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The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

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Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#111

Post by rocqua »

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…

In my experience, the opposite works soo much better. Put your true self out there and people will respect that massively, be willing to trust you, and be willing to open up to you.

Obviously, you need to have some sense of the other person, and whether they will respond well. But really, most human beings are decent. And those who aren't, mostly aren't worth knowing at all.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#112

Post by topmonk »

AstralStorm wrote: post #85
topmonk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes your hands dry, though.

Push for a better soap then, disinfectant, or use a cream. Well, even just scrubbing the hands under water is better than nothing, if that's an insoluble problem in your organization.

I wasn't talking about soap. I never use it or shampoo either. My theory is that by washing away all the oils from your skin, you just encourage your body to produce oil faster. That's why you soap users get all goopy at the end of the day and your clothes smell. I can wear my clothes for at least 48 hours before they start to smell.

But anyway, even just water can dry out my hands, and I don't want to use any creams. Either they contain alcohol and dry my hands out further or make them too greasy, and cause then to stop producing oils.

I think your just going to have to get used to the fact that there is going to be traces of poop and pee wherever you go. I mean, even if people like me did wash my hands, the spray from flushing the toilet disperses fecal matter and urine throughout the whole room, onto your clothes, on your hair, in your mouth when you breathe.

It's probably a healthy thing, exposing your immune system, anyway.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#113

Post by MakeUsersWant »

jmccorm wrote: post #25

I've gotten a long ways in my technical career from being able to ask sensitive questions. (In the business environment, I've focused more on them being "critical questions".) It has been really great for me, and I've tried to make it as painless as possible for others. It started simply enough. For real business reasons, there are things that I either needed to know, or I needed to be confident that the other person…

Your techniques remind me of the book Maister/Green/Galford: the trusted advisor.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#114

Post by xvector »

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…

You're instigating workplace bullying. Have you thought of handling this like a mature adult?

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#115

Post by quelltext »

rriepe wrote: post #27
chirau wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bit about unknown knowns does not make sense to me, also it seems to change the point of reference. It is referencing things from third party perspectives whereas the original ones are referencing from first party. That is, you are talking other things other entities might not know about me that I know myself which makes them, from my point of reference, known knowns. And in the event that I don't know those thin…

If your parents are in town and ask where the nearest weed dispensary is, you might pretend not to know, even though you know. That's an unknown known.

But you still know it. Pretending not to know doesn't render it unknown knowledge.

To the other person/parents they don't know that you know, but that's looking at knowledge of party a vs. party b, which is mot quite what all this is about. Yo your parents it's still a known unknown (hence why they ask you).

I believe the closest to unknown knowns would be temporary loss of knowledge, where at a given moment you don't manage to make the right connections between the known knowns. So it's a "could know" given the right moment or prerequisite calculation step/thought, but right there you don't so it's an unknown known.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#116

Post by CalRobert »

kbenson wrote: post #96
Yessing wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> But a core part of being polite, is not hruting others through your actions directly or undirectly. ( or at least trying) The problem is that in some cultures it's perfectly fine to talk about things that in other cultures it's not. The solution to that is to give people a benefit of a doubt and not assume they are trying to be hurtful, even if your first response is to be hurt. We don't seem to be great at that wh…

Not to mention the thousands of little subcultures that exist. I've seen people offended by others leaving notes that seemed polite to me - "please refill coffee pot if it's empty" as passive-aggressive, etc.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#117

Post by [deleted] »

topmonk wrote: post #72
fouc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first spurts of urine aren't actually sterile, nevermind the area around the urinal (where there's probably a non-zero chance of transfer). Ultimately washing hands is for the benefit of other people. It just shows conscientiousness.

It makes your hands dry, though.

[deleted]

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#118

Post by hrktb »

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 point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody.

If you genuinely think the ones you saw could have been avoid just by a conversation, I’d wager the main issue was not an awkward situation but a crucial lack of trust, often coming from a toxic culture.

I saw a lot of situations where something awkward was going in, ranging from bad hygiene to mild harassment.

Dozens of people are witnessing the situation every single day, even if the manager doesn’t step in there’s a flurry of other people with enough power or influence to intervene. That often means that the situation goes on because nobody gives a crap, or the one in fault thinks (right or wrong) that nothing will happen if the warnings/requests are ignored.

That’s just a crappy place to work either way. Quitting won’t be because of the awkward situation, but because it was a symptom of a deeper issue.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#119

Post by anilakar »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #50
rcurry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I straight up just walked over to his cube, unplugged his keyboard and threw it in the trash and told him “Go tell IT you need a new keyboard.” I’m not sure whether you’re proud of this story, but that is an extreme overreaction. What grown adult throws away a keyboard (company property!) rather than having a conversation with someone? Did you also go around removing the doorknobs to all the rooms this person went…

Employees don't usually value hardware they didn't pay for. I've seen people intentionally banging their old laptops against the table to break the HDD and consequently get a new, faster computer.

I'm also guilty. A certain easily-upset micromanager sourced a box of one dollar second hand HP keyboards that are pretty much unusable, so I've been shipping them out with other hardware, forgetting them at customer premises and so on.

Re: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

#120

Post by vitro »

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 once worked on a desk opposite a guy, who had often his finger in his nose, searching, finding and taking out.. you know.

After weeks of hesitation, once I told him: "Please, if you need to do it, do it in the bathroom". He said "Ok" and that was it.

It is a sensitive topic, just when writing this I have doubts whether to post this message or not.

But those things are just here, and if you act out of kindness towards the person, seeing how may he/she suffer because of that and by having a discussion or drop a few sentences on the subject, you are actually helping the person as well.

I guess it is better to try than to alienate that person in our mind and the longer it takes, the harder it is to start the discussion.

Be rebel! Talk about those things! With kindness.

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