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Today we are going to talk about a topic that I think is a really key part of emotional intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence is absolutely critical for you to succeed in your career. It would be interesting to do some research about what percent of people are fired for reasons that trace back to a lack of emotional intelligence. I have to believe it is pretty high. Working on improving your emotional intelligence is something I believe we should all be doing all the time. Today’s topic – logical fallacy – will give you another way to think about emotional intelligence. Logical fallacy is a concept that fits within critical thinking. Critical thinking is a skill that we must all develop, and just as important, keep sharp through constant practice and vigilance. When you are drawing conclusions using critical thinking, logical fallacies can sometimes cause you to draw bad or wrong conclusions. So, it is very helpful to understand the types of logical fallacies and be able to spot them when you either encounter them or fall into the trap yourself. When you are engaged in critical thinking, you evaluate evidence in order to draw conclusions. Logical fallacies are errors in thinking that weaken or discredit an argument. It can be very easy to miss these errors and arrive at a wrong conclusion. There are eight types of logical fallacies to become familiar with. Ad Hominem An argument that attacks the person rather than their argument or claim. You are making it personal rather than about the idea. For example, the head of your department, who is nearing retirement and has been with the company for 30 years, announces a new policy that you disagree with. Your argument for disagreeing is “this guy is so stuck in his ways that he doesn’t understand corporate culture anymore.” Straw Man This is when you exaggerate the ideas that people are debating. For example, you present an improvement idea to your manager and she tells you that, although it is a good idea, she can’t approve it. Your reaction is “I can’t believe she is so insecure that she is going to block my idea because it wasn’t hers.” Bandwagon Argument This is where you jump to the conclusion that something must be true because it is popular of many people believe it. This fallacy is one we all learn when we are children when our mom tells us “if George jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you?” In a corporate environment, I think this one is a really sneaky one. A lot of times, the way we operate within our job is based a lot on bandwagon arguments – or what might be more commonly called cultural norms or habits. Think about someone in your company who you know about, but don’t know personally. What do you know about that person? Whatever it is you know, you know it because you’ve gathered the information from others. You’ve gotten on the bandwagon. Slippery Slope This is when you jump to the conclusion that is one thing is allowed to happen, then it will trigger a chain of events. I have no hard evidence for this, but my experience is that some people are more prone to the Slippery Slope fallacy than others. I don’t even have to make up an example for this one. I have an example that I’ve encountered multiple times in my career. Its been a tough year and your company has missed its financial goals. As a result, the leadership team decides that there will be a freeze on salaries. No raises this year. The management team is brought together and notified of the decision. The response of the managers is “well, we better be ready for the consequences. I expect nearly everyone will resign. For sure, I’m going to lose my best performers. Then we’ll have to hire unexperienced people, which is going to cause us to struggle to meet customer expectations, which means we’ll probably miss our financial targets again this year.’ Again, logical fallacies can cause you to draw bad or wrong conclusions. When it comes to the slippery slope, you are pontificating about the downstream impacts of a decision that may or may not come to fruition. You need to be able to balance the need to think through and plan for downstream impacts of a decisions with the fallacy of drawing the conclusion that these things will happen. Red Herring This is when someone introduces a new claim as a distraction from the original argument. For example, a coworker promised to have a report to you by the end of the day yesterday. You didn’t get it so you reach out to get an update. He says, “did you see that memo that came out yesterday telling us we aren’t getting a raise this year?” False Dilemma This is where you wrongly assume that there are only two possible conclusions to an issue. For example, you are running up against a deadline and you really need to sell this deal in order to make your quota. The pressure is on. The client is moving slow and you are worried they may be hesitating due to price. You call your manager and say “we either give them a discount or lose this deal altogether.” Appeal to Emotion This is when you make a claim that manipulates the other person’s emotions rather than addressing the actual issue. Let’s return to the freeze on raises example. The management team is brought together and notified, and the manager responds, “how can you do this to these employees? These people are family. They worked hard. They have rent to pay and mouths to feed.” Questionable Cause This is when you draw the wrong assumption that because two things happened at the same time, one thing caused the other. Let’s go back to the sales quota example. The sales manager tells the sales person that they can’t give the discount, they will just need to find another way to get the deal done. He contacts the client to find out if they have made a decision and they tell him that they have decided not to sign the contract. The sales person tells his coworker, “she cost me the deal and my quota because she was too cheap to give them a discount.” What our sales guy doesn’t know is that the client was just bought out by a competitor, so they no longer have authority to make a purchase. The deal was lost with or without the discount. Which Logical Fallacy Do You Use? So, your homework for this week is to try and notice logical fallacies at work in your life. Where are you drawing bad conclusions due to your reliance on one of these fallacies? When you are using your critical thinking skills, are you examining all of the evidence before jumping to a conclusion, or are you relying on one of these logical fallacies to do your thinking for you? In this episode, you’ll learn:
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Are you a specialist or a generalist? The world needs both, so I’m not going to argue for one over the other. I can see the benefits of choosing either path for your career.
