The Leadership Mistake Almost Everyone Makes (Adam Grant)

Hello and welcome to doing it anyway, the show where we rethink challenges, build our confidence and learn how to do it anyway. Today I'm talking with Professor Adam Grant, he's one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of success, leadership and human potential. We had a broad conversation and touched on many areas of both being a boss and being an employee. We talked about the hippo effect, I'd never heard of that, which is a syndrome where the highest paid person in any meeting can quietly kill good ideas and get their opinion across before everybody else does. We talked about how to give feedback that is actually useful. We talked about why people pleasing might stop you from getting promoted and how self-doubt could actually be a useful tool for success and here's a counter-intuitive one. We discussed why procrastination, something I am very guilty of, might actually boost creativity. Here's Adam Grant. This episode is presented by Vanguard. 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What does it take? Oh, well, how many hours do you have, Catty? Oh, a few. Okay, good. Well, I'm going to say I'm looking for basically two things. I'm looking for character and competence and I think the competence part is talked about all the time. We need someone who can exercise good judgment and makes smart decisions. We need somebody who can do vision and strategy. Somebody who can resolve conflict and align people. I don't think we talk enough about the character aspects. I don't think we talk enough about the importance of leaders embodying generosity, humility, and integrity. When I think about those character strengths, those are the qualities that allow leaders to say my mission is more important than my ego, which is sadly more rare than I would like to admit in leadership. How do you balance the idea in that character component of looking for people who are cheerleaders of their group, who kind of encourage people, who praise people, who tell people they're doing well and give them a kind of sense of promise, and somebody who is also prepared to say the tough stuff, who is prepared to be your critic. Does one person need to embody both of those? Do you need leaders in an organization, some of whom are critics and some of whom are more on the praising cheerleaders side of things? How do you see that? This is a conversation I have with my own teams when I have to lead, which I try not to do. Whenever I can avoid it. You're a very good leader. I've seen you do it. No self-deprecating. No, it's much easier to study it than it is to live it. I think that what I've learned to say to my teams is, look, there are moments when our natural impulse is to be a cheerleader or a critic, and when you're cheerleading, you're basically applauding the best version of someone. When you're criticizing, you're attacking the worst version of someone. But what I've always benefited the most from, and what I want to be for you is a coach. I think a coach is somebody who sees a better version of you and helps you realize your potential. And in order to do that, sometimes I'm going to have to tell you things that don't feel good today, but allow you to grow tomorrow. And I think too often leaders get stuck in one or the other. I think they need to either fix you today, or they need to prop you up today. And I think both of those instincts are short-sighted. I think that what effective leadership is about is saying, look, I have very high expectations of you. I'm confident you can reach them. And here's what I know about how to help you get from where you are today, to where both of us would like you to be tomorrow. Is that another way of saying find ways to give your criticism that are constructive? It is. Or is it a little different? Is the coaching element of this a little different? Well, I think it depends on how you look at it. I think what most leaders do is they give feedback. They tell you what you did right and wrong yesterday. There's a growing body of evidence suggesting that advice is often more helpful to people. If I start to give you tips on what you can change today, that's more likely to put you in an action-focused frame of mind and less likely to have you wallowing in the past saying, either, I'm already doing really great because I'm stuck on all the positive feedback I got, or beating yourself up and saying, you know what, I'm terrible, I'm never going to be any good. Why try? Can we take this into the realm of kind of specifics of some of the things that happen in workplaces that I think often trip people up that I've heard in the decades of kind of studying the field, particularly looking at women, but I think it also applies to many young men as well, that there are areas around work that they find particularly hard to navigate. And one of those is so basic, it's meetings that how meetings are run really makes an enormous difference in terms of whether everybody around the table feels they are getting heard. But perhaps more importantly, from the organisation's point of view and the boss's point of view and we're looking at kind of this from the boss's point of view at the moment, how do you maximize the chances that the talent that is around your table at your meeting or on your Zoom calls or wherever it is, is actually being utilised to the best of it's your organisation's needs and how do you get the best out of everybody around the table? Because there's so much research that shows that people who talk the most somehow just