Mike Lehr's Blog

We often hear about the jealousies women have for other women who they feel are attractive. While it’s easy to discount this as pettiness, there are business implications when it comes to appraising and hiring talent.

For example, the March 31, 2012 edition of The Economist reports in its article, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful,” that it’s better for attractive men to submit photos with their resumes but not women. The reason was that “human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women,” especially when it comes to resumes’ initial screenings. Bradley Ruffle of Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner of Ariel University Centre conducted the study.

As I wrote above, it’s easy to view from a petty perspective. However, let’s frame it from a perspective of power. For instance, would a man hire another man who he felt was more powerful (i.e. more talented than he was)? More specifically, would a male manager hire another man who could take his job or the promotion he was expecting to receive in the near future?

Thus, if we look at beauty as power, couldn’t the women in this study be feeling threatened from a power perspective? This is even more possible if we review how beauty’s subliminal influence deliver many advantages to attractive people in the marketplace. As a result, rather than see the rejection of attractive women by other women as something superfluous, it’s now a natural defense mechanism.

Again, the purpose of this series is to explore the tangible, pragmatic influences beauty has on us in everyday business life. It’s not just a personal sideshow in that life. Beauty, and its superficial sister, attractiveness, trigger deep, natural forces within us that influence our decisions.

Other posts in this series:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty
• Beauty as Power (Part III): Appreciation
• Beauty as Power (Pt. IV): Subliminal Influence

The research behind behavioral economics is full of emotional solutions to everyday problems. By tapping into the emotional biases behind our decisions, we can expand the range of limited solutions offered by rational thought models. The exploring of emotional solutions has gone big time as the article, “Nudge Nudge, Think Think” explains in the March 24, 2012 edition of The Economist by focusing on the amount of investments governments are making in this area.

Said simply, “How we phrase things matter.” I’ve written how this can change the taste of food and even change the reactions to a bonus plan. As the article explains, nudging “shows it is possible to steer people towards better decisions by presenting choices in different ways.”

For example:

• People were three times more likely to pay an outstanding vehicular tax when the letter was simplified and included a picture of the automobile.
• Boys did better than girls did when a technical drawing class was called “geometry,” and girls did equally well or better when it was called “drawing.”
• People were more inclined to use less energy when their consumption was compared to their neighbors.

Not only does this help us solve problems, it also helps us avoid them by being aware of what we say so we don’t sabotage our well-intentioned plans. Choosing the right words for a personality can go a long way in helping us to effect the change we desire by tapping the right emotions.

For example, my wife won a bet at a party by talking a friend’s six-year-old daughter into selecting a vegetable over chocolate to eat. Understanding and appreciating the power behind words’ connotations helps us immensely here, and Roget’s Thesaurus is invaluable in our efforts.

Remember, people eat escargot not snails.

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 in relationship building.

Synchronization is using words or phrasing of the other person to ask, comment or respond. The technique facilitates communications by ensuring he and you are “speaking the same language.” It’s keying in on the person’s pet words and phrases that emphasize key thoughts or emotions. It can be difficult to use since it requires intense listening and conscious avoidance of mocking or mimicking. We might also require some time and experimentation to ensure we are using the person’s words the way he does.

Some examples of synchronization include:

• Buzz words, for example:
  • “Reorg”
  • “Rush job”
  • “Strategize”
  • “Devi’s in the details”
• Acronyms:
  • ASAP
  • RFP
  • Industry specific ones
• Particular to person:
  • Person: “Run this by Sue before doing anything.” You: “Ok, I’ll run this by her first.”
  • Person: “This is an awesome idea.” You (later in the conversation): “I believe this other idea is awesome too.”
  • Person: “This report has some sound and strong recommendations.” You (later in conversation): “The reasoning behind Tom’s idea is sound and strong.”

From a relational perspective, synchronization conveys the feeling that you are:

• Complimentary through subtleties
• Connecting, recognizing similarities
• “On the same page”

The effect of synchronization is to create:

• Synergies
• Perception of being on the same wave length
• Establish and improve common understandings

Synchronization effectively builds relationships when integrated with other techniques.  It ensures that we use words the other person understands, thus reducing miscommunication. More importantly, since this technique, when done well, is very subtle, it promotes the development of relationships on a more interpersonal, emotional level.

Other posts in this series:

• Relationship Building Technique #1: Open-ended Questions
• Relationship Building Technique #2: Closed Questions
• Relationship Building Technique #3: Pause
• Relationship Building Technique #4: Acknowledgement
• Relationship Building Technique #5: Encouragement

People often have unrealistic expectations for intuition, sometimes thinking it’s a crystal ball, magic lamp or answer giver. This usually stems from trying to see it as we do cognition. However, if cognition is a map, intuition is our compass. If cognition is our street address, then intuition is our city, state or nation.

Of course, visualizations help to differentiate between cognition and intuition. I use the schematic below that way. Cognition represents logic and reason, easily connecting each point because one naturally follows the other. One thought connects the next.

Intuition on the other hand is like trying to find the best line to represent a group of observations. It doesn’t connect them as easily and new points don’t always fall on or near the line; however, taken as a group, our observations form a pattern giving a sense of direction to them. Thus, intuition narrows our possibilities. More significantly, we don’t need many observations to get this directional sense.

For example, we can predict tendencies of people simply by looking at what they buy. In some cases, if we know their favorite car, beverage, hobby, store and book, we can make predictions about their favorite restaurant. Political campaigns take such consumer information and make accurate predictions about what candidates and issues potential voters might prefer. We can form psychological profiles of people from consumer – and other – activities, similar to what we see on crime shows when tracking criminals.

