- CareerCoacha
- Posts
- Make a great first impression
Make a great first impression
PLUS: Avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect
For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.
In today’s newsletter:
Make a great first impression
How to say sorry to restore trust
Avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect
Enlist the knowledge of your colleagues
Steve Jobs as career coach
ON YOUR CAREER
Make a great first impression
People don’t like changing their minds. It’s cognitively much easier to integrate confirming information than disconfirming information. This is part of the confirmation bias each of us have. Therefore, it’s preferable to make a positive first impression than to try and reverse a negative first impression. Here are 3 tips to help you make a great first impression:
1. Positive body language
+ Smile
+ Shake hands (where appropriate)
+ Stand and sit sternum-up
2. Positive words
+ Share positive news or ideas
+ Don’t complain or say negative things about people
+ Be solution-focused and action-oriented
3. Say peoples’ names
+ Introduce yourself with your First Name; Surname
+ Repeat others’ first name on introduction: ‘Pleased to meet you Nia’
+ And on departure, ‘Lovely to meet, Nia.’
A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.
Read Anyone can be charismatic for tips on being charismatic in conversation.
COMMUNICATION
How to say sorry to restore trust
All of us mess-up. Sometimes we say things we regret and sometimes we don’t meet our commitments to others. This is human. The simplest way to restore trust after we mess-up is to apologize well. This contains three elements:
1. Be authentic
❌ I’m sorry if my comments offended you.
✅ I’m sorry for what I said to you. I’ll do my best to choose better words in the future.
2. Take responsibility
❌ Yesterday, you said some things, I said some things, let’s move on.
✅ I’m sorry for what I said to you yesterday. I’d like us to communicate better.
3. Identify positive future behaviors
❌ I’m sorry I’ve not sent the report but I’ve been so busy.
✅ I’m sorry I’ve not sent the report. You’ll have it by 8am tomorrow.
PRODUCTIVITY
Avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is where we have modest knowledge of a domain and we overestimate this knowledge. This can lead to us promoting ideas of little value. We can also pass judgment on the ideas of others where we have no competence to do so. Combined, this frustrates our colleagues. And it reduces productivity. Humility is the antidote. Our default position should be there are complexities, risks, and opportunities we don’t yet understand. Especially in domains and topics that are new to us.
A less described aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is where experts underestimate their own knowledge. They can falsely assume complex tasks are simple and quick to perform by non-experts. Experts can help transfer knowledge by avoiding jargon and acronyms. Drawings and flowcharts help. Experts have an important role to help colleagues understand the value their business creates for customers.
Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty
1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS
Enlist the knowledge of your colleagues
I was coaching a conscientious salesperson last week and she described a situation she found stressful. A prospective client had asked her about a product specification that she did not know. After the client meeting, she was disappointed. Her self-talk was negative. And unrealistic.
We cannot immediately know everything that would be useful to our clients. We can, however, enlist the knowledge of experts who know more than us. We get to leverage the strengths, experience, and wisdom of colleagues. Clients get us standing on the shoulders of our organization’s best.
My coachee is broadening how she regards her value proposition. She now sees herself as a curator of her company’s resources for clients. In the future, if she does not know an answer for a client, she will assert: ‘I will get you that answer by _________’. Stress is reduced by knowing we have back-up.
Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people.
GET SMARTER
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs (1955 — 2011) was one of the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors in history. He co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, founded NeXT, and chaired Pixar. He holds more than 450 patents. Jobs was born in San Francisco and adopted soon after. After high school, he attended one semester at Reed College before dropping out. He continued living on campus where he audited classes including calligraphy and modern dance. Jobs then travelled to India seeking spiritual enlightenment. Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, said, ‘the simplicities of Zen Buddhism really informed his design sense.’ Jobs concluded that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. This sensibility can be seen in the clean lines of Apple products. Some of Job’s wisdom:
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Watch Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address.