Rethinking Leadership, Work, and Human Connection in the Age of AI
episode
The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
38 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 8 hours ago
Transcript
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Welcome to the Curiosity
Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Curiosity Shop. I finished my intensive teaching and I'm excited to do an Ask Me Anything. I posted just an open, what do you want to know? What do you want to hear me talk about? On a couple of different social media platforms and pulled some of my favorite themes and questions. We've got a series of questions about leadership and careers. We have some about AI. Got a bunch of questions about rethinking and some questions about personal writing practices and productivity habits as well. So I'll tackle as many as I can. I'm going to spend more time on some questions than others because they're more complicated. And I hope this is interesting for you as I think out loud in real time.
I reserve the right to rethink anything I say today, as always. And if I do, I think that will be a sign of growth. And if I don't, I'll be glad that I didn't completely miss the mark on everything. So let's dive in. Here we go. All right. The majority of the questions were about leadership. So let's begin there. There's a great question from my cola that I want to kick off with. The question is, how can leaders restore a credible connection between speaking up and being heard without creating the expectation that every suggestion will be adopted? I love this question. I think it's such an important question, both from a leadership perspective, but also from an employee perspective around how you can speak up without losing faith or becoming cynical.
I first started thinking about this question years ago when I had a PhD student, John Sumanth, who did his dissertation on the question of whether it's possible to be too inclusive as a leader. And what he found was that, as you would expect, there are many benefits to seeking out ideas from other people to being a great listener. But leaders who are seen as receptive to all of the ideas all the time really struggled to prioritize what they wanted to act on and ultimately ended up getting less done. And since then, I've seen this dynamic over and over again in organizations. I think leaders bend over backward to tell people they have a voice, and then they can't possibly put all of the suggestions they get into practice.
And at that point, people start to get discouraged. I think the mistake that many leaders are making in those situations is they're not being clear about what it means to have a voice. There's some classic research on this by McFarlane and Sweeney that has really stuck with me, where they point out that people want to have a say, even if they don't get their way. And I think that's the missing message that more leaders need to emphasize. To say, look, I'm going to consider every suggestion that gets raised. Ultimately, I am not going to be able to implement all of them. I've got to apply a filter, which is number one, what's most relevant to our mission and our values? Number two, what's strategically doable?
Number three, what's actually affordable for us? And I think that conversation is a critical one to have. I think once you collect ideas and suggestions, the next step then is to clarify what criteria you're actually using to evaluate them. Ideally, this is done upfront, but it's not always feasible to do that, or you're not always sure what you're looking for at the beginning of the conversation. But whether you're doing a poll or a survey or a series of speed dates with your employees, once you've done that, the next step for leaders is really to sit down and say, okay, here's the screen that I applied. Here's what I'm looking for. And here's why I adopted some ideas and not others.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
2 identifiedMore from The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
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