Karl Edwards presents Working Matters

Tag: perception

  • Listen In -> Playing Favorites #2: Favoring Certain People

    You think a certain employee performs amazingly. Everyone else seems to hate them. What gives?

    You may be guilty of playing favorites, and that without even knowing it!

    In this week’s show, Claudia and I take a look at what happens when we play favorites among our team members.

    While rewarding excellence, performance and results is important, some times we favor certain people for their charisma, because we like them, or because we work well together.

    Of course there’s no crime in enjoying working with one person more than another, but what about the unintended consequences to the morale of everyone else?

    Once people form the perception that you are playing favorites, they will begin interpreting your every decision through that lens. And who can blame them?

    It is difficult enough to hear criticism of one’s work when it’s completely warranted, but when we feel that someone else isn’t being held to the same standard, our willingness to improve can evaporate pretty quickly.

    Could you inadvertently be playing favorites?

    Listen in.

    Just now joining the conversation? Catch up on the entire series here.

  • Thought Leaders Unpacked -> What the Dog Saw #7: Open Secrets

    thought-leadersCraziness. Think about it. Enron was not keeping secrets. The executives explained their actions to the early inquirers. It was all out in the open.

    But it was complex. Complicated in detail and extent. Possibly too complicated for any one person, team or company to wrap their minds around completely. Certainly too complicated for the average investment manager to comprehend… even though all the information was available all of the time.

    What-the-Dog-Saw

    I think I learned more from this chapter than any other so far. Most powerful to me is Gladwell’s distinction between puzzle and mystery.

    The significance lies in the different approaches to solving, understanding, and perceiving that take place depending on whether an issue is dealt with as a puzzle or a mystery.

    Perception is reality. And therein lies the rub. If you’ve already decided that something bad has happened and the perpetrator must be identified and held to account, then you look for a perpetrator. Your eyes are closed to other avenues of inquiry.

    On the other hand if you see that something bad has happened and intend to explore what the contributing factors were, how they came together and resulted in the current bad situation, then you look for multiple causes, issues and dynamics. Your eyes are open to all avenues of inquiry.

    How many of the analyses, verdicts, and positions of attacking leaders, biased pundits and suspicious spouses arise from mistaking complicated mysteries for solvable puzzles?

    How might you catch yourself treating a mystery as a puzzle? What was you main take-away from this chapter?

    Each week I post my reflections from one chapter of What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. If you are just joining the discussion now, welcome! Catch up on the entire series here.

  • What’s In A Perception?

    Perception MattersSo what’s the big deal with how others perceive me?

    I can’t control what another person thinks. I can’t force them to change their mind about me if they have settled on some incorrect perception.

    The big deal is that those other people are making decisions that affect you. To the extent that their perception about who you are and what you bring to the professional table is incorrect, so will their decisions be.

    Decisions like whether to hire you, promote you, invest in your training, or in the worst case, lay you off in a recessionary season.

    While you cannot make someone see what they will not or cannot see, you can exert influence.

    Our conversation topic this month is how our resume can be a powerful perception influencer. That is, if we accept responsibility for choosing how we present our professional interests and work history.

    Begin by listing three responsibilities you would love to have in a job, even if you don’t have any work experience in them.

    Now turn each of them into a job title, however silly it might sound. For example, if I want to be in charge of the development of a new product and lead the process from beginning to end, I might call myself a “Project Manager” or a “Lead Designer” or a “Brilliant Idea Implementor.”

    The idea is to create for yourself some job-related vocabulary that would be helpful for describing yourself in terms of what you want to do next.

    Try it. Share one or all three of your desired responsibilities and corresponding job titles in a comment here.

    On your side,

    – Karl Edwards

    Don’t forget to sign up for our Resume Workshop: A Fresh Approach to Career Advancement coming up in Los Angeles on February 7th! Or contact us for information on inviting us to your community.