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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are horrible for collaboration, for teamwork. And Microsoft was famous at one point for doing that within teams. So you have a seven person team. One of you is gonna be out of here. How are you gonna collaborate with each other? But that's different from still having very high standards.
So Netflix is famous for their keeper test, where like, when you decide whether to retain someone at the end of the year is, what do I fight to keep this person? And what's better about, like you can say it's cutthroat, but what's better about that system is you're just competing against yourself, right? You're not competing against anyone else. That means you don't have to undermine anyone else.
We can actually help each other all be kept, right? And so I think that's part of it is how do you create high standards that don't lead to cutthroat competitiveness and all the downsides that occur with that?
So I've been studying this concept called perspective taking for almost 30 years now. Actually, 1995, I started my dissertation and that was what I ended up studying. And the title of my dissertation was Perspective Taking. de-biasing social thought.
And one of the things that I've discovered over the years is that perspective-taking really is this superpower, and it functions in so many different ways. One of the ways it functions is it helps us navigate a diverse world by understanding the different perspectives. So I've shown in my research, my award-winning dissertation, that perspective-taking decreases the tendency to stereotype others.
I've also shown in negotiations that when we're really good at understanding the other side, we can propose creative solutions that not only get us what we want, but also solve whatever issue our partner or opponent, the other side, is experiencing. It's also really helpful for innovation to take perspectives.
And sometimes we're taking the perspectives of individuals, and other times we're taking the perspectives of what we might call a class of people. So one of the things I've studied in my research, and you mentioned in my TED Talk earlier about how to speak up for yourself, is I've studied power dynamics.
And so one of the things that we know is there's a term I mentioned, the leader amplification effect. I have another term that I coined called the leader silencing effect. And the leader silencing effect is that Because of our power and our authority and our position, we tend to silence the perspectives of other people. But those perspectives can be incredibly valuable.
They can carry the critical insight, even if someone's like lower down in the social hierarchy. And so one of the things we have to do to get to wise decisions or innovative solutions as a leader of a group is we got to to lower the risk of speaking up. We got to reduce the leader silencing effect.
And so one of the ways that we can do that is we can take the perspective of what prevents low power people from speaking up. And if we can identify those things that prevent them from speaking up, we can counteract them. So one of the things that you mentioned is, and I mentioned this word elevating other people before, elevating. If you know someone in the room who has
unique expertise or experience, you want to highlight it, say, hey, I know Jane over here has worked for 20 years in this industry, and I'd love to get her perspective on what might be a solution as we try to enter that market, right? And so by highlighting that, it's elevating that person saying, their opinion really matters. It's lowering their risk of speaking up, right?
Versus Danny Kahneman telling me my point wasn't right at all, right? That was so shattering to me of my confidence. It increased the risk of my speaking up for a very long time.
And so that's one of the things we wanna do is we wanna take the perspective of our opponent negotiation, of our interaction, the person we're trying to motivate, like what's gonna motivate this person, but also because I'm a leader, What is the perspective of someone with less power than me?
And how can I mitigate some of those constraining forces that prevent them from sharing their perspectives and therefore not allowing for wise decisions or innovative solutions?
It's a great point. I still remember when I was reading The Gatsby, my dad, without skipping a beat, could quote that entire last page. And that's, again, an example of being in awe of his competence, right? But he also, that was part of his vision, right? And I write in the book that my parents had infuriating flaws, but really inspired me about both my mom and dad
is they wanted to be a better person today than they were yesterday, and they wanted to be more inspiring tomorrow than they were today. And so just like that green light, they strove towards that. So I would say the single biggest thing, maybe the core of this book, is that it answers centuries old question, right? Are leaders born or are they made?
And I think that I've shown definitively that leaders are made because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring. We can study those, learn those, practice those, and develop those skills. It also means that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates.
So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the inferior end of the continuum tomorrow. But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better, right? You can strive towards that green light of inspiration. And so part of it is that we have to stay the course, right?
Even when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the winds of chaos are all around us, we have to keep going forward. And here's a final thing that I think is really important from my research is that don't be too hard on yourself. One of the things that I've shown in my research is shame is a particularly destructive emotion.
It makes us into defensive monsters or hiding ostriches, putting our head in the sand. And so none of us are perfect. we're all going to make mistakes, right? I'm going to be an infuriating person tomorrow, even with the best efforts. And so the question is, how do we recover from that? And how do we become more inspiring tomorrow? If we dwell on those moments and we beat ourselves up, right?
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