Leadership Mindsets: How Cognitive Biases Shape Team Culture & Performance

The way you lead affects your team. A negative leader will cause their team to be negative, while a positive, optimistic, and future-oriented leader will have a team that is more positive.

One kind of negative leader avoids finding a cloud’s silver lining, instead seeing only the threat of bad weather. This leader is always looking for potential problems, while failing to identify the opportunities that a positive leader would pursue.

As a leader, you set the standard for your team, who looks to you for guidance. What you believe is true will also be true for them. If you believe things are bad, you will transfer that negativity to some part of your team. If you remain positive, a large part of your team will follow your lead.

Here is a list of things leaders might do that can cause them to be negative. If you tend to fall victim to these cognitive distortions, you may do harm to yourself, your team, and your results.

• Filtering: Your sales team won seven new deals in the month, but two salespeople lost deals that would have ensured you reached your goal. Even though you added seven new clients, you are upset that two reps failed to win the deals you needed.
• Polarization: You treat the winning seven reps well, but you treat the two who failed differently. This is black-and-white thinking. The fact that the two reps had a bad quarter should not cause you to treat them differently, unless it’s coaching them.
• Overgeneralization: When you overgeneralize, you take a single event and convert it into a losing pattern. If you say, “We never win big deals,” you are over generalizing. Stay away from never, always, or everything, when the event is negative.
• Discounting the positive: You had a great second quarter, and your senior leader compliments you on your great results. Instead of saying “thank you,” you say anyone could have done it. When someone compliments you, believe it is sincere and don’t discount it.
• Jumping to conclusions: One team member received an email from a large client they are pursuing. The client wrote “We need to talk this afternoon.” Your negativity bias will have you jumping to conclusions. Maybe it’s bad news, but it might also be good news. Don’t assume it is negative.
• Catastrophizing: When your mind goes right to the worst possible thing you can think of, you are catastrophizing. Last year, a friend called me. I missed his call, but he left a message that said he had something important to tell me. He couldn’t call back until the end of the day. I spent two hours catastrophizing, only to learn that I already knew his news.
• Personalization: You gave one member of your team advice on a deal. They lost the deal, and you personalize the outcome by believing you caused the sales rep to lose the deal. You blame yourself, without knowing what factors caused the loss.
• Control fallacies: This cognitive error will have you believing you are in control of everything or nothing. In the first case, you believe you are responsible no matter what happens, and in the second you are helpless. Control is an illusion. Suppose you owed your leader a forecast, but you could not complete it because you had to help a team member retain an important client. Do not beat yourself up for not getting everything done.
• Fallacy of fairness: I have two daughters. One is aggressive, and the other is passive. Both wonder why I treat them differently, causing them to fall into the fallacy of fairness. I treat them differently because they are different. You might fall into this cognitive trap by believing people who disagree with you are wrong.
• Blaming: You are full hot. You didn’t hit your targets and now you blame your team for causing your unhappiness. You decided to be angry, even though you are responsible for your team’s results. I once heard a senior leader share on CNBC that they missed their goals because the sales force failed.
• Shoulds: You should always be on time. You should always plan your week before the week starts. You might make your “shoulds,” other people’s “shoulds.” Pay attention to exceptions.
• Fallacy of change: You believe people will change to meet your expectations, pressuring them to have them comply. You ask your team to make 250 cold calls each day, and when they fall short, you are upset.
• Global labels: When you believe someone is lazy, you are assigning a global label. The label, however, is an observation of a behavior rather than an intrinsic, unchangeable attribute. This person can be productive. Labeling people is another form of overgeneralizing.
• Always being right: You believe you are right, even though the evidence is to the contrary. It’s not only okay to be wrong. Everyone misses the mark sometimes. In Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative, I help salespeople become One-Up, meaning they know more and have greater experience than their buyers. Being One-Down can help you learn, while being One-Up can help you educate others, so both positions are important.

Leadership, Culture, and Beating Negativity

How you lead will determine what your culture is like. If you avoid these cognitive mistakes, you will, on balance, have a more positive culture. If you fall into these cognitive mistakes, you cause your culture to be negative, something that will harm your overall results, and possibly drive away your most positive team members.

Your team reflects your leadership. They will become what you are. Negativity is the only cancer that spreads from person to person. As a leader you can cause it to metastasize through your team.

Leadership isn’t easy, but you will make it easier and more certain that your team will be more positive more of the time. Leaving this article, list the cognitive errors you need to remove. Forewarned is forearmed. If you need more practical strategies, see Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.