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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It's one of the best ways that we can get into a visionary state of mind. We ask people think about a time when they think about what are their most important values in their life and how they've demonstrated those values and why they're important. And this has shown to make so many things better in their lives. It can motivate people.
I showed that when people reflect on their values, if they're unemployed, they're twice as likely to find a job in the next two months than if they hadn't reflected on their values. But in this case, in the workplace, around AI, that values reflection task had no effect. It didn't impact. It didn't make people trust AI, more likely to experiment with AI.
They were still ostriches putting their head in the sand and wanting to avoid it because they were scared. But then we did something different and we asked, what is it? What are they worried about? Why is this value affirmation, this value reflection task not working? They're really worried about losing standing in their organizations, of not being valued, of not being respected.
So we went back to the drawing board and we did a different manipulation. And we asked people to think about the things about themselves that other people value in them. What is it about you that other people value, that they respect you for? And then that sense of getting their standing, their sense of being seen, recognized, valued, respected, affirmed and confirmed in their own mind.
Then they started to open up to the possibility of looking at AI, understanding what it is and utilizing it.
Absolutely.
I think it's a big gap and part of the gap is a complicated one, right? Because at one level we want efficiency, right? And we want equity, right? And fairness. And so the question is when we start tailoring or personalizing motivation or rewards, we can get into those problematic areas. But let's just start off with like, how do we understand the motivations of others?
The single biggest mistake we make is we think everyone's a mirror image of ourselves. One of the examples I give in the book, which I really love is that I've been dating my now wife for about just over two months. And we were going, I had to give a talk in DC and she was going to come down. It was a birthday.
And I found out that one of my favorite comedians, Demetri Martin was going to be performing, but the show was sold out. So I spent like 36 hours doing everything I could. I have like friends of mine with Amex cards, trying to get tickets, like whatever I could do. And I finally was able to get two tickets and I thought I'd hit the boyfriend jackpot, but it turned out my wife hates standup comedy.
It's just like, I love it. She hates it. She loves opera. I hate opera, right? So if you can imagine getting me opera for my birthday, right? And so one of the biggest problems is we really have to let go of our own perspective. And so one is they're not just like me, but they're also not just like each other. And anyone that has two kids immediately recognizes they come from us, right?
But how different each of those kids are. It's just one example. My older son, you can... He's generally outgoing, but you can like go to a party and he'll just walk right in and start interacting with people. And my son Aiden, it'll take him 45 minutes to go in that party.
So here's one of my great leadership inventions I did as a parent is I realized I just have to get to every party 30 minutes early. Because if I get to the party on time, it's going to take him 30 minutes to go in. But I've got the 30 minutes early. then he's finally going to be ready to go in right when the party starts. So that's just one small example.
Now, one of the questions is how do we create equity in the fact that different people value things differently, right? Just as one good example is some people may want more money. Other people may want more flexibility in their job. And so one of the things that I think is really important is how do we create rewards for people that are
are equal value or cost to you, but can tap into their different needs and desires that they have. And actually, one of the first consulting projects I ever worked on in my life was back in the mid-2000s out there. I was at Northwestern University of Chicago. There's a little company that you might have heard out that's headquartered out in the suburbs there called McDonald's.
You might have heard of them. And so anyway, I was working with them and another professor, Huggy Rao, because they were trying to figure out the fact that they had two different types of workers. They had like teenagers, college students.
And then they had people that were like mothers and fathers who were, this job was actually what they needed to feed their family and to give housing to their family. And so the question is, how do you set up a set of rewards that cost the company the same, but are equally valuable? And so one of the things that we talked about was, well, what do the younger people want?
Well, they might want money for education. So you could give them as a reward, right? For every six months, we'll pay X amount of dollars towards education. What are older people? Well, maybe they want health insurance, right? To help their family be healthy and safe. And so part of it is we want to think about
things that we can offer and give people a choice and that is probably the single i think biggest thing that i've done in my own research i've shown in negotiations one of the best ways to get the best possible outcome for yourself while leaving the other side satisfied is giving people a choice between different options that are equal value to you
And then that allows you to be ambitious or even what some people might call aggressive in your offers because the choice is signaling flexibility, is signaling your desire to reach a deal. That means the other side is going to trust you more. And so you're going to get this great outcome. They almost always don't get a worse outcome. You've expanded the pie.
Most of it's gone to you, but they walk away satisfied. So choice really matters in the psychology of people.
Showing 101–120 of 285 · page 6 of 15
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