Culture Change

In life and work, people are often admired for their decision-making ability. Most of us would agree with the axiom ‘any decision is better than no decision.’ But are we right? Many people develop a preference for a certain way of decision-making that comes to define them. Psychologists identify at least five common ways that humans make decisions. Most of them reveal more about us than we might like.

Once upon a time, most people began successful careers by developing expertise in a technical, functional or professional domain. Doing your job well meant having the right answers. If you could prove yourself, you’d climb the ladder and eventually move into managing other people. As a manager, you knew what needed to be done, so now you taught others how to do it and evaluated their performance.

People in charge of the UK’s public sector budgets have recently been spending money to identify the impact of microaggression in the workplace and mitigate its impact. These days one might be tempted to question whether any UK civil service department represents a workplace in the literal meaning of the word. Since the pandemic, UK civil servants have been at the forefront of defining the new normal

Last week we touched on the impact of narcissistic behaviours in the workplace. Narcissism is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others. It manifests itself in four forms ● Grandiose Narcissists - charming master manipulators. ● Social Narcissists - craving peer group attention. ● Vulnerable Narcissists - hypersensitive, negative and adept at blaming others. out destroying the prospects of others.

We all know a Prima Donna. Not in the true sense of the word, as few of us number among our friends the leading female singer in an opera company. But the term has come to mean a temperamental person with an inflated sense of their own worth. It is often connected with another term - Narcissism - which is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others.

At work, we are slaves to the acronym. If we can find a way to abbreviate a company name, a process or a condition we will use it. Even though, forever after, someone will always be explaining the acronym to someone else who hasn't heard it. When it comes to employee performance, many of us are slaves to the KPI and the KRA. There is certainly a role for these in planning and measuring employee productivity.