Showing posts with label Risk Aversion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Risk Aversion. Show all posts

July 21, 2022

Watch That Hard Work

Even work is a risky endeavor.  ;-)

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)


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May 28, 2011

Perfect Is The Enemy of Good

Perfection is a destructive force.

And the French philosopher, Voltaire recognized this when he said "Perfect is the enemy of good."

I never really fully understood this saying, until recently reading a Harvard Business Review article (June 2011) called "The Paradox of Excellence."

The article states: "High achievers often undermine their leadership by being afraid to show their limitations."

At the heart of it...high achievers can let anxiety impede their progress through stress, alienating others, and failure to seize real opportunities.

Here from the article are some of the "classic high achiever" behaviors that can get in the way of success unless artfully managed and balanced (my views):

1) Results-driven: High-achievers can be so work-oriented that they forget the people the make it all it happen. This is why they need to remember to delegate, empower, share, and CARE about others. The work is a team effort!

2) Highly-motivated: They can be so serious about all aspects of their jobs that they "fail to distinguish between the urgent and the merely important." Instead, they should take a bigger-picture PERSPECTIVE on the tasks and prioritize these accordingly. Not everything is life and death, thank G-d, and we need to keep a sense of humor and take the time to enjoy what we are doing.

3) Competitive: They "obsessively compare themselves with others," which can cause them to feel insufficient or make false calibrations. You have to remember to INTERNALIZE that the competition is not with others but with yourself--be the best you can be!

4) Risk-managed: "They may shy away from the unknown" and avoid risky endeavors. As they say in Wall Street, without risk, there is no reward. To INNOVATE and transform, you need to take calculated risks (without betting the farm!) after doing due diligence on an investment or opportunity.

5) Passion: This can lead to powerful, productive highs, but can also result in "crippling lows." Recognize that there are natural ups and downs in the course of one's work. You can STEADY yourself through these by seeing it as incremental growth and improvement, rather than as either pure success or failure.

6) Guilt: "No matter how much they accomplish, they feel like they aren't doing enough." This is an endless trap of it's never enough and never good enough. Hey, we're all mortal. Do what you can and balance the many demands that you have on you in your life, but FOCUS on what's most important, since you can't do it all and you can never get it all done.

7) Feedback: High-achievers "care intensely about how others view their work" and they require a steady stream of positive feedback. Don't get hung up by what other people say or think--it's not personal and they have their own problems. Stay focused on delivering excellence in products and services to the customer, and use whatever feedback you can get--positive or negative--as valuable information to IMPROVE your offering.

If you are a high-achiever and demand much (if not the impossible from yourself), take a step back and a breath in and out--you can accomplish a lot more of what's important to you if stop trying to be perfect, admit your vulnerabilities and limitations, and just try to do your best--that's all that anyone can ask.

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July 3, 2010

Moving Beyond The Blame Game

Leaders have a choice about the messages they convey to their followers—they can empower people to take ownership and sometimes risk, or they can promote “CYA” as the corporate mantra.

This is the subject of a new article in Psychology Today (July/August 2010), “Just Don’t Do It,” by Dr. Art Markman.

The article provides an explanation of how people fall into the trap of risk-aversion. Essentially, when the outcome of an action causes trouble, the person performing the action is assumed to have negative intentions, and more or less, be automatically blamed. This leads people to assume the stance that “silence is golden” and avoid “trouble.”

Markman provides the analogy of a boy who gets blamed for throwing a ball and breaking a window, while the girl he threw it to averts blame:

- “The boy is definitely going to get in trouble. He threw the ball…what about the girl, though? She watched as the ball passed over her head...perhaps she could have done something that would have stopped the ball from hitting the window.”

- “This tendency to blame outcomes on actions rather than inactions [is called] the omission bias.”

Especially in a tough economy, people can easily get timid in the workplace because of the “omission bias.” Everyone is afraid of losing prestige, power, and even their paychecks, if they but open their mouths or make a mistake. And if leaders do not intervene, the result can be employee complacency and inaction.

This is reminiscent of the saying that “it is better to be silent and have people think you are a fool, then to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

What a waste of our organization’s most precious asset—people!

Rather than drawing on our employees’ education, skills and experience to promote organizational growth, we squelch them in the name of “going along to get along.” They learn to “toe the line.”

Part of the problem is that organizations frown on failure, which is a necessary component of learning. We blame people for every mistake rather than celebrating their willingness to try.

The result is that we end up with a workforce so cautious and risk-averse that it stunts our ability to compete. Unfortunately then, our people are like rats who have been shocked into a submission that we don’t really want or intend. Then we wonder why it seems like there is a lot of “dead weight.”

So is blame all bad? Of course not, because accountability and the assignment of responsibility go together.

However, there is a tendency to distort the tool of accountability and take it too far. “The blame game” prevents leaders from harnessing people’s creativity and productivity.

We need to ask ourselves what it is that we really want from our organizations. We can improve our organization’s engagement with their people by building trust versus suspicion, inclusion versus exclusion, and action versus inaction.


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