reward. In doing so, she was able to admit that the reward was a rather illusory one. Wanting to appear competent was at the core of her routine of managing everything without paying attention to the effects. Once she was able to identify the habit loop, Wiley was able to make some changes. First, when she could, she scheduled meetings according to her role in the organization. In other words, she tried to avoid jumping from one leadership role to a different one in back-to-back meetings. Second, when she couldn’t have that kind of control over her calendar, she acknowledged in advance the stress this type of day generated in her. When she could, she built in mini breaks in order to regroup. When

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she was able to admit that juggling different roles was less than pleasurable for her, she was able to let herself off the hook. Simply acknowledging this generated a new routine. And the new reward was improved health and greater effectiveness as she dealt with her stress more positively. Acting to replace this habit could not have occurred without taking the time to pause and introspect. Once again pause and consider the personal habit you’ve been examining. Are you able to identify a replacement habit loop that you could begin to implement?

Breaking Common-Sense Leadership Habits Ideally, leadership habits that we would like to change do not need to make us ill, as they did Wiley, before we bring them into our awareness. It is important to examine our standard operating procedures to see which habits are producing results that we do not want or desire. In particular, we suggest watching for the triggers that initiate common-sense routines so that you can choose to respond to those triggers by leading with uncommon sense instead. Consider the kinds of events that can trigger common-sense leadership habits that keep us from being humble and uncertain. Here’s a partial list of examples: • Your boss raises concerns about your team’s performance and wants a solution. • One of your team members takes issue with a decision you’ve made. • The head of another department asks urgently for a solution to a problem that involves your team. • You are new to a leadership role and feel like you need to prove yourself. • Many people are counting on you for a timely decision. All of these triggers can make leaders feel pressured to give a clear and decisive answer right now. While acting quickly and decisively may result in some short-­ term rewards and conform with common views of effective leadership, the long-­ term consequences are seldom as positive. Few decisions that leaders make which are of any import are simple enough to deal with swiftly and without question. As we learn what it means to be a leader, we receive many messages, implicit and explicit, informal and formal, telling us that effective leadership is speedy, decisive leadership. Frequently, our bosses, colleagues, and followers communicate quite clearly that we need to make a decision now, and the decision we make needs to be crisp and unequivocal. Leaders are rewarded for deciding quickly and clearly and are punished for delay or uncertainty. Not surprisingly, leaders often develop the habit of acting swiftly and boldly. However, given the limitations of human cognition (Chap. 3), the complexity of decisions that leaders face (Chap. 6), and the turbulence of the environments in which leaders operate, quick and certain decisions are often less than optimal [4]. While the people in our organizations often want speed and the pace of activity

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reinforces that demand, the results of deciding swiftly and certainly are frequently undesirable. An alternative response to such cues is to lead with uncommon sense—first, pause, then be humble, and be uncertain. These approaches provide the opportunity for leaders to examine what they’re thinking and feeling, to consider the potential influence of unconscious cognitive functioning, and to resist the tug toward unwarranted certainty. The process we are suggesting is to identify the cues that activate your common-sense leadership habits of being too quick and too certain and consciously replace that routine with an uncommon leadership approach. As these new behaviors are rewarded with greater leadership effectiveness, they can become habitual. We can also be triggered to enact common-sense habits that focus on suppressing emotions; they can keep us from being emotional. For example: • You feel your pulse quicken during a tense meeting. • Your judgment is being questioned by coworkers, and you want to defend yourself. • You feel overwhelmed with your workload and deadlines. • You feel elated by a personal success. • You’re avoiding a coworker with whom you’ve had a conflict. Very commonly, these triggers cause leaders to tamp down, ignore, or run away from their emotions. Having been taught that accepting your emotional responses will lead you astray, the goal becomes to make the feelings go away. Just as leaders are taught to decide now and to be strong, they are taught, in ways both spoken and unspoken, to keep their emotions out of their leadership. Leaders are warned to “not get emotional” and “keep your emotions out of it.” Decisions that are in any way emotional are seen as inferior or questionable. The common-sense leadership habit that results from this powerful set of messages is suppressing emotions. As we discussed in Chap. 4, we now know from a multifaceted stream of research that there is an essential connection between feeling and thinking. Rather than being at odds, they are inextricably linked. Emotions are useful pieces of data that can help leaders build effective relationships, make better decisions, aid in negotiations, and enhance other key leadership skills [5]. Attempts to suppress emotions are not only inevitably unsuccessful, but they also distance leaders from valuable information that could make them more effective. Rather than working to escape your emotions and act “rationally” in such situations, a more productive response to the same triggers is to attend to the stream of emotions that you are feeling. This doesn’t mean acting immediately on the basis of those feelings; emotions can point us in the right direction, but they can also lead us down dead ends. The crucial behavioral response, the new habit to be developed, is to learn from your emotions. What are you feeling? Why might that be your emotional response? How does this situation resemble previous circumstances about which you had strong feelings? Emotions are information from your brain about what is important to you. Pay attention to that information and weave it into your overall approach to the situation.

