Tall Poppies
I work with very bright people who often have low self-confidence – they constantly look for external validation to calibrate their own standing. This proclivity can come out in different ways:
- They work super hard, because there’s a background fear that someone will find out they’re not actually very good
- They don’t like being wrong in public; they’d rather put in more hours testing other avenues so they won’t be ‘caught out’
- They don’t like asserting; they prefer discovery – soliciting opinions, discussing small details, mulling things over in the relative safety of topics they already know well
Engineering schools make this last effect worse: engineers are taught to be risk-averse and conservative. This makes sense because the things engineers design, build and operate can cause harm. It is also expensive to iterate on physical products – by contrast, the marginal cost of iteration for software is close to zero. But the obsession with risk mitigation has turned into a kind of tall poppy syndrome, a points-scoring contest for finding flaws rather than suggesting improvements, and it drives me up the wall.
Asserting is a higher-agency, higher-urgency way of interacting than presenting information. “I think we should do X – what do you think?” implies that:
- You’ve put thought into what the right way forward might be (rather than relying on someone else to do that work for you)
- You’re open to better answers – you want to hear what others have to contribute
It also saves the most valuable commodity there is: time. If person A says “I think we should do X – what do you think?” and person B says “Yes, that makes sense”, we can use the remaining 29 minutes of the call for something else (calls expand to fill whatever slot they’re given).
Most importantly, it’s indicative of a high-trust culture – ideas might be right or wrong, but finding out which isn’t a personal referendum. High-ego interactions are dominated by points-scoring and performance; they leave little room for choices to be properly considered, and they make people less willing to share. Asserting is a vulnerable act – you might be wrong – and it encourages low-ego exchanges that maximise the value of the participants’ instinct and experience.
A practice I’ve found works is to stop people when they’ve dropped into ‘presenting information’ mode and ask them what they think we should do – they can explain the why afterwards, but it’s up to them to say which direction to head. Sometimes that requires a lot of pushing, especially for people who’ve been in slower environments (academia, big corporates, most engineering companies), but the shift to asserting is the single biggest step I’ve seen in people who have gone from ‘good’ to ‘great’.