Transcript for "Leadership, the Brain, and Managing Lasting Change - An Interview with Dr. Robert Eichinger"
What makes a leader great? Is it a big personality with a compelling vision? Or is it the combination of intelligence and integrity? Our guest for this episode of 12 Geniuses is Dr. Robert Eichinger. For half a century he has studied and researched the competencies of leaders – the good ones and the bad ones.
He has authored more than 100 articles and books on leadership, while coaching thousands of leaders from first-time managers to Fortune 500 CEOs.
In the first part of our conversation we talk about leadership myths, how leadership has evolved over the last fifty years, why the brain resists change, and the competencies leaders need to master in order to become great. The second part of the interview focuses on leadership in a world of artificial intelligence. We will also discuss the importance of change readiness, learning agility, and whether or not new technologies will enable leaders to be more effective.
Don MacPherson:
If you have ever wondered what separates top performers from everyone else, you probably discovered it is just a couple differentiators that determine wild success from average results. My name is Don MacPherson, and for two decades, I've been working with executives to help them optimize performance at the individual, team and organization levels. Now I interview exceptional performers in athletics, music, entertainment, and business, so we can all learn from them. Welcome to 12 Geniuses.
What makes a leader great? Is it a big personality with a compelling vision or is it the combination of intelligence and integrity? Our guest for this episode of 12 Geniuses is Dr. Robert Eichinger. For half a century, he has studied and researched competencies of leaders, the good ones and the bad ones. He's authored more than 100 articles and books on leadership while coaching thousands of people from first-time managers to Fortune 500 CEOs.
Dr. Eichinger, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Thank you.
Don MacPherson
You've been at this leadership thing for about 50 years. Can you describe your background and how you became interested in the topic of leadership?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, it was by mistake. When I was, I think, a sophomore in college, I needed a course on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And by the time I got to the registration office, the only course remaining was on personnel psychology, and being a farm boy from Minnesota, I thought it was misspelled. I thought it was personal psychology. I had never heard of the term personnel. So, I took a psychology course and literally, that's what got me to where I am today.
Don MacPherson
And when you think about the biggest changes over your career that have altered what it takes to be an effective leader, what are a couple of things that come to mind?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, I think, more recently, we're getting into how the brain works and there's a sort of a field called NeuroLeadership. And for my 50 years, I've been treating the outside of the body as a coach and a mentor and a therapist. Now that we know how the brain works and we're beginning to know how the brain works and how that relates to leadership behavior, my insight into people, I think, has gotten deeper, and my coaching better because now I'm coaching the whole person. So, that's probably been the biggest change.
Don MacPherson
It had to happen at the end of your career, right?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Yes. It was a little late. Yeah, I think I started really studying this in 2009. So, I've sort of dedicated all my extra time to the study of NeuroLeadership for the past decade. I wish that had come earlier. It would've changed my life.
Don MacPherson
But there weren't very many people who were studying this particular topic, even before you started to, right?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Not in the leadership area. I mean, they've been studying the brain, of course, for centuries, but in my education, the brain was never mentioned. And I've talked to a lot of my colleagues, and in their academic preparation, there was no course on brain. But recently, the University of Minnesota, for instance, has a brain minor, behavioral brain minor, and a lot of the colleagues that I speak to now, who are younger, are beginning to take that into account in their training. So, the brain is now seeping into I-O psychology.
Don MacPherson
And what have you learned about the brain that's been transformational for you?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, the interesting thing is neuroplasticity that is, I think a decade ago, the meme was that the brain is what it is, and it is what it is, and you can't do anything to change it. Now we know that that's completely incorrect, that it's very plastic and can change based on environmental or toxic reasons. But now it can change because of a technology called mindfulness, that is you can gain control over a lot of what your brain does by going through brain exercises. So, that's new. The second thing is an understanding of the automatic brain. It's called automaticity. Because of how the body works, most of the body is operated by the brain outside of your awareness. So, a lot of what your body does every day is automatic, breathing, and blood circulation, and hormone flow, and digestion, and all that stuff you don't think about. You don't direct that activity.
So, we're beginning to get a better understanding of why it's said that people resist change. And it turns out that part of your brain resists change. Most people in full awareness don't reject change, but it turns out that your automatic brain does.
Don MacPherson
And that automatic brain is very efficient, right?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
It has to be efficient. It has limited energy to work on. And if the body has a choice to operate itself efficiently, or think great thoughts, it will operate itself efficiently. So, it has about 25 watts of power to work with. 2% of the size of the body is the brain, but it takes up 20% of the energy. And so, it has to operate efficiency. And then, it has these automatic habitual routines that it does. Understanding those routines helps you a lot in leadership behavior and understanding why people do what they do. As we're watching our political situation here in the United States, there's something called a confirmation bias, and the brain actually resists taking in counter information to your belief system as a survival mechanism because it sees counter information as a threat. The majority of the population of the United States now has one of two views.
It will not take in information on the opposing view. And therefore, from a brain standpoint, at least, there is no way out of the divisiveness that we're seeing.
Don MacPherson
And you're saying that's because it's easier, right? It's easier to have this confirmation biased than actually go and research the information and use another part of your brain?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
If you got up each day and said, “This is a new day, I'm going to take in information as information. I'm not going to prejudge the information coming in, and I'm going to seek out diversity of information, because at the end of each day, I want to go to sleep knowing that I've made the best choices and I have the best beliefs and values that I can,” that is not done. So, it turns out that innovation, and change, and creativity takes up more energy than routine. So, people pretty much are nest builders and they operate inside the box. And the brain, the automatic brain, and just for cutesy, I call it Otto, O-T-T-O. So, Otto, who's in everybody's head, prefers to stick with what it thinks, and what it knows, and what it's decided.
And so that it doesn't have to take up three additional watts of information, it would prefer not to rethink through attitudes, biases, beliefs, opinions.
Don MacPherson
I've heard you refer to YOU 1 and YOU 2 as different parts of your brain. Can you talk a little bit about what the distinction of those are? I think you've mentioned a little bit about it already, but I want to hear you talk about the way that those different parts of your brain work.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Keeping in mind that, if you did an autopsy, there's not a YOU 1 and a YOU 2 brain.
Don MacPherson
Correct.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
So, this is just a teaching metaphor. But the YOU 1 brain is the brain that runs your body. It's automatic. It runs the nine organs that you have. So, in the same sense that you don't direct your kidney each morning to do what it is you want it to do that day, the kidney, and the liver, and the spleen, and the appendix, and the digestive system pretty much do what it does each day automatically in response to environmental stimuli and what you happen to be doing. It also is the emotional brain. So, it's the limbic system and the amygdala. And for the most part, it has first call on the brain's resources.
So, whoever designed the brain system decided that the fight or flight response or the threat management system has first call over the other part of the brain, the YOU 2 brain, which is the thinking part of the brain and the reflectivity part of the brain. That brain is slower. And Dan Kahneman wrote a great book called Thinking, Fast and Slow about that.
And the thinking brain is a wonderful thing, but it's slow. And the YOU 1 is charged with keeping you out of harm. And everybody understands the physical nature of that. That is, before you even know if a stick is a snake or not out in the woods, YOU 1 will jump out of the way and back up before YOU 2 has even looked at it to consider what it is.
Don MacPherson
And you can physically feel this, right?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Oh, you can feel it. It operates about 0.5 seconds faster than YOU 2. And it has to do that, because if you have to get out of the way of a car that's blown a tire and it's heading towards you on a sidewalk, you don't have time to calculate the distances and decide whether or not that car's going to hit you or not. Your YOU 1 gets you out of the way.
Now, unfortunately, the threat mechanism, or the fight or flight, also relates to work behavior in people. So, that whole system works where a person is in your environment. And if YOU 2 believes that that person is a threat to you in any way, it will act like it acts getting out of the way of a snake.
