(notes) David Deppner on “Leadership, Confidence, and Humility” on #EconTalk

Personal Notes/highlights on podcasts.

Today’s episode is between Russ and David Deppner, who is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Psyberware. The topic: the importance of humility, the value of being humble intellectually, and the importance of conceding that there are many things that we don’t know the answer to — this in context of leadership.

Thoughts on the ethical side of how people in positions of leadership should handle the burden placed on them by everyone else that says they should have certainty. You are usually talking about these issues from the perspective of everyone else in their interactions with those in positions of authority. What about from the perspective of the manager, the surgeon, the professor, the politician, and so on?

• [This expectations of leaders creates strange incentives: my note] In all of those situations there’s still this dynamic of how most people look up to people who are “leaders,” and demand certainty or they ditch them. It’s difficult to stay in a social role that other people look up to if you are intellectually honest;
• For somebody in a leadership position, not only humility may be a deal-killer — not only are you going to struggle to become the CEO, to be the head of Mission Control, to get elected as president, to be a successful surgeon — it’s not what is consistent with doing your job well. Your job in those settings is to exude confidence, certainty, vision, a path to that vision;
• [in politics, this bias of strong, certain leaders limits the area for more humble and honest people] We seem to crave certainty from our leaders so much that we’ll choose from a field of bad choices who all lie to us and convey a faux expertise. But a better leader who actually didn’t know everything — who grappled with human limits to understanding and admitted those human limits — that person couldn’t elected. That person wouldn’t even make it to the early rounds of debates.

• [Leadership and leaders are among one of the factors that influence the success of organization/collective] One of the lessons of all of this is that the style of leadership that works is going to depend on the time, it’s going to depend on the organization; it’s going to depend on the leadership, the leaders alongside the main leader — the other executives.
• It’s incredibly important in any kind of relationship, not just leadership, to be aware that the people in the room you are interacting with are not the same as you. What would be good for you — what you need to hear from a leader is not necessarily what other people in the room need to hear. I think that’s so unnatural for most of us to remember that. We tend to give the answers that we think would comfort us without thinking sometimes that that person we’re interacting with is not like us — in fact, needs the opposite;
• [I love this insight most in the discussion — you should have proper checks & balances and incentives in any type of setting; too much dependence of the CEO/leader indicates that the organization actually is not sustainable & has central point of failure] Whether we want to depend a great deal on the individual in the role. And instead it’s mostly about the institutions surrounding that role and all of the other checks and balances involved. I do get a little nervous about psychopaths with too much power;

One of the points that will survive this conversation is that, being aware of your failings does not mean you should give up. It may mean you shouldn’t be a leader. It may mean you are not good at it. There are situations where a lesson learned is that you should stop doing something. But I think — I’m going to try to square this circle in a minute — but I think there is a way to deal with the reality that we’re not perfect. We make mistakes. We lose money. We have surgeries that don’t go well. Some of them are our fault. They are not just random. But there’s a huge random component on top of it. But on top of that, there’s our own imperfection. So, I think one of the answers I’m going to give you is that I don’t think humility means that you give up. You should grow. You should understand what you needed to learn from a situation, and ideally you should get better at it.

• Issue of fault: it s always my fault, when I am in leadership position [extreme ownership concept promoted by Jocko Willinik: m.n.]. But the leader should suffer too when organizations fail i.e. have skin in the game;
• [Skin in the game, i.e. responsibility for failure is good rule of thumb — any other scenario is worse and may incentives bad and risky behavior] Justice is expensive — justice means making sure that you made the right decision about how to cope with this accident — you know, whether the person deserved to be fired/punished. Whether the captain should have done something different. The amount of effort it would take to dispense that level of justice is infinite. It’s a level of information that almost never will be acquired. And so, a rule of thumb — your ship goes down, you lose your commission, you are out — is unfair. It’s unjust. Because there are going to be times when it wasn’t the person’s fault. But, the alternative — which seems attainable — of justice: ‘Oh, well, each case, we’ll look and see whether it was their fault or not’ — there’s such a gray area, there. And there’s such an effort that would be put into ascertaining that, that it might be better to be unjust.
• The point is: A rule of thumb can sometimes be incredibly unjust and be the right rule anyway.;

Argue as though you are right, but listen as though you are wrong. And that, to some extent [says Charlan], captures doing both of those — I think is getting close to what you were sort of suggesting: Is that you are arguing as though you are right, because like the strong opinions. But you listen as though you are wrong. And that’s because you know they are weakly held and there’s still much to learn.

• in general, in the reality of the world you have to make decisions under uncertainty and so you do the best you can. The more you grapple with it, often, the more confident you are that you’ve done what I think you call best practices: there’s imperfect information, you can’t decide exactly what the right thing is but you do the best you can.
• That old story about, I think it’s Michelangelo chipping away at the David statue, ‘How do you find David in the middle of that marble block?’ And it’s: ‘I chip away everything that’s not David.’ And I think that, with many of these issues, we haven’t found David yet. We’re sort of just chipping away at the block. But the closer we get, the more we know that it’s not David. That, it’s not always about being certain, about being right. It’s sometimes just understanding more ways that we used to be wrong and we’re not that wrong in that way any more. Don’t have all the answers. But we’re moving in the right direction.