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And we also routinely experience triggers that can activate behaviors that neglect the important social identity differences that surround us. Common-sense leadership instructs us to be fair and, therefore, to treat everyone the same no matter what their social identities. The cues that initiate the common-sense leadership habit of attempting to disregard social identity differences often feel similar to moments when people break the rule of not talking about religion or politics at a party. Here are examples of the kinds of situations that can trigger leaders to enact the counterproductive leadership habit of trying to ignore identity differences: • A coworker calls attention to a customer’s race. • Your boss highlights a coworker’s sexual orientation, seemingly without meaning to do it. • During a one-on-one meeting, one of your team members complains about her experience of a glass ceiling. • A new policy that you’re reviewing seems to provide different benefits to people of different religions. • You become aware that you are noticing a coworker’s age during a heated work discussion. It can feel like the discussion is not fair and not polite, given our training as leaders to avoid discrimination. It seems that if you pay attention to these social differences that carry powerful emotional valence, it will lead to inequitable behavior. As leaders are shaped to be quick, decisive, and unemotional, they are also encouraged to be fair. This is, of course, an admirable quality to instill in our leaders. However, the specific techniques that are taught, officially and unofficially, to achieve this commendable goal often result in unintended consequences. In order to avoid any danger of bias, leaders are often told to treat everyone the same and pretend to not see differences. Leaders frequently work hard to develop this habit. In striving to be fair, common sense tells us to not see social identities—an individual’s race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. When we begin to believe that we have accomplished this, the trouble begins, as we explored in Chap. 5. Research tells us that it is impossible for our brains not to register this information [6]. And we also know that we all carry biases associated with particular identities [7]. If we convince ourselves that we are not noticing social identities, we blind ourselves to how those biases are influencing our perceptions of people and our resulting behaviors. In addition, by telling ourselves that we’re not noticing identity differences, we neglect the reality that people experience the same situation very differently depending on their particular social identities. The more productive leadership habit to develop is to be “impolite.” When triggers like those listed above occur, ignore the common-sense dictum to avoid the complexities of identity differences. Instead, uncommon sense tells us to wade into the intricacies of our identities and explore both the challenges and the benefits of those differences. This includes paying attention to your own social identities—ask how your own race and gender and religion and age and other important social identities are affecting the way you feel about yourself in a given situation and affecting how others might be seeing and reacting to you. Therefore, rather than

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habitually operating by the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which assumes that everyone would like to be treated the same and as you would like to be treated, we suggest that you strive to enact the habit of following the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.” We encourage leaders to pay attention to differences in people, especially people’s social identities. Ultimately, the question we need to be asking ourselves is whether our habitual behaviors are resulting in real rewards. Too often our habits have evolved in pursuit of common-sense rewards that are short-lived or distorted. By replacing such habits with routines based on uncommon sense, we reward ourselves with results that reflect the challenging, emotional, complicated, uncertain world we live in as leaders.

You’re Not Alone Duncan was on the staff for a personal development workshop for mid- and upper-­ level leaders from nonprofit organizations, the public sector, and business. It was an intense multiday event focused on helping the participants deepen their awareness of their interpersonal style and their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with other people. For many of the leaders, it was quite a profound experience, which they left with strong commitments to do things differently when they returned to their organizations. A few weeks later, word trickled back to the staff that one of the most enthusiastic participants had run into a little trouble on his reentry following the workshop. One of the key insights he had received from the session was that people often experienced him as overly formal and unapproachable. Determined to remove barriers, he changed the furniture in his office, replacing a traditional table and chairs with a comfy couch, soft chairs, and even some large pillows that he invited visitors to use to sit on the floor. Unfortunately, the new decor did not fit with the culture of the organization, and his bosses had serious conversations with him about his future. We offer this snippet of organizational life to underscore one of the key limitations of this book. Our focus has been on individual change; we’ve asked you to develop the habits of pausing and looking inward so that the actions you choose will be more thoughtful and less often on the path of least resistance. However, by definition leaders are members of organizations. The formal and informal systems of those organizations can create potent impediments or provide valuable supports to leading with uncommon sense [8]. We won’t attempt to deeply analyze the complex ways in which organizational structures, procedures, and cultures assist or prevent leaders from practicing in the ways we’ve described. (That’s for another book.) But we can’t leave you without acknowledging that your individual hard work to lead with uncommon sense will not be enough. Obviously, we believe the individual is crucial, but we all exist within powerful organizational constraints and resources. As we introduce people to the notion of leading with uncommon sense, it is not uncommon for individuals to ask what they can do if their coworkers have not yet

