Success Secrets and Stories
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Success Secrets and Stories
Elevating Leadership through Personal Insight
What if unraveling the nuances of your subconscious could revolutionize your approach to leadership? This episode promises to illuminate the transformative power of self-awareness, anchored by insights from Craig Dickerson's thought-provoking article in the Harvard Business Review. Join us as we navigate the ladder of inference, a groundbreaking model that reveals how personal biases and assumptions shape our interpretations and decisions. Just as physical fitness demands strength, balance, flexibility, and endurance, leadership fitness thrives on recognizing and challenging these subconscious biases. Through this journey of self-discovery, leaders can enhance their decision-making prowess and confidently tackle complex situations.
With expert insights from Dr. Durst, we explore how interrupting habitual thought patterns can unlock new realms of leadership flexibility. Confront personal filters, identify triggers, and comprehend the underlying need to be right — all crucial steps toward breaking negative cycles. By embracing the truth about our behaviors and reactions, leaders can take responsibility for their actions and cultivate personal growth. Discover how self-awareness is the key to overcoming obstacles and effectively "kissing problems goodbye," paving the way for a more successful leadership journey.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Thank you, hello, and welcome to our podcast Success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, tim Wadoloski, and I'm here with my close friend, rob Powell.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so today in this podcast, we wanted to talk about self-awareness, and the first example of human-centered leadership requires a self-awareness approach. This is from an article that I thought was really interesting. The second example of our discussion will be about the MBR approach in terms of self-awareness, and it discusses some of the assumptions and filters that we use on terms of decisions, but being able to understand self-awareness. Hopefully we're going to be able to put these two together, and it makes some sense that there are different applications for self-awareness, but it's more important to understand how to get in touch with your feelings and understand some of the things that are holding you back, and that was really the essence of what we wanted to talk about. Okay, so we have this article that I thought was really interesting, the letter of inference building self-awareness to be a better human centered Leader, by Craig Dickerson, may 9th of 2024, in the Harvard Business Review, their corporate learning section, and the article starts off with human-centered leadership requires self-awareness, which can be difficult to teach, which is an understatement. The latter provides a model for raising leaders' self-awareness and has several additional practical applications. The latter supports leadership fitness and their development of balance and flexibility.
Speaker 1:Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that people don't always learn from their experience. That doesn't come to me as a surprise, to be honest, that we experience does not help people to root out the false information, and that seeing ourselves as highly experienced can keep us from doing the homework seeking disinformation, looking for the evidence and questioning our assumptions. So one of the concepts that's key to Mr Dickerson's concept is selecting data from an available information, what they sometimes call his information pool. Imagine a ladder leaning against a wall sitting in a puddle. The puddle in which the ladder sits is the data's or the facts. The amount of data in any given situation is more than our brains can handle, so filters are applied. Two people looking at the same data will filter and retain different data, but no one will process all the data completely or in the same way. As you step into the first rung of the ladder, your brain selects and triangulates data, keeping some and ignoring others. Adding meetings to the selected data is the next step of the rung of the ladder. Our brains push the data through filters and lenses of our paradigms. They are biases, worldviews, mindsets. Think of it as glasses with yellow lenses when you first put them on, everything looks yellow and then your brain adjusts and everything looks normal, until you take the glasses off and then everything looks green. What you are looking at is that it never changed. It's how you perceived it that has changed.
Speaker 1:Interpreting the data is his next point. Interpreting the data and making assumptions this next rung on the letter. You interpret the data and begin to assign meanings to it. You make assumptions to fill in the gaps. Have you ever been reading an email and realize that you heard the writer's voice and tone in your head? I kind of remember one time I sent a message out in all caps and I had the person send a message back to me is why are you shouting at me? I didn't realize that I was shouting, I thought it was an email, but anyway, the tone of voice you can hear, it's the exact interpretation of what's being added and our interpretations, like in my example, are powerful. They affect the content, the experience, the culture. This is also a step where you may start to assign the situation of whether it's good or bad, or treat it with reward or benevolence or evil.
Speaker 1:The next one is an interesting rung on the ladder drawing conclusions from your assumptions. As you get close to the top of the ladder. You draw your conclusions From where you stand. Your conclusions are clear and obvious and important. Your inference feels like a fact you cannot imagine any other sane person coming up with a different one Because of its certainty. When we share our brilliance and our insights to others, we feel no need to explain how we arrived to those conclusions, because it should be obvious but sadly not necessarily obvious to anyone else.
Speaker 1:The next rung is the adoption of beliefs based on the assumptions. Adding complexity to the situation is a profound influence of our mental models, our ingrained values, our assumptions, our beliefs that are functioning in the world on the way each of us ascend and, respectively, understand how the ladder works. To depict the concept visually, one could almost liken these mental models to the sides of a ladder providing the structure and the coherence of reasonable thinking. For example, when people who embrace thinking positively, it's a mindset it infers that the world is largely benevolent. On the other hand, those who expect the worst mentally are inclined to filter and judge occurrences that reflect a negative outlook.
