Adam Grant on the Power of Leading Quietly

hi my name is monica mcgrath this is my 13th year of the 16th year here um good to see familiar faces out there it's very nice when you get an opportunity to introduce a colleague and friend my job this morning is or this afternoon is to introduce adam grant i want to highlight a few things about adam for you to add to his resume first of all he's he's been named one of the 40 top business professors under 40 and that qualifies him as cool they don't have a 65 under anyway um he is an exceptional scholar and his his research has made a significant impact on the field of organizational behavior and organizational psychology many many uh impressive articles you can see on the website he's an excellent consultant he has a unique ability and i've seen him do this to translate theory into practical implementable solutions that we in the field of practice tend to be able to use and he's an electric uh person in the classroom great educator he's deeply committed to the learner and he paves the way for them to go i think beyond the obvious platitudes and explore the complexities of their leadership roles so because of that he's been given the distinct honor of being the single highest rated professor in the wharton mba program a source of both envy and motivation anyway my pleasure to introduce adam grant um well thank you for that i actually stopped listening after monica called me cool which my wife will be the first to tell you that's the first time i've ever been described that way um so it's it's a real honor to have the chance to address such a distinguished group um there's a little bit of an irony to what i want to talk about today because i have to talk about being quiet and i'm not quite sure how to do that but hopefully we're going to see how this works the place i want to begin just to dive in is a call center that i entered about 10 years ago this was a call center where people were doing a job that was described as worse than telemarketing it was university fundraisers who are trying to convince all of you to donate your hard-earned money to your alma mater and i got a call from the manager of this call center who said let me just be honest with you we've hired and fired three academ or sorry three consultants and we thought before we give up on this entirely we might as well try an academic and i figured actually this was a great place to begin because at minimum i could do no harm and so what i did was i went into the call center and i was trying to figure out why do they need me why were things going so badly the first thing i discovered was a turnover rate exceeding 400 percent annually so for those of you who think you have turnover problems imagine your entire staff of 120 people quitting every two months and having to re-hire re-recruit retrain and re-motivate that staff six times a year that's what they were facing and when i started to analyze the job this was not at all surprising the callers only have one task no variety they have to pick up the phone and basically harass a bunch of alums to try to get them to give they don't have very much autonomy they're given a standardized script because of course the idea is to boil down into the fewest number of words possible this script to i can get you i can get you to try to give and then i can move on to call a couple of million other alums every year now the worst part of this job though by far is the rejection average rejection rates in this call center over 99 so if you are lucky one sucker out of every 100 will actually give so the callers are completely burned out and demotivated and you know again this is a really exciting place for me to enter as an organizational psychologist because i know that no matter what i do i cannot make motivation any worse so i walk in and i'm trying to figure out what do we do do we give them more autonomy in their scripts do we perhaps try to give them a little bit more variety in their tasks and let them do things other than calls on the phone do we perhaps even give them incentive compensation which turned out to be illegal largely because there was a group of callers who had decided it would be really fun to write down fake pledges and say yes these alums gave 10 000 each today and then by the time of course the cheating was discovered they would have been laughing all the way to the bank so there's no incentive compensation as an option and i'm trying to figure out what else can you do to motivate these fundraising callers forget about the turnover and retention issue i just want to convince them to stay on the phones and keep raising money for this university so i walk into the call center and i was interviewing the callers and doing some observations and what really struck me more than anything was a sign that one of the callers had posted in front of his desk really one of the most uplifting motivating and inspiring signs i've ever come across not generally a fan of motivational posters but this one took the cake and i've actually i took a picture of it right there because i was so impressed by it i've saved it for the past decade and i wanted to bring it here to all of you here's the sign in its full glory that was a life-changing moment for me to this day you will never catch me in a suit that is not dark but but this was also a really poignant observation because i thought look the problem that these callers are facing more than anything else is they don't feel appreciated and valued they feel like they're raising money for this university but nobody cares and so i thought what we really need to do is help the callers understand how their jobs make a difference so i started asking some questions where does the money they raise actually go and who benefits from it and i got a lot of very obtuse answers that didn't give me what i was looking for but eventually i was able to break down there's support for new buildings there's athletic teams there's student scholarships and i thought okay the student scholarships are really where the motivation is at what we need to do of course is help these callers how the money they raise is actually enabling other people to go to school and afford an education so the managers pull together a bunch of information they share some statistics with the callers and they say look here's how much money you guys have actually raised for scholarship students and here are all the people that you're helping go to school it's an incredibly noble purpose and i'm just there basically observing trying to figure out if it works so my job is basically to run this as a little experiment where some of the callers get exposed to that speech from the managers and others don't and i've got a really nice sort of treatment and control group and then i have data on how hard the callers are working things like time on the phone number of calls made and also their productivity how much revenue do they