Business

How to spot random people ‘setting it up’ at work

“This is going to be quite special,” teased the Australian reporter Instagram post. How right he was. Traveling with the television crew to interview British pop star Adele, he discovered too late that he had missed an email containing a preview of her new album, 30. Talking about the album was the whole reason for their meeting. “This is the most important email I have ever overlooked,” he said. The interview has been completed.

The story emerged on the same day Boris Johnson delivered a speech that appeared to be about the UK’s creative industries with CBI, the UK’s largest group of employers. Instead, he loses his place in his note – begging “forgive me” – and moves on to talking about Peppa Pig. I’m no expert in public speaking, but asking your audience for forgiveness can be a mistake.

As examples of getting it going, both failed spectacularly, criticized for being unprofessional and disrespectful. We have all attended meetings, viewed panels or watched speeches where participants were lying, failing to do their homework. Some (many?) of us may have even been scammers.

Its wings are attractive. It’s a lot less work, for starters. And it might seem glamorous: turning its doers into humans instead of robots, in line with business trends for the sake of authenticity. A few people can actually do it.

However, beware of wing fakers (FW). Anyone who has ever attended school will be all too familiar with someone kicking an exam claiming to have not studied at all, hiding the fact that they studied hard. Falling on an FW swing is a mistake that can land you on your back.

A classic FW tool is spontaneity. It looks easy but can be hard work. I called up an FW friend I knew from college, where he would procrastinate by evaluating different cookies. Today he is a senior attorney. Unsurprisingly, he leaves the cookies behind and prepares for cases with rehearsed arguments, detailed strategies and answers, piles of notes, including key questions. The jokes and analogies seem to have been made on the spot, to engage the audience. “You have to work harder if you want to cheat,” he says.

Another friend prepares for sports stars to appear on television. He works with two athletes (it’s frustrating, he won’t name names and is embarrassing) who have very different attitudes. One put the job and appeared fluent and natural in press conferences, the other made no effort and tried to clumsily and inaccurately express the words he had been fed.

Chaos is Johnson’s schtick. One-time broadcaster Jeremy Vine Written an interesting post about watching the prime minister prepare for his after-dinner speech by jotting down a few random notes just as he was about to take the stage and then forgetting half the joke. Only to see him do exactly the same thing – and the same speech – in a different function. In many cases the prime minister seems to be a classic FW.

Those at the peak of their professional game can be allowed to run on the right wing, with little preparation as they already have experience. But as demonstrated by the recent performance of Johnson (apparently a case of genuine winger) and interviewer Adele, there’s no reason for an experienced professional not to cover the basics. copy.

It’s hard to distinguish real from fake wingers. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organizational psychologist who has studied confidence, says that we are not very good at measuring performance, either in ourselves or in others. And, as he puts it, “the worse you are, the worse you rate your performance.” (In other words, Dunning Kruger function.)

One of the paradoxes of the modern world of work, says Chamorro-Premuzic, is that “the more complex, skilled, and well-paid your work is, the harder it is for others to see if you’re doing it well.” . In other words, higher complexity makes performance harder to gauge.

Overconfident people often end up with too little work: they can get it done, but they most likely won’t. “Less confidence can enhance performance because it means you prepare and learn,” Chamorro-Premuzic points out. That for all the anxious people out there (like me) is a huge consolation.

emma.jacobs@ft.com

Pilita Clark is away

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