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How do leaders effectively promote organizational change through their thinking styles?

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 25, 2024

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This video explores the effectiveness of different types of rhetorical communication used by leaders when articulating visions for their organizations or governments. Research indicates that the most compelling rhetoric is concrete and vivid, providing a clear picture of the future, whereas abstract rhetoric tends to be less engaging and harder for audiences to visualize. Although concrete communication is identified as beneficial, the research finds a paradox: leaders who excel in concrete thinking often focus on short-term, narrow issues rather than long-term, large-scale changes necessary for inspiring and galvanizing people.

The research further investigates the characteristics of leaders who can regularly convey effective rhetoric. It suggests that leaders in hierarchical organizations are more likely to communicate long-term visions because the structure prevents them from being bogged down by minute operational details. Consequently, these leaders can focus on broader strategic initiatives. The studies highlight two approaches: a big data analysis of CEO behaviors linked to organizational change and a controlled experiment assessing decision-making scenarios.

Findings suggest that CEOs who think concretely and are situated in more hierarchical settings are more successful at initiating organizational changes. In contrast, those who communicate abstractly do not seem to benefit from hierarchy in the same way. The research emphasizes the importance of selecting leaders who possess concrete thinking abilities, arguing that organizations should prioritize the selection of individuals capable of effectively communicating and implementing transformative visions, rather than solely focusing on organizational culture. The study points to opportunities for future research in understanding how best to identify and cultivate such leadership talent.

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Here are five key points derived from the video:

1. **Effective Rhetoric and Communication**: The video emphasizes that the most effective rhetoric for leaders to communicate visions—whether for organizations or governments—tends to be concrete and vivid, allowing people to clearly envision the future. In contrast, abstract communication, such as stating goals of "environmentally friendly" futures, is less compelling.

2. **Concrete Thinking vs. Long-Term Vision**: While leaders who think concretely are often better at communicating vivid visions, they also tend to focus on narrow, short-term problems. This short-term orientation poses a challenge for effectively planning and inspiring long-term organizational change.

3. **Role of Organizational Hierarchy**: The hierarchical structure of an organization can influence a leader’s ability to maintain focus on broader, long-term objectives. Leaders higher up in a hierarchical organization might be less distracted by operational details and more able to articulate a clear vision that resonates with the organization’s long-term strategy.

4. **Research Findings**: Studies indicated that concrete-oriented CEOs in hierarchical organizations are more likely to initiate organizational change. This suggests that the combination of concrete thinking and a supportive organizational structure fosters effective long-term strategic communication and implementation.

5. **Selection of Leadership**: The video concludes by noting the importance of selecting the right leaders based on their concrete orientation, emphasizing that organizations should focus on identifying and selecting individuals who possess the ability to effectively communicate inspiring visions and coordinate activities. This selection process is as critical as fostering an appropriate organizational culture.

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Here are some key quotes from the video that capture its main themes and arguments:

1. **On the effectiveness of rhetoric**:
- "The type of rhetoric that's most effective tends to be very concrete, very vivid, giving a very clear sense of what the future could look like."

2. **Contrast between vague and concrete visions**:
- "A more general and vague and abstract vision, like, we wanna have a very environmentally friendly and sustainable future, that's not quite as compelling."

3. **The prevalence of abstract visions**:
- "In one study, we found that more than 90% of visions are very abstract rather than concrete."

4. **Dilemma of concrete thinkers**:
- "People who think and speak concretely tend to focus on problems that are very narrow and very, very short term in nature."

5. **Connection between hierarchy and communication**:
- "If a very concrete oriented leader is in a...organization that is more hierarchical...they're likely to think at a much higher level to think in a, in a, about the big picture."

6. **Importance of attention in communication**:
- "Attention is a really interesting topic because...it's actually quite remarkable how little we can pay attention to at any single moment."

7. **Findings on CEO communication and change**:
- "We did find that concrete oriented CEOs...if they were in an organization that was more hierarchical, they were more likely to trigger the onset of organizational change."

