Today I want to talk about a manager whose sparking reputation became a burden. To put the story into context I first need to establish a psychological concept – namely cognitive bias. For those of you who have not come across this term before, cognitive bias is a psychological pattern that results in a person's subjective image of the world around them deviating from reality. Any good psychologist should be aware of their own biases and thanks to a triple digit number of hou

When was the last time you discussed your shame? Today I’m going to discuss mine. During a fascinating seminar I was attending on the concept of shame, I got firsthand experience of how shame restrained me. Following an introductory lecture we were asked to reflect on what we had heard. After being divided into groups of five, each group got the opportunity to talk while the others listened. I was in the last group and heard lots of interesting points and wanted to comment on

Do you know who is a member of your management team? Are you sure? Let’s continue digging out the gold nuggets from the article ‘What every CEO wants to know: Six conditions to create an effective top team’ that I reviewed here. The article reasons that an effective management team is interdependent, stable and bounded. The first two suggestions probably come as little surprise to anyone who has ever looked into what constitutes a successful team. When it comes, however, to b

Imagine a study that examined critical success factors in management teams. Then imagine that the study looked at 120 top-level management teams from eleven different countries, where every team and individual member were exhaustively measured with quantitative and qualitative methods. For example using interviews, surveys and observations of the dynamics in every team. If you are intrigued about what such a study would reveal I’m pleased to report it has, in fact, been carri

Have you ever had a conversation and truly felt like you were being listened to and taken seriously? Then there’s a good chance that the person you were speaking to had used one or more of the methods I’m going to explain below. The reason why I’m addressing this topic is that I recently had a coaching client who was afraid of being perceived as someone uninterested in other people's feelings and opinions. The truth, of course, was that she is interested but wondered how she

– I can’t stop thinking… do I still have a job? We can only imagine how much courage she needed to summon up in order to be able to put that question to her manager at the beginning of the change process. And we can only imagine how much speculation there had been behind closed doors amongst her colleagues, asking themselves the same question. The manager bit his lip, realising his previous communication on the matter had not been so clear, after all. I was recently hired to

Thirty-six per cent of recent graduates have deficient team and interpersonal competencies. Also, according to the article Team Development Interventions: Evidence-Based Approaches for Improving Teamwork, only 21 per cent of managers believe their organisations have the expertise to develop cross-functional teams, which a management team in my experience always is. So in this post I’m going to reflect on what the article has to say about four research-based approaches that ca

”You really are a pain sometimes.” ”Why, thank you kind sir”, I replied, thinking the CEO’s remark meant that I had done my job. I had, after all, for two days been challenging him and the members in his management team rather than going along with communication patterns that preserve status quo. When writing about communication, I sometimes imagine my esteemed reader thinking I am a stereotypical psychologist, promoting cosiness in the team. It is a bit more complex than tha