World Leading Psychologist: The 19 Words That Change How You Handle Criticism | Adam Grant

0:00Unlock it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Micah Hackinen, the Formula One world champion who mastered life at 200 miles an hour and the mindset it takes to win.

0:14We're trying to feed our egos as opposed to fuel our growth. That is where we begin today. I mean, what a quote, what a way to start an episode of High Performance as we welcome one of the most influential thinkers, Adam Grant, world-leading organizational psychologist to the show. This is a man whose work on leadership, mindset and performance has shaped the thinking of the greatest leading CEOs, athletes and creatives around the world. And I think the way I would describe this conversation, Damien, is this is a kind of a very real look, if you like, at what high performance actually demands from a human mind and from a human being.

0:52Yeah, I'd say it's practical, pragmatic and incredibly profound. He shares why the best performers build challenge networks and not echo chambers around them. He describes the difference between ego and growth and how you can spot which one's in charge and why real loyalty isn't sitting in silence. It's about being willing to give answers honestly. Oh, I love that. Look, if we've learned one big thing since we started this show, it's that real high performance should be sustainable, right? It should, of course, give you success if that's what you chase. But more than that, high performance should give you clarity, confidence.

1:24It should give you a calmness that just helps you navigate the choppy waters of the world. And that's exactly what Adam Grant offers today. A real playbook for how you can get yourself to that place. Don't forget to hit follow on Apple or Spotify. You'll never miss an episode. As we welcome to High Performance, Adam Grant.

1:46We're trying to feed our egos as opposed to fuel our growth. And I think if you have a group of people around you, just like an athlete would with a coach, who are solely there to ask, how can I help you get better? It's really hard not to grow. And I think we should show that work much more often. That idea of almost subfusing your ego, being able to put your ego to one side to go, this is what I did do. And this is the ideas that didn't work or the feedback that was a bit bruising. And I'm interested in how do you go about doing that? Well, I think I learned it early on when I was afraid of public speaking early on.

2:25And as a shy introvert, I was just extremely uncomfortable getting on stage. And I said, the only way to get over this is to practice. And I've got to seek out the very experience that makes me cringe. So I started volunteering to give guest lectures in my friend's classes when I was in grad school. And I said, every lecture, I'm going to give out a feedback form. and I'm going to ask the students what I could do better. And I'm not going to have the benefit of a relationship with the audience where I have a whole semester to earn their trust and show how much I care about them. I'm just going to get evaluated by people who saw me for an hour.

3:01So what questions did you ask on that feedback form that our listeners could maybe think about adopting? It was really simple. It was, what can I do better? What should I do more of? And what should I change? And that's it. Yeah, I've evolved that approach over time when I have more targeted goals for what I'm trying to work on. But at that point, I just, I wanted to know everything. And the feedback was brutal. I had one student write that I was so nervous I was causing them to physically shake in their seats. Another wrote that I reminded them of a Muppet because I moved so awkwardly and they never told me which one.

3:36But I remember reading that feedback and thinking, I can't change that perception. I can't convince them that I wasn't nervous or that I come across as really smooth on stage. All I can do is try to make a better impression the next time. And later, my colleague Sheila Heen told me there's a name for what I was doing. She said, you're giving yourself a second score. The first score was garbage and you can't change it. And most of us are obsessed. Those students were giving me clearly C minus, D plus, not a good mark, right? And most of us, we try to change that score. We fight with the judge. We go to the teacher and tell us, no, no, I really deserved an A.

4:18And what I have found enormously helpful throughout my career is realizing I can't change the first score. All I want to do is ace the second score, which is the response to the first score. So I want to get an A plus for how well I take the C minus. And that idea of just saying, you know what, I'm going to rate myself on how well I take feedback, as opposed to, you know, asking, do I want to accept the feedback or not, has made it so much easier to learn from the people around me. I love that. We interviewed an entrepreneur who told us that make your comeback bigger than your setback, which seems to capture exactly what you're saying.

4:53That's a great way of phrasing it. And it's the kind of thing that I think comes in handy in situations where you're not prepared to be criticized. It's easy to take other people's feedback when you've sought it out or when you have a relationship with somebody who is your coach or your mentor. I think the hardest moments are the ones where somebody just... There's actually research on this. A group of my colleagues have called it a swoop and poop. Basically, somebody flies in, they drop a bunch of crap on you, and then good luck. You have to clean up the mess. And I think those situations are where it's most critical to be able to give yourself that second score and say, okay, I've got to ace my response to this mess, not claim I didn't make a mess in the first place or point fingers at the people who dumped it on me.

5:43I'm really intrigued about how you've won these awards for being Walton's best professor for seven consecutive years because that's taking information that in somebody else's hands might be quite dry or bland or anodyne. and yet having read your work and seen your stuff, you do make it dance, you do bring it to life and you do do it in an incredibly engaging way. You know, like when you do your books, for example, and you have to, where you don't have that in the room connection, but you've got an audience of like just a homogenous mass of people that you're trying to bring the idea of rethinking to a mass audience.

6:20How do you go about that connection then?

6:28You know, early on, I tried to do it by sort of writing what I knew. And I wrote a first draft of my first book, Give and Take. I sent it to my brand new literary agent. And he said, to be totally honest with you, I don't even think your academic colleagues are going to want to read this book. Start over. And I threw out 102 ,000 words and started over from scratch. And he gave me a piece of advice that I think about almost every day when I write. He said, write like you teach, not like you write a research paper. And what that gave me was a litmus test to say, would I open a class with this experiment?

7:06Is it interesting enough that it would have my students at the edge of their seats? And that helped me weed out a lot of information that didn't need to go in a book. But it also reminded me that when I teach a class, the element of surprise is incredibly important. If I were to tell you that you are much more effective if you could bring your team with you that you've worked with before, you'd say, duh, of course I already know that. If I instead say to you, it turns out that in this incredible study that Huckman and Pisano did where they studied cardiac surgeons and they wanted to know how many cardiac surgeries do you have to do with minimally invasive technology before your patient mortality rate drops?

7:54How many reps do you have to do before you climb up the learning curve? What do you think that number is? All of a sudden, they're curious. Like, well, I don't know the answer to that. And people throw out guesses, and some people say, well, you've got to do 10 of them before you start to develop some expertise. Other people say 100, and then somebody will say, I don't know, however many it takes 10 ,000 hours. And I get to say you're all wrong because in their data, the answer is infinity. Reps never make you better. How could that be? That's so weird. Patients are every bit as likely to die on surgery number 100 as they were on surgery number one.

8:28That does not make sense. It flies in the face of everything we know about high performance. Well, guess what? Huckman and Pisano realized in their study that they had surgeons operating at different hospitals. And when they broke down their data by different hospitals, they found that every surgery you did at hospital A reduced your patient mortality rate by about 1%. But tomorrow when you go to hospital B, it's like you're starting over, you're a complete novice and you don't benefit from the practice you had at hospital A. And what's going on there, of course, is the team around you really matters.

9:00The shared experience with anesthesiologists and nurses and medical tech ends up really having a huge impact on your ability to perform a successful surgery. And when I tell you the story that way, all of a sudden, wow, I never realized how critical it was, even in work that's supposed to depend on individual geniuses using their minds and their hands to save lives, how much the interdependent system of collaboration around them matters. And that to me is the essence of, you know, of building a relationship with an audience is to ask you a question that you really don't know the answer to and set up that surprise.

9:33I think it's really good for people. I think it makes me want to know, how do you determine who gets to be part of your crew and your gang? How do you recruit? So my most valuable coaches and critics are people that I've come to call disagreeable givers. The first question is, if you think about the personality trait of agreeableness, disagreeableness, are people more on the agreeable side where they're warm, friendly, polite, Canadian? Or on the disagreeable side, are they more critical, skeptical, overrepresented among engineers and lawyers, and maybe a little more British than I am? That I think is important because we know that agreeable people often hesitate to dish out tough love.