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had the opportunity to be exposed to these enlightened (!) ideas and are, therefore, still stumbling around with common-sense leadership practices. Again, individual change is not enough. We generally respond to this question by acknowledging its importance and encouraging engagement with colleagues. We believe a mix of advocacy and inquiry is effective when implementing new approaches to leadership [9]. Advocacy means clearly stating your goals, beliefs, and approaches; inquiry means authentically asking about how the other person sees the situation and why they are approaching it as they are. Just because we’ve seen the light, we can’t expect others to change their worldview immediately, if ever. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to encourage your organization to provide training and development opportunities that will stimulate discussion of leadership approaches that reflect more current understandings of how our brains operate and how we function as human beings. But the organizational contexts in which we function are not only impediments to our leading with uncommon sense. In earlier chapters we have described several ways in which organizations can be helpful to individuals seeking to lead with uncommon sense. While your work home may not facilitate every hair-brained idea you come up with to be humble, emotional, “impolite,” and uncertain, organizations do provide resources that support the practice we’ve outlined. Very importantly, organizations routinely collect and report data, both quantitative and qualitative. Such information is absolutely essential as input to the introspection we have described. While there are certainly dangers in putting too much stock in the data collected and crunched by your organization, this material is invaluable as you ask yourself what might be out of your awareness and as you search for patterns in your behavior to which you may be blinding yourself. The bureaucratic components of organizations can (surprisingly) be helpful in leading with uncommon sense, as we mentioned in Chap. 6 and elsewhere. Organizations are naturally slower than individuals, thus providing a sometimes-­ frustrating pause. And the orderly procedures that organizations must develop can often force us to examine the basis for our actions. For example, policies for hiring, promoting, and firing employees, if carefully constructed, can help us examine how our blind spots, emotions, social identities, and drive for certainty may be operating in these crucial decisions. And organizational systems like checklists, premortems, and meeting processes can slow us down and help us look inward. As we’ve just mentioned, most organizations offer professional development programs. Ideally, at least some of these will provoke participants to not only buff up their technical skills and become more sensitive to coworkers but also to look inward and reflect on who they are as leaders. Obviously, managing your relationship with your organization as you attempt to lead with uncommon sense is a complex and multifaceted challenge. Here are a few options to consider, in addition to utilizing the resources that your organization provides to support you as a leader. • Attempt to influence your organization. From the training and development opportunities that are offered, to the kinds of data that are collected, to the policies and procedures that govern daily life, to the unwritten rules that shape the

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organizational culture, leaders can usually have a voice in how their organizations support or impede their attempts to lead with uncommon sense. • Shape your piece of the organization. Even if you feel quite constrained in your ability to change your organization in service of leading with uncommon sense, you probably have room to implement practices, policies, and procedures in your unit that will support uncommon approaches. In addition to creating an environment in which you can lead with uncommon sense, you may have a larger impact. We both have had the experience of seeing our uncommon ideas spread to other parts of the organization. For example, Duncan initiated a feedback system through which senior members of his department received developmental input from a much broader range of colleagues than had been the case previously. It had been assumed that people who had reached top ranks needed only limited feedback on their performance. Word spread among his peers about the approach, and soon other departments were doing it. • Leave the organization. Maybe you will determine that your organization severely limits your ability to lead with uncommon sense. Obviously, moving on to a different work setting is a huge decision, but it’s worth asking whether the costs of staying are too high. Maybe there are places that will free you from the strictures of common-sense approaches to leadership.

