I was back on the university circuit this week, talking to college seniors about career development and, as always, I learned just as much from the students as I hope they learned from me.
Interestingly, what the students wanted to know about interview strategies was essentially the same thing sales professionals ask me all the time about prospects.
The dialogue goes something like this,
“I know that ‘opening up’ will help me develop my relationships (with interviewers or prospects) but how much is too much? Where’s the line that turns personal sharing into relationship suicide?”
To guide your self-disclosure efforts, these are a few researched rules of thumb to go by:
- Disclosure increases with relational intimacy and the perceived need to reduce uncertainty in a relationship,
- It tends to be reciprocal, incremental and symmetrical,
- Likability is generally related to positive disclosure and increases with relational intimacy (negative disclosures not so much),
- There is a curvilinear relationship between relational satisfaction and disclosure… which simply means that moderate levels of disclosure lead to the highest levels of relational satisfaction… get to that tipping point of too much disclosure and bombs away on that relationship! (1)
In the end, it all comes down to feel, experience and common sense.
Like my grandma always used to say, “Good neighbors build good fences”.
So be on the lookout for opportunities to personalize your interactions. You can go really close to the line but be wary of crossing over or… like my grandma also said, “Don’t try to hug a bear, cause you ain’t going to get what you think you’re gonna get!”
Reference:
(1) Retrieved March 27, 2015 from: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/comm321/gwalker/relationships.htm
