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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia

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Psychology as Superpower

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A quote from Brandon Sanderson’s novel Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds:

Psychology-as-superpower is a recurring theme in my works. I’ve always believed that the personality traits that make us each distinctive (the way we process information, the way we motivate ourselves, the way we shelter our psyche from the bad while learning to cherish the good) can be either our greatest strengths or our most dramatic limitations. How you see yourself, along with how you use what you have, often more important than talents, skills, or even supernatural abilities.”

The Deadly Reality of the Lazy Manager

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In his book Mastery, Robert Greene writes about social intelligence and its importance when working with other people. In human behavior, says Greene, we can detect patterns that transcend culture and time. There are positive traits, but also negative ones. He calls these negative qualities The Seven Deadly Realities: Envy, Conformism, Rigidity, Self-obsessiveness, Laziness, Flightiness, and Passive Aggression. “Most of us have these negative qualities (…) in mild doses. But in a group setting, there will be inevitably people who have one or more of these qualities to a high degree that they can become very destructve” (p. 141)

Describing laziness, Greene writes:

We all have the tendency to want to take the quickest, easiest path to our goals, but we generally manage to control our impatience; we understand the superior value of getting what we want through hard work. For some people, however, this inveterate lazy streak is far too powerful. Discouraged by the thought that it might take months or years to get somewhere, they are constantly on the lookout for shortcuts. Their laziness will assume many insidious forms. For example, if you are not careful and talk too much, they will steal your best ideas and make them their own, saving themselves all of the mental effort that went into conceiving them. They will swoop in during the middle of your project and put their name on it, gaining partial credit for your work. They will engage you in a “collaboration” in which you do the bulk of the hard work but they share equally in the rewards. (…) If you are doing work for a superior, be prepared for them to take full credit and leave your name out. (p. 144)

Let’s consider laziness not from the apprentice point of view –the point of view that Green uses– but from the point of view of the leader in an organization who manages a team. If we were describing a lazy manager, Greene’s description would closely match what Adam Grant refers to as a taker1.

Some people may justify this behavior by telling themselves —and others— that “the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place”, a zero-sum game. For some people to win, others have to lose. But the research done by Grant tells a different story: most of the time, the best performers are not of those who behave as takers, but quite the opposite. These givers, as Grant calls them, are people who use a different cost-benefit analysis: people who help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs2.

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As Simon Sinek writes, “Givers advance the world. Takers advance themselves and hold the world back.” 3

This makes sense. Consider that for achieving outstanding results, you need to “enlist” other people to your cause: you need your team’s commitment, but also support from people higher in the hierarchy. If you need your team to go the extra mile consistently, they need drivers that go beyond what external motivators like compensation, fear of loosing their job, or even status, can provide.

The saying goes that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”4 Nobody likes working in a place where, to thrive, you need to follow Greene’s advice: “Keep your ideas to yourself. Conceal enough of the details so that it is not possible to steal them. Secure your credit in advance. When someone ask for help, pass it off as a ‘collaborative’ effort.5”

How to grow a culture of givers, not of laziness? Example is one of the most powerful forces. Be a giver yourself. Don’t look for shortcuts, look for efficiencies instead. Don’t take credit for other’s work, but recognize and promote their good work in front of their peers and other managers.

Most important, don’t reward or recognize people who focus work as a zero-sum game, who act like takers. Don’t be naive, don’t feed them. Don’t hire them, because they’ll dump you as soon as they can’t benefit from you or the company. Learn to judge people not by first impressions, but by the consistent traits of their behaviour instead.

The best companies don’t care just about results, but also about how those results are achieved. They are not excellent only because of their strategies, but because of the people who design and put those strategies to action.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

  1. cfr Grant, Adam. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, p. 4.
    “Takers have a distinctive signature: they like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting their own interests ahead of others’ needs. Takers believe that the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place. They feel that to succeed, they need to be better than others. To prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure they get plenty of credit for their efforts. Garden-variety takers aren’t cruel or cutthroat; they’re just cautious and self-protective. ‘If I don’t look out for myself first,’ takers think, ‘no one will’.” ↩
  2. cfr. Grant, Adam., op. cit., p. 5. ↩
  3. cfr. Grant, Adam., op. cit., p. 258. ↩
  4. Quote allegedly attributed to the late Peter Drucker. ↩
  5. Greene, Robert. Mastery, p. 144. ↩

You have to build diversity into your company from day one

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Fred Wilson, commenting on how diversity happens:

A few years at our annual CEO summit, Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, told a room full of startup CEOs that you have to build diversity into your company from day one because if you don’t, it becomes so much harder later on. He explained that nobody wants to join a company where nobody looks like them. That really hit home and woke quite a few people up.

All companies and people suffer from back burnering things. You focus on what you must get done and everything else takes a back seat.

That doesn’t work when it comes to hiring and diversity. You have to prioritize it and make it intentional.

Coherence and loyalty

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Coherence, the quality of forming a unified whole, is about our actions matching what we think and what we say.

Pablo Ferreiro and Manuel Alcazar, in their book Managing People, refer to lack of coherence as disloyalty. Although it’s obvious, the term disloyalty gave me a new light on the concept: lack of coherence always has an effect on other people.

Disloyalty. This is the attitude of an individual whose actions do not match his words. Even when truth and veracity exist, action is neutralized. In these cases, the problem is not communication but motivation: the disloyal person knows what he is doing but chooses to continue. This is particularly serious in the case of managers because their disloyal actions are more eloquent than their words and compromise any good communication that may exist in the organization. Unity1 is rapidly destroyed2.

  1. Unity can be loosely defined as the bond of trust and motivation among the members of the organization that makes them willingly go the extra mile for both those members and to exceed the expectations of the organization.↩
  2. Garcia, Manuel Alcazar; Pablo Ferreiro de Babot. Managing People, Kindle Edition, Locations 4208-4212. The quote in Gobierno de Personas, the Spanish edition of the book, reflects better the idea: “Deslealtad: Es la actitud de quien no es fiel en sus acciones a la palabra dada. Aunque haya verdad y veracidad, la acción se torna estéril. En estos casos el problema no es la comunicación sino la motivación: el desleal sabe, pero no quiere. Es especialmente grave en el caso de personas con mando, porque sus acciones desleales resultan más elocuentes que sus palabras y contradicen toda la buena comunicación que pueda haber en la organización. La unidad se destruye de modo acelerado.”↩

Link Roundup

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The Bullshit Web, excellent article by Nick Heer on why some webpages take more time to load than 20 years ago, even if our connection bandwith is 20x better.

An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.

Death to the bullshit web.

Larry King interviews Seth Godin in Communication University.