psychology Archives - Page 4 of 10

Criticising the work

There was a time when I gave very indirect feedback. Especially when it comes to negative feedback. It was probably an artifact of my work in the government where people are just way too afraid to offend. And often, the boss could be the one making a mistake and no one wants to embarrass him/her. So it was perhaps a big change for me when I joined a French firm. The french were known to disagree passionately about things; and also give pretty direct negative feedback.

Fast forward 2.5 years at the firm. I got feedback from fellow countrymen that I was too direct in giving negative feedback. Upon reflecting and scrutinising the way I gave feedback, I think it wasn’t so much an issue with the directness but how far I was criticising the work rather than the worker. I might not have been delicate enough to recognise this. Going forward, I’d have to pay more attention to structuring these feedback. And there’s a model I came up with which I’d like to share. It follows this framework:

Start by discussing expectations and standards
Then bring up observations on the work done. Note, it is the work and not the ‘performance’ of the individual
Get the individual to compare and share what they think are the gaps
Discuss how you can help them with the gap

It is not easy to follow this framework. Because we are quick to start sharing our observations and how things can be better. What is missing is the point about standards and expectations. Even if those are implied and not made explicit, there has to be some way of aligning it.

Bringing my writings together

Probably for the first time in the history of my personal blogging, I’ve brought together all my writings under a single site. Since migrating kevlow.com to a self-hosted platform (though you probably won’t be able to tell), I’ve pulled in some of the even older pieces of writing I’ve put out on the internet. This includes blog entries written from as far back as 2005.

Looking through my entries, there was the period of 2011-2013 when I wasn’t so active probably because I was busy in LSE. It was probably a bit of a shame because those were some really formative years as well in terms of the development of my academic thinking and also integration of my faith into my intellectual identity. Perhaps I had wanted to keep things a bit more private. I would like to point out that those were also years when Tim Keller’s writings engaged my mind so much more.

The focus of my writings has certainly evolved significantly especially with the addition of topics around energy and climate. My passion for education and learning was more dominant earlier in my writing though I wouldn’t consider it to have died down from then. My interest in other topics had expanded.

I could have continued to keep my writings in different niches and have them separate but I realised that in some sense, they were reinforcing one another and were all products of my principles and conviction that drove me. After years of refinement, my conviction is still towards this broader theme of trying to create a future that we all want to live in. Whether it’s energy, education, sustainability or economic development, I am future-oriented and all for investing in what is to come.

Delays and promises

Ordered something and there was something wrong in the order? Delivery delayed? Put in a complaint and got a voucher code? What was the promise from the company when you first made an order? Was that promise broken?

Service promises have been escalating under the competitive pressure in the consumer markets. But these promises are increasingly costly to deliver consistently and cheaper to break.

Think about these platforms – they probably make about 10-20% margins so giving you a $5 voucher might cost them only $4 but you will end up spending $10 more potentially which allows them to cover another $2 and end up costing only $2 for the broken promise rather than having to invest in better systems or pay their service staff more to serve you better.

In long run, it does mean you pay higher prices, continue to get poor services and allow these business to remain in that bad cycle.

If we start taking promises by businesses more seriously, be less tolerant of poor delivery of service promises, we might just be able to create a better culture for business and for our future generations.

Good professional versus good employee

Sometimes I wonder if being a good professional can be different from being a good employee. After all, what is being a good employee when you’re over-delivering or serving your customers better than your employer expects? Is that “stealing” from your company? How about when you are over-worked by trying to be a good employee – does that set a bad example as a professional?

There seem to be some tension between doing good work and being a good employee. And it has to do perhaps with the actual business culture and character of the firm that you’re in. Or it comes through from the self-interested capitalist identity of what a firm stands for. It is strange though, that the firms that would persist tend to be the ones who have been able to uphold their values and commit to them.

So all the short run success factors and metrics turn out to be pretty poor indicator of long-run success. Yet people feel like they have no choice but to stick to these short term metrics because people can’t patiently wait for results or their fruits.

Sunny day will come

I chanced upon this brilliant letter penned by Stephen Fry to a fan named Crystal who wrote to him for help in a bout of depression and with no one else to turn to. It was kind of Stephen to have thought through it and replied, kindly and lovingly.

You might enjoy the letter as well as Stephen’s public reading of it in audio form nicely captured in this website stewarding all sorts of letters.

Labels and bullshit

I think that schools and parents should spend a lot more time teaching kids to read labels and discern marketing from science and verified statements. One of the problematic trends that emerged from our market economy or highly marketised, monetised society is the rise of wildfire marketing. You’d think that lies or wrong claims would be quickly discovered but often, verification takes time and money and has the nature of a public good so no one invest in them.