seem to have the most status in a meeting type or group type situation. How do you mitigate for that if you are an effective boss? Yeah, I think what you're describing is called the Babel Effect. I knew it would have a name, I knew it had to have a term. Of course it has a name. The Babel Effect, there's evidence that the person who talks the most is most likely to get chosen as the leader because people mistake their confidence for competence. Even though those qualities are not correlated positively and sometimes are even negatively correlated. So I think we need to create space for everybody to participate and contribute and the first thing to do to make sure that happens is we actually need to talk about why we're meeting. I mean, life is just full of useless meetings. I think if we do the number of them, people are a lot more likely to fully engage in the ones that they do show up for because they're worthwhile. And so as far as I know, there are only four reasons to meet. We can meet because we need to decide. We want to bond, we're here to create, or we're showing up to learn. If you are not meeting for one of those reasons, if you're not there to decide bond, create or learn, you don't need to be meeting in the first place. I think everything else falls in the category of this meeting should have been and could have been an email. So let's get clear on that. If we're here to decide the kind of contribution you're looking for in terms of people challenging assumptions and bringing options that we hadn't thought about before, it's very different than if we show up to bond, where we're going to be sharing personal stories and maybe talking a little bit about our collective values. So let's get the purpose clear. That would be my table stakes. Before we get into actually role-playing running the meeting, how many balls are there? Bosses, do you speak to Adam who are going into meetings every day, multiple times possibly a day, without a clear sense of the reason that they're doing them? It's just because somebody's put a meeting on their calendar and they're going into that meeting, they feel they should show up for it. I've lost count too many. It's extremely frustrating and this is a solveable problem. Rebecca Hines has done some great demonstrations. She did this at Dropbox and then at Asana, where she had people cancel all their recurring meetings. And then she said, okay, now let's do an audit. Which ones are important? Which ones are value added? Which ones are unnecessary? And on average, when teams did this, they were able to save about 11 hours a month. So I would say, clear the calendar, startover is a good place to kick this off. And then when you're running the meeting, how do you run the meeting? Well, I think there are a couple of options here, but let's assume we're here to make a decision, which is what a lot of group meetings are fundamentally about. I think there's a case to be made that Amazon has done something right here that the rest of us should pay a lot of attention to, which is the person who's driving the decision or framing the meeting has actually written a six-page structured memo that is sent out in advance. But no one is expected to read it because we're all too busy. So we show up for the meeting and we will spend the first 15 or 20 minutes just reading the memo to make sure that we're all up to speed and we're on the same page about what the goals of the decision are, what the options on the table are. And then we're going to go around and make sure we hear from every single person. Ideally, we don't let the leader share their opinion until the end. So, you know, I think sometimes people will say the leader should speak last. I wouldn't go that far. I think the leader's job is to facilitate and to make sure that everybody's voice is heard. But as a leader, you are vulnerable to what's been called the hippo effect, which caddy has become my favorite acronym, hippo stands for the highest paid persons opinion. As soon as that is known, people are going to start conforming to you. Good biodiversity of thought, hello group think. And so you actually want to withhold your opinion so that people don't know what your preference is, what direction you're most excited about, so that you can go around and say, "Okay, I'd love to hear everybody's views." And then let's make sure we're all challenging each other and questioning each other as opposed to looking for consensus and kumbaya. And at that point, we're a little bit more informed and then the leader can begin to weigh in. Okay, I love that. And I hope that anyone who is listening who is in a position of leadership, who is in a position of deciding whether meetings take place and how to run them, takes that on board because I'm going to be honest. Most of the meetings that I have been to in my 30 odd years in the workplace have not been run the way that you've just described. And I think I've wasted a ton of time and I've written about this often that just scrap half of the meetings you go to because I think there are a waste of time and the blow-hards are the ones that come out getting heard. I want to touch on another area that you mentioned at the beginning and that's the notion of feedback within the kind of realm of coaching because I do think this is another area where there's potential for misinterpretation and misalignment of objectives and how these things turn out. How do you make sure, as a boss again, that you give feedback that an employee really takes on board and at the same time doesn't get overly