THE LEAFLET

May 02 2024

colonoscopies & morale, growth cycle hacks, belief cycle & allergies

WHAT COLONOSCOPIES TEACH US ABOUT BUILDING MORALE

Morale isn’t an all-things-considered judgment of how things are going but a certain-things-considered-more-than-others judgment. (Not quite as pithy.) Called the “peak-end rule,” social science research (definitely click this post to read all the gory details!) has taught us something important about people’s evaluations of their happiness:

People’s overall morale assessments aren’t perfect sums across all their experiences at work; morale is mostly informed by people’s emotional peaks (good or bad) and most recent experiences.

This is good news for leaders: You can’t control the emotional valence of every moment that every person will experience at work. But if people index their morale judgments mostly to the memorable moments of extreme high and low, you can impact that. To boost overall morale, then, your job is to create powerful moments and stamp people’s experiences. In other words, create positive emotional peaks on a regular basis. And don’t forget to do something positive and noteworthy before time away from work (e.g., winter break) when people will naturally be reflecting on how things are going.

(For advice on how to do this well, see The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.)

In sum, good leaders are intentional about shaping those things that loom largest in people’s minds.

Read the rest here.

GROWTH CYCLE HACKS TO BOOST PERFORMANCE

For hundreds of years, no runner could run a mile in less than 4 minutes. In fact, many people thought that four minutes was the limit of what human kinesiology and physiology would allow. Then one day in 1954 Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4. The running world rejoiced! Then, just 46 days later, Bannister’s record was broken with a race time of 3:57.9. Apparently, it was a psychological — not physiological — barrier that was holding back progress. 

Here’s what I think is going on: Bannister’s sub-4 mile shattered the illusion of impossibility and forced all other racers to index to a new expectation. They were required to accept they could go faster. Overriding prior expectations about the ceiling of possibility caused their performance to increase in turn. 

This same thing happens all of the time at work. Expectations about the ceiling of “as much as possible,” “as good as possible,” or “as fast as possible” tend to be far too low. Then we behave in ways that match those expectations (at best).

Almost everyone’s initial assumption about the ceiling of what’s possible is too low. 

The job of a great leader is to constantly clarify the bar of excellence and raise people’s expectations about what is possible. In other words, your job as a leader is to challenge your team’s sense of what they can accomplish. 

People’s performance follows their expectations far more than the opposite.

Read the rest here.

THE BELIEF-ENERGY CYCLE & ALLERGIES

As a leader, maybe you’ve had the feeling, “My top performers somehow manage to continue getting even better while my lower performers seem to actually be getting worse.”

It’s called the Matthew Effect, and it seems to be directly connected to the positive feedback loops people naturally experience at work. High-performers put in the work, succeed, feel good about themselves, then start over again.

The problem is, when we think about how to help under-performers, we often forget about these feedback loops affecting people’s motivation. Our typical approach to under-performers is to tell them to work hard, give them support, and ask that they trust that success will follow. But striving continually through failed performance to improve just doesn’t work. So how can you overcome this? Rather than starting with the hard work, start with the identity of your under-performers. Reset their view of themselves as being more capable.

The masters of helping others grow invert the “work → success → identity” process. 

Your job is to point out every positive energy expenditure, every productive micro-behavior, and every instance of incremental progress on which these people are succeeding. Remind them of all the times they have accomplished things related to X. Consider all of the ways in which their skills are well suited for doing X. In sum, shift their sense of self as being the sort of person who can totally knock X out of the park. They will then do the things that people who are good at X do, and their performance will then catch up.

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Writer Joan Didion on self-respect:

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Novelist Haruki Murakami on unoriginal thought:

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Cataloguer of many things Stewart Brand on a harmful idea:

Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric