Mike Lehr's Blog

In 2008, a study by Professor Jens Krause, then of the University of Leeds, indicated that it only takes a purposeful minority of five percent to influence an entire crowd. The implication of his work for change management is this: we can initiate change with a small minority, we don’t need everyone at the outset. A passionate minority can often be very successful against an inert majority.

In general, there are four types of personalities when it comes to change:

1. Initiators: want to initiate change because the status quo doesn’t serve them
2. Adapters: adapt once they see the change working for the initiators
3. Followers: will follow the other two types once they believe it’s “the thing to do”
4. Resistors: will resist change because they don’t want to change or can’t change

The five percent will usually include Initiators. The problem is that many companies have them scattered across the company as in Figure #1. However, if we can consolidate them so they can work together and mutually support one another, they become Figure #2. Even though it’s only five percent of the total picture appears quite more powerful than the five percent spread randomly throughout Figure #1. The same happens in groups and organizations especially if some are in leadership positions.

Any insurrection begins with connecting supporters. This might mean reorganizing so they can work together: assigning them to the same project team, task force, product development team, call center or marketing campaign. The grouping should be as cross functional as possible down to the support people.

To cement the team’s camaraderie, it should receive attention from top leadership and ample dose of interpersonal techniques from it. Their momentum will encourage the adapters and followers leaving only the resistors with whom to work.

The Freedom-Order duality expresses a dimension of our personality involved in interpreting how we balance freedom and order. It can help us – in real time – understand, appreciate and predict better the reactions of others to such things as processes, decision-making, management, customer service, change and organization.

However, all of this is arbitrary, subjective, meaning different people are comfortable with different levels of freedom and order. To some freedom is chaos because it seems anyone can do whatever he wants. To others order is slavery because there is someone or a rule telling her what to do. Therefore, since there are no absolute states for either, you can be the benchmark as the figure shows. This allows you to assess whether people are more freedom-oriented or order-oriented than you are by the feelings and thoughts they trigger in you.

For instance, more freedom-oriented people might make you feel they are:

You might also notice they tend to use words such as these:

By contrast, more order-oriented people might make you feel they are:

Similarly, you might find them using words such as:

In our daily business lives, this means adding process and procedures to those who are more freedom-oriented than we are might stir anxious feelings about becoming nothing more than an automaton. Conversely, more flexibility and options to more order-oriented people might trigger anxious feelings about what is the right thing to do.

Once we are sensitive to this, we can better position the change by adapting immediately to what we observe in others. To the freedom-oriented people, we will need to reassure the flexibility of adding their own dimension, and to order-oriented people reassuring clear definitions of their duties will exist. In essence, we personalize our approach and words to by appreciating people and their needs better.

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

I received a question about Emotional Intelligence and Leadership in a comment about Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III):

What are your thoughts on Emotional Intelligence(EI) and whether you feel there is a way to objectively measure EI and if it is a measure of Leadership?

Essentially, EI is a head thing; my work is a heart thing. EI is about being “intelligent” about emotions; it’s not about feeling. If you look at EI’s definition of empathy, this becomes clear:

Ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.

With intuition, I define empathy as:

Ability to feel what the other person is feeling.

Understand is a “head” term, not a “heart” one. Feel is about the heart not the head. EI helps people read the reactions of other people to understand their emotions. In contrast, a true empath (someone who is empathetic) will tend to feel what the other person is feeling even before needing to see a reaction.

Since EI is learnable and is all about understanding and not feeling, a psychopath could learn to become more emotionally intelligent because he can understand without feeling. Empathy, on the other hand is only developed from the emotional sensitivity given to us at birth. It’s analogous to us only being able to develop our athletic capabilities from our given physical attributes.

As for leadership, EI aids it, but it does not objectively measure it for two reasons. First, other personal attributes contribute to leadership which EI does not measure such as our ability to communicate and influence. Second, EI is not measured objectively. As with any personality assessment tool, EI is dependent upon the assumptions and benchmarks underlying it. Those are subjectively determined by the tools’ creators based upon what they feel will work best.