actually bring in for the call center i look at the data and the callers who actually got to hear from their managers went down in every metric imaginable they made fewer calls they spent less time on the phone and they raised less money now this was sort of a sad statement about the ability of these managers to deliver a motivational speech we discovered but it was also i think a really compelling statement about a challenge that leaders face i thought that maybe this is the right message but it's coming from the wrong source and what if there's another group of people that could actually inspire more effectively than the leaders in this call center so the natural source of course was the scholarship students so i go around and i try to find some scholarship recipients who are willing to tell their stories i've got this big intervention plan there are going to be a dozen scholarship students different walks of life from different areas of the world and studying different topics we're going to tell the callers here's how your work changed my life and enabled me to go to school here managers of course say this is way too inefficient we can't waste this much time i will give you five minutes and you can do whatever you want in those five minutes to try to connect the callers to their impact on scholarship students so i'm pretty discouraged by that what i do is i look for the most charismatic scholarship student i can find and i found him one of these studies was at the university of michigan and this student's name was will will had just been voted most likely to become president of the united states by his graduating class he is an incredibly dynamic speaker and i thought this is the guy in five minutes that's going to inspire the callers so will walks in for a meeting there's a randomly assigned group of callers who are going to hear the story from him and he starts to talk a little bit and he says look i grew up in massachusetts i always wanted to be a michigan wolverine the wolverines are in my blood and i mean that quite literally because apparently my parents recently told me that my brother was conceived after a michigan football victory so he talks about how he'd really dreamed of becoming a wolverine his parents couldn't afford the out-of-state tuition and because of the the need-based scholarship he was able to receive funded by the work that the callers did he was able to come to school and it really had changed his life five minutes you hear from well you go back to work now again i'm pretty pessimistic about whether this is going to have any impact but i have the data available so i start to track the effects and i'm really stunned by the results that i see which is the average caller who heard from will showed nearly triple the number of minutes they spent on the phone a full month later week by week to where they had started so they're working a lot harder now the control group that didn't meet well shows no change in their effort they're also making more calls they're doubling in the number of calls they make per hour and on average they showed about 170 percent caller by caller increase in revenue raised five minutes one scholarship student so then i started thinking okay this is a will effect if you are the charismatic next president of the united states you too could inspire that kind of effort but what about a regular scholarship student from a fairly ordinary walk of life so i found her her name is emily emily's a freshman who's so shy and so quiet that you can barely hear her when she speaks and i figure this is the opposite end of the spectrum from from will emily walks in i'm observing again to see what happens she comes in like this and she says hi my name is emily i got this scholarship and i wanted it and she could barely get through her words i had to strain to hear her and i was sitting right behind her and i was just sure that this experience was not going to work when i looked at the data emily's effect was two and a half times stronger than wills two and a half times the average caller who met emily for five minutes showed a 400 week by week increase in money raised going from 400 a week to over 2 000 a week and that lasted for a full month after meeting emily now i was really struck by that and it turns out that it's a lot easier to empathize with emily than it is with will one thing is you can see that you know she actually has a real need the second thing is a lot of people feel like if she didn't get the scholarship she's just going nowhere in life whereas will is fine either way right so uh there's an empathy piece but there's also the element of authenticity will comes in he sounds slick and smooth and polished whereas emily you know she's speaking from the heart and in fact no person in their right mind would intentionally come in and deliver that speech unless they felt they had no other choice so i got really interested in this idea because if you think about what was going on here this is a five minute intervention that led to a 400 percent increase in color by caller productivity for a full month what's most powerful about it is if you take 23 callers who met emily they raised over 36 000 extra dollars every week just from interacting with her and what's striking to me about this is that they never once had to hear from a leader and this has really led me to rethink the role of leadership a little bit and i got to wondering okay why don't more leaders do this why do most leaders feel that they have to be the ones delivering inspiring messages why don't they think about other sources of those messages because in some ways i think this idea of bringing in these scholarship students if you were running this call center is common sense of course you want the people who work for you to see the people they're helping and yet it's not common practice last year i pulled over a thousand executives very very diverse walks of life from military generals to fortune 500 ceos and just about everything in between fewer than one percent of them actually recommended this as a solution to the call center problem very very few of them thought of bringing in the scholarship student and i want to know why not to answer that question why is this common sense but not common practice i want to give you all a chance to do a self-assessment this is the moment when i need to clarify by the way i'm an organizational psychologist not a clinical psychologist so those of you who have existential crises after taking this test don't come to me here it is just take a moment you can rate yourself on these items use a 0 to 10 scale where 0 is i am never this way 10 as i am always this way and 5 would be somewhere in between for those of you who are very detail oriented you may use any numbers between 0 and 10. as of 2012 wharton undergraduates no longer recognize that theme song when you're done what i'd like you to do is add up your scores and math is not