GRANTED: What psychological safety is not and why we choose the wrong careers
February 2019
Experts don't walk around claiming to be experts. They demonstrate their expertise through the questions they ask and the knowledge they share.
Here's some knowledge that I found worth sharing this month:
1. The Art of Decision-Making
We make too many career choices based on ambition over aspiration. Ambition is what we want to achieve. Aspiration is who we want to become. When deciding between jobs or organizations, ask how they'll shape your identity.
2. How Fearless Organizations Succeed
A great overview of what psychological safety is not:
-Relaxing your standards
-Feeling comfortable
-Being nice and agreeable
-Giving unconditional praise
Psychological safety is a culture of respect, trust, and openness where it's not risky to raise ideas and concerns.
3. Time for Happiness
An abundance of wealth has little value if it comes with scarcity of time. One of the most reliable ways to boost happiness: spend money to save time. And my personal favorite way to make time feel more abundant: make it a habit to cancel one meeting every week.
4. Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?
Productivity isn't a virtue. It's a means to an end. It's only virtuous if the end is worthy.
Don't worship at the altar of hustle. Don't boast about grit. Strive to be productive in generosity, creativity, and integrity.
From My Desk:
5. It's Time to Switch to a 4-Day Working Week
The 5-day work week is an arbitrary human invention. In many jobs, people can be just as productive (and more creative) working 4 days a week.
6. Leaders Promote the Wrong People
The more senior you get in your career, the better you think you are at judging character—but the worse you actually are, because people are more motivated to impress you. As you gain power, to figure out who to trust, you need to rely more on the people below you.
Season 2 of WorkLife launches March 5. Stay tuned for a sneak preview of the latest science of making work not suck.
Cheers,
Adam
Adam Grant, Ph.D.
Organizational psychologist at Wharton, author of ORIGINALS, GIVE AND TAKE, and OPTION B, and host of WorkLife, a TED original podcast