“So what you're telling me is, we’re weird.”
A CEO said this to me earlier this month.
I was in Florida leading a two-day session with his executive team, and we'd just finished going through their behavioral assessments.
This was a great team of leaders – highly intelligent and execution-minded. And like a lot of such leadership teams, they were in DISC terms a bunch of D’s: Dominance personalities.
In other words, they were the assertive types who are overrepresented on executive teams, even though D’s only make up 9-15% of the total population.
This CEO was seeing in real time that nearly his entire leadership team was made up of a rather unusual personality type (including himself).
But this team was even weirder than that. They were a financial group, so they also had strong C or Conscientiousness tendencies, very common for people dealing with capital analyses and valuation reports. But most people are not like that.
Now you’re dealing with a team that’s a subset of a subset (highly dominant and very into process and detail) and they're looking pretty weird indeed.
That, in itself, is not a problem.
The problem comes about when you don't realize you’re weird.
That leads you to falsely think that you and your cohort are the normal standard for the rest of humanity.
What Psychologists Got Wrong
This CEO’s statement (“You’re saying we’re weird?”) immediately reminded me of a different kind of WEIRD.
In 2010, three researchers, Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, published a paper that caused something of an uproar in the social sciences. They analyzed decades of psychological research and discovered that 96% of psychological studies were conducted on people from Western countries, with 68% using American participants alone.
Most of those Americans were college students.
In short, researchers had been studying the psychological equivalent of left-handed, red-haired people and then confidently declaring universal truths about all of humanity.
Henrich and his colleagues coined the term WEIRD to describe this problem: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations represent a tiny sliver of human diversity, yet they dominated research for generations. The paper became one of the most influential in psychology, forcing an entire field to reckon with its inherent assumptions.
Researchers have indeed discovered that WEIRD populations often think and behave fundamentally differently from the rest of the world. For example:
East Asians pay attention to the overall context of a scene, while Americans focus on individual objects within it.
What seems like a reasonable deal to someone from an individualistic culture feels completely unfair to someone from a more collective society.
College-educated populations are much more comfortable with abstract reasoning and probabilistic thinking than people without higher education, who often prefer concrete, experience-based decisions.
The researchers had been generalizing from a tiny, unrepresentative sample to the entire human race.
CEOs Are the Ultimate WEIRD Population
If you and everyone around you have strong D tendencies, of course you think that represents the world. Then you get confused when people do things that make no sense to you, or when you say things and people misinterpret them. You think they're the problem.
In reality, you've made the same mistake those psychologists made for decades: operating with the assumption that you and the people you deal with are a representative sample.
CEOs are especially vulnerable to this error because they represent such an unusual slice of the population. Very few people actually want to be CEO. When I was much younger, this surprised me. I thought everyone shared my aspiration. But it takes an unusual personality to even want a job with this much pressure, isolation, constant decision-making, and responsibility for other people’s livelihoods.
I realized what should have been blindingly obvious to me: Many people prefer being part of a team rather than leading it. Many people want direction rather than having to create it. Many people value time for personal pursuits over the all-consuming nature of running a company.
But when you're surrounded by other executives, ambitious managers, and Type-A personalities all day, it's easy to forget how rare your particular combination of traits really is.
You Know What Assuming Does…
If you don't recognize how unusual your perspective is, you make assumptions that can severely undermine your ability to lead. You might think that:
Everyone eventually wants your job - so you're surprised when your best people turn down promotions or seem content in their current roles.
Everyone communicates as directly as you do - so you're baffled when people don't speak up in meetings or fail to challenge ideas they disagree with.
Everyone shares your tolerance for conflict – so you wonder why people seem uncomfortable during heated strategic discussions.
Everyone processes information at your pace – so you get frustrated when people need more time to digest complex decisions.
Everyone separates emotions from business decisions – so you're caught off guard when people take strategic pivots personally.
The most successful CEOs I work with have learned what those researchers eventually discovered: if you want to understand and influence people effectively, you can't assume they're just like you.
What to Do About It
The solution isn't to stop being who you are. Your particular brand of weird is probably a big part of why you're effective as a CEO. But you need to recognize that in many contexts, you're the odd one in the room.
Some tactics to use:
Learn your people's behavioral profiles. Get familiar with DISC assessments, CliftonStrengths, Predictive Index, or whatever tool works for your organization. Know (for example) whether someone is a high C who needs data before making decisions or a high S who values stability over rapid change.
Write your User Manual. You can do that and get your DISC type for free with a tool we created here.
Practice the Platinum Rule. Treat them how they want to be treated based on their communication style, not yours.
Get a 360 review. Ask your direct reports, peers, and board members how your communication lands with them. You might be surprised by what you learn about your impact.
Adjust your style to the audience. Your CFO might appreciate your bullet-point emails, but your head of HR might need more context and a warmer tone.
Ask more questions, make fewer assumptions. Instead of wondering why someone isn't contributing, ask them directly what they need to be more effective.
Bottom line is, we’re all weird in our own way, and that’s only a problem when we don’t adjust for it.