Undoubtedly in our daily lives, we face struggles with commensurate ups and downs. We bring in new sales deals in our jobs, but also stressfully lose disgruntled clients.
We feel good about nicely done work presentations, but get anxious over the next round of expected company layoffs.
Despite the wide fluctuations in our work lives, humans long for past times. When we think of the past, we often think favourably about our previous experiences.
We often remember our early adulthood with fondness. We believe we had more fun in the past than we have in the present.
We want to return to earlier points in our career when we had better colleagues. Such sympathetic views of our personal history are called pro-past bias.
Humans also carry a pro-self bias. We extend ourselves forgiveness for our actions far more frequently than we forgive other people for exactly the same behaviour.
If we look at a matatu driver who swerved in front of us in traffic and cut us off from making our exit on Thika Superhighway, then we are likely to ascribe all manner of negative thoughts about perhaps the perceived arrogant and selfish PSV driver.
But if we run late for an important work meeting and, in our haste, swerve into traffic and cut off other cars behind us, do we also ascribe the traits of arrogance and selfishness to ourselves? Usually no.
We typically view ourselves with forgiveness and think that our bad behaviours are situational and unusual because of the perceived situation we find ourselves in.
In our driving example, we would blame the urgency of the meeting or whatever made us tardy leaving our homes that morning instead of thinking we possess bad traits.
Yet we quickly ascribe negative traits to other people when we observe their bad actions.
Combine our pro-past bias with our pro-self bias and we get a problem of not being able to look into our past with any real accuracy.
This evolutionary coping mechanism helps humans increase their self-esteem and heal from past mistakes while moving forward.
But the combination of these biases has frequently been misunderstood and also a nuisance in dealing with colleagues and managers in our workplaces.
Ever dealt with an employee who repeatedly fails to complete tasks accurately or is constantly late in deliverables?
When you review their performance at regular intervals, they vigorously defend themselves even pulling up examples of great performance from their past.
However, their version of historical events does not match your clear recollection of those same events.
Inasmuch, the stubborn employee cannot agree to remedy their behaviour because they do not see that they made errors in the past.
As baffling and irritating as it is to manage such staff, you can partially blame their evolutionary psychology for this lapse.
Therefore, when giving performance feedback, be as objective as possible while providing tangible evidence of poor task completion.
Then, in order for them to lower their defences, give the employee two affirmations for every area of necessary improvement.
The brain exists as hardwired to defend against attacks and finds it difficult to listen to criticism. Do not stack positive feedback and negative feedback the way most managers conduct performance discussions.
Stacking involves telling the employee all their positive attributes and then afterwards listing all their negative improvement areas.
Such an approach fails to work well with the employee and does not generate needed change.
Shade Zahrai advises following the two affirmations model to precede each critique requiring improvement in a repeated 2-1, 2-1, 2-1, 2-1 format for each negative feedback.
In so doing, the staff member is more likely to see you as a coach who wants them to succeed and therefore, they are more willing to change their behaviour.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
