People Don't Talk at Full Power All the Time
With one person, the words just keep coming:
So what you're saying is this, right?
Broadly, it breaks down into three stages.
Then how would you think about this case?
With another person, it all ends with:
Uh, yeah.
Looking at that gap, it seems like
their communication skills change depending on who they're talking to.
But sometimes the person is deliberately holding back.
When Explaining Costs You, You Stop Explaining
In some workplaces, going into detail has meant, again and again, that
- new work gets piled onto you
- the discussion branches out
- you end up on the hook for things outside your role
- someone shows up later with a different "correct answer"
- pushing back gets treated as a bad attitude in itself
In that kind of environment, if
"speak up more and take the initiative"
only makes things worse for you, then
replying with the bare minimum
is perfectly rational.
The ability hasn't disappeared. The real problem is that
there's little reason to expect a payoff from showing that person what you can do.
Employee Voice Depends on How the Listener Reacts
In organizational behavior research, passing improvement ideas, concerns and opinions up the chain is studied as employee voice.
The key point is that
a good opinion isn't automatically accepted.
Research suggests that when a subordinate's voice makes a leader feel their own competence is under threat, the leader may judge the suggestion as "not constructive" and trust the person who made it less, which can lead to the voice being rejected. [13]
Of course, nobody outside can diagnose whether a particular boss actually feels threatened.
But if the pattern keeps repeating, where
agreeing earns you good marks
and disagreeing gets you told "you don't understand,"
then you should consider that the evaluation may not be a pure test of your understanding.
If You're Throttling Yourself in Front of the Evaluator, the Evaluation Gets Distorted Too
There's a measurement problem here.
Say your real ability is 100.
But with a certain person you've learned that
saying anything extra is risky,
so you only put out 30.
The evaluator sees only that 30 and concludes
this person's ability is 30.
Yet in other settings, you're producing 80 or 90.
In that case,
the evaluator's observations aren't necessarily all wrong.
The 30 they saw really happened.
The problem is treating
what was observed = what the person is capable of
as the same thing.
When Rating Yourself, Look at Behavior That Repeats, Not Who Rated You
When judging your own ability, it's more useful to look at
- what you could do on a task you'd never seen
- whether you could do it again with someone else
- whether the other person actually understood after your explanation
- whether you could apply it to a case you hadn't met before
- whether you can still do it as time passes
rather than only at
what your boss said about you.
In particular, it's not enough to hear
"That was easy to follow."
If you then gave the person a new case after explaining, and they judged it correctly, that tells you more than simple likability.
It lets you check that the explanation may have actually built understanding on the learner's side.
"Doesn't Understand" Is Not the Same as "Couldn't Guess the Unstated Right Answer"
Two things often get mixed together in workplace evaluations.
1. Not being able to understand the information you were given
That's an understanding problem.
2. Not being able to guess conditions that exist only in the other person's head
That involves requirements definition, tacit knowledge and communication problems.
For example, suppose someone asks,
Please make it so we can see the results.
You build it, and then you're told afterward,
I meant show them on that specific existing screen.
If all of that gets filed under "lack of understanding," the analysis goes wrong.
Of course, the person doing the work could also have asked,
Where should they be displayed?
But the requester's unstated conditions exist at the same time.
To improve accurately, you need to separate the two.
What You Need Isn't to "Ignore Evaluations" but to "Break Them Down"
So the answer isn't
ignore everything the evaluator you dislike says
either.
Break the evaluation down like this:
- Is there a concrete fact behind it?
- Is it a mistake that keeps recurring?
- Does the same thing happen with other people and in other situations?
- Are unstated conditions mixed in?
- Does the rating change depending on whether you agree or disagree?
- Is it a behavior you can actually fix?
- Has it turned into a personality label?
Take only the feedback you can use.
Don't let a sloppy personality verdict into your sense of who you are.
That's all there is to it.
