Si hay una pandemia universal y peligrosísima es la estupidez. Nunca dejo de asombrarme de los comportamientos perjudiciales para sí mismos y para otros que veo en tantas personas a mi alrededor. (Aunque quizás ellos ven lo mismo en mí.) 😉
Desde el punto de vista evolutivo, es fácilmente explicable: El cerebro es el órgano que más energía consume. Por lo tanto no ha evolucionado para dar las mejores respuestas posibles, sino unas respuestas que minimicen el esfuerzo mental hasta el nivel que permita la supervivencia inmediata. Una vez que lo entiendes, comprendes muchos comportamientos.
Hace tiempo hice un vídeo en el que introducía el tema de la estupidez y explicaba el modelo modelo de Carlo María Cipolla para que puedas analizar en tu entorno quiénes son estúpidos, inteligentes, ingenuos o egoístas, y qué hacer con ellos. Lo incrusto de nuevo como introducción.
Recupero este tema porque el otro día escuché un podcast muy completo e interesante sobre la estupidez, por el psicólogo Miguel Ángel Alcarria en el programa de César Vidal. Por algún motivo no me deja incrustarlo en este post, pero te dejo el enlace a continuación. Escúchalo mientras haces cualquier cosa que no requiera mucha atención. ¡Merece la pena para descifrar esta maldición e intentar librarse de ella!
Aviso: El primer síntoma de infección por estupidez es creerse inmune a la misma. Sólo el conocimiento de la enfermedad y la sana autocrítica para detectar sus síntomas a tiempo permiten minimizarla.
Si te interesa el tema, también te recomiendo otros posts anteriores:
Fabuloso discurso de graduación de uno de los mejores tenistas de la historia, con lecciones para el tenis, pero sobre todo sabiduría para la vida. Compártelo a tus hijos y compañeros.
Now they’ve shared their research: «The leadership journey: insights into effective leadership progression. An international research report.»
It explores the perspectives of employees, leaders, organizations, and scientific literature about:
The direct impact of leaders on their people at each level
What leadership behaviors and attributes are important at each level
The leadership challenges leaders face as they transition to the next level and their degree of preparedness
How organizations can best prepare leaders to transition successfully and be effective in their future leadership role
These findings offer practical and actionable insights to help build effective leaders for strong leadership pipelines.
Summary
Here are some key ideas:
Only 38% of leaders feel extremely or very prepared to move to the next level of leadership.
Enabling and supporting leaders as they progress through your organization is critical when facing tight labor markets and increased reliance on leaders to deliver results. However, only 36% of leaders surveyed received formal leadership training or development when they moved to their current leadership level.
Leaders of all levels feel that mentoring programs and individual coaching were in the top three most useful development opportunities
Leaders who made employees feel more positive emotions were also rated as more effective leaders by employees. Yet one in five employees are still experiencing stress and frustration on a very frequent basis. Employees whose leaders display negative behaviors reported a decrease in their own work performance, engagement, and overall wellbeing.
This reinforces the need for leadership development to focus on a human-centered approach and places emphasis on emotional intelligence
Employees identified being supportive, providing constructive feedback, giving autonomy, and communicating well as leadership behaviors that most enhance their work performance.
80% of leaders felt they had to change their behavior to a moderate, large, or very large extent when they transitioned to their current leadership level.
First-level: Leading self vs leading others: An initial mindset change is required as individual contributors move into leadership – focusing on delegation and empowering others, appreciating individuals and communicating task expectations. First-level leaders also face complexity in managing their relationships with former peers and new colleagues.
Mid-level: Leading others vs leading leaders. Moving to mid-level leadership requires a further shift in mindset. There is a need to demonstrate and balance both strategic and operational capabilities and leaders at this level have many audiences to communicate with. They must recognize the need to move out of the detail and have a broader strategic focus.
Senior level: Leading the organization. At a senior leader level a final mindset shift is required, often recognized as the most difficult by organizations. Building and maintaining trust and providing clarity in communication are essential at this level. Leading the organization involves a step away from day-to-day management and a move towards big-picture strategic thinking, managing a greater breadth of relationships and empowering managers and teams.
However, there’s much more to learn. I encourage you to read the full report here.
We all want to feel happy, but few are able to get it on a regular basis and in a purposeful, sustainable and conscious way.
In this life-changing interview by «Diary of a CEO» with Arthur C. Brooks, we can learn important concepts and practical behaviours to become happier, according to science.
A few key ideas:
Positive and negative emotions are there to keep you alive. It would be deadly to feel happy all the time. The brain works in an environment of homeostasis, which means that unusual physiological states (like pleasure) are momentary reactions.
Happiness is the pursuit of three things: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We need to know how to get them in efficient and healthy ways and we need them in balance.
Meaning is a combination of three things: coherent purpose, significance, and a theory about why things happen. If you don’t have answers to these questions, you have a meaning crisis.
The worst answers to the questions «Why are you alive?» and «What are you willing to die for?» are «I don’t know» or «Nothing». But that doesn’t mean it’s a problem, it’s an opportunity to realize you don’t have answers to these questions.
Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure (sugar, sex…) is a lymbic message to guide us towards survival or reproduction, but it’s been hacked by modern technology and companies in a way that doesn’t make us happy or healthy.
Enjoyment + memories + people make you happy. Spend time sharing memorable and fun experiences with the people you like.
Entrepreneurs are good at deferring their gratification, which means they do hard things to get big payoffs, and those payoffs are sweet (remember the Marshmallow experiment). This is why entrepreneurs are happier.
Diets fail because people think that the reward is getting to the goal and not the journey itself. People who crack the code of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management experience remarkably higher satisfaction.
Dalay Lama said that «you need to want what you have, not have what you want«, to get lasting satisfaction.
Carl Jung said that «the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe and acting according to it«. You’re hurting yourself when you do something not in accordance with the way you want to live.
The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Money, power, pleasure, and fame are only intermediate goals.
Exercise lowers cortisol levels, which is a hormone that makes you anxious. Exercise also lowers your unhappiness, and the two can co-exist in the same person, so you can have both high positive affect and high negative affect.
Start with five minutes of contemplation of life every day, and stop distracting yourself.
Gratitude listing is really important, because we are resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias, and the way to not let that become all adapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude.
When people fall in love, their brains react with testosterone, estrogen, noradrenaline, epinephrine and dopamine, which causes a feeling of anticipation of reward and Euphoria, followed by a dip in serotonin, which is what psychiatric drugs try to manipulate.
People are happier when they help others than when they take care of themselves. If you’re lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer.
Negativity is a virus, and so is positivity. This is why the mood and emotional well-being and emotional self-management of Ceos is so critically important.
When your friends become obese you become more obese, when your friends get divorced you get divorced, when your friends get happy you get happy, and the more proximity that your friends have to you measured geographically or in terms of the intimacy of the relationship, the stronger the transmission mechanism.
Extroverts tend to get more short term happiness and introverts tend to have more long-term happiness. So what you find is that extroverts tend to get more enjoyment and introverts tend to get more meaning.
Modern life is full of vague threats that are giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time. Anxiety is unfocused fear. The solution is to focus the fear and move it from the amydala to the prefrontal cortex where it can be turned into a logical kind of fear.
