Leadership Wise

CHAPTER 7“Keeping It Real”

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

—Aristotle

In previous chapters, I've alluded to “knee-jerk reactions” and your emotional, personality-driven tendency to go with the same types of options in your decision-making again and again. In this chapter, we're going to dive directly into that topic, which is going to feel very different from the preceding six chapters. This is going to be the weirdest, most uncomfortable part of this anti-business-book business book.

Previously we've talked about setting priorities, generating options for solving problems and sorting them, pulling more data, running premortems, etc. Very cerebral! Very dry. But we're integrated beings with reasoning that's always touched by emotion, so we have to understand that side of our decision-making better if we're going to have any hope of improving it overall.

Right at the top, I want to credit Bob Lewis, founder of Lewis Leadership and my executive coach while I was at Mailchimp, with helping me make sense of how emotions influence decision-making. Much of the content in this chapter originates with Bob.

Emotions Are Shortcuts

Conflict-averse people tend to, well, avoid conflict in the options they choose.

Conflict-seeking people tend to do the opposite. It's their personality. It's their emotional makeup.

Now, is this an entirely bad thing?

No!

Recently, I went back and listened to an episode of the radio show and podcast Radiolab called “Overcome by Emotion” ...