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Today on Nudge, we're looking to answer an important question.
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This age old scientific question of, you know, are leaders born or are they made?
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That's my guest on today's episode of Nudge.
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My name is Adam Galinsky. I'm a professor at Columbia Business School, and I wrote a book called the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others.
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Adam has undertaken groundbreaking research on perspective taking, social hierarchies, and the science of leadership. And today, we'll figure out if great leaders are born or if they're made. Now, chances are you're listening to this ad while doing something else. Maybe a couple of other things, maybe three other things. Unfortunately, this is the bane of podcasters like me. We have to repeat points because many listeners don't pay full attention when they're listening. There's a bit of evidence that suggests people only pay attention to 70% of what you say, but that is just us podcasters. Now imagine only listening, listening to 20%. Now, that would be ridiculous. And yet most businesses do exactly this with their data. They miss 80%. The emails, the calls, the chats, all of these data points just float into the digital abyss. HubSpot, however, pulls that data together so you can actually learn from it. It helps you see the data you miss because the more you know, the more you grow. Get the full picture at HubSpot in Adam's fantastic book Inspire. He starts with two leadership examples, one inspiring leader and one infuriating leader.
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Tammy J. Schultz was flying Southwest Airlines 1380 from LaGuardia, New York to Dallas. And about half an hour into the flight, the left engine exploded.
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With an engine down a hole in the plane and terror gripping her passengers, Tammy Jo Schultz had to think quickly and clearly.
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So that is bad enough. But the explosion was so strong and so severe, it actually tore a hole in the side of the plane. No, it's not on fire, but part of it's missing. So here's Tammy Jo Schultz, captain of this plane with her first officer, and all sudden, you know, they're dealing with incredible level of unscripted disasters, right? And I think she did a number of different things that moment that are just truly inspirational. The first thing that she did, right, is that she, as she likes to say, is she really listened to what the plane wanted to do and she said the plane wanted to descend. So she descended the plane 20,000ft in less than five minutes. But I think the thing that she did next was maybe the most remarkable thing, and it's something that very few people do in this situation, is she recognized what was the experience of her passengers in this moment, right. She's protecting them, but she also needs to reassure them. And she recognized that if you're a passenger with a hole in your plane that's lost an engine and you're dropping 20,000ft in less than five minutes, you probably think you're going down. And so she got on the intercom and said 10 words. She said, we are not going down, we're going to Philly. That one statement that people talked about like it took them from the edge of a heart attack right into hope and possibility. She, if you listen to her on the air traffic controller, it is one of the most remarkable experiences.
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Listen to her voice on a call to air traffic control.
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Could you have the medical meet us there on the Runway as well? We've got injured passengers. She's like, yeah, we have a hole inside the plane and we're going to need to land in Philly. And then she, she says, we're slow in debt. You know, she's just describing things in very matter of fact. And that sort of, that calmness, right.
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Is incredible, unshaken, measured and calm. Tonight, the 56 year old pilot is being hailed a hero, most loudly by the passengers.
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That pilot, I give it out to.
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Her, I mean, wow, that lady has a nerves of steel.
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And then after she landed the plane, she did something else that I think was pretty remarkable is she went row by row and checked in on every single passenger on the plane.
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With the plane safely on the ground, Schulz walked back into the cabin to speak personally with every person whose life she just saved.
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She said afterwards it was funny because she's like, you know, I find it very odd and very surprising that the media made a bigger deal about my stroll down the aisle after the plane was landed than what it took to land this crippled plane. But also shows you how starved people are for what I like to call a mentor that really takes the perspective of others, feels empathy for them. She understood in that moment that, you know, her job wasn't done even though she landed the plane, that she also needed to make sure that people were in a good emotional state.
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Adam makes the point that Tammy J. Schultz took certain actions that made her an inspiring leader. In the book, Adam contrasts this with a totally different leader, a leader who was faced with a very similar catastrophe but didn't take the same actions.
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What happened in this case was Captain Francesco Schettino. He was the captain of the Costa Concordia in a cruise ship and he got too close to shore and tore a hole in the side of his ship. 150 foot hole in the side of his ship. So now you have two captains, right, with both holes in their vessels. And how do they respond to that? Well, first of all, Captain Schultz wasn't responsible for hers, and Captain Scatina was. He claims he got close to salute submariners. Prosecutors claim he was trying to impress his mistress, a Moldovan dancer, who I think was unsure. But what happened next, I think, is where they really diverge. So the first thing that happened next is Schettino didn't do anything. He didn't contact the Coast Guard for an hour. Now, what was he doing for that hour? He was trying to get his story straight. So he was communicating to some people, like, should I say this? Should I say that? I should point out that when the hole came in this vessel, total blackout, right? So they lose electricity because the water's flooding in. Then he wants to claim this, the blackout caused the accident rather than vice versa. He finally gets on with the Coast Guard, and then he dithers for, you know, another 20 minutes before he finally comes clean and says, what's happening? And that 90 minutes is crucial. Right, For. For saving people.
