ILI Class Content

S3-Ep21: Tools for Avoiding Disastrous Decisions

Guest: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
Effective decision-making is one of the key skills for great leaders. Learning how to balance science-based approaches to decision-making and also leveraging experience and intuition form a strong foundation for leaders to improve how they make decisions and how they improve their decision-making process. During the discussion Gleb shares several key points from his research. He will share tips and an underlying foundation to enable you to improve your decision-making skills. • How do you use science-based strategies for avoiding disasters in business environments? • How do you appeal to the emotions of internal and external stakeholders in your business to maximize success? • How do you manage your own emotions to make wise decisions—neither taking undue risks nor failing to seize promising opportunities? • How do you combine intuitive and analytical thinking to make the best possible decisions in an environment of uncertainty?
 
Avoiding Decision Disasters: Integrating the Gut and the Head
This guest blog was written as a companion to the podcast interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, Tools for Avoiding Disastrous Decisions. In the interview and the blog, Gleb explores how we can balance intuition and data-based decision-making to achieve the most effective business outcomes. He also explores some common misconceptions and offers recommendations for avoiding them.
Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job, and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, and she’d be a perfect hire for this job – except your gut tells you otherwise.
Should you go with your gut?
In such situations, your default reaction should be to be suspicious of your gut. Research shows that interviewing job candidates is a poor indicator of future job performance.
Unfortunately, most employers tend to trust their guts over their heads and give jobs to people they like and perceive as part of their in-group rather than simply the most qualified applicant. In other situations, however, it makes sense to rely on gut instinct to decide.
Yet research on decision-making shows that most business leaders don’t know when to rely on their gut and when not to. While most studies have focused on executives and managers, research shows the same problem applies to doctors, therapists, and other professionals.
This is the challenge I encounter when I consult with companies on handling workplace relationships better. Research that I and others have conducted on decision-making offers clues on when we should – and shouldn’t – listen to our guts. Our gut reactions are rooted in the more primitive, emotional, and intuitive part of our brains that ensures survival in our ancestral environment. Tribal loyalty and immediate recognition of friend or foe were especially useful for thriving in that environment.
In modern society, however, our survival is much less at risk, and our gut is more likely to compel us to focus on the wrong information to make workplace and other decisions.
For example, is the job candidate mentioned above similar to your race, gender, or socioeconomic background? Even seemingly minor things like clothing choices, speaking style, and gesturing can significantly affect how you evaluate another person. According to research on nonverbal communication, we like people who mimic our tone, body movements, and word choices. Our guts automatically identify those people as belonging to our tribe and being friendly to us, raising their status in our eyes.
This quick, automatic reaction of our emotions represents the autopilot system of thinking, one of our brains' two systems of thinking. It makes good decisions most of the time but also regularly makes certain systematic thinking errors that scholars call cognitive biases.
The other thinking system, the intentional one, is deliberate and reflective. It takes effort to turn on, but it can catch and override the thinking errors committed by our autopilots. This way, we can address our brains' systematic mistakes in workplace relationships and other areas of life.
Remember that the autopilot and intentional systems are only simplifications of more complex processes and that there is debate about how they work in the scientific community. However, this systems-level approach is very useful for everyday life in helping us manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Regarding tribal loyalty, our brains tend to fall for the thinking error known as the “halo effect,” which causes some characteristics we like and identify with to cast a positive “halo” on the rest of the person, and it's opposite the “horns effect,” in which one or two negative traits change how we view the whole. Psychologists call this “anchoring,” meaning we judge this person through the anchor of our initial impressions.
 
