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Break Out of Your Managerial Bubble
Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center at Sloan School of Management, says too many CEOs and executives are in a bubble, one that shields them from the...
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Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center at Sloan School of Management, says too many CEOs and executives are in a bubble, one that shields them from the reality of what’s happening in the world and in their businesses. The higher you rise, the worse it gets. Gregersen discusses practical steps top managers can make to ask better questions, improve the flow of information, and more clearly see what matters. His article “Bursting the CEO Bubble” is in the March-April 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. There’s a conundrum common to managers up and down the organization no matter what kind you’re in from startups to small businesses to nonprofits to the biggest global corporations, and that’s the spots that come with power. The more say you have in what your organization does, the more that the information you base those decisions on is filtered through other people. You don’t know what you don’t know, and this conundrum is the worst at the top.
CEOs have chiefs of staff, reports that come in daily, all sorts of layers of curation between the truth of what’s happening in the world, and the most powerful person in the company who has to decide how to respond to it. Today’s CEO is in a bubble, and it’s time to get out of it, says Hal Gregersen. He runs the MIT Leadership Center at Sloan School of Management. His article, Bursting the CEO Bubble is in the March, April 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. Thanks for joining us today.
HAL GREGERSEN: Thank you, Sarah. It’s great to be here.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This huge camera that you’ve brought into the studio today, does that go with you everywhere?
HAL GREGERSEN: For better and for worse that Canon 5D hangs at my side every moment.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Why is that?
HAL GREGERSEN: Well, I fell in love with photography as a teenager, and actually, paid my way through college doing portraits and wedding. And then a few years ago, I just randomly, serendipitously connected with Sam Abel who’s a 30 year National Geographic Veteran. And Sam and I for the last three years at MIT, we deliver a workshop for executives called Leadership in the Lens, and it’s all about teaching executives how to ask better questions through photography.
When I carry this camera around, it actually causes me to see things I, otherwise, wouldn’t pay attention to not only here in the Harvard Business School Press building, but wherever I wander in the world.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So there are clear parallels here with CEOs coming to you to try to get better at being patient and framing the scene and looking at the scene. You talked to, I think, over 200 leaders and executives for this article. How prevalent is this problem, and how do they describe the problem?
HAL GREGERSEN: It’s related to a dilemma that a good friend and colleague, Clay Christensen, talked with me about just a few weeks ago, which is that as senior leaders we constantly have active data coming at us, be it people or reports or information or streams. You fill in the blank. That kind of information is already pre-prepared and fed to us in ways that it’s trying to tell us what people think we want to know often. And the real challenge for a CEO is figuring out– it’s the passive data. It’s the stuff out there that’s not actively coming at me. This is the challenge as a CEO.
When I get into a position of power and prestige and that sort of role, it’s super easy to become so insulated from the information that might make me uncomfortable, that might prove that I’m wrong, and those are some of the conditions that I’ve got to be in to be able to burst out of this protective bubble that’s keeping me from getting at the data that otherwise could stun me and surprise me.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This is what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns.
HAL GREGERSEN: That’s exactly right, and it sounds like this bizarre thing. But imagine someone– someone like me, 58 years old, jumping off of a diving board into a swimming pool. And the worst scenario for me is not that I don’t know how to swim. It’s that I don’t know that I don’t know how to swim. Because if I knew that I didn’t know how to swim, I would not be jumping off the board. But when I know that I don’t know, I’m smart enough to not do that. And so this is the challenge. And so you look at taxi companies before Uber comes into their space, they weren’t paying attention to a lot of passive data that was telling them stuff they needed to know before Uber knocked them over and made many of them bankrupt.
Now fast forward Uber in this amazing dominant space, that was an organizational level issue. You’ve got the CEO Kalanick who didn’t know what he didn’t know about how he talks with people like drivers in their cars, and before you get into an escalated conversation where passive information is not getting through, and that creates its own problem.
And so getting blindsided– or even in a very technical narrow version of disruption in the way Clay frames it– getting that kind of blindsided or getting disrupted, it almost always comes from that unknown unknown space. And that sounds a bit mystical to most leaders, like, ugh what’s that thing. But the reality is that’s the place from which the biggest, baddest surprises always come. And then the question is as a CEO I’m the least likely person to be exploring that space.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Why is that?
HAL GREGERSEN: Their number one chiefs of staff could protect me, the CEO, from getting people into my space. For most chiefs of staff the worst case scenario is that someone gets through their door into the CEO and either asks a question that’s uncomfortable, or they say something that makes that CEO uncomfortable. When that happens, more often than not, the chief of staff gets the head cut off kind of thing. And so there’s this vetting by the people around the CEO as to who’s going to get in, and even what are they going to talk about?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: There is a kind of CEO though who will say my door is always open, they’ll do management by walking around, they try to make themselves more available. Why don’t those sorts of efforts seem to be working very well?
