Dave Stahoviak (3:56)

And it gives me so much hope because I think a lot of us, this doesn't come naturally to. I know for me, it certainly hasn't. So much of the things that we talk about on the podcast and my work over the years, I feel like a lot of it's things that I've had to learn and figure out. And I think that that's oftentimes an obstacle for a lot of us as we see someone who's really inspir. We see a leader who has really found their voice in this way, and we think, wow, they've got a natural knack for this. But where do I begin? And that's one of the things that I think is really powerful about your research, is like, you've got some really great places for people to begin and the importance of that, too. And one of the things that you highlight, and I'm quoting you from the book now, you say, across all our experiments, we have found that whenever we are feeling uncertain, unmoored, dislocated or anxious, we are desperately in need of a meaningful and clear vision. And you add, when we're feeling lost, we are also attracted to strong leaders, even if they are infuriating. We just crave this as humans, don't we?

Adam Galinsky (5:02)

Absolutely. So I mentioned this idea of a fundamental human need for a sense of meaning, understanding, a sense of control, a sense of direction, and we don't have that. We feel unmoored, right? We feel lost at sea, and we're desperately Searching for any beacon, right, that can take us from being adrift. And one of the first steps of that beacon is really establishing a vision. And one of the things that I've shown in my research, right. Is that to be visionary, you know, sometimes people even use the words to be charismatic. You know, those sound like words that come from within, that they are endemic to an individual. And. But that's just not true. It turns out to be visionary, to be charismatic, to be inspiring, is really made up of a, of a set of specific characteristics, behaviors that each and every one of us can engage in.

Dave Stahoviak (5:53)

And there's some really clear paths to do that. And you highlight three of them, and I think we're going to look at each of the three in some detail. The what, the how, and then the when, which is all really important when it comes to vision and when it comes to the what you say offer a glorious future and that a. What is big picture? It's optimistic. I think when we think of vision, a lot of times we do think of those things, right. We think about like, okay, it has to be an optimistic, optimistic vision. It has to be a big picture. What does that sound like, though, when, when you actually are, like, seeing people that do that? Well, what are, what are they doing that makes that really capture it effectively?

Adam Galinsky (6:38)

Yeah. I mean, big picture, optimistic, meaningful vision of the future is really helping people understand. It's what can the world look like and how can I take you in that direction? And one of the things that we'll see a lot of times with great visionaries is they in some ways brutally describe the present. Like Lincoln during the Civil War, Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights act, even the way that Donald Trump has framed his campaign in 2016, 2024. He talks about how horrible the world is today, but then he presents this optimistic, big picture vision of the future, like, we're going to a better place. You. Some people call it the sunrise side of the mountain, which was one of George W. Bush's phrases. But this idea that there is a better world that awaits and we can get there together and I can help take you there.

Dave Stahoviak (7:28)

Yeah. And it's, it's. How do you know if. What's the balance? And maybe there. Maybe I'm asking a question that, like, isn't even the right question, but is there a balance between setting up the. Here's the reality of what people are experiencing today, or at least how I see it as a leader, and also painting the picture of the future. Is it an either or. I'M just kind of curious, like thinking about Martin Luther King and some of these examples of like the I have a dream speech, a masterful example of painting the picture of today, the real difficult reality, and then the future. Do you need both?

Adam Galinsky (8:05)

It's a great question. I think that it's most impactful when you have that contrast and use the word contrast. So like if you think about Martin Luther King, he used words like Swift sheltering in the heat of injustice, which is a great, great example of this. But I think that you don't necessarily need that, but you 100% need the optimistic vision of the future. So that optimistic vision of future can become more poignant when it's juxtaposed to the degradations of today. But even without that, the optimistic vision of the future is foundational, fundamental. We have to believe we're going to a better place and that, that this person can help take us there.

Dave Stahoviak (8:43)

You talk about values also as being really important in this. How does that fit into the what of a vision?

Adam Galinsky (8:51)

Yeah, I mean, I think that values are one of the most foundational drivers of goal driven behavior that exists in humans. And it is so powerful that study after study over the last 20 years have demonstrated that simply giving people time to reflect on their values has such dramatic effects that it can predict five years later who graduates from high school and goes to college versus doesn't. In one of my research studies, we brought in recently unemployed people in Switzerland. They came to a Swiss employee agency and we gave half of them a 15 minute intervention where we asked them to think about their values, to put them into a hierarchy of five values. Which one's the most important? How does that lead to your other values? Think about why those values matter to you, but also think about when you've demonstrated those values in your daily life. Now, two months later, the people in our experimental condition were twice as likely to have a job than people in the control condition. And the effect was so powerful that we were forced to end the experiment and give everyone the values. Reflection, intervention. Our values are really, in some ways they are steering wheel, they are our guide. In some ways you might think about, if we think about a car is I haven't thought about this before, so I'm using a new metaphor for everyone here, is that the optimism is the gas pedal and the values are the steering wheel. And so if you don't have the gas pedal, you're just going to stand still and do nothing. And if you don't have the steering wheel, you're going to crash into things along the way. So you need to have the optimism fuels you, but the steering wheel or your values direct it in the right place.

