The author of this article suggests that in love and war, surprise is your friend; in leadership, it’s better to be predictable and boring:
Borrowing lessons from the field of neuroscience, this article explains that the key function of the brain is to serve as a "prediction engine". While recollecting, the brain relies on "reconstruction", a mechanism which it follows to generate "future memories" as well.
The brain constantly revises its predictive models balancing the need to store stable memories and the need to update them with novel experiences. The accuracy (or the lack of it) of the predictive capacity of the brain triggers the commensurate behaviour. It can explain why we feel angry when people do not follow rules.
- The important lesson from a leadership perspective is to be temperamentally consistent. Employees are happy when they see their workplace as safe and predictable and mercurial bosses with sudden and extreme mood swings may create more anxiety than consistently bad ones
- The second lesson is regarding the messages that leadership need to pass to their employees. Key here is not to oversell good news, not to hide the bad news and not to be over predictive more than the situation demands. Unpredictability, whether positive or negative, invariably triggers negative response and hence leaders need to harness the power of predictability to make employees feel secure and committed
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