Overriding the gut
Now, let’s go back to our job interview example.
Say that the person went to the same college you did. You are more likely to hit it off. Yet, just because someone is similar to you does not mean she will do a good job. Likewise, just because someone is skilled at conveying friendliness does not mean she will do well at tasks that require technical skills rather than people skills.
The research is clear that our intuitions don’t always serve us well in making the best decisions (and, for a business person, bringing in the most profit). Scholars call intuition a troublesome decision tool that requires adjustments to function properly. Such reliance on intuition is especially harmful to workplace diversity and paves the path to bias in hiring, including in terms of race, disability, gender, and sex.
Despite the numerous studies showing that structured interventions are needed to overcome hiring bias, business leaders and HR personnel tend to over-rely on unstructured interviews and other intuitive decision-making practices. Due to the autopilot system’s overconfidence bias and a tendency to evaluate our decision-making abilities as better than they are, leaders often go with their guts on hires and other business decisions rather than use analytical decision-making tools that have demonstrably better outcomes.
A good fix is to use your intentional system to override your tribal sensibilities to make a more rational, less biased choice that will more likely result in the best hire. You could note ways in which the applicant is different from you – and give them “positive points” for it – or create structured interviews with standardized questions asked in the same order to every applicant.
So if your goal is to make the best decisions, avoid such emotional reasoning, a mental process in which you conclude that what you feel is true, regardless of the actual reality.
 
When your gut may be right
Let’s take a different situation. Say you’ve known someone in your work for many years, collaborated with her on various projects, and have an established relationship. You already have stable feelings about that person and have a good baseline.
Imagine yourself having a conversation with her about a potential collaboration. For some reason, you feel less comfortable than usual. It’s not you – you’re in a good mood, well-rested, feeling fine. You’re unsure why you feel bad about the interaction since nothing is wrong. What’s going on?
Most likely, your intuitions pick up subtle cues about something being off. Perhaps that person is squinting and not looking you in the eye or smiling less than usual. Our guts are good at picking up such signals, as they are fine-tuned to pick up signs of being excluded from the tribe.
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe that person has a bad day or didn’t get enough sleep the night before. However, that person may also be trying to pull the wool over your eyes. When people lie, they behave in ways that are similar to other indicators of discomfort, anxiety, and rejection, and it’s really hard to tell what’s causing these signals.
Overall, this is a good time to consider your gut reaction and be more suspicious than usual.
The gut is vital in decision-making to help us notice when something is amiss. Yet, in most situations, when we face significant decisions about workplace relationships, we need to trust our heads more than our gut to make the best decisions.

S2-Ep35: How Do We Successfully Implement Large-Scale Change?

Guest: Kathy Starkoff
A key element of successful leadership in this dynamic time is successfully implementing large-scale change. Kathy Starkoff has extensive experience successfully transforming large IT organizations as well as advising others on their implementations. She is an expert in all facets of IT including cyber security and risk management. This show will give you a better understanding of how leaders and their organizations successfully implement large-scale change. This interview includes the following questions:
• How does an organization achieve sustainable large-scale change?
• What are the critical components of large-scale change?
• Why does it always take so long?
• How do you recognize issues along the way?
• How do you address issues along the way?
• What is the probability of a typical project’s “success”?
• What are the most common mistakes made?

Recession Prep 101: Planning is Everything

Whether it’s official or not, the signs of a looming recession surround us. But that doesn’t necessarily mean doom and gloom. During the Great Recession of 2008, for example, while GM needed a huge government bailout to survive, Ford made it through without a Federal dime. Both are large automakers, both based in Detroit, so what made the difference? Planning! Ford started preparing for a downturn nearly two years before. Greg Moran – Ford’s Chief Strategy Officer at the time – shares that history and what we can learn from it to ride our organizations through the current economic shifts.
 
