Field notes
Field Notes
Our daily Field Notes email is just the kind of jumpstart you need. A fast read. Maybe less than a minute. Because sometimes it just takes one insight to change the trajectory of the day.
Subscribe
Search Field Notes
Recruiters who scout talent for an organization are sometimes swayed by a particular skill, attribute, or trait that they believe is a difference-maker. If they allow this quality to overwhelm their attraction and assessment, thereby ignoring other data and important success factors, they invariably make a bad call. Even talent scouts as professional and accomplished as those in the National Football League can fall sway to overweighting a preferred skill.
The motivation behind offering criticism and critique to others has a profound impact on how people respond to feedback. It is painfully obvious to those on the receiving end whether a leader cares about them as people and whether the intention of their criticism is to make them better. Leaders who fail to spend the time to establish both the foundation of good intentions and caring will often find team members who disregard or resist their feedback.
People are suspicious of leaders who offer criticism without a clear motivation to help. They have the strong sense that evaluation and judgment without caring is cynical and scornful. And they would be right.
Leaders who are highly driven to learn and excel sometimes can become hypervigilant about everything in their world. Technically speaking, hypervigilance is an elevated state of constant assessment, usually regarding dangers and threats. For law enforcement and military professionals, this excited state of situational awareness can help to protect people from harm. But being on constant guard creates a host of problems.
The best leaders concede that they don’t have to have their way on many of the decisions critical for executing strategy. They know when to stand their ground over issues, which battles they must win, and when to allow the team to outflank them.
Sometimes, winning the argument is how to lose the team. But the vision, mission, and values of the team are never up for grabs. Input is welcome, but influence is unlikely to make for any real change. Good leaders defend the ground of values at all costs.
It is always a good idea not to let society or media define what we believe or how we should view the world or an issue. Homogenized thinking is always of a lower quality and is often wrongheaded.
Good leaders don’t leave the possibility of weak thinking to chance. They shape meaning by emphasizing the qualities underlying success and driving a narrative that people are empowered to define success in more realistic and personal terms.
Your success as a leader depends on it.
The most important ratio for a leader is not debt to equity, supervisor to employee, efficiency to cost, or price to earnings. The ratio that matters most for leadership success is the proportion of praise to criticism.
Leadership at its core is about making people and situations better. To help a colleague improve, leaders can emphasize what they believe the team member should amplify or do more of, or what they should do differently. Getting a colleague to do more of what they already do is all about positive reinforcement, such as praise, encouragement, compliment, and applause. To encourage others to do things differently, leaders turn to feedback, criticism, advice, and suggestion.