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Adaptive leadership reveals the hidden cost of being politically correct

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img545.jpg.w560h202Adaptive leadership is a framework for practicing leadership developed by Harvard Professor Ronald Heifetz through his teaching in the early 1990s. Critical to the theory is the distinction between authority and leadership: that being in a position of authority (CEO, President, Manager) does not by definition make someone a leader.

And, in fact, leadership is a practice that can be exercised by anyone, whether they have any formal authority or not. Leadership, then, becomes defined as “the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”1

The term “adaptive” is borrowed from nature, and is meant to refer to the way nature uses conflict to cause evolution through natural selection. As conditions change, organisms are forced to adapt or perish. This makes a decent analogy to us humans facing changes in our environment, whether that environment is social, legal, or more based in nature.

Leadership is in the process of guiding and motivating the work required to adapt to a new condition which cannot be changed or wished away.

When news stories like this one about Bowdoin pop up, where a college administration is in the midst of punishing some of its students for, essentially, having a Mexican themed party, many of us shake our heads. We know instinctively that this isn’t the right way to react. But why?

The problem with being too politically correct is that avoiding conflict is actually avoiding really important adaptive work.

If you subscribe to the concepts behind adaptive leadership (which I do), then you realize that the real work of progress (and leadership) happens in the minds of the constituency, and it happens when we are forced to confront just the right amount of conflict.

“Political Correctness” does damage in two ways: it is itself work avoidance, it pulls our attention away from the realities we should be reconciling with our values, and it reduces our overall capacity as a group, organization, or society to handle the psychological load of future work that will cause psychological stress.

In many cases, like what’s going on at Bowdoin College at the moment, the work that needs doing is the work of cultural integration. Most colleges go to a lot of effort to bring students to their campus from all over the US and the world, and put them together in a relatively closed environment.

This is a wonderful opportunity for leadership and learning: the college system can be a “holding environment,” a zone of protected conversation, for the students, supporting them as they use conflict to change their own understanding and opinions about other cultures, and preparing them to live in a country they must share with others. But that conflict is critical to the process. If there is only one cultural narrative, or rather, if only one system of values is allowed to be expressed, then there are no stressors on the system to create motion and force people to do adaptive work. The administration mistakenly believes that their job is to avoid conflict, when in fact they must enable and manage it.

If, instead of stepping in with a course of action, the college administration were to do nothing and wait2, they would force the students to continue to think about the party, the mini-sombreros, and the cultural statements being made by their actions. The students might ask themselves: is this party in line with my values? do I believe that cultural symbols should be fair game for parties and jokes? Is this just a reality that I need to live with, or is this a changeable norm that I would like to work on changing?

All this goes out the window when the authority takes action. The students, on both sides, become distracted by the more immediate questions about education, enrollment, and administration. The students who might have faced pressures from their peers, forcing them to examine their values and make a decision about whether or not they need to change, instead feel that there is nothing for them to do: the powers that be have taken this work for them.

In this way, the progress of society, and successful leadership, depend on a system that allows for managed conflict.

The practice of being politically correct is based on the idea that conflict is harmful. Conflict can be hurtful — it can cause pain, and change can cause loss — so for these reasons we understandably avoid it. But sometimes there is no way through but through, and when this is the case, we need leadership not political correctness.

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1 This definition is from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

2 It’s always more complicated than this. Having authority gives you the power to do things like control what people pay attention to, and the administration, if it wants to exercise leadership in confronting this issue, might have to bring attention to the party if the students themselves were not already doing so. But raising a question or an issue is a different thing than acting on it, and they often have opposite psychological effects.

The critical insight for achieving mastery in anything

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mindset-coverIn April 2015, Denter Mark Pearson’s audiobook startup Libro.fm launched their book club with a nonfiction title called Mindset, by Carol Dweck. I purchased a copy and listened to it on my commute to and from work, and it’s one of those books with a straightforward central insight that, if you don’t already run it natively, can massively change your approach to success.

Dweck separates people loosely into two mindsets, which she terms the “fixed” mindset, or the “growth” mindset:

  • The fixed mindset describes a belief that “your qualities are carved in stone,” that things like your IQ score are measured and, crucially, not possible to improve.
  • The growth mindset applies to people who believe that growth is possible in all aspects. That failures are not a referendum on your innate abilities, but a necessary step in learning.

Fortunately, modern research stands thoroughly behind the growth mindset:

Scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought. Of course, each person has a unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, But it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way.

Robert Sternberg, the present day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise, is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagements. Or as his forerunner [Alfred] Binet recognized: it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

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For 20 years my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be, and whether you accomplish the things you value.

One of the core beliefs behind what we do at Dent is that greatness is not prescribed at birth by a lottery — Marie Curie, Ronald Reagan, Gandhi, J.K. Rowling — there is nothing they’ve done which is not accessible to most other people with a sufficient amount of well-directed effort.

