Brain-Based Boss

Pattern recognition, recency and familiarity biases can impact our perceptions and responses. If you're hiring a librarian and the applicant doesn't look like your preconceived notion of what a librarian looks like, does that impact your assessment of them? If your high school bully was named Toby, does that affect your impressions of other Tobys you meet later? On average it does. Don't be average.

The odds are very high that any people you’re leading, and from whom you’re trying to get buy-in for change, have had leaders like you try it with them before. On average, it’s likely that those previous efforts and results have not been great. Overt and obvious opposition is easy to spot and you're compelled to actively deal with it but how do you spot and proactively manage those that don't actively oppose change but 'drag the chain'?

Our longevity, health, quality of life and personal productivity are due 30% to luck and 70% to our choices and behaviours. What are 10 choices we can make, any one of which would actually diminish our odds of decline or disaster? How wrong are we when it comes to estimating where our problems will occur?

What are the habits of those who do live longer and remain happy and meaningfully productive for longer? What are the signs to watch out for that maybe now is the time to start taking control rather than continue to rely on your body's and mind's good luck? What clues are there that the fad you're reading about is snake-oil quackery?

“Sleep is a waste of time.” – Thomas Edison (Inventor of the lightbulb, possibly the single item most responsible for messing up our Circadian Rhythms.) Nah. Though researchers don’t know the exact mechanism, it seems that chronic lack of sleep causes inflammation, elevates blood pressure and heart rate, and affects glucose levels, leading to a much higher stroke risk in the sleep-deprived. Sleep increases the ability of the four main healthy lifestyle habits (a healthy diet, exercise, moderate alcohol consumption and not smoking) to protect the body against cardiovascular disease. So, what can we do...?

Poor sleep can increase your risk of a stroke by 400%. Ineffective sleep makes you less productive immediately, not at 3pm the next day. If you pour red bull into your laptop, it doesn't work as well. The same goes for your body and brain.

Much time, effort and expense is wasted on hiring the wrong people. Job interviews are critically important, yet the vast majority of people conducting job interviews have received zero training at job interviewing. Here is a walk-through a simple but consistently effective approach to conducting job interviews, either solo or as part of a panel. From defining the role to drafting effective and purposeful questions to the mechanics of the face-to-face interactions to the post-interview work - this ep lays it out for you. And there's a handy tip sheet too.

People with strong connections to their future selves make better decisions. In the absence of time travel technology like the Terminator movies, how can we generate such connections?

A half dozen or so studies on how physical space influences behaviour, decisions and relationships.

When we start a job, how accepting are we of the way things are done around here? Where's the challenge or validation of things that may have lost their point or been surpassed?

A quick snapshop of a couple of studies on how our behaviuour can be nudged by others through small positive actions.

A few tips and techniques on getting the right amount of sleep consistently and optimising its quality, plus a breakdown on some consequences longterm for not doing so :-(

I talk about debriefing in a training context then a workplace context, plus recommend an HBR article by Doug Sundheim.

Some thinking around the inter-relationships and conflicts between social norms and marketing norms when it comes to influencing the behaviour of others.   Click here for my book 'The Brain-Based Boss' and more interesting psych studies.

Short n sweet - a quick story about a quirky psych study showing how we perceive that others take far more notice of us than they actually do.   Click here for more on my book 'The Brain-Based Boss' and more interesting psych studies.

What is a 'shift worker'? Is a tired employee 'fit for work'? Click here for my book 'Live Work Love' and more on fatigue.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. What tricks do our lazy brains pull on us and others? How can we prevent or lessen these, or, how can we leverage these to our advantage?

Continuing on from the last episode, we look at the criteria by which we assess our past jobs and provide a tool with which we can steer towards future jobs. Recommending this book by Chris Johnson: http://www.kerridgepartners.com/resources-books/taking-charge-the-book 

My responses and reactions to a speaker I MC'd at a conference last week who spoke about career planning. What jobs are coming and going? Too many of us too often think about our careers and ask, "What next?" A smarter road is to ask, "Where to?"   I recommend Chris Johnson's book available at: http://www.kerridgepartners.com/resources-books/taking-charge-the-book

Following up last week's episode about how our brains fill in the gaps and make up memories, this episode gives a great case study, suggests some solutions and there's a neat optical illusion activity to prove our actual blind spots.

