Wikipedia lists over 100 cognitive biases. These include the human tendency to make decisions based on attention bias where we prioritise recurring thoughts that catch our attention, as well as the bandwagon effect where we believe a certain thing because many other people believe it too. Unfortunately, most of us will be prone to a certain bias at some point as having these biases allows us to simplify the world to ourselves.
One challenge I have, however, observed is that corporate politics feeds on these biases. It is actually possible to destroy someone’s credibility in very covert ways by releasing opinions and information about them is the most subtle of ways. Typically this happens with seemingly innocent comments such as “I wish I was working with John on this project. Not that Peter is bad. I just prefer John. Anyway, what were we taking about?”
Without knowing anything about Peter or John I can hazard a guess who you would prefer to work with too. We have no idea how valid, true or relevant the comments about these individuals are but it was enough in 20 seconds to feed the bias and sway perception. In a long term career this is guaranteed to happen on an ongoing basis and it is difficult for any individual to completely control the narrative circulating about them.
My personal favourite was a manager who told my colleagues that he thought my team was very resilient. Sounds like a compliment right? Wrong! He then explained that compared to his department things in my team were very bad. All that people took out of the conversation was that my team were performing badly. In his defence our performance was poor, but we were a new team that had been working together for less than 6 months that inherited a product category with immense competitiveness challenges. Within 18 months we had turned performance around to be the fastest growing product category in the business and the other manager’s department was in need of resilience. But who is keeping count anyway?
The opportunity exists to influence the narrative by developing real value to our business partners and making sure that those that need to know are aware of this. I do think people spend way too much time on this in many organisations rather than simply delivering great work. So one just has to aware of how much energy they are putting towards this. Another strategy would be to simply disregard this and focus on being your authentic self. Let people believe what they want to believe. Very noble, but really not strategic at all as your detractors will continue to destroy your reputation in the background while you sit around passively.
More importantly, however, which was my initial intention for posting this is to encourage us all to really think about what we say about people. Whether in an overt way or understated way there is a chance that the recipient will create some sort of impression based on your words. As biased humans we are not able to completely rationalise communication and sift through the wheat and the chaff.
The saying that if one has nothing good to say, rather keep quiet is extremely relevant. People are going through many battles we may not be aware of and withholding negative opinions may be the right course of action. This may be difficult when our experiences with the individual have been particularly negative. Sometimes you just want to let everyone know that so and so is evil. Avoid it if possible!
Lastly, the flip side of this is that one can actually use grapevine type opinions to generate momentum for people in their careers. If someone is doing a good job and needs help being noticed, tell everyone. But especially tell people who can influence their path and open doors for them.
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