EntreLeadership - Why Leaders Need to Get Better at Changing Their Minds with Adam Grant

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

If you're a human (and we hope you are), at some point you've looked back on a moment in your life or your business and groaned, "I wish I had done that differently." Well, what if there was a way to reduce those moments? The secret is to start thinking like a scientist. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant argues that challenging the way you think, treating ideas like theories, and being willing to unlearn is essential for positioning yourself to win in business and relationships - and for making better decisions! In this episode, Adam gives practical advice for staying mentally flexible, pivoting your business strategy, and becoming comfortable with doubt while still holding on to what you value.   entreleadership.com/podcast Adam Grant's website Think Again by Adam Grant Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant The Reboot Podcast Adam Grant’s Instagram WorkLife with Adam Gran‪t‬ Difficult Conversations Checklist EntreLeadership Partners Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, when you start a business as the founder, you've got to do everything. You're the chief production officer, which means you better freaking produce, or it's just not going to happen. But if you stay in that seat, you're never going to scale your business. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entry Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and the profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and our guest today is Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist and a TED speaker who helps people find meaning and motivation at work. He's a bestselling author and he's also the host of Work Life, a great podcast you should check out. In his new book, Think Again, Adam challenges us to slow down and stop doing and executing all the time and actually spend time thinking, thinking about our business, where it's going, what problems we have to solve.

why is it that we have such a temptation to just stay on that treadmill of producing and executing, and we never stop and make the time to think? One is that we get rewarded for what we deliver, right? And it's sometimes hard to connect the dots between, all right, I've got a bunch of new ideas or a fresh perspective and what that actually means for my small business. I think the second thing is we get rewarded for doing things the same way over and over again, right? That gives us excellence of execution. It helps us build productive routines.

And then we get really comfortable in our best practices. And I think the danger of that, of course, is that we don't look around to ask if there are better practices. And I think what a lot of us end up doing is we think too much like preachers and prosecutors. When we're in the mindset of preachers, we're convinced we're right. When we're thinking like prosecutors, we're proving people who are challenging us wrong. And that means we stop thinking flexibly. And sometimes we fall under the trap of foolish consistency. And we see this happen all the time with huge companies, right?

I don't think that Blackberry or Blockbuster or Kodak or Sears had any problem with doing, right? They were great at executing. The problem was they were executing the things that had made them great in the past, and they missed out obviously on a bunch of digital disruption, some of which was brought from the outside. But if you look at a Kodak, they actually pioneered digital imaging. And then they said, no, our business model is selling film. Obviously, that didn't work out very well for them.

and I see the same dynamics in small businesses pretty regularly, where people are unwilling to rethink their strategies, their products, their services, and some of their practices that have driven their success in the past. And that means sometimes we get trapped in stability where we should be embracing change. I love the Kodak example, because in hindsight, we can all see how they actually could have become Instagram. I mean, they were the market leader in photography, and had they been thinking this way, they could have shifted that and caused that revolution. Knowing what you know and what you studied that goes into this book, think again,

if you could go back and be a consultant into the executive team at Kodak at that time, what do you imagine they would have been saying that was keeping them entrenched, and what would you tell them about how they were thinking and the opportunity that they would miss if they didn't change the way they thought? Oh, that's such an interesting question. Well, I would have, I mean, it would have been great to introduce them to the future of the internet and talk to them about how we were all going to be. posting selfies one day, but I think long before that, where I would have started would have been

to talk to them a little bit about the fat cat syndrome, right, where we tend to rest on our laurels and get complacent when things are going really well. And that's the perfect time to shake things up because we have the resources and the slack capacity to do it. And then I think the next thing that I probably would have done is I would have encouraged them to stop preaching that they were right, stop prosecuting me for being wrong, and instead think a little bit more like scientists. Daniel, my all-time favorite experiments was done recently with small business owners in Italy. So they're all pre-revenue. They're taking a three to four-month crash course in how to start and run a business. They all get the exact same training in education. What they don't know is that

half of them have been randomly assigned just to think like scientists in the way that they build and run their businesses. They're told, your strategy is just a theory, go to customer interviews to develop some specific hypotheses. And then when you launch your first product or service, that's just an experiment to test your hypotheses. And it turns out that that group that's just encouraged to think like scientists over the next year, they bring in on average more than 40 times the revenue of the control group, which is a stunning effect, right? And the major reason why they're so successful when they think like scientists

is that they're more than twice as likely to pivot. They run their first product launch or service launch, and it doesn't work. And instead of doubling down, they say, you know what, I guess I learned that my theory was wrong, or my hypotheses didn't work in this market, or I need to rethink my minimum viable product. And I would have encouraged Kodak to do the same thing, right? I would have said, okay, you all are great scientists when it comes to figuring out how to process film and build a camera. Why don't you apply that same AB testing that you normally do with products to your strategy, to the kinds of products that you create, to how you run your company? And let's just,

let's try the digital camera. You have the technology. What's going to happen if we roll it out, instead of waiting for a couple dozen to get rolled out first and then saying, whoops, it's too late. What are the hallmarks of thinking like a scientist that we don't see when you're thinking like a prosecutor or a preacher? So I don't think you have to own a microscope or a telescope, right, or even a lab code. Thinking like a scientist to me just means you favor humility over pride and curiosity over conviction. That means you know what you don't know. and you're excited to discover things that might actually teach you a fresh perspective or, you know,

an area of expertise that you don't currently have access to. And one of the things that the scientists do best, at least good scientists, right, sometimes even scientists don't think like scientists. But a good scientist is somebody who says, I'm not going to let my ideas become my identity, right? I'm not going to start to define myself as the kind of person who only leads a certain way. Or I won't define us as the kind business that only does one thing. And I think that flexibility is a huge part of what allows this scientific thinking mindset to allow small business owners to continue adapting and not only responding to change in the world, but actually creating it. You mentioned not letting our ideas become our identity. It kind of brings up an interesting

muse into what we should be rethinking and what we should always hold on to. I'm thinking about things like core values and things that are core to. And things that are core to. our identity, how do we decipher the things that we should be challenging all the time versus the things we should say, no, this is foundational and I don't want to reanalyze and reinvent all the time. You just captured it really nicely. I think there's a distinction between our values and our practices. So a lot of people, I think, when they make their ideas, their identity, they say, okay, we've got a set of habits, and that's part of who we are. And that's a mistake because you don't know which practices and which habits are ultimately going to advance your

mission, right, or make you profitable or make your business sustainable. What you do know is you have a set of values, ideally, according to the data, three to five core principles that you stand for. They might be excellence, they could be integrity, they could be learning. And I don't think those need to change a whole lot year to year, right? There needs to be a stable core so that people know what you're all about. And that identity anchored on your values is what's distinctive, what's central, and what's enduring about you. It's your DNA. Everything else, though, is open to change, right? Because there are many ways that you could advance those values. And I think a lot of people, they look at leaders who, you know, who might do a pivot or might do a 180, and they say, no, you're a flip-flopper. Like, no, no,

no, no, I've got a set of values about running a great business. And I'm going to be open-minded when it comes to the most effective ways to do that. And honestly, my favorite example of this is is from the world of politics. Abraham Lincoln, great flip-flopper. He came into the White House thinking that if he abolished slavery, that it would tear the union apart. How lucky are we that he changed his mind on that? He wasn't really shifting his values much, though, right?

He always was interested in getting rid of this horrendous practice. But he was very open-minded about the right time and the right policy to roll this system out. And I think staying true to your values and staying flexible on your opinions and your practices is probably the most effective way to navigate this tension. What do you think?

Well, I think you're dead on, and I know in my own experience, it took me a while. It took me a little bit of becoming seasoned in life to figure out even what I valued. You know, in my early 20s, I was in the middle of this Ramsey organization, building entree leadership,

very grassroots at the time. I'm selling. I'm on the phone a lot. And I don't know that I could always distinguish between what I valued versus I really like that, versus that's a dopamine rush, versus this is the idea of the week. You know, it just, it was all kind of in this, the same bucket. And I think I had to have some tough seasons and weather some storms before I could really go, what do I care about deeply that I'm just not going to negotiate on? Things that I'm going to use as filters for my decision

making, or at least these guiding principles where on this side of the ditch, there's a guardrail here, I'm not going past it. On this side of the ditch over here, there's another guardrail. or I guess the side of the road, rather, before the ditch. And it took me a while to figure out what those values were. We talked to business owners a lot who struggle in the values exercise when it's just an exercise. You know, if you're at a workshop and it's like, all right, let's take the next hour and figure out our core values. I've found that's really challenging because you need some season and some experiences.

What do you think? Yeah, I think you're spot on here, Daniel. I would say I have two favorite ways of trying to figure out values. So I think on the personal side, a lot of people, say, well, you know, pay attention to what you say. No, what we say is often how we want to be seen, right? It's what's important to other people, not always what's important to us. So then, you know, people say, well, okay, look at what you do and how you spend your time. And I think that gets a little bit closer to values, but to your point about dopamine, that's also our energy is driven a lot by

our interests, right? What we think is fun and exciting, not always what we think is important. I think where you really see values is look at the sacrifices you make. what are the things that you give up and why? And the answer to that why is usually your core principles. I think for a lot of small business owners, right, what we see is they will sacrifice time with friends in order to build a great company. And that's a great example of saying, okay, you know, I care about the legacy of this business even more than some of my personal relationships.

And that sacrifice, right, tells us a lot about who you are. And then on the organizational level, my favorite way of it, to identify your collective core values is to ask people for the story about the time when your culture was at its best. The culture highlights. And as you collect those stories, you see common themes in them.

There's actually some classic research on this showing that when you ask people to tell a story about their culture, no matter what organization you're in, you see some of the same kinds of stories come up over and over again. There are stories about how the little person got to the top, how the big boss was human,

how people didn't get fired, when they made a mistake. Right. And once you identify those defining moments, you can find the patterns in them and say, okay, this is who we are and this is who we want to be. And what I love about that is

it takes those values out of the abstract, right? Nobody really knows what it means to live a value of excellence. Or we're not always sure what it means to live by integrity. But when we hear a story, like the ones that I just gave examples of, we say, oh, well, okay,

integrity means that we are committed to you, even if you make a mistake, can we want you to learn from that. And I think those stories probably during a pandemic are even more powerful than they were before because we're not seeing those culture moments happen like we normally do. And so we need to hear them for the culture to come to life. You know, as you say that, I think about just the way that we define success in general. And I'm curious what you would say about rethinking the scorecard for success. As a business starts out, and I imagine this is your case early in your career, it was for me. A lot of success is

about, there's a bit of a Maslow's hierarchy of can we pay the bills? You know, can we survive? Is my business service or product viable in the marketplace? But once we check off these boxes and we start to think about meaning and purpose, hopefully we ascend a little bit more towards the contribution we're going to make, how we're helping other people. I know for me it wasn't until my dad died that I really went on this journey thinking about my whole life and how short life is and evaluated, how am I living? How much energy am I putting into my legacy versus just performing and achieving, you know, the next trophy on the wall? How should we be rethinking what success looks like for us individually and maybe even for our companies? Well, first, Daniel, I'm sorry for your loss.

It's something, obviously, that so many people have had to deal with on a different scale this past year. And I think if there is a silver lining, right, because we can't undo those moments of loss, it's that after traumatic events where you lose someone close to you or you go through severe hardship, roughly 15% of people end up with post-traumatic stress disorder. And, you know, that's obviously terrible news, right? Nobody wants PTSD. I think the good news is, though, over half of people experience the opposite of PTSD, which is called post-traumatic growth. It's where you say, look, I wish this hadn't happened. But because I have no other choice, I am going to get better from it.

We see people come away with greater personal strength saying, you know what, if I survive that, I can get through anything. They often have gratitude that they didn't have before. They come away with stronger relationships with the people that they made it through hardship with. And to your point, they especially end up with a new sense of possibility and purpose, saying, you know what, I am going to make the most of my time. they become people who pursue meaning not just success.

And I think the shift that goes on there is a lot of people say, okay, I was defining my success as achieving my goals, but it's actually more about living my values. Right. It's not just the quantity of my accomplishments. It's actually the quality of life that I create for the people around me. And my favorite test of meaningful work has always been to ask people, if your job didn't exist, if you were not leading this small business, who would be worse? stuff. And the groups of people you name, the individual humans that you name, those are the people

who give meaning and purpose to your work. And those are the people that you want to try to figure out how to serve better. Yeah, I really like that. That's a great question. Good exercise to do to list out that list of people. And hopefully it's not a short list if it is that that would make me rethink, you know, how am I leading and how are those relationships going? You know, I'm curious in sticking with my own experience, and hopefully this is helpful for our listeners, I have thought about since my dad passed away with what I'm seeing now and how I'm thinking about my life and thinking about being more available for people, being more interested in genuinely serving, not just as a means to building a successful, you know, whatever crusade I'm on,

I've thought a lot about, what would I go back and tell myself a decade ago that what would have actually gotten my attention enough to learn what I've now learned through the trauma. And so as we're talking about people who experience trauma, oftentimes that is a catalyst for this whole new take on life and this pursuit of meaning and purpose. Is there a way to help actually experience that catalyst without experiencing a trauma? Is there a way that we can engage at that level in our minds and our hearts without going through a significant storm? such an important question. I only recently, actually, did I have a term for it?

So I wrote a book with Cheryl Sandberg, option B, after she lost her husband suddenly. And one of the questions that she asked was exactly on that. She said, well, okay, post-traumatic growth. You know, obviously, I have no other choice but to learn from this tragedy. But is there such a thing as pre-traumatic growth? Can you get the learning without the trauma? And I would love to see more data on this, but I think your exercise is a step in that direction, right, of doing a little bit of mental time travel and saying, okay, you know what, we're often given this advice. Carpidim, seize the day, live in the moment. Sometimes the moment just sucks, right? And you actually want to rewind in the past or fast forward to the future. And I think that's often where we gain the kind of wisdom that you're describing. So I think looking back, right, when you go through, hardship, whether it's personal or professional. One of the things that a lot of us do that I think

is a big mistake is we see it as a completely unique event. So Daniel, we've been seeing this a lot during the pandemic. People say, you know what, I'm not really sure how to cope with this because I've never been through a pandemic before. And unless you're over 100 years old, right, none of us have. And so how in the world am I possibly going to face this and grow from it? Well, what if you take a wide angle lens and recognize, okay, you know what? Never faced a pandemic. But you've been through loss, you've been through failure, you've faced heartbreak, you've probably been depressed and lonely at some point in your life. And if you take those past experiences of adversity, you can learn a lot of lessons from your own resilience and then grow through the kinds of

things that have helped you get through other difficult events. And then I think fast forwarding is also a pretty helpful step. There's evidence showing that if you can imagine your future self and what advice your future self would give to you, you actually can anticipate some of that wisdom and say, okay, you know, 10, 20 years from now, what are the choices that I'm making that I might regret? What are the things that I'm, you know, I'm too worried about that I just won't care about? And one thing we see pretty consistently in the science of regret is that most of people's regrets are not the actions they took. They're the actions they didn't take. They're the what if moments where we say, you know what? Yeah, it hurts to fail, but it hurts even more to fail to try. And so I think

that's another exercise that's worth doing, which, you know, in some cases, we can actually just do it through reflection. In other cases, there's evidence showing that if you give advice to other people, you actually make better choices than you would have if you just made the decision for yourself. What do you think that is? I think the problem is when we're deciding, we focus on all the trees in the forest, whereas when we're advising, we take a step back and we look at the forest and say, all right, let me just think through, what are the one or two most important factors here? And so I think anybody who's stuck right now, this is the perfect time to say, find somebody else who has a similar problem, go and give them some recommendations.

And then the advice you give to them is probably the advice you need to take for yourself. I like that. It's not the angle I thought you would go. I can see the value in that. I thought you might talk about the importance of getting outside perspective and getting some coaching. It's really difficult to see into our own blind spots. It's probably impossible. This notion of we don't know what we don't know is one of the funniest cliches to me because isn't that always true? Like, is there ever a time you actually know what you don't know? Let's unpack that a little bit because I think coaching and outside perspective, it's something for me that has been super valuable and also uncomfortable. But many times I look back on experiences

with somebody else who was pushing on me a little bit. I'm like, I never in my life would have gotten there on my own. I never would have looked over into that dark corner of my life and seeing what they were kind of calling out and getting me to confront. Yeah, I think you're talking about rethinking what it means to have a network around you. Most of us, when we think about building a network, we're thinking about a support network, the group of people who encourage us, who cheerlead for us,

who build up our confidence when it's shattered. But I think we also need a challenge network, which is a group of people we trust, to poke holes in our thinking and also help us see the blind spots that are invisible to us. And one of the things I did after writing Think Again was I went to a bunch of the people in my life

who have been my most thoughtful critics. And I said, hey, you may not know this, but I actually consider you a founding member of my Challenge Network. I haven't always taken your feedback well. Sometimes I've been defensive. Sometimes I've just been, you know, I've been on a path,

and I sort of dismissed it because it seemed diverting. But I've always appreciated how much you push me to rethink my own assumptions and to try to get better. And I know that sometimes people hold back on telling me the truth because they don't want to hurt my feelings. But the only way you could ever hurt my feelings is not telling me what you really think. And I've noticed that I've gotten better coaching from those people after I've told them that because, you know, it really solidifies this role they play in my life. And they say, hey, you know what? Now you wrote a whole book about rethinking. And so I feel like I have a moral responsibility to tell you, you.

that you might want to rethink this. And I think opening that door for people and keeping it open is a great way to get them to keep coaching you. Daniel, how do you do that? I love that. I know you get coaching not just from a formal coach, right? But from lots of colleagues informally,

how do you create that psychological safety for them to give you the critical feedback that you may not want to hear, but you need to hear? I can tell you for a long time I didn't. A long time, you know, I'd ask somebody, how do you feel like I'm doing in our relationship or as your leader? And they would say, fine.

