Month: July 2020

Describe an occasion when you observed group think.

I hate to do this almost, but I think it applies:
pretty much the entire ethos of what is going on in America right now is groupthink. Most Americans have aligned themselves with the views that they are supposed to have based on the group they see themselves as part of. “Identity Politics,” a term frequently weaponized against liberals in particular, seems to affect everyone. I had a logic class in 7th and 8th grades (formal and informal logic), and I see what I learned EVERYWHERE. I feel that it would be easy to descend into a rant, but I not even begin to assume that the reader doesn’t know what I’m talking about; anyone with social media or consistent news access, etc. knows what I’m talking about.

On a deeper level, it’s clear that we’ve fallen victim to many neurological, psychological, and sociological traps: confirmation bias leads people to see what they want to see in the world, consume the media they want to consume, and surround themselves with people that agree with them; tribalism has led to our creation of ingroups and outgroups, and a dehumanization or disrespect for those not in our groups; fundamental attribution error leads us to glorify people, or see others as less, when we shouldn’t, and assume bad intentions or character deficiencies in those who are not our groups, but assume good intentions and “honest mistakes” when it is our group; ad hominem arguments have come to rule the day, and we will seek any excuse to invalidate someone’s perspective, whether it be digging something up they said online 10 years ago, or constructing an ideologically extreme straw man that we proceed to tear apart as if it represented our counterparts at all.

I’ve been reading a lot about the history of racism and division in the United States, and how it has been internalized and damaging to whites and blacks alike in our identities (again, will avoid going into that for brevity’s sake). Racism is perhaps one of the most salient examples of groupthink that our country is dealing with currently.

Briefly explain how you might use process consultation in your personal life.

Personally, I really love the concepts of process consultation, and I am not just saying that to curry favor or as a vapid statement to provide words for an assignment

I really think that Schein was ahead of his time. His espoused principles and methodologies reflect both the common sense that many of us have from our own life experiences, but also his wisdom after years in the field. For example, his concept of involving the client at every step is reminiscent of the modern concept of “design thinking” (centering the design of a product, service, or process around the end user); his principles of listening and observation jive with everything I have learned about neuroscience, empathy, and building a positive rapport; his concepts of timing, reading the situation, and learning to question our own assumptions and baggage, while seeking to hear out others’ perspective, rings true for any of us that has been in a long term romantic relationship.

The way he expresses process consultation as a comprehensive approach and methodology, and really almost a r’aison d’etre for all relationships and situations of carrying oneself to reflect it, really gives it “legs” for me in the sense that I feel it can be applied outside of just a consulting context. It is based on truths with relationships, after all, and relationships are something that our life is chock full of; it sounds a bit trite to say, but even the relationship with ourselves.

More tangibly speaking, as this could easily be a 10-page paper, one major aspect (to choose just one) is the concept of observing, listening, and treating everything as data. In conjunction with understanding the context, timing, relationship, consideration of perspective of others, etc. I can use any one of these mindsets to help cultivate the self that I want to cultivate (which in itself kind of reflects a Schein principle – I’ll only change in a way I want to change!) – someone who is more patient, analytical, and empathetic, and speaks at the right moments with the right things to say.

This example goes way back. When I was a summer camp counselor at a religious sleepaway camp in 2008, we had a week of pretty intense teambuilding and training before the kids started arriving for the summer. This teambuilding was very important, as counselors would have countless situations where they would need to support and cover for each other throughout the summer, as each was going to be responsible for dealing with 6-10 campers at a time. The situations where counselors would have to collaborate, or would have to count on other counselors to help with their campers, were pretty endless (imagine if you have to escort one to the nurse, etc.).

There was one female counselor who arrived to the training, then left (I don’t remember why) about 2 days in, never to return. We found out soon enough that a male counselor had decided to do this for the summer with us simply because he was romantically interested in that female counselor; he was pretty clearly completely unqualified, and apparently uninterested, in the job. Although he did decide to stay through the summer (ostensibly because he was from NYC and had already made the move for the summer to rural PA, and needed the income), we questioned his reliability immediately once his original motivations were revealed. He never really quite seemed on the same page as the rest of us, and we would collaborate or choose to rely on other counselors instead of him.

