Businesses should stop glorifying cheerful superheroes and emphasize the quiet safeguarder. Cheerful superhero is my term for those people who sweep in to fix a problem after it’s occurred, often with a loud noise and a smile on their face. They don’t complain about cleaning up other peoples’ messes, partly because they thrive on restoring…
While talent, hard work, and passion are important characteristics for high performance, business success is increasingly dependent on how employees interact with others. In a team environment, so-called negotiated givers might be the best employees. In the best-selling book, “Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success,” Wharton professor Adam Grant describes three different workplace…
The commonly-accepted practice of employee ranking can be dangerous to company culture. Ranking employees, also known as stacked or forced ranking, is a process which compares individual employees to each other, typically associated with annual performance reviews. Employees are usually forced into one of three buckets: A (top 20%), B (the middle 70%), and C…
If you want someone to achieve a goal, you should give them a head start – even if that head start is really just an illusion. Loyalty programs are based on the idea that consumers are more likely to repeat purchase if they are given incentives to reach specific goals with well-defined rewards. A classic…
I stumbled on an insightful definition of being stupid from Adam Robinson: Stupidity is overlooking or dismissing [conspicuously] crucial information. Robinson argues stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence. Instead, stupidity is impaired judgement due to one or more factors: Rushing or urgency Information overload Physical or emotional stress Intense focus on an outcome Being…
In 1965 two researchers conducted a now-famous experiment in a public elementary school, dubbed Pygmalion in the classroom. The researchers told teachers that about one-fifth of their students were unusually intelligent (so-called “growth spurters”), based on results of a fictitious IQ test. Even though the gifted students were seemingly chosen at random, these students performed…
“Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.” – Tony Schwartz (source) In the late 1950’s, researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman documented that humans sleep in 90-minute cycles – from light to deep sleep and back to light sleep again. Professor Kleitman later discovered…
Not long after I joined my last employer, a colleague provided me with an incredibly important insight on how to get things done. Informal networks, she explained, were much stronger than the official hierarchy. Top-down decisions were usually met with questions which delayed their implementation. On the other hand, powerfully-connected people could implement decisions virally…
For much of my career, I’ve argued that people design key performance indicators (KPIs) incorrectly. One of my own favorite blogs made the case that, unless you compare yourself against some external benchmark, you might be making progress towards achieving your KPIs but actually losing ground. Simplistically, if you’re growing by 20% and the market…
In the climactic scene of the movie A Few Good Men, Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) demands the truth from a testifying Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson). Jack’s response is a cinema classic: You can’t handle the truth! It’s a mesmerizing scene which contains an interesting psychological tidbit. People often rate honesty as the most important value…