These biases shape heuristics—the mental shortcuts or cognitive rules of thumb that rapidly direct your actions and problem-solving. Heuristics are the established analytic or action scripts embedded in your thinking. They methodically focus your attention and eliminate distractions, helping the brain and body move fast and deal with the torrent of information rushing in at every waking moment.
The speed and ease of heuristics can reduce the accuracy of your decision-making as you reach conclusions and take action without complete data and rigorous analysis. Heuristics also are useful shortcuts when there is neither the time nor the need to carefully think through a problem. Think of them as naturally occurring brain algorithms. For example, you walk into a colleague’s book-lined office for the first time. You don’t need to read the title of each volume before you conclude that Sally is probably smart and well read. Your brain automatically connects the data points in a way that is, at least superficially, logical.
Heuristics can be both a solution and a problem. For example, the anchoring heuristic is one that causes you to overestimate the significance of the first bit of information you receive. If a car salesperson says that a used auto is worth $10,000, you assess all other valuations in relation to this initial anchoring valuation. In this case, the anchoring heuristic is a solution because it orients you to the range of potential values for the car. It’s also a problem because you may overvalue that one data point over a more objective price for the car (especially if the car is really worth only $5,000).
When facing a crisis or urgent situation, you have little time for careful analysis. For example, during an active shooter event, the public is instructed to “run, hide, fight!” This is an easily remembered heuristic. Recalling it can help terrified people get up and out of their basement (their “freeze”) to save their lives. Football players apply heuristics when the ball is intercepted and offensive players suddenly are transformed into defensive mode. There is no time for a huddle or strategic analysis. They do whatever is necessary to get that tackle. Heuristics are trigger scripts to get you out of the basement and headed toward productive action.
The familiarity heuristic causes you to draw a quick parallel between what is happening now and something that happened before, even if the current situation is very different. For example, there are people who ignore warnings to evacuate during hurricanes because they figure that they survived disasters before and they can do it again. They downplay the specifics of the impending situation.
The way to circumvent heuristics and avoid such misperceptions is to call upon a broad base of data whenever possible. Data will provide you with a more accurate perspective. Ask yourself how heuristics affect your thinking and decision-making. How do heuristics affect the thinking and decision-making of family members, colleagues, or friends? What happens when their heuristics collide?
Heuristics can be a problem when we ignore or dismiss significant information. They can also cause inefficiency and wasted time as they unleash poor-quality decisions and all that ensues. Heuristics are tools. Know them and then apply them with caution and care.
Hidden deep in your brain’s subconscious is a vast reservoir of memories, experiences, and facts that are not readily recalled. It could be a childhood experience, a disturbing interaction with a colleague, or a book you read. Though you don’t remember details, these memories subtly affect your attitudes and decision-making. They may surface in your dreams, and they also invisibly color your daily interactions. Following are two exercises to help you surface and apply the power of your subconscious.
To gain access to your intuitive wisdom and experience, try this drill devised by the neuroscientist David Eagleman: You face a difficult decision, and you are having a hard time making a choice. Flip a coin. Heads and you take option A. Tails and you go with option B.
The point is not to randomly make a choice but rather to note your emotional reaction after you flip the coin. If you are satisfied with tails, why is that so? If you are disappointed and had hoped for heads, what does that tell you about your hidden predispositions? Think about it.
This exercise give you access to the wealth of hidden information stored in the recesses of your brain. It aids awareness of your true preferences and cognitive biases. Alert to this phenomenon, you may discover hidden factors that likewise complicate the rational decision-making of others, perhaps the result of their own traumatic or profound experiences. Unlocking your subconscious reveals memories and insights that tap into the wisdom of your experience.
Here is another analytic exercise that we have found useful. Who is the greatest leader you have ever known? Not someone you have read or heard about, like Gandhi or Moses, rather someone you’ve chosen to follow, with whom you’ve interacted, and whose strengths and weaknesses you know. Likewise, who is the worst leader you have ever known? Again, think of someone you have known, not a Hitler or Mussolini.
These two people you have identified could be a boss, professional colleague, political leader, or friend. Place them on either side of a continuum. Now place yourself right in the middle, between the greatest and worst leaders you have known. How do these three people compare at getting themselves up and out of the basement? How open-minded are they? Are they overly bound by cognitive biases? And how would you rate their emotional intelligence?
By recalling both your greatest and lousiest leaders—the one you aspire to emulate and the one you disdain—you articulate the behaviors and characteristics that shape your own leadership.
Emotional Intelligence
Meta-leadership practice requires an abundance of emotional intelligence. While smart people have a high IQ (intelligence quotient), truly successful people possess a depth of emotional intelligence (EQ, or emotional quotient). You use these attributes every day and everywhere, and they are particularly important when there is opportunity to meta-lead.