Don MacPherson
We've had this conversation a number of times, and I've heard you speak a number of times as well. And as I've started to process YOU 1, and YOU 2, one of the things that has seemed to resonate for me is that YOU 1 does keep you alive and YOU 2 allows you to flourish. Is that a fair assessment?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
That's correct assessments. Well, and remember, there's YOU 3, which is the muscle, the brain muscle you build up when you do mindfulness practices. And YOU 3 manages the balance between YOU 1 and YOU 2. YOU 1 is very helpful. As you say, it keeps us alive, keeps the blood doing what it's supposed to do, and the hormones doing what they're supposed to do without any intercession from you. But on the other hand, it makes us do dumb stuff. And we have memes that we say count to 10 before you… And the end of that sentence is before you do something you're later going to regret.
Well, that means that YOU 1 decided on an action before it consulted YOU 2. So, hitting your boss in a meeting is not a good idea, but anger management would probably allow YOU 1 to do that and then you would regret that later as you're on the unemployment line. So, YOU 1 does all sorts of things. People say, “Why did you do that?” And I'll say, “Why I lost my mind.” Well, what that means is YOU 2 wasn't functioning.
So, YOU 3 is in charge of detecting what YOU 1 is doing. And you have about a half a second to prevent YOU 1 from taking an automatic action. And during that half second, YOU 3 has to engage YOU 2 to say, “Okay, here's the situation. Here's the stimulus. Here's what's happening. YOU 1 has suggested action A, what do you think about that?” And YOU 2 would say, “Well, that certainly would work, but action B and action C would get me 80% of the impact, but have no negative consequences. So, I would suggest you talk to YOU 1 and see if you could have Otto move over to action B or action C.” Now, all of that has to happen in half a second, which it can. But that's basically getting control of the negative downstream consequences of what YOU 1 can do. And in leadership, lots of leaders have anger management issues.
They have impatience issues. They are dismissive. They're narcissistic. They do all sorts of things that comes out of YOU 1. When we teach executive mindfulness, what we're trying to do is to get executives to be able to observe and monitor and stop, temporarily, what their YOU 1 wants to do in this situation, in this meeting, or in this speech with shareholders, and consider whether there are better paths. And to the extent that you can do that, we think that your performance would greatly increase.
Don MacPherson
I want to talk about the brain and change and how you get leaders to change their behaviors. But before we do that, I want to talk about your days at Lominger, a firm that you founded, and the feedback that you used to gather on leaders. You would gather tens of thousands of data points on leaders across the world. And you looked at 67 different competencies. What are the competencies that you found that best identified an effective leader?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, we found that even though that's the popular thing or the popular way to think about that, what we found is that leaders lead in different ways. There is no such thing as a pattern of a leader, and that there are a number of different combinations of competencies that can be successful. And that is, to some extent, dictated by the industry you're in and the phase. Are you a startup or are you a fix-it or are you a maintenance situation? There's probably no universal pattern of leader, even though that's the popular way to think about this. On the other hand, what we found is that people get promoted for cognitive skills and they fail for people skills or EQ.
For decades, B schools, business schools taught cognitive skills and did not teach people skills in that sense. So, there's a whole field called derailment research, and what it shows is about 90% of supervisors, managers, directors, leaders, if they fail, they fail because of a lack of people orchestration skills, or EQ. And that's pretty universal over the 30 years we've been looking at that data.
Don MacPherson
So, the failure is not necessarily competence. Can it be summed up as character or lack of people skills, or lack of compassion, lack of empathy?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Not character. It would be more likely style. What happens, of course, is we promote cognitively strong people. And what the research shows is that it's very difficult to be good at both. So, this might be a capacity issue in the brain. So, in your upbringing and in your education, you decide whether you're going to be cognitively strong or people strong. People end up being sort of aggressive extroverts with cognitive skills or compassionate people with people skills.
And it's very rare to get a high-level leader who's got both of those. So, what we find is that the people who get to the executive suite are generally cognitively strong, technically strong, and business knowledge strong, and people orchestration weak. One of the things they have to manage is change management. You cannot manage change cognitively. It has to be managed from an EQ standpoint. Most of the coaching that I've done over my 50 years has been coaching C-suite officers in people skills. I do not remember a single client where I was coaching on lack of cognitive skills. People get promoted based on smarts and fail based on people skills.
Don MacPherson
You mentioned change management, and that's a perfect stopping point for this segment because we are going to talk about change after the break here. Our guest is leadership guru, Dr. Robert Eichinger. When we come back from the short break, we are going to talk about the future of leadership, your brain and change, and how to more effectively use your YOU 2 decision-making.
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We are back with Dr. Robert Eichinger. Before the break, we were discussing YOU 1, your more impulsive decision-making brain, and YOU 2, the executive part of your brain. And I've heard you talk about nicotine addiction smokers, and you've cited a statistic that doctors who say, “If you don't stop smoking, you're going to die,” 40% of those people do not stop smoking. Why do we find change so difficult, even when our life is on the line?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, I think it goes back, again, to the YOU 1 brain. It is a nest builder, it's a comfort zone, kind of a phenomena. It likes to stay with what it has. In the case of addiction, there's an additional chemical issue that is dopamine flows to your striatum, which is your reward center, and tends to support the behaviors that brings in dopamine. And in 2009, when I really got serious about neuroscience and NeuroLeadership, Dave Ulrich is the one who came up with that statistic.
And I attended a conference where he made that statement. I, more recently, looked at the data and it's the same, that is 50% of people who pay for medical advice do not take the prescriptions that are prescribed. I just saw another study on sleep apnea, which you know can kill you. It's a very serious disease. And only 50% use the CPAP machinery that fixes sleep apnea. And sleep apnea can kill you overnight. And the same is true about other kinds of things we get addicted to. So, once the brain has decided that there is a way to get this wonderful chemical, dopamine, be it drugs, or gambling, or shopping, or whatever it happens to be, alcohol, it is extremely difficult to stop that.
I've been fascinated since 2009 on the issue of, why do people not follow the advice and council of experts, even in the case of paying for that expertise? It is said that people resist change. And I think you have to be a little bit more specific, that is YOU 1 resists change. YOU 2 doesn't exactly resist change. And if I look at executives in change management, they are talking to YOU 2. It is a cognitive narrative. They say, “Oh, this is going to be great. We are going to make more money and more margins, and we're gonna have markets around the world, and this is going to be fun. And this is why this merger or acquisition is great, or this change that we're anticipating.” Well, all of that is YOU 2 talk. It's narrative.
That is not where change is resisted. Change is resisted at the emotional point. I've been through many of these, all hands meetings, and mergers and acquisitions, and always somebody has the courage to get up in the audience to say, “All of this sounds interesting, will I have a job tomorrow?”
Don MacPherson
So, the executive is speaking from a YOU 2 brain and seeing the possibilities, but the audience is listening and their YOU 1 brain…
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Is listening for a threat.
Don MacPherson
Is listening for the threat. How does this affect me? Am I going to have a job? Am I going to be replaced?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Right. Are my friends going to be here? I've watched this for 50 years, and inevitably, somebody in those, kind of all hands meetings, gets up and asks a question like that, and say, “Gee, this is great that we're going to dominate the world in AI chips. Am I going to be employed Monday or do I need to get my resume ready?”
Don MacPherson
And before the rollout of that message or that all-hands meeting, should somebody in the executive meeting be putting on the shoes of, or the hat of an employee, and saying, “How are those folks going to react?”
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, and not only employee, but that's how human brains function. If you're managing a change like that, you need to, first of all, do YOU 1 narrative.
