What Is Balanced Processing?

Balanced processing is a research term that sounds like a new part for your computer. (You may be hearing the Intel jingle in your head.) But this less-than-sexy term gets at something really important in today's collaborative business environment.

Balanced processing is a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skill that allows you to look at yourself, others, and situations with a broad lens that does not magnify your own view or organize everyone else's views around your own. Balanced processing is not easy, but it is essential for the practice of authentic leadership.

In the foundational piece of research on authenticity by Brian Goldman and Michael Kernis,³ it was called unbiased processing. Their theory of authenticity in psychological terms was actually developed from recurrent, timeless themes in philosophy, and unbiased processing was what they termed one of those themes. It meant unbiased processing of information about yourself. Later researchers⁴ specifically exploring authentic leadership broadened the notion of unbiased processing and changed it to balanced processing.

The presence of bias in all of our thinking is well documented within the scholarly and popular literatures. A quick Wikipedia search will explain over 100 types of common biases in daily human thought and social interaction. Balanced processing is a more practical term than the notion of being unbiased because, while it is actually possible to balance our thought process, it is naive to believe we can actually learn to think in an unbiased manner. In business, we need to bring balance to our thinking about ourselves, others, and situations. Bringing your thinking and decision making into balance is possible, but not easy. We are all a bit like fish that can't see the water. Unlike fish, we can actually survive and thrive outside of the water of our own thinking.

It is all too easy to get caught in the box of your own thinking and perspective. Brian Grazer, a successful Hollywood producer (and many would say absolute mogul), provides a great example for other executives. This is the man who produced A Beautiful Mind, Splash, Apollo 13, Parenthood, and many other huge box-office hits. Grazer prioritizes what he calls curiosity conversations. He has several monthly conversations with people who interest him, for the sole purpose of understanding how they think, to broaden his own view. He purposefully does not overtly connect the conversations to specific movie projects. Just like someone staying in shape physically, Grazer works at keeping his own thought process balanced by the viewpoints of others.

It takes work, effort, and attention to get out of the box of your own perceptions and broaden and balance your thought process. Balanced processing is the skill of blending your thought process with the thought processes of others without a bias toward your view. Balanced processing is the opposite of self-deception. We all know people who deceive themselves every day. You probably sit next to someone who you and everyone else knows is mediocre in terms of talent but who is convinced he or she will be the next CEO of the company. Deceiving yourself can appear to be easier, at least in the short term, than dealing with the cold, hard realities about yourself, others, or situations. We all deceive ourselves on occasion. Becoming a balanced processor is the antidote to being trapped in self-deception. How on earth are you going to be authentic and real if you can't see things, yourself, and others clearly? Balanced processing is actually a necessary ingredient for good decision making in general, not just for the practice of authentic leadership. So how do you become more like Brian Grazer and Abraham Lincoln in your quest to become an authentic leader?

First think about the following questions. These items are adapted from the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) created and validated by Walumbwa and associates. For our purposes, answer yes or no to the questions. But let's add another step we do not usually include in such quizzes. To fight the natural processes of bias and the rising tide of self-deception, challenge yourself to provide three recent examples of behavior to back up your claim of yes or no. Be very specific as you cite the recent examples. If you answer yes to seeking the opinions of others, name the others in each of your three examples. If you answer no, think of three decisions you made without seeking any other points of view besides your own.

1. Do you seek the opinions of others before making up your own mind?
2. Do you listen to the ideas of people who disagree with you and alter your view?
3. Do you take the time to listen carefully to the ideas of others before making decisions?

How did you do? When I do this with my clients, they do not get a heads-up about the examples. They just answer yes or no. Then, as we discuss, I ask for the examples including the names and so on. It can feel like an inquisition or a cross-examination in a courtroom. With a little well-timed humor and positive regard for the client emanating from me, the process usually results in the client saying, “I could do this balanced processing thing a bit more.” Then, they ask, “What exactly do I need to do?” (You know my clients like the word exactly!)

Balanced processing is not something you can get better at due to good intentions. The theory of balanced processing is one thing, and the practice is a different ball game. It takes disciplined thinking and guts. You have to perform specific actions on a consistent basis.