Charisma isn’t some magical aura, it’s a set of behaviors, social cues, and habits that some people learn earlier than others. Being seen as a visionary isn’t so much about being right as it is about successfully hiding your effort.

Dweck’s growth mindset is the perfect mental attitude for tackling this kind of learning.

Building smart teams

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Success and failure are often separated by teams that work well together and teams that don’t, yet building a team has often been considered a soft science. An activity that great leaders could be intuitively better at, but that people screw up on more often than not.

But professors Anita Woolley, Thomas Malone, and Christopher Chabris have conducted (and published) some research that shows there are some reliable links between how you construct a team and how it performs:

The smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

They followed this study up with some additional research that shows this dynamic applies to teams that work remotely as well as teams that work in person.

I remember learning about Theory of Mind in introductory psychology class in college:

Theory of mind (often abbreviated ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own.

Which of course is not quite right — we are looking for people who have empathy, which is something you develop to a greater or lesser degree based on your theory of mind and your life experience.

Another interesting twist is that team smartness was not correlated with how intelligent the team members were:

We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

In other words, if you want to build a team that can dent the universe, pick people who have a lot of empathy, and if you lack a better barometer for it, pick women.

Can you be a good entrepreneur if you've never built a successful company?

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This question is riddled with ill-defined words. What is “good”? What is “successful”? For that matter, what is “entrepreneur?”

But I think it’s an interesting question to ask nonetheless. It turns out that folks seem to fall into two different camps on answering it, and it depends on whether you want to take a strict definition of “success” and “good” (you can read the comments on Facebook here for a more nuanced view of everyone’s actual opinions).

If you want to measure success in the typical, stricter sense (does this business create and keep customers?) then it’s pretty hard to be a good entrepreneur if you’ve never managed to do the one thing all entrepreneurs must do: build a going concern, or reach an exit for your investors.

On the other hand, if you’re a bit more forgiving on what it means to be either “good” or “successful,” then we start realizing that there must be good entrepreneurs who have not had financial success for their businesses.

This interpretation makes more sense to me, because we consistently acknowledge that failure is inevitable as an entrepreneur, and VCs will make a habit of funding a “good entrepreneur” even after a failed venture, even if they haven’t had a successful exit yet.

Entrepreneurs need to be good with people. It’s hard to find talented people to work with you for less money than they could elsewhere. It’s hard to find customers who will buy a new product, or sign a contract with an untested organization. It’s hard to find believers in a new vision.

Over time, and sometimes multiple startups, these characteristics will become apparent. If you’re a good entrepreneur, failure will not be an obstacle to raising money in the future, or reaching out to past customers and partners, or poaching old co-workers.

To quote Scott Berkun: “there are many different kinds of not-succeeding and some are far more impressive than people who got very lucky and won.”

So fear not: exits are not the only measure of your value as an entrepreneur!

Why ethical decisions escape us

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It turns out that we as groups of humans are pretty bad at actually making ethical decisions. And according to professor Ann Tenbrunsel, it’s mostly because we don’t recognize we’re making ethical decisions when we make them.

According to a Harvard paper (that predates her book, Blind Spots), we tend to make decisions that have ethical consequences “in the moment”:

We argue that the temporal trichotomy of prediction, action and recollection is central to these misperceptions: People predict that they will behave more ethically than they actually do, and when evaluating past (un)ethical behavior, they believe they behaved more ethically than they actually did.

The paper’s authors also divide a person into two “selves”:

The “want” self is reflected in choices that are emotional, affective, impulsive, and “hot headed.” In contrast, the “should” self is characterized as rational, cognitive, thoughtful, and “cool headed.” The presence of these two selves within one mind results in frequent clashes: We know we should behave ethically when negotiating with our client, for example, but our desire to close the sale causes us to make misleading statements.

It seems like what they’re dancing around is that we all imagine ourselves to be a certain kind of (ethical) person, but when we get into the details of making decisions, we often:

  1. Don’t recognize that there are ethical dimensions to the decision
  2. Make the decision based on specific incentives at hand, not general principles

The Search for Extraterrestrial…Pollutants?

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In addition to monitoring for radio signals from alien worlds, another way of searching for extraterrestrial life might be to look at planets in certain types of solar systems for pollution:

Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University. [has] a new suggestion based on his experience here on Earth. Scan the skies for little, brown men – the chronic polluters. Astronomers have been able to glimpse the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system for a while now. And there’s a new space telescope scheduled for launch in 2018 that Loeb says, he could use.

The idea would be that when a planet like the Earth is passing in front of its host star a small fraction of the light from the star would pass through the atmosphere and show – potentially – evidence for these pollutants.

Certain pollutants don’t occur naturally. So if astronomers saw them that would point to industrial activity on the planet. And that would indicate intelligence. Loeb has published some calculations in the exciting, September issue of the astrophysical Journal Letters. They showed that if the new telescope looks at the right kind of star, the pollution will be detectable if it’s 10 times bigger than in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Dent The Future is coming up March 22-25, 2015. Register here.