Management gemsFind here some gems from our monitoring of the best publications on leadership and management
Why do we so frequently promote bad leaders?
Paradoxically, people promoted to the highest ranks are far from systematically being those most suited to leadership. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Professor of Business Psychology at University College London, deciphers this phenomenon in a McKinsey podcast.
One of the main causes of this paradox is the confusion between competence and self-confidence. Expressing one’s opinions with confidence, charisma and strength of conviction conveys the impression of possessing strong leadership potential. This overlooks the importance of empathy, of integrity, and of the ability to motivate one’s teams to engage in a collective effort. In this way, an insidious discrimination is established in favor of people displaying excessive self-confidence, or even narcissism.
In order to counter this bias, the priority is to review promotion processes so as to place greater emphasis on emotional and interpersonal skills. Which, observes Chamorro-Premuzic, has a far greater effect on increasing diversity than the implementation of quotas. Furthermore, orienting leadership development programs toward the reinforcement of these qualities within all potential leaders will allow not only the improvement of leadership quality, but also the development of a corporate culture that is at once more inclusive and more effective.
Source: Why so many bad bosses still rise to the top, McKinsey Talks Talent podcast, May 2024.
“Things were better before”… Really?
We often hear this nostalgic chorus: “We can’t trust one another like we used to; people are more and more individualistic; incivility and violence are on the rise…” According to this ditty, our society is facing a form of moral decline.
Psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert reviewed hundreds of studies to analyze this worrying phenomenon. They discovered that the myth of “moral decline” has in fact been around since antiquity. In parallel, the study of actual behaviors shows, at worst, stability, and most often a progression of positive behaviors. We are less frequently at war, rules and laws provide a better framework for relationships and reinforce trust, we continue to help one another…
Why do our perceptions differ so significantly from reality? Two cognitive biases are involved: the negativity bias and the memory bias. Our brains give greater importance to negative information, which originally constituted a protective reflex. On the other hand, our negative memories fade more quickly than our positive ones, which allows us to distance ourselves from negative experiences, but can also lead to our idealizing the past.
As a result, we cannot help thinking, often erroneously, that things were better before. But knowing why we have this biased perception can help us put it into perspective.
Source: Déclin moral : pourquoi pense-t-on toujours que « c’était mieux avant » ? [Moral decline: why do we always think “things were better before”?], Adam Mastroianni, Polytechnique Insights, November 2023.
Do you remember to organize “spring cleaning” sessions?
There is no dearth of inconveniences over the course of our professional lives. What we do not always realize is that a huge proportion of these arise from our propensity to add rather than subtract. By way of illustration, when a university president solicited ideas for improvement from students, professors and administrative staff, only 11% of the proposals involved removing an element or discontinuing an activity. A striking figure, but a fairly universal one.
How can we fight this reflex? Urging everyone to show self-discipline proves exhausting and largely ineffective. The authors of this article instead recommend organizing sessions to suppress any unnecessary irritants. One criterion: telling yourself “good riddance”! This was the approach taken by the chief quality officer of Hawaii Pacific Health, a healthcare network. She asked the entire medical staff to point out what was ”ill-conceived, unnecessary or simply stupid”. As a result, 188 cuts were recommended and 87 implemented, providing clear gains in time and motivation for all concerned.
To your dustbins! …
Source: Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate Everyone, Robert I. Sutton, Huggy Rao, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2024.
How do you define success?
Certain graduation speeches leave a lasting impact on the students they are intended for, but also on all those who listen to them afterwards. This is the case of the one given by Roger Federer at Dartmouth College this year.
Of course, Federer spoke about work, effort, perseverance, stress management. Of course, he underlined the importance of one’s entourage, of having faith in oneself and the trust of others. But a particularly striking insight—and certainly a useful one in the corporate world—was the way he looks at his successes and failures.
Of all the points he has played, what proportion has he won? As surprising at it may be, that proportion amounts to just 54%—barely more than half! But it allowed him to win 80% of his matches, and to be world number one for nearly six years.
An invitation to not focus on our errors: the important thing is to know how to put them behind us (while reserving the right to draw lessons from them later, at the opportune time) and, especially, to play the next point without assuming that we will fail again.
Source : 2024 Commencement Address by Roger Federer, Dartmouth, June 2024.
ShareA job well done: an overlooked source of motivation?
With every passing survey, it is observed that employees are disengaging from their work. Suffering at work seems to be inexorably increasing, and rare are the efforts to recreate job satisfaction that wind up being crowned with success.
It might be the time to return to the excellent article by Yves Clot, L’aspiration au travail bien fait (The aspiration for a job well done). The psychologist underlines that performance and health are wholly compatible. When we make an effective effort, one that meets the goal we had set ourselves or accepted, we may be tired, but also satisfied. Unless the load is a chronically unbearable one, we then recover from this healthy fatigue to take on another motivating project the following day. On the other hand, producing an ineffective effort is exhausting and demoralizing. Work fatigue is compounded by stress and ruminations about doing the same job again the next day, in an equally ineffective manner. It then becomes necessary to redouble our efforts to manage to get back to work—without even being in a condition to give the best of our capacities.
Yves Clot thus invites us to first remedy the organization’s dysfunctions: the idea is to treat what is preventing people from doing quality work, without limiting ourselves to offering psychological support to “help make unbearable situations bearable”.
Source : L'aspiration au travail bien fait (The aspiration for a job well done), Yves Clot, Journal de l'École de Paris du management, n° 99, January-February 2013.
To learn more :
¬ Stimulate job satisfaction (Manageris’ Synopsis No.212a)