May 2023

  • 6 vs. 9

    My experience as a people leader, and from working with and speaking to many people leaders, is we often default to a normal distribution when it comes to performance evaluation: if we’re evaluating people’s performance out of 10, we’ll say most people are a 7.5, maybe there are a few 9’s or 10’s, and while we hope it’s a rare case, there might be a few people at a 6 or below.

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  • Experience and expertise are very different.

    It took me a long time – much longer than I would like to admit – to realize there is a significant difference between experience and expertise. In my first few years at Avanti, I regularly made the mistake of wrongly inferring more years of experience would translate to a greater degree of expertise. While there should be a strong correlation between the two, it’s certainly not a given.

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  • Judgement: The Antithesis to Curiosity. (2/2)

    We judge people for all sorts of things: their appearances, where they grew up, their educational and professional background, how much money they have or we think they have, if they are single, if they aren’t single, etc. etc. We’re particularly judgemental when we first meet someone. And despite it being a fairly unattractive behavior, it’s seemingly human nature. We all do it.

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