Mike Lehr's Blog

Previously I had indicated that placebo management could impact performance. I recently read

Michael Specter’s article, “The Power of Nothing,” in the December 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. He shared Ted Kaptchuk’s work on the Placebo Effect at the Harvard Medical School. I found this passage extremely apropos for placebo management:

. . . although placebos had no impact on the chemical markers that indicate whether a patient is responding to therapy, patients nonetheless reported feeling better. Kaptchuk concluded that objective data should not be the only criterion for doctors to consider.

Translated to the business world, we cannot just evaluate our effectiveness with people only on objective considerations. For instance, when a manager explains a business plan to an employee, the value isn’t just in the manager’s explanation and the employee’s understanding. There is additional intangible value in the time the manager spent with the employee. The manager could have enhanced this value by taking the employee to breakfast or lunch for the discussion.

As we saw there are two aspects to an interaction: thinking and feelings (see diagram to right). In this example, the manager’s explanation represents the thinking; the time and place represent the feeling. A different outcome would occur if the manager simply gave the plan for the employee’s reading.

In using this managerial approach, keep five things in mind:

1. Objective information and criteria don’t tell the whole story
2. People react differently
3. Expectations of you and the other person matter
4. Feelings matter more than #1
5. Different users have different results

Relationship building strategies and techniques maximize the placebo effect. It helps to have a strategy for improving your relationship with each of your employees. Implementing initiatives and effecting change will be easier and more effective.

Other links in this series: Placebo Management: Impacting Employees’ Beliefs

Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t.

This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty” appearing in the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. They found:

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

In fact, when answerers perform the dodge effectively, less than half of the people could remember the question accurately. The key rests in the answer’s first ten words by disrupting the cognitive link we have for the question and expected answer. In everyday life, we like to complain about the fast-talking salesperson; however, on a higher level, fast-talking becomes eloquence. It’s here that we increasingly trust and like eloquence more than honesty.

Even though I promote the practical understanding and application of intuition in business on this blog, people can use intuitive approaches for ill or good. For instance, my guest 12 Most post, lists ways to influence people intuitively to build morale; however, people can use these techniques for questionable purposes too.

How do we defend ourselves? There are two broad introductory ways:

1. Realize people can influence us intuitively and subconsciously even if we believe they can’t
2. Raise our awareness regarding intuitive approaches

In this way, we can begin accounting for these natural biases in our decision-making and actions. However, believing others can influence us without our knowledge is scary for many of us, especially if we believe in the supremacy of the conscious mind and free will.

Intuitive approaches, ones that influence people on an emotional, often unconscious level create additional options for almost any problem, especially if they involve people. Too often though, we look at problems objectively: we solve problems rather than alter how people feel about them.

Customer service is fertile ground for intuitive approaches. In the May 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Ryan W. Buell and Michael I. Norton write in “Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast…” that customers will endure waiting “even when what’s shown is merely the appearance of effort.” Examined this way, customer service is theater, even entertainment. People pay to see comedians. Why wouldn’t they feel better about the same old service if it was suddenly more enjoyable?

Once, a quality service group, who had already heard many speakers on the topic, asked for a different approach from me. So, I taught them how to improve customer service without changing one process for doing so.

Here’s the key: don’t assume you improve customer service by providing better service. This doesn’t matter if customers don’t know or don’t feel that you are servicing better. So, communicate better that you are providing better service and influence better how customers feel about the service.

Previously, we saw that changing people’s feelings for you would change how they interpret your message even if you don’t change anything about the message. This principle holds true for customer service: change how they feel about you and you will change how they feel about the service even though you don’t change one thing about the service. We saw the same with management-employee relations.

By thinking of ways to influence people’s feelings about problems, we create more problem-solving options. Customer service is ideal for seeing how effective this can be.

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

I’m often asked to improve employees’ “social skills” especially those who are classified as “quiet” or “introverted.” When I work with them, I establish two things first:

1. You don’t have to talk much to be a good conversationalist.
2. When people talk, especially about themselves, 95% of the time (if not 99%) they won’t notice that you aren’t talking.

Here is the major technique I teach them:

Focus on asking people questions especially open-ended ones encouraging elaboration.

I stumbled across this one day during college while visiting my brother at his college. He wasn’t at his fraternity so a fraternity brother entertained me until his return. Having driven for over eight hours, I was tired and unenthusiastic about returning any conversation. Fortunately, the fraternity brother was very talkative and it only took a few of my questions to carry him for almost forty-five minutes. Later, he told my brother what a “great conversationalist” I was.

Initially, people are skeptical, so I have them practice in social situations. In one case, I had an IT employee practice on his wife. When he saw how she ran with the conversation from his questions and how much more she enjoyed their “conversations,” he began integrating it into his work.

Focusing on asking questions works extremely well with people who might have an expertise that we don’t. This happened at a party last week. By focusing on the other person’s work, he carried the conversation for the entire twenty minutes while we ate together. I also learned quite a bit. However, as my wife has come to learn, you will begin to notice how few questions people really ask of others in conversation.

Related post:

Related post:

• Become a Good (or Better) Conversationalist Overnight (Part II)

Here is another site with some other good conversational techniques:

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

Looking at beauty as power is important in understanding and appreciating intuitive approaches because it dramatically expands the influences and solutions we see. However, as I mentioned in the A Blue Heron Instructs on Patience, we tend to be prejudiced toward action; therefore, we will often overlook beauty as power because it’s not an active force. Thus, it helps if we initially think of beauty as attractive because the verb “attract” implies some kind of active force.

