Perception, deception, or misconception?

Frank Butler 0:00
Do you think your boss stinks, but your co-workers love him? Or do you think all babies are cute? Or is it just your baby? We discuss perceptions in this episode of the Busyness Paradox. Hello Busybodies. Welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey. 

Paul Harvey 0:34
Good day.

Frank Butler 0:35
And on today's episode, we're going to discuss perceptions. Much like our opening questions, we are going to talk about how perceptions really just inform your reality. 

Paul Harvey 0:46
Perception is reality. It's a cliche kind of statement, but it's very true. Until proven otherwise, what we perceive to be real, we assume to be real. problem is we don't all perceive the same thing.

Frank Butler 0:59
That's very true.

Paul Harvey 1:00
My baby, for example, was in fact, the most adorable baby ever born in the state of New Hampshire. Like that's objectively true. But you know, there's other people in the state who thought their babies were the more adorable ones. And you know, perception is a powerful thing.

Frank Butler 1:19
perceptions are a powerful thing. This is a topic that truly influences nearly every facet of one's life. And your perceptions are going to be based on the experiences that you have had. And a lot of other influences that have gone on, things that you've read, things that you've watched, things that you've seen, experiences, they're going to all shape perceptions,

Paul Harvey 1:43
nearly everything we talked about in this show, nearly every difficult situation that arises in the workplace, can be traced back to differences in perceptions.

Frank Butler 1:54
I think that's spot on. You know, we could talk about this in a variety of different ways. We could start with food, for example, some people think that the quality of McDonald's is better than that of Wendy's. Or some people think that Ruth Chris is better than Smith and Wollensky or whatever, Coke versus Pepsi, there are strong, strong opinions about that, or Ford versus Chevy,

Paul Harvey 2:19
where, to in an uninterested, objective, outsider, they might not even realize there's a difference between the two things. But you see these very, very strong, like you said, opinions and perceptions, about which is better.

Frank Butler 2:33
Exactly. And of course, perceptions of quality thing in cars, for example, some people think that German marks like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, are all higher quality, and others view them as over engineered and expensive, and will break and if they need repairs are expensive to repair. Is that accurate? For some people? Yes.

Paul Harvey 2:56
Well, you could say that that is accurate. But different people are focusing in on different attributes, and weighing them more heavily or weighing certain attributes more heavily than others. Yeah.

Frank Butler 3:09
Yeah. And I can see it right. If you're making, let's say, $45,000 a year, and you will get a BMW that cost $40,000. And it's used, and then you have a $5,000 repair bill on that, to that person. That's a lot of money.

Paul Harvey 3:27
That's a lot of money to most to everyone, I think.

Frank Butler 3:29
Yeah, absolutely. But my counterpoint would be if somebody is making $500,000,

Paul Harvey 3:34
I got you,

Frank Butler 3:35
and they have to spend $5,000 on that repair, they're not going to be as negative toward that they're not going to have that perception of Oh, my gosh, this is a crappy car, it's so expensive, they're still going to probably perceive that as it's a great car, it's worth that money to invest in it to make sure it's working properly. Because of what it does for them,

Paul Harvey 3:54
they might still come to that conclusion, they might still have that perception, but it's less likely, right? The same information going into the, to the gray matter, but it's being processed differently.

Frank Butler 4:05
Exactly. And that's what it is. That's the whole idea of this episode, we want to talk about different variants of this idea of perceptions and see how it's applied or used in different areas or different contexts. And at the end of day, really to show that you have to be open minded. And we'll talk more about that as we work through this episode a bit more. I think another great example or going back to that opening examples. The kid one, right? Some people think all babies are ugly, except for their own. I mean, I've heard people say this before. And now my wife and I don't have kids. My wife does think some kids are cute. I tend to not think kids are cute, my friends, kids are all cute. We'll just go with that. They're all my favorite. I think they're going to be great human beings because they're my friends kids. So they're adorable. But at the same time, I don't think that I have that same reaction of Oh, they're cute in the sense Some people have a traditional sense of, oh, they're cute. Right? I don't know how to put that any differently. I like my friends’ kids, because they’re my friends’ kids.

