How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life
Caroline Webb
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0553419633
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows readers how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform our approach to everyday working life.
Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best. But it has not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the real world – until now.
In How to Have a Good Day, Webb explains exactly how to apply this science to our daily tasks and routines. She translates three big scientific ideas into step-by-step guidance that shows us how to set better priorities, make our time go further, ace every interaction, be our smartest selves, strengthen our personal impact, be resilient to setbacks, and boost our energy and enjoyment. Through it all, Webb teaches us how to navigate the typical challenges of modern workplaces—from conflict with colleagues to dull meetings and overflowing inboxes—with skill and ease.
Filled with stories of people who have used Webb’s insights to boost their job satisfaction and performance at work, How to Have a Good Day is the book so many people wanted when they finished Nudge, Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow and were looking for practical ways to apply this fascinating science to their own lives and careers.
A remarkable and much-needed book, How to Have a Good Day gives us the tools we need to have a lifetime of good days.
the way you included the customer perspective. Can I give you some comments?” Praising something specific is more effective than making general warm statements, as we saw in Chapter 10. Lead with solutions, not problems. Instead of saying: “Unfortunately, our original idea isn’t going to work because…, so what we’re going to do is…,” lead with your proposed solution: “What we think will work best is…That’s different from our original plan because…” Same content, different sequence, different
professor Charles A. Czeisler. Harvard Business Review, October. 27. For a great review of the evidence on the benefits of exercise, including many references to studies that are themselves meta-analyses, see Ratey, J.J., & Loehr, J.E. (2011). The positive impact of physical activity on cognition during adulthood: A review of underlying mechanisms, evidence and recommendations. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 22(2), 171–185. For a meta-analysis of 150 studies showing beneficial workplace effects,
How did they decide they were “similar”? It wasn’t a particularly deep assessment. One of the most important factors was having familiar leisure pursuits, such as a shared interest in sports or technology. And that tees up the good news here, which is that research confirms that it takes very little to create a tribal sense of “us.” Experiments have shown that it’s instantly created when people are randomly assigned to be on the same team.6 Researchers even found that volunteers were more likely
intended.18 The curse of knowledge creates lots of potential for crossed wires in the workplace. Sometimes we know when a misunderstanding has occurred: “I’m sure I told you this was due on Friday. How was it not clear which Friday I meant?” But on many occasions, we never find out that our message failed to land as we intended. We simply don’t achieve the impact we’d hoped, and we don’t really know why. So to make your communication as clear as it is in your own head: never assume that others
Being involved gives people a soupçon of control, and that’s highly rewarding for their brains. This has huge implications for the way we communicate. It seems efficient to just tell people what we want or need to have happen—and that can be fine when the stakes are low or the negotiations simple, when it’s good to apply my earlier advice on making the first suggestion. But if we’ve got ideas that require real buy-in and belief from our colleagues to be a success, the advice changes: we