The Hidden Psychology Behind Great Leadership | Sebastien Page

I would say this is something I learned in my own career over the last few years. We all think of leadership as a communication exercise. Communication is super important in the corporate world, in life, and for your leadership journey. And it's one of my strengths, I like to think. But what I've realized, what we get wrong is that as you climb the ladder and you get increasing levels of responsibility, leadership becomes much more about listening rather than talking. And that is maybe a lie we tell about leadership. Maybe it's just a misunderstood part of the role, but if you're able to listen well as a leader, it's like a superpower. And most of us leaders, ambitious people, we just focus on communicating well, on speaking well. But it's really much more about listening than you think. And this is at 25 years. I've probably managed teams for 23 roughly. This is recent for me. It's like how important listening is part of leadership.

Absolutely. Listening helps you make better decisions. It helps you develop empathy. All these skills that are absolutely crucial. You know, the toughest part of leadership is basically people management. But I give you an example. Let's say you're a leader and you have a steering committee meeting where you're going to have to make some decisions, maybe some tough decisions for the business. So, let's do this thought experiment together and with our listeners. Suppose you're sitting at the head of the table because you're the leader. There's an important decision to be made. What is your reflex? What are you going to do? Your reflex is going to be to set the stage and more often than not to reveal your intention, to show your cards, to reveal your views on what the decision should be. That's actually the wrong thing to do as the leader. Most of the time you have to speak last and start by going around the table because as soon as you reveal your intention or your thoughts and you might do that not really on purpose just because you're used to talking and you're used to giving your opinion and that's the exact wrong time to do it at the beginning of the meeting. You might not even realize you're doing it, but your team is picking up on it. And whether you want it or not, whether you put caveats around it and you say, 'This is just my opinion. I really want to hear from everybody else.' All the wrapping into caveats is not going to help. Now they know where you stand or where you're leaning. And it's going to influence the decision-making. It's going to influence how candid those that disagree with you can be. Now, if you just hold back, let the team speak first, and they... This might sound a little devious, but it really is not. It's more about changing the order. They don't know exactly where you stand. They're going to be very open about what they think about the tough decision to be made. This, by the way, applies to investment decision-making a lot. I sit on investment management, money management committees and if I as the co-chair of the committee express a view from the beginning, it's going to tilt the views in the room. So you listen and you get all the views and then you can make a wiser decision. And the reason why I emphasize that, Sam, is that it's counterintuitive. It's not what we're kind of wired to do as leaders. And the research in psychology is getting pretty interesting around this. There's a famous book by Susan Cain that shows that actually introverts, they have a hard time getting the job of leaders but those who are introverted in leadership roles actually do very well and in a lot of cases better than extroverted leaders.

Both. I think some people, there's a heritable component to leadership skills. You can see it in kids. They'll take charge in the playground, right? So there's part of it that some people are born with, but a lot of it can be learned and developed. And here's the thing, Sam, we're all leaders in our lives. I wrote a book about leadership, but I'm super psyched to be talking about self-improvement with you as well because of the nature of your podcast and your audience because everybody's a leader. You're a leader in your family. People look up to you whether you realize or not. You're a leader in your community. You're a leader in your church, in your sport team, wherever people take example from you. And so leadership is life really. We all are leaders in different situations at different times. So it's not directly answering your question. I'm going to, you know, I've read a lot of research. I haven't found an exact estimate of the split of how much of leadership is inherited versus learned. And even if you did all the research, you'd probably find 10 different estimates. So I'm going to give you mine. I think it's as little as 20-25% that comes naturally. And you know, the rest is you can learn and develop the skills in your life in the corporate world. Which means if you're not a natural-born leader, you can actually have a very successful career managing teams, managing people by learning and developing the skills. And what I do in the psychology of leadership, my latest book, is to bring positive psychology and sports psychology and personality psychology to what you can learn and do better about leadership. And I think that's greatly underrated in the world of leadership and the sort of numbers-driven business world.

It's super important and you have to practice the skills too. You can go to seminars and read books and listen to our podcast today and know intellectually what leadership is about. And for example, we just talked about listening and letting the team speak first. But until you practice it in the heat of battle, you don't really know. My father was a professor actually, was a finance professor and I studied finance. I took two of his classes which is probably a story for another podcast but he loved to use analogies and he would tell the students that academic knowledge is only the beginning of success in business and he would say, 'Look, I've read a book on fly fishing. I know all the terms, I know how it works but until I'm on the river wearing the boots and trying to do fly fishing and practicing it, it's not going to work, right?' So the practice of leadership skills like listening and lots of counterintuitive skills apply to high-level, high-performing leadership. You know, we think leaders should be very resilient and kind of never give up in the face of uncertainty. You know, that's the hardest thing and the most prized skill in business, it's quitting. It's knowing when to shut down an initiative that's not going to work. That is actually much harder and is a high-level leadership skill, quitting. And if you can, read a book by Annie Duke on this, she titled the book 'Quit'. It's a difficult skill and it's very prized. So it's kind of counterintuitive knowing when to quit. Amazon famously, they will launch 30 different initiatives and they will quit the ones that don't take off and reinvest in the ones that look successful. This is incredibly difficult to do in business because you've invested in things and it's hard to give up. So, you know, and then we say leaders are always calm under pressure. Well, not really. Stress is actually part of the game and some level of activation is actually going to make you perform better. You learn that from sports psychology. So that's why I had a lot of fun writing the book because there are all these things that we think about traditional leadership that turn out to be quite counterintuitive and a lot of it comes from research in psychology.

This is the story of why I wrote the book because I was stressed at work. But not only was I stressed at work, I was stressing about stressing. I kept telling myself, 'Hey, I've been doing this for 25 years. I should be able to handle that level of pressure and uncertainty.' And so I had these two levels of stress and I ended up talking to a sports psychologist. His name is Dr. Daniel Zimit. He lives in Maryland where I am in the US. He also happens to be a pro athlete. So the mindset of the sports psychologist he applies to the game of handball. Do you play this in the UK where it's kind of like squash but you whack the ball with your hands?

Not a popular sport. It's a niche sport, but he happens to have 40 nationals titles in that sport. And we sit down and he tells me the story of his best match ever. And he's emotional. The match took place 10 years prior. He remembers everything about it. He's telling me where the ball was at 0-9. It hit that wall, then that wall. It's fascinating how important that match is for him. And it's from 10 years ago. And at some point, he's like, 'I'm on my knees. And I make the extreme shot that I didn't think I was going to be able to make.' And it's like point-by-point description. And then, Sam, it's this letdown because he goes almost matter-of-fact, 'And then I lost the next two points.' And I go, 'What? You lost that, your best match ever, the highlight of your sports career?' And that was his way of introducing the sports psychology mindset. For him as a sports psychologist, what was the most important thing in that match is that that day on the court he realized that he could play at a higher level. He was playing a much stronger opponent. And he starts talking about process orientation versus ego orientation and the fact that sports psychology is actually about losing. Sports psychologists are super interested in losing and what you learn from losing and how you grow. So I found that fascinating as a way to think about the stress of investing because in investing you don't get everything right all the time. You're going to lose money because no one has a crystal ball. So it started to come together. How can I bring this mindset, learn more about it in my life and then share it with others. It's just so much in sports psychology that applies to life that is kind of underrated, I think, in business.

I was talking with the sports psychologist. He trains, he coaches NFL players in the US, pro baseball players, Olympic athletes, and he goes, 'They're all incredibly neurotic.' It is stressful, but they reframe it as activation, as fuel for performance. And there's research behind this, Sam. It's called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and it's been researched for decades, including in sports psychology. And the idea is quite simple. Optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero. Which means that up to a point for an athlete, if they get a little nervous about what they're about to do, it actually increases performance. Now, then it reaches a point of optimal functioning and then it decreases performance because if you get too stressed, you choke under pressure. And there's a lot there because the curves, those Yerkes-Dodson curves, they're different for different sports and they're different for different people. But it's just a way of stopping beating yourself up because you're feeling pressure in a high-pressure situation and learn that you need some stress to perform. I would rather my surgeon be a little nervous about what they're about to do so that they prepare more, they pay more attention, they're more awake, but I don't want them to be incredibly nervous that they can't function. So to me, it was one of the most important from a self-improvement perspective findings in my research and ultimately in the process of writing the book.

Well, Sam, if I can jump in. You said offline you're a firefighter, right? How calm do you feel and how do you handle stress in that? Because you got to perform.

Preparation, repetition. In the book, I use the story of the first moon landing in 1969. And by the way, before I tell that story, which is a well-known story, I went on the podcast and talked about the moon landing and someone wrote in the comments, 'Does he really think this happened?' So, let's just assume it happened. I think it did. So, what happened was Neil Armstrong had to take manual command of the module because everything went wrong. They lost connection, so they didn't have communication. The computer malfunctioned. The module went off course. They were running out of fuel. It's the maximum highest pressure situation maybe in the history of humanity if you think about it that way that you can think of. Neil Armstrong takes manual control and lands the module in the wrong spot, but he lands it. As an astronaut, he was hooked to a heart rate monitor. And here's the fascinating thing. For most of the mission except for when he actually landed the last few seconds, what would you guess his heart rate was?

It definitely spiked when he landed, but to me the incredible thing is his heart rate was 75 for basically most of the time as everything was going wrong. And this was someone who had so many repetitions flying fighter jets like you in fires, right? You've seen many, many fires. So you have the muscle and mental memory of handling those high-pressure situations. So practice helps and repetition. And interesting part of sports psychology is they also do mental reps. So if you have something stressful to do, just visualizing in your mind how it's going to go down, what you're going to do, whether it's a presentation or a sporting event, mental repetitions count, your body is going to prepare for this situation. I also think that in the moment, I used to think this was trite advice and kind of overdone, but the breathing exercises actually work in the moment. It's not a magical thing that kills your stress right away. And I wonder, Sam, if when you go into a burning building if you do something to kind of reset and breathing-wise, but for me if I'm about to go on national live TV, talk about investment views and I know it's going to be hard and we're going to debate them, I take deep breaths. I take 4 seconds in breath, I hold it for 4 seconds, I let it go for four seconds and I hold it for four seconds at the bottom. This is called 4x4 breathing. I do that three times. You don't need a separate room. You can do that anywhere. No one even notices you're doing it. And again, it's not magical. It's not like you do three of these and you're all super calm. But on the margin, this is the only pathway between something you can control, your breathing, and the rest that you cannot control, which is your adrenaline, your heart rate, your blood pressure. This is the pathway. So, I don't know if Neil Armstrong did breathing exercises as a practice, but as a practice, it actually works on the margin and it's helpful for stressful situations.

You know, the job of the leader is to understand and as I said earlier, listen to where people are coming from. And empathy is key to business leadership because you do have to make tough decisions. You can't always be nice. And so if you do it with empathy and in an environment of trust, it will be easier for you to handle as the leader and it'll be easier for the person receiving the occasional bad news to handle. So it's super important. And there I think personality psychology is interesting, right? Knowing where people are coming from and how they're wired. Although I think sometimes we overdo personality psychology and we think, 'Oh, this person's an extrovert. They're going to act that way in all situations.' You don't want to stereotype, if you will, based on personality psychology. But to develop the empathy and the listening skills, understanding personalities is very important. It helps a lot. It's helped me in my journey. But yes, if you're a leader, it's not about you really. It's about your ability to get the best out of the team.

You know, Charles Duhigg is a great author and he has a recent book titled 'Supercommunicators'. Part of the book is about persuasion which is part of leadership. You need to bring people along. He explains that one of the best ways to persuade someone is not to go through your arguments or counterarguments one by one. It's counterintuitively to ask a bunch of questions and there you make yourself vulnerable to being convinced the other way. But scientifically, and this has been studied, you're going to be more effective with persuasion if you understand where the other person is coming from. But practically to do that is to actually ask a bunch of questions. Now that's difficult because someone says something, let's say it's in investment management and they say we're going to get a recession and we should reduce our exposure to stocks and just buy a bunch of very safe assets like US Treasury bonds. And your view is that probabilities of recessions are really low and that to make money for your clients you should keep invested in the stock market. So your reaction when you hear this counterpoint of view is often, if it's really important, the stakes are high, it's a stress reaction and immediately what we're all going to do is, 'Here are five arguments why we're not getting in a recession.' But that's really not as effective as saying, 'Oh, why do you think we're going to get a recession?' 'Well, I think that unemployment numbers are increasing and historically that has led to a recession.' 'Okay. But what do you think might be different from those numbers right now to what we've seen historically? Is there anything that might be different?' And you see how the questions are used very skillfully to lean the person towards, 'Hey, let's probe your thinking. I'm listening.' And if you do that, you develop that ability to just be curious as opposed to defensive. You become much more effective at persuasion. It's a bit counterintuitive and you don't feel like doing it in the moment. Adam Grant has written about this as well in his book, 'Think Again', another fantastic author. And he goes, you have to turn your mind into like you're a scientist. Someone disagrees with you. First thing, your first reaction has to be interested curiosity, not defensiveness.