Paul Harvey 5:07
Yeah, different perceptions. And the fact that if you legitimately think your friends’ kids are more physically cute than non-friends’, kids well that’s an example of perception, right there…what do we call that it's not proximity effect. But one of the many, many social, social perceptual biases that have been identified, is that if you, you have a favorable opinion of someone, you tend to have favorable opinions of things surrounding that person. You know, take for example, is, if you're listening to this show, how many of you have someone in your immediate family who was fired from a job for a good reason? Now, how many of you know someone who's not in your immediate family that was hired, sorry, fired for a good reason? This was one of my kind of opening forays into this the study of perception. So you always hear these stories of like, the wrongly fired, you know, the tragic, is treated so unfairly, and it's just fired for stupid reasons. You only hear that from people who are, you know, friends, or family members of those people? What are the odds that everyone I know, doesn't know anyone in you know, in their families or their close friends, was just bad at their job and got fired for legitimately good reason. Part of my motivation, and that little anecdote is, maybe that one didn't hit the mark for you. But it's important to realize, again, if you're listening to this show, you have perceptual biases, the world you see, is not 100% accurate. For example, there's roughly 95% likelihood that you take more credit for the good things in your life than you really should we call self serving bias. So when good things happen to you, you think, well, it's because I work hard, because I'm good at my job or an ethical person. And sure, hopefully, that's all true. But there's probably some other stuff. luck, perhaps was part of the bargain. Similarly, when things go, not so well, if you family member gets fired from a job, it's because your boss didn't like you, or your co workers are sabotaging you, or it was bad luck. It's not always the conclusions we come to, but we're kind of tuned to go that way, sort of protect our own sense of self a little bit. So that's self serving bias. Studies all over the world, different cultures, different time periods, about 95% of the human population is a little bit biased in that regard. Not like superduper, you know, takes credit for everything good in the world, and never accept blame. Those people are, are out there. We're not talking about that level of bias. But just that that slight level of self serving bias, we almost all have it. And it's generally viewed as a psychologically healthy thing.

Frank Butler 8:02
Unless you have imposter syndrome, I guess that would be one of those conditions in which they probably view that outcome as being not attributable to themselves. Maybe,

Paul Harvey 8:13
yeah, that would kind of be the reverse. There's a name for that, too. We got pessimistic attribution style, where we don't take enough credit for the things we should take credit for.

Frank Butler 8:22
Whereas I think the other end is the narcissistic side of it. Right?.

Paul Harvey 8:26
Yeah. Yeah.

Frank Butler 8:27
It's interesting.

Paul Harvey 8:27
Depends what type of narcissism and yeah, grandiose narcissism is, yeah.

Frank Butler 8:32
very interesting. There's so much in there, folks, I think that's the key we're trying to get at is that we're all unique. Our experiences are unique, the way we perceive the same experience is going to be different. I mean, two people can be sitting in the same exact classroom. And they're going to have very different experiences with that class

Paul Harvey 8:52
We should read some of our teaching evaluations, these two students are actually in the same class.

Frank Butler 9:00
I tell you what I get   I'll get this because I don't use it's funny because I, I don't really use PowerPoint, except as a guide for my undergraduate class. And I'll have students who say that I use in PowerPoint too much. And I'm like, okay, I don't actually read the slides. I use them as a framework for the examples I'm about to give. And then I'll have students who say, I don't use slides enough. And I'm like, which, which way do you get right? It's confusing.

Paul Harvey 9:28
Too much group work, not enough group work, everything. Every class pace is too fast. It's too slow. in the same classroom, same time. 

Frank Butler 9:34
It's amazing. I think that's what's so important to understand. People are all going to perceive things differently. And we got to be mindful that in some way, if you want to be a manager, or if you're working in a group project, or if you're going to be on a team, you've got to come to a consensus in a lot of cases. So one of the things that we do in project management is we talk about the importance of debrief. And that's one of those things that you can start sharing, understanding, very powerful tool to help you get into that idea of Okay, we all brought in our perceptions of what happened. Let's talk about that. And let's find a consensus, where we can all go, okay, we'd always share a collective understanding of what others experience and sort of what the truth of it might be. And I use truth kind of loosely, in that sense, we can always agree on what the event led to, even though we all had different perspectives on it.

Paul Harvey 10:30
And that is about the best, arguably, one of the best tools we have to counteract our own perceptual biases is to get as many other people's opinions on the same thing as possible. So when you're doing a performance evaluation, if you have a supervisor, evaluating an employee, but also get feedback from co workers of that employee, and customers of that employee, and whoever else interacts with that person, odds are that everyone's going to have their own slightly skewed perceptions. But they should all more or less cancel each other out. So that group debrief is a good example of that using kind of a group consensus not to get necessarily to the 100% objective truth, but hopefully to get closer to it than you would get by yourself.

Frank Butler 11:15
Right. Exactly. And I think there's a lot that we probably recognize as being perceptual in nature, but don't often think about it, right. It's not something that tends to be at the forefront of people's minds as they're going through. But I mean, how many times have you heard beauty is in the eye of the beholder? That's something that you hear a lot? Well, that's because it's basically saying, beauty is your own perception. What you think is beautiful, is going to vary from person to person. I know that what I find beautiful is going to be different than what Paul finds beautiful,

Paul Harvey 11:48
like the bezel on the watch. Oh, yes, years ago on the smooth bezel versus a

Frank Butler 11:54
smooth bezel versus the fluted bezel

Paul Harvey 11:56
fluted bezel. On a watch.

Frank Butler 11:58
I'm a fluted man, I like the fluted bezel

Paul Harvey 11:59
Smooth bezel guy. backstory is that Frank pointed out a watch when he came to visit me in Budapest, and I decided I must have it but, we both thought it was a gorgeous watch, but Frank couldn't understand why I would want the smooth bezel version. That's the I guess everyone knows what bezels are nowadays, because it comes up with the monitors, it’s the ring around the face of the watch. So I like the smooth look. Frank likes the wavy rippled fluted bezel

Frank Butler 12:26
I do is just something that I just love that little extra glint that happens when the light hits

Paul Harvey 12:31
that glint is nice. Yeah.

Frank Butler 12:34
But that's it. That's a great example. And that's why you see companies will make variants of the same product. If everybody had the same tastes. Apple wouldn't have just released a bunch of iMacs in, what, six or seven different colors?

Paul Harvey 12:47
Yeah, seven colors.

Frank Butler 12:49
That's something that wouldn't happen.

Paul Harvey 12:51
Flipside is those phones are like, they've really homogenized the smartphone market. But you could argue that our for whatever reason, our perceptions don't vary as much in regard to those things.

Frank Butler 13:04
Exactly. And that's a great example of it. I mean, we see it on the product side all the time. And this is why we have different brands designing products to look relatively the same. I mean, if you look at cars these days, I feel like they've kind of homogenized as well. But they still try to do things that make them stand out from the others in that whether it's colors, or whether it's certain design elements. And then of course, some specialty cars as you get into certain areas where they just retain their own brand identity, the Porsche 911 looks like the Porsche and Porsche 911 has always looked just been updated through time, but that's because they have a certain demographic that really appreciate that style and that look and what have you

Paul Harvey 13:46
very similar example…almost redundant it's so similar, that’s my Ford Ranger, the 2011, Ford Ranger that actually went up in value in resale value when the new Ford Rangers came out. Oh, because they changed the look of them. And people, some people out there said, Oh, no, I thought the new Rangers when they came back on the market, were going to look like the old Rangers, but they don't look like Rangers. So I'm gonna go get a used Ranger.

Frank Butler 14:10
Well, you know, it's funny, I had the similar experience. I had a Corvette for a little bit of time. And it was just a car I couldn't bond with in the same way as I felt like I should have. But it was a C six. So that's the sixth generation of Corvette. And it had the round tail light still and, and Corvette had released or at least, they were starting to tour around their new c seven. So at that time, it was right before the release of the seventh generation, but people were all up in arms about the taillights on the C seven they got more trapezoidal in nature looked a bit more like the Camaro. But you know, it's that theme is the Chevrolet branding through those sports cars, right? So the Camaro and the Corvette share similar style, but they're at least designed for that product. Now, I personally thought the C seven looked amazing. But people were like, Oh no, the C seven is not for me. It doesn't have route round two. Let's, which was an odd one, because I think like the C four didn't have around tear lights and square ones. And I don't know, it's just this weird, you know, thing that people get sort of obsessive about. And that's fine. You know, it's part of the idea of loving a brand and sort of being passionate about it. And I think that's a good thing that's healthy. I think there's healthy passion in there.

Paul Harvey 15:18
perceptual differences make life interesting. If we all saw everything the same…which is why it's so enjoyable to travel and experience other cultures, I think, because not only do us see things that you don't normally see, and that whole side of things, but I think it's one of the best ways to become aware of your own perceptual tendencies is to go somewhere where your way of thinking is not the as much the norm. You say “you know, I never really thought about that.” It's not a given that…

Frank Butler 15:47
 you just get tap water if you ask for water?

Paul Harvey 15:49
Right? Yeah, thank you.

Frank Butler 15:50
I mean, that one's a big one to me,

Paul Harvey 15:52
or ice cubes in everything you drink at a restaurant. You know, it doesn't need to be that cold does it? I have sensitive teeth. I've been like living in pain my whole life up until some point, and hey, they drink like warm water and soda and stuff. That is an option, isn't it? I never thought of that.

Frank Butler 16:09
You know, we're so used to if you ordered just water at a restaurant here in the States, you're going to get tap water, it's probably gonna be filled up with a bunch of ice and is going to be tap water. And it's free. Now, if you go to Germany, and other places in Europe, you go, Hey, I want some water. They're gonna ask you the question of do you want it with gas? Or bubbly? Or still or without bubbles?

Paul Harvey 16:29
The correct answer is with bubbles.

Frank Butler 16:31
Correct answer is with bubbles

Paul Harvey 16:33
Objectively. That's not a perceptual thing. Just the truth.

Frank Butler 16:36
I have a lot of people who disagree with that. But I personally also like bubbles, but the whole thing is interesting about is that both of those are not free, you actually have to specifically ask for tap water. In Germany, for example, most of the world, I think, outside of the US, or inside North America. And then there's some places in the world who don't want tap water because of where you are. But that's a whole different topic. But that's the thing is there's some things like this, I think another great example is we're so indoctrinated with free refills, here, Oh, I got an iced tea, or I've got a Coke Zero or a Pepsi, whatever it is. And the moment it gets to halfway empty, I got a waiter or waitress filling it back up for me. And it's the bottomless pit of deliciousness. Like me, for example, I will consume a lot more of it, and is sitting, because it is being constantly filled up. Oh, dear god, yes. But in Germany, when I'm there, I know that I need to be, I need to pace myself more. But then also, there's the idea of I'm not getting free refills. German beer is quite delicious. And it's about the same price as the coke. Now it's becoming a toss up. In I think that's another thing, right? It's like, that's those perception that of course, as you were saying, it made me think differently about how I have an intake of soft drinks here. That's a that's not a bad thing, right. And we have different perceptions of the quality of food, like I, I tend to think that the food quality is higher in European countries, and is here in the States, I attribute it to things like fewer preservatives, because the domain of how far products are being shipped is much smaller. And you know.

Paul Harvey 18:18
That took some getting used to for me when I first moved to Hungary, and I like buy food at the store. And two days later, you know, apples would be like rotting and bread would have mold on it. So this is what food normally does. What are we putting on our food that you can buy a loaf of bread and like six months later, it's just the same.

Frank Butler 18:35
That's so big, right? It's that man, I think this is a great example of it, talking about cultures. The idea is that, and I'll use Germany because I lived there for a while. And I've got a good reference point there. And people tend to shop every other day for food products, breads, cheeses, meats, because it doesn't last very long. I mean, you go buy rolls that morning, the next day, they're not going to be good anymore. They go bad. They're they're not made with preservatives to keep them intact for weeks at a time as we have here in our foods. And that's an interesting thing, right that that happens. And so that, that changes your mindset a little bit, thinking about what are you putting into your body? In some cases, sometimes you don't care enough. So I mean, I love our bread here.

Paul Harvey 19:21
Really? I don't like American bread, store bought, like the sliced stuff. I never…eh

Frank Butler 19:26
honey wheat man. That's where it's at.

Paul Harvey 19:31
Well my perception is different.

Frank Butler 19:32
Exactly. I think that's a case in point. But it's those perceptions that change the way we deal with designing products or selling products right. And kind of going back to the automotive example. European cities are much older, they were oftentimes erected during the time of carriages and horses and such. So the rows aren't quite as wide quite often, or they've had tram lines installed and the cars were not quite there the same way. So the city roads aren't designed to handle bigger vehicles. So you don't see a lot of giant pickup trucks, like you do here in the states are giant SUVs. They're much more compact vehicles frequently. But it's not the only reason why you see that either gas, there's literally like four times the price of what we pay here for a gallon. So you want something that's going to be economical at the same time. But then there's also how they buy cars. You know, Volkswagens one of my favorite brands, just in general. But the Volkswagen that they make for the US, the facade in the Atlas that they make for the US for North American market, is not the same quality, perceived quality, mind you, as the European made Volkswagen sold for the European markets. And they cost a lot more. And part of that's because of what our perceptions of quality are for cars, you know, the Americans tend to hold on to their vehicles much shorter time than the Europeans do. The Europeans plan on holding on their cards, usually a decade or more. So they're willing to pay more for a car that's going to hold up. Whereas Case in point, if you ever go buy a 1990s, or early 2000s, Chevrolet product, they're in tears start looking rough after about six, seven years, because the average American wasn't owning the car for quite that long. And so they would decay much more quickly. Because the average, at that time, the average ownership length was about five, maybe six years. So we were turning over our vehicles there, they didn't need be built to the same level of durability, build the perceptions of your market, right, exactly that spot on. So that's the reasons why you see things are done differently in different places. It's part of the national culture of the people, it's part of their, you know, regional cultures that can be there. So a lot of this stuff is very much related. And it changes your thoughts on things. But I think what's key is that having these experiences and being more aware of it makes you think differently about other activities, you might do

Paul Harvey 22:00
It generalizes to all sorts of every aspect of your life literally, right, when you realize that something that you've just taken to be a given is, in fact, just your perception of that thing. And the dominoes just start falling. Like, what else have I not? You know, what else did I start questioning about the way I see the world? And what are the implications of that? It's kind of fun. It's interesting.

Frank Butler 22:19
I agree. What else have I closed my mind off to? Yes, yes. And really mistakenly. So

Paul Harvey 22:26
without ever being aware that you're doing so.

Frank Butler 22:28
Right. And without questioning, I think that's another thing. And this goes back to, it's okay to change your mind. This is the one thing that this should do these kinds of changes and perceptions should help influence you to change your mind, you could become maybe more entrenched in your belief system as a result of experiences. That's okay. But a lot of times what it does is it makes you question what your belief pattern was, and makes you more open minded to things. But more importantly, I think what it does is it makes you more open to differences. And that openness to differences is what really starts changing your attitude, and how you interact with others. And if you can get to that point, that's what really I think starts separating good managers from great managers.

