Mike Lehr's Blog

We know each of us is different; however, the degree of difference is clearly underestimated. We experience this whenever we exclaim we cannot understand why someone does something, whenever anyone gets thrilled or appalled over something we don’t. I once worked with a sales manager who found it incomprehensible that a sales person wasn’t motivated by money.

As an example of how different we can be, I posted a while back that the ability to praise was a function of personality. This is an easy, enjoyable event for some and quite an arduous for others. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, I found another example of our vast differences when I read Lauren F. Friedman’s article, “I’m Not Sorry”, citing the work,  The Disposition to Apologize, of Andrew Howell and his colleagues at Grant MacEwan University. As examples, Friedman mentions some people who have difficult apologizing. Those who possess:

• A low degree of compassion and agreeability
• Low self-esteem
• An overly grand view of themselves (very egocentric)
• A strong sense of justice

The point is that we can approach any human attribute – praising, apologizing, intelligence, athleticism, dedication, nurturing, courage, trustworthiness, relentlessness, sensitivity or any countless others – the same way: each having a myriad of variations and intensities across all humans. For instance, we know there is a difference between men and women, but “How big is that difference?” I often suggest to people that they imagine differences between any two people to be ten times greater than they think they are.

Again, this shows up when we can’t fathom why someone would think or do something and when we believe their “cure” is quite simple: “Just do what I do!” Both are signs of greatly under appreciating how different we are.

Part of what makes intuition so powerful is the assumption that we are born with personalities, talents and knowledge. Life then becomes the challenge to express them.

For example, we are born knowing about the “opposite sex.” It’s only later in life we arrive at an understanding of it and the ability to verbalize it. However, this contradicts the more popularized view of humans being born a “blank slate.” The article, “Transporter of Delight”, in the October 15, 2011 edition of The Economist, severely undercuts this notion by beginning:

“The idea that the human personality is a blank slate, to be written upon only by experience, prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, that notion has been undermined.”

The article cites research concluding, “personality is the single biggest determinant” of happiness with “a third of the variation in people’s happiness [being] heritable.” For example, extroverts tend to feel happier than introverts do. Thus, what I wrote regarding free will (more) and “who we are” being quite different from “who we think we are” is really about us being substantially more than “the sum of our experiences” and more than “a product of our environment.” There are opportunities for us when we realize we weren’t born slaves to our conditions, environments, societies and cultures.

Yet, this poses some thought provoking questions such as, “What happens to us when our nature is in conflict with our culture, our society or our upbringing?” Also, “What happens when we try to express ourselves in the midst of such conflict?” In such situations, we can easily see how God or Nature created us to alter the status quo, to change things . . . to encourage growth where stagnation exists. Growth cannot occur without change.

So, the boss walks in and harshly reprimands an employee. Unknowingly, she probably just shot his productivity down for the day. A while ago I worked with a company in which it was fairly common practice for the owner to come in late Monday morning and severely reprimand his employees. I witnessed what that did to their productivity for the week.

What we often don’t realize is how much words, phrasing and general conversation can affect people. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, Tori Rodriguez in her article, “What Just Happened?”, cites several studies including ones in which:

• “. . . people who were unconsciously exposed to images of fast-food logos became more impatient . . .”
• “ . . . when participants recalled an illness-related memory, their pain tolerance decreased.”
• Participants were “unknowingly primed toward goal pursuit” simply by reading something “that included words such as ‘success’ and ‘achieve.’”

While Rodriguez recommends that we become more aware of this “priming” as she calls it by recalling what we “saw, heard and thought about in the past few minutes,” we can also raise our awareness concerning how we negatively influence people accidentally. Moreover, we could use this priming for good. For instance, simply wishing people luck can improve their productivity and performance.

That means we need to beware of that “constructive criticism” we offer. If it really is that constructive and helpful, we should position it as advice, assistance or simply help. Consider too, if we never compliment an employee. It’s as though we never watered a plant.

Next time you want to motivate someone, it might be as simple as talking about something positive, enjoyable and yes, even humorous.

Intrinsic rewards are important aspects of creating a cooperative work culture. However, such rewards are difficult to understand and teach. Moreover, many, many people just don’t believe they are that powerful. Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review endorses the importance of intrinsic rewards in cooperative cultures.

Essentially, as we saw in the second post of this series, most people enjoy being cooperative, enjoy helping others; but, this enjoyment will dissipate if we ignore, discount or unreinforce it. Using effective, intrinsic, morale building techniques and compliments while working to minimize selfish extrinsic motivations such as money will ensure this won’t happen.

Since intrinsic rewards by nature are less tangible, it’s often difficult for managers and leaders to understand and appreciate the internal motivations of others, especially if they by nature don’t receive tremendous enjoyment from helping others. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for encouraging a cooperative workforce:

• Thank employees when they help others (letting them know it’s important to you)
• Demonstrate how they have helped you or others (it’s not always apparent to them)
• Recognize that they naturally enjoy helping others (reinforcing their internal motivation for helping others)
• Show how their job helps others to do theirs when performed well (creating a personal connection between their job and others)
• Hire and promote people who enjoy helping others (the desire to help others is a function of personality)
• Believe that people enjoy helping people (we cannot promote cooperation if we don’t believe it’s a motivation)

These tips will be uncomfortable at first but regularly applied they will produce positive effects over the long run. Thus, they require relentlessness, discipline and almost a fanatical belief in the power of cooperation.

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

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt

In the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review Jeff Weiss, Aram Donigian, Jonathan Huges discuss in their article “Extreme Negotiations” the importance of affecting process not just outcomes in negotiations. The same holds true in problem solving since negotiations are only problems of bringing two sides to agreement. Thus, you can get different solutions by changing your problem-solving process.

In one simple situation, Manager A took the initiative of drafting a plan for review. Manager B did not like it. Thus, they decided to collaborate on the next rendition. As another example, two hiring managers couldn’t agree on a candidate, so they changed the process by requiring the candidate to write a business plan for his hire.

Here are some techniques I use to alter the problem-solving process. I change the:

• Process by having another person or group create it
• Point at which people work independently and then come together
• Definition of the problem to include more lower-tier variables
• Makeup of the people or teams involved in the process
• Documentation required even to the point of using different forms and templates
• Timetable of when a solution is needed
• Any screening and filtering steps to allow more or fewer options
• Stakeholders involved in the process usually by adding new ones
• Objective of the process such as focusing on options not the solution
• Facilitator of the process
• Location of any meetings such as from office to offsite
• Forum for any meetings such as in person versus video conferences
• Initial parameters of what constitutes a viable option for processing

Of course, each problem-solving situation presents its own additional aspects that could effect change in process. So, if you’re not getting the solutions you want, change the process.

In this series’ previous post, I wrote about using Wordle to help identify word usage and phrasing trends by people as a prelude to identifying personalities in a real-time sense. In this series’ first post, I wrote about using everyday conversation to identify personalities. In this post, I will combine the two concepts to validate our findings, which I call extrapolation. Essentially, we try to predict responses to our questions by changing topics.

For example, after listening to someone, we notice he talks extremely pragmatically about things. Extrapolating, we can ask him a couple decision-related questions such as, “Why do you like your house?” In our minds, we predict a pragmatic response. If he does respond with answers such as, “It’s close to work,” “In the school district we want,” and “We were able to get a good price,” then they support our findings. However, if he responses with, “The setting is beautiful,” “We liked the ambiance when we walked in,” or others, we know we need to work further.

Again, the challenge is being able to spot trends in word usage. The series’ previous post lists five other word pairs in addition to the one here: pragmatic versus emotional. Another challenge is avoiding iron-clad perceptions of people; our observations and conclusions should be ongoing and fluid as new discussions arise. It is quite possible for people to assume different personalities in similar situations depending upon their moods.

For instance, people will often behave one way when they’re happy and another when they’re angry. That’s why results from classical self-reporting personality assessments can vary. The book Was That Really Me? by Naomi Quenk does an excellent job highlighting this phenomenon.

However, this only reinforces the persistent point that personality assessment requires ongoing practice and modification.

Other posts in this series:

• Assessing Personalities thru Everyday Discussions (1.0)
• Real-time Personality Assessment (Pt 2): Important Qualities
• Real-time Personality Assessment (Pt 3): Word Themes

As I had mentioned in The Rise of Intuition, the biggest advancement we’ll see in the next five to fifteen years will not be in biotechnology, cloud computing, medical treatments, alternative energy, personal computing devices or any other tangible technology. It will be in understanding ourselves as human beings.

Technology and new research methodologies are fueling this revolution. In these previous posts, I highlighted what these methodologies are showing about what influences us:

• Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars
• Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You
• Rude More Powerful than Respectful

Now, in the October 29, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Mind-goggling,” tells of four different technologies capable of reading our minds:

• Bin He of University of Minnesota (more)
• Martin Dressler of Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (more)
• Jack Gallant of University of California, Berkeley (more)
• Francisco Pereira of Princeton University (more)

While the readings are crude today, work is rapidly progressing. Remember the medical tricorder Doctor McCoy used in Star Trek to scan bodies? Even as fantastic as that was, Spock still had to read minds via a mind meld. Now, imagine if McCoy had a brain tricorder capable of reading thoughts.

These technological advances are going to revolutionize our understanding of how we work. Early returns show an increasing amount of complex brain activity occurring on a subconscious level beyond the classical reflexive functions. This will directly challenge our concept of free will (more) as I have written earlier.

Amazingly, this revolution is silently flying under our radars and continuously fails to garner the hype of the other advancements I mentioned. Of course, this may be fitting since the revolution will likely uncover many thoughts and emotions that live outside of our consciousness.