And, to be honest, I’m not even sure I know what the definition of specialist is because it is all relative. You can specialize in marketing vs finance – sure. But, within marketing there are a lot of different roles you can specialize in. I’ve even seen job postings for inbound or outbound marketing specialists. Apparently, there is a big difference between whether you send the message or receive the message. Specialization Bias The thing is, when you specialize in an area, you begin to look at everything in a certain way. You fall into patterns or routines. You know the saying ‘to a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” To a marketer, every problem looks like a marketing problem. To a finance person, every problem looks like a numbers problem. We all approach our specialty with blinders on. We bring our experiences, our knowledge, our comfort zone to our actions. It is natural and expected, and doing this doesn’t make you a bad person or serve as a weakness. Expand Beyond Your Specialization But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to improve. Having a broad, generalized knowledge about areas outside of your core specialty help you to find innovative solutions to problems. It helps you to connect seemingly unrelated dots in ways that others might not have thought of. This takes effort and requires you to be a little deliberate about the whole thing. It may require you to go a little outside your comfort zone. It takes some effort and time, so you will need to build that into your schedule. But, my experience has been that it is so very worth the effort. Area of Focus So, what I’m advocating for this week is that you pick an area of focus to expand your horizons. What is something that you can learn about that is outside of your area of specialty? Spend the next 6 months purposefully learning about it. That could mean reading books about the topic. It could mean listening to podcasts focused on the topic. It could mean reaching out to people in your company, or in your network and asking them to teach you about it. Not because you want to move into it as a career, but because you want to expand your knowledge beyond your current blinders. An area of focus is like taking a 101 course in college. Your goal is to learn the basics and be able to speak the language. Whether you move beyond 101 is up to you. But, you have to be deliberate about it. It takes effort. It doesn’t just happen. It isn’t going to be part of your routine, so you need to make it a priority for yourself and give yourself enough time. Little by little, you can learn more about the topic until it is time to pick the nxt area of focus. Over the years, I’ve had areas of focus in sales, support as I’ve already mentioned, critical thinking, nutrition, podcasting, change management, customer experience, and literacy. Right now, I’m taking a deep dive into the industry of senior living community operations. What will your next area of focus be? In this episode, you’ll learn:
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This week, I’m replaying Episode 18: Building a Reserve. It is a topic I’ve been talking about for over 10 years, and I really feel that it is core to managing stress in your life.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
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Regardless of your specific job, the ability to use critical thinking is an indicator of being successful. Today, we are going to take a look at this skill and give you some ways to put it into practice more often.
Let’s start with a definition Critical thinking is the process of carefully evaluating ideas and facts to make decisions about what to believe and do. I think an important part of the definition is ‘what to believe.” Critical thinking is as much about what you believe as what you actually end up doing. I also think it is important to recognize that critical thinking is a process. Critical thinking doesn’t mean you instantly know the answer. Six steps in critical thinking My goal today s to get you to think about how you naturally approach critical thinking. Where are the areas that you could improve? By doing this, you can focus on improving a specific area in the coming weeks and notice how your critical thinking process improves. The 6 steps of critical thinking are:
Ask Questions You can’t evaluate ideas if you don’t ask a lot of questions. Someone who is not good at critical thinking jumps to conclusions based on their filters or their biases. Jumping to conclusions means you haven’t gone through a process to evaluate ideas. Gather Evidence Depending on the situation, you might gather evidence by:
When gathering evidence, it is important to recognize the types of evidence.
The fact that something is blue is qualitative. It describes something, but how you and I interpret the word blue is going to be different. It gets us both into the same general arenas – blue is definitely different than red – so we both understand that – but your blue and my blue will not be the same. Quantitative data is a measurement, so it is more precise. The blue thing is also 2 pounds. Two pounds means the same thing to both of us. Now, whether 2 pounds is a lot or not, is part of the context of the situation. A 2 pound hummingbird is huge while a 2 pound elephant must be a stuffed toy. You can gather evidence from a lot of sources:
What is important to recognize is that evidence doesn’t all have equal weight. Evaluate the Evidence Good critical thinkers evaluate the relevance, importance, and accuracy of the evidence when determining how to incorporate it into their decision. You want to consider:
Knowing how much weight to give each piece of evidence can be a critical part of your decision making process. When evaluation evidence, it is good to keep in mind the difference between an assumption and an inference. An assumption is a belief that a person thinks is true without questioning if it is true. An inference, on the other hand, is a conclusion you make based on the evidence you’ve gathered. An inference can still be wrong in the end, because you can draw an incorrect conclusion from the evidence gathered. Test Your Assumptions If you’ve drawn a conclusion, you’ll want to test it out to see if you’ve properly gathered evidence. If you think about buying a new car, you go through a process of deciding which car to pursue, but ultimately, until you test drive it, you won’t know if all of your research led you to the right decision. In a business setting, this might mean putting your decision into practice for a trial period or for a small section of your process. For example, we recently rolled out a change by starting with the immediate team, then including one manager who we knew would be supportive even if we had come to the wrong conclusion, and then eventually to the whole team. Up to the point that we rolled out the change to the whole team, we were open to the idea that we might have made a bad decision that would require us to make changes. Reach a Conclusion Once you are ready to draw a conclusion, you will want to go back to your original question, review the evidence that you gathered, consider your values, and then be confident in your conclusion. The true test that you’ve reached a conclusion using critical thinking is that you can confidently defend your conclusion with others who may have a different point of view. Homework So, this week, I’d like you to notice yourself going through the critical thinking process.
Becoming a better critical thinking will take some work, butt in the end you’ll find that you are more successful when you make better decisions. In this episode, you’ll learn:
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PMO COachI teach people how to thrive at work. Let's connect on LinkedIn 
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