• Hiring is hard, especially when the stakes are high. If you can’t hire well you will need to have spectacular management.
• Without strong management, you must hire especially well, which will take a long time and require compelling incentives/EVP.
• Personality matters (conscientiousness, resilience and neuroticism in particular). However, you can still work improve what you’re weak at (see: therapy!).
• Being aware of your weaknesses at this level is critical to improvement.
• People don’t stop developing at adolescence - there are adult developmental stages (see Changing on the Job, Jennifer Garvey Berger). Most people are socialised - i.e. want to part of a group and not yet highly driven by their own principles.
• Adults at different developmental stages can handle different amounts of complexity and have different relationships to authority, roles and autonomy.
• People who are at the edge of a developmental level can be resistant to concepts from other levels, especially those “in front” of them. Coaching helps here.
• The same applies to organisations (see Reinventing Organizations, Fredric Laloux).
• Matching the developmental level of the individual, the organisation and the role is difficult but important. It helps to have the ability to assess all three.
• Each time a new person is added to a team, that makes it a new team.
• Empathy is not a magical power. It is usually a combination of people-pleasing, a lack of boundaries and high emotional intelligence.
• Being able to describe emotions with specificity and nuance is typically a sign of high EQ, but does make you seem to be “more empathetic”.
• People-pleasing