Name: Abhishek Malhotra

Batch: A
Lecture: 1
Roll No: 6617007

Personal Learning Paper: Lecture 1

There was a time I used to pride myself on being able to read
people, understand their motivations and also objectively
communicate with them by being empathetic and by understanding
their perspectives and point of view. However, I made some bad
judgment calls when I was hiring for my startup and ever since
human behavior and the way individuals react to circumstances has
been a topic of keen interest for me. When the course started, I
wasnt too sure of what to expect from it but I was definitely excited
at the prospect of learning something to do with the psychology of
human behavior.

After a number of self-assessment tests that helped understand my

own personality, the first official lecture formally dealt with the
subject of perceiving people and understanding the science behind
it. People in different positions coming from different backgrounds /
experiences may perceive the same situation in different ways and
react accordingly. The film that was shown very well articulated this
concept. In the film, The Eye of the Beholder, the first reel plays
out where the main protagonist is looked upon by the other
characters namely the Waiter, the House Keeper, the mother, the
cab driver, the landlord. From what we are shown, the protagonist
generally comes out as being arrogant, self-centered, eccentric, high
handed and a bit of a womanizer, all characteristics that make you
immensely dislike the protagonist. While the second reel plays out
pretty much the same scenarios and situations but this time we
view it from the protagonists perspective. It is almost as if the first
play had a number of missing elements which triggered us to make
judgments on the basis of what was available. But after the second
play, when we have all the data points available, the protagonist
comes across as a person with high integrity, someone who is
motivated, intellectual, driven and passionate about his work. At the
end of it you actually start liking the protagonist and the initial
impressions that one may have formed about him get completely
flipped on its head.

This brings us to the moot topic of discussion that the way people
go about forming perceptions about others, differs from person to
person. Human beings constantly perceive others, both consciously
& subconsciously. They constantly look and organize behavioral or
visual data points and stimulus that they then use to form or shape
their perceptions about others. Different people put in the same
situation may end up picking up different data points as their
choices are often influenced by their experiences, their background
or even by their psychological needs. Like in the film shown earlier,
the cab driver perceives the protagonist to be a gangster because
he himself is one. He presumes that the bulge under the
protagonists clothing is because of a gun that the protagonist is
carrying just because he himself carries a gun.

Further more these data points may end up being interpreted

differently by different people as interpretations are also influenced
by personal biases & experiences. It is very common for people to
stereotype an individual as belonging to a particular group just
because they perceive the individual as having characteristics
matching to that of the group. Which is why the landlord, without
understanding the protagonists context and frame of mind
misinterprets his words and actions. He has a strong belief that all
artists are eccentric and mad people and after the discussion with
the protagonist, he ends up stereotyping him with other artists and
calls him mad.

I could relate to something similar when I migrated from working on

my own startup to joining a mid sized company. In startups with
small teams you are always pressed for time and end up handling
multiple responsibilities. You end up being productive a lot of the
times and the easiest visual stimulus for a productive person is that
the person appears busy. But when I moved to a mid size
organization, I felt a drastic change in the work culture. I felt as if
the whole pace of doing work had slowed down drastically and I felt
stalled. I was used to working at a brisk pace and seeing my team
members hustling and working hard to solving a particular problem.
But here in this company I felt people just did not have that sense of
urgency in their body language. I kind of associated being relaxed
and relatively free as being unproductive and unconcerned and this
very error of perception also resulted in a couple of tiffs with a few
individuals from my team.

In essence one of the biggest learning that I can take from this
episode is that in order to understand people, their perspectives and
motivations and in an effort to perceive them correctly, it is very
important for us to curb our instincts of being judgmental. We need
to be more objective in our assessments and a way of doing that
can be by perhaps being more open minded and not letting our
biases, experiences, preconceived notions or backgrounds clout our
thinking.
 Personal Learning Paper: Lecture 2

The second session in Organizational behavior covered a very

important topic pertaining to team dynamics, the information of
inter & intra communication between teams and the fallacies of
falling into the vicious silence trap.

The session started off with discussing the Strike in Space case
study. The case study is about how a team namely skylabs-3
rebelled against the mission control and went on a one day strike. It
showed how the skylabs-3 team was not happy and satisfied with
the schedule and the rigor that they were being subjected to by
mission control. Although there was no lack of determination,
motivation & excitement to do the job, circumstances got built
where communication started to suffer. The genesis of this problem
can be traced back to the incident where a member of skylabs-3
was not feeling well and vomited. As per protocol Skylabs-3 as
supposed to preserve the specimen of vomit for analysis but they
feared that mission control would perceive the vomiting incident to
be that a member was unwell and it would interfere with the pace at
which they could go about doing their jobs. The intent was good but
the execution was wrong. Yet, mission control rebuked the skylabs-3
team openly and the relationship between them went spiraling
downwards after that.
Breakdown of communication between teams or between members
of the same team can be detrimental for an organization. Apart
from the breakdown of collaboration between individuals, the firm
ends up suffering the maximum damage.

The case study bought back a couple of strong memories of my

own. There was a time when I was managing sales for my own
startup. I was barely 22 years old then and did not have much
hands-on experience. Sometimes learning was bookish while some
other times it involved getting your hands dirty and learning through
experiences on the filed or through making your own mistakes.
Since I was in charge of sales, I used to conduct weekly sales
meetings where we used to take stock of the sales teams KRAs.
Meetings required each sales individual to give a report of his
progress and the numbers that he had met. Incase if some numbers
were not met, he would brief on what steps would he be taking to
make up. Although the intention behind starting these meetings was
correct, somewhere down the line, the focus became more number
driven and a number of new KRAs were introduced so that I as a
business owner could get more clarity on what was happening on
the ground by looking at individual metrics. Such sales meetings
went on for a couple of months but unfortunately I was unable to
get the desired results even after following most guidelines and best
practices to the T. People used to turn up for the meetings and
report the numbers on different KRAs and although all the numbers
looked good somehow the revenues were not picking up as had
been anticipated. Fortunately a couple of senior sales members of
my team came forward and that when I realized that instead of
improving the sales funnel these meetings and focus on multiple
KRAs had actually become a distraction for the sales team. It was
taking the focus away from the main KRA, which was to increase
sales. Individuals used to end up wasting precious sales time, just to
find ways of beating the system and devise means of meeting the
numbers on individual vanity metrics at the expense of missing out
on the most critical revenue driven metrics. I was thankful to the
people who had the courage to come forward and took the initiative
to open a feedback communication channel, which went a long way
in improving the efficiency of the sales team as a whole.

As is rightly mentioned, silence doesnt resolve anything. Rather

than erasing differences it just procrastinates hard decisions or
discussions. When we remain silent about our thoughts & feelings it
manifests itself in the form or negative emptions & feelings that
cause more damage to us and to our organization in the longer run.