Speaker 1:Carol DeWitt points out that how profound a mind impact or a fix or growth can affect the behavior and outcomes. This is how different people standing on the same ladder in the same puddle of data will wind up with different ladders against different walls, reaching vastly different conclusions. The visualization of the ladder, I think, is the important key here that every time that we make that assumption, we're making an adjustment, we're filtering the data. It's another rung of what we're coming up with a conclusion. Those are the challenges, greg. Thanks, john.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about how the ladder of inference supports leadership fitness. In Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Study on HCL, in a more recent paper, we propose the leadership fitness, like physical fitness. It requires strength, it requires balance. You've got to have flexibility and you must have endurance. The latter most directly supports the middle two. We suggest that part of balance is the ability to read situations more accurately by challenging subconscious encoding processes that lead us to ignore some cues in favor of others. That is, disrupting unconscious bias and default behavior patterns through metacognition or thinking about your thinking. After consciously disrupting these thought processes, leaders display greater balance by intentionally choosing leadership behaviors. The latter is a tool that helps leaders make implicit thought patterns explicit, allowing for analysis, choice and correction. In leadership style, the leader supports flexibility by interrupting habits.
Speaker 2:Does a person have the choice to act differently without noticing their default thinking? Maybe, but the chance seems slim. Imagine that you're driving home from work, you're tired, you're hungry, the traffic is just terrible, it's bad, and then somebody cuts you off, right? For most people, the response is automatic. The only option is what word am I going to use to describe that person? Jerk, idiot, moron. Exactly that person. Jerk, idiot, moron. Exactly.
Speaker 2:So let's continue with this thought on how the ladder inference supports leadership fitness. These are conclusions. If the default process is interrupted and assumptions are evaluated using the ladder, you may realize that the person who cut you off may not be evil or lacking in intelligence. And there may be another possible conclusion, an alternative conclusion. You might also realize that you have accidentally cut people off yourself before and you are not evil and you're not stupid. Right Now that you have access to different possibilities of how to react, you can choose to send positive thoughts toward that person, hoping that they get where you're coming from and they get where they need to go safely.
Speaker 2:Before the ladder, you only had options. After the ladder, you have new possibilities of how to act, and that's what we call flexibility. The ladder of inference is a simple but powerful tool for self-awareness that can be used in many situations to increase leadership balance and flexibility, supporting human-centered leadership. But this is not the limit of the application of the ladder in leadership. In the next post in the series, we will look at how the ladder can be used to support better decision-making, manage productive conflict and create space for building trust and collaboration. For more on how the latter influence supports the four dimensions of leadership fitness. Download our paper Leadership Fitness Developing the Capacity to See and Lead Differently Amid Complexity.
Speaker 1:John and lead differently amid complexity, john. So his article has additional detail and it is a wonderful example of an academic approach in terms of how to understand self-awareness and bringing in the elements of how to look at yourself, and I love this article. We're taking excerpts from it, but it reminds me of the elements that I had learned with Dr Durst on being the cause, which is a lot of looking at yourself and a lot of self-reflection. And Dr Durst talked about the filters, the things that are holding you back that sometimes aren't spoken out loud. It's a little bit different. It's really the same subject. So let me explain. He goes about it in terms of trying to give you references.
Speaker 1:Confronting yourself is how he starts. The first part Life is a series of problem-solving exercises and then he lists six things that he wants you to try to think about. What are your triggers? What do you get out of having it your way? What is your pattern? Who needs to be right? Tell the truth about it all and kiss it goodbye.
Speaker 1:The next point I thought was probably the most entertaining the only people without problems are the people who are six feet under. To be more alive, you need to face your problems. That whenever you mention something like money or relationships or politics, or somebody gets close to you, you go unconscious. What do you get when you have it your way? Well, there's a payoff. Your payoff might be to defend yourself against fear, to make someone else wrong, to protect your incredible ego, to have something to bitch about credible ego, to have something to bitch about. To determine your payoff, all you have to do is look at what you get out of the situation having it your way. What's the thing that you're trying to accomplish? The next point is what are the patterns that are involved? When you determine that there's supposed to be a payoff, you start to notice a reoccurring theme. If you have an incompetent boss, maybe your payoff is that you were able to make them wrong. Or maybe you were able to tell others how rotten of a boss you had. Maybe you are able to blame your boss for your irresponsible and mediocre performance. Maybe you're able to re-experience the same familiar theme that you've had with your parents.
Speaker 1:Determining your patterns can help you end the cycles. So if those are the patterns that you have and you notice that it's something that goes on and on, that you're almost looking for it. That's his point about self-awareness. His next point, I think, is also interesting who gets to be right? Because you have to win the argument. You create the patterns to get something out of them. Those patterns are your patterns. You need to know that you're telling the truth and you're hopefully finding a way that they're telling the truth. Many of us set up automatic behavior responses to get out of taking our responsibilities as long as we can make your boss or your spouse or your secretary or your kids or your parents wrong. Now that's setting up a pattern.