I thought it was an interesting concept that we tend to avoid conflicts of “face,” even when someone’s claim to that “face” is false. I’ve seen and experienced countless examples of people being “very full of themselves” or otherwise overconfident, and the response is frequently an avoidance, or perhaps a behind-the-back snickering, but rarely a confrontation trying to “put anyone back in their place,” so to speak.

I have a few friends whom I also consider potential networking sources, as they are in careers that I find fascinating, and are very high up, status wise, in those careers (e.g. one is a manager at Microsoft, another is the Chief of Staff for Winklevoss Capital in NYC), and I do find that my treatment of them is different than other friends or acquaintances. I find myself being less critical (internally) and assuming that, because they are so successful, any decisions they make or views they espouse must be for good reasons that I respect (definitely an expectations thing). I also notice that my way of talking to them is a bit more guarded, and I am a bit more prone to try to “show off” a bit more in the sense of showing my success or ability for any hypothetical business opportunities or connections they may throw my way in the future. I also have more leeway when it comes to boundaries, and am more apt to do favors for them in order to preserve that relationship as a positive one.

I can, and think we all can, notice how that sort of communication differs from those whom we find less appealing. I am far less accommodating, open, and willing to be friendly or helpful if it’s more of an “acquaintance” whom I do not really care for, and do not find their personal or work lives interesting or desirable at all. I think deep down, the instinct as far as motives is “these people have very little to offer me,” so I treat them differently than the aforementioned group.

Of course, none of this is set in stone; I have close friends who have little to offer career-wise, and I have people that I value their input on career and other things but don’t really enjoy their company. However, the general observation remains.

From your own experience, describe an occasion of consulting in which you acted as an expert. Did you solve the problem?

When I lived in South America (Santiago, Chile), I founded a small marketing firm with a Chilean friend. Much of my work ended up being one-off consulting where I was hired to fix or help solve specific problems that startups were encountering in their growth journey; anyone familiar with the startup scene and the entrepreneurial process knows about these occasional “sticking points” that arise.

A successful example I can think of was in the consultation for an e-commerce site. They were having a lot of page bounces (i.e. people arriving to their site on various pages and just instantly leaving) and were wondering why. We evaluated their website design, which we realized was lacking a bit in ease of use and, aesthetically speaking, was not the prettiest. Of course, certain sites like Craigslist look terrible but work fine; that, however, is pretty unique to Craigslist’s ethos and sort of an outlier.

We realized that a major part of online commerce is trust; with online transactions lacking the tangibility aspect, people want to know that their transaction can be trusted and they are indeed getting what they pay for. In particular, this clients’ payment page looked very outdated and was poorly designed; it resulted in over half of their customers arriving to the page and just leaving, because entering credit card information in the fields available felt very “scammy” and illegitimate due to the site design choices. Re-designing that page, and others, allowed for customers to stay more time on the site, navigate it more effectively, and to complete their payments successfully.

Success.

From your own experience, describe on occasion when you filled out a questionnaire or survey. Did you feel that questionnaire/survey asked meaningful questions or asked for meaningful opinions?

I am a mentor for the Loyola Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, an autonomous branch of Loyola Unversity Maryland that seeks to:

1. Increase a sense of innovation and foster entrepreneurship among students
2. Increase relationship with other innovation institutions and with small businesses/ startups in Baltimore city
3. Improve relationship with local community and provide resources for the local business ecosystem, particularly small businesses featuring founders of color.The Loyola CIE has a yearly accelerator called the Baltipreneurs, which has various speakers and experts talk about various aspects of starting and growing a business. Every week, surveys are disseminated to the accelerator participants, mentors, and staff to provide feedback for that week’s speaker and programming. I felt that this survey DID ask for meaningful opinions and feedback; it asked what we thought of that week’s content, whether we thought it should be repeated next year (which is a good way of getting around “yeah,it was good” and really getting to the heart of “was this useful and helpful and should we do it again”), what we would like to see the following week, and any feedback we had for the content or speaker, or follow up we wanted from the speaker or staff member on the given topic.

The surveys were anonymous, putting everyone on the same level.

From your own experience, describe a situation in which you receive feedback. Was it a helpful experience? If not, why not?

At my old job working as the head account manager/ marketing guy at a small staffing company, I received regular, consistent feedback on pretty much all activities. The company was small, and the understanding in the company culture was that all communication should be more or less direct, especially from management down. The CEO and CFO were both Eastern European, and the VP of Ops was Puerto Rican; these are all cultures that prize candor, and I enjoyed that more than anything more potentially passive-aggressive in nature.

I received helpful feedback specific to the industry frequently from the CFO and the VP; they both had my best interests at heart, or at least appeared to, and routinely solicited my opinion, especially on marketing and management of our CRM. Having come from a more informal work background, I was able to learn a lot from their collective knowledge and experience. However, I felt that their feedback, after some time at the company, began to fall flat more often than not – for all the employees – as we grew increasingly in the sense that our solicited feedback was not actually enacted very effectively, or often; we also failed to agree on goals and performance standards, as my incentive structure was continually in flux and often did not pan out in any actual benefits for me to reward meeting goals.  More importantly, the feedback often felt arbitrary in its timing and content, and the VP and the CFO were often not on the same page.  I felt like I didn’t really know where to begin with anything, and I had no real path to financial success or growth within the organization. When I was given an ultimatum regarding the evolution of my position to involving working on Sundays and making 150 cold/warm calls a few times a week to people’s cell phones, I decided to leave the company.

The CEO’s feedback was really ineffective compared to the others. He was very, very old school in his approach, had little understanding of the day-to-day operations of the company (they had two companies under one roof, and he was focused mostly on the other), and represented a strategy that was antithetical to that of the CFO and VP, who were more progressive. His response to any sort of suggestion was “we need to make more calls!” and he never asked any employee what we thought about anything. Not surprisingly, his feedback tended to carry less weight, as it usually involved nodding your head until he just left the room.

Describe your communication style.

I absolutely have an assertive communication style. Growing up in Central PA with the “mennonite culture,” famously passive  and even passive aggressive, I have spent a lot of time in my life working on being more healthily assertive. A large impetus for this change was my years as an entrepreneur in a few accelerators, where I realized that many ill-informed and ill-intentioned people would walk on others, just due to having stronger personalities. In order to not get walked on, I had to cultivate a more assertive nature; previously, I had been very “go with the flow.”

I realized later in life that a lot of it comes down to the “ask vs. guess culture” dichotomy; ask culture feels no guilt with pushing for whatever their desired outcome or agenda is at all times, and are not offended by dissension or rejection; in fact, ask people tend to just push until they meet resistance. They get frustrated by people who don’t share what they’re thinking or tend to waffle.
Guess culture assumes that others have your best interest at heart, and involves subtly angling toward your desired outcome while “feeling out” the situation to avoid any kind of direct ask that could be considered too forward or offensive.
For example, if I needed a place to stay in NYC for the weekend, ask culture would lead me to just send out a non-emotional, blunt message to 5 friends asking to sleep on their couch; guess culture would have me reach out, make some small talk, say I was coming to NYC for the weekend, ask “do you know of any good housing options?” and see if somebody offered to host me, at which point I would politely refuse before “reluctantly” accepting.

Quite bluntly, I’ve found American “white culture” to be more on the passive, guess side of things.

I was once told by a professor in college that people need to “tell others what they need from them.” This perspective has dictated my journey to assertiveness. I am still relatively easy-going, but I try to be assertive (in a non-confrontational way, using I statements and emphasizing that others are welcome to do as they please but I feel x way about x outcome) when it’s important to me, or when it’s something that is a large disparity in inconvenience, money, etc. I’ve realized, through books like “Never Split the Difference,” that giving in can frequently be a lose-lose situation, and – although it may sometimes make me uncomfortable – pushing a bit to arrive at a more equitable conclusion is appreciated by both parties.