"Cacatne ursus in silvis?" - Does a bear shit in the woods?

During a recent session with a client, we stumbled into an interesting discussion about how stereotypes were impacting their workplace and resultantly their leadership and overall team performance. 

As we started to explore 'Team Role Inventories' [#Belbin, 2010], the client identified that their teammates were significantly more nuanced than the allocation of a singular workplace role. Layer on top an individuals' personality and character, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, temporal influences etc, etc and this whole #leadership / #management business starts to get really quite complicated...

A '#rebel' can also be a '#realitytester' and a '#criticalevaluator'. 

An '#energiser' can also be a '#shaper' and a '#blocker'. 

Etc, etc. 

From a place of curiosity, this led our session into an exploration of #heuristics, #biases and #stereotyping, asking why these tools of System 1 thinking (your intuition) [#Kahneman, 2002] are so often framed negatively?

My client identified that without stereotypes, they would need to spend much longer analysing every action, reaction and interaction for every team task and individual in micro-detail. (Clearly fans of #ActionCentredLeadership [#Adair, 1973]. They would never be able to get anything done for questioning the way in which every stakeholder needed to be managed, supported and led on a constant loop.

As a leader, they identified that they rely heavily upon the social cues provided by their teammates to make educated judgements and leaps as to their wants, needs and motivators. This in turn enables them to use different levers of influence (#transactionalleadership) to get stuff done.

Returning to the original question; 'cacatne ursus in silvis?' Absolutely, yes. 

But it can also shit on your lawn, or even in your lavatory when invited into the house. It may even just be coming over for a cup of tea. 

Stereotypes, biases and heuristics are mental shortcuts that we use to help explain the world around us to ourselves and to others akin to #naturlisticdecisionmaking [

#Klein, 1993]. But to be a good leader / manager, we must know when we should override these schemas whilst also accepting that quite often they're really useful.

Cacatne ursus in silvis?