Conquering Skepticism Bias

Any project that explores territory beyond the frontier of a team’s experience, and especially those where the work you’re trying to accomplish is inherently challenging, will be laden with roadblocks. Behind many of these roadblocks is the skepticism that many folks feel when you are trying to lead them somewhere that they’ve never been before. It can come from self-doubt, lack of trust in the team and/or its leadership, having attempted and failed similar things in the past, or simply not believing that the goal of the project is the right one. Your job as a leader under these circumstances is to deploy a set of tools and techniques to help the team overcome its skepticism bias before that bias escalates into a set of failure avoidance behaviors that can metastasize and doom the whole project. 

Tool number one is telling a story about where you want to take your team, and how you’re all going to get there. Before fretting over whether or not the story is inspirational, and giving everyone a massive motivational speech about how they can do it, just tell the f***ing story. The bigger the team, the more important it is that the story be clear, consistently told, and that everyone hears and internalizes it. It is literally impossible to coordinate the efforts of large groups of people without a shared story, one that they have accepted as their own, to guide their actions. It is easy to see examples of failure, tension and friction all around us that is the result of folks not having shared stories. My former boss at LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, is well-known for telling folks that “we are the stories that we tell” when trying to get them to clarify the narratives around their work, or to get them to focus on critical details of our internal and external communications about LinkedIn. Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens goes so far as to assert that the very foundation of human society’s ability to cohere beyond groups of a 150 or so homo sapiens comes from the ability to tell and share stories, an ability that awoke in a “cognitive revolution” 70,000 years ago. In any case, in my experience, a clear, consistent, comprehensible, and ridiculously oft-repeated story is often the lynchpin of a successful project or initiative. And it should go without saying that being honest and transparent are non-negotiable prerequisites in developing and telling a team's shared story.

Tool number two is finding yourself some allies, folks who believe the goal you’re trying to accomplish is a worthy one, and who are willing to help you with technical heavy lifting as well as helping to beat back skepticism when it arises. Find these allies before the story is 100% set in stone. Having your allies come in early and shape the story with you gives them a genuine, powerful sense of ownership. In fact, if you’re doing your job well, your allies will have such an intense sense of ownership over the story, they will lose sight of who started telling the story in the first place. 

Tool number three is getting rid of any ego. You need to recognize that having multiple owners of the story is the best possible thing for getting to the goal. The less you can make the story about you and what you want, and the more you can make it about the goal and what the team wants, the better. In true success, every member of the project will feel as if the project's story is their's, and they will be proud to tell it.

Tool number four is inspiration. Once you have a clear, consistent, comprehensible, and ridiculously oft repeated story, you need to make it as inspirational as possible and the goal as worthy as you can, in a sincere and honest way. For someone like Steve Jobs, with a one-in-a-billion reality distortion field and god-like willpower, that might be enough. But you are not Steve Jobs. That means you are probably going to have to do some additional work to figure out how to align the diverse interests and objectives of your team against what you’re trying to accomplish. Some folks may want career advancement. Some folks might want to see their work recognized in public. Some folks may have a particular aspect of the project that interests or even fascinates them. Some folks may want to accumulate a particular type of experience. Some folks might want to try something that they’ve never tried before. And so on. Your job, and the jobs of your allies and the other leaders of the project, is to understand enough about what motivates the team so you can place them in positions where progress toward the goal of the project is the same as them making progress toward their individual goals. One of the worst kinds of skepticism bias is believing that you’re getting nothing out of a long, challenging project.

Tool number five is helping the team find its confidence. Hopefully you and your allies have infinite faith that you can accomplish what you’re setting out to do. Hopefully your team is incredibly skilled, and when you look at the union of everyone’s expertise and prior experience, it’s a virtual no-brainer that you’re going to be able to get across the finish line in some reasonably predictable amount of time. Your confidence is essential to the success of the project, but your confidence alone can’t carry the whole team. You have to help the team prove to themselves that they can succeed. It can help to provide concrete details about how you or other folks have succeeded under similar circumstances in the past. It can help to demonstrate and celebrate the prior accomplishments and capabilities of members of the team, and try to reassure everyone how capable they are collectively. But the best way to help the team gain confidence is to have them actually win. Decomposing a huge project into a sequence of smaller ones with quickly achievable milestones at the beginning can allow a team to see how it’s possible to come together and accomplish something. Setting those early milestones so that the team can get some quick wins under the belt and then taking time to celebrate those wins can be incredibly important to the long term success of your project. Later on, if you’re pushing on the frontier of what’s possible, the milestones will become harder and harder to accomplish, and the confidence that you’ve banked from some of those early wins can be the thing that helps you push through. 

Tool number six is getting rid of jerks, recalcitrant detractors, and mercenaries. At the end of the day, the thing that lets you accomplish amazing things is believing that you can and believing that the folks around you can too. Almost every amazing thing that has ever been accomplished has required the prolonged effort of lots of people who have been able to push through adversity and tame the unknown, together. Jerks, detractors, and mercenaries bring collaboration friction, sow doubt, and in dozens of other ways, actively and passively undermine the ability of the team to function as a team. Sometimes these folks act the way that they act because you have failed to use tools 1-5 well: they don’t understand the story; you’re an ego monster trying to hero the project across the finish line and they’re not buying what you’re selling; you have not been able to align their personal goals with the project’s; or you have failed to help them gain confidence in their ability to succeed. If that’s the case, try again. But at the end of the day if you can't get folks to believe, you have to find something else for them to do. Entrenched skepticism can be like cancer in a team. You have a limited amount of time to get it contained or removed -- or it will kill the project.

Tool number seven is repeating tools one through six. Even if you use these techniques to overcome all of the skepticism bias at any single point in time, know that it will likely reemerge again, and almost always at the worst possible time. When that happens, go back to tool number one and start over again.