Ep 47: Sébastien Page – quit more, listen more, stress better

Roger, what a fantastic intro. Thank you. I'm super excited to be doing this with you today.

Well, you're certainly starting strong with the questions. That's an awesome question. There are so many misconceptions about leadership that persist. First of all, people think of leaders as communicators. First and foremost, we want a figure who's inspiring. That's how people picture a leader in their mind. She also will never give up. She won't show any stress and she'll be decisive. Well, I'm going to tell you and I explain this in The Psychology of Leadership. It's actually most of the time for high level leadership the exact opposite of these things. So, I hope I have your attention. I hope I have your audience's attention. Let's start with communication. The real leadership skill as you climb up the ladder is listening rather than talking. And that's counterintuitive and it's something I've learned too late in my leadership career. I'm still working on it. But as a leader, if you're a strong listener, you become a better decision maker. Never give up. The most difficult skill in business for high level leadership is not to stick to your goals is to know when to quit. Author Annie Duke has a wonderful book about this. The title is Quit. That is a prized skill in leadership because we invest in projects and initiatives that sometimes don't work and it's very difficult to make the decision to quit something and to reinvest in an initiative that has a better chance of working. Quitting is an underappreciated leadership skill more rare than the never give up attitude that we think from traditional leadership. And this thing about no stress, I talk a lot about stress and resilience in The Psychology of Leadership. This thing about no stress, you know what? It doesn't exist. The human condition is to feel stress. And the best leaders I know actually embrace it, reframe it into activation and fuel for performance. And lastly, this idea of being decisive. Yes, traditional leadership, you imagine the leader, she's very decisive. But again, the most prized skill is strategic patience. Knowing when a decision is urgent and much more difficult, knowing when you have a strategic advantage by waiting it out. That is much more difficult and more tied to high level leadership. The top leaders I've worked with knew when to make urgent decisions and knew when to be strategically patient. So, Roger, I guess like in two minutes I'm saying people haven't gotten the memo because top level leadership, if you study psychology and you work in business, you realize it's not what we think it is most of the time.

We love measurable goals, don't we? They're motivating. They help align the organization. We want this country to go to the moon. These measurable goals are incredibly powerful. So my principle is beware of the side effects because goal induced blindness is well documented in the research in psychology and occurs when we get obsessed with our goals and we lose sight of everything that's non-goal related that still matters in our lives or in our business. Making our quarterly numbers in a business might be the measurable goal. But if we have goal induced blindness, we might sacrifice our personal health. We might sacrifice relationships which are key to thriving in the long run. We might sacrifice ethics. We might start cheating. There are all these ways that people get goal induced blindness. The example in the literature in psychology is Mount Everest. Psychologists like to write about Mount Everest because that's where people clearly get goal induced blindness. They risk their lives. And in fact, I would even question the goal to climb Mount Everest because if you want to reach the summit, there's a 4% chance that you'll die in the process.

There's plenty of goal induced blindness there. Again, quitting is a good skill. There's someone who's climbed Everest, reached the summit 30 times. Those pro climbers that do it repeatedly, they have a skill that others don't have. They know when goal induced blindness is setting in and they know when to abandon the summit, when to quit. So, it's real. It's real in business. It's real in life. It's destroyed companies. Wells Fargo, for example, had a measurable goal of opening as many new accounts as possible. So, they started ultimately opening famously fake accounts.

Volkswagen was trying to reduce their emissions and they started tweaking the tests. These are blue chip worldclass companies that should have the best corporate cultures. These are successful companies over decades. And they suffered from goal induced blindness. It's real. It matters. I almost died from it early in my career. I was completely overworked. I got a mysterious infection. Spent a week in the hospital, almost died. I wasn't taking care of myself. Pure and bold induced blindness. It's important.

Isn't that counterintuitive?

If I reach my goals, I'm going to be happy. And what I'm saying is if you're generally happy, you will reach your goals. Let's give credit to Shawn Achor from Harvard for this concept. He's done lots of research on positive psychology. He's published a book titled The Happiness Advantage, and he talks about reversing that equation. It's fascinating research when you think about it. People who are generally happy perform better, not the other way around. And then you ask, okay, sounds good. How do you make it practical? What does it mean in business? It's kind of cute thing to say. There's research behind it, but what does it mean? If you study positive psychology, you'll very soon run into the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. I don't like acronyms. I think we use them too much in business, too much in technology for sure, but there's one acronym from positive psychology I absolutely love. When I was doing this research, it's PERMA. P E R M A. It speaks to what makes people thrive in the long run. Research in positive psychology shows that P stands for positive emotions and those are like sugar highs. You know, you get a like on social media, you have a nice glass of wine, you share a laugh with a friend. They're wonderful, but they're short-term. And we tend to focus on this and we tend to ignore Irma, the rest, what actually makes people thrive and increases long-term well-being. Irma stands for E engagement, R positive relationships, M meaning, and A long-term accomplishment. If you're engaged in your work, by the way, most people in America when you run a survey are disengaged in their work, more than 70%.

If you maintain positive relationships, if you find meaning in what you do and you focus on longer term goals, you will over time perform better as a leader, as an individual. And we know that from decades of research in positive psychology. How I had not studied positive psychology before I started working on The Psychology of Leadership. I started reading on it and became absolutely fascinated with all the research behind it. You think of psychology for its very important role treating clinical issues like depression and anxiety. But about half the research published nowadays in psychology is not for clinical issues. It's for how do people thrive? How do you reach high performance? What makes people happy? This really matters. It leads to higher performing organizations. So you start thinking how do I increase engagement? How do I maintain positive relationships between members of my team? How do I infuse meaning in the business? How do I communicate meaning? And how do I think of longer term goals? We're way too short term in business. We need to think 10 years ahead. We need to think longer term. So that's how this all comes into practice. And for each of these letters E R M A there are practices you can follow to increase performance through this reversed counterintuitively reversed equation. Happiness will make you successful not the other way around.

Oh, I love that question. You know, Simon Sinek is a famous leadership. I almost hesitate, but I will say guru. I like him a lot. I respect him a lot. He's an outstanding communicator, but I kind of have sometimes a lovehate relationship with the way he communicates some of the concepts. But here, Sinek is absolutely right to the point where the why, find your why, has become a cliche in the corporate world. It's used in marketing campaigns as well and it's overdone. But Sinek has a wonderful example of the Wright brothers to make the point here. His point is the Wright brothers invented flight, you know, the airplane. They did not want according to Sinek and I think that's historically verifiable, they did not want money or fame really. That's not why they got up in the morning every day and they had competitors who were better funded than them but for the Wright brothers and if you look at what they said and what they wrote, it was about we need to master flight. We need to figure this out. An absolute sense of overarching mission. And they would say that's why we get up every morning. We want this to work. This would be so exciting for humanity. It's a pure example of having sense of meaning. And it led to them overcoming obstacles, working harder, faster than competitors who had more money trying to do the same thing.

That's a pretty good one, isn't it?

And they overcame. I really like what Sinek has done. Ultimately, there's more nuance when we talk about meaning and we need to bring it to the workplace in more practical ways, which is part of what I'm trying to do here.

You'd be amazed how rarely in the corporate world we talk about the meaning of what we do. We just don't talk about it enough. It comes down to tying what you're doing to the greater mission. I like to use the analogy of the three brick layers, right? Goes as follows. An architect walks to three brick layers and he asks the first one, 'What are you doing?' The first one says, 'I'm tired. I'm laying bricks. It's hard.' Architect walks to the second brick layer. Second brick layer seems a bit more energized. Says, 'I'm building this wall.' Then he walked to the third brick layer. And the third brick layer says, 'I'm so excited. I'm going to work all day, all night. I'm building this amazing cathedral.' And it's a bit of a cheesy story, but it just drives the point of meaning because these three brick layers are doing the exact same job, but they have a completely different sense of the mission and what they're doing. If I do this in my world in money management, I might walk to an analyst working on a spreadsheet. They might say, 'Oh, I'm debugging the spreadsheet.' I might walk to a second analyst. They might say, 'I'm finding ways to outperform the markets.' I might walk to a third analyst who might say, 'I'm basically building better retirements for people. I'm finding ways to invest money that people will retire, where more money, will have more financial security, will put their kids through college.' The three analysts are doing the same thing, right? So, how often do we think about that in business? Almost never. How often do we talk with an analyst about, hey, here's what we're doing here? Just not enough. Well, the same thing can be said about interpersonal relationships. You know, small talk is not the purpose is not just to fill time. Small talk can often be very helpful in helping people be more comfortable, more feel more safe, all of those things.

You know, in relationships, there's research that shows that it is the number one factor of long-term well-being. Do you have quality relationships in your life?

And people have studied this over decades and they were hoping to find things like did you make more money? Did you have more career success? Did you get sick? Were you healthy? And the one factor is a famous Harvard study now overseen by Robert Waldinger is positive relationships in one's life. So that really matters. And you know what they also found that people were healthier.

Healthier. They lived longer as they had more positive relationships in their lives.

I don't know. Maybe, you know, maybe if you're healthier, you spend more time with friends and vice versa. It doesn't really matter. It's a really meaningful correlation anyways.

I think it's a bit of a I'm not a Kierkegaard expert, but a bit of a pessimistic statement in that we go through life and we only understand what we should have done after the fact. This definitely applies to my day job in investing in money management. I'm making decisions under uncertainty. I'll only know backwards if those were the right decision. But most importantly, it ties to something famous leadership writer Stephen Covey wrote, 'Begin with the end in mind.' Covey's point was if you have a long-term vision of what you're trying to do with your life and you begin with that, two things will happen. You'll become more resilient to the day-to-day setbacks because they don't matter as much as you think. If you look at it from the end point that you're trying to drive to and second it'll guide your decisions and your values day-to-day. You'll behave in a way that's aligned with your long-term mission. Philosophers. Now the book The Psychology of Leadership is about research and psychology. I touch on philosophy a little bit but there's a school of thought in stoicism that suggests the stoics were not depressed. They were not dark people but they frequently talked about the fact that life is finite that you're going to die one day. And there's actually comfort you can find in that. That's the ultimate end in mind. But there's actually comfort in that. And what you begin to think about going back to what we talked about earlier with positive psychology and PERMA is Irma, you know, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. I don't know if this works for podcasts, Roger, but someone told me once, I do a lot of public speaking that people remember about 10% of any public presentation. I hope people remember more of a podcast, but if that is the case statistically that people just remember a little bit. The takeaway from this one in my mind should be how Irma is the key to long-term well-being, engagement, relationship, and accomplishment.

Good point. Hopefully will make it so good that people will listen like the movie Titanic, like people will come back to it a few times.

I really like that question because feedback is super important in the workplace, but also if you think about it in life, it's less formal, but family members need to give each other feedback. Teammates and sports teams need to give each other feedback. The coach needs to give the players feedback. Feedback is a key to self-improvement. And you know what? We all hate it. People hate it. It's super threatening if someone comes to you and says, 'Can I give you some feedback?' If I hear that, my mental boxing gloves are raised. It triggers a fight-or-flight response. Enters Dr. David Rock, famous neuro leadership expert. I think he's basically invented the field of neuro leadership. He looks at how the brain works and finds principles to apply to leadership. He did this research where they would hook people up to all sorts of monitors responding to your body temperature, your heart rate, your breathing, looking at your stress response. And they found a little tweak on the feedback process that changed everything. Actually made it much less stressful for the people giving the feedback and for the people receiving the feedback. Just one little tweak proven by the research makes feedback easier and more effective.

What is that tweak? You have to ask for it. Makes a world of difference. So leaders should model that. They should go around and ask their team members, their peers, how did I do there? And model that. And people start asking for it. And then the stress response is reduced at least by half. It's also much easier to give the feedback. By the way, giving feedback is also stressful, not just receiving it. So, Dr. Rock really hit on something here. It's rarely modeled because we think leaders should have all the answers and should be absolutely self-confident. But there's nothing more confident in practice than going and asking for feedback. It means you're ready to receive it. It actually shows confidence again counterintuitively. So that's how I would think about it. Ask for the feedback. Encourage people to ask for it. Thank you, Dr. David Rock. It actually works.

Absolutely. So many benefits from doing that. I could not agree with you more that it will be counterintuitive at the beginning. First time you ask people will give you compliment. So you're absolutely right in practice you need to make it an ongoing activity, an ongoing practice.