HAL GREGERSEN: I think they fall short unless there’s a fundamentally powerful and deep reason for doing it that is not about the CEO. It’s either about how can we solve this customer need, how can we make the organization or product better, and I have to be up out of my office into the world in order to get that kind of information. I’m rarely going to get that kind of critical data sitting in my office. It’s on the fringes. It’s on the edge. And so the critical thing is I get up, I get out. And we call it management by walking around, but it’s really I’m walking around in order to surface the uncomfortable wrong stuff that I normally don’t run into.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: How can CEOs do that, kind of, more actively? Is about asking, kind of, the right questions? How do they figure out what those questions even are?
HAL GREGERSEN: I mean it’s a great issue. The challenge becomes that when we’re stuck in a situation, we don’t have a solution to a problem. The fundamental reason we’re stuck is that we’re asking the wrong questions. And so it’s like that’s, kind of, an obvious statement, but then the next, sort of, thing is, well, if that’s the case, how do you ask the right new question? And when I propose that or ask people that out there in the world, they often look at me like I have no idea. Can we go to the next question, please?
And so that’s where Michael Sippey, who used to be at Twitter, and now he’s a CEO of Talkshow Industries– Michael basically said, how do I put myself in the situation where the right question will surface? It’s a different way of looking at it, and so these sorts of leaders like Michael or– and Ed Catmull at Pixar, they’re actively out there wandering around, but it’s not with people that they’re comfortable with or in places that they’re familiar with.
They’re actively doing that with intentionality to get stunned, to get poked, to get provoked, to be wrong, to be uncomfortable, so that when that happens, there’s enough quietness that settles into their soul, literally, they shut up long enough interior wise in order to hear and surface a new question that, otherwise, they never would have asked.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You had a great story in the article about Aramex.
HAL GREGERSEN: Oh, it’s fantastic. So Fadi Ghandour, he’s Jordanian. He years ago did an initial joint venture with FedEx to deliver FedEx goods in the Middle East, because they didn’t quite know how to do it in that very complicated uncertain world. He excelled at it, learned everything he could from them, and then he founded a company called Aramex, which does essentially what FedEx does, but it does it in that part of the world. And 20 years later, 15 years later, he’s successful. It’s incredibly successful. He’s the CEO. He’s the founder. Every reason in the world to not be getting the data he needs to be getting.
He lands in Dubai at 2:00 in the morning. He asks a courier for Aramex to pick him up and take him to the hotel. How many CEOs do that? Versus being in a nice car that gets picked up, and you just immediately go there. But he did it with intentionality. I want to meet the courier, I want to know who he is or she is, I want to know what their life is about, so he’s asking all these kinds of questions on the way to the hotel. And he discovers we have deep problems here in Dubai with Aramex.
He goes to bed a little while, wakes up in a few hours, gets a hold of all his senior leaders there in the area, calls a meeting first thing in the morning, and says nobody is going to get punished or hurt for this, but we’ve got some challenges. And we’re going to now openly talk about all of that until we come to some solutions that can help the couriers do their jobs better. It wasn’t about Fadi, it wasn’t about manager in the room, it was about helping the couriers do their jobs better.
That story to this day still gets shared around the company. It’s catalytic. It changed the company then, it changes it today, and then they have a practice where not just Fadi, but senior managers regularly get out there in the trucks in the field with the people seeing, talking, and getting pushed and provoked in ways that most CEOs don’t get when they don’t do it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One other CEO you mentioned in the article who, sort of, did something similar. Sara Blakely of Spanx, you talked about how she shared some of her early mistakes with the company to, kind of, get people more in a mindset of you can tell me about things you think we could do that will improve. Do you specifically know– can you share what some of those missteps were?
HAL GREGERSEN: To be honest, truth be told, I don’t know the specifics of the oops moments. But I do know that in her life. It’s a built in mechanism for her as a leader that started when she was a young girl. She’s growing up in her home, and her father every week would ask her what did you do wrong this week? In other words, what mistake did you make this week? And if Sarah’s response was none, he would be like you’re not pushing far enough. You’re not pushing hard enough. So there was expectation that you go to the edge, you go to the boundary, you do things you can’t normally do, you fail, you make mistakes. That’s how you do good things.
