6 Tips for New Managers

Becoming a manager is a stressful, yet rewarding, experience. Beginners in management often fail in their first role. This is mainly because of their misconceptions about what it means to be the boss. In this post, you will find the main misconceptions about management, reality, and tips for successful leadership. The main misconceptions of the new managers are:

  1. I can rely on the same skills that led me to the management role.
  2. Being a manager means I am more independent.
  3. Formal authority is a source of power.
  4. Results delivery requires controlling people.
  5. I must build relationships with individual subordinates.
  6. I will make sure that the operation will keep running smoothly.

1 – Be a leader. Don’t be a star.

  • Myth: I can rely on the same skills that led me to my new role.
  • Reality: The required skills to be a successful manager are completely different. You learn them mostly by experience. You need to put your emotional intelligence at work.
  • Tip: Prepare yourself for the management role before you take it. If you already are a manager, it is never too late. Learn and practice.

2 – Stay humble, you can’t do whatever you want

  • Myth: Now I can implement my brilliant plans. I can change everything.
  • Reality: You are tied with a complex chain of interactions. You discover that someone who works for you could get you fired.
  • Tip: Build your network inside the organization. Learn how to negotiate and influence. Understand the interdependencies and stay humble.

Angry boss yelling at his assistant secretary

3 – Don’t rely on your formal authority. You must earn it.

  • Myth: My position is a source of power. 
  • Reality: You can’t be more wrong. It will surprise you that people will not give you respect and trust you for your formal authority, you need to earn it.
  • Tip: Demonstrate competence (listen more than talk), character (your willingness to do the right thing) and influence in the organization.

The more talented the subordinate, the less likely he/she is to follow orders.

4 – Don’t seek compliance. Seek commitment.

  • Myth: I must get compliance from my subordinates. I am in charge; I control.
  • Reality: More often than not, direct reports will not respond when you tell them to do something.
  • Tip: Build commitment by empowering individuals to achieve team goals. Don’t use orders.

Continue reading “6 Tips for New Managers” →

When Can We Trust an Expert’s Intuition?

I recently read the book “Blink, the power of thinking without thinking“, by Malcolm Gladwell. A book about the magic of experts’ intuition. The book left me with big questions on expertise and intuition, so I had to dig deeper. I am convinced that experts’ intuition is not always reliable, what I found is that it depends on the domain of expertise and the expert’s experience in the domain.

In this post I summarize 2 approaches to intuition:

  • Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM)
  • Heuristics and Biases (HB)

The confrontation of these 2 approaches results in 3 conditions for reliable intuition, abbreviated as REF:

  • Regularity
  • Exposure
  • Feedback

For starters, we define intuition as the ability to detect a pattern and solve problems rapidly, without relying on conscious reasoning.

Reasoning versus Intuition directional signs

Two Approaches to Intuitive Expertise: NDM vs. HB

The first approach to intuitive expertise is naturalistic decision-making (NDM). It is focused on the decisions made in real life by experienced people such as firefighting commanders, nurses, chess-masters, etc. NDM aims at demystifying the intuition by searching for the cues that led to the expert judgment.

Continue reading “When Can We Trust an Expert’s Intuition?” →

Plans are worthless, but Planning is everything.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

How to Learn New Skills Quickly

Image result for The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast

Learning new skills is paramount in today’s world. Whether you are searching for a first job, seeking a promotion in your current job or planning to make a career pivot, your ability to learn new skills (fast) will be your best friend. 

In his book “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything. Fast!”, Josh Kaufman suggests the following 10 steps to gain a new skill quickly:

  • Choose a project you love, a project you are very curious about.
  • Focus your energy on one skill at a time, don’t try to learn everything at once.
  • Define your target performance level, when you become “good enough” on the skill. This will define how long and how much energy you will put in this project.
  • Deconstruct the skill into sub-skills. Divide and conquer.
  • Obtain critical tools, the tools you need for practice and performance.
  • Eliminate barriers to practice, including emotional barriers. Set your environment in a way to reduce the effort required to practice. Remove distractions, put your mobile phone away, etc.
  • Make dedicated time for practice, MAKE it.
  • Create fast feedback loops. Feedback is to get accurate information about how well you are performing. Using this information to improve the performance creates a feedback loop. The faster the loop, the faster the learning.
  • Practice by the clock in short bursts. You may try the Pomodoro technique.
  • Emphasize quantity and speed. Don’t seek perfection. Quantity is better than quality for learning a new skill.

To be at your best performance, and accelerate your learning curve, make sure you are in the zone, or in a flow state. More on that in future posts.

The Optimal Level of Stress

Stress is the response of your body to challenge. Your level of stress predicts your performance in your job and your relationships. On the one hand, high levels of stress would cause strong anxiety, exhaustion, and impaired performance. On the other hand, low levels of stress would result in boredom, inactivity, and disengagement.

You need an optimal amount of stress to perform at your best. In psychology, this is known as the Yerkes–Dodson law, depicted in the figure below.

The Optimal Level of Stress

If you are a manager or a leader, make sure that your people are experiencing the optimal level of stress to stay engaged, motivated and at their best performance.

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

Image result for blink audible
  • Title: Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
  • Author: Malcolm Gladwell
  • Publication Date: 2005
  • Recommendation Score: 3.5/5

Book Review

“Blink” is about experts’ intuition. The takeaway of the book is: the experts cannot be fooled easily because of their “thin-slicing” ability, that is, they can judge and find patterns in events based on a narrow window of experience, thanks to their intuition. On the other hand, experts can be easily (catastrophically) fooled, as in the case of “Warren Harding Error” (chapter 3). The book leaves you confused about when to trust an expert intuition and when not to.

Gladwell is a good writer and knows how to attract his reader’s attention. He is a talented journalist, who reads tons of articles and books, and interviews a lot of people, to write a good story. His storytelling style makes the reading of the book pleasant. When it comes to the content, the author is far from being an expert on the topic. In many chapters, Gladwell seems to jump between 2 or 3 stories to come to some conclusion, without citing solid evidence about the conclusion.

If you want to read a book that is based on solid scientific research, “Blink” may not satisfy your need.

Outsmart your Confirmation Bias

The first cognitive bias that we will review in the series “Outsmart Your Biases” is the Confirmation Bias, that is, the tendency to search for, interpret and recall information in a way that confirms our opinion, and neglect information that contradicts it.

The Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is one of the most common biases that have direct consequences on our personal life and professional career. The examples are endless. We often seek information to prove that our political party is right. When we like a person, we don’t want to see her character flaws. To prove the validity of our proposed strategy we search on google for “Is the [proposed strategy] better than [opposite strategy]?”. In a job interview, we frame our questions in a way to confirm our beliefs or our first impression of the candidate. etc… Try to figure out in which decision you were prone to it.

Jeff Bezos about today’s internet: “a Confirmation Bias Machine”.

To outsmart your confirmation bias, you may use the following tricks:

  • Ask for an outside view of the topic at hand and seek criticism.
  • Search for the pros and cons of the different options.
  • Suppose the opposite: be the devil’s advocate.

Such debiasing strategies can be performed in brainstorming format, in informal discussion, etc.

Set SMART Goals

Do you struggle with new year resolutions? Do you find it difficult to achieve your goals? And by the way, how do you set your goals?

Failing goals may have negative consequences on one’s well-being and self-confidence. To achieve goals, we should first know how to set them, then how to work towards them. If you set a non-realistic goal, you are bound to failure. This is why you should learn how to set SMART goals.

SMART is the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. These are the characteristic your goals should have to make it possible to achieve it. Whether you are setting personal goals such as new year’s resolution, or you are setting goals for your company or your team members, make sure that each goal satisfies these 5 characteristics.

SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goal setting

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Alan Lakein

Outsmart Your Biases

Do you think you are rational? Are you sure that you often make the best decision? Do you feel that your reasoning is superior to that of others? Do you regret some acts and wish you had thought more before committing them? You are, like all human beings, a victim of your cognitive biases.

What is cognitive bias?

Cognition is the mental process of understanding and acquiring knowledge. Cognitive bias is an unconscious cognitive process in human psychology that makes us prone to errors in our reasoning and judgment. It is the gap between rational thinking and our actual way of thinking.

There exists a lot of biases that affect our interaction with the world; we seek pattern in everything even if there is none, we confuse correlation with causality, we hire people who are similar to us, we don’t react the same way to the same information if framed differently, we don’t understand why the opposite side don’t see the ‘truth’, we overestimate our knowledge, etc.

Cognitive biases are an important cause of many catastrophes and tragedies in business, politics, relationships and everyday life. Outsmarting our cognitive biases is key to good decision making and critical thinking.

A New Blog Post Series “Outsmart your Biases”

Outsmart your biases is a forthcoming series of posts that will discuss some of the major cognitive biases, illustrated with examples; the confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planning fallacy, the halo effect and more. In this series, you will find mental tricks and processes that you can use to outsmart these biases and become a better decision-maker. Stay tuned!