Self-Perception vs. Reality
photo by Victoria Peckham
Another hidden gem from Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing. Dr. Iyengar had several hundred Columbia Business School students get 360-degree feedback from past managers, colleagues and subordinates.
The lesson? You’re not as great as you think you are so get over yourself.
Turns out that 90% saw “…significant discrepancies between how they saw themselves and how others interpreted their actions. Many who thought they were popular and valuable team players learned that they were seen as average and difficult to work with.”
90%.
Unfortunately for that group, others’ perception is reality.
Even worse news is that Dr. Iyengar references a study by Daniel Ames that reported that “…in the workplace, people who attempted to overtly enhance their position and reputation were seen as disruptive to the group and ultimately performed poorly.”
This speaks to the importance of being able to have those immensely difficult conversations about who we fundamentally are (or perceived to be) as people and how we behave in the workplace.
The more you have in common with others in terms of values and personality the easier these conversations are and the better you understand and appropriately interpret the actions of your colleagues. This gets to the heart of what we’re measuring at RoundPegg and why we so vehemently believe that hiring for fit needs some objectivity and rigor.
And while we may not have the exact answer, we believe we’re taking a big step toward the solution with our internal Touchy Feely meetings. It’s damn hard to discuss our perceptions that rub or (possibly harder) to be on the receiving end of that feedback. But it’s what makes a group and company run more efficiently and effectively. When we can get out of one another’s way we’re better able to put the business first.
We can all improve and we will be far more successful if we’re able to listen to others’ perceptions and internalize that.
Everyone and every company is a work in progress, to be sure, but nothing worthwhile is easy.
Kaizen.
Interpersonal Issues: Touchy Feely Meetings
Hiring people who fit your company culture and team personality vastly improves overall performance, but there is still hard work to be done to make sure that the interpersonal dynamics are being actively managed so that the good work sees the light of day.
Even when people are friends, as we are, and have a lot in common, which we do, there will always be bullshit (our fancy internal term) that arises. If left unattended, it will take root and blow up spectacularly.
And those festering issues can manifest themselves in other ways. Someone will shoot down an idea not on merit, but because of who suggested it. Or someone gets caught up thinking about how they’ve been ‘wronged’ rather than focusing on the business.
There are only so many minutes in a day. You can either do your best to clear the mental decks or you can ignore the issue altogether, let things build up and then fire someone.
Unfortunately, most companies select the latter option.
At RoundPegg, we’ve chosen a different approach. We air our concerns and grievances with eachother in a bi-weekly Touchy Feely Meeting (a bit of a misnomer since it’s actually one of the hardest things to do).
We also have the benefit of knowing how each of us are wired and we pull out our ‘Peggs’ at every meeting to remind others of what we value or what our personality is. That makes things more effective…as do the rules we’ve put in place:
- 1. Start by stating how a situation makes you feel (When X happened, I felt Y). Describe the situation and your reaction to it only. No focusing on what you think the other person intended or their motives
- 2. Be vulnerable. Letting your guard down is the best way to prevent the meeting from going south and ensuring that everyone has the same goal of improving the situation
- 3. Think. Don’t react. Being defensive is not helpful. Instead, try to understand why someone felt that way. Needless to say, attacking is prohibited. Nobody is keeping score so it’s pointless
- 4. Take ownership of making someone feel the way they did/do. Likely, that wasn’t your intention, but it happened. Own it
- 5. Don’t let issues linger. It’s okay to agree to think through things as ‘homework’ and revisit in the next session but the person who brought up the issue must agree
- 6. Walk out stronger than you came in. The air should be more clear and will be if people are owning their actions and agreeing to
- 7. Work hard. Put real thought into solutions between meetings. If, like most other meetings, you walk in and wing it then it’s not going to work and you’ll likely violate rule #2.
We’re then posting the output on our internal wiki. This may be going too far, but we want to have a fully transparent workplace and you can’t get more sensitive than these meetings. We’ll continue doing so until we’re badly burned. And then we’ll still probably continue doing so with a tweak or two (like removing names).
As we grow we have every intention of rolling this out for every team. Frankly, it’s a couple hours a month that are very well spent. You waste more times doing less productive things, like status meetings.
While I’d like to tell you these are the elixir that cures all workplace ills, it’s too early. We’ve been at it for a couple of months, but we can definitively say that it doesn’t hurt and that we all believe we’re a stronger team for feeling comfortable bearing our insecurities.
Eat, Work, Sleep, Repeat
Today is Groundhog’s day. A day I more closely associate with the Bill Murray movie than with the furry, winter-loving, Pennsylvanian rodent. You remember, Bill Murray’s character wakes up to find he’s living the same day over and over.
It’s hard to be creative and think of better, more interesting solutions if you find yourself on auto-pilot most of the time. I find this particularly true for me. I very easily fall into the same patterns and can see my productivity plummet when things feel too familiar. I try to mix it up with varying degrees of success by working from different locations, grabbing coffee with different people or varying my ‘to do’ list so that it uses different sides of my brain within a given day.
But I’m curious what others do. How do you stimulate yourself and your team? Please comment if you have ideas. A few thoughts if you don’t:
Photo by Stefano Pizzetti
- Pepper in projects for your team that are important and forward-looking rather than always focusing on the urgent and immediate
- Shift around the responsibility for those mundane tasks that are redundant but that you’ve deemed ‘necessary’ – are they even really necessary?
- Ask everyone on your team (including yourself) to teach the group something new – anything of their choosing. Give them all 90 minutes to assemble props and knock together an outline for a two-minute tutorial. Encourage creativity and keep it light
- Take a different route to work every day for a week and take notice of something small; the different types of doors, tree trunks, whatever interests you
- Schedule a meeting outside
We may have six more weeks of winter this year, but I’m hoping that doesn’t mean six more weeks of the same old thing.
Make Exit Interviews Useful – Eliminate ‘Em
With so many companies now laying off employees I’ve started thinking about the exit interview. I think nearly everyone would agree it’s completely useless. But frankly, I’m a little stumped on how make it useful.
On paper, the concept is a good one. People are leaving (by choice or otherwise) and you want to know why so that you can improve your company.
But employees paint a glorious picture of rainbows and butterflies because neither are flammable enough to ignite a bridge. Similarly, employers are all too happy to hear that. They don’t want to admit that anything is wrong.
Two thoughts on how to change this.
1. Completely eliminate this useless waste of time
Instead build what you want to get out of the exit interview into your everyday processes. The key is to listen dispassionately. Nothing is personal, nothing is held against anyone.
- Collect anonymous feedback either systematically or set up a suggestion box
- Take individual employees out to lunch and ask what they would change if they were in your position
- Make feedback flow both ways…always
2. Give employees some incentive to give good feedback
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of good ideas here. But I do have one that I’d like to experiment with.
Companies pay consultants big dollars to analyze their processes, culture and operations. Shift that budget away from the suits who parachute in for a couple months and transfer it to those who endured and operated within the system.
Offer the employee a small pot of gold in exchange for an additional day or two of work. The output of that day or two is a document (or whatever form works best for the employee) that addresses what they’d do if they were in charge, why they couldn’t implement their ideas, etc. Identify the open-ended questions that are germane to your company and pepper in the additional questions that are unique to their function, manager and team.
It’s not perfect, but $1,000 plus the chance to prove how smart you are may be just enough to tip the scales and provide the incentive for employees to offer up what’s broken.
Thoughts? Does the process work for you? How would you improve it?
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