How to Deal With Performance Stress
Prime yourself for better performance with three simple tricks. Think back to your last high-stakes encounter. A major investor pitch. A nail-biting client presentation. Maybe even your all-hands meeting. When forced to confront these moments, we face a jarring mix of dread, uncertainty and self-doubt. We start to wonder: Am I up to this? What if I say the wrong thing? And while research shows that pre-performance jitters can be a positive force, most people would rather find ways around the pressure. Here are three tricks to take the edge off your fears: Talk it out… Read More
Are you “bike-shedding” your feedback?
Resist the urge to begin with easy but trivial matters. Are you “bike-shedding” your feedback? Bike-shedding refers to the act of spending lots of time on unimportant details while leaving crucial matters unattended. The term traces back to 1955 article in The Economist by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian and author. “Parkinson’s Law of Triviality” states that people tend to focus on things that are trivial but easy rather than those that are important and hard. To make his point, Parkinson described a fictitious committee overseeing plans for a nuclear… Read More
Break Your Creativity Echo Chamber
Be deliberate about how you put together your teams. Fresh ideas and new perspectives are the lifeblood of great work. But what happens when inspiration routinely comes from the same place – people who think the same as you? Homogeny of thought can stifle originality and threaten creativity, leading to a creative echo chamber that prevents good ideas from reverberating across teams.
Give Feedforward Like a Fighter Pilot
Feedforward is a unique approach to giving feedback that improves performance, boosts productivity, and keeps teams on track. Unlike traditional feedback, feedforward is timely, continuous, and focused on development – a refreshing change from the typical feedback fare that rarely makes a positive difference or offers much insight about how work gets done.
Too much feedback makes people less effective
Giving too much feedback is counterproductive. People can’t fix what they can’t see. From time to time, it’s our job – as managers, teachers, parents and friends – to see for them. By providing eye-opening feedback, we eliminate some of the tunnel vision that keeps others from recognizing their personal or professional flaws. And while sharing negative feedback can be good news, we need to be particular about how much of it we share at once.
Teams and the Magical Number 150
We like to claim that some institutions are “too big to fail.” Can the same be said of teams? Turns out that bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to team size. Not only can large teams put a freeze on workplace culture, they sometimes create silos that stifle collaboration and threaten a company’s ability to innovate and grow – all because of the magical number 150.
Time To Fix Our Feedback
This is a book about giving feedback, but not the kind you’ve come to know and loathe. Whether it’s the feedback we give to employees and co-workers, teachers and students, or family and friends, we have a nagging suspicion that it’s ultimately going to fail. And you know what? We’re right. According to researchers, people apply just 30% of the feedback they receive. The rest is ignored, rejected, stonewalled, or mangled the moment it arrives. Even if they don’t dread feedback, the vast majority of people just aren’t interested in applying it… Read More