Listening in the workplace is the most useless quality an employee can have!

There are three prerequisites for being a "disobedient" employee.

The first is the courage to dislike, i.e. having the guts to put forward a different view from that of the boss.

The second is the ability to dislike, that is, the ability to prove one's point of view is right.

The third is the ability to dislike the boss, the skill to get him or her to agree with his or her point of view.

Are you an "obedient" employee at work?

Whatever the boss says.

Do not dare to challenge your boss's views, even if they are too subjective and personal, and empirical.

The purp,ose of work is not to deliver better results, but to "make the boss happy" ......

I remember a maths exam in primary school where a student found the question wrong when doing a certain application problem, so he raised his hand to ask the teacher, and the maths teacher said categorically that it was right, so we all buried our heads in the problem and no one dared to ask questions.

At that time, although I suspected that the question might be wrong, I did not hesitate to follow the teacher's advice.

Guess what happened?

In that exam, there was only one perfect score in the class, and the one who got the perfect score was the boy who raised his hand to question the error of the question.

Because he insisted on his own opinion when the teacher said he was right, and modified the conditions according to his understanding before doing it.

At that time, when I got the paper with only 90-odd marks, apart from being afraid of being reprimanded by my mother at home, I was more regretful that I had failed to stick to my judgment when the teacher said the question was fine.

It is not uncommon to see such obedient employees at work.

They are designers, but the clients and leaders who have no aesthetic ability say that they will change it, so a proper design becomes a miserable artworker.

The leader's ideas change from day to day, and even if the work that has been prepared for a long time has to be overturned, he keeps nodding his head and saying yes, and he feels that "the boss is happy".

But suddenly one day you will find that being obedient may no longer be useful, not only does it not help you gain acceptance, but it may lower your status in the minds of others.

You've been obedient and the client says you're not professional enough.

If you do as you're told, the leader says you have no initiative or ideas.

Why is it so difficult for people who listen to you to be welcomed into the workplace?

Why do people who don't listen get more and more attention?

01

Obedience is a form of blame-shifting

A story was told in The Alienist about a Korean Air Flight 801 from Seoul (now Seoul) to Guam that crashed before landing on August 6, 1997.

The last 30 minutes of Korean Air Flight 801's voice recording restores the circumstances leading up to the crash as follows.

Captain: Well ...... really ...... was too sleepy. (Indistinct utterance)

Co-pilot: Of course. What follows is the most critical part of the entire flight.

Co-Pilot: Did you feel the rain coming down harder? In this place?

The co-pilot intended to remind the captain that the weather conditions were very bad for a visual landing.

Then the random engineer added, "Captain, the weather radar played no small part."

The random engineer's intention was the same as the co-pilot's; it was not a good night for a visual landing.

It was pouring rain outside, it was dark, and the downward angle indicator was still faulty, but the captain decided to land visually.

Even though from a professional point of view the captain's actions were not by the regulations, neither the co-pilot nor the random engineer dared to point out the captain's mistake, which turned out to be a big mistake.

This was not an isolated case, as, in the Florida crash, the co-pilot never warned the captain of the icing hazard by anything other than a "hint".

He even hinted four times through four different expressions, but because of the power distance between him and the captain, he always expressed his opinion to the captain in a subtle way.

Malcolm points out that the root cause of these accidents lies in the culture of context.

High and low context cultures were coined by the American anthropologist Edward-T Hall, and cultures like Chinese, Japanese, African and Latin cultures all belong to high context cultures.

Simply put, people in high-context cultures communicate more by interpreting the message according to the context of the situation.

Therefore, in Chinese communication, everything is a "euphemism", and it is impolite to point out the leader's mistakes or to suggest ideas that contradict him.

However, to do as you are told, to do whatever the leader tells you to do, or to not dare mention a better solution when you know there is one, is a form of blame-shifting.

Just like the co-pilot of Flight 801 before, his duty was supposed to remind and correct the captain in time when he made a mistake in operation, but because he listened, he shifted the responsibility that should have been his own to the captain.

And the engineer who was with the flight was supposed to provide a plan to deal with the flight in case of emergency and calculate the data for take-off and landing, but also because of obedience, he did not stick to his duties, thus putting all the responsibility on the captain.

But if the co-pilot and the random engineer had stuck to their responsibilities instead of letting the captain's poor judgment go unchecked, then the tragedy might not have happened.

The same is true at work. Those very obedient employees who nod their heads and say they are right no matter what their boss says are precisely those who are afraid to defy authority and stick to their opinions because they are afraid of taking responsibility, so they simply put the choice and the responsibility on the boss altogether.

Bad readership?

It's not the boss who sets the headlines.

Typos in the article?

The boss didn't even notice it when he finally reviewed it.

Readers don't like the topic?

No problem, the boss likes it (smiley face)

If an obedient employee always gives all the options and responsibilities at work to his superiors and is too lazy to think and too timid to take responsibility, he will become a mummy in the workplace over time, with no ideas of his own and only passively carrying out the tasks given by others.

02

Obedience is a kind of laziness

Obedience has a subtext: "Why bother to find work for yourself? "

It is a kind of laziness to choose to submit to authority when it contradicts the boss's ideas, to turn on the default system, to default to the boss's words being right, to be too lazy to think and to prove one's point of view.

Why is this so?