And what I heard was, everything is fine. I would move on to the next thing. And it was actually a coach who told me, hey, there's some areas where you're not paying attention to feedback and you need to be more proactive and making it, I think the phrase you said, is psychologically safe. And that was really confusing. Like, what do you mean safe? Like if Dave needs feedback, I give it to him. If other people need feedback, I'm going to let them know. And I think there's certain people wired like me where we just, if we're thinking it, we're just going to say it. But many people don't feel comfortable doing that. And so first of all, I had to take my own projection of the way that I did this with other people off of the people that I was looking to get feedback from because they may not be wired that way. And then secondly, instead of just saying, how do you feel like we're doing, I learned that getting really specific, you know, when somebody said, I feel like things are good or you're doing great at A, B, and C, you know, I had to almost frame it in a way where I'm like, okay, but if there was one thing I could work on, what would it be? well you know in meetings it seems like sometimes you're kind of tuned out okay cool in meeting something about my presence in meeting okay on a scale of one to 10 if 10 is I'm super engaged the way you want me to be you feel like you're the only person in the room you feel like I'm talking the right amount listening the right amount 10 is perfect in terms of my conduct and meeting and one is I suck I'm not

even there I'm not helpful at all where would it be right now well you're you know and most people want to again be kind and so they're not going to say a one but they're they might say a six or seven. Yep. And then I can go, okay, how would I get from a seven to a ten? And it's almost like I have to guide them through this where it's felt very safe for them to go, oh, you're really asking. And you're really giving me a framework where I can still be kind and complimentary

to you in our relationship because nobody really, unless they're just a jerk, really wants to just dog you and completely bag on you. But I've just found I really have to work hard to disarm people and invite that feedback and almost create a scorecard. and also make sure it's not a, it's an all or nothing binary type thing where it's about improvement, not about shame and wholesale you suck as a person. Daniel, it's amazing to hear you describe that because I have stumbled into the exact same practice. When I was doing an early draft of the opening of Think Again, I sent it to one of the best members

of my Challenge Network, Reb Rebley, who's a longtime collaborator. And he gave me some feedback. It seemed like he didn't like it that much. And I said, okay, give me a zero to ten rating. And he gave it, I think it was a four and a half or a five. And I was like, whoa, this is really bad. I'm aiming for 10 here. How do I close the gap?

And I just got an email from him the day before yesterday because I'm working on a new TED talk, and I sent him a draft. And I didn't even have to ask this time. He said, seven, seven and a half. And then he gave me a list of things that would close the gap. And then the next draft, he gave it a nine. I'm like, okay, good, we're making progress here. asking for that specificity and precision

makes it so much easier for people to let you know that they may like you and they may think your work is decent, right? But they're still a long way to go. I found, though, that sometimes that people are just reluctant to give the rating or they say, honestly, I wouldn't change anything. You know, I was really happy with the talk you gave

or the meeting that you led. And I just did an experiment on this with one of our doctoral students, Konstantino's Kuda Ferris. And we got leaders and managers to try a different approach to creating psychological safety, which is instead of just asking

for the criticism, to show that they could take it by criticizing themselves out loud. So some of them said, hey, you know what, I'd love some feedback on this meeting. I think I talked about three times longer than I should have. What do you all think?

And that immediately made it easy for people to say, oh, I'm not going to be punching them in the gut when I tell them that, right? They already know that they rambled a little bit. In other cases, we had leaders and managers who took it upon themselves to actually share their own performance reviews

and say, all right, you know what, I just want you, you're my team, I work with you regularly. here are the things I'm trying to get better at, and I would love you all to hold me accountable. And we found that when we taught leaders and managers to just be a little bit more open in commenting on their own shortcomings in development areas,

that psychological safety was more likely to build and more likely to last. Yeah, that's really good. I like that process, that method. I'm going to steal that. It occurs to me, though, as... Well, thank you. You know, it occurs to me as we're talking about these frameworks

or these methods to invite feedback. it's also really important for our listeners to understand. And I had to learn this the hard way too because I kind of started out with, okay, where's the book of the 10 things to say that makes sure everybody feels psychologically safe? And it came off mechanical. And what I really work hard to do now

is before I'm going into what might be a difficult conversation or a conversation where I need to get feedback or really express humility, I actually have to get there in my heart. I have to pause and go, Daniel, you're probably wrong. And then the devil on my shoulder says, no, you're not, you're right, you're brilliant.

And then I have to go, no, you're probably wrong about something. Or what your experience is, is not what their experience is. You know, there's this whole your truth, my truth, and the truth. And as a leader, I've really had to work to say, if I'm one percent culpable, I'm going to be 100% responsible. And it's so difficult. It's a shot to our pride because if you're like, yeah, but they're 99% of the problem, well, you know, maybe that's true.

But if I'm one percent part of the problem, then I'm going to spend 100% of our energy working on, how can I fix that one percent? And it's only in modeling that humility that our teams over time start to go, wow, you're serious. Like you're really working on growing yourself, not pointing fingers or what everybody else could do better. And then as a byproduct, they start to pick up on that in the culture. and it starts to feel safe organizationally for everybody to give and share feedback. And I haven't perfected this, but it's just, it's been my experience that if you're just

looking for the right question to ask and you aren't actually in your heart genuinely humble and assuming you're off on something, it just comes off as plastic. Have you experienced that? Yeah, it's, I think you articulated it so well. It reminds me of one of my favorite philosophers, Will Smith, who is a local hero, right? West Philadelphia, born and raised. That's right. He said a couple years ago, I thought this was profound, that everybody is interested in trying to figure out whose fault a problem is.

