Wharton psychologist Adam Grant: How to rethink the work day - and the soft skill future leaders need

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor When I walk into organizations, one of the things I see is people are measured only on their individual results. They get rewarded and they get promoted on whether they can drive revenue or whether they can turn out code. And what we're forgetting is the people we want to elevate are not just the ones who can produce individual excellence. They're the ones who elevate others. And most organizations don't have a clue how to measure them. Let alone how to teach them. And I think that deserves a C-minus.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader. I am delighted to introduce you to Adam Grant. He is an organizational psychologist, Wharton professor and bestselling author, most recently of the book Hidden Potential. And he is the most recommended author at Meet the Leader. How are you, Adam?

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor: Wow, that's a lot of pressure.

Linda Lacina: It isn’t, people love you. And we're so excited to have you. I wanted to get started with our Future of Jobs report that was just released this past month. There's a lot of really interesting things here about soft skills, which I know you have some opinions on and some thoughts on.

One of the things that we talk about in the Future of Jobs report is that there's going to be an increased importance as we have geopolitical change, technological change, demographic change, and increased importance of leaders to manage that through soft skills. And defining soft skills is things like being analytical, being collaborative, being creative. And so what I wanted to do first off is, if you can give workplaces a grade, Adam. How are we doing in terms of soft skills?

Adam Grant: C-minus.

Linda Lacina: How so?

Adam Grant: I think we could be doing a lot better. I think when I walk into organizations, one of the things I see is people are measured only on their individual results. They get rewarded and they get promoted on whether they can drive revenue, or whether they can turn out code. And what we're forgetting is the people we want to elevate are not just the ones who can produce individual excellence. They're the ones who elevate others. And I think that that really goes to the heart of the kind of collaboration skills that you're talking about. Most organizations don't have a clue how to measure them, let alone how to teach them, and I think that deserves a C-minus.

Linda Lacina: Have workplaces ever really prioritized the development of soft skills? We all talk about how much we value them and how great it would be if we had them, but have they ever truly prioritized them?

Adam Grant: I've definitely worked with some organizations that have prioritized soft skills. I think mostly that happens in human capital-intensive industries. So, I see that in consulting. I see it in in tech very often, where you know that talent is irreplaceable. But I don't think it's something that sustains itself easily.

I think that it's one of the first things that gets cut when we see an economic downturn or when the pendulum swings away from sort of talent having power. And I think that's not only a loss for people, it's also a loss for organizations, because ultimately organizations are collections of people that are trying to solve problems and accomplish great things. And if you don't invest in developing the skills of those people, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot.

Linda Lacina: Do you think we'll ever do it? Do you think we will ever truly master soft skills? I know it's a moving target. But what do you think?

Adam Grant: I think my confident answer to that question is a definitive maybe. I don't know. I think that in some ways, I think where we are right now, we used to see a lot of organizations put a premium on ability. So, you try to hire the smartest people. You try to promote the people who are doing the best job. And I think that that's flying out the window as we speak.

I think what the currency of success is now and moving into the future will be agility, as opposed to ability. I think being able to anticipate, change, adapt to it, lead it, is ultimately probably the soft skill that matters most. It's probably the question I hear most often from leaders: How do I lead change? How do I shift a culture? How do I get people to rethink their mindsets and their behaviours?

And I think that we know that's important. We live in a world where the pace of change is accelerating, and in the dynamic world, you cannot rely on the best practices of yesterday. They were just built for an environment that doesn't exist anymore. So, I think we need to be scrapping our best practices and trying to build better practices.

I remember years ago I was working with Google on a project and Larry Page had just come back in as CEO. And I asked him what his biggest fear was, and he said, “My biggest fear for Google is that we're going to become a cultural museum, that we're going to take the artifacts and practices of the past and we're going to put them in a glass case and admire them. And just, you know, talk about how great yesterday was.”

And he said, “We can't afford to do that. We need to smash the glass case and we need to invent new artifacts and new practices.” And I think that's more true now, than it was then.

