94. LEADing ideas: Research-Backed Tips and Tools from Four Stanford Professors

[Music] people actually follow recommendations more when they're said than when they're [Music] written Recent research has shown that sharing goal failure stories as a leader actually make you a more influential leader we can get a little bit too obsessed with driving towards the destination and we have lots of tools for making that as efficient as possible talking to somebody who has fa facilitated the engagement going early to the engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people so you have an idea of where people are and what they are most interested in learning so that you can deliver so know your [Music] audience what do you get when you bring together 400 students from all over the world four professors who are insightful and inviting and one mediocre podcast host you get an amazing educational experience welcome to think fast talks smart the podcast I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business recently we did our first ever live inperson podcast session we brought Stanford lead students from all over the world in to chat with four of our previous guests yesper Sorenson sui Hong s Su and Jonathan Laval what you're about to listen to is a condensed version of that conversation we'll start by hearing from everybody expand on some of the things we've discussed in previous podcast episodes and then I'll ask our guests to share something they're researching that excites them and then have some closing advice along with some listener questions enjoy I am thrilled to be here with all of you thank you so much for the support of our podcast and we love getting your questions your feedback your your following on LinkedIn and Instagram thank you so much we wanted today to be very special so we've invited four of our most popular guests to come talk with us so we're going to have fun and we look forward to hearing from you so let's get into it yesper we're going to start with you uh for those of you who don't know yesper yesper is a professor in organizational behavior and the senior associate dean of academic Affairs when yesper and I had our conversation on the podcast he shared how when we think about strategy we can think about strategy as making an argument telling a story and it turned out to be one of our most popular episodes on YouTube people really really got interested in in strategy and how to tell strategy stories and make Arguments for your strategy so yeser my question to you is for all of us we all have our own personal strategies our our goals for ourselves can you give us some some suggestions about how we can tell our own strategy stories sure so I mean thanks first of all for for having all of us here and for doing this and for this amazing crowd uh and I I'm continually Amazed by the fact that the YouTube video is so popular but I think it's because we didn't actually video record I have a face for podcasts I think is what somebody told so yeah so when I talk about strategy I think about strategy as being the narrative right that you have for why it is you're able to accomplish what it is you do and I think you can think about that in in different kinds of ways as you think about constructing these stories for yourself and that's whether you're constructing that story for your company or for your own career I think for me the most important thing to remember is that unless a story is fictional you have to give yourself a little bit of uh space and some forgiveness for not having the story right at any given point in time I think when you think about when people think about their careers right and you see young people just starting out they have this IDE that they should have a very clear trajectory and plan and so on and so forth and then they get very anxious and frustrated sometimes when things don't work out the way that they want it because it doesn't fit that narrative that they had constructed for themselves but again I think the only stories you can tell in advance or fictional and so that means that that story was a fiction right and that the story is going to be the one that evolves and I think when you get to be as old as some of us are up on this panel right you realize that really it's about things that you discover as you go along the the way and so I think where this matters the most is when you're making big decisions and I think the thing that I like to think about is you should always think about a decision where you think about an experiment as being something where you're testing a hypothesis you're testing a theory and in particular you should think about what you learn from that experiment as being something that informs your understanding of what your story is going to be and how it's going to evolve so I think yeser called me old I think I just I was referring to myself oh I see I see okay I appr apprciate very much the the notion of of running those experiments and then figuring out how to communicate them and what I also really heard which is important for me personally is to remind myself to give myself a little space in Grace as I think through those things it's very easy to get caught up in the moment and not give yourself that space so thank you for that next I'd like to come to sui uh sui is an associate professor in marketing and her research focuses on consumer motivation and when sui joined us we talked a lot about motivation and one of the things that I really took away from our podcast together was how to sustain motivation over time and in fact after that episode I I told some of my friends about what we had talked about and we all agreed that we were going to take on this new type of exercise that we hadn't done before and we we were a little competitive but we're mostly supportive and what I took away from the episode is when I should best compare myself to my colleagues and how that can help sustain that motivation all of us in this room are