Why CEOs need to check their blind spots and their judgments 

As CEO of Yum!, I also had the privilege of touring our restaurants often, meeting frontline workers who were just as smart as I was but who hadn’t had the same opportunities. Because they happened to be washing dishes, working the drive-through, or standing at a grill, people automatically assumed that they didn’t have much to say worth listening to. It was a big mistake that I always tried to rectify, and it saved us from making mistakes more than once. It’s also how I brought to life the defining principle of Yum!’s culture: a culture where everyone makes a difference. For instance, when we launched our oven-roasted chicken pieces at KFC, everyone at our corporate office thought the product was just great as it was. But then I talked to the cooks at a couple of our restaurants who showed me how difficult it was to make the product with consistent results in the real world. That insight sent us back to the drawing board. Thanks to those cooks, we found a quicker and simpler process for making a consistently good product, which saved us a ton of time and money in the long run. 



Bernie Marcus , who cofounded Home Depot, would do the same when he was CEO. He opened himself up to the associates on the front line, often asking, “How would you tackle this?” or “How would you do that?” It’s how he gathered some incredibly valuable ideas that helped Home Depot grow as fast as it did. 



Before you can check your judgment about the ideas people share, you first must check the assumptions you’re making that limit the people who are in your sphere of influence. For instance, when she became president and CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty could see three transformations the company needed to make. It needed a new technology platform, it needed new skills, and it needed to change how it worked as an organization. (You know, just the small stuff!) The hardest to solve was acquiring skilled talent—because the people doing the acquiring were operating on two faulty assumptions: people with at least a bachelor’s degree and with experience would be better hires. But IBM desperately needed digital skills and couldn’t get them. There just weren’t enough trained people in the talent pool. Technology also changes dramatically every three to five years, and IBM had too many people who weren’t all that interested in changing with it. 



So, Rometty helped the team make two big hiring changes. First, they started looking at high schools and community colleges for talent and doing more in-house training and education for the skills they needed most. Second, they started testing for the traits that made people successful through transformation: curiosity, grit, and drive. When they let go of their assumptions and biases about degrees, background, and experience, they found people who could bring the greatest value to the organization. 



We all make prejudgments in our life and work , and none of us likes to admit we’re doing it. The current conversations about inequality, discrimination, and exclusion in our country highlight this fact. But we still do it. We do it about strangers and friends, people we dislike, and people we love. For example, I went to lunch with an older friend who is semiretired from leading his family business. He was telling me about his concerns that his son wasn’t seeking his counsel or wasn’t leveraging the knowledge he had shared to solve some key problems. “I think it’s chronological snobbery,” he said, using a term C. S. Lewis introduced to capture “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” No, I wouldn’t take medical advice from a doctor who was trained in 1920, but I also know that some of the best business advice I’ve ever received came from people who were decades older than me, who had come up during very different eras of leadership. 



This is why it’s so important to build your self-awareness. When you understand who you are, how you operate, and where you might be letting biases and assumptions rule (because we all do sometimes), you’ll be in a better position to understand and check your judgment. The more you make the effort to learn about diverse ideas and worldviews from more diverse people, the deeper and more robust your learning will be, and the more effective action you’ll be able to take with it.



Learning to make—and check—your own judgments




Take a minute to consider whether you’re making a prejudgment somewhere in your life or work right now. This isn’t easy. Try considering a situation that feels limiting or an idea that maybe you’ve shot down because of who proposed it. What’s the assumption or bias behind the judgment? What could you do to test your assumptions?



How could you broaden your templates by interacting with and learning about more people, their ideas, and their experiences?



Have you ever accepted somebody else’s judgment blindly, without seeking out more perspectives or learning more on your own, and then regretted it later on? What would you have done differently?








Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World’s Most Successful People by David Novak with Lari Bishop. Copyright 2024 David C Novak. All rights reserved.