And so I don’t know the details of it, but I know that that notion of I’m standing up now and saying oops about something, it’s not just a management trick. It’s a lifestyle for her. And Ed Catmull, again at Pixar, is the same way where it’s like I’m going to get up to the new hires in this company and explain to them some of the mistakes I’ve made and we’ve made. Because guess what? You can’t make great movies without making lots of mistakes and making them fast and learning from them.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the other people in the article who stuck out to me in a similar way was Narayana Murthy of Infosys who talked about the importance of asking dumb questions. It just seems to me this is a very unusual kind of CEO who will make himself look dumb or admit mistakes that he or she has made. Do you feel like the people you talked to for this article may not be a representative sample of leadership in this sense?
HAL GREGERSEN: Well, most of these leaders in the article and in the research were leaders of companies that actually are sustainably innovative. They do this stuff over and over, and they’re good at it. And those kinds of companies are the exception, Sarah. They’re the 20% that are delivering enormous value. And so this is why Narayana Murthy, and others were saying the following, which is ask simple questions.
When you start asking long, complex questions. It’s basically framing the answer with the length of the question. The longer the question, the more the conditionalities. It’s a deeper, sharper, tighter frame that tells people, oh, she knows exactly what she’s looking for, I’ll give it to her, versus a simple question.
One of the people I interviewed was one of the top people at the Applied Physics Laboratory. They make super high end weaponry for the US. And one of the guys there is– senior person is a mathematician, not a weapons guy. And so when someone comes to pitch him a laser weapon system, he doesn’t know what a laser is. So he’ll look on Wikipedia the night before, kind of, what’s a laser? And then what’s the first question he asks when the team comes in the morning to pitch their proposal?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What’s a laser?
HAL GREGERSEN: What is a laser? Exactly. And his point is if they’re incapable of explaining to me simply and understandably what a laser is, they don’t know what they’re talking about. And so he asked those sorts of questions. And you laughed at the simplicity of that, and that, again, it’s like Adrian Wooldridge at the Economist who talked about his mentor in one sense that he paid careful attention to, Bob Woodward, who did the same thing. You know walked into rooms, walked into these briefings, and would ask simple questions that sometimes– often, actually, people would laugh at. Like, Bob, really? That’s a stupid question.
But by asking the simple but very wide open question, you start touching the edges of what’s going on in the system, and you start getting information that, otherwise, you wouldn’t get.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s good advice for podcast host as well, I think, probably.
HAL GREGERSEN: Think five words or less. No, seriously.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m now struggling. I’m not a five words or less person. OK, you mentioned– oh, shoot. That’s already two words.
HAL GREGERSEN: Skip the self-consciousness. We’ll be fine.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: OK, OK, OK. How do you know if you’re in a bubble?
HAL GREGERSEN: If I were sitting down with the CEO or even a first line supervisor, and they were trying to figure out am I in the bubble, the first question I’d ask them is let me see your schedule, your calendar. I want to see where you’re spending your time, and who you’re with. And number one is how much are you out of your office, and then where are you out of your office?
And so a lot of CEOs will say, oh, I’m out of my office all the time. And then I’ll ask, well, who are you with? And 95% of the time it’s other CEOs. We see the world the same. So it’s are they seeing different people? Are they physically out there in different places with different people? That’s the first, kind of, question. Then there’s some fun questions that are to me diagnostics.
How many barriers do people have to cross directly to talk with you? And think of n plus zero. It’s either they have my phone number or my email. They can get right at me. And these leaders who are good at doing this, they make that invisible often inside and outside. The other piece becomes when was the last time you were dead wrong about something. And this is the sort of question if I can’t remember, I’m in trouble.
Another question is how often do people ask you uncomfortable questions at work? This is a real interesting one. If I have a hundred leaders, be they, again, first time supervisors or senior executives, when I ask that question, 80% of the people in the room are very uncomfortable. Because they’re struggling. I can’t remember, which means they’re in the bubble. They’re like, I’m worried. The other becomes how often do you wait silently for three or four seconds after you ask a question, and, literally, if I’m now asking questions that cause people to wait three or four seconds before they respond, they’re not great questions. They’re leading questions.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So this is something where we’ve been mostly focused on CEOs, because the higher you are in the organization, the more bubble you are probably dealing with, but this does seem like it affects managers at lower levels to some degree as well. What do those middle managers or senior, but not CEO managers, need to know about this?
