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The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

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Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#61

Post by mkagenius »

mikestew wrote: post #38
acidburnNSA wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said stall so I am onboard with your disgust. This always reminds me about a Richard Feynman story where he'd stand in the bathroom and ridicule people who washed their hands after using the urinal, saying the urine was sterile anyway. I find that kind of hilarious. Colleagues complained all the time, like "well I was headed to lunch anyway and always wash my hands before lunch"

Mr. Feyman’s mistake is assuming I’m trying to wash away urine. I touch stuff other than my dick throughout the day. Post-piss is as good a time as any. Not that I would have ever that I felt I owed such an asshole an explanation.

Why is urine getting on your hands? Who designs your (not you specifically) urinals?

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#62

Post by sneak »

tony wrote: post #13

I wonder what would be a more personal (and interesting) question than: - Describe your relationship with your mother - Describe your relationship with your father Completely open-ended, yet, is universal to everyone. Being candid in that area can provide a lot of foundational underpinning to understand someone. But - would people find it awkward? Would they take offense? Feel pain thinking about the answer? As for s…

Let me tell you about my mother.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#63

Post by sandoooo »

georgewsinger wrote: post #33
sandoooo wrote: post #2

The author misses the point. People are avoiding sensitive questions not because it impacts opinion on average, but because of the rare outliers that ruin it for everybody. It takes just a single asshole reporting you to HR to ruin your life.

Yep -- a classic "Expected Value is not the only thing that matters, but also one's Risk of Ruin" situation. The counter-argument is this: do we still overestimate our true risk of ruin when it comes to asking sensitive questions? Are we actually going to get fired (or whatever horrendous thing) for not asking that question? I bet the answer is that we still overrate our true probability of ruin when it comes to thes…

the true risk of any given question is a nebulous thing depending on many unknowns and your very specifc circumstances, and it varies from day to day. Working it out is a cognitive load that doesn't seem to be worth the effort. Plus you don't even get much for braving this danger, on average.

From the organization's perspective, though, this is a cancerous growth that kills your employees' motivation and innovation and foments a culture of distrust, siloing and paranoia. Too bad there's no easy way to align the incentives there, since the corps are hella scared of being on the wrong side of political winds, too.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#64

Post by nate_meurer »

rcurry wrote: post #30
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

The worst one for me was the guy who didn’t wash his hands after using the restroom. One day, one of my team members told me about this, and I didn’t believe him, ha ha, so a few days later I’m in the restroom and this guy comes out of a stall and just walks out the door. So about a week later my guy who’d complained about it had some problem with one of our other systems, and who do they send over to help him out? Y…

This story is layers of stupidity. Yes, you should wash your hands after pooping. But that keyboard, simply by virtue of being a keyboard, was more heavily laden with bacteria than the toilet seats in your bathrooms, regardless of who was using it, and evidence of any health risk therefrom is so far lacking [1].

Do you have dogs? Better get rid of them too since they track feces into your house in quantities that dwarf those spread by Mr. Poopy Hands.

1 - www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/your-phone-and-laptop-probably-wont-make-you-sick-but-you-should-still-clean-them/2019/08/13/99ba1416-b9f5-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#65

Post by cgriswald »

Yessing wrote: post #44
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

"not offending others by asking sensitive questions/Avoiding awkward" is the polite thing to do. But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying) In cases where not asking the question puts the other party in a disadvantage or at the risk thereof, I feel one shouldn't be allowed to claim that one was being polite or "doing the right thing". You…

I’ve heard people talk about the “compassionate” thing to do and I’ve asked, “What exactly is compassionate about prolonging suffering?” Either they get it or they think I’m a brutish social nub.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#66

Post by mkagenius »

artsyca wrote: post #29
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

I had a manager like that dude he was house poor and had only one ratty Hilfiger sweater There's no way to relate to people like that and confrontation being avoided is the only way out

Ed Sheeran mostly wears same red shirt

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#67

Post by kqr »

_y5hn wrote: post #57
vanniv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to "just be myself" at work, I would be fired very quickly -- because my self is outside the narrow little band of what is "approved of" in my workplace. Every conversation of a sensitive nature is an opportunity for disaster if not treated with the utmost care not to be "found out"

Doesn't this depend on decency of the people?

No. Being an asshole -- regardless of reason -- is terrible for the team, no matter how decent they are.

Making an effort to conform to social norms of politeness goes a long, long way.

Don't get me wrong; feel free to upset people, but they should be upset about the factual content of the message, not the delivery!

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#68

Post by kqr »

zrkrlc wrote: post #3

Hmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond…

You might be interested in the opposite perspective, too. Some authors believe conversation (and indeed nearly everything we do) is an art of posturing. We converse because we want to show how eligible mates we are. We want others to know how intelligent we are, or how brave we are, or how resourceful we are. I highly recommend reading "The Elephant in the Brain" for more about that. It starts a bit slowly but then picks up!

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#70

Post by greggman2 »

rcurry wrote: post #30
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #23

I'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager ( https://www.askamanager.org/ ), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this…

The worst one for me was the guy who didn’t wash his hands after using the restroom. One day, one of my team members told me about this, and I didn’t believe him, ha ha, so a few days later I’m in the restroom and this guy comes out of a stall and just walks out the door. So about a week later my guy who’d complained about it had some problem with one of our other systems, and who do they send over to help him out? Y…

sounds like you need to do some research into what's actually dirty. hint it's not bathrooms

https://www.google.com/search?q=are+bathrooms+more+dirty+tha...

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