Emotional intelligence is a framework popularized by Daniel Goleman. His model details five attributes of emotional intelligence:
1. Self-awareness encompasses knowing yourself and the experiences that color your perceptions. Understanding what drives you requires awareness of your hopes and passions as well as the demons and distractions that steer you astray. You can recognize both your strengths and your weaknesses. You cannot know and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of others if you don’t first know yourself.
2. Self-regulation is the capacity to control your desires, moods, look, impulses, and interactions with others. You can become the person—the meta-leader—needed in the moment. You have the ability do so in a manner that is both genuine and intentional. And you are able to avoid emotional outbursts when you are upset.
3. Motivation is not only what inspires and impels you forward. It is so deeply engrained in you that it inspires and energizes others.
4. Empathy is the capacity to understand other people for their distinct experiences, needs, and interests. Empathy requires viewing and appreciating someone else’s experience as different from, yet equally valid as, your own.
5. Social skills enable you to be comfortable with other people and to make other people comfortable with you. These skills are particularly important and potentially challenging when interacting with people from other cultures, professions, organizations, or walks of life. The capacity to find and forge connections across differences is part of the engaging talent of the meta-leader.
With these five attributes of emotional intelligence in mind, how would you compare and contrast your greatest and worst leaders? How do you fit into this continuum of emotional intelligence? Do you share attributes with your great leader? Are there improvements you could make? Likewise, are there attributes you share with your worst leader? How might you shed them?
Emotional intelligence and self-awareness in particular have been shown to correlate with leadership effectiveness. People who demonstrate self-awareness possess an understanding of their own impact: their personality, experiences, culture, emot
ional expressions, and character.
The Importance of Trust
The foundation of your personal meta-leadership credibility is trust. Forming and maintaining trust-based relationships—across a wide spectrum of people, including those you don’t know well—is particularly important when leading through ambiguous circumstances. Decisions and actions often must be taken without complete information or certainty, be it a volatile crisis or the launch of a new business initiative. Trust is crucial for leading through the cycles of complexity. It was central to the emergence of swarm intelligence among leaders during the Boston Marathon bombings response.
What is trust? It is predictability. When you trust someone, you know how they will react to new or unknown circumstances. It is a measure of assurance of someone’s honesty and integrity. As you lead, the circumstances that confront you may be uncertain and even out of control. However, if you trust those around you, you have a solid platform upon which to assess what is happening and what should be done about it. Trusting relationships are marked by reciprocity: you do good for others and they do good for you. These are people you can surely count upon. They will be there for you through the toughest times. Just as you will be there for them.
Trusting relationships calm the brain’s survival circuits and assist the process of wading through complexity. You are with people whose relationship with you and opinions you value and believe. Without trust, it is difficult to discern fact from fiction. A difficult situation becomes even more so, further deteriorating the chances of getting out of the basement.
Trustworthiness is a quality you earn. First, you establish confidence. You promise to do something, and then you do it. You provide information, and it is accurate. You encounter a problem, and you responsibly take care of it. Your actions and attitudes are reliable, even in the face of uncertain conditions. Only then do you achieve genuine trust. Trust is anticipatory. It is a reflection of integrity, faith, and safety. Without trust, leading is difficult, if not impossible.
Your followers evaluate whether or not to trust you. They assess what you do as a strategist, tactician, diplomat, and decision-maker—the person of the meta-leader—in the context of the situations at hand. Demonstrating your own integrity is the first and most basic step. Your followers are both calmed and subtly persuaded to follow and mimic when you present a model of composure, even-handedness, and reliability. What do you want people to know about your character? You provide information with every meeting, decision, and action. You also build trust when you show your willingness to listen and are receptive to feedback that your judgment may be askew. What is it about your great leader and your worst leader that signals trust or lack thereof?
You also learn to cultivate trust in your followers. Choose them carefully and invest in their leadership development. If you trust them and encourage them to act independently, you extend your reach. Then you can count on your followers, and they in turn can count on you.
What if trust is absent? Be vigilant toward people who lie to you, misrepresenting their credentials, information, or experience. In its most chronic form, the habitual fraudster operates without a moral compass, upending the very purposes that motivate your leadership. This person’s lack of integrity damages yours. The methods and practices outlined in this book do not work in the absence of honesty and mutual respect. This profile may very well describe the person you chose as your worst leader.
