The phrase "Leave no man behind" is universally understood as the bond soldiers have to their fellow soldiers. The 5th stanza of the Ranger creed says " I will never leave a fallen comrade..." Wouldn't it be nice if our leaders took the approach to leave no team member behind?
If we accept that a leader’s job is to take action to create an environment where others can take action to achieve a desired outcome; then it goes without saying that you are going to have to reconcile with passionate ideologies on your journey to serve the diverse teams that youwill be challenged to lead. It's not about you. It is about remaining authentic but also being accountable to reconcile and unite people in teams that can achieve a desired result.
My wife Carol and I watched a movie called the JesusRevolution this past weekend. In the 1970s, Greg Laurie and a sea of young people descend on sunny Southern California to redefine
truth through all means of liberation. Inadvertently, Laurie meets a charismatic hippie street preacher and a pastor named Chuck Smith who opens the doors to his church to a stream of wandering youth. What unfolds is a counterculture movement that becomes the greatest spiritual awakening in American history.
Counterculture movement. What we would call counter ideology today. The movie depicts a far-left extreme hippie, drug using, me generation vs a far-right conservative body of people. Picture a church service where the older attendees dressed in suit and tie that give most of the money are on one side in pews. On the other side are long hair, bare foot hippies playing bongo drums. Two very different diverse groups of people.
Pastor Smith reminded me of today's leaders who must bridge that kind of division in America today. Pastor Chuck Smith realizes that he is thereas a spiritual LEADER (emphasis on LEADER) to bring everyone regardless of their ideologies on a common path to accepting Jesus Christ as their
savior.
In one scene, he tells the congregation that the door goes both ways. It is open to all who seek Jesus and if you can not align on that path and accept that the hippies also need Jesus then feel free to leave. Pastor Smith was a leader helping people from diverging ideologies find a common purpose.
Several of the suit and tie group get up and leave. Then one older man in a tie gets up and moves across the aisle to sit with the hippies and says: “alright pastor let’s begin?” He was one of the church elders or leaders in what many of us grew up exposed to in a liturgical denominational church.
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The fact that leaders are exposed to diversity on amultitude of levels to include ideology is probably one thing everyone would agree on. Recent voting shows just how divided our country is when it comes to ideology. We have a continuum of views from far left to far right and everything in between. People are passionate on the way that they feel about a variety of topics. Making the move to be an accountable authentic leader like Pastor Smith did is to understand that there are just some things you will never change with people. We all have deeply seeded views on what we believe.
You are who you are and your team members are who they are. The good new is that you have a better chanceof influencing the group. Servant leaders are accountable to realize that it’s not about you. It is about creating purposeful work with apath everyone can follow.
Why then are folks so entrenched in their views? Answering this question is all about understanding how the brain works. It is about understanding our emotions and strategies to regulate that emotion in order to deliberately engage in thoughtful decision making. We could talk for hours about the science behind this. It gets even more complex when you try to understand the impact of traumatic brain injuries, autism, drug addiction etc. on emotion regulation. I am going to try to simplify it a bit for you.
It might surprise you to know that the same trait that makes many business leaders successful in making decisions from their gut without all the data and keeps soldiers alive on a battlefield is why people are passionately entrenched in certain lines of thought. In a word - INTUITION. Intuition is the complex system that acts like a bridge between the subconscious and the conscious mind. It requires no analytical reasoning.
US Air Force Colonel John Boyd developed the OODA loop todescribe the combat operations process, in particular, aerial combat. It is generally used to explain how agility can overcome raw power.
OODA stands for observe-orient-decide-act. Survival is about making betterdecisions. You learn and create habits based on experience. This becomes part of our unconscious thought. These are filters that bias how we observe. Observations also include situational awareness influenced by the environment, social media and other people.
How we interpret (orient) and likely judge what we are observing is biased by our own agenda, filters and bias. We are all absolutely biased. Decision making in this model is inferring unconscious reactions based on Intuition. Once we take action, results inform future action or adjustments.
Picture Maverick in top gun deciding and then observing andadjusting and acting in a dog fight. OODAbreaks the process down into phases but in many real world scenarios this takes
a fraction of a second.
