Leave No Doubt
In popular media, leaders often use dualities as rhetorical devices to inspire their people and paint a vision for how they can win despite their current circumstances. Simplistic, mutually exclusive dualities such as light or dark, theistic or atheistic, victory or defeat, and profit or loss, can be useful. They inform our thinking and invite us to deepen our understanding of both by examining them in opposition to each other. Dramatic scenes in movies and television regularly depict leaders as they use these rhetorical flourishes to replace their people’s doubt and fear with certainty and confidence.
Stories shape and perpetuate cultural expectations about what it means to be a leader and all of us bring these expectations to the workplace. Think of accounting firms gearing themselves up for tax filing season or sales organizations making their big push toward their 4th quarter goals. Painting the vision for success, rallying the troops, and setting them loose to storm the metaphorical hill is a useful model for organizational leaders when challenges are well defined, a known response is demanded, and a clear finish line exists.
Unfortunately, real life rarely fits neatly within a narrative structure. In business, there is no permanent finish line, the camera does not fade to black, and the credits do not roll after victory is attained. In addition, few business leaders make adequate room for the rest and recovery needed after celebrations are over as the next project, objective, or deadline begins to assert itself. As a result, leaders that repeatedly rally their troops will typically see diminishing returns over time, increased employee burnout, and may find themselves having over-promised and under-delivered.
So that begs the question: If CEOs and organization leaders should not model themselves after the coach psyching up players before the big game, and should not seek to replace doubt and fear with opposing certainty and confidence, what should they be doing? A recent episode of the podcast Hidden Brain suggests that a useful alternative is replacing fear and uncertainty with critical reflection and curiosity.
This is not an easy thing for business leaders to do given the prevalence of cultural conditioning to value certainty and project confidence. In his book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know, Adam Grant talks about the “first instinct fallacy” in which people generally assume that their first thoughts will be their best thoughts about a given topic, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. Critical reflection is difficult because it runs counter to the first instinct fallacy. It demands that leaders proactively entertain and invite the possibility that their current answers may not represent the best solutions or outcomes.
Reexamination can be difficult, but it is a necessary precursor to improvement at the individual and organizational level. Organizations with a high degree of certainty typically execute on strategy very well. However, certainty will never reveal whether they are executing the optimal strategy in the first place. For that, leaders need to foster curiosity by productively managing task conflict and building psychological safety within their organization.
Task conflicts are “disagreements among group members, concerning ideas and opinions about the task being performed, such as disagreement regarding an organization’s current hiring strategies or the appropriate information to include in an annual report” (Jehn et al. p. 4). Task conflict is distinguished from other types of conflict such as relationship conflict (between people) and process conflict (how work should be delegated or completed). Task and process conflict are not personal and focus on what tasks should be done and how they should be done rather than on issues related to the people doing the work. Leaders must help their team keep their perspective as they challenge the status quo. They must prevent productive task and process conflict from spilling over into unproductive relationship conflict as they work to create a meritocracy where the best ideas can win.
For such a free marketplace of ideas to develop, leaders must create psychological safety which is defined as “a shared belief that” one’s workplace is “safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson p. 6). When leaders think about psychological safety, they often imagine spaces free from conflict or ones in which all ideas are assumed to be equally valuable. However, this assumption is not true. Group cohesion is not necessary for psychological safety to exist. In fact, it can actually undermine psychological safety if team members become unwilling to disagree, challenge each other’s views, and debate the merits of each other’s ideas. Psychological safety does not permit careless or lazy ideas to flourish nor does it require all ideas to be embraced. Put simply, it is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up” and stems from a sense of “mutual respect and trust among team members” (Edmonson p. 6). It is a sense that the person bringing ideas to the table will be valued, respected, and treated fairly whether those ideas are ultimately acted on or not.
As a leader, your job is indeed to paint a vision for the future and show your people how to get there. But there is more to it than replacing your people’s doubt and fear with simple certainty and confidence in what you already do. Replace it with critical reflection and curiosity as you do the work to improve your organization over time. It can be hard to give your team the space to challenge assumptions and find better solutions. You will never be able to place the right bet 100% of the time. But knowledgeable guidance can help you replace fear with curiosity and leave no room for doubt that you will ultimately succeed.
Let’s get to work!
