In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, guest Mitch Warner explains that the need to justify oneself often leads people to ignore their role in team struggles, perpetuating cycles of conflict and stagnation. Warner describes how fostering a culture of mutual understanding frees teams from blame and enables genuine collaboration. Listen in on this timely conversation and get insight from Warner’s co-authored fourth edition of Leadership and Self-Deception.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Mitch Warner, a managing partner at the Arbinger Institute, is a bestselling author and expert in mindset, culture change, and leadership. With a background in healthcare administration and organizational turnaround, he co-authored Leadership and Self-Deception, The Anatomy of Peace, and The Outward Mindset.
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WHY WE’RE STUCK
According to guest Mitch Warner, “people problems” are often at the heart of why teams feel “stuck.” That’s why his company’s leaders regularly examine their approaches through the principles of Leadership and Self-Deception, a book they co-wrote, to better understand these dynamics. According to Warner, the hardest challenges in organizations aren’t usually about tactical or technical issues. Instead, they stem from “people dynamics” that are tricky to manage and often keep leaders up at night. “If they can’t get a handle on the people problems, nothing gets any better,” Warner says. Put simply, resolving these interpersonal issues is critical to driving progress.
Warner explains that this feeling of being “stuck” usually points to difficulties in mobilizing teams, managing conflicts, or breaking down silos that hinder collaboration. Central to the problem is what he calls “self-deception,” where individuals fail to see their own role in the issues at hand. This leads to a cycle of blame, with everyone believing that the fault lies elsewhere. Even when confronted with their own contributions to a problem, people tend to resist acknowledgment. “We don’t want to hear it,” Warner notes. Ultimately, self-deception prevents teams from moving forward in a positive and collaborative direction.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Learning How to See
“What we find in our work is that if you can change the way people see — if you can change their mindset — that’s where behaviors are coming from. […] That comes as a function of how we see, how I see you, how I see myself, how I see my challenges and my opportunities. And so it seems like the most effective leaders that we have found are not the leaders that come in and say, ‘Alright, everybody, here’s what we’re going to do.’
They’re leaders that just help people see what their job is and particularly the people around them. […] They unlock innovation. Leaders that just try to come in and prescribe behaviors, they not only get stuck, but they get resistance.”
Where Transformation Starts
“It’s not a project to become highly self-aware. That’s not the project. The project is to finally see you and go, ‘What’s it like to be Brandon?’ Whether I report to Brandon or he reports to me, or you’re a customer, or you’re a peer of mine, it’s like, ‘Well, what’s life like for you?’ And specifically, ‘What’s life like for you having to work with someone like me?’ […] But sometimes I think I think a lot of the modern kind of self-help stuff that we engage in is problematic because it’s all about me and that never works.”
What We Ignore, And Why
“It seems like we all have that power to keep ourselves from seeing what we know to be true. We wouldn’t be so good at keeping ourselves from seeing that if we didn’t know it was true to begin with. […] We ignore it, and why do we do it? Because I think, at least for me, the need to be justified is more important in my life when I’m inward than success or happiness or any of the things that I say I’m invested in. Now I say, ‘I want this team to succeed,’ or ‘I want this company to succeed,’ or ‘I want my marriage to succeed,’ or ‘I want my kids to succeed,’ or any one of those things, or ‘I want to just be happy,’ but I end up sabotaging the very things that I say that I want because I actually want something more when I want to be justified. So I’ll ignore any evidence that tells me that I’m wrong, and I’ll bias myself toward evidence that this story I’ve been telling about them is the truth. Now, my marriage doesn’t get any better. My team doesn’t get any better. My company doesn’t succeed. But you know what? At least I’m justified.”
Fostering Real Change
“When it comes to shaping a culture — because I think the people that are listening to your podcast have a responsibility in one way or another to shape culture — you can do that in one of two ways. You can come in and you can implement programs, or you can prescribe behaviors, or you can incentivize behaviors and maybe you do that through programs or something like that. Or you just help people free themselves from these justifications so that they can just be together. And in my experience, that’s what transforms a culture — just people free of the need to be justified for how they’ve been.”
A Threat Around Every Corner
“I walk into a meeting with this image that I’ve adopted of myself that’s not true. It’s a lie, but it gives me justification that I’m smart and capable and have all the answers.
And then somebody else has a better idea, or I offer an idea, and somebody says, ‘Oh, you know what? I’ve tried that at another company. It didn’t work. What about this?’ All of a sudden, now the feelings that I had in self-betrayal with you, how bugged I was and how much I was in anguish around how problematic our relationship was — I feel all those same feelings in this meeting and I shut down. Not because I betrayed myself, but because the image that I created in self-betrayal is now under threat. Right? The very fact that someone else had a great idea is now a threat to my self-image, and there goes leadership, there goes collaboration, there goes productivity, and that’s going on in every organization for everyone every day. I think it’s the root cause at the heart of our dysfunction.”
Everything We Do
“There’s nothing on my to-do list that doesn’t impact another person’s ability to succeed. So I can either do this in a vacuum — this task or activity — or try to accomplish this objective on my own. Or because it impacts somebody else, what if I just went out and found out how this impacts them? How would that change what I do? And I’ll tell you, for me, not only do I do better work when I remind myself of that every day, it’s more satisfying, it’s enlivening. And I don’t care what your job is — recognizing that the way I do this impacts this person […] changes how I work.”
LEARN MORE
If you’re ready to elevate your leadership approach and workplace culture, don’t miss out on the fourth edition of Mitch Warner’s co-authored book, Leadership and Self-Deception: The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results.