it’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. It’s the manager’s job to push them past their reticence. Shona Brown, a longtime Google executive, calls it being an “evangelist for courage.”
When his team was confronted with a challenging decision, Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.” He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution, and usually they would come back a week or two later having decided together on the best course of action. The team almost always agreed with their recommendation, because it was usually quite obvious that it was the best idea. The rule of two not only generates the best solution in most cases, it also promotes collegiality. It empowers the two people who are working on the issue to figure out ways to solve the problem, a fundamental principle of successful mediation.
THE THRONE BEHIND THE ROUND TABLE THE MANAGER’S JOB IS TO RUN A DECISION-MAKING PROCESS THAT ENSURES ALL PERSPECTIVES GET HEARD AND CONSIDERED, AND, IF NECESSARY, TO BREAK TIES AND MAKE THE DECISION.
People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”
In social sciences, a “latent variable” is an element that is influencing a result, but one you haven’t yet observed or measured—a hidden construct that’s floating just out of view. So what is the hidden construct here?
