The Top 5 Biases That Sabotage Performance (and How to Coach Them)

Even experienced leaders are not immune to flawed thinking. In fact, success and seniority can amplify certain cognitive biases that quietly erode decision quality, collaboration, and performance.

This article explores five biases that sabotage performance and show up repeatedly in leadership and professional environments, alongside practical questions you can use to examine your own thinking and coach better thinking in others.

1)      CONFIRMATION BIAS

This is one for your executive team to watch out for. Years or decades of success behind them can lead to futile complacency in their thinking and decision making, trusting their intuition or ‘gut feeling’ without critically analysing the reality before them.

Confirmation Bias is essentially the reinforcement of existing beliefs, based on past successes and example scenarios, which can feed through and influence decision-making processes. These ‘mental shortcuts’ based on past successes make it tempting to dismiss new ideas, or data, which may be in contradiction to the new reality.

If your leaders are often the ones calling the shots and making decisions without the gathering of ideas from others and true collaboration, then this can lead to situations where personal blind spots are left unchecked, over time corrupting the effective decision-making process, and ultimately your bottom line.

Blind Spots

Johari’s Window captures this thinking succinctly. We all have blind spots, and it is your job as a leader to ensure that you aren’t preventing yourself from building awareness on your own.

As the below image indicates, seeking feedback is essential to this process; the challenge for you as a leader with authority is to work out how best to obtain this, in cognition of the responsibilities you carry and the hierarchical / power dynamics at play.

Q – When did you last obtain feedback on your performance and how did you go about obtaining this?

Impression Management (The Fuel)

As a leader you are undoubtedly going to be surrounded by people that want to impress you and, if you are lucky, do good by you.

As a leader you will be aware that you must be intentional about what you say in certain circumstances, considering the responsibilities you carry, not least in relation to the company or firm you lead. This behavioural dynamic is similar for junior staff when in your presence. They will adapt in your presence and, perhaps except for a rare few individuals, filter what they say being cognisant of your role (and being sure not to say the ‘wrong’ thing!).

It is this behavioural dynamic that can be most dangerous for leadership teams and can occur at any level. However, it is obviously amplified the further apart the relative roles of authority are. Your people will be eager to please. To that end, they are more likely to say what they think you want to hear, as opposed to what they genuinely think or feel about a situation.

When obtaining feedback, awareness of this dynamic is essential to truly identify and address your own blind spots:

1)      People say what they think leaders want to hear.

2)      Blind spots aren’t identified.

3)      Leaders reinforce their Confirmation Bias.

Internal confirmation bias is essentially reinforced by the external effects of Authority Bias and Impression Management. And so the cycle continues - until one day the affected decision-making starts to take its toll on your bottom line.

Q - How are you leaders’ blind spots being identified, tested, and improved?

A Culture of Safety (The Solution)

Creating a culture of ‘safety’ where employees are safe to give their thoughts and opinions without being penalised for doing so is essential to navigate the tendency for Confirmation Bias to occur.

Q - If you do capture ideas and thinking of wider staff, then what processes do you have in place to capture and ultimately action these ideas?

It’s important now more than ever before to have your younger staff contributing ideas and driving initiatives, as this generation is more likely to be on top of latest technological developments and opportunities that could be a key differentiator for your company’s future successes. Cutting graduate jobs to save on costs comes with the downside of losing access to the bright ideas your younger people often have, and the specific knowledge and experiences they bring with them.

2)      OVERCONFIDENCE / OPTIMISM BIAS

Optimism Bias leads us to expect positive outcomes. Overconfidence Bias, which is often referred to in connection with Optimism Bias, leads us to overestimate our ability to deliver on outcomes / commitments.

It is well established and proven that we tend to overestimate our abilities. Economic Cost-Benefit Analyses must apply a mandatory 15% upward adjustment to cost estimates as part of the UK government’s Green Book process for this very reason. Isn’t it bizarre that we must apply this as a rule of thumb to avoid Optimism Bias interfering with some of the most thorough and detailed economic assessments?!

The reality is that it is part of being human and we must accept and consciously work with it.

Pushing for business success is also part of the reality of human nature and forms the very purpose of most positive oriented organisations. So how do we balance this thirst for success whilst remaining cognisant of our innate tendencies to expect positive outcomes and overestimate our capabilities?

From a business perspective, taking on too many projects or workloads in pursuit of greater revenue will ultimately compromise brand reputation if deadlines are missed or if the client care side isn’t able to cope with the demands. It’s a fine line and navigating this diligently is a challenge for leaders.

On a personal level, our egos can also inflate our concepts of what we consider ourselves to be capable of (from a skill perspective). We might find ourselves out of our depths in a role with responsibilities greater than what we were ready for, leading to significant personal stress and poor business performance as a result.

We can just as easily over-estimate what we are capable of outside of work too, committing to too many social plans, denying our limited social energy / capacity, or over doing our training; both, ultimately, potentially pushing us one step further to overhwelm and burn out. We’ve all had those weekends come around where we have ‘no plans’ and I’m sure just as many have experienced the secondary feeling of ‘thank goodness’. If you have experienced this recently, it is perhaps a sign you are over-estimating what you can physically and / or mentally tolerate in a healthy capacity.

3)      STATUS QUO BIAS

In a world quickly changing, a company culture succumbed to the Status Quo bias is a recipe for disaster. Doing things a certain way ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ will leave companies lagging behind their competitors, particularly so in a world undergoing rapid change in a myriad of ways. Blackberry, Blockbuster, Enron…I’m sure we’re all acquainted with the stories attached to these three example (ex) firms.

My first management job was part of a year in industry working for Aldi, and I recall one of the Aldi management mantras being to ask staff, “why are you doing it this way?”*. Whilst ‘why’ questions are generally cautioned for their natural cause-effect to be one which generates defensiveness on part of the person being asked, the question does highlight the need to get quizzical, frequently, as to what the thinking is behind what we are doing.

*an alternative question you could try would be “what was the thinking applied that led you to this conclusion?” – it is a naturally less challenging perspective and invites the ‘coachee’ to offer their thinking process.

A reluctance to change how things get done could be rooted in a desire to avoid difficult decisions, the uncertainty that comes with new ideas, clinging to legacies, or avoiding unpopular decisions.

You can only bury your head in the sand for so long though before the tide comes in.

Q - is the thinking behind this still relevant today? What other aspects might we be missing? What new information do we have access to which could offer better insights.  If I was X person, what would they think?

4)      COGNITIVE DISSONANCE BIAS

Cognitive Dissonance relates to the discomfort we experience when we hold two (or more) conflicting truths at once, and the rationalisations we then create for ourselves to reduce that discomfort.

For example, you might have a senior leader who is damaging the company culture and you’re losing good people because of them.

But on the other hand, said individual brings in revenue and removing them would be politically messy and financially impactful.

In this example you have a dissonance between values and consequential realities. It may lead to conclusions such as “we all have flaws”, “now isn’t the time to deal with this” etc.

Uncovering and accepting the reality is a key element that Coaching can reveal about yourself, your situation, or your thinking.

There are some things that we just don’t want to know or accept – either about ourselves and our capabilities (think Johari Window), or about the current reality of a situation we might find ourselves in. Emotional shortcutting can make it tempting for us figuratively to bury our heads in the sand again, rather than face up to the reality of what’s required from us. Inconvenient truths can plague us in a multitude of ways, both inside and outside of work.

If you suspect that there is something you need to explore then your suspicions are probably correct. Choosing not to act on that hunch is a decision in itself (and the consequences of such will reveal themselves at some point in time).

It may be uncomfortable or emotionally undesirable but if your mission is to grow or improve your performance then it is a process by which we have no choice but to go through in order to improve.

Q - What might you be ignoring or inviting dissonance into?

Coaching can help you work through these more challenging matters in a safe way, exploring the wider context these situations often come with and seeing new perspectives that may help you identify corrective actions and behaviours to ameliorate the situation.

5)      AUTHORITY BIAS

If your company culture is to defer too quickly to senior voices to make decisions, then you may be susceptible to Authority Bias. If frequently occurring in practice, then your leaders may have an over inflated sense of being right (Confirmation Bias). This can lead to short cuts and over-confidence (Overconfidence Bias), ultimately leading to ineffective decisions as a result of the necessary work not being undertaken, wider discussions not being had, or wider involvement not occurring.

It’s this combination that undermines decision-making at a deep, complex, and often unnoticed level.

Q – How are you set up to accept ideas from those that don’t like to be the loudest in the room?

Understanding your power dynamics and who the loudest voices are can help you to identify strategies and processes for more effective balancing of the thinking and input from all of your staff. Doing this effectively will help you to avoid your very own company ‘echo chamber’ and support your team to see and act on the truth.