Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success

Francesca  Gino; Gary P. Pisano

Article | Harvard Business Review | April 2011

Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success

Abstract

We argue that for a variety of psychological reasons, it is often much harder for leaders and organizations to learn from success than to learn from failure. Success creates three kinds of traps that often impede deep learning. The first is attribution error or the tendency to see superior performance as rooted in one's actions rather than other factors (such as luck). The second is that success feeds overconfidence bias, which can then blind leaders to potential future problems and opportunities for innovation. The third is a tendency to fail to probe the root causes of success. Whereas post-mortems after failure are becoming a norm in many organizations, such soul searching rarely occurs after success. This causes leaders and their organizations to miss opportunities to develop deep causal knowledge that can lead to greater long-term improvements. We suggest a number of concrete actions leaders can take to help themselves and their organizations avoid the success-breeds-failure trap.

Keywords: Learning; Innovation and Management; Leadership; Failure; Success; Performance Evaluation; Prejudice and Bias;

Format: Print

7 pages

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Citation:

Gino, Francesca, and Gary P. Pisano. "Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success." Harvard Business Review 89, no. 4 (April 2011): 68–74.

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then show that in contentious policy discussions, government executives who were rated as more receptive—according to our algorithm and their partners but not their own self-evaluations—were considered better teammates, advisors, and workplace representatives (Study 2). Furthermore, using field data from a setting where conflict management is endemic to productivity, we show that conversational receptiveness at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end. Specifically, Wikipedia editors who write more receptive posts are less prone to receiving personal attacks from disagreeing editors (Study 3). We develop a “receptiveness recipe” intervention based on our algorithm. We find that writers who follow the recipe are seen as more desirable partners for future collaboration and their messages are seen as more persuasive (Study 4). Overall, we find that conversational receptiveness is reliably measurable, has meaningful relational consequences, and can be substantially improved using our intervention.

Keywords: receptiveness; natural language processing; disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management;

Citation:

Yeomans, M., J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen, and F. Gino. "Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 160 (September 2020): 131–148. View Details

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Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success

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