Ways to Manage - Back by Brain Science (with Caroline Webb)

Radical Candor: Communication at Work

In this episode of Radical Candor's sabbatical series, host Kim Scott interviews Caroline Webb, author of 'Leadership Intelligence,' about t

Key takeaways

• Specificity in feedback is crucial because the brain remembers details more than generalities, making it far more effective for development and recognition.
• Leaders must intentionally widen their perspective by asking 'What am I missing?' and 'What's another way of seeing this?' to counteract cognitive biases.

Main topics

• Leadership intelligence framework
• Cognitive load and decision-making

Notable quotes

"What am I missing? What's another way of seeing this?" – Core questions for expanding leadership perspective.

Conclusion

Caroline Webb's Leadership Intelligence framework offers a science-based, compassionate approach to leadership that

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I think that in particular, something that you and I both, you know, write about is the importance of specificity. And there are various different reasons for that. But one is that the brain remembers specifics more than it remembers generalities. And that's true on the positive side and on the developmental side. I think that honestly fixes a great deal of what managers are not doing as optimally as they could in the feedback realm. They don't understand perhaps just how powerful it is to make a very specific observation and then explain why it matters. Speaker 1 (0:38) Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott, talking to the authors of the books that have meant a lot to me while the rest of the Radical Candor podcast team is on sabbatical. Today with me is Caroline Webb. Welcome, Caroline. I'm thrilled to have you. Speaker 2 (0:57) It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1 (0:59) Thank you. Caroline is the author of Leadership Intelligence and How to Have a Great Day and is a wonderful coach. else I should say about you, Caroline? Speaker 2 (1:11) I've been leadership coaching for a long time and I actually live in New York despite my accents. Speaker 1 (1:16) I love your book so much, Caroline. It is packed with wisdom and it has a very strong structure. I love a book with a very strong structure. And so what I would love to do is I'm going to actually share my screen so that folks can see. Speaker 1 (1:37) your structure of your book. And then I'll describe it for people who aren't looking. But leadership intelligence is about three things. Deliberate wisdom, intrinsic inspiration, and reasoned resilience. And there's two parts to each of those two things. So it's very balanced. For deliberate... you want to widen your perspective where it matters and lighten your cognitive load where you can. For intrinsic inspiration, you want to expand everyone's sense of personal competence and deepen everyone's sense of social connection. And then for reasoned resilience, you want to make the situation feel manageable and amplify what's meaningful. Caroline, what else is there to say? Speaker 2 (2:25) Thank you. This is my leadership intelligence system. That's what glues the leadership intelligence book together. And, you know, my background is in economics and I'm a behavioral scientist, broadly speaking. And this is my grand synthesis of everything that leaders should know about how the brain works, how their brain works, how other people's brain works. And what that means is the right way to make good choices. motivate great performance in your people and help everybody keep going and build resilience through the ups and downs. And each of those three is based on fundamental science about how the brain works. The deliberate wisdom is based on the science of how the brain processes information. Intrinsic inspiration is about how the brain processes reward. And reasoned resilience is about how the brain processes threat. And that's the backbone to the book behind all of the practical advice. Speaker 1 (3:17) And it's... The great thing about this book is that as you read it, you will feel less alone. That means Speaker 2 (3:25) a lot. Speaker 1 (3:26) Yeah, Caroline, she's in your corner, which is important for leaders because leadership and management, it's a lonely job and can feel like a thankless task as well. Speaker 2 (3:39) Yeah, it can be wonderful. It, you Speaker 1 (3:41) know, Speaker 2 (3:42) it is wonderful. It's a noble thing to be bringing the best out of other people and to doing to enable everybody to do more than you could on your own. I mean, that is just, it's the most. you know, beautiful human thing to be able to do that. But yes, it is, you know, always harder to bring the best out of many people than just yourself. So, you know, that's, that's why we, that's why we, we think about what it takes to do it better and make it easier to do it better. Speaker 1 (4:09) Yes. Well, so let's jump right in. Let's jump into deliberate wisdom and what you say about widening the perspective. If you had to boil it down, what's the best way for a leader? to widen their own perspective. Because I think one's own perspective is often a limiting factor in your ability to lead well. Speaker 2 (4:30) Yeah, so true. So, you know, your brain has a billion pieces of information coming at it at any given time. And depending on which study you read, you know, it's 10 to 100 is actually the capacity for us to consciously process. And a billion is bigger than 100, let's agree. So you've got this tiny amount of conscious attention. I think one of the central responsibilities of a leader is to be really intentional about where that tiny, tiny piece of attention goes. And left to yourself, your brain is going to try and figure out where should this tiny bit of attention go. And it's going to choose whatever is matching what's already on your mind. Speaker 1 (5:06) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:08) And, you know, that might be you've got an aim in mind and you're very attached to it. So you can see everything that confirms that, you know, that's the right thing to be focused on. You might have an assumption that's, you know, you're going to look for everything that confirms you're right. You know, even your attitude is going to shape what you notice. You know, we all know deep down and the research backs this up in a bad mood, you see more negative things. Speaker 1 (5:30) Yes. Speaker 2 (5:31) So and the other way around as well. I mean, in a good mood, you see more positive things. You might not. actually notice some glaring risk that you know someone is trying to get your attention about so a really smart leader notices what's on their mind because it's going to drive whatever is on their mind now is going to drive what they notice next and you want to be deliberate about that and specifically when you're doing something that really matters you don't want to just notice what's right in front of you you want to say okay let me take a moment yeah Speaker 1 (6:02) uh Speaker 2 (6:04) I understand what my point of view is now. What else is there out there? What's a different way of thinking about this? What could I be missing? And you don't, and it's easier said than done, but actually really helps to have a couple of really simple questions that just remind you, okay, what's another way of seeing this? What could I be missing? And, you know, there's a lot of more detailed advice that, you know, spins off that, but that's really what it is at its heart. Speaker 1 (6:29) Yeah, so let's just like double click on that. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:31) What Speaker 1 (6:32) am I missing? Wait, what were the two questions? See, you said them and I've already forgotten them. Speaker 2 (6:37) What am I missing? What's another way of seeing this? Speaker 1 (6:40) Yes, what's another way of seeing this? And Speaker 2 (6:43) another one in the AI area is how can I test that? How can I check that, right? Because you're getting work presented to you or information delivered to you and you're like, okay, yeah, that looks great. And you've got to do that step back and say, okay. How do I test this? How do I check this? So I like those three questions as a trilogy, you know, for keeping your attention going where it needs to go. Speaker 1 (7:05) Yeah. Yeah. I think another thing that you talk about and another great way that resonated well for me about widening your perspective is and asking those two questions is soliciting feedback. Oh, for sure. Speaker 2 (7:21) Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, because we can't see everything at the best of times. And the thing we can see least is ourselves. So I 100 % agree. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:31) That's the best way of being self-aware is to invite the people around you to hold up a mirror. And what about what you write about the causal map and the driver tree? Can you explain the difference between those and what? how we can use that understanding to broaden our perspective? Speaker 2 (7:51) Yeah, sure. So, you know, I'm a big advocate of, you know, getting beyond your first assumption, getting beyond your first impression, doing a little bit to test by talking to your mentors and saying, please kick the tires on this or talking to your team and really inviting challenge and ideas from them. Okay, then you've got a lot of information. Maybe you've even done some benchmarking and, you know, Right. Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:18) OK. Speaker 2 (8:18) A lot of information. And your brain's got a small amount of conscious attention. So how do you use it really well? And the way that you can make better use of your limited attention is to actually look for connections between. So if you've got a list of 20 things and you start to organize that list and look at what causes what, you've got a map that gives you more of a sense of where are the real drivers in this in this whole system. Funnily enough, it's less... strain on your brain to have everything written down in a map than have a long list that just feels totally unwieldy. And it's an evolution on the driver tree, because I think many of us, you know, have learned how to do driver trees where you break down a KPI and you look at all the things that drive it. Speaker 1 (9:05) Right, Speaker 2 (9:05) right. And the challenge is that a lot of things that we look at as managers and leaders is they're not linear, they're complicated, messy. And so a map really helps in that way. And I would say even people People who are not visual, you know, you don't have to be, you know, doing this as a sort of beautiful piece of art. It's just, you know, scribble on the back of a piece of paper and just start to kind of map. OK, well, I think this causes that. And then usually you see new relationships and new possibilities when you see, oh, actually, that causes five things. I think that might be the place to intervene. Speaker 1 (9:41) And the causal map looks less hierarchical than the driver tree. Exactly. And life really is not as hierarchical as we imagine it to be. So Speaker 2 (9:50) true. So true. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:52) The other thing that you wrote about that I found really helpful was disagreement. And what happens when you wrote that when people feel they're not being listened to, it can trigger a defensive response that impairs their ability to reason. So what why is that? And and how can we have the kinds of disagreements? both as leaders, but also fostered disagreements between people that help them feel listened to rather than ignored. Speaker 2 (10:22) Yeah. Well, jumping off where we were just at, you know, if we all have this tiny amount of conscious attention, we're all noticing and experiencing the world in a different way. So you know how you come out of a meeting or you come out of a conversation and you talk to someone and you think, were we even in the same? Speaker 1 (10:40) Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:42) How do you, I mean, maybe you see a movie with, you know, with your spouse and you're like, I, how, it was a different movie for me because we each perceive our version of reality and it's driven by what's on our mind to start off with. So I think, you know, having a good debate in the workplace actually starts with that understanding that actually you may not have the whole picture. You know, I remember when I was a management consultant. I got a clue on this because I noticed that however good my idea was, I noticed that whenever we sat with the team, it got better because of other people's points of view. So I think it starts with that acknowledgement that actually you probably are going to get to a better answer if you can listen to where each other is starting from. But there's no doubt if someone's disagreeing with you, it can challenge your sense of... competence, it can feel like it's a sort of existential threat if it feels like it's not controllable, I need them to believe what I believe and that can be a classic stress trigger but the more you bring it back to okay, we have plenty of common ground, most likely and you start from that common ground, you list all the places you agree you have a very different type of conversation because then you can focus on Or where is it that we disagree? What's driven that difference? Oh, that's interesting. Yes. Speaker 1 (12:09) Because Speaker 2 (12:09) you saw this go horribly wrong one time and it's never gone anything but perfectly for you. Right. OK, interesting. Let's learn from both. So I do think there are ways to, you know, acknowledge the differences and make the most of them in the workplace. It helps to have a little, you know, run sheet of, OK, I'm going to start with where we agree. not with where we disagree. And then you're much less likely to get the defensive response. Speaker 1 (12:33) Yeah, yeah. So starting with, you know, if it's a Venn diagram, you start with the overlap. Exactly. Or it's a Rogerian argument, right? Where I take your side and you take my side. Speaker 2 (12:47) Well, yeah. In fact, so I think the pro approach here is exactly what you say, where you start with, you articulate the other person's point of view. in a way that's so brilliant, makes them sound so fantastically smart that they couldn't argue, you know, they would just feel, wow, you really got it. And if you're a leader and you've got disagreement in your team, sometimes you have to be the one that summarises each side and says, OK, well, you think this because of that and