endeavoring to do lots of different things sui can you share with us some ways to sustain that motivation in the activities that we all do sure definitely and first of all I'm glad to hear that you took my advice actually using it so I have three things to share with you today first start small second social support and third Journey mindset so first start small a lot of us have big goals and definitely for your organization the goal is big the big goals means it's valuable and it's not attainable and it is really hard to get motivated when we only focus on big goals so we are starting it's really important to focus on small goals can you make it into peace me goals instead of thinking about a large quarterly or annual goals what should we achieve by the end of today so when you start small it's easier to motivate yourself as a leader and also to motivate your employees and stakeholders second social support I see that that's what mat took to heart we in our research we found that social support fluctuate in the beginning we're excited to actually announce that's our goal get everybody on board when we are getting close to the end of the quarter or the year we are also excited because we want to celebrate and we think we are winning it is through the middle stage that things get muddy when you feel especially challenged that's when we hide from social information we don't want to know what our peers are doing because those information is threatening but what we found is that at those very moments is exactly when you need social information and social support to get you going either to give you some competitive motivation or some collaborative energy so social support is important throughout and especially in the middle when things get T the last thing is Journey mindset in the society today we think about goals as destination which is great we are motivated to reach them and we have no clue what to do after we reach them thinking about goal as a journey means that it's not just about reaching the goal and get it done it's about also thinking about that it's a continuation after I reach this goal there's the next thing I look back and think about what went right and what went wrong and I take what I learned and I continue so it is a continuous journey in never really and that is really helpful for maintaining that motivation absolutely and I and I see how what you just said about the journey mindset ties nicely to what yesper said about running experiments so if you're continually thinking about the next step as another experiment that all of a sudden starts helping you define that narrative and can help you figure out where you want to go next so thank you for that I'd like to come next to Sarah Sarah is a professor of organizational behavior I recently came to learn about some of your new research that you published and it's about confessions and fessing up to misdeeds and misbehaviors uh and wondering if you can share a bit about what you found and any advice that it leads to absolutely let me tell you about this research in 2020 I'll take you back to that year when in May of that month in the United States a man by the name of George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis now what you may have noticed either here in the US or in your own whole country was that many leaders of organizations CEOs organizational leaders and educational institutions and nonprofits and so on if issued racial Justice states in the wake of that event sometimes these statements issued support for the black lives matter movement sometimes they issued support for any kinds of and procedures within the organization to do something about racial and inequity in the organization or abroad and so on and we when I say we I mean my wonderful PhD student Lambert Me took notice of this and decided to collect all of these statements from 14500 companies as well as benefit corporations and we noticed a pattern which was surprising to us and that is that many leaders willingly confess and that's the term we use issued a public confession about either not knowing that there was a problem with racial inequity in the country even confessing publicly that they were complicit in some way we found interesting because much of the prior literature which is known as impression man agement talks about ways in which corporate leaders when communicating put positive information out here we saw something different a willingness put forth negative information about themselves and so what we did with these statements one of the first things we've done with these statements is sent them out all of them we collected 525 of these statements and we sent them out to people in an online survey and ask them to tell us what they think about the leader and about the state Unit C and what they think about the organization in terms of their Corporate social responsibility and their reputation for corporate social responsibility they found that in the statements not all of them had a confession but those statements which did have a confession were an associated with positive views of the leader and an impression that that organization was a good corporate social responsible and it was especially true for any kind of confession but for those confession that involved confessing something negative they have done we call this a a confession of of commitment right uh those were especially highly rated so in terms of thinking about what this might mean I think importantly what we're seeing at least with the case of racial Justice in the US was that there was something different happening with impression management rather than putting positive information out there the The View that the leader in the organization is authentic and transparent was what led to more favorable attitudes towards the organization and and especially towards the organization as a responsible and in society so it's changing the common perception that you only put out positive information by acknowledging some negative behavior it actually has some positive benefit well now I'm coming to Jonathan Jonathan laab a professor of marketing the only podcast guest ever to swear in an episode our editor had to work extra time on that one uh Jonathan you have some new research out about giving recommendations and there's a difference between speaking those recommendations versus actually having them in writing can you share a little bit about the results of that study and what it might mean for us as we give recommendations I promise to keep it clean because there's no editing I didn't even remember I gursed I thought it was this natural course of events in general my my research is kind of looks at the difference in sort of physical experiences of consuming technology and so how those different ways in which we consume technology influence our decision- making process and so one of the things that we've looked at is modalities and so what technologies allow you to do is that allow you to present information in different modalities so you can read things and sometimes you can feel things and you can also um hear them or say them out loud and so it turns out that you would think that whether you read something or hear something it should have the same effect because after all it's the same information if I tell you you should take Sarah's class right whether I wrote take Sarah's class or I said take Sarah's class but it should be the same the recommendation is the same what we're finding is that people actually follow recommendations more when said than when they're written and the effect is a large but it's very consistent and we look at it across lots of different cons both consumer products and also different kinds of tasks and it's a little bit of a mystery to us of why exactly it's happening what we're finding is that it has to do with the ephemerality of the information when I say something it's gone when something is written it's still in front of me what we're finding is that when people are exposed to Emeral information we also test that by actually showing them sentences of things that go and disappear right so we can create a ferality also with written text is it basically it creates almost like an action orientation like to be able to hang on to that information I have to create I have to act on it and so that translates into when you hear a recommendation right you say okay I'm going to follow it whereas when you read it you don't have to sort of engage in that kind of immediate action moment and so we find that with a couple of actually I should credited grad students sh marasu and Chris Beckler who co-authored this with me perhaps one of the reasons the podcast has been successful is it's us making recommendations in a spoken format so so maybe we're on to something also you're celeb mat oh yeah right exactly now let's hear from yesper and Jonathan as they describe some of their current research and [Music] thinking I'm very interested to have been for a while on entrepreneurship and for a long time what I studied was why do people choose to leave their jobs to become entrepreneurs and one of the things that I've emphasized way in which entrepreneurship we should think about Entre rip as being part of a career as opposed to the way we tend to think about it in the scholarly literature is kind of like you become an entrepreneur and then we stop entrepreneurship is actually more like marriage right like you enter into it and then sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't painfully like entrepreneurship has a higher failure rate than marriage well what that means is that there that a lot of people try this right in various kinds of ways and then they have to find jobs so what I'm interested in now is like how do employers respond to somebody who applies for a job and who has entrepreneurial experience experience on their resume and there is some existing research that shows that if you send people resumés with you know two resumes one that has the entrepreneurial experience on it and the other one that doesn't the person who has the entrepreneurial experience is actually less likely to get a call back which is puzzling right so there's kind of a penalty and so there are various theories about that about well entrepreneurs are hard to manage they're hard to control and that to me feels like a very ad hoc POS hoc argument so we're trying to figure out what the real story is intuition right now is that there's two stages in a hiring process there's a screening stage where people are just kind of going through all the resumés and trying to figure out the ones they're going to pay more attention to and then there's a more deep evaluation what happens is at the screening stage you don't really pay attention to ones that don't fit into your mental model so if you're looking for a marketing manager you want somebody kind of has work experience as a marketing manager and if you see that they had their own startup doing marketing stuff you're like well you know and you're kind of mine kind of shuts that out and so but if you get to the evaluation stage maybe you have a more well-rounded assessment of what actually the strengths and weaknesses of an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are also creative they're energetic they are go-getters and so on so forth so you would think that employers would want those candidates as well so the soat is partially around thinking about how employers process things and then there's also going to be a set of implications for how you might think about that as an entrepreneur about how you want to portray your accomplish things absolutely what you put on that resume on LinkedIn might affect how people think about you for sure and I like that yesper used that analogy to marriage one of the things that comes up a lot on the podcast is how we frame things Michelle gelfin spend some time talking about how you frame negotiation how