Management gemsFind here some gems from our monitoring of the best publications on leadership and management

Do you know the “positive results bias”? This is a very common cognitive bias, which pushes us to believe that good results are necessarily the outcome of good decisions or of a superior performance.

Rasmus Ankersen alerts us on this form of blindness using the example of soccerclub Newcastle United. He shows how one season’s good performance led the management to want to replicate its “winning” configurations the next one. The disappointment was great! Indeed, the management had insufficiently analyzed the reasons of the success and totally underestimated the role that luck had played. A very common mistake.

Thus, let’s not satisfy ourselves with post-mortem returns of experience! We need to analyze our successes with as much rigor and critical mind as we do our failures…

Source: How to outthink your competition — with a lesson from sports, Rasmus Ankersen, TEDxManchester, October 2022.

Even if consumers are increasingly “volatile”, it can be noted that brands that benefit from a strong confidence capital enjoy high rates of loyalty. There iseven a protecting effect: customers with a high level of confidence towards a brand are three times more likely to forgive it for an error and to remain loyal, despite setbacks.

How can you create and consolidate this confidence? Deloitte Digital investigated it in its study HX TrustID Customer Survey. Covering more than 200,000 responses, focusing on 500 brands, it allowed it to identify four pillars of trust:

• The humanity of the brand: does it treat its customers with fairness and empathy?

• Transparency: does the brand openly share information, its choices, its motivations?

• Competence: does the brand produce quality products?

• Reliability: does the brand consistently keep its promises?

Improving its scores on each of these tracks has enabled the Wall Street Journal, for example, to significantly increase the level of confidence of its customers. A checklist to remember for your next marketing studies?

Source: 4 Questions to Measure—and Boost—Customer Trust, Ashley Reichheld, Amelia Dunlop, Harvard Business Review, November 2022.

Gender diversity has strongly progressed in businesses over the past few years. Yet, strong disparities remain in management positions. Whilst the willingness is clearly displayed, and even when sincere, female candidates to fill the required profile are still missing. How can you break this persisting glass ceiling?

One of the action tracks proposed in this study is cultural. Women are more numerous than men to suffer from the “impostor syndrome”, this propension to under-evaluate one’s competences despite success. This is how they often wait until they tick all the criteria requested to become candidates to a position, whereas men consider it normal to master some competences whilst needing to develop others. Furthermore, “women tend to evaluate themselves one to two levels below an equivalent position,” Laurence Batlle, President of Foncia ADB, underlines.

Sensitizing men and women to the need of correcting the perception that women have of their own competences and aptitudes is thus indispensable to restore a balance. The women will also gain by being accompanied by a colleague playing the role of sparring partner, by a mentor or a coach to help them seize the opportunities that emerge, and thus accelerate their professional track.

Source: Trajectoires de carrière au féminin - Qu’est-ce qui éloigne encore les femmes des postes de direction en entreprise en 2022 ? [Women’s professional tracks—What still keeps women away from business management positions in 2022?], Grandes Écoles au Féminin/Roland Berger, November 2022.

In this interview, business organizations’ sociologist François Dupuy takes stock of the evolution of management styles, from Taylorism to cooperative models. Paradoxically, the traditional authoritarian approach seemed more propitious to commitment: the work was segmented and sequential; it was easy to take note that the expected work had been well done and to reward it.

The current models have aimed at breaking the silos. Apparently a common-sense decision: by cooperating, it becomes possible to optimize the operating methods and to ensure that the whole organization takes advantage of each unit’s progress. But this came hand in hand with an increasing disengagement of the staff. A point to remember from this analysis is notably that cooperation does not come easily. It requires an effort, by demanding that we get out of our comfort zone by placing ourselves in a situation of interdependence. It blurs the perception of the impact of our own efforts, which hampers motivation. Thus, asking your teams to cooperate is not sufficient. It is also — and maybe even foremost — through regulating and setting up processes that make cooperation natural that it will be possible to make it happen.

Source: François Dupuy : « l’injonction à la coopération est généralement stérile » [The injunction to cooperate is generally sterile], Observatoire de la compétence métier, obervatoire-ocm.com, December 2022.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”, Seneca noted. Stoic philosophy reminds us that the way we experience a situation is not only the reflection of the events. It is also linked to what we imagine could happen. Yet, if our fears do not always turn true, the simple fact of having imagined them has an immediate price, under the form of anxiety, stress or even paralysis.

This book invites us to become aware of this bias, and to exercise extra vigilance when the future is uncertain or when we do not control the situation. It is then time to take a break, even to talk with a person who will know how to maintain some distance, such as a coach or a friend external to this anxiety-generating context: what is the probability that the worst-case scenario, on which your fears are focused, actually happens? What is the part of delusion stemming from a projection of your fears? What do you have control over, here and now, and what should you focus on to draw some gain?

A proven approach to avoid inflicting yourself today a real suffering over hypothetical future damages.

Source: The Little Book of Stoicism, Jonas Salzgeber, self-published, 2019.