Workhacks
How to succeed in business (with or without trying)
July 19, 2020 — June 14, 2022
Workplaces are a mix of ideal teamwork and moral mazes. Here are some tips to survive them, which might be implemented by workers of low rank within an organisation who want to do well for themselves and/or the organisation.
- Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- Brag documents keep your skills apparent
- Telling your colleague’s managers those colleagues did great
- Difficulty Anchoring to make sure your work is valued appropriately (especially advocated for under-represented minorities.)
- Chutzpah
- Ask for feedback after rejection (or advice).
- Important: general communication
- Avoid little leagues, Max Hodak
1 Advice
Yoon et al, Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback:
As it turns out, feedback is often associated with evaluation. At school, we receive feedback with letter grades. When we enter the workforce, we receive feedback with our performance evaluations. Because of this link between feedback and evaluation, when people are asked to provide feedback, they often focus on judging others’ performance; they think more about how others performed in the past. This makes it harder to imagine someone’s future and possibly better performance. As a result, feedback givers end up providing less critical and actionable input.
David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis, The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice:
Advice seekers and givers must clear significant hurdles, such as a deeply ingrained tendency to prefer their own opinions, irrespective of their merit, and the fact that careful listening is hard, time-consuming work. The whole interaction is a subtle and intricate art. On both sides, it requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, restraint, diplomacy, and patience. The process can derail in many ways, and getting it wrong can have damaging consequences—misunderstanding and frustration, decision gridlock, subpar solutions, frayed relationships, and thwarted personal development—with substantial costs to individuals and their organisations.
Because these essential skills are assumed to emerge organically, they’re rarely taught; but we’ve found that they can be learned and applied to great effect. So we’ve drawn on extensive research (ours and others’) to identify the most common obstacles and some practical guidelines for getting past them.
C&C Cate Huston, Being coachable.
Sam Atis, Most advice is pretty bad
2 Mentoring
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