Below, Caroline Webb shares five key insights from her new book, Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges.
Caroline is an executive coach and economist who transforms insights from behavioral science into practical advice for managers. She is a Senior Advisor on leadership to McKinsey & Company, where she was previously a Partner.
What’s the Big Idea?
Behavioral science can make us better leaders by helping us work with, rather than against, the way our brains naturally operate. With a better understanding of how people think and respond to challenges, we can become more thoughtful, adaptable, and effective at work.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Caroline herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. 360 Degree Vision.
Leaders often need to work quite hard to find out what’s really going on. Studies tell us that people prefer not to let their boss know what they’re finding difficult or what’s going badly, unless the boss makes it very clear that they really want to know and want to help fix it.
On top of that, confirmation bias means your brain naturally steers your attention toward information that confirms what you already assume to be true. As a result, it’s easy for you to miss the real story, especially in situations that are complex and unfamiliar.
So when you’re digging into an important issue, try to develop 360 Degree Vision. This habit depends on seeing in four different ways to get a full picture of what’s going on:
- See Deeper: Ask questions that dig below the surface of what people are saying, with real curiosity and openness. Say, “Tell me more about that,” or ask, “If you had a concern, what would it be?”
- See Differently: Test your early thinking with three people you can count on to challenge you from different angles. Ask them, “What am I missing?” AI can be an ear, too.
- See Across: Compare what you’re seeing with what has happened in other settings. Consider what has happened in the past, or elsewhere, so you know whether a result is unusual or normal for an organization like yours.
- See the System: Step back and map how all your data points interconnect. Then ask, “What causes what?” It helps you see where the biggest drivers are, and therefore where the biggest solutions might lie.
Michael Roberts, the Chief Marketing Officer at MetLife, has learned to do this every time he faces a new challenge. When he first stepped into his role, he had assumed the top priority would be a big brand refresh. But he held back, and did every step of the 360 Degree Vision process to better understand the issues he was inheriting. He asked a ton of questions and mapped how the pieces connected. His open-mindedness and curiosity led his team to give him a plaque that read “Chief Question Officer,” which he still keeps proudly on his desk.
A wider perspective showed him that his real priority wasn’t branding at all, but investing in his new team’s technical capability. Sure enough, once he did that, it turned around the performance of his marketing function—their sales impact rose tenfold in a few years. Michael had made sure he was solving the right problem before spending time solving the wrong one.
2. The ACORN model for better decisions.
Instincts are worth something, but the research is clear that when we rely on gut feel alone, we tend to make worse decisions. We’re all subject to cognitive biases we’re not aware of. Recency bias makes us back an investment just because we happened to read about something similar last week. Homophily means we hire someone simply because they remind us of ourselves. Default bias means we’ll often default to whatever proposal is in front of us, without checking alternatives.
The good news is you don’t have to memorize a long list of cognitive biases. Studies show that you can offset a lot of them with one decent, structured decision-making approach. I call it ACORN, after its five steps:
- A: Aim. Get clear on what you’re trying to achieve.
- C: Criteria. List the qualities the ideal choice would have.
- O: Options. Lay them out, and make sure you have more than one on the table.
- R: Ratings. Score each option against your criteria.
- N: Next steps. What do your ratings tell you? Is there a clear winner? If not, your next move might not be the decision itself. It might be gathering more information, or reducing the risk you’ve spotted in an otherwise strong option.
Use all five steps, and you’ll find your decisions get steadily better and stronger over time.
3. The CASE for Change.
It’s hard to get other people to change the way they work. In general, that’s not because they don’t want to improve, but because asking someone to change a well-established habit requires more mental energy from their brain than simply running on autopilot. However, if you make that extra mental effort feel worth it, you’re much more likely to make change stick at a deep neurological level. The CASE model for Change is a way of remembering how to do that:
- C: Clear. The brain’s reward system engages when you make progress toward a clear goal. But studies show that what’s clear in your own head often isn’t clear to others. So spell out the from-to shift you’re hoping for—from doing things this way, to doing things that way—so everyone has clarity on what you’re all aiming for.
