Hiring and promotion, for example, particularly for leadership roles, usually depend on how competent someone seems.
Related Quotes
The study revealed that mistakes themselves are neither good nor bad. Their impact hinges on the broader context. When incompetent people made mistakes, it just reinforced otherâs already negative impressions. It was more of the same.
When competent people made mistakes, though, it had the opposite effect. Successful people are hard to identify with. They seem so perfect that itâs hard to connect. And thatâs why mistakes can help. Because when otherwise competent people make a mistake once in a while, it humanizes them. It makes them more real, which makes them more likable.
As long as someone is already perceived as competent, acknowledging mistakes can be beneficial.
Employees whose linguistic style was more similar to their coworkersâ were three times more likely to be promoted. They received better performance evaluations and higher bonusesâŚ
Indeed, people with a dissimilar linguistic style werenât so fortunate. They were four times more likely to be firedâŚ
Adaptability, in turn, helped explain success.
Telling someone theyâre smart, good at math, or a great presenter implies that their performance depends on a stable trait. If they did well on a test, they have that trait, but if they did badly, well, theyâre just out of luck. They donât have what it takes and thereâs not much they can do to change it.
But rephrasing that feedback as process praise is more likely to have the intended effect. Telling someone they did well, or did a good job on a test or presentation, focuses less on stable traits and more on the particular instance at hand. Which means if things donât go so well once in a while, itâs not a mark of failure or lack of ability. Itâs just a misstep and a reminder to work harder next time around.
Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasnât that experience wasnât important, but they âbet on brains,â as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.