The 7 practices of persuadable leaders
Strong leadership has traditionally been looked at as being decisive, persistent and unwavering. As a leader you traditionally set a goal, work toward it, and don’t allow any distractions. Focus is your major consideration. But one author believes that contemporary leaders also need to be more supple and ready to alter the course of things when warranted. That author is Al Pittampalli, and his book is Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World, a research-based, no-nonsense guide to help you understand that people who change their minds are actually the most likely to change the world. Pittampalli challenges your perceptions and helps you make a difference with your work.
Business leaders, by and large, are pretty persuasive, but they can reach a peak on persuasiveness. “It’s not that it’s not significant, but it’s just not as important as being persuadable, especially in a world that’s changing faster than ever,” Pitampalli claims. “It turns out that the competitive advantage that business leaders need now is the ability to change their minds in the face of new information and new circumstances.”
The book asserts that really courageous leaders go out of their way to seek out information that might threaten their industry, their reputation, an existing business product that they currently have on the market. They are in the business of finding out the truth and they are in a hurry, because bad news doesn’t get better with age.
Persuadability, the author avers, is “a vastly underappreciated advantage in business and life.” He lists seven practices of persuadable leaders, which were culled from forward-looking studies on cognitive and social psychology. “These simple yet powerful habits have accelerated the path to success for some of the best leaders in the world, and they have the potential to do the same for you,” Pitampalli declares.
1. Consider the opposite: If being persuadable means changing your mind in the face of evidence, first you must spot the evidence when it crosses your desk. Noticing evidence that supports your current beliefs is easy, but when it comes to counterevidence — information that cuts against your current hypothesis, theory or opinion — it can be devilishly difficult. When you look at counterevidence, it often appears to you as an anomaly — a one-off that should be dismissed completely — or else information that, despite contradicting your current way of thinking somehow strangely confirms it.
The force responsible for this distorted thinking is what is known as the confirmation bias, one of the most powerful and insidious forces in human behavior. If you want to be persuadable, you’re going to have to learn to manage it. The technique to manage it is to “consider the opposite,” and the trickiest part is knowing when to use it.
Leonardo da Vinci, the man who painted the Mona Lisa, believed that in order to solve a problem, you needed to look at it from multiple perspectives. Knowing that his own perspective was fundamentally biased, he wrote: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. We know well that mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others than in one’s own. When you are painting you should take a flat mirror and often look at your work within it, and it will then be seen in reverse, and will appear to be by the hand of some other master, and you will be better able to judge of its faults in any other way.”
2. Update your beliefs incrementally. You need to move from thinking in black and white to thinking in shades of gray, which is not easy to do. Most people think that by constantly shifting your beliefs you can never be sure about anything, thus making you a slave to uncertainty. But thinking in shades of gray is the opposite of slavery. It’s complete freedom — the freedom to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. Eliezer Yudkowsky says, “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.”
3. Kill your darlings. It’s the idea of active open-mindedness — the ability to passively accept information you might not like. If your product, business, strategy or relationship with a customer is being threatened by new information, open-mindedness says: “Okay, I’ll give that new information a chance, I’ll sit here and wait for that information to come to me.” The most successful leaders are actively open-minded — people who go out and proactively try to kill their own beliefs. They don’t wait for negative feedback to come to them, they hurry up and say, “If I need to change my mind, I might as well do it sooner rather than later.” Jeff Bezos was unsatisfied with patiently waiting to be convinced that his favored beliefs about digital books were wrong. He was intent on killing them himself. And it paid off — big time. Amazon and its Kindle device dominated the digital book world. Ordinary open-mindedness leads to ordinary growth and agility, but, as Bezos proved, active open-mindedness leads to extraordinary growth and agility.