discouraged by? I think a lot of people fixate on the message and we need to think about the messenger first. It is surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth from somebody who believes in your potential and cares about your success and well-being. And too often managers are busy. They have a lot of other things on their plate. They show up to deliver the message and they think it's abundantly clear that, of course, I'm trying to help you get better but what the employee hears is I'm judging you, I'm attacking you, I'm belittling you. And so I think time needs to be invested in making it abundantly clear and obvious. The only reason I would ever give you feedback is because I have high expectations of you. I see great things in your future and that's why I'm investing time to try to figure out what you can do better. Ideally, what I do in those initial conversations is I'm getting to know you if I'm working with you is, I would say, "Catty, talk to me a little bit about how you like to receive feedback." Have you ever had either a mentor or a boss or a coach who told you things you could do better and you came out feeling fired up as opposed to deflated? What did that person do? I want to emulate as much of that as possible. Talk to me also about the worst feedback you've ever gotten in your career. Who just made you feel small, ashamed, depressed, discouraged? What did they do? I want to make sure I can avoid all those things. Oh my God. I'm feeling like I've got PTSD because I'm remembering the time I was fired and somebody came to me and said, "It wasn't that I wasn't any good on my job. It was just that I had no personality on television." And they needed to hire somebody else and really it was a question of apples and oranges. You know, Adam, I never figured out whether I was the apple or the orange, but I was clearly the wrong kind of fruit and there was no disagreement with that. But it was just somebody who did exactly the opposite. I mean, actually literally didn't even take the time to think what is the kind of feedback that would manage to get the best out of this, but then I burst into tears and realized my job was over. I'm so sorry that that happened, Cati. I feel like we need to spend the next half an hour just talking about it. Could we just do some therapy and maybe that person whose name is still remembered out there listening? What did you do afterward? Because if I were in your shoes, I would be really tempted to give them some meta feedback on their feedback and say, "This is actually not only ineffective, it's actually counterproductive, and if this is how you're interacting with other people, you are not going to go on to great things in your future." Well, so of course, I mean, now Adam, I wish that I had said that at the time I was 33 years old and relatively new still in the world of broadcasting and didn't have anything like the kind of perception or insight or confidence that you've just suggested to be able to say anything apart from kind of going to a cupboard and grab an ice cream and literally burst into tears and then feel embarrassed and humiliated, like you just said, "I'm so interesting that you use the word humiliation because that's exactly what I felt in that moment." And I think for a lot, and in a way, this gets us to younger people listening to this because I think it's, you know, it is easier for you and I with all of the work that we have done and all of the studying that we have done to take the position that you did, which is, "Listen, can I give you some feedback on your feedback because you're not going to go very far in the world of feedback if that's the way you approach people?" I think that is an almost impossible thing for somebody who is starting out and doesn't have the seniority and the years of experience that you and I have to say to a boss, right? I mean, I think, first of all, knowing what to say and then having the confidence to say it are both things that I'm not sure that somebody who's young and more junior would be able to do. Agreed. And I wouldn't advise it either because it's a great way if you haven't already been fired to get fired because it's seen as, you certainly your boss is in the door. Especially if the boss isn't jerked like my boss was. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about this as, "Okay, you have nothing else to lose. What's your parting shot?" But, if this is a relationship that matters to you, that you hope to maintain, and you respect the person, especially, I think that it's not easy to get them to open the door if it seems to be closed. I think there is a conversation that I've coached some of my students to have that works that's a version of this in a lot of cases, which is, if you're junior, you go to your boss and you say, "Hey, I want to deliver the best results I can for you. I want to be the most effective contributor possible." I've been thinking a little bit about the context in which I do my best work and I realized there's no way you would know that because you haven't gotten to see my highlights and lowlights. If you're ever interested, let me know. I'm happy to share a little bit of that with you. There's something really powerful about dangling information, but then not sharing it that leads the other person to get curious. Your manager is likely to say, "Oh, well, I've got time right now," or, "Let's put that on the calendar," because I'd really like to hear more about that, wondering what you know that they might be missing. I think just planning the seed and offering to