Psychological research pushes leadership knowledge

Our tendency to see things primarily as they affect us has clear implications for leaders’ behavior

By Dave Crisp

The pace of research and innovation continues to accelerate in every area, and nowhere is this truer than in management where business professors and consulting houses compete with each other to deliver insights at a furious pace.

Of course, not all of it is highly reliable, nor can it be taken at face value without looking for confirming studies just as in hard sciences where we expect findings to be replicated before they are fully trusted. With the rapid pace, however, confirmation isn’t usually long in coming.

A very interesting, relatively new book, The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, raises some fascinating questions that can be applied to how leaders think.

What can be so new? New opportunities, input from the Internet and far more instant sharing of information place us still at the early stages of finding out what humans can do. Are we going to be burned out by it, overwhelmed or outpaced by our own technology? Will machines start to “think” faster than we can on topics we traditionally excelled at? Would that be a blessing?

In this hustle a number of fierce debates rage about the meaning of some of the things we find. A very interesting, relatively new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, raises some fascinating questions that can be applied to how leaders think. Along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, Marcus points out we are subject to many automatic reactions to information and situations due mostly to the way in which our brains evolved, with more or less instantaneous emotional reactions to events not entirely balanced by higher level logic functions.

The book is an easy and well-balanced assessment of the good and bad resulting from this uneven power of two styles of “thinking.” Others argue our brains are still actually evolving as opposed to discovering what can be done with the mental machinery we’ve inherited.

Reading this could be depressing. Human thinking clearly is limited, often flawed and subject to so many competing interpretations one wonders if we can trust conclusions any of us reach. On the other hand, clearly our thinking ability is what got us to the level we’ve reached and what keeps us learning day by day… and both types of brain activity (logic and emotional reactions) contribute, something machines aren’t going to be able to attain and blend quite so easily.

How we balance our thinking modes is so idiosyncratic it’s questionable whether we’ll ever fully understand the way the human brain thinks. Yet the patterns Marcus points to emerge consistently. For instance, our tendency to see things primarily as they affect us has clear implications for leaders’ behavior. At an event a few weeks ago I was struck again, listening to a CEO, how even the best individuals in that role for any length of time develop a distinct way of looking at the world that those not in the role don’t relate to in quite the same way. In this case, this verifiably good copy of the type spent much of his presentation focused on pay and perks — specifically those for CEOs and senior executives — and the difficulty new regulations pose for making changes (read “increases”), something he feels vice-presidents of HR definitely need to work on.

The discussion was unquestionably relevant to how leadership works and was fascinating. It took me back to the days when I expected to be fired for continued failure in one very important part of my job — getting the CEO more compensation.

It occurred to me to wonder how much of the accusation that HR doesn’t understand business revolves around not properly understanding the importance of higher pay in the front office and for line managers in general. The book is certainly enlightening about how completely we have to expect this and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.