Mike Lehr's Blog

A commenter asked how people could become more sensitive if they don’t feel as sensitive as they would like? The short answer is through better self-awareness focused on four areas:

1. Appreciate your own sensitivity
2. Avoid “Do onto others as you would have others do onto you”
3. Tame anxious and threatening feelings
4. Convey that you’re listening

The sun doesn’t know how bright he is. To him every day is the same. I find the same holds true for sensitive people: they often don’t know how sensitive they are. Even the feeling of wanting to become more sensitive requires sensitivity. In other words, highly sensitive people could feel very insensitive if they performed even one insensitive act because it would weigh heavily on their minds.

Many apply the rule “Do onto others as you would have others do onto you.” I’ve found this extremely problematical because it’s similar to saying, “All people are like me.” Helping people from their perspective rather than our own tends to be better.

Anxious and threatening feelings encourage insensitivity. For example, other cultures often make us think about our own. This could create anxieties. People very different from us often encourage us to feel threatened.

Listening is an excellent sensitivity tool. However, listening is one thing, conveying we are listening is quite another. We can do this by asking questions, encouraging others to speak and summarizing for them what we heard.

Still, feelings of insensitivity can plague sensitive people simply because it only takes a couple events to stir them. Maybe a job or tradition lends itself to putting people in insensitive situations. Raising their self-awareness with regard to the four above areas will help to minimize feelings of insensitivity in sensitive people.

Other links in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

My initial post addressed the importance of managers following up with employees. I suggested that managers who believe giving instructions only once to employees removes the onus from them are poor managers; we should treat them as such.

In the May 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Professors Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi discuss this point: Effective Managers Say the Same Thing Twice (or More). However, they emphasize that effective managers proactively did this. They did not wait to observe whether employees carried out their instructions. They soon followed up their initial instructions with a redundant communication.

Proactive follow up is also more important than authority. Their research found that managers who did not have authority were more effective than those were with authority if they proactively followed up while the others did not. Managers with authority often assumed that authority alone was enough to motivate.

Of course, this should be no surprise. What these effective managers are doing is no different than what advertisers do: repeat their message. It also means that proactive follow up or, as Neeley and Leonardi say, redundancy could help all employees enhance their informal organizational power. If they don’t have authority, adopting proactive follow up practices would help them accomplish things without it.

High-end retailers are expecting us to spend more money on our kitchens even though we are spending less time in them. Why? Cooking is slowly transforming from a necessary activity to a leisure one (see the article “The Joy of Not Cooking” by Megan McArdle in the May 2011 edition of The Atlantic). People are not cooking out of necessity but out of desire. There are many alternatives to cooking such as dining out and prepared foods.

So, here is the lesson in problem solving:

We can alter a problem simply by altering how people feel about it; thus, we create additional potential solutions.

Marketers, advertisers and merchandisers know that if they can alter our preferences through education or branding, new markets for existing products and existing markets for new products open.

If this holds true in these disciplines, why can’t this be true:

If we can change how employees feel about their employers and work, we can create additional potential solutions to our business problems.

So, posed as two questions we arrive at these:

1. If we could change how people feel in a way we would like, what potential solutions come into play?
2. What must we do to change their feelings?

In one post, we saw how we could change the interpretation of a message simply by changing feelings. In another, we saw how simple gestures by company executives change feelings and performance. Finally, we saw the problems that arise when employees have bad feelings for employers.

Thus, if people’s feelings for their kitchens can open up new opportunities even when traditional perspectives of the statistics indicate gloom, imagine the opportunities that would avail us if people’s feelings changed at our businesses.

Several folks on Twitter inspired this post: Ted Coine, Kevin Vonduuglasittu, Tim Steigert, Peggy Fitzpatrick and Michele Price. Their discussion centered around the merits of Twitter relative to Facebook and other social media sites.

While every social media site has its advantages and disadvantages, the challenge is not deciding where to spend your time but rather how to use them integratively. A military analogy can serve well here.

For instance, Twitter is the Air Force. It’s quick, fast and covers a lot of ground. You can meet more people per hour than on other social media sites. However, they are shallow meetings.

Blogs or blog-like sites that change frequently are Armor. It’s the first solid dose people can get of you. More importantly, its content adapts quickly to attract people repeatedly.

Facebook is the Infantry, the human side. Yes, networking can be frustratingly slow because it’s a friendly domain; many types are there for many different reasons.

LinkedIn is the Heavy Artillery, the business side. Networking is less personal and more business. It allows the display of the full, unvarnished impact of your business efforts in a social setting.

Websites are home; they link all the above forces and allow people to engage for the effort’s central mission.

The Air Force makes initial, quick contact. The Armor advances to exploring expanding that contact more thoroughly. Infantry arrive to solidify the relationship, and the Heavy Artillery follows later to show that this is business. Finally, if all of it works, people accept an invitation home to engage.

Every situation is different, and it will likely require different sequencing and coordinating. No military can succeed using only one branch of its force; therefore, no outreach effort can succeed using only one avenue. Integration is a natural force; look at nature.

It’s difficult to defend yourself emotionally as a sensitive person without understanding the unconscious. People interpret their worlds on two levels: conscious and unconscious; however, the boundary between the two varies individually.

A purely conscious version of this is situational awareness. At any point in time for any given situation, any two people will vary in the degree to which they are aware of their surroundings especially when they must focus on something. It’s a crucial quality for fighter pilots who must focus on a target while maintaining awareness of their surroundings.

Thus, if people can have varying degrees of conscious awareness, it follows that the interplay between the unconscious and conscious will vary too. The diagram accompanying this post shows the difference between a certain emotion affecting an average person and a sensitive person.

In this situation, the average person isn’t consciously aware of the emotion; however, the sensitive person is. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the sensitive person will know why the emotion is there, but he will feel something. On the other hand, just because the average person isn’t aware of the emotion doesn’t mean he won’t be affected by it. It will appear as a rationale for thinking, doing or saying something and tell us much about his emotional state and personality. This holds true regardless of whether he’s aware of this.

Consequently, sensitive people are more in tune with people and situations’ emotional aspects. That’s why many of them can quickly assess the mood of a group without even talking to anyone. The problem is that they often let themselves be convinced their feelings are nonsense. Unfortunately, this is analogous to a group of blind people convincing a seer that he’s hallucinating when he sees colors.

Other links in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

The article, “Think Yourself Better,” in the May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed the placebo effect: belief in a medical treatment increases its effectiveness. Research is also showing that this effect continues even if patients know a placebo was used. So, if belief helps doctors treat patients, why can’t it help managers manage employees?

The connection becomes more pragmatic when we consider that placebos work better when the drama around administering them is intensified. For example, the more enthusiastic the doctor is in administering it, the more likely it will have a greater effect. Additionally, giving an injection works better than a pill and a sham surgery works better yet.

The application to management is this: you can improve employees’ performances by telling them you believe they will become better. By connecting this belief to various new tools, initiatives and training, you will make the tools, initiative and training work better.

Presentation is a large part of what makes placebos work. A previous post talked about two identical bonus plans that were presented differently to employees. One motivated them more than the other did. This held true even when employees learned later that they earned the same bonus under both plans.

In pragmatic terms, this means that the more enthusiastic you are, the more attention you pay to employees and the more important you believe they are, the better they will do. This will occur even if you don’t show them one single technique to do their jobs better.

To make employees better, help them believe they can become better by showing sincerely and enthusiastically that you believe they can become better. If you want good employees, treat them like good employees.

Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Creation Myth” in the May 16, 2011 edition of The New Yorker was the best article I’ve read about the challenges of managing relationships in an innovative environment.

You need two key attributes to manage relationships in this environment:

1. Comfort with the tensions that can come from extremely diverse personalities working together
2. Discipline to overcome the tendency to score failures

Long ago, I believed creativity was a flash of brilliance that popped into someone’s head. Reading about Picasso drastically changed this. He often did dozens of sketches and renditions before he painted the final piece, if he even intended that piece to be the final one.

Mature red oaks can drop 15,000 acorns in a season; however, few become 100-year oaks. Those are the memorable ones though. As Gladwell mentioned, Steve Jobs and Xerox overlooked some fabulous innovations (high definition screens and the mouse respectively). However, the ones they did capture, the mouse and the laser printer altered their businesses. Innovation is about the one you caught, not the ones that got away or never materialized.

Here’s my nomenclature for the three personalities Gladwell indicates as essential to innovation:

1. Visionary: crank out many ideas
2. Builder: engineer ideas
3. Commercialist: make the idea sellable

You need many ideas. Remember the oak tree. The winnowing down of those ideas will encourage many opportunities for intense friction among these personalities. However, many managers prefer a quiet, efficient team. They terminate “troublemakers” as some of those in Gladwell’s piece were threatened.

Innovation is an act of aggression on existing perspectives cured in concrete. Upsetting that is anything but clean and quiet. It’s about large numbers, a lot of work and much tension.

The article, Now You Know, in the May 28, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed a study published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville regarding the directing of children in their play. The conclusion is that prior explanation of how to play inhibits exploration and discovery.

Developmentally, businesses, through their everyday managerial practices, tend to instill a resistance to change in their people. They do this by excessively directing their people what to do. This direction not only comes via communications from managers but also procedures managers established. Consequently, employees don’t need to think; they just do as told.

As with any task, practice reduces anxiety of doing it. Uncertainty is no different. To become more accepting and adapting of change, employees need exposure to uncertainty. They need to explore and discover. Reiterated more pragmatically, they need to try and err. However, this requires time and money which is intolerable in most business cultures.

Therefore, managers need to look for tasks and projects that require thinking, exploring and discovering by their employees.  For example, assigning tasks requiring unique customer solutions would help. This could mean simply writing a letter to address a unique customer inquiry. Tasks involving working with people of different personality types work too. Creating a new process or set of procedures is good. Any task where the method or solution isn’t pre-defined or one of several works will help.

If you want to encourage your employees to have a change mentality, you need to give them experience in dealing with uncertainty. It means giving them time to explore and discover, to try and err. It means encouraging them to think for themselves rather than telling them what to do.

Periodically, I help sensitive people so I have special life management techniques set aside for them. A recent success has encouraged me to document some. I begin with raising their awareness for their gift.

The first point I make to sensitive people is that they are more in tune with their own emotions and the emotions of others than other people are. While almost all of them believe this is a curse, I share advantages. Primarily, they will tend to do much better at assessing the emotional state of groups and individuals. I even identified for one CEO the one employee she should talk to if she wanted to get a quick pulse on her employees.

When sensitive people try to explain their feelings, problems usually occur. Since most people will likely be less sensitive, they won’t feel the same. They’ll just say the sensitive person is wrong or way off base. This hurts them and creates self-doubt. As a result, they adopt the majority view even if they feel it’s not best.

The second point I make is that even though others don’t feel what they feel it doesn’t mean they aren’t being affected. It’s just whereas it’s happening on a conscious level for them it’s happening on a subconscious level for the others. Everyone has different levels of consciousness.  Eventually, these feelings will “bubble up” from their subconscious to manifest themselves in actions, thoughts and feelings.

When I talk to sensitive people, it’s not unusual for them to feel that they get the emotional temperature of the individual or group rather quickly. However, it’s very normal to find them talked out of doing what they believe will work or going about their work beneath the radar. Thus, raising their awareness is usually a huge relief.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage