Yeah, you heard that right! We should treat other the way they want to be treated instead! The logic behind it is quite simple, but it took a while for me to fully connected this dot. After switching the perspective, there is a whole new world to discover. I’m also astonished by how widely this principle can be applied like below.
Supporting People’s Career Growth Effectively
Different people have very diverse career aspirations. Even for the same person, the career goals are different at different time. For example, for some people constantly learning new things and gaining new experience is way more important than promotion. For some people scaling existing software is the most exciting, while for others building brand new software is. For some people, there is no clear preference and they need the opportunities of exploration to help discover their strength and passion. Different people have different preferred way of communication. For example, some people feel the most acknowledged in front of big audience, while some others much prefer a simple but candid private thank-you during 1:1.
Understanding people’s need/preference and supporting their career growth based on that is a way to treat other the way they want to be treated.
Writing Effectively
While writing, it’s important to keep readers in mind and understand how they want to be treated. At the workplace, people are mostly very busy so we need to prioritize and order the content based on the importance for the readers instead of us. For example, for a proposal, put the “ask” at the top of the write-up followed by context and detailed analysis instead of the other way around. This is because the readers are more interested in what decision needs to be made and how they can help. For a project summary report, put the result at the top of the write-up instead of how hard you worked and the long list of completed work items. This is because the readers are more interested in the outcome and learnings and whether follow up actions need to be made. Most of them are interested in the effort it took to accomplished the project, but it comes after the outcome.
Nailing Job Interviews
While having a job interview as a candidate, we should keep in mind how the interviewers want to be treated. This is important to perform the interview successfully. Interviewers have a tough job to form a high-stake “hire .vs. no hire” decision within a very short period of time (45 minutes – 1 hour). So they need to collect many signals during the back and forth conversation. So as a candidate, providing answers concisely to the point, confirming the interviewers get what they need, and moving to the next point to ensure sufficient time to provide interviewers all the needed signals is important. For some interview sessions, the interviewers want to assess behaviors, so showing the expected behavior like driving the conversation, driving a complex design process, working as if you are a partner or stakeholder, etc. are important to provide interviewers what they need.
Conclusion
Having full social awareness and audience perspective in mind is easier said than done. Identifying our blind spots and practice are the keys.
(Source of the featured image above)