Mike Lehr's Blog

We often don’t learn the value of listening techniques in building relationships. Consequently, people might not realize we are listening; this needs to occur to build relationships.

Closed questions encourage specific or limited responses. For answers, they usually require one word, short phrases or a response from a menu of possibilities. Often, they begin with the words, “Who,” “How,” “What,” “Where” and “When.” “Yes” and “No” are often typical responses.

Even though many discount their value, when combined with other listening techniques, closed questions become extremely valuable in building relationships. They clarify specifics for us, pinpoint the facts, verify what we heard, nail down agreements and commitments, and test whether we can move.

Some examples include:

• Are you going out to the plant? (Yes/No)
• Which color do you want? (Facts)
• You want me to call the vendor . . . right? (Verification)
• Is seems you’re saying [X], correct? (Verification)
• Would today, tomorrow or the next day be better? (Menu)
• Do you agree? (Agreement)
• Will you help me? (Commitment)
• Do you need to tell me anything before we move on? (Testing)
• Is there anything else I need to cover? (Testing)

From a relational perspective, closed questions convey the feeling that you:

• Have a purpose for your conversation
• Grasp the details
• Understand them
• Respect their time by getting to specifics

The effect of closed questions is to encourage people to:

• Conclude that you’re listening and digesting
• Focus and sort through fuzziness
• Shorten their answers
• Clarify agreements and commitments

Closed questions have downsides. They can make discussions feel every interrogative and restrictive if used alone. Nevertheless, when integrated with other listening techniques they can reduce misunderstandings, demonstrate that you’re listening and build relationships.

When learning listening techniques, we often don’t learn their value in building relationships. As a result, we might be listening, but the other person doesn’t know it. The latter must occur to build relationships effectively.

Open-ended questions encourage a wide range of responses. Pragmatically, they retrieve an accurate assessment of the person’s thoughts and feelings. Relationally, they invite longer, deeper responses. This encourages feelings of freedom thought and expression.

Often, they begin with the words, “How,” “What,” and “Why,” or can include phrases such as “Tell me about . . .” and “Fill me in on . . .” Wording and tone should encourage the expression of thoughts and feelings, not just facts.

Some examples include:

• How do you think this project will go now?
• Fill me in on what you feel you want me to do.
• Why do you think Mary would be better than Nancy?
• How do you feel about that?
• What’s your reaction to Bill’s comments?

From a relational perspective, open-ended questions convey your desire to have answerers feel:

• Free to answer as they please
• You value their thoughts and feelings
• They control the direction of the discussion

The effect of open-ended questions is to:

• Minimize negative emotions
• Establish the questioner as someone with whom it’s easy to converse
• Encourage conversation and a longer interaction period
• Direct conversation with a talkative person

The downside of open-ended questions is that they can make discussions feel scattered or lacking purpose. That’s why we need to integrate them with other relationship building techniques.

Nevertheless, open-ended questions are often the first listening technique we learn. However, they let the other person know we are listening to them because we can’t use them well if we aren’t.

As I had mentioned in The Rise of Intuition, the biggest advancement we’ll see in the next five to fifteen years will not be in biotechnology, cloud computing, medical treatments, alternative energy, personal computing devices or any other tangible technology. It will be in understanding ourselves as human beings.

Technology and new research methodologies are fueling this revolution. In these previous posts, I highlighted what these methodologies are showing about what influences us:

• Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars
• Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You
• Rude More Powerful than Respectful

Now, in the October 29, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Mind-goggling,” tells of four different technologies capable of reading our minds:

• Bin He of University of Minnesota (more)
• Martin Dressler of Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (more)
• Jack Gallant of University of California, Berkeley (more)
• Francisco Pereira of Princeton University (more)

While the readings are crude today, work is rapidly progressing. Remember the medical tricorder Doctor McCoy used in Star Trek to scan bodies? Even as fantastic as that was, Spock still had to read minds via a mind meld. Now, imagine if McCoy had a brain tricorder capable of reading thoughts.

These technological advances are going to revolutionize our understanding of how we work. Early returns show an increasing amount of complex brain activity occurring on a subconscious level beyond the classical reflexive functions. This will directly challenge our concept of free will (more) as I have written earlier.

Amazingly, this revolution is silently flying under our radars and continuously fails to garner the hype of the other advancements I mentioned. Of course, this may be fitting since the revolution will likely uncover many thoughts and emotions that live outside of our consciousness.

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.

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

Periodically, I help sensitive people so I have special life management techniques set aside for them. A recent success has encouraged me to document some. I begin with raising their awareness for their gift.

The first point I make to sensitive people is that they are more in tune with their own emotions and the emotions of others than other people are. While almost all of them believe this is a curse, I share advantages. Primarily, they will tend to do much better at assessing the emotional state of groups and individuals. I even identified for one CEO the one employee she should talk to if she wanted to get a quick pulse on her employees.

When sensitive people try to explain their feelings, problems usually occur. Since most people will likely be less sensitive, they won’t feel the same. They’ll just say the sensitive person is wrong or way off base. This hurts them and creates self-doubt. As a result, they adopt the majority view even if they feel it’s not best.

The second point I make is that even though others don’t feel what they feel it doesn’t mean they aren’t being affected. It’s just whereas it’s happening on a conscious level for them it’s happening on a subconscious level for the others. Everyone has different levels of consciousness.  Eventually, these feelings will “bubble up” from their subconscious to manifest themselves in actions, thoughts and feelings.

When I talk to sensitive people, it’s not unusual for them to feel that they get the emotional temperature of the individual or group rather quickly. However, it’s very normal to find them talked out of doing what they believe will work or going about their work beneath the radar. Thus, raising their awareness is usually a huge relief.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

There is a scene from the comedy movie Animal House (Clip – Quote @ 2:51), a story about a cavalier fraternity, in which a brother Bluto played by John Belushi is trying to rally the house after being expelled from the college for failing grades and unbecoming behavior. After his rally cry failed, one brother finally exclaimed, “Bluto’s right!” The look on Bluto’s face is a combination of surprise, bewilderment and doubt; it’s apparent no one had ever said he was right about anything.

All of us find difficulty in resisting the seduction of having our beliefs, thoughts and feelings validated by others. In extreme cases, strong egos crave it. Nevertheless, one of the most powerful compliments we can give another is simply to say, “You’re right.” Of course, as is true with all compliments, sincerity is important, so it won’t behoove some of us to deliver this “you’re right compliment” (YRC) even when we believe the other person is wrong. Nonetheless, if we do believe someone is right, what’s the harm in telling her?

YRC has many variations:

Yes, you’re right;

• I never thought of that.
• I’ve never looked at it that way.
• that’s certainly a good way to do it.
• your idea would work.
• that’s how they would feel about it.

As practice, in your next conversation with someone, try to find one opportunity to compliment the other person this way.  Not only might it stun him, but it might also shorten the conversation if the person is extremely extroverted and talkative. All you need to do to see how rare and surprising the impact of YRC might be is to ask yourself this question: When was the last time anyone ever said to you, “Yes, you’re right.”

Related Link:

• Strategically Using Compliments in Relationship Building

As I had mentioned in a previous post, who we are (WWA) is different from who we think we are (TWA), an important concept behind intuitive approaches. It can explain many of the contradictions we observe in what people say and do and explain the problems with self-report personality assessments. Awareness of TWA-WWA will help us minimize erroneous conclusions when predicting human behavior.

Who We Are is Different From Who We Think We Are

Whereas TWA resides in our conscious, WWA resides primarily in our subconscious and is much greater. Consequently, TWA only represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of our potential. We often only discover aspects of WWA when we are challenged to learn or face a crisis.

On the downside, TWA holds much of what others (parents, friends, educators, community, etc.) teach us or condition us to believe about the world and us. Consequently, TWA can impede us from doing what we really want to do by causing us to ignore, deny, discount or suppress it. Pragmatically, the TWA-WWA difference will often account for the many errors we find in all kinds of surveys (quality service, market research, etc.). On an interpersonal level, it will account for much of the hypocrisy we see in others.

We learn WWA by listening to what we say, observing what we do and interpreting what we think; we can do the same with others. It works because we cannot consciously control every aspect of what we say, do and think. There are gaps; our subconscious fills them. It’s this “filler” that provides clues to WWA; it’s a matter of learning to read these clues. Many times this can only be done through direct interaction with the person so we can make ancillary observations; something surveys often don’t do.

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.

Touching can enhance relationship building. In the workplace, some touching creates problems. However, the handshake is generally acceptable and is an extremely effective morale builder when used regularly with employees.

While frequently used to greet new people or re-acquaintances, it’s normal for employees to go with unshaken hands for long periods. For example, a fourteen-year veteran machine operator with a 150-employee manufacturing company had never had his hand shaken by a company executive.

I advise that every employee receive a handshake from a company executive (or senior manager in larger corporations) at least once every three to six months. Executives should be able to do this on a regular basis for their top 100 reports.

Shaking employees is usually easy and fun. Extending your hand often encourages the employee to do likewise. Sometimes, when it’s unexpected, I’ve had to keep my hand extended for as much as 10-15 seconds before the employee extended hers. Thus, I often play off the technique’s novelty by saying:

Hello Anne, how are you [extend hand]?  [As hand is extending continue uninterruptedly.] It has been a while since we talked. What’s going on with your (client, market, family, vacation, etc.)?

I’ve also had employees ask:

Did you want something in particular?

To which I’ve responded with something like this:

No, I just wanted to see how you were doing and to thank you for your efforts.

Touches influence people’s feelings and in turn their thoughts. For instance, a patient touched by a doctor will tend to think that the doctor spent twice as much time with him than she did. We need to remember that people are not light switches. Over time, handshakes work and lay excellent ground for future initiatives.