The power of agreeableness

Agreeableness. It sounds like a likeable quality in a leader. But maybe a bit wishy washy?

Professor Randall Peterson, academic director of the Leadership Institute at the London School of Business, says it’s a characteristic that boards need in their directors, and in their board culture, to improve decision making.

This is because boards are at their best when they make collective decisions that incorporate many points of view. Directors who are ‘low agreeable’ may not be comfortable accommodating other perspectives – with the result that board decision-making becomes poorer.

So watch out for that superstar chief executive who has just made the transition into governance, he says.

“If you look, historically, at the type of people we have had in management, it has been ‘low-agreeable’ people,” Peterson says.

“We generally encourage, in management, individuals to do well, to be stars, and don’t spend enough time talking about how you work with others and facilitate others. In the boardroom, in particular, this can become a huge problem.

“From the perspective of people who hold a ‘low-agreeableness’ point of view, there should be a rational, right answer. In many things there isn’t a single right answer. There are multiple ways you can deal with something, all of which have trade-offs.

“Agreeableness is sometimes misinterpreted as not being able to make a firm, rationale decision and stick to it. What you are trying to do with ‘agreeableness’ is bring different disparate views together. The point is giving up on the idea of a single best answer and trying to reach the best combination of pluses and minuses we can come to.”

Peterson’s research has shown that willingness to be collaborative and cooperative is really important for effective decision making. When you are dealing with problems that are not very well structured, your willingness to be cooperative matters hugely, he says.

“This is not just in terms of the ‘nice’ things – getting along – but it dramatically improves the quality of the decisions you make.”

This is particularly evident when there is chaos or unpredictability in the environment. The ability to share contrasting views improves a board’s response to unknowns and complexity, Peterson’s research has found.

“When the environment was pretty straightforward, agreeableness is actually kind of irrelevant.”

Summing diverse parts

“One of the big surprises for people coming into the boardroom is that it doesn’t really matter what you do as an individual, because it is not about you,” Peterson says.

“It is about how you work with, influence and encourage others, ie management or the board as a collective. You can be an island and say ‘this is how it should be’ but a boardroom is about persuading a group of people that this is the best decision, the best set of trade-offs.

As boards become more diverse in make-up, the requirement for directors to be agreeable is becoming a necessity. When genuinely diverse boards meet, there is a risk that disagreement can move beyond the issue at hand and become almost a battle of identity politics, he says.

“You can imagine there might be conflict of an unhealthy type. It becomes meta-conflict – about why we are even having the conflict. It is not just ‘I disagree with you’ but ‘I disagree with your approach to the problem’.”

Not all ‘diverse’ boards will have this problem to the same degree, Peterson notes, because some are not all actually diverse in terms of thought.

“Some people see diversity as a ‘diverse board’ that looks good in a photograph – and we need to have a few superstars on this board. At one level that is okay, in terms of a signal you are trying to send to the world, but it is not likely to be very helpful to you. Partly because a diverse board may find it difficult to talk to each other and partly because superstars don’t work well with others.

“The best boards, generally, talk about things until everybody can live with the decision. The basic principle here is that if somebody really objects to what the board is trying to do, unless they are trying to stir the pot, there is an idea behind it – they have not been persuaded that the trade-offs are appropriate or reasonable. In which case you should probably keep talking about it.”

Agreeableness, in this sense, enables ongoing conversation and consensus based on a sense of shared responsibility, acknowledgement of others’ ideas, and an understanding of opportunities and risks that may not occur to directors in isolation.

“Which can mean that agreeable boards don’t need to vote,” Peterson notes. “Oftentimes, voting can be a very dangerous thing. Boards that make decisions where people are in serious disagreement tend to make poor decisions.”

Qualified consensus

Full consensus in which everybody agrees this is the right thing is highly unlikely in the real world, Peterson says.

“What I call ‘qualified consensus’ is very reasonable. It is when everybody can live with the decision that has been made. It may not be their first choice, but it is not a ‘bad’ choice.  If everybody can get to that point then that is what predictive of a better decision.”

Reaching this qualified consensus requires not only agreeableness among directors but also a savvy chair, he says.

Shutting down the last concerned voice – in order to finalise a decision - is a mistake chairs sometimes make, he says

“It may only be one person - and you could shut it down. The problem with shutting it down is that person then has little incentive with continuing to engage. They will feel disenfranchised. More importantly, other people will see that if they are not compliant they can be shut down at any moment. So people stop raising issues because nobody wants to be the person who is left out, over there. Nobody wants that. No matter how strong you are it is an awful thing to be. So people give in.”

There is little point in seeking the decision-making advantages of diversity if disagreement is shut down, instead of being talked through, he says.

“What’s the point of diversity if people are not going to argue about why this is important to the perspective they represent?”

Danger of a winning mentality

“People search for an answer and when they think they have found it they advocate for that answer,” Peterson says. “Then it becomes about winning.”

Boards can become side-tracked when individual directors advocate too strongly for their own proposed solution instead of engaging with the ideas of others.

“Whenever the conversation is about winning the argument, you might as well pack up and go home. You are highly unlikely to make a good decision. You need to understand the difference between a conversation about winning – this is what I think we should do – and a conversation about what is really best.”