Commencement For both of us, schools have been among our most important organizational homes. One of the fundamental rituals in every school we’ve known has been commencement. It marks the completion of students’ courses of study but also (as the word signifies) heralds a beginning, the start of a new chapter. We offer the following activity as a commencement—a wrap-up to the ideas presented in this book and, hopefully, the beginning of your efforts to lead with uncommon sense. This is a four-part case based on the experience of a colleague of ours, here called Lucia. One of the purposes of multipart cases is to challenge your capacity to anticipate what will happen next in a complex leadership situation and choose courses of action accordingly. As you make sense of the case and think about how you would approach Lucia’s dilemmas, we hope you will use the leading with uncommon-sense practice outlined in the previous chapters. Very importantly, as you wrestle with the case, we encourage you not only to use the concepts from this book to analyze the facts but also to monitor your own internal processes from an uncommon-sense perspective. Do you pause to give yourself the chance to introspect? Do you ask yourself the introspect questions as you attempt to help Lucia? • What is out of my awareness? • What are my emotions telling me? • Am I neglecting identity differences, my own, and others?

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• Am I too sure? Ideally, you will not only be smart about the circumstances Lucia is juggling but also be very aware of who you are during the case analysis, pushing yourself to be humble, emotional, “impolite,” and uncertain. After each piece of the case, we will ask some questions and offer some ideas about what we see going on. We will not, however, provide a comprehensive analysis. First of all, we’re not smart enough to do that, but more importantly, we want you to personalize your investigation of the situation. This book is about your capacity to mobilize your resources as a leader rather than about broad leadership principles that supposedly apply in all circumstances. If we frustrate your drive for certainty by not supplying more solutions, we’ll have done our job.

Lucia’s Case: Part 1 Lucia works for an international marketing consulting firm in their office in her hometown of Madrid, Spain. She is the project manager for a “co-marketing” campaign focused on simultaneously broadening the appeal of a major German auto company and building brand awareness for several emerging European rock bands. The auto company came to Lucia’s firm in hopes of growing its customer base among younger buyers. Having developed several previous co-marketing efforts, Lucia felt confident about using rock bands to reach that demographic while also creating much greater visibility for the bands. Usually, a German member of the consulting firm would have been assigned as project manager for a campaign located in Germany, but the CEO, Jon, chose Lucia because of her strong experience with co-marketing efforts and her expertise with social media as a central component of such campaigns. In addition, the key client in Germany, Emma, had requested Lucia as project manager, based on recommendations from colleagues who had worked with her on other projects. The central approach of the campaign is to use social media, especially Twitter and Instagram, to stimulate interaction between the target customers, the auto brand, and the emerging bands. Each evening potential customers are invited via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to submit tweets or Instagram photos with a picture of one of the company’s cars in an outrageous setting, backed by a soundtrack of the band’s music. Photoshopped entries are encouraged. A crucial aspect of the campaign is interaction with the brands, so members of Lucia’s team engage with contestants through social media. Multiple contestants win concert tickets each evening, and grand prize winners will win cars at the end of the campaign. Lucia’s team for the project is comprised of talented colleagues from many of the firm’s offices, specifically Turkey, the United Kingdom, Italy, Dubai, Poland, and Russia. The firm routinely creates such multinational teams, feeling strongly that the range of perspectives is a key advantage that they bring to their customers. Lucia

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is very pleased with her team and particularly grateful for the hard work and long hours that they have devoted to the project. OK, some questions to think about: • Did you ask yourself the four introspect questions as you read this part? Were you tracking: what might be out of your awareness, your emotions, which of your social identities were activated, your degree of certainty? –– Specifically, national identity is a prominent element in this part of the case. Might your own national identity have influenced your thinking about the dynamics here? • What concerns, if any, do you have about Lucia and her team? –– Is there any possibility that Lucia’s expertise in co-marketing could get her into trouble (as it did the art experts who were fooled by the fake Vermeers in Chap. 6)? Do you worry about her being humble enough? –– Lucia is experiencing strong positive emotions about her team thus far. Is there any danger that this could lead to complacency (Chap. 4)?

Lucia’s Case: Part 2 After the campaign has been underway for 2 weeks, Lucia and her team members have a conference call with Emma, their client, to update her on how things are proceeding. Lucia’s CEO, Jon, also participates. Lucia is feeling very good about how much has been accomplished already. Soon after the call begins, Emma raises concerns about the strategy of the campaign. She argues that they should be using only Facebook, not Twitter and Instagram, and is particularly unhappy about how much emphasis is being placed on hashtags. Lucia is flabbergasted by Emma’s criticisms. She had approved the strategy before the campaign began, and her comments indicate that she has little understanding of how social media works. As the call proceeds, members of Lucia’s team begin sending her messages via Slack— “Stop her! We’ve done a great job and the results are positive. Please don’t let her change the entire campaign. I can’t work even more hours to change this now. She’s crazy; say something.” Oops! Seems like things have become a bit complicated. • Emotions are up. What was your emotional reaction as you read this segment? What might those feelings be telling you about what’s happening and what Lucia might do? • How would you hope Lucia handles her own emotions and those of her team members? Does she need to be concerned about emotional contagion (Chap. 4)? • Are you concerned that Lucia and her team were feeling too confident (Chap. 6) about their progress? How can she move herself and her team into a learning stance (Chap. 1)?