have the conversation and then putting the ball in their court is one of the easiest ways to initiate it. Adam, I think your students are very lucky to have somebody like you who is so open to feedback. I wish all bosses were. We are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to ask you something really interesting that I heard you say on the truth about people pleasing. Welcome back to doing it anyway. Now, Adam, let's stay on the employee side of things. You and I have talked a lot about some of the differences between men and women. I think one of the differences that women are perhaps a little bit more prone to. There is some data on this, then men is the idea of people pleasing. I was really interested to watch the interview that you recently did with the actress, Kristen Bell, where you talked about people pleasing and she described herself as a people pleaser, as an addicted people pleaser. You had a really interesting response to why people pleasing is not going to help you in the world of work, but is also just not a good trait to have from everybody else's point of view as well. I thought it was counterintuitive. Tell me what you said to Kristen. Well, I used to think that people pleasing was driven by concern for others, and the research I've read suggests that it's not. It's driven by concern for others approval, which means when I try to please you, I'm not doing what's best for you. I'm doing what's going to get you to like me. That's problematic in the workplace because at the end of the day, it's more important to be respected than to be liked. If you have a reputation as a people pleaser, people see you as nice. They see you as warm, polite, friendly, welcoming. In other words, the kind of person that they can dump a lot of thankless work on, which we know empirically is much more likely to be something that they do to women than men. Women who become people pleasers end up getting stuck with the office housework. They have to take notes and meetings. They have to plan parties. They have to organize meetings again, and again, and again, and again. It's not strategic work. Or not, by the way, which is valuable in an organization and makes an organization run smoothly, but it's not going to get you promoted. Exactly. It needs to be done, but nobody gets credit for it. Women are disproportionately asked to do that kind of work. They are also then given less credit if they do it because people assume based on gender stereotypes will you know She's she's caring. She wants to help and then they're more likely to get punished if they say no Because she's violating that expectation and I don't want to mansplain any more of the CEO You've you've seen it all right, but I think Linda Babcock's research on this has has been really clear and in deck Documenting that as a problem and so you know, I think the challenge here is that especially for women You need to make sure that you you know, you don't completely violate the expectation that you do care about other people But you also have to show that you're highly capable and earn people's respect so that they think your time is valuable And they don't want to waste it on tasks that you know that might not leverage your unique skills So I think the the way that you do that is You offer what Hannah Riley bulls and Linda Babcock would call a relational account Which is somebody brings you a task your impulse might be to please them or to say yes because you want to get along and Instead you say you know what I've I've actually been combarded with requests this week I would love your advice on how to prioritize because I want to make sure that I'm spending my time on you know In the most important tasks and you know moving the others lower down the priority list or ideally Delegating them to somebody who you know just has fewer things on their plate And then what you've just done is you know, you've you've gotten the person either lateral or above you who's imposing on you To see into your world a little bit and understand hey, I've got a lot of demands on my time and You're still showing some some Karen concerned by asking for advice When I when I say to you, hey caddy like I'm not sure how to prioritize here offer me some guidance I'm signaling that I value your judgment And that that is a relational account, right? I'm saying hey, I care about you I want to learn from you I also am trying to help all these people and so this is not a violation at all of You know my my concern for others but I can't help all the people all the retail him with all the requests and Setting those kinds of boundaries I think is is one way to I guess to thread the needle You went even further in the interview with Kristen that I was interested in and You described people pleasing as selfish and I'm going to kind of lean on the psychologist in you And maybe even this is something that is useful to people outside the world of work even in their relationships I'm a I'm a I'm super conflict of us It's very hard for me to engage in conflict and I am and always have been quite a people pleaser But I there is something that you said to me in the way of saying that people pleasing that you said to Kristen About people pleasing being selfish, which I thought was a very New and interesting way and helpful way I'm of framing it in my own head That actually I'm not doing the people around me a favor. I'm not Helping them. I'm being kind of selfish when I'm trying to please everybody. Can you unpack that a little bit more? Yeah, well first of all, I think I have to put a little