A feed update from ‘The Personal MBA’ caught my eye:

“Here’s a curious fact about human beings: we have a really hard time realizing that something isn’t there.”

As it turned out, the post entitled Absence Blindness has some great insights to offer, especially when it came to management at work:

Great management is boring – and often unrewarding. 

The hallmark of an effective manager is anticipating likely issues and barriers and resolving them in advance so the team can make progress as quickly as possible. Some of the best managers in the world look like they’re not doing much, but everything gets done on time and under budget. The problem is, no one sees all of the bad things that the great manager stopped from happening. Less skilled managers are actually more likely to be rewarded, since everyone can see them “making  things happen” and “moving heaven and earth” to resolve issues – even issues they themselves created via poor management.

It also offered an effective antidote to the problem – checklists!

Absence blindness is an example of a cognitive bias, and the only semi-reliable way I’ve found to overcome it is checklisting. By thinking in advance what you want something to look like and translating that into visible reminders you can refer to while making decisions, checklists can help you remember to look for the absence of qualities in the moment.

So make a note to remind yourself to handsomely reward the low-drama manager who quietly and effectively gets things done. It may not seem like their job is particularly difficult, but you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Posts like this make it well worth the effort to stay subscribed to blog feeds, don’t you think?