Jeffrey Pfeffer: preference

Transcript context

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Learn how teams like Dropbox, IDEO and Orange Theory trust Webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at Webflow.com. Another element of your course that you try to make clear in your syllabus is to teach people not to be as judgmental. You also have this whole huge bold phrase, "This class is not for everyone." Can you just talk a bit about maybe why it's not for everyone and then why being less judgmental is important? The class is extremely popular. I have a long waiting list. It's kind of mythical. And because of the principle of social influence, we are influenced by what other people do. We're influenced in our choices of restaurants, we're influenced in our choices of music. I'm not sure I like Taylor Swift, but I certainly want to go see Taylor Swift because everybody else is. And many people sign up for the class. And one year in particular, there were some people who sat in about the third row up, directly in front of me, and they looked every day like they were having some terrible thing put up some horrible orifice or something. They looked literally in pain, and so I decided, and of course they learned nothing. If you come to the class and you're in that much psychological discomfort, you're not going to learn anything. And so what I try to do is tell people that in order to benefit from this class, you have to be open to learning the material. And if you're not, and by the way, this would be true for any class. If you go to physics and you say, I don't like physics, I hate physics, I don't believe in physics, I don't believe in the theory of physics, whatever, you're not going to learn anything. And so I'm trying to get the class, given those huge waiting lists, I'm trying to get the class to have people in it who are in fact going to benefit from it rather than sit there and look like they're in pain. And the judgmental thing, if Matthew 7, "Judge not that ye be not judged." The Koran says, "Only Allah can judge people." The American poet, Walt Whitman said, "Be curious, not judgmental." Mother Teresa said, "If you judge people, you have no time to love them." Judgment, if I need to build a positive relationship with Lenny because you are on my critical path in my job, and jobs necessarily entail a reasonable amount of interdependence, I get things done through and with other people. If I decide that Lenny is whatever set of bad adjectives you want to use, dumb, incompetent, immoral, whatever, my ability to build a positive relationship with you, and you remain on my critical path, becomes almost zero unless you're a better actor or I'm a better actor than I think most people are. So therefore, you should suspend judgment in the sense that if somebody is on your critical path, the only judgment you should make is they're on my critical path. If I want to get something done, I need their collaboration and cooperation, and the fact that I may not like them is in fact irrelevant. And as I have taught senior executives over the years, it is absolutely clear to me that one of the skills that they have mastered is they have a skill that you cannot tell what they think of you. And that's important because I need your collaboration, I need your cooperation. And if I leak out in ways that say I don't respect you or I don't like you, I don't admire you, whatever, my odds of getting you to work productively with me goes essentially to zero. our cooperation. And if I leak out in ways that say I don't respect you or I don't like you, I don't admire you, whatever, my odds of getting you to work productively with me goes essentially to zero. So that's a judgmental story. Does that make sense?…

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