Leadership | Brain diversity will drive your business forward

Every week, The Press presents advice, anecdotes and reflections for leaders, entrepreneurs and managers.

The board

Diversify brains

If, as a boss, you hire other managers who look like you, it’s because your brain is wired to like and promote people who look like you, explains German neuroscientist Friederike Fabritius in her book The Brain-Friendly Workplace: Why Talented People Quit and How to Get Them to Stay. “If you think about how many people are burnt out and how much of an issue mental wellbeing is in today’s workplace, it’s because the people at the top are creating a workplace that works for people like them. As a leader, you need to work on your empathy and be more tolerant, she suggests. When you start to get upset and think, “That person isn’t like me,” you have to remember that this is a competitive advantage for the organization and it’s easier to reform a workplace than to change the personality of people. The scientist suggests that organizations create places where each brain does not have to adapt.

Source : Fast Company

The solution

Betting on 55-year-old employees

While the lack of manpower is shouted from the rooftops, ageism is rampant in many workplaces. However, an employer would benefit from betting on a 55-year-old employee, says in an interview with The Press Emilie Pelletier, from HRM Groupe, recruitment specialist and co-author of the book How to attract and retain employees. “55-year-olds still have 10 to 15 years of employment,” she explains. How many young people remain in employment for so long? By hiring someone aged 55, we are almost more likely to retain him longer than by hiring a young person aged 26, 27 or 28. When managers build work teams, she advises them to have a 360-degree view by including older employees who have experience and expertise. “They will prevent us from falling into certain traps and prevent us from making mistakes,” says the specialist. To break the dynamic of prejudice against the oldest and the youngest, she also advises managers to mention everyone’s strengths to make employees aware of them.

The number

53%

When a new position is posted internally in companies and organizations, many employees look at it ironically, thinking that it has already been filled. Which makes 22% of workers surveyed by LifeWorks say that promotions at work are not awarded on merit, while 31% doubt it. Canadians with disabilities and women are more likely to believe that promotions in their organization are not based on merit. The monthly LifeWorks survey, which has measured the mental health of Canadian workers since April 2020, indicates that it deteriorated in November for the second month in a row. This month, the digital service provider wanted to know if workers were the target of negative feedback from their manager. While the majority of participants (74%) said no, those who were underweight said they were twice as likely as their overweight colleagues.

The phrase

Work in progress

In school, your perfectionism motivated you to stay up late, because you got better grades on the final product. However, in life, there is no end product, everything can be improved, recalls the American magazine Inc., dedicated to fast growing companies. Perfectionism therefore causes you to procrastinate or make things late, because you want them to be perfect. Or you are forcing people to unreasonable standards. How to achieve balance? By adopting the mindset work in progresswork in progress, suggests the magazine. Seeing your work as a first draft, criticism will not be an attack, but a way to improve your draft. You will also see mistakes as opportunities to collect data to improve. You can go from judge to teammate by keeping your standards high, but not being afraid to make mistakes or allowing others to make mistakes.

Source : Inc.

The study

The ” mansplaining »

Does it exist in the workplace? Researchers at Carleton University have looked into this social media phenomenon, where a confident man with a condescending tone provides an unsolicited explanation to a woman assuming she lacks knowledge on said topic. Researchers Linda Schweitzer, Chelsie J. Smith and Katarina Lauch cited the case of astronaut Jessica Meir who had a man explain her own scientific experiment on Twitter. Results: the phenomenon also affects people in their professional lives. “Almost every individual in our study, regardless of gender, experienced at least one of the behaviors of ‟mansplaining“,” the report reads. Each of the experiments was associated with lower organizational commitment and emotional exhaustion. The researchers suggest considering the “ mansplaining as a form of workplace incivility and dealing with it.