“I try to make work not suck,” renowned organisation psychologist Adam Grant explains when people ask him what it is exactly that he does.
Speaking in front of more than 2000 people at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre last week, the international best-selling author shared his tips for unlocking hidden potential and transforming workplace culture, and ultimately to help make work “not suck” for ourselves and others.
Women’s Agenda was in the audience. Below are seven gems Grant imparted last Thursday about giving and taking feedback as well as dealing with imposter syndrom, taken from his latest book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Grant’s appearance was made possible by The Growth Faculty.
Give yourself a ‘Second Score‘
Grant outlined Shelia Heen’s theory of the second score. If you’re given a D on a test, give yourself an A+ for how you respond to the D. If you’re given a bad yearly performance assessment, give yourself an excellent score for how you decide to take on that feedback and improve on your skills.
At the end of the day, it’s all about how you react to what you’re given. Decide what to do with the feedback you’re given. Make it a good choice.
Turn critics into coaches
Ask for advice, not feedback, Grant said.
Advice is specific and actionable but feedback can be too vague. The higher up the leadership ladder you climb, the more lies people will tell you. As managers, people are less likely to tell you the truth, Grant said.
Beware that we live in a culture that follows and worships the HIPPO mentality: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
And in reverse if you need a tip on how to give advice, Grant says don’t be polite, be kind.
What’s the difference?
“Being polite is taking care of the emotional wellbeing of that person today,” he said. “Being kind is taking care of the emotional wellbeing of that person tomorrow. Honesty is the greatest sign of loyalty.”
Show that you can handle the truth
If you want honest feedback about how to be a better leader, you need your employees to be honest with you.
How? By criticising yourself out loud. That way, you are claiming this behaviour as something you can do yourself, to yourself. You can demonstrate to your employees that you can take criticism, because you can criticise yourself.
Remember to take your job seriously, but not yourself, Grant said.
Although from a Women’s Agenda perspective, we couldn’t help but be aware that this advice is not so salient for us as women. Women can be penalised for criticise ourselves because it often diminishes our perceived competency.
Grant suggested that leaders read aloud people’s negative comments on them. “Model that level of openness,” he said. “Know what you’re bad at, so you can show your employees that you have a high level of self awareness, and that you have humility to admit that you are flawed out loud.”
Finding diamonds in the rough
There’s a unique skill to being able to find people who don’t necessarily appear to fit the position at first.
Grant wants us to ask: Do they have skills that actually fit the job? He told audiences that the worst person he ever interviewed was with a man who could not make eye contact throughout the entire 45 minute interview. But the job was a phone salesperson – he didn’t need to be good at eye contact.
Find people with hidden potential, he advised. Distinguish your team as either Givers or Takers
Givers vs Takers
To find the above-mentioned diamonds, Grant suggests identifying people by distinguishing them as givers or takers. Givers are those who are willing to do things not in their job description. They volunteer, they share knowledge, they give advice. (In a corporate environment, they’re usually the women.)
Takers are people who do none of these things. Their negative presence has a detrimental consequence on the company’s culture. Their impact is worse than anything else because takers spread paranoia, and it spreads around the company. It takes just one person, Grant warned.
Weed out the bad apples, he said. The ‘takers’ destroy the work culture. But how to do this? Grant suggests we think about a behaviour or trait you absolutely despise.
For example, people who take credit for other peoples’ work, hoard knowledge, and resist change. It’s behaviour you are most concerned about growing within your company. And weed it out.
Build a culture of Givers
You want to have a workforce filled with proactive Givers. But how do we get people to ask for help? Grant suggests playing a game with them called the reciprocity ring.
It’s basically crowd-sourcing knowledge. You gather a handful of disparate individuals and everyone has a turn asking for something they want. Everyone else in the group wrangles their connections to help that person get what they want. That way, Takers can start giving. And Givers can start asking for what they want.
Make the Unfamiliar Familiar
During this segment of his talk, Grant asked the audience to think of a song in their heads, then turn to the person next to us, and clap that song. Few people in the crowd actually guessed correctly their partner’s song.
He quoted a statistic that revealed that in one study, over 50 per cent of participants in the game believed that they would successfully guess their partner’s song. The reality was that only 2.5 per cent guessed it correctly.
So, why are we so overconfident?
“This game is a perfect metaphor for bringing your vision to others,” Grant said. “Overcommunication is better than undercommunication, so overcommunicate your vision.”
The leadership skill here is to repeat, a million times if need be. Like a politician.
Normalise Failure
Grant doesn’t like the tech culture idea that ‘celebrates failure’. He believes that normalising failure is better.
“Make it part of everyday routine,” he said. “That way, you will keep experimenting, innovating, being open.”
He showed us a video of himself in the early stages of his diving life. He was 14 and wasn’t tall enough for the basketball team. His athletic dreams were shattered. He was called Frankenstein because he walked like him, and he lacked grace. His diving coach said none of that mattered – as long as he wanted to be a better diver, he would make that happen.
But Grant was debilitated by his perfectionism. “The thing is, there is no such thing as perfect,” he eventually realised. “There’s just excellent. So you need to build the confidence to do what you need to do just by doing it, by taking the leap.”
Don’t wait for confidence to catch up to you. Don’t judge yourself by your first try at something. If something is initially hard for you, you’ll eventually learn it better.
Grant said there are two types of scores you should give yourself: “There’s an aspirational score, and an acceptable score – sometimes, just settle for an acceptable score. It’s knowing when you reach for which.”
Turn Imposter Syndrome into fuel.
Grant admits he has never entirely let go of his Imposter Syndrome. “Even backstage before the show, I was thinking ‘How have all these people decided to come to see me, talk?’” he said.
According to Grant, the more often we have doubts, the more often we feel like an imposter, the better we perform.
Of course, this probably doesn’t apply to women. Most female leaders believe they have it, but still not enough women are being materially rewarded for it.