8. **Role of organizational structure in leadership effectiveness**:
- "Concrete oriented CEOs are...very good at operationalization or the implementation of a plan."

9. **On the characteristics of leaders**:
- "Maybe we need to choose...the kinds of people we choose for certain positions."

10. **Focus on both selection and culture**:
- "Both, of course are very important, but I think that's a critical area, and I think that's actually a really important area for future research."

These quotes encapsulate the discussion surrounding effective leadership communication, the preference for concrete versus abstract thinking, and the implications of organizational hierarchy on leadership effectiveness and organizational change.

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We've had, an accumulating body of evidence

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for quite a while, suggesting that the types of rhetoric

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that leaders use

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that's most effective when they communicate visions

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for their organizations or their,

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or their governments, tends not to be the kind of rhetoric

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that, is the type of rhetoric that they use.

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So the type of rhetoric that they use

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and the type of rhetoric that's most effective

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are often two different things.

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Uh, we found that the rhetoric that's most effective tends

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to be very concrete, very vivid,

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giving a very clear sense of

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what the future could look like.

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So, for example, you know, a,

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a very compelling statement might be, we wanna have a,

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a city full of electric vehicles

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and solar panels on every rooftop

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and wind turbines on every hill.

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And that's gonna be very vivid.

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It gives you a sense of what the future could look like.

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Uh, by contrast, a more general and vague

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and abstract vision, like,

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we wanna have a very environmentally friendly

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and sustainable future, that's not quite as compelling.

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It doesn't give people a clear sense of, of

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where they, where we're gonna be going.

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It's more difficult to coordinate.

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It's, less emotionally impactful.

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So the basis for the research was, okay,

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there's certain types of rhetoric that's better.

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So let's try to identify what kind

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of leaders are most likely to be able

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to convey that kind of rhetoric.

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The growing body of evidence, suggesting that

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that particular rhetorical style is advantageous relative to

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abstract communication, even though abstract communication

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is actually much more prevalent.

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In one study, we found that more than 90%

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of visions are very abstract rather than concrete.

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One of the reasons is it's very hard

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to think concretely about the future,

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and visions are typically about the future.

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So, so that's the state of the science.

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And I think the big gap is, well, okay, if it's,

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if it's the case that there's a certain type of rhetoric

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or oratory or speech that better, then who, who is the kind

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of person, what kind of leader is, is going to be able

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to convey that on a regular basis?

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Who should, what kind of personality characteristics,

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for example, should we be looking for?

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The first premise is that people

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who naturally think concretely are gonna be better equipped

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to convey concrete visions of the future, right?

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So if it's desirable to talk more concretely,

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why don't we pick people who

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show a predisposition individually to speak concretely?

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So that's not very surprising.

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Um, however, the problem is that in cognitive psychology,

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there's been a pretty robust finding that people who think

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and speak concretely tend to focus on problems

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that are very narrow

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and very, very short term in nature.

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They tend, for example, instead

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of thinking about large scale change, on the order

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of many, many years, that includes,

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includes maybe thousands of people.

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They instead might focus on, the specifications

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of a very specific product that's gonna come

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to market in the next couple of weeks.

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So concrete thinkers tend to have a very short term,

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small scale, orientation.

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And so the conundrum here is that the person who appears

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to be, it would stand to reason to be best

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Equipped to communicate vivid visions

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of the future, the distant future.

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The problem is they don't really think

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about the distant future at all.

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Maybe the problem here is it's an attentional issue.

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So maybe it's the kinds of problems

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or topics that leaders are paying attention to,

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and maybe that is deficient

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amongst concrete oriented leaders.

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Um, and by deficient, I mean, at least with respect

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to communicating about visions, for the organization

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that are supposed to inspire people, galvanize people,

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maybe they are not thinking about the right topics.

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So attention is a really interesting topic

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because, you know,

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when we're focusing on whatever we're focusing on,

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so the people right now are, are watching this interview.