Linda Lacina: And we talk about sort of getting stuck in the past. There's this really fascinating anecdote that you have in your latest book, Hidden Potential, and it's about the surprising origin of the word soft skills. Soft skills and hard skills. Can you tell us about that?

Adam Grant: I even hesitate to use the word. I don’t want to talk about soft skills if I don't have to, because they get stigmatized. Soft is weak. Nobody wants to define themselves based on something that sounds like it's not strong and tough. So, I wanted to know where did this term come from? Why are we sort of devaluing leadership and collaboration and agility?

It turns out the United States Army is responsible for the term, but they didn't mean it the way we think they did. So back in the 1960s, they were trying to classify skills for soldiers and they said, well, hard skills are anything that requires the use of metal – machines, guns, tanks. And they called everything else soft skills because you weren't touching metal and therefore it was soft. But they saw them as vital skills. They said the most important thing we can do is actually teach soldiers how to live and how to collaborate.

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I think that was unfortunate branding. I think there have been movements since then to say they're not soft skills. They're human skills. They're behavioural skills. They're vital skills. Their character skills. I don't care what we call them, I care that we build them.

Linda Lacina: Absolutely. And I want to do sort of a funny little thing, a little game that I have invented. We'll see how it goes. Right, I call it Fire, Retrain, Promote. And these are going to be sort of classic parts of the traditional workday. And we're going to decide whether or not they're going to come with us into the future.

So, you're going to tell me I'm going to give you a classic part of the workday and you're going to tell me whether we should fire it, whether we can retrain it, whether there's any kind of potential there or, you know, whether we should promote it. Is there a way to kind of put it through and maybe even upgrade it?

Adam Grant: This is already my new favourite game.

Linda Lacina: Okay. All right. So fire, retrain, promote the morning meeting?

Adam Grant: Retrain.

Linda Lacina: How so?

Adam Grant: One morning a week.

Linda Lacina: One morning. And why? Why is that?

Adam Grant: Meetings are a huge time sink. On average, most people at work spend more than half of their time in meetings, where very little gets done. And oftentimes people walk away more depressed than they were when they came in. I think the point of meeting is to do, to bond, to learn or to create. And we don't need to do that together every day. We need to do it together about once a week.

Linda Lacina: So fire, retrain, promote the corporate ladder?

Adam Grant: The corporate ladder. I think I wanted to fire it for a long time, I think we probably need to retrain it.

Linda Lacina: How so?

Adam Grant: There was a Stanford professor, Harold Leavitt, who spent his whole career studying hierarchy, and he was all about trying to flatten hierarchies. And at the end of his career, he said, “Look, hierarchy is inevitable. We are creatures that need structure for efficiency. We need status to know whose opinions are worth listening to, on particular issues where they have expertise or a track record of excellence, and trying to fight against that instinct is a fool's errand.” What we should do instead is make sure that hierarchy is enabling, as opposed to coercive. So, what does that look like?

I think one of the most interesting examples I've seen is at W.L. Gore. So, Gore has a great track record of innovation, not just in their Gore-Tex fabric for winter clothes, but they've also invented guitar strings that can repel grip effectively, and dental floss – and they've really been able to do some disruptive work in unexpected areas. And I went to study them to try to figure out how were they doing that as a large organization.

And one of the things I saw in action was, instead of a traditional ladder, they actually have a corporate lattice. So, if you picture a crisscrossing structure of a lattice, the basic principle behind it is … the reason that startups are so innovative is that all it takes is one yes to get a shot for your idea. Whereas in a corporate hierarchy, all it takes is one no to kill your idea.

And Gore said, “We want to invert that. We want to be more like a startup.” So, they created a lattice where any time you have an idea, you can pitch it to anyone in the hierarchy above you. And if one person says yes to it, it gets a green light and now you can begin to tinker on it. And I think that's a great way to make sure that pilots happen, that people end up experimenting and tinkering and ultimately innovating, and I'd like to see more of that. So, I guess that means that people at the top of the ladder ought to be looking for reasons to say yes, not just reasons to say no.

Linda Lacina: Fire, retrain, promote the five-day week?

Adam Grant: Fire the five-day week, immediately.

Linda Lacina: Instead of five days, what should we do?

Adam Grant: Well, I think there's an emerging body of evidence suggesting that the four-day work week may be an advantage for well-being and work-life balance, without any cost to productivity. And in some cases, even benefits to productivity.

Juliet Schor I think has done the most interesting work on this – partnering with companies across multiple countries and having them do trials and showing that people are spending a lot of their work time not focused. And I would rather have four focused days than five unfocused days. Wouldn't you?

Linda Lacina: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to talk a little bit about, you know, how else we can sort of change to reinforce the value of soft skills. Right? How in all sort of parts of our professional experience, how can we reinforce these values? And so, if we were going to rethink – you were saying, “Hey, we need to rethink how work actually works” –I'm going to take you through a couple other things… what would this look like? So the regular job interview, how should we be rethinking the typical job interview to make sure that we are actually finding out can you collaborate? Are you an effective analytical thinker? What should we do, Adam?

Adam Grant: Oh, I have had so much fun with this. So, I used to hire salespeople – one of my first jobs – and I would just interview them about their sales skills. And I would never forget a candidate who came in with a very unconventional resume. He was a math major, and he built robots in his spare time.

And it was immediately clear to me that this guy was not cut out for sales, but he was kind of interesting, so I decided to interview him. Forty-five minutes later, I came back and said, “There's no way I can hire this guy”. And I explained my rejection to our president by saying, “Look, he didn't even make eye contact once in a 45-minute interview, this guy is not going to be able to sell. He doesn't know how to build relationships”.

And our president looked at me and said, “Adam, you realize this is a phone sales job, right? There is no eye contact.” Did not even cross my mind. It was a classic case of falling victim to confirmation bias. I expected him to be bad at sales. I found a clue that reinforced that conviction and did not try to challenge my own assumptions.

So, then the opportunity was to rethink how I interviewed and I said instead of just talking to him, I should give him a chance to demonstrate his soft skills. I ended up asking candidates to sell me a rotten apple because I figured if you can sell that, you can sell anything. And I wanted to look at how able you are to improvise, how creative you are on the spot. Can you make a connection with somebody who is not interested in the product that you're trying to sell?

I'll never forget I demoed this with a colleague and we had lots of people sell rotten apples to us and one candidate came in and said, “Okay, look, this may look like a rotten apple. It's actually an aged antique apple.” You know the saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away? Well, you only have one of these a week because the nutrients have been developed and you can plant the seeds in your backyard and grow an apple tree. And my price is cheaper than if you bought them at a store.”

I had some honesty and ethics concerns about that candidate, but I hired him. He ended up being our highest performing salesperson, and it was the math major who built robots in his spare time. It didn't matter that he didn't make eye contact. He was great at problem solving and relating to the customer’s perspective.

And I think what that taught me is two things. Number one, we need to give people demos. Figure out the skills that are most critical for the job and then give people a challenge where they can showcase those skills. That's where you really get to see their capabilities. And then secondly, if the first interview doesn't go well, give them a do over. It's not how they perform in the first interview that ultimately shows their agility. It's how well they learn and progress from what didn't go well in the first interview into an improvement in the second interview. And there's some brand new evidence, actually from military jobs, that if you give people a do over, you become better at predicting who's going to be successful in your organization.

Linda Lacina: That’s amazing. And what about promotions? How would we rethink the skills or how people get selected for promotions with some skills in mind to get reinforce the importance in an organization?

Adam Grant: I think that so many people are promoted on the basis of confidence, rather than competence. There's research on what's called the Babel Effect, which shows that the person who commands the most airtime in a meeting is the most likely to rise into a leadership role, and that is not the person you want to elevate. That person is more likely to be a narcissist than a servant leader.

So, how do we change that dynamic? What we do is we start to look at what is the impact of your work on other people. We know there's research on salespeople, for example, showing that the most the most effective managers coming from a sales background are not the biggest rainmakers; they're not the biggest revenue drivers. They're the people who made the most referrals to other salespeople, because they were looking for ways to create opportunities for others. And ultimately, that's what a leader does.

