I would add to this fine quote that work-life presents us daily with options. And we get to choose which options we take, or stick with.

In conversations with two people last week (both immigrants, for more context), I heard two opinions on how the workplace was viewed. The first was, “There is no kindness to strangers here,” and the second was, “There is a lot of complaining and whining about everything, even the smallest inconveniences.” Again, both viewpoints were contextual.

On diving deeper into what choices they made to go against the tide of these workplace variances, it turned out that one person had started a very successful informal employee resource group for women from their part of the world, and the other was choosing actively to reframe and redirect. Both very valid choices among the plethora of options available to them, in dealing with what I presume would have been vexing circumstances.

These kinds of options, regarding group and inter-individual dynamics, are the focus of this edition.

In the study of team dynamics, one of the key concepts we learn is that in many workplaces, we don’t get to choose who we work with. So when we are on a team, we have to turn on our choice meters. Before we continue, one key thing to know is that one can always choose to walk away from a toxic workplace. But there are instances where this might not be feasible in the immediate term, and as a result, we would need to learn (and relearn) various approaches to choosing better, for our improved work satisfaction and performance.

Since choosing is, many times, an active and present process, it stands to reason that one of the things we need to learn is how to attribute better. Attribution is simply how we explain the causes of either events or other people’s behaviors (including our own). And as with many other processes, it turns out that we can attribute wrongly, and that leads us to make less-than-optimal choices.

In a previous edition, we talked about emotionality at work. And while the influence of emotions on our mood, and how we show up at work, is rarely given its due, now we know better — emotions matter in more ways than one.

Emotions play a role in how we attribute. And because we humans are capable of moving between emotional states (some more quickly than others, due perhaps to personality differences), the way that we feel about what a person did, does, or is doing is quite dependent on our emotional state. When we are in a low positive state, we may wrongly attribute another person’s behavior as a fixed and non-malleable characteristic. Then, when we see or interact with the person, we allow this attribution to cloud our judgment. The other party senses our aura in how we behave and may respond to this, and it very quickly becomes a negative spin cycle.

Let’s take a common scenario that I have witnessed personally: the attribution of “laziness” to a person. In this case, the general thing is to attribute the behavior to a trait or an innate characteristic, as opposed to attributing it to an external cause or causes. But we can consider and realize that people are motivated to do different tasks and activities in various ways and by different things. For example, teenagers are notorious for being unmotivated about hygiene and tidying up, but the same person will go to sports practice every day for hours on end. I, for one, know I would choose to pick up and tidy any room, no matter how big, rather than spend five hours on the courts practicing. It doesn’t make either of us deficient in the conscientiousness trait.

This tendency to attribute internal traits to others is a common human attribution error, and while it may make us smugly superior in the present moment, it can be crushing when we are on the receiving end of it — because then we think we know ourselves and what we are capable of, and therefore the other party doesn’t “get” us.

The good news is that we can train our brains and practice attributing better. Learning how to do this can take the cognitive stress off us and the other parties we work with. Because of the principle of reciprocity, when we become more generous in our thoughts about others, the likelihood that we would be on the receiving side of that generosity from others is higher.

How do you practice more “generous” attribution at work?