By Pranab Chakraborty, Senior Manager, Corporate Human Resources Development Team, Wipro Technologies
Harry is a young engineer who recently joined a company and is undergoing its orientation training program. Today he is going to attend some training on “Business Etiquette,” and he doesn’t know what to expect.
Once the facilitator enters the training hall, he greets everyone good morning and immediately suggests that everyone should go for a round of introductions. Harry realizes this is the usual ice-breaking part of the session. The faculty emphasizes that it should be brief and before anyone else may begin, he says, “I can go first.”
Then he starts, but what follows after that cannot be termed as “brief” introduction. “I have an overall experience of more than 25 years,” he says, stressing the word, “twenty-five.” “Some of you might not have even been born when I started my career.” Then with an air of supremacy, he talks about the depth and breadth of his experiences, the various awards, achievements, and accomplishments he has received so far. He continues with a few spectacular success stories from his personal life, as well.
Finally, he stops with a deep breath and with a sense of satisfaction concludes, “Friends, that is the summary of my profile!”
By the time the facilitator finishes, Harry feels there is nothing much to talk about himself. Later, he realizes the situation is more or less the same for every other person in the room. The whole introduction round eventually is reduced to a series of mumbled talks as the majority of the audience has lost the interest in sharing anything.
Examples of Subliminal Arrogance
What went wrong here? Is it because the participants lack confidence to speak? Or did the facilitator himself indirectly cause it?
A careful analysis would point out that the facilitator failed to detect a lapse in etiquette by inordinately stretching his self-introduction. In fact, one may go one step further and term this impropriety as nothing short of arrogance.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines arrogance as someone “having an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.” Although normally we associate arrogance with rudeness or haughtiness, there are times when we may unknowingly show arrogance simply by flaunting an extra sense of self-importance. These occurrences are so subtle that most people would not raise an objection or provide any feedback, but the damages can be considerable. The only way to avoid such lapses would be to constantly maintain a vigil on this type of behavior, a behavior that we may refer to as subliminal arrogance.
So what are some of the instances where one may demonstrate subliminal arrogance?
- Introducing yourself: This is the example we discussed above. Typically, when someone is leading a session, he or she may enjoy some sort of psychological immunity as no one else will call a time-out, and, thus, one may fail to understand where and when to stop.
- A member from the audience asks your favorite question: You are thoroughly prepared to handle a particular question. You anticipated it (or perhaps secretly wished for it) and now someone has asked it. Bingo! You start answering, and the more you speak, the more ideas and thoughts come into your mind. You feel the audience must be impressed with such details, whereas in reality, people might be desperately hoping you will stop so the discussion can move on to other relevant questions.
- A member from the audience shares a personal story: And you feel you have a much more compelling story to share—so the last word on any topic always must be yours. As a result, the audience may start thinking that you don’t appreciate their experiences and they also may lose the motivation of sharing such personal stories.
- Someone opposed your point of view: You consider yourself an authority on the subject being discussed. So you think you cannot allow your point of view to be proved wrong. You have to win all the arguments. If required, you may start making sarcastic remarks, gather verbal support from other audience members, and prove beyond a doubt that your point of view is the correct one. This can have a serious negative impact as everyone will stop voicing any more ideas or experiences due to the fear of being humiliated.
Best Practices to Help Avoid Pitfalls
- Be modest: Prepare a script for an introduction that takes less than two minutes to articulate. As much as possible, avoid speaking about the awards you received and instead focus on your experiences and the learning that are relevant to the context. The idea is not to show how “great” you are but how committed you are on the topic of the session or discussion.
- Avoid lengthy monologues: Research data indicate that the average attention span of an adult in a session is around 9 to 10 minutes. So do not get stuck on a particular idea for more than 10 minutes, however passionate you may be about that concept. Avoid lengthy monologues and invite discussions. If there is a variety of contradictory ideas floating around that are not converging to a consensus, park the question or issue and move on.
- Make basic process checks on the session: Check at appropriate intervals whether participants are able to follow you: “Is the pace of the session OK or do you want me to go faster or slower?” “Can you all hear me?”) or whether they are with you on the flow (“Am I making sense or do you have any counter-view?” etc. Also, try to continuously gauge how actively participants are listening to you and determine whether majority of them are maintaining eye contacts with you or not.
- Keep a lively environment: Even when you are talking about deep concepts or discussing data points, do not make the environment very serious or heavy. Plan for humor, have light conversations, or get into small talks with the team once in a while to maintain a balance.
Apart from these measures, also reach out to close friends, colleagues, or family members to seek direct feedback and understand if there are detectable lapses in behaviors. The basic underlying principle is to accept that our behaviors are not always perfect. Once we accept it, we can reflect on our actions, find the gaps, and take corrective measures.
Pranab Chakraborty is a senior manager in the Corporate Human Resources Development team of Wipro Technologies. He has been associated with the IT industry for the last 19 years during which time he gained extensive expertise in client engagement, program management, and delivery management roles. He is passionate about contextualization of learning using practical experience. He can be reached at pranab.chakraborty@wipro.com.
