Like most people, Christina was spontaneously managing her image at work. As noted sociologist Erving Goffman argued in his seminal 1957 book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, as humans, we are constantly attempting to influence others' perceptions of us by regulating and controlling information in social interactions. We do this both consciously and subconsciously.
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In hesitating and then choosing not to speak up, Christina was making a quick, not entirely conscious, risk calculation â the kind of micro-assessment most of us make numerous times a day.
While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions. When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation around us, to whatâs happening to us. If weâre doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesnât understand the situation thatâs forcing us to act that way. This tendency is called the Actor-Observer Bias, and itâs one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem.
These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you areâyour drive, or style, or effort, sayâwhich in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.
And by the way, if you think about it, much of the world of work is designed this wayâitâs designed for Those Other People, who need to be told what to do (hence planning instead of intelligence), whose work needs aligning (hence goals over meaning and purpose), and whose weaknesses put us all at risk (hence the deficit thinking we saw in the last chapter, instead of the focus on distinctive abilities). One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but donât see in ourselves.
People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and âempower employees to empower themselves.â The thinking is exactly what weâve heard from Paolo. The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of âmicromanager!â âdictator!â and âautocrat!
Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself. Indeed, executives who do not manage themselves for effectiveness cannot possibly expect to manage their associates and subordinates. Management is largely by example. Executives who do not know how to make themselves effective in their own job and work set the wrong example.
Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself. Indeed, executives who do not manage themselves for effectiveness cannot possibly expect to manage their associates and subordinates. Management is largely by example. Executives who do not know how to make themselves effective in their own job and work set the wrong example.