I’m no AI hater, but I can’t say I’ve been its staunchest supporter either. So when it comes to using large language models like Claude or ChatGPT, I admit that I haven’t always put my best foot forward. Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe I’ve never been all that impressed with AI’s output because what I put into it in the first place hasn’t been that impressive either. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. 

Put another way, my experience with AI might very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by my own reservations. This week, Kellogg’s Leigh Thompson illustrates how some self-fullfilling prophecies can be dangerous for leaders—and how we can rise above them.

Plus, we look at what a conversation between two world leaders can teach us about disagreeing well.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Leaders don’t just manage their team members; leaders shape them, says Thompson, J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations. So when a leader allows preconceived notions or stereotypes to dictate their decision-making, that can have profound implications for those around them. 

Thompson offers an example based on a conversation with an executive MBA student. The student believed that because women are “different”—more emotional, more dramatic, more intuitive—he needed to lead them in a different way. Though seemingly harmless at first glance, that generalization could potentially lead the MBA student to treat an entire group of people on his team in a detrimental way.

“If I assume that one employee is emotionally fragile, I may give that person less candid feedback, fewer difficult assignments, less autonomy, or fewer opportunities to take consequential risks,” Thompson explains. “Eventually, I have created a different working environment for that employee—and perhaps even elicited some of the behavior I expected in the first place.”

Instead of developing “demographic management techniques,” Thompson recommends centering leadership on principles like clear communication, trust, and respect. That would better serve leaders in setting up the foundation for their leadership playbook. 

Still, having a unified approach doesn’t mean people should treat everyone in exactly the same way, Thompson says. Leadership requires adapting to individual differences “discovered through curiosity and observation.”

So for those who ever find themselves asking how they should be leading a particular group of people, Thompson suggests they ask themselves the following question instead: “What does each person on my team need from me to do their best work?” Then they should directly ask the same of the individuals, observe them, listen to them, challenge them, trust them, and allow them to reveal who they are.

“One leadership playbook. Many different human beings,” Thompson says. “That’s not ignoring differences. That’s what empowering leadership looks like.”

Read more at Thompson’s Dear Professor substack.

Enlightened disagreement

Back in 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sat down in a small house on the edge of Reykjavik, Iceland, and tried to come to terms in the face of a nuclear standoff. 

The conversation didn’t result in a deal. On the surface, their meeting seemed like a failure. 

But headlines don’t always measure what matters, says Eli Finkel, a Kellogg professor of management and organizations and co-director of the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement.

“When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t just look at the scoreboard,” he says. The metrics that matter go well beyond who “won” any single meeting.

Finkel highlighted three subtle outcomes of the meeting that suggested it was much more successful than the headlines suggested. 

First, Reagan and Gorbachev left the meeting having developed a better understanding of each other and some interpersonal trust. Second, the two world leaders laid the groundwork for a potential agreement. And third, their conversation expanded the range of ideas society was willing to entertain at that time. 

“Before Reykjavik, the realistic debate was about slowing the growth of nuclear arsenals,” Finkel says. “Reykjavik shifted that window enough to make outright reduction, and eventually elimination, part of the conversation.”

Read more at Kellogg’s News + Stories.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight