Building A Leadership Framework Backed By Data | Benjamin Granger | 728
The Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast is created by Peter Winick and Bill Sherman and produced by Thought Leadership Leverage.
Dr. Benjamin Granger on turning organizational psychology research into a USA Today bestselling book
This episode explores the psychology behind bias, miscommunication, and incentive-driven data gaming, and why real change starts with harder conversations with ourselves.
Why do we size up a rude stranger in seconds and decide they don’t belong in our “tribe”?
Dr. Benjamin Granger has a term for it: the evolutionary hangover — his phrase for the cognitive biases our brains evolved for savanna survival and never quite retired. As Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, Granger spends his days distilling billions of data points on how employees and customers really feel, and in this episode, he brings that same lens to his new USA Today bestseller, A Leader Worth Following.
The conversation moves from the biological to the deeply practical. Granger traces human speech back only 100,000–200,000 years — a blink in evolutionary time — to explain why we still assume our texts and emails land exactly as intended, and why they so often don’t. He and host Peter Winick dig into a favorite (and least favorite) example: the customer satisfaction survey. Whether it’s a car dealership coaching you to “circle the five” or a flight attendant joking about the inevitable post-flight survey, Granger shows how well-established science like goal-setting theory gets bent out of shape the moment it collides with real incentive structures.
There’s also a candid look at what it takes to write a book while holding down a demanding day job — from years of scattered iPhone notes to a publisher’s cold outreach that landed within days of deciding to write one. Granger and Winick talk through the tension every corporate thought leader faces: how do you promote your ideas without it feeling like self-promotion? Granger’s answer — “I’m selling the message, not myself” — anchors a broader discussion of why academic rigor and real-world readability don’t have to be at odds.
The episode closes on a personal note: Granger’s hope that more leaders will get comfortable with hard conversations with themselves, and a few concrete ways to start — from a two-minute daily reflection borrowed from Marshall Goldsmith to a monthly sit-down with your future self.
If you’ve ever wondered why your best-intentioned message got read the wrong way, or why your company’s survey scores don’t tell the real story, this one’s for you.
Three Key Takeaways:
- Our brains are running outdated software. Granger’s “evolutionary hangover” concept explains why we instantly judge people as “abrasive” or “rude” — a tribal survival instinct that made sense on the savanna but creates friction in modern offices and customer interactions.
- Good science can get gamed by bad incentives. Goal setting is one of the most well-established practices in organizational psychology, but Granger shows how tying compensation to survey scores (like a car dealership’s NPS rating) corrupts the very measurement it’s supposed to improve.
- Selling ideas isn’t the same as selling yourself. Granger reframes self-promotion as message-promotion — a mental shift that let him push through years of book marketing discomfort because he believes the underlying research deserves to reach people.
Ben isn’t the only one turning years of hard-won research into a book built to scale. Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal have just released The Thought Leadership Handbook: How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas—and How You Can Too — a field guide drawn from more than 700 conversations on this very podcast, mapping out the frameworks and five “thought leadership avatars” that separate an idea stuck in your head from one that actually reaches an audience. If Ben’s path from scattered iPhone notes to a USA Today bestseller has you thinking about your own expertise, this is the next book on your list.
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Learn more at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on this LinkedIn Live version of our podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Dr. Ben Granger. He’s a Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics. Many of you know Qualtric, you probably use them whether you know it or not. He has over 15 years experience building, running, and optimizing experience management programs across hundreds of global organizations. His research has been published in academic and business media, including CNBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and he’s earned a doctorate in industrial psychology from University of South Florida. And he is now an author of A Leader Worth Following, which is now a USA Today bestseller as of, I guess, midnight this morning or whatever. Welcome, guys, for coming on. Thanks, Peter. Yes, pleasure to be here. So I wanna talk about your sort of journey, if you will, right. So you’ve got a really cool job at a really cool company. So I’m familiar with Qualtrics for a long time. But tell us what your job like if you were writing the job description of your job, you just never really knows what a organizational psychologist does at a tech surveying tech company. But what is what is the day job?
