The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 7 minutes

The Nature of Leadership and Career, is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a more natural way.

Today at a glance

• Newsletter update

• Illustration of the Week

  - Slow and fast

• The Nature of Career

  - The fear of being wrong outweighs vs the desire to make the right choice

  - What makes a good decision?

  - Improve your decision quality in 3 steps

• Gem of the week

  - 10 leadership lessons to improve your thinking and decision making - Daniel Kahneman tribute.

Where has the newsletter been the last few weeks?

I've been reevaluating its direction.

I made a commitment to never inundate your inboxes with irrelevant content just for the sake of an issue.

Lately, I've noticed a shift away from the nature-focused content, with more emphasis on psychology.

So I’ve take the time to go slow to go fast again.

Thanks for your patience.

If you have any feedback on what you like, want more of, and thoughts about nature inspired leadership and organizations please email me.

Illustration of the Week

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Decisions shape our lives.

Yet many of us never got taught the basics of “how to decide.”

We swim in the “stuckness” of tricky options. Because we don’t want to appear weak, small, or inferior.

Consider these two scenarios:

To work through these scenarios ask yourself:

• What does a good decision entail? 

• What reliable tools do I have to help me choose?

By the end of today’s issue you will have some simple but powerful mindset shifts and frameworks from Annie Duke’s “How to Decide and Thinking in Bets” to help you decide in a strategic and intentional way. 

You don’t want to make the wrong decision. How do you know you’ve made a good decision?

Take this thought experiment and advice from Annie Duke:

If you said Yes in the first scenario and No, this is very common. 

But neither answer is correct, because you’ve judged the decision quality based on the outcome. Outcome bias or “resulting” is a mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of the decision.

In neither case did you have any meaningful information about the process you used to arrive at the decision. You only have a description of the decision and the outcome. 

So it’s had to know if you made the right or wrong decision. 

The key takeaway is the decision quality is not determined by the outcome quality. 

This 2 x 2 is a useful way to understand decision outcome and decision quality. 

Earned reward and earned negative are obvious.

Dumb luck is important to pay attention to because you might think you have made a good decision because the outcome turned out well.

Bad luck - sometimes you will take all the right decision making steps yet it might result in a poor outcome.

Duke suggests based on the laws of probability, if you keep making good quality decisions enough times you will come out on top.

The key is to have a process to make quality decisions.

Here’s how ↓↓↓

To make a good decision you need the right decision tools

Like many people you may rely on one or more of these “tools”:

• Pros vs Cons list

• Brainstorming

• Asking others for advice

• Procrastinating

• Using gut feel

The issue is that many of these methods don’t reduce cognitive biases e.g. overconfidence, hindsight bias, confirmation bias.

Duke suggests a good decision tool:

• Can be reliably repeated

• You could teach someone to use the tool reliably for the same purpose

• After you’ve used the tool you can look back and examine whether you used it properly or not

In this issue, we'll explore the most effective decision-making tool: "thinking in probabilities."

3 steps to improve decision quality 

1. View each decision as a bet. Imagine yourself wagering money on your correctness. This prompts critical self-assessment and reduces confirmation bias.

2. Analyzing past decisions and not just the ones that didn’t work out. Duke suggests scrutinizing both successful and unsuccessful decisions to:

• Identify replicable strategies.

• Identify weaknesses in your decision-making process, even when the outcome is positive, to enhance future decisions.

3. Ensure that the expected value of the decision outweighs the opportunity cost. 

Where:

Expected Value = Potential Reward x Likelihood (%)

Opportunity cost = Potential Loss / Downside x Likelihood (%)

What is the expected value of making that decision? 

Potential reward x Likelihood

• You feel calmer due to making a values aligned decision. .33 x 100% = 33%

• Getting a better outcome for you and the team. .33 x 60% = 20%

• Increasing relationship with the team you are advocating for. .33 x 100% = 33%

  Total expected value = 86%

(You can come up with multiple “potential rewards”. Here I have chosen 3. To do the calculation the potential reward needs to add up to 1. Because there are 3 criteria each one has a weighting of .33. If you had 5 criteria for example then you would weight each as .20)

What is the opportunity cost?

Potential loss x Likelihood

• Being left out of important meetings. .33 x 20% = 7%

• Potential damage to your career aspirations. .33 x 50% = 17%

• Being labeled as “difficult” or someone who “can’t handle the pressure.” .33 x 80% = 26%

   Total opportunity cost = 50%

If the expected value (86%) outweighs the opportunity cost (50%). So it's a signal to speak up for your team.

Conversely, if the opportunity cost surpasses the expected value, you might opt not to speak up.

Non-monetary decisions can be particularly challenging, as they involve assessing potential rewards against multiple subjective factors like fear and biases.

In such cases, relying on inner reflection, intuition, and advice from trusted individuals complements (but doesn’t replace) reliable decision-making tools.

Are you currently facing a tricky leadership or career decision? Try this out.

Let me know how you go. 

Whenever you’re ready here are 3 ways I can help

#1 Gain clarity and confidence in your career transition

#2 Join the free weekly Career Soul Sessions for women in tech and sustainability. A safe space to share your thoughts, and feelings on all things career.

#3 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram for more Career + Leadership tips to help you thrive.

Gem of the week

On March 27 this year Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate passed away.

As a tribute here are 10 leadership lessons to improve your thinking and decision making.