Over the years, I have noticed five habits or disciplines of balanced processors. The good news is that you can make a great leap in balanced processing skills just by working at one or two of the following habits.

Get in Balanced Processing Gear or Not

Not everything requires balanced processing. The most effective balanced processors know when to get in balanced processing gear and expend all the effort it takes to get multiple points of view and really process all of that information. They also know when it is just not worth the effort to go through all of that. Balanced processing is a collaborative activity, so it takes time. We do almost everything in teams or work groups today. However, it is a myth that teams are more efficient and effective than individual decision making.⁵ Richard Hackman from Harvard, who devoted his professional career to understanding and helping teams be more effective, taught us that teams make operating a business more difficult in many ways and are only effective under specific conditions, including a clear structure and expert coaching from the leader or an outside source. In my work with teams, I force them to be very structured about whether an item is for discussion or for decision. Some decisions are energy drainers for a whole team and can be addressed easily by one person or a small subteam. For example, I sat in a two-hour meeting with several high-level executives discussing where to have the Christmas party a few years back. Way too much balanced processing! As you might guess, everyone had an opinion. Finally, the operations guy lost it and said “can we make a decision on the Christmas party in the next two minutes and then deal with the fact that we have lost a hundred million in business within the last quarter?”

The first discipline of balanced processors is common sense but is often overlooked by inexperienced leaders. You have to accurately identify and categorize what you are dealing with. My grandfather always quoted Mark Twain: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Authentic leaders need multiple approaches to making decisions based on what exactly they are dealing with. Simply put, is it a dilemma or a problem? One of my colleagues, Jonno Hanafin,⁶ taught the leadership at a large professional services firm to regularly discriminate between problems and dilemmas in a seminar. Problems must be solved. In contrast, dilemmas must be managed. Dilemmas do not have right or wrong answers. For example, “should we invest in the future or balance the budget.” This is a dilemma, not a problem. I did some of the follow-up coaching and strongly encouraged my people to say out loud “this is a problem” or “this is a dilemma” as they moved through their daily grind. You could just see the body language change as they relaxed and slowed down to deal with a dilemma and thought quickly when needing to address a problem.

Dilemma gear is different from problem-solving gear. Labeling something as a dilemma or a problem cues the brain of the individual executive well. Of course, dilemmas require balanced processing, and problems may or may not be better solved through balanced processing. Some thorny issues can have aspects of both problems and dilemmas. But for the purposes of improving your balanced processing and keeping yourself and those around you sane, start discriminating between problems and dilemmas immediately. In general, when you are facing a dilemma, label it a dilemma and seek out other viewpoints, and be very careful to balance out your own thinking with a wide variety of points of view.

In contrast, problems simply require action to meet a need. You need a spot to have the Christmas party and you choose one. The light bulb goes out and you change it. Dilemmas, on the other hand, require decisions among two or more alternatives that seem mutually exclusive but are not. Let's take one of the most common strategic business dilemmas: investing in future growth vs. tightly controlling costs. You have to do both. However, investing in the future may be more important than controlling costs at different times in the evolution of the business. Controlling costs may be key if you are not profitable.

Dilemmas are never resolved. They are just always showing up in different clothes. When a dilemma shows up in your world, intentionally get in balanced processing gear and begin balancing out your view with the ideas of other smart people. Think about how complicated it often is to decide what the right balance is between investing for the future and controlling costs. Where do we cut and where do we invest? It's a good idea to get lots of people thinking and collaborating on that.

Again, for emphasis, leaders must recognize dilemmas and get in balanced processing gear. They must also recognize problems as simple problems and either make a call or delegate a call. That is not always as easy as it sounds, as the examples are not as clear-cut as the ones provided in this section. Many of my clients have historically been so good at problem solving that they instinctively address dilemmas as if they were problems to be solved. (Remember, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) My advice to those clients is often to slow down and get in gear to do some balanced processing. Recognizing when to get in balanced processing gear and shifting into a slower, broader, more collaborative mode is the first and most fundamental habit of balanced processors.

Three Tricky Words for Leaders

People often rise to leadership roles because they are really good at their function or discipline and know most of the answers. If they don't know, they can usually figure it out either on their own or with little help from others. Becoming a leader in this way creates a form of self-reliance that has to be outgrown if you are going to be effective in more complex situations.

