- How To Spot An Idiot - Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker
- "The kindest person in the room is often the smartest"
- "We survived as a spieces by being suspiciuos. In order to be kind, we have to shutdown our animal instinct ... empathy and compasion are evolved states of being"
- How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
- SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others
- Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness
"Status is about relative importance to others. Certainty concerns being able to predict the future. Autonomy provides a sense of control over events. Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, of friend rather than foe. And fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people. These five domains activate either the ‘primary reward’ or ‘primary threat’ circuitry (and associated networks) of the brain. For example, a perceived threat to one’s status activates similar brain networks to a threat to one’s life. in the same way, a perceived increase in fairness activates the same reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward."
- This article is pure gold ... after I highlighted almost every word.
- NonViolent Communication - Marshal Rosenberg
- What are you feeling? "I feel insert feeling because" not "I feel, like you"
- Do you have any unfulfilled needs? Make a clear request. Remember, the other person isn't behaving wrongly, they just aren't behaving according to our beliefs and values. Focus on your own needs, instead of what is wrong with others.
- Framework for Dealing with Difficult situations:
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- Fully accept the situation. Do not deny your feelings, but investigate why it is important to you, whether it is coming from your ego or your principles. I do not want to stick to a point because of my ego, I want to be able to truly let go.
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- If it is conflicting with my principles, then I do not want to deny who I am and accept it, I want to try and change it.
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- If I can't change it, then the only logical conclusion is to walk away.
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- Empathy Is The Most Important Leadership Skill According To Research - Tracy Brower When people reported their leaders were empathetic, more than double the amount of people: reported to be innovative and engaged, were less likely to leave and found the environment to be inclusive. Empathy drives results.
- Dear HBR - podcast
- My Dad's notes - private, sorry, read mediation skills first.
- If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
- Brilliant Jerks in Engineering - Brendan Gregg
- Dealing with a Micromanaging Boss - Beat Your Genes
- The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition: Essays On Software Engineering - Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
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SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others
"Many new leaders may negatively impact the domains of SCARF by accident. They may know how things should be done, and subsequently provide too much direction and not enough positive feedback, thereby affecting people’s status. They often don’t provide clear expectations, impacting certainty. They micro manage, impacting autonomy. They want to maintain a professional distance, impacting relatedness. And, they may impact fairness by not being transparent enough. When the opposite happens and you meet someone who makes you feel better about yourself, provides clear expectations, lets you make decisions, trusts you and is fair, you will probably work harder for them as you feel intrinsically rewarded by the relationship itself."
"Techniques for motivating and rewarding staff are largely based on the carrot and stick principle, with the carrot mostly involving money or a promotion. The SCARF model points to more creative ways of motivating that may not just be cheaper, but also stronger and more sustainable."
"in most people, the question ‘can i offer you some feedback’ generates a similar response to hearing fast footsteps behind you at night. Performance reviews often generate status threats, explaining why they are often ineffective at stimulating behavioral change. if leaders want to change others’ behavior, more attention must be paid to reducing status threats when giving feedback. one way to do this is by allowing people to give themselves feedback on their own performance."
"Years of research show open office plans actually make people less likely to talk to each other. Having no possibility of privacy causes stress and therefore discourages creative thought"
"maintaining observability of workers may counterintuitively reduce their performance"
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More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews
- Who gets ahead around here? Is it the people who help others succeed? Or is it the people who put themselves before the team?
- The best managers in the world create moments where genuine dialogue can occur, where employees feel their opinions matter and like they are cared about in a unique way.
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Performance Reviews Are Pointless And Insulting -- So Why Do They Still Exist?
- Performance reviews are artifacts left over from the Industrial Revolution.
- Performance reviews are not effective at improving performance. They have never shown their value as leadership tools -- but they make excellent power-and-control mechanisms, and that is one reason some companies have trouble giving up on them.
- If the relationship is healthy between the manager and the employee, they're having regular conversations anyway.
- Of course, employees need to be able to get feedback when they need it. If they can get that feedback without being graded like elementary school students then it's a win-win for everybody.
- It doesn't help an employee move forward for a manager to tell them what they did well and did badly last year. If a manager needs to give someone feedback, they should do that in the moment — not months later.
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The 5 New Habits of the Most Effective Leaders, Backed by Considerable Science
- Why not use a shit sandwich to give feedback?
While one in five people appreciate the positives, three out of four feel manipulated. Nine out of ten feel patronized. And only 7 percent actually change the behavior in question.
- For 40 percent more effective feedback, rather say:
I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them
- Getting rid of toxic employees is more valuable than employing superstars:
Adding a superstar to a team boosts employee morale by 16 percent and saves the average company approximately $6,000 per year. Removing a toxic employee from a team boosts employee morale by 61 percent and saves the average company over $13,000 per year.
- Why not use a shit sandwich to give feedback?
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Why appraisals are pointless for most people
"They’re really toxic and people hate them. You’re creating artificial steps just to check a box."
"Brain imaging research positing that even high-performing employees automatically go into a defence mode during performance reviews, turning a supposedly productive meeting into a fight-or-flight scenario."
"In the world of business, there aren’t many universal truths. Just one, really: Annual performance reviews are the worst."
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The Performance Management Revolution
"Dell, Microsoft, IBM and other big business names ... have ditched the process" "Companies that say they are getting rid of ratings are still using ratings. They just have different labels. For one thing, managers must have some rationale for assigning promotions and raises." "If there’s no data on performance, the process of handing out promotions and raises can turn chaotic. In some cases, companies could be vulnerable to lawsuits if they don’t have a way to justify decisions."
"restricts creativity, generates mountains of paperwork, and serves no real purpose." "appraisals haven’t prevented discriminatory practices." "there’s the possibility of bias in every piece of qualitative information that decision makers consider"
"performance actually declined when people were rated relative to others. Nor did the ratings seem accurate."
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Why ranking employees by performance backfires
In many organisations, line managers assign provisional grades then thrash out the overall distribution in “moderation” meetings with other managers. But it is hard to objectively rank people in white-collar jobs doing different things. “You’d have people sat in a room who barely knew each other, comparing apples with pears,” said a second manager at a different firm.
these systems are often corrosive for morale, which damages the very performance levels they aim to improve. Research shows that feedback has a moderately positive effect on performance on average, but in a third of cases it decreases performance. What is key is whether people feel the feedback is fair.
Microsoft scrapped forced distribution in 2013. The UK’s senior civil service followed suit in 2019.
Human resources departments have had to rethink plenty of old notions since the pandemic hit. The counterproductive pseudoscience of forced distribution ought to be one idea that finally stays dead.
- The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal - Seth Freeman
- STABEN - Jennie Byrne
- Durable decisions: Start by documenting your goals, assumptions, pros and cons of your options and very importantly who the decision maker will be, who people can follow up with afterwards. Make sure everyone agrees on the inputs and then let the decision maker make the decision. Communicate the decision widely and quickly. The decision can change, but only if the inputs change. This means that anyone who disagrees, needs to say why the goals, assumptions or options are incorrect.
- Narcissism Driven by Insecurity, Not Grandiose Sense of Self. Narcissists tend to engage in self congratulations, because of their insecurities, but this tends to make people like them less, which leads to more insecurities and more self congratulations.