How to Handle Foolish People

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by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

 

Exploring the roots of stupidity and strategies to combat the ignorance of others.

 

Most people, at one time or another, act foolishly. However, truly ignorant individuals exhibit a lack of introspection and stubbornly cling to their opinions, regardless of how irrational they may be.

These people demonstrate unwavering self-assurance and are often completely oblivious to their own inadequacies. They craft retrospective justifications to validate their beliefs and hold onto them. Even when presented with opportunities for personal growth and change, they seem incapable of breaking free from their entrenched habits.

Reasoning with stubborn individuals can be as perplexing as it is frustrating. Many have written it off as a hopeless task. As American writer Mark Twain once cautioned, “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”

To argue against stupidity only seems to reinforce it. These individuals thrive on power and control, defending their position and denying their foolishness, regardless of innumerable counterarguments.

Despite these challenges, it is still possible to sway such people towards more sensible behaviour. It all starts with understanding the roots of stupidity.

Inside the mind of a fool

From a psychological perspective, stupidity is often considered an outcome of cognitive biases or errors in judgement. Many prominent psychologists attribute irrational beliefs and foolish actions to our cognitive limitations. Research into human cognition and decision-making has shed light on why these biases persist. It reveals that humans are not purely rational beings; they switch between fast, intuitive thinking and slow, rational thinking depending on the situation.

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HOW TO IMPROVE AGILITY IN LEADERSHIP

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  by Tresha Moreland

Do you ever feel stuck as a leader? You want to make changes quickly and effortlessly, but you feel as though you are trapped in quicksand and are sinking quickly.  This makes it difficult to promote innovation or to be prepared for any unforeseen obstacles.

If this describes you, enhancing leadership agility is an important first step. The capacity to adapt, pick up new skills, and take advantage of your team’s strengths is agility in leadership. It is the capacity to articulate a compelling future vision to your team in a clear and effective manner. It is the capacity to change quickly in a variety of contexts, including strategy, operations, people, and oneself.

However, how do you increase your agility and become a more effective leader? Here are key steps for consideration.

DEVELOP A CLEAR AND COMPELLING VISION

Having a unique and appealing vision of the future is the first step in developing your agility. What do you want? What are your objectives? What values do you hold? What kind of impact do you want to have on the world? You can better align your actions and choices with the goal and vision of your organization if you have a clear vision for it. Additionally, it will encourage and drive your team to strive for greatness and conquer challenges. You must be open to criticism and willing to modify your vision in response to new facts or evolving circumstances if you want to establish a clear vision. Additionally, you must effectively convey your vision to your team through stories, analogies, and feelings. Continue reading →

Are Multiple Job Interview Rounds Really Necessary?

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by Chengyi Lin

 

How companies can simplify the process without compromising their evaluation of candidates.

While it’s critical for companies to thoroughly assess potential hires, the length of the job interview process seems to be increasing. On LinkedIn, you’ll find numerous stories of candidates undergoing anything from nine to 12 rounds of interviews in their quest to secure a role – only for their application to be unsuccessful.

The time it takes for an organisation to make a new hire has reached an all-time high, as reported by human capital advisory firm The Josh Bersin Company and global talent solutions business AMS. Beyond unfavourable macro conditions beyond a firm’s direct control, much of the culpability for drawn-out, cumbersome interview processes falls on the companies themselves.

A prolonged process – say, one that stretches over two months from start to finish – doesn’t just cause psychological stress for candidates, but also has practical implications for firms. Vacant roles remain unfilled, which can be a drain on both time and resources. Candidates can become frustrated and withdraw their application, causing the company to lose out on a good hire.

One reason for conducting so many interviews could be that firms are just not adequately prepared when they begin the hiring process. A lack of internal alignment and entangled politics increase the complexity and slow things down. Leaner headcounts – especially in HR departments – due to recent layoffs could also mean that individuals without the proper knowledge of how to interview candidates are being asked to step up without sufficient preparation.

