Brain-based Boss

Pattern recognition, recency and familiarity biases can impact our perceptions and responses. If you're hiring a librarian and the applicant doesn't look like your preconceived notion of what a librarian looks like, does that impact your assessment of them? If your high school bully was named Toby, does that affect your impressions of other Tobys you meet later? On average it does. Don't be average.

The odds are very high that any people you’re leading, and from whom you’re trying to get buy-in for change, have had leaders like you try it with them before. On average, it’s likely that those previous efforts and results have not been great. Overt and obvious opposition is easy to spot and you're compelled to actively deal with it but how do you spot and proactively manage those that don't actively oppose change but 'drag the chain'?

Our longevity, health, quality of life and personal productivity are due 30% to luck and 70% to our choices and behaviours. What are 10 choices we can make, any one of which would actually diminish our odds of decline or disaster? How wrong are we when it comes to estimating where our problems will occur?

What are the habits of those who do live longer and remain happy and meaningfully productive for longer? What are the signs to watch out for that maybe now is the time to start taking control rather than continue to rely on your body's and mind's good luck? What clues are there that the fad you're reading about is snake-oil quackery?

“Sleep is a waste of time.” – Thomas Edison (Inventor of the lightbulb, possibly the single item most responsible for messing up our Circadian Rhythms.) Nah. Though researchers don’t know the exact mechanism, it seems that chronic lack of sleep causes inflammation, elevates blood pressure and heart rate, and affects glucose levels, leading to a much higher stroke risk in the sleep-deprived. Sleep increases the ability of the four main healthy lifestyle habits (a healthy diet, exercise, moderate alcohol consumption and not smoking) to protect the body against cardiovascular disease. So, what can we do...?

Poor sleep can increase your risk of a stroke by 400%. Ineffective sleep makes you less productive immediately, not at 3pm the next day. If you pour red bull into your laptop, it doesn't work as well. The same goes for your body and brain.

Much time, effort and expense is wasted on hiring the wrong people. Job interviews are critically important, yet the vast majority of people conducting job interviews have received zero training at job interviewing. Here is a walk-through a simple but consistently effective approach to conducting job interviews, either solo or as part of a panel. From defining the role to drafting effective and purposeful questions to the mechanics of the face-to-face interactions to the post-interview work - this ep lays it out for you. And there's a handy tip sheet too.

People with strong connections to their future selves make better decisions. In the absence of time travel technology like the Terminator movies, how can we generate such connections?

A half dozen or so studies on how physical space influences behaviour, decisions and relationships.

When we start a job, how accepting are we of the way things are done around here? Where's the challenge or validation of things that may have lost their point or been surpassed?

A quick snapshop of a couple of studies on how our behaviuour can be nudged by others through small positive actions.

A few tips and techniques on getting the right amount of sleep consistently and optimising its quality, plus a breakdown on some consequences longterm for not doing so :-(

I talk about debriefing in a training context then a workplace context, plus recommend an HBR article by Doug Sundheim.

Some thinking around the inter-relationships and conflicts between social norms and marketing norms when it comes to influencing the behaviour of others.   Click here for my book 'The Brain-Based Boss' and more interesting psych studies.

Short n sweet - a quick story about a quirky psych study showing how we perceive that others take far more notice of us than they actually do.   Click here for more on my book 'The Brain-Based Boss' and more interesting psych studies.

What is a 'shift worker'? Is a tired employee 'fit for work'? Click here for my book 'Live Work Love' and more on fatigue.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. What tricks do our lazy brains pull on us and others? How can we prevent or lessen these, or, how can we leverage these to our advantage?

Continuing on from the last episode, we look at the criteria by which we assess our past jobs and provide a tool with which we can steer towards future jobs. Recommending this book by Chris Johnson: http://www.kerridgepartners.com/resources-books/taking-charge-the-book 

My responses and reactions to a speaker I MC'd at a conference last week who spoke about career planning. What jobs are coming and going? Too many of us too often think about our careers and ask, "What next?" A smarter road is to ask, "Where to?"   I recommend Chris Johnson's book available at: http://www.kerridgepartners.com/resources-books/taking-charge-the-book

Following up last week's episode about how our brains fill in the gaps and make up memories, this episode gives a great case study, suggests some solutions and there's a neat optical illusion activity to prove our actual blind spots.