by Charles Plant | Mar 12, 2013 | Leadership Development
Do you ever wonder why, if you write it down, you tend to learn something better? There’s some biology behind it. (Today’s science lesson is brought to you by the letter B.)
When you write something down, it stimulates a bunch of cells called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that exist at the base of your brain. The RAS filters all the stuff that is going on at the time in your brain and gives more importance to the things you’re actively focussing on at that moment. Writing something down brings that information to the forefront of your brain, making it more likely that you’ll remember it.
This doesn’t work though for typing as when you write using your hand, you activate more of your brain and are thus able to remember better.
As to leadership, let me pose a question. Is there anything you have learned about being a leader that you have actually written down?
by Charles Plant | Mar 11, 2013 | Learning
Do you remember the one person in the class who, when presented with something a little out of the ordinary, would ask the prof: will this be on the test?
Think now to the answer. If it was not going to be on the test, would you bother learning it or even bother reviewing the material once? I didn’t think so.
Now think about your company’s values. Can you even remember what they are. Heaven knows, some group of executives spent a long time coming up with them. But do they form part of your annual performance appraisal? Are you judged on how well you exhibit those values, how close you are to achieving them?
Chances are you aren’t evaluated on such things as how you exemplify the company’s values and that’s a problem. If it won’t be on the test, you won’t even think twice about it.
If you want someone to learn something and to change their behaviour, they have to think they’ll be evaluated on it or chances are it will go in one ear and out the other.
by Charles Plant | Mar 8, 2013 | Leadership Development
I think I’ve finally figured out why we hate meetings so much and how we got here. Let’s go back to the industrial economy for a second. Leadership in the industrial economy was pretty simple. You looked after process and the process got you results. Life was pretty unambiguous, process was known and clear and life was simple. As a result you didn’t need a lot of meetings and the ones you did need were probably pretty well defined.
Fast forward to the knowledge economy and things aren’t so simple. Software has taken away a lot of our process work and left us having to face new challenges at a steadily increasing rate. Without process responsibilities, our work is now about getting results and those results are often hard to measure and poorly defined. There is a radical increase in ambiguity.
So take a problem to solve that requires a meeting. You’re already stressed from having too much to do. There isn’t a process in place or the process would have run its course and solved the problem. It isn’t clear what results are required or who has responsibility.
The net effect is discomfort. We don’t like ambiguity, lack of clarity, unmeasurable results, unclear lines of control and yet all of that is what today’s meetings are about. We don’t hate meetings because they are meetings. We hate what we’re trying to do in those meetings: resolve multiple simultaneous ambiguities.
by Charles Plant | Mar 7, 2013 | Uncategorized
Since I can’t get away from the topic of meetings I might as well give in and continue in the same vein. In answering a reply to Monday’s post I had a brain wave (or maybe it was a brain fart.) Whatever.
In any case, I wondered what would happen if we just eliminated internal meetings for some arbitrary period of time as an experiment. As necessity is the mother of invention, I wonder what new solutions people would come up with in order to meet the objectives that had previously been accomplished in meetings.
So here is your challenge. Try doing a way with meetings for a week and tell me what you did to get the same work done anyway.
by Charles Plant | Mar 6, 2013 | Leadership Development
I hadn’t intended on focussing on meetings this week but I got two replies to Monday’s post and thought I should at least weight in with some useless research on meetings. I found an article in the Telegraph that says it all.
“Meetings make people stupid because they impair their ability to think for themselves, scientists have found.
“The performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.
“Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the US said people’s performance dropped when they were judged against their peers.”
So it’s conclusive. Meetings aren’t stupid, only those who attend.
Do you ever wonder why, if you write it down, you tend to learn something better? There’s some biology behind it. (Today’s science lesson is brought to you by the letter B.)