While these examples are very conscious, we unconsciously pick up patterns too. These are translated into feelings, emotions and finally intuitions. That is why it’s important to listen to how we feel. It might be our intuition giving us some direction, giving us a north. In this sense, intuition can be our guiding star.

Related link: My Intuition White Paper (3 pages)

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.

My October 13, 2011 post, “Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars,” discussed how style affects our assessment of talent. Now, in the November 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, the article, “It’s Not What You Say but How You Say It,” cites the research of

Timothy DeGroot’s team from Midwestern State University indicating the attractiveness of leaders’ voices influence our perceptions of their effectiveness.

Again, the challenge is that we often don’t realize this influence is occurring. Moreover, we tend to believe other people are influenced but we aren’t. Combining this with the way labels influence our perceptions of content and how beauty and attractiveness influences us, we begin to see easily how incompetent people can receive promotions especially if they are confident.

In combating this influence, it’s important to begin with two perspectives:

1. Acknowledge that style influences us (“That includes me!”)
2. Remain focused on more intrinsic indicators of talents such as process (how a person works, thinks and interacts)

Often, we erroneously focus on results when we don’t factor in extraneously factors such as the team, timing and situation of the person’s experience. Perhaps the person was just along for the ride. Culture, processes and tools can also affect outcomes. When we fail to account for these, we tend fall into the trap of believing people are “winners” if they come from “winning organizations.”

In the final analysis, what makes assessing talent difficult is not the intrinsic analysis of it but rather being able to do so while trying to navigate the murky cloud of our own perceptions and biases. Many forces intuitively influence us on a subconscious level to stir up this mud.

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.

When I’ve written about the illusion of free will, I’ve focused on the advancement of technology and research methodologies to uncover subconscious thought patterns. However, these advancements are also discovering a connection between chemical reactions and some of our emotions.

In the September 24, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Rogue Hormones,” reports on the research of John Coates, a  neuroscientist from Cambridge University. His research of derivative traders showed that when they “are on a winning streak their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk.” This biochemical process produces extremely “powerful emotions” encouraging traders to “go crazy.”

This helps to explain why we often learn more from our failures than our successes and why success can deliver us to a state of hubris, an exalted arrogance that can corrupt our decision-making processes. Such biochemical processes help explain why such exuberance can infect many people to think and act similarly without communicating with each other while each is believing he is responding of his own free will. Thus, such events as financial bubbles and housing bubbles can occur on a broad scale.

A way to mitigate this effect is to diversify your workforce to include many types of personalities in decision-making positions. For instance, the article concluded that hiring women, who generally have about 10% as much testosterone as men, could help offset “irrational exuberance.” Experience can also help especially if it contains crises brought about by excessive risk taking. Moreover, even from strictly a gender perspective, not all men will experience the same increases in testosterone levels from success making them prone to erroneous risk assessments.

Of course, it’s not easy to manage a diverse workforce.

I decided to revisit the illusion of free will after running across two other articles reinforcing it. As technology and research methodologies advance, we are finding more and more that biological and psychological factors heavily influence us without our knowledge, further eroding the rational actor theory. This theory forms the basis of many decision-making models in business; however, it’s turning out we cannot expect people to behave rationally.

The article by David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” appearing in the July/August 2011 of The Atlantic, discusses recent brain and genetic research. Whether you believe nature or nurture is the more impactive force in our development, the point is this: we control neither. If free will really existed, we wouldn’t need drugs to cure depression because threats would work. As Eagleman also indicates, free will has tremendous difficulty overcoming what our subconscious has already decided to do. We cannot divorce behavior from biology or the unconscious. At minimum, free will operates in an increasingly smaller field of play.

We are also learning that genes don’t just change at an evolutionary rate but at a generational one too. In the July 23, 2011 of The Economist, the article, Baby Blues, mentions, “a mother’s stress while she is pregnant can have a long-lasting effect on her children’s genes.”
Biology and genes form an integral part of our personalities. As I mentioned in my previous post, if we look at personalities as being analogous to software in computers, we can see where knowing the personality can help us predict behaviors in much the same way as knowing the software can help us predict what a computer will do.

What this means is that our decisions need to factor in a reality where people don’t behave rationally because they aren’t free to do so.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will

I’ve seen positive thinking do much harm to some folks; if they can’t keep their smiley face on, they feel they’re failing. Moreover, if they fail and don’t know why, they begin to question their attitude thus compounding their problems. Too many times looking at why they can’t do something is declared negativity by their friends, colleagues and family. However, these “negative” thoughts can spurn motivation, preparation and problem solving.

I came upon an excellent article by Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz in the May/June 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind titled, “Can Positive Thinking Be Negative?” They summarize research on positive thinking from many angles by concluding that many of the benefits pushed by the self-help movement are tenuous. In one, they declare:

Optimists, especially when bolstered by success, can suffer from overconfidence and Pollyannaism, creating financial and business difficulties. They are also less likely to take corrective action because their optimism is a breeding ground for complacency. We see this in something as non-business as losing weight.

Recently, improved technology and research methodologies have taught us that biology and our subconscious influence us far more than we ever thought. “Who we are” is different than “who we think we are” so positive thinking’s influence is temporary at best. That is why it requires constant maintenance very much like a sandcastle does on a beach; we need to address the underlying biological and emotional elements of our being in order to find a more permanent and natural solution.

Optimism and pessimism work best together. One without the other produces a rosy picture on one hand and a bleak one on the other.