But he said it doesn't matter whose fault the issue is if it's your responsibility to fix it. And I think that's what you're capturing here too. And, yeah, that sense of responsibility means I am not here to prove myself. I am here to improve myself. I'm not trying to create an image that I'm a perfect leader. I'm trying to become a better leader. And I think that ultimately means,

of course, you end up in the long run being wrong less often and making fewer mistakes because the faster you are to recognize them, the faster you can fix them. Really, really good. It reminds me, one of my favorite coaches has a quote,

Jerry Colonna, and he's a business and leadership coach and has a podcast called Reboot, but he will often ask one of his clients, how are you being complicit in the situation you say you don't want? And it's just one of those kind of puts you on your heel, reframe the conversation. And I ask myself that a lot, how am I being complicit in the situation I don't want? Because usually I'll complain and, oh, this is a problem, and them and they and the environment or the culture. And when I catch myself doing that,

if I just pause and ask that question where I'm like, okay, am I contributing? At some level I am. I mean, it takes two to tango, and it's a great reframe. But I think we talked about a network of people around you is really important because I've found that when I just try to do that in my own head, usually the dragons win. But when I have other people that I can process those feelings with, safe place to process them where they're going to hear me out and I can feel heard. But they're also not just going to create a codependent or enabling kind of environment. They're challenging me going, okay, you've whined a little bit now. What are you going to do about it? That really makes all the difference for me.

It does, and I think it speaks to something else that's helpful to rethink. So one of the things I've had a lot of fun talking with Jerry Colonna about is how we explain when something goes wrong. You're talking to Jerry. So I'm quoting Jeremy. No, I love it. No, Jerry's a friend. Oh, yeah, you're just not along like, oh, I've heard of him. Okay.

So you're boys. No, no, no, no. I mean, look, there aren't that many of us who live in this world of organizational psychology and leadership coaching. Right. So I think everybody pretty much knows everybody. And Jerry, one of the things I think is so powerful about his perspective is he pushes you to make a different set of attributions for a problem or a mistake or a failure. What most of us do, to your point, is we say, all right, well, you know, it's not me, it's you. And then

we gain a little bit of humility. And we say, well, actually, sometimes it is a little bit me. And I think we want to go a step further here, which is to say, you know what, in any collaboration, most of the problems, they're not me, they're not you, they're us. Right? It's about the interaction between us as opposed to, you know, your personality is flawed or I'm an idiot, right? And to look at the relationship as a unit, I think people are taught all the time to do this in, you know, in therapy when they're married, right? If you've ever gone to couples counseling, right? The first question is, okay, what are the dynamics of the relationship that are, you know, are causing some of these issues that each of you are pointing fingers about? And the same is true when, you know, when you're managing

somebody or when you're working in a team to say, look, we've got a set of norms for how we interact that could bring out the best in us, but sometimes bring out the worst in us. And let's try to figure out how to navigate those more effectively. Let's stay on this counseling metaphor for a second, because I think there's a thing that we do sometimes as leaders with our team. Sometimes we're the leader, the commander in chief, that take charge. Sometimes we're the therapist. Sometimes there's conflict within the team. And we have to sit down and mediate. We have to sit down and figure out, why are they not getting along and kind of unpack that stuff? I've experienced that. I've had people mediate and be counseling. In fact, you mentioned marriage counseling several years ago. My wife and I

put our marriage counselor in a new tax bracket and it was just this long, arduous process, but it was so good at the end because she gave us the tools to learn how to see each other's experience and how to communicate and connect in a way where it's like, okay, we can both be heard, we can both have feelings, and exactly what you said, kind of putting it all on the table and being able to look at the dynamic of the relationship versus me versus you. So as leaders, when we're doing that with our team, what have you found to be effective? How do we actually facilitate those conversations where it nets and a more healthy relationship with our team members? Well, if you look at the research on conflict mediation, one of the things that turns out to be pretty effective is to have a caucus

with each person involved beforehand. And that way, let's say you've got two of your employees who are butting heads. If you sit down with each of them one-on-one, it gives them a chance to feel heard. It also helps you become a little bit more neutral, as opposed to walking in and there's a risk that one person thinks you're taking the other person's side. It also helps you identify common ground, right? So you can begin to facilitate, okay, look, you may be at different positions, but you actually have similar interests.

I went through conflict mediation training, gosh, 20, 20, 21 years ago now. And I think the biggest thing that I took away from it is it's just it's way easier to mediate other people's conflicts than your own. There's so many times when, you know, I'm in a disagreement whether it's with my team or with my wife that I just don't practice what I teach. And so I think as a, you know, as a leader or a manager, the first thing you have to recognize is sometimes you are not the best person to mediate a disagreement. One thing I've seen in a couple different organizations, one is Morningstar, a tomato paste plant. Another is Bridgewater, the hedge fund, is when people have a disagreement, they get to nominate somebody who they both respect, who they think would be a credible person to help resolve it. And then they'll actually sit down with that person, and that person plays the mediator role.

And I think too often, right, as the leader and the manager, you think it's your job to fix it. You know what, let them find a peer who they think is willing to hear both of them. And that also then is leadership experience, right? It's training for that, Pierre, to say, all right, if I can get better at conflict management and conflict mediation, then I'm going to be more skilled when I end up in a position of authority. You know, I think any practice that is used effectively at a tomato paste plant and a hedge fund is worth a second look, probably. I like that. That's good. You know, I mean, as leaders, we really feel like at Entree leadership, our job is to not only resolve conflict, but to actually mine for conflict.

to catch, we say, catch things when they're a low-grade fever and actually deal with them and root these things out. There's this temptation to hope that it resolves itself or to let things kind of fester and maybe that employee that's causing the problem. Maybe they'll just leave at some point. Maybe they'll quit. Maybe it'll go away. It took me a long time to kind of shift and learn. I actually have to go, not just deal with the conflict reactively when it shows up, but I've actually got to go find it. I've got even created a little bit to have a healthy organization. Our friend Pat Lanchone talks about this. You know, healthy teams engage in a lot of healthy conflict. So how do we overcome as leaders this resistance that we feel, first of all, to just conflict in general, but then also that temptation to kind of let it sit and hope that it just deals with itself?

Well, the first thing I think of is some research led by Kathy Eisenhardt that concluded that the absence of conflict is not harmony. it's apathy. It's essentially just, okay, nobody cares enough to raise a dissenting opinion or to step up and say, you know what, I am going to be that challenge network right now. We need some conflict in order to make good decisions

and find creative solutions to problems. Without conflict, we have groupthink. And I think the most helpful distinction I've seen here is from another researcher, Eddie Jen, who's distinguished between task conflict and relationship conflict. Relationship conflict, Daniel, is what most of us are thinking about

when we shy away from conflict. It's the, you know, I think you're either a bad person or I don't like you. So there's some kind of clash of personality or values. And, you know, as a leader, you avoid that because it's uncomfortable and you know it's going to be counterproductive. But there's another flavor of conflict, which is task conflict. And that's when we just disagree about ideas and strategy and vision. And that can be healthy, right?

That's where we start to surface different opinions and actually consider news. solutions to problems. And so I think the key for leaders say, okay, look, not every disagreement is going to be a relationship conflict. And then how do we disagree in such a way that it stays in the zone of task conflict? There are a couple steps that seem to help in the data. One is there's research showing that if you just say, hey, can we debate that people are less likely to take it personally because you activate a mental model of, oh, we're going to have different perspectives, but, you know, it doesn't mean we're going to damage our relationship in any way. We're just, you know, going to bat things back and forth a little bit.

Another approach that seems to help quite a bit is to say, okay, look, we're looking for a whole variety of perspectives here. And so what I would love to do is to go around the room and hear everybody's point of view before I even tell you mine. And if as the leader, if you speak less, that really protects against what's called the hippo effect, where the hippo is the highest paid person's opinion. And as soon as that's known, everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon,

and then you get all this, you know, this convergent thinking, and not enough divergent thinking. So those are a couple of things I like. What do you do? Well, I could definitely relate on the Hippo effect. We've seen it, especially at Ramsey. I mean, Dave's got a huge personality. And I think he has a lot of maturity on this,

because when we facilitate our executive committee planning session, strategy sessions, he asks a couple of us who sit on executive committee to be the one standing with the marker, putting things on the board and facilitating the session while he's sitting at the table. It helps to neutralize the power differential. where, you know, if Dave's up there and he's just always the one talking and he's got such a force of personality that a lot of people wouldn't feel like they could embrace in that healthy conflict or actually push back. And I've noticed to model that super, super well. It's an interesting thing when you say we should debate about this. I mean, again, it goes back to as a leader making it psychologically safe to say, hey, let's engage in an argument. And I think the subtext on that is, I might be right. I might be wrong. But there's something healthy about the verbal processing and the banter and the beating up on the idea. And I think foundationally, if you have a strong culture that says, hey, we're for each other and you've got experiences

where we've had your back and this isn't personal and your job's not at risk here, we are fighting for the best idea for our mission. We are fighting to edit. We're co-editing something. And you've got a perspective. I've got a perspective. And we're going to run really hard against these different perspectives for the sake of bettering the idea. But then, hey, we're going to put that on the table once we made a decision, and our relationship is 100% intact. And so I think it takes a lot of art and energy to make sure that that person knows that when we're fighting about the idea, it's not implicit on our relationship that somehow we're going south in our relationship if we're having a really intense argument about something that's, you know, for bettering the idea. Yeah, bingo. I mean, it reminds me of a dynamic I've seen at Pixar, actually, where one of their all-time great producers, John Walker, has this mantra, which is you fight like hell from 9 to 5, and then you go out for drinks afterward.

And you're not fighting the person, right? You're fighting for the best ideas, which everyone is committed to. And I think one of the things that stalls that often is, you know, people start budding heads, and they say, well, let's just agree to disagree. And I think that's a huge mistake to end the conversation there. Whenever somebody says, let's agree to disagree, I say, actually, I don't believe in that. And what it activates for me is it's a signal that it's time to stop arguing to win and start asking questions to learn. So what I'll do is I'll say, hey, Daniel, you know what? I think that I try to be a reasonable person. I know you're a one too. I think we're both reasonably intelligent.

And it makes me think that something went wrong in the way we had this conversation, that we weren't able to get on the same page. And so I would love to just rewind this. Can you tell me where I screwed up? Where did I lose you? What did I do in the way that I presented my argument that you didn't find convincing? And I may not change your mind. I'm no longer trying to. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to figure out the next time you and I disagree, is there a better way to approach this? And then also, if I end up having a similar conversation with somebody else, is there something I can learn from that? And when I've done that, what people often tell me is that I have a bad habit of going into logic bully mode, where I just think my job is to bombard you with facts and with data.