Don MacPherson
Right.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Say, Welcome to the meeting. We're all sort of both excited and scared. And let's talk about the scared part first. And here's the three things to be scared about. Am I going to be employed?” And you have to say, you have to be very careful about leadership trust. So, I've seen many people get up and say, “We love everybody. And we wouldn't have acquired this company unless these were good people.” And then three weeks later, there's a 10,000-person layoff. No, you can't do that.
Don MacPherson
Yeah. A couple of years ago, as you know, a company that I started with a couple of other guys was bought, and we announced it to the employees, and we talked about all of the benefits. Well, what this is going to mean to them, that there's going to be global opportunity, that we're going to expand, et cetera, and nobody wanted to hear that. They talked about exactly what you discussed, which is, am I going to have a job? This is going to be a big change. I don't know these leaders. Are they going to have my best interest?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Do I get to work here or do I have to drive further? Are we going to be located in a different place?
Don MacPherson
Yeah, that's right.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
So, ideal leadership of change management has to do with addressing YOU 1 first with truth, and say, “Well, as a matter of fact, synergy is one of the reasons we're doing this. And we expect a 20% reduction in a head count. And we're going to first try attrition and see if this is going to cause people not to want to work here. Then we're going to offer voluntary packages and see how far that gets us. And then if there's any left that we have to do, then we're going to do it by merit as best subjective judgment can do. But for 80% of you, this is going to be continued employment and greater opportunity.” So, leaders tend not because they're not good at EQ in general.
They tend not to think about the YOU 1 scare, that M&A, or a big change, or we're switching IT platforms on everybody, or we're changing locations, we're moving to another city, or whatever it is.
Don MacPherson
Let's talk about individual change. What are the best ways that we can change ourselves, or how does that change have to occur? What are the conditions that need to be there?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, on a one-to-one basis, that's where some of the techniques of mindfulness come in, that is you have to know that Otto is designed to resist change. There's also another thing that happens out of YOU 1 that's called ANTs, which is Automatic Negative Thinking. But YOU 1 tells us not to try and juggle in public because we're going to make a butthead out of ourselves.
They tell us not to stand up in the meeting and declare that you're an opponent to this idea. They say, you don't try to start a new business because you’ll most likely fail. The brain has what's called a negativity bias, and it's a four to one ratio of negative to positive. So, your YOU 1 brain tries to prevent you from going into the woods, in the first place, because the YOU 1 brain knows that there are snakes in the woods, so it would rather not deal with that. So, if it can convince you not to go down this path by yourself, then it doesn't have to worry about snakes. The YOU 1 brain is resistant to change, not for the sake of change or not changing, it's just much more convenient and electrically efficient to keep in my patterns, keep my habits, and keep out of danger.
And the number one fear that human beings have in surveys is being evaluated by others in a public speaking format. That's even bigger scare than death. So, YOU 1 does not want to put you in a position of being evaluated by your bosses or peers. Therefore, you do not state in meetings what you really think. You do not take initiative without consensus. There's many things you don't do that you're capable of doing. You're not as creative as you actually can be because creativity is a risk in a work group. So, the Otto, who's in everybody's brain, is the source of most of what we think of as resistance to change. And I can help you as an outside coach to decrease the resistance of change, or you, yourself, can decide, with a growth mindset and mindfulness, that you're not going to allow YOU 1 to prevent you from flourishing, as you said before.
Flourishing is having a growth mindset and a, what we call the beginner's brain, or the Buddha brain that is being open and non-judgmental about opportunities and incoming information. All of us probably have make up a number, a third more potential than we're actually doing, because we're allowing the YOU 1 brain, or the Otto brain, to restrict doing new things, doing things differently, and considering opinions different than ours.
