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“We have long assumed that those who rise to high office will be ‘good chaps’, knowing what the unwritten rules are and wanting to adhere to them.”

So writes British constitutional historian Peter Hennessy, whose “good chaps” theory of government (or as I’m calling it, good eggs) has been under considerable strain. 

This is not new to managing a business, of course.

We often have to decide whether to structure around good eggs or bad...

Outcome bias is our tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcomes instead of the quality of the decision at the time it was made. 

In other words, that decision you make today, feeling pressured or frustrated, will be judged without the benefit of context.

No one will care what was happening to you or around you – they’ll only care how your decision turned out.

Two things to consider:

1. Next time you feel overwhelmed and uncertain about what to do, imagine...

We employ people to make our lives easier.

So why doesn’t it always feel that way?

Because they either don’t do what we want or they don’t do it in the way we want.

Then, to change what they do, we assume what motivates us will motivate them.

Can you see the problem?

When we’re ‘me’ centric - seeing the world from only our point of view - we’re likely to find fault in how others behave if it doesn’t match our expectations.

It’s...

As author Liz Wiseman writes, there are five realities of working in an organisation.

1. Messy problems
2. Unclear objectives
3. Unforeseen obstacles
4. Moving targets
5. Unrelenting demands

A small percentage of the burden you carry is actual workload – it’s the muck that comes along with it.

And in my experience, most of the muck involves people. 

Imagine then, having clarity about why people behave the way they do and how you can influence them for the better?

Imagine how...

It’s not that you don’t see the red flags when you work in HR.

You do.

And you tell the line manager.

But then the line manager doesn’t act.

This points to two problems.

The line managers don’t have the skills – or more likely, the confidence – to influence their team members.

And HR don’t have the skills to influence the line managers.

And when you’re employed to be experts in people, that’s a difficult thing to admit.

But...

Are you part of a distributed team? Perhaps you manage one?

It's new language, isn't it, distributed team? It means that colleagues who work together, don't physically work together. They're scattered around the state, the country, the world.

It's not quite the same as "remote work", where you and your colleagues might work remotely from your office some or all the time, but there is still a central office.

For distributed teams, there is no central office so everyone works remotely.

How to...