Bob was one of my smartest clients ever. He had a doctorate from MIT in a highly specialized technical area plus an MBA from another highly prestigious university. Not to mention he also had a great personality and was good looking to boot.

Balanced processing is a huge challenge for my smartest clients like Bob. I got to know Bob in the middle of his career during his first international assignment in which he was responsible for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa division of the company. As his boss put it to me, Bob was crashing and burning as a leader while becoming fluent in two languages by going to night school. Bob was working harder than ever, of course. Bob's boss was concerned about the business; the team in place, which was mostly local and hard to replace; and Bob on a personal level. Members of his highly skilled team were quitting one right after the other. We had three months to figure something out or Bob was out. The pressure was on. The results were not great when he took the job, but they seemed to be declining, as opposed to improving, which was also bringing the morale of the entire team to an all-time low.

The first and most pressing issue was how to keep what was left of the team. Individual interviews with team members revealed that everyone thought Bob talked a lot for someone new who did not really understand how the business worked in vastly different areas of the world. They also viewed him as needing to be the smartest guy in the room. When pressed for what this need looked like, they mentioned things like him going into detail about particular operations and naming everyone who worked there in an effort to impress them with his memory. He also seemed to want to impress them by remembering every detail about their work and personal lives. Needless to say, no one described Bob as authentic and genuine.

What do we do when our view of the world is unsettled in such a difficult manner? These moments become a true test of one's ability to grow. I did not pull any punches when I presented the unsettling findings to Bob. He was uncharacteristically very quiet as we moved through the data. I stopped, made eye contact, and held silence on purpose. I knew we were at a defining moment, and I wanted to do everything I possibly could to help Bob move through it and be more successful. I knew my chatter to fill the void would not help. He had to have the guts to speak first. Would he pontificate and intellectualize, or was he really processing what I had said?

Bob looked at me and said, “Karissa for the first time in my work life, I don't know what to do.”

I took a deep breath and knew that we had a shot. Bob had uttered three important words that are very tricky and very difficult for smart leaders: I don't know. Saying “I don't know” at the right times is critical in being authentic and in being successful given the complexity of our era. Moving to a better place with this team required Bob to admit to them that he did not know how to turn the business around and that he wished he could start over with the team. Two big leaps of authenticity there. Bob was not comfortable with saying any of that, but he did it anyway and he really meant it. Over several months, the team did give him another chance, and together they moved the business back into positive territory. Bob learned the importance of balanced processing and is not likely to forget it.

What are you going to do if you're a leader who really doesn't know the answer or know what to do? You must rely on others and solve the problem as a team. On an emotional level, that is very scary if you have been successful by knowing the answers. You first have to admit to yourself that you don't know, and then you have to be clear with others, both verbally and nonverbally, that you don't know. Having the guts to admit to yourself and others that you don't know is the second habit of balanced processors.

Hire a Brilliant Antagonist or Three

I love it when people agree with me. It feels so good. The sheer joy of feeling right is just great. It does not feel dangerous, but the reality is that too much agreement, peace, and harmony can be dangerous in today's ever-changing business environment. The dangers of groupthink termed by Irving Janis⁷ are ever present. Groupthink occurs when a group makes bad decisions with negative consequences because the group begins to think alike and miss or dismiss key data points. The space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight on national television on January 28, 1986. On board were seven Americans from NASA, one of whom was a schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space. The disaster happened as a result of the failure of O-rings. Understanding what an O-ring does is less important than understanding that an engineer named Roger Boisjoly predicted there was a clear and present danger the shuttle could disintegrate in exactly the way it did.

The Challenger example provides a vivid visual image of the dangers of groupthink. Business dilemmas are less dramatic but also have negative consequences in terms of lost opportunity and revenue. I had the chance to work with renowned strategist Vijay Govindarajan during an executive-level training in London a few years back. You could have heard a pin drop in the room when Vijay asked why Kodak had not benefited from digital photography. He continued, why did AT&T not invent and capitalize on Skype? The short answer is that both Kodak and AT&T were immersed in the world as they knew it. While no one died, Kodak used to be a dominant player in the world of cameras. In a peculiar twist of business history, Skype is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft was likely buying Skype as they were missing the first wave of tablet computing! The iPad and tablet computing as a concept were not part of the world as Microsoft knew and defined it.

