Master Class: Leadership Capital

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: I’m a social psychologist and I believe that social psychology is the most useful discipline for executives.

Kurt Lewin is the founding father of social psychology. And, um, he has an equation that I often use in my classroom, and the equation is something like this: behavior is a function of both the person—what’s inside the person—and the situation, what’s around that individual.

Oftentimes, we focus a lot on the individual or the personality or the person. But the lesson of social psychology is to understand that there’s a broader environment. As executives, we have much more control over factors in people’s environment or in their situation.

So I always tell my executives that if you wanna change someone’s behavior, you change their situation.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: With reference to Star Wars, I always say that every force has a light side and a dark side. And what we wanna do is move more toward the light side.

And focusing on strengths, I think, is a great example of this. It’s important to not start with something you don’t have, to not start with weaknesses, but to build from strengths.

I teach a lot of executives, and it’s interesting that they never think about leveraging strengths as a development opportunity. We’re so focused on weaknesses, and that we think that what we have to do is to help people improve their weaknesses. I encourage you to try to leverage your strengths. How about doing more of what you do well every day?

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, urged executives to play to strengths, their own strengths, the strengths of their boss, their direct reports, their peers, even the strengths of the situation around them. Making strengths productive is such an important tenet that Drucker called it a moral imperative.

Think about it. To focus on weaknesses is not only foolish; it’s irresponsible.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: There are these stereotypes associated with what it means to be a “leader,” or what it means to be a “manager,” and we actually limit our choices and our own . . . our behaviors and the behaviors of others, when we use these types of labels.

My friend and colleague Rick Larrick proposes the following challenge to his students. And I have adopted this challenge. Try, in your everyday conversations, in your everyday language, to use the words lead and manage as verbs as opposed to using the words leadership and management as nouns.

If you think about the fact that everyone can engage in leadership behavior independent of personality traits or position in an organization, then you can understand the power that comes from using lead and manage as verbs as opposed to assuming that they are people or positions.

When we start to understand that leading and managing are behaviors and that we can choose to engage in the behaviors of leading and managing, this really allows us to practice leadership more often and it allows us to create an environment that helps other people to develop their leadership capital.

And so that’s the homework assignment. You’ll see that it’s harder than you think.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: If you’ve ever had a problem or a situation that you’re working to resolve, and you’re not really thinking about it consciously at the moment but . . . you’re in the shower, and all of a sudden an idea comes to you. Or you go to sleep and you wake up or even in the middle of the night and you have an idea about something that’s been bothering you, something you’ve been working on. That is the Zeigarnik Effect.

So I’m gonna introduce you to Bluma Zeigarnik. Bluma was a psychologist and she’s responsible for identifying the Zeigarnik Effect, the tendency to remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones. Ernest Hemingway is said to have used the Zeigarnik Effect to his advantage. He would end each day of his writing by stopping mid sentence.

Instead of completing his thought, he would allow the Zeigarnik Effect, this productive tension, to work for him. Executives tend to rush to closure. We have a bias for action. We want to move on and get the answer so that we can get a lot of things done.

But I always say that perceptive questions are much more important than answers, and this is because questions are tools. Questions generalize across time and place whereas answers are specific to a given context.

It’s my hope that you will practice staying in the question, where creativity and energy often reside along with uncertainty and anxiety.

So may Zeigarnik be with you.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: It’s incredibly important to understand the consequences of the labels that we use every day. For example, use of the noun leader implies that the behavior has something more to do with personality than with choice.

I have a student who once said to me, “Well, I’m just a manager. Someday when I’m a leader, then I’ll be able to do these other great things.”

Why is it that we think that we are constrained by the labels that are used to describe who we are or what our opportunities might be?

Leadership is not better than management. Leadership isn’t even more important than management. Management and leadership are different. They’re both important.

When you’re managing, you’re in the present. You’re in the here and now. The terrain is charted. The symbol is a map. So you can look at the map and you can see where a road is. You can plan a bridge. When you’re managing, you’re in the here and now. You are maintaining or enhancing the status quo.

I have these students and sometimes they say, “You know, I really want to be a leader but I need a vision. So I know leaders need visions. Where do I get a vision?” Well, visions come from your understanding of the present, when you’re managing, when you’re in the present, when you’re in the here and now, because leadership is a choice that’s made, usually based on some dissatisfaction with the status quo. The vision comes from your unhappiness with some element of the current situation.

So for me, the symbol for leadership over leading is the compass, because the terrain is uncharted, and all you have—all you can have—is a sense of direction.

The challenge is to know when to reach for the map and when to reach for the compass. Keep both close by.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Linda Ginzel: There’s an important concept in negotiations. It’s called the Pareto Frontier. And the Pareto Frontier is that point at which maximum value from a deal is had. So for example, if you don’t hit the frontier in a negotiation, then you quite literally leave money on the table.

So I have taken this notion and created sort of a pseudo, another frontier. I call it the Ginzel Frontier. And similar to the Pareto Frontier, if you don’t hit the frontier, then you quite literally leave money on the table. But this frontier is your ability to extract lessons from your everyday experiences.

To the extent that you don’t collect data, experiment, practice, and reflect on your understanding of your experiences, then you leave money on the table. Your experiences are literally expensive. Benjamin Franklin is often misquoted. People think that his quote is something like, “Experience is the best teacher.” You’ve probably heard that, right? That’s not his quote. What Benjamin Franklin said is that experience is a dear teacher. A dear teacher is expensive.

And do you know why experience is expensive? Because we don’t learn from it. Just because we have a success or a failure, it doesn’t mean we learned anything from it. Or maybe we learned the wrong things from it. So what I try to do is to help people to be more systematic in collecting the data of their experiences. And the way to do that is to experiment, to practice across time, experiment with your behavior, practice across time, collect data—feedback—and reflect on that data.

Maybe you think about data just as feedback. OK, so just think how fortunate you are if you have a boss who gives you feedback. Or a spouse. Or if you’re like me and you have a teenage son who tells you everything you do wrong on a moment-by-moment basis. To the extent that you don’t collect data, experiment, practice, and reflect on your understanding of your experiences, then you leave money on the table.

Your experiences are literally expensive.

(upbeat music)