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Groupthink
I see groupthink in every organization I work with. You know, groupthink is a problem when everybody is stuck in seeing a problem the same way and you’ve lost diversity of thought. This is extremely dangerous for organizations. It means that they miss out on major problems that nobody sees, let alone talks about. It means that they miss out on opportunities for innovation and experimentation and growth because it never would’ve occurred to somebody to try a new idea.
Fundamentally, organizations that fall victim to groupthink are organizations that fail to survive and succeed. We live in a dynamic world and many of our best practices were built for a world that does not exist anymore. If we’re stuck in a pattern of groupthink, we don’t change quickly enough, we don’t evolve. And the world will eventually just leave us behind.
The HIPPO Effect
A common culprit behind groupthink, is what’s been called the HIPPO effect. HIPPO’s become my favorite acronym. It stands for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.” As soon as that’s known, everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. People just pile on to agreeing with whatever the leader thinks. The way you disrupt that pattern is you invite the leader to speak less. As a leader, you can still frame the conversation initially. You can talk about the stakes of the decision. You can maybe highlight a few different options, but your goal is to not disclose your preferences.
If people don’t know which direction you want to go, it’s really hard for them to conform and cater to your ideals. So you might go around the room and say, “I’d love to hear everybody’s analysis of what are the different options we haven’t even considered yet? How would you weigh these different options? What are the pros and cons? And then at the very end, I’m going to weigh in with my perspective.” And that means you get much more variety of views and you also are much more informed. By the time you bring in your opinion you might actually know what you’re talking about.
Fidelity to Purpose, Not People
A lot of groupthink stems from leaders rewarding loyalty. Pretty soon people become bootlickers instead of boat rockers. You’re surrounded by a bunch of yes men and yes women. It gets really bad and a leader comes into work one day and says, “Good morning.” And a bunch of people are like, “Great point.” I hope that never happens to you. That’s a terrifying place to be.
I think instead of rewarding loyalty to leadership what we want to reward is loyalty to organizational values and to the mission. The most valuable loyalty is when people are so principled that they will challenge and disagree with the leader because they think the leader is actually jeopardizing the vision or is violating some values that they hold dear. And so I think you really want to pay attention to where people’s loyalty lies, right? It should not be about fidelity to people. It should be about fidelity to purpose.