Happy Thursday, everyone.
I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
The workplace plot twists did not slow down this week. Here are the stories HR are whispering about between meetings:
💸 Only 1 in 5 Women Feel Confident About Retiring
A new survey shows women are significantly less confident than men about retiring comfortably, driven by pay gaps, caregiving breaks and rising living costs. The retirement gender gap is getting wider, not smaller.
👉HR Dive🤖 AI Is Changing HR Faster Than Expected
SHRM’s latest AI roundup highlights how quickly HR is adopting automation across hiring, compliance and employee support, with new tools hitting the market weekly. The message is clear: HR teams that ignore AI now will feel it in 2025.
👉SHRM🏡 Employees Are Trading Office Perks for Hybrid Happiness
Research from HR Daily shows workers care far less about fun office perks and far more about flexibility and life balance. It also finds that hybrid models have not rebuilt genuine social connection, which many employees say is still missing.
👉HR Daily📉 Workers Say Pay Isn’t Keeping Up With Life Costs
A new report finds employees feel their wages have failed to keep pace with inflation, and many are cutting back spending as financial strain grows.
👉SHRM
Now that we’ve covered the chaos, let’s get to the fun part: the science of why everyone thinks they’re nailing it at work.
Last week I sat in a meeting with a leader who spoke with so much confidence you would think he personally invented the topic. Then a quieter team member asked two very gentle questions and the whole thing collapsed. Turns out he did not, in fact, know what he was talking about.
So later when I read an article in Psychological Science showing that people often feel confident long before they are right, the meeting suddenly made a lot more sense.
And here is the part that stings. Overconfidence is not limited to the usual suspects. It’s a very human hobby. Apparently the rest of us are just as capable of confidently sprinting in the wrong direction.
🤝 Supported by HiBob
AI in the workplace isn’t just a tech shift—it’s a human one. This article explores how HR leaders can use empathy to ease fears, build trust, and guide their people through change. Learn practical ways to balance innovation with compassion so teams feel empowered, not replaced, by technology.
🧠 The behavioural science lens
Overconfidence is funny when you are observing it. It is less funny when you are managing a project that falls apart because someone was one hundred percent sure, and zero percent correct. The research behind it is remarkably consistent:
The Dunning–Kruger effect plays a starring role: The Dunning–Kruger effect helps explain why some of the most confident people in the room are also the least accurate. When someone doesn’t have enough expertise to evaluate their own performance, they also don’t have the insight to recognise their blind spots. It looks like confidence, but it’s actually just really poor calibration. And you can see it everywhere from optimistic timelines to bold recommendations that don’t survive five minutes of scrutiny.
Overconfidence survives even high quality feedback: You would think corrective feedback would fix this. It does not. A recent summary on Workplace Insight explains that even when chess players receive precise, public performance information after every match, their confidence barely shifts. People tend to overweight positive signals and downplay negative ones, protecting their existing self view.
Organisations do not automatically correct it: An academic review shows that overconfidence not only survives inside organisations, it often thrives because internal checks and balances are too weak to counter it. The paper highlights three flavours of overconfidence that show up constantly at work. People overestimate their performance. They assume they are better than others. And they are far more certain than the evidence supports.
People overestimate their performance at work: Field research from a large trucking company showed workers misjudged their performance in both directions. Low performers consistently overestimated their productivity, while higher performers tended to underestimate it. Their confidence stayed high even when the data disagreed.
🚀 What this means for leaders
Confidence is not a competence signal: Do not mistake volume for clarity. Ask for assumptions, data and alternatives, not just conviction.
Feedback must be specific and unavoidable: Overconfidence thrives in fog. Clear expectations reduce the gap between how people think they are performing and how they actually are.
Slow decisions down on purpose: Add a pre mortem. Ask what you might be missing. Invite one person to challenge the consensus. Tiny bits of friction save months of chaos.
Do not confuse enthusiasm with accuracy: Some of your most optimistic people are also your most miscalibrated. Anchor performance conversations to observable behaviour.
Treat humility as an actual leadership skill: Humility signals that someone understands where their knowledge ends (which definitely is not a weakness, rather good judgement).
💬 Final thoughts
Overconfidence is rarely a character flaw. Instead, it’s a predictable human bias that workplaces accidentally feed. Confidence feels good, it sounds good, and it’s often rewarded more than accuracy. But confidence is only useful when it is connected to reality. When it’s not, all that certainty turns into expensive background noise.
And if the research proves anything, it’s that the loudest person in the room is rarely the one with the clearest view.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
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