Progress-focused

Stereotyping can have all kinds of harmful consequences. This article shows that people who are subject to stereotyping can be hindered in their performance by it. Also, the article shows that stereotyping can stand in the way of an fair and accurate assessment of stereotyped individuals. In this article you can read that stereotypes can affect people at a very young age, often even without them being aware this influence. This article shows evidence that not only negative stereotypes may impede performance but also positive stereotypes.

On several occasions I have been critical about positive psychology (for example see here ). To summarize my worries and criticisms briefly, my impression was and is: (1) that positive psychology puts too much emphasis on individual factors as determinants of behaviors and too little on situational factors, (2) that positive psychology emphasizes happiness too much as a criterion, (3) that positive psychology focuses too much on strengths and virtues as causes of human flourishing, and (4) that commerce and science appear to be too much intertwined.

In my earlier article Reasons for skepticism about happiness research I mentioned some skeptical comments to research and publications about happiness (I'll paraphrase what I said there): (1) Happiness is important but the importance of happiness is exaggerated. Happiness should not be the ultimate life goal. It is of relative importance. There are many other things in life which are as important. Trying to maximize happiness is an unwise strategy, (2) Much research into happiness is correlational and does not allow for conclusions about causation of happiness. Still, the suggestion (or at least the interpretation by the public) of publications is often that when a variable correlates with happiness it causes happiness, (3) There are reasons to question the validity of self-reported happiness. Research by Sean Wojcik demonstrated that conservative generally rate themselves as happier than democrats but appear unhappier when assessed through two objective methods (text analysis b...

Sometimes people make the following two assertions about progress-focused work: (1) progress-focused work is not focused on problems but on progress, and (2) progress-focused work is not focused on the past but on the future. These assertions sound enthusiastic and I'd rather not be a killjoy but I find it important to contradict them. Neither talking about the past, nor talking about problems is a taboo in progress-focused work. Indeed, both are important elements in virtually every progress-focused conversation. I'll explain below.

There is an interesting new working paper by two Harvard Business School researchers: Toxic workers (Housman & Miner, 2015). They analyzed a large data set containing a range of information about more than 50,000 workers from 11 firms. Their analyses were aimed at gaining insight into which personal and situational circumstances lead to toxic behavior and into which effects toxic behaviors have. In the working paper they present some interesting findings and they make some recommendations for management and HR-policy. Below, I will briefly summarize the findings and add some personal remarks.

How you look at your own progress determines how competent and motivated you will feel. A way of working which is not well-suited for this, is to grade your own competence level. There are at least three reasons why this type of self-assement is slippery and unreliable: (1) the Dunning-Kruger effect, (2) the curse of knowledge, and (3) the raised bar.

A new article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (photo) in Harvard Business Review says that strengths based coaching may backfire. The article says that the strengths-based approach has become a very popular approach about which many books have been written. An exponent of this popularity is the Gallup questionnaire StrengthsFinder. The article makes the following five claims about the strengths-based approach: