Doodle

 

Don’t seek casual opinions.
漫然とした意見を求めない。

 

The person you ask for feedback is as equally important as the question you ask.

360-degree feedback is one of the common evaluation processes in a corporate world. From my point of view, it is also quite dysfunctional.

Some say, we can receive objective feedback about ourselves through 360-degree feedback. Not at all. People fill out a survey based upon their own opinion, and we receive the aggregate of subjective opinions of others. It can never be objective.

360-degree feedback also has the risk of asking for feedback from wrong people, even if its questions are right. Not everyone in a workplace — even a person who is sitting next to us — knows enough about what we do. Without enough facts in hand, how could it be possible to answer a survey without being affected by personal feelings or opinions?

Even worse, 360-degree feedback often asks wrong questions. Many companies use a template that outside people created (like HR agency), and some — if not all — questions don’t fit the culture of the company. It is a kind of comedy when we see questions like “Avoids negative politicking and hidden agendas” or “Serves others; avoids selfishness” on a 360-degree survey at the company that has a very hostile and bureaucratic corporate culture.

The same applies when we personally ask for feedback from others. To avoid receiving subjective opinions, we carefully need to choose whom we ask and what to ask. People who are close to us aren’t always capable of giving us the right feedback.

We need to avoid vague, out-of-context questions. For example, “From your point of view, what are my strengths?” may not always be the right question because people who don’t know you well can’t answer to this type of broad question. If we ask more specific question like “What kind of contributions did I make to your work in the past 6 months, and how did my contributions help you?” instead, we can get more useful feedback.

Getting sincere and useful feedback requires patience and careful thoughts. It is not something we can easily achieve on Facebook.

 

 

Choose the right person.
ふさわしい人を選ぼう。

 

When we ask someone to do something, there are only two ways of asking: as a laborer or a doctor.

When we look for a laborer, what we expect for the person is to do a certain thing instead of us doing it.

But when we look for a doctor, what we expect is completely different; we expect them to solve a problem that we can’t solve or we don’t know what to do with it.

Problem happens when we ask a laborer to do a doctor’s role, or when we ask a doctor to do a laborer’s role. The former is quite speculative and would not work most of the time — although the odds are slightly better than winning the jackpot, because there are some laborers who want to be a doctor someday. The latter happens quite often, but only causes a lot of frustrations on both side.

Even business leaders are not always good at distinguishing doctors from laborers. It requires careful observations of people, and it is the skill that no business school would teach us.

 

 

Trust makes things better.
信頼はモノゴトをより良くする。

 

Tragicomedy in a workplace often happens when everyone is eager to get credit.

I worked in such a circumstance once. People in the company were keen to find a problem — especially a problem that other person created — and fix it. That’s the battle they fight every day. They desperately wanted to make them look good by winning the battle — oftentimes by making someone else look bad. Funny enough, they also made up a problem that doesn’t exist so as to make someone else look bad. It is like an argument from ignorance, or argument from personal incredulity — if someone else can’t prove that they always do the right things, he or she is considered doing something wrong. Of course this kind of fallacy never creates a collaborative attitude in a workplace.

When we doubt someone, it is better to doubt ourselves first — because our doubt can often be based upon our personal thoughts, not a concrete evidence. And it is always better to trust someone than to doubt someone. Trusting someone in a workplace does not mean we blindly leave everything to them; It means we give people rules and boundaries, and let them play within.

When people feel a sense of control and ownership — even though they just do things within the playground we created for them — they will fully engage in their job. We have to be wise enough to make the most of people’s potential. Doubt never help us achieve that.

 

 

Keep learning & do better.
学び続けて、もっとうまくなろう。

 

“Envy is the ulcer of the soul.” ― Socrates

So how can we avoid being envious? Can we really do that?

Confession: Since my childhood, I have been envious of skills and talents of others. At younger age, I was also envious of good-looking and charming guy — I gave up on it a long time ago, but I still can’t stop feeling envious of other’s brilliance.

Psychologists would say, stop focusing on what we don’t have rather than what we do have, or stop comparing ourselves to others. But in a real-life situation, we (or our products and/or services) are always compared with someone or something else. Even psychologists or self-help gurus, who say envy is a bad thing, always compare someone/something with someone/something else.

Is envy really a bad thing? It can be the source of motivation that makes us better and help us reach to a higher level. In a highly competitive world, feeing envious might be inevitable, and it would not necessarily be a bad thing — unless it connects with inaction. That can be a really bad thing.

 

 

Never give up on your life.
自分の人生は見捨てない。

 

What would you do if no one cares about you? If everything is against you? If nothing works although you think thoroughly and work very hard? If you lose everything?

If you have been lucky enough, you would not have seen these terrible things happening. But they could happen at any time in our life, and you may feel like you want to give up on everything.

We can give up on our employer. Arrogant customers. Government. Bad habits. Or dysfunctional relationships. At any time.

But, even if other people give up on us, we can’t simply give up on our life. No matter what happens. Don’t give up on yourself.