Workhacks

How to succeed in business (with or without trying)

July 19, 2020 — June 14, 2022

communicating
cooperation
economics
faster pussycat
game theory
institutions
mind
money
networks
rhetoric
Figure 1

Workplaces, some mixture of ideal teamwork and moral mazes. Here are some tips to survive them tips that might be implemented by workers of low rank within an organisation, who would like to do well as well as possible for themselves and/or the organisation.

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 organizations.

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

3 Networking

4 Incoming

5 References

Bar-Yam, and Kantor. 2018. A Mathematical Theory of Interpersonal Interactions and Group Behavior.”
Betts. 2022. “Mentoring Handbook.”
Egan, and Song. 2008. Are Facilitated Mentoring Programs Beneficial? A Randomized Experimental Field Study.” Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Ghosh, and Reio. 2013. Career Benefits Associated with Mentoring for Mentors: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Grant. 2017. The Third ‘Generation’ of Workplace Coaching: Creating a Culture of Quality Conversations.” Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice.
Kammeyer-Mueller, and Judge. 2008. A Quantitative Review of Mentoring Research: Test of a Model.” Journal of Vocational Behavior.