Sunday, October 12, 2008

“How’m I Doin’?”


Improving your perception skills is a valuable step towards improving your overall communication skills and, thereby, your employability.

A simple way to do this is with a process called perception checking. With indirect perception checking, you just raise your awareness level and look for nonverbal hints to see if what you think is going on is, in fact, actually going on.

For example, an employee may perceive that his supervisor is upset with him. To asses this, he may watch how the supervisor acts around other employees. With direct perception checking, the employee would approach his supervisor and come right out and ask how he’s doing?

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that younger workers are not only resorting to direct perception checking…they’re embracing it. The Journal states that this shift towards seeking out feedback is “forcing some employers to rethink how they discuss employee performance.”

The story cited a survey that showed 85 percent of Gen Y employees believe their age-group peers want "frequent and candid performance feedback.”

Read the whole story here.

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