The Secret to All Victory Lies in the Organization of the Unobvious

This kind of gets to something else you touched on earlier in terms of trying to peel back the onion and everything and the difficulty of trying to do all that in a hybrid environment where you don’t get to see everybody in the office anymore. So how can a leader effectively handle diverse opinions or styles or approaches within a team?

As a manager, as a leader, you set the standard and you establish the tone. So, I think first you have to set the norms of how we work with each other.
And you may have a wide band, which is like from here to here, it is okay. Everything in the middle is okay. I think the first thing you have to set the standard on is in this world of very diverse opinions, what’s outside of the bounds?
Anything to the right of here or to the left of here is actually not a part of our norms as a team of how we work with each other. I think that’s the first piece, and then I think within the bounds, then I think it’s always making sure that you are not leading with the answer.
I think we learned this a bit in business school. I think you learn it in any sort of more liberal arts context, how do you ask really helpful open-ended questions? And then how do you leave open space for people to engage?
How do you plant the right questions to keep the conversation going but not insert yourself too soon in the conversation? Because I think if I insert my opinion too soon in the conversation, then what happens? All of a sudden it becomes group think. “Well, Neda has said that, so maybe there’s a reason she said that. And oh, I want to agree with Neda,” or whatever the context is. You can very quickly lead people down a path that you don’t intend to, that may not even be the right path.
And I think the other thing that’s really important as a leader is don’t listen…We have such confirmation bias when we listen to things, so don’t listen to the things that only confirm your opinions.
If anything, try to build the ability to hear the things that don’t confirm your ingoing opinion and write those down and then dig in more on those. I’m not saying that your opinion will be changed. There’s a reason why you thought what you did, had a hypothesis going into it. But I think that that’s really critical.
And then the other expression that I often use as my team is, “how do you hear the dogs that aren’t barking?” It’s really easy to hear the dog that’s literally barking in the background. But how do you develop the ability to hear the unobvious? There’s this great Marcus Aurelius quote. He says, “The secret to all victory lies in the organization of the unobvious.”
And so I think what’s so great is in these more diverse teams and contexts that we’re working in, there will be more of a propensity for people to help you see the unobvious because they see things from so many different vantage points.
So how do you build that muscle as a team? Not just as you as a leader, but that expectation for all the people and how they work together so that those things can get surfaced.