Mike Lehr's Blog

We often don’t learn the value of listening techniques in building relationships. Consequently, people might not realize we are listening; this needs to occur to build relationships.

Closed questions encourage specific or limited responses. For answers, they usually require one word, short phrases or a response from a menu of possibilities. Often, they begin with the words, “Who,” “How,” “What,” “Where” and “When.” “Yes” and “No” are often typical responses.

Even though many discount their value, when combined with other listening techniques, closed questions become extremely valuable in building relationships. They clarify specifics for us, pinpoint the facts, verify what we heard, nail down agreements and commitments, and test whether we can move.

Some examples include:

• Are you going out to the plant? (Yes/No)
• Which color do you want? (Facts)
• You want me to call the vendor . . . right? (Verification)
• Is seems you’re saying [X], correct? (Verification)
• Would today, tomorrow or the next day be better? (Menu)
• Do you agree? (Agreement)
• Will you help me? (Commitment)
• Do you need to tell me anything before we move on? (Testing)
• Is there anything else I need to cover? (Testing)

From a relational perspective, closed questions convey the feeling that you:

• Have a purpose for your conversation
• Grasp the details
• Understand them
• Respect their time by getting to specifics

The effect of closed questions is to encourage people to:

• Conclude that you’re listening and digesting
• Focus and sort through fuzziness
• Shorten their answers
• Clarify agreements and commitments

Closed questions have downsides. They can make discussions feel every interrogative and restrictive if used alone. Nevertheless, when integrated with other listening techniques they can reduce misunderstandings, demonstrate that you’re listening and build relationships.

In a previous post, I discussed the rebirth of Freud and the idea that most (if not all) of our decisions are driven unconsciously. Personification is a way we can influence others’ decision-making on this level.

Revisiting The Economist article “Retail Therapy” in its December 17, 2011 edition, it says about Ernest Dichter, who revolutionized marketing in the 1960’s:

Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a “soul”, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody . . . Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it.

Personification is giving something a personality. For instance, my wife has a name for her car. People do the same with boats. Advertising often links products to celebrities; they become the “face of the product”, and thus its personality.

Translating to business, we encourage change if we can give change a personality. Sometimes it’s as simple as putting the face of the Owner, President or CEO on the change by saying, “It’s George’s initiative.” We can do this formally or informally; we can do this with projects, ideas and plans: “This is Mary’s project, Matt’s idea, Kathy’s plan.”

We can also reference other types of people to the change such as “The Herculean Effort,” “The Superman Plan,” and “The Rocky Project.” Any person will help as long as the connection to the person is a positive one. For example, if people don’t like Mary, her name will likely hurt the change.

When it comes to change management, we often neglect to tap into the techniques that work in advertising, merchandising and marketing. Personification is just one of those techniques.

One can read endlessly about leadership. However, if plays play on a stage, if baseball plays on a diamond, movies on a screen and chess on a board, where does leadership play? It plays in the mind of every member of the group.

Yes, we often see leaderships as having a good vision, strategy, idea or something tangibly similar. In reality though, these aren’t any good if leaders can’t inspire members around these things. By putting leadership on this emotional plane, it becomes subjective; a leader to one could be the Pied Piper to another.

Additionally, leadership comes from the word lead. Lead implies movement from one place to another. This is a change, so leadership is about change. Thus, by combining emotions and change, we arrive at a the conclusion that:

Leadership is an affect – felt by members and personified by one individual – which induces change.

We can see this more clearly in business if we ask: Are employees’ hearts into following their leader? After all, inspiration is a far better motivator for change than compliance. For example, if a leader can personify some of these feelings into an affect, that leader could be a powerful change agent:
 

Since groups are an abstraction, leaders become the “faces” groups, the vehicle through which members can give their feelings a human form. Leaders become the manifestation of their members’ feelings.

The practical outcome of this is that leadership changes from a project- or action-oriented endeavor to a relational one. This means people are more important than vision and relationships are more important than processes. Thus, leadership transform from something mechanical to something human . . . and possibly divine.

In business, people often see aggressiveness as a virtue; however, it can be a defect. Exploring this will give us insights into dealing with aggressive personalities in our lives and examples of how different perspectives help in problem solving.

The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 from the American Civil War, the turning point in that war, is a good initial example.  The Union won this battle over the Confederates but never attacked. That’s because the Confederates relentlessly attacked a different part of the Union line on each of the battle’s three days (see diagram to right) despite the Union being on higher ground and firmly entrenched. Consequently, the Confederates suffered heavy losses and retreated.

In nature, the article, “Unnatural Selection” from the May 23, 2009 issue of The Economist, reports on the work of Laszlo Garamszegi from the University of Antwerp. He found that the aggressive animals were most likely to be caught in traps. The Battle of Cannae from 216 B.C. is a human form of this. Hannibal had tapped into his Roman opponents’ aggressiveness and hubris to lure them into a trap, thus destroying an army twice his size. In American football, the screen pass takes advantage of aggressive defenses by luring them into the backfield.

Thus, aggressiveness alone is defective without intelligence, wisdom or insight. As these examples show, we can defeat aggressiveness by:

• Allowing it to tire itself on extremely difficult tasks
• Giving it “a bone” (a lesser important task) to distract it
• Tapping into its hubris and goading it into wasting time on irrelevant things

In business, we see examples when companies expand too aggressively, thinking they have the “secret,” taking shortcuts and ignoring planning. As a result, aggressiveness produces huge losses for them, just as it did for the Confederates.

When learning listening techniques, we often don’t learn their value in building relationships. As a result, we might be listening, but the other person doesn’t know it. The latter must occur to build relationships effectively.

Open-ended questions encourage a wide range of responses. Pragmatically, they retrieve an accurate assessment of the person’s thoughts and feelings. Relationally, they invite longer, deeper responses. This encourages feelings of freedom thought and expression.

Often, they begin with the words, “How,” “What,” and “Why,” or can include phrases such as “Tell me about . . .” and “Fill me in on . . .” Wording and tone should encourage the expression of thoughts and feelings, not just facts.

Some examples include:

• How do you think this project will go now?
• Fill me in on what you feel you want me to do.
• Why do you think Mary would be better than Nancy?
• How do you feel about that?
• What’s your reaction to Bill’s comments?

From a relational perspective, open-ended questions convey your desire to have answerers feel:

• Free to answer as they please
• You value their thoughts and feelings
• They control the direction of the discussion

The effect of open-ended questions is to:

• Minimize negative emotions
• Establish the questioner as someone with whom it’s easy to converse
• Encourage conversation and a longer interaction period
• Direct conversation with a talkative person

The downside of open-ended questions is that they can make discussions feel scattered or lacking purpose. That’s why we need to integrate them with other relationship building techniques.

Nevertheless, open-ended questions are often the first listening technique we learn. However, they let the other person know we are listening to them because we can’t use them well if we aren’t.

Previously I had indicated that placebo management could impact performance. I recently read

Michael Specter’s article, “The Power of Nothing,” in the December 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. He shared Ted Kaptchuk’s work on the Placebo Effect at the Harvard Medical School. I found this passage extremely apropos for placebo management:

. . . although placebos had no impact on the chemical markers that indicate whether a patient is responding to therapy, patients nonetheless reported feeling better. Kaptchuk concluded that objective data should not be the only criterion for doctors to consider.

Translated to the business world, we cannot just evaluate our effectiveness with people only on objective considerations. For instance, when a manager explains a business plan to an employee, the value isn’t just in the manager’s explanation and the employee’s understanding. There is additional intangible value in the time the manager spent with the employee. The manager could have enhanced this value by taking the employee to breakfast or lunch for the discussion.

As we saw there are two aspects to an interaction: thinking and feelings (see diagram to right). In this example, the manager’s explanation represents the thinking; the time and place represent the feeling. A different outcome would occur if the manager simply gave the plan for the employee’s reading.

In using this managerial approach, keep five things in mind:

1. Objective information and criteria don’t tell the whole story
2. People react differently
3. Expectations of you and the other person matter
4. Feelings matter more than #1
5. Different users have different results

Relationship building strategies and techniques maximize the placebo effect. It helps to have a strategy for improving your relationship with each of your employees. Implementing initiatives and effecting change will be easier and more effective.

Other links in this series: Placebo Management: Impacting Employees’ Beliefs

It’s generally easier to understand what positive and negative reinforcements are than it is to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Tradeoffs exist. Generally, in terms of getting action positive reinforcements are better over the long run, negative over the short run. The table below explains:

Now, it’s important for us to understand and appreciate how these work together. After all, managers are likely to use both, not just one or the other. Therefore, here are two important ratios to remember:

Results Ratio: It generally takes five (5) positive reinforcements to do the work of one (1) negative one.

5:1

Relationship Ratio: It generally takes ten (10) positive reinforcements to overcome the negative feelings of one (1) negative one.

10:1

For instance, one could hold a gun to someone’s head and change his behavior very quickly, but the relational damage is immense. We don’t want to become overdrawn on our relational accounts because overreliance on negative reinforcements will reduce the effect of positive reinforcements. This will necessitate greater use of negative reinforcements and produce a synergistic spiral downward resulting in a compliant, uninspired workforce.

Even though rankings are extremely subjective, they seduce us as strongly as the sirens did sailors in Greek mythology. Consequently, we often wreck ourselves on the rocky shores of fantasy island.

In order to understand the lure of rankings, we need to understand the lure of numbers. When we quantify something, it becomes easier to grasp. However, easier doesn’t mean that what we are grasping is real. It’s often easier to understand what we want to believe than it is to understand reality. For example, in reality a woman’s measurements don’t tell us much about her, but that doesn’t prevent them from triggering our fantasies.

Applying this illusionary power to rankings, they tap into our insecure desires for:

1. Simplifying a complex world
2. Defining limits to large or limitless knowledge pools
3. Quantifying the unquantifiable
4. Delivering certainty in an uncertain world

Rankings perform complex thought for us by determining which is better by deciphering many, many variables. They imply we can get by on much less knowledge by giving importance to the top ten rather than the top million or billion. Their parameters and measurements are subjectively determined, trying to measure something that normally is immeasurable. Finally, as implied above, the quantification inherent in rankings provides certainty; “these are the important ones and that’s it.”

For instance, consider these Google searches:

“Top 10” = 743 million results
“Top 100” = 1,083 million
“Top 1,000” = 46 million
“Top 10,000” = 17 million
“Top 100,000” = 2 million
“Top 1,000,000” = .6 million
“Top 1,000,000,000” = 5,250

Clearly, our focus is on the simple with limits; so, the problem is this: How are we going to ever appreciate the billions of unique people, places, creatures and things in this universe if we’re so focused on the top ten?

There is no place that the revisiting of our unconscious urges are taken more seriously than in retailing. The Economist article “Retail Therapy” appearing in the December 17, 2011 edition gives a great historical accounting of the rise and fall . . . and rise again of the application of Freud in business which Ernest Dichter is noted for introducing. As the article asserts:

Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational.

Increasingly, researchers are finding Dichter’s assessment that “most people have no idea why they buy things” to be correct.

Of course, “Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago.” However, as we saw earlier, it took science almost a hundred years to acknowledge that the subconscious existed. Meanwhile, “businesses were recognizing the limits of quantitative studies . . . which offered little genuine insight into how customers behaved.” Said more directly, you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they might buy.

The failures of online dating showed this truth as well as research into people’s internet surfing habits. The Atlantic’s article, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” which appeared in its April 2011 demonstrated that it’s “not what [people] say they want, nor what they ‘should’ want, but what they choose when they have a chance.”

If this applies to purchases, it also applies to all decisions. Names can affect decisions about scientific grants, and information that judges know is wrong can affect their decisions. So, if people don’t behave and choose as they said they would, we have no one to blame but ourselves for not looking deeper into the real emotions powering us.

In Part 4 of this series, I discussed the positivity of intrinsic rewards in the workplace. Let’s now address the negative impact of monetary motivations which are the primary extrinsic reward in today’s business world.

As Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review writes on page 84:

Whenever you design a policy that relies on monetary rewards, you have to assume that it will have side effects on the psychological, social, and moral dimensions of human motivation.

While it might be easy for us to see how monetary rewards encourage us to pursue our selfish interests, it’s difficult to see their deeper negative side effects. For instance, in many ways incentives encourage us to feel no better than rats in a maze. Rats seek out the cheese to guide them successfully through the maze. A right turn returns cheese while a wrong one does not. When businesses help employees navigate the maze of their business plans, making the “right” turns brings monetary rewards. When they make the “wrong” turn, the cheese is not forthcoming.

Now, many will claim, “I don’t feel like a rat.” However, as we come to understand ourselves better, we find much of this affects us subconsciously. We see this whenever we jokingly refer to the business world as the “rat race,” the “dog-eat-dog world,” or other similar descriptors. Of course, as Lily Tomlin pointed out, “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

This isn’t to say we eliminate monetary rewards. It’s similar to eating; people require diverse foods to be healthy, so they also require diverse motivations for their professional health. In other words, we can’t create a cooperative culture on money alone.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 5): Humans vs. Apes