The Mind Is Like A Magnet – Your Illusions and Bias as Work
Table of Contents
Imagine you are thinking about buying a car. Your brain ignores the hordes of varying models you pass. Then, you decide to purchase a Red Jaguar EV. Your brain adjusts, and suddenly, you start seeing Red Jaguar EVs everywhere. Research shows there hasn’t been an increase in Red Jaguar EVs. You just rarely noticed it before. The truth is, you’re thinking more about Red Jaguar EVs. Psychologists call this the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or the frequency illusion. According to frequency illusion—seeing Red Jaguar EVs everywhere–you’re bombarded with information all around you every second.
Now, imagine you’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in your work setting. It bothers you. Your subconscious can be selective and deceptive in what it gives attention to or ignores without you realizing it. You are beginning to see the need for leadership to guide the organization. Your mind is like a magnet. You surmise that leadership is essential–pandemic mania, resigning or quietly quitting, remote worker preferences, need for safe spaces, disappearing talent, and needing to transform a service or process or go out of business, etc. Remember the invisible gorilla test? Sadly, research and real-world situations confirm your observations. You’re finally seeing through your brain’s selections and deceptions with illusions or other cognitive biases.
The same case can be made to focus the brain on leader development. Think Red Jaguar EVs. Are you willing to take advantage of this confirmed (backed by research and real-world situations) frequency illusion?
Ask Yourself: What is the importance of the Red Jaguar EV in the context of leadership development? How can cognitive biases and illusions impact leadership in healthcare settings? What are some methods to enhance leadership skills and overcome or manage cognitive biases and illusions?
Illusions and Biases May be Holding You Back
Cognitive biases and illusions can obscure the path of senior health executives through a frequently complex environment. Mental shortcuts, although advantageous, have the potential to result in erroneous judgments and impede their efficacy.
- The Halo Effect: Acknowledging potential deficiencies in other areas while attributing positive qualities to a leader based on a single impressive aspect. Neglecting to recognize potential areas for growth and development may result from this.
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Leaders with inadequate expertise or understanding overestimate their capabilities, resulting in suboptimal decision-making and ineffectual strategies.
- Confirmation Bias: The tendency to selectively consider and interpret information that supports preexisting beliefs regarding one’s leadership style or oneself while disregarding contradictory evidence. This may impede learning and adaptation.
- Anchoring Bias: An erroneous evaluation of situations and individuals resulting from an excessive reliance on the initial piece of information encountered. This may have adverse consequences in intricate healthcare settings.
- Information Overload: The incapacity to effectively prioritize and process substantial volumes of data, resulting in analysis paralysis and instances of overlooked opportunities. Filtering information effectively is critical for leaders.
- Availability Heuristic: Assessing the probability of occurrences by relying on readily recollected instances, disregarding less frequent yet potentially more consequential hazards. This may result in insufficient readiness to confront unforeseen obstacles.
- Groupthink: The inclination of unified teams to stifle dissent in favor of conformity, which results in less-than-optimal decisions. Leaders are responsible for cultivating milieus that appreciate and applaud a range of viewpoints.
- Planning Fallacy: A tendency to underestimate the resources and time required to finish tasks, which results in impractical expectations and failure to meet deadlines. Effective leadership involves contingency planning and practical approaches.
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: Diminishing more viable alternatives in favor of persisting in a futile course of action based on previous investments. Leaders must be flexible and capable of pivoting in response to shifting conditions.
- Self-Serving Bias: Attributing failures to external factors while taking credit for successes. This can impede trust and team morale, thereby complicating the process of learning from errors.
How To See Red Jaguar EVs — Improve Your Leadership Skills
Let’s assume you’ve acknowledged an opportunity to improve your leadership skills by overcoming or managing illusions and biases. In this case, your brain is being very reasonable in what it lets you see. Your brain has taken a conscious note of your Red Jaguar EV.
Your brain will alert you when it sees it elsewhere — on the road, TV, conversations, etc. Don’t let it slip away. It would be best to consciously commit to lifelong development and learn about hard, soft, and intelligent leadership to improve your leadership skills. Here are a few suggested ways to improve your leadership skills:
- Be Mindful of Learning Opportunities: Interestingly, you use most of the skills needed for effective leadership in your daily interactions. Or you don’t when you should. Suppose you are brainstorming the next project, conducting an after-action report on a completed project, or wondering where the budget went. In that case, you’re practicing critical thinking, planning, listening, and implementation skills. The difference is you’re doing it unconsciously. However, when you’re aware you’re using these skills—wanting to buy a Red Jaguar EV–you’ll proactively develop them every day, nor will you pass up an opportunity to apply them. By being mindful, you can ask questions or ask for feedback from people you interact with. This way, you learn about your opportunities to develop and become the leader you aspire to be.
