On a recent family trip to a shopping mall, our younger daughter pointed to a drastically reduced product and enthusiastically lobbied for us to purchase it. After all, it seemed so cheap. The original price was prominently displayed, crossed out, and replaced by a much lower number. The discount appeared irresistible. So I found myself trying to explain to her the power of anchoring.
Anchoring is one of the most familiar ideas in behavioral decision-making. In their pioneering work on judgment under uncertainty, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that people often rely too heavily on an initial reference point when making estimates or decisions. Once an anchor is set, we tend to adjust away from it, but usually not enough. A price tag, a first number in a negotiation, an early performance rating, or even an initial description of a person can quietly shape what we subsequently consider reasonable, fair, or true.
The downsides and upsides of anchors
This is why the original price in a shop matters even when we never intended to pay it. It is why salary negotiations can be influenced by whoever names the first number. It is why a candidate introduced as “high potential” may be evaluated differently from a candidate introduced as “solid but still developing,” even before either has had a chance to demonstrate much. Anchors do not need to be accurate to be powerful. They only need to arrive early enough.
Given this, anchoring is often treated as a problem. It can be a marketing device that nudges us to buy more than we need. It can become a cognitive straightjacket that keeps us tied to an outdated opinion even when better evidence becomes available. It can also distort fairness: when past salaries, legacy performance ratings, or inherited labels become the reference points for future opportunities, they may reproduce old inequalities rather than reflect current contribution.
Yet anchoring is not only something that happens to us. It can also be something we do intentionally. We are not merely passive recipients of the anchors placed around us. We have some agency in choosing the reference points that shape how we interpret situations, how others perceive us, and how teams make sense of what matters.
How anchors operate in global work
This is especially relevant in global work, where ambiguity is almost always higher. When we enter a new country, join a dispersed team, work in another language, or collaborate across unfamiliar institutional contexts, we often lack the subtle cues that would help us interpret what is going on. In such moments, we may be tempted to grab the first available anchor: a stereotype about a national culture, a single difficult interaction, or the way things were done in the last country or organization we knew well. These anchors may offer comfort, but they can also mislead.
Consider a manager arriving in a new subsidiary. If her first anchor is the assumption that the local team is “resistant to change,” she may interpret every question as defensiveness. But if she deliberately anchors her understanding in curiosity (think “there must be local knowledge here that I do not yet have”) the same questions become a source of insight. The anchor does not change the facts, but it changes the meaning she attaches to them.
Or consider a global team that has just been formed across Barcelona, Singapore, São Paulo and Munich. If the anchor for collaboration is the headquarters’ meeting rhythm, everyone else becomes a deviation from the norm: too late, too quiet, too asynchronous, too hard to reach. But if the team anchors itself in the principle of equitable participation, it will design meetings, handovers and decision rules differently. The reference point shifts from convenience for the center to fairness across the system.
A third example concerns language. In multilingual teams, fluency is often used as an implicit anchor for competence. The colleague who speaks quickly and idiomatically is assumed to be sharper; the colleague who searches for words may be judged as less prepared. A more intentional anchor would be contribution rather than fluency. Leaders can make this visible by separating the quality of an idea from the ease with which it is expressed, by giving people time to prepare, and by creating written channels where more voices can enter the conversation.
Anchoring as a source of proximity
Importantly, intentional anchoring can become a source of what I call proximity: our ability to balance the need for belonging with the need for distinctiveness in any distance-infused context. Global work often stretches both needs. We want to feel connected to colleagues across distance, yet we also want our local knowledge, professional identity and personal background to be recognized rather than flattened into a generic template.
Anchors can help here. A team might anchor its identity not in sameness, but in a shared purpose that leaves room for difference. Think “We are here to make this product work across markets” rather than “We all need to work like headquarters.” Such an anchor creates commonality without erasing local distinctiveness. People can belong to the same endeavor while still bringing different forms of expertise to it.
Similarly, a leader can anchor a distributed team’s routines in moments of human connection rather than constant availability. A short personal check-in at the beginning of a monthly global meeting, a rotating “local context” update, or a ritual of explaining the story behind a market decision can create a sense of closeness without pretending that distance has disappeared. These practices may look small, but they provide reference points for how people experience the team: not as a collection of remote transactions, but as a community of people trying to do meaningful work together.
Of course, anchors can be badly chosen. A team can anchor itself in headquarters dominance, native-speaker fluency, or the myth that the “best” global professional is the one who is always available and always adaptable. These anchors may produce compliance for a while, but they rarely produce connection, learning or collaboration across boundaries.
Choose them wisely
The question, then, is not whether anchors will shape global work. The question is whether we leave them to chance.
In an increasingly distributed workplace, leaders and professionals need to become more aware of the reference points they create and accept. What do we use as the first lens for interpreting a new colleague? What becomes the default model of a good meeting, a good contribution, a good leader, or a good global professional? Which early stories about a country, a team or an individual are we allowing to harden into assumptions?
Practically, then, we need to choose our anchors well. We can anchor new relationships in curiosity rather than judgment. We can anchor global teams in shared purpose rather than head office convenience. We can anchor evaluations in contribution rather than accent, familiarity or inherited labels. Or we can anchor our own professional identity in the kind of value you want to create, not merely in how others first happen to see you.
My daughter did not get the discounted product that day. But she did get a lesson in why the first number we see can be so persuasive. For global professionals, the lesson is broader. In a world full of distance, difference and uncertainty, the anchors we choose can either narrow our field of vision or help us build more inclusive forms of connection. The price tag is only the beginning.