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There’s a leadership exercise which I’m finding to be a stimulating and successful way to challenge people to think about the way in which they would lead a team in a stressful situation.

The situation that we use is drawn from real life and concerns the famous footballer, Vinicius Junior. At the time of recording this blog, Vinicius Junior is a potent striker for Real Madrid.

He has had some well documented difficulties with some sets of supporters when he plays rival clubs in Spain. The fans have chanted and used unforgivable racism to try to put him off.

So my question to groups is about what you would do if you were captain of the team, imagining the following:

1. it was halftime in a match and in the first half there had been such behaviour by opposing fans;
2. Vinicius is looking a little upset, but he’s playing well; and
3. so are the other members of the team.

It is halftime, what do you do? If you’re reading this blog, perhaps you can just take a moment and do the exercise yourself. What would you do to try to protect the functioning of this team? How would you lead them?

I’ve heard lots of answers to what people would do, and of course there isn’t a right answer or a wrong answer, but one of the things that motivated me to use this scenario as a test for leadership is that I heard it debated on the radio in the UK, and two former England football captains gave their point of view. And you read on, you can compare your view with theirs.

I think there are something like 6 possible responses to this challenge. Of course, we bear in mind that we are not in the changing room in halftime and we’re not able to read the room. Also, of course, we don’t know Vinicius ourselves personally.

If you want to assess your own leadership, pause now and consider what you would do before reading on.

But that said, let’s analyse some options for what to do

1. Moan about it. You could certainly let everyone know how unhappy you are about the situation. That’s something. It helps the team know that you share a value with them and the expression of that value might be enhancing for the team. But it’s a fairly modest response and perhaps not enough in this situation.

2. Make promises. You say, “At the end of the game, we will put in a formal complaint”. “We will contact higher authorities”. “We will say in the strongest terms that the club whose supporters these are must be held to account.” And that’s not bad either, but in leadership terms, if you make promises, you must follow through. One of the elements of trust within a team is whether a leader is reliable and true to their word. So be careful if you go down the promissory route that you absolutely deliver. You should probably over-deliver rather than under-deliver. Do not let your commitment dissipate as soon as the game is over.

3. Reframe the problem. Some challenges can be successfully reframed. Reframing is so common, that some phrases used by leaders are now cliches of trying to reframe a problem as an opportunity. But many of the delegates who’ve done this exercise have ways to try to convince Vinicius to see the chanting in a more positive light. They would say to him that these fans are jealous, or these fans are ignorant, or they are doing it because they know how good Vinicius is, and they are only doing it because of how brilliant he is. This might work, but we feels like a short lived and shallow response. We can’t brush everything aside with by trying to reframe it away.

4. Inspire. It may be that we can use our strong shared values to inspire the team. Victory against the racists will come if we score more goals and defeat their team. Leaders can only inspire if the team members believe them, trust them, and respect them. Without those fundamentals in place, the leader’s words will just seem hollow, insincere and self-interested. The success of the any attempt to inspire will depend on the years of work that the leader has done to act commendably in the past.

5. Take immediate action (Vini decides). There aren’t many options for immediate action. But one option is to stop playing, and to take the players off the pitch. This denies fans any further opportunity to do what they were doing. Both the England captains were in favour of at least considering this option. There was an interesting divergence though. One England captain said one should empower Vinicius by putting the decision into his hands. ‘Empowerment’ is a strong and positive word, and on one view, empowering a member of a team to make a key choice (that concerns them acutely) does seem like a good strategy. But read on.

6. Take immediate action (captain decides). The second England captain had an interesting alternative take, which is that if Vinicius is already under enough pressure, we shouldn’t put more responsibility upon him. Don’t ask him to make a big decision for which there could be serious consequences. This is the time for leadership, and the leader must be the one to protect the team. The leader should declare the values, and to pick the action, and live wholly with the consequences upon their shoulders. On that reasoning it should not be Vinicius who takes the decision, but the leader. The leader should say “This is my decision and I will take full responsibility for it.” The fine balance between taking decisions oneself, or delegating them to others, is a great leadership challenge.

So what should we take away from this interesting discussion in terms of leadership? My thought is that leaders can only get things right in this moment of challenge or crisis if they have done a lot of other things right beforehand.

Almost all the options that we identified above, need certain pre-conditions. First amongst them is that the team has unified values. If the team members don’t care about each, and only care about picking up their pay, then the leaders’ options become very limited.

If the team has invested in building a culture and values, then leaders have more options to deal with challenges. And those options are likely to be more successful.

Another pre-condition is that the leaders know their team members well. It is easy to assume what someone wants in each moment. But people can be surprising, and mistakes can easily be made about what they value in that moment of pressure. Investment of time in getting to know team members, and listening well, will open up leadership options further down the line.

I was recently a guest on the excellent Leadership Enigma podcast for a client of my friends at Emeritus Business School – and I thought I would share one element of our conversation which is on the topic of persuasion and influence. This is applicable equally to courtroom lawyers or anyone seeking to influence a decision of another.

The idea that I would like to share is that you visualize or consider your attempt to persuade as a journey. In this journey, you are seeking to move another person from point A to point B. A represents the view they hold before you speak, and point B represents the other person agreeing with you.

If we use the analogy of a journey there are several benefits that we get that lead us to helpful techniques to make our persuasion successful.

The first benefit of this analogy is that it is easy to visualize a journey as having a starting point. If we take the journey together, well, we have to meet at the start of the journey. When you speak to influence or persuade, it can therefore be really helpful to reference and agree where we start from.

If you don’t know where the other person’s head is at, you don’t know their starting point, and you don’t know how far you need to go on your journey. That’s a big disadvantage.

So the first question is how you might learn their starting point. Lawyers in court might be able to tease out an indications from a judge or tribunal about how close or far that tribunal is from agreeing with you. But in other situations, such as a jury trial, there’s no chance to ask. In that case, you can only do your very best to read the room and to think with care and empathy what their point of view is likely to be.

If you get the starting point right, it allows you to recognise if the journey is short, or long. Longer journeys need more time and preparation, you need to honour the fact that you are asking more of the person you are seeking to persuade.

But the distance of the journey is not only defined by the starting point, it is defined also by the end point. And that can be fluid too.

This introduces us to the lovely notion of a tipping point. Your tipping point is the point at which the person you are trying to persuade flips from disagreeing with you and refusing your request, to deciding to agree with you, and to do as you ask.

Some people will be prepared to agree with you without needing much convincing. Maybe they trust you, or don’t really care, and are happy to authorise you without a big effort on your part.

Others will need to feel a higher degree of assurance that you are right, and won’t yield to your request without feeling almost certain.

In legal advocacy, the tipping points for tribunals are usually defined by law. We have many phrases that define tipping points, such as ‘reasonable prospect’ or ‘not frivolous or vexatious’ or ‘no reasonable prospect’. When it comes to a trial, the tipping points are famous. In civil law, the judge needs to feel that you are ‘more likely then not’ to be right. A criminal law jury can only act to convict if jurors feel SURE.

So a prosecutor must take a juror on a longer journey, to a higher tipping point than the defence lawyer. The defence lawyer wins once any reasonable doubt is established.

In the commercial world, it will be rare that an organisation defines for a CEO (for example) precisely where their tipping points will be for deciding when to agree or disagree with a proposal. So a good influencer will do well to discover what sort of burden is upon them, and how open, or resistant, the decision maker is, to acting in the way that you want.

If we know both the start point, and the tipping point, for the subject of our attempt to influence, we know the length of the journey that we need to go on.

Everyone wants to make decisions efficiently and economically. No one wants to hear a 2 hour speech seeking to persuade them of something they were going to do anyway. But similarly, you don’t want to take it for granted that you’ll get what you want, and undersell yourself. Only then to find that the decision maker made a decision against you.

There are ways to ensure that you give your decision maker opportunity to give you indications on whether you are nearing the tipping point, or if you are still woefully far away. These are teachable and can be practiced. Good advocates and influencers are constantly reading their audience, and adjusting the pitch and tone of what they say depending on whether they are nearly at their destination, or if they still have a way to go.

This brings us onto the final of the three points that we can take out of the journey analogy. The point is this. As you take steps along the journey, not every point that you make is a step of equal length.

You might have one really good point, which should be a huge leap forwards and move the listener a considerable distance in your favour. You may have host of other points, all of which might move the listener a little closer. It is like imagining your points as cards in a card game, or even units of currency. Not everything has the same value.

I have observed over decades, that SCRIPTED advocates find it almost impossible to vocally express any DIFFERENCES in the value of the points that they are making. They present all arguments as if the impact of each is equal. And that’s almost never actually the case. They undersell good points as a result, and they oversell lesser points too.

A really good presenter or advocate will use the voice and that intonation to convey the size of the step. Their voice will be firmer, stronger, more energized, imploring, and urgent when they are seeking to get the full value of the excellent point. They know that they need to move the listener a substantial distance. Without true vocal commitment, you might not move the decision-maker as far as the quality of your point deserves.