I think the other thing that we ought to do is, when we interview people, we ought to ask them to do a self-assessment of what they did effectively and how they can improve. And that's a chance to see their humility. It's an opportunity to see can they take an honest look in the mirror and know what they're not good at yet, and then make a commitment to try to get better in that area. And I don't think we do enough to hold people accountable for growth before we promote them, instead of just growing into the role. Show me that you're willing and able to grow, first.

Linda Lacina: You wrote in your book Hidden Potential that a lot of times achievement is really about being a freak of nurture rather than a freak of nature. Right? You need to practice at these things we want to get better at. And sometimes we're not thinking about practicing at collaboration, creativity and analysis.

How can we practice at nurturing these different soft skills as, you know, work becomes a lot more task driven. A lot of people around here today are talking about tasks as opposed to, you know, how do we actually collaborate. How do we do this? How do we nurture these skills to practice more?

Adam Grant: Well, I actually think a lot of people are starting to use AI for this purpose. I do a lot of work with BetterUp, and one of their findings is that a popular use case for generative AI tools is to role play difficult conversations and test out, “Okay, I'm going to give you some tough feedback” or “I'm going to maybe raise a conflict that I've been avoiding with you. Let me let me try out a few different ways of teeing up that issue and then see how…” obviously it's not a direct human response, but I am getting predictive text back from a large store of human communication around how somebody might respond.

And then that helps me think through do I want to open that conversation differently? And then what reactions do I need to be ready for? And I think it's a travesty that in almost every field of excellence, people spend most of their time practicing and very little performing. Think about actors doing rehearsals, musicians doing rehearsals, athletes practicing far more than they compete.

In leadership and management, and frankly, in most jobs, we do the opposite. We perform and we don't practice. And I don't know that AI is the answer for everyone, but I think if you have a colleague that's willing to role play and test out some of these skills, the more you use them, the more opportunities you have to figure out what are you good at and where do you need to still work on development?

Linda Lacina: You said that one thing that the workplaces are going to need to do is sort of measure and understand where they are, so they know how they can develop these soft skills further. What does that look like? How else can they do this?

Adam Grant: How do organizations measure soft skills? I like the Corning example a lot. They built the Gorilla Glass for the iPhone in the iPad and they needed, in upstate New York, to attract brilliant engineers who could easily work in Silicon Valley.

And one of the things they did was they created a Corning Fellows programme, where if you're named a fellow, you get a job for life and a lab for life. That's cooler than university tenure. Who knew you can get that kind of job security in the corporate world? What does it take to become a Corning fellow? One of their criteria said you have to be a lead author on a patent that's worth at least $100 million. And most companies would stop there. If you can drive that kind of innovation, we want to lock you up for life and throw away the key.

Corning said, “No, we are worried that highly competent but selfish takers are going to pollute the culture if we give them permanent job security and they're going to stop contributing. And so we want to know, are you making other people better?”

And one of the ways they measured that was, “Are you a supporting author on other people's patents?” I think this was ingenious, because in their world it often takes eight or 10 years to get a patent. And so there are not a lot of people who are like, “Hey, Linda, I'm going to pretend to help you for the next nine years in hopes you will reward my fake generosity by making me author 32 on your patent application.”

It's the people who, day in and day out, are sharing their knowledge, helping to solve problems, connecting dots across silos, who ultimately end up earning those later patent authorships. And Corning said, “Importantly, you've got to do both. You have to show you can drive your own success. You also have to show you can make other people successful.” So, the question I would ask to leaders is what is your equivalent of later patent authorship? How are people not just being nice or indiscriminately generous, but actually adding value in ways that advance the mission? Measure that behaviour and those are the people that you want to promote.

Linda Lacina: We have a lot of research that is, again, talking about how there's going to be a focus on tasks. In fact, some experts -- I have one economist tell me this week that there's going to be maybe more focus on the growth of tasks as opposed to the growth of jobs in some sectors.