10:16They're often afraid to hurt other people's feelings. They don't want to rock the boat. They're trying to be sort of supportive and maintain harmony. And so I found that people who are disagreeable are much less likely to bite their tongues and more likely to tell me the truth. But their motives really matter too. So when I've studied the differences between givers and takers, a disagreeable taker is going to maybe criticize me for personal gain or to try to feel smart. A disagreeable giver is going to ask, can I criticize in a way that actually makes you better? And they're challenging you because they care about you and they want to help.

10:52And so what I've tried to do is I've tried to look at who are the people who gave me the criticism that I didn't want to hear in the moment, but I needed to hear in the long run. And those are the people who, even though they might not always be shielding my ego, they actually are investing in my growth and my performance over time. So what's the best way to do that, to be a disagreeable giver? Well, I think as an agreeable person who's worked hard to get better at this, I think the most important thing is to recognize that the effect of what you say always depends on how you say it. So one of my favorite experiments showed that you could say about 19 words to dramatically increase people's openness to criticism.

11:33And those 19 words are roughly, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I'm confident that you're going to reach them. Completely changes the relationship, right? I'm not judging you. I'm not attacking you. I'm here to coach you. And I actually taught that in class right after that research came out. And then I gave out my mid-course feedback forms and three different students had written at the top, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations. I'm like, no, no, you don't have to use the words. It's the signal that you believe in my potential and you care about my success.

12:04I think that's the most important thing to do before you challenge somebody or criticize them. And then the other thing I think that's pretty important is I've started asking people to assess their own performance before I give them feedback. So I would say, hey, I was observing to see if I could identify anything that might help you. I'm happy to give you a couple tips, but I would actually love to learn from your analysis of your own performance and try to calibrate what I'm seeing against what you've noticed. What did you think went well and what were your notes for yourself? And then I know that some of my points are not going to surprise you because you already anticipated them, but I also have a sense of what your blind spots might be.

12:43And I can say, oh, I was intrigued that you didn't mention this. And I'd love to hear your thought on that. So can you give us an example of that, Adam, of where you've used that 19-word technique and then that second technique that's had quite a profound impact on the recipient? Yeah, I've got a lot of examples. Let me give you one that was a tricky situation for me. So during COVID, I got a call from the founder of a wildly successful startup saying, I'm having trouble with culture. and I'm being told that we have a culture of takers rather than givers, basically. And I know this is something you study a lot, trying to figure out how to get to the bottom of this.

13:27So I end up going to a session with the senior leadership team and I see this person basically check off all the boxes of what I would advise a leader not to do. Dominating the conversation, interrupting other people, dismissing their ideas in a way that almost comes across as demeaning. And so after the session, my job is to try to give some feedback as the outsider. And I start the conversation and I just ask a simple question, which is, how do you think that went? And he says, well, I think it went pretty well. I think we made the following decisions and I was really happy with the buy-in I got for this particular direction.

14:10I'm like, okay, there's a gap of self-awareness here. and I said, all right, well, let me just reinforce what my role is, which is you brought me in to hold up a mirror for you. I don't have answers for you. I don't have solutions, but I think I can maybe help you see your own behavior more clearly. And in the spirit of doing that, I was more interested in how other people thought that went. How do you think they thought it went? And he was like, I don't know. I didn't really think about that. Well, why is that? Because to me, your first job as a leader is to try to elevate the people around you.

14:43Your success depends on making them successful, right? That's why you're in charge of other people as opposed to just being an independent solo operator. And I remember him coming back and saying, you know, I really have to think about that because I have goals. And so my success was, did I meet the goals or not? And he ended up going and getting the feedback from his team. And some of them sugarcoated it. But there were one or two, there were two, I think actually, who said, honestly, this was not an effective meeting and we had a bunch of ideas that got squashed. And even if you think those were bad ideas, you are building a culture where ideas can't be heard.

