Mindset | Emotional Intelligence in Action

The Best Way to Decide: Fast or Slow?

by Michael Nicholas | 20 Oct 2020 | Creativity, Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Leadership, Mindset, Uncertainty

There can be few things more important to leaders than their professional judgment. As Jim Collins clearly demonstrated in his best-selling book, Good to Great, leaders have the power to build spectacular success stories or drag their companies into decline. Which way they go is largely determined by the quality of their decisions.

The challenge for leaders at all levels, is that making decisions, whether relating to strategy, operational crises or people, cannot reliably be boiled down to the ‘science’ of pure reasoning in a process that will provide all the answers. In this rapidly changing and highly complex world, judgement calls are often riddled with far too many intangibles, complexities, unknowns and variables to allow every option to be identified, fully analysed and understood.

Because it is unclear to many people how this uncertainty impacts decisions, opinions as to what constitutes the best decision-making approach are often divided into two camps: the first believing that slow decision-making driven by clear, structured processes is most effective, whilst the other preferring to trust in speed and accuracy of their intuition. Essentially, it’s a question of slow vs. fast. Even those that attempt to use a combination of the two approaches rarely know which to apply in a certain set of circumstances, ultimately allowing their intuition to decide!

This article examines this hidden dilemma, exploring how different combinations of confidence and speed of decision-making impact leaders’ ability to make effective choices. The answer might surprise you…

Read the Article: Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists

My Advice

I have written previously about the dangerous overconfidence that arises from the belief that “I know” which is highlighted by the article Leading When Uncertainty is Pervasive. The evidence is clear cut that, once we lose our willingness to consider alternative ideas and perspectives, the quality of our decision making, particularly when facing uncertainty, will be badly affected.

This idea points to another dimension that can be overlayed on the analysis presented in this article, to help you to find a better balance between rational and intuitive approaches. This is the level of complexity, ambiguity and pace of change of the environment.

When complexity is low, there will tend be a relatively clear cause-effect relationship between actions and outcomes. This allows a slow, logical, “problem-solving” type of approach to work well, as long as we guard against falling into the “conventional wisdom” trap, assuming that just because a strategy has worked before, it will continue to do so!

At the other end of the spectrum, where uncertainty and pace of change are high, the many variables and potential outcomes make rational analysis much less effective, with the potential to introduce huge errors. Here, intuition and creativity become much more important, because they provide the means of identifying solutions to unknown and previously unexperienced situations. However, keep in mind that this makes it impossible to “know” what the outcome will be, and to plan accordingly.

Why Balancing the Brain is Vital to Great Leadership

by Michael Nicholas | 28 Aug 2020 | Decision Making, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Michael Nicholas, Mindset, Psychology

The majority of leaders, in my experience, are already familiar with the notion of ‘Level 5’ leadership, a term coined around 20 years ago by Jim Collins and made famous in his best-selling book, Good to Great. He used it to describe the very best leaders: those possessing the capabilities to enable the transformation of a company from good to great.

Collins’ work was remarkable because it challenged the accepted wisdom of the day – that CEOs should be charismatic, larger-than-life figures. He initiated a major shift in leadership thinking by showing that, far from being high-profile individuals with big personalities and a love of success for their own glory, the most effective leaders avoided the limelight wherever possible. In his words, “They weren’t aggressive, self-promoting or self-congratulatory, but diligent and hardworking, self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy.” He discovered that these outstanding leaders were absolutely committed to the success of both the team and the organisation, whilst at the same time being the first to pass credit to others when things went well and to accept the blame when things went badly.

In summarising their qualities, Collins said that such leaders were remarkable because of their ability to:

“Build enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.”

Unfortunately, Collins stopped short of providing guidance on how such leaders could be developed; indeed, he even suggested that to propose a method to do so would be “speculation”! The means of developing emotional intelligence to this level are not well understood, so perhaps it is unsurprising that both research and anecdotal evidence suggest that very few leaders have achieved the goal of mastering leadership at Level 5. How few? According to one study, by David Rock, director of the Neuroleadership Institute, where he evaluated the related qualities of goal focus (similar to professional will) and social skills (within which humility is a uniquely powerful resource), scarily few! He discovered that less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.

