Curious Wanderers, Compassionate Directness and SoftBank
Three stories that I found interesting:
• What does the path to success look like? Is it a linear one, i.e., one step higher than the last always? Or could it be more like learning to walk; stumbling a lot but learning from each fall? Madeline Levine tries to answer this question in a piece that came out a couple of weeks back. Parents, teachers, and community are all likely to encourage a linear way of learning, she writes but that’s like taking a short-term view and promotes a ‘narrow notion of success’. This is a bookish path to success where being on track means avoiding distractions and failures altogether. However, her analysis based on real life cases indicates that the path to success is a ‘squiggly line with multiple ups and downs that trends in an upward direction’. Though the story is written keeping kids and parenting in mind, however, I felt it’s an essential read for all adults as well. Chasing one promotion after another is the same narrow notion of success that Levine refers to in her story. All in all, becoming a curious wanderer following an unexpected path across multiple domains is a more likely path to success. So go ahead and dabble a bit more!
• Two stories from acknowledged thinkers on the topic of giving feedback at workplace caught my eye. This one by Arianna Huffington talks about ‘compassionate directness’ as an approach. ‘Compassionate directness is about empowering employees to speak up, give feedback, disagree and surface problems in real time. But it has to be done with compassion, empathy and understanding,’ she writes. Delivering a negative feedback head-on without the soft wrapping of compassion seems like a short-term approach that rarely leads to long term learning and commitment. She then goes on to list a number to steps that can help build the habit of compassionate directness. For example, by giving only one piece of constructive feedback at a time and not open the floodgates fully and giving such feedback more often instead of waiting for the year-end review to allow for course corrections mid-way when it’s most needed. However, there is a sweet balance to be achieved. Too much sugar coating does as much harm as inconsiderate directness. This other article by Michael Schaerer and Roderick Swaab warns against positively inflated feedback. An interesting and useful concept that I took away from this story is that of ‘illusion of transparency’ — ‘in which people are so focused on their own intense feelings and intentions that they overestimate the extent to which their inner worlds come across to others.’ According to the writers, this tendency to self-protect leads to vague ineffective feedback. This article also lists down a number of steps that managers can take to improve communication during the feedback sessions, some similar to what Arianna writes about — for instance, increasing the frequency of feedback.
• Finally, if you are not tired of reading about the destructive cultures at WeWork (I wrote about it here earlier) and SoftBank, and their toxic relationship, then here are two more pieces. This one is a deep dive primer on everything that went wrong at WeWork starting with its founder and the culture he promoted. And, this investigation by WSJ documents how espionage and smear campaign was used by SoftBank’s Rajeev Misra to undermine rivals. Riveting reads both!
A quote that I came across last week:
Our culture gives extra credit to people who are thoughtful, generous and well-spoken
— Seth Godin
