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Golfing Analogy: Working with People
People often feel that playing politics in the workplace is something dirty and to be avoided. Well, cleaning house and taking out the garbage is dirty work too, but it’s necessary. Still, it’s hard for some to see this as anything but compromising, “not being who I am.” Yet, as we saw with honesty, euphemisms, [… Read More]
Our Personalities: Crashing Others’ Expectations
As computers and robots are able to perform more of the mental and physical tasks of humans, we are finding they can become more unnerving to us. Why is that? “Mapping the Uncanny Valley” (The Economist, July 21, 2012 edition) examines the work of Kurt Gray (University of North Carolina) and Daniel Wegner (Harvard) to [… Read More]
Manager – Employee Relationship: “Acid Test” Question
Even though we tend to focus on employees complaining about their managers, they do compliment them too. However, one employee over fifteen years ago totally transformed how I look at manager-employee relationships. In his case, we were having lunch refreshing our connection. We discussed training, his career and his manager. I eventually asked, “How do [… Read More]
Problem-solving Technique: Train Brain to See Smaller Parts
In 12Most I wrote about business lessons from various battles. Pydna in 168 B.C. – the titanic clash between two undefeated armies, the Macedonians and the Romans – illustrates flexibility’s inherent power by working with smaller units. We can become better problem solvers if we can train our minds to see the smaller aspects [… Read More]
Clarity vs. Truth: Problem-solving Implications
We often assume two words have the same meaning. If true, there would be no need for the two separate words. Distinguishing the difference develops our problem-solving skills in very much the same way that higher resolutions allow cameras to picture things that lower-resolution ones can’t. We won’t see problem-solving opportunities using a low-resolution perspective [… Read More]
People Easily Make False Confessions
When we approach problems too logically and reasonably, we tend to place too much faith in the dominance of consciousness and to discount subjective influences that vary by person. For example, the Innocence Project, by using DNA evidence, has helped to exonerate 271 people wrongly convicted of crimes, but almost a quarter of these people [… Read More]
Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars
Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t. This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence [… Read More]
Why Employees Lie Even When the Truth is Better
A labor relations expert emailed me describing a trial in which an employee lied about a previous injury even when the truth would have helped her receive compensation. He wondered whether such lying was just something the employer had to accept. First, I would broaden the context by asking: Why did the employee feel the [… Read More]