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Look beyond early performance
We live in a world that’s obsessed with raw talent. We admire child prodigies in music, natural athletes in sports, geniuses in school. And I think that focusing on where people start really causes us to overlook the distance that they’re capable of traveling. We all know people who have started out pretty bad at a task and then ended up becoming fairly good at it, and odds are that you’ve actually been that person in some realm of your life.
One of the fundamental truths of leadership is that the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful. And that means as a leader, your core job is to recognize the potential in people that they don’t see in themselves and then help them realize that potential. That means you are going to lead more successful teams. It means you are going to build a more successful organization. If a group is less than the sum of its parts, then you’re failing as a leader. If a group is more than the sum of its parts, that’s when you’ve really contributed something of value.
We all have more capability for growth than we realize. And if we focus just on early talent and on initial performance, we’re going to miss out on the progress that we’re capable of achieving.
See lack of experience as a strength
One of the biggest mistakes that we see people make in teams, and frankly, in any industry or organization, is people are worried. I’m not the smartest person in the room. I’m not the person with the most expertise. So if I speak up with my idea or suggestion, I’m going to sound like an idiot. And I don’t want everyone to find out that I don’t know what I’m talking about or I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’m going to hold back on all my thoughts. And the problem with that is often the people with the most novel ideas and the freshest perspectives are the ones who suffer from those kinds of imposter beliefs.
As a leader, you have to look out for those self-limiting beliefs. You have to watch out for people saying, “I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’ve never solved this problem before. I don’t have a lot of experience.” And you have to help people recognize that that lack of experience is actually an asset, it’s not a liability.
There’s a problem that psychologists call cognitive entrenchment, which is the idea that when you have deep experience in a domain, you start to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned. You’re so stuck in your old schemas that you can’t see new ideas. And so it’s often the people who lack experience, who come from a different industry, a different job, a different culture, who are the most capable of seeing the blind spots that everyone else is oblivious to. Inviting those people into the conversation, getting their voices on the table is vital to harnessing the collective potential in a room.
Rethink brainstorming
What most leaders do to try to unleash potential is they say, “Look, two heads are better than one, and five heads are better than two. So let’s gather a group of people to brainstorm, and that’s the way to get the best ideas on the table.” I am thrilled to see that happen. I’m delighted when leaders gather groups of people together to brainstorm, except for just this one tiny wrinkle, it doesn’t work.
In my field of organizational psychology, we have decades of evidence showing that if you gather a group of people together, if instead you had let those people work alone, you would’ve gotten more ideas and also better ideas. There are at least three things that go wrong when groups brainstorm together, and I bet you’ve seen all of them at some point in your career. One is called production blocking. We can’t all talk at once, so some ideas get lost. Number two is ego threat. I don’t want to sound stupid, so I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas. And then three is conformity pressure. When an idea gets popular in the room, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, and then instead of diversity of thought, we end up with groupthink.
All of those problems are magnified for people who lack power or status. If you are the introvert in a group of extroverts, if you’re the most junior person in the room, if you are a woman of color in a team dominated by white men, it is that much harder for you to overcome the production blocking, the ego threat, and the conformity pressure. So that’s the bad news.
The good news is there’s a workaround that’s been extensively studied. It’s called brainwriting. All you do is you give people the problem or the prompt in advance, and you let them generate their own ideas independently. Then you ask people to separately rate the quality of each idea. You can make the ideas anonymous if you’re worried about people deferring to the person who’s the most powerful in the room. And then you can begin to leverage the wisdom of crowds and bring the group together to develop and refine the most promising ideas.
The power of this brainwriting approach lies in recognizing that individuals are actually more creative than groups, but groups are wiser than individuals. So you want to let people start by generating as much variety as possible and as much volume as possible. And then let’s bring in the group’s judgment to figure out which of these ideas have real potential.