Prestige Bias in Leadership | Dr. Alex Auerbach

You're more likely to be vulnerable if you see me do that and you look up to me. There's a social psychology bias called prestige bias, right, where we try to emulate people in power because we're sort of looking for how did they achieve that status. And so if the leader is vulnerable, it communicates to everybody else, hey, it's safe for me to do that here. And really that's what we want, right? We want people doing things like surfacing mistakes, surfacing uncertainties, because we need to talk about those things so we can resolve them. And so often, like, if people aren't sharing a mistake, it's probably not because there wasn't one made. It's probably because it hasn't been set up for it to be comfortable to do that. And so the leader can step in and really move that process along in creating that psychological safety so that people feel comfortable talking about that.