Development through Psychology

I haven’t blogged in a while – it has been an extremely intense couple of months here and clients always come first. But did you assume that’s why I hadn’t been blogging?

We all view the world through our own set of schemas. While simplified, we may have a schema that say that a prototypical blogger tends to start off with frequent posts (once or twice a week) and after a while these posts tail off and stop. In this case, an individual with this schema would have thought I’d got bored.

On the other hand, it’s fairly obvious this blog exists because of Setsights Ltd – and not for the sake of blogging alone. So there might be a schema in which you think that organisations blog, but tend to let the blogging fall to the wayside when work gets too busy… and in this case, the schema would have been correct.

But let’s switch back to the workplace.

I’m a big proponent of learning at work, and the ability to learn how to avoid making these assumptions is astoundingly important to progression. I recently worked with a very recent graduate – about 22, and a few months since his graduation – who said the following about a very senior leader in his company.

“He can’t spell. How did he manage to get into a position of such responsibility when he doesn’t understand simple grammar. He must be stupid”

He was relying on a schema that suggests that ability to spell and leadership ability are on parallels… but of course, they’re not. Here are some explanations for the poor grammar in an email:

• They are dyslexic
• They typed the email too rapidly and didn’t check what they had written
• They didn’t actually write the email, their secretary wrote it from dictation
• They find a specific grammatical rule hard to understand (defence/defense, or the use of semicolons)
• English isn’t their first language
• They’re stupid

Considering they’re a senior leader, most of us would – hopefully – assume it’s one of the first five, not the last one.

Assuming the worst has dangers – undermining others in this way correlate with negative outcomes of workplace achievement (Duffy, Ganster & Pagon, 2002) and therefore it is a strong predictor for this individual that he will not, unless something changes, be a potential leader himself.

So a question for you to ask yourself – and please do, whether you use the comments section below to respond or not – do you have negative schemas and stereotypes about anyone at work? And if you do, what do you think the effect will be…

P.S. Stay tuned, the Setsights website redesign is imminent, as all the rest of our materials etc. have now been rebranded with much less neon yellow!

References

Duffy, M., Ganster, D., & Pagon, M. (2002). SOCIAL UNDERMINING IN THE WORKPLACE. Academy of Management Journal, 45 (2), 331-351 DOI: 10.2307/3069350

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