For example, if your boss thinks a certain headline is better, but in reality, you think another headline might be more appealing for readers to click on.

The obedient employee will often just go with the headline that the boss thinks is good, while the disobedient employee will throw different headlines out to various groups for people to vote on to prove their point.

But these actions are, in the opinion of the obedient employees, a way of "giving themselves a job".

In their view, when their ideas differ from their boss's, listening to him is a way to save effort and make him happy, but not listening to him is a kind of tossing and turning, and it's a lot of work.

Some people will say, my boss is not the kind of person who will listen to your advice, but you will find that if you want to convince your boss, you do not have to act very toughly, you can also make some tactics.

I have a friend who, when working on a proposal, encounters a situation where the proposal he has spent several all-nighters on turns out to be easily overruled by the leader for reasons that may just be unimportant minutiae.

This is because he finds that no matter how carefully he prepares, the leader has a habit of rejecting his first version of the proposal.

If he had been an obedient employee, he would have honestly followed his leader's ideas and suggestions and modified them anyway, but he didn't do that.

He figured out a way to make two copies of his operating plan each time he did it, one not so good and one prepared with his own heart.

When he submitted the proposal, he would first show the not-so-good one to the leader, and after it was rejected by the leader, he would wait for a day and then submit the second one that he had made with his heart.

And with this method, 90% of the time, the proposal will be approved.

Is it not a problem to make two proposals?

Of course, it's trouble, but obedient employees often stop at trouble, and disobedient employees often go beyond trouble.

03

Obedience is a form of incompetence

I know a friend who is a designer and always behaves "obediently" in the company, no matter who is telling her what to do with her designs.

One minute, this person asked her to change the base color, the next, that person thought the font was too ugly, and after revising several versions over and over again, the leader came back and said he thought the original colors looked better.

A group of people with no aesthetics and no knowledge of design could easily make her revise her work.

She thought she would have to work overtime every day to change the design, but instead she was considered by the leaders to have "no ideas of her own".

She felt particularly aggrieved.

But in fact, she was not to blame for the incident.

When a colleague made a bad suggestion or an opinion that went completely against aesthetics, her first reaction was not to refute him with her professionalism but to nod her head and say "yes".

When the leader came over and thought that the poster should be copied, she did not use her professionalism to explain why she chose the current layout and elements, but nodded her head and said "yes".

She thinks that listening is a form of professionalism, but in reality, listening is precisely a form of unprofessionalism.

Every "yes" is a compromise concession to her professionalism.

And each compromise and concession is in turn a diminution of one's professional authority.

I remember reading that in Japan, wives who are housewives reject their husbands' entire kitchen because they consider it an invasion of their territory and that only an innocent wife would let her husband come in and out of the kitchen and tell them what to do.

The same is true in the workplace, where everyone needs to have a sense of "territory", to be the most professional and authoritative in their territory and not to be invaded.

If we see work as a craft, what we need to do is to practice our craft well. A professional workplace perspective firmly defends his or her position and professionalism in his or her work territory.

A senior new media editor should have a bad headline, even if it was suggested by his boss.

A professional designer should have a paranoia about aesthetics and stick to the principles of beauty even when the client is telling him what to do.

The biography of Steve Jobs tells this story.

The Mac team, starting in 1981, would give an annual award to the person who was most courageous in the face of Steve Jobs.

One day, Jobs stormed into the cubicle of one of Atkinson's junior engineers and uttered his oft-repeated phrase: "This is shit."

It might have been difficult for an ordinary person at this time to confront Jobs' powerful aura head-on, but to his surprise the junior engine, er replied, "No, it's the best ."

So he explained to Jobs the engineering trade-offs he had made, and the result was that Jobs lost the battle.

On another occasion, Joanna Hoffman discovered that Jobs had changed her marketing plan "in a completely distorted way" without her consent.

She stormed into Jobs' office in a rage and told his assistant: "I'm going to stick a knife in his heart".

Strangely enough, Steve did not lash out but instead gave in after hearing what she said.

The professionalism people defied authority and held their ground, and instead of being fired, they gained respect.

Redefining the Company mentions a culture within Google of "don't listen to the hippopotamus", a reference to the habit of listening to the highest-paid person's opinion when making decisions in a company. The "hippo" may be your immediate supervisor or boss, who is a symbol of authority and whose opinion few people dare to contradict.

But the author also points out that "only the creative elite would dare to risk being trampled by a hippo in defense of quality and performance".

The so-called creative elite is the "brain defense that refuses to make any concessions or compromises on their professionalism, preferring to offend others rather than defend their profession.

Zhang Xiaolong once gave an eight-hour talk within Tencent on "The Product View Behind WeChat", in which he argued that one of the qualities that a great product experience should have is a responsible attitude.

To put it simply, being responsible means being committed to one's professionalism, so that one can "resist the pressure from superiors and performance reviews, and executoduct planning according to one's own will without distortion or compromise".

Of course, not all people are suitable for "disobedience", to do disobedient employees often have these three prerequisites:

One is the courage to dislike, that is, dare to put forwemployeeoss different views.

The second is the ability to dislike, that is, the ability to prove their point of view is right.

The third is to be able to dislike and to have the skill to get your boss to agree with you.

Only in this way can you become an employee who is needed by your boss, rather than an employee who does what he or she is told.