Mike Lehr's Blog

The two aspects of every interpersonal interaction are thoughts and feelings. You can change people’s views of your ideas by changing how they feel about you; you don’t need to change your idea. This is because emotions are more powerful influencers than cognitive tools such as reason, logic and thoughts. However, we still need cognitive tools. They serve as the diversion, distraction and excuse allowing the emotional aspects of relationship building to work. This is because emotions can create discomfort for people especially in a business setting.

The right-hand diagram expresses this by showing the direct nature of thoughts (red arrow) and the indirect one of feelings (blue arrow). While thoughts become the overt focus of the interaction, the message’s real impact arrives through the back door on a deeper level in the form of impressions. Therefore, thoughts become excuses to build relationships.

For example, when a boy carries a girl’s books home, it’s not because he likes to carry books. He wants to interact with the girl. The visible, tangible acts are carrying books and conversing. The invisible, intangible ones involve developing a emotional connection.  If he were to overtly state his romantic intentions, he’d likely scare off the girl. Carrying the books serves as the boys excuse, diversion and distraction while feelings do their subliminal work.

Even though the emotional connection we develop with employees is not the same as the one in our example, we observe excuses to foster relationships every day in business as “face time” with the boss. From the perspective of the right-hand diagram, the feelings developed in this face time are more important than the actual exchange of ideas. Thus, we should evaluate every interaction’s potential for relationship building, not just for the objective communication of ideas.

A financial professional emailed me regarding bosses who “manage by email.” She implied that her boss rarely calls  or meets with employees. She asked, “What does this mean?” and “What should I do?”

First, email does provide certain efficiencies over personal interactions (phone calls and visits). However, from a relationship-building perspective the others are superior. Consequently, I advise managers to have at least one personal interaction with every employee every day.

Managers who MBE will do so for different personal reasons. Nevertheless, we can categorize them under one or both of the following:

• Wanting to minimize their personal interactions
• Liking something better about email communications

So, what do you do? Begin by uncovering the specific reasons under these broad preferences. Here are a couple sample questions to customize:

• What are the advantages of emailing on ____ over meeting to discuss it periodically?
• It seems you prefer to communicate by email; if so, would you share with me why so I can ensure I communicate effectively in them

Their answers will give you a general direction as to what bosses like to see in their relationships. For instance, if he references efficiency, then speed might be more important than substance in his relationships. If she references documentation, she might prefer accountability, organization and recollection. If he references organizing or forming his thoughts, he might prefer control to spontaneity in relationships.

After gaining this insight, employees can initiate personal interactions and seek to deliver the attributes they’ve identified. Regardless, employees are wise to reverse the tables and make it a point to call or visit their bosses at least once a day. This will not only help protect their jobs but also help employees be happier and more successful in them.

Brian Christian’s article, “Mind vs. Machine,” in the March 2011 issue of The Atlantic covers the Loebner Prize competition which administers the Turing Test to artificial intelligence (AI) programs. This involves an instantaneous form of instant messaging (IM) in which judges have to determine within five minutes whether they are conversing with a computer or a person.

What computers teach us about being human when we attempt to program them to converse is really how formulaic our conversations can be. Therefore, are we really putting any thought or effort into them? The computers sometimes fool the judges, often enough to make us stop and think. When the first such conversational computer arrived, Eliza (more), many people mistook the experience for a human one.

For instance, casual conversation tends to be relatively predictable and easily programmable because it’s driven by the most recent comment. It rarely refers back to prior comments made three, four, ten or more in the past. In other words, we don’t require any knowledge of the conversation’s history to continue it. We don’t need to remember and sort through relevant points to formulate our own ideas. We only need to remember the most current comment.

Returning to what computers can teach us about being human, I was prompted to recall that someone had emphasized to me the importance of “getting down to a human level” when dealing with people. This made me wonder:

If our conversation is programmable and actionable by a computer, can we really be human with one another?

Perhaps this explains why we find some people’s conversations shallow. They’re conversing at a level no better than a computer.

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

Expressing our thoughts is challenging especially when we don’t know the words to do so. Therefore, restricting our vocabulary will tend to restrict our thoughts. As a result, we will experience more difficulty influencing others and solving problems. It’s important for us to expand our vocabularies, to allow stylistic differences and to exercise our minds by defining the fine differences between synonyms rather than assume they are the same (i.e. truth vs. clarity, influence vs. control, power vs. authority).

George Orwell’s book 1984 details this thought control through a state working feverishly to restrict the words of its citizenry. By eliminating words like “freedom” and “revolution,” citizens would have difficulty thinking of these concepts.

We don’t have an Orwellian state; however, business and company cultures tend toward self-censorship because they need standardization for efficiencies. Standardization often requires standardized communication practices, as exemplified in warfare and football. They save time.

I call such words “vanilla” words. They tend to be:

• Inoffensive to the group (politically correct)
• Repeatedly used to enforce positivity and optimism (i.e. great, awesome, super)
• Technically or narrowly defined
• Promoting cost-control, speed and efficiencies
• Easily understand (no dictionary needed)
• Buzz words, phrases and acronyms
• Void of emotionalism and feeling (i.e. business reports and legal documents)
• Emphasizing groups over the individual (i.e. We versus I, They versus He/She)

Basically, vanilla words encourage us to look at our businesses in vanilla terms. We cannot arrive at new flavors by using words that encourage a vanilla filter. The cost is employees who can only think inside a vanilla box.