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What it's hard to be mindful of is that there's actually

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thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of stimuli

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and topics that they're not paying attention to.

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And at any given moment of a time,

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it's actually quite remarkable

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how little we can pay attention to at any single moment,

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typically between only five

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and nine discrete bits

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of information we can pay attention to.

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So that means that we're neglecting everything else.

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So what we were interested in is, okay,

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maybe leaders are people who can think concretely,

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their attention is on the wrong type of thing,

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and we need to figure out how can we reorient

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or repurpose their attention toward large

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scale, long term problems.

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And so that's where hierarchy came in.

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So we became interested in,

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maybe there's something about the situations in which they

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operate, specifically the

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how hierarchical their organizations are, such

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that if they work in an organization

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that is more hierarchical.

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So if a very concrete oriented leader is in a,

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is it occupying a perch?

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That's, that's very high up.

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And there are many, for example, many layers

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of management in between them and entry level workers

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or employees who are doing the, you know,

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on the ground productive work

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or interfacing with clients and customers.

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If there's many layers of management, they're more likely

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to not succumb to their natural predilection

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to get bogged down in very small details.

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And instead, they're likely to think at a much higher level

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to think in a, in a, about the, the big picture.

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And as we say, they can speak,

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clearly about the big picture.

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So we can clearly communicate a,

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a clear picture about the big picture.

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If you are further away from on the ground work, you're not

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as likely to be distracted by

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and bogged down in small operational detail.

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So the, the day-to-day detail, the thousands

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of operational details that A CEO who's very,

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let's say very technical in their orientation,

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they can get consumed with, with the specifications

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of any specific of any, let's say product

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that's gonna come to market.

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Or they can be focusing on interacting

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with a very specific constituency

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or customer base in a very specific market,

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and then lose sight of the big picture.

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That's less likely to happen if they're in a very hierarchal

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organization where there's many layers of operation

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that already exist that are there to take to,

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to address those low lying operational details,

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well then they're likely

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to have their attention nudged away from those

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low level details and

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Directed more to these big picture considerations,

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including long-term strategy.

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We actually had two studies.

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One study was, a, maybe one way to say it is a, a kind

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of a big data study where we drew on publicly available data

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about CEOs and,

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and, we looked at real organizational outcomes,

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in this case organizational change, which,

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which organizations are likely to take healthy risks

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to position them for long-term success.

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So that was the first study. The second study was an

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experiment in which we created a scenario

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where people could, imagine people

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who actually did have direct reports in real life.

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They were asked to imagine, being in a scenario

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where they had to make certain decisions

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for their organization strategy.

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We, we did two different studies

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because one of the problems

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with research is you can't get everything in any single

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study that we care about to be as robust

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and rigorous as possible.

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So the, the big data study, what that allowed us to do is

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to study CEOs in their natural environment.

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And then the experiment allowed us

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to get more direct control

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and randomization of participants

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to be be more confident in the causal claims we were making.

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Um, the problem of course is you can't get,

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can't get all those things in a single study.

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So that's why we had multiple studies,

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to your question on how we selected cos.

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So we selected, ultimately our final sample was 303 CEOs.

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We actually started with a much bigger initial sample

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of organizations and we used a technique called stratified

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sampling, where we, we essentially,

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and one of the problems with dealing with big data

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that's publicly available is you are kind

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of at the whims of what's available.

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And there often is not the, the complete amount of data

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that you need to run your analyses.

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Often it's available for only a very select, subset

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of the data that you have.

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So we started

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with I think something like 25,000 organizations.

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Ultimately only about 300 plus

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of those organizations had the data, the complete data

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that we needed, stratified sampling.

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What it allows us to do is to ensure

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that the sample is representative of all organizations

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or as many organizations as possible so that the,

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the claims we're making are, are generalizable.

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Um, and then in terms of the,

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the way the rest of the study was run.

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So we collected data from, quarterly earnings reports

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where the CEOs were asked questions by analysts

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and they, they couldn't prepare for these questions,

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so they couldn't have, you know, canned and,

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and very polished responses at the ready.