And that just shuts people down or it leads them to go on the attack. And so I guess it's a reminder for me to get out a prosecutor mode and into scientist mode and say, all right, you know, instead of trying to force my idea on you, let's explore this. And let me try to understand your viewpoint better. And what I've started doing now is I actually do this at the front of the conversation rather in the end. So if you and I were going to have a debate, I would come in and say, you know what, I've been told I have a bad habit of becoming a logic bully. I do not want to be that person. And so if you ever hear me going into that mode, please call me out on it. And it just happened

the other day. A friend of mine, we were debating something by email back and forth on a project. And he said, you know, you're going into lawyer mode again. And it sort of snapped me out of it. And I said, oh, that is not how I want to argue. It's super disarming when you say I've been told I've got this bad habit. First of all, they're probably like, yeah, I've seen it. But it's inviting, again, it's inviting them back into. It's safe for you to call me on this. I need your help. When you see this, please don't assume that I'm doing this on purpose or even consciously. That's really good. It's kind of fun too, because it allows you to step out and have a conversation about the conversation. I think in a lot of cases we get stuck in the, in the, weeds of, okay, well, let's sort out this idea, but we're not really thinking about, well, what's the best way to, you know, to get to the bottom of this question? Or what's the best way to resolve our differences? And even if we don't agree on the substance, we can find some consensus about what a healthy versus unhealthy process might be. You talked about not saying

let's agree to disagree. I'm still kind of processing that. And kind of the practical, when you get to that point and a decision's going to be made, and maybe it's not the way that I would have made the decision. What comes to mind, a friend of mine, Clay Scroggins, talks about this idea of disagree and commit. And so what he essentially is saying there is, it might not have been the path you wanted to go on, but once we've decided we're going on this path, for the sake of unity, for the sake of alignment and buy-in, you have to completely commit and say, I'm all in. And even if I initially wouldn't have chosen to go this direction, we're now on this path together. Is that the essence of we're not going to say we agree to

disagree? I think so with a caveat, which is sometimes you disagree and commit, and then you fall into this trap that's called escalation of commitment to a losing course of action, where you know, you've decided, all right, we're going to go all in on this direction, then you get some negative feedback. And you don't want to admit to yourself or anyone else that you're a bad decision maker or you made a dumb choice. And so you throw in more resources and you double down. We end up hanging on to poor performing employees much longer than we should because, you know what, I hired them, right? I have to prove that that was a wise investment. We end up often investing more money in failing projects than successful ones because we're trying so hard to turn them around.

And to my knowledge, the origins of this disagree and commit idea are at Amazon. And a few years ago, I went to give a talk at Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos shows up. Like, okay, this is a great opportunity for me to go and learn from somebody who has incubated a whole lot of small businesses inside a large one. And I asked him how he knows when to stick with that commitment and when to pull the plug. And when I took away was that there are two dimensions that he thinks about. One is how important is this decision. And then the second is how reversible is the decision. And what he basically said was, look, if the stakes are high and I can't easily undo it, I will wait as long as possible before I commit. I want to gather as much information as I can, and I want to find out what I don't know,

because otherwise I could be making a huge mistake that I can't just erase. He said, but if the stakes are lower and or, you know, I can easily change my mind tomorrow, then I will disagree and commit. I will run the experiment, and then we'll find out what it shows, and we can always shift gears.

You know, combining that with what we're talking about earlier and thinking like a scientist, I think is super important, especially as a business growth. You know, you can actually get away with a lot of gut, raw ingenuity, fill in your way. You can grow to a certain level. But what you talked about there is how much is at stake. And so the bigger the organization is, the more obligations we have to paying our team members

and providing for their families, the more that there is at stake about one bad decision when it was just me and my wife in our garage may have just been a bad week. But now one bad decision could be the whole organization. And so it's kind of like as there's seasons of growth in the business, you've got to really think through being more scientific and testing more and not going all in on any given decision that impacts the whole strategy. Yeah, and Jeff Azos has an interesting phrase for that too, right? Instead of saying, all right, let's just commit right off the bat. He says, all right, we disagree.

Will you gamble with me on this? And I think gambling is such an interesting phrase because it highlights that there's a lot of risk here. We're rolling the dice, and this may not pan out. And one of the things I've seen with effective entrepreneurs, and this is especially true as they move into leadership roles, right, that they're not just founders, but they have to manage people and run their business is they manage risk like a portfolio, like a stock portfolio. They say, okay, look, you know, I may be somebody who loves risk, but I need to hedge my bets. Or on the flip side, right, I may be very risk-averse, but I would never build a good stock portfolio by investing in a bunch of boring, predictable mutual funds, right? I have some of those. And then I'd also, you know, choose some higher risk, potentially higher return options.

And I think that portfolio lens is a helpful way to think about, all right, I've got to have some gambles. I also have to have some safe investments. This has been a really powerful conversation full of a lot of practical things and especially around decision making and evaluating our own leadership. You bring a lot of science. You bring a lot of really cool anecdotes from things that you've observed. But I also follow you on Instagram. And I just sense that you have a sense that you have a lot of science.

spirit of encouragement. You bring a lot of good practical things, but you just have this heart that is for leaders, that is for people actually experiencing a better quality of life and a better journey as they're on this adventure called leadership. As we wrap up today, I'd love for you to just talk from your heart to the leaders listening. Many of them, tired, exhausted, been through a lot of storms over the last 18 months. How would Adam just encourage that small business owner sitting there who's going, man, this is all good stuff. I'm trying to rethink everything. I'm trying to do what you're talking about in the book. But dude, I'm just spent, and I need some oxygen right now. Yeah, I might say a couple of things. The first one is, yeah,

I think I do really enjoy encouraging people, in part because I've been really lucky to benefit from having people in my support network and my challenge network, right, who play that role for me. and one of the first ones was my diving coach, Eric Best, who, you know, I got into springboard diving when I was, I was way too old to start. I was 13, and I showed up for high school tryouts, and I was awful. And Eric said, I will never cut a diver from the team who wants to be here. He saw way more potential in me than I saw in myself.