Don MacPherson
One of the things that we've talked about in the past in order to enable change is this, the self-awareness, and what are some of the techniques that you've seen used among leaders and organizations to build that self-awareness?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, for 30 years in Lominger, as you know, we've been using the 360 format to get information on the 67 competencies. So, it's the same process. Only now, you're getting feedback on how your brain operates. And you can have other people comment on your behavior in the same way if they have a checklist of verbal and nonverbal and action behaviors you take that are indicative of what the YOU 1 brain is doing. You can get feedback on that from team members. Or you can engage in executive mindfulness, which means that you become more sensitive to what your YOU 1 brain is doing. And you have that half second opportunity to adjust, let it go through, stop it, delay it, and let your supercomputer, your prefrontal cortex, think through five better ways to do this, and pick better options, make better choices, make better decisions with the superior part of your brain.
And all that has to do with… You have to be kind to Otto. You don't want to make Otto mad. So, the internal dialogue is sort of peculiar because you have… When Otto decides it needs to do something in a hurry, you have to have an internal dialogue. You literally talk to Otto, and you say, “Ah, Otto, you've been asleep for a while, what's the issue?” “This boss who's in the room is going to call you out in the meeting and is going to embarrass you, and it's probably going to be bad for your career.” I say, “Oh, very interesting. Where did you get that from?” “Well, he did it in the last meeting to somebody else and it's sort of our turn.” I say, “Okay, was the information correct or incorrect?” “Well, it was sort of okay. But I mean, he delivered it in a very mean way.”
“I see. And did that person get fired that day?” “Well, no, they're here in the meeting.” “Oh, okay. So, if this occurs, if the boss takes me on today and says something negative about my performance, although I could get fired, the most likely statistical event is that I'm not, right? Okay. So, it's going to feel uncomfortable and I'm going to get embarrassed. I have to be careful about what I say after he shoots at me. So, what we're going to do Otto is we're going to wait, thanks for the alert. I'm going to sort of do deep breathing and I'm going to relax. If, in fact, this event occurs, I'm going to be reflective and I'm going to not respond in any defensive way. And I'm going to thank him or her for the information that's accurate. And if it's appropriate, I might point out a point or two that's not completely accurate and try and diffuse it that way. Is that okay with you, Otto?” “Okay, good.” Now, all of that, of course, is a half a second.
Don MacPherson
That's incredible self-awareness though.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
That's how it has to work.
Don MacPherson
And you're doing role playing, right? Essentially with yourself.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Right.
Don MacPherson
That's remarkable.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
And YOU 1 is not statistical. It's not normative like YOU 2 is. So, YOU 1 takes each event, each thread event as a unique event and does not do math. Doesn't do Bayesian probability analysis.
Don MacPherson
You had talked about doing 360-degree feedback, and I know you've done this with hundreds of leaders or worked with them to-
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Thousands.
Don MacPherson
Thousands of leaders, okay, and worked with them to analyze their results. When somebody evaluates themselves highly, but their peers and their direct reports evaluate themselves as lowly, what percentage of those people dismiss the results?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
The other way to talk about that is we get about 25% penetration of delivering feedback to executives of a negative nature.
Don MacPherson
What does that mean?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
About 25% of people accept the feedback and do something.
Don MacPherson
Okay. So, it's really small.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Really small.
Don MacPherson
Regardless of what the feedback is?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
No, a negative.
Don MacPherson
Oh, if it's negative feedback. Okay. So, one in four who are receiving…
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Critical feedback.
Don MacPherson
Critical feedback, accept it. Okay. So, let's talk about those folks, those three out of four who do not accept it, what do you do?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
We've collected a list of 28 reasons why the data's not correct. And this is very stable.
Don MacPherson
So, it's your fault?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Very stable.
Don MacPherson
it's Bob's fault.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, no, no. on this list are things like, people are jealous of my success.
Don MacPherson
Okay. So, they rationalize it.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
My boss doesn't like me.
Don MacPherson
But it says here all of your peers don't either, and your direct reports.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
I'm not really like this, but my boss asked me to act this way. I wasn't like this in my last job. So, there are 28 of those things. When we get into a situation where somebody has feedback that could be career threatening, then I give them an opportunity. I say, “Before we discuss this, here's a checklist for you. I'd like to read this over so that we don't… because we've only got two hours. Go through the checklist and check three to five of these 28 reasons why the data isn't right so that we can move on.” And it's a softening device because they immediately understand that we're talking about being defensive and not being open and being judgmental of others.
