Namecalling

In spite of my habit of chatting about politics and other non-PC stuff, hence the name of the blog, this is about Assessing and Characterizing. As a HR Manager, we are expected to charaterize and assess employees. Their capabilities, their behaviors, their personalities, and any other characteristics important to the team and the business. We discuss stress tolerance and emotional intelligience like they are components of a large machine. In our usual circles, these conversations function like an engineering meeting, reviewing torque and specs to decide if the process is robust. However, in other parts of the business characterization takes on a whole new meaning. I remember sitting in an office with an African American Manager and a Middle Eastern Associate, the associate was being stalked by a customer that left poorly written notes. I asked if the customer used English as a second language. The associate was tremendously offended and became very defensive. The manager understood the question and tried to explain to the associate that I was trying to figure out how the person perceived their behavior. To me it was clinical, to the associate it was personal. The conversation went from assessing and characterizing to name calling based on perspective. It turns out that the customer was a native English speaker with limited grammar skills. Instructions were provided to the associate and managers on what to do, if and when that customer came back to visit, based on this characterization. The intervention was successful, but the associate held it against me for a long time. The leap from assessing and characterizing to namecalling comes from individual insecurities. If my language skills are poor and I'm sensitive about it, a simple assessment is more like a playground taunt. When do we teach others to separate assessment from ego? How capable of emotional intelligience are we, really? Humans are incapable of refraining from compartmentalizing (characterizing) to process information. Anamalia, chordata, mammalia, primata, homindae, homo sapiens, just like Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species - we need these boxes as much as we hate them. I am a brown haired, blue eyed, caucasian, female, human resources manager, wife, daughter, pet owner, petulant child and blogger. In the right context, any one of these is a compliment or a condemnation. Maybe this blog should be titled understanding, to truly connect we must seek to understand. What we infer, is not necessarily what is meant, so just ask!