As I had mentioned in a previous post, who we are (WWA) is different from who we think we are (TWA), an important concept behind intuitive approaches. It can explain many of the contradictions we observe in what people say and do and explain the problems with self-report personality assessments. Awareness of TWA-WWA will help us minimize erroneous conclusions when predicting human behavior.

Who We Are is Different From Who We Think We Are

Whereas TWA resides in our conscious, WWA resides primarily in our subconscious and is much greater. Consequently, TWA only represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of our potential. We often only discover aspects of WWA when we are challenged to learn or face a crisis.

On the downside, TWA holds much of what others (parents, friends, educators, community, etc.) teach us or condition us to believe about the world and us. Consequently, TWA can impede us from doing what we really want to do by causing us to ignore, deny, discount or suppress it. Pragmatically, the TWA-WWA difference will often account for the many errors we find in all kinds of surveys (quality service, market research, etc.). On an interpersonal level, it will account for much of the hypocrisy we see in others.

We learn WWA by listening to what we say, observing what we do and interpreting what we think; we can do the same with others. It works because we cannot consciously control every aspect of what we say, do and think. There are gaps; our subconscious fills them. It’s this “filler” that provides clues to WWA; it’s a matter of learning to read these clues. Many times this can only be done through direct interaction with the person so we can make ancillary observations; something surveys often don’t do.

In the last two weeks I ran across articles in The Atlantic and The Economist about online dating: “Take the Data of Dating” and “Love at First Bite” respectively. Regardless of your relational status, the surveys and profiles people are completing to facilitate the process are instructive in understanding the pitfalls of objective personality tests (also known as self-report inventories). Contrast these to the projective tests I discussed in a previous post.

The basic problem with most kinds of self-reporting is that it assumes people are consciously aware of their tendencies. In reality, there usually is a significant difference between “who we think we are” and “who we are.” We often observe this disconnect in others as hypocrisy. Thus, simply answering a series of questions similar to another person doesn’t mean we are even remotely similar.

Things like upbringing, culture, religion, politics and education can condition us to like certain things that we might not like on a deeper level. This can affect our emotional health and our social and interpersonal interactions. Yes, it’s possible to match up objective factors such as income, profession and education, but subjective factors aren’t so easy.

For example, people who talk a lot will often vehemently claim to dislike those who do. Its psychological underpinning is similar to the one in the Shakespearian line from Hamlet (III, ii, 239), “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” That’s why we should not be surprised to find vehement protesters of an action to be conducting the action themselves.

It’s these kind of personality traits that self-reporting inventories, such as online dating surveys, have difficulty capturing. These can often lead to faulty matches.

Anytime we describe or comment on someone’s personality, we are doing an assessment. Yes, it might not qualify as a formal psychological assessment, but it can still help us. More than likely, we are interpreting people’s responses to certain events to arrive at this assessment. This is very similar to projective personality assessments (also known as “free response” assessments). The most famous one is the Rorschach (inkblots).

In reality, people’s actions, decisions and words tell us something about them. For instance, the music, movies, books, clothes, cars and food they like give us insights. The challenge is figuring out what they tell us. Moreover, just because two people like the same book doesn’t mean they have similar personalities. The key question is, “Why do they like it?” Their answers are the clues.

When they answer, we listen by pretending they are now describing themselves. Many times the attributes we like, we will tend to like in other people and things. Conversely, the ones we don’t like, we will tend to not like.

For example, someone who says she liked the book because it was well organized is very likely to like organization in people and other facets of her world. If another says he liked the book because it made him think differently, he is very likely to like thought-provoking people and ideas. Usually, people’s first response is the most telling.

It’s important though that we continue to question and listen to see if we get other responses that tend to support our initial observation. Maybe something else besides personality drove the response such as education, upbringing or rules. That’s why I like doing this with everyday discussions because they tend to be less encumbered by other factors.

