Mike Lehr's Blog

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.

Intrinsic rewards are important aspects of creating a cooperative work culture. However, such rewards are difficult to understand and teach. Moreover, many, many people just don’t believe they are that powerful. Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review endorses the importance of intrinsic rewards in cooperative cultures.

Essentially, as we saw in the second post of this series, most people enjoy being cooperative, enjoy helping others; but, this enjoyment will dissipate if we ignore, discount or unreinforce it. Using effective, intrinsic, morale building techniques and compliments while working to minimize selfish extrinsic motivations such as money will ensure this won’t happen.

Since intrinsic rewards by nature are less tangible, it’s often difficult for managers and leaders to understand and appreciate the internal motivations of others, especially if they by nature don’t receive tremendous enjoyment from helping others. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for encouraging a cooperative workforce:

• Thank employees when they help others (letting them know it’s important to you)
• Demonstrate how they have helped you or others (it’s not always apparent to them)
• Recognize that they naturally enjoy helping others (reinforcing their internal motivation for helping others)
• Show how their job helps others to do theirs when performed well (creating a personal connection between their job and others)
• Hire and promote people who enjoy helping others (the desire to help others is a function of personality)
• Believe that people enjoy helping people (we cannot promote cooperation if we don’t believe it’s a motivation)

These tips will be uncomfortable at first but regularly applied they will produce positive effects over the long run. Thus, they require relentlessness, discipline and almost a fanatical belief in the power of cooperation.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy

Beauty’s power often influences us without our knowledge and thus distorts our decisions. In other words, we think we are making them based upon objective criteria, but we’re not. In order to understand this better, it helps to see beauty beyond something feminine and physical.

In the August 27, 2011 issue of The Economist, “The Line of Beauty” reviews three books examining the “economics of good looks.” While it focuses on physical attractiveness and implies it’s somewhat the same as beauty, it includes a masculine aspect to the concept. For instance, it cites:

• Homely NFL quarterbacks earn less than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and years in the league.
• Attractive people also have an easier time getting a loan than plain folks, even as they are less likely to pay it back.
• [Attractive people] receive milder prison sentences and higher damages in simulated legal proceedings.
• . . . looks have a bigger impact on earnings than education . . .

However, the real point is that beauty applies much of this power below our consciousness. For example, in none of the citations above did anyone think these:

• Quarterbacks are attractive so we should pay them more.
• Loan applicants are attractive so we should give them a loan.
• Prisoners are attractive so they should get milder sentences.
• Plaintiffs are attractive so they should get higher damages.
• Employees are attractive so they should get paid more than those with better educations.

Moreover, the overwhelming number of folks making these decisions didn’t feel that people’s attractiveness was influencing them. Now, if this can happen with physical attractiveness, imagine the impact beauty can have. Disciplines such as advertising, marketing, merchandising and retailing contain many examples of beauty’s sublime power.

Other links in this series:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty
• Beauty as Power (Part III): Appreciation

People often marvel that more managers don’t use inexpensive morale builders. Of course, many of the same also wonder, “How did that person become a manager in the first place?” It’s that we tend to feel negative power is more powerful than positive power is; thus, we will tend to feel the former would be a more powerful leader.

An article in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled, “Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind” by  Batia M. Wiesenfeld, Naomi B. Rothman, Sara L. Wheeler-Smith, and Adam D. Galinsky provides research supporting this. In terms of powerfulness, they found that rude managers consistently scored higher than respectful managers did.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask: Which dog would you prefer as a pet, a collie or a pit bull? Frequently, people select the collie. I then ask: If you lived in a high-murder neighborhood, which would you choose? People frequently switch to the pit bull. While the workplace isn’t that dangerous, evolution and the days of uncivilized life long ago still affect us. Then, we required leaders unencumbered by sensitivities to protect us. It’s why some of the world’s most ruthless, modern dictators (i.e. Stalin) are still admired today by significant portions of their native populations.

In everyday business life, we often experience this bias when people disqualify others as leaders because they “aren’t tough enough.” Negative power is very overt, easy to see. Contrast this to the positive, subtle power inherent in the inexpensive morale builders. That’s why we often see Darth Vader as a very powerful Star Wars figure even though he was the slave of the Emperor.

Thus, when we promote the rude, the Dark Side has successfully seduced us by triggering our insecurities and fears.

Business drastically discounts the interpersonal interaction in favor of group ones. Saying the same thing to ten people simultaneously is more efficient than saying it ten different times to each person. However, this efficiency overlooks two important qualitative, interpersonal aspects:

1. People prefer to interact with their leaders one-on-one.
2. People enjoy talking about their leaders to others.

In a business setting, presidents, executives and managers, can influence the company’s internal grapevine through dynamic, interpersonal interactions with their employees. The right-hand figure illustrates the reverberation these interactions can create. A leader (blue sphere) interacts with an employee (red sphere) causing him to share his experience (red rings) with the leader with others (green spheres). The challenge is making the reverberation a positive one. Leaders accomplish this by taking advantage of opportunities to employ their personalities.

For example, in a thousand-person, five-floor regional office, a sales representative sold the largest single order for a particular type of product in the fifteen-year history of the office. The Regional President sent the sales representative a congratulatory note.

While a satisfactory response, it demonstrates the dynamic, grapevine opportunity he missed. He could have gone done to the sales representative’s floor and congratulated her personally. Even if she weren’t there, the mere sight of him on the floor would have created positive reverberations. Moreover, while he was there, he would have had the opportunity to interact with other employees creating other reverberations.

Every day, business leaders miss these kinds of opportunities to seize control of the grapevine, to make dynamic gestures. The effort is very similar to a public relations campaign except it’s internal. Instead, business leaders moan and complain about gossip, believing it’s beyond their control, when in actuality they actively make the grapevine work for them.

Related post: Tapping the Power of Personality for Executives and Senior Managers 1.0

My post, “Beauty as Power”, resulted in a commenter questioning, “Is beauty the same as attraction?” The short answer is, “No.” However, elaboration helps us to position beauty better as an attracting force by comparing and contrasting it to other attracting forces. Beauty is just one such force. Many things attract us not just beauty.

For instance, we can find ourselves attracted to low prices, flashing lights, accidents, disasters, loud noises, foods, water, statistics, designer labels, celebrities, power and many other things. On hot days, ice cold drinks attract us, on cold ones, hot beverages and soups attract us. Sporting events, musical performances, movies and plays attract some of us. Advertisers, merchandisers and politicians certainly work hard to attract us. News programs and publications attract us with bad news. Politicians attract us with negative advertisements. Some reality shows attract us by displaying personal conflict.

Some of us will find beauty in all and some of these things. Beauty is a higher form of attraction. Beauty is to attraction what skill is to work and what talent is to effort. It’s true that beauty attracts us, but not all things that attract us are beautiful. This also explains the difference between beautiful and attractive. Beauty is a far stronger attracting force than attractiveness alone. Beauty is the qualitative aspect of attraction in the same way a fine restaurant is of all eateries.

What this means in terms of beauty as power is that beauty is more powerful than attractiveness. In other words, the attraction we have for certain things becomes more powerful if we also find them beautiful. It also means that as we discover the beauty in something or someone that thing or person will come to exert more attraction on us.

Related link: Beauty as Power

The power someone has as a leader in an organization is a function of 1) the authority it gives him and 2) his personal influence within the organization. The former is formal organizational power (FOP) and the latter informal organizational power (IOP). Figures 1 and 2 help us visualize their difference.

Figure 1: Formal Organizational Power

The importance of IOP becomes more apparent if we view leadership beyond a management context. For instance, one client expanded its definition from those in management to those who could initiate and develop new services, those who could grow existing services and those who could find and develop new customer channels.

The source of IOP varies by person. It could be his expertise, knowledge, experience, achievements, attractiveness, personality, education, intelligence, relationships, character, talents, skills, abilities, credibility, reliability, judgment, wisdom, seniority plus many other things. I knew one machinist who was a leader because he could run more of the machines in the plant better than anyone could.

Figure 2: Informal Organizational Power

FOP gets people to do things because they must; it’s the rule. IOP encourages people to do things because they want to; they like those with IOP or do so out of respect. Using a body as an analogy, FOP represents the bones and IOP the muscles. The most powerful leaders have a lot of both; organizations give them a lot of authority and people within the organization have a strong desire to help them.

Thus, when we try to understand and appreciate how organizations work, looking at the organization chart shows formal organizational power. Overlaying this chart is the influence of a multitude of relationships that vary by situation and by moments in time. In effect, we don’t really know an organization unless we have a feel for how informal organizational power influences it.

Related Link:

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

Figure 2: Holes (Unknowns)

Figure 1: Emotional Driver

Leadership is about people, and management about things. Management will tend to objectify people as resources (i.e. human resources) and rely more heavily on authority from the organization. Thus, management manages all resources given to it by the organization not just people.

We cannot make a similar connection between these things and leadership since leadership is an emotional connection that the member has for the leader. Things can’t have emotional connections to managers.

By delving deeper into this connection, we can more easily see how leadership differs from management. Figure 1 shows the emotional driver a member will have for the leader on a subconscious level. The member and leader are different people as denoted by the different colors. However, no member can ever know a leader completely, so holes in a member’s knowledge of the leader will exist as Figure 2 shows.

Figure 4: Blend (Perception)

Figure 3: Fill (Member’s Likes)

These “holes” produce emotional vacuums that need filling. If the member likes the leader, he will imbue the leader with qualities he likes (Figure 3). These qualities blend with the ones the member knows to produce Figure 4, which is essentially the member’s perception of the leader.

Consequently, what motivates the member is not the leader but his perception of the leader. From the leader’s perspective, she is really two people: the one she knows as herself and the other that the member knows. Every member will have a slightly different perception. Thus, the leader must not only manage herself, but also manage the perception others have of her.

In essence then, leadership is the interpersonal aspect of management. Since we do not need to be managers to be leaders, leadership becomes the interpersonal aspect of any job. Therefore, tapping the power of personality is more the domain of leadership than management.

Other links in this series:

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

Thanking employees periodically for doing their jobs generates a superior return on our time. It’s an effective cost-containment technique for our labor cost; the less employees like the culture the more money it will take to keep them. Consequently, no employee should go more than three to six months without an executive or senior manager thanking him for his work.

Moreover, Thank You’s power extends beyond the immediate employee. She will assuredly talk to other employees about her experience, thus producing a ripple effect. We are making the company’s grapevine work for us.

Here is a simple, direct thank you:

Hi, Tom. How are you? Listen, I just wanted to thank you for the work you’ve been doing for me. I appreciate it. You’ve really been helping us out.

Often, employees will respond with something like:

Well, I’m just doing my job.

To which we can respond with:

Perhaps, but I know that you don’t have to show up and you don’t have to apply your total effort. So, I’m thanking you for those things too.

Occasionally, I’ve heard executives and managers say:

• If they don’t like it, there’s the door!
• Why should I do this when their paycheck is our thanks?

First, employees are under no legal obligation to show up for work; we cannot sue them for not showing. We avoid headaches when they show. Second, every company issues paychecks; every company does not issue thank you’s. They give us a competitive edge in securing and keeping talent. Third, if money is the only way we show appreciation, then money will be the only thing that motivates them. Thank you’s allow us to develop and leverage personal connections. These build a team culture and make goals more achievable.

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?