Fighting Back Against Tech Bully Techniques

 A new book, Robin Hood Math, gives practical examples and… What a fun and helpful read! If you’ve paid attention to many of the social media and online search/buying scandals, you’ll be familiar with what Giansiracusa details in this book. If you’ve thought about better ways to spend time on (or avoid) social media apps, many of the recommendations will feel like common sense to you. But you will learn more about how to shop better, scroll better and be less anxious by what’s being “fed” to you because of some choices and actions you’ve made. Similarly, you’ll learn more about finances and how to interpret other people’s analyses—and do your own perhaps to calm some medical scares. Polling may make sense. Risk assessments will make more sense. And the author teaches you how to do a lot of this on your own if you want.

Very helpful suggestions in each chapter come after example stories and a breakdown of what’s happening “behind the scenes.” While the stories are illustrative, many are long—which you can skim if you want to accelerate to the gist of the chapters—and some concepts/points in the argument are repetitive. The repetition isn’t all bad as most of us need repetition for lessons to sink in. 

While this book describes the state of the art “today,” tech-related scenarios will change as companies continue to adapt their algorithms to altered priorities and regulations. This book, however, will give you some ways to look for the changes, take stock of the changes and adapt your usages and decision-making as well.

I’m appreciative of the publisher providing an advanced copy.

Cultural Communication and Trust in the Workplace

 A new book, Talk to Me Nice, has some interesting insights. This book reads as a conversation between you and the author, Minda Harts, as she outlines and describes the aspects and obstacles to building trust in the workplace. Yes, trust is important; it’s the foundation for all other efforts, especially engagement/motivation, personnel development, strategic buy-in and so on. Without it, many efforts are just viewed as manipulative.

Harts describes her advice as trust languages; sensitivity, security, transparency, feedback, authenticity, acknowledgement, etc. This framework might be slightly different than what you may have seen as dimensions of trust; competency, integrity, openness, vulnerability, reliability/dependability are the main ones. As the author goes through her aspects, she gives multiple examples and provides survey questions, self-reflection points, checklists, practical steps in order to build trust. If you’re looking for a way to augment or improve mutual trust, trustworthiness in your teams and organizations, there are some guides in this book.

While the languages are helpful and necessary in every workplace, I believe, I’m not sure if they are the stimuli for trust-building or the result of having built trust and then working on keeping the team aligned and motivated. Harts admits there are values such as mutual respect, maintaining dignity and such that start trust. Each person needs to start with a choice of believing the other person(s) is trustworthy or not. If they start with the stance that the other has to prove themselves trustworthy, no amount of trust language will convince them otherwise. Any slip, error, unfiltered moment will sabotage any trust built. Any “compliance” with sensitivity and so on will be viewed as just being politically correct (PC) or inauthentic obedience to the corporate “law.” Whereas, if the choice is believing the other is trustworthy, these languages will enforce that belief. 

Likewise, while Harts shows different people with different wants/needs (such as how they want to be recognized), it seems the assumption that each person wants all of these languages “spoken” in equal amounts. Often on teams, you have to learn and discern who needs you to be reliable, who needs you to exhibit strong integrity, who needs you to be open and vulnerable, who needs to feel accepted… In the framework of this book, some may want more security while others want more sensitivity or acknowledgement. This might need a whole chapter in the book: how to balance competing needs with a team, department, organization.

This is not a bad place to start if you’ve haven’t thought about how to raise trust in your organization from a 4 to a 6, or an 8 to a 9.

I’m appreciative of the publisher sharing an advance copy of this book.