Innovative Leadership: Moving Beyond Resilience To Antifragility
Greg Moran, a C-level digital, strategy, and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience, shares his experience in this podcast, Recession Prep 101:  Planning Is Everything.
This article is written by Christoper Washington, a learning ecosystem designer who serves as Executive Vice President and Provost of Franklin University
Over the past two years, the destabilizing effects of the pandemic and other socio-economic, geopolitical and technological headwinds have made it difficult to harmonize plans, infrastructure, resources and programs with the changing needs of stakeholders. Changing stakeholder needs and differences in leaders' responses to disruptive forces in higher education resulted in an uneven recovery from the pandemic, with some colleges struggling or even shutting their doors, others resiliently bouncing back to pre-pandemic operating levels, and some even growing stronger in achieving their mission. With regard to the destabilizing effects of change, it was the 20th-century pugilist Mike Tyson who said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” For many nonprofit and educational leaders, the pandemic was a sucker punch.
According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2022 Global Risks Report, the pandemic is much more than a temporary and single bump in the road. Researchers at the WEF suggest that organizations will increasingly encounter, and be challenged by a “volatile, fractured, and increasingly catastrophic” outlook that includes social cohesion erosion, geo-economic confrontations, cybersecurity failures, misinformation and digital inequality, among other factors.
I think it’s time for leaders to move beyond their initial reaction to the pandemic's sucker punch and begin to plan for the next rounds of disruption to come. In a recent article, Maureen Metcalf, my fellow Forbes Councils member and a colleague I work with on podcasts, articulates an innovative leadership framework that explains how leaders can develop more complex perspectives as a way to manage complex challenges. One such lens that enables leaders to conduct situational analysis and realign elements of the system to achieve growth during periods of disruption is put forth by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. This lens accounts for the impact of stress on organizations over time and articulates an action logic that can result in strengthened systems. In relation to stressors, Taleb classifies organizational systems in one of three ways:
Fragile: Systems that break under pressure, where the results of the organization decrease in value due to the negative asymmetry with the operating environment.
Robust: Systems that stay the same under pressure, or are resilient and have the ability to return to a state of symmetry and balance with the operating environment.
Antifragile: Systems that get stronger under pressure (up to a point), where the results of the system increase in value due to positive asymmetry with the operating environment.
Taleb suggests that these three states are relative to a given situation, and not an absolute property of a system. For example, a glass may be robust enough to hold hot water, but fragile enough to break if it is dropped. One can also determine if an object or system feature is more fragile than another and predict which one will last longer in a given situation. For Taleb, antifragile systems are strengthened by introducing them to a modicum of harm, challenge or stress. Think weightlifting for muscle strength or vaccinations for disease immunity.
The action logic and related decisions leaders make in response to disruption can either make organizations more fragile, resilient or antifragile. Taleb calls professionals who cause systems to be more fragile over time the “fragilista.” I think this type of thinking is reflected in responses to change for many non-profit and educational organizations that have experienced a loss in value during the pandemic. These fragilista organizations:
Are unwilling to consider competitive forces and to respond accordingly.
Define all disorder as "bad" or as roadblocks to goals.
Refuse to look objectively at low-performing programs and to take appropriate action.
Maintain and defend the “status quo” rather than experiment with alternative approaches that may be more effective
Choose not to keep pace with emerging risks such as digital security and cyber-threats
Have inadequate cash reserves or resources to invest in more promising options.
Restrict the use of staff and resources rather than engage all resources and the collective intelligence of people in resolving problems and pursuing new opportunities.
Developing A Fresh Mindset
Alternatively, more innovative leaders can think beyond resilient approaches to antifragile approaches that respond to disruption in ways that increase the performance value of their organization. Presented below are eight ideas for leaders who are interested in developing a more antifragile mindset.
Heighten awareness of changing situations by regularly reading reports such as the WEF’s Global Risks Report mentioned earlier.
Set financial growth goals, develop plans to achieve them and work to assure that the value of intended accomplishments exceeds the cost of pursuing them.
Seek to detect fragilities in organizational systems and minimize them, rather than avoid addressing the necessary cuts that can potentially drain critical resources away from more valued initiatives.
Encourage creativity and risk-taking that supports growth strategies. This can include entrepreneurship activity, running pilot projects and conducting program experiments.
Collaborate with partners who are willing to grow with you and to put “skin in the game,” as suggested by Taleb. In this way, partners are invested in the outcomes, more likely to think long-term and less likely to be affected by disruption.
Consider what Gervase Bushe and Jacob Storch call “generative images” when communicating about changes to your team. Metaphors of organizational transformation can offer fresh insights and change one’s ideas about what is possible and desirable to achieve.
Pursue interdisciplinary learning by tackling problems that don’t fit neatly into a disciplinary area, connecting ideas across disciplines, learning from experts in different fields and taking field trips to learn about other complex organizational systems.
Participate in innovative leadership development programs. Across industries, there are plenty of such programs designed for leaders.
Leaders can expect to face multiple sources of disruption in the foreseeable future. It is reasonable to think that disharmony and disruption on the horizon will penalize more rigid and inflexible leaders and their organizations. Alternatively, those leaders willing to develop an antifragile mindset can be well positioned to adapt their plans and approaches to emerging realities and grow through the stress and disorder.
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher L. Washington, Ph.D. serves as Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at Franklin University. He is a Fellow of the Innovative Leadership Institute, and serves on the America250 International Advisory Council.

Jet Fuel of Talent Development Feeds Success

Featured Guest: Doug McCollough
Building a talented workforce is a key element in growing our community. For Doug, being named in the TOP 20 for Amazon HQ2 is a wake-up call for the community. The question to us as a community – are we prepared to grow and compete with other communities that have other natural advantages? This ability to compete comes down to access to talent. As IT Leaders, who do we presume will come in to address this. We need to engage in this conversation and develop a new skill set for ourselves. It is up to us to build the community that builds sustainable talent flow. Doug discusses: 1. What do we want our community to look like in the future? 2. What gaps do we see? 3. What does the technology leader of the future look like? Who exemplifies that leader now? 4. What do we have in place now that can help provide the "jet fuel of talent"? 5. What do we still need to build? This discussion will be informative for leaders trying to build their talent pipeline anywhere in the world!

A Senior Consultants View - What Drives Successful Transformations?

Featured Guest: Kathleen Bergen
Many organizations are facing complex large scale change initiatives. We have talked about innovation, agile organizations, the future of the organization and future trends. Kathleen shares her experience leading large projects and give practical insight. She will answer the question – what do I need to know before I start a project that will increase my likelihood of success during the project and sustaining the progress we made after implementation. Here are the main conversation topics: 1) What are the top 5 drivers of successful implantation 2) What causes failure - explain the top 5 barriers to success 3) What do you wish clients knew and understood at the outset? 4) If you could hand out a magic pill that made sure they understood two key points – what would those be? 5) What needs to happen to support value realization after project completion? 6) If you were to share 1 success and 1 failure – what would you want others to learn from your successes and struggles?

S6-Ep50: Success Mindsets: Your Keys to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life

Guest: Ryan Gottfredson
Mindsets are the most foundational element for why leaders do what they do. Unfortunately, most leaders are not conscious of their mindsets, and their negative mindsets wreak havoc on their effectiveness. Ryan Gottfredson joins the show to discuss his new book “Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work and Leadership” and what leaders can do to awaken to their mindsets and develop Success Mindsets, so they can unlock much more effective leadership.
 
Vertical Development: Elevating Your Leadership
This blog is provided by Ryan Gottfredson, Assistant Professor of Leadership at California State University-Fullerton, author of Success Mindsets, and a Mindset Consultant/Trainer/Speaker. It is a companion to his podcast Success Mindsets: Your Keys to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life.
Two types of development leaders can go into horizontal and vertical development.
Horizontal development involves helping leaders add more knowledge, skills, and competencies. The focus of horizontal development is on helping leaders to DO more.
It is not unlike adding a new app to an iPad, making it more capable of performing more functions.
Vertical development involves helping leaders elevate their thinking capacity to navigate more complex and uncertain environments better. The focus of vertical development is on helping leaders to BE more able.
Instead of adding a new app to an iPad, vertical development is upgrading the iPad to a newer, more capable model.
Question: Of these two forms of development, which is most commonly focused on for leadership development?
The vast majority of leadership development focuses exclusively on horizontal development. Very little leadership development focuses on vertical development.
Why is Vertical Development So Important for Leaders?
When two leaders with different altitudes of vertical development encounter a situation that is low in complexity, both leaders are likely to navigate this effectively.
But, if those same leaders encounter a situation that is high in complexity, it is likely that only the one with greater vertical development will be able to handle this effectively.
This is critical to understand because leaders are increasingly facing increasingly complex and uncertain circumstances, something that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t helped with.
This hopefully demonstrates that vertical development can be a competitive advantage for individual leaders and entire organizations.
Quick Vertical Development Self-Assessment
Here are questions that I have come across that might be decent revealers of leaders’ altitude of vertical development:
How do you respond to constructive criticism?
Would you be willing to let someone survey your employees about your effectiveness as a leader?
Is it bad to build close relationships with those you lead?
Can you hold competing perspectives on a controversial topic (e.g., abortion)?
Do you generally focus on the outcomes you want or on the drivers of the outcomes you want?
When something goes wrong, do you ask yourself: “Who am I being that their eyes are not shining?”
How do we help leaders vertically develop?
To improve leaders’ vertical development, we must get to the core of one’s verticality: Their mindsets.
Both psychology and neuroscience have independently identified mindsets as the foundational mechanism that governs leaders’ processing and operations. This is because our mindsets are our mental lenses that shape how we see and interpret our world, and how we see and interpret our world shapes the quality of our thinking, learning, and behavior.
Fortunately, there have been 30+ years on mindsets, which has led to the identification of four sets of mindsets, ranging from less vertically developed to more vertically developed.
 
