Who is curating your leadership???

Ahoy legends. Welcome back again, looking forward to getting stuck into the next episode today as we jump into a another useful and sometimes painful leadership topic. And that for us today is going to be around curating the leadership narrative, and the things that are getting fed to you as a leader. Now you might be going, What the h3ll are you even talking about? The second item, I want to cover off on is what I call echo I haven't heard this spoken about in the context of It sounds a little bit far fetched. But the reality is, leadership. And that's what I want to focus in on today is, we're just starting to understand this in news and chambers. This is a relatively well known phenomenon, maybe media is that what we consume, and what we hear as a leader what things what narratives what curation, are we allowing to definitively shapes what we believe to be true. Now, in it's not something you've bumped into before, and that's media and social media, we're starting to understand that that's true, we're starting to understand that if you curate perfectly fine. But the idea of an echo chamber is that we the content that comes into your brain, if you curate the things that are allowed to surround you, then you can better control surround ourselves with information and people and your state of mind, you can better control your energy, and you can better control the false narratives that surround you. mechanisms that reinforce whatever narrative we believe to be true. So if you hopped onto, let's say, your Facebook happen around us by the people around us, maybe unconsciously, or maybe consciously, but it's just easier to do. So we're account, or your LinkedIn account less so but going to go through today, some considerations on what those things might be that are allowing that to happen and what predominantly Facebook or Instagram or any of those things the contributing factors might be. But also, we're going to, as always give you some tips on how you can make strides to pull that back, and to really take control of the things that where you consume to a certain level, even your Netflix you're seeing and hearing and that are affecting the way in which you make decisions as a leader, because ultimately, if account, you would have an echo chamber and it would feed back you're listening to this, you're a leader of your own business, or a large corporation, or some level of leadership from frontline team all the way through to a board member. You to you recommendations, advice, things, images that reinforce need to be able to make effective decisions, you need to understand the way in which the information around you is affecting the quality of your decisions, and the quality of whatever narratives the platform has picked up from you. So if your well being and energy. So let's get stuck into that. Now, first I mentioned we're going to talk about considerations. I think it's really important to start with you, for example, this is not to pick on anyone, but if you are a these considerations. And one of the ones I see first up is affinity seeking. Now, affinity seeking is something in which flat earther or an anti, and you had those as things that you people around you, through wanting to have a good relationship with you, through wanting to have approval through the need for them to feel satisfied, whatever those needs followed on your social media, then all of the content would are, are driving towards an increase in affinity from you. And that comes from telling you the things I think you want to reinforce that narrative. So if you believed that #s were a hear, telling you things that make you feel better about things that maybe you shouldn't feel as good about because you haven't done the right thing or just telling you things that are problem, you engage with content that showed the platform that good news only stories. That's a problem. If people around you want you to like them, and they tell you $hit that they think you need to hear to feel good about them and your relationship you believe that and then you followed pages that said that with them, they're only going to feed you good news stories. And that's a problem too, because you miss the signs of big issues what you would have created is an echo chamber in which even if before they ever hit your desk. Not good. some great level of evidence comes out to show that that narrative is wrong, the platform and the things around you will continue to feed you pieces of information that reinforce your false narrative. That's f*cking dangerous to have the information around you reinforce a false narrative or you know, at the time maybe not false, but now false narrative is so incredibly destructive. Now, imagine that you're a leader responsible for a dozen, a few 100, a few 1000 people and customers and you've created an echo chamber in which all the things around you you've allowed to reinforce your narrative and you've created no way in which something can be counter to that narrative. You will have massive problems. As information being fed back to you, it will feel like you're right all the time. But the $hit you're hearing is not at all accurate, and it's going to punch you in the face at some point.. don't want that. The third potential consideration or item you might bump into, is what I call confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is not new. But that doesn't mean it's still not a problem. Confirmation bias is where again, you seek to find pieces of information, and this will create an echo chamber for you if you do it often enough, but you seek to find pieces of information that validate whatever thing you're trying to prove. So if I, for example, was going to, in my corporation, say; "you know what, we need to move to an agile based working model, I want everyone to be in squads, I want it all to follow agile discipline", what I might do to confirm that this is the right thing to do is I will go out and Google ways that agile working models benefit my corporation, the best agile working models, the ways in which agile changed an organization. What's the problem with that? That's like me asking you a survey question about a product and going How much do you love our product? That's a terrible question. What if I hate your product? And your loading the question with something that gives me no room to say anything to the contrary, without having to be really uncomfortable. So if you pull back from that, instead, you could Google; "What are the challenges in rolling out an Agile Model? If I did agile, what things should I know as an executive". Right? Again, some level of bias in that but a much more neutral degree of questioning, than "why is agile in the best"? Okay, it's such a loaded thing. So when you're talking to your team, you need to be aware of am I asking them questions that kind of put them in a position where they have to do the thing, or say the thing or answer in a way I want? Or am I asking more of those neutral questions? But more on that later. And then the last one to consider in this whole curating your leadership narrative and understanding how information is coming to you is culture constraint. What culture constraint or constraints exist in your organization, that will heavily bias what people say in the organization, what they tell you, what they're comfortable with telling you? You know, if we are known as being a culture of heavy governance, where we're always worried about the narrative, we're always worried about any risks that come up, if I'm going to float, something potentially risky, I've got a lot of work to do to try to even have that conversation. Now, if you're the leader, and I know that the organization and potentially you have real affinity for low risk activities and have very low appetite for high risk activities, then it's going to be f*cking difficult for me to raise that conversation with you. And instead, what I might do because of the culture here and that style of