Why Is Liking Overrated Than Respect
Edition #097
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are So Freaking Hard?
Benn Stancil is a Co-founder and Chief Analyst at Mode, a company building collaborative tools for data scientists and analysts. Benn is responsible for overseeing Mode's internal analytics efforts and is also an active contributor to the data science community. In this article, Benn writes about ‘Why startups are hard?’, which is very insightful and profound.
Here are some great points from the article for you to think and reflect on:
The 60-year-old Huang(founder of Nvidia), without hesitation, said he wouldn’t start a company if he were 30 again! - “The reason why I wouldn't do it—and it goes back to why it's so hard—is building a company and building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be than any of us expected it to be.”
Because big businesses aren’t built on gimmicks. We get excited about our smart idea; we race it to market; we expect the cavalry to arrive and make this easier. In other words, building companies and products are to borrow Jeff Bezos’s famous analogy, like learning how to do a handstand. But the reality is that doing a handstand “takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.”
Companies can’t outwit it any more than an athlete can outwit their training.
The upside of all of this is that you don’t actually need a clever idea to build a great company. The clever plan doesn’t remove the need to compete; it just distracts us from it.
Read the entire article here.
Avoiding the Likability Trap at Work
In this conversation in Kellogg Insights, Prof. Harry Kraemer, a clinical professor of management and organisations at Kellogg, talks about how to avoid the trap of being liked at work.
As you grow into leadership positions, this is a constant challenge most people face - ‘How do I express what I feel honestly about people’s performance, especially with whom I work directly, in a way that it is taken positively by them?”. However, most often, you may say or do things that could be the opposite so that you are liked by the people you work with.
Here are some key ideas and thoughts that you can reflect on:
Do you want to be respected or liked? This is a crucial question you have to answer for yourself.
Liking may happen immediately with the concerned person to whom you wish to give feedback in the manner they expect or can handle. However, respect is something the person may develop over time, though you may not say the things that may be palatable to the other person in the short term.
Some people ask for constant reassurance, which can become a nuisance for their managers. Meet with them to discuss this before it becomes out of hand or after. Find out the deeper reason why they’re asking for constant reassurance.
Maybe these people don’t have a lot of self-confidence, and find out if there is something you can do to help you with that.
Set expectations with the person after eliciting feedback on why they feel the other way. Also, communicate with the person on why you’re making decisions a certain way, especially if they differ from what that person thought was the best thing.
Listen and read the full transcript of the conversation here.
What Will Happen To Marketing In The Age Of AI?
In this TED Talk, Jessica Apothekar, CMO, Managing Director & Partner, BCG Paris, talks of how Generative AI is poised to transform the workplace, but we still need human brains for new ideas.
Here are some thoughts and ideas for you to think about:
Think about it for a minute - 30 years ago, when word processors and spreadsheets hit the market, they were supposed to jumpstart productivity, and we were supposed to spend less time writing or calculating. The truth, however, is we spend more time on them now!
Marketing has been a super-right-brained function and has been great at tapping the emotional needs of consumers across the world.
In a study by BCG-Harvard, she mentions that Chat-GPT improves right-brain performance by 40%!
After AI adoption, marketing will spend more time building more personalised content and ideas. Therefore, marketing needs to reskill and reorganise to embed people who can use and diffuse AI tools for decision-making, thus employing more marketing data engineers or scientists.
Marketing people will need marketing scientists who uncover through data what product is working with what consumers, what audience creative couples are doing well in the market, how is the marketing funnel evolving, etc.
Jessica gives examples of how industries will start to use marketing to analyse data about their audience, influencers, and trending consumer habits by thinking outside their direct ecosystems.
Just click and watch the video.
Why Is Liking Overrated Than Respect
Reading through the articles this week, one thing was quite sure - most often, the feelings you leave in the immediate moment supersedes the ones you can get over time. However, while it may leave a good feeling in the near term, what may not be apparent is that it may not be right for the person in the long term.
Most people find it hard to say the truth as it leaves a harsh taste in the other person. Hence, they refrain from telling them to the person as feedback, and most importantly, they start to say what the person would like to hear or be palatable. What this does is that as a leader or person leading a group or team, they move up the ‘likability charts’ in the company. What they don’t realise is that it does more harm to the company and the person in the long run. But who cares for anything in the long term when you have to manage the short term, which is - the person getting upset, quitting, backfilling for the person is pretty hard, the skill is hard to find, relationship with the concerned person goes for a toss, etc. Therefore, ‘liking’ takes precedence over respect.
When do you gain somebody's respect?
The person might initially feel it hard to digest the feedback or your response, but as they grow in roles or gain experience in the world, especially when they work with different people, different environments, different challenges, and different stakeholders, the feedback, input, and advice start to bubble-up in the way respond and handle those situations. That’s when you begin to respect the person who shared the feedback, but it is not apparent to them in the short term. As a leader or person heading a group or a team, it is essential to share your feedback in right earnest as it will do a lot of good to the person - no matter how the person may feel about you. Also, be ready to accept feedback about yourself and learn to reflect on them, too.
What does it take for people to practice this?
We live in a world shrouded with people with very little ability to handle tough responses or conversations. We lack the self-confidence to absorb it and are not trained to handle it right from the time we are young. We are told not to hurt the other person with our words or responses, which is deeply ingrained in our minds and behaviours. Hence, when we enter the real world, we find it hard to handle these situations both as receivers and givers. There is a need to practice the art of accepting ‘ruthless reality’, which is very tough mentally. Irrespective of the fact that we admit it or not, the reality will hit us one day - the question is the time-delay of that happening. Hence, developing the mental tenacity to handle it is something we must develop, and this happens, just like the handstand example - this will not happen overnight, but deliberate practice over time helps in receiving and accepting feedback. However, this does not mean you have to be rude in your response, but you must learn to be precise yet emphatic in your message delivery.
Respect develops in drips, while likability is like a flood - it creates a massive burst of short-term impact but has long-term negative consequences, which must be avoided.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Big businesses are not built on gimmicks. It’s a hard, long grind.
Decide whether you want to be liked or respected.
In the future, marketing will continue to use human brains for ideas but must learn to leverage Generative AI for decisions.