Patrick Vermeren presents the case for an evidence-based approach to leadership.
Research into effective leadership is expanding at a rapid rate, and staying current is a challenge.
Leaders must sift through advice promoted in the media, by coaches, and indeed by colleagues – much of which is popular but not necessarily evidence-based.
Evidence-based leadership and management is an exciting new field that critiques current practices by using ‘hard’ evidence to question whether what we are currently doing actually works.
Evidence-based practice has emerged with the backdrop of breakthrough research about how the brain ‘biases’ our experiences, resulting in our failure to draw good conclusions from experience, which leads to poor decisions and performance.
In this presentation, Patrick Vermeren will:
- Define evidence-based leadership practice
- Discuss the three bases of information leaders use to make decisions and why two of them are often flawed
- Introduce the brain’s key biases and explain how leaders are misled by their own thinking
- Challenge a number of popular leadership practices that lack evidence for their effectiveness: annual performance reviews, pay for performance, forced ranking or ‘rank and yank’, use of some personality tests and other non-evidence-based surveys, and show how leaders can improve their effectiveness by adopting techniques to overcome these biases.