always the strong suit of we psychologists but you should have a score somewhere between zero and 100. thank you for the courtesy laughs um when you're done if you could look up at me i will know you're done and i want to try to make a little bit of sense out of this scale those of you who are looking at your neighbor's scores right now to quote the psychologist brian little it's really lame to cheat on a personality test but i will say the higher your score on this test the greater your likelihood of trying to copy your neighbor so what you've all just taken is an assessment of extroversion introversion many of you are familiar with it from the myers-briggs it turned out that carl jung only got extra virgin introversion about 50 right and i want to try to get to the heart of what does it really fundamentally mean to be an extrovert versus an introvert but first let's find out where all of you stand so technically if you scored above 55 on this scale and you are honest and self-aware i would call you an extrovert how many of you scored above 55 okay we have a lot of extroverts in the room good to know anybody score in the 45 to 55 range okay those of you who with your hands up i'm going to call you an ambivert in a moment don't ask me what that means but it's a really cool term right and then anybody below 45 okay we have a few people who claim themselves to be introverts if you are i don't know what you're doing at a leadership conference but we're going to get back to that stay tuned so let me show you some data before we get to the data though let me just say a word about the way i think about introversion extroversion ashton and lee are two psychologists who have spent their whole careers trying to figure out what does it fundamentally mean to be an introvert versus an extrovert and they find out it's sort of related like the myers-briggs told many of you to where you get your energy but it's more related to how your neocortex in your brain processes stimulation so somewhere up here you have a neocortex it's sort of the opposite of the lizard brain for those of you that are not big neuroscience fans it's the part of the brain that processes stimulation helps govern willpower and self-control and if you think about the neocortex basically what the neocortex is trying to do and in fact you've been doing this your entire lives whether you know it or not is to get to this point that we call optimal arousal it's the point in your neocortex where you're fully engaged if you're an athlete you'd say i'm in the zone i'm focused i'm on it's a point where we all feel sort of very effective and happy if you get above that point you'd be at the point of overload where you have too much stimulation too much information coming at you if you're below that point you'd be at the point of basically boredom where you're under stimulated so everybody wants to be in the optimal zone of arousal and it's generally a place where we tend to be again happy and effective the challenge is introverts and extroverts have opposite ways of getting there so if you look at some classic research by han zeissek and his colleagues what they show is that for those of you who are extroverts anybody score in the 90s by the way on this scale okay a few of you um you actually start out neocortically with inadequate arousal so you start out way down here and one of the ways that you get to the optimal level is you seek out stimulation generally speaking that means being the center of attention because it turns out that social attention is just about the most stimulating thing neocortically that can happen in life more so than skydiving or going to a rock concert so one of the reasons you seek out attention from other people is it actually raises your arousal and helps you get engaged on the other hand those of you who are extreme introverts anybody in the tens or twenties yeah you wouldn't have even set foot in this room if you were but if you were you'd start out way up here over the level of optimal arousal and so to get to that same point of engagement you'd actually be trying to reduce stimulation and sort of fade more into the background and that's kind of how we think about the neocortexes of introverts and extroverts differently the ambiverts are the lucky people who actually start out in the exact right place and so your default when you wake up in the morning is engaged which gives you a little bit more flexibility to be comfortable acting more introverted and more extroverted without getting burned out or bored so now you know way more about the neuropsychology of introversion and extroversion than you ever wanted to know i promise there will be no more of that but i think this is really useful to know because if you think about introverts and extroverts as basically differing in how much they like social attention then you can start to make sense of a trend that i want to show you so in the united states according to some research by denise owens and steven dilcher that was done in 2009 this is the u.s population if you're just going to cut it right at the middle exactly 50 of people score on the introverted side of the spectrum exactly 50 score on the extroverted side of the spectrum now this is actually a really crude analysis in some ways because if you really look at the data introversion extraversion is distributed like a bell curve it's a normal distribution and most people fall somewhere in the middle either ambiverted or only slightly introverted or slightly extroverted it's more and more rare to go out to either extreme but if we were to just cut it right at the midpoint we'd say half of all americans are extroverts my question for you is what percent of all american leaders are extroverts above the midpoint and you can shout out your answers preferably now 90. that's a pretty high estimate 70 50. who said eight that's oddly specific so here are the data this is a nationally representative sample what you get is this picture 96 of american leaders score on the extroverted side of the spectrum only four percent below the midpoint now this to me is part of why nobody thinks when i pull corporate executives and military generals why nobody thinks to say let's bring in the scholarship student if most leaders are extroverts they feel they need to be the center of attention they need to be the ones delivering inspiring messages now for those of you who want to look at how this breaks down in a little bit more depth here's a breakdown of scoring in the top 25 percent of extroversion so being very extroverted not just above the mean and what you see is the population of course only 25 percent of people can do that supervisors half of them are there by the time you get to a top level executive 80 of people are very very extroverted so every level you climb up the hierarchy you get more and more extroverts being attracted to that role and being selected into those leadership positions and my