Work Matters

Tag: self-awareness

  • A Method For Determining If A Boss Is Self-Aware (And Listens Well)

    I was talking with a journalist from Men's Health today about how bosses can become more aware of how they act and are seen by the people they lead, and how so many bosses (like most human-beings) can be clueless of how they come across to others.  This reminded of a method I used some years back with one boss that proved pretty effective for helping him come to grips with his overbearing and "all transmission, no reception" style; here is how it is described in Good Boss, Bad Boss:

    A few years ago, I did a workshop with a management team that was suffering from “group dynamics problems.” In particular, team members felt their boss, a senior vice-president, was overbearing, listened poorly, and routinely “ran over” others.  The VP denied all this and called his people “thin-skinned wimps.”

    I asked the team – the boss and five direct reports — to do a variation of an exercise I’ve used in the classroom for years.  They spent about 20 minutes brainstorming ideas about products their business might bring to market; they then spent 10 minutes narrowing their choices to just three:  The most feasible, wildest, and most likely to fail.   But as the group brainstormed and made these decisions, I didn’t pay attention to the content of their ideas.  Instead, I worked with a couple others from the company to make rough counts of the number of comments made by each member, the number of times each interrupted other members, and the number of times each was interrupted.  During this short exercise, the VP made about 65% of the comments, interrupted others at least 20 times, and was never interrupted once.  I then had the VP leave the room after the exercise and asked his five underlings to estimate the results; their recollections were quite accurate, especially about their boss’s stifling actions.  When we brought the VP back in, he recalled making about 25% of the comments, interrupting others two or three times, and being interrupted three or four times.  When we gave the boss the results, and told him that his direct reports made far more accurate estimates, he was flabbergasted and a bit pissed-off at everyone in the room.

    As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group:  The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them. 

    My colleague Huggy Rao has a related test he uses to determine if a boss is leading in ways that enables him or her to stay in tune with others.  In addition to how much the boss talks, Huggy counts the proportion of statements the boss makes versus the number of questions asked.  "Transmit only bosses" make lots of statements and assertions and ask few questions. 

    What do you think of these assessment methods?  What other methods have you used to determine how self-aware and sensitive you are other bosses are — and to makes things better?

  • Clueless And Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples!


    Clueless-pointy-haired-boss-Microsoft-Windows-7-Phone-Designed-By-Dilbert-Committee Good Boss, Bad Boss     is a serious book, and certainly there is plenty of evidence that bad bosses do much harm and good bosses do a great deal of good for their followers, customers, and organizations.  But it is nice to take a break now and then and have some fun.  So I thought it might be fun to come up with a top ten list of funny, weird, astounding, and otherwise amusing (if sometimes destructive) things that clueless bosses do.  Research on power poisoning suggests that because wielding authority over others leads to "dis-inhibition," impulsiveness, and disregard for and detachment from the reactions of others –so bosses are likely to do some pretty strange and offensive things.  Here are a few examples to get you started:

        He walks around the office with his shoes off, and doesn't realize that his feet stink.

        She picks her nose during meetings.

        He talks VERY loudly on his cell phone, even when talking of company secrets.

        She talks and talks and talks, and seems incapable of listening.

        He keeps forgetting to zip-up his pants after going to the men's room.

        When we go to lunch, she eats food off our plates without asking permission

        He calls women "honey" and "sweetheart" and doesn't realize that they find it offensive.

    I would love to hear other examples.  I will propose a top 10 or 15 list after going through your comments and emails.  Bonus points for stories and real examples — but for this kind of thing, let's err on the side of being too silly rather than too serious

    Thanks, Bob

  • “I Have Already Told You More Than 125% Of What I Know”

    I first heard from a charming and honest statement years ago from a Stanford colleague who was being asked question after question about a case study he had done. He was providing us one compelling answer after another. But then he stopped himself in mid-sentence and said he refused to answer more questions because, as the headline says, "I have already told you more than 125% of what I know."

    I think that those of us who are alleged to have expertise in certain topics can easily fall into this trap as we try to be helpful to others, and rather than stopping and realizing that we are beyond our expertise, we just keep saying more and more about things we know less and less about.

    I was thinking of this comment this morning after I got yet another media inquiry to talk about swearing in the workplace, a topic I officially retired from talking about after my NPR interview on power players and profanity.  I did devote time to reading research on swearing and such and did learn some interesting lessons from The No Asshole Rule (especially from all the great comments and emails).  But after being pressed pretty hard by a reporter to do another interview, I realized it was time to turn back to topics I know more about, and I used the "125%" line to deliver the message.

    I don't think it is always bad, by the way, to tell more than you know so long as you make clear that you are speculating or hypothesizing beyond the information you have.  A lot of creativity happens that way, but when you do so, it is good to understand (and explain to others) that this the case.  This isn't an easy thing to do, however, because we human beings often have excessive confidence in our knowledge and expertise ESPECIALLY about areas we are must ignorant about. Comforting, isn't it?  The path to self-awareness is not easy for any of us humans.

  • I Am Just Like You

    A few days back, I wrote about David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us.  Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique — usually as superior to others –  when that actually are  not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on.  Dunning proposes on page 166 that:

    "People would hold more accurate self-perceptions if they conceded that their psychology is not different from the the psychology of others, that their actions are molded by the same situational forces that govern the behavior of other people. In doing so, they could more readily learn from the experiences of others, using data about other people's outcomes to forecast their own."

    I find this quite fascinating. I believe that the average person would benefit from this perspective, but some industries would suffer — especially those that have a kind of Ponzi scheme quality where most people fail, a rare successes happens now and then, but no matter what happens, the people who run the system always seem to benefit.  Both casino operators and venture capitalists come to mind.

    The implication, however, that if we assume "I am just like you" rather than "I am special and different," or even that "we are all the same," we might make better decisions and learn at others' expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable.  For example, I've been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

  • Flawed Self-Evaluations: David Dunning’s Facinating Work

    Professor David Dunning from Cornell University, along with numerous colleagues, has done fascinating and sometimes discouraging research on self-awareness.  His most famous paper on the topic was published in 1999 with Kruger … check-out the abstract of Unskilled and Unaware of it.  I have known about it for a long time, but I have just discovered Dunning's book, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself.   This is a pretty pure academic book, but it sure is fascinating, and should make all of us stop and pause when we feel supremely confident about ourselves.  You can learn tidbits like people do a pretty bad job of guessing their IQ scores, are downright awful at rating their ability to catch other people's lies, that workers do a far worse job of assessing their own social skills than their superiors or peers, that in survey of thousands of high school seniors 70% of respondents rated their leadership ability as above average while only 2% rated their leadership ability as below average, and — turning to my own profession — that 94% of college professors say they do above average work.

    Self-Insight also contains an update of research for the 1999 article — the basic finding is that people with worst skill levels at diverse tasks (ranging from debating skill to having a good sense of humor) consistently overestimate their abilities by huge amounts.  For example, people who had skill levels at the 12th or 13th percentile usually estimated that they were in the 60th percentile of performance.  In contrast, people above the 50th percentile made far more accurate assessments — although the most skilled people tended to underestimate their relative skill a bit.

    The upshot of this rather famous work is that you should be wary of self-assessments in general, but especially wary of people who seem to be incompetent. As Dunning puts it, "The central contention guiding this research is that poor performers simply do not know — indeed cannot know — how badly they are performing.  Because they lack the skills required to produce correct answers they also lack the skills to accurately judge whether their own answers are correct." 

    The book has all sorts of great research and I found it a lot more fun to read than most academic books, but be warned that it contains a lot of studies and such.