The Experimenter Series: Influence and Motivation with Prof. Vanessa Bohns & Prof. Laura Giurge
The experimenter series is a collection of interviews with people pioneering experiments in organisations. This time, we speak to Professors Vanessa Bohns and Laura Giurge from Cornell and LSE about how and why we should re-imagine leadership.
Vanessa Bohns is a professor of organisational behaviour at Cornell University and specialises in help-seeking, social influence and consent. Her recent book “You have more influence than you think” has been met with much acclaim. She and professor Laura Giurge recently published a paper on what they call the "email urgency bias" showing how we underestimate how soon others feel they need to respond to our off-hour emails as well as how stressful such emails can feel. Laura is an assistant professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, and her research focuses on time, wellbeing, and the future of work. She is also head of research at MTN, and this HBR summarises her recent research on how working non-standard hours can damage intrinsic motivation.
“Stop and check your assumptions at the door… They are based on what we hope is true and on our own experiences which might not be the same as your employees.”
Professor Laura Giurge & Professor Vanessa Bohns
Gus: Hi Laura & Vanessa! Thanks for speaking to me. Starting off big once again, why are you interested in researching leadership? Why is it important for us to research it and challenge the status quo?
Laura: Leaders shape organisational culture and define for others what behaviours and norms are rewarded. By virtue of their position in the organisation, leaders have the power and responsibility to positively shape workplace culture and break the status quo in a sustainable manner. And without the support of leaders, most – if not all – workplace initiatives are doomed to fail. If leaders don’t change how they behave, if they don’t challenge the status quo, others are unlikely to follow. So, I often think of leaders as a necessary puzzle piece when it comes to deploying successful workplace interventions.
Vanessa: And leaders become leaders, right? Most people haven’t always been leaders. You work your way up through the organisation first. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they were suddenly put in a leadership position. And if they rely only on their gut instincts, those intuitions are shaped by what worked for them in the past—before they became a leader. The same things may not continue to work now that they are in this new role. That’s where empirical research can help to provide effective, validated suggestions to those still who are still adapting to their role as a leader.
G: Vanessa, congratulations on your recent book! In it, you dissect the power of influence, and I was wondering what organizations can learn from your work in connection to leadership.
V: A big conclusion in my book is that, as the title suggests, we have more influence than we think: we tend to miss times when we’re inadvertently influencing people in ways we don't intend to. Partially due to the assumption that people won’t listen to us, when in most cases, particularly when we're in positions of power, people are primed to listen to us.
Often in leadership positions, we don’t realize this dynamic. There’s this quote that I use in the book: “When you’re in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout to people who aren’t in positions of power.”. When we make little comments or suggestions, in our minds, it’s not a big deal. But someone in your team will view it more as an order, something they must make happen. Consequently, we have so much more responsibility to be mindful of the things that we're putting out there as leaders’ words do carry weight. If we want diverse perspectives and others to feel like they can contribute, we must hold back more than we would if we weren't in a position of leadership.
“When you’re in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout to people who aren’t in positions of power.”
G: Those are some important conclusions for managers to remember. Laura, I loved your recent HBR on intrinsic motivation, especially the connection you explore with flexibility. What should leaders learn from your research?
L: Like purpose or meaning, when it comes to motivation, you cannot tell someone how to feel it. You need to create the necessary conditions that allow employees to discover what motivates them, and then support them by helping to nurture that motivation. This is partially why leadership is such an interesting concept and why I often think of good leadership in terms of how the people they are managing are doing both professionally and personally.
“When it comes to motivation, you cannot tell someone how to feel it. You need to create the necessary conditions that allow employees to discover what motivates them, and then support them by helping to nurture that motivation.”
Also, to Vanessa’s point, many leaders are guided by their ‘gut instinct’, and demand things from people based on it. One of the most recent examples of such gut-based decisions is asking people to come back to the office full-time or 3 days a week, without testing if these work models are beneficial for their employees. Leaders might want to take a step back and , first, question why they’re making these decisions. What is their motivation? Is it because they fear change, or because they worry about productivity at home? Whatever the motivation, it’s important to consider the evidence and if there is no good evidence, use the scientific method to test if their gut-based decision is accurate or not.
This return-to-the-office discussion further highlights an interesting yet challenging tension between structure and flexibility. On the one hand, employees desire more and more flexibility over when and how they work. On the other hand, leaders seem to hold onto a work structure that they have become accustomed to. However, while structure is important, holding onto it too tightly can backfire. This is especially true when it comes to knowledge work where quality is hard to quantify because more hours worked doesn’t necessarily equal better performance.
Despite knowing these, organizations today continue to rely on outdated metrics of performance such as face time or instant responsiveness. So, to solve this cycle, we need to take a step back and think about how to design performance metrics that accurately capture performance as quality not just quantity of work. Coming back to the structure-flexibility tension, leaders could still create a structure by setting and communicating clear goals for employees or even better co-create the goals with employees. But then, take the backseat and let employees decide how best to achieve those goals. There is also something to be said about creating a culture of trust where employees feel trusted to do the work they were hired to do and feel supported in getting the job done. At the same time, leaders trust that employees will reach out when they need help, which circles back to the value of creating a culture of support and trust where structure and flexibility co-exist.