15:20And that means you're gonna miss the good ones too. And you're gonna pretty soon be surrounded by a bunch of yes men and women who when you come to work in the morning and you say good morning are all gonna say, great point. And is that who you wanna be? No. And I didn't have to do a whole lot in that situation, right? It was just kind of prompting him to say, well, have I really gotten feedback from other people? But sometimes I can imagine that that puts you in quite an uncomfortable position, being the guy that's holding the mirror. You know, so I'm interested of how do you make a determination of whether you're actually going to invest in that relationship because you feel you can help them improve?

15:59Or what are the sort of triggers that you would identify to say, I need to just walk away from here? Well, I usually start by saying, I'm a terrible consultant. You don't want to hire me to give you ongoing advice. There are, I think, two ways that I can be helpful. One of which is I can try to give people a common language to talk about the challenges they're running into and the goals they're trying to achieve that they're missing, right? which is, I think what often becomes a catalyst for change is for people to be able to describe. It's something like saying, okay, you have a star culture, which you think is a perfect meritocracy.

16:38But in fact, you have some people who are rising for reasons that are unrelated to their performance. And you have some people who are failing to get opportunities despite their excellent performance. And so how are you going to find the holes in that system and then try to make it more meritocratic. And all of a sudden saying, oh, well, we're over-rewarding our superstars who have great individual results and we're under-appreciating the culture carriers, the givers behind the scenes who are making other people better. That's a catalyst, right? You don't need me anymore. I've walked you through the data behind that, but you can now figure out how to change that in your own environment.

17:18And then the other approach is to say where I think I can add value is if you actually want to systematically study the problem you're interested in or the goal you're trying to achieve. So if I can come in and do an experiment, if I can gather longitudinal data, then at the end of this project, we're going to be able to teach other people what you learned. And that's a signal to me that you're committed to learning for the long haul, not just looking for a quick fix or trying to have somebody else fight your fires for you. And that's a pretty good filter for me. If you want to go beyond just, I'll give a talk or I'll have a conversation with you, you better be committed to not only running an experiment, but wanting to gather data about the results.

17:57Your thoughts and comments are so helpful, Adam. I mean, particularly for Brits like us, because we've all been brought up in a society where if you're disagreeable, that's a negative. And if you're agreeable, that's a positive. So we all walk around agreeing with each other when there's a voice in our head saying, I'm not really sure that I agree, but I better say I do, because otherwise it's seen as negative, which is unhealthy. You know, Jake, it's funny that you say that because I lived in the UK for a while and I came home feeling like I was always, as an agreeable person, concerned about politeness.

18:27And the degree of politeness that was normative in British culture, at least when I was there, made me uncomfortable. I kept having conversations where people would just kind of nod and validate my ideas. And I started to feel like if two people never disagree, it means at least one of them is not thinking critically or speaking candidly. and that is a disservice to a relationship, right? If you can't tell me the truth, then you're actually hindering my ability to learn from you. I didn't know it was going to happen. One of the effects of going across the pond and then coming back was to say, I think the fundamental challenge of being an agreeable person or living in an agreeable culture or even just having an agreeable team, right?

19:12Is people feel a conflict between honesty and loyalty. And what I tell every person I work with is, I see no conflict. To me, the highest expression of loyalty is honesty. The more candid you are with me, the more I will know that you care about me. So if you ever hesitate because you're afraid of hurting my feelings or hurting our relationship, don't. The only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth. And that just, it just erodes the politeness norms in an interaction because all of a sudden people realize, well, yeah, being polite is protecting your feelings in the moment, but being kind is actually helping you get better in the future to try and bring this into our own lives is this about communication because i'm thinking of people i know who have fired colleagues because i'm why why are they left are we kept on we couldn't agree or even i have friends who've divorced why have you divorced we just got to a point where we disagreed on everything like it's negative.

20:12So even if it's opened our eyes to the fact that actually disagreeing doesn't mean that you can't, you know, relate or coexist, how do we get the other person to understand that when I disagree with you, I'm not coming at you, I'm not being aggressive, I, you know, I don't want to fight here. This is a disagreement based purely on respect for you and me. I think the framing is important. So I mean, as a psychologist, my first inclination is always to bring the evidence to the table and say, look, research shows that the quality of a relationship and also actually whether your kids end up well-adjusted if you have kids is not about how often you fight.

20:50It's about how constructively you fight. You know, kids who are raised in homes where parents never argue, never learn to work out their differences. And that turns out to be unhealthy for them. Kids who are raised in families where parents disagree respectfully, they learn to speak up. They learn to listen to people who have a different point of view. And that's ultimately good for their resilience as well as their ability to have thoughtful disagreements. So I like to talk about that right up front and set that as a context when I'm interacting with somebody. For people who wouldn't do that, I think the simpler way to do this might be to say, I have a style of working out my thoughts, which is to debate.

21:33And sometimes that makes me seem like a prosecuting attorney, which is, you know, I'm just, I'm trying to shoot down everything you say and I'm always trying to prove you wrong, but that's actually how I pressure test my own arguments. That's how I sharpen my own thinking. And if I take the time to disagree with you, it means that your opinion matters to me, right? If I didn't care about your opinion, I wouldn't bother to argue with it. I'd say, screw you. Like, why am I bothering to talk to you? And so my engaging in an argument is a sign that I care and that I care about you. And I may argue really forcefully, but I expect you to do the same thing back and I want this to be like a debate.

22:11And then my wife will say, I'm not your debating partner. I don't want to have a three-hour discussion about everything we disagree on. That may not be necessary. And I think what I've tried to land on there is to say, it's important to agree on core values. And it's important to disagree on the best way to live those values because I don't know and neither does anybody else. And we're kind of trying to figure it out as we go along. I think one of your superpowers, Adam, having listened to you here is the ability to provide clarity for the terms of any relationship. I think when you speak about going in as a consultant to a business and agreeing the terms of which you're going to go in and consult with them or whether it's in a relationship, agreeing the clarity of like that phrase that you used about honesty and kindness are not mutually exclusive.

23:01They're one and the same thing. So what I'm interested in is any quick tips beyond the one that you said about building that relationship, first of all, that our listeners can do to create a culture of clarity in terms of engagement for any relationship. You call it a superpower. I say it's a weakness that reared its ugly head one too many times. And I've been in so many situations where I've regretted not clarifying expectations. And then I've been disappointed by someone and then kind of wake up the next morning and realize, wait, when I'm disappointed in you, it's not because of your actions.

23:38It's because your actions clasped with my expectations. And I never told you what my expectations were. So why am I disappointed in you? I should be disappointed in me. I guess if you're trying to set the terms for clarity in any relationship, the most important thing that I've learned to do is to ask, why are you here? I gave so many pieces of bad advice or unwanted advice to students, to athletes, to entrepreneurs. In every walk of life where I was trying to apply psychology, people would come and then I would tell them about the best evidence I knew. And it just missed the mark because I didn't know what they were trying to accomplish.

24:14And so even just asking, you know, when you come to me for advice on a decision or a dilemma, are you looking to basically get my stamp of approval? Do you want validation? Because you already have it. I want whatever you believe is going to bring you success and happiness. And if you believe that this is the right choice for you, who am I to tell you otherwise? I'm not you. Are you here to widen your options? Do you want me to help you think about possibilities you haven't considered? Are you here because you want me to really decimate your reasoning and you're worried that you might be making the wrong decision and you're bringing me to be part of your challenge network.

24:52And once I know that, it's a completely different conversation. And I think that asking that, obviously, if you're on the mentoring or advising side or coaching side is invaluable. But I think sharing that, if you're the person who's coming to seek advice, right? Not to just say, could you give me advice on this? But here is the goal of seeking advice. In a lot of cases, I will go to multiple people when I'm seeking advice and then they're disappointed that I didn't follow their advice. And what I realized was, I forgot to tell them that I have a whole challenge network and I know that one person's view might be objective quality or it might be idiosyncratic taste.

25:30And the only way I can separate those two things is to ask a bunch of independent people and then see where they converge and where they diverge. And so the fact that I didn't take your advice doesn't mean I didn't value your opinion. It's that I wasn't looking for you to tell me what to do. I was looking to gather a bunch of information and then synthesize those different perspectives and make make an informed decision based on that. And I think you have a particular perspective, just like I do, but both of ours are incomplete. And so I wanted to round those out. And I think just trying to clarify that on both sides is my most important advice.

26:02And that was not a quick tip. No, it wasn't, but it was a brilliant one. So thank you. Thanks for sharing it. With everything that you've learned and all the amazing knowledge that you've shared with us, is imposter syndrome still alive and well in your life? Or have you found a way of quelling it? I don't believe in treating it as a syndrome, like it's a chronic debilitating disease. I guess there are people who walk around feeling like, I am an actual fraud, and I've never been qualified for any role I got. I got lucky in every success I ever achieved, and it's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out.

26:37That is extremely rare. What's much more common if you look at Basima Tufik's research on this is imposter thoughts, the everyday flickers of doubt. of wondering, am I as good as other people think I am? And if you don't have those, you're at risk for arrogance or narcissism. If you never doubt whether other people are overestimating you, then you are not putting yourself in a position to keep growing and challenging yourself. And so I think it's actually really important to have those imposter thoughts. And Basima shows that they motivate you to work harder and longer sometimes. And that they also motivate you to learn more from other people because you know there's a gap between where you are and where you want to be.

27:17And you don't have all the answers. And so you've got to try to close the gap. So for me, yeah, I have imposter thoughts almost every stage I get on. You know, there's a moment where I think, why should this audience learn from me? And a colleague of mine, Hadla Thomas-Dotter, who I think is a brilliant leader and really skilled at turning imposter syndrome into fuel, taught me something that I apply in those situations. She says, if you're going to ask, why me? You should also ask, why not me? Brilliant. Right. Quickfire questions, Adam Grant.

27:54Your three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you should buy into. Three non-negotiable behaviors. One is striving for excellence. Two is being candid with each other. and three is trying to focus not on our individual success but on our collective contribution. If you could go back to one period in your life, where would you go and why? I would go back to yesterday and I would spend a little bit more time thinking through what's the most valuable information I can share today so I ramble less. What's your biggest strength? What's your greatest weakness? my my greatest weakness is probably that i have a really hard time letting go of a goal when i get attached to it and i end up in escalation of commitment to losing courses of action a lot and i know it drives the people around me crazy and sometimes gets me in trouble too which is why i wrote a whole book on why we need to think again i think if i had a greatest strength it's probably it's the flip side of that, right?

29:11I think most weaknesses are strengths overused and misused. And I think probably my greatest strength is my ability to lock into a goal and not let it go and persevere. What's your one golden rule to live a high performance life? I think for me, high performance is about recognizing that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. It's hard in the span of years and decades to keep finding meaning in climbing a mountain yourself. But being able to lift other people up to the top of that mountain, that creates a sustainable sense of purpose. Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure.

29:52I do have one final question. And it is that for someone who rethinks a lot and asks questions of themselves and other people a lot, what is the question you ask yourself at the end of each day that we should be asking ourselves as we close our eyes just to get ourselves into the right space for improvement and growth and forward momentum. One of my favorite questions is, if what I did today was the only work you saw of mine, the only performance you got to witness, would I be proud of it? And what I love about that question is, it's not about the outcome, it's about the process, right? Because when I think about the day's performance, nobody achieves a great result in a day and so what my test there is am I proud of how I tried to achieve my goal thank you so much for listening to this episode if you love these conversations with deep thinkers well Pippa Grange, Mark Manson, Simon Sinek, Matthew Seid we've had so many brilliant people like this on the show and if this made you question things and think a bit differently it may well do that for someone else as well so please do us one favor and just pass this episode onto people in your network.

31:03Challenge them to have a listen and see what they make of it. Don't forget you can get early access to all our episodes on the High Performance app and we look forward to seeing you next time.

31:31Thank you.