You may have heard the expression you are what you eat meaning what you consume has an impact on your physical health. In a similar manner, the state of your thoughts – meaning the subjects you think about and your opinions on those subjects is greatly determined by what is available to you to consume, whether it is news, film, music, or Instagram posts of gossip from your friends. When the availability heuristic comes intoplay, this can lead to people being extremely stuck in their own opinions and prevent them from being empathetic to other’s viewpoints.
When you “follow” someone in social media you are subjecting yourself to focused thought driving the right or non-rational side of the brain. You are further arming your intuition.
The subconscious mind takes everything literally. It does not differentiate between negativeand positive. So, if you continuallytell yourself that you’ll never succeed in a particular venture, it’s likely to turn out that way. If you repeatedly tell yourself idea A is unacceptable and that is what you hear from those you “follow” then that becomes the loop that plays continuously in your brain. Our subconscious mind focuses on emotion rather than logic or reason.
The subconscious mind is like a supercomputer. It is far more powerful than the consciousmind and can process huge quantities of information that come via your five senses and translate them back to your brain in the blink of an eye.
Another way to look at this concept of availability bias isthe acronym WYSIATI. What You See Is AllThere Is. This is a cognitive bias described by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast andSlow. WYSIATI says that when presentedwith evidence, especially those that confirm your mental model, you do not question what evidence might be missing.
This System 1 thinking (fast, intuitive thinking) thatseeks to build the most coherent story it can without stopping to examine the quality and quantity of the information may seem bad when you consider the impact on ideological thinking. System2 (slower more logical) is not invoked to question the data. Yet this intuitive unconscious response has helped many soldiers on the battlefield.
Rangers spend a lot of time training over and over again on quick reaction drills so that they react quickly under fire. This is really no different than the athlete who uses muscle memory to execute in a game.
When you develop an emotional attachment to an ideology,you train yourself to adopt a narrative into which all incoming information must fit. We treat our ideologies as though they were the only valid way to interpret our social, political and economic lives because in our subconscious we secretly believe that we are better at thinking than other people. The brain defaults to reward and is ego centric. It wants to be right. There is more reward when you feel you are right.
When turned against competing ideologies these passionate thoughts can be weaponized as we see so much in the world today – on both sides of the aisle.
One of the best explanations of all of this is in a book bypsychologist Jonathon Haidt called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Jonathon describes an elephant and the rider trying tocontrol the elephant as the two parts of our brain. The elephant being the innate unconscious part that drives the majority of our reactions. In a summary Jonathon comments:
“…the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, andthe rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our consciousreasoning—the stream of words and images that hogs the stage of our awareness. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur
outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. “
Behavioral scientists generally refer to the elephant asSystem 1 thinking (non-linear automatic , intuitive thinking) and the Rider as System 2 thinking (controlled, rational, linear ) thinking. We are generally more affected by biases that restrict awareness when we rely on system 1 thinking. Noticing important information in contexts by not responding with system 1 emotional thinking can help us as leaders make more effective decisions.
Significant change can occur when we as leaders create anenvironment for others to take action toward a desired end state. That environment consists of the:
- rational side (the Rider)
- The emotional side (the Elephant)
- the situational world (the Path)
Unconscious thought and emotions (the elephant) are a lot more prevalent than rational thought (the rider). You have to understand the elephant and find the feeling without judging the elephant. Everyone on our team has triggers that elicit positive and negative emotions. All emotions lead
to some sort of change. I must first understand the triggers that create negative emotion and create an organizational culture that eliminates them. I must care enough to try to understand.
Then I need to do my best to be accountable to avoid them and find a place everyone can agree. That "middle ground" or situational factors is a common purpose and a corporate or team culture that people from all ideologies can align on to some degree. The middle ground is focusing on
the positives you can leverage. Instead of coaching on how to "fix" the negative behavior from your perspective, highlight the positive.
After we know the triggers to avoid, we need to find thebright spots. Positive conflict is about being positive and finding the win-win solution. To direct the rider, the bright spots help us remain solution focused as we can usually align with someone when we focus on being positive.
If we accept that a leader’s job is to take action to create an environment where others can take action to achieve a desired outcome; then it goes without saying that you are going to have to reconcile with passionate ideologies on your journey to serve the diverse teams that you
will be challenged to lead. It's not about you. It is about remaining authentic but also being accountable to reconcile and unite people in teams that can achieve a desired result.