Other links:

Projective Test Definition (About.com)

Projective Personality Test (PsychCentral)

Projective Versus Objective Personality Tests (Yahoo! Contributor Network)

Psychological Testing (Wikipedia)

Here’s a friend’s story. It’s an example of what we can hypothesize about people from everyday comments. They are a starting point from which we can probe, learn and build relationships.

Black Bark

Situation

My friend, as part of a touring group, visited a contemporary art gallery. She was talking to a man in the group who said he prefers artists who “stab him in the gut.” She asked him what a mainly black piece composed of bark and charcoal meant to him. He said it was “very cleansing” and that the black pieces on the canvas “represent all the dark and negative energy in the room being absorbed.” For him, it made the room light and “cleansed of all negative energy.” My friend found two other pieces that he liked disturbing.

Commentary

Possibly, the pieces of black wood and charcoal might not only be pulling negative energy from the room but also from him. This is further supported by preference for artists who “stab him in the gut.” Feelings of mutilation can often be prompted by negative energy from within. Moreover, knowing my friend, she would not want artists (or anyone for that matter) to stab her in the gut, a disturbing thought. On the other hand, since feelings help us feel alive, the man might value intense, almost shocking feelings.

Approach

In building a rapport with him, I would initially:

• Allow him to “shock” me
• Avoid expressing disapproval
• Show extreme interest
• Encourage him to do most of the talking

If he appeared disinterested with this approach, my alternative path would involve direct and edgy questions and remarks. I would also consider expressing, in a positive way, how unique he was for holding such views.

Note: Details of the original story have been changed. Any relationship to specific people is coincidental.

As reported in the November 2, 2009 edition of The New Yorker in the article, Robots That Care, Professor Maja Matarić of the University of Southern California is experimenting with robots caring for stroke and Alzheimer’s patients and autistic children. The major thrust of this work entails programming robots to respond to behavioral cues of patients. One path involved addressing the extroverted-introverted nature of a person. Since many of us have been exposed to a plethora of personality assessment tools and often struggle with how to apply the information, I thought it might help to know how this professor programmed robots to respond to extroverted-introverted people.

When Professor Matarić programmed robots to work with extroverts, she had them:

• Work closer than the standard distance for a task
• Speak with a slightly higher pitch
• Talk quicker
• Instruct using more forceful words

When she had robots work with introverts, she programmed them to:

• Work farther away than the standard distance for a task
• Use fewer gestures
• Speak with a slightly lower pitch
• Talk slower
• Offer more praise
• Instruct using more soothing words

Additionally, Professor Matarić was able to program robots to “learn” the behavioral style of the person so they could adjust the above parameters depending upon their assessment of the person as an extrovert or introvert. Perhaps, this information will help us to “program” ourselves to work more effectively with the extroverts and introverts in our lives.

Intuitive approaches require the identification of emotional drivers in influencing and problem solving. They generally work better than cognitive approaches because emotional drivers tend to impact behaviors, thoughts and decisions far more than logic, reasons and rationales. Therefore, if we want to effectively identify these drivers, we need techniques to help us. Our word choice is one such technique.

Generally speaking we can uncover feelings by simply asking, “How do you feel about . . .” If we ask, “What do you think about . . .” we’ll tend to receive a heady response rather than a heartfelt one. The word “believe” gives us more of a middle-of-the-road response. We need the mid-range approach because some people do not like to be asked how they feel about things. I once asked a woman how she felt about something, and she replied, “I hate it when you ask that question.” Therefore, we need a mid-range approach for these folks.

Furthermore, we can incorporate these words into our discussion, not just our questions. The more we use the word “feel” the more likely our discussion will hover on an emotional plane. Conversely, the more “think” is used the more likely it will hover on a logical one. In order to avoid redundancy we can incorporate more feeling words like emotions, empathy and sympathy. Thinking words would include reasons, rationale and logic and keep the discussion on a heady level.

If you will be teaching others how to use these words, you need to be aware that some people don’t like to even use the word “feel.” If so, they will have difficulty using this technique.