question is what are the consequences of that is it good to be an extroverted leader let me just say to be clear you many of you claim to be extroverts and you're going to feel really good about the data i'm about to show you so there are some neuroscientists who believe that leadership is so intertwined with extroversion that one of the ways to define an extrovert is to enjoy being a leader because that's fundamentally being in the center of attention and if you look at the data on this they're pretty consistent with that idea one study that i did with colleagues francesca gino and dave hoffman was in pizza stores which was sort of a fun setting to study this we got data from pizza stores around the united states and we got basically the leader of each store to fill out a survey just like you all just did of how introverted versus extroverted they are then we got seven weeks of store profit data and we were able to find out are you actually more profitable if you're an extroverted leader of a pizza store than an introverted leader and again extroverts you'll be very pleased yes on average extroverted leaders had stores that brought in 16 higher profits especially after you adjust for all the other factors that might affect profit like what city you're in and so on but here's the interesting twist if you look at that effect it's only for stores where there's a certain type of employee that i'm going to call a good follower an employee basically who's looking for direction from above who's dutiful who's going to listen really well to you turns out extroverts are great at engaging and motivating and inspiring those good followers right they're enthusiastic they're charismatic they're outgoing and they really encourage people to want to complete high quality and high quality work but what about another type of employee that we need in this economy more than ever before the opposite i think of being a good follower is basically an employee who takes the initiative to lead only not from a formal leadership role i'm going to call that a proactive employee it's somebody who brings in ideas and suggestions and perhaps has a better set of work processes and methods they might challenge the status quo but they might also cause some kind of improvement in organizational functioning now it turns out the more dynamic the more unpredictable the more uncertain the economy gets to connect to the last talk the more we need proactive people in our organizations we know it's impossible for leaders in a really turbulent environment to anticipate all of the changes that they might need to make to recognize all of the problems that might be going on below them and that's where we really need the proactive employees to drive change from below so if we need these proactive people who leads them more effectively is it the introverts or the extroverts introverts yes it would be the opposite of the extroverts but in a really interesting way and in a more compelling way than i would have thought so if you look at these pizza stores that have really proactive employees who are constantly coming up with better delivery methods with better ways to cook pizza efficiently so that you can get a lot of them out during the super bowl for example when you have a bunch of proactive employees in your pizza store introverted leaders actually get 14 higher profits than extroverted leaders this is not to say of course that all introverts lead proactive employees well but what the evidence shows pretty clearly is there's something going on where extroverted leaders are ineffective with this group of self-starting motivated employees and i got to really wondering why so you got this 14 lower profits for these extroverted leaders follow-up studies that francesca dave and i ran showed that when you have an extroverted leader and people come from below with ideas and suggestions extroverted leaders are threatened on average they like to be the center of attention they don't like proactive employees stealing the spotlight and as a result they tend to react in a slightly more defensive way which is interesting because if you get good followers they actually perceive their extroverted leaders as more positive but proactive employers feel like their extroverted leaders are actually resisting their suggestions and their ideas which has really two costs one is it discourages them from contributing because they don't feel like their ideas and their perspectives are valued and two maybe even more worrisome it actually discourages them from benefiting from the ideas that come from below so in a follow-up study we had proactive people just come to leaders with suggestions and the leaders were instructed to act in either an extroverted or introverted manner and it turned out those proactive people produced 28 lower output when they brought their suggestions to an extroverted leader than when they brought them to an introverted leader so i think that there's a real power struggle that often goes on between extroverted leaders and very very proactive employees who love to take initiative and maybe there are actually some benefits to leading in a more introverted and quiet way and that's what i want to try to think about in the next few minutes so let me just make my confession now i am an introvert for those of you who do not believe me um i can just give you a few facts to back it up the first one is that i went to a rock concert once and i couldn't think for a week and i should qualify that it wasn't a rock concert it was a bare naked ladies concert and that was completely overstimulating second data point when i started teaching nearly a decade ago the most frequent comment from my students after you remind us of a muppet you may know more about what that means than i do but they told me it was the swedish chef anyway um so the next most frequent comment was that i was so nervous standing in front of my students that i was causing them to physically shake in their seats as an introvert i've often found it challenging to be in roles that require me to act in a more extroverted manner right this very moment i feel like i have to act a little bit more extroverted than i might naturally on one hand you would all be really bored if you saw my normal introverted style and you had to listen to that for a few minutes but also i would be really bored because it's not engaging at all but um i think that sometimes we get trapped into these roles more than we think we need to be and i want to illustrate this with an experience i had when i was in a leadership role has anybody traveled with the let's go books by any chance so 10 years ago before i ran the company into the ground all of your hands would have been up no longer what we have now basically is you're familiar with a lonely planet of photos of fromers or rough guides or rick steves 10 years ago we were a competitor of theirs and i had the misfortune of managing a team at