leadership, I might just leave it alone. And I might not bring it up. And the problem with that is what if that's the thing that fixes our problem? What if we had a better culture that allowed people to have those conversations without the repercussions that would come with them? So just be aware; what are the culture constraints that exist that maybe aren't even your leadership style but are the way in which the organization processes information and makes decisions. And if you're not aware of that, you will have resistance to change that you hadn't even anticipated? Because you weren't aware of the constraints. So now, the pain is out of the way, let's shift gears into what can you do to make strides towards a cleaner curation or lack of curation of those things that are affecting the information and the decisions that you need to make. How do we pull back from some of those four mechanisms I mentioned earlier, which were affinity seeking echo chambers, confirmation biases and culture constraints? So the first thing you can do is start to look at busting some of that culture. Right? That's a hard thing to do. It's not easily done. But look at where the heart of those things sit, you know, is it that there's a policy that forces us to think and act and decide in that way? Is there a framework we use to make decisions? Or maybe we don't even have one? But if we do have a framework, is it biased itself and forces us to adopt certain practices and principles that maybe we otherwise would not be attracted towards? What are some of the culture levers here? You know, are there certain committees that formed this level of thinking and for certain types of information to make its way through the organization? Look at the cultural mechanisms, the structures, the policies, the KPIs, and pull them apart. Start looking at what can you interrogate. What can you do within your own leadership level to start busting those apart of it. Now the second thing you can do is you can start looking at skip levels. With skip level meetings, let's say you're a director, and you have some managers that report to you, and those people have leaders that report to them. And then there's some frontline staff (below them). Instead of relying purely on what your managers are feeding you as a director, because they'll have some bias, and they'll have some complexity to those relationships, you can conduct the skip level meeting. You can make it a regular practice, even quarterly to have skip levels, where you drop down to a level or two below those managers. So you might drop down to that team leader level that we mentioned. Or it might drop down even another level to the people actually down in the trenches doing the daily activities. Now the benefit in doing that, provided you have the right structure, and you need to make sure you're really clear on what you're trying to do. But the benefit of that is that you create a forum for context at the right level, to be fed to you. So if you're hearing from your managers, that there's an issue with this customer policy, and it's the reason why we're having all these problems, and it's to do with the system, you can go, you know, great, fine, I'll make a decision based on that. Or you can go you know what, I'm gonna spend some time with people on the ground, hop on some phone calls, I'm going go sit in some meetings, I'm going to have one on one conversations, and I'm going to hear from the people directly, what are the challenges we're seeing in doing that work. You'll get so much more insight from that approach than you will from getting curated information that's what fourth hand at that time? It comes from front level, through to team leader through to manager and then to you. I mean, that's crazy, so much filtration happening there. Now, you obviously cannot do this with everything, but it's a great practice to adopt. And you can do it generally, to just find out what other things are happening. The third tactic you can do to make some strides against that curation is establish a group of trusted advisors, or confidants, or people you can chat with who do not have a horse in the race. You know, they are not interested necessarily in the immediate decision being made, they don't have a bias towards the policies itself. They are people who could be a mentor could be a coach, that could be people who sit in other organizations who you've just connected well with or you create knowledge sharing groups. But whatever they are, there are people who can give you the real insights, share the real information, share the stuff they're hearing and seeing in their own work, without the level of bias that will come from someone being too close to the decisions needing to be made. It's a really, really effective mechanism to counteracting some of that inherent gravi-, I would call it gravitational pull, of people toward certain decisions just purely because they have a vested interest in it not because they're being malicious. And then the last thing you can do, which I highly encourage you to do and it is something we work on here at Team buffalo, as well, but it is to leave that echo chamber, to get out of the industry to get out of the groups to get out of all the stuff that tells you the things you know, and to go to places where you can find some unexpected insights, and some novel concepts. You know, there's this idea of getting out of reading business books when you're a business person. And instead of looking at things like art, psychology, philosophy, these are all places where you can go and just pull your brain out of the traditional narrative you're hearing out of all the normal structural kind of repetitive things that we're hearing, and go challenge your brain to just think a little bit differently. You know, and if that's a bit too far, fine. The next level intervention you could look at as well; "you know, I work in Customer Service, I'm only hearing these things about customer service, when I go spend some time reading or researching or looking at trends in marketing, or trends in finance". It is still business related, still related potentially, to your industry, maybe not ideally not. But it's different, right, a marketer and the marketing challenges will be different, but they will still be related to dealing with customers. So you can get benefits without leaving your whole comfort zone on that if that's a bridge too far. But either way, leaving the echo chambers absolutely critical. Great. So we've talked about the four considerations when you're hearing this curation happening, or you're worried that you're not getting all the information. So those again, are affinity seeking, echo chambers, confirmation biases, and culture constraints, and then the things you can do to make strides against that and to make sure that you're taking back control of whatever narrative is being fed to you is to look at busting some of the cultural mechanisms, you skip level meetings to get away from the immediate sources of information, seek trusted advisors out in your life and people you can have these conversations with and who will give you unbiased information or turn you towards the right resources. And then last is to leave that damn echo chamber and find other sources of insights and reflections and knowledge that take you away from everything you've known and heard and seen up to this point. So now I challenge you to step away from these biases and curation and everything else that's affecting you and to go and implement at least one of the things we've talked about today, so you can continue to level up as a kick @ss leader. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to follow us for more insights and great tips, you can check us out at teambuffalo.co Or you can check us out on Instagram, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. If you enjoyed the podcast, give us a like and follow for more episodes. We release them at least weekly. Thanks again and we will see you in the next episode.