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The Science Behind Know-It-All-Leaders

I’ve coached dozens of incredibly successful leaders who suffer from this addiction. They are extremely good at fighting for their point of view (which is indeed often right), yet they are completely unaware of the dampening impact that behavior has on the people around them. If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are being drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response I described before, which diminishes their collaborative impulses.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing.

Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others’) addiction to being right:

Set rules of engagement.

If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see.

For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns.

Afterwards, consider how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.

Listen with empathy.

In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them.

And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.

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judithglaser@churchleaders.com'
Judith is the CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc., and the Chairman of The Creating WE Institute. She is one of the most innovative and pioneering change agents, consultants and executive coaches in the consulting industry and refers to herself as an Organizational Anthropologist. A best-selling business author, Judith is the world’s leading authority on WE-centric Leadership, Neuro-Innovation and Conversational Intelligence®. Judith was awarded Business Woman of the Year in New York City in 2004. In 2012 Executive Excellence 500 ranked Judith as one of the Top 15 Leadership Consultants globally, and as the #1 Woman in this category, and since 2006 she has been listed as one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders globally on the subject of Leadership. In 2011 she was awarded the Drexel University Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2006 she was inducted into the Temple University Gallery of Success. Judith is a Founding Fellow of the Harvard Institute of Coaching.