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June 27 - September 20, 2020
You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
“The Structure of Phenotype Personality Traits” that suggests there are five key factors: Extroversion (outgoing versus reserved) Openness to experience (curious versus cautious) Conscientiousness (organized versus easygoing) Agreeableness (compassionate versus challenging) Neuroticism (nervous versus confident)
People with high EQ are typically more empathetic, correlated with high abilities in these areas: • Perceiving complex emotional states in others • Managing these emotions in themselves and others • Using emotions (including their own) to facilitate conversations Thus, roles that involve group dynamics, coordination, or empathy (e.g., project management, leadership, sales, marketing) are best suited for people with high EQ. (Note that IQ and EQ are independent traits, meaning the same person could have any combination of high or low IQ and EQ.)
When people are excelling, it’s natural to reward them with promotions for their excellent performance. However, you need to keep the Peter principle in mind when doling out those promotions, so that you don’t put people in roles where they are unlikely to succeed.
Often higher roles involve different skills, such as more people management and less individual contribution, which may cut against someone’s strengths or career goals. To counteract the Peter principle, organizations can develop multiple career tracks, such as a technical leadership track that doesn’t require people management. In addition, higher roles tend to involve more strategy than tactics. Generally, strategy is the big picture; tactics are the details. Strategy is the long term, defining what ultimate success looks like. Tactics are short term, defining what we’re going to do next to
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Your best people know how to be effective within your organization. They know the organizational history, who to go to for different pieces of knowledge, and ultimately how to get things done. When these people leave, their institutional knowledge walks out the door with them, and the whole organization becomes less effective.
The ideal situation for any group setting is one where you have clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, and people who are well suited for each and intrinsically motivated to excel at them. Those are the ingredients for a 10x team.
But for your feedback to be effective, you are going to need specifics.
Caring personally involves nurturing the relationship you’ve built prior to giving feedback. If you’ve consistently shown that you have this person’s best interests at heart, then you’ve laid the groundwork for that person to be receptive to your constructive criticism. On the other hand, if you don’t have much of a relationship at all, or worse, have a negative one, your feedback is not likely to be accepted. It is too easy at that point for the receiver to disregard it.
When you truly understand what job people are really trying to get done by using your product, then you can focus your efforts on meeting that need. Asking customers what job they really want done can tell you the root of their problem and eliminate faulty assumptions on either side, ultimately resulting in a solution with a higher chance of success.
First, get a partner in super thinking. Thinking about complicated topics in isolation does not yield the best results. It’s much better to share your ideas with someone and get their feedback. It doesn’t have to be the same person for all topics. You could talk to one person for political topics, someone else for economic topics, etc. But talking to people who are interested in the core truth of a particular subject is essential. Second, try writing. Even if you never publish anything, the act of writing clarifies your thinking and makes you aware of holes in your arguments. You can combine
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