How do we change the impact of a message without changing anything about the message? In other words, as seen in the diagram, we don’t change the messenger, the receiver of the message, the message itself or the way it’s delivered . . . but, yet, we still change the message. Answer: we change how the person receiving the message feels about us because it alters how he interprets it.

Communication Map

Simply stated, if the person has a positive impression of us he will likely interpret what we say positively. Conversely, if he has a negative one, he’ll do so negatively. We most commonly see this when a commercial is pulled after the celebrity in it commits a crime or immoral act. That commercial is the same; it’s the same person in it, the same person viewing it, the same communication channel and the same message.  Nothing changes. However, because the viewer of the commercial now feels differently about the celebrity, she will have a different interpretation of the message delivered about the product or service.

This also applies to a whole range of emotions beyond those along on a positive-negative line. It can affect how much latitude people feel they have when we give them instructions. If they’re fearful of reprisals, they’ll be more inclined to follow them to the letter regardless if unforeseen situations arise. If they feel more confident about our relationship, they’ll be more likely to adjust.

What this means is that we can invest all our time in correcting “miscommunication” by learning to communicate better, but if we don’t solve the underlying relational problems, we are likely wasting our time. It’s the relational elements that affect how people feel about us, and in turn, interpretation of our messages.

People enjoy hearing their names. We just don’t realize how much they like it. Rather than devote extra time to crafting the right message, devote it to learning and using people’s names. It will change how they feel about you, and the interpretation of any message is greatly affected by how people feel about the messenger. People will tend to like those who use their names much better than those who don’t.

Here are some tips when using names:

• Ensure you are using a name people like, you are permitted to use and you are pronouncing it correctly; an unrelated but preferred nickname might exist
• If people have purposely shortened their names ease of pronunciation, try to learn the longer form if they prefer it
• Don’t assume that the name everyone uses for a person is the preferred name
• Whenever you engage in conversation (phone or in person), try to use the person’s name at least twice
• In emails – no matter how short – use people’s names in some form of salutation or greeting; you can use names enclosed in commas in the first sentence to preserve informality in short responses (i.e. “Yes, that is correct, Mike.” “Yes, Mike, that is correct.”)
• Avoid using people’s acronym unless it’s their preference
• Avoid using your own acronym in correspondence unless it’s your nickname; intuitively acronym’s tend to come across as more impersonal
• Even when the person is not involved in the communication, use his preferred name with others; it might correct a bad group habit that the person will appreciate
• If people are married, have family or other people important in their lives, referencing them helps too

Since intuition is rooted in emotions and thus subjective, intuitive approaches allow us to see a single, objective situation as many. We see this most clearly when we tap two distinct, opposing emotions such as the fear of loss versus the joy of gain. The first is generally stronger in people than the second.

In the January 16, 2010 edition of The Economist an article titled “Designing Rewards – Carrots Dressed as Sticks” reported on a paper by Tanjim Hossain of the University of Toronto and John List of the University of Chicago outlining how they made a bonus plan more effective without changing one thing about the plan (i.e. more money, shorter time frame). Rather, they simply changed the wording of the letter outlining the plan’s details.

To one group, they communicated it in the traditional way: hit this target by the end of the week and earn the bonus. However, to another group they said that employees had “provisionally” earned the bonus but would lose it if they did not hit their targets; thus, pitting the “joy of gain” against the “fear of loss.”

Cognitively, objectivity says no difference exists. However, Hossain and List found that the second approach (fear of losing the provisional bonus) was much more motivational than the traditional approach (joy of gaining the bonus). Moreover, the motivational difference persisted over time even after employees understood the bonus better.

In effect, by tapping into the way people intuit different emotions (fear and joy) a single bonus plan becomes two distinct ones. That is the multiplying effect of an intuitive approach.

A special report on television in the May 1, 2010 edition of the Economist stated “. . . people seem unaware of their own behavior. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form . . .”

One of the important assumptions underpinning intuitive approaches is that people are largely unaware of their behavior. This implies that personal descriptions of behavior are heavily laced with personal and collective emotional drivers. A similar effect occurs when different people describe an accident; descriptions vary.

This example is particularly fascinating for two reasons. First, for most people television occupies a large chunk of daily activity (4 to 8 hours). Second, they tend to watch over 40% more television than they think, and tend to think they watch other video formats almost four times more than they actually do! Therefore, we are not talking about insignificant activities or variations.

However, here is the important question unanswered by the article: What are the emotional drivers causing people to underestimate television viewing and to overestimate the viewing of other videos formats so drastically? Could television, while popular, still be viewed as the “idiot box?” Could other video formats, because of their better interactivity, give the user a greater feeling of control and thus greater cultural acceptability? Is so, perhaps people want to believe they aren’t idiots and they have their viewing under control?

A similar effect commonly occurs in business – but perhaps more consciously – when subordinates will overestimate the time spent on approved activities and underestimate disapproved ones. Regardless, the point is that applying an intuitive approach means having a handle on all emotional drivers – individual and collective – lacing any communication.