Subscribe
Follow Us
My Favorite Hamburger
Oct 16One of our former au pairs, Anna, came to visit us from Hamburg, Germany. She’s my favorite Hamburger.
What’s really cool is that she’s a very successful businesswoman now. She has her own salon in central Hamburg. She started small, and now the business is burgeoning. Anna says that she has to turn away clients because they are maxed out. In fact, she says she’s going to have to raise prices in the new year to level out her business. That’s a high class problem.
We haven’t seen Anna in four years, and it’s been seven years since she lived with us and took care of our boys. She was always very smart and very motivated. She said that she was going into business, and studied cosmetology for a few years to prepare. Then she took a risk, started a business, and it worked. Great.
It’s super great to see Anna now. And there’s an HR communication lesson embedded in all this. There’s an interpersonal communication flaw that people are guilty of called “static evaluation.” Basically, it means that when we don’t see something, we assume it stays the same. An extension of static evaluation is that the first impressions of a person stays with us. Start out as a secretary and make it to CEO, and that person is a “secretary who made it.” Static evaluation means that we don’t recognize that the CEO might look like the secretary, but is no longer the same person.
Static evaluation is most dangerous in career planning and performance evaluations. In our minds, people don’t grow up. We grow up, we’re different people. But people who report to us — they’re still kids. But don’t fool yourself — people grow. And static evaluation is a thinking flaw. When we’re aware of it, we can correct our thinking. When we’re not, everyone is frozen in time.
About the Author
Frank Roche
Frank started IFRACTAL over 7 years ago with Sarah Chambers. Together, they've created HR communications and HR software for some of the world's leading companies. Frank is also studying Flamenco guitar and origami.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Featured Product
Social Media
Flickr
A possible cousin to “static evaluation” is “pidgeon-holing.” I've seen this phenomenon at work for a long time. Someone makes a mistake and from then on, they are placed in that particular “pidgeon hole.” Sometimes, the employee has to leave the company to get another chance. Almost everyone can be put in a pidgeon hole as in, “Oh, that Frank, you know him…” or “Ron always…” Like you say, people can grow, change and learn from their mistakes, but the misperception can carry on anyway.
Ron, that's exactly it. One mistake is magnified x 1000 when it
s performance review time. I know a very bad NSFW joke about this, but it's not right for this blog. (Jokes often cut to the core of an issue.)
I feel so out of it… what is an NSFW joke?
Not Safe For Work