Mike Lehr's Blog

There is a scene from the comedy movie Animal House (Clip – Quote @ 2:51), a story about a cavalier fraternity, in which a brother Bluto played by John Belushi is trying to rally the house after being expelled from the college for failing grades and unbecoming behavior. After his rally cry failed, one brother finally exclaimed, “Bluto’s right!” The look on Bluto’s face is a combination of surprise, bewilderment and doubt; it’s apparent no one had ever said he was right about anything.

All of us find difficulty in resisting the seduction of having our beliefs, thoughts and feelings validated by others. In extreme cases, strong egos crave it. Nevertheless, one of the most powerful compliments we can give another is simply to say, “You’re right.” Of course, as is true with all compliments, sincerity is important, so it won’t behoove some of us to deliver this “you’re right compliment” (YRC) even when we believe the other person is wrong. Nonetheless, if we do believe someone is right, what’s the harm in telling her?

YRC has many variations:

Yes, you’re right;

• I never thought of that.
• I’ve never looked at it that way.
• that’s certainly a good way to do it.
• your idea would work.
• that’s how they would feel about it.

As practice, in your next conversation with someone, try to find one opportunity to compliment the other person this way.  Not only might it stun him, but it might also shorten the conversation if the person is extremely extroverted and talkative. All you need to do to see how rare and surprising the impact of YRC might be is to ask yourself this question: When was the last time anyone ever said to you, “Yes, you’re right.”

Related Link:

• Strategically Using Compliments in Relationship Building

The power someone has as a leader in an organization is a function of 1) the authority it gives him and 2) his personal influence within the organization. The former is formal organizational power (FOP) and the latter informal organizational power (IOP). Figures 1 and 2 help us visualize their difference.

Figure 1: Formal Organizational Power

The importance of IOP becomes more apparent if we view leadership beyond a management context. For instance, one client expanded its definition from those in management to those who could initiate and develop new services, those who could grow existing services and those who could find and develop new customer channels.

The source of IOP varies by person. It could be his expertise, knowledge, experience, achievements, attractiveness, personality, education, intelligence, relationships, character, talents, skills, abilities, credibility, reliability, judgment, wisdom, seniority plus many other things. I knew one machinist who was a leader because he could run more of the machines in the plant better than anyone could.

Figure 2: Informal Organizational Power

FOP gets people to do things because they must; it’s the rule. IOP encourages people to do things because they want to; they like those with IOP or do so out of respect. Using a body as an analogy, FOP represents the bones and IOP the muscles. The most powerful leaders have a lot of both; organizations give them a lot of authority and people within the organization have a strong desire to help them.

Thus, when we try to understand and appreciate how organizations work, looking at the organization chart shows formal organizational power. Overlaying this chart is the influence of a multitude of relationships that vary by situation and by moments in time. In effect, we don’t really know an organization unless we have a feel for how informal organizational power influences it.

Related Link:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)

Figure 2: Holes (Unknowns)

Figure 1: Emotional Driver

Leadership is about people, and management about things. Management will tend to objectify people as resources (i.e. human resources) and rely more heavily on authority from the organization. Thus, management manages all resources given to it by the organization not just people.

We cannot make a similar connection between these things and leadership since leadership is an emotional connection that the member has for the leader. Things can’t have emotional connections to managers.

By delving deeper into this connection, we can more easily see how leadership differs from management. Figure 1 shows the emotional driver a member will have for the leader on a subconscious level. The member and leader are different people as denoted by the different colors. However, no member can ever know a leader completely, so holes in a member’s knowledge of the leader will exist as Figure 2 shows.

Figure 4: Blend (Perception)

Figure 3: Fill (Member’s Likes)

These “holes” produce emotional vacuums that need filling. If the member likes the leader, he will imbue the leader with qualities he likes (Figure 3). These qualities blend with the ones the member knows to produce Figure 4, which is essentially the member’s perception of the leader.

Consequently, what motivates the member is not the leader but his perception of the leader. From the leader’s perspective, she is really two people: the one she knows as herself and the other that the member knows. Every member will have a slightly different perception. Thus, the leader must not only manage herself, but also manage the perception others have of her.