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Gives the impression of the captain having just completely dropped the ball on this.
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The second thing that is really remarkable about his example is that when he was communicating eventually with the Coast Guard, he was actually in one of the lifeboats and not on the ship.
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The Port Authority saying, let me just read you a bit of this saying, port Authority saying, how many people are on board? The captain replies, 2, 300. Port Authority, are you on board? No, I'm not on board because the ship is keeling. We've abandoned it. The port Authority. What? You've abandoned the ship? The captain says, no. What abandoned? I'm here. And it goes on. You must return on board, climb the ladder, return to the force, then coordinate the work. And the captain doesn't reply.
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He claims that he fell into the lifeboat, you know, rather than intentionally went into it. But the key thing here is you might not have recognized him because he somehow also fell out of his captain's uniform into civilian clothing. So he was sitting in a lifeboat, you know, as a nameless passenger, essentially, while other people were frantically running around and trying to save themselves.
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Under maritime kind of convention, if something like this happens, it is the captain of the ship who should be coordinating the rescue operation. It is captain of the ship who should be the last one to leave, making sure all his passengers are safe. And that doesn't appear to have happened.
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In this case, the coast guard is literally screaming at him and he's cursing at him. At one point he said, you know, he basically says, you know, I'm going to make you pay for what you've done. And Scatino did pay. He, he was ended up charged with numerous counts from manslaughter to dereliction duty, was sentenced to over 10 years in prison, and 130 people died. I mean, he took, you know, numerous lives from this.
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In his book, Adam analyzes these two leaders. He looks at the they took and contrasts the reaction, the enormous reaction that.
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Really percolates inside people and consumes them. And it's either that wide eyed inspiration of awe and hope and possibility, or it's that seething cauldron of rage and resentment that just consumes people.
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Adam's research shows that we are not born as inspiring or infuriating individuals. Rather, it is our current behavior that either inspires or infuriates. Our words, our actions, our interactions create either a wellspring of hope and possibility, as Adam writes, or a seething cauldron of rage and resentment inside others. Schulz's reassuring words created immediate hope, while her compassion lingered with her passengers. Schettino, in contrast, filled the coast guard with a rage so intense that he thirsted for retribution. Inspiring leaders, they're not born, their inspirational techniques are not natural. Instead, they come from a particular set of behaviors that Adam thinks anyone can adopt. And Adam is sure that small behaviors leaders take can impact us because of something called the leader amplification effect.
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Leaders command our attention. And it's not just people in formal roles of leadership. It's someone who is central to a situation or someone who has status. For example, they might have power in that situation. Basically, people in those positions demand our attention. And one, one of the basic principles of cognitive psychology is simply this attention leads to intensification. When we pay attention to something, our reactions to that get intensified. And so a joyful moment will become more joyful and a sorrowful moment will become more sorrowful. And I've shown this in a number of different research projects. So when a leader acts, whatever they do is going to become more impactful.
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Adam has experienced the leader amplification effect himself.
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Many of your listeners out there are familiar with the sort of godfather of behavioral science, Danny Kahneman. And you know, my first class I ever took was with Danny Kahneman, 1993. It's the first day of my PhD. I'm sitting in this class, 11 other people. You know, I want to prove that I belong. And at one point, I raised my hand to say something, you know, in class that I think is insightful. And I still remember the four things Danny did that day. He crossed his arms, shook his head, scrunched up his face, and he said, that's not right at all. And then he went on, and, you know, he was. He always had a beatific smile. Danny, you know, and sort of went back to that whole class kind of moved on. And, I mean, I was frozen in space. I mean, I just felt humiliated. I mean, it took me weeks to be able to speak in his class or any other class, right? But about six weeks into the semester, I was walking down the hallway, and Danny, without stopping walking, just kind of over his shoulder, turned to me and said, hey, Adam, I love reading your reflection papers. You're a great writer. And they turned the corner, and I was like, I didn't even know what to do with the. The joy that experience. I literally skipped down the hallway, you know, and so, you know, these two very different Danny Kahneman stories just represent the same thing, right? For him, these comments were offhand right. For me, they were momentous. Right? That still affect me 30 years later. Like, I still feel the sting. That's not right at all. Right. But I also still feel the. The joy that I savor from his offhand comment that you're a great writer.
