David

  • Sometimes, focus only on the good. Ignore the bad.

    I was at an event earlier this year where an older woman (the boss) opened her speech by expressing gratitude to her Associate (the employee) for all the heavy lifting required to organize the event. It was intended to be a sincere thank you. And it mostly was… except, one of her talking points included a sarcastic joke about an error made on one of the printouts. It was meant to be a light tease but it did not land well at all. It came across as mean spirited and you could absolutely tell the employee was offended.

    It reminded me of an important lesson my dad taught me a long time ago: in some situations, you need to focus exclusively on the good and ignore the bad. When I was around ten years old, I bought my mom a combo pack of scented perfume from Shoppers (good boy). It was some sort of 5-for-one pack, I think private label brand?, and probably intended for tweenage girls. Not my best gift, but I was young, so good intentions. My mom put it under her bathroom sink and it was never opened, which with the benefit of hindsight of course makes complete sense. But I noticed. And next year on her birthday, I was writing out her card and came to my dad to tell him I had come up with a witty comment to include. Something along the lines of “I hope you like this gift much more than the perfume that’s never been opened”. Fortunately, he pointed out that when you’re celebrating someone (e.g., it’s their birthday), you want to focus exclusively on the good. As simple and silly a story as that is, it really stuck with me.

    Adding sarcasm, or a back-handed compliment, or even teasing (if done in poor taste) to a genuine and sincerely intended message will at best water it down. When you’re announcing someone’s promotion, or giving a toast at your friend’s birthday, focus on the good and best parts of that person. Don’t use it as a chance to bring up an issue you might be having with them. It’s not the time or place for that.

  • Can taking pride in your work be a problem?

    I generally believe taking pride in your work is a hugely important characteristic commonly found in high-performing professionals. When you take pride in your work, you care. You are more likely to go above and beyond. You are likely to re-read before hitting send. Taking pride in what you do also correlates positively with effort; you’re going to put more in because it matters to you.

    For these reasons, I like hiring people and working with people who take pride in their work. There are two watch-outs, though. First, when someone takes immense pride in their work, it can occasionally lead them to strive for perfection. Perfection is impossible to achieve. There’s a gap between excellence and perfection, and in almost all scenarios ‘excellent’ is a sufficient bar to strive for. Usually, I start to wonder if someone is falling into the perfection trap if they always deliver extremely high-quality work but consistently struggle to keep up with the pace of deliverables, if they deliver work after a reasonable, mutually agreed-upon deadline has passed, or if they can only hit the deadline by working an unreasonable amount. Second, is when I notice someone struggle to get started on a new project or work deliverable. The desire to deliver a work product close to perfection can lead to inaction by creating this intimidating invisible barrier to start.

    Fortunately, I’d much rather work with someone who struggles with these challenges than someone who doesn’t give a shit. With coaching, it’s possible to educate someone on the declining marginal benefit of taking something close to ‘perfection’, and make them feel really, really good about delivering something that’s (just) excellent. There’s still a lot of pride to be had and finding that sweet spot between quality and effort is an important learned skill.

    Part of building good professional judgement over time is knowing which projects and work products require more or less time and effort and whether the investment is likely to impact the outcome. For far too long, my desire to take pride in my work resulted in me investing too much effort into deliverables where the quality didn’t necessarily impact the outcome much. Spending an hour honing the perfect email proposal to an executive at a client, who you can reasonably predict might skim the email and say “let’s hop on the phone” may not be the best investment. I try to remind myself of the intended outcome of what I’m working on to help calibrate what level of effort should go into it, despite a general desire to produce something I can be proud of.

  • Learning Styles

    I recall being taught the concept of learning styles at some point in school. The idea is everyone has a certain learning style that works best for them. The four main learning styles are visual (images, charts, diagrams), auditory (spoken information, podcasts, discussions), reading/writing (engaging with text-based input, writing notes, working with written instructions), and kinesthetic (hands-on experience, physical activity). They aren’t intended to be mutually exclusive and ideally can be combined for best effect.

    When I first learned of the concept, I don’t recall identifying strongly with any style. But in the past few years, I’ve come to really appreciate how much better I learn and retain new information when there’s a visual component. It seems so simple it’s kind of silly, but it’s a pronounced difference for me. If someone can SHOW me something, or draw it, or share a visual, it helps immensely.

    I started to become more aware of it when I was working 5 days a week in the office. Amin and I spent a lot of time chatting through things in each other’s offices and we both had whiteboards on our walls. Amin is a natural teacher and I came to realize how helpful it was for him to draw things on the whiteboard as we were discussing. Having moved to an almost entirely distributed work environment, I’ve had to adjust accordingly. Now, I find I’ll often ask someone to share their screen so I can actually SEE what they are talking about. And if I have any significant planning work, or need to come up the curve on a technical or complex topic, it’s essential I can draw it out or see it in front of me.

    I did a bit of googling on the concept as part of writing this post and there’s a lot of criticism of the Learning Styles concept. Apparently, it might be pseudo-science and the empirical evidence is lacking. I didn’t dig deep enough to validate one way or another nor do I necessarily care. I’ve learned for myself, finding ways to incorporate visuals into conversations has made a meaningful difference and being aware of it has real value to me.