 
These mindsets come to life when we recognize the typical desires that flow from these mindsets:
If you would like to assess the quality of your mindsets, I have developed a FREE personal mindset assessment, which can be taken here: https://ryangottfredson.com/personal-mindset-assessment
To Summarize…
Most leadership development focuses on horizontal development, but because of the increasing complexity and uncertainty in our world, we need vertically developed leaders.
To develop vertically, we must get at the core of our verticality: our mindsets.
If we can become conscious and aware of our mindsets, it allows us to shift to a more elevated way of processing and behaving.
Climb on!
 
About the Author
Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge mindset author, researcher, and consultant. He helps improve organizations, leaders, teams, and employees by improving their mindsets.
Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of “Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership” (Morgan James Publishers). He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources from Indiana University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.
As a consultant, he works with organizations to develop their leaders and improve their culture (collective mindsets). He has worked with top leadership teams at CVS Health (top 130 leaders), Deutsche Telekom (500+ of their top 2,000 leaders), and dozens of other organizations. As a respected authority and researcher on topics related to leadership, management, and organizational behavior, Ryan has published over 19 articles across a variety of journals including Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Business Horizons, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, and Journal of Leadership Studies. His research has been cited over 2,500 times since 2015. Connect with Ryan here.

THE MIND OF THE LEADER: Driving Extraordinary Results

Featured Guest: Jacqueline Carter
$46 billion a year is spent on leadership training, but a recent Gallup survey showed that 82 percent of employees find their leaders “uninspiring.” Why the gap? Because most leadership development focuses on outward skills like strategy, people management and finance. Instead, new research shows that leadership should start inward with the mind. THE MIND OF THE LEADER: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results (Harvard Business Review Press; March 2018) by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter reveals how leaders can lead themselves, their people, and their organizations by training their minds. The authors found that three mental qualities are essential to becoming effective leaders. Leaders must be mindful (being present and attentive to their people’s needs), selfless (to model cultures based on growth and learning instead of ego) and compassionate (show their people they have their back).

Success Begins with Trust

Featured Guest: Mark Given
“Our world and our businesses revolve on the level of Trust people have in us. Success begins with Trust and ends when Trust dissolves.” This quote by Mark Given is the basis for this show. Mark joins Maureen to discuss the topic of trust and the importance of trust to help leaders succeed.

Can Your Business Survive the Rapid Advance of Technology?

Featured Guest: Terry Jones
The burning question many businesses should be asking is “Can our business survive and thrive the rapid advance of technology?” Today Terry Jones, the founder of Travelocity.com and founding chairman of Kayak.com, joins the show to discuss with Maureen how existing corporations can change and adapt to new products, as sometimes it's forgotten how to discover new things. His advice: “You better take a risk, if you don’t, you’ll be gone.”

Leveraging Technology to Deepen Human Performance

The greatest story of the 21st century is not technology, but how technology will be used as a tool for deepening the levels of human potential. Brian talks about his work leveraging the most proven performers, time-honored principles and cutting-edge technology to develop unique performance solutions for a wide range of “arenas” – from medicine to agriculture. He will discuss the following questions? 1. Why has "innovation" become such a buzzword in recent years? 2. What trends are you focusing on and how do they impact organizations and leaders? 3. What is the archetype of a leader who is effective in a world of dramatic change and dynamism? 4. Why is "human potential" such a powerful concept in today's global environment? 5. What challenges do all modern leaders face? 6. What is the most important trait of today's leaders? 7. What are "The First Principles of High Performance" 8. How does technology serve leaders and make for more high performing teams? What is singularity?