you frame entrepreneurship framing really affects the way that you yourself perceive what you're talking about but also how others you interact to so thank you for demonstrating that Jonathan let me come to you what are you studying or doing I'll talk about something that we're just we don't know the results we don't know if it's going to work and we we running the experiment now so one of the interests that I've developed is is is in face Toof face versus video interactions and and and we did a bunch of research on it that looked at sort of uh creative output and video versus face to face you do better Face to Face by the way just as the quickie just so you know but sort of that sort of gave rise to a whole set of other interest and one of the things that is different in video interaction is the psychological distance when you're talking to somebody on video there's some kind of sense of distance I have a gradon that was talking about working with one of our colleagues and he said I could never work with him if it was face to face he's too aggressive for me but online I can totally do it and we like let's test it so now we're actually running a study it takes quite a while but um we're running a study we're using an economic game where you can basically be aggressive towards somebody else by taking more of the pot and we're looking to see are there differences when people are playing this game face to face versus over video and then we also measure a series of things of sort of how they feel about each other afterwards I don't have the results yet that's the latest I think it's fascinating to think about how being virtual affects everything about how we feel about people what we're willing to say and do and I I think that research sounds really [Music] interesting we took a break from the academic conversation and looked to get questions from our audience hi I'm Felicia kamani I'm curious Professor Soul if you can comment on in social media we have seen so many people for right about confessions of wrongdoing in the canful culture really good question here and I'm going to say the one of the things that we haven't tested and I'm not sure how to test is where this idea of public confessions came from and I suspect that this came from the meu movement where we saw a lot of male leaders in particular proactively getting ahead of the curve and confessing before an accusation came forward and so I suspect that this might have been a kind of a diffusion process by which other corporate leaders decided and again with the racial justice issue to do this before discoverable information came forward and they were directly targeted so I in terms of you know thinking about cancel culture and so on I suspect that this is exactly a proactive a defensive mechanism prior to the possibility of being quote unquote canceled my name is s I'm from beia another Hot Topic that we have today is AI my question to panel is how do you see this AI impacting Humanity overall so I'll I'll start and I would love to hear from some of you I interviewed GPT I don't know if you heard that it was it was it was actually cool but scary at the same time so I typed in questions and then we did a a text to voice response and it was really fascinating to have it tell me that I one could keep my job which made me feel really good but also that for it to explain that it understands that there are ethical and information biases that it could have and that to me is something to think about now as a teacher I do see value in some of what it can provide it gives my students for example opportunities to practice uh you can type in generate questions about X and then they can practice answering those questions in a way that they couldn't prior so for me personally I'm still trying to figure it out but I see that there are advantages to learning but there are also some concerns yeah so I have a variety of reactions to these things so I would say first of all as a teacher you always worry about how it's going to make your life harder and uh because it's making grading a lot hard but I think that's probably a good thing cuz now we have to think more carefully about and and you know what we know is that there's always moral panics right about these things so when I was a kid it was all about calculators people would never be able to do math again and that might be true right actually but we are still around I mean to me what's interesting about these kinds of things like chat gbt is we worry about them supplanting us I guess but like I think what we have to remember is that everything that it's able to do is based on trying to recombine everything that's already existed and so that's a limited form of creativity it's a very important form of creativity and production certainly and so I can see places where that's going to matter a lot but I think there's also at the same time lots of room for us maybe free us up to do other things my name is Girish noal so follow-up question have you figured out how you are going to figure identify whether the essay is chat GPT essay versus a genuine essay this is a a really terrific question and I have one anecdote was a colleague in another at another University was concerned about students writing their essays for the final exam rather than giving them the question to answer they colleag had chat GPT answer it and then the students assignment was to critique what chat GPT had come up with by citing material in the class and so on so there are really nice and creative ways to lean into what chat GPT is doing and also I think that there are some nuances that we can pick up on even if we think we can Emily white huge fan of yours as you know um I listen to your podcast a lot and share it with with everyone so my question is as um as an educator the Stanford GSB what's your biggest communication challenge for me personally it's just getting my students attention Stanford MBA students and our MSX students and others are they're