Speaker 1:The next point he brings up is tell the truth about it. And when you think about being self-aware, that no one is born perfect, that we all have things that we're trying to work on, when you stop putting the energy into blaming other people, circumstances or events for what's happening in your life, you're on your way. The eventual problem is you keep running from it or you keep turning your back on it, or you keep going faster to avoid it. And it's still right behind you, sort of like a dog chasing its tail. Wake up to the fact that it's all about you and it's just the truth, and if you're lying to yourself, you're the biggest fool in the room because you know it's a lie and therefore it starts getting stuck in your gut. That piece of being self-aware is knowing when you're getting yourself ill because you're trying to hide from whatever it is that's chasing you. So his last point is probably the most important.
Speaker 1:The bottom line is kissing your problems goodbye. When you're lying to yourself and you're trying to compensate for the things that you're trying to avoid, that self-awareness piece of it has to kick in, because the only person you're lying to is you and the person who knows that you're lying is yourself. It's like that cosmic joke. If you don't get it that you're the most important person in that conversation of whether it's true or not, there's the problem. The best thing to do is take a situation that is negative, that might be influencing what you're dealing with in terms of self-awareness, and consider it a memory, park it and kiss it goodbye. That memory isn't going to do anything for you long-term. You need to make a decision, you need to be aware, and that memory is just a reference point. It is not a decision maker. That is probably the most important element that Dr Durst talked about the progression of maturing with your ideas and the ability to stand back and be self-aware. Greg, maybe you have an example that would be a little bit more business-related for us.
Speaker 2:Thanks, John, when I think about the phrase they don't know or they don't care Okay, we're talking about self-awareness that comes to mind. We had a situation where we had a really difficult job. It was one of those manager jobs that nobody really wanted, but the work needed to be done and we'd gone through several people and just couldn't find the right person internally or externally. So Cast a WiderNet and recruiting. We found a very accomplished individual, great credentials, top flight companies. They'd done the same job we needed to have done and they did it, according to the references, impeccably well, went through the interview process. We did panel interviews and the hiring team was dazzled by the person's experience, the level of confidence that the candidate displayed during those interviews. But still had a couple of reservations. The hiring manager had just a couple, but that was all right because we were desperate to get that job filled right.
Speaker 2:A difficult job the longer it was open, the worse we were, the position we were in. So the hire was made and the experience went downhill from there. So this individual had a kind of approach that said it was their way or their highway. Even after coaching, after mentoring, this person was a resident, the resident expert. They didn't show any savvy, didn't show any patience, had a very high ego, butted heads with peer managers, butted heads with their boss, butted heads with admins In fact, there was no one she didn't butt heads with in trying to get the job done Again, very talented, but chose not to get the job done the way it needed to be done.
Speaker 2:She forgot that a lot of the job in this manager role was about influence and you need to be aware of your own cues. What are you sending out there? How are people receiving you? Because, even though her intentions generally were honorable because she wanted to do a fantastic job quickly and efficiently that wasn't the way to get there. We ended up having to put her on a performance improvement plan after just hiring her. It didn't work out, had to part ways. So a talented individual, actually brilliant in some respects, but just didn't have self-awareness, couldn't demonstrate it in the workplace.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's probably the hardest to deal with somebody who's competent, but they don't understand that unless they have 20 arms, their department is the key, not themselves. Their department is the key, not themselves. The expert syndrome that whole part of I know how to get it done follow it my way. Yeah, I've run into that a lot, especially in technical kind of positions. Yeah, there's that tendency of my way or highway. It's very frustrating because the rest of the team needs to learn to be as proficient as the person that was leading the team and they don't have the skills of leadership. They have the skills of the task, but they don't have the skills of leadership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and John, one thing you maybe just think about the individuals that reported this person were getting some bad behavior models Because they were saying, hey, this person is really brilliant, this is how they're doing it. They just hired this individual. We should behave the same way with the folks we deal with at Arlo.
Speaker 1:We definitely didn't want that, yeah no, you got to stop that as soon as you can. So hopefully this helps in terms of two different formats to learn about self-awareness and the most important part is to understand when those filters are being applied. You have to be able to stand back, look in the mirror and say am I doing it? Is it me, is it the environment that I have to compensate for? That self-reflection sometimes I can tell you is best if you can do it in a quiet room and just take a few minutes for yourself, just to be at peace, and it makes so much easier those skills of self-awareness to try to take hold. That's probably the best advice I can give. So if you like what you've heard, yeah, my book Building your Leadership Toolbox is available on ebook and Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The podcast is available on what you're listening to, thank you. It's also available on Apple, google and Spotify.
Speaker 1:Dr Durst's material and his MBR program is available on successgrowthacademycom. And if you want to get a hold of Greg and I, we have a website now. It's wwwauthorjawcom. So, yeah, my middle name is A is Alex. So, john, alex, never mind, and the music is brought to you by my grandson. So we want to hear from you. Drop us a line, help us try to make the programs something that you want to hear. Your input has really helped us to change the program and we appreciate it a lot. Well thanks, greg.
Speaker 2:Thanks, John. As always, Next time yeah.