The BIGGEST productivity killer

As a manager, you're going to have to proactively fight the "groupthink."

Group negativity bias

Sometimes there’s nothing that brings you down quite like talking to your peers.

Have you noticed that?

For instance, someone brings up the subject of an unpopular boss or coworker at lunch, and everyone takes turns saying how terrible the person is.

Or maybe it’s a vendor pitching a new branding concept to your company - one person makes a critical comment - and it just devolves into everyone glomming onto how much they think this vendor sh*t the bed.

You can end up walking away from each of the encounters with that feeling of “everything is terrible, why bother?”

Cut to 45 rounds of revisions later with endless budget wasted and everyone at their wit’s end trying to get something produced. The vendor, no doubt, getting the lion’s share of the blame. But the problem isn’t actually the vendor, even if they did things imperfectly.

Negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when positive or neutral things of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than either neutral or positive things (source). All humans do this.

So what do you do about negativity bias?

Honestly? You have to train yourself to start noticing when things are going well.

So if you think “I suck at designing stuff” - you have to start writing down at least 5 reasons you DON’T suck, on a regular basis, in order to even arrive at a place of self-neutrality. There’s no hard and fast rule on that, by the way…I’m just going off of personal experience ;)

Of course, I don’t mean that we pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening. We don’t gaslight here, okay? I just mean that you need to ALSO notice what’s working.

And what if it’s your job to lead a team? The larger the team, the greater the multiplicative effect of negativity bias.

That’s what I mean when I say GROUP negativity bias.

For example: Karen says that Rachel is slow at making strawberry-glazed mochi donuts — and before you know it, no one will even TALK to Rachel, let alone ask her to make a REGULAR donut.

Even if Rachel IS a bit slow at mochi donuts…she’s actually amazingly fast at the creme brûlée “crackling” ones – but no one ever bothers to find that out. Because once the group negativity bias kicks in…it’s over.

I’ve seen this happen many times.

Nothing kills productivity faster than negativity bias…so you have to actively work to diffuse it the moment you see it - and even before that. I guess I like to think of this as training the culture of the team to be more “yes, and😊” rather than “and ANOTHER thing😡!”

Sometimes that’s about being an example and sometimes it’s about encouraging others to set the example. Sometimes it’s about making explicit ways to measure what’s working or not working so you can point back to that if group sentiment starts to dip a bit sideways. Sometimes it’s about remembering to celebrate even when you really, really don’t feel like it. Sometimes it’s about telling people how much you really don’t feel like it too, so you acknowledge the bad and let them know you see it, too.

And sometimes, because none of us can really control other people…there’s nothing you can do except continue to patiently redirect towards productivity in the midst of negativity bias (yours or others')...until it shifts on its own.

What about you? What kinds of things do you notice about negativity bias? Reply and let me know :)

XOXO,

Cathy

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