certain circumstances today lead me to contemplate for a good part of the afternoon how to best evaluate someone’s work ethic. the party line definition i’ve heard my whole life of a good work ethic did not give many guidelines for accurately evaluating someone. growing up, i was told that someone with a good work ethic was a person who was self-motivated, hard-working, and finished things to the best of their ability. they were dependable, reliable, and worked without being told to work. these characteristics are all well and good, but there are two other pieces to properly evaluating someone’s work ethic that are easily forgotten.
for the sake of self-indulgency and novelty, i’m going to refer to these two pieces as The Other Side Of The Picture and Outside The Picture.
The Other Side Of The Picture refers to factors and circumstances that may be difficult or impossible for the evaluator to be aware of and consider. some might refer to this with the phrase “there are two sides to every story”. it is the evaluator’s responsibility to gather all the facts before coming to a conclusion, even if those facts are not immediately observable. the best solution to seeing The Other Side Of The Picture is to directly ask the person being evaluated about things that should be considered. if this is not possible, ask a close friend or colleague of the person who has a much better view of The Other Side than you do.
someone who appears to be napping could merely be deep in thought; or the other way around. the only way to find out is to ask them or to throw a brick at them, depending on which favor you’d rather have returned.
the second piece that is easily forgotten is the circumstances, behaviors, and actions that occur Outside The Picture. this is the area of the situation that is hardly interesting, juicy, or action-packed, but is very crucial to interpreting a situation as accurately as possible. always pay attention to everything around the situation and not just the situation itself.
no one ever found waldo every time by only looking at every other page in the book. it is quite difficult to bake world-famous chocolate chip cookies with only one half of the recipe. also, i don’t come up with very good examples when only half my brain is working, but we’ll save that for another post.
this entry has morphed from being specifically about work ethic to more general thoughts about forming conclusions of a person’s traits and abilities. to keep things simple, don’t form any conclusions or opinions. if it is necessary, form them only after seeing The Other Side Of The Picture and Outside The Picture and keep them as inconclusive as possible. things change, so why should we assume people don’t?