disclaimer on the table Which is that conversation with Kristen was for my rethinking podcast and I've done a little rethinking since we had the conversation It would be ironic but didn't and I I think some people reacted strongly to the word selfish I don't mean selfish in that you're putting your needs above everyone else's and in fact when you try to please people You're clearly addressing their needs or at least what you perceive as their needs to I think what I should have said was it was self-centered I think of people pleasing as a self-centered act and part of that is because it's about me being liked Right and trying to to curry favor with you and so I'm putting the spotlight on myself and how you feel about me but also I think to the heart of your question I think that people pleasing is self-focused because it actually does the other person a disservice You know when when I Okay, let's let's say Kristen's example She had a really hard time telling her flight attendant that She didn't make the coffee the way that she wanted it and so she didn't tell her she said it was great Well now the flight attendant can't make her a drink that she's gonna like and also she's probably gonna keep serving the You know the the you know, what was it was coffee that was like 90 percent Cream or something or had too much cream it was just cream and she's gonna keep serving that to other passengers and Kristen is sitting there thinking I don't want to be uncomfortable Telling the flight attendant the truth and so I'm not going to disclose how I really feel And that means other passengers are gonna get stuck with a cup full of cream And that's not fair to the flight attendant. It's also not right for the other passengers And I think a little bit of honesty this goes back to the point that it's more important to be kind than it is to be polite I can be polite and say what's gonna make you feel good right now. I can be kind and say what is going to help you in the future And I would choose kindness over politeness, wouldn't you? Yeah, and I think yes Yes, I would choose kindness over politeness in in my work relationships and in my personal relationships Every time I agree with you And I think there is also something about giving The framing it in a way of giving somebody the opportunity to do the best they can by giving the feedback You're trusting the flight attendant to be robust enough to take the feedback particularly when it's couched kindly But also you're giving them the opportunity to excel at their job which you're not doing if you don't give the feedback Okay, another area that I wanted to talk about with you is something that I'm when I You and I have spoken about this before in the context of the work that I have done on Women and confidence and one thing that I'm or asked about almost automatically in every talk I get About the work I have done from young women in particular is okay. This is all very well being confident is great But how do I avoid the pitfall of appearing like a jerk? How do I not get into that Uh area where we know the playing field is not quite level and and women are not judged necessarily the same as men And I come across as overly confident and I'm labeled a bitch and I I I cannot add them literally every time I talk about this subject I'm asked that question bicep whether it's six people in the room or six hundred people in the room somebody will ask that question because it's clearly something they're feeling And you have a an interesting way of Thinking about confidence, but that is also allowing for authenticity and humility And I wonder if that is a way of kind of squaring this circle It might be I I wish this didn't fall on women to begin with Right, it is utterly ridiculous that in 2026 we're still judging people by the demographic group they belong to as opposed to the value of their contributions And it drives me crazy every time I see a study that shows well, you know when women use weak language And they you know they they use a little bit of a hedge or a tagline or a disclaimer like this might be a bad idea But or I'm not sure about this. What do you think it actually prevents them from you know from stepping on the toes of And threatening the men in particular around them and then you know they they get They get penalized to ask like they should not have to do this I Collaboration and communication should not be gymnastics We should judge our ideas on their content not the style of speech or the you know the kind of person who who's bringing it to the table, but We we haven't succeeded in changing that reality That's you just described the utopia we all want unfortunately we have to deal with the real world Um, and how do you get round this? Well, I I become a fan of a confident humility and When I think about confident humility, it's being secure enough in your strengths to acknowledge your shortcomings It's being comfortable enough with your knowledge to admit what you don't know And you know, I think when I think about the women who who really have mastered it Oftentimes you see it when they're in a position of power and they've Quote proven themselves and so there's less to lose in their minds by showing humility And so you'll see just into Ardern in the early days of the pandemic saying We don't know how to fight this yet and so I'm going to be following the science and you know evolving in real time That's the kind of message I would love to hear from more leaders you see in some of the work that I did at the Gates Foundation Linda Gates actually Reading