Mike Lehr's Blog

People’s names are extremely powerful. Every day, opportunities to use names present themselves, but we don’t seize them. Names in emails, even the shortest ones, allow us to personify them, giving them personality. Just as people find pictures and news articles about people more interesting, the same holds true for emails.

For example, rather than send an email like this:

Can you meet me today at noon?

We can personify it this way:

Joan,

Can you meet me today at noon?

Linda

Thus, a generic email from by anybody to anybody becomes personal. Moreover, rather than use a formal address and closing, we can alter it by writing:

• Joan, can you meet me today at noon? ~Linda
• Can you meet me today at noon, Joan? ~Linda
• Can you, Joan, meet me today at noon? ~Linda

In these examples, we used the person’s name in the beginning, end and middle of the question. We can employ the same strategy longer emails:

I’m thinking about going out for lunch today. Can you meet me today, Joan, if I do? It would be great to see you.

Linda

We can also use their names more than once by combining the techniques above:

Joan,

I’m thinking about going out for lunch today. Can you meet me today, if I do? It would be great to see you.

I want to share a project I’m working. Joan, I really feel you might be able to help. If so, I’d like to introduce you to my manager.

Please let me know,

Linda

People aren’t light switches, so we can’t expect this to work instantaneously. Nevertheless, if we employ regularly and integrate with other techniques, we will accelerate better relationships and responses to requests over the long run.

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.

People feel better about themselves when they feel they have power to effect change in their worlds. One of the best ways is to ask them to help you. It also integrates well with other morale building techniques.

It’s difficult for people to feel valueless when they are helping others; helping senior members of the organization compounds these positive feelings. Telling people what to do only reinforces helpless subordinating feelings because they are just order takers. In the end, it’s the difference between creating a compliant workforce and an inspired one.

The Ask has two parts:

1. The ask itself
2. The tying of the ask to you

For instance, compare the following:

• “Would you do this?”
• “Would you do this for me? You would really help me make this project successful.”

Feelings of value grow if they know how they are helping you. Avoid “we,” “they,” or “us.” Avoid generic group terms such as “company,” “employees” or “customers.” Use the power of names by referencing specific people, especially if they were helped too. Evoke the CEO’s (or Owner’s) name rather than the company’s name.

Sometimes employees will appear puzzled by your ask especially if it’s something that is obviously mandatory. Here’s a response:

• Employee: Why are you asking? I don’t have a choice.
• Manager: That’s not true. Yes, you might not have a choice whether to do this but you can choose whether to do it in an acceptable manner or an exceptional one. That is why I’m asking for your help. Will you help me?

This exchange demonstrates why the ask is sincere and valuable. We are asking for something exceptional. People not only feel better about themselves when they help us, but they feel even better when they learn that their help is exceptional.

Many companies are finalizing their 2012 strategies by planning their roll out to their employees. To this effort, Nilofer Merchant’s March 22, 2011 post on the HBR Blog Network, “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time,” is very apropos and relates to my “Best Decision as Myth” post: we often spend more time trying to make the best decision than we do trying to ensure we can implement it. A vital aspect of that implementation is a healthy company culture.

Taking Merchant’s themes further, an important part of a healthy company culture is the relationship between management and employees. That is more than just having a great vision, definable roles and enforcing accountability. It’s about doing the sublime relational techniques that mean so much even though they don’t seem to serve a direct business purpose. For instance, it’s important for managers to spell their people’s names correctly. Yes, unfortunately, this isn’t an automatic.

I’ve called this placebo management. If there is scientific evidence supporting the positive effect of placebos in medicine, they can work in business too. While managers are taught around the world in business schools about the more concrete aspects of visions, goals, compensation, information and credentials in developing relationships, they rarely learn the more intuitive aspects of relationships. Consequently, they never learn how to change the message without changing anything about it. Conversely, they don’t learn that even the best message can be ruined by a lousy messenger.

The holiday season is approaching and many companies and teams get together in celebration and camaraderie. It’s often a time to develop business relationships on a more human level. Good interpersonal relationships we develop with employees ensure a company culture that can implement strategy. Let’s make every month the holiday season in this regard.

Our names unconsciously influence people. We humorously smile at actors who change their names making them more appealing. Yet, some people relate because they wish their parents had given them better names.

Even in a field striving for objectivity such as science, your name can influence the peer review process. In the August 20, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article “A Black and White Answer” reports racial name research by Donna Ginther of The University of Kansas indicating it does. The article also references the 2003 racial name study, Racial Bias in Hiring, by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan at the time of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which names influenced who received job interviews.

While the article focused on the racial connotation of names, an October 23, 2008 article of The New York Times mentions research about non-racial correlations focused on similar names, initials, sounds and letters. Of course, if we overlay the concept of branding from advertising on these two areas of research and the territory between them, we come back to “what’s in a name?”

From an intuitive perspective, what connotation does each of our names have? What feelings do people get when they hear it? How do we feel when we run across names far different from ours, ones we can’t pronounce? Subconsciously, do they trigger our defense mechanisms? All you need to do is look at popular baby names to know we do not distribute names randomly even if we account for ethnicity.

What we can learn from science in this research is that no matter how objective we think we are it is no match for the unconscious emotions truly driving our decisions.

Remembering names is important, but it’s challenging to do that. It does require time but less so as we train our minds. We do this in the same way we train our bodies for any athletic or skilled endeavor: practice, practice, practice.

Remembering five hundred employee names is quite doable. As proof, start listing all the people you know including celebrities, politicians and athletes. You’ll be surprised as to how many names you can remember. You’ll come very close to 500 if not more, and most of them are probably far less important to you than your employees.

Of course, there are many ways to “cheat” too:

• When you realize that you want to remember someone’s name but don’t, find it out as soon as possible; it’ll be easier to remember later.
• Ask help from others such as people’s managers, front office staff, human resources people
• Always review rosters of attendees for gatherings such as a conferences or seminars before you attend even if you don’t know many people; their names will be easier to remember when you hear them in meeting
• Before visiting, sort and review your contacts by location or department or secure a company roster; try visualizing each person on a roster; research those you don’t remember
• Create “seating charts” to help you by verifying your knowledge in the course of your normal work by using as cheat sheets before and during visits
• Immediately after your visit or attendance, review rosters and re-visualize each person you met; the sooner you do this the better

Keep your own notes on people – including fellow employees – that you can reference before visiting again

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

The way people look at things is greatly influenced by how they feel about us. People like to hear their names and to have them remembered. Therefore, you can influence their intuitive processes by doing these. While many of us know this, we don’t realize how important it is. It’s an effort very deserving of our time and resources.

In journalism class, instructors will tell students that using names in articles is critical to securing readers’ interest. At a party, someone told me his favorite class was statistics because the professor remembered everyone’s names. A college professor said that a student focus group told his colleagues that professors could improve their course evaluations and standing with students by simply starting to remember and use students’ names in class.

What do names have to do with enjoying statistics or evaluating professors? A lot. They affect people’s intuition which in turns affects their cognition. Their cognition is responsible for producing the rationales that support people’s preferences. The more they like the messenger the more likely they’ll like the message; they’ll learn material, adopt initiatives and perform tasks much quicker and more effectively.

However, remembering people’s names, especially all your employees, might be difficult, but virtually all of us, if we work at it and “cheat” a bit can remember close to five hundred names. First, it’s a matter of saying, “This is important.” Second, it will initially seem like a daunting task, but we become better as we train ourselves. In this sense, our minds work very much like our muscles. They become stronger through training and practicing.

Here are some techniques for using and remembering names.