I Confused Being Liked With Doing Good Work

I had been working in user research at a product company in Chennai for three years when I began to understand, slowly and with some discomfort, that there was a gap between the quality of work I was capable of and the quality of work I was producing, and that the gap had a specific cause.

I was editing myself before I shared. Not in the normal way of refining an analysis before presenting it - in the way of removing the parts that I judged might create friction or challenge the existing thinking in ways that would make me less easy to work with.

I had a sharp instinct for what the room expected to hear and I was using it not to communicate more effectively but to pre-remove the things that might produce disagreement, which was also removing the things that were most distinctive and most useful about my work.

This had produced a professional persona that was well-liked and consistently underperforming its own capability. The recognition came through an unexpected route. I presented a research finding at an all-hands that I had significantly diluted before sharing and a senior product person asked me afterward if that was the full picture, with a directness that suggested she suspected it was not.

I told her the fuller version in the corridor afterward and she said, with a frustration I found clarifying: why was that not in the presentation? The answer I could not give her in that corridor - but that I spent the next month examining - was that I had not been sure the full version would be well-received.

She would not have asked that question if the diluted version had been the only one. I had prioritised being approved of over being useful and had done it so consistently that it had become invisible to me as a choice.

The work I have done since that corridor conversation has been fuller and more honest and occasionally less comfortable for the people I present it to. It has also been more useful, which is the only measure that actually matters in a research role. I do not do good work in order to be liked.

I do good work and some people like it and that is the right order.