Ben Granger Really what I do is I take a lot of the data that we collect. As you can imagine, those are familiar with quadtrix. We collect literally billions of data points every year. From how consumers feel about brands, for how employees feel about their employers, what’s going well, what’s not going well. And so my job is really to look at a lot of that data and to distill actionable insights from it and share that with business leaders, with business professionals, customer-facing employees, just anybody in an organization on what are some of the things they can do to improve the experience of
Peter Winick You’re spotting patterns and you’re seeing things that happen in the aggregate right everybody’s using quadric to measure their stuff but you get to see the big who know without you know and. Violent any privacy is there exactly patterns by industry or geography or trends and all that. And then in reading your book i see lots of you there are lots of things that stuck out to me i want you to define is it’s the first time. I heard the term define the way you did is the evolutionary hangout. Well, I read that, I’m like, what the heck, huh? And then I was like, that makes sense. So tell us what that is. That was one thing that stuck out for me.
Ben Granger Yeah. So evolutionary hangover is just my word for cognitive bias. And so I got really fascinated. Obviously I’m an organizational psychologist Peter, as you know, I’m fascinated by the field of evolutionary psychology. And so one of the things that I normally do just in my own day-to-day work is I try to think more deeply about some of the normal mundane stuff that we do. Like for example, what’s a company? What is an organization? And the way I kind of define it as a, an organization today is a group of people working together, using shared resources to accomplish a shared mission. Okay. Humans have always done that. We just do that today and what we call companies and organizations, but it, I think we glean, we gleen a lot. If we go way back in time to look at how did the human brain evolve? Why did it evolve the way it does? And a lot of it has to do with us being a social species. So evolutionary hangovers have to do with, well, why do we engage in all this automatic judgment of people? You know, if we run into a mean person in the street and we, and they, and they, they say something rude to us, or we’re dealing with a customer and they lash out at us and we say, man, what an abrasive person or what a rude person, well that’s a cognitive bias and what I call an evolutionary hangover, essentially. It’s something that developed over evolutionary time for a very good reason, but in modern business settings and modern social settings, it can sometimes cause problems, just like how you were doing last night.
Peter Winick Today, not so much. Right, so we’re tribal. If I had a jerk detector on and really quickly I can go, oh man, that person’s a abrasive or a jerk, I’m probably doing that biologically to go, I don’t want that person to be in my tribe because they’re not gonna be fun. They could put my life at risk or they’re gonna be good hunters, whatever. And that kind of made sense at that time, but I think the evolution of technology and the way we do things, whatever, the brains are always gonna be a couple hundred years behind. Exactly.
Ben Granger Exactly. The author, Hilary Scarlett, puts it really nicely. You know, our brains weren’t designed for 21st century living. They still think they’re on the savanna.
Peter Winick Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you’ve got this job, it’s a really cool job at a really cool company, right? And then you sit around and you go, you know what, I don’t have enough to do, I think I’ll take on another project. I’ll write a book, right. That’s how this happened. I have so much time to fill. Is that what happened? Not exactly.
Ben Granger Yeah, but, but what would basically happen was I was, I’d been working, I’ve been working for Qualtrics for over 10 years and I’ve had a bunch of different jobs and I was doing some work with our PR, with our P R team, with the media and our PR team said, Hey, you know, you’re, you’ve been doing a good job with the medium. We need to elevate your title so we can open some more doors. Okay. So they gave me this great job title chief workplace psychologist and I said, yeah, sign me up for that. But the problem Peter was. I’m surrounded by amazing behavioral scientists and psychologists. So I’m sitting over here thinking, do I deserve this? Like, do you know, do do I belong in this this job title? So I just said, I got to earn this. And so I just started tearing through books and academic papers and yet my area, leadership, all these other areas, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, physics, as you’ve Yeah, different subfields of physics. And then I started writing notes. And so I had this, I had like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notes on my iPhone. Because when I read, write, yeah, one day I’m sitting in church, I’m a religious person, sitting in a church one day and I get this whole nudge. Hey, maybe I should put this all together into a book. Not two or three days later, I got hit up by a major publisher who said, Hey, we just read something that you wrote, you know, work. Would you like to work together on a book? I was like, well, just so happens I just decided to write one, so.