let's go that was responsible for advertising sales after september 11th the travel economy had just crashed it was the year after the internet bubble had collapsed and so i had to try to motivate these people who are calling clients where half of them went out of business and the other half said we're in a really challenging economic circumstance the first thing we've cut is our advertising budget so hotel operators airlines tour guides they all said sorry we can't afford to advertise my job was to try to get my employees motivated to keep making cold calls and this is part of what i enjoyed so much about interacting with the fundraisers is it reminded me of the work that i used to do but i came in and i felt like i just had to be an extroverted leader all the time so i'd come in in the morning i'd give a really big motivational pep talk i try to engage them and give them lots of feedback and i started to burn out really fast i started to get exhausted one of the things we know is that introverts who operate in roles that require them to be extroverted all the time are at major risk for burnout and even ill health and i was definitely starting to experience a lot of that so i also found though that i was just a terrible motivational speaker and that my employees weren't actually motivated by anything that i was saying so i got to thinking what else could i do to motivate this team to keep calling prospects and one morning i decided to try something radical i came into the office on a monday and my employees could tell i was just exhausted and really frustrated with the fact that we were falling far below our budget we were not going to actually be able to make anywhere near what our goals were and i said guys i just i need to be really honest with you i'm having a hard time in this job and i'm gonna quit my employees were all pretty surprised and i waited for a moment to try to get a little bit of sort of timing and then i said i'm gonna quit because i want to do your job for a week and i want to find out how hard is it to actually recruit business in this economy so i literally stopped managing for a week and my job was to find prospects to call them to sell them on advertising their services and let's go books now this was like my sort of foray into the undercover boss world and a couple of things that you've all seen on tv happened there one is there was a huge amount of vulnerability that i had to express by doing that because my employees saw what a bad salesman i was they actually had a whole series of jokes making fun of my sales technique that they had mastered and would sort of regale me with as we were starting work each morning which was fun but the other thing that happened was i got a chance to actually get a taste of their work and i got to thinking that we were actually missing part of our market and that maybe there were some clients that we hadn't considered maybe we needed to leave the travel market because the travel market was in trouble and we needed to think about our target demographic which was college students who read these books trying to travel on a budget so i started contacting really diverse clients who had nothing to do with travel but really wanted to reach college students and they started to respond and i started to get some people to to buy and soon after my week of basically quitting my manager job i raised about 40 000 in revenue which wasn't a lot but it was more than my employees said they could do in a given week they had watched it they knew that it wasn't because of my technique in fact they knew that my technique was so inferior that they could do much better and after that their motivation completely transformed they were coming in early they were generating new ideas for prospects they hit over three dozen industries that we had never contacted before that ended up advertising we ended up clearing our budget and i won this manager of the year award that was completely driven by me saying nothing and literally just doing the employee's job as opposed to my manager job and this was a really eye-opening experience for me a wharton professor here sigal barcead calls this leading by doing and i think it's another way of leading quietly it's a way basically of saying look yeah i could lead through my words and i could develop really compelling and charismatic rhetoric or i could actually lead first through my actions and i found that my words took on way more meaning the few that i used after i had gone and done the employee's job it created a sense of what tony simons at cornell is called behavioral integrity which is basically a consistency between your words and your deeds and i had that once i had actually done their job and didn't have it before and it was really interesting for me because it stimulated some reflection about did i really need to act like an extrovert in order to be an effective leader there's some great work by the psychologist brian little one of my heroes and mentors who has been studying introversion extroversion for years and what he finds is that it's actually quite comfortable for an introvert to act like an extrovert as long as you get what's was called a restorative niche which is basically sort of a place where you can retreat to be your more introverted self for me that's reading writing or for those of you who have emailed with me way too much responding to emails and i find that it's much easier to maintain my energy if i have to play the center of attention kind of role in speaking or in leading when i have those kinds of outlets built into my day on a regular basis because they reduce that level of stimulation from overload back to optimal there's a phenomenal book about this idea called quiet by susan kane i know some of you have read it for those of you who are extremely extroverted and won't sit down to read the book she has an 18 minute ted talk that i highly recommend only if you're really extroverted you may be bothered by the fact that there's no dialogue with her when she's on the screen but i think that this is a real opportunity to think about developing what brian little calls a second nature i think of your personality that scale you just filled out are you an extrovert introvert or ambivert that's your first nature there's a big biological and genetic basis of it it's hard to change but what we know is all of us develop a second nature a comfortable role that we walk into the role that i'm playing right now and that turns out to be a role that in some ways is very much out of character because i am an introvert acting like an extrovert but in other ways as brian would say i'm doing it because of my character i really love these ideas i believe in sharing this knowledge and as a result i'm yeah stepping out of my personality-based character but i'm doing it in service of a set of values that i really believe in deeply and i think this is something that we need probably more