Mike Lehr's Blog

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.

How many times do we hear, “I’m really a people person”? Yet, when people are the problem, we can’t find those folks in the country?

It’s not unusual for employers to say, “My people make my business,” and then in the same breath say “The worst part about running a business is dealing with the employees.”

How many times do we hear salespeople say, “I’m a relationship specialist,” but when it comes to working with their assistants, they stumble over themselves and run to human resources?

How many times do people say they want to get into management, but then pass on their less desirable employees to other departments by giving them satisfactory reviews?

When conversation is light and pleasant, many extroverts mingle with the best, smiling, shaking hands and joking. Yet, how many of them enjoy working with people when they have protracted developmental problems? When we use the term “socialize,” does it even connote people problems?

What does it mean to “work a crowd”? It means meeting people as fast as you can before they dump any problems on you. When was the last time anyone worked a crowd to find out what the problems were?

Yes, computers can be problems, but they are usually quiet about them. Wouldn’t it be neat if people were the same way? Maybe that’s why some people prefer sitting at their desks reviewing the latest figures to see what problems there might be rather than wandering around to see what problems people might have.

Perhaps the next time someone says, “I’m a people person,” we should ask two questions:

1. What was the last people problem you tackled?
2. Why did you enjoy it?

I was recently advising a sales rep on one of her major clients when I asked midway through our conversation, “So, Kathy, have you ever told this client that you enjoyed working with her?”

After a pause, Kathy replied, “No, but she knows I enjoy working with her.”

“How?”

“Well, . . .” and Kathy proceeded to tell me all the things she did that helped the client to know that she enjoyed working with her. However, at no point did Kathy say that she ever told her client that she enjoyed working with her.

So, I asked, “Okay Kathy, so what you’re telling me is that if your husband believes you’re beautiful that there is no reason for him to tell you so as long as you know that he believes you are. True?” After this question, Kathy committed to telling her client that she enjoyed working with her.

The point is that we often “beat around the bush” with compliments. I was recently guilty myself when I told an executive recruiter that I enjoyed working with the candidate. She asked me, “Have you ever told him that?” After confessing guilt, I promised her I would, and I did.

We often comment on our dislike for those who “beat around the bush” and don’t get to the point. So, perhaps during this holiday season, while we’re enjoying our friends and families, we could extend the joy to clients, co-workers, employees, colleagues and many others in our careers that contribute to our enjoyment.

We can simply say, “I enjoy working with you.”

We often hear that good sales people don’t make good sales managers. While incorrect, the transition is admittedly difficult. However, few give reasons. I have identified three major attributes that distinguish a good sales person who can be a good sales manager from one who can’t be: patience, adaptability and introspection.

Good sales people by habit are not patient; if one prospect says, “no,” they go onto another. We can’t rollover sales people as quickly as we can prospects. As for adaptability, good sales people usually find a workable style and stick with it; they rarely need to try others. Contrastingly, as managers, we have to deal with multiple selling styles. Lastly, many good sales people will run their processes without knowing why they work; often they don’t need to know. Sales managers need to understand the “why’s” so they can solve problems and duplicate successes.

As a result, good sales people who become sales managers tend to have developed little patience, adaptability or introspection. They will tend to push their people into a single style, usually the one that worked for them, and reprimand those who don’t implement quickly or successfully. In effect, they are sales administrators not coaches.

Experientially, this means that the best sales managers who were good sales people are likely to be those who had to struggle to be good. Perhaps they had to try a lot of different things until they found their style. This might have included a real close look at what they were doing and why some things worked and others didn’t. Finally, they learned to have patience with their own development.

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

The other day a colleague forwarded this link to the BNET blog speaking to intuition. Embedded in it was a link to an article that appeared in Psychology Today back in November 1, 2002. It provided early insight into the scientific advancements into the study of intuition.

Whenever I speak to people individually or collectively about interpersonal skills for disciplines such as sales, management, leadership and influencing, I emphasize that the most dramatic advancements we’ll see in the next 5-15 years will not be in areas such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, communications or even sensors but rather in how we understand ourselves, especially our decision making and knowledge acquisition abilities.

Increasingly, science is finding – as the Psychology Today article noted back in 2002 – that we make decisions and acquire knowledge before we are consciously aware of them. Yes, there are problems with trusting intuition unquestionably; however, there are problems with doing the same with the most well reasoned and supported scientific findings. You cannot make decisions by facts and figures alone. There will always be unknowns; intuition helps here.

The key is integrating both intuitive and cognitive functions. The danger we face now as the article implied is that we are generally living under the illusion that our decisions are largely conscious (cognitive) ones. We are prejudice in thinking our consciences are in control. Of course, this control calms our insecurities; control is often analogous to safety and security. In reality, many factors beneath our radar influence our feelings and thoughts. They encourage us to choose rationales to justify our wants.

