Why this key skill can make people highly effective leaders

Airbnb employees seem to love CEO Brian Chesky.

One possible reason? The startup founder’s ability to inspire awe in his people.

Take for example the company’s headquarters, which allows people to transcend San Francisco and enter another world by simply picking a conference room; the company’s core mission to entirely reimagine the way we travel today; or the endless Airbnb listings that show us homes we never would have known existed.

It’s hard to imagine an employee that hasn’t at one time or another experienced large-scale wonder at work there.

People who possess the ability to elicit these feelings of awe in others could be highly effective leaders says Paul Piff, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at University of California, Berkeley — that is if they use their powers for good.

During a series of studies recently published by the American Psychological Association in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” Piff and his team of researchers found that inducing a sense of awe in people could promote generous, helpful, and positive social behavior.

“We find that awe makes people more ethical, less entitled, more cooperative — all of which often play key roles in organizational and workplace success,” Piff explained to Business Insider.

During one study, for example, researchers had a group of volunteers stand in a grove of towering trees and look up at them for one minute while another group looked instead at a tall building. Then experimenters spilled a handful of pens, seemingly by accident, and volunteers in awe of the vast trees were deemed to be the most helpful in picking them up.

Piff says awe also has the potential to promote curiosity and openness to novelty, both of which are central to creativity. It could make people more cooperative and team-oriented, more attuned to collective interests, and identify more strongly with their organizations.

The researchers wrote that they believe awe induces a feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself. This diminished sense of self shifts focus away from an individual’s need and toward the greater good.

The studies used a variety of methods to test the effect of awe including showing video clips of nature and of colored water droplets colliding with a bowl of milk.

“The common thread across all of those manipulations is that each one, however different in content, exposed people to something vast that transcended their understanding of the world, or their default mode of seeing the world,” Piff explained.

A leader could orchestrate this in a number of different ways, Piff says, including incorporating collective rituals at work, time outdoors, art, music, and dance.

This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Rachel is a careers reporter at Business Insider.

Image: Pedestrians cross a road at Tokyo’s business district. REUTERS/Yuya Shino.