so amazing and they're so busy and they're doing so much it's just helping to give them space to to work on the things that we work on and it's it there's just so much going on so for me personally it's trying to create activities and experiences that are immersive enough to get that Focus so that the work can be done and that's not I'm not saying anything negative about them the work that they're doing is phenomenal and and I learned so much from my students it's just getting the the Mind share in the moment in the class to do that I think my biggest challenge when I first came to Stanford which was 10 years ago was to learn how to project comp competence in this environment so I grew up in Asia and as a Asian female I automatically I might the perception of me is that warm approachable but maybe less confident and I have to learn how to actually understand that queue and leverage that queue starting from wearing high heels to learning how to project my voice and eventually learning how to actually communicate that through my content as well I think that was my biggest challenge I will just add I think the biggest challenge right now with Communications is what the pandemic has done to all of us but especially some of our Learners and part of that I think is getting the attention but I think part of it's also that you know many people are suffering most people I will argue are suffering some of the after effects of the pandemic and being able to be empathetic to what people are going through and and understanding where we can push and where we shouldn't push [Music] it before we wrapped up our event I asked several of our panelists for closing advice that they had for anyone wishing to hone their leadership skills spend just a moment to share perhaps a bit of advice for our awesome leaders in the room maybe short-term advice about what to do while here on campus or maybe longer term advice in terms of what they're doing as their careers unfold why don't we start with sui so I have one advice since I study goal and motivation share your failure you talk a lot about our goal success but research has Recon research has shown that sharing go failure stories as a leader actually make you a more influential leader and it doesn't H the perception of your ability it only make you actually better connect feel free to share go failure first let me say thank you sui I want to talk more about that because that seems like perhaps some of the mechanism in the public confession and my advice actually comes from Matt so I've had the opportunity to teach with Matt and also to watch Matt teach and listen to his advice and one of the things that Matt always tells us is to know your audience so in your communication figure figure out how to learn who it is that you are about to address whether that is by reading about them on LinkedIn talking to somebody who has facilitated the engagement going early to the engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people so you have um an idea of where people are and what they're most interested in learning so that you can deliver so know your audience in your communication I guess what I would say is you know I think it's very important to have a sense of goals and a sense of purpose I don't think we should be so wetted to them that we are not open something that has been lost with new technologies so if you think about Google Maps right so now you go to a new city and you're like okay I want to go visit this Cathedral right and you get out your phone and says okay Walk This Way in again in the old days I'm sounding a lot like an old man but like you would like get out of map you try to read it and you like start walking and then suddenly you'd end up in a totally different place and that would be spectacular you would eventually make it to the cathedral or whatever but it's actually the place you ended up at my mistake that was much more powerful and I think we can get a little bit too obsessed with driving towards the destination and we have lots of tools for making that as efficient as possible and we don't want to lose sight of all the fact that the great things that come from being open to new discovery as a special treat we asked some of the audience members to share their answers to the questions I end every episode with okay my name is s milov so the question that I've got was what the best advice you have received when it comes to communicating with others and I don't know if that's the best advice but it's one of the most difficult ones for me so it's it's kind of a question which which is around think about the most important thing that you want the audience to remember or to understand after you communicate with them of course the communicated admire I have to mention Matt because he's so smooth as silk and Flawless with no fillers but recently I saw the presentation of Brian chesy CEO of Airbnb I found him to be very riveting very energetic and he was able to condiment a lot of his um accounts with storytelling so I found it very effective as a communicator hello I'm stania and the three ingredients first one for a successful communication would be knowing the your audience because this is a very important thing to know in tailoring your message second structure putting structure will help your audience follow your message and the third one will be Clarity like avoiding misunderstandings misinterpretations well there you have it our first ever in-person live podcast episode a big thank you to all of the people in the audience who participated and to my guests yesper senson Sarah Su sui Hong and Jonathan Laval I hope you took away some interesting insights and some valuable lessons to help you be a better leader and a better communicator think fast talks smart the podcast is a production of Stamford Graduate School of Business this episode was produced by Podium podcast company Jenny Luna and me Matt Abrahams 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