At the end of the day, by not persistently measuring every tool a prospective new hire brings to the table, and by not matching his skills, qualifications, interests, and personality traits with the work in question, an employer does himself a costly disservice. Every soul walks the planet in the company of his own particular set of gifts, after all. If his very specific properties are not aligned with the very specific efforts required of him in a job, then nobody wins.
Group Therapy
But take heart, gentle executive. All is far from lost on this front. Indeed, managers just now coming around to this school of thought can take serious comfort from the fact that they're doing so in the company of legions. It's an apparent no-brainer, evidence notwithstanding, that the attention required of this subject at the corporate level is still emerging for the great majority of the business-based public. That managers are now acknowledging the need for staffers to be mindfully employed within a company, such that their talents and preoccupations – line for line – are put to the most effective use, constitutes a widespread awakening that promises to rewrite the corporate landscape.
Books are starting to be drafted on this subject and awareness is beginning to spread. Human resources departments are increasingly under enormous pressure to change. We're seeing emerging sectors in which talent acquisition is singled out from the reactive personnel roles in HR departments. We're witnessing HR leaders' push to get ROI education for their staff. And we're seeing smarter job descriptions being employed by better companies.
In turn, the world has responded with a slew of resources designed to smooth the transformation, making this a challenge that's – happily – very much in business leaders' control. A profusion of concrete behavioral science techniques exists to reduce the risk of a company suffering a talent shortage, and to maximize the payoff of an engaged and well-employed workforce. With a large percentage of employees “disengaged” (a Gallup 2011 study says 52 percent), any process that focuses on taking the employee from being a time consumer at work to a contributor at work is happily received.
Chapter 2
How to Break Analysis Paralysis
SO-CALLED “ANALYSIS PARALYSIS” IS ONE OF those serendipitously rhyming terms that cleverly captures the characteristics of a condition from which a great bulk of us suffers – many chronically. Here we find an individual in the throes of an utter inability to arrive at a decision. Like a terrified deer caught in the headlights of an approaching truck, a person experiencing analysis paralysis is overwhelmed and immobile. He can advance neither forward nor back, so bewildered is he by the requirements he feels he must fulfill. Often, he remains in this state of inertia – casting about wildly for a sign that will clear the clouds and present an answer that makes conclusive sense – for much longer than the subject at hand could ever demand, all the while expending energy and time that could be applied to the much more productive pursuit of seeing through one or the other of the possibilities. And his peace of mind goes way south in the meantime.
Analysis paralysis can rear its hesitant head for every kind of decision, from what shoes to put on in the morning to whether to have a kid. And it's a frequent fixture in the business setting, where the affliction can be brought on from an excess of corporate bumps and corporately freighted, multilayered decision-making protocols. Too often in these scenarios, efficient determination about something is wholly unlikely because of endless, unnecessary discussion and evaluation. Studies are conducted, reports are ordered, meetings are held. And still no one is able to conclusively arrive at a verdict.
Indeed, more than individuals, entire companies can fall into the analysis paralysis trap. If the one for whom you work requires your regular attendance at more than two hours of meetings every week, you might be victim to this, the organizational strain of the condition.
Ultimately and at its tangled heart, analysis paralysis is a fear of the unknown. The absence of certainty of outcome can deliver anxious souls into fits of angst over the consequences of making a commitment to one side or the other without a guarantee of it being the more advantageous choice. And while it's perfectly natural to want to spend time thinking about a project, especially one that's freighted with an element of risk, there comes a point where any more thinking about it is counterproductive – the unknown be damned – and the imperative to start making some progress is pounding in your ears.
But there is a remedy for this unhappy condition. Indeed, there are a fair number of strategies for nudging the cement mental block out of the way and opening up the path for successful and satisfying decision-making, the participation of quibbling, detail-oriented, research-happy, ego-saddled managerial types notwithstanding.
Here are the best ones:
• Make a mental commitment. Sometimes, the best way to come to a decision is to make it – and then gauge your reaction to follow. In other words, you reach a conclusion by committing to something inside your head and then immediately taking stock of how this move feels. If your belly fills with immediate regret and despair, it could be you've made a poor pick. But if relief and joy are your kneejerk responses, that's better.
In either case, be sensitive to the after-emotions of this approach. And be sure to fill in all of the details of the outcome, too, including the environment, the reactions of others, and the attendant financial benefits. Mentally replay your imaginary aftermaths over and over until you feel utterly confident in moving forward with one of them. Ultimately, you can take comfort from the fact that your decisions made via this approach are made in your brain alone. You've announced nothing; you've taken no concrete action. And so if you determine you've made the wrong one by way of your reflexive response to it, it's not too late to change. This strategy is useful, too, because it kicks fear out of the driver's seat to make room for the gut.
• Act. It's hackneyed and has been referenced into the ground, but the folks at Nike had it right when they urged the world to “just do it.” Certainly you should spend some time pondering your various options. Tackle the age-old pro-and-con list with a vengeance. And, depending on the decision's relative urgency, sleep a night or two on the stuff and take stock of your clear-headed morning point of view. But then take your leave of any more indulgent exercises of decadent self-reflection and get on with it.
Put one foot in front of the other and take a step forward.
Now you're committed. May as well take another. Before you know it, you'll have put some distance behind you and the swirling quagmire that was your indecision. Better still, the satisfaction of having advanced from it will have fueled your confidence in your pick with each new step.
• Change your decision perception. A common view that people who are stymied by choice carry with them is one that imagines that there is really only option A or option B available to deliver them to destination Z. If they don't take one or the other, they fear, they will never achieve their endpoint, and they will forever have cut short their ability to do so. But what if there were actually many routes leading to the same goal? What if these stuck souls were able to imagine that, in fact, a great number of networked passages made their meandering way to Z?
By recasting the visual in your mind as a web whose various threads provide for a multitude of means to the objective, it might free your mind from its perceived pressure to get it right in one.
• Try CBT. Cognitive behavioral therapy was originally devised to help treat depression. Here, unhealthy and dysfunctional thinking is directly replaced by more productive, nourishing thinking. Rather than train our attention on the past, this psychological approach focuses on what's wrong with our understanding of an issue in the present, and offers constructive alternatives for coming at it from a different tack.
Most importantly, these arrive in the form of practical actions, such that a person trapped in a particular mindset is motivated to kick into meaningful gear. By adopting the philosophies of CBT, an individual can discover fresh possibilities for recasting a situation in a new light that could never have surfaced inside of the penned-in enclosure of self-sabotage.
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