The temptation might be for those on the employer side to try to put themselves in the candidate’s shoes but it seems that this is not a practical goal. Candidates for jobs are trying to figure out what employers want, but employers are trying to figure out what candidates are. A tall order indeed.

Know Thyself

How we see ourselves is not the same as how we see others. More specifically, it turns out that the evaluation technique that we use is different in each case.

When we  evaluate ourselves, we focus on specific details, like our messy hair, the size of our nose, or the lines on our faces. But when we evaluate other people we tend to take a more gestalt, abstract approach. The focus is on the whole, and not just the sum of the parts.

So a person will focus on one set of information to make an evaluation of another person but that person will use a different set of information to evaluate themselves. Not surprisingly the two evaluations don’t match each other.

The research that backs this idea up was done by Tal Eyal and Nicholas Epley, and published in the May, 2010 issue of Psychological Science. The methodology was to take pictures of people and tell them that others would be evaluating them for how attractive they were.

Then they were asked to rate how attractive they thought other people would find them. One group of people was told that the other raters would be making their ratings later that day. A second group of targets was told that the other raters would be making their ratings several months later.

The agreement between a target person’s rating of herself and other people’s ratings of her picture was higher when the target thought other people would be doing the rating some time in the future than when he/she thought the ratings would be made that afternoon. That is, by making people think of themselves more abstractly, they were better able to see themselves as others saw them.

Then they took it further and asked participants to put themselves ‘in the other’s shoes’. This didn’t make any change to the accuracy of the assessments, and to summarize the research, it appears that the details of a person’s life interfere with their ability to truly put themselves in other people’s shoes.

Lessons Learned

If we are to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes we have to accept the fact that this is incredibly difficult. To get any success at all you have to minimize the distance from that person, and get down to the fine-grained details of their lives, which is practically impossible in the interview situation

This takes a lot of time. There are no short-cuts to depth.

Money quote:

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who’s evaluated hates it. It’s a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

At the same time he does not believe that an employee’s performance should not be evaluated. What he suggests is that it should be done continuously, as a good faith attempt to point staff in the right direction, and help them improve if they need to. Currently, he thinks performance reviews are just seen as a power play by both HR and line managers.

The replacement for the Performance Review is called the Performance Preview. In this process managers are judged by their ability to get the best out of everyone below them. If they are not getting the best out of the subordinate they are required to ask the subordinate what they are looking for in terms of support. So the  boss asks the subordinate what he is doing wrong.

This is a process that continues indefinitely, and not just once a year. More on the website.

It illustrates well how much we are missing (information and context) when we try to make judgments about other people. It is also a big encouragement for spending as much time as possible with people before we finally come to a judgment about them.

Once there was an old man who lived in a tiny village. Although poor, he was envied by all, for he owned a beautiful white horse. Even the king coveted his treasure. A horse like this had never been seen before — such was its splendor, its majesty, its strength.

People offered fabulous prices for the steed, but the old man always refused. “This horse is not a horse to me,” he would tell them. “It is a person. How could you sell a person? He is a friend, not a possession. How could you sell a friend.” The man was poor and the temptation was great. But he never sold the horse.

One morning he found that the horse was not in his stable. All the village came to see him. “You old fool,” they scoffed, “we told you that someone would steal your horse. We warned you that you would be robbed. You are so poor. How could you ever protect such a valuable animal? It would have been better to have sold him. You could have gotten whatever price you wanted. No amount would have been too high. Now the horse is gone and you’ve been cursed with misfortune.”

The old man responded, “Don’t speak too quickly. Say only that the horse is not in the stable. That is all we know; the rest is judgment. If I’ve been cursed or not, how can you know? How can you judge?”

The people contested, “Don’t make us out to be fools! We may not be philosophers, but great philosophy is not needed. The simple fact that your horse is gone is a curse.”

The old man spoke again. “All I know is that the stable is empty, and the horse is gone. The rest I don’t know. Whether it be a curse or a blessing, I can’t say. All we can see is a fragment. Who can say what will come next?”

The people of the village laughed. They thought that the man was crazy. They had always thought he was a fool; if he wasn’t, he would have sold the horse and lived off the money. But instead, he was a poor woodcutter, and old man still cutting firewood and dragging it out of the forest and selling it. He lived hand to mouth in the misery of poverty. Now he had proven that he was, indeed, a fool.

After fifteen days, the horse returned. He hadn’t been stolen; he had run away into the forest. Not only had he returned, he had brought a dozen wild horses with him. Once again, the village people gathered around the woodcutter and spoke. “Old man, you were right and we were wrong. What we thought was a curse was a blessing. Please forgive us.”

The man responded, “Once again, you go too far. Say only that the horse is back. State only that a dozen horses returned with him, but don’t judge. How do you know if this is a blessing or not? You see only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge? You read only one page of a book. Can you judge the whole book? You read only one word of one phrase. Can you understand the entire phrase?”

“Life is so vast, yet you judge all of life with one page or one word. All you have is one fragment! Don’t say that this is a blessing. No one knows. I am content with what I know. I am not perturbed by what I don’t.”

“Maybe the old man is right,” they said to one another. So they said little. But down deep, they knew he was wrong. They knew it was a blessing. Twelve wild horses had returned. With a little work, the animals could be broken and trained and sold for much money.

The old man had a son, an only son. The young man began to break the wild horses. After a few days, he fell from one of the horses and broke both legs. Once again the villagers gathered around the old man and cast their judgments.

“You were right,” they said. “You proved you were right. The dozen horses were not a blessing. They were a curse. Your only son has broken both his legs, and now in your old age you have no one to help you. Now you are poorer than ever.”

