How to avoid a common career pitfall by Eduardo Bellani

If the way you think others see you is in stark contrast to how others actually see you, you are in danger of derailing in your career.

To avoid that, here are 3 steps, and a reference:

  1. Ask and embrace feedback from bosses, peers and followers1,
  2. Expose your most cherished ideas to the most intense forms of public scrutiny you can find,
  3. See ways to measure yourself, such as 360 feedback mechanisms and validated personality assessments.

It all boils down to reducing your own cognitive dissonance(Festinger 1957), which is:

… The maximum dissonance which could exist … determined by the resistance to admitting that he had been wrong or foolish.

Figure 1: Abbey of St Victor, before being destroyed by republican revolutionaries during the French Revolution

Figure 1: Abbey of St Victor, before being destroyed by republican revolutionaries during the French Revolution

References

Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Mass Communication Series. Stanford University Press.

  1. I like the terms superordinate, coordinates and subordinates, but they are not in common usage ↩︎