To the people you're leading, to your peers, to your bosses, to any stakeholder you might have. This comes from my experience in the corporate world in large and complex organizations. Communication is key. For most jobs in business, you will have multiple stakeholders. People that are looking for you and your team to deliver something to them as part of the value chain, delivering value to the ultimate customer. If you don't communicate to everybody involved what's on your plate and the amount of work your team is doing for different stakeholders, each of them will think, 'Oh, my ask is the most important and they have no idea what else your team is working for.' And this works with customers as well. So this transparency of here's everything on the... I've done this my entire career. I've sent weekly updates to my stakeholders, my teams, my bosses, my peers for 25 years. The only weeks I miss is if I'm all the way on vacation for the entire week, then I send a photo of the ocean or something where I am. But otherwise, I've always done it. And this level of transparency builds trust. And it's not about bragging or you don't necessarily need to make this self-promotional. Just make it very clinical. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we've achieved this week. Here are the challenges. And transparency solves a bunch of issues where people might not understand why it's taking your team longer to deliver something or they might think you're working on the wrong priority. Now, if your boss has transparency on what you're working on, they can nudge you towards the right priorities. So, it also helps you self-reflect if you do it weekly. Like, okay, I promised to do that on Tuesday to that person and I almost forgot, but because I'm doing...

My weekly update now, I remember there's so many advantages to this transparency. It just builds trust. And it's not that people don't want to be transparent. I think, you know, generally people are open and transparent. No one is trying to hide stuff by default. Some people do for different reasons, but generally people want to be transparent. It's just that they don't see it as a priority. Busy with the actual work. I can't take the one hour to write a weekly update and send it around. Well, you know, that one hour can actually be very productive if it increases transparency about everything you and your team are doing. This is very much a corporate thing, you know, something that's more important the bigger the organization. I can imagine a startup where everybody's rolling up their sleeves, everybody's running together might not be as important, but I'd say any company more than 30 people, it probably becomes important and it's not that much work to do.

So I have something in the book about the personality trait conscientiousness. It's a very desirable trait. If you're conscientious, you're on time, you're detail oriented, you dot your i's and cross your t's, and you're just organized and dependable. And there's research that shows that scoring high in conscientiousness is positively correlated with leadership promotions and success. It's not a very large correlation, but it's meaningful. It's about 30 to 35% correlated. So, it's something that really helps overall in the workplace. However, the fascinating thing about personality traits is that if you take them to either extreme, you're getting in a problematic zone. So, if you're hyper-conscientious, it's a good trait to have, but you might become a perfectionist.

And that is the counter, again, we're talking about a bunch of counterintuitive things about leadership, right? That is the counterintuitive thing where your conscientiousness works against you. Perfectionism is a real trap and it prevents managers from delegating effectively to their teams. And when you delegate and you empower people, you are fulfilling your mission of getting the best out of the team and you can leverage your time better as well. If anything in my own career, Sam, I've probably overdone it, over-delegated sometimes, and you know, people probably needed more of my support than they've gotten over time. So while some over-delegate and over-empower if you will, most don't. And then another thing about research in psychology is that it shows that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful in the long run than extrinsic motivation, like you know, you'll get paid X if you achieve Y. The intrinsic motivation is, hey, we have a mission here in money management. We want to make money for our clients so they get better retirements, they can pay their bills, they can send their kids to college, just build better financial lives for people. That's super meaningful. If you have this intrinsic motivation, you're going to be more engaged in work and you're going to perform better and you're going to thrive in the long run. But guess what? The sad thing in corporate America is that most employees are not intrinsically motivated by their work. The surveys on engagement are depressing. And where as a leader can you foster more intrinsic motivation is by empowering people, giving them responsibility for the outcome.