And I've always wanted to pay that forward, and I think that is part of both the privilege and also the responsibility of being a leader. your job as an entree leader is to see more potential in people than they see in themselves, right, and to help them deliver on that potential. And I think that that becomes even more important when we're dealing with a pandemic and a recession, and a lot of people are getting discouraged and starting to, you know, to lose hope. I think the most helpful conversation I've had in the past year was with a friend of mine,

Scott Kelly. Last March, I thought, all right, if anybody knows how to deal with remote work and with all the uncertainty we're facing. It's Scott because he set the American record for spending 340 straight days in space. So an astronaut who lived on the space station for a year, right? That guy has to know something about how to weather a storm like this. And the biggest thing that I took away from Scott, which I've been trying to do myself, is he said, look, in order to make it through that mission, I had to set a goal that I was going to come back to Earth with the same energy and enthusiasm that I had when I left. And I thought that was a brilliant. I immediately

sat down with my wife and kids and said, all right, what are we going to do to maintain our energy and enthusiasm? So we started by saying, all right, well, let's create an image of what it looks like to have that energy and enthusiasm at the end of the pandemic. And we talked about where we want to go when this thing is over, what we want to do, who we want to see. And then that's given us something to look forward to ever since. It also helped us rewind a little. bit and say, okay, what are the daily habits that we need in order to make it through this, right? And as a family, it's simple things. It's game night. It's movie night. You know, as I think as a company, though, this is a similar conversation as a leader to say, okay, how do we get to the end of this

pandemic with the same energy and enthusiasm we had before it started? And I don't know what the answers are going to be, but asking that question is such a powerful way to show people that you care about them and you're also going through this with them. Yeah, man, I really like that. a great mindset. So the book is called Think Again, the power of knowing what you don't know. You know, Adam, what's in my heart is to help leaders experience transformation. I think we've all experienced it and we've seen the power of when there's somebody that's stuck and then they experience a transformation. What's the transformation that you're hoping leaders experience or go on a journey of when they read this book? Think again. I think one of the saddest things

that I watch happen to leaders is they think that if they say, I don't know, or I was wrong, that they're admitting weakness. I actually think that's a sign of strength, right? That you're secure enough to admit what you don't know and what you screwed up. And I think that's how you keep learning, is modeling that rethinking is actually something that makes you better as opposed to avoiding it like the plague. And so my hope is that think, again, will lead a lot of people who are in positions of power to say, okay, I need to do more of my rethinking out loud to, you know,

to project uncertainty as opposed to certainty, right, to favor the discomfort of doubt over the comfort of conviction and maybe even turned out into a comfortable thing. Yeah. Wow, that's good. It's cool to change your mind. I'm going to have to get comfortable with that. I think all of us who have a little bit of pride and ego that hits us between the eyes a little bit in a way that's really good. Guys, the book, think again, you can't afford to not have this in your

leadership library. It's available now everywhere books are sold. Go pick it up. And Adam, what a great, great book, great conversation. Thank you so much. As we wrap up, any final thoughts. I hope you don't rethink any of that enthusiasm. There's some things that we shouldn't rethink. And I actually think that that's something I've been getting asked about a lot as people have been reading Think again is, well, what if I do too much of this? And I was, To say, number one, I think most of us are too far to the left of that curve. We do too much of our rethinking in hindsight. And we say, oh, man, I wish I had reconsidered that decision or that opinion. And I want more of us to do it proactively. But also, rethinking doesn't have to change your mind. It just means being open to reflecting and reconsidering. I love it. Being open-minded, staying humble is the key to staying hungry. And that's the key to a growing organization. Adam Grant, always great to have you on the Entry Leadership Podcast. Thank you, friend. It's been a blessing to our audience. and we wish you the best as you guys continue to push this book out there. I hope a lot of people pick it up because it's really, really good stuff. Well, thank you. It's been a delight to be here.

What a great conversation. One to go back again and take notes. Now, we talked about three different areas, you know, rethinking our own leadership, how we're performing as leaders. We've got to grow. We have to reinvent ourselves as leaders. We talked about that. We also talked about making sure that we're rethinking essentially our business model, you know, making sure that the value that we're putting out into the marketplace is continuing to increase and get better and better. And the best way to do that is to talk to your customers. They can help you rethink how things are going with your product offering and then especially helping our team members rethink their relationships with each other. So our own leadership, the marketplace, in our team. Now, when it comes to the team,

they don't all naturally get along all the time. Have you noticed? But you and I know that we have to have unity if we're really going to grow this thing the right way. Because when we don't have unity, when there's gossip and backstabbing and infighting, there's just all this sideways energy. And we work too hard,

and there's too much going on to help customers for our team to not be unified. So this is a big area, big topic. Our coaching team works with our entree leadership, elite clients on this all the time, helping them build a culture of unity, and they're dropping you a free nugget here on, well, it's a resource that they use with our coaching clients

that really helps when it comes to having a difficult conversation. If you need to lean into difficult conversations with your team and help increase unity, this checklist is going to help you out. It's a list of do's and don'ts for helping you deal with conflict. Now, you may feel like, hey, I don't like conflict. I don't do it very well. Guess what? It's okay.

I haven't done it well for a long time, but what I've figured out is if you want to, you can become a conflict ninja. It's absolutely possible. And this free resource is a great way to get started. So to get the free guide, text the keyword difficult to 3344. Again, text difficult to 33444 or you can just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership Show. If you did, leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Also, if you're a small business owner between two and 200 employees, we'd love to have a live conversation with you and have you help us rethink the Entree Leadership podcast. How about that?

So if you want to help us out with that, click on the link of the show notes and our producer Tim will call you and get you squared away. And we appreciate you helping out with that effort. Also, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entry leadership team,

thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Dr. John Deloney show. Mental health challenges and hurting relationships happen to everyone,

but they don't have to define you. I'm Dr. John Deloney, and I help people navigate through the messy things in their lives, on the Dr. John Deloney's show. I'll walk alongside you as you face parenting, marriage, and other relationship challenges, and I'll walk alongside you as you try to connect with people

as you face depression, overcome anxiety, and learn how to change your life. Listen, I want you to be well. Listen to the Dr. John Deloney's show wherever you listen to podcasts.