As this article explains, some of the difficulty involved in developing a balanced capability in both analytical and social leadership skills may be due to fundamental characteristics of how our brains work. When we focus on either of these two types of task, we engage specialised areas of the brain. However, countless neuroimaging studies have shown that, with few exceptions, there is an antagonistic relationship between the two areas, such that the more one of these networks gets activated, the more the other quietens down. This means that once we are engaged in one type of thinking it is much harder to engage the other, or even to recognise that the other type would be beneficial. I call this a neural seesaw.

This article describes the interaction between the two networks in greater detail. It also explains the importance and value of recognising that we all have a “natural”, or preferred, approach in terms of which network we tend to default to, and addresses what you can do to begin to learn how to create an optimal balance between them.

Read the Article: The Best Managers Balance Analytical and Emotional Intelligence

My Advice

Leadership, like most things in life, requires balance. As such, the seesawing nature of mental function described in this article has huge implications for leadership development and performance. We are much less likely to succeed without focusing on our people, and they won’t succeed unless we’re focused on results – neither characteristic on its own will consistently produce great leadership. Furthermore, it is insufficient simply to understand or remember that we need both task and social capabilities, because so many of the decisions about where and how we focus are made unconsciously.

In the modern, high stress working environment (and life more generally), people are often juggling many priorities at once. When this happens, switching from one side of the brain to the other becomes too difficult, resulting in those tasks that are less automatic getting neglected. The solution requires us to overcome the inevitable neurological conflict that makes it difficult to switch between task and social roles. The foundation of that capability is:

To learn to be able to intentionally choose which parts of the brain to use.

… not easy, I know, that’s why it’s the subject of one of my in-depth workshops!

Take the Opportunity for Growth

by Michael Nicholas | 28 Aug 2020 | Agility, Leadership, Learning, Michael Nicholas, Mindset, Psychology

You may well be aware by now of the work of psychologist and Stanford University professor, Carol Dweck, who identified the important difference between what she called “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. The fixed mindset belief is that our capabilities are innate capacity – we were either born with them or we weren’t – while individuals who have a growth mindset believe in the capacity for development through effort. Dweck discovered that a growth mindset is a prerequisite for the achievement of excellence, while a fixed mindset is almost guaranteed to result in mediocrity. This is true at a corporate and individual level.

The fixed mindset is so powerful that it will often lead people to turn down opportunities to improve, even when they are obviously necessary and require no initiative or effort to take advantage of them. For example, a study was conducted at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. This gives some students a considerable advantage because not all of them arrive with equal skills in this area. A group of students with poor English were identified and sorted into fixed- and growth-mindset groupings. They were then asked whether they would like to take a remedial language class (that would not affect their grades).

Amazingly, most of the fixed mindset group refused the offer. In total contrast, the growth mindset group showed a high interest in taking the class. Those with a fixed mindset were prepared to jeopardise their future success rather than risk the possibility of failure in the remedial course.

The differences between these two mindsets are so deep-rooted that they even show up in brain scans. The brains of people with a fixed mindset “light up” to show interest when given feedback on their strengths, but during discussions where there is an opportunity for them to learn, their brains can be seen to switch off. They even fail to show interest in learning how to make corrections when they have made mistakes. As such, neuroscience proves that only those people with a growth mindset are genuinely interested in learning and being stretched.

Clearly, this is a critical issue for businesses, and leaders will always benefit from helping their employees to become more growth oriented. This article discusses some mechanisms by which you may be able to take advantage of crises, such as Covid-19 and is consequences, to help to cultivate this type of mindset more strongly.

Read the Article: 6 Ways a Crisis Can Help You Cultivate a Growth Mindset

My Advice

Research has clearly shown that, contrary to what most of our education, training and experience to date may have led us to believe, it is not innate ability or talent that brings success: the most important fundamental, underlying everything else, is mindset. The good news is that the key to a developing a productive, success-oriented mindset is to focus on learning.