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So we got a sense of

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how do they actually think about problems

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and how do they actually speak?

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And we looked at are, is there, are there stable patterns in

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how they speak across time?

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And, and then we, we see, we, we tracked

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to see whether their stable patterns of speech

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impacted whether their organizations

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engaged in long-term change.

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Meaning the, are there more concrete thinkers,

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in more hierarchical organizations,

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are they more likely to instigate change?

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A lot of large, and, and very successful organizations often

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stumble upon what we'll call success traps,

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where they don't, they're, they're not,

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sufficiently nimble across

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A long period of time. They,

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they end up exploiting what they're really good at

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and they don't explore enough to create new capabilities.

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So change is really important. Uh, change is very risky.

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It can, it can often lead to, to problems,

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but it can also lead to discoveries that can really pay off.

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So we looked at changes our dependent variable

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as our outcome, and we actually looked at it at

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three different measures of change.

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We looked at whether an organization was likely to,

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either, acquire new firms or,

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or avoid acquiring new firms,

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or I should say, acquire firms at a lower

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rate than they used to before.

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'cause we wanted to look at change, both

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that was very growth oriented,

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but also change that was about reducing growth

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or actually pulling back on costs.

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Acquisitions was one, property sales was another.

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So is an organization engaged in a lot of selling or,

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or buying a property?

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And then, research

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and development spending property sales.

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So acquisitions is, is a separate

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measure from property sales.

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Property sales primarily is a, we can call

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that a reduction focus form of growth in the sense

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of if you're selling awful lot of property,

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you're actually trying to constrict growth,

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at least in one sense, often in terms

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of your productive capacity.

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It's especially relevant for,

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for manufacturing organizations.

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We did find that, for the, for the study

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of the 300 plus CEOs, 303 CEOs, we did find that

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concrete oriented CEOs, so CEOs who think more concretely,

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which we measured by, you know,

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and again, we, we made sure that they think

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and communicate more concretely in a very

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stable way over time.

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Uh, that those CEOs, if they were in an organization

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that was more hierarchical, they were more likely to,

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trigger the onset of organizational change.

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And we, you know, we suspect, as I mentioned

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before, it's partly because they can communicate in a very

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clear way about the distant future.

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Um, or I should say they communicate in a clear way

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because they're concrete, they have a concrete orientation,

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and that communication is then dedicated

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or repurposed toward the distant future, as opposed

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to their natural tendency to focus on the short term.

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But then it's also coupled with the fact that something else

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that concrete oriented CEOs are very good at is

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operationalization or the implementation of a plan.

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So once they have a strategy, they can get people to commit

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to it, and they can build plans and set objectives

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and goals to help people realize the change

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that they have in mind quite effectively.

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We did not find that the same,

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that hierarchy has the same effect for abstract thinking cos

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so abstract thinking, cos these are people

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who think at a very, very grand level, very high level,

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very, they're very general in

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how they tend to think about problems.

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They were not affected by

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how much hierarchy the organization has.

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And it turns out that in no circumstances did they

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communicate very concretely about the distant future.

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And we essentially chalk this up to, it's hard

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to do something if you don't even

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have the potential to do it.

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So irrespective of the circumstances they were in,

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they just didn't co communicate

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concretely about the distant future at all.

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I feel this focuses

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Very heavily on creating situations

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and circumstances that will allow people

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to thrive as much as possible.

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Whether it's the, the nature of the work that they do

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or the way that their work teams are structured, the way

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that conflict is managed, whether

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and when their opinions are

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solicited, when they're collaborating.

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So the, the environment in which people work,

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the culture in which they work is incredibly important for,

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for helping them reach their potential.

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However, I think there, there is sometimes a neglected,

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or it is sometimes neglected to think about, well

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what about the people that we choose for our roles?

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Before we even think about which circumstances we want them

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to, they're gonna allow them to thrive.

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Maybe we need to choose, spend more time

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focusing on the kinds of people we

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choose for certain positions.

