The Next Time You Want to Complain at Work, Do This Instead
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I looked at my watch. It was 3:20pm. I had been on the phone for over an hour, almost all of that time listening to Frank*, a senior manager at Jambo, a technology company, complain about his boss, Brandon. Jambo is a company I know well — I have many ongoing relationships there from when I used to work with their CEO — but they are not, currently, a client. In other words, I wasn't soliciting complaints or asking for feedback.
"He's so scattered," Frank griped about Brandon, "He'll waltz into a meeting — late, mind you — and share his most recent idea, which is often a complete distraction from our current plan. Totally ignoring our agenda. And then he'll micromanage everything we do, reorganizing our work — though we're still accountable for the stuff he's ignoring. And that's not the worst. The worst is he's completely clueless. He thinks he's great. At yesterday's meeting . . ."
This was not the only complaining I heard from people at Jambo. Earlier that week I had spoken to several others, as well as a few members of the Board. And they weren't just complaining about Brandon — they were complaining about each other as well.
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.
As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".[1] Colloquially, people experiencing this bias are said to be "on Mount Stupid."
Original study
The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who, on April 19, 1995, robbed two banks while his face was covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.
Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance. Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.
In Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), Dunning described the Dunning–Kruger effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life", referring to a neurological condition in which a disabled person either denies or seems unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."
In 2011, Dunning wrote about his observations that people with substantial, measurable deficits in their knowledge or expertise cannot recognize those deficits and, therefore, despite potentially making error after error, tend to think they are performing competently when they are not: "In short, those who are incompetent, for lack of a better term, should have little insight into their incompetence—an assertion that has come to be known as the Dunning–Kruger effect." In 2014, Dunning and Helzer described how the Dunning–Kruger effect "suggests that poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance".
It's time to talk about how Joe Biden defeated a dominant model of leadership
Psychiatrist and professor Gianpiero Petriglieri argues that maybe, just maybe, Joe Biden will help us break up with the belief that great leaders are the cure for every ill.
If you are interested in leadership, there is no grander spectacle than the U.S. Presidential election. It is not just a race for one of the most powerful leadership positions in the world. It's a preview of what we might come to regard as a global leadership standard. Seen that way, the election is the equivalent of the Fashion Weeks in Paris, New York City, and Milan. The models display trends that we will see around town (or on Zoom) in the months ahead.
Gianpiero Petriglieri is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. A medical doctor and psychiatrist by training, he researches and practices leadership development. Follow him on Twitter at @gpetriglieri.
While scuba diving around the Aleutian Islands in 2014, marine ecologist Doug Rasher saw little sign of the curtains of lush green kelp forests he would have had to push through decades earlier. "It feels like a ghost town," says Rasher, a researcher at the nonprofit Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The eeriness did not end there: during a boat ride, one of Rasher's colleagues pointed to a cove where he had seen hundreds of sea otters splashing in the frigid water in the 1970s. Only a handful remained.
The two losses are connected. As sea otters declined (for reasons scientists are still trying to understand), their favorite prey—sea urchins—exploded in number. The voracious echinoderms not only mowed down the kelp but are also tearing apart and devouring the massive, slow-forming limestone reefs on which this seaweed grows, Rasher and his colleagues recently reported in Science. Rising ocean temperatures and acidification are compounding the damage.
Restoring otter populations could rein in the urchins and help protect the larger ecosystem, and ecologists are increasingly interested in applying this idea more broadly. "Our study ... highlights the power of trophic cascades in nature and the potential for large predators to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change in the near term," Rasher and his co-authors wrote. ("Trophic cascade" refers to the compounding effects of removing an organism from an ecosystem.) Many climate impact studies on species have not adequately acknowledged this kind of ecosystem complexity as a factor, according to Rasher and other scientists. Incorporating it would offer a clearer picture of what a warmer future holds in store. "I think we're all coming to realize that there's going to be a lot of synergies between species loss and climate change," says Hillary Young, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new study. "So what you would expect to happen with the loss of a species in the absence of climate change is not what's going to happen with the loss of that species in the presence of climate change .... And this paper is the holy grail of showing that interaction."
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The idea of restoring predators to blunt the impacts of warming has been simmering in ecology for decades. Fifteen years ago Christopher Wilmers, a wildlife ecologist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published studies looking at how warmer winters in Yellowstone National Park meant fewer elk foundering in deep snow and dying. The result was less early-winter carrion for the park's many scavengers, such as grizzly bears and ravens, with dead elk bunching up at the end of relatively severe winters. After wolves were reintroduced in 1995, though, they became the main cause of elk mortality and created a steadier carrion supply that helped sustain other animals throughout the cold months. "Wolves provide this kind of temporal subsidy, where they're making food for scavengers that would be overabundant at one time of year and underabundant at another and smoothing it out," says Wilmers, who tracked Yellowstone wolf packs for four years.