Dave Stahoviak (10:31)

When I read about that study in the book, it was just so fascinating and it seems so unlikely that 15 minutes of having someone just reflect on a value that's important to them would shape their behavior and their optimism and their drive for the coming months and being able to find a new job. And yet it's so profound, so substantially works. And I'm curious, like, thinking about that from a standpoint of a leader who's articulating that big picture vision, how do you bring in that kind of value? What is it that you say or do that paints that picture so that people latch onto it and they have that same sort of motivation?

Adam Galinsky (11:14)

Yeah, I mean, so I talked about the what, right? Which is this sort of, you might call it big picture, optimistic values based vision of the future. Right. That's one way of thinking about saying that. And then the question is, well, how do we communicate that? Right? And so this brings us to what I call the how of the vision. So the what is the optimistic big picture values based vision of the future, right? And then the how is really the communication of that. And there's two words that, that really matter. One is make it simple. And I call this the Inception rule, because in the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to implant an idea into someone's dream, and so that influences their future behavior. And he asked someone who's tried it before, and he said it didn't hold. He's like, oh, you didn't go deep enough? He's like, no, we didn't go simple enough. You want it to be simple enough to grow naturally in someone's mind. And so that's one part. And then the second way that we want to communicate our vision is to make it vivid, visual, kind of tangibly metaphorical in people's minds. One of the examples I like to give is the difference between saying, our mission is to make our customers happy versus our mission is to make our customers smile. And now notice, like smile and happy, right? Smile is a representation of happiness, but you can see a smile, right? And so it becomes just that. It's simple and it's vivid and it's visual. And so. So that is really what you want. You want that big picture, values based, optimistic vision of the future simplified and visualized for people.

Dave Stahoviak (12:53)

And when it's simple and identified, it's so much easier for people to hang their hats on it. And come back to it and recall it. And there's an example in the book about a procedure.

Adam Galinsky (13:06)

Yeah. This is a famous experiment from the 1970s done when my dissertation advisors, Marsha Johnson, when I was at. She was my advisor at Princeton University. She's now at Yale University. And she brought people into the lab and she gave them a little scenario, and she just said, can you figure out what's going on here?

Dave Stahoviak (13:24)

Here it is. The procedure is actually quite simple. First, you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient, depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to the lack of facilities, that is the next step. Otherwise, you're pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. A mistake can be expensive as well. After the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. So when I read this before I knew the context, I got, like, halfway through that paragraph. I remember it was actually late in the evening, I was reading this, and I was thinking, like, what on earth is this? Like, it just seemed like all gobbledygook to me.

Adam Galinsky (14:11)

Absolutely. You know, talk about being unmoored. Right. In a sea of words. Right. You just don't even know where to go. So that was one of the conditions in Marshall's experiment. The second condition actually gave people a title. And I'm going to give you the title now. And I want you to notice that as soon as you get the title, everything makes sense. We go from being lost to being found, if you will. And the title is simply this. Doing the Laundry. Now, every one of those sentences takes on meaning. Every one of those sentences connects and coordinates with the other sentences. Now we see why you separate things into piles, why you might have to go somewhere else, like a laundromat, why you don't want to do overstuff it, you know, and why you put things back into their appropriate places. Right. It all makes sense, but without the title, none of it makes sense. But here's the most interesting thing about Marcia's experiment. It's not just that people could read it more quickly and easily and digest it. When they got the title and they didn't, is what happened later is that later when she gave people a memory test, the people got the title. They couldn't remember it word for word, but they remember the gist. The people who didn't get the title, some of them couldn't even remember having read anything. There was nowhere for it to go in the person's mind. And it kind of just went in one ear and out the other, if you will. And so the title allowed it to stick into people's brains for them to remember it, to digest it, and then be able to recommunicate it in the future. And this is so important for a vision. Doing the laundry is the vision for that paragraph, right? Without that vision, people are lost. It's why we need to, A, create that vision, and then B, we got to reduce it, simplify it, and visualize it for people to really appreciate that. I'll give you one more example of just a brilliant, simple and visual vision that someone had that transformed the world, and that is a man named Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs, before he came with the iPhone, he had a phrase. He said, I want to put a computer in the hands of everyday people. Now it's visual, right? A big computer, okay? So then we got to think about this smaller. We can see someone's hand, right? And he's basically saying, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this computer, I'm going to turn into something else. We hold in our hands a phone and combine the two. But it's so elegant, it's so simple, it's visual, and it's powerful.

