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Manage others’ perceptions
In the workplace, one of the most important things you can do is to manage others’ perceptions of you. This begins with understanding the difference between intent and impact. Intent is what you mean. Impact is how you come across. You know your intent, and presumably, your intent is positive, but others can’t read your mind and can only read your actions. And so you showing up late to a meeting could be because you were stuck in traffic, but others don’t know that. So in the absence of additional data points, others don’t know if it’s because you don’t care very much or because this person isn’t important to you enough, that you don’t respect their time. Managing others’ perceptions begins with letting others know what’s going on, letting others know proactively, making no assumptions about what the other person knows, because you should probably assume that they know nothing.
Make a good impression in virtual settings
In this era of hybrid and remote work, the breadcrumbs that you leave behind in a virtual setting aren’t just others’ first impression of you, if you never meet someone in person, these become others’ only impression of you. And so it’s important to be mindful of how you’re coming across in phone calls, in emails, in instant messenger, in files that you’re sharing with other people, in documents that you might be collaborating on in real time. These are all, whether you know it or not or recognize it or not, sending signals to other people about how competent, committed, and compatible you may be.
Have you ever had that coworker who, just by the reflection of their glasses, you can tell that they’re actually not paying attention to this video call, but are instead scrolling through social media? Well, if so, you’ve come to your own conclusions around how much this person is really paying attention. Have you ever had that coworker who is taking a call from a loud environment where there are a lot of distractions and you’re wondering to yourself, “Wow, if their environment is so chaotic now, are they really even getting their work done when we’re off this call?” That, too, is an impression.
Another impression is one of paying attention and taking notes. Have you had that coworker who’s typing away and their eyes are moving all over the screen and you’re wondering, “Are they taking notes or are they typing an email to someone else?” People can’t read your positive intent. They can only only interpret the impact that you have on them. So when in doubt, it’s important to clarify what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Those coworkers who say give me a moment, “I’m just going to go ahead and write this down,” are actually trying to clarify to you what they’re doing so that you don’t let your mind wander and come to the incorrect conclusion of what they’re really doing.
Put in the extra effort
If you are sending emails, you have so many opportunities, multiple times in a day, to leave behind a great impression. It can go a long way sometimes, depending on who you’re working with, to send those emails within their business hours. You can go a long way in bundling your requests so that instead of pinging someone five separate times, you can ping them with five questions one time. And finally, you can go a long way in your communication by structuring your requests in a way that’s easy to skim and easy to respond to. So instead of writing that email or instant message in one big block of text, consider listing out your questions in the form of bullet points, and right up front at the top of that email, and then leaving all of your explanations, all your caveats for later. And consider using bolding, underlining, formatting, and spacing to make this as easy to skim and as easy to follow as possible.
We’ve probably all had those moments at work or in our personal lives when we think to ourselves, “Ugh, I wish I had said this in this other way to so-and-so.” Where conversation may not have gone as well as you thought it would’ve. Well, the advantage of having face-to-face conversations or video chats or phone calls is people forget about them at some point in time and you can move on.
The challenge with email and instant messenger is that they’re permanent. It’s extra important to put that little bit of extra effort to proofreading your email, make sure you’ve spelled every person’s name correctly, make sure you’ve included everything, and to make sure that you’ve got the tone that you want instead of coming across as frustrated, passive aggressive, or angry. So once you hit send, there’s no clawing that email back. It’s in other people’s inboxes and so is their impression of you. And by the way, this is also self-serving, because the more well structured, the more well timed, and the well presented your information is, the more likely people actually get back to you. So it’s not just about impression, it’s also about getting the work done.