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Lucia’s Case: Part 3 Lucia attempts to explain the importance of Twitter, Instagram, and hashtags to Emma, and she shares data demonstrating the effectiveness of the campaign. She expects Emma to be impressed. On the contrary, Emma seems unconvinced and adds, “I don’t think we should reply to people. You don’t know the tone of voice of the brand and you are not native Germans, so I don’t think we should interact with the audience.” Lucia explains that the campaign is based on the many benefits of providing the opportunity for potential customers to interact with the brand. She offers to provide Emma with typical comments and questions that come in as well as the kinds of responses the team has been providing so that she can make sure the interactions are appropriate. Following the call Lucia sends Emma the tweets and Instagram posts developed by her team to attract interest in the campaign as well as the questions, comments, and responses they have received from customers. Emma replies that she doesn’t have time to approve all this material. She changes the tweets that were scheduled for that evening but doesn’t understand that she is limited to 140 characters. As a result, the campaign is unable to use Twitter to initiate that evening’s communications. Following Emma’s unsuccessful attempt to edit the tweets, Lucia’s team is even more upset, and they push on her to fix the situation. The importance of social identities and emotions seems to be escalating. • How did you react to Emma’s actions in this section? Did you pause and introspect? What did you notice how you were framing the situation? • Did you wish that Lucia had paused a little longer before sending the Twitter and Instagram material to Emma? What might that have accomplished? • How would you like Lucia to manage her team dynamics at this point?

Lucia’s Case: Part 4 Jon, the CEO, is quite aware of what’s happening because he participated in the conference call and has been copied on the email exchanges between Lucia and Emma. Lucia is shocked by the solution Jon chooses. He decides to have Sofia, a German member of the firm but not a member of Lucia’s team, act as project manager during future communications with Emma. Behind the scenes, Lucia’s team will continue to work as before. Lucia is upset and offended by Jon’s decision. Not only has her authority been undermined, but she now faces a significant amount of additional work to keep Sofia updated so that she can deal with Emma. Lucia expresses her displeasure to Jon, but he tells her that this is how the project will proceed. Now what? Lucia is in a very uncomfortable situation; she’s upset and offended.

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• What are your emotions telling you about what she might do? What range of options/discretionary power (Chap. 7) does she have at this point? • What, if any, common-sense approaches to leadership are you worried Lucia might fall back on? • Could any of the uncommon principles for action described in Chap. 7 be relevant here —for example, embrace the disagreement, be assertive, and find the third story? We hope Lucia and her team, Emma, and Jon gave you plenty to think about and lots of opportunity to flex your uncommon-sense muscle. This was clearly a struggle for Lucia, and we can't report a fairy-tale ending, but thanks to working hard to maintain a learning stance, she emerged with greater understanding of herself as a leader and how to bring an uncommon perspective to situations like this.

Good-bye Way back in Chap. 1, we said that the goal of this book is ambitious. We observed that improving leadership is a powerful objective because the impact extends beyond the individual leader. Of course, as leaders become more effective, they will benefit personally. They will become healthier and more satisfied, less harried, more grounded, and more fulfilled in their lives and work. But very importantly, the network of people with whom they interact as leaders will also benefit significantly from improved leadership. The pain and turmoil that colleagues experience because of poor leaders are a familiar and dispiriting component of organizational life. Enhanced leadership will make organizations themselves healthier. As decision-­ makers function more effectively, organizations will achieve their goals more efficiently and with greater quality. Ultimately, this results in a healthier world. Organizations of all kinds are central to the functioning of our society; leadership deficits cause those organizations to be less able to make the crucial contributions on which the world depends. Our hope is that this book will make a contribution to leaders, organizations, and our society becoming more fully what they can be. May uncommon successes result from using uncommon sense.