HAL GREGERSEN: That the dynamics of information restriction that keeps me from getting the data to ask better questions to unlock those unknown unknowns, those dynamics operate at every level. And as soon as I get in that position– again, first time supervisor– they’re operating. And then the challenge– it’s an awkward challenge for first time supervisors, because I’ve taught them a lot earlier on in my own career, and they often feel too self-conscious to ask other people about the problems they’re facing. They want everybody else to think they know what they’re doing.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But can I ask about that? Because in my experience when you’re more junior in the organization, you don’t have a lot of power, and you really do feel like you need to look really confident and know things and, actually, the more senior you are, the more standing you have and the easier it is to ask the dumb question, because you know you already have a lot of, sort of, power and sway. And so I’m surprised to hear that for some people it feels like it’s the opposite.
HAL GREGERSEN: So I used to teach a course for first-time managers when I taught at Insead, and I’d have hundreds of those sitting in the room. And 85 of the 100 would be like I’m describing, Sarah, which is, wow, this is the first time in the last six to nine months that I’ve actually talked with somebody about the real things I’m wrestling. And so they don’t often have that kind of sounding board, and so this is the issue for me. It’s like even at that beginning stage of my career, am I creating a good sounding board of people who don’t think like me about the issues that matter and that I’m struggling with. And the process is the same.
The other part you mentioned, Sarah, is really critical, and that is there is this enormous answer centric, answer driven assumption and culture and fuel that that promotes people through a system, because they have all the right answers and expertise. And one executive said when I got to be the CEO, it was like, uh oh. Because I was exceptional at giving answers, but I was actually quite incompetent at asking the right questions. And it was– he described it as a massive personal, cultural shift inside of himself. It’s a big transition. And this stuff whether I’m at the bottom or the top of an organization, whether I’m at work or not, these kinds of things surface. They get us. It happens for me too, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you suspect you’re in a bubble– I know this is a very complex problem. But if we had wanted to leave people with like here’s three things to focus on, three practical takeaways, what are those?
HAL GREGERSEN: The first would be the spirit of Stewart Brand, who’s an iconic innovator from Silicon Valley, who said in the morning he wakes up and he says to himself, how many things am I wrong about today? In AG Lafley view, it’s what am I going to be curious about this week? The first thing is do I have that active curious mind set on when I go to work in the morning to be surprised, and sometimes stunned in ways that are uncomfortable. So that’s kind of the first piece.
The second is get up and get out. Over the course of the last decade, interviewing and working with some most innovative leaders in the most innovative companies on the face of planet Earth, I have known and heard of very few blockbuster breakthrough ideas that happened in an office. It’s almost always in places that are unique and different or with people who are, again, from different industries and context. It’s being out in the world on a systematic regular basis is profound.
And the third part becomes, and it’s not trivial in the world that’s just so intense 24/7. Social media in your face, data coming, quarterly this and that. It makes me want to go, boom, blow up. It’s creating the space somewhere that I’m going to settle down, be quiet, and listen to stuff that I’m not normally listening to. I’ve got to create that.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Seems like being– maybe part of the appeal of being a CEO for some people is not having to be in that kind of situation.
HAL GREGERSEN: No, so absolutely. This notion of being unexpectedly wrong, unusually uncomfortable, and uncharacteristically quiet is not the way we normally think of CEO work. But literally, Sarah, 20 plus years ago, I collected data from 1,000 children– survey data, interview data, picture data even. Analyzed it, and a question I asked them was what does the average manager do at work. Two things came up. They control people, tell them what to do, and they solve all the problems.
And when I do the same question with executives today, I get the same answers. Which fits that whole model that it’s not about being wrong, it’s about being right. It’s not about being uncomfortable, it’s being comfortable. It’s not about being quiet, It’s about telling people what to do. Those kinds of approaches work when what we’re doing is the right thing as a company, and the world doesn’t change. If we have that figured out and the world is not changing, being right, being comfortable, and being a little vocal is not a bad thing. But if the world’s changing, we’re in deep trouble. And that’s what the leaders of today have to realize that it’s not either, or.
I’ve got to be right and wrong. I’ve got to be comfortable and uncomfortable. I’ve got to be very vocal and quiet. And when that list that’s less attractive from a sort of social sense of being uncomfortable [? or while I’m quiet, ?] when that list isn’t part of my operating mode, I’m in trouble. Because if I’m not actively out there looking for surprises, trust me they come looking for us. Sooner or later they come.
But when I am in situations with those kinds of conditions operating, the right question, the right new question surfaces that unlocks what I don’t know I don’t know and takes me or my team or my organization down a better path.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Hal, thank you for coming in and chatting with us today.
HAL GREGERSEN: Thank you. Great to be here, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Hal Gregersen. He heads the Leadership Center at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Hal wrote the article, Bursting the CEO Bubble in the March, April 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. You can find it at HBR.org. Thanks for listening to the HBR Idea Cast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.