Yet the interest of the marketing departments and companies to make claims that can get them customers is so much more. So there is no prize for guessing who would put more resources into the activity and who emerges as winner, at least in the short term.

Question is why has our market economy created such short-termism? The people at marketing departments are measured perhaps by the short term sales figures. The management is assessed based on short term profit and loss or worse, share prices. No one within the transactions have any long term stake other than the consumers.

Besides strengthening consumer bureaus, you will have to strengthen the consumers through education. And that has to start whilst young; and these are extremely long term investments that will pay off for the broad society.

Training programmes

During my time in public service, I’ve attended lots of different training programmes. There were a lot of training on writing minutes, professional reports and trip reports, as well as some on professional etiquette in a wide range of situations including during presentations, business meetings, business meals, cross-cultural interactions and so on. I won’t say all of them stuck with me and in fact, the elements that stuck were the ones I found useful on the spot and decided to make it a point to adopt. If they didn’t stand out when I first received them, the chance of them being useful to me was really low.

So the notes I took during those courses were at best museum artifacts of professional training I had received. The greater learning was done actually observing how my seniors, my managers and bosses behaved in those various settings, what they deemed important and asked questions about in reports and minutes. Those standards and disciplines were cultivated in that manner rather than through a couple of hours of training. In fact even days of training won’t cut it.

So is training a good way to enforce standards and uplift them across the people in an organisation? I think it can be if it aligns well with what is being practised and expected in an organisation to such a level that the senior management is practising them already. As David Maister rightly pointed out, training doesn’t work if it’s designed to change the juniors or frontline staff while the senior management or middle management is allowed to be set in their old ways.

Expert vs advisors

I’ve been reading the ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ by David Maister. I think very highly of David’s crisp thinking in the manner he approach strategy and the manner in which he cuts through issues and topics. He simplifies the concepts to the core of the subject matter without ignoring the human elements in them.

One of the interesting ideas he introduced is the idea of expert vs advisors when it comes to serving in professional services. A lot of consultants claim to desire to serve customers as advisors, as trusted partners but in reality they want to be treated as the expert, to have control and defend their expertise rather than to build strong trusting relationships with their clients.

In essence, from my perspective, the expert cares about the topic and the subject matter more than the client’s problem. And as a result, the client can benefit from the expertise but more as flat information or knowledge than actionable insights.

The advisor may not be the expert but he gains his authority to consult with the client through his deep understanding of the client’s problem. And that allows his synthesis of insights gathered from other parties, especially those who consider themselves experts.

A client can decide what he needs is an expert but he can never expect the bespoke synthesis to come from the expert. He or she will have to take responsibility for that.

Facts or opinions

I saw a pretty brilliant video of a mother trying to teach her child about facts, opinions and mindsets in response to social environments. It’s in Chinese so I paraphrase in English the approach she has taken.

She held up an apple as her daughter eats a cob of corn and asked, “This is an apple. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“A fact” said the daughter.

“Yes. That is a fact. Now Mummy says that the apple in my hand is tastier than the cob of corn you’re eating. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“An opinion” said the daughter, still happily chewing on her corn.

“So when the kids at the playground says that they don’t like you and don’t want to play with you. What do you think that is? It is an opinion.” the mother continues.

The mother than took out a mug with black coffee in it. She said, “Look, daddy loves to drink this black, bitter drink but mummy doesn’t like it. Whether someone loves it or don’t like it, the coffee is the same, it has the same color, smell and look. People liking or not liking it says more about themselves than the coffee.”

She went on to say, “So when those kids at the playground say they don’t like you, it has nothing to do with you being you. You are still the same.”

The wisdom extended from the simple analogies were really brilliant and the manner she brought it forth and contextualised it for the daughter really made for a great model in teaching these ideas.

What is value?

One of the key fundamental steps to take in order to move towards a low-carbon future is to re-assess our notion of value, economic value. Over the past decades, economic value had been increasingly important as more and more things in the world could be bought with money. This is what Michael Sandel calls the making of a market society.

This is worrying because the value of anything and everything used to be so much more. There’s richness in being able to evaluate and appraise value of various things in different ways. And this is why dollar values can never encapsulate all of that. In fact, there is no such thing as a market for single goods and services. The notion of a market price is just about as real as the notion of an average. The same good can be simultaneously sold at low and high prices depending on where, when, and to whom it was sold.

By defining this abstract concept of market values, we are trying to make a subjective valuation something objective. We are trying to abstract from specific context and circumstances and forcefully say that surely there is something about the good or service itself that has nothing to do with all that. And if we can gather the averages or have a large number of observations, we can use that statistic as something objective. In reality, the statistic is just a statistic – is it a market value? That’s up to whoever is reading the statement.

Beyond the market, the real way to appraise value continues to be subjective and that is okay because we all should be selecting the dimensions we all care about and build our decisions based on that.