Peter Winick Here we are. Stay there a minute. So I wanna go back in time to, all right, I think this is a good idea to write a book. Right, so this is, I’m guessing a year or two ago, something like that.
Ben Granger About two years ago.
Peter Winick Years ago. So you say, all right, I’m going to write the book. And now here we are on the other side of that. What were your expectations as, or say young Ben, but but pre author Ben versus the reality. And I’m having to eat a little bit of your own dog food that’s in the book?
Ben Granger Yes. Thank you. Dr. Naive, Dr. Ben, let’s talk about naive doctor. I love reading. I love writing. I was having a blast. I was like, oh, this one, I can’t wait to start my next one. And I have a couple in the works, by the way. Right. And at the time, we were kind of joking about this beforehand. A lot of the publishers were that I was talking to around the time were saying, hey, you know, the real work starts once you’re done with your manuscript. Non-mike. Yeah, I mean, I do keynote talks all the time. I do workshops. This will be a great new pocket. Right. Yeah. Sounds awesome. Let’s do that’s not work for me. I like that part. Oh my God. That I underestimate the amount of work involved in marketing and promoting. And I should also add, you know, self-promotion is not natural for me? I don’t like that. It feels just
Peter Winick Stay there a minute, right? So in your job at Qualtrics, which is just an amazing company, you’re not client fit, right. You’re not out there on the business development side. You’re out there attracting clients. In your role, there’s always plenty for you to do. You don’t have to create demand of, oh, there is not enough data today for me to sift.
Ben Granger In my current job, that’s true, but I have been on demand generation. I’ve been on revenue generating teams. So I’ve done a lot of that work, but in my current job, That’s true.
Peter Winick Right, but even when in those roles you’re not promoting Ben, you’re promoting the suite of offerings and services and solutions that fall under the brand. So a lot of folks tell me that it doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t come natural. It’s not what I do. But how are you coming to terms with that? Because part of what you need to do is if you’ve got to believe in this more than anyone else, and I know that you do, then you got to take on the role of, Geez, I gotta be banging the drum on this.
Ben Granger Right. The way I justify it to myself is the message is what needs to get out there. Right. And I have heard competing arguments here and I’m actually very curious what you think about this, Peter, because you know this area better than me. I don’t see it so much as it’s me that I’m selling. What I’m telling is the messages which I really believe in and I get that feedback of life.
Peter Winick Stay there for a minute because I think that’s really important. I think people are smart and there are people that promote themselves and everything that they do, whatever that is. There’s always a price tag at the end of the thing. One week it’s a program or a book or whatever and that’s fine and dandy if that’s who you are and what you want to be and all That sort of stuff, right? I think you’re right that you are really the messenger, the evangelist, call it what you will, for the ideas. And these ideas will could live longer than you, right? Like I can imagine a time in whatever, 50, 100 years from now, when you’re not here anymore, when people are still looking at this book on those are pretty cool ideas, right. And I think that’s a great mindset to say, part of the reason I’m on the planet is to unleash the power of the ideas, not for ego satisfaction because Anybody that reads this book will be smarter, a smarter leader, a better leader, a happier leader, or more grounded.
