The Manager's Guide – #71

Jan 25, 2024

These 10 Mental Models Will Make You Smarter

🧠 First Principles Thinking involves breaking down complex concepts into fundamental truths to foster critical thinking and innovation.
💡 Intellectual Humility encourages acknowledging cognitive limitations, admitting mistakes, and being open to changing beliefs for effective learning and decision-making.
📊 The Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) helps prioritize actions by recognizing that a small proportion of inputs leads to a majority of results.
🙌 The Mediocrity Principle promotes humility by acknowledging that personal experiences are not exceptional but part of universal laws.
🎲 Probabilistic Thinking involves estimating outcomes based on probability and questioning assumptions, particularly valuable in uncertain situations.
🌌 Projective Thinking encourages open-mindedness and creative exploration of possibilities beyond current beliefs and boundaries.
📈 The Law of Large Numbers states that with a large sample size, averages tend to converge to expected values, crucial in various fields.
🧩 Bottom-Up Thinking starts from fundamental principles, promoting a deeper understanding and innovative solutions.
🔄 Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Our perception of normality evolves, affecting our responses to change.
↩️ Inversion: Think backward to understand and avoid actions leading to negative outcomes.

💼 Technical leadership involves nurturing the growth of individual team members and goes beyond project management.
🤝 Democratic leadership style in tech leadership emphasizes inclusivity, collaboration, and shared decision-making.
🧠 Psychological safety is crucial in a team, allowing members to take risks, express ideas, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
🌐 Inclusivity enhances problem-solving by considering diverse perspectives and instills a sense of ownership within the team.
🚀 Democratic Tech Leads empower individual team members to take charge of their own growth, provide opportunities for skill development, and mentorship.
📚 Creating a culture of continuous learning by providing resources for professional development and encouraging participation in conferences and workshops is essential.
👥 Encouraging mentorship and knowledge sharing among team members accelerates individual growth and establishes a culture of mentorship.
🌟 The democratic leadership style prepares teams for more senior engineering roles by fostering collaboration and individual growth, promoting continuous learning, and encouraging mentorship.

🎯 Setting goals provides clarity and focus, helping you cut out distractions and make intentional decisions.
🌟 Different types of goals include objectives not fully within your control (e.g., promotions), objectives entirely within your control (e.g., behavior change), action-based checklists (e.g., reading books), recurring patterns (e.g., daily exercise), and feeling-based goals (e.g., confidence improvement).
🎯 When deciding on goals, start with focus areas in your life and create goals within those areas.
📆 Break down annual goals into quarterly or monthly goals and create actionable steps to achieve them.
🔄 Establish a system to regularly check in on your progress toward your goals to ensure success.

It's probably nothing to do with them.

🤔 Your manager may disappoint you, but it's not necessarily because they're bad at their job or have a grudge against you.
💼 As you become a senior leader, traits like self-sufficiency, expertise, leadership style, and a unique organizational perspective can lead to friction with your manager.
📈 Your own growth and independence can create conflict with your manager, especially if you're a high-growth individual.
📊 The Reporting to Peter Principle suggests that you'll reach a point where you experience internal conflict with your manager's approach to their job.
🤝 You have two choices when facing conflict with your manager: resentment and breakdown, or embracing differences for mutual growth and performance improvement.
🌱 Recognizing the Reporting to Peter Principle is crucial, and choosing the second path benefits both you and the organization in the long term.
💡 Ultimately, it's up to you to decide how to handle disappointment with your manager as an opportunity for personal growth.

🤔 Constantly thinking about work after hours may not be beneficial, especially for new leaders.
😴 Ruminating about work in the evening can drain mental resources and make leaders less effective.
💡 Detaching from work in the evening and recharging is important for leadership effectiveness.
📊 Research shows that followers perceive leaders who detach from work as more transformational and powerful.
👶 Inexperienced leaders may be particularly affected by after-hours rumination, so finding ways to rest and recover is crucial.
🕰 Establishing mental boundaries between work and home and disconnecting from leadership responsibilities can improve leadership performance.
⚡ Leaders need to manage their energy after hours, engage in leisure activities, and leave work behind at the end of the day for success.