G: Both of you are part of the leadership lab, where the question was raised to organisations: “How can leaders influence their own and their employees’ motivation in the virtual world?”. How would you answer this question? What kind of research do you think is necessary to solve it?
V: There’s this viral tweet that comes to mind saying: “Let’s stop pretending there are different jobs. There’s only one job and it’s emails.” One of the problems that Laura and I are trying to solve is how do we make it so that you can do your job in a virtual world, without it turning into just menial tasks like emails. If all we're doing is pausing every two seconds to immediately respond to emails intruding on any focus-related task this is a massive problem we need to solve right?
An important factor to solve this was examining ways that leaders can encourage people to take breaks from emails or schedule sustained attention times. Or to find ways for them to communicate when an email is not an emergency. To create healthier and more efficient ways of dealing with email traffic so that work becomes more than that.
“Remote work amplified the need to use digital tools. However, here too the implementation of such tools is often suboptimal. To improve this, leaders need to recognize that remote work is a different way of working.”
Tools of connectivity are great, but if they’re interrupting actual work they need to be managed differently. Creating healthy, efficient standards around them is key, especially for leaders. They can create an organizational culture around this, which is the main goal of our research.
L: Whenever there’s a problem in the workplace, most leaders opt for implementing a tool to solve it. But there’s little explicit communication on how to make use of the tool, such as who to use it with, when to use it, what to use it for, and so on. There’s also little to no testing around what technology might be beneficial for employee well-being and motivation. We have been thrust into this digital way of working, and we’re still learning how to make the best use of all the different digital tools available to us today. Remote work amplified the need to use digital tools. However, here too the implementation of such tools is often suboptimal. To improve this, leaders need to recognize that remote work is a different way of working than in-person, and that’s ok. Learning how to do both ways of working well can allow organizations to be agile, build resilience, and foster better a culture that allows employees to bring their best selves at work and in life. How should leaders do this? Well, it starts with leaders paying better attention to their behaviour as that communicates to others what is expected or what is normative. At the same time, we need to better understand what shapes leaders’ own behaviours and emotions and how those impact them. So, we can intervene both bottom-up and top-down.
G: What would this look like? Creating a better understanding from an employee's as well as a leader's perspective.
L: One way could be to focus on desirable leader behaviour, such as limiting off-hour work communication, and then measure both leaders’ and employees’ well-being and productivity. Another way relates to the research Vanessa and I did on expectations in digital interactions, showing that we shouldn’t assume others will know what you thinking or what your intentions are. Instead, it’s important to make implicit expectations explicit. For example, if you must work on weekends or holidays, you might want to clearly communicate to others why you are doing that. Otherwise, employees might think that is normal or expected so they start working when they are not expected to do so, and this can severely jeopardize their ability to disconnect from work and recharge, which we know is very important for well-being as well as performance at work. As people advance to higher ranks in an organisation, they tend to forget what it’s like the be on the lower levels. Reminders to take others’ perspectives can help leaders become more mindful of how they interact and communicate with others.
For leaders’ own wellbeing, it’d be interesting to re-evaluate how they divide their time and help them better navigate the tension between needing to be flexible with their schedule and needing to have some structure and boundaries around their time that allow them to achieve their important work goals. . There are so many things we can follow up with.
V: Another focus for leaders should be on aligning their goals and actions, as people often unintentionally undermine what they're trying to do. For example, they say: we're going to be better around taking time off whilst still sending emails at 10 pm. You just said one thing, but your actions say another. As a leader, you often underestimate the salience and influence of these actions on others.
“Focus for leaders should be on aligning their goals and actions, as people often unintentionally undermine what they’re trying to do.... As a leader, you often underestimate the salience and influence of these actions on others.”
G: If you could give a leader advice based on your research, what would you tell them to make the workplace a bit better for all?
L: Stop and check your assumptions at the door. With every interaction that you're having, ask yourself if this is good for the other person or only for yourself. We’re so focused on speed that we don’t always realise our actions can have negative consequences for others.
V: Completely agree, and to ask and listen. Often our assumptions are wrong. They’re based on what we hope is true and on our own experiences which might not be the same as your employees’. When in doubt check it with others.
L: From a hybrid work perspective, the research on motivation shows that we forget that people find it harder to make up for lost leisure time than to make up for lost work time and this is especially damaging when working from home where boundaries around our professional and personal life are fuzzy and it’s more likely and easy, to work through our lunch break. In today’s world of digital interaction and non-standard working hours, leaders need to be extra vigilant in helping employees who work when they're not supposed to work to take time off and vice versa: to be focused and achieve their important work tasks when they are working.
V: In a similar vein, leaders often don't realize when they're asking for something, it doesn’t feel like an ask, it's more of an order. To people in positions of power, I recommend giving employees time and space to think about what you've asked so that they can come back and send you a response later and aren’t put on the spot. Leaders often forget about their presence and how big it can be. But if given more time to process, someone might respond with a more honest answer. This would also be a great thing to experiment on!
Many thanks to the brilliant Prof. Vanessa Bohns and Prof. Laura Giurge, for sharing valuable insights on why and how we can improve leadership. They’re both part of the Leadership Lab, about which you can find out more here: