Professional Development – 2021 – Week 37

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/54585499@N04/

Business

5 Reasons Your Employees Don’t Understand Your Company’s Vision (via HBR)

  • Telling them only once
  • Giving just the high-level view (everyone needs to connect what they do to the vision)
  • Lack of clarity
  • Distaste of the vision
  • People not wanting to change

Leadership

Why AI Will Never Replace Managers (via HBR)

AI is not very good at reframing problems. Stepping away from problems can help our minds restructure our current picture of them. Managers can bring about cognitive conflict to surface hidden assumptions. Playful exploration can let you remove typical constraints, allowing you to reframe problems in novel ways. Analogies are useful for helping bridge gaps between people and ideas.

Motivation

Is Your Motivation Still on Vacation? (via HBR)

  • The mountain seems to high to climb. “…the more distant you are from something, the more abstractly you think about it. … if you don’t think you can get a particular task done, you’re unlikely to muster the energy to work on it.” Break work down into steps you can achieve.
  • Nothing seems that important. “The real sense of mission in your work comes from that combination of seeing how the tasks you perform are connected to a more significant set of outcomes… when you feel like your work serves a broader purpose that connects you to other people, you also feel greater satisfaction with the tasks you perform.”
  • You’re stuck in a rut. “Work on concepts like flow suggests that people are most engaged with their work when they’re working right at the limit of what they’re capable of doing (that space between a task being too easy and a task being too hard), and where each action succeeds and naturally leads to the next.”

Process

Cognitive Task Analysis (via Software Lead Weekly)

I think something this Twitter thread explaining the process overlooks is that sometimes the goal isn’t to learn the end skill, it’s to learn how to learn skills.