Snoqualmie Falls, Cascade Mountains, Washington
Hello, readers!
We’ve reached week nine! This will be the last blog for the term and we’ll be talking about emotion as it impacts decision making.
This week we read about Information Cascades (Hoch, et al., 2001) (Tunkelang, 2010) and have watched a video (Stanford, 2011) about the impact of emotion on decision making. Information cascades, or following along with the crowd, have an element of wanting to belong as one of its drivers. The emotion of fitting in or belonging feeds one’s confidence in a decision and can lead to a loop of following along.
Prof. Shiv talked about the role confidence plays in decision making. In particular, it is the projection of confidence that can persuade followers that the leader knows what he or she is doing. In other words, as Prof. Shiv said, “Emotion is what yields decision with conviction.” (Stanford, 2011, 1:08) As a side note, I find it interesting that Prof. Shiv exudes very little in the way of emotion while giving his persuasive presentation. He makes his point, nonetheless.
Athletic coaches, military leaders on the brink of battle, politicians at election time, and late night infomercial hosts are all examples of people who use passion and confidence to sway people to their way of thinking. Nancy Duarte, in a speech at TEDxEast in 2010 discussed the way great communicators built the emotion they wished to convey into their speeches. Emotion is a powerful tool and driver of decisions.
As I review decisions about which I was very confident, my decision to leave my dream job at Delta to join The Boeing Company is high on the list. I can remember thinking, as I was walking into the interview, “This is the place I am supposed to be. I am the man for this job and the interviewers are going to know that by the time we are done.” I had weighed the opportunity against staying in my current job and felt the positive impacts for me and my family would far outweigh the negatives. Some time after being hired it came to light that I scored the highest of all the candidates that interviewed that year in my department. I give full credit to the confidence I exuded in boosting that score. After getting the job, the transition to the Pacific Northwest didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped. As is often the case, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and the move was very difficult for me and my family. However, after riding through the initial rough patch of moving 1800 miles to a new place the benefits started kicking in. I know I am a better person for the experience and my family has seen benefits they would not have realized had I stayed at Delta. I have been able to experience deep satisfaction as I helped customer pilots master the skills to fly Boeing jets, I have also experienced a sense of pride like never before when the team I had recruited and hired honored me at a dinner via a surprise presentation of a genuine officer’s kepi from the French Foreign Legion. My diverse team had been given that nickname by other employees at Boeing and it became our unofficial moniker. I’ll admit that I broke down in front of them. The emotion was overwhelming.
The decision I was less confident about may surprise you. It would be the decision to start flying lessons. I was by no means sure that I wanted to learn to fly. I had worked around airplanes and grown up in an airline family. The “flying bug” just hadn’t bitten me totally. The main reason I decided to start was I felt a distance growing between my father and me. I thought that if we had aviation to share, we could bridge the gap. That idea didn’t really come to fruition. However, the more I flew the more I realized what I wanted to do for a career. Getting into an airline cockpit became an obsession and I worked feverishly on attaining that goal. I felt my confidence growing every day. My sense of joy and learning to seek out responsibility were also growing all the time. In the end, my attempt to repair a relationship opened the door to experiences I had no idea I would find. The friendships, the emotional and intellectual growth, and the responsibility I have been fortunate to merit are all results of my stepping forward into something about which I was unsure.
Emotion can impact decisions. Lack of emotion can also impact decisions. As I like to tell diversity classes I teach, No one wants to hear Mickey Mouse on the airplane’s public address system when there’s an emergency. They want Cool Hand Luke, John Wayne or Tony Stark to tell them it’s all going to be ok. Your team wants that, too… So do your bosses.
Take a look at the references below and keep working on building your EDUCATED LEADERSHIP.
Until next class!
Hoch, S. J., Kunreuther, Howard C., with Gunther, Robert E. (2001). Wharton on Making Decisions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Stanford University, Prof. B. Shiv. (Producer). (2011). Brain Research at Stanford: Decision Making. [Filmed lecture] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRKfl4owWKc
TEDxEast, N. Duarte. (Producer). (2010). Nancy Duarte uncovers the common structure of greatest communicators. [Lecture] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk
Tunkelang, D. (2010). An Information Cascade. Retrieved from http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/11/17/an-information-cascade
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