We also talk about… We go a different direction and say, what is your legacy? What's on your tombstone? Is your picture going to be in the Hall of Flame or the Hall of Fame? So, what do you want to be seen as? How do you want people to talk about you? And I'm an expert at behavior change, so I can help you do this. But on the other hand, I'm very busy and independently wealthy, so I'm not going to waste your time. If you're not interested in being better, then why don't we just shut this down? And I need to get back to my airplane and go home because you obvious… And I'm going back to my knowledge of so few people take prescriptions and the CPAP machine and all smoking people mostly don't change. I'm not going to sit there for two hours and fight somebody on changing.
I can help anyone change who wants to change. The battle of getting somebody to change who doesn't think there's anything wrong with them is extreme.
Don MacPherson
I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about three topics, women, artificial intelligence, and leaders who know their weaknesses. And let's start with leaders who know their weaknesses. We were talking, during the break, that there are great leaders who are very self-aware, who know what their weaknesses are. For example, somebody who might be a little prickly, but a very effective executive, and they may surround themselves with a people person. Can you talk a little bit about that as a strategy? And does it work?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
We studied a group of legacy executives, people who others would agree are outstanding leaders. And we basically asked them how they discovered their weaknesses and what they did about them. And we were quite surprised by the information because we had spent 30 years getting people to work on their weaknesses. And what the data said is that any given role or job can be defined by about 13 to 15 competencies or skill sets, but the truly outstanding leaders who are only outstanding are about 4 to 7 of the 13 to 15. And what we found is that people like that tended not to fix weaknesses because they had done that before in their lives.
They know it takes 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell told us that. And they didn't want to do that again. So, the key is, first of all, do I have flat spots? Do I have developmental opportunities? Do I have weaknesses? They get it through 360 and other feedback and self-observation, looking in the mirror. And then the key is, what do you do about it? And the legacy executive said, “Well, the easiest thing I do is I delegate it.” So, they hire their weaknesses. Bad leaders clone themselves and hire people identical to themselves. And therefore, the whole team has the weakness of the leader. So, if he's dismissive and aggressive, he hires people who are dismissive and aggressive because they like each other.
So, legacy leaders said, “Well, the easiest thing I do, if I don't have EQ or I don't have people skills, I hire a strong person who's good enough on the cognitive skills to be on the team, but they're excellent at dealing with customers and stakeholders and employees.” The second thing is they compensate. So, there's a strategy called compensation, so if I tend not to be a very good presenter, but I'm a funny person, I may use humor to compensate for not being an outstanding presenter. And I put Dilbert cartoons in all of my PowerPoint slides and that has made me a better presenter, even though, technically, I haven't become a better presenter. Or they use a substitution strategy that is among my four to seven outstanding skills.
Could I blend or meld them together in any way that sort of covers for what I'm not good at? So, we were sort of taken aback at that, that legacy leaders, once they found a weakness, didn't work on it. But now that all makes sense to me as I watch leaders today. The outstanding leaders delegate their weaknesses.
Don MacPherson
I agree. It takes an incredible amount of energy to improve a weakness. And if you can continue to enhance your strength and then fill in the weakness, I think that's a much more effective way of going about-
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Well, and it all starts with self-awareness. If you're not a hundred percent awareness of the good, bad, and ugly, then you cannot get to be a legacy leader.
Don MacPherson
You won't fill on the gaps, right?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Mm-hmm.
