The Secret Language of Leadership

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The Secret Language of Leadership
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Leader To Leader, No.48, Springthinking.
2008
change.
When leaders give reasons for change to people who don’t agree with them, it’s worse than ineffective.
A significant body of research shows that it usually entrenches those people more deeply in opposition
to what the leaders are proposing.
In 2003, Howell Raines was fired from his post as managing editor of the New York Times. Raines
had every managerial advantage. He had the strong support of his boss. He had a clear strategy for
reenergizing the newspaper. He was able to hire and fire and place his own associates in key positions.
Under his tenure, the newspaper won an unprecedented number of Pulitzer prizes. The pretext for
Raines’s dismissal after only nineteen months on the job was the revelation that a young reporter—
Jayson Blair—had been found guilty of plagiarism and lying. But the deeper underlying reason for
Raines’s dismissal is that he had “lost the newsroom.” He had failed as a leader to win the hearts and
minds of the staff of the New York Times to implement his bold change strategy.
In 2007, Bob Nardelli was dismissed from his position as CEO of Home Depot. He’d arrived with
impeccable credentials, implemented a plan to revive the struggling company, and achieved dazzling
financials. After six years, he had doubled sales and more than doubled revenues. Gross margins had
also steadily improved. The apparent trigger for Nardelli’s departure was his unwillingness to lower the
amount of his extraordinary pay package. This had become an issue because the stock price was down 7
percent since Nardelli had taken over, while his compensation remained astronomical. But the
underlying reason for his departure was that he wasn’t able to generate sustained enthusiasm among
the array of investors, shareholder advocates, hedge funds, private-equity deal makers, legislators,
regulators, and nongovernmental organizations who want a say in how a company is run.
When Reasons Do Not Prevail

The problem for Raines and Nardelli, as for many CEOs these days, is that unless they can generate
sustained enthusiasm for the ideas they are pursuing, their very survival as leaders is in jeopardy. Both
had powerful reasons why they should remain in their jobs, but in each case, reasons did not prevail.
Why?
Many psychological studies have shown that when we believe something firmly, our immediate
reaction to news indicating the opposite is to jump to the conclusion that something must be wrong
with the source. Raines and Nardelli had alienated people, and so their reasoned arguments fell on deaf
ears. This phenomenon is known to psychologists as the “confirmation bias.”
The classic study was done by Charles Lord and his colleagues in Stanford University in 1979. They
took 24 proponents and 24 opponents of capital punishment and had them read scientific studies. Some
studies supported the case for the death penalty, while others undermined it. The researchers found
that both sets of subjects were reinforced in their views by studies that were consistent with their
preexisting opinions, while they were able to find ingenious reasons why the studies that conflicted with
their preexisting opinions were unsound or not to be taken seriously. The result was that the group was
more polarized after the experiment than before. The experiment has since been replicated many times
in many different settings.
This is why the traditional leadership approach of trying to persuade people of something different by
giving them reasons why they should change their minds isn’t a good idea if the audience is at all
skeptical, that is, cynical or even hostile. If a leader presents reasons at the outset of a communication
to such an audience, it will likely activate the confirmation bias and the reasons for change will be
reinterpreted as reasons not to change. This occurs without the thinking part of the brain being
activated: the audience becomes even more deeply entrenched in its current contrary position. Reasons
don’t work, because the audience is neither listening nor thinking.
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So although leaders might imagine that giving a presentation discussing and analyzing problems
and reaching rational conclusions in favor of change can do no harm, they need to think again. Giving a
talk full of abstract reasons arguing for change can quickly turn an audience into an army of strident
cynics.
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When Reasons Do Not Prevail

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