Page 17 - Make Work Great

Make Work Great

lighting assume that the second person hit more shots because he
was a better player. 8

The people around you are strongly influenced by their peers, their
authority fi gures, and their role sets. But when you observe their
actions, you tend to think that they are acting from personal choice
alone, and you respond accordingly.
By the same token, you are strongly driven by your peers, your
authority fi gures, and your role set. Yet when the people around you
notice your actions, they attribute them to your personal choices.
You probably make the same assumption about your own actions.
Remember, the forces around you act to shape not only your actions,
but also your perceptions. You don’t always realize the existence of
the forces acting upon you, much less their infl uence.
After all, if you tend to blame an individual unfairly when you
can see the situational factors, imagine how much more blind you
are when the situational factors are hidden. The influence of peers,

authority fi gures, and role sets is far less obvious than the infl uence
of poor lighting! Your chances of naturally perceiving their power are
quite small. You will only see them through conscious attention.

Culture Building Is a Conscious Choice
As I said earlier, you are not as autonomous as you think you are.
Neither am I. It’s an important fact to understand if your goal is to
make your workplace great by creating a new culture at work.
You must start by making a conscious choice to drive the culture
around you rather than to be driven by it. This is not a trivial matter.

You’re influenced by the culture of your workplace in ways you don’t
realize and on levels you don’t comprehend. Your very perceptions of
the solutions to problems you face can be more heavily infl uenced by
the culture around you than by your own thinking!
Yet experts agree it is possible to maintain autonomous choice
despite the often covert infl uence of peers and situational factors.
Even in situations with extremely strong components of mind control,

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