94. LEADing ideas: Research-Backed Tips and Tools from Four Stanford Professors
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Recent research has shown that sharing goal-fellower stories as a leader actually makes you a more influential leader. We can get a little bit too obsessed with driving towards the destination, and we have lots of tools for making that as efficient as possible.

Talking to somebody who has facilitated the engagement, going early to the engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people so you have an idea of where people are and what they're most interested in learning so that you can deliver. So know your audience.

What do you get when you bring together 400 students from all over the world, four professors who are insightful and inviting, and one mediocre podcast host? You get an amazing educational experience.

Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Recently, we did our first ever live in-person podcast session. We brought Stanford lead students from all over the world in person.

to chat with four of our previous guests, Jesper Sorensen, Suu Kyi Huang, Sarah Sewell, and Jonathan Laval. What you're about to listen to is a condensed version of that conversation. We'll start by hearing from everybody, expand on some of the things we've discussed in previous podcast episodes, and then I'll ask our guests to share something they're researching that excites them, and then have some closing advice.

along with some listener questions. Enjoy. I am thrilled to be here with all of you. Thank you so much for the support of our podcast. And we love getting your questions, your feedback, your following on LinkedIn and Instagram. Thank you so much. We wanted today to be very special. So we've invited four of our most popular guests to come talk with us. So we're going to have fun and we look forward to hearing from you. So let's get into it.

Jesper, we're going to start with you. For those of you who don't know Jesper, Jesper is a professor in organizational behavior and the senior associate dean of academic affairs. When Jesper and I had our conversation on the podcast, he shared how when we think about strategy, we can think about strategy as making an argument, telling a story.

And it turned out to be one of our most popular episodes on YouTube. People really, really got interested in strategy and how to tell strategy stories and make arguments for your strategy. So, Jesper, my question to you is, for all of us, we all have our own personal strategies, our goals for ourselves. Can you give us some suggestions about how we can tell our own strategy stories? Sure. So, I mean, thanks, first of all, for having all of us here and for doing this and for this amazing crowd.

And I'm continually amazed by the fact that the YouTube video is so popular, but I think it's because we didn't actually video record. I have a face for podcasts, I think is what somebody said. So yeah, so when I talk about strategy, I think about strategy as being the narrative, right, that you have for why it is you're able to accomplish what it is you do.

And I think you can think about that in different kinds of ways as you think about constructing these stories for yourself. And that's whether you're constructing that story for your company or for your own career. I think for me, the most important thing to remember is that unless a story is fictional, you have to give yourself a little bit of space and some forgiveness for not having the story right.

at any given point in time. I think when you think about, when people think about their careers, right, and you see young people just starting out, they have this idea that they should have a very clear trajectory and plan and so on and so forth. And then they get very anxious and frustrated sometimes

when things don't work out the way that they want it because it doesn't fit that narrative that they had constructed for themselves. But again, I think the only stories you can tell in advance are fictional. And so that means that that story was a fiction, right? And that the story is going to be the one that evolves. And I think when you get to be as old as some of us are up on this panel, right, you realize that really it's about things that you discover as you go along the way. And so I think where this matters the most is when you're making big decisions.

And I think the thing that I like to think about is you should always think about a decision where you think about an experiment as being something where you're testing a hypothesis, you're testing a theory. And in particular, you should think about what you learn from that experiment as being something that informs your understanding of what your story is going to be and how it's going to evolve. So I think Jesper called me old. I think I just... No, I was referring to myself. Oh, I see. I see. Okay.

I appreciate very much the notion of running those experiments and then figuring out how to communicate them. And what I also really heard, which is important for me personally, is to remind myself to give myself a little space and grace as I think through those things. It's very easy to get caught up in the moment and not give yourself that space. So thank you for that. Next, I'd like to come to Suchi. Suchi is an associate professor in marketing and her research focuses on consumer motivation.

And when Suchi joined us, we talked a lot about motivation. And one of the things that I really took away from our podcast together was how to sustain motivation over time. And in fact, after that episode, I told some of my friends about what we had talked about. And we all agreed that we were going to take on this new type of exercise that we hadn't done before. And we were a little competitive, but we're mostly supportive. And what I took away from the episode is when I should best compare myself.

to my colleagues and how that can help sustain that motivation. All of us in this room are endeavoring to do lots of different things. Suchi, can you share with us some ways to sustain that motivation in the activities that we all do? Sure, definitely. And first of all, I'm glad to hear that you took my advice. I did. Actually using it. So I have three things to share with you today. First, start small. Second, social support.

And third, journey mindset. So first, start small. A lot of us have big goals and definitely for your organization, the goal is big. But big goals means it's valuable and it's not attainable. And it is really hard to get motivated when we only focus on big goals. So when we are starting, it's really important to focus on small goals. Can you make it into piecemeal goals?

instead of thinking about a large quarterly or annual goals, what should we achieve by the end of today? So when you start small, it's easier to motivate yourself as a leader and also to motivate your employees and stakeholders. Second, social support. I see that that's what Matt took to heart. In our research, we found that social support fluctuate. In the beginning, we're excited to actually announce that's our goal, get everybody on board. When we're getting close to the end of the quarter or the year, we are also excited because we will not celebrate and we think we are winning.

It is through the middle stage that things get muddy. When you feel especially challenged, that's when we hide from social information. We don't want to know what our peers are doing because those information is threatening. But what we found is that at those very moments is exactly when you need social information and social support to get you going, either to give you some competitive motivation or some collaborative energy.

So social support is important throughout and especially in the middle when things get tough. The last thing is journey mindset. In a society today, we think about goals as destination, which is great. We are motivated to reach them and we have no clue what to do after we reach them. Thinking about goal as a journey means that it's not just about reaching a goal and get it done. It's about also thinking about that as a continuation. After I reach this goal, there is the next thing.

I look back and think about what went right and what went wrong. And I take what I learned and I continue. So it is a continuous journey. It never really. And that is really helpful for maintaining that motivation. Absolutely. And I see how what you just said about the journey mindset ties nicely to what Jesper said about running experiments. So if you're continually thinking about the next step as another experiment, that all of a sudden starts helping you define that narrative and can help you figure out where you want to go next. So thank you for that. I'd like to come next to Sarah.

Sarah is a professor of organizational behavior. I recently came to learn about some of your new research that you published, and it's about confessions and fessing up to misdeeds and misbehaviors. I'm wondering if you can share a bit about what you found and any advice that it leads to. Absolutely. Let me tell you about this research. In 2020, I'll take you back to that year when in May of that month in the United States, a man by the name of George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.

Now, what you may have noticed either here in the U.S. or in your own whole country was that many leaders of organizations, CEOs, organizational leaders of educational institutions and nonprofits and so on, issued racial justice states in the wake of that event. Sometimes these statements issued support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sometimes they issued support for any kinds of procedures within the organization to do something about racial inequity in the organization or abroad and so on.

We, when I say we, I mean my wonderful PhD student, Lambert, me, took notice of this and decided to collect all of these statements from Fortune 500 companies as well as benefit corporations. And we noticed a pattern which was surprising to us. And that is that many leaders willingly confess, and that's the term we use, issued a public confession

about either not knowing that there was a problem with racial inequity in the country, even confessing publicly that they were complicit in some way. We found interesting because much of the prior literature, which is known as impression management, talks

about ways in which corporate leaders, when communicating, put positive information out. Here we saw something different, a willingness to put forth negative information about themselves. And so what we did with these statements, one of the first things we've done with these statements is sent them out, all of them. We collected 525 of these statements and we sent them out to people in an online survey and asked them to tell us what they think about the leader and about the

a state unit itself and what they think about the organization in terms of their corporate social responsibility and their reputation for corporate social responsibility. We found that in the statements, not all of them had a confession, but those statements which did have a confession were associated with positive views of the leader

And an impression that that organization was a good corporate social responsible actor. And it was especially true for any kind of confession. But for those confessions that involved confessing something negative they have done, we call this a confession of commitment, right?

those were especially highly rated. So in terms of thinking about what this might mean, I think importantly what we're seeing, at least with the case of racial justice in the U.S., was that there was something different happening with impression management. Rather than putting positive information out there, the view that the leader in the organization is authentic and transparent is

was what led to more favorable attitudes towards the organization and especially towards the organization as a responsible in society. So it's changing the common perception that you only put out positive information by acknowledging some negative behavior. It actually has some positive benefits.

Well, now I'm coming to Jonathan. Jonathan LaVavre, a professor of marketing, the only podcast guest ever to swear in an episode. Our editor had to work extra time on that one. Jonathan, you have some new research out about giving recommendations, and there's a difference between speaking those recommendations versus actually having them in writing. Can you share a little bit about that?

the results of that study and what it might mean for us as we give recommendation. I promise to keep it clean because there's no editing. I don't even remember I cursed. I thought it was a natural course of events. In general, my research is kind of looks at the difference in sort of physical experiences of consuming technology. And so how those different ways in which we consume technology influence our decision making process. And so one of the things that we've looked at is modalities. And so with technology,

allow you to do is it allow you to present information in different modalities. So you can read things and sometimes you can feel things and you can also hear them or say them out loud. And so it turns out that you would think that whether you read something or hear something, it should have the same effect because after all, it's the same information. If I tell you you should take Sarah Sewell's class,

Whether I wrote take Sarah Sewell's class or I said take Sarah Sewell's class, but it should be the same. The recommendation is the same. But what we're finding is that people actually follow recommendations more when they're said than when they're written. And the effect is a large, but it's very consistent. And we look at it across lots of different, both consumer products and also different kinds of tasks. And it's a little bit of a mystery to us of why exactly it's happening. What we're finding is that it has to do with the ephemerality of the information. When I say something, it's gone.

When something is written, it's still in front of me. What we're finding is that when people are exposed to ephemeral information, we also test that by actually showing them sentences of things that go and disappear, right? So we can create ephemerality also with written text. It basically creates almost like an action orientation, like...

Like to be able to hang on to that information, I have to create, I have to act on it. And so that translates into when you hear a recommendation, right? You say, okay, I'm going to follow it. Whereas when you read it, you don't have to sort of engage in that kind of immediate action moment. And so we find that with a couple of, actually, I should credit the grad students, Shweta Maridasu and Chris Beckler, who co-authored this with me.

Perhaps one of the reasons the podcast has been successful is it's us making recommendations in a spoken format. So maybe we're on to something. Also, you're a celeb, Matt. Oh, yeah. Right. Exactly. Now let's hear from Jesper and Jonathan as they describe some of their current research and thinking.

I'm very interested, I have been for a while on entrepreneurship. And for a long time, what I studied was why do people choose to leave their jobs to become entrepreneurs? And one of the things that I've emphasized, way in which entrepreneurship, we should think about entrepreneurship as being part of a career, as opposed to the way we tend to think about it in the scholarly literature is kind of like you become an entrepreneur and then we stop. Entrepreneurship is actually more like marriage, right? Like you enter into it and then sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Thankfully, entrepreneurship has a higher failure rate than marriage. But what that means is that a lot of people try this in various kinds of ways, and then they have to find jobs. So what I'm interested in now is how do employers respond to somebody who applies for a job and who has entrepreneurial experience on their resume? And there is some existing research that shows that if you send people resumes with...

you know, two resumes, one that has entrepreneurial experience on it and the other one that doesn't. The person who has the entrepreneurial experience is actually less likely to get a callback, which is puzzling, right? So there's kind of a penalty. And so there are various theories about that, about, well, entrepreneurs are hard to manage, they're hard to control. And that to me feels like a very ad hoc, post hoc argument. So we're trying to figure out what the real story is.

Intuition right now is that there's two stages in a hiring process. There's a screening stage where people are just kind of going through all the resumes and trying to figure out the ones they're going to pay more attention to. And then there's a more deep evaluation. What happens is at the screening stage, you don't really pay attention to ones that don't fit into your mental model. So if you're looking for a marketing manager, you want somebody kind of has work experience as a marketing manager. And if you see that they had their own startup doing marketing stuff, you're like, you know

And your kind of mind kind of shuts that out. And so, but if you get to the evaluation stage, maybe you have a more well-rounded assessment of what actually the strengths and weaknesses of an entrepreneur. Because entrepreneurs are also creative. They're energetic. They are go-getters and so on and so forth. So you would think,

that employers would want those candidates as well. So the so what is partially around thinking about how employers process things. And then there's also going to be a set of implications for how you might think about that as an entrepreneur, about how you want to portray your accomplishments. Absolutely. What you put on that resume or on LinkedIn might affect how people think about you for sure. And I like that Jesper used that analogy to marriage. One of the things that comes up

a lot on the podcast is how we frame things. Michelle Gelfand spent some time talking about how you frame negotiation, how you frame entrepreneurship. Framing really affects the way that you yourself perceive what you're talking about, but also how others you interact with. So thank you for demonstrating that. Jonathan, let me come to you. What are you studying or doing?

I'll talk about something that we're just, we don't know the results. We don't know if it's going to work and we'll be running the experiment now. So one of the issues that I've developed is in face-to-face versus video interactions. And we did a bunch of research on it that looked at sort of creative output and video versus face-to-face. You do better face-to-face, by the way, just as a quickie, just so you know. But sort of that sort of gave rise to a whole set of other interests. And one of the things that is different in video interactions is psychological distance. When you're talking to somebody on video, there's some kind of sense of distance.

I have a grad student that was talking about working with one of our colleagues and he said, I could never work with him if it was face-to-face. He's too aggressive for me, but online I can totally do it. And we're like, all right, let's test it. So now we're actually running a study. It takes quite a while, but we're running a study. We're using an economic game where you can basically be aggressive towards somebody else by taking more of the pot.

And we're looking to see are there differences when people are playing this game face to face versus over video. And then we also measure a series of things of sort of how they feel about each other afterwards. I don't have the results yet. That's the latest. I think it's fascinating to think about how being virtual affects everything about how we feel about people, what we're willing to say and do. And I think that research sounds really interesting.

We took a break from the academic conversation and looked to get questions from our audience. Hi, I'm Felicia Cameriani. I'm curious, Professor Soule, if you can comment on, in social media, we have seen so many people ford right about confessions of wrongdoing and the cancel culture. Really good question here. And I'm going to say that one of the things that we haven't tested and I'm not sure how to test is

is where this idea of public confessions came from. And I suspect that this came from the Me Too movement, where we saw a lot of male leaders in particular proactively getting ahead of the curve and confessing before

an accusation came forward. And so I suspect that this might have been a kind of a diffusion process by which other corporate leaders decided, and again, with the racial justice issue, to do this before discoverable information came forward and they were directly targeted. So in terms of thinking about cancel culture and so on, I suspect that this is exactly a proactive, a defensive mechanism.

prior to the possibility of being quote unquote canceled. My name is Sangeeta. I'm from Bay Area. Another hot topic that we have today is AI. My question to panel is, how do you see this AI impacting humanity overall? So I'll start and I would love to hear from some of you. I interviewed ChatGPT. I don't know if you heard that. It was actually...

cool but scary at the same time. So I typed in questions and then we did a text to voice response. And it was really fascinating to have it tell me that I, one, could keep my job, which made me feel really good, but also that for it to explain that it understands that there are ethical and information biases that it could have. And that to me is something to think about. Now, as a teacher, I do see value in some of what it can provide. It gives my students, for example, opportunities to practice.

You can type in generate questions about X and then they can practice answering those questions in a way that they couldn't prior. So for me personally, I'm still trying to figure it out, but I see that there are advantages to learning, but there are also some concerns. Yeah, so I have a variety of reactions to these things.

So I would say, first of all, as a teacher, you always worry about how it's going to make your life harder. And because it's making grading a lot harder. But I think that's probably a good thing because now we have to think more carefully about. And, you know, what we know is that there's always moral panics, right, about these things. So when I was a kid, it was all about calculators.

people would never be able to do math again. And that might be true, right, actually, but we are still around. I mean, to me, what's interesting about these kinds of things like ChatGPT is we worry about them supplanting us, I guess. But like, I think what we have to remember is that everything that it's able to do is based on trying to recombine everything that's already existed. And so that's a limited form of creativity. It's a very important form of creativity and production, certainly. And so I can see places where that's going to matter a lot.

But I think there's also at the same time lots of room for us, maybe free us up to do other things. My name is Girish Novalgunkar. So follow-up question. Have you figured out how you are going to figure, identify whether the essay is a chat GPT essay versus a genuine essay? This is a really terrific question. And I have one anecdote. I was a colleague at another university, was concerned about students writing their essays for the final exam. Rather

Rather than giving them the question to answer, they probably had ChatGPT answer it. And then the student's assignment was to critique what ChatGPT had come up with by citing material in the class and so on. So there are really nice and creative ways to lean into what ChatGPT is doing. And also, I think that there are some nuances that we can pick up on, even if we think we can't.