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And it turns out that there's only a certain type of person,

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at least in this one personality characteristic

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that we looked at concrete orientation,

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there's only a certain type of person,

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a concrete oriented individual who is likely

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to have the potential to communicate in an inspiring way,

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in a way that's memorable, in a way

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that helps people coordinate activity, especially in very,

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very large organizations.

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So it might be worthwhile for organizations to focus more

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of their energy on, on the selection component rather than

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just on the, the culture component.

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Both, of course are very important,

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but I think that's a critical, area,

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and I think that's actually a really important

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area for future research.

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Which organizations, what kind

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of attributes do they have are best at

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recognizing that kind of talent.

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And I would actually say even more specifically,

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what are the instruments that we can create,

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to help identify the skill?

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It's something that we spend a lot of time on trying

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to identify which people are really good at communicating

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and thinking concretely versus abstractly.

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It would be great to have a more refined

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and, rigorous, instrument

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that organizations can use more readily to attract the kinds

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of leaders that are, they're gonna help 'em be successful.

Effective Rhetoric in Leadership Communication

00:00:00 - We've had, an accumulating body of evidence for quite a while, suggesting that the types of rhetoric that leaders use that's most effective when they communicate visions for their organizations or their, or their governments, tends not to be the kind of rhetoric that, is the type of rhetoric that they use. So the type of rhetoric that they use and the type of rhetoric that's most effective are often two different things. we found that the rhetoric that's most effective tends to be very concrete, very vivid, giving a very clear sense of what the future could look like. So, for example, you know, a,

00:00:35 - a city full of electric vehicles and solar panels on every rooftop and wind turbines on every hill. And that's gonna be very vivid. It gives you a sense of what the future could look like. by contrast, a more general and vague and abstract vision, like, we wanna have a very environmentally friendly and sustainable future, that's not quite as compelling. It doesn't give people a clear sense of, of where they, where we're gonna be going. It's more difficult to coordinate. It's, less emotionally impactful.

00:01:06 - there's certain types of rhetoric that's better. So let's try to identify what kind of leaders are most likely to be able to convey that kind of rhetoric. The growing body of evidence, suggesting that that particular rhetorical style is advantageous relative to abstract communication, even though abstract communication is actually much more prevalent. In one study, we found that more than 90% of visions are very abstract rather than concrete. One of the reasons is it's very hard to think concretely about the future,

Rhetoric and Leadership: The Challenge of Concrete Thinking

00:01:37 - So, so that's the state of the science. And I think the big gap is, well, okay, if it's, if it's the case that there's a certain type of rhetoric or oratory or speech that better, then who, who is the kind of person, what kind of leader is, is going to be able to convey that on a regular basis? Who should, what kind of personality characteristics, for example, should we be looking for? The first premise is that people who naturally think concretely are gonna be better equipped to convey concrete visions of the future, right?

00:02:08 - why don't we pick people who show a predisposition individually to speak concretely? So that's not very surprising. however, the problem is that in cognitive psychology, there's been a pretty robust finding that people who think and speak concretely tend to focus on problems that are very narrow and very, very short term in nature. They tend, for example, instead of thinking about large scale change, on the order

00:02:38 - includes maybe thousands of people. They instead might focus on, the specifications of a very specific product that's gonna come to market in the next couple of weeks. So concrete thinkers tend to have a very short term, small scale, orientation. And so the conundrum here is that the person who appears to be, it would stand to reason to be best Equipped to communicate vivid visions of the future, the distant future. The problem is they don't really think about the distant future at all. Maybe the problem here is it's an attentional issue.

Reorienting Leadership Focus: The Impact of Attention and Hierarchy

00:03:10 - or topics that leaders are paying attention to, and maybe that is deficient amongst concrete oriented leaders. and by deficient, I mean, at least with respect to communicating about visions, for the organization that are supposed to inspire people, galvanize people, maybe they are not thinking about the right topics. So attention is a really interesting topic because, you know, when we're focusing on whatever we're focusing on, so the people right now are, are watching this interview. What it's hard to be mindful of is that there's actually

00:03:44 - and topics that they're not paying attention to. And at any given moment of a time, it's actually quite remarkable how little we can pay attention to at any single moment, typically between only five and nine discrete bits of information we can pay attention to. So that means that we're neglecting everything else. So what we were interested in is, okay, maybe leaders are people who can think concretely, their attention is on the wrong type of thing, and we need to figure out how can we reorient or repurpose their attention toward large

00:04:13 - And so that's where hierarchy came in. So we became interested in, maybe there's something about the situations in which they operate, specifically the how hierarchical their organizations are, such that if they work in an organization that is more hierarchical. So if a very concrete oriented leader is in a, is it occupying a perch? That's, that's very high up. And there are many, for example, many layers of management in between them and entry level workers or employees who are doing the, you know, on the ground productive work

Hierarchy's Role in Strategic Leadership

00:04:44 - If there's many layers of management, they're more likely to not succumb to their natural predilection to get bogged down in very small details. And instead, they're likely to think at a much higher level to think in a, in a, about the, the big picture. And as we say, they can speak, clearly about the big picture. So we can clearly communicate a, a clear picture about the big picture. If you are further away from on the ground work, you're not as likely to be distracted by

00:05:15 - So the, the day-to-day detail, the thousands of operational details that A CEO who's very, let's say very technical in their orientation, they can get consumed with, with the specifications of any specific of any, let's say product that's gonna come to market. Or they can be focusing on interacting with a very specific constituency or customer base in a very specific market, and then lose sight of the big picture. That's less likely to happen if they're in a very hierarchal organization where there's many layers of operation

00:05:48 - to address those low lying operational details, well then they're likely to have their attention nudged away from those low level details and Directed more to these big picture considerations, including long-term strategy. We actually had two studies. One study was, a, maybe one way to say it is a, a kind of a big data study where we drew on publicly available data about CEOs and, and, we looked at real organizational outcomes,

Studying CEO Decision-Making for Long-Term Success

00:06:17 - which organizations are likely to take healthy risks to position them for long-term success. So that was the first study. The second study was an experiment in which we created a scenario where people could, imagine people who actually did have direct reports in real life. They were asked to imagine, being in a scenario where they had to make certain decisions for their organization strategy. We, we did two different studies because one of the problems with research is you can't get everything in any single study that we care about to be as robust

00:06:48 - So the, the big data study, what that allowed us to do is to study CEOs in their natural environment. And then the experiment allowed us to get more direct control and randomization of participants to be be more confident in the causal claims we were making. the problem of course is you can't get, can't get all those things in a single study. So that's why we had multiple studies, to your question on how we selected cos. So we selected, ultimately our final sample was 303 CEOs. We actually started with a much bigger initial sample

00:07:22 - sampling, where we, we essentially, and one of the problems with dealing with big data that's publicly available is you are kind of at the whims of what's available. And there often is not the, the complete amount of data that you need to run your analyses. Often it's available for only a very select, subset of the data that you have. So we started with I think something like 25,000 organizations. Ultimately only about 300 plus of those organizations had the data, the complete data

Studying CEO Communication Patterns and Organizational Change

00:07:50 - What it allows us to do is to ensure that the sample is representative of all organizations or as many organizations as possible so that the, the claims we're making are, are generalizable. and then in terms of the, the way the rest of the study was run. So we collected data from, quarterly earnings reports where the CEOs were asked questions by analysts and they, they couldn't prepare for these questions, so they couldn't have, you know, canned and, and very polished responses at the ready. So we got a sense of

00:08:22 - and how do they actually speak? And we looked at are, is there, are there stable patterns in how they speak across time? And, and then we, we see, we, we tracked to see whether their stable patterns of speech impacted whether their organizations engaged in long-term change. Meaning the, are there more concrete thinkers, in more hierarchical organizations, are they more likely to instigate change? A lot of large, and, and very successful organizations often stumble upon what we'll call success traps,

