Nov 27, 2019
Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and
team intelligence at Cisco. He is also the co-author of
Nine Lies About Work: A
Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real
World, and the author
of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback
Fallacy and Reinventing Performance Management. In today’s
discussion, Ashley breaks down why 360 reviews about your staff are
flawed, the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on the
workforce, and why dedicating resources to building a
‘well-rounded’ employee is not always the best approach.
Key Takeaways
[3:55] There is an interesting
connection between leadership and music. Music allows people to
create and collaborate together and the same applies to
leadership.
[7:15] When you want to make
space for someone to be creative and to help them feel comfortable
with collaboration, be sure to be the leader that speaks
last.
[10:55] Ashley breaks down his
interpretation of the theory world vs. the real world. In theory,
everyone has metrics that break down what you should be doing, but
in reality, people need a baseline first and then the
metrics.
[13:30] We think that having a
well-rounded individual or employee is a good approach, but
devoting resources to make them well-rounded might not make the
most sense. Some of your best people are not well-rounded! They
have a set of focused skill sets that make them great.
[15:00] If you want to spend
your time getting better, stop focusing on your weaknesses, focus
on your strengths instead.
[21:30] Don’t find a job you
love, make a job you love. Instead of focusing on work/life
balance, focus on the content of what you do on a daily
basis.
[28:30] Ashley saw a gap between
what works at work and the actual practice of what organizations
were doing. This is why he and his co-author, Marcus Buckingham,
wrote the book, Nine
Lies About Work.
[33:10] Leaders need to
challenge the status quo. If they recognize that their reports
about their staff’s characteristics and personality are inaccurate,
leaders need to speak up and challenge this thinking.
[42:35] As artificial
intelligence and automation get incorporated more and more in the
workforce, leaders think they can now do less. In reality, leaders
actually have to step up and focus more on the human aspect of the
organization.
[49:00] Ashley challenges you to
ask your team what their thought process was when they did
something great and if they can replicate that success.
Quotable Quotes
- “The
conductor makes space for people to play into.”
- “Go
look at the best people. Are they well-rounded? The answer is
no.”
- “You’ll find that excellent and well-rounded
are opposites, not synonyms.”
- “The
lesson from the real world is that avoiding failure repeatedly is
not the same as building excellence.”
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Ashleygoodall.com
Nine Lies About Work, by Ashley Goodall
The Feedback Fallacy
Reinventing Performance Management
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