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Leadership Skill: Psychological Context
By harveyrobbins | December 2, 2002
There is a natural human trap in which we often get caught. Basically, we all interpret information we hear based on the last piece of information we happened to be thinking about. For example, if a salesperson is thinking she knows what a customer needs (”a blue coat”), she may unthinkingly ring up the blue coat - even though the customer only bought a pair of red socks. The salesperson wrote the order based on what she was thinking, not on what she actually heard.
In factories there is a storage space set aside at the end of the assembly line. It’s called the redo line, because it’s where everything that has to be redone it put. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the cost of redoing work, across all industries, is the result of mistakes incurred because of psychological context - people misperceiving, seeing false patterns, unthinkingly turning a screw to the left instead of the right. We slap ourselves on the forehead when we make these completely avoidable mistakes - then we proceed to make them again.
The lesson here is that a team member must be vigilant about his or her own attitudes. Suspicions that would have saved us from treachery and defensiveness in another era become our workaday enemy in the team era. We must learn to identify when our instincts about one another are serving us well, and when they are doing us a disservice.
It’s ok to trust your senses. It’s your brain you have to keep an eye on.
Topics: Leadership Skill |