So my worry – and you tell me if I'm just being a, you know, a worrywart here, Adam – do you think that this will drive an even larger gap with soft skills? That maybe leaders will focus only on tasks, especially right now with AI, we have not gotten to the point where we are using AI in most workplaces beyond sort of like helping you summarize a meeting. How do we, you know, because we aren't using it to collaborate quite yet… that's maybe the third phase, we're at phase one. So, do you think this task focus will drive a larger gap with soft skills?

Adam Grant: Maybe. I think more and more people are going to have jobs that look more like the gig economy. Right? Where instead of just a job description that's designed for one person, you cobble together a series of different tasks that may end up with a job that looks nothing like what your peers are doing.

And I think that's a good thing and enables what my colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton have called job crafting to say, “Look, you should be an active architect of your job. Instead of managers mass customizing work. You know best what your passions are, what some of your hidden strengths are, and what your values are. And you should be bringing those into your job, and we want to give you the autonomy to do that.”

Actually, Amy and Justin Berg and I have published some research in the last couple of years showing that we don't just need people to think flexibly about their own skills, right? That's traditional growth mindset. It's also important to teach people to think flexibly about their jobs, to say, look, this is not a static, fixed set of tasks. You can expand tasks to become a bigger part of your day than they were if you enjoy them and excel at them. You can try to minimize them or offload them to AI, if they suck the joy out of your workday.

But also, let's not limit your job to tasks. Let's also think about interactions as a basic building block of your work. Who do you meet with on a regular basis? Who do you seek expertise from? Are you limited to your inner circle of strong ties? Are you branching out to your weaker ties who travel and in different worlds and know different things and can open up access to new ideas? If you think about adjusting those interactions as part of the job, not just the task, there are a lot more likely to both build and leverage the soft skills that we need.

I think that the other thing that comes to mind when it comes to the rise of tasks as an area of focus is, I think that we used to promote people who were basically fact collectors. You become a subject matter expertise and learn how to ace a certain set of tasks and that becomes a source of status in the organization.

Well, now information is a commodity. It's easy for people to get the knowledge they need. And I think the future does not belong to the fact collectors; it actually belongs to the dot connectors. The people who are able to synthesize patterns, who are able to build bridges across silos are the ones who ultimately are going to be adding value that's difficult for AI to substitute for.

Linda Lacina: You are not taking any meetings at Davos. I love this. Can you tell us why? I think it ladders right up to some of the things we've been talking about, how sometimes meetings don't go where we need to go. Tell me about this.

Adam Grant: Yeah. I set a goal of zero meetings this week because, one, I just find them really draining as an introvert. Part of my job here is to think and learn. And if I'm sitting down having to talk to individual people all day, then I think my cognitive capacity starts to get limited.

What I want to do instead is I want to be in rooms where people are having interesting conversations, and I can hear a lot of perspectives in rapid succession. So, I've been doing a lot of salons, lunches, dinners, and then also, you know, some sessions where new ideas are really getting seated. I think obviously I don't have a real job. If I were running a company, I would be having bilaterals to do deals. But as somebody who's whose job is to think and then share what I'm learning, I think the best way to learn for me is not a bunch of one-on-one interactions.

Linda Lacina: What does this teach leaders about maybe rethinking the formats of how their teams come together? In your mind, how can that inspire them?

Adam Grant: Susan Cain wrote about what she calls the new groupthink, which is the belief that two heads are always better than one, and five heads are always better than two. And empirically, that's just false.

If you look at research on creativity, for example, if we had a group of five people together brainstorming, if instead we had let them work alone separately in different rooms, we would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas. What goes wrong in group brainstorming? I think a lot of people have lived it. There's production blocking. We can't all talk at once. Good ideas get lost. There's ego threat. I don't want to look like an idiot, so I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas.

And then there's conformity pressure, which I've come to think of as the “HIPPO effect”. HIPPO is definitely my favourite acronym, stands for the highest paid person's opinion. As soon as that is known, people want to jump on the bandwagon and then you can say, “Goodbye diversity of thought. Hello, groupthink.”

That's the bad news. Good news is there's a simple workaround that's been studied for years. It's called brain writing. All you do is you give people a problem or a prompt in advance, you let them generate their own ideas independently and then ideally you keep them anonymous and you have everybody do a separate rating of the potential of that idea. At that point, having gotten independent idea generation and judgement, you bring the group together to evaluate and refine.

And what we know is that individuals have more brilliant ideas than groups. They also have more terrible ideas than groups because they're too close to their own ideas to judge them objectively. And often people are like, “Well, this is my idea. How could it not be genius?” And they need somebody who has a little bit of distance, too, to help them assess it.

So, what we want is we want to maximize individual variety. Individuals excel at creativity. And then we want to bring in the wisdom of crowds with group judgement. And I think that what that means concretely for a lot of people, is you're spending less time in counterproductive meetings, more time really thinking through important ideas, and then benefiting from the perspectives of colleagues, who have also spent time thinking as opposed to just pontificating and talking out loud without having necessarily done any processing.

Linda Lacina: Some people might know this, but you were a professional magician in college. And so, there's a wonderful anecdote in Hidden Potential about this. But tell me a little bit about that. Tell me about working as a professional magician in college. What does that look like?

Adam Grant: It mostly looked like doing weddings and, you know, awkwardly approaching people and saying, “Do you want to see a magic trick?” And then wondering whether they're honest when they say yes.

No, we did mostly student shows and it was a mix of card tricks and stage illusions mostly for me. And one of the things I learned from performing as a magician is that I thought you had to be an extrovert to be to be on a stage. And the reality is that's not true.

Actually, most magicians I met, especially the good ones, were introverts, because most of the work was actually spending time in front of a mirror trying to perfect a technique or master a sleight of hand. And extroverts did not want to spend that much time alone.

And it was it was pretty helpful for me is at the time, I didn't know I was going to become a professor and a public speaker, but I think it was it was early training and realizing that I could learn to perform, even if my natural impulse was not to be the centre of attention.

Linda Lacina: And that experience also helped you as a professor, as you engage students, because there was an element with both surprise and sort of engaging with sceptics. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that helped in your work as a professor?

Adam Grant: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the one of my biggest frustrations early on as an organizational psychologist was students thought, I'm teaching soft content like leadership. How do you measure that? Teamwork. Is that really important? Kumbaya… That's that's not serious.

The time I spent performing as a magician taught me that ignoring sceptics is often less effective than engaging them. And so, I thought what I would do is I would actually present some of the more interesting findings in our field. Only I wouldn't tell what the result was, and I would have the students guess what they think is going to come.

So, a favourite example is you can measure CEO narcissism as a predictor of financial returns that companies get. This has been done in a lot of studies over the last 15 years. And instead of just saying, “Here's how you measure it and here's the average impact on company performance”, I posed the question to the students and I say, how would you measure whether your CEO is a narcissist without ever meeting her or him?

And they all do their independent brain writing first and jot down their ideas. And then I call on people and the classroom – even with 80 or 100 people in the room – almost never anticipates all the measures. They don't think to look at the company's annual report and measure the size of the CEO's photo and whether the CEOs photographed alone or with other people, which turns out to be one of one of the valid indicators that they’re narcissists. They have bigger photos of themselves and they're more likely to be pictured by themselves, sending a clear message “I am the most important person in this company. It is all about me.” They don't think to measure the size of the CEO's signature, narcissists actually represent their names bigger, and they often don't think to measure relative pay.

So, in one study, the average CEO made about two to two-and-a-half times the annual compensation of their number two highest paid executives in the company, usually the CFO. The average narcissist made seven times the annual compensation; feeling entitled to take more since they think they're the sole driver of the company's success.

And you just see sceptics immediately get so curious. I never thought I could look for these basic cues that would not only tell me whether, you know, I want to work for your company with a narcissistic leader, but also should I invest in that company? And then I also pose the question, what's the average impact on organizational effectiveness?

Some people make a prediction that narcissists drive great results. They think of innovators being bold and confident, and they think that's necessary. Other people say, “No, narcissists actually destroy cultures. They're extremely cut throat. Sometimes they license unethical behaviour.” And we have that debate.

