Adam Grant Reveals What Most Leaders Get Wrong & Simple Things All Execs Should Try | Davos 2019

so last year at Davos you started a project studying power and tell me some of the ways you can see power dynamics at work here at Davos so I had one last night actually I was walking out of a reception and a guy came up to me who I've I guess I've met briefly in past years and he said so I he said have this student who's brilliant I'm wondering if you would be willing to meet her and mentoring her will enrich your life I had like whoa back off you're asking me for a favor and you're trying to convince me it's good for me listen I'm happy to try to be helpful but you know if you're trying to ask me to help you just be honest about it and I think what I see in that dynamic as in so many is people feeling like they're in a position where they lack status or power and then trying to overcompensate and claim it and it just makes it worse and what made you so interested in power and how is it changing now well I got interested in it because I went very quickly from hiding in academia to all of a sudden engaging with people who were who were powerful and I was fascinated by the fact that many of them were much more human I realized I was struck by the fact that they were very often not sure what to do with their power and especially the fact that they often underestimated the power they had right so you take somebody who who goes from well actually a fun example here is Maria konnikova so Maria's a fellow psychologist New Yorker writer best-selling author but she's been very good at publicizing her ideas but you know not making herself that visible and for her new book she learned how to play poker and went in a year from not having played a hand to winning the World Poker Championship or one of the championships and you know people come up and she feels like she's the same person but people are like oh my god you're a genius you're you know can you teach me how to play poker can you teach me how to think about risk and I watched a lot of people not know how to respond in that situation where all of a sudden they felt like they were being put on a pedestal and they just wanted to have a normal human interaction so I think that's the dynamic that's changing today is never and well I think there are times there were rare moments where that happened but it's so common now for people to just catapult in the seats of power because of social media because of the way that the world is networked because of how easy it is to start a tech company with an app in your basement and I think that means people gain power much faster than they used to but it's also way harder to hold on to it and just so the old power people that have been in power for a long time what are they struggling with you know I think there's certainly a few things one is trying to figure out how to keep their power right so if you're a giant company you're constantly living in fear of disruption right and then the other piece of it is also trying to figure out which of these tools should I pay attention to right like how do I become tech savvy there are people here who do not have email accounts and have never like sent or received an email how does that really how do you exist in the world you've wrote a book about givers and takers and you can identify a giver or a taker in some ways by what they do when they have power who makes a better leader givers or takers and who ends up as a leaders I think that's the paradox right so we have a wealth of evidence that givers are better leaders than takers takers tend to be overconfident they swing for the fences and they end up often taking unnecessary risks and they have more fluctuating volatile performance if you track what happens their company's total shareholder returns or return on assets there's some really fun hedge fund data that if you're a taker in the hedge fund industry and one of the ways they score that is by when you're in a job interview they videotape that and then they see whether you smile and somebody else's misfortune I so like schadenfreude and takers do that more they're excited to see other people fail because they think that means they get to succeed they actually have over 10 years significantly lower returns and but in the in the leadership context takers aren't just overconfident they also tend to squash other people's ideas they leave other people feeling devalued they have a very hard time hanging on to talent because if you're a star and somebody is constantly exploiting you what do you do you take the first opportunity that you have to work somewhere else great and you leave so givers are great leaders in the sense that they focused on lifting other people up rather than cutting others down they're constantly developing that people blow them but they often miss out on leadership opportunities because they don't do the degree of self-promotion that's necessary to get on the radar in the first place and you talk in power moves how other the leaders above them are not promoting her they can't identify Josh can you explain that this I find this terrifying so the more senior you get in your career the better you think you are at judging character right and you actually say look this is how I got there hey it's like hey I'm really good at knowing who's talented and who to trust and part of how I gave my power and the reality is the opposite the more powerful you get the worse you are at judging character because people are more motivated to try to impress you so all the takers below you are really good fakers because they know that's how they're gonna get ahead and that means the more powerful you are the more you have to rely on the judgment of other people you don't want to trust your own judgement you don't want to trust the judgment of other powerful people you if you're trying to judge whether you're hiring somebody or promoting somebody if you're trying to judge their values you actually want to go to the people who work with them lateral and the people who work with them below who get to see more their true colors because if you're a taker you're like wow it's a lot of work to pretend to care about everybody and so you reserve your generosity for the people that you think can you know accelerate your career and then you kind of screw over the people who work beside in below you what makes better leaders introverts or extroverts so I did some research on this a few years ago with a couple of colleagues and we found that there was no difference overall in the effectiveness of introverted and extroverted leaders if you actually track the performance of their teams and their companies but we found that it whether introverts are more effective or less effective depends on the kinds of employees they had so extroverts were better leaders with that with sort of reactive followers people who are looking for direction for above because if I'm an extroverted leader all right I'm gonna get you excited and fired up and then you're ready to follow the direction I've created introverted leaders actually were more effective though with proactive