Ben Granger Yeah, that’s such a good way to put it. Totally agree. And I like the way, you know, what, what one idea about ideas that is really stuck with me comes from the great John Henry Cardinal Newman, and he used to say is ideas are infinite and the ideas unfold over time in the play of lively minds, I just see myself in that unfolding I’m helping to unfold these ideas, not only with these ideas live past me, they’ve lived before me. And they’ll continue to live on. And I feel like my job is to help catalyze the unfolding of that and to get people talking about it, to engage in this conversation. Yep. So what other…
Peter Winick Surprises. What other things surprised you along the journey? And I know you’re really in the book marketing journey, though you’re in the depths of it now. What are the things that quote, you know, young Ben of two years ago, naive Ben?
Ben Granger Well, this is a this is kind of a meta point and a key point that I address in the book itself is about communication. So the whole book is an effort and communication. Right? I’m having a conversation with people through the book. Yeah. But one of the most fascinating things I found in probably the biggest surprise actually, was when I was going down into the development of human language. And so like I mentioned, I allowed my reading to take me wherever it needed to go. So if I was reading a P P book or a piece and I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. I just, I just allow myself to go because I wasn’t planning on writing the book. Right. So I just was studying and when I eventually got to how long ago did humans learn to talk, right? Right. Because what a lot of anthropologists agree, this is disputed, but what most anthropologists agree is that the development of human speech developed about a hundred to two hundred thousand years ago. Now, I think to the average person, that sounds like a long time. But in the in the evolutionary history, right, if we really zoom out and we look at how long or no have may has mankind been around. It’s almost like we learned to talk yesterday and we learned to write an hour ago because we’ve been communicating nonverbally for millions and millions of years. So, this got me thinking. Okay, now we’re living in this world where everybody texts each other. We’re all on anonymous social media posts to each other, we’re sending emails to thousands and thousands of people, and we assume that the meaning behind the words that we string together are interpreted exactly the way that we intend.
Peter Winick A great idea is only the beginning. In the Thought Leadership Handbook, Bill Sherman, Nara and Ariel and I share what it takes to shape, package, and scale your expertise in a crowded market. It’s available now. Learn more at thoughtleadershiphandbook.com and order it today at Amazon, BNN, Bookshop, or Amplify. Well, but we all know that’s not true, right? We’ve all gotten that email from a friend or a colleague or a loved one. And you read it three times. And it could be depending on your mood, you’re feeling sensitive that day or cranky that day, you’re never enough coffee and go, Oh my god, why are they attacking me? Or why are there sarcastic or what you know, like there’s, there’s a bold font, right, right. Not a sarcastic font, like, so and sometimes that leads to negative stuff where you got to pick up the phone and say, did you I took that to mean this is that what you Thank you. Like oh no no no I left off a letter right you know I was because we don’t think about the other we’re thinking about they were rushing off to get that text to you or that email whether it was a starbucks or something and they didn’t sit there and contemplate it for 20 minutes like you just did on the receiving.
Ben Granger Exactly. And here’s my big challenge. I think we all do know this, but how often do we operate as if that’s true? Right. That’s a different question. And I think we often don’t operate as it that’s trip, especially when we’re the one delivering the mess.
Peter Winick So let me ask you this. So you’ve got a pretty demanding job at a pretty high growth organization and they sort of blessed the project, right? You could have just done this all on your own, but they said, you know what, Ben, this would be a good thing. It’s good for you, it’s good us, it’s for our customers, it good for our employees. What do you think, why do you they justified that this is a great use of some percentage of your time over the last couple years and moving forward now in promotion and speaking at all? What’s the benefit to the, to, to Qualtron?
Ben Granger I think the first thing I would say is that the book, the studying in the book I did on my own time. So I was that was I made that very clear. We were very clear on that together. But then I went through a lot. I did a lot of work to pitch it to the company to say, hey, Qualtrics, look, I’ve been working on this for a while. Looks like I got a book deal here. Do y’all want to partner on it? One of the things I did and I did, this wasn’t a mechanism to sell it to Qualtrics. I just did it because, you know, we sit on a ton of data and insights. I leave a lot of what we’ve learned into all the academic studies I did. So it’s intertwined. And so I said, look, I think what this is going to do is it’s going to show off how deep our research is and the same plane as all this other academic research that a lot people are very familiar with. That’s mutually beneficial. And so… That resonated. And also, the mission and vision I had for the book, which is to improve the human experience, is identical to the mission and vision of our company. So, there was…
Peter Winick Right, stay there a minute because I think a lot of authors and thought leaders struggle with this issue and the reality is there’s alignment, right? Now alignment might last for a month or 10 years or forever, but as long as there’s a alignment around benefit and around why and around, and I love how you brought it back to sort of mission vision values, it’s probably not a coincidence that your personal mission vision values line up to ball tricks and you’ve been there a long time, right? So There’s a self-selection piece there, right? And the more successful this book is and the more successfully you are, there’s a halo effect to Qualtrics. And that’ll, you know, so there’s a flywheel effect there. Good for Ben, good for Qualtric, good for our employees, good for our customers, whatever. And I think it’s really a cool thing for a brand, if you will, to go with X number of published authors. Because we expect that of academia, right. Like you’re not gonna stay, like you could have been an academic if you wanted to, right, Academia is that the KPI, if you will, is published. Publish or perish. Right. And the fact is, sorry, my academic friends, nobody reads most academic journals, there’s five people that read the article you spent years on. What I love about what you did is it hits an academic standard in terms of quality research, whatever, but it reads like a real book. Therefore, you’re unleashing the power of the ideas, not by dumbing them down to the silly level, but making them approachable and relatable and whatever. And and there were a couple of pieces in there. I’m like, wow, there had to be a ton of data under that to get to that point. Like this, this isn’t I don’t believe this just because well, Ben said, right? Like that’s that’s a piece. So.
Ben Granger It’s right on. And I would also add to my academic friends there is the work that they do is essential is critical. And we need both. We need the evangelists who can take those insights distill them, tell a story about it to the general population. And we need the people who go really deep and get very technical because that’s where those insights come from They are testing it. They’re beating it up and they’re saying okay this and then I’m one of, I’m a practitioner, I am a scientist practitioner, so I take a lot of that, I bring it into the field, I test it in the field and then say, okay, that passes the eye test, let’s put it, let’s go out there and get it.
Peter Winick And that overlap of the theoretical to the applied, the academics typically don’t get the advantage. Like they could model out, improve their ideas from a research perspective, but you work in the real world, right? Yeah. Oftentimes the real world, you know, was it the Mike Tyson, but everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face, HD until they get punch from the face. Right. But it’s you’re dealing with that on a day to day in the reality of the customers and such using quality.
Ben Granger Here’s a really good example of exactly what you’re saying, Peter. I’m working right now with a good friend of mine and colleague, Dr. Shawna Waters, and she herself is a phenomenal thought leader and publisher and an author. And one of the topics we working on is this, the problem of goal setting and organizations. Now goal setting as a science has over a thousand articles that have been written on it in academia, lock and lay them back in the nineties. I mean, it’s one of the most well-established. Practices of motivation. And yet, you take that, you take that practice that’s so well published on, and established, and you drop it into a messy, complex, large organization. And surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work exactly the way the research suggests. So we’re talking about why is that the case? And it’s not a problem of the science. It’s a problem, of assumptions that we make when we apply the research in the real world.
Peter Winick Well, an example in the book, and it’s funny when I was reading that, I’ve had the exact same experience where you go to buy a car, the car’s amazing, you know, the experience is great. The sales guy is great, the price like you’re like, wow, this was awesome. And then I’ve have this several times that the real car comes. And then at the end, the sales layer gal sits down and says, and you’re going to get this survey and blah, blah, and they’re going to tell you to answer it. Like, wait, time on time out here. Time out. I know the head person at BMW didn’t say this was a good idea. I know that people at Net Promoter Score, or whatever tech they’re using for that, didn’t train that person on how to do it. So why did that person do that? Well, why he did that is because X percent of his comp per vehicle comes from getting these scores. So if you’re going to say to me, this is going to hit me in the pocketbook, you don’t have to train me. I’m going to sit down and look eye to eye and say, hey, Ben, you know… I hope you love everything, but it’s really not good for me or my career or whatever, unless you circle the number five. Let’s practice circling the number 5 for me. And you just bastardize the entire data. And you’ve just wasted zillions of dollars, right? But we’ve all seen this every day. And I love that you call that out, because if you make the wrong thing, right, the intent of the measurement was to, where can we get better? How do we meet all the sales gap?