Dave Stahoviak (16:35)

And it just illustrates the power of a phrase or a sentence. I think about that paragraph again in doing laundry. If you just had that phrase doing the laundry, and you hadn't even read the paragraph, and someone asked you, would you write a quick paragraph on what are the key steps we need to do this? People would come up with something that was like, in the ballpark, right. For the most part. And in a way, it's so obvious. And yet how often in organizations, in a leadership context, we are spending time talking about the logistics of the stuff, whatever this stuff is, and no one's ever said a short phrase or two to three words or a sentence of what are we actually doing? What does the future look like? And to get it as simple as possible. And just that label makes such a difference.

Adam Galinsky (17:27)

Yeah. And you know, there's a follow up to this story, which I really love, which is I had an executive in one of my workshops and I share this example doing the laundry. And then she wrote me an email later and said that she put a little post it on her computer monitor that said, do the laundry. And after about a week, you know, her second in command came by and was like, are you Ever going to do your laundry. And so she said, oh yeah, you know, it has literally has nothing to do with doing the laundry. It's just a reminder to me that I need to set the vision, I got to make sure that I'm doing that. And then it actually became a catchphrase for them. So when they noticed that one of them was veering or not acting in a vision consistent way, they could just say, do the laundry. Right? And so that was their own simple little catchphrase that allowed them to in some ways solidify the vision. And that actually example brings me to the third point, the when, which is when should we share a vision? And the answer is all the time. So one of the things that my research has shown, other people's research has shown is that repetition is the key to understanding. You got to repeat, repeat, repeat. There's different tales and myths about how many times things need to be repeated before they're remembered. Some say seven, some say three. But the point is, repetition becomes so important for digesting, orienting and moving people forward. So you want to take this big picture, values based, optimistic vision of the future, simplify it and visualize it right into a cohesive statement that you can give. And then you gotta repeat that over and over and over again.

Dave Stahoviak (19:08)

And the power of repetition, amazing. I mean, you write the more times we've seen a statement, the more times we're likely to think that it is true. The effect of repetition is so powerful that it leads to something called the illusion of truth. Something doesn't even need to be true, as unfortunately we've seen, you know, in the media in the last number of years. That repetition is so powerful that it, it often can create truth. And this is something that I think that a lot of leaders I've worked with over the years miss this piece, that they get that big picture optimism. They get having, you know, making things a bit simpler. What they often miss is the repetition piece. And without the repetition, people just don't hear it, do they?

Adam Galinsky (19:56)

Absolutely. And I think here's one of the biggest reasons why leaders often don't repeat their vision, even when it's amazing and optimistic and simple and visual, is something called the curse of knowledge. And it's basically they keep seeing and hearing the vision in their own brain and they think that other people can see transparently inside their head, and they're also seeing that same vision. And so that's one of the reasons why they fail to repeat it enough times over and over again, because they forget that we can't hear what they're thinking, right? We can't see what's going on inside their head. And I think that's, that's another. So it's just a reminder. A CEO came up to me once and he said, oh yeah, I call it the throw up rule. And I was like, what is the throw up rule? He says, I know I've said the vision enough times when I say it one too many times and people kind of throw up a little in their mouth, they're so sick of it. I said, okay, that's the point. I've said it enough, right? And there's a recent paper that just came out by one of my friends, Frank Flynn at Stanford. He showed that leaders are 10 times more likely to be critically judged when they under communicate than when they over communicate. So sometimes people fear over communicating, but by far the biggest problem is under communication.

Dave Stahoviak (21:12)

I'm so glad you mentioned that. And what an interesting way to frame it, right? And I have heard more times than I can count someone who has been working on conveying a vision to a team. And they'll get three, four, five months into this and they'll come back and say, you know, I've been going all these months on seeing this vision and finally today, like someone in a meeting reflected back to me what I've been saying this whole time. And they sometimes come to that from a place of exasperation, like, my gosh, I've been saying this for three months and just now one person seems to have paid attention and they're sort of ready to throw in the towel a bunch of the time of like, you know, this obviously isn't working because I'm not getting it through. And, and I often have the exact opposite thought. And I'll come back to them and say, no, no, no, no, like this is the critical moment. You're now starting to get traction. It takes 60, 90 days, whatever that repetition, for people to hear it, like keep going when you get to that point. But I think a lot of times we don't, we don't stop and realize, again, to your point, the curse of knowledge. We don't stop and realize that it just takes time for a vision to take hold in an organization.

Adam Galinsky (22:23)

But there's something you just said right there that's so important too. So in addition to this power of repetition takes time to hold is one of the other central themes of my book is a phrase that I coined called the leader amplification effect. And the leader amplification effect basically says, because of the leader. There's so much attention on us, there's eyes on us. We're on stage. Everything we do gets amplified and has a bigger impact on people. So when someone repeats back to your vision finally, and you act exasperated, that tells people, don't do that again. Right. People will never say again, but if you're like, that's exactly right, Dave. That's exactly what I believe in. Thank you so much for saying that. It's going to teach people, okay, I should also be following that vision and repeat it myself. And so our behavior also matters so much in those critical times. I want to give just one quick example of what it means to have a shared vision versus not. And it's just the simplest version of the idea, but it's basically this, like, two people walk out of a meeting, and one person thinks the goal is to do it as fast as possible, whatever the task is, but someone else thinks the goal is to do the task with the highest quality possible. So now imagine these two people start interacting, and the person going quickly is like, why are you being so slow and so frustrated? Right. And the person who's doing it with great precision is like, why are you so sloppy? Driving me crazy. And so when we don't have that shared understanding, we get conflict, we get miscommunication. So what you're doing is you're not only satisfying this human need for meaning understanding, you're also solving the problem of interaction, that fact that we can have miscommunication, we can have conflict. And it just highlights again, again, how unbelievably important it is not only to have a vision, but to share it and repeat it enough times that other people internalize it.

Dave Stahoviak (24:23)

And speaking of repetition, one of the other phrases that really leapt out of me in the book is that fear doesn't hear. Tell me about that.

Adam Galinsky (24:31)

Yeah. So I've shown in my research that when we are feeling anxious, when we're feeling fearful, right. When we have anxiety, we're trapped inside our own brain, inside our own mind. And so we can't. Not only we can't really hear information out there, we just also can't really process it. And so we can't digest it. We don't have our own doing the laundry title in our mind, essentially, when we're listening to something. And so what that means as a leader is that during uncertain times, during anxious times, when people are scared, when they're fearful, we need to repeat things even more. The power of reputation becomes even more important.

Dave Stahoviak (25:13)

Yeah. Which sometimes is the Opposite of what we think. We think, okay, there's fear, there's concern in the organization, like maybe I don't need to, or I say less. I mean, it's interesting how people respond to this, but it is a time where a lot more repetition becomes really important.

Adam Galinsky (25:32)

Yeah. And I think what you just said is really important. We think, okay, it's a time of uncertainty. I shouldn't say anything until I have more certainty.

Dave Stahoviak (25:39)

Right.

Adam Galinsky (25:39)

Then you're just leaving people in the dark. And whatever people think about Rudy Giuliani today, back in 2001. Right. He was up there every single day, even when he didn't have complete information. But he was communicating. And that's why he became what people called America's Mayor, because he communicated even without having all the answers.

Dave Stahoviak (26:02)

Yeah. Such a powerful example. Speaking of saying things, there's something in the research around the how to do it that we didn't hit on that I think I'd love to come back to and the power of making things vivid. And there's a really interesting study that you cite in the book from Drew Carton where he brought people together and did a study. And they were looking at toys and there was two versions of the vision. One vision lacked vivid imagery and it sounded like this. Our vision is that our toys, all of them made to perfection by our employees, will be enjoyed by all of our customers. The other vision used strong imagery. The vision is that our toys, all of them crafted flawlessly by our workers, will make wide eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile. And then they looked at like the people who saw those different images and even kids who saw those like different. That different wording. And it made a big difference on just like the vividness of the language that was used.

Adam Galinsky (27:09)

Yeah, absolutely. So. So just to clarify, what they did is they gave people those different the visual versus the less visual imagery. And they had them make a toy and they had to literally work on a toy. Then later they gave those toys to kids and had the kids rate the quality of the toys and how much they wanted to play with them. Now, the kids had never seen the vision. So the kids are only responding to the toys. And what they found is that when the adult workers had created the toys under the more visual vision, the kids found those toys more enjoyable. They were more happy to play with them. They wanted to play with them more. So you can see how that vision, because they could see it right in their mind, it led them to be just a little bit more engaged, a little bit more creative, a little Bit more maybe precise in whatever they made. And then the kids, even though they were blind to the visions, could see that craftsmanship. Right. They could see the people really seeing their laughter and their wide eyes and then putting that into the toy and then the toy became more enjoyable for them.