4. Take the perspective of others. In order to lead effectively, you need to be understood. But you need first to understand. People are complex creatures, and you can’t communicate with and influence them effectively if you don’t know their interests and positions. For you to communicate, take into account the receiver’s worldview and perspective. While leaders are less likely to take perspectives, when they do, it brings extraordinary benefits, especially from a communication perspective. According to New York University psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer, there are three ways to fail: you simply forget, you fail to seize the opportune moment to act, and you have second thoughts at the critical moment.
In 2007 Tom Coughlin led the Giants to their first Super Bowl in 26 years. According to him, this achievement was due in no small part to his ability to listen to the perspectives of his players. He says it has made him a more effective coach and improved the quality of the working environment, which translates to winning.
5. Avoid being too persuadable. Being persuadable enables accuracy, agility and growth, but it would be foolish to pretend that there are no costs to acquiring these benefits. Beware the traps of being overly persuadable. You must learn to recognize when you are being driven to overanalyze, thus preventing you from making decisions and doing great work. You need to understand the external and internal costs of being persuadable, so you can ask whether being persuadable is worth it — not just for you, but also for the society as a whole.
In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was unhappy that the old Macintosh operating system was taking so long to boot up. He approached one of the engineers and told him to reduce the time by 10 seconds. The engineer claimed it was impossible, implying that he didn’t think it was worth the considerable time to make it happen. So Jobs performed the following calculation out loud for the engineer: if five million people were using the Macs, and it took 10 more seconds to boot up, that would equal to about 300 million hours per year in collective time people would save. Jobs went on to rationalize that the improvement to the operating system would amount to 100 lifetimes saved each year. The engineer saw the point. It was worth it.
6. Convert early. Social movements don’t progress linearly. They begin slowly and gradually, often advancing over an extended period of time, until one day — boom! A critical threshold is reached, followed by a rapid acceleration. This threshold is what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as “the tipping point” and when it’s reached, a relatively fringe idea can quickly be adopted by the mainstream. This non-linear pattern of adoption can be described by the diffusion of innovations model, which predicts that any innovation progresses through predictable stages. Each stage marks the penetration of the idea into a different group: innovators, early, early majority, late majority and laggards.
Innovators hungrily seek out new ideas and boast a very high-risk tolerance. They derive so much gratification from being the first to adopt a new innovation, and don’t even care if it hasn’t been thoroughly tested yet. The early adopters are visionaries, and they like to stay ahead of the curve, while the early majority are skeptical of new trends, fads, and tend to wait and see. The “late majority” needs to see that an innovation has really been vetted and tested before they’ll buy a product, while the “laggards” are the last to convert, if at all. In order for social progress to occur, an idea has to cross the chasm and be embraced by the early majority. For this to happen, brave individuals, early majority champions, need to step up, publicly change their minds, and serve as examples for their peers.
7. Take on your own tribe. Norms within the early majority are deeply ingrained and difficult to change. As such, you have to consider going one step further, and focus on actively persuading those with whom you have the most influence — your own tribes. It’s how you survive, through cooperation and solidarity. This tendency to be part of tribes remains with us today. You might be a Catholic, a Muslim or a Buddhist, a kapamilya, kapuso or kapatid. All of these are examples of tribes whose social norms undoubtedly influence your beliefs. You didn’t consciously choose many of your beliefs and positions. You adopted the belief, not through analysis, but mainly because it was normal and acceptable within your tribe.
Conformity and polarization are problems inside a tribe. When everyone in the tribe shares the same beliefs, discussions and debates tend to be one-sided, and an echo chamber is created. As a result, people in tribes, when left unchecked, often develop extreme views and become wildly overconfident that these views are true. Even when an idea or product is clearly better that the alternatives, people don’t automatically switch over. Conformity is one powerful reason why. Many times people retain a certain position in order to conform to the social norm, even if they believe the social norm is wrong.
Trying to encourage the world to be more persuadable is no easy feat and will undoubtedly be met with censure. But that’s okay, because the persuadable person is open to criticism and loves nothing more than impassioned dialogue—a quality that would no doubt serve yourself and the world.
* * *
Email bongosorio@yahoo.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