Inefficient stakeholder management could also be at play. Some firms require multiple individuals to meet and sign off on a hiring decision, which may be advantageous for reasons of equity and diversity. But this can prolong things if too many people with similar profiles are involved.

There is also immense cost and performance pressure to hire the right candidate – one that can execute the role, is an organisational fit and will remain in the firm for at least a year (or, ideally, longer). Hiring managers and HR executives could therefore feel the need to put a candidate through the wringer to ensure that they are making the right choice.

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Why you should build a “Career Portfolio” (not a “Career Path”)

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by April Rinne

 

Every four years, something inside me shifts. I get restless and want to learn something new or apply my skills in a new way. It’s as though I shed a professional skin and start over, fresh.

In my 20s, I got all kinds of flak for this. When I decided to guide hiking trips rather than join a consulting firm, my peers said that my resume made no sense. When I opted to defer graduate school to travel in India, my mentors questioned my seriousness and said my professional future could crash.

I felt like something was wrong with me because I was interested in so many things while my friends were laser-focused on climbing the corporate ladder. It’s not that I wasn’t disciplined or willing to work hard. There was just too much worth learning and doing. To settle on one pursuit seemed like a mistake.

Today, the world has changed in some amazing and profound ways. Broadening your career focus and professional identity is no longer seen as abnormal. It’s celebrated. The macro forces driving the future of work demand independent and adaptable thinkers. When we add in the potential for automation to transform jobs en masse, the Great Resignation, and the growing number of hybrid offices around the world, it’s clear that the time is ripe to rethink what a successful career path looks like.

Up until this point, we have lacked the language necessary to design our careers in ways that veer from the traditional script. But now there is hope. A new vocabulary is emerging. At the heart of it is a shift from pursuing a “career path” to creating your “career portfolio.” This term was originally coined by philosopher and organizational behavior expert Charles Handy in the 1990s, and is poised to finally enter its prime today.

What is a career portfolio?
The term portfolio comes from the Italian words portare (to carry) + folio (sheet of paper). People often think of a portfolio in terms of finance, business, or art. For example:

  • Investors build investment portfolios to diversify their holdings and mitigate risk.
  • Financial advisors recommend a portfolio that includes equities, bonds, and cash.
  • Executives often use portfolio theory (pioneered by BCG’s product-portfolio matrix in the 1970s) to analyze their business units, strategy, and foresight. The purpose of their portfolio is to manage risk and return into the future.
  • Office managers and HR leaders use portfolios to stay organized.
  • Artists throw open their portfolio to show works they’re really proud of — the canvas of their lives.

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A New Approach to Writing Job Descriptions

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by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

 

 

Jobs today are changing fast, and traditional job descriptions can’t keep up. As new technologies disrupt processes and require new skills, and as companies are moving toward more and more project-based work, we are beginning to see the evolution of job descriptions away from static, holistic prescriptions that follow an employee for years to dynamic guidance that changes based on needs.

For example, a company that hired an employee for a certain set of tasks might find that four months later, a different set of tasks takes strategic priority. Even though that employee has the right skills for the new tasks, the employee can point to their job description to decline to do the new task by saying that it wasn’t what they were hired to do — or, if they take on the new tasks, their job description becomes quickly out of date.

This article is one in a series on “Creative Resilience: Leading in an Age of Discontinuity,” the theme of the 15th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. See the conference program here.

Because most job descriptions are firmly embedded in the employee’s core area of work, they also tend to encourage silos in the organization by discouraging cross-functional collaboration. Rigid job descriptions also discourage experimentation with new technologies that may have been unimaginable at the time the description was written. And finally, narrow job descriptions can mean that an employee isn’t able to fulfill the full range of their talents at work, leaving them dissatisfied.

In response, companies are starting to approach job descriptions in new, more flexible ways based on outcomes, skills, and teams. I’ll describe each of these in turn, but first let’s look at how job descriptions came to be what we know them as today, and what they do.

Why Job Descriptions? Continue reading →