Dave Stahoviak (28:14)

Huh. I'm so glad you clarified that because it's like even more powerful than I was thinking about it. Like here are children who didn't even have any sense of what the vision was, had never seen the language and yet experienced like noticeable differences of the effects of people who had seen it and the only difference was a sentence or two. It's like such a powerful example of everything you've said of like the how we do this, like making things vivid, creating like the really, it's like you said earlier, rather than happiness, like thinking about making people smile, that vividness in language, it makes such a difference on this.

Adam Galinsky (28:49)

Yeah, yeah. We're going to make toys that kids are going to enjoy versus we're going to make toys that wide eyed kids squeal at with laughter or enjoyment. Right. Just adding that little bit of visual imagery is so powerful.

Dave Stahoviak (29:03)

You have been sharing this research with so many. There's a ton more in the book. Obviously we're not getting to, but I know you've been thinking about this and talking with folks about it. And I'm curious, Adam, as you've done all this work and put all of this together and been thinking about vision and inspiration, what, if anything, in the last year or two of like going through that process, doing this, have you changed your mind on.

Adam Galinsky (29:29)

I think one of the things that's really changed for me is this idea of being thoughtful and careful about the words that we use. Right. We don't often think enough about that. And I think that this, you know, the what, the how and the when are really a powerful cookbook for people in order to craft their own vision. But I think the other thing that I think is really, really impacted me is reflecting on my values much more frequently and realizing that the values are really the driver of vision. That the driver being a better exemplar, that calm and courageous protector who's authentically passionate, they're a driver being a more inspiring mentor who lifts people up and elevates them and empowers them and that reflection is really of our values is really the foundation of having a better vision but also being more inspiring more generally.

Dave Stahoviak (30:24)

Adam Glinsky is the author of the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. Adam, thank you so much for your work.

Adam Galinsky (30:32)

Thank you so much. What a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Dave Stahoviak (30:42)

If this conversation was helpful to you, a few related episodes I'd recommend. One of them is episode 482, how to sell your your Vision. Michael Hyatt was my guest on that episode. Michael's been with me on the show a few times over the years. An extraordinary leader in his own right and has built an entire career, a second career really, on supporting leaders and helping them to do better. And he wrote a fabulous book on vision. And in that conversation we explored how do you sell a vision? So once it's there, or at least most of the way there, then what do you do inside the organization and navigating the politics and getting buy in for it. We looked at that in detail in episode 482. A great complement to this conversation. Also recommended episode 707, the recent conversation with Stephen Mr. Covey, the beliefs of Inspirational Leaders. We talked about the importance of inspiration and the mindset that's critical for leaders to bring if they want to inspire others. Again, a wonderful compliment to Adam's message today. Episode 707 for that. And then I was thinking about one of our audio courses that's up on the coaching4leaders.com website. Adam's book focused on of course, the professional side of having a vision for a team and an organization. And he also talks about the personal side of vision. There's an audio course on the coaching4leaders.com website that I produced called how to Create youe Personal Vision. It's one of the things that we talk about extensively in our academy. Conversations of yes, team and vision for a larger organization and for a group of people. But also what's an individual vision that every leader needs to have for themselves? Details in that audio course, step by step on exactly how to begin putting together your own personal vision. It is inside of the free membership under audio courses. All the details there as well as so much more inside of the free membership. And if you haven't set up your free membership, I'd encourage you to go over and do that. Coaching4leaders.com is where to go. Right on the front page there you will see a place to set up your free membership. You'll then have access to the entire library of audio courses that are inside of the free membership. Lots of audio courses you can track your progress, specific practical things that'll help you to move forward in your work, plus tons of other benefits. The entire library searchable by topic of all the episodes since 2011 that I've aired plus a ton more Inside the Free Membership Just go over to coaching4leaders.com and one of the things that I'm doing every week in addition to our free membership is I'm writing a weekly journal entry. And just this past week or so I wrote an entry about the practice I used to do of annual planning. I used to sit down and spend a whole bunch of time over several days, usually over the holiday, first holidays versus the year of writing out a personal plan and work and personal and career and family and all those things. And I set that practice up aside about a decade ago and I replaced it with a practice that is far easier and actually has worked way better. I talk about it in detail in one of my recent journal entries. If you'd like to get those entries delivered to your inbox each week. It's one of the many benefits inside of coaching for leaders. Plus for details, just go over to coaching4leaders.com plus you'll find out more and an opportunity to join. Join in with us. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday I'm glad to welcome Alison Wood Brooks to the show. We are going to be talking about a key principle for better conversations. Don't miss it. I look forward to sharing that conversation with you. Have a great week and see you back on Monday.