Culture Change

Ten months after the WHO declared the COVID pandemic over, we’re all living with the digital transformation it stimulated. There have been some changes in working behaviours but I’m not convinced that a positive ‘new normal’ has yet been defined. I’m sure you’ve been in online meetings where one or two individuals seem to dominate the conversation... ‘empty vessels make the most noise’ seems to ring true.

In life and work, people are often admired for their decision-making ability. Most of us would agree with the axiom ‘any decision is better than no decision.’ But are we right? Many people develop a preference for a certain way of decision-making that comes to define them. Psychologists identify at least five common ways that humans make decisions. Most of them reveal more about us than we might like.

Once upon a time, most people began successful careers by developing expertise in a technical, functional or professional domain. Doing your job well meant having the right answers. If you could prove yourself, you’d climb the ladder and eventually move into managing other people. As a manager, you knew what needed to be done, so now you taught others how to do it and evaluated their performance.

People in charge of the UK’s public sector budgets have recently been spending money to identify the impact of microaggression in the workplace and mitigate its impact. These days one might be tempted to question whether any UK civil service department represents a workplace in the literal meaning of the word. Since the pandemic, UK civil servants have been at the forefront of defining the new normal

Last week we touched on the impact of narcissistic behaviours in the workplace. Narcissism is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others. It manifests itself in four forms ● Grandiose Narcissists - charming master manipulators. ● Social Narcissists - craving peer group attention. ● Vulnerable Narcissists - hypersensitive, negative and adept at blaming others. out destroying the prospects of others.

We all know a Prima Donna. Not in the true sense of the word, as few of us number among our friends the leading female singer in an opera company. But the term has come to mean a temperamental person with an inflated sense of their own worth. It is often connected with another term - Narcissism - which is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others.