Gazing through my Johari Window

This is part two in the Johari Windows posts, covering the results of the experiment. You should start with Check Your Blind Spot: Rypple and the Johari Window to get the context for this second half.

So! You’re probably wondering how it all went down. Well let me tell you! It’s no easy task whittling down a list of 56 adjectives into a shopping list of self-selected descriptors. My six advisers selected a total set of 19 adjectives, which I’ve listed as a tag cloud to show their relative weights:

Able, Adaptable, Calm, Cheerful, Clever, Confident, Energetic, Extroverted, Friendly, Happy, Helpful, Idealistic, Intelligent, Kind, Knowledgeable, Relaxed, Responsive, Self-Assertive, Witty

I picked six adjectives to describe myself: bold, caring, clever, friendly, happy, witty.

Here are the full set of results plotted into the Johari quadrants:

Johari Window Results

Here’s what I learned:

• The Johari list is almost entirely ‘positive’ words. Sometimes positivity is in the eye of the beholder. Is being complex a good thing? My meaning of it might be entirely different from yours. The few generally negative terms are nervous, self-conscious, and tense, though I’d argue that you could probably include introverted and idealistic. Also worth noting: this makes it impossible to write this post without sounding insufferably conceited. (I only used to be insufferably conceited – now I’m perfect. Ha!).
• A number of the terms are very closely related. It can be hard to decide between things like friendly and extroverted or cheerful and happy. They aren’t exactly the same but there really isn’t space for both of them in a short list of six terms. More on this below.
• Our team rocks the response rate. I sent the request for feedback to all 16 of my fellow Rypplers and I got 10 responses, which is a 63% rate. Four of my advisers took advantage of the “Nothing to add” link, giving me real responses from six of my colleagues. That’s really impressive considering that the task required a fair bit of time to complete.
• Make sure your advisers know if you’re going to blog the results. Even though Rypple will never reveal their identity to you, it’s only fair that you disclose your intentions in advance so they know what they’re getting into.
• Kaizen: would be a stronger exercise if you included the Nohari list. The Nohari list is made up of negative antonyms of the original, positive terms, so including it would give a more balanced perspective.
• Kaizen: asking exclusively work colleagues gives a slanted perspective. Although we spend more time with them than anyone else, including only your teammates doesn’t excludes the more personal perspectives of friends and family.

Checking the Blind Spots

As stated in the previous post, this exercise was all about checking my blind spots. Here’s what I found:

• A few of the Blind Spots were actually on my short list but I had to choose between them and their almost-synonyms (e.g.: I picked friendly over extroverted). The near synonyms are valid blind spots by the letter of the Johari law but not really by the spirit of it.
• Only two of the Blind Spots are actually surprising to me: calm and kind. Although it’s definitely nice to be thought of as calm, I would describe myself as being more at the excitable end of the spectrum. And it’s not that I don’t think of myself as kind, but rather that I would never have thought it to be such a defining characteristic that it made my top six.
• You’ll also note that idealistic made it in there, leaving me wondering if it was meant in the good “stands up for his beliefs!” or bad “One whose conduct is influenced by ideals that often conflict with practical considerations” sense. Luckily, Rypple has an awesome Comment on Feedback feature that let me ask my anonymous adviser which sense they meant. He or she replied “In the positive (in most circumstances. But in some circumstances, a loosening of the “idealistic” standard would be helpful).” That’s the most useful thing I learned about myself and confirms something I sort of knew already: standing by your ideals is important but it’s more important to pick your battles wisely.

This was a really useful exercise for me and I highly recommend it. Well worth the roughly 30 minutes I’ve invested to date in asking the question and analyzing the results. Another win for Rypple!