Episode #277: Leaders Who Don't Know What They Don't Know And Why It Matters

In 1955, psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, in a burst of errant egotism, foisted the words Johari Window on the world. It is a clever idea, with a dog of a name (Joe + Harry). A bit like those hokey Mum and Pop company names, formed by combining the spouses two personal names. Anyway, they came up with a cognitive psychological tool to analyse our behavior. They created four quadrants named Arena, Facade, Blind Spot and Unknown. Arena referred to things about yourself which were known to you and others. Façade were things known to you, but not others. Blind Spot was not known to you, but known to others and Unknown was not known to you or others.

We were recently doing some leadership training and looking at the Blind Spot leader areas in Japan. What were some things that leaders were doing in Japan that they were unaware of, but which were obvious to their followers. The group nominated being self-centered as one of them. The leader is focused on their own good rather than the good of their troops. The team are seen as tools to be used to allow the leader to climb up the corporate ladder. Glory is kept for the boss alone and blame is spread far and wide below. They are so focused on promoting themselves, that they fail to see that this self-centered behavior is completely obvious to the team and consequently the trust is not there and neither is the team motivation.

It is a bit like that joke where the boss says to the team member, “If you work really hard, come in early, stay late, work weekends, really punch out the results then I will get a big bonus”. Nothing in any of this for the team member, so why would you bother and that is the point, they don’t bother.

Another complaint was around not respecting the time of the staff. “I am the boss and I want it now” is a common mentality. Others have work to do too, but boss prerogative overrides what everyone else is doing. Staff can put up with this occasionally, but if this is standard operating procedure, then no one in the team is going to be happy about it. We are all time poor and have our own KPIs to which we are working, so things that derail that effort create unhappiness. We have to do it, because this person is the boss, but we don’t like it and we are becoming more and more disengaged in the process.

Bosses can lack sensitivity when speaking. This usually falls into two buckets. The totally failed effort at humour, which is actually insulting people or making fun of them. This is especially a problem in Japan, with foreign bosses who come from a different background, when considering what passes for humour at work. Apart from the raw language used, which can often just leave people feeling puzzled, it can be contextually puzzling. Satire, sadornic humour, irony, double irony, one-upmanship all fail in translation into Japanese culture contexts. The other cases are remarks made with no understanding of their inappropriateness. Sexism, ageism, religious beliefs, race tinged comments, etc., the list is long and well called upon by tone deaf bosses. No one thinks the boss is so witty and clever. They just think the boss is a dork.

Words and action have to be aligned in business, especially by bosses. When we are saying one thing and doing another, our hypocrisy is not lost on the troops. People want surety, because this is how trust is built. We want people to say what they mean, when they are the boss, because we have to follow their direction. If we get confused about what the boss really means, then we become immobile, unable to advance or retreat. This applies to all aspects of life. We don’t like it when the words and actions don’t line up. We feel the person is being self-indulgent. They have one rule for themselves and a different rule for everyone else. They say we are cutting costs, but continue to fly seated at the most expensive pointy end of the plane. Everyone knows this and no one respects it.

Being self-centered, insensitive to the time demands on the team, inappropriate in one’s language and comments and not matching words with actions are all own goals. So how can bosses doing all or some of these things which as Blind Spots, by definition, are not known to them, fix the issues? Staff satisfaction surveys, engagement surveys, 360 reviews, anonymous staff feedback, annual performance reviews are all tools available to help us gain some broader perspective. If there are confident people in the team who are unafraid to speak truth to power, then that is also a very useful source of information.

When I was at the Shinsei Retail Bank we had an issue with the hierarchy of age and stage limiting upward communication. The Middle Managers would make sure those at the bottom never got the ear of those at the top. To overcome this issue, I introduced a system where an external vendor hosted a website, where the staff could post comments on anyone and anything. It was all raw data and the bank could not know who posted which comments.

After a few testing posts, to see what would happen and whether the bank really couldn't know who was posting what, we found we had opened up a Pandora’s Box of issues. This was very helpful in addressing things bosses were doing, which they were not aware of. Yes, we got some slanderous comments and some people tried to use it to undermine colleagues, but for the most part it was very successful in finding out what we didn’t know.

Being more aware of what we are doing, how we are doing it and when we are doing it is difficult because we are all so busy. We are constantly moving forward, rather than looking back to review where we have come from. It is useful though to be aware that we are doing things which may be unhelpful and which may be demotivating our team members. We need to make an effort to search those out and work on them.