employees so if you've got a whole team of people who are bringing ideas and suggestions to the table who are taking initiative extroverted leaders tended to feel threatened by that and they're like hey don't steal my spotlight I'm in charge here and that had two negative effects one was it shut those people's ideas down which meant the extroverted leaders didn't hear as many ideas and two they left their people feeling team motivated I thought they were good and any kind of you dismissed me the introverts were much more likely to listen and make people feel valued and get better ideas and I think we're living in a world now where we need more proactivity from employee right we as the world is more dynamic and competitive you can't as a leader see everything that's going to happen that's going to affect the fit in your company and so given that proactive employees are more important than ever before I think introverts are going to be more effective leaders than ever before so what's the way that that some leaders can maintain power or collect power that is counterproductive and it's not good for what they're trying to accomplish so there's some classic research that goes back over half a century on different bases of power and some bases of power are actually things that you get to accumulate and hold on to like your ability to to to connect with other people and gain respect which is called referent power right so the things that you do to cause people to like you and admire you you carry those with you no matter where you work expert power is another thing you get to hold on to so if you build a skill if you accumulate a body of knowledge right that's yours but there's also positional power which are that can be broken down into the rewards that you dole out the punishments that you you create the authority that you have and that's fleeting because if your company takes all of a sudden you may not have control over rewards you might get demoted you might have someone promoted above you and your authority is taken away and one of those positional bases of power is called informational power which sounds like expert power but it's not your expertise it's the information that you're accessed by virtue of where you sit so think about executive assistants for example they are remarkably powerful because they get to read the CEOs emails they have usually control over the CEOs calendar and I think what happens when people gain informational power is they often feel like they want to hoard it because you know if somebody has the information that I I have my advantages taken away reality is when you study what happens to two information hoarders they end up failing to learn anything basically they struggle to innovate because other people then punish them and say look you didn't share anything with me I'm not going to share anything with you I think the more effective use of informational power is to say look I want to I want to take the knowledge that I've gained access to I want to share it with people who can use it effectively and then you become sort of a power broker right people are excited to have you involved in innovation because they realize you have a lot of information to contribute one of the questions that you posed at the beginning of your book I'm gonna ask you how do you leader deal with a workforce that has is more empowered and more entitled than ever well I think one of the things you do is you turn your exit interviews upside down so I did a project with Goldman Sachs a few years ago where David Solomon came in and he said look he's running Investment Banking at the time co-running investment bank at the time and he said you know it used to be the case that anybody who wanted to consider Wall Street we were the dream job but now we're losing people to Google we're losing people to private equity and how it has a lot more power than ever before and how do we how do we keep them you know it more than a year or two and one of the things that we looked at was exit interviews I said all right how are you learning why people leave and I said well one of the things we do is you know when people let us know that they're departing we asked them why did you leave and you know why did you decide to leave and what would have convinced you to say it daunted me that is the last possible moment you should have that conversation right which in any company why would you wait until people are already on their way out the door to find out how you could have kept them around and so we actually decided to flip it and we introduced the idea of entry interviews and we said look and when people join the company in their first week ask them all the questions you would normally ask in an exit interview why did you join what are your goals in the next five years what's your favorite project you ever worked on what impact you want to have and what are you hoping to learn and that that kind of opens the door then to tailor the job to what people are looking for and it also shows people who on day one that you appreciate them and you care about their goals not just that yours and so I think every company autorun entry interviews and I love in this book at the end of every chapter you offer practical tips power not power tools but power tips do you have a favorite one one that you think is that you want to share oh yeah my personal favorite is actually unscreened givers and takers so for years I've watched leaders get them get fooled by you know these these takers who are great fakers and it turns out that you can't ask people what their you know their own values are right so sorry are you are you a giver or a taker definitely a giver obviously right which is the first way I know someone's a taker they're like oh yeah we giver no outside of this context of course but what what I think you can learn a lot from is when you ask people to predict other people's values and motives and so what there's a there's a classic question in the integrity test research where you you say all right taking behavior like stealing from the company how common is theft by employees of at least 10 US dollars a month and people think about it for a while and it turns out that the higher your estimate that other people are thieves the greater the odds that you're a thief interesting that's how takers rationalize their behavior right they're like hey you know what everybody else is selfish and so I've got to put myself first or else no one will and so I would say take the the selfish behavior you're most worried about in your company ask people how common they think that behavior is and then if they come up with a high estimate you want to find out why did they think that and is it really the case that they're projecting their own selfish behavior onto others

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 27,109

Rating: 4.9340205 out of 5

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, adam grant, organizational psychologist, wharton, u penn, professor, author, power, powerful, ceo, business, news, government, politics

Id: YheWnPYRvVY

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019