All managers will have come across employees who believe their achievements deserve more credit than they merit. They are also likely to have worked with someone who thinks their every mistake is logged by superiors with dreadful efficiency.

The science of psychology is well aware of these traits. In fact, both can be linked to a phenomenon known as “the spotlight effect” explains Nick Epley, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Prof Epley says the tendencies to claim too much credit or to fear that the world notices all our imperfections, however small, are both reflections of a basic psychological failing.

Because we are always conscious of our own thoughts, we wrongly think that others are paying us as much attention as we are ourselves. As a consequence, we expect too much praise in the workplace – or too much blame.

This phenomenon has been illustrated by an experiment in which people were told to don Barry Manilow T-shirts. Afterwards, they massively overestimated the extent to which others noticed their questionable fashion statement.

The spotlight effect is just one of the psychological insights that Prof Epley applies to management in three video lectures for FT Business School.

In ‘Making unbiased decisions’, he shows how managers unconsciously distort or omit vital information when choosing what to do. In ‘Mind reading at work’, he explains why it is so difficult to intuit what bosses, colleagues and underlings are thinking. Finally, in ‘Motivating staff’, he says cash is overrated as a way of firing up employees.

Previous FT Business School video lectures include Iese’s Pankaj Ghemawat on the limits of globalisation and their impact on corporate strategy, as well as Insead’s Herminia Ibarra on moving up to a leadership role – or moving out to a new career.

Review of A Sense of Urgency
John Kotter
Harvard Business Press
$22/£11.99

Back-to-back meetings, an exploding e-mail inbox, an ever-longer working day and almost permanent jet lag – this is the familiar world of today’s frenetically busy executive.But now a distinguished author says that what so many of us really lack is a sense of urgency. Is this guy for real?

He is. John Kotter, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has a clear and simple message.

What most of us think of as urgency, as busy-ness, is not actually making things any better. This false urgency is stressful, exhausting and unproductive.

True urgency may sometimes involve moving fast. But the most important aspects of true urgency are relentlessness, steadiness and the purposeful pursuit of a goal while “continuously purging irrelevant activities to provide time for the important and to prevent burn-out,” says Kotter.

The author is perhaps the business world’s favourite guru on the subject of change.

His book Leading Change (1996) has become a classic, with its eight-step programme for managing change effectively.

Step one in Kotter’s approach was to create a sense of urgency. Now, a decade after publishing his best-seller, he returns to consider this first step at greater length.

He has done so because he has become convinced that this sense of urgency is overwhelmingly the most important factor if change is going to be handled successfully.