During a crisis, the need to change can be even more evident than normal, so there may be no better time to practice the skills needed to stimulate learning and growth. With this in mind, there are two ideas in this article that I particularly love:

The concept of a “learn it all” culture, as opposed to the typical expertise-based culture which is described here as “know it all”.
Making a practice of asking people what they’ve learnt.

Whenever we ask a question it changes the thought processes that are taking place in the other person’s mind. It literally hijacks their thinking to focus it on the subject of the question, not only changing what the brain is doing in that instant, but also starting to shift future behaviour. By asking great questions you can align thinking and behaviour with growth, thus orienting your people and your business in that direction.

Maximising Influence: The Secret is in the Preparation

by Michael Nicholas | 9 Jul 2020 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Mindset, Psychology

What is leadership? This simple question has spawned dozens of theories, literally thousands of definitions and hundreds of thousands of books. However, while researchers disagree in many areas, there is one viewpoint on leadership where there is almost unanimous agreement, which is that, at its heart, leadership is about influence. Great leaders are always great persuaders.

So, how might we become more effective at influencing/persuading others?

One of the most influential thinkers on the mechanisms of persuasion is Robert Cialdini, whose classic book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, became a national bestseller and listed on New York Times bestseller list and Fortune Magazine’s 100 best business books of all the time. In it, Cialdini identifies what he called the six universal principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. However, this is a book that is probably more useful to marketeers than leaders.

Now, 30 years on from Influence, Cialdini has added to his previous body of work by identifying another aspect of persuasion, this time, of direct relevance and immediate value to leaders. In fact, he believes this to be the most critical of all, because it also empowers the other six: how we prepare recipients to receive a message. He calls it pre-suasion. This article explains the key elements involved.

Read the Article: How to Be a Persuasive Leader (hint: it’s about the ‘moment before’)

My Advice

I’ve worked with many leaders to help them to craft important presentations that will create the impact they desire. Without exception, these high-achieving and committed professionals already have a powerful message and carefully developed plan for delivering their content, before they bring anything to me for discussion. The area that always receives much less attention, is how to maximise the impact of what they say; however, research clearly shows that this area may be more critical than the words themselves. We all know that a poor presenter can kill even the best message.

This principle is also true in any other communication or interaction where you have a goal of influencing another person. I love the example in this article of the degree to which an image, when presented alongside identical information, greatly improved the performance of call centre volunteers. Emotion matters. Attention matters. And both can be greatly enhanced by giving some of your own attention to the softer aspects of your communication, particularly those that impact the state of mind of the people you are speaking to. The principles in this article provide a great starting point.

The “Better than Average” Trap

by Michael Nicholas | 27 May 2020 | Emotional Intelligence, Michael Nicholas, Mindfulness, Mindset, Perception, Psychology

There are two areas of understanding involved in our sense of self-awareness:

Who we believe that we are – our identity, including our values, fears, thoughts, feelings, behaviours, strengths and weaknesses, drivers and motivators.
How we fit into the world around us – based our beliefs about how the world works.

The problem is, we aren’t typically very good at making these assessments. Worse, as human beings, we have a tendency to overestimate ourselves, especially in relation to others.

For example, in one of a series of experiments by researchers at Cornell University, students were asked to predict how many flowers they would buy in an upcoming charity event, and how many the average student would buy. They then compared the predictions with actual behaviour. Consistently, the students greatly overestimated their own contributions, while making good guesses about what others would do.

This trait is known as illusory superiority, and it leads directly to problems like over-confidence, poor critical thinking, and a weakened ability to learn.

To compound the problem, even being given feedback on actual outcomes doesn’t lead us to make accurate adjustments. People have no resistance to adjusting down their estimates relating to others, but don’t similarly revise their perception of self, preferring to maintain their inflated self-image. The result is that, while we evaluate everyone else on observable behaviours, we cling to our original assessment of ourselves, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. For us, our knowledge of what we are “really like inside” is preferable emotionally, and therefore outweighs the external evidence.

The evidence of illusory superiority has been found in many studies, for example:

High school students evaluate their leadership ability as above average 70% of the time, while only 2% of them see themselves as below average.
When MBA students were asked to estimate their contribution to a team effort, the overall total came to 139%.
94% of university professors rate themselves as above average.
In one company, 32% of the employees saw their performance as being in the top 5%.

Leaders are especially susceptible to the tendency to overestimate their skills and contribution, because the delusion affects people most when the traits required are ill-defined – which is definitely true of leadership! That enables us to set up comparisons in a way that favours us.

This comprehensive article examines the power of reflective capacity, or mindfulness, to increase self-awareness because of the way it improves our ability to observe ourselves objectively. It examines the importance of giving consideration to our “inner self”, which is separate to our thoughts, looks at some of the benefits of self-awareness, and offers some simple practices for improving it.

Read the Article: What is Self-Awareness and Why is it Important?

My Advice

A powerful way to reduce our sense of illusory superiority is to become completely intolerant of our own excuses for our shortcomings, especially those which are based on the idea that poor results were “outside our control”. I call this desire to take personal responsibility, “getting to cause”, rather being “at effect”. Then, taking advantage of the fact that we are generally pretty accurate in assessing other people, seek third party input any time you find yourself making excuses, and make sure that you give full consideration to their responses. It won’t be comfortable, but you will increase the speed of your learning and immediately improve your decision making.

Home Working Lessons from Cockroaches

by Michael Nicholas | 27 May 2020 | Engagement, Leadership, Michael Nicholas, Mindset, Psychology, Teamwork

After weeks of lockdown, science suggests that significant numbers of those being forced to work in isolation could be finding it progressively harder to maintain their motivation. Part of the problem is the double-edged sword of a human trait described by a psychological theory called Social Facilitation Theory, which explains the well-known tendency for people’s performance to change when being watched by others.

One of my all-time favourite studies examined this phenomenon with cockroaches as the test subjects. It was led by professor Zajonc of Stanford University, and it demonstrated that behaviour modification in social settings is not a uniquely human occurrence. First, he created two different tunnels – one easy and the other much more difficult – for the cockroaches to run through. He then timed how long it took the cockroaches to get from start to finish under two conditions: 1) while being observed by other cockroaches, and 2) when on their own (I’d give him an award just for the creativity of it!).

Amazingly, the results showed that being observed affects cockroaches in the same way as it does human beings! Compared to their performance when on their own, the presence of observers caused them to do better at the easy task (running more quickly through the easy tunnel), but worse when challenged with the task of navigating the difficult tunnel. Similar studies have now found this trait in many other animals as well.

This illustrates the basis of social facilitation theory, which is that our natural dominant response is amplified in the presence of an audience. This term – natural dominant response – refers to anything that we do automatically as a result of instinctive human reactions or practiced behaviours and actions. For example, in the presence of observers or competitors, people are likely to:

Perform better if they are doing something that they are already good at. For example, athletes put in more effort and are much more likely to achieve a personal best in front of a crowd. Similarly, cyclists are faster riding against each other than against the clock.
Make errors when undertaking tasks they are not familiar with. For example, individuals taking their driving test are often much more prone to errors in front of the examiner.

The explanation for this change in behaviour is that the presence of others heightens arousal and thus increases our ability to perform habitual or well-learned tasks. However, the same arousal leads to stress and produces social inhibition, reducing performance in areas where we are not confident/competent.

Studies have found that people in groups tend to perform better than those who are alone, and that has significant implications in the current era where huge numbers of people are required to work from home. Quite simply, in areas of competence, we are motivated to work harder when people are watching us. This article explains this phenomenon in greater detail and provides some ideas about how its effect may be reduced.

Read the Article: We Work Harder When We Know Someone’s Watching

My Advice

The essence of the recommendations in the article is that accountability needs to be maximised. An extremely powerful way of achieving this is to create a forum within which tasks and deliverables can be shared, which leverages a powerful psychological driver: that commitments made public become central motivators of behaviour.

More generally, maintaining an awareness of social facilitation theory can convey benefits at any time, not only during this pandemic. Whenever people are outside their comfort zone, I’d suggest making additional efforts to ensure they feel supported, which can do much to calm their evaluation anxiety.

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