And then the question is, what do the data show? And the data show on average that both groups are right, that narcissists drive not average, better or worse performance, but more extreme volatile returns. They're more likely to win big. They're also more likely to lose big. And then we talk about some of the Chatterjee and Hambrick research on software companies. We talk about some evidence on banks in the financial crisis, where if you had a narcissist at the helm, you actually recovered more slowly because you tended to have riskier policies and then you were slower to admit that you made a mistake. Because if you're a narcissist, you don't make mistakes.

Anyway, that's an example of, “Let me let me talk to you about what we're trying to study, the questions we're asking, and let's see how smart you are. Can you figure out how to measure these things and what outcomes they predict?” And the answer is almost always, “No, I couldn't.” And that means I have something to learn.

Linda Lacina: And is it teasing out questions, or even a little sort of frisson of doubt, Is that maybe helpful for leaders to think about as they are promoting analysis and experimentation?

Adam Grant: Yeah, I think I think that a lot of leaders have been promoted on the quality of their answers, but ultimately their success as leaders is going to be dependent on the quality of their questions. My colleague Bob Sutton loves to measure what I think is one of the best indicators of leadership skill, which is the ratio of statements to questions that you make.

And I think that if a lot of leaders were to do that analysis – and I've seen it first hand – they would find that the ratio that they have of statements to questions is far higher than appropriate. And I don't even want it to be one to one. I want you to ask two or three questions for every statement that you make.

Because as a leader, part of your job is to try to figure out what are the threats and opportunities that are on the horizon. And then how do I leverage the best ideas around the room? Too many leaders insist on being the smartest person in the room. I think great leaders try to make the room smarter.

Linda Lacina: What's the book you recommend?

Adam Grant: I have a few right now. Brand new Calling In by Loretta Ross. It's my favourite book on how to fix cancel culture. Validation by Caroline Fleck. She's a therapist who studies how to make people feel seen and heard. And the skills she teaches, I think, are as important for leaders and employees as they are for people at home, managing friendships and parents talking to their kids and even maybe husbands and wives and partners. And then one other that I loved, and I'm a little biased on this one. My wife, Allison Sweet Grant, has a novel called I Am the Cage. And it is a profoundly moving look at how our past trauma shapes our future and how we can rewrite our stories.

Linda Lacina: Is there a piece of advice that you've always been grateful for?

Adam Grant: I think one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from one of my psychology professors, Ellen Langer, who said, “If you're ever agonizing over a decision, stop worrying about making the right decision and instead focus on making the decision right.” She said, “If you're really torn, there is not a correct answer upfront ex-ante. All you can do is commit to the option that seems to align with your values and then try to turn that into a good decision.” And I think that saved me a lot of hours of analysis paralysis.

Linda Lacina: Very good. We are almost done. We're going to do a little bit of rapid response to sort of tie us up here, Adam. What I’m going to do is I'm going to give you I'm going to have you fill in the blanks, right. So, we'll start with coffee or tea?

Adam Grant: Tea. I've never had a sip of coffee.

Linda Lacina: Very good. Biggest work pet peeve.

Adam Grant: Ah, there's so many. Current pet peeve… work spouses. You are not married to someone at work. I'm sorry.

Linda Lacina: I love it. What's your go to karaoke song?

Adam Grant: I'm not allowed to sing karaoke. I have no rhythm.

Linda Lacina: The best thing that you've stopped doing?

Adam Grant: I have a whole 'To don't' list. So I don't scroll in social media. I don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch. And I don't look at my phone in bed.

Linda Lacina: And how do these boundaries help you?

Adam Grant: They make me less miserable and also give me a lot more free time.

Linda Lacina: A habit, you can't work without?

Adam Grant: A habit I can't work without… There's one habit I can't work without – running five to 10 minutes late for almost everything. Unless there's a whole room or bigger, depending on me.

Linda Lacina: And the biggest challenge that you see for 2025?

Adam Grant: I think the biggest challenge for 2025, is everyone knows that it's going to turn the world upside down. And no-one is doing enough experimentation to figure out how.

Linda Lacina: Thank you very much, Adam. For more video podcasts, please go to the World Economic Forum's YouTube page. And for more podcasts and transcripts, go to the World Economic Forum's website.