- A: Appealing. You’ve got to make it feel good to try something new. The most obvious way to do that is to recognize and appreciate people whenever they do what you’re asking. (And check that your formal incentive structure isn’t still rewarding the old way of behaving.)
- S: Social. Social connection is such a powerful way of engaging the brain’s reward system that your change is more likely to stick if you create a sense of shared endeavor around it.
- E: Easy. People’s brains usually pick the easiest path to save energy. You need to remove any friction that will get in the way of what you want.
Astro Teller runs X, Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory,” and he’s spent years getting brilliant colleagues to redefine what success means: from “being right all the time” to “learning fast from failure.” He has made that shift clear through sharing lots of stories and examples. He’s made it appealing by baking it into performance reviews, so people are recognized for shutting down projects that aren’t working. He made it social by celebrating those shutdown decisions in public. And he is working to make it easier by giving people more ongoing feedback, so they always know where they stand. As Astro likes to say, culture is always a work in progress, and using the CASE model makes that progress a lot more likely.
4. Manageable and meaningful.
We’re all less smart when we’re stressed. When someone’s brain senses a threat, it launches a defensive stress response that rebalances brain activity—away from careful thought, and toward fast, jumpy reactions.
You probably know that part already. What you might not know is what the brain treats as stressful. It goes on the defensive when it predicts that three things are about to combine: a situation that’s demanding, uncontrollable, and unpleasant. A demanding situation on its own usually isn’t stressful, as long as it still feels under control, or there’s something worthwhile in it.
That gives you a real opening to be useful as a manager, because you can help colleagues think a lot more clearly by making the situation feel less uncontrollable and less unpleasant. Or, as I like to call it: making the challenge feel a little more manageable and perhaps even meaningful.
“What you might not know is what the brain treats as stressful.”
“Manageable” means helping them focus on what they know and what they can choose to do, even if a lot remains uncertain. That might include helping them see a path forward, or at least a first step they can take. It might mean helping them bottom out a plan for the worst-case scenario, to take the sting out of it.
And then “meaningful” means helping them find something worthwhile in the middle of the mess. Maybe that’s by reminding them who will be helped by their work, or what they might end up learning from it, or helping them feel that you’re all pulling together to tackle the issue.
None of this is about pretending everything’s wonderful when it isn’t. It’s about lowering the sense of threat in someone’s brain, to help them move out of defensive mode so they can think more clearly and creatively about what they should do next to solve the problem. It’s a precious skill to have when leading people through the unpredictable twists of modern working life.
5. The ABC routine.
There’s a mountain of evidence on how to calm yourself in a tense or annoying moment. Labeling what you feel, getting some distance, mindfulness—they all help. But the irony is that when you’re in the thick of it and feel yourself tightening up, that’s precisely when it’s hardest to think clearly and remember what you’re supposed to do.
So I’ve distilled it all into one reliable routine, simple enough to reach for in the heat of the moment. I call it ABC: Awareness, Breathing, Centering. Every step is backed by studies showing it lowers the state of alert in your brain:
- Awareness. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” and get really specific in your answer. “I’m feeling X because of Y.” The more specifically you can label what’s going on, the bigger the steadying effect.
- Breathing. Take the deepest breath you can, by pushing your belly out as far as it will go. If you sit up straight, I can vouch that nobody will see you doing it. Do it a couple of times if you can.
- Centering. Reconnect your mind to the most central issue by asking yourself, “What matters most right now?”
Do those three things, and you’ll usually find you’re better able to see a smart way forward. The quicker you notice you’re off balance, the quicker you can launch your ABC routine, so it helps to tune into the mental or physical pattern that tells you that your stress hormones are rising. The early warning sign for one CEO I work with is that she has a sense that she’s looking down at a vortex. Another notices his chest tightening, and an inner voice that says, “Why, why, why!” As soon as they notice these tells, they take a beat and do the ABC routine.
Once you’ve got the hang of ABC, you can teach it to anyone on your team who needs a steadier moment.
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