Quiet leadership by david rock
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This is a user manual for the brain. But, there’s a twist - it’s not a user manual for YOUR brain. It’s a user manual for everyone else’s brain. We know that everyone thinks differently. Quiet Leadership is a guide to understanding how people think, and more importantly, that only you thinks the way you do. This is a fact that is hard to recognise, and we tend to overlook it most of the time. David Rock draws out all the ways that fact affects our interactions with other people, and gives some guidelines for recognising and adapting your interactions with people who aren’t you.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. When we are trying to help a colleague think anything through, we make the unconscious assumption that the other person’s brain works the same as ours. So we input their problem into our brain, see the connections our brain would make to solve this problem, and spit out the solution that would work for us. We then tell people what we would do and are convinced it’s what they should do.
2. Diversity isn’t important only because it’s the right way to grow as an organisation. If you need a transactional justification, remember that the different wiring of other people’s brains means they see things from a fundamentally different position, and therefore will bring value that you could never have contributed.
3. You can’t advise someone to get out of a problem you didn’t advise them into. You cannot form the neural pathways in someone else’s brain that are needed for them to solve a problem. Instead, you need to help them think through it themselves, and let their brain forge the connections needed to arrive at a solution.
4. Negative feedback is easy for people to give, and hard for people to receive. Positive feedback is hard to deliver - we tend to overlook those areas where people are performing well - and it has an uplifting impact on people’s performance. Positive feedback is more powerful, and more useful, than negative feedback.
5. Email is not a good form of communication where emotions are involved. You have no way at all of knowing how the message will be interpreted.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Challenging people’s contributions, rather than their thinking, is a challenge to their social status. This is integrated mentally as an attack, and they will defend their position rather than concede to the attack. Determining how the contribution was determined as appropriate, and altering the path from through to action, will avoid the challenge and the automatic defence.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
People usually know when they’ve made a mistake. They can deliver that feedback to themselves. Leaders need to recognise when their team are already in a place to improve, and help them move on from there. Offering another critique on the past performance helps no one. Instead, focus on what was learned. This reinforces the mental map that people develop to avoid the mistake in the future, and increases the chances of not repeating a mistake.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
If we want people to think better, let them do all the thinking, then help them think.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Stop critiquing your team’s performance. Focus instead on what was learned, and reinforcing the positive aspects of performance.
2. If your email is more than five sentences, use another form of communication.
3. Use visual metaphors to describe problems. This helps offset the difference between your approach to a problem, and someone else’s. You can both build new mental models to interpret the issues, and to develop solutions from a common understanding.
Inspired reading
The Good Listener by Hugh Mackay