For example, suppose we saw a metal ball rolling on a level table toward a wall. We might initially think that there was something about the ball that caused movement. However, suppose later we find out that a powerful magnet was implanted in the wall. Now, we begin to see the wall as the active force.

Another problem we tend to have is that we look at beauty very superficially, as something physically feminine. However, beauty can exist in anything, including intangible things. For instance, consider the movie A Beautiful Mind; also consider the attraction of beautiful ideas, prices, cars, paintings, formulae, advertisements, parks, scenery, etc. Anything that attracts us has some level of beauty in it; even power is beautiful to many.

So, if a car dealer stocks his showroom with a car that he knows is likely to attract us enough to buy it, who is really applying the active force: the buyer or the dealer? Similarly, when the Indians attracted General George Custer into the trap on Battle of Little Big Horn because he thought he had a beautiful opportunity to defeat them, who was playing the active force: Custer who rushed in or the Indians who created the attractive situation?

A question posted by Expat 21 asked for examples of patience in the workplace, especially those demonstrating a contrast between American and other cultures.

While I find non-American cultures more patient, the examples I have aren’t that distinguishable by cultures except in their acceptance of patience-oriented approaches and the rules under which they might apply them. However, these rules don’t alter the basic strategies and tactics behind the employment of patience; they will only make application of patience more or less accepted.

With that said, Rahm Emanuel’s well documented quote,  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before,” summarizes the business implications of patience. However, this means partnering patience with our knowledge, experience or insight about the future that others lack; we are waiting for the “crisis” that we know is over the horizon.

For example, I worked on an IT project involving the rollout of client management software (CMS). From my experience, I pushed for certain functionality that I knew sales executives would want. However, the CMS team discounted the functionality, had other priorities and didn’t incorporate it. I could have pushed harder, irritated the team and achieved only a partial list of what was needed. Instead, I waited for the rollout because I knew sales managers would request the functionality. When they did, I had their entire support to get the team to do what I originally proposed and much more.

Another example for me was the reorganization of an 80 person call center. They had already gone through three reorganizations in four years. I had advised patience to the new executive because her people were “shell shocked” and hadn’t been able to establish sound interpersonal working relationships; they needed a period of stability. She went along with her reorganization anyway; she felt pressure to do something. However, the reorganization reinforced anxieties, undermined executive credibility and made achieving goals difficult. She left after only eighteen months.

“Management by walking around” and “teachable moments” are key general examples of techniques employing patience. People are more receptive to instruction when they approach us than when we approach them. We can encourage it by making ourselves accessible but we need patience to make this work.

Some macro-business applications of patience deal with such things as branding, investment, public relations, training and marketing. In each of these cases, patience is required to see a return. Often the urgency of the moment disrupts these initiatives before the return on our patience is realized. It’s personal discipline combined with the corporate and social culture that will determine how much patience is accepted; however, the basic strategies and tactics remain fundamentally the same across cultures. It’s similar to warfare; weapons, training and supplies might be different, but the basic principles remain the same no matter who is fighting.

Related Post: Blue Heron Instructs on Patience

We live in an activist business culture, meaning we are biased toward action to solve problems. For instance, reorganizations often occur simply to show something is being done when most of the time they achieve very little. In reality, neither action nor inaction is better; it all depends upon the situation. Intuitive approaches often involve positioning which requires patience.

One day my wife and I were having a picnic lunch along the Cuyahoga River during a hike. At the inside corner of a bend in the river stood a Blue Heron. My wife asked what I thought he was doing there just standing. I told her he was waiting for a fish.

About twenty minutes went by when my wife said, “I don’t think he’s waiting for a fish; it has been a long time. I would just go after the fish.” Within a minute of telling her she would never catch one with that approach because the fish were much quicker, the Heron stabbed his head downward and retrieved a fish.

In business, people will encourage us to take action even when it’s not the best option. In nature, many animals, like the Heron, lie and wait for their opportunities. Sometimes we need to position ourselves for opportunities to maximize our returns and minimize our costs, but it’s often discounted by the urge to act. Real estate is an excellent example. It’s about “location, location, location.” That real estate is lying and waiting until the benefits from its location are reaped.

In our everyday business lives, we are often prejudiced to force a bad position just so we can feel action oriented, sooth our egos or look good politically. Resisting such temptation is challenging; patience requires more discipline than action.

One of the major characteristics of intuitive approaches for leadership is the dominance of intrinsic rewards over extrinsic ones. The demarcation between the two is most clear in studies of the effect of praise over money from immediate managers. A November 2009 article from McKinsey Quarterly, Motivating people – Getting beyond money, is but one example.

In addition to praise from an immediate manager, the article sited attention from leaders and opportunities to lead as two other nonfinancial rewards valued above compensation. However, the transition to nonfinancial rewards is difficult for many managers. A major reason the article gave was that “nonfinancial ways to motivate people do, on the whole, require more time and commitment from senior managers.”

While this is true, an important aspect that is rarely examined is that the tendency to praise is a function of personality. In order to praise and interact effectively, people need to have some emotional awareness and sensitivity. Just as some cars are better than others, some praises are too.

For instance, a manager who is more easily drawn to statistics, reports, information and finances might not have the personality necessary to encourage him to seek out opportunities to praise and spend individual time with employees. Moreover, while some extroverts can excel at networking a room, they can fail miserably at nonfinancial rewards. It’s one thing to have polite, congenial conversations in public but quite another to have involved, developmental discussions with an employee one-on-one. This is why some great public speakers can’t teach and some teachers can’t speak publicly.

Until companies look for personalities and aptitudes conducive to using nonfinancial rewards, overreliance on compensation to motivate will continue.