References 1. Davi WC, Spelman DH (2018) Breaking habits to foster engaged leadership. In: Marques J, Dhiman S (eds) Engaged leadership: transforming through future-oriented design thinking. Springer, New York, pp 251–264 2. Duhigg C (2012) The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business. Random House, New York; Clear J (2018) Atomic habits: an easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad

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ones. Avery, New York; Wood W, Tam L, Witt MG (2005) Changing circumstances, disrupting habits. J Personal Soc Psychol 88(6):918–933. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.918. 3. Duhigg, The power of habit. 4. Martin RL (2009) The opposable mind: how successful leaders win through integrative thinking. Harvard Business Press, Cambridge 5. Caruso D, Salovey P (2004) The emotionally intelligent manager. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco; Leary K, Pillemer J, Wheeler M (2013) Negotiating with emotion. Harvard Business Review, (January-February, 2013); Goleman D (1998) Working with emotional intelligence. Bantam Books, New York 6. Fine C (2010) Delusions of gender: how our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. W.W. Norton and Company, New York 7. “Project Implicit,” https://implicit.harvard.edu/iimplicit/iatdetails.html 8. Johnson AG (2005) Privilege, power, and difference, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York 9. Senge PM (2006) The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. Broadway Business, New York

Index

A Activated identities, 87, 88, 101 Adjetey, O., 120 Ashbrook, T., 31, 32 Attention, 2, 3, 5, 8, 18–28, 32, 35, 36, 39, 42, 45, 46, 49, 52, 56–58, 61, 63, 66–68, 72, 74, 78–80, 82, 83, 86, 89–91, 94–96, 101, 104, 112, 115, 117, 125, 127–129, 137, 147, 150, 154, 157, 159–161

Emotions charting, 61, 62, 69, 70 and decision-making, 56 and perception, 55 in the body, 63

C Checklists, 44, 45, 48, 128, 144, 145, 162 Chunking, 83, 84, 87 Cognitive behavioral therapy triangle (CBT), 53, 54, 63, 66, 67, 111 Common traps, 5, 6, 19, 28, 32, 34, 49, 52, 53, 78, 105, 110, 113, 129, 133, 153

G Genuine support, 24, 27, 28, 46, 47, 49, 69, 73, 103, 104, 126, 134 Gonzalez, E., 51, 52, 60, 66

D Decision-making causality, 122, 128 resolution, 122, 128 salience, 122, 128 shortcuts, 40, 44, 45, 137, 144, 145 wholeness, 122, 128 E Emotional contagion, 58, 59, 147, 165 Emotional intelligence, 7, 15, 59

F Faultlines, 3, 86, 87, 100–101, 148 Feeling of knowing, 9, 115

H Habits in action, 157 habit loop, 156 how habits work, 155–158 Handedness, 80, 81, 86 Happiness, 55, 57–59 I Implicit association test (IAT), 97–98, 100 J Jobs, S., 17 Johari window, 32–34, 45, 46, 53, 111

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. C. Davi, D. H. Spelman, Leading with Uncommon Sense, Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41971-4

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Index

170 K King Lear, 133 L Ladder of Inference reflexive loop, 115 Learning stance, 10–12, 18, 126, 127, 140, 143, 165, 167 Literature, 15, 66, 67, 98, 125 M Meditations, 4, 5, 21, 24, 25, 42, 63, 71, 72, 135 Memories, 32, 35–39, 41–47, 53, 60, 62, 89, 135, 145, 150 Microaggressions, 82, 100 Mmofra Trom, 120 N Nomophobia, 20 P Parker, P., 77 Pausing techniques at work, 23 outside of work, 24 proactive, 22, 27, 42 in the moment, 4, 18, 20–22 Perceptions, 7, 8, 13, 23, 24, 27, 32, 35–37, 39, 41, 43, 45–47, 53, 55, 68, 69, 73, 83, 94, 95, 100, 115, 116, 127, 135, 137, 140, 160 Practice, the, 4 Prejudice, 84–88, 97, 100, 102–104, 116 Proact, 136, 147–150

R Re-act, 136, 149 Relationship networks, 27–28, 103, 104 S Self-talk, 64, 65, 124 Shepard’s two tables, 37 Sleep, 10, 22, 26, 27, 39, 42, 43, 54, 72, 73, 136, 149, 150 Social identities, 2, 19, 34, 52, 77, 116, 135, 154 Social identities profile, 93–96 Solitude and silence, 25, 61 Stereotype threat, 88, 89, 101–102 T Third story, 144, 146, 167 U Unconscious, 7, 8, 33–42, 54, 64, 83, 85, 88, 97, 100, 102, 104, 113, 137, 159 V Van Meegeren, H., 109, 119 Vermeer, J., 109, 110 Visual thinking strategies (VTS), 117, 118, 125 Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA), 116 Z Zeigarnik effect, 114