Recently I had the pleasure to speak for the second time at the last Berlin Leadership Meetup event. I presented a talk about The Psychological Contract.
To give a simplicistic definition we can say that the Psychological Contract is a non-written, informal agreement between employer and employee. Its goal is to align expectations and beliefs between the two parts about topics that the format written contract doesn’t cover.
During the talk we covered the duties of the Leader when it comes to the Psychological Contract and more specifically the importance of being transparent when the Contract needs to be defined and mutually agreed.
I also presented a list of practices that help a leader being more aware of the Psychological Contract and avoid common mistakes.
Make the implicit explicit
This was a recurring mantra during the talk. If you, as a Leader, don’t explicitly define the Psychological Contract, you end up having two of them. One on your side, one on the employee side. And each part doesn’t know how the other’s Contract “looks like”, leading to misalignment and sense of unfairness.
See you to the next event!
The people attending the talk were lovely. The questions after the talk inspiring. I’m really looking forward to the next Berlin Leadership Meetup event.