Fundamental Attribution Error

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Short Story Shorter

If a team member at work makes a mistake, we’re more likely to attribute it to their personality, character, or skill level. However, if WE make the same mistake, we’re more likely to attribute it to the situation (i.e., we were rushing, felt tired, or someone else’s fault).

What is Fundamental Attribution Error??

The Fundamental Attribution Error states that when we try to explain other people’s bad behavior, we tend to overemphasize their personality and underemphasize the situation they were in.

“Why does this matter? What are the implications in my life?”

The Fundamental Attribution Error leaves people feeling unappreciated. And can lead to a chain reaction of frustration, disengagement, subpar performance, further judgement, toxicity, and ultimately parting ways.

Solution?

The Simple Solution to The Fundamental Attribution Error is - Give People The Benefit Of The Doubt

Benefits !!

Be a leader that people actually want to follow and over-deliver for.
Communicate with your boss or employees more effectively.
Speak to your kids and significant other without them tuning out or being tuned out.

To understand in details.. check our the nicely written blog about the same here

Credit

Medium.com; Michael Simmons; Accelerated Intelleigence Checkout full article on medium.com

Great Leaders !

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Thankfully, to my experience, its not too difficult being a good at leadership.. One would just need to develop a mental model for how to think about leadership.

Recently I came accross a very good online content by Ali Rowghani - YC Partner and CEO of the YC Continuity Fund. From his experience working with (many many) great leaders, he has made three observations on leadership.. These observations demystify what skills one need to be great at leadership.

Observation 1 : There’s no Single Archetype for a great leader

Observation 2 : All Great Leaders have Three Fundamental Attributes

They can Think and Communicate Clearly
They have Good Judgment about people
They have Strong Personal Integrity and Commitment

Observation 3 : They are able to build Trust in employees, investors, customers, users, and so on.

Which implies, to be a good leader, one needs to:

Be Authentic to who he/she is
Think and Communicate Clearly
Have Good Judgement about people
Present Strong Personal Integrity and Commitment
Build 360 Trust

To quickly understand why/how these obersvation matters… How to be good at these.. read as follows..

Observation 1 : No Single Archetype

There is no single leadership persona, like a way you have to be, a way you have to act in order to be a great leader to be followed by people.

Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes, all personality types and characteristics. All great leaders are really different. Some are introverts, some are extroverts, some are technologists, others are storytellers, some are diplomatic and very calm and others are emotional and a little bit hot-headed, some are nerds and some are cool.

It means that anyone fundamentally has the capabilities to become a great leader. You just need to be yourself. You don’t need to try to be someone else. Trying to imitate someone else forever, well… that’s impossible. Also we humans are very good at detecting inauthenticity. We’re really good at telling when someone is being fake and we don’t generally follow or trust those that we find inauthentic.

This simple sort of realization will help you become a much better leader..

Being Self .. Being Authentic

Observation 2 : Three Fundamental Attributes

While there is no single archetype, great leaders nevertheless share three fundamental attributes and you kinda gotta be really good at these three things if you wanna be a great leader

Think and Communicate Clearly

If you’re gonna have other people want to do the thing you’re compelling them to do, you have to be able to paint a clear and compelling vision of the future for them to be able to follow.

As you grow, as company grows, as any organization grows, your communication has to get better and better and better because more diverse people are hearing you. Now your processes that you use to communicate can no longer be one-on-one, but they have to scale as your audience itself scales.

The most important thing for great communication is that it needs to be simple. And to add simplicity in communication takes some time and preparation..There’s an example here of Woodrow Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson, who was once asked how long it would take him…he was asked to give a speech and he was asked, how long would he…would he need to prepare? And he said, “Well, it depends how long you guys want me to talk. If it’s a 10-minute speech, then I’m gonna need 2 weeks to prepare for it. If I can talk for half an hour, I only need a week. But if I can talk as long as I want to, then I don’t need any preparation at all. I can speak right now.”

This example in effect captures the point, if you wanna communicate simply, if you want to express things that are memorable and that can be repeated, it takes time to prepare.

So how do you get good at this? clear and concise communication comes more naturally to some people. For others, practice does make one better when it comes to communication.

It pays to work on communicating clearly

One must realize that clarity of thought precedes clarity of language. So you have to think clearly to communicate clearly.
- One need to free up time in one’s schedule to just think and
- try to jot down one’s thoughts and
- try to think about how do I express these thoughts in clearer and clearer ways.
- Next step is practice on whats prepared.

Good Judgment About People

The decisions that you make in terms of who to empower as leaders in your organization have a really profound impact on the future of the company. They become extensions of you so you have to make really good choices in terms of who you empower. Bad decisions may happen, but if you make consistently bad decisions, then your authority, your followership, the trust that people have in you will diminish.

So how do you get good at this one? Again, good judgment/good EQ comes more naturally to some people. Others should try to meet a lot of people. And just talk to them about their jobs and their backgrounds and how they came to be where they are. Ask them about how they lead people, what they think goes well, doesn’t go well. This type of kind of educational interview will really help you, will really help hone your judgment about what’s good and what’s bad and who’s good and who’s bad. And don’t think that you’re wasting time in doing this. You should put real time and energy into it. You should try to even meet people who you have no hope of hiring, because it’s important to kind of get a sense for what really great leaders are like, what great, engineering managers are like, what great sales leaders are like, etc. Don’t cut corners. Spend time meeting people and honing your instincts.

As I mentioned earlier, bad decisions may happen. While recruiting, some of those people will not work out. Just make sure that you view the hiring process as something that you can learn from every single hire and just be very diligent in terms of learning, who you hired, why you hired that person, what went right, what went wrong in terms of their original hire, their onboarding and their career at the company. Be self-reflective about the development of people in your organization and your own choices as to who you’re empowering with authority.

Strong Personal Integrity and Commitment

It means standing for something meaningful beyond themselves and being motivated by things outside of their narrow personal interests. It means avoiding behavior that diminishes trust, diminishes credibility in a leader like favoritism, conflicts of interests, inappropriate language, inappropriate work relationships, etc.

Commitment means making your work into a life mission in ways that inspire other people. It means giving it your all. People see this and they respect it and they follow it.

So how do you get good at this? Hold yourself accountable to the transparency test - i.e aAsk yourself if all of your private communications and behavior towards others were to be transparent to everyone at the company, would you be embarrassed by any of it? We obviously all make mistakes, but patterns of mistakes are bad and mistakes that damage your integrity are the worst of all.

Observation 3 : Build Trust

Across any organization, the job of every leader is to build trust, trust in employees, investors, customers, users, and so on. Building trust is both an art and a science. So the science of trust is fairly simple. You have to be right about the empirical questions in your business. If you’re predicting,we should build this product or we should try to sell to this customer or, we should try to market the product in this way, these things over time, these choices get proven right or wrong. Hopefully you’re right much more than you’re wrong because if you’re consistently wrong, then you diminish the amount of trust people will have in you.

The second aspect of building trust is more of an art. This is about being able to show empathy and good judgment, having timing, good timing when you confront issues. It’s about striving for something bigger than yourself and not being selfish or self-centered.

So how do you get good at this? Building the art of trust is a more delicate topic. And again, practice makes you better, but I’d always try to keep “it” in mind..with every step that you take forward, try to optimize for trust as leaders. You’re gonna have lots of hard decisions to make in the coming years. You’ll have to fire people. You’ll have to admit mistakes to your customers. You’ll have to say no to people because you disagree with them and their ideas. Try to view every challenge as a trust building opportunity. And as you evaluate one course of action versus another, ask yourself which path is gonna generate more trust in you as a leader, and always try to choose that path.

Credit

Ali Rowghani. Checkout full video on YouTube
Y Combinator
Startup School

Necessary Risk for a Leader

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Short Story Shorter

Trusting is a necessary risk for a leader. If we give people a sense of control and autonomy, we end up with healthier and happier teams.

Check our 73sec video about the same here

Credit

Simon Sinek Checkout full video on a post at Linkedin

Attempting Leadership | imrhythm

Fundamental Attribution Error

Short Story Shorter

What is Fundamental Attribution Error??

“Why does this matter? What are the implications in my life?”

Solution?

Benefits !!

Credit

Great Leaders !

Observation 1 : No Single Archetype

Observation 2 : Three Fundamental Attributes

Observation 3 : Build Trust

Credit

Necessary Risk for a Leader

Credit