Ignore Impression Management At Your Own Peril

In yesterday's article, we once more underlined the monstrous importance of avoiding Impression Management (the dark side of Psychological Safety - the negative behaviour where we refrain from engaging and speaking up for fear of looking Incompetent, Ignorant, Negative and Intrusive/Disruptive/Unprofessional) and today we go further in unpacking what that means.

It is worth remarking that not all Impression Management is bad and there is a fair amount that can come to pass in benevolent, positive social settings, personal settings and even group settings on the condition that they are bringing value to the person performing it and the dialogue partner typically in a learning and sharing context. 

The type of Impression Management that is the nefarious bad behaviour we need to curtail, can always be easily recognised by how it occurs when we stop ourselves from speaking up. 

When we're afraid of looking bad to our peers in the team and perceive that as too high of a risk to share what we had in mind, whether it was information, observation, opinion or facts, that detracts from the overall Psychological Safety of the team. 

Coming out of the pandemic and entering a ravaging global economic recession means that no company is equipped to ignore the financial losses they would incur by not placing Psychological Safety as the only lever of performance as a firm priority. 

If they do, one of the easiest things to start with is focusing on Impression Management in teams and teach them to recognise the behaviour in order to change it.

In this video, we speak about the concept but also about how we have created Alarms in the Dashboard so that the team leader and the team can immediately be alerted when Impression Management happens but also about how a wonderful side effect of asking the question has been that it allowed the individual employee to reflect on the times when they engaged in the behaviour. As such they can easier identify it and prevent it the next time they are tempted to not participate. 

We firmly believe that not preventing impression management in ourselves is foolhardy as it will render us and therefore the team much less productive and in the absence of performance we may very well be out of a job and that not focusing on Psychological Safety at the company level is, beyond foolhardy, incredibly risky and potentially fatal over the next 12-18 months. 

So invest in understanding, recognising and intently avoiding Impression Management to mitigate your recession risk. 

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