Tag: Adam Grant

Replied to

Andrea, Adam Grant’s discussion of care and ‘feeling joy of progress’ reminds me of Dave Cormier’s post about ‘care’ as learning’s first principle.

Once we jointly answer questions like “why would people care about this” and “how does this support people starting to care about this for the first time” and “will this stop people who care now from caring”, we have a place to work from.

I’m in this business because i think i might be able to help, here and there, with trying to build a culture of thinkers.

Liked Are you a giver, taker or matcher? (edte.ch)

To dig deeper into reciprocity, I recommend Adam Grant’s book Give and Take.

Giving, taking, and matching are three fundamental styles of social interaction, but the lines between them aren’t hard and fast. You might find that you shift from one reciprocity style to another as you travel across different work roles and relationships. It wouldn’t be surprising if you act like a taker when negotiating your salary, a giver when mentoring someone with less experience than you, and a matcher when sharing expertise with a colleague. But evidence shows that at work, the vast majority of people develop a primary reciprocity style, which captures how they approach most of the people most of the time. And this primary style can play as much of a role in our success as hard work, talent, and luck.

~ Adam Grant

Bookmarked There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing by Adam Grant (nytimes.com)

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

Adam Grant explains that mental health is a spectrum and in the middle between florishing and depression is the feeling of languaishing. He describes how when we name such a condition that it starts to pop-up everywhere. In response, Grant suggests finding a way to get into a state of flow and carving out uninterrupted time.

Referencing gardening, Austin Kleon argues that the issue is not languishing, but rather lying dormant

I disliked the term “languishing” the minute I heard it.

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

Like a plant. Or a volcano.

I am waiting to be activated.

…

It seems to me that the reason that so many of us feel like we’re languishing is that we are trying to flourish in terrible conditions.

Bookmarked Opinion | No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. by Adam Grant (nytimes.com)

Being overwhelmed is no excuse. It’s hard to be good at your job if you’re bad at responding to people.

Adam Grant explains that email today is what taking calls was in the 90’s. He explains that simply ignoring them is not a solution. Instead we need to have clearer processes in place, whether it be alternative means of contact or writing short replies explaining this.

Remember that a short reply is kinder and more professional than none at all. If you have too much on your plate, come clean: “I don’t have the bandwidth to add this.” If it’s not your expertise, just say so: “Sorry, this isn’t in my wheelhouse.” And if you want to say no, just say “no.”

The one caveat, emails from strangers continually asking for something. These can be ignored.

I have a few general rules. You should not feel obliged to respond to strangers asking you to share their content on social media, introduce them to your more famous colleagues, spend hours advising them on something they’ve created or “jump on a call this afternoon.” If someone you barely know emails you a dozen times a month and is always asking you to do something for him, you can ignore those emails guilt-free.

Replied to Throwing Our Own Ideas Under the Bus by Ross Cooper (Cooper on Curriculum)

Grant cites four reasons why we should accentuate the flaws in our own ideas when “pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change.”

  • “Leading with weaknesses disarms the audience.” When we’re only presented with positives, we become skeptical and look for holes as if to say, “What’s the catch?”

  • “People think an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professor to critique it.” We hold in higher regard those who can praise and critique vs. those who heap on nothing but lavish praise. Think restaurants reviews, movie reviews, book reviews, etc.

  • “It makes you more trustworthy.” This speaks to the credibility of the person pitching the idea.

  • “It leaves audiences with a more favorable assessment of the idea itself.” If the idea is a good one, and we’re already pointing out its worst problems (which aren’t so bad in the first place), there’s nothing damaging left to uncover.

I wonder Ross if the challenge in focusing on the why and why not is about finding balance? This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of Generous Orthodoxy.

Bookmark for this post is here.

Listened Your company’s culture is not unique, psychologist Adam Grant says from Recode

In an interview with Kara Swisher for Recode Decode, Adam Grant explains why company cultures are far from unique. He touches on a few key idea:

  • Fail Fast: Failure (and product) is not what matters, instead we should be focusing on processes.
  • Culture Fit: The right mix is not about being less cohesive as an organisation, but rather more open to diversity.
  • Givers: We need more givers. However givers require a culture to prosper. There needs to be a ‘culture of asking’ and a move to weed out the takers.

Agreeable Disagreeable Grant

Overall, success is about contributing and helping others succeed. This is addressed in Grant’s TED Talk.

As a side note, one of the interesting points discussed during the TED Talk was that of the ‘agreeable taker’:

The other combination we forget about is the deadly one — the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who’s nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back. And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, “Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?” The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don’t have as much power, who can do them no good. And let’s face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver.

via Doug Belshaw