Welcome to “Driving Businesses by Developing People” written by me, David Huynh. For those who do not know me, I am a people-focused business professional who builds team members to generate results. Thank you for joining me. If you are not on my email list yet and want to dive deeper into the intersection of business and people with me, you may subscribe here:
The working world is filled with indirect language. When I first joined Shopee Philippines, I remember my boss mentioning "David, I do not feel your presence." This was strange to me, because I was typically one of the first in the office and one of the last ones out, not to mention working a few weekends as well. I have come to realize that "I do not feel your presence" is indirect manager language for 'I do not have enough visibility into your work'. At the time, I was confused why I needed to share additional visibility. I felt that the work was straightforward and could do so without input from my boss. However after bridging my learnings on psychology and management together, I have concluded that there are multiple reasons, beyond getting assistance, why visibility matters. Specifically, increased visibility results in the fabricated importance of others, the cross-pollination of our ideas, and the accelerated development of our careers.
Fabricated Importance
In Dale Carengie's book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People", he mentions how every human has the desire to feel important. Boss' primarily obtain this feeling of importance when other people ask for their opinion. So, even if we feel like we know the full solution, providing visibility and showing the boss that their opinion matters will make them feel more important. By making other people feel that they are important, we are naturally perceived in a better light by them. And when we are perceived in a better light, our future decisions and actions will have a stronger influence on them.
To illustrate this in further detail, I want to go deeper in the example mentioned in the opening paragraph. I was not sharing progress updates and decisions with my boss, which made her feel undermined, and thereby less important. As she felt I was devaluing her, naturally she devalued me, putting me in a negative light. So, as I was trying to launch our first warehouse, I noticed my work was constantly scrutinized and my decision making power was decreased. However, after I increased the visibility into my work by providing appropriately timed and appropriately detailed updates, I noticed I received more support and responsibility, in the form of additional team members to manage and ownership of the warehouse launch.
In order to truly create the feeling of fabricated importance, the timing and detail of the visibility need to meet the circumstance's needs. Firstly, if we are not sure what to do at any point, we should inform others, so that we can receive appropriate guidance. Outside of getting stuck, every individual and project may have different timelines, so we need to share visibility with enough time before the deadline in order for the reviewer to give feedback and for us to make adjustments. For quick decisions, such as getting approval for process plans in opening a warehouse, prior day or even same day may be enough time. However, if we are making a presentation on whether to acquire a competitor, which requires more time to review and adjust, multiple days or weeks of added visibility and thereby additional reviews would be beneficial. The level of detail we provide should be enough for the reviewed to come to a decision, which may vary depending the working relationship with our counterpart. If we are not sure, it is wise to ask, what level of detail would be suitable?
Cross-Pollinated Ideas
In addition to fabricating the importance of others, increased visibility gives other individuals access to our ideas. This is the cornerstone of collaboration. When other individuals have access to our ideas, we can filter, sort, group, and/or combine our ideas so that we arrive at the best solution possible. Cross-pollinated ideas can also be viewed as getting feedback or input from managers and peers.
Digging deeper into the opening example, after I started sharing my plans and providing regular updates for the warehouse launch. After raising a potential issue, sellers lacked awareness of stock and sales volume, my manager was able to connect me with team members across the organization, specifically the business intelligence (BI) or data analytics team. After sharing my plans with my counterparts in BI, we were able to arrive at a solution for providing appropriate reports, covering stocks and sales, to sellers who have in-bounded items into the warehouse. This reporting solution would be automated and require limited human input. Initially, I was planning to build the reports myself manually. If I had not raised the issue, I would not have been able to develop a better solution by cross-pollinating ideas across teams.
Accelerated Development
Our professional development can be broken out into internal improvements and external acknowledgement. Internal improvements includes advances in learning, whether technical skills or conversational skills. External acknowledgement comes in the form of promotions and salary raises. Visibility accelerates our learning by providing others more opportunities to provide us feedback and our promotion potential by improving how others perceive us. Both are important to our development and build on one another. Additional skills are typically needed for promotions, and promotions will typically give additional opportunities to learn.
Increasing visibility to our work opens the door for other individuals to criticize our ideas. This criticism or feedback will accelerate our development by giving us more information about the final output. Our ability to respond to this feedback will demonstrate how quickly we can learn. Accelerated development comes to those who actively seek out feedback, whether positive or negative.
Promotions and raises are a function of both actual and perceived performance, both of which are controllable. Actual performance is the genuine output delivered (e.g., sales results, increased clicks, code dropped). Perceived performance is how our presence is felt on the team, which primarily comes from increased visibility. Fabricating the importance of others by increasing the visibility of our work will further increase our perceived performance. As we shift towards upper management, where people skills and corporate politics plays a larger role, perceived performance plays an even larger role. As of this writing, promotions and raises ultimately come down to another human's decision, therefore, if we can improve their perception of us, we are more likely to be a benefactor.
Closing Remarks
Making our work visible means opening it up for feedback and criticism. This feedback and criticism makes the reviewer(s) feel that we value their opinion, even if we already know the answer. By making the reviewer(s) feel more important, we can help improve our perception with them. Additionally, feedback will give us the opportunity to improve upon our past efforts more quickly. This improved perception and additional learning can then lead to more rapid personal and career growth.
Visibility to our work matters because the outwards perception can dictate how we are treated as employees and as individuals.
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