constructive criticism from her team out loud In front of a large number of employees and I will never forget this um, we did it we did it in the style Jimmy Kimmel's mean tweets So um, you know how you've seen celebrity is read nasty online comments about themselves out loud. Yeah I said to the leadership team of the Gates Foundation. This is this is a way of showing confidence and humility Let's try it with with the feedback that you get and to her credit Melinda volunteer to go first. She raised her hand And I'll never forget her team handing her a stack of cards with comments. She'd never seen before And she she reads the first one and it says Melinda is like Mary effing poppins practically perfect in every way She bursts out laughing and she says I am so not perfect and then she starts listing all of her imperfections Well, I turn that into a randomized controlled experiment some employees at the foundation get to see her engage with those comments Others get to hear her talk about the culture she wants to build without role modeling it personally And then there's a third group that's a pure control group Three months later only the first group is bringing more ideas and suggestions to the table not just to her But to leadership across the board and I think what she's doing is she's saying look, I take my job seriously. but I don't take my ego too seriously. And that's such an important message to send, with a former student in Constantino's Coutifrus, we actually studied whether leaders at lower levels could do this. So we randomly assigned managers and supervisors to have a meeting with their teams. And some of them we said just ask for constructive criticism. And others we said critique yourself out loud. And that second group, a year later, had created a stronger culture of voice and openness in their teams. They had more psychological safety. People were more willing to bring them concerns and also suggestions and solutions. And I think that, you know, if you just ask people for constructive criticism, you don't really know what to make of that. Are you really interested in hearing my view? Are you insecure? Whereas if you critique yourself out loud, that's a confidence move. You are saying, hey, like, I know that I'm, you know, I'm overall good enough at my job to admit that there are things I don't know and to acknowledge that there are things I need to get better at, but I need your help with that. And so talk to me a little bit about how I can improve. And then when you put in the work to make those changes, then you are signaling, okay, I want to get more and more confident. And that's a great way to both show your confidence while also exuding some humility. I've always believed that kind of intuitively in life that, you know, somebody who has the ability to say, God, I'm a really good cook, but I'm terrible at languages, or I'm a good athlete, but I'm really useless at singing, is actually a remarkably confident thing to be able to say. And it's very empowering of other people somehow around you. It's very, it's sort of the opposite of what an alienating is. What I'm wondering about that, about the Melinda Gates example, and your student's example, is put yourself in the shoes of a 25-year-old starting out, or a 28-year-old on their second job, it's a harder proposition for them to know how to navigate this idea of expressing confidence without coming across as, if it's not totally natural and, and if it's not coming completely in their nature, without coming across as being brisk, or jerkish, or, and I don't know that they could get away with saying, I don't feel very good, that I'm particularly good at, you know, I don't know, writing memos or something. Does it apply to somebody starting out as well? This idea? - I think if that's the question, they're focusing on the wrong thing. I think what they should be focusing on, not is expressing their confidence, but trying to figure out how to build their confidence, and the best way to do that is to get coaching. Sue Ashford has published research on this for years, showing that people actually above you, people judge you more positively, if you ask for criticism, then if you go around trying to see compliments, for example, because people who see criticism are seen as trying to improve, and that's something that your manager ought to value, right, no matter how good you are, the person above you wants you to be better, full stop. And I think what that means is not only asking, but following through. And that's where you showcase your competence as well as building it, right? So if I come to you, Caddy, I report to you, and I say, hey, I have a skill that I really want to master. I know that people really admire you for your memo writing ability, if you want to pick that one, or you're public speaking. Would you be willing to watch me give a talk, and then give me some pointers? Then I'm going to follow up with you two weeks later, and I'm going to say, here are the things I've been working on. Here's the progress I've made. Are you open to coaching me again? And what I'm demonstrating there is the distance I'm willing and able to travel. And also, I'm showing you, I'm coachable, and I want to keep getting better, and I'm telling you that your time was invested well, right? Because there was a return, you can see the impact that you had, and now you're interested in continuing to work with me and help me grow. - Yeah, I also think most people like genuinely want to help. I mean, I just think it makes us feel good. Most people know it makes