Massive reefs, built slowly by C. nereostratum over centuries to millenia, are now rapidly eroding because of overgrazing by herbivores. Grazing has intensified markedly in recent years due to the combined, indirect effects of predator loss and climate change. Credit: J. Tomoleoni USGS
Volker Rudolf, an ecologist at Rice University, also found that predators can alter the effects of climate change. In a 2018 study he considered how interactions among pond predators (dragonfly larvae) and their herbivorous prey (the tadpoles of gray tree frogs and green frogs) changed amid rising temperatures.
Rudolf created four habitats with pond water at present-day temperatures and four with heated pond water. He raised some tadpoles separated by species, some with mixed species, and others with mixed species and the dragonfly larvae. One species had lower survival rates in heated water when it was on its own—but when exposed to either competition or predation, the rates between heated and nonheated ponds were virtually equal. It could be that warmer conditions slow the larvae's metabolism, prompting the predators to eat less, Rudolf says. Or the tadpoles might grow so fast in warmer water that it is harder for the larvae to capture them. "You might have reduced survival because of the direct effect of heat," he says, "but [changes caused by] predation and competition can compensate for those direct losses. It buffers it out a bit."
Rudolf, Wilmers and Rasher all say their work shows that future climate change research needs to factor in ecosystem complexity more effectively. For instance, many scientists have studied how climate change will affect marine organisms' performance and survival. They have mostly done so by exposing a single species to warmer temperatures and/or higher acidity and recording how it responds, however. Such work is valuable but can miss the big picture if it ignores the community in which a species exists. "Everything we know about ecology is that as things get more complex, they change," Rudolf says. That perspective is echoed in a soon to be published paper by University of Colorado Boulder ecologist Laura Dee, who points to the many indirect effects warmer temperatures can have on a species. These include increasing or decreasing prey, changing competitive abilities, shifting feeding rates and altering trophic cascades.
In the case of the Aleutian Islands' reefs, for example, if the scientists had simply exposed living reef samples to warmer and more acidic water in the lab, they might have incorrectly concluded the reefs were in no great danger because those impacts alone only slightly softened their skeleton. But because the researchers also included sea urchins in their tanks, they realized how the two forces interacted: sea urchin grazing increased significantly as warming and acidity increased, pushing the system "beyond a critical tipping point," Rasher says.
In 2017 his team resurveyed the reefs' status across the Aleutian archipelago and discovered that some had shrunk precipitously in just three years. Large areas that had been alive for centuries or millennia were crumbling and bleached, indicating urchins had recently killed them. Such devastation underscores the urgency of restoring balance to the ecosystem by bringing the otters back. And similar situations likely hold true for other ecosystems across the globe. Scientists still need to understand the reasons behind the otters' disappearances, but Rasher Is hopeful. "Bringing the otters back would bring many ecological benefits," he says, "and would also buy us time to get our act together on curbing carbon emissions."
Now thatJoe Biden has won the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an aberration ("not who we are!") or another instantiation of America's pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star—the one job he was good at.
From an international perspective, though, Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin's opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates this era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the "right" people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) —just like the other populists. And so on.
But there's one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.
In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: The Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn't have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country's politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players—such as then–FBI Director James Comey—took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton's win; and Trump's rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.
It's not that he is completely without talent. His rallies effectively let him bond with his base, and test out various messages with the crowd that he would then amplify everywhere. He has an intuitive understanding of the power of attention, and he played the traditional media like a fiddle—they benefited from his antics, which they boosted. He also clearly sensed the political moment in 2016, and managed to navigate his way into the presidency, though that probably had more to do with instinct than with deep planning.
Luck aside, though, Trump is not good at his job. He doesn't even seem to like it much. He is too undisciplined and thin-skinned to be effective at politics over a sustained period, which involves winning repeated elections. He seems to have been as surprised as anyone else that he won in 2016. While he hates the loser branding that will follow him now, he's probably fine with the outcome—especially since he can blame it on fantastical conspiracies involving theft or ballot-stuffing or the courts—as long as he can figure out how to escape the criminal trials that are certainly coming his way. (A self-pardon? A negotiated pardon? He will try something.)
Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he'd win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America's decimated manufacturing sector never resurged. In Wisconsin in 2018, the president announced "the eighth wonder of the world"—a Foxconn factory that was supposed to employ 13,000 in return for $4.5 billion in government subsidies. However, going into this election, the building remained empty, and the president lost Wisconsin in the Electoral College. (Foxconn hired people in the final weeks of 2019 to fulfill quotas for the subsidies, and laid off many of them right after the new year.) Most populists globally deploy wide patronage networks: state spending that boosts their own supporters. Trump's model remained attached more to personal graft: He encouraged people to stay in his hotels and have dinner at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for access, rather than develop a broad and participatory network that would remain loyal to him for years. And when the pandemic hit, instead of rising to the occasion and playing the strongman, rallying the country through a crisis that had originated in China—an opportunity perfect for the kind of populist he aspired to be—he floundered.
Erdoğan has been in power nationally since 2003. After two decades, he has arguably lost some of his political magic, evinced by increasing missteps and a deteriorating situation around democratic rights. Still, he is among the most talented politicians in Turkey's history. He has been able to navigate multiple challenges, including a previous global financial crisis. In Russia, Putin has won many elections, even managing to subvert term limits. In India, Modi has also been reelected. One could argue that these elections were far from perfect, but they were elections. Brazil's Bolsonaro has bungled his country's response to the pandemic but is giving the poor emergency aid and increasing his popularity. The CARES Act did the same thing, providing a significant subsidy to businesses and improving household finances, especially for people with low incomes, but it ended right before the election; Trump erratically tweeted about having nuked a new deal.
I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump's loss. It's striking how quickly Fox News called Arizona for Biden, and how many Republican leaders have condemned the president's rage-tweeting and attempts to stop the count. They know that Trump is done, and they seem fine with it. For them, what's not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters.
And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: The Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: Remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures.
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn't already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn't on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state's voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won't be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. Perhaps it will be Senator Josh Hawley, who is writing a book against Big Tech because he knows that will be the next chapter in the culture wars, with social-media companies joining "fake news" as the enemy. Perhaps it will be Senator Tom Cotton, running as a law-and-order leader with a populist bent. Maybe it will be another media figure: Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, both men with talent and followings. Perhaps it will be another Sarah Palin—she was a prototype—with the charisma and appeal but without the baggage and the need for a presidential candidate to pluck her out of the blue. Perhaps someone like the QAnon-supporting Representative-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who first beat the traditional Republican representative in the primary and then ran her race with guns blazing, mask off, and won against the Democratic candidate, a retired professor who avoided campaigning in person. Indeed, a self-made charismatic person coming out of nowhere probably has a better chance than many establishment figures in the party.
What can be done? First and foremost, we need to realize the nature of the problem and accept that elite failure cannot be responded to with more of the same. A good deal of the Democratic Party's messaging has been wrapped in nostalgia. But populism's resurgence is a symptom of the failures of the past. Pearl-clutching for the good old days will not get us out of this. Yes, it's important to highlight the value of norms and call for the restoration of democratic institutions. But what we need in order to move forward goes beyond more politeness and the right rhetoric. The failures of the past aren't to be yearned for. They're to be avoided and, crucially, understood and fixed. There will be arguments about how to rebuild a politics that can appeal to the moment, and how to mobilize for the future. There should be. Our American crisis cannot be resolved in one sweeping article that offers easy solutions. But the first step is to realize how deep this hole is for democracies around the world, including ours, and to realize that what lies ahead is not some easy comeback.
At the moment, the Democratic Party risks celebrating Trump's loss and moving on—an acute danger, especially because many of its constituencies, the ones that drove Trump's loss, are understandably tired. A political nap for a few years probably looks appealing to many who opposed Trump, but the real message of this election is not that Trump lost and Democrats triumphed. It's that a weak and untalented politician lost, while the rest of his party has completely entrenched its power over every other branch of government: the perfect setup for a talented right-wing populist to sweep into office in 2024. And make no mistake: They're all thinking about it.
Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive
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You set aside the first hour of your day to work on a strategy document that you've been putting off for a week. You haven't been disciplined about getting to it, but you've had one crisis after another to deal with in the past week. Now, finally, you've carved out 90 early morning minutes to work on it.
First, however, you take a quick peek at the email that has piled up in your inbox overnight. Before you know it, you've used up the whole 90 minutes responding to emails, even though none of them were truly urgent.
By the time you walk into your next meeting, you're feeling frustrated that you failed to stick by your plan. This meeting is a discussion with a direct report about the approach he'll be taking in a negotiation with an important client. You have strong views about how best to deal with the situation, but you've promised yourself that you will be open and curious rather than directive and judgmental. You're committed, after all, to becoming a more empowering manager.