In essence then, leadership is the interpersonal aspect of management. Since we do not need to be managers to be leaders, leadership becomes the interpersonal aspect of any job. Therefore, tapping the power of personality is more the domain of leadership than management.

Other links in this series:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part IV)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part V)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part VI)

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the third of a five part series.

Tactic #3 involves breaking down and delivering change in very small, simple steps. For organization-wide change, every manager has responsibility for detailing this for every one of his employees. This is difficult.  Usually, there are two problems:

1. Failing to uncover some important details
2. Seeing only one step where there are two or more

Unfortunately, the difference between too little and too much detail isn’t clear. Generally, it’s better to err on the latter; while keeping in mind timing and the threat of over planning, and accepting that we will always overlook some details.

When we bring the change to the individual level, it’s extremely important that we break down the change into small bites and deliver them one at a time. Emotionally, the change is too daunting if we show someone all of it at once.

Often, the worse person to detail these steps is someone who performs them well because they come naturally to her. Thus, what she sees as one step could easily be five to ten. In these cases, someone with a project or process management orientation is helpful. He can observe and work with the model to detail the steps. If the change is dramatically new and lacks a model, he can jointly work with the expert on the new process and those affected employees to detail the new steps.

Once detailed, someone with a training attribute can help organize them into a developmental plan for the manager’s use with his employees.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

As a result of responses to my previous post, I’m following up with a related technique which I call the “Refer Back Technique” (RBT). As with Part I, it concerns itself with using questions to sustain conversations, but it’s also effective at demonstrating listening. Listening builds relationships, but it helps if the other person realizes you are doing it. This technique effectively demonstrates that.

Refer Back Conversation Technique

As the post “Computers Teaching Us About Being Human” shared, most informal conversations wander from one point to the next. Often, we can just jump right in because it’s only the last comment that is sustaining the conversation. It doesn’t matter what was said five or six comments ago. Thus, it’s easy to program a computer to sustain conversations.

RBT is different because it refers back to a previous comment in the conversation. The question is not about the recent comment, but about something the person said a while back. This frequently applies when the other person says much in a few minutes. It subtly tells the other person that you are listening.

RBT has two parts:

1. A transition statement referencing an earlier comment
2. A question about that comment

The figure to the right helps us visualize what is happening. It also has a sample transition statement along with seven sample questions. The two keys are:

1. Ensuring we listen for opportunities
2. Asking the right transition question to make the conversation seamless

Here are some other examples:

• I found your comment earlier about ____________ fascinating. What other insights can you share on that?
• I’d like to go back to something you said before about ____________. How would you apply that in a situation where____________?
• I thought what you said earlier about ____________ was important. What other reasons can you give?

Related post:

Related post:

• How to Become a Good (or Better) Conversationalist Overnight

Here is another site with some other good conversational techniques:

• 14 Methods and Mindset Tricks to Make you a More Interesting Conversationalist

I ran across a good article by Malcom Gladwell in the February 14 & 21 issue of The New Yorker titled, “The Order of Things.” The detail with which he explores rankings of colleges, hospitals and cars demonstrates the immense subjective potential rankings have. What is even more astounding is Gladwell’s discovery of the degree to which many organizations hold their leaders accountable for their place in these rankings.

From an intuitive perspective, people tend to have an emotional connection to statistics; they satisfy feelings for certainty, clarity and knowledgeableness. Thus, when we express arguments statistically, they tend to carry more weight than if we simply express them in words. Rankings clearly define for us what is best, better and good. However, they are more akin to magic where reality is but a trick. Thus, the feelings we receive from rankings (certainty, clarity, knowledgeableness) are satisfied because we want to believe their magic is real.

As a rule, unless the ranking is comparing very similar things against a single, measurable criterion, it is highly subjective. Therefore, here are some important questions to ask about the ranking to discover how its trick works:

• Is it really comparing similar things?
• Is the ranking based upon multiple criteria?
• How important is each criterion and is it valid?
• How does it weight the criteria?
• Is it using some criteria as proxies for things that are difficult to quantify or research?
• What important criteria are absent because of these difficulties?
• Is the difference between one rank and each of those immediately above and below it that significant?
• How accurate was the data collected for each criterion?
• What problems might have retarded data quality?

Applying these questions will demonstrate that our affinity for rankings is more emotional than pragmatic.

Long ago I sat in on the reprimand of an employee by a manager. The manager concluded his discussion by asking the employee, “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The employee responded, “Yes.” It suddenly occurred to me how biased we are in thinking that education alone will correct behavior. In other words, we assume that if someone understands our argument and reasons they will adopt our point of view.

In this above situation, there was no follow up by the manager to explore whether the employee agreed with the manager’s alternative action or whether the employee was moved to act accordingly in future situations. Yes, he was aware of the consequences, but we tend to forget that sometimes people are willing to pay those consequences.

I refer to making this false assumption about “Do you understand?” as a cognitive bias; we tend to believe that reasons, logic and rationales are enough to win the day. This bias will tend to make us wrongly believe that we’ve done “our best.”

I also experience this in non-disciplinary situations in which anyone is trying to influence another person. This cognitive bias happens frequently with instructors trying to move participants to take action in such settings as business training. They will ask participants, “Do you understand what I’ve shown (said, did, etc.)?”

Therefore, in summary, I find four basic hurdles, represented by the following questions, that we need to negotiate and verify before we can have significant confidence that we’ve persuaded someone:

1. Do you hear me?
2. Do you understand me?
3. Do you agree with me?
4. Are you moved to take the recommended action (to act on this idea)?

Even though it spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs, the article, The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker had much relevancy to effecting change. It covered five tactics to do so and crystallized many of my experiences. This post covers the second tactic. Three future posts will cover the remainders.

The second tactic is strengthening relationships with employees. If change management were painting, then this tactic would be prepping and priming the surface. Just as the outcome of painting is largely determined by the prepping and priming of the underlying surface, the success of change initiatives is largely determined by the relationships management teams have with their employees.

This relationship building is best done through approaches that influence employees on an intuitive level, making emotional connections. Here are five approaches discussed in other postings:

1. Remembering and using employees’ names
2. Thanking employees for doing their job every 3-6 months
3. Shaking employees’ hands every 3-6 months
4. Learning to use compliments effectively
5. Tapping the power of personality in executives and senior managers

None of these requires any expense. However, they require a disciplined and well-coached management team. Ideally, these are happening on an ongoing basis not just when a change initiative is happening.

Some personality styles will be more comfortable with these, especially those with greater empathy, sensitivity or emotional intelligence. Managerial and executive assistants can help their bosses by scheduling and prepping them for these activities. They can even encourage their more reticent bosses.

Initially, if these approaches are new, employees might be suspicious so they will need some reassurance. However, regardless of the manager’s or executive’s interpersonal skills, employees will eventually appreciate them. The keys are consistently applying them and not expecting quick fixes.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration
• Change Management – Tactic #6: Guard Employees’ Time

How many times do we hear, “I’m really a people person”? Yet, when people are the problem, we can’t find those folks in the country?

It’s not unusual for employers to say, “My people make my business,” and then in the same breath say “The worst part about running a business is dealing with the employees.”

How many times do we hear salespeople say, “I’m a relationship specialist,” but when it comes to working with their assistants, they stumble over themselves and run to human resources?

How many times do people say they want to get into management, but then pass on their less desirable employees to other departments by giving them satisfactory reviews?

When conversation is light and pleasant, many extroverts mingle with the best, smiling, shaking hands and joking. Yet, how many of them enjoy working with people when they have protracted developmental problems? When we use the term “socialize,” does it even connote people problems?

What does it mean to “work a crowd”? It means meeting people as fast as you can before they dump any problems on you. When was the last time anyone worked a crowd to find out what the problems were?

Yes, computers can be problems, but they are usually quiet about them. Wouldn’t it be neat if people were the same way? Maybe that’s why some people prefer sitting at their desks reviewing the latest figures to see what problems there might be rather than wandering around to see what problems people might have.

Perhaps the next time someone says, “I’m a people person,” we should ask two questions:

1. What was the last people problem you tackled?
2. Why did you enjoy it?