BOOK BRIEFS
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By Liz WisemanBook briefed by Sharon Lustig
Every life sciences organization invests in training. Curriculum is built, learners complete modules and workshops energize them. Yet, too often, behavior doesn’t change.
We spend enormous energy asking whether the training was good enough. Author Liz Wiseman asks a different question: Was the leadership environment capable of receiving it?
Wiseman’s Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter is not a book about training. It’s a book about the leadership behavior that determines whether talent — and by extension learning — actually shows up at work.
Based on research across more than 150 executives, Wiseman identifies two fundamentally different leadership orientations: Multipliers and Diminishers.
Multipliers operate from the belief that people are smart and will figure it out; their role is to create the conditions for that intelligence to surface. Diminishers, often just as smart and just as well-intentioned, operate from the belief that their team can’t function without them.
The effect is predictable: Multipliers consistently support roughly twice the output from their people than Diminishers do.
What stopped me when I first read this book was the concept of the Accidental Diminishers and through that, acknowledging my own blind spots. Wiseman catalogs the ways capable, enthusiastic leaders unintentionally suppress the people around them: The leader who generates so many ideas that the team stops contributing their own or the one who jumps in to “help” before the team has a chance to struggle through.
Most of these people do not set out to diminish. Most would describe themselves as supportive. The impact is invisible to them because they’re busy being helpful. Wiseman discusses identifying these traits and adopting new ones to create a more conducive environment for success.
For those of us working in life sciences learning and development, this is the variable we know but may not discuss. We can design excellent programs. We cannot control whether the manager who receives a newly trained professional challenges the team or short-circuits their thinking, creates space to apply new skills or fills that space with their own.
Wiseman’s framework provides trainers with language for a conversation that has been hard to have — not “your managers are the problem,” but “here’s what the research shows about which leadership behaviors accelerate what we’re trying to build, and which ones work against it.”
Multipliers is worth reading for the Accidental Diminisher framework alone. It’s a book that makes capable leaders genuinely curious about their blind spots rather than defensive about them. That makes it a useful companion to almost any leadership development work happening in your organization.
Another book by Wiseman, Impact Players, looks at the dynamic from the individual contributor perspective. I look forward to reading that one soon.
Sharon Lustig is president and CEO of CMR Institute. Email Sharon at slustig@cmrinstitute.org or connection through linkedin.com/in/slustig.