Don MacPherson
We have talked in the past about women in leadership roles and you have a belief that, and I'm sure it's supported by data, that women are positioned to be more effective leaders. Why do you say that?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
In general, women are better at EQ skills than men, and men are better at cognitive skills than women. That may be natured, may be nurtured, may be cultural, we don’t know. That's just the way the data is. So, women tend to be better at managing people and men tend to be better at managing things. AI, I think is going to decrease the value of cognitive skills because AI has to do with analytics, has to do with critical thinking, problem solving, the management of numbers. I think AI's first penetration is going to be in cognitive skills. I've watched it in my doctor's office. I've noticed in the last three years that the doctor’s entering my symptoms into a symptom checker. Didn't do that before.
And the symptom’s checker has been put together by outstanding clinicians and diagnosticians, and many times will come up with lupus or Lyme disease, where the primary physician didn't think about that. So, in the same sense in business, making decisions on who I might acquire, who I should merge with, that's going to be taken over, I think, by AI, or at least greatly assisted. Therefore, I think the future leader would be cognitively okay, assisted by AI, but the key thing in global diversity management of stakeholders would have to be strong in EQ. And I think that's sort of the definition of the upcoming cadre of women who are stronger than men in people skills, and equivalent to men in cognitive skills. I think the AI revolution is going to bring an increased proportion of women into the C-suite.
Don MacPherson
I want to get back to AI for a moment because in a previous conversation we were talking about the medical fields and prediction that you had around how medical school may evolve and take advantage of artificial intelligence. Could you talk about that a little bit and the importance of empathy from physicians?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
I worked with a medical school in New York as part of my consulting. And when I was talking to the dean of the medical school, and medical school is sort of broken up into two pieces. One is the academic piece, which is the first three to four years. And then the second is the clinical piece where you're working out with patients. And he made the comment that people who made high grades in the academic portion tended not to do well in the clinic. And it was sort of the medium students who got through the academic piece, but did not flourish, who tended to flourish in the clinical environment.
Well, that first three to four years is anatomy and physiology and differential diagnosis, and all of those kinds of things. And my guess is that AI in the medical field is going to be able to give a physician access to that first three to four years of education, which may go down to two years. If differential diagnosis, which many older physicians will claim is an art, not a science, and they get very disturbed when you say it's going to be taken over by a computer. But if 20 outstanding clinicians agree on 100 symptoms and what those symptoms add up to, and then you add which tests should you run to confirm what the AI diagnostic app says, and then the medical doctors can still do what they do subjectively. It could be that the beginning of med school gets truncated into a shorter amount of time and then bedside manner and dealing with patients and change management.
Talk about leaders in industry, physicians have to be change management experts also, because if you don't take your pills, I can't help you.
Don MacPherson
A couple quick questions for you. What advice do you have for a new first-time CEO?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Besides everything else you do, become a brain master, study NeuroLeadership and become… It increases the depth of your understanding of why people are doing what they're doing and it increases your ability to do change management.
Don MacPherson
And same question for a first-time manager.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Yeah, it's pretty much the same thing. It's almost as if we've been given the gift of a third better skill set. If I could teach a batter to get better at understanding where the ball's going to hit the strike zone and which way is it turning, I could increase your batting area. It's the same thing. Management is a muscle, leadership is a muscle. You need to learn how to use it and develop it.
Don MacPherson
Last question for you, who is the best leader you've ever worked for as an employee and why?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
My first boss out of college. I probably would not be sitting here today if I didn't have… And now that I think back on it, he had a beginner's brain, used Buddha’s brain. He listened to every stupid thing I had to offer and would calmly tell me what's right about that and what's wrong about that. Very patient person. I was a very crude and rough graduate. I didn't go to finishing school. So, that boss probably put me in shape to do the rest of what I've done in life.
Don MacPherson
Did he allow you to be curious?
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Oh yeah. And allowed me to fail.
Don MacPherson
Having known you for about 10 or 15 years, that's the thing that I see about you, that's very obvious, is that you're a very curious person.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Yeah. I love to know how things work.
Don MacPherson
Well, Dr. Robert Eichinger, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for being a genius.
Dr. Robert Eichinger
Thanks.
Don MacPherson
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