For Asians, it’s potentially more difficult to give than to receive direct negative feedback. And as I mentioned before, giving feedback should be a course. I have also suggested tips and ideas.
The problem is we don’t remember them because culturally, it’s just such a taboo; we don’t want to “hurt” others. It just reflects how feedback have been weaponised before in our culture so often and far too much. Whether in the form of “advice” from elders, or just unsolicited statements from distant family members.
The thing is, negative feedback can only hurt us to the extent we allow them to. If we don’t take advice from someone, why should we be taking their criticism?
What do you ask of your boss? And are you where you would like to be as a boss? Or have you fully embraced your identity as the boss and realised you can’t understand why the staff reporting to you simpy cannot understand the constraints you are under?
Every choice you take boils down to 2 different directions: you are either reinforcing the status quo or trying to change it.
So you attended a course or workshop, finished all the work and participated in all the discussions. Did you learn anything new? Did you make the best of it? Supposing you did. Now they forgot about your participation, your attendance wasn’t on the record and you did not receive your certificate for attending/participating.
Did you actually took part? Was there a point in you attending it when all records says you didn’t? Does it make a difference if it was a requirement by someone else that you attended it? What if it wasn’t? If you attended by your own volition, would you care more or care less about the certificate?
What is the most important thing you would take away? The learning, or the certificate and the evidence of you being there? Were you showing up for yourself? Or was it something else?
When an employee makes a mistake due to a wrong decision he made, could it be due to his own misjudgment? Or his boss’ judgment of him? Or the lack of good context set by the bosses?
During my time in public service I recognised how important context-alignment was and we did it extremely frequently, and at all levels. Giving and exchanging contexts allowed us to function in highly coordinated ways that were lacking in many other governments.
As a junior officer, I was often frustrated because a lot of time were spent on such alignment. And practically everyone had to know many things at once even when it had not that much to do with you. Yet as I matured, I realise how important it was in helping one make strategic information and decide on myraid of matters which have seemingly nothing to do with one another.
The challenge is to try and match responsibilities with empowerment. Despite high amount of context provided, and people given loads of responsibilities, empowerment was kind of limited. People would still rather defer to bosses and managers keen on asserting their views top-down. Context was used to seek buy-in to get the ground to do more work rather than a source of empowerment for decentralised decision-making.
Or maybe that is the next step we have to get to. But for now, we have to deal with a culture where context is said to matter, but control even more.
The old way of thinking about your work experience is to use job titles and roles or positions as your buckets to demonstrate your abilities, and what you have gone through.
I suggest we change that. I suggest we think about our work in the form of projects. Projects we take on and play a role in. Some can be sequential, some may be concurrent. But think through the projects you’ve been involved, in which organisation, what capacity. What were the objectives and how did you achieve them? What did you learn along the process? How would you do better? What would you have done differently?
Consider every performance review or evaluation in this manner; and prepare well for them. This is how you keep yourself relevant in the job market, and continually prepare to seek new jobs and opportunities, and how you maintain a strong ability to position yourself, to take charge of your work and be driver of your own development.
Notice you pay $1.20 for a can of coke at the neighbourhood shop, $0.70 at the supermarket and $4 at the salad place in CBD (why on earth does a salad place serve coke anyways?). As it turns out, prices and value of things are not intrinsic in a single product or service. The context for their purchase, use or subsequent consumption matters for the valuation.
Context forms part of the answer to “what is this for?” And that is why, when the same useless plastic ring is peddled around as a pet dog puzzle (for you to stuff food in the ring) increases its value. The can of coke, when consumed with a meal simply raises its value for the customer and hence allows the vendor to charge more.
Whether we are businesses, teachers, managers or parents, being able to create and set up the context to generate value is important. With the right context, people are able to make better decisions and work better. In long run, we all grow when the context is suitable.
It’s hard to disagree that context matters, and yet we consistently overlook it. My household has been fostering yet another dog – and his behavior gives the best example of how context can create a stark difference in “personality” and behaviour.
At home, he tends to be very wary of everything (even his food or drink bowl) and treads carefully as he walks around. He didn’t even play with his toys – consequently it also meant no destruction of furniture and fittings at our home.
But once he is out on his walks, he can be joyfully jumping around, dashing back and forward the path, sniffing everywhere and clumsily picking up nonsense from the grass to eat. He plays freely and wildly with tree branches, tearing through coconut husks of fallen coconuts, dragging large coconut branches or leaves around. Recently, he was even at the beach with us and swam.
Yet I’d still overlook that and try to play with him at home only to have him cowering in a corner with his tail tucked between his legs. I’d try to toss stuff for him to pick up when he’d just run away. I assumed he was capable of doing all that but I get disappointed when he doesn’t.
If you are a manager and boss, do you also experience the same challenges with your staff? What is the context that helps them shine? And what elements cause them to fear and underperform? It’s your job to figure out and lead with the right context and environment.
My latest break away from work lasted about 2.5 weeks. It was a time of disconnecting almost completely with work. I think the whole cycle of disengaging, disconnecting deliberately and then re-engaging is a natural cycle of things. And the rhythm that our biology needs.
The cycle of waking up and sleeping, the seasons, the waves of busyness and then lull. These are patterns etched in nature, patterns we should be honouring.
There is no question that when you’re driving in the opposite lane from the design of traffic that you’d eventually end up in an accident. But unfortunately we are not clear about how we should be honouring our bodies and our minds. Consider what is stopping us from taking a genuine break, one that is not accompanied by anxiety or guilt or the compulsion to be “productive”.
Being a highly organised person means that we often have to meet with the disappointment of certain arrangements being cancelled, postponed for some good reason (or we charitably interpret to be so). And then the question is whether our high level of organisation means we have the cognitive flexibility to use that time appropriately for something else or have we become so optimised with our schedule that such postponement feels like a threat to our plans.
For those who might be slightly less organised, the postponement can also be a relief; because we actually really needed the time for something else. Then the question is why didn’t we initiate that rescheduling in the first place.
Increasingly, I realised that most of the time we are not taking charge and organising our lives as we want it to because we are afraid of disappointing someone, coming across as being disagreeable or being the one who spoil the plans. But ultimately, we need to make a decision, whether we rather be that person who lives his own life or, one who is living a life others want him to live.
There is this sense that the world is about to fall apart with major crises (war, pandemic, climate change), and smaller ones that might creep up on us. It all sounds much like “The Emergency” in the Mysterious Benedict Society; where they characterised this sense that “there’s no one at the wheel”.
We are all bombarded by the negativity and sensational materials in the news typically designed to arouse us. And since it is easier to arouse us with fear and anxiety, that is what they do in order to keep us paying attention. The problem with attention becoming a currency in the modern economy is that a large part of the workforce have their attention taken away from more productive pursuits towards the superficial and trivial.
Do we want to continue to behave like this and allow our anxieties to indeed manifest as failures in reality? Or do we want to leverage that anxiety to drive us forward, away from freezing, towards a common goal of a future that we all want to be in?
