Yesterday, while driving back from work I was listening to a podcast from Wall Street Journal, in which they were discussing a new survey results, claiming that managers over-rate their skills in managing their employees (which they also said has always been the case). They argued that this was human behavior in which they always overestimate their own abilities.
This reminded me of a recent training which I had on accountability in my company, in which employees were grouped in 4 and were asked to rate their organization (i.e. company and their concerned department) on certain measures, and then they were asked to rate themselves as individuals on the same measures. Well, the results came out weren’t unexpected but were altogether amusing. Each individual rated themselves on a higher scale than they rated the organization on same measures. If, we group all the people in the group together, overall score in the individual category would be higher than what was in the organization category. If extrapolate the results and measure the cumulative score of each individual throughout the company, I bet individual’s would outscore the organization. So, help me understand that if the organization is made up of all the individuals why isn’t it on par with them.
May be its true the individual’s just overrate their own abilities.
