11 little ideas for the Workplace

The motivation for this post is "100 Little ideas" Morgan Housel published in his terrific blog Collaborative Fund. These are some of my notes to self in my quest for the elixir of leadership.

1. Gresham's law: The bad drives out the good when it comes to management and  incompetent managers, wherever situated, inevitably drive away good employees. It may not be just in management. A generally enthusiastic and hardworking employee who see her colleague(s) whisking away time roaming around in the campus and doing casual work getting equal or better rewards tends to choose the path of least efforts or quits the 'culture' eventually. Ultimately a company's culture is a symphony of all those bad behaviors' accommodated in silence vis-à-vis all the good ones that hasn't been reinforced or appreciated enough.
2. Social Loafing: Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.” or “No one will notice if I don’t put in 100% today.”. Reading it in the light of Gresham's Law again, the presence of free riders in the group if any, results in otherwise high performing individuals scaling down their own effort. After all, nobody wants to be the unpopular workaholic who does all the work while everyone else coasts off. It eventually results in bad team performance.
3. Invert, Always Invert: A famous parable by mathematician Jacobi. Rather than hunting for fifty things to do today to become a better leader at work place, it is easier to latch on to those five things you could stop doing immediately which is preventing you from being a good leader. Say you want to create better work-life balance for your employees at work place.Thinking forward, you’d think about all the things you could do to foster better work-life balance within your team members. If you look at the problem by inversion, you just immediately stop doing those four or five things that are currently affecting work-life balance of your employees . Ideally, you’d be notches above.
4. Story Telling: A must have tool kit for every aspiring leader. It increases the the longevity of your message in your team's mind.It's your philosophical heartbeat: to inspire people to act and behave in a way which will enrich their professional lives and those of people around them. Storytelling provides you with a powerful tool to make change happen. Stories spark emotions. People use stories to make sense of things. People learn from stories.
5. Dunning-Kruger Effect: Knowing the limits of your intelligence requires a certain level of intelligence. Or to put it simply, the very skills you need to take the right decision are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right decision is.The fact that a poor performer is likely to lack the appreciation of his under performance in a performance appraisal discussion for the very reason that he under performs: he fundamentally lacks the skills to appreciate what constitutes good performance or assess his own performance in comparison.
6. Peter Principle: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In other words, employees who perform their roles with competence are promoted into successively higher levels until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. There they hit their ceiling and remain. That is where up-skilling, re-skilling and reverse mentoring from your smarter junior colleagues or books and resources around the world are very important at every juncture of your career growth because you never know.
7. Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else. Extreme examples are tyrannical bosses who are egotistic, full of themselves however extremely charismatic , who leads with the attitude . "Don't think with your little brains (the brain in your head), but with your BIG brain (mine)" and are known for creating obedient followers but never great leaders.
8. Abilene Paradox: A group decides to do something, that no one other than the leader and his close circle in the group wants to do, just because everyone mistakenly(conveniently) assumes they’re the only ones who object to the idea and they don’t want to rock the boat by speaking up. Very dangerous for healthy organizations. Also, in a connected way Group-attribution error: Incorrectly assuming that the views of a group member reflect those of the whole group.
9. Golem Effect: Performance declines when your manager/supervisor have low expectations of your abilities. In corollary, high achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation (The Pygmalion Effect). If you receive frequent recognition from your boss, you are likely to feel motivated and will tend to achieve an even better performance. On the contrary, if you are continuously questioned and your work is ruthlessly criticized, the quality of your work can suffer. So Environment and stimulus are very vital in creating a performance culture.
10. Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe. Leadership is not a popularity contest. Being an organizational leader isn’t about being liked. It’s about doing what’s right. Humans have a deep seated craving to be popular and cherished. But great leaders are different. They fearlessly make tough calls and shows high conviction and courage in their action consistently.
11. System Justification Theory: Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity. This is one of the biggest impediment to driving cultural shifts in Organizations.

References:

1. https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/100-little-ideas/
2. https://fs.blog/mental-models/
3. https://www.safalniveshak.com/mental-models-investing-special-ebook/
4. https://janav.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/latticework-of-mental-models/