Adam Galinsky
speaker
285 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Adam Galinsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. So what are these three universal factors?
Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be here.
It's a great question. About 20 years ago, I had an experience where I was teaching the FBI and one of the agents started talking about a leader of his that inspired him. It was such a remarkable moment for me because I saw everything about his body change. His eyes light up. He smiled. He looked wistfully in awe. You could tell that this leader, for whatever they did, changed that person inside.
They created that sense of wellspring of hope and possibility. At that moment, I decided I wanted to study what was it about that person or about people in general that inspire others. I started a two-decade-long journey in which I've asked thousands and probably tens of thousands of people a very simple question, which is, tell me about…
What I've discovered with these thousands and thousands of examples is it turns out that there are three universal characteristics or factors that really distinguish between these people that change us inside positively and another type of leader, I call them the infuriating leader, that create these sort of seething cauldrons of rage and resentment inside of us.
It actually turns out it's A, systematic, and B, universal. There's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. What are these three universal factors? Well, the first one is how we kind of look at the world, how we conceive and perceive the world.
And I call that being visionary. The second factor is how we kind of stand in the world, our presence, how we are in the world. And I call that being an exemplar of desired behavior. And the third factor is how we interact with others in the world. And I call that sort of being a great mentor. And so these are the three universal factors, being visionary, being an exemplar and being a mentor.
It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. You may be inspiring today, but infuriating tomorrow, right? What you do today is not going to protect you from falling to the other end of the continuum. And so we're never going to be inspiring all the time. We're never going to reach this apotheosis of inspiring perfection. But we can...
strive to be more inspiring tomorrow than we were today, right? And that is, I think, the fundamental, most important insight of my research.
Well, so I think one of the other key things that my research has shown is that one of the foundational elements for being more inspiring today than you were yesterday is the power of reflection, reflecting on our experiences, reflecting on important aspects of ourselves. And so I actually can go through and I can give you what is the key reflection that allows us to be more visionary or more
exemplary or a better mentor because I think these provide profound insights for how we can become more inspiring. Let me tell you about a study that we did, which I think is going to have a big impact on listeners. If any of you out there have ever lost a job, you know how demoralizing it is, how humiliating it is. I lost my first post-college job three months after being hired.
I was fired and I was just so demoralized. We did this study with the Swiss government. We went into an employment agency where everyone has to register in order to get unemployment benefits in Switzerland. We gave half of these people coming into the employment agency a little 15-minute reflection task. We said, I want you to think about your values. What are your top five values?
Now, put them in a hierarchy. What's your most important value? What's the one that animates the others? Just put them in a little hierarchy. Now, I want you to think about why are those values important to you. Then, finally, think about times when you've demonstrated those values recently in your own behavior.
Two months later, we found that people who were given this values recall intervention, this reflection task, were twice as likely to have a job than people in our control condition. In fact, the effect was so strong, we stopped the study and gave everybody the values reflection intervention. Now, what's going on there?
There's something, again, getting back to that need for meaning and understanding, there's something about our reflecting on our values that centers us. that gives us a little bit of optimism, a little bit of agency, and allows us to overcome all those psychological deprivations that occur when we lose a job.
Yeah, so for me, I've done this task myself. We actually give it to every single MBA student walking into Columbia Business School. And so you just start thinking about it. Now, one of the things we do is we give people a link to a list of values because it's hard to create them off the top of your head. It's a Google Sheet.
I started just thinking about values and I put some down and then I realized I found another one that was more meaningful toward me. I had a particular ranking and then I changed it. For me, my single top value is generosity.
It's not just generosity financially, it's generosity in spirit and in thought, being generous in trying to give people the best interpretation for their behavior, trying to contextualize why someone did something, giving people the benefit of the doubt. My second important thing is what I call positive energy, optimism, humor, good-naturedness. Another value of mine is creativity.
How do we be creative and solve the problems that we have in unique and creative ways? Another one is what I call kaizen. Now, my wife spent time in Japan and they have a word for continued improvement. which is kind of the heart of inspire and how to inspire others. That, to me, is really important. How I want to always be striving to be better at everything I do.
Every time I do a podcast, I want to do it better the next time, for example. Then you can start to think about why do those values matters so much to me. Well, I want to always be improving. I love creative solutions. I love humor. Every birthday, I go see stand-up comedy. It's really important to me. But generosity is the one that drives them all because that's what I want to be in the world.
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