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Two offhand comments from Danny Kahneman have stuck with Adam for years. They've shaped his behavior, his actions, and his perception. And that's all because of this leader amplification effect.
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Leaders are always on stage. People are paying attention to them. They're going to, A, notice their behavior, but B, their reactions are going to be intensified. They're going to be more affected by whatever people do.
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So this led me and probably you to the same question. If we're in a leadership position, what behaviors can we adopt to inspire our team? What can we do to benefit from the positive side of the leader amplification effect?
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I was teaching an executive education group at Columbia Business School, and I was talking about the idea of the leader amplification effect. And I was saying that you can use it for good, right? So if you take Danny Kahneman's example, you can sort of acknowledge people or praise them. And this guy, Joseph Stigliano, was president of a bank. 12 or 1400 employees. Remember the exact number, but more than a thousand employees. And he emails every single employee on their birthday. And I was like, that's impossible. He said, it's not And I said, how is that not impossible? He said, well, you know, I'm doing like three to four a day, right? You know, but I have a spreadsheet and I know when their birthday is and I also know I put in something about them, right, that I can remember. So he showed me one example. It was like, hey, Barbara, I hope you have a great birthday. How was bowling this weekend, right? And then, you know, Barbara sends back a novel back. Oh, my God, bowling was this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, like, she's so thrilled the president of the bank has reached out to her. He just built that in as a daily habit of his coffee. And this is, I think, one of the most remarkable things about thinking about what inspiration is, is, you know, in 10 minutes, right, he changes people's lives.
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Stigliano has adopted a behavior that seems, I think, fairly minor. A happy birthday message is hardly much. But like Adam's experience with Kahneman, these small from a leader can really amplify. They have a disproportionate impact on the recipient. It's just like how Schulz experienced more public praise for her walk down the aisle at the end of the flight rather than the actual landing itself. Stiglino probably experienced more goodwill than you would expect from just a simple email. And there is some evidence that explains why. Cialdini, in his book Influence refers to this as the principle of reciprocity. We are wired to want to return the favours of others. One study cited in Influence found that shoppers at a Candy store became 42% more likely to make a purchase if they had first received a gift upon entering the shop. So, like a small piece of chocolate, for example. And according to sales figures from the retail giant Costco, other types of products like beer, cheese and frozen pizza get big lifts in sales from free samples, all because of reciprocity. But this reciprocity only becomes more impactful when it comes from a leader. One 2013 study by the Behavioural Insights Team and the UK Government Cabinet Office highlights this very nicely. The study tried to encourage investment bank bankers to donate part of their salary to charity. In the study, they tested different influence techniques. So there was a standard request, it was just a simple email asking them to donate, and only 5% did so when they received this, there was that request, but with a celebrity endorsement that boosted compliance to 7%. And then there was a reciprocity based approach where they gave sweets to the bankers who donated. This lifted donations to 11%. So reciprocity seems to work, but it gets even better when combined with authority. The authority appeal, which was a direct letter from the CEO that raised compliance to 12%. And when they combined that authority appeal with the reciprocity, so the sweets and the letter from the CEO, compliance or donations, it rose to 17%, the highest result in the experiment. So going from 5% in the control to 17% in that variant. Stiglino seems to have hit on a highly effective behaviour to motivate. Wishing his staff happy birthday triggers reciprocity. But knowing the email comes from the CEO, a position of authority, it only heightens the effect.
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Joseph Stigliano, I think, really captures a phenomenon and something that I try to do every single day over a cup of coffee. I'm like, who's one person in my orbit that I can reach out to and say, hey, you did a great job. Right? You did a fantastic job on that. Or you know what? I was working on that project and you helped me and I couldn't have done it without you, right? And so this idea that everyone wants to be recognized for their contributions and that's really maybe the inspiring leader superpower, right, is the ability to acknowledge the contributions of others.
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Tammy J. Schultz and Captain Schettino showed two very different types of leadership. But Adam is sure that these two people aren't born totally different. He says infuriating leaders can become inspirational if they just follow a certain set of behaviors. One of those is to recognize others, perhaps just for a simple birthday message. But after the break, Adam has two more suggestions for aspiring leaders. The podcast My First Million is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. And it's the podcast I'd recommend today. My First Million explains how successful entrepreneurs made their first million and how you can apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunities. There are many fantastic episodes, but the one I really enjoyed was with Will Gidara. Gidara's book is one of my favorite books. It explains how Will applied behavioral science to create a three star mission restaurant. It's a fantastic book and it really made for a fantastic episode. So if you want something to listen to after this, go and listen to My First Million wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far, Adam has shared the difference between inspiring and infuriating leaders. But next he had more advice. Advice that can help leaders become more inspiring. Specifically a 2014 study run by Andrew Card.
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So, Drew Carton. Let's I'll give you the example that I've heard him use, right? We can say our mission is to make our customers happy. Or here's an alternative, our mission is to make our customers smile. And I notice happy and smile, like smiling is a representation of happiness, but smile is more visual. And he showed that if you give people these sort of visual missions, it actually makes them more motivated, more engaged. In fact, in one study he just manipulated how visual a mission was and he actually had people create real products that then they gave to customers. To test.
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Andrew Carton varied the vision statement that the toy makers read. One vision lacked vivid imagery. So it said our vision is that our toys, all of them made to perfection by our employees, will be enjoyed by all of our customers. So that's lacking vivid imagery. The other vision statement used very strong imagery. It says, our vision is that all of our toys, all of them crafted flawlessly by our workers, will make wide eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile. Carton then had a group of 7212 year olds Rate how much they wanted to play with the toys these people created.
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The people reported that the products made by people with the visual mission were more engaging products. Right. It really led to a different product.
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Loyal listeners of Nudge will know this as the concrete phrases effect. It's the idea that concrete phrases are more memorable. This is a principle first noted by ian Begg in 1972. He showed participants abstract phrases like absolute truth, basic theory and common fate, and then some concrete phrases. So phrases you can visualize. Muddy village, round temple, hungry prisoner. The results were Stark. People remembered 9% of the abstract phrases, but 36% of the concrete phrases. A striking fourfold difference. In fact, Recent research from 2023 has abstract language in adverts made customers up to 16% less likely to buy a product. Consumers were 15.7% less interested in a quilt and 11.9% less interested to buy detergent when descriptions used technical jargon instead of concrete benefits. However, Andrew Carton's research is the first time I'd seen concrete phrases applied to leadership. And Adam says this effect can help have even greater effects and it can.
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Even, I think, get you elected president of the United States. One of the projects I really love and when I wrote the book, we only had half of this, but now we have a second half of this project. But we basically analyzed the convention speeches for American presidential candidates, the Republican and the Democrat over 100 year period, and we basically coded it for how much visual metaphorical language was used in these speeches. But we also controlled for economic factors, gdp, inflation, unemployment. We even controlled for polling at the time of the conventions. Right. You know, like who was even leading at that point. And we controlled for incumbency. Right. So because incumbency has a big effect and we could predict winners and losers of presidential elections based on that.
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Specifically, Adam and his colleagues analyzed every convention speak of the Democratic and Republican nominees for president since World War II.
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Now one of the things that we wanted to show was like, this was even not just true in speeches, but in manifestos. So we actually used UK parliamentary elections over again, 100 year period, and we took the party manifestos. So these are written documents. And even the visual and metaphorical language in these written documents still predicts vote share in these parliamentary elections. There's something so powerful about engaging people and being more visual.
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Adam writes that he found that the nomination speeches of the eventual winners contained more vivid and visual language. The future winners used twice as many metaphors and image laden words compared to the soon to be losers. Importantly, the positive impact of this vividness occurred above stuff like economic factors, so unemployment rates and inflation and above political factors. So if a president was an incumbent, for example, these winning words visualize the world and they make the speaker seem more visionary and inspiring.
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It's funny because I remember 2000 election, Al Gore versus George W. Bush. And I remember feeling so upset because I was reading for Al Gore, but at George W. Bush, when he ended his speech, I just thought it was so brilliant. He said, Americans live on the sunrise side of the mountain. And I just thought that was such a beautiful visual metaphor. Right? It's so hopeful, you know, not the sunset, but the sunrise. Right. You know, we're at the beginning and things are looking up. You know, it's, you know, the sun after the storm, you know, and so that was a great example. You know, he actually didn't get the popular vote, but, you know, he still won the election by, you know, a.
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Few votes in Florida as a leader. Using visual language, these concrete phrases, these words you can visualize it seems to be a particularly effective way of becoming an inspiring leader. Tammy J. Schultz, very concrete phrase, we're not going down, we're going to Philly is inspiring for that reason. It's concrete. If she'd said, this isn't the end, we're just changing direction, it would have been far less reassuring. But concrete language, it wasn't Adam's only bit of advice. He had one more important lesson for leaders. It's repetition.
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The power of repetition has a long History in cognitive psychology. Right. So there's a lot of research that just shows that it goes back to something called the illusion of truth model effect. Right. If you repeat a false statement enough times, people start to believe it. And the reason why is that there's a phenomenon called cognitive fluency. Right. The more times you hear something, the more familiar it seems, the more fluent it is. And that sense of fluency or familiarity then gets used as a cue to truth value, essentially. And so one of the things that Blaine Horton and I wanted to test was would that also give people essentially a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Blaine Horton, and it's just a brilliant, brilliant researcher. He's also on the visual imagery project with presidential stuff. He got the idea originally from just a little study that was done in the classroom where people had to. On the first day of entrepreneurial idea ideation class, he had people do 60 second pitches. And then afterwards he asked people say which of the pitches would they invest in, you know, essentially like the most. And you know, he had them record. And he noticed that when people repeated not just a fact, but the specific, their name. Right. You know, I'm Adam Galinsky, you know, and I'm just here to say, you know, X, Y and Z that they got better ratings.
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For this study, Blaine put together a mock jury for an investment competition. The only element he varied was whether the founder mentioned their name or not. So some would say, hi, I'm Phil Agnew, I'm founder of XYZ.com whereas others would be told to just say, I'm the founder of XYZ.com so half the jurors heard that I'm the Filagne version and half didn't. Although the difference between the two versions is genuinely tiny, its impact was large. When the name was included, jurors increased probability of funding by nearly 20%. Simply repeating your name can be key to future success.
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And so then what he wanted to do, he had this huge data set of angel investors and he, he went through the pitches and he showed that when people mentioned, in this case that the company name multiple times, they actually got real funding from these angel investors. And then he went and looked at TED Talks and he noticed that when people repeated their own name on TED Talks, they got more comments at the bottom, the idea of being more engaged. And then he went to the Apple Store and he noticed that when people repeated the name of the company more times in their sort of synopsis, again, they were more likely to be rated the number of ratings and the Positivity of the ratings.
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Blaine Horton looked at 2,452 TED talks, 17,007 app descriptions and 14,766 venture descriptions. He found that repetition increased the viewership of the TED Talks, the rating of the App Store games and the number of investors startups received.
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A lot of my research has to do with, you know, how do we make sense of the world I mentioned, you know, Tammy Jo Schultz helped people make sense of their experience of falling, you know, quickly 20,000ft in five minutes. You know, how do we make sense of all the information that we're getting? We need some type of ballast, right? You know, and so what repetition does, it gives us that ballast, it gives us that sense that and we can remember it. And so, you know, you want to repeat, like if you're, you know, a company, you just want to repeat the, you know, want people to remember your name, right? And so the best way to do that is to repeat it. I'll just tell you aside, is that the power of repetition is, or my discussion, I should say, of the power of repetition has, you know, earned clients, you know, over a billion dollars. I've been an expert witness in more than a dozen defamation cases and where I talk about why defamation is so durable and so damaging to people. And a key component of that right is repetition. Like how frequently has this comment been made, how wide of reach has it gotten? And I basically say the more times that this defamatory comment has been repeated, the more durable it is and the more damaging it will be.
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We started today's episode with a very simple Are good leaders born or are they made? Adam's convinced me that they're made. Good leaders follow certain behaviours that make them more inspirational. We've heard a few of those behaviours today. Concrete phrases, repetition and reciprocity. But there's more. In two weeks time, Adam will be back on Nudge and he shares five more evidence backed tips to become a better leader. To make sure you don't miss that, please do go subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts or you can sign up to my newsletter. I will send you an email announcement as soon as that episode comes out. So to do that, just go to nudgepodcast.com and click Newsletter to subscribe. It's totally free. Adam's book Inspire is absolutely fantastic. If you've enjoyed today's show, you'll love Adam's book. We've only scratched the surface of the book's contents today. In the book he goes into much more detail about how to inspire others. He also shares how to become a better negotiator, how autonomy and choice can make your workers more productive give and why good leaders often praise other people. So if you want to learn more about all of that, search for inspire wherever you get your books to pick up a copy. That is all from me. I've been your host, Phil Agnew, and I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge and Adam. We'll be back in a fortnight. Cheers.