Recently, I ear-witnessed a conversation revolving around the disadvantages of online meetings and discussions. The main argument was that we lose a lot of valuable information to in-person meetings, like the ones we can gain from body language. I became curious how good we – average people – are reading it.
We tend to believe that we know good friends’, coworkers’, and our couples’ minds better than the minds of strangers. Is this really the case?
Researches and discussions report how diversity increases profit, productivity, or innovation. DEI (or more fashionably DEI&B) has clearly been on the HR agenda for many years now. We don’t need to do a deep analysis to experience how challenging it is to push the DEI idea through the managers. If we still feel it necessary to attend conferences, events or to go to workshops or training dinasours, it seems suspicious that it requires quite a lot of effort. But why is this, if the concept is so common sense? What is it that managers don’t understand? Honestly, they don’t understand what HR doesn’t do either.
Improving employee engagement is a permanent topic on almost every HR agenda. Despite that many companies implemented health programs, home office, LTIs, they still struggle to improve engagement; according to Gallup’s global research, only the 17% of the workforce is engaged. There’s no way to sugarcoat that the data represents a stinging indictment of management-as-usual.
Several studies have concluded that a sense of psychological safety is an important component of a successful team. It could be roughly described as the leader creating an environment in which team members can feel confident to speak up or get the job done without fear of being turned against if they are wrong or punished if they are wrong. A sense of psychological safety allows us to openly and frankly question beliefs, opinions or even the way we do things.
If these issues are important to us, then it is worth learning to balance confidence and doubt. In my experience, a healthy amount of self-doubt can keep us from being arrogant assholes. Or as the ancient Japanese proverb goes: we are less annoying if we keep our mouths shut. 🙂
In every company, there are secrets under the surface that we suspect, but would like to believe that they are not true. If we allow corporate values or communication to navigate us instead of observing what is really going on, we can easily fall into a trap.
When my colleague Robert Dobay called me in 2014 to say that Magyar Telekom (subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) would like us to develop a “likeable” mobile application for them that would support the daily work of managers, I was not very enthusiastic. Developing managers is not an easy business, and their phone will NOT do it for us, I thought.
