![]() Just as changing a few pixels can make AI believe that a picture of cat is actually a bowl of guacamole, so too can minor changes in your online presence lead to very different conclusions being drawn about you. If you understand the formula, you can curate the image you want others to see. But their capacity for error is more human than many think: AI identifies signals and patterns, trying to make sense of them, just like people do, but they do it in a more rigid, prescriptive, and formulaic way. Understanding the AlgorithmĪ common myth is that algorithms are impossible to fool or trick. No matter what your goals may be, you should become aware of the story your public data tells - and understand how to change it. Understanding how our online profiles get created and used by others - as well as how we can access and modify them - is part of building a successful career. While people and corporations are busy using our data to influence and judge us, we have the ability to curate our avatars in a way that will influence them. We can be sure that recruiters, investors, peers, and competitors are also using the same data to generate and test hypotheses about who we are, what we care about, and our odds of success in different scenarios.īut we have options. Consider how easily corporations use our digital personas to evaluate us, ascertain our preferences, “profile” us based on demographics, and sell us things. ![]() The mountain of data each of us produces on the internet is the raw material used to fuel the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that track our digital “footprints.” It’s also what other people - and organizations - use to make quick judgments about our personal and professional attributes, particularly when they are deciding whether to recruit us, hire us, invest in our startups, collaborate with us, or compete with us.Įven if our social media accounts are private, there is likely ample public information that any person determined to assess us can access. Now that so much of our communication takes place on-line, however, we have all become our own “avatars” and have access to much (if not most) of the same information that others do. In those settings, we don’t have the opportunity to see ourselves exactly as others see us, and our feedback is only as good as the signals they convey (a smile, a yawn, more or less eye contact), or what they tell us directly. Even our scents convey important social information to others. When we enjoy the luxury of convening with colleagues and clients in person (remember that location called “the office”?) others gain impressions of us based on our physical presence in a three-dimensional space, including how firm our handshakes are and how our voices sound in the acoustics of the room. As academic reviews have highlighted, successful people (with the notable exception of Joan Jett) worry a lot about their reputations, and they care deeply about portraying themselves in a socially desirable way. Those who live by the mantra “don’t worry too much about what other people think of you ” may hinder their own career advancement. ![]() This may run counter to popular advice, but the ability to present ourselves in strategic and politically astute ways is indeed critical to succeeding in any professional context. Whether we get informal advice from our peers, or partake in formal assessment-related exercises, there is no better way to pinpoint who we are at work than to crowdsource evaluations of our reputations and personal “brands.”Īcademic research indicates that people with high functioning and accurate self-perceptions incorporate other people’s opinions into their sense of self. ![]() Social science research says that who we are at work is predominantly defined by what other people think of us: how they measure the success of our behaviors and actions, how they perceive our characters and motivations, and how they compare us to others. In the business world, there is a far simpler way of working out who we are, at least when it comes to our professional personas: just pay attention to how others see us. Nor do average employees need to dig deep into their unconscious, or unleash their inner Freud. The good news for business leaders is that they don’t need to turn into armchair psychotherapists, or get an advanced degree in metaphysics, to figure it out. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists – not to mention poets and artists - have been trying to answer this question for centuries.
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