The old man spoke again. “You people are obsessed with judging. Don’t go so far. Say only that my son broke his legs. Who knows if it is a blessing or a curse? No one knows. We only have a fragment. Life comes in fragments.”

It so happened that a few weeks later the country engaged in war against a neighboring country. All the young men of the village were required to join the army. Only the son of the old man was excluded, because he was injured. Once again the people gathered around the old man, crying and screaming because their sons had been taken. There was little chance that they would return. The enemy was strong, and the war would be a losing struggle. They would never see their sons again.

“You were right, old man,” They wept. “God knows you were right. This proves it. Your son’s accident was a blessing. His legs may be broken, but at least he is with you. Our sons are gone forever.”

The old man spoke again. “It is impossible to talk with you. You always draw conclusions. No one knows. Say only this. Your sons had to go to war, and mine did not. No one knows if it is a blessing or a curse. No one is wise enough to know. Only God knows.”

Tip ‘O the Hat to Psych Central

Psychology is very new in China, to the extent that after opening up in 1979 the number of qualified psychologists in China could be counted on the fingers of one hand. It was much the same for lawyers, although I think the figure for qualified lawyers was about 70.

So how dangerous is it to rely on this research, and how much of it is applicable to the Eastern world?

According to many researchers, the fundamentals are the same but there are obvious differences. Skills are easier to measure and seem to suffer less from cultural distortion. They show consistency around world. But the motivations that drive people into the office every day do not show the same consistency. If anything, what is constant about them is the lack of constancy.

People from different cultures have been raised differently; make decisions in different ways; and as a result have imbued a starkly different set of values. It varies from the Protestant Work Ethic of Northern Europe to the communitarian work spirit in Japan; from the free-wheeling anything-goes attitudes in San Francisco to the conservative don’t-ever-borrow-money approach that you find in Germany. The differences go right down to the level of whether people will accept phonecalls from a telemarketer, or whether they need to know someone before they do business with them.

But how different are these issues across the world?  And with the reliance on Western students for psychological research, could we be missing out on this variance?

Into the mix comes a new study which says that an over-reliance on research subjects from the U.S. and other Western nations can, and we’d assume probably does, produce false claims about human psychology and behavior. They contend that the psychological tendencies of the research subjects, usually US and European university students, are highly unusual compared to the global population. The researchers call the subjects WEIRD because they are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD).

Money quote (my emphasis):

our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers

Specifically they suggest there are big differences when it comes to motivation, behavior, visual perception, fairness, spatial and moral reasoning, memory and conformity. WEIRD subjects tend to be more individualistic, analytic, concerned with fairness, existentially anxious, less conforming and attentive to context compared to those from non-WEIRD societies.

So be careful about universal claims in any psychology research. You may end up making weird decisions.

Fortunately, there are enough niggly-nagglies (infrastructure, education lack, skills, stability, intellectual property rights, legal conflicts, inflation …) about those countries to keep the threat at bay for a while. At the same time we should be wary of slow grinds. Think about the frog in the pan of hot water …

Tip ‘O the Hat to Andrew  (Note that salaries in any given country are directly related to PPP-Adjusted GDP per capita. Strange choice of graph but it gets the disparity issue across.)

This comes across to some as a weird hippy-yippy-dippy tautology that probably has nothing at its root. But it does have something. It suggests that we are all responsible for the communication that we generate, and that the only way we can judge the effectiveness of this communication is to examine the response that we receive.

If the response is positive then we can safely assume that at the very least we did not offend. We may not have had the intended effect that we were looking for, but at least the door is open for us to try again to explain our meaning.

If the response is negative, as it was here and here, then we have to ask ourselves if we are the source of the negativity. Did the meaning that we intended actually get communicated. Or did the recipient hear something else entirely?

The childish response is to blame the victim and suggest that if they didn’t get it then it’s probably because they are, take your pick; not-too-bright, a bit-bleedin’-deaf, or a total flake.

But an adult understands that the recipient in the communications model (sender-channel-receiver) is as important as the sender. Our communications have to be presented in a way that allows them to be understood. Anyone with small children or dogs gets this immediately.

In the case of the financial services provider getting the hump because I was not happy to receive his call, you clearly have someone who does not get this, or more likely, is choosing to ignore it. The hope for the caller is that 1 call in a 100 will actually result in a meeting. Out of 5 meetings, 1 will result in sale. In this scenario pissing off 99 people by phoning them constantly is just the cost of doing business.

You definitely need a hard neck to do this job, and I don’t envy anyone in the unfortunate position to have no other choice, but when you call back to complain about the rudeness of the recipient of your unwarranted call you are clearly suffering from cognitive dissonance.

But that’s an issue for another day …

I told the caller to give it a rest and to take me off this list, and not to call me again. I put the phone down in frustration, as I have done once to twice a day for the last three months!

The person who made this most recent unwarranted, unwelcome call, which would be funny if it were isolated, then called me back to tell me that I was rude …. sheesh!  (and they wonder why they have such a bad reputation)

But I still get 1-2 calls a day. It’s like living through the Terminator. These guys, ‘n gals, just won’t stay down! Hard to believe that these companies are not sharing my mobile phone number with each other. Or that they are not using multiple company names to disguise their origin.

It’s a tough job I know but I’m not interested! … And 1-2 calls a day won’t ever make me interested … Persistence is not an effective strategy when the person you are calling is not even a remote possibility, never mind a prospect. It’s a guarantee that I will NEVER use an offshore financial service provider. Ever.

Approaching former colleagues with an offer of potential new opportunities in your new employer may constitute a breach of the non-compete clause. Simply connecting for the sake of connecting presumably would not.

More here …