Reflect and Diminish is a technique to deescalate situations where emotions run hot, and where decision making ability is compromised.
Use Empathy to de-escalate hot situations
Reflect and Diminish is a technique to deescalate situations where emotions run hot, and where decision making ability is compromised. Letting emotions drive decisions is a mistake, but this does not mean leaders should be devoid of emotions.
In situations where someone is overly emotional, it is important to both empathize with the person but to also reduce the emotion to a more controlled level so that you can focus on solving the problem at hand.
Reflect and Diminish: Reflect…
Train your teams by putting junior people in charge so they become more experienced and knowledgeable.
The best way to transfer knowledge and to build experience in a new team member is to put them in a leadership position. Put them in a position where they must make decisions and where they can make mistakes.
Ideally they are put in charge of a project that is outside of their comfort zone (but not excessively so). It should be challenging, but they should still ultimately succeed. You should continue to be there for support and instruction when necessary.
Putting junior people…
Fundamental rules to keep in mind in order to succeed as a new leader, by former U.S. Navy Seal Jocko Willink
- Be humble. It is an honour to be in a leadership position. Your team is counting on your to make the right decisions.
- Don’t act like you know everything. You don’t. The team knows that. Ask smart questions.
- Listen. Ask for advice and heed it.
- Treat people with respect. Regardless of rank, everyone is a human being and plays an important role in the team. Treat them that way. …
I’m reading a book called “The Dorito Effect” and it raised and answered an interesting question:
Why does food have flavour?
It’s a question that reinforces why you shouldn’t eat anything with natural or artificial flavouring in it:
When you eat a blueberry, your body associates the nutritional content of the blueberry with the FLAVOUR of the blueberry. So let’s assume that a blueberry has a high level of antioxidants. When you eat a blueberry, your body associates “blueberry flavour” with “anti-oxidants”. …
“Once a CEO hungers for a deal, he or she will never lack for forecasts that justify the purchase. Subordinates will be cheering, envisioning enlarged domains and the compensation levels that typically increase with corporate size. Investment bankers, smelling huge fees, will be applauding as well. (Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.) If the historical performance of the target falls short of validating its acquisition, large ‘synergies’ will be forecast. Spreadsheets never disappoint.”
— Warren Buffett
“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have lost their confident that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
— Colin Powell
The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
— Colin Powell
Twelve key principles of leadership, taken from the book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Principle #1: Extreme Ownership
On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
When subordinates aren’t doing what they should, leaders cannot blame the subordinates. …
- Pay no attention to macroeconomic trends or forecasts, or to people’s prediction about the future course of stock prices. Focus on the long term business value — on the size of the returns down the road.
- Stick to stocks within your “circle of competence.” If you don’t understand the business, you can’t value the stock.
- Look for managers that treat the shareholder’s capital with owner like care and thoughtfulness.
- Study prospects — and their competitors — in great detail. Look at raw data, not analysts’ summaries. Trust your own eyes. But one needn’t value a business to precisely. …
The best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them. This is why we would rather our hiring process generate more false negatives (people we should have hired but didn’t) than false positives (we shouldn’t have hired but did).
Test yourself: If you could trade the bottom 10 percent of your team for new hires, would your organization improve? If so, then you need to look at the hiring process that yielded those low performers and see how you can improve it. Another test: Are there members of your team whom, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep? If there are employees you would let go, then maybe you should.
— Eric Schmidt, “How Google Works”
Alex Czartoryski
Skeptic, Generalist, Ignoramus
