Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Copyright © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College

I realize that most hard-driving managers and executives have been socialized to believe they cannot admit vulnerability to themselves or others. I would urge you to get past this misconception and realize that such admissions will enhance your productivity and career. So, consider: Do you regret any significant decisions you've made about your career? If you had to do it over again, would you do it differently? Have there been times when you treated your people unfairly? When you failed to listen and learn and instead directed and dictated? Do you feel you've been working at peak capacity in recent years? If not, why not? Are you unwilling to admit your mistakes to your direct reports? To your bosses? To your colleagues? Have you asked anyone for help recently? Have you admitted you didn't know something and needed to learn it? Have you asked for coaching? If you were to be completely honest with your boss and knew that there would be no negative repercussions, what secret fear or anxiety would you admit to him? Do you believe that you're in the right job, in the right group, and in the right organization? Or do you feel there's a mismatch between where you are now and what you want to accomplish

Letting go—or flying without a net—is a big part of DeLong's prescription. He calls for the reader to stop and reflect with self-awareness; let go of the past; create a vision or specific goal with an agenda; seek support through mentors and a network; don't blink (or fall back on old behaviors); and take action that makes you vulnerable.

To study this phenomenon, the researchers built an original toy

they recruited 85 preschool-age children to interact with the toy under one of four conditions: pedagogical, interrupted, naïve and baseline.

In the pedagogical condition, the experimenter said, “Look at my toy! This is how my toy works,” and demonstrated the squeak function twice (but made no mention of the other functions).

Many children in the pedagogical condition failed to discover even one function in addition to the squeak, while children in the other three conditions found, on average, one or two functions they had not been taught. What’s more, children in the pedagogical condition spent less time playing with the toy — less than two minutes, on average — than children in the other conditions, whose times ranged from slightly more than two minutes in the naïve condition to longer than three minutes in the baseline condition.

“The whole double-edged sword concept is really interesting,” says Susan Gelman, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “In almost any domain and across different cultures, we engage in spontaneous teaching. It doesn’t have to be in the classroom, we just naturally do this with young children — we show them how things are done, point out what’s important. This study shows how sensitive children are to the kind of cues that signal teaching.” Further experiments may want to examine differences in children’s behavior across cultures, she adds.

the study underscores the real-world trade-offs between education and exploration, and the importance of acknowledging what is unknown even while imparting what is known. Teachers should, where possible, offer the caveat that there may be more to learn.