Thus, every one of our decisions has emotions influencing it no matter how rationale and scientifically supported we believe they are.

The difference between cognitive and intuitive arguments can best be summarized as one between reason and belief. Just as the strength of someone’s reasons can persuade us so can the strength of his beliefs. However, this strength of belief can be used against us as well as for us. An August 19th, 2010 Economist article demonstrates this by reporting five cues bosses give when they lie, but they could apply to anyone.

They are from a study by David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and include:

• References to general knowledge (i.e. “as you know”) as opposed to specific knowledge
• Use of fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words” to describe information and situations (i.e. using more “greats” rather than “goods”)
• Avoidance of using “I” and employing more third person pronouns
• Use of fewer “hesitation words” or utterances (i.e. pauses, “um,” “er”)
• More frequent use of swear words

Along with the influence one’s strength of belief can have on us, the other important intuitive lesson we can glean from the article is that people’s patterns of speech can reflect their emotional states. For example, the emotion that is being satisfied by someone who is lying is the desire to have us believe him. Extended further we could apply the same cues to someone who intensely wants us to believe what he is telling us such as in a sales situation. His phrasing will satisfy his desire to “sell” us.

However, a better way to convey the influence strength of belief has on us is to describe it as confidence. Since people tend to have a prejudice toward those who are confident, people who wish to deceive others will tend to express themselves confidently in order to do so.

Glass Half Full? Half Empty?

One of my favorite metaphors to use as a “challenging assumptions exercise” is the “Is your glass half full or half empty” one. The basic assumption is that the choice is one of attitude: if your attitude is positive you will choose “half full,” if negative “half empty.” One of the reasons why I like it is that it can create quite a stir in folks when they see the answer is not quite so clear cut. This is important because viewing problems from an alternate perspective can trigger negative emotional responses that retard problem solving.

For instance, we can disrupt this popular metaphor by asking: Who is more likely to go out and get more water? The answer is the one who views his glass half empty. As we saw with bonus plans, the fear of loss is much more powerful than the joy of gain. Therefore, those who feel that they’ve already lost half their water supply are more likely to secure more water than those who feel they still have half remaining.

I experienced a real life example of this when I was taking a new national sales manager around to the troops. We visited the office of a sales representative who was out. The manager looked around and pointed to a picture of the representative’s four children and wife and said, “I love to see that. It means he’ll be real hungry to sell and support his family.”

This is also why crises are the most effective ways to encourage change. Consequently, if you were a water salesperson, you would be more likely to make a sale if you could get the customer to see his glass as half empty rather than half full.

One of the best problem-solving techniques I learned is writing down the problem as specifically as you can. This technique helps find solutions by:

• Putting the problem in a form that allows you to see it
• Uncovering aspects of the problem you had not considered
• Encouraging you to think about the problem as you choose the right words
• Ensuring everyone is tackling the same problem in brainstorming sessions

My most successful use of this technique involved the design of a week-long seminar for top sales reps regarding some new product lines. I worked with the National Sales Manager to define the problem based upon the questions his people were asking. This question seemed to sum up the rest and became my definition of the problem:

How do we integrate our various products into our story and our presentations?

The training solution this definition gave me was focused on questioning, the premise being that the questions you ask say much about what you’re selling. Therefore, an integrated product line required integrated questioning. How did I arrive at this solution from this definition?

Basically, I contrasted the sales process his people were using with the question and saw something missing: the focus was on what to say about the products at an introduction (story) or closing (presentations) not what to ask, the most important part.

The training was extremely well received by the sales reps; eighteen product managers focused on questioning strategies that the reps could use to uncover problems. I provided the overarching questioning strategy to integrate those. By writing down the problem, I saw something missing. In this case what was missing became the solution.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and holder of 440 patents worldwide, says in the June 12th issue of The Economist, “Technology is easy to develop. Developing a new attitude, moving the culture from one mental model to another, that’s the difficult part . . .” From the rifle, to the machine gun, to the tank, to the aircraft carrier, military history supports Kamen;  people might employ new technology but they still fight using old strategies and tactics.

In the workplace, we often see technology just supporting old processes rather than creating new ones. For instance, people continued to keep extensive paper files long after word processing and desktop storage improved. Thus, while people used the technology, they did so with an old mindset that made computers glorified typewriters just as they made the rifle and machine gun just other guns rather than the transformative agents of new tactics.

Compounding the integration of technology is the old mindset that doesn’t demand highly developed soft skills of IT, Process Management and Organizational Development people. Very few receive experience and training in areas such as selling, active listening and relationship building. It’s not uncommon to hear employees say, “So now, IT is telling me what my job is?” Much of this is because the IT person didn’t do the necessary advance work in relationship building.

If we truly have “internal customers,” shouldn’t we apply the same sales and service protocols that we use with external ones? This is why soft skills and intuitive adeptness are critical to capturing the potential of new technologies in the form of new processes.