00:08:53 - sufficiently nimble across A long period of time. They, they end up exploiting what they're really good at and they don't explore enough to create new capabilities. So change is really important. change is very risky. It can, it can often lead to, to problems, but it can also lead to discoveries that can really pay off. So we looked at changes our dependent variable as our outcome, and we actually looked at it at three different measures of change. We looked at whether an organization was likely to, either, acquire new firms or,

Impact of Concrete Thinking on Organizational Change

00:09:23 - or I should say, acquire firms at a lower rate than they used to before. 'cause we wanted to look at change, both that was very growth oriented, but also change that was about reducing growth or actually pulling back on costs. Acquisitions was one, property sales was another. So is an organization engaged in a lot of selling or, or buying a property? And then, research and development spending property sales. So acquisitions is, is a separate measure from property sales. Property sales primarily is a, we can call

00:09:55 - of if you're selling awful lot of property, you're actually trying to constrict growth, at least in one sense, often in terms of your productive capacity. It's especially relevant for, for manufacturing organizations. We did find that, for the, for the study of the 300 plus CEOs, 303 CEOs, we did find that concrete oriented CEOs, so CEOs who think more concretely, which we measured by, you know, and again, we, we made sure that they think and communicate more concretely in a very

00:10:24 - that those CEOs, if they were in an organization that was more hierarchical, they were more likely to, trigger the onset of organizational change. And we, you know, we suspect, as I mentioned before, it's partly because they can communicate in a very clear way about the distant future. or I should say they communicate in a clear way because they're concrete, they have a concrete orientation, and that communication is then dedicated or repurposed toward the distant future, as opposed to their natural tendency to focus on the short term.

Concrete Leadership: The Importance of Operationalization and Selection

00:10:56 - that concrete oriented CEOs are very good at is operationalization or the implementation of a plan. So once they have a strategy, they can get people to commit to it, and they can build plans and set objectives and goals to help people realize the change that they have in mind quite effectively. We did not find that the same, that hierarchy has the same effect for abstract thinking cos so abstract thinking, cos these are people who think at a very, very grand level, very high level,

00:11:27 - how they tend to think about problems. They were not affected by how much hierarchy the organization has. And it turns out that in no circumstances did they communicate very concretely about the distant future. And we essentially chalk this up to, it's hard to do something if you don't even have the potential to do it. So irrespective of the circumstances they were in, they just didn't co communicate concretely about the distant future at all. I feel this focuses Very heavily on creating situations

00:11:57 - to thrive as much as possible. Whether it's the, the nature of the work that they do or the way that their work teams are structured, the way that conflict is managed, whether and when their opinions are solicited, when they're collaborating. So the, the environment in which people work, the culture in which they work is incredibly important for, for helping them reach their potential. However, I think there, there is sometimes a neglected, or it is sometimes neglected to think about, well what about the people that we choose for our roles?

Selecting Leaders for Success: The Importance of Concrete Orientation

00:12:29 - to, they're gonna allow them to thrive. Maybe we need to choose, spend more time focusing on the kinds of people we choose for certain positions. And it turns out that there's only a certain type of person, at least in this one personality characteristic that we looked at concrete orientation, there's only a certain type of person, a concrete oriented individual who is likely to have the potential to communicate in an inspiring way, in a way that's memorable, in a way that helps people coordinate activity, especially in very,

00:12:58 - So it might be worthwhile for organizations to focus more of their energy on, on the selection component rather than just on the, the culture component. Both, of course are very important, but I think that's a critical, area, and I think that's actually a really important area for future research. Which organizations, what kind of attributes do they have are best at recognizing that kind of talent. And I would actually say even more specifically, what are the instruments that we can create, to help identify the skill? It's something that we spend a lot of time on trying

00:13:41 - and thinking concretely versus abstractly. It would be great to have a more refined and, rigorous, instrument that organizations can use more readily to attract the kinds of leaders that are, they're gonna help 'em be successful.

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