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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Anything that we're paying attention to that we're looking at, whatever that stimulus is, it's going to have an amplified reaction on us and we're going to have a more intense reaction to it. And so that's really what the leader amplification effect is. And that can be good or bad, right? Like an offhand compliment versus an offhand criticism can have hugely monumental effects on people.
That's also why Tammy Jo Schultz's phrase, we're not going down, we're going to Philadelphia was so powerful is because she was that leader. Everyone was paying close attention to everything that she said. I started my PhD at Princeton University in 1993.
And the first class I ever took was with Danny Kahneman, who is the only psychologist who would one day go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he just arrived with incredible fanfare from University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the top five paid employees of the entire university. Like, I think he might have even been second or third, like after the president and general counsel.
I think he was third, actually. Anyway, so there's 11 of us, so 10 other people. classmates that are first year doctoral students at Princeton in psychology. And in the first day of class, I raised my hand and I'm eager to prove that I belong, that I'm valued and respected, as we've talked about already. And I still remember the four things Danny did that day.
He crossed his arms, he shrunk up his face, he shook his head and he said, that's not right at all. And then he smiled and he moved on and the rest of the class moved on, but I was frozen in place. Like I felt humiliated, right? His offhand comment, that's not right at all, it reverberated inside of me, right?
But then, and it took me weeks before I felt comfortable speaking in any class, let alone Danny's class. About five or six weeks later, I was walking in the hallway and Danny's walking this way and I'm walking this way. And Danny just over his shoulder says, hey, Adam, I love reading your reflection papers. Then he turns the corner. And you're a great writer.
He said, I love reading your reflection papers. You're a great writer. And that offhand compliment filled me with so much joy, I literally skipped down the hallway. I didn't know what to do with my energy. And so what I like about this example is these are two casual, offhand, inconsequential comments by Danny Kahneman that he doesn't even remember to this day.
But because of his position of authority, but also because of the respect, so much eyes were on him paying close attention to what he said, right? What he said got magnified, amplified, intensified, right? So that that's not right at all became like humiliating criticism, right? Crushing criticism. But that you're a great writer became glorious praise. And so I realized in that moment how
These offhand comments can have a huge impact, right? You mentioned the percent lows who's well-respected. One comment could like green light or red light a project, right? One of my favorite examples of this is a man named Barry Salzberg, who was CEO of Global Deloitte. And after he, you know, there's tens of thousands of employees.
And after a few months, he realized there was always bananas at important meetings. And he's like, huh, are bananas a symbol of Deloitte that I didn't discover my 30 years here? Does someone really important love bananas? So he asked his assistant, why do we have bananas at every meeting? And she said, because you love bananas. He's like, wait, what?
So apparently the first meeting he ever attended, the assistant was like paying close attention to whatever he did. And she saw him pick up a banana with a little bit of enthusiasm and eat it. And so she coded that as Barry Salzberg loves bananas. We have to have bananas at every meeting. And that's such a great example how he didn't even say anything. It was so incidental.
It was so offhand, but it had this massive impact.
Yeah. And I think it also ties into so much of what we've talked about because I said there's these three universal factors, right? Being visionary, being exemplary, and being a mentor. You've just highlighted how being visionary and being a mentor go together. What's the vision for campus visits? The vision for campus visits is, I think, twofold.
One is to present your university in an optimal way, right, positive way. But two is to make the people that are visiting feel excited and valued and respected. And so Harvard lost the vision, right? The vision isn't to be realistic, right? The vision is to create a sense of excitement and wonder in these people.
Sure, they're probably not going to get in there, but that the dreaming of getting in there is also something that's really positive and powerful. And so why kill someone's dream? Right. Why not that dream? They might not get into Harvard, but maybe they'll get into Princeton or Cornell or Penn or Duke or UNC or Texas or UCLA, other great schools.
And so there's like the idea of like killing someone's dream. is just so unnecessary. It's cruel. It's selfish. It's patronizing. It's small-minded, right? And so to me, what I see in that and what happened to you and your daughter was they didn't have a vision that was generous towards the people that they were interacting with. And I'm sure it would have a huge impact.
And you can just ask yourself, what was the point of the Harvard person saying that? What purpose did it really serve? And so I think that's one thing that we learn as leaders is after, we could be honest about
But one of the things you talked about, visions, you talked about goals, you talked about, you could, someone at NASA could have said, look, the odds of us ever walking on the moon are so low and it's certainly not going to happen for 20 years, right? But like, what's the purpose of doing that? Let's work towards a goal. And maybe instead of 20 years, it becomes 12 years.
It's not 10, but that's okay. We're still better off than we were by not having that ambitious goal. And there's a famous phrase, there's no point to rain on someone's parade, right?
Yeah. And I think there's different ways that we can try to create rewarded motivational systems that matter for people. I personally, based on everything I know, am very much against Rankin-Yank systems. And the Rankin-Yank system would be something where like every year, 10% of people have to be fired and only 10% of people get promoted or something like that. And those systems
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