Mike Lehr's Blog

In the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review Jeff Weiss, Aram Donigian, Jonathan Huges discuss in their article “Extreme Negotiations” the importance of affecting process not just outcomes in negotiations. The same holds true in problem solving since negotiations are only problems of bringing two sides to agreement. Thus, you can get different solutions by changing your problem-solving process.

In one simple situation, Manager A took the initiative of drafting a plan for review. Manager B did not like it. Thus, they decided to collaborate on the next rendition. As another example, two hiring managers couldn’t agree on a candidate, so they changed the process by requiring the candidate to write a business plan for his hire.

Here are some techniques I use to alter the problem-solving process. I change the:

• Process by having another person or group create it
• Point at which people work independently and then come together
• Definition of the problem to include more lower-tier variables
• Makeup of the people or teams involved in the process
• Documentation required even to the point of using different forms and templates
• Timetable of when a solution is needed
• Any screening and filtering steps to allow more or fewer options
• Stakeholders involved in the process usually by adding new ones
• Objective of the process such as focusing on options not the solution
• Facilitator of the process
• Location of any meetings such as from office to offsite
• Forum for any meetings such as in person versus video conferences
• Initial parameters of what constitutes a viable option for processing

Of course, each problem-solving situation presents its own additional aspects that could effect change in process. So, if you’re not getting the solutions you want, change the process.

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.

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.

I received two related questions in a comment about Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III). They help us refine the difference further, so I decided to answer them in a post of this continuing series. They are:

1. How do you determine whether you are a manager or a leader?
2. Is there an objective way to determine this?

Objectively, it’s much easier to determine if you are a manager than a leader because the former is a designated position in an organizational hierarchy. A leader isn’t necessarily so defined; it’s more subjective. Leadership is not determined objectively. This becomes easier to see if we remember two perspectives:

1. A leader doesn’t have to be a manager.
2. A leader can take on many forms.

My post about informal organizational power, which is also a supplement to Part II of this series, clarifies these two perspectives by showing where a non-management leader could derive her influencing power (i.e. expertise, achievements, personality, intelligence, experience). As a result, she could exhibit leadership by initiating a new service, growing an existing one, developing new markets, receiving high service ratings or having great sales.

Now, it’s often true that we describe managers as leaders, but it doesn’t mean they are. Part I of this series discusses this. A manager who is not a leader will have severe problems getting his employees to change behaviors; when they do, their behavior will be more compliant than inspired.

Still, sometimes the only way to know you’re a leader is to turn around and see if someone is following. It’s not unusual to be one and not know it. However, an organization chart clearly states if you’re a manager. This is a vital difference between leadership and management.

Other links in this series:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part V)

Related link:

• Informal Organizational Power: Your Personal Influence in Organizations

I came across a book review in the October 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker about The Thief of Time, edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White. It’s a collection of essays on procrastination. Under an illustration there was this caption: Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.

I never knew that procrastination received such puzzling attention. No one can really explain why we do it. Yet, it’s very common across all personalities. What makes it even more puzzling is that “indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.” In fact, according to Professor Piers Steel of the University of Calgary, “people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002.” He defines it as “willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.”

Why is this important to intuition? Well, in order to appreciate intuition’s impact, we need to appreciate the degree to which our emotions influence our decisions and actions. Since procrastination is a frequent, everyday occurrence, it can serve as a tangible reminder to go beyond simple, rational analysis.

While many of us would acknowledge this, we often don’t practice it. Rather, we attempt to analyze problems in rational, logical and objective terms employing the best scientific analysis we can muster. We try to quantify then weigh benefits and costs without even considering the emotional weights of each. Then, we try to communicate our findings in the same way.

This can lead us astray because in reality emotions play a dominant role in people’s decisions and actions. Thus, when we try to be objective, we often aren’t realistic. Imagine not accounting for procrastination in planning because it’s irrational.

Management by objective is basic expectations setting 101; people will tend to achieve the expectations we set for them. Yet, when it comes to training sessions, we often don’t worry about any expectations until there are “cheeks in the seats.” At that point, we set them. The problem is that expectations for the training have already been largely set; it’s uphill trying to change them.

By this time, attendees have already read some sort of description of the training. Most likely, they’ve already heard their managers’ rationales for attending the training. If someone has already attended the training, the “grapevine effect” is in full force. Just as politicians, coaches and promoters work hard to set expectations before elections, games and events, the same should be done for training.

