NEW YORK–There are three biases every leadership team needs to watch out for, according to one strategic coach.
Bruce Eckfeldt, founder and CEO of Eckfeldt & Associates and the host of two business podcasts, said leadership teams often fall into “thinking traps” like any other team. But there are ways to avoid those traps, he said.
“At the core of my role is helping teams identify and articulate the issues and then facilitate the discussion between members,” Eckfeldt wrote on Inc.com. “Having worked with dozens of leadership teams and held hundreds of strategy and planning sessions, I've found a key set of ruts and bad patterns that teams fall into. These are common thinking traps that every team can find themselves in. However, for leadership teams, the costs of these traps can be very high and impact everyone in the organization.”
According to Eckfeldt, the three most common pits teams fall into, along with ways to avoid those pits, are:
Anchoring
This one is rampant in most leadership teams, according to Eckfeldt.
“Usually, it comes in the form of the CEO or another powerful executive dominating the conversation and leading with strong opinions that everyone else needs to then argue for or against,” he wrote. “The problem is that this sways everyone's thinking and will suppress other comments and ideas, which is exactly what we don't want if we're striving for perspective and constructive debate.”
The solution, said Eckfeldt, is to have a clear process for articulating the topic and gathering data and success criteria before launching into solutions and decisions. He said he also typically has the CEO or other influential executives on the team speak last so they don't skew the discussion.
Correlation = Causation
It's easy to assume that just because one thing relates to another there is a causal relationship, observed Eckfeldt.
“My favorite example is a study that appeared in Nature in 1999 that showed that parents who leave the lights on in their infant's bedroom at night cause myopia,” he said. “One year later, Nature published a new study that showed that the lights have no impact, but rather there is a strong correlation between nearsighted parents having nearsighted children. The lights were just something that nearsighted parents left on so they could see better.”
According to Eckfeldt, leadership teams fall into this same trap. “Just because one thing goes up at the same time as another, it doesn't mean that one causes the other. Making that assumption and failing to find the true cause can lead teams down bad paths,” he wrote.
Eckfeldt said the way to avoid this is to assume temporarily that the opposite is true and try to prove that by looking for evidence. “If you can make a plausible argument, you might be looking at a correlation, not a causation situation,” he said.
Polarization
Humans love drama, observed Eckfeldt, but on leadership teams it's typically a liability. Unfortunately, it can be human nature to take one event or one case and to assign a disproportionate meaning or weight to it in order to make a point or advance a personal agenda, he added.
“Key giveaways that this is happening are when I hear people using
‘never’ and ‘always’ in their arguments,” he said. “This technique is usually employed to emphasize a point or to strengthen an argument, but, instead, they are just setting things up for an argument.”
Instead, what Eckfeldt said what he encourages teams to do is speak with realistic data and probabilities.
“If you know that 82% of the deals close within a month, don't say, ‘We always close.’ And if you know someone was late to the daily huddle three times last week, don't say they are ‘never on time,’” he said. “While you may think you're making a stronger point, you're just going to pick a fight over the data.”