Emily White, huge fan of yours, as you know. I listen to your podcast a lot and share it with everyone. So my question is, as an educator at the Stanford GSB, what's your biggest communication challenge? For me personally, it's just getting my students' attention. Stanford MBA students and our MSX students and others are, they're so amazing and they're so busy and they're doing so much. It's just amazing.

helping to give them space to work on the things that we work on. And it's, there's just so much going on. So for me personally, it's trying to create activities and experiences that are immersive enough to get that focus so that the work can be done. And that's not

I'm not saying anything negative about them. The work that they're doing is phenomenal. And I learned so much from my students. It's just getting the mind share in the moment in the class to do that. I think my biggest challenge when I first came to Stanford, which was 10 years ago, was to learn how to project concepts.

competence in this environment. So I grew up in Asia and as an Asian female, I automatically, the perception of me is that I'm warm, approachable, but maybe less confident. And I have to learn how to actually understand that cue and leverage that cue, starting from wearing high heels.

to learning how to project my voice and eventually learning how to actually communicate that through my content as well. I think that was my biggest challenge. I will just add, I think the biggest challenge right now with communications is what the pandemic has done to all of us, but especially some of our learners. And part of that, I think, is getting the attention. But I think part of it's also that, you know, many people are suffering. Most people, I will argue, are suffering some of the after effects of the pandemic.

and being able to be empathetic to what people are going through and understanding where we can push and where we shouldn't push it.

Before we wrapped up our event, I asked several of our panelists for closing advice that they had for anyone wishing to hone their leadership skills. Spend just a moment to share perhaps a bit of advice for our awesome leaders in the room. Maybe short-term advice about what to do while here on campus, or maybe longer-term advice in terms of what they're doing as their careers unfold. Why don't we start with Suchi? So,

So I have one advice since I studied goal and motivation. Share your failure. You talk a lot about our goal success, but research has, recent research has shown that sharing goal failure stories as a leader actually make you a more influential leader. It doesn't actually hurt the perception of your ability. It only make you actually better connect.

feel free to share GoFailure. First, let me say thank you, Suchi. I want to talk more about that because that seems like perhaps some of the mechanism in the public confession. And my advice actually comes from Matt. So I've had the opportunity to teach with Matt and also to watch Matt teach and listen to his advice. And one of the things that

Matt always tells us is to know your audience. So in your communication, figure out how to learn who it is that you are about to address, whether that is a reading about them on LinkedIn, talking to somebody who has facilitated the engagement, going early to the engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people. So you have an idea of where people are and

what they're most interested in learning so that you can deliver. So know your audience and your communication. I guess what I would say is

You know, I think it's very important to have a sense of goals and a sense of purpose. I don't think we should be so wedded to that we are not open. Something that has been lost with new technologies, if you think about Google Maps, right? So now you go to a new city and you're like, okay, I want to go visit this cathedral. And you get out your phone and it says, okay, walk this way. And again, in the old days, I'm sounding a lot like an old man.

but like you would like get out a map and you would try to read it and you're like start walking and then suddenly you'd end up in a totally different place and that would be spectacular and you would eventually make it to the cathedral or whatever but it was actually this place you ended up at by mistake that was much more powerful and I think

We can get a little bit too obsessed with driving towards the destination, and we have lots of tools for making that as efficient as possible. And we don't want to lose sight of all the great things that come from being open to new discovery. As a special treat, we asked some of the audience members to share their answers to the questions I end every episode with.

Okay, my name is Soro Milkov. So the question that I've got was, what's the best advice you have received when it comes to communicating with others? And I don't know if that's the best advice, but it's one of the most difficult ones for me. So it's kind of a question which is around...

Think about the most important thing that you want the audience to remember or to understand after you communicate with them. Of course, the communicator admirer. I have to mention Matt because he's so smooth as silk and flawless with no fillers. But recently I saw the presentation of Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. I found him to be very riveting, very energetic, and he was able to condiment a lot of his accounts with storytelling. So I found him to be very effective as a communicator.

Hello, I'm Stefania and the three ingredients. First one for a successful communication would be knowing your audience because this is a very important thing to know in tailoring your message. Second, structure. Putting structure will help your audience follow your message. And the third one will be clarity, like avoiding misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Well, there you have it, our first ever in-person live podcast episode. A big thank you to all of the people in the audience who participated and to my guests, Jesper Sorensen, Sarah Sewell, Suu Kyi Huang, and Jonathan Laval. I hope you took away some interesting insights and some valuable lessons to help you be a better leader and a better communicator.

Think Fast, Talk Smart. The podcast is a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. This episode was produced by Podium Podcast Company, Jenny Luna and me, Matt Abrahams. Find more resources, follow and join our conversation on LinkedIn by searching Think Fast, Talk Smart.

Hi, Matt here. Quick question for you. When was the last time you took a step back from your daily life and took the time to invest in yourself and your education?

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