Fighting the forces of groupthink or just thinking within the box of your own mind or the predominant mind-set of the company requires effort and intention. You need to be on the lookout for a brilliant antagonist or three for every team. The brilliant antagonist pushes the team's thinking in different directions and is willing to oppose the predominant view with intensity.

When I meet an executive, I am always curious about the quality of his or her team. Usually, over time, I get to meet most of the individuals on the team either socially or in a team meeting. Remember, if you want to develop your skills in balanced processing, you have to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in general or in a specific way, and you must encourage them to disagree with you. If I start picking up that one of my executive's team is too homogeneous in the way they think, my clients hear about it. With one team of engineers, the leader and I decided to have a designated antagonist team when addressing true dilemmas. The antagonist team was tasked to prepare a case against the will of the team. Here is how it worked: The team would make a decision, everyone felt great, then the leader would task three people to work together to prepare a case for another alternative. Their job was to convince the group to do something different. Initially, the team hated the process. But two major decisions were changed as a result. The experience was eye opening for the entire team. I was thrilled when the leader asked me to meet with a potential new hire. I will never forget his words; he said, “I like this guy. He is really smart, but he comes at things from a totally different direction than I do. See what you think. I will be curious to have your point of view on him.” Big leap in balanced processing! The guy was smarter than my client and was his polar opposite. He also was his choice to run the team when the client was offered a bigger, better opportunity.

Surrounding yourself with people smarter than you and who think differently will not make your life easier. But decision quality is likely to improve and your perspective will expand. So take a look at the people you work with every day. Be honest. How often do people disagree with you? How do you respond when they do? Do you really listen to the other side of the argument? Think about your boss. Does he or she have people in the inner circle who push back regularly? Do people disagree? What happens when they do? A true authentic leader who is working at balanced processing will listen carefully. Based on how the leader responds when someone disagrees, they are more or less likely to disagree again. When someone has the courage to disagree with authority, the way the boss responds either creates a climate for balanced processing or not. Authentic leaders with balanced processing ability welcome the smart antagonists and, most important, their views.

Know and Own All Your Biases

Although it is impossible to think in an unbiased manner, it is important to understand common biases. We will cover two types of biases in this section that balanced processors need to understand and own about themselves. The first type of bias is more general. These typical biases affect the vast majority of humans to a greater or lesser degree. Psychologists have validated their existence over and over. The second type of bias you will discover is rooted in your personal history and unique to you. This less well-known type of bias goes back to the work of an underappreciated psychologist of the last century named George Kelly.⁸

First let's dig into the three most common recurrent cognitive biases. The first one is overconfidence bias. There is a natural human tendency to overestimate our personal competence. Research psychologists ask people to complete questionnaires with actual, factual, right-or-wrong answers just like tests. Then, they ask how confident people are that they were right. When they say they are 100 percent confident they are right, they tend to be 70–80 percent correct. Overconfidence bias tends to make us think we got the right answer when we did not, or that the blow-up we just had on one of our best employees will soon be forgotten.

As previously mentioned, balanced processing has to do with how you relate to yourself, other significant people, and situations. This one primarily gets at how you think about yourself. I know my clients are really starting to get this one when they say things like, “At the risk of sounding overconfident, I think I got through to him.” The quickest way to convince people of your inauthenticity is to be overconfident and overestimate your own abilities in general. Authentic leaders understand overconfidence bias and adjust their self-perceptions accordingly. Remember, overconfidence bias is found in the majority of the population, but you could be an outlier. Some of my clients through the years have had an underconfidence bias that made them work hard and be wildly successful, particularly in zero-mistake environments like nuclear power.

Anchoring bias accounts for lots of errors in decision making. Anchoring bias simply means that what we hear first sticks with us more.⁹ Imagine that you are overseeing several manufacturing plants. You get a call over the weekend from a plant manager in Spokane. He says there has been an incident in the plant and three people have been hurt. The plant manager says: “One of our operators went to sleep at 2:30 AM and did not see the hazard light on the control panel for machine 48 in the back corner. Three workers came over to move the raw materials and they were badly burned because the machine had overheated.”

