Monthly Archive: February 2022
As a manager, there isn’t a rule book for all the decisions you need to make and all the steps you need to take. You will make plenty of mistakes on the way. You will have a hard time getting your ideas heard and convincing others. The uncertainty of your decisions along with the daily struggle to make things happen can be quite taxing on your personal health and mental wellbeing. Practicing self-care as a manager isn’t just necessary, it should be your topmost priority.
What’s more dreadful than receiving difficult feedback? Giving one. Worried that negative feedback will hurt the other person and ruin your relationship is one of the biggest deterrents to avoid saying what you need to say. Giving difficult feedback is the most difficult thing you may have to do at work, but building this skill is like building muscle. It only gets better with practice. It never gets easy, you only get better.
The difference between leaders who push their teams to the ground and those who take their teams to great heights isn’t knowledge, capability, or competence. It isn’t even their motivation and desire to succeed. They both want to achieve success. What sets them apart is the difference in how they handle their ignorance. Their ignorance isn’t limited to their skills and abilities, but also how they come across to others.
We do not conform to cultural and behavioral expectations around us that exist, but to a version we believe exists. Stuck in a vicious cycle of pluralistic ignorance, we continue to support the very behaviors we deem bad. Call it peer pressure, fear of rejection, our desire to fit in, or simply the fear of standing out, we think one thing and do another because we are deluded about other people’s real views and feel compelled to adhere to that delusion.
