The best half of a business conversation i ever heard was “look, the bottom line is this: give her £100,000 a year, give her a Porsche, give her her own office, give her a secretary, and she’ll bring in more than a million in profit every year.”
I've said this so many times. Being a woman in a male dominated field is exhausting.
Being a younger person (hell, I'm 42 and consider myself young in comparison) in a white old male dominated field is also exhausting. I stopped counting the times I warned my superiors of things that would happen if they don't do X, and then they happened because why take a younger person seriously?
God I feel this.
Yep or worse outright dangerous
People can also be confidently wrong.
It's my self-admitted worst trait. Not that I'm wrong on purpose or out of malice or anything. But when I think I know the answer, I will often express it as if I know the answer.
It's a terrible personality trait and I've been trying to work on it by forcing myself to use the words "I think..." before saying anything.
However...as someone in a leadership role, I also believe that sometimes, when there is no black-or-white answer, it's more important to be confident than to be right so as to not undermine the teams confidence in your leadership/decision making. Captain Picard taught me that.
in a leadership role
it's more important to be confident than to be right
... No dude, it isn't.
Yeah, nothing gets me to cut my leader out of the loop on shit I'm working on faster than knowing they won't hear me out when I disagree with them on something. Like I might be wrong myself but we need to talk it out, not just disregard my knowledge and experience because "your the boss". Same went when I was a leader. If someone disagreed with a decision of mine my door was always open.
I think maybe I worded that wrong.
I don’t mean in terms of giving answers to questions. I mean in terms of decision making. When facing a decision with two equal possible outcomes, it’s more important to be decisive than to be wishy washy.
“Hey boss. For this project we can either continue doing “x” or we can shift over to doing “y”. What should be do?” In those types of situations it’s more important to make a decision and be confident in your decision. If you second guess, they’re going to second guess.
I think they’re half right.
I feel it can be more important to be confident than right, in the moment, but once that moment is over you want to correct yourself and let others know that you were wrong about x, y, or z.
I feel the way you handle trying to be confident, even when you may be wrong, matters as well. For instance, you don’t want to be dismissive of the correction, but you should assert that you’ll reconfirm the details so there’s no ambiguity, but you’ll approach x problem with y solution for now until you’ve had time to verify z.
How can that be more important? What moment?
Example from my week, training. This week I was training some fresh employees, one of them asked a really good question which I didn't have an answer to at the time. I told them as much and said I'll come back to them after the session to find an answer to their question. They were unhappy with my answer but I had a class full of people who want to get back out to do their work. The best thing to do was move on, get everyone else going then follow-up. Which I did and I learned something. My point being, sometimes it's better to be wrong and move on than to stop everything to answer a single question. Experience has informed me what questions I have to take immediately and what ones I can circle back to.
There’s lot of examples I can think of where it can go both ways.
In an sport for instance the optimal play can be worse if not everyone is on the same page, so sometimes the decent play where everyone is on the same page is the one a leader would want to be pushing for.
In an emergency, having a leader giving directions to keep people calm and organized can matter even if it’s not the optimal way of handling things. The opposite can be true too there though, if a leader is trying to have people put out a fire with a rag, water, or a broom when a fire extinguisher in present then the individual that thinks to grab and use the fire extinguisher could be demonstrating that there are times when it makes sense to override the leader.
The leader above is still doing the right thing by tackling the problem the only way they know how in the moment, but as individuals we need to be able to know when we should go along with the plan the leader puts forward or when to break from that plan.
Oh man if I found out my manager had that mentality I’d be second-guessing literally everything they say forever. I would much rather someone say “I don’t know, but that’s a good question. I’ll find out for you” than give me the wrong information confidently.
I already struggle with respecting authority figures who clearly don’t know what they are doing and thus have no actual basis for their authority, so yeah that’d be a ticking time bomb.
Please try to move away from doing that. It’s genuinely not great for your reports, only for you to put in less effort.
I think maybe I worded that wrong.
I don't mean in terms of giving answers to questions. I mean in terms of decision making. When facing a decision with two equal possible outcomes, it's more important to be decisive than to be wishy washy.
"Hey boss. For this project we can either continue doing "x" or we can shift over to doing "y". What should be do?" In those types of situations it's more important to make a decision and be confident in your decision. If you second guess, they're going to second guess.
People in public doing "business on their phone" are the worst.
I mean at an airport it is kind of warranted though. The only other options are to leave and go home and miss the flight (If you're even near your home at that point), miss the call and put your job on the line, or go to the bathroom I guess but this is still public.
At least they aren't doing it on the plane.
Or, you could just chill and not be available. You're traveling. If you start doing business at an airport, it's because you want to be known as the super busy person that does business between Security check-in and boarding. I'll just listen to some music and chill while waiting to board the plane, thank you very much.
There's a ton of situations where that's not realistic. If you travel a lot for your job, not doing work when you have downtime like a layover isn't feasible. Timezones are also a factor, and that may be the only time where all parties could be available. Or they just want to get the work done in the time before their flight so they don't have to when they get back.
Some people who face reasonable trade-offs in doing so have a choice. Others who face unreasonable trade-offs have less of a choice. It's usually quite difficult to tell when it's a stranger you're overhearing without making assumptions.
For those that are Formula 1 fans, this reeks of "Toto, it's called a motor race, OK? We went car racing."
If I was trying to gather US trade secrets, I'd have a few spies on payroll just hanging around airport bars listening in on phone calls.
A few years ago I was sitting across from a guy at an airport and he was loudly buying skis for his son. Not only did I clearly hear the whole story of how his son just made the ski team and needed skis ASAP, I also heard his full credit card information.
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