On the other hand, you must not claim you can move someone a long way with a less striking point. You need to be more careful and nuanced, when you have a point of value, but which plays more of a supporting role to the main points. It’s a real challenge to ensure that you still talk about the point in a positive sense, and you don’t sound apologetic about making your points. It is just that the points contribute their true worth, not less and not more.

Smaller points can move a decision maker over the tipping, so can be crucial. But how many of these points you might need will depend on whether you’ve already reached the tipping point, if you are very nearly there, or if you are still some way back.

So there we have it. Consider your attempt to influence as a journey, where you ensure that:

1. you begin your journey together from an understanding of where the decision maker’s thoughts are at;
2. know how far you have to take them to get them to a place where they will accept your idea, submission or proposal, and
3. and tread each step according to its own merits – taking full value for good points and not overreaching with supporting points.

If you need to practice any speech, application, pitch or presentation, we can help you with feedback using these tools, and many many others.

I spend a lot of time encouraging people to improve their listening skills. Listening skills are more challenging than people appreciate, and often emotion and neurochemical responses get in the way. It is now widely accepted that almost anyone can improve at almost anything IF they can listen to feedback with open ears and an open mind.

When I deliver training on listening, I am occasionally moved to tell a deeply personal, but actually rather funny story of a failure of my listening, which had quite extraordinary consequences.

And with some reservation, I’ve decided to share it here. So the story is about one of the great loves of my life. I’ve not had many, I assure you. She is the most wonderful person, and her name is Nita.

I met her in Indonesia where I was teaching English as a gap year project. So I was 18 or 19. I was totally and utterly smitten with this amazing young lady.

I was culturally a Christiam. She was a Christian, but Indonesia, of course, is Islamic, and her culture was very much associated with the values of that faith.

Her view was that physical attraction was of very minor relevance in a relationship. It was about the beauty of the person on the inside. It meant that never once did she say anything nice to me about how I looked. She thought that such comments were shallow and would rather undermine the relationship rather than add to it. And as a 19-year-old Western lad, this took a bit of getting used to.

Similarly, she was very cross with me if I ever complimented her looks. It would make her worried that my values were shallow and that I was in the relationship for the wrong reasons.

And it was hard to argue that she wasn’t right.

Let’s fast-forward. We’ve been together for 2 years, and I don’t compliment her, she does not compliment me, at least on our looks. And I was sort of getting the hang of that, and understood it, and was beginning to even think it was a good thing.

So one day, I decided to tackle the topic and tell Nita how happy I was about the progress I had made in deepening my thoughts about what was important in a relationship. But I couldn’t help my curiosity. I still wanted to know if she thought that I was handsome. So I asked, ever so gently, just out of curiosity, if she thought that I was handsome or not.

“James,” she said to me in a slightly cross tone, “I love you even though you are ugly.”

Whilst I thought I really didn’t care about looks any more, in truth it was still a shock. I tried not to show it, but I was a little bit disappointed. I hid it, and I changed the subject.

For the next 2 years, I kept up on my journey of dealing with having a partner who loved me, but found me ugly. It was a humbling journey, and actually a rather spiritually beautiful one. And by the end of it, I felt so incredibly secure that nothing would ever shake her love for me. Even if I lost my looks, it would not make a scrap of difference.

Having eventually really found peace with her comment, I dared to bring it up again. So I said, “Nita, uh, this has been such an extraordinary journey we’ve been on. And perhaps the greatest gift I’ve learned is to feel that I must be such a nice guy that you would love me even though I’m ugly.”

And she looked at me a little bemused. “Who says you’re ugly?” she asked. “Well,” I reminded her, “you did. You said ‘I love you even though you’re ugly,’ “Oh,” she said. “That’ll be my English. It is so confusing. ‘Even though’, ‘even if’. I always muddle them up.” “Excuse me?” I said, now wondering if I had completely misunderstood her. “Yes,” she said. “I love you even IF you’re ugly.”

Of course, that single word of difference, reverses the meaning. And my years of agonizing about her point of view was completely unnecessary.

So what is the learning to take away? It’s always important that difficult conversations must run their path. And even when you think you have understood, check understanding. You can use phrases like, “Can I check I understand you?” Or “It’s really important that I hear you without error or misunderstanding.” And what you then do is to summarize and reflect back what you think you have heard. Ask with genuine curiosity and genuine openness, (not with bitterness or judgment) “Have I, have I understood that correctly?”

I often wonder if I had done that what a different journey I would have been on with Nita.

The topic of this blog is, what you see is NOT always all there is.