Instead, you find yourself growing even more irritable as he describes an approach that doesn't feel right to you. Impulsively, you jump in with a sharp comment. He reacts defensively. You worry for a moment — and rightly so — that you cut him off too quickly, but you tell yourself that you've worked with this client for years, the outcome is critical, and you don't have time to hear your direct report's whole explanation. He leaves your office looking hurt and defeated.
Welcome to the invisible drama that operates inside us all day long at work, mostly outside our consciousness. Most of us believe we have one self. In reality, we have two different selves, run by two separate operating systems, in different parts of our brain.
The self that we're most aware of — the one that planned to work diligently on the strategy document and listen patiently to your direct report — is run by our pre-frontal cortex and mediated through our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the self we prefer to present to the world. It's calm, measured, rational, and capable of making deliberate choices.
The second self is run by our amygdala, a small almond-shaped cluster of nuclei in our mid-brain and it is mediated by our sympathetic nervous system. Our second self seizes control any time we begin to perceive threat or danger. It's reactive, impulsive, and operates largely outside our conscious control.
This second self serves us well if a lion is coming at us, but the threats we experience today are mostly to our sense of worth and value. They can feel nearly as terrifying as those to our survival, but the danger we experience isn't truly life-threatening. Responding to them as if they are only make things worse.
It's in these moments that we often use our highest cognitive capacities to justify our worst behaviors. When we feel we've fallen short, we instinctively summon up our "inner lawyer" — a term coined by author Jonathan Haidt — to defend us.
Our inner lawyer is expert at rationalizing, avoiding, deflecting, dissembling, denying, disparaging, attacking, and blaming others for our missteps and shortcomings. The inner lawyer works overtime to silence our own inner critic, and to counter criticism from others. All this inner turmoil narrows and consumes our attention and drains our energy.
The problem is that most organizations spend far more time focused on generating external value than they do attending to people's internal sense of value. Doing so requires navigational skills that most leaders have never been taught, much less mastered. The irony is that ignoring people's internal experience leads them to spend more energy defending their value, leaving them less energy to create value.
In our work with leaders, we've discovered that the antidote to reacting from the second self is to develop the capacity to observe our two selves in real time. You can't change what you don't notice, but noticing can be a powerful tool for shifting from defending our value to creating value.
A well-cultivated self-observer allows us to watch our dueling selves without reacting impulsively. It also makes it possible to ask our inner lawyer to stand down whenever it rises up to argue our case to our inner and outer critics. Finally, the self-observer can acknowledge, without judgment, that we are both our best and our worst selves, and then make deliberate rather than reactive choices about how to respond in challenging situations.
Also, watch out for times when you feel you're digging in your heels. The absolute conviction that you're right and the compulsion to take action are both strong indicators that you're feeling a sense of threat and danger.
In our work, we provide leaders with small daily doses of support — reminders to pay attention to what they're feeling and thinking. We've also found it helpful to build small groups that meet at regular intervals so leaders can share their experiences. A blend of support, community, connection and accountability helps offset our shared impulse to stop noticing, push away discomfort, and revert to survival behaviors in the face of perceived threats to our value. A good starting place is to find a colleague you trust to be your accountability partner, and to seek regular feedback from one another.
Finally, it's important to ask yourself two key questions in challenging moments: "What else could be true here?" and "What is my responsibility in this?" By regularly questioning your conclusions, you're offsetting your confirmation bias — the instinct to look for evidence that supports what you already believe. By always looking for your own responsibility, you're resisting the instinct to blame others and play victim and focusing instead on what you have the greatest ability to influence — your own behavior.
A deceptively simple premise lies at the heart of this deliberate set of practices: see more to be more. Rather than simply getting better at what they already do, transformational leaders balance courage and humility in order to grow and develop every day.
I get that the stress of this election has shut people down. Everyone has a busy life. Many things come up. Our conversation is on hold, awaiting the outcome of the election. I can't help but assume that you are not interested in discussing what is going on in our nation today. I don't need a reply, but I do want to keep in touch and solidify my position.
If the polls are wrong, and I think that they are, the liberals in media, politics, and tech have attempted once again the same disinformation and psyops campaign they've used in the past. This is an exercise in wish fulfillment and voter suppression.
This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt they intentionally misled a huge portion of the United States electorate. This is election interference. Anything you believe that came from this discredited source must be scrubbed from your hard drive to avoid outright corruption and eventual failure.
But, like the viewership of town halls maybe Biden wins. Then our failure is complete.
Trump: Always Be Closing
Trump will win four more years and the big media polling industry could be all but finished.
You need take only one glance at the swarming Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania over the weekend to consider that something is not right with this election.