Here are some pointers on what to do prior to the training:

• Invest more energy on the training’s title than on its description; make it marketable yet accurate
• Script what managers or promoters of the training should say about it, including FAQ’s
• Give trainers as much access as possible to potential attendees (i.e. emails, promotional information, links)
• Ensure logistics (i.e. hotel, travel, directions, instructions) run soundly and a helpline exists
• Send a detailed agenda at least a few days prior
• If the training is part of a multi-day event, create opportunities for trainers to socialize with attendees
• Ensure all communication channels (i.e. materials, websites, announcements) are under control and delivering a consistent message

In short, the more you treat the announcement of your training as a marketing effort, the more likely you are to succeed in ensuring the right expectations are set when attendees walk through the door or log in.

We often anticipate and rationalize people’s decisions using a cost-benefit analysis. This perspective frequently leads to erroneous conclusions and restricts problem-solving capabilities. Consumer buying habits provide fertile fields for understanding this truth and the impact intuition has on people’s decisions. Pragmatically, these understandings can dramatically increase our range of low-cost solutions for our businesses.

A typical example of what grows from these fertile fields is a June 2009, Harvard Business Review (HBR) article by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton titled How Concepts Affect Consumption (research document). The article explores the emotional aspects of competition, expectations, goal setting and rewards in encouraging people to alter consumptive decisions without experiencing changes in their physical requirements. Of course, this does not mean that people won’t find rationales to support emotionally based decisions, but their intuitions will drive their cognition to produce these rationales.

For example, the HBR article suggests that “keeping up with the Joneses” is an emotion driving a competitively based buying decision; we have a need to buy what everyone else is buying in order to be socially accepted (i.e. peer pressure). Expectations affect people’s product experiences; price is a major setter of expectations. People will tend to like higher-priced beverages over lower-priced alternatives even though the beverages are identical. People will tend to feel better, quicker from higher-priced drugs even though they are the same as lower-priced alternatives. This effect even shows up tangibly as increased activity in the brain’s reward domains.

All of these changes and more were achieved without changing people’s objective requirements. Thus, when we grasp emotional drivers and how they impact people’s decisions via their intuition, we open up a whole new world of solutions for everyday business problems.

How many times have we heard, “Nothing breeds success like success?” In a study of the orbital launch vehicle industry by Peter M. Madsen and Vinit Desai the finding was that “organizations learn more effectively from failures than successes.” Their paper was published in the June 2010 edition of the Academy of Management Journal and reported by The Economist online in August.

While it seems logical that we can learn from our mistakes, what’s less clear is whether we learn more from our failures than our successes. However, from an intuitive perspective which accounts for the intense effect our emotions can have on our decision making, the fear of pain is much greater than the joy of gain. This is not only an anticipatory phenomenon but a historical one. In other words, we also learn more from feeling pain than from feeling gain. Moreover, Madsen and Desai found that the lesson learned through failure stayed with the organization longer than the one learned through success.

How do you maximize learning without having to experience a critical or fatal failure? Of the conclusions, one, which applies to intuitive approaches, is “greater flexibility towards meeting set goals.” This would allow employees to learn from smaller failures. They found that organizations which were “too tightly” focused on deadlines and profit margins gave their employees legitimate, implicit approval to discount, ignore or rationalize smaller failures containing valuable lessons.

Therefore, the next time everything goes according to plan, realize that something went wrong. Most likely it will be the failure to learn.

As we saw with an earlier post, intuition arrives first when we make decisions. But, how does this happen? How does intuition become involved in our response to an event?

Consider for a moment a restaurant’s ambiance. Objectively, it has nothing to do with the food; however, if it’s unclean, disorderly and ugly we will tend to feel there is also something wrong with the food. Why do children ask their moms and dads, “Are you in a good mood?” They know their parents’ emotional state will affect their decision-making.

Figure 1 illustrates what’s happening. For any event, there are conscious (solid lines) and unconscious aspects (transparent lines). Our cognition cannot capture consciously all an event has to offer.    Analogously, ponder light: some of it we can see some we can’t (such as heat, infrared, ultraviolet and radiation). Still, even if we can’t see unseen light, it affects us. The same holds true for events. Even if we can’t consciously grasp the unconscious aspects; they slip through our conscious defenses and affect us.

Figure 2 demonstrates how this happens. The unconscious aspects impact our emotions which triggers our intuition. Our intuition produces more complex emotions that impact our cognition, our thinking processes. These emotions will select the rationale that best express our wants, desires and needs. These are a function of our personalities and give insights into who we are (red lines).

Returning to our restaurant analogy, the negative feelings produced by the ugly ambiance trigger negative emotions. These in turn encourage us to select a rationale that might have us translate the ugliness into unsanitary. Therefore, we’ll rationalize that the food is unsafe and not good. Conversely, if the ambiance produces good feelings, we will tend to like the food more.

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.