I take this unashamedly from the brilliant Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner for economics, who identifies that one of our cognitive weaknesses is to assume far too quickly that what we know is all there is to know. There are often unknowns. And the most dangerous unknowns are the unknown unknowns.

Donald Rumsfeld mused on this quite famously when he was guiding the USA through one of the conflicts in the Middle East. He said, that there were things that the administration knew that they didn’t know. But there were also other things that they don’t know that they didn’t know. And it’s this last one which is the challenge for humanity.

And that concurs entirely with Daniel Kahneman’s observations that we are cognitively inclined to get on and make decisions before reviewing whether we’ve uncovered all the unknowns.

Why do we rush our decisions, and not search out the unknowns? Well, as humans, we rarely used to need this skill. Take an example. You are a hunter gatherer, early in our history. You were in group that found a new type of bush. An unknown fruit is hanging from it. Someone tries the fruit. They get sick. So no one eats the fruit again. Easy. No need to worry about unknown facts.

This sort of history has made us weak at finding out the unknowns.

So to bring this to life a little, I’m going tell a story about when I ended up as a defendant in court. And the trial had a bombshell revelation (i.e. something previously ‘unknown’).

This story is also of great relevance for lawyers, on the topic of litigation risk. Good lawyers negotiate settlements to protect clients from the risk of a discovery of unwelcome unknowns in the litigation. Trial lawyers are there to unearth an unknown or 2 in the trial and change the momentum of a case.

And so it was with me. I was 18 years old and one day, I was driving my car with a friend as a passenger. We came across, (on a quiet road, on a Sunday morning), a driver who was going slowly. So slowly in fact, I thought he had a mechanical defect. He seemed to be deliberately letting me go past.

And I did. And I didn’t give the manoeuvre a second thought.

A few miles down the road, he was still the car behind and we arrived at some traffic lights and the driver of the car I’d overtaken got out. He came to me, knocked on the window. I dutifully opened it thinking he had some useful information for me. But rather he just started shouting at me rather incoherently about what a reckless terror I was and I should be taken off the roads.

Well, the lights turned green and I shrugged and just drove away wondering what on earth had possessed him to berate me in this way.

You might imagine my shock and surprise when a few days later the police knock on the door and informed me that man was bringing a private prosecution against me. The police had been entirely disinterested in his complaint about me, so he was going to hire lawyers and prosecute me himself.

In the trial, it was a simple word against a word. I maintained there was nothing at all wrong with the manoeuvre. He was making out it was astonishingly dangerous and that I should be removed from the roads.

His lawyer had a very difficult question for me which was, why would he make it up? Why would he go to the expense and bother of bringing me to court unless, I had done something to warrant it?

And to be honest, I didn’t really have an answer. I couldn’t imagine why he would do such a thing.

But then, the most extraordinary thing happened. He said in the witness box that I was not the driver of the car. He said that my friend Johnny was the driver, and I was actually the passenger. He alleged that we’d swapped places for the trial, and we were deceiving the court.

This was a massive escalation, and there were mutterings about perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Luckily though, I thought of how I could prove him wrong. At that time, I had an earring. Forgive me, it was the 1980s. And Johnny, my friend, did not. And the man had seen us both at the traffic lights. He said he’d seen us well enough to know which of us was the driver and which was the passenger.

So I asked him, “The driver, did he have an earring?” “Oh, yes,” he said. “I definitely remember that. Hideous thing it was.”

I proudly announced that the only one of us who had a pierced ear was ME. Johnny didn’t. So I WAS the driver.

This turned the tables. I asked the question, “Why on earth would you make up the allegation that I was not the driver?”

And under the pressure, he cracked and he revealed that actually, I was the fourth person he had prosecuted on the same road, and he had been motivated by the fact his son had been hit on that road, the victim of a fatal hit and run. The perpetrator had never been found.

So clearly, he was acting as the vigilante of the A4155 from Henley to Wallingford and hoping to find a driver reckless enough to have been a possible suspect in his son’s death. That piece of information, of course, changed everything, but it did not emerge until the very last minute. And might very well have never emerged at all.

So to all leaders and people in business I say watch out for the unknown unknowns, and this is why questioning skills, knowing the right questions to ask and keeping listening and listening deeply is so important to make sure that you don’t rush decisions which are important when you may not have all the information that you need.

And for lawyers, I say beware the risk of going to trial. Interview your clients and witnesses well ahead of time and always persuade clients to take settlements even if they’re not quite as good as they would like. The risks at trial are rarely worth it. There’s nothing worse than taking a case to trial and seeing it unravel by the revelation of something hitherto unknown.

Like many trainers, I offer and deliver leadership training on a range of popular topics. These are topics such as psychological safety, resilience, and growth mindset. I think that everyone knows that there is some sort of connection between them, and that they probably all help in their own way towards better functioning teams. But I haven’t seen or read anything in the literature that really explains how they connect together. So, I’ve done some deep thinking about it. And I think that there’s a really nice way to understand that there really is a pathway through these skills, which you can build in the right order to get your teams super-successful.

So what’s step one? It starts, I think, with asking questions and listening. These are the foundational skills for high performing teams. Why? Asking good questions and listening is the gateway to trust. Trust really cannot develop between people unless people within the team feel heard. It is such a basic human need to feel connected, to feel seen, and to feel heard. And that doesn’t happen unless the the leader in the situation is able to frame and ask good questions and to listen.

These sound like simple skills, but believe me, there’s a lot more to them than you might imagine. The discipline of asking questions that are full of curiosity and free from judgement is not easy. And I should know. As a courtroom lawyer, I absolutely understand how 2 similar sounding questions can actually be profoundly different in terms of the response that they will elicit.

And listening, well, there’s a lot of research and literature about the different levels of listening and the ways in which we engage with one another. Asking questions, and listening are very teachable and learnable skills, and we can use these foundational skills so that we can develop trust within our teams.

So step 2 is to develop trust. Our question and listening has been the foundation trust to flourish, but there’s a lot more to trust than just this.

Trust itself needs some work. It’s an elusive commodity, and there are some very helpful thoughts in the literature and research on leadership into how you gain it and how you hold onto it. It’s often by habits that you can learn and practice and monitor and review in yourself. Leaders who understand the mechanics of trust, and have plans for how to grow it within teams take a huge step forwards towards high performance.

So what then is the dividend and return on the investment of time which is needed to grow trust? Well, it seems clear to me that the outcome of trust is psychological safety.

Psychological safety is therefore step 3 on the path to high performance. It is built on the trust which was developed through questioning and listening. But having established the pre-conditions for psychological safety, the next question is now to foster it further. Unsurprisingly, there are a host of ideas, tools and techniques to help leaders recognise the threats to psychological safety, and to fend them away.

Our brilliant minds which are wonderful in so many ways are also liable to the occasional error, and sometimes these errors are almost inevitable because of the way that our brains are set up to work. This introduces the topic of unconscious bias. This is an enemy to psychological safety, and it is one of the topics that leadership training should take seriously in order to really keep their teams safe.

So, again we ask the question what the benefit is of psychologically safety within teams? Why work so hard at each stage to develop these leadership skills? When do we see the long promised ‘high performance’? Well, rest assured, we are just about there.

There are 2 great dividends from psychological safety. You open the door to productive feedback and to unlocking the collective intelligence of your team.

If you have collective intelligence, everyone in the team is contributing, and if everyone in the team is comfortable asking for, receiving, and giving feedback, then this team will grow. It will upskill constantly, and you will then achieve high performance.

There is a lot of wisdom to impart on the topic of how to give feedback effectively. If a leader does not have the skill to give effective feedback, then all the good work building up to this point is wasted. Good feedback allows team members to habitualize all their good behaviours, and to error correct on any thinking or behaviour which is not optimal. This is living the dream of growth mindset.

Harnessing collective intelligence is vital to making the most of the benefits of having a psychologically safe team. There are teachable skills that help leader to become great facilitators within meetings, and to ensure that team members are working productively, collaboratively, and sparking off each other to generate the ideas that will drive the business forward.

So here’s a recap of the steps to high performance.

Questioning and listening (which gives you…)

Trust, (which gives you…)

Psychological Safety (which gives you…)

Productive feedback and collective intelligence (which gives you…)

High performance.

It does seem to me that each step is contingent upon the one before, and if there is any weakness in the chain, of course there will be problems.

Sustaining high performance within teams is a matter of continued listening, continued trust building, and particularly the setting of good KPIs and review and reward mechanisms. If the review and reward mechanisms are seen as unfair, then the system breaks because the trust becomes lost because the team members may feel that they are not being seen and that they are not being heard.

My final note is that you haven’t seen ‘growth mindset’ in this blog. Growth mindset is the idea that through good feedback and error correction, everyone has a strong chance of making significant progress on all aspects of their performance. I think that almost all leadership training now presupposes that this is correct, and that a leader’s role is to grow the skills and capabilities of all their people. If this assumption is not shared, then the entire endeavour of leadership is probably largely misunderstood.

So perhaps any journey on high performance should start with ensuring that there is a shared understanding and assumption that all team members are capable of growth in the right conditions.