Ben Granger Exactly. Exactly. It’s one of my favorite. It’s one of my favorite and least favorite examples. In fact, I had a friend of mine who I gave the book and gave her early copy of the book to he was reading that chapter. I think it’s chapter four, if I’m not mistaken, on the plane. His plane landed. He just finished that little section in the book. And then what happened when they landed? The flight attendant said, oh, you’re going to get a survey. And he said he just busted out laughing.
Peter Winick And the flight attendant is not holding you hostage until you get off the plane.
Ben Granger Unless you give us fives, you know.
Peter Winick At least they didn’t do that in the air and say, if you don’t give us five, I don’t know, the pilot might not be in a good mood today. It might be a rocky land.
Ben Granger Yeah, maybe we’re not going to LAX. Kind of depends.
Peter Winick What are the things that you hope, if we were to say, let’s schedule a time a year from now and talk, what are you hoping is different in the, maybe the business lexicon in your world and the Qualtrics world, what would be the, what would be different?
Ben Granger Yeah, I Hope that I hope that we get more comfortable with having hard conversations with ourselves I know that sounds a little fluffy and light, but I don’t think it is I really want to see I want to a bit of an internal revolution and
Peter Winick Say more about that. What does that mean, conversations with yourself? Because, you know, I’m in New York, I walk down the streets and see a lot of people having conversations out loud. Is that what you’re?
Ben Granger Deep intentional introspection. So introspections, that term, I think we’re all somewhat familiar with. I say it’s almost anonymous with psychology as a field. But really what that means is trying to access your thoughts and trying to access, why do I do what I do? Why do I say what I said? Why do think the way I do about people, especially? Why do I create the stories that I do about somebody based on a small interaction and an isolated experience and really just starting to get comfortable being uncomfortable with these conversations with ourselves? I don’t think enough people do this because I interviewed tons of leaders as part of this process.
Peter Winick So often, what’s the frequency? What’s the, I mean, imagine it’s not something you’re gonna say, hey, boss, I’m taking off three days to talk to myself, right? Is it, you carve out a cup of coffee on a Monday morning or is there a frequency? Is there a way? How would you prescribe?
Ben Granger What one of the great suggestions I heard many years ago was from Marshall Goldsmith and he said, you know, one thing you can do after each day is just ask yourself a couple of quick questions at the end of the day. What could I have done to be a better coworker? What could have done to be better at delivering customer service? And that’s a great place to start a quick two-minute daily reflection. But then I also think we should probably start to do things like more intentionally, hey, I’m going to spend an hour and I’m just going to sit down with a notepad and I am going to write about, just get. And by the way, Ariana Huffington at a conference one day mentioned this, that women are much more likely to sit in silence and do really in self-reflection than men. I thought that was interesting. I kind of looked it up. If that was true, I find that it was. And so this is something I think it obviously some women need to hear this too. Obviously some men need to here this too, maybe some men do this already. But I think we all need to be able to spend some dedicated time really thinking deeply. And so cadence, that could be once a month that you sit and you have a 30 minute conversation with yourself and that might be your future self, you know, right? I mean, look, I call that travel back to the future and not to one of my favorite movies of all time.
Peter Winick Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time, so much insight here, and I wish you the continued success with the book and all the other things you’re working on.
Ben Granger Thank you so much, Peter. I really appreciate you having me. Love the questions.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