Between your greatest and worst leaders, where do you fit on the trust continuum? However difficult, be honest with yourself. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you certainly can’t be honest with others. At its core, meta-leadership is a social phenomenon. The better you understand the contours of interpersonal dynamics—yours and those of others—the greater your success at building the trusted cohesion of effort that is central to meta-leadership practices.
People Follow You
Your relationships with other people are part of your meaning-making as a meta-leader. You care about other people, and they care about you. Their attachment to you signifies their attachment to the purposes, values, and objectives you pursue.
You experience a lot together. In the crucible moments, there is the elation of victories, the disappointment of defeats, the many descents to the basement, and the ascents back up and out. You and your followers may also experience meaningful interpersonal feelings of esteem, respect, and affection, as well as bitterness, jealousy, or disdain. Mirror neurons are in play: followers take spoken and unspoken cues from their leaders, and vice versa. The expression, reception, and understanding of those cues and feelings are critical to your meta-leadership practices and achievements.
How do you embed an appreciation for connection in your leading? Try this exercise for a day: Be fully present with everyone you meet, see, or come into contact with. Greet the security guard at work or the grocery checkout clerk by name. Thank them. Greet your colleagues, your family members, and friends in the same way: ask how they are feeling or what they are reading—and pay attention to the answers. Spend a day investing emotion in everyone you encounter. Treat no one as though they are invisible. Acknowledge and appreciate each person you encounter that day.
You will move beyond the transactional nature of each encounter to become fully aware of the personal interaction. See what you learn and note it in your meta-leadership journal. How do people react? How can you tell if you succeeded? Observe the impact on those who expected you to ignore or not acknowledge them. How do these interactions affect you? What do you learn about yourself? Beyond an exercise, how does this way of being fit into your meta-leadership practices?
You embody the values, motives, and purposes to which you rally your followers. You can’t just do it. You must be it. In the words of the British novelist E. M. Forster, “Only connect!”
Muhtar Kent, former CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, demonstrated his ability to connect with people throughout his career, often displaying emotional intelligence when it mattered most.
He became the head of the company’s operations in Turkey in his early thirties, charged with leading people who were significantly older and more experienced. “Listening and showing empathy were absolutely critical,” he told us. “Our people were somewhat demoralized by the state of our business there at the time. Once people sensed that I understood their challenges and that I was there to support them, magical things started happening. We grew Turkey into one of the most important markets in the entire Coca-Cola system.”
Kent faced a significant challenge shortly after assuming the CEO role in 2008. World financial markets went into free fall. His top priority was to ease the fears of employees, business partners, and shareholders about the long-term implications of the economic turmoil. With the company owning a limited number of bottling territories and holding minority investments in some of its franchise bottlers, the Coke system’s internal business relationships can be complicated.
“One of the first things we did,” Kent explained, “was bring our leadership team together with leaders from our bottling partners around the world and talk about the resilience and strength of our business. From those discussions, we began to create a shared vision for the next ten-plus years.” Although much of this work could have been accomplished by teleconference, Kent understood that the face-to-face connection in a time of disruption was critical to keeping the enterprise focused and aligned for long-term success.
One of Kent’s most difficult moments came in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima triple disaster in Japan—an earthquake followed by a tsunami and meltdown of nuclear facilities, with a resulting release of radioactive material. Japan is one of the company’s largest markets. There was certain to be a drop in sales with production and distribution interrupted. Coca-Cola had employees and bottling partners who lost friends and family in the tragedy: “I felt it was imperative to get over there immediately and reassure everyone in our Japanese system that we were there for them. I was thinking about the personal st
ruggles our people were going through. We were going to be there to help them get their lives and businesses back in order.”
Kent knew the importance of being physically and emotionally present at a time of turmoil. Showing up demonstrates sincerity and builds trust. It makes it possible both to send and to receive the verbal as well as nonverbal signals through which people determine if they will follow you—and you will know if they are following.
Reflecting on connection, Kent said, “It is imperative to be real, authentic, and transparent. When people try too hard to impress or to be someone they are not, that always backfires. Leadership is less about authority and more about credibility and communication. A keen knowledge of the business and the job at hand are vital in that regard. When folks know you’ve walked a mile in their shoes and that you’re not asking them to do anything you’re not doing yourself, you build credibility. If the credibility is there, leadership will show.”
We remain in contact with many graduates of our Harvard executive crisis leadership programs. We ask about their meta-leadership learnings and how they apply them. Many people cite the brain function and emotional intelligence lessons for how useful they are in regulating themselves and guiding others.
They also mention our advice, especially when leading through complex situations, to take chances and allow themselves to make mistakes—though preferably calibrated ones with small consequences. Leaders can take what they learn from this to recover and prevent a more catastrophic failure. Why is it so valuable to take chances and make mistakes?
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