Paul Harvey 23:18
That's a good way of looking at it. And the track record of American managers in expatriating, to work in other countries has been fairly abysmal over the years. I don't know what the current stats on this are. But at least around 10 years ago, our average was something in the less than 50% success rate. Meaning that if you had a man, an American manager, go to another country, like you did in Germany, over in Asia, whatever to manage something over their manufacturing plant and office, whatever, slightly more than half the time, that American manager would come back sooner than expected, because it just wasn't working out over there. And it can almost always be traced back to them just not knowing what the question we are going to Asian culture and trying to do like an employee of the month or something, you know, singling people out for praise or even worse criticism in front of other people, you know, face saving all this stuff, stuff that we just sort of assumed that's how you manage people in the US. Nope, it's actually very offensive, or at least very ineffective in other parts of the world to do some of these things. That's part of the fun of traveling too is you often learn about these things the hard way. Every time you commit a really embarrassing cultural foe PA, it's usually something to do with a perception you never even realized was the perception. Exactly. I love that movie. gungho By the way, from the 80s. Remember Michael Keaton. Oh, yeah, actually based on loosely based on is that true story of that NUMMI car plant out in California. That's quite a thing in itself. But I've taken the showing at the end of my Organizational Behavior courses. So everything we just did the whole semester talk About they get to Japan, everything's totally different. So you've got the Japanese executives taking over a car plant in the US and this is the US of the 80s. So the car plan was just turning out complete junk. You got the individualism versus more collectivism. So the the Japanese managers not understanding why the American workers weren't like taking pride in the in the company had no like sense of what do you call that like collective esteem or anything and the American employees not understanding why the Japanese managers were going on about this stuff. We mean care about the company like having a union out girl that it doesn't take a whole lot of analysis to kind of understand why each cultural difference existed. But you know, all the humor in that movie comes from the fact that both sides were so ignorant of the other culture, that they were just constantly putting their foot in their mouth and things like that.

Frank Butler 25:51
I'm surprised it wasn’t office space that you show in ob.

Paul Harvey 25:54
So…so vulgar. I used to not ever do it, because just used to be like every college kid seen that movie 100 times. That's not really the case anymore. It's getting older now.

Frank Butler 26:05
I used it in my graduate ob class when I was teaching Yeah. It changed people's perceptions going to the OB class and then watching that movie, because it could really then see, like, what you were teaching them, right, like the lessons they were learning, but the movie I use is outsourced? It's very similar in that sense. Yeah. So it's an American guy going to India. That's a great movie. And there's a TV show built around. And most people probably know the TV show, but I encourage you to watch the movie actually find the movie to be spectacularly done. Great. Acting 

Paul Harvey 26:35
Yeah I wasn't such a big fan of the TV show. Yeah, it was awesome.

Frank Butler 26:39
Yes, the movie was fantastic. Anyway, so that's, that's in there in a lot of that the perceptions, right? what we perceive is right, going to India, finding McDonald's, it's not going to be serving hamburger. Does that make a difference? Does that make it bad? No, it's different. But is that a problem? That's their perceptions is how they perceive the world and what they believe in? Does that make them wrong? No. It doesn’t.

Paul Harvey 27:01
Anytime you find yourself saying that's weird, like how they do it is weird. That's a good red flag that you're the one who is shut your mind off to something that right? You're the one that's being weird because you don't get what's normal to someone else.

Frank Butler 27:15
Right, exactly. I think that's a great, great point there. And we talked about it, we had the whiskey episode where we talked about the whiskey scale, that's all about perceptions, right? How do you perceive your manager, some people perceive their actions as abusive, whereas others don't. And it's all based on your own personal characteristics. And that's something that, again, being mindful of these things, being aware that there might be some own of your own implicit bias of some former, your way of perceiving things, and you're seeing others are not perceiving in the same way, something to consider in that process.

Paul Harvey 27:52
And that's the key thing. If your boss is actively punching you in the face, it's probably not your own perception. That's no no informing things at that point. But like Frank said, if your coworkers don't see things the same way you do. That's kind of interesting. I think it's always worth asking yourself, I think my boss is being mean to me, try to put yourself in someone else's shoes, say, if this was somebody else, would I still think they're being mean to that person? Or they think, Oh, no, they're being giving honest feedback?

Frank Butler 28:23
Well, and I think going down that line, too, there are cases where the boss might have selected somebody out, and is being mean to that single person. So it's key to triangulate your experiences with others. Hey, has the boss said this to you? Good point. And how did you respond to that? And just find that out? Right? Because I mean, in some cases, sure. I mean, it's when you're in the classroom, it's hard not to have a teacher's pet kind of idea, right? Somebody that, you know, is going to be always prepared that you're able to call on what have you. And you don't want to always look at that person be like, okay, we know that always prepared, because what happens when they're not prepared that one time? And then you call on them? It's not the best thing, right? I mean, he's kind of lets you down, it lets them down. And, or they could use that maybe to exploit you in some way to in another way. It's like, Oh, I can't take the test day I'm sick. And you're like, oh, you're such a great student.

Paul Harvey 29:13
I'm okay with that. I tell students after a semester is over something that that works. being the one who like always raises their hand, I will hook that student up if the opportunity arises, because there is just nothing worse than dead air in the classroom. I Please someone get this like conversation started.

Frank Butler 29:32
Right? I agree. Yeah.

Paul Harvey 29:34
But that's perception, management and action. It does work. It does. If it's done properly, and

Frank Butler 29:40
well, if there's authenticity to it, I think that there's authenticity, if you're authentically involved, if you enjoy the material, if you're reading it, not just because you want to be seen as the smartest person in the room or the teacher's pet, but rather, you're preparing and it's obvious you're trying to do what's best for you.

Paul Harvey 29:58
And the same is true in the workplace. Then, yes, there's a difference between this the flagrant kiss up to the boss and, you know, it's the reliable stand up employees can always be counted on.

Frank Butler 30:09
And all this comes back then to sort of the name of our podcast to the buisiness paradox, right buisiness. And buisiness in itself is a form of perception management. And that's something that can influence the way others perceive you. Some people are going to perceive that as very negative, oh, that person is just trying to suck up to the boss constantly, by always trying to do X, Y, and Z or what have you. whereas others are like looking at it going, I need to be doing that stuff in order to get in good favor with the boss. So that way, maybe I can get the same perks or whatever. And people will start burning the candle from both ends. And next thing you realize you're burned out, you hate your job, life sucks and whatever.

Paul Harvey 30:55
Or you're just bored out of your mind, acting busy, not stressing yourself out in the conventional sense. But as we've discussed before, that's a kind of a hell all its own, trying to give off the impression of buisiness. Because you want to be perceived as busy. That is perception management. That's what this whole whole episode is about. We've mostly talked about being on the receiving end of things, but just as often, we're trying to influence the perceptions of others. I mean, go on a first date. And yeah. Do you dress the way that you normally dress that day? Do you act the same way you act with your friends? No, you probably act differently. Yep. Like you said, as long as you're not being inauthentic about it. It's not a bad thing. But it's just to kind of put things in perspective. That's what you're doing your low grade perception management.

Frank Butler 31:49
Yep, exactly. And that comes back to also now with the work from home situation, right? First and foremost, the idea of we talked about in the past, how do you generate the same perceptions of being involved in making sure you get your job done, you know, in certain environments, when you're in work from home, but I think, really what we haven't gotten into as much as how people perceive working from home in the first place, there seems to be a really huge divide between people who are so ready to go back to the office, versus those who are wanting this to continue long after the pandemic is over. And what's interesting, I think somebody had said to me, they had seen the stat that upwards of 90% of CD CEOs would like to see people back in the office. But I think the employee numbers far lower than that.

Paul Harvey 32:41
And it's not zero either.

Frank Butler 32:43
It's not zero

Paul Harvey 32:43
Depends… It depends on a lot of things, the personality of different employees, what the workplace culture is, like, what their coworkers are, like, what they actually do for a job, all these things, go into the equation, and on what comes out on the other end is your perceptions, who you are as a person who what you do as a job, who you do your job with all these things, combined together to influence these perceptions. But we don't think about that when we're having these conversations is so and so doesn't want to work at home anymore. They want to go back to the office, what the hell's wrong with that person? Well, nothing's probably wrong with them. They have they maybe they're they have a different personality or different coworkers or a different type of job, that for them, it's better to, to go back to wherever they used to do their job.

Frank Butler 33:26
Right. And that's it, right? It's all these different scenarios that we've talked about. And there's so many more. I mean, it's been probably years talking about perceptions on different things and what have you. But the reality is that, what I think we try to get you guys to do, or what we want you all to do, is to just take a moment, and try to think about why you think something's the way it is when others disagree with you. Does that mean you're wrong? No. It's just trying to be open minded as to why

Paul Harvey 34:01
you could be wrong,

Frank Butler 34:03
you could be wrong,

Paul Harvey 34:03
or you could both be right

Frank Butler 34:05
And that's it too, right? Because sometimes when we argue things, or when we have disagreements over things, we are both wrong in the context we're arguing about. But when you start comparing similar variables of some whatever it might be, oh, we're really talking sideways about some things, right? And then we get into these ideas of miscommunication and what have you, but there are those times but that doesn't that it does come from perceptions. It's like, okay, you get an argument with your significant other there, right, you're right, in some cases, but it's because you're probably are you about the same thing, but in different ways. So that, that is the case,

Paul Harvey 34:39
or you're putting different weight on different variables.

Frank Butler 34:42
Exactly. And that's the other big one, right? Like your car example at the beginning. right in. So those are the things that at least be more aware of and go okay. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means that you need to probably look at how can I expand my understanding of a situation and identify What variables are what characteristics are causing people to see this differently from me? And how would that then change my perspective on something? Not easy to do. It’s not. 

Paul Harvey 35:11
preparing for this episode, I tried to sit there and think of something that I've never questioned. It's not, it's not easy to think of something that you, because perception is our reality. That's why coming back to travel again, I think, I think the best way to expand your perceptual, maybe that's not the way to put it, to take down your perceptual barriers, and fix a lot of your perceptual biases is to travel when we're able to do so again.

Frank Butler 35:38
Yeah, and it doesn't have to be like international either. No, I mean, if you're outside of New York City, a lot of people look at New York City and go, man, I'll hear nothing but bad things about those people. And I encourage you to go to New York City or something like that, and go hang out there for a little bit and experience it. And I think you'll find that it's not necessarily that people are mean, as a lot of times as they've been characterized as it's not. their lifestyles are very different. I mean, if you're in a city of what 18,000,020 1 million people or something like that, it's huge. 10 million, isn't the artist, in fact, checking on that will report on error correction in a later episode. I know it's a big city. And the thing is that you can't be polite to everybody, right? But it's not that they're being impolite for them. They're not being implied. They're just going about their day. Because there are so many people, the population density is so incredibly high, that's going to be very different than if you're in a place like, let's say, where I live in the countryside. I've got seven homes around me. And they're not really that close necessarily, right? They're very friendly. People were friendly to each other, because we were always see we walk down the street, we get stopped by our neighbors, we talk to him. It's because literally This is always see it. So there's that idea of Hey, if I was running into people constantly, I would get worn out by having to have a conversation with every single person on the street. Whereas here in this little sleepy community that I'm in right now, it's not that way.

Paul Harvey 37:09
They have an example of us both being right at the same time, Franklin, New York City population 8.2 million, but metro area, population 19 point 1 million Nope, there it is.

Frank Butler 37:20
So we are both actually right. But our characteristics were different. Right? You were talking city. I was thinking more of the metro regions, but I wasn't clarifying that. So that's a great example. There you got folks,

Paul Harvey 37:36
glad we recorded that.

Frank Butler 37:37
Yeah. So with that, Paul, you got anything that?

Paul Harvey 37:41
Don’t think so, will come…I want to say we’ll come back to this topic. But we really we never leave this topic, every episode. If you go back through every topic that we've discussed, perceptions of abusive supervision, the whole busyness thing, the name of the show, I don't think there's been a single episode where perceptual differences wasn't the underlying supporting character of the thing. Yeah.

Frank Butler 38:03
For me, perception, management's in so many parts of it, right, which if you think about perception management, is how you're trying to manage others perceptions. It's literally what it is, right? It's like it's what it is. You're trying to, you know, that first date example, I get dressed up, go on first date, because I'm trying to put on a good first impression. But

Paul Harvey 38:22
which is a thing that perceptions do stick.

Frank Butler 38:26
So anyway, thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time,

Paul Harvey 38:30
till next time, the Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from its business time by Jemaine Clements and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And we'd love to hear from you. Please any questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input at Busynessparadox.com or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, busynessparadox.com to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I-Heart Radio, Google podcast or your preferred podcast provider

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