them feel good, and if you approach it in that way, where you're serious about it, and you're putting in the effort, they're more than likely to want to help you. What I like about what you're saying is that it is another way of treating the whole area of lack of confidence or self-doubt, almost as a tool that you can use to improve, to grow, right? I mean, if you're, you can take those, and you can use it as a tool specifically, because some of the things that I've looked at is that when people have self-doubt, some people use it as a spur to action, and some people have self-doubt, and it's a barrier to action. And the spur to action is what you want. You want those moments of self-doubt to push you forwards, rather than hold you back. - I think that's right, and there's some very cool data, and also some examples that I think bring that to life. So, yeah, I think the unhealthy version of Imposter Syndrome is, I don't know what I'm doing, and it's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out. And that can be debilitating. What you want is to approach self-doubt with a little bit of a growth mindset, and say, I don't know what I'm doing yet, and it's only a matter of minutes until I figure it out. That's much more empowering. That puts you in the mode of saying, okay, there's a gap between where I am today, and what I want to know, or excel at tomorrow. How do I close the gap? So, Bissima Tufik, she's a former PhD student of ours, now in the MIT faculty, published some research on, how often do people have these Imposter thoughts, where they think, maybe I'm not as good as other people think I am, or maybe I'm not up to the challenges of this role. And what she found when studying medical professionals, military professionals, investment professionals, is there were no consistent costs of having these Imposter thoughts more often. They were actually surprising benefits. When you felt like an Imposter, you realized you didn't know everything, and that made you more oriented toward learning from the people around you. That also made you a little bit more motivated to persist in overcoming obstacles and taking on challenges, because you knew you had to put in the effort to get where you wanted to go. And so, Bissima's advice is to say, when you feel like you don't know what you're doing yet, that is not a chronic syndrome, that is a signal that you're in a position where you're about to learn something new. And I would go a step further, Caddy. I would say Imposter syndrome is a paradox, because on the one hand, you're saying, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't believe in myself, but you're also saying on the other hand, but I definitely know that I don't know what I'm doing. And you should definitely believe me on that. Like if you don't, if you doubt yourself, you should also doubt your judgment of yourself. And I think if multiple people believe in you, it's probably time to believe them. - I also think, if your company has employed you and they're putting you in meetings and they're paying you a paycheck, they're not doing it because they're a charity. They're doing it because they want something out of you and they believe that you have something to offer. - I think that's right, but I think a lot of people take that and they say, well, but you don't know me as well as I know me. You know, I fooled you, right? - I tricked you. - You think I'm capable, but I'm really not. And what they don't realize is, yeah, you have more, you have more information about your own successes and failures and strengths and challenges than anyone else does because you've lived with yourself your whole life, but you can't see yourself objectively. You're looking from the inside. You can't compare yourself apples to apples to other people. And so if you've got multiple managers, mentors, colleagues who all see the same potential in you, chances are because they're neutral, because they have more distance, they're actually seeing you more objectively than you see yourself. - Talk a bit about the work that you've done on sort of exceptionalism or originality, which is your phrase for it. It seems that a lot of the most successful people are people who have original ideas. They come up with a way of looking at things that other people don't. But you've also said that people that are originals, exceptional, have characteristics in common. Can you describe a little bit what those characteristics are? And is it something, and I think we've all come across them. We all come across people in our work life, whether they, I have a producer at the moment in some of the work that I do who is really exceptional. And I just can see his potential. And I wish other people who were his age could look at him and say, okay, that's what he is doing that is so great. Do you see common characteristics in people who are exceptional and can we learn those traits? - Yes and yes. So I think, you know, when it comes to, I think about exceptionalism a lot in terms of original thinking. And when it comes to generating original ideas, one of the biggest surprises for me as I looked over the evidence is the people who have the most brilliant ideas, also have the most horrible ideas. And it's not because, you know, they're just taking random shots. It's because they have the most ideas period. They generate lots of possibilities. And with volume comes variety. And with variety comes a greater chance at doing something that's new and better than what's existed before. And a lot of people stop too soon. You go into a typical brainstorming meeting and somebody will generate three or four ideas and they think they're done because they're not flowing quickly and they think it's supposed to be like it's supposed to be a eureka moment. They think that genius is supposed to be fluid. And the reality is your first idea is rarely your best idea. The fact that it was so easy to think of that it was top of mind means it's usually pretty obvious. It's the ideas that come to you when you've taken some time to incubate. When you've gone for a walk, when you've taken a shower, when you're reading something that's outside of your world or you're talking to somebody you don't usually interact with, that you're more likely to start looking at things differently. And so I've actually come to believe that a combination of persistence and procrastination is a recipe for having original ideas and being more innovative. Not perfectionism. That is out of that realm. I think it might have to be because a perfectionist can shoot a thousand holes in every idea, whereas somebody who's both willing to procrastinate in terms of waiting for new ideas to come and not pulling the trigger right away, but also persistent in saying, but I want to keep working at this problem is more likely to stumble onto something new. I published some research with another one of our former students, G. Hey Shen, where we found that people who procrastinate moderately, either because that's their natural habit or because we tempted them to, with funny videos while they were supposed to be doing a business problem solving task, some procrastination actually boosted creativity because with some distance, while you were distracted, while you were not staring right at the problem, you were more likely to reframe it and you were more likely to consider some non-obvious solutions. Then the question is, what happened to the people who were severe procrastinators? I don't know, they never finished our study. No, actually, they did, and they were not creative. The people who didn't procrastinate at all, they tended to fall victim to this, what's called plunging in bias, where they rushed ahead with their, their first idea. The people who procrastinated too much, they made the opposite mistake. They waited until the last minute and then they had to rush ahead with their easiest idea, and there was a sweet spot in the middle where people waited for the best idea, but then they still had time to develop it. I love that. Adam, thank you. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time, but also with your ideas, and thank you for letting me lean on you for a bit of therapy and deal with my own getting fired trauma, which still, clearly, after 20 years, wrinkles, that was a. Well, I just have to say on that, it's actually, it's a completely different kind of story than I've heard before, because when you were talking earlier, I was thinking about Kieran Snyder's finding that, I think, men tend to get task feedback, whereas women are given this very, kind of, vague personality feedback, which doesn't help them get better. In your case, you literally got no personality feedback. What did you do with that? What did no personality mean, and how did you overcome it? I don't know. I mean, I guess I overcame it by doing the job more. I mean, if he had said, "Listen, sometimes on television, you have a tendency to look straight into the camera and not at the guest you're talking to and not listen to the guest you're talking to in a way that would be more natural," that would have been so much more helpful, because in a two-minute conversation, I would have learnt what it took me by, kind of, trial and error myself to learn over the course of six months, right? As opposed to, "You're really boring," which I think is what my feedback was. I'm an apple or an orange, I still don't know which one I am. It's incredibly frustrating. I think it's a good reminder that useful feedback and coaching focuses on behaviors, but also a lot of people hold back on giving that kind of feedback and coaching to women because they're afraid of hurting their feelings, and then they're actually preventing the women they're working with and managing from learning, which I would not advise. Just as we talked earlier about why it might be problematic to be a people-pleaser, I think that it's just, it's exasperating to see a leader or a manager who thinks their job is to please their people. It's not. Your job as a leader or a manager is to help people achieve your shared mission, and you're not going to do that by giving people vague comments about their personalities or lack thereof. I will let him know. Adam, thank you. Thank you. If I ever come across him, I will let him know what Adam Grant thinks, I think that's excellent. Thank you very much, Adam. Thanks for your time. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, and I wanted to let you know that just as we were wrapping that interview, Adam, who lives by what he preaches, asked for feedback on the interview. I thought he did great. It took me a moment to come up when I knew feedback at all, but since he asked and he was not going to let me off the hook, I did give it to him. I think that is a sign of what a great leader he is, that he is open to getting feedback and takes it very well. If you have any questions for future episodes or you want to get in touch with us by email, you can find us at doing it anyway at gollhanger.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you back here next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]