- Find a Mentor, Be a Mentor: Ideally, a mentor is someone who’s been there, whose reputation exudes integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all they do. They’re willing to share their leadership experiences, knowledge, and advice objectively. They’re also ready to clarify and candid about your strengths, weaknesses, and developmental requirements. For example, increasing soft skills such as self-awareness, resilience, and active listening, skills that tend to derail aspiring strategic leaders, must be on the agenda list. Conversely, being a mentor helps you widen your network and broaden your perspective by passing it on.
- Be a Lifelong Learner: Many believe leaders are born. They’re not. You can develop your leadership skills and style by getting involved in projects or requesting a transfer to another part of the organization, such as human resources. You can build your skills through formal learning: certificate programs (i.e., CEP or PMP Certification), short courses (i.e…….., digital event planning), and secondary education programs (i.e., online MBA), enabling you to lead a more complex endeavor successfully. You decide based on your needs: soft skills training for improving interpersonal skills, hard skills such as public affairs training, or smart skills such as divergent and systems thinking. The key is embracing the notion of lifelong learning.
- Focus On Self-Improvement: No one is perfect. One of the best ways to develop as a leader is to aim to be an aspiration version of yourself for any setting or opportunity. Self-improvement allows you to focus your life to drive positive changes or reduce anxiety in yourself and others, regardless of how big or little. By making yourself safe and approachable, others will follow. Personal development makes you more agile in your thinking, resilient in the face of adversity, and confident in the direction you’re going or want to go. The outcome is a stronger character, including building trust within your network, among your peers, and those above you responsible for your performance.
- Broaden Your Horizons: Sooner or later, regardless of level, you’ll be faced with a situation calling for your knowledge in the industry(i.e., strategic communication and marketing), your organization (i.e., innovative conference offering), or a sensitive work situation (i.e., budget cut or lackadaisical event planning). As a proven informal or formal leader, all eyes are on you to provide guidance. Broadening your horizons, such as knowing your industry’s trends, obstacles, opportunities, benchmarks, and models of success, will make you a more confident leader. You can do this through networking meetups, engaging in social networking communities, watching webinars, and belonging to a professional group. Subscribing to your industry’s news: magazines, newsletters, blogs, and podcasts will get you started. You can listen to them during your hour-long commute to work.
- Become A Coach: Once you’ve gained a measurable reputation via mentoring, upgrading your knowledge through education, and developing yourself, become a coach. You begin to flourish and reinforce your leadership skills by coaching a peer, subordinate, or elderly father figure. By using a variety of development, constructive feedback, and behavioral change techniques and methods to improve someone’s professional performance, you will be on the road to more significant opportunities and self-fulfillment.
Summary
Using Red Jaguar EVs or frequency illusions may not have been the best metaphor. The brain strives to identify patterns and uses confirmation bias to affirm Red Jaguar EVs are everywhere. The human mind is like a magnet. When the anecdotes or frequency of observations and research add up to a pattern, there’s something there. The same is valid for noticing leadership malaise and opportunities.
The frequency of illusions and bias are natural and ongoing. Keep your personal leader development and momentum going. These illusions and biases can significantly impact senior health leaders’ decision-making, leadership effectiveness, and team dynamics.
Sadly, most organizations are not seeing those Red Jaguar EVs – trends, malaise, or opportunities on a reoccurring basis. They’ve become complacent with their selective and deceptive thinking – isolation, status quo thinking, and groupthink. Many leaders overlook toxic leaders, micro managers, and those who have become complacent so long as their bottom lines are met. Don’t be those leaders.
By acknowledging their existence and proactively mitigating their influence, leaders can navigate the complex healthcare landscape with greater clarity, adaptability, and success. Get in your Red Jaguar EV and drive off into the next level of your career aspiration through your leadership development plan.
References
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Bierly, M., & Mone, M. T. (2005). The halo effect: Examining leadership reputation’s effect on performance and decision-making evaluations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 828-837.
- Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. T. (1999). Unskilled and unaware: difficulties recognizing incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.
- Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-221.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
- Malhotra, N. (2004). Information overload: A theory of overload and its consequences for decision-making. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2), 1-14.
- Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign policy decisions and failures. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under uncertainty. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.
- Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27-44.
- Ross, L. (1977). Self-serving bias in the attribution of causality: Fact or fancy? Psychological Bulletin, 84(2), 213-228.
Key Words
1. Leadership 2. Cognitive biases 3. Illusions
About the Author: I am passionate about making health a national strategic imperative, transforming and integrating health and human services sectors to be more responsive, and leveraging the social drivers and determinants of health (SDOH) to create healthier, wealthier, and resilient individuals, families, and communities. I specialize in coaching managers and leaders on initial development, continuously improving, or sustaining their Strategic Health Leadership (SHELDR) competencies to thrive in an era to solvewicked health problems and artificial intelligence (AI).
Visit https://SHELDR.COM or contact me for more BLIP-ZIP SHELDR advice, coaching, and consulting. Check out my publications: Health Systems Thinking: A Primer and Systems Thinking for Health Organizations, Leadership, and Policy: Think Globally, Act Locally. You can follow his thoughts on LinkedIn
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