On our December 10, 2012 blog, we gave an overview of cognitive bias (our tendency to filter information through our own past experiences, likes, and dislikes) and surmised that it can lead to judgments that are faulty. So much of leadership is about good decision making so we really wanted to expand on different biases. In the second of our series, I am going to talk about Negativity Bias – the tendency to give more weight to negative information than positive information. Continue reading
If you’re somewhere in the management chain and not yet a member of either the Leadership Think Tank or Harvard Business Review groups on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on some very interesting conversations that get to the core of well-being in the workplace… or perhaps lack thereof in many American companies. One of the questions being debated on LinkedIn this week is as follows: If your employee makes a mistake, do you accept responsibility? Fascinated by the discussion thread, I scrolled through all of the comments and got a good sense for what people had to say about responsibility, accountability, and throwing subordinates under the bus. While I didn’t do a tally, it struck me that a rather large percentage of the comments had a strong authoritarian flavor, many with advice on the process and education needed to avoid mistakes… …
“Never do today what you can put off ’til tomorrow.” —Aaron Burr, Jr. I know a bunch of procrastinators that seem to live by Burr’s words. And yet, why would anyone want to delay leading a happy, fulfilling life? It turns out we don’t put off achieving happiness intentionally, but it is a by-product of the all too common ‘I’ll be happy when’ mindset. You know, when people think that they’ll achieve a greater level of satisfaction when they: Get married Find a boyfriend/girlfriend Receive a much anticipated promotion Lose weight… The list goes on. Also known as the arrival fallacy, this mindset actually produces much less satisfaction than expected because people have primed themselves for the achievement and it is already factored into their general state of happiness. When a person hits the longed-for target, they realize there’s something else… …