By Monday, the details have been sorted out and an investigation has made it clear that the hazard light never came on in the control room. The plant manager is passing the information along to his boss, who is convinced of a cover-up. Boss goes ballistic. Keep in mind that this was the first safety incident in years and there is a logical explanation for why the plant manager initially thought the guy on the control panel went to sleep. But there is no convincing the boss. This is an example of anchoring bias. What you or anyone else hears first, especially in a new or ambiguous situation, carries more weight. Keep that in mind always. The most common example is the power of first impressions. It can take years and a lot of effort to overcome a bad first impression due to the power of anchoring bias.

The third and final bias that you need to watch out for is called the availability bias. We tend to be way too heavily influenced by information that is readily available, more recent, or creates a vivid image.¹⁰ Think about a personal relationship with a friend or significant other. If you just had a big fight with that person and I ask “how is your relationship going?” you are more likely to say negative things. But if I ask you the next week, you will be less likely to be negative if you have not fought within the last week. As one of my clients used to say, do great things right before and during performance review season. I used to laugh because he would wait to tell his boss about some of his accomplishments until closer to performance review time.

In your quest to be a balanced processor, be aware that you will be unduly influenced by things that are top of mind unless you actively work to fight the availability bias. This one deserves special consideration, given that so much information is readily available on Google. However, there are few controls to ensure accuracy. The bottom line is just because it is easy to get information does not mean it is actually helpful, relevant, or accurate. But your mind and my mind are unduly influenced by what is close at hand and easy to obtain.

We have been delving into biases that affect all of us to some degree or another. We are all vulnerable to having our judgment clouded by availability bias, anchoring bias, or overconfidence bias. We can't stop there, though. We also have biases that are unique to us that are rooted in our personal histories. In order to be more balanced in our decision making, we need to be aware of what personality psychologist Kelly called our personal constructs. In Kelly's view, we are all actively producing theories about how we think the people and situations around us work. We use these theories to predict the behavior of others. We are all like scientists forming theories and testing them all the time. A personal construct has two extreme points like happy/sad, tech savvy/not tech savvy, introvert/extrovert, or hard worker/lazy. We all have certain personal constructs that we use regularly to make sense of ourselves, other people, and the world. The ones that are used the most are core to us and are core personal constructs.

Let me give you an example. I was asked to assess two candidates for a high-level role in a retail company. Through several discussions, three characteristics were deemed key to the new executive being successful: driving change, strategic agility, and approachability. The company was in the midst of significant change like everyone else. Strategic agility mattered because the team believed the fundamental direction of the business was likely to shift in the next few years. Finally, approachability was a core personal construct of the CEO. He did not like people who were uppity in his view. He had grown up poor and hated uppity people. Just like Kelly would have predicted, the CEO evaluated whether he wanted to be around you or not based on whether you were uppity or approachable.

The assessment process consisted of a three-hour interview, an IQ test, and a personality test. Let me tell you about the two candidates. The first candidate was MENSA smart and had an extroverted personality made for the hand-to-hand combat of the retail industry. His experience base was such that he had led two very significant strategic changes in another company. Strategic agility, check. The second candidate was bright enough but not MENSA smart. He was more reserved personality-wise and had spent several years at McKinsey doing strategy consulting. I was struck by his ideas and optimism about the existing business. Overall, he was the kind of guy who would make a great dinner companion. The time comes for me to report my assessment findings. I walk through each of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses. Both would be a good choice, but the first candidate was stronger in my view due to the depth of his actual experience in demonstrating strategic agility vs. consulting on strategic issues. I notice that my CEO client is frowning at me. We engage in active dialogue. That is code for he has hired me to be an antagonist in this situation and hopefully, I am being brilliant. This goes on for 45 minutes and we part deciding to sleep on it.

I promptly call him the next morning to continue our discussion but also to make sure that he is not going to fire me. I had pushed back pretty hard and he was a great client. We are chatting and he says: “Karissa, I just can't see trusting a person with this level of responsibility, who came to a meeting with me in a Kmart sports jacket. If everything that you say about this candidate is true, why does he not get a better sports jacket?” Internally, I laugh and think that I should have seen this coming. I let myself off the hook because I understand fabric quality better if we are talking about womenswear.

On a more serious note, we had just uncovered another one of my client's personal constructs. Those who dress well vs. those who do not was a way he made sense of other people. Clearly, those who dressed well were more competent in general, in his view. He hired the well-dressed candidate and came to find out the well-dressed candidate struggled with the strategic-agility aspect of his job and needed coaching. I was ready to provide that coaching, and it was a win-win of sorts!

Think about the previous example. Notice the uniqueness of my client's system of personal constructs. Uppity vs. approachable was about a way of interacting with people, in his mind. You spoke to people, knew their names, and looked them in the eye if you were approachable. Being well-dressed or not had nothing to do with whether you were uppity or not. Being well-dressed or not was a separate and unrelated personal construct. All of our personal constructs and biases are unique to us. We need to know what they are and not expect them to be logical. They just are what they are.

What are some of your personal constructs that can bias your view of other people or situations? What polarities or opposites do you habitually use to categorize other people? The awareness of your personal biases is critical in becoming a more balanced processor. My client and I laughed for years about the case of the Kmart sport coat. He still surrounds himself with well-dressed and approachable people who are not uppity according to his particular definitions of uppity and well-dressed.

Have a Big Ego and Put It on the Shelf

In the spirit of knowing and owning your biases, I admit that I am a Jamie Dimon fan. (In 2015, Jamie Dimon had been chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase for more than a decade). I have become a fan by watching how he handles himself as he has been hauled in front of Congress on multiple occasions in recent years. Knowing that my judgment may very well be compromised by admiration, let me tell you why I am a fan. Although I am sure he is a complex character with multiple sides, some of which can be very difficult to deal with for those who know him well, he has artfully put his ego on the shelf and maintained a strong point of view at the same time as he has dealt with Congress on multiple occasions during the last few years. That is one seriously difficult dance.

Although the cynic in you may be saying anyone could handle that with enough public relations coaching, his self-presentation in those situations in front of Congress is consistent. Given how many times he has been in front of Congress and how consistent he has been, my hypothesis is that he has the ability to put his ego on the shelf at the right time for the good of the enterprise as a whole. When in front of Congress, Jamie maintains his contrite body language, explains the issues in terms that are clear but not talking down to people, admits mistakes, and lays out corrective action every time. My favorite appearance actually goes back to 2008 during the TARP era when they asked him what they should do if he came back needing money again and he said, “If that happens, it won't be me coming back!”

It takes a strong ego and a strong point of view to lead in complex organizations. The word ego has unfairly gotten a bad reputation. Ego simply means a sense of yourself. Putting that ego on the shelf at the right time can make a difference in business terms but also in the process of becoming more authentic. Having a big ego and putting it on the shelf at the right time is the last discipline in this chapter, for good reason. It is the most difficult of the practices and it may very well play a role in all of the others. You have to put your ego on the shelf to say “I don't know.” You have to challenge your own point of view (the water you swim in) in order admit your biases. Working every day with people as smart as you who are going to challenge you does not always make you feel good. It takes a lot of confidence or what I call a big ego to tolerate constant pushback on what you think.

The Workouts

• Go have coffee with someone who has diametrically opposed political views. Go right for the hot-button questions and ask them who they are supporting for president and why. Ask them questions and attempt to understand why they believe what they do. It is more fun if you pick someone that you like. Do not argue.
• Analyze your current job. How much of what you deal with in an average day are problems that must be solved vs. ongoing dilemmas? Are you collaborating enough on the dilemmas? Are you pulling the trigger and executing with just a few people on simple problems when appropriate? We are in an era in which it can be the default to try to put a team on everything. It may or may not be a good idea.
• For a week, write down every time you say “I don't know.” You have to say “I don't know” out loud for it to count. Simply thinking it is not enough to hit the log. For some of us, that is hard. During the next week, write down every time you say “I'm wrong” out loud and in public. That is hard for others of us. Learning how to verbalize both phrases is essential in becoming a balanced processor. If you never use either phrase, you know where you need to start.