thought about in our workplaces we need room for introverted leaders to act like extroverts but be able to actually take a step back we also need room for the reverse to happen for extroverted leaders to know especially when they're with proactive employees how to actually dial down that style and create space for those employees to demand the center of attention so in terms of a possible call to action i want to get you thinking about a couple things that you might be able to do to lead more quietly so i think for those of you who like the idea of leading by doing i think there's real power in saying look i don't just have to influence people through my words there's a chance to show it may not be a huge amount of time seagal recommends something like 10 of your time actually doing the work that your employees do both for the learning and the trust and rapport that develop through that i think it's a great way to lead quietly it doesn't require speeches it doesn't require words it really requires putting your money where your mouth is in terms of actually getting into the nitty-gritty of the work that people below you and around you do a second thing you could think about doing is outsourcing inspiration this is what happened in the call center that i was working with and it turns out there's some really innovative companies that are starting to think about well maybe just maybe it's not leaders who have to deliver every single message about why our work matters who have to deliver every vision and mission statement i'll throw out a couple examples medtronic medical technology company some of you are familiar with their annual holiday party where thirty thousand plus employees all come together and yes their ceo speaks but the moment everybody's waiting for is when six patients walk up on stage and tell their stories about how medtronic's work has changed their lives bill george the former ceo told me a couple years ago that every single medtronic employee has a defining moment where they come face to face with a patient whose life their work has changed or contributed to changing that is not an effect a leader can create a leader in most cases cannot share that kind of firsthand story about how this technology makes a difference and rehabilitating people from accidents but the patients they can tell that story in a really emotional and compelling and authentic way john deere has a nice example of this if you were to ever build a tractor for john deere one of the things that you would get to do is you get to meet the farmer who ordered it and oftentimes it's a farmer coming in with their family it's the first tractor they were able to afford and if you worked on that tractor you have a golden key that you get to hand over to that farmer and actually see the person who's going to benefit from your product use it for the first time again a powerful way of letting perhaps the customers do the inspiring when you get to see these people you're creating products for some other examples that i like a couple years ago facebook had a consumer marketing team that said we want to learn a little bit more about how our services could be useful to the the billion or so facebook users that exist in the world and we're going to invite a bunch of users to focus groups and talk about what they like and what they don't like and along the way one of the marketing officers said gee we never thought about sharing these stories with our engineers and actually letting them know how the software they create is helping people fall in love and find long-lost relatives and do some of the amazing things that facebook does so they decided they're actually going to bring in facebook users on a regular basis to talk about how the company's technology is changing their lives and again really reinforce not from the leader but from this end user's perspective how the work makes a difference volvo has a club if you've ever been in a serious accident in a volvo car it's called the volvo save my life club if a physician nurse emergency medical responder police officer or firefighter determines that a volvo car made the difference between life and death for you you're asked to record a story audio or video those stories are available for all volvo employees to watch and listen to and again be reminded of how their work makes a difference in the lives of their customers wells fargo is a really innovative vice president there by the name of ben sikorsi who years ago wanted to really get people who are working for him at wells fargo bankers mostly to sell a new mortgage product and they didn't really get why it was valuable and he saw the product really making a difference in people's lives allowing them to get out of debt or to buy their first home so he started creating little wow videos and he basically got these customers together to talk about how the loans from wells fargo were really influencing their lives lo and behold there's a huge boost in his employees motivation to sell the product and the results and i think it's a really nice example again of bringing that end user face-to-face no words from ben required one other example i want to throw out from the medical world there's a study that was done a couple years ago by israeli radiologists led by yonatan turner which gave radiologists an x-ray to scan and their job is basically to look at the x-ray and try to find what are called incidental findings so you have a primary purpose for the x-ray then you have a bunch of other things that might show up and you might think of those as health risks can you detect them all even though you're not looking for them what turner and his colleagues found is that all these radiologists are given the same exact x-ray today and three months later and about half of them got more accurate and half of them got less accurate it's the same x-ray how could some people get better and some people get worse well it turned out that in the study half the people were given a photo of the patient whose x-ray it was which radiologists often don't see and they get to actually see the photo of the patient whose x-ray they're going to be diagnosing they start to empathize with the patient think about that person as a human being maybe even what if this were my family member they write 12 percent longer reports their diagnostic accuracy goes up by 46 from one photo if you take that photo away it drops by 46 and it turns out that whether you had the photo first or second determines whether you got better or worse and the photo of the patient was enough to motivate you to develop a more accurate and more careful diagnosis so again these are all different ways of outsourcing inspiration really bringing the end user the client or the customer face-to-face with employees instead of letting the leader do all the talking my third recommendation and this is the the final of the three recommendations is to think about the other 80 20 rule jim quigley introduced me to this he's the former ceo and partner at deloitte and what he actually does to make sure that he leads quietly is in every meeting he walks into where he has a leadership role he will not talk any more than 20 of the time and his comment is i don't learn anything when i'm talking i learn when i'm listening and he finds out to be a really helpful practice for making sure that he actually gets ideas and helps his employees feel valued now i should say there's a phenomenal book that keith murray just published called do nothing and it is tempting for those of you who like the idea of quiet leadership to assume that you will have no contribution whatsoever if you embrace this style i'm going to perhaps not talk as much i'm going to let other people deliver my motivational messages i'm going to spend a lot more time listening but i think there's some really powerful social capital that gets created when you actually embrace this choir leader quiet leadership style and there's a really powerful study that james pennebaker did at texas a couple years ago that i want to close with before we open it up for questions first of all take this test please i'm not going to say that extroverts are always narcissists but the correlation ranges positive pennebaker years ago brought strangers together and he wanted them to have sort of a get to know you conversation like you might have in the hallway in about 20 minutes with someone you've never met and he got them all together you could talk about anything you wanted if you're in this group you could talk about the weather you could talk about your favorite sports team you could talk about a problem you might be facing in your organization and then he asked you afterward how much did you enjoy the conversation and how much do you want to talk to these people again and he's got a measure of how much you talked and it turned out the more you talked the more you like the group and he calls this the joy of talking but it goes further you don't just like the group more if you talk more you actually say you learned more about the other people in the group the more you talked i kid you not penavaker's words people and i would add especially extroverts find listening to themselves talk to be an incredibly enjoyable learning experience if that's not a case for leading quietly i don't know what it is thank you happy to take a few questions if we have time or comments for that matter yes so what do you do if you're an innovative employee with an extroverted class do you need to just go find another job i might start katie by changing your boss's personality no i think that that oftentimes what we see is there there are settings in which people sort of gravitate from introverted to extroverted roles and vice versa so i would ask what are the times that you could catch your boss in a more introverted frame of mind it's typically not in a big meeting where he or she is supposed to be the center of attention right often it's a one-on-one or a side conversation where there's much more of an opportunity for a back and forth dialogue in some cases if your boss is a careful reader it's an email exchange or you know a phone call but i would think a little bit about the medium and the setting for the conversation because we all you can all think of times when you acted like an introvert and acted like an extrovert and i want to catch my boss in the moment when he or she is the most receptive i guess would be my quick thoughts yes yeah a little bit so the the research on on generational differences i think is really tricky one of the problems that shows up is most studies will start by saying let's survey you know a bunch of people of different generations and then see for example do they score differently on introversion extroversion or do they have different styles of working and when you get differences the question i always want to ask is are those differences driven by generation or is it just age and wisdom and is it possible that you know everyone would have been sort of similar if they had been caught at the same age there's a psychologist at san diego state jean twenge who has two really fun books on this topic one is called generation me and the other is called the narcissist epidemic and what she does is she overcomes this problem by getting surveys that were done of each generation when they're the exact same age and stage of life so one of her studies for example looks at high school students who are 18 years old who are surveyed in 1960 then you've got another group of high school students in the 70s 80s 90s 2000s etc so every time you have different generations of people at high school age and that's a fair test i think of whether there are generational differences she does find some differences she finds for example that millennials care slightly less about intrinsic rewards about for example enjoyable work as opposed to sort of climbing the career ladder she finds that they tend to care more about self-expression and less about social approval which may explain some of the patterns that many of you see with your kids what's interesting about her research though is that the effects are tiny and age differences are swamped or sorry generational differences are swamped by age and so what you get are basically most generations are pretty similar if you got them at the same age and most studies that return differences are much more about youth and inexperience than they are actually about generation but those two books are much better resources than i could be yes different cultures may play this out very differently yeah it's it's a fascinating set of questions and hard to study across cultures given that we have very different norms in different settings one of the most consistent findings in psychological research costa and mcrae have shown over and over again that you get basically higher introversion scores in east asian cultures than in western cultures which is familiar to a lot of people in the audience now the interesting question is is that actually a difference in personality i don't think so i believe it's a difference in social norms and basically appropriate mechanisms of expression here's the interesting thing about east asian versus western cultures though that even in east asian cultures where there's a much stronger introverted norm it's still the relatively more extroverted people who get promoted into leadership roles and so it's not that we actually prefer introverts in that context it's that we prefer our extroverts a little bit less extroverted and i think that's one dynamic that i find really interesting i think the other dynamic that's playing out across cultures is very much a sort of a skip level dynamic that we see right now of in some ways there's a complementarity between the proactive employees and the introverted leaders but then who do you put above the introverted leaders and how do you make sure there are matches across different levels of the organization i think it's a really vexing problem that's waiting to be studied and i wish i had a better thought on that your yes and the work of mark uh tangentially yes so extroverts are slightly more likely to be optimists introverts are slightly more likely to be pessimists but there i think two major distinctions there one is extroversion introversion has a much greater biogenic source so the neocortex plays a bigger role in that optimism is much more learned typically as is pessimism the other big difference is you have to cross another personality trait along with introversion extroversion to get better prediction of optimists and pessimists from their personalities which would be what we think of as emotional stability so you're cool calm and collected under pressure versus you tend to react with anxiety and anger and frustration when you're stressed and what we find basically is that a prototypical pessimist is typically much more on the emotional side of that and much more introverted and that a prototypical optimist basically is much more emotionally stable and much more extroverted so that's one way to think about it anyway yes motivated by your dilbert slide is there any correlation with the engineers and whether they are extroverted yeah so there are huge self-selection effects if you look at what careers people choose and not surprisingly there's a lot of evidence that introverts are much more drawn to engineering and technical roles i think the interesting question though is who is promoted in those roles i've been doing some research at google for the past few years and one of the the questions we're currently exploring is is it still the extroverts even in an engineering setting there they get promoted or does it actually reverse and i think the jury is still out on that yeah it definitely does and i think that as far as i've seen the evidence is really conflicting on how social media is either facilitating versus inhibiting these kinds of conversations there's a lot of research suggesting that introverts self-disclose more for example when they're in social media and when they're sort of dealing not face to face one of the reasons of being of course that that eye contact with other people is one of the most stimulating things that people experience and so introverts are often less overwhelmed if they can step back a little bit and communicate via chat or twitter or text the interesting thing though is that a lot of our social media are moving more social and so it's much more about our networks and our relationships and here again the introverts seem to be disadvantaged um keith campbell and his colleagues have some evidence for example that extroverts have far more facebook friends than introverts do and that the same kind of very broad networking that extroverts do in real life is mirrored in their social networks and so i think we're still looking for ways of helping introverts sort of navigate some of the social challenges they might experience um within the new developments and technology and i'd be interested in anybody's thoughts on that who wants to chat afterward yes yeah i mean i think there are times when you have to stand up and speak right i'm not saying that leaders should not be vocal um i'm saying that some of us feel more pressured to be vocal all the time than might be either healthy or effective but i think that in crisis certainly that's where we most often need to hear directly from our leaders and want to one example that comes to mind for me is i was working a couple years ago with with a biotech joint venture and the ceo was extremely introverted and had never ever spoken in front of a group of employees that was greater than six and it was a pretty large joint venture and so there were a lot of people who just felt like they didn't know what he wanted in terms of in terms of their future they hit a crisis and they were basically in jeopardy of being shut down by the parent companies and there were a series of consultants who were saying you've got to speak you've got to speak they need to hear from you you have to create the burning platform in the sense of urgency and he wouldn't speak and finally i sat down with him this was another one of those situations of the consultants didn't work let's try an academic and i sat down with him and started asking him about what are his beliefs about the leader's role and when he started answering those questions one of his answers was i think it's my job to give vision and direction to the organization and i said well how are you going to do that if you know if you're not actually speaking in front of people so he decided to do it his first ever speech he got his 200 top people together and he stood up and gave the most awful speech anybody in that organization ever heard the joint venture got shut down about a month later and i seriously think everyone was wishing that he hadn't spoken because the speech was so badly prepared but i stand by the fact that it was his responsibility to speak in that situation and i wish he had done a better job one more yeah in the back examples of introverted leaders so if you look at susan kane's book quiet she has some outstanding examples featured she has some hot in her blog too i think it's often hard to find honestly because one there's it's a really small fraction and two they're not usually in the spotlight so there's a little bit of a challenge there but i think that another place you would find them is when jim collins writes about level five leaders and good to great he's often talking about that kind of quiet humility that's more characteristic of introverts than extroverts it's hard for me to feel comfortable saying so and so as an introvert without really getting a comprehensive assessment of their personality i will say though that there are a lot of great and classic historical examples if you think of gandhi rosa parks lincoln many of the people that we've really looked at as very charismatic figures were much more shy and quiet and withdrawn i think we have some contemporary examples out there um doug conan at campbell soup is one person who has come out and said basically i'm leaving the introvert closet and i actually am one and has been pretty vocal about that which is interesting but i think we're still waiting for role models to be more front and center and i would welcome that if people have ideas thank you again for having me if anyone wants to chat further let me know thanks

Channel: Adam Grant

Views: 84,664

Keywords: Introverts, Quiet, wharton, adam grant, business, business psychology, leadership, organizational psychology, original thinkers, creativity, creative thinkers, productivity, work, problem solving, originals, give and take, management

Id: 7YC0G-ZA8gU

Length: 52min 47sec (3167 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2013