We often miss things. We often remember things that never were. We are very reluctant to believe that we miss things or remember things that never were. Memories are less like CCTV footage and more like all of us being directors of reboots / reimaginings of our lives.

In this episode, I look at several pieces of research around the illusion of familiarity and how evolution and experience has shaped us into preferring the safety of the familiar and distrusting the novel. This impacts on people in the workplace - the aversion to change in many and the errors people make in perceiving patterns in randomness. A higher performing workplace culture builds into its processes self-correction and the challenging of assumptions. How can we tweak our workplace cultures to be more like that?

Gladwell drew a lot of attention to the notion of expertise requiring 10,000 hours. In this podcast, I talk about the original researcher, the very narrow application of the theory, and the set of practical steps anyone can apply for themselves and those they lead (as long as you're really keen and passionate about what performance you're trying to improve.).

We might imagine that a tremendously positive workplace envrionment is a productive place to work. Research shows that a totally positive workplace isn't as productive as you might think. There's a place for negativity in proportion. How can we, individually and in teams, see things and behaviours as they actually are and critique them? 

So often we try and teach others or coach others or supervise others in a way that clashes with the way people naturally learn. It's quicker, cheaper, more effective and longer-lasting if we can plug into the way people learn naturally. In this episode, I talk through some techniques to quieten our unhelpful inner mental critics and guide people to leverage the power of their own subconscious minds to practise and learn experientially in a way that sticks and drives purposeful changes in behaviour.

Picture if you will a vertical axis called 'Challenge' and a horizontal axis called 'Skill.' Various combinations of challenge and skill can result in a person being in a state of apathy, worry, control... but what we're aiming for more of is 'FLOW' - a magical (not really magical) state where a high level of skill meets a high level of challenge. Time flies and good things happen.

Extrapolating current trends to ridiculous extremes. Will there be jobs for humans in 2115?

The highly skilled and the highly unskilled have something in common - a poor ability to accurately judge their own skill level. It's just that the skilled judge themselves too low and the unskilled judge themselves too low. Just watch every talent show audition process ever...   For a limited-time promo free copy of my book 'Live Work Love: #Add10QualityYears', check it out at amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R8RW7JK 

A primer on the work of Carol Dweck and how people's behaviour towards effort and mistakes reveal our true mindsets and how those mindsets, unless we choose to change them, can affect our outcomes.

What do first years at West Point Military Academy and New Zealand's high school NCEA participants have in common?

Learn a research-based technique for making decisions that results in better decisions and feeling better about whatever you decide.

Most industrialised countries have a history of poor saving and mucking around with retirement savings schemes. More changes are likely. Would employees, if employers provided support beyond mere money, have the capability to ever become super savers?    

(Office) Space - The Final frontier?   People are not mice wandering through mazes in search and cheese and getting rewards for pushing levers. Having said that, employers can greatly influence the performance of their people by the physical environment they create and provide, both positively and negatively, both intentionally and unintentionally.    

To what extent is executive leasing like leasing a car? Do we ask the same questions before we do it? What are the pro’s and cons? Do we have to pay a penalty if we return it damaged?    

John Manning's research on relative finger length provides some insight into one of the genetic cards we get dealt over which we have no control. How does the difference in length between your ring and index fingers requate to your odds of having a heart attack?

Coaching is a term used a lot. It apparently means different things to different people. I think it has a very specific and quite narrow meaning. That's not to say it can't co-exist productively with other activities such as managing, leading, training, facilitating and mentoring.

Surveys show males and females prefer working for a male boss. Surveys are stupid and misleading. So are PodCast teaser descriptions.

One commentator suggests workplace cultures need to evolve. The problem is – bosses already imagine they have. What are the categories of workplace culture, where are you and where should you be?