Attitude Precedes Behaviour

A person's outlook or perspective will affect that person's behaviour.

I believe that in my gut.

If you're trying to get Johnny to clean up his room every day, or Beluga to submit her expense reports on time, then just saying the words won't do the trick. You've got to get underneath the matter.

People have too many well-embedded habits and attitudes, operating totally outside the reach of conscious awareness, to just flick a switch and implement a change of any significance.

There are many approaches a leader or educator can take to penetrate the stuff that precedes behaviour. Basically the approaches establish some kind of genuinely appealing context.

Unless you're using electric prods or something; but then that approach sort of dehumanizes things.

Who is Driving the Bus?

When you ask someone why they made a certain decision, they will explain their rationale.

That is, their sense of who they are, their consciousness, will explain how a conclusion was reached. It’s like, “I am Billie-boy, and here’s how I reached my answer.”

But I offer that Billie-boy’s consciousness, or his sense of self, didn’t have any role in the process. He uses rationality retrospectively. He explains why his answer was rational after having it simply pop into his head.

For example, please think of a decision you made recently. A simple one will do.

Here’s mine. I just sent a guy an email.

If you ask me why, I’ll explain the nuanced politic behind my decision. It will sound very rational. But, in truth, the idea of sending the email came to me somewhat out of the blue. In fact, maybe I wondered, for a moment, “What should I do?” But I didn’t get the idea through any conscious, rational thought process; it just came to me. I have no idea how it came to me.

This is not to say the things that pop up aren’t reached through some rational process. It’s just to say that it’s not our conscious mind that goes through the rational thinking process; our decisions come from someplace deep inside—skilled, practiced, well-embedded, perhaps; but our conscious mind doesn’t actually have the bandwidth to produce, or follow the process of generating, the thought with the speed we typically require.

Our sense that our consciousness is the one in charge of us is a bit of an illusion. In fact, ample research (google: “Libet” to get started) has shown that there’s about half a second delay between when our unconscious mind decides stuff and our conscious mind is aware of it.

Next time you’re asked about something, catch yourself sitting there, pausing, while you wait for the answer to be delivered to your conscious awareness. YOU didn't do it. Your other, hidden you, did.

Narcissim

The late real estate heiress Leona Helmsley was quoted saying what is now taken as the quintessential Narcissistic Personality Disorder utterance: "We don't pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes."

The Art of Calibrating While You Influence

My team employs, constantly refines, and espouses (and builds into most of its client training programs), a model called "Humanistic Influence". It's a model that describes an orientation one can adopt when trying to influence a person. It is very focused on the psychology of high-integrity influence--how to lead, sell, present, negotiate, coach--explaining how people can self-manage their thinking through the dialogue process.

This blog entry is about a recent modification. It might LOOK simple, but it's really just the tip of the iceberg and it took us a while to land on it.

We've been wrestling in particular with one component of the model: calibration. That is, what goes through the mind of a humanistic influencer when he or she is interacting in a high integrity fashion with an influencee?

Our present view is simply this: calibration is a process of reframing one's goals and an influencee's goals, through dialogue, to find a point of unity.

For example, let's say you work for a manufacturer of a bunch of different types of food products. You want me to put your whole product line-up on a lot of linear feet of my store's shelving. I'm not inclined to let you do that; I want to offer my customers a selection of products from multiple manufacturers.

Just how do you, the noble influencer, win this sale? The two goals seem in conflict, yes?

So, in your head you calibrate. You dialogue with me and clarify with me that behind my goal is the desire to offer wide selection AND, particularly these days, improve my overall profitability. Indeed, I agree, I want both.

So you've tweaked our description of my goal a bit. That's no small feat. Great.

And you tweak your goal a bit. You pull back on your effort to "own" my shelf space and offer to help me take full advantage of some unused space in my store by installing an end-aisle unit that can be usesd to highlight your, and my, most profitable product.

I say "yes" because you've helped me achieve my goals, and you're pleased as punch because you got more shelf space in my store (the end-aisle unit) and the chance to draw attention to a key product.

Bingo, bango...I've been influenced. I get what I want and I respect you. You make progress against your long-term goal. Everybody goes home happy.

Dialogue. Calibrate. Go home happy.

I'm just sayin'

This may sound self serving. And maybe it will be. But that’s not my motive. As my daughter says, “I’m just sayin’, that’s all.”

For many months our company has been winning more than its fair share of all the contracts we have been competing for ("more than its fair share" is just a figure of speech, of course; I don't really feel bad about it).

We recently did a survey to ask clients, amongst other things, why they chose us. Mostly they said it's because we listen particularly well.

That’s nice. But I don’t really think that’s it. At least, not on the nose.

I think it’s the people.

We have very smart people. Nice people. People who listen. People who care. People who are articulate, professional, diverse, experienced. My colleagues have high integrity. And they know what they are doing.

I ask people all the time, “Are you happy here? What do you like most about your job?” And the most common thing I get back is: “I like the people.”

On a daily basis I read of our praises. Internally and externally. Clients send notes of thanks. Colleagues offer each other accolades.

Sometimes I read the work of certain people and I think to myself, “Gosh, is this person ever smart.” Or, “Holy Toledo, this person works hard.” Or, “This person is so acutely client centric, it blows me away.”

But does this explain our success rate? Lots of places have smart, hard working, good people.

Here’s my theory. There are four things: Smarts. Experience. Love. Integrity.

When those things are present in a community, special things happen. When they are brought to bear on client challenges and opportunities, genuine value is created.

I like that Oxford defines 'value' as: advantage or the possibility of advantage. The idea that our work opens such doors is quite alluring.

True, the "love" reference, for corporate purposes, usually needs to be translated into "the desire to serve" or "stewardship", but, well, "I'm just sayin'".

Don't Swat the Dog

I was speaking with someone the other day about a junior manager on his team who, no matter how often he’s told about it, “loses his cool” and gets somewhat caustic with front-line subordinates.

The view of the person I was speaking with was that the solution was to point out consequences.

“What kinds of consequences?” I asked.

“Well, that when they do something, like being terse or flippant with direct reports, there have to be consequences,” he replied.

“There HAVE TO BE or there ARE?” I was trying to get at whether he was coming from the point of view of punishing the person, in order to teach a lesson, or educating the person, in order to help create better consequences.

I was disappointed to hear him ultimately argue that, “If this guy doesn’t lighten up with his people, I’ll have to demote him.”

For me, his stance was like rolling up a newspaper and swatting a dog.

Admittedly, I fell into speech mode.

“When this manager has the impulse to get terse, he obviously has the opportunity to make a different choice—it’s just that he can’t quite manage his impulse to be mean. So, I believe we need to educate him on two things: that the terse response is ultimately counter productive and that, by going the terse route, he is somewhat robotically responding to a trigger. He can pre-empt that robotic response if he chooses to. But it requires a certain level of clarity and a kind of robust intentionality, a will to change. And it is our job to nurture this wilfulness. One way to do this is to show him how we can separate who he is from how he behaves at these times. Indeed, he is NOT his behaviour, and, in fact, we value his BEING, if you will. Then he is far more able to manage his impulse to be terse—particularly if we make the undesirable outcomes of his terseness clear. For example, believe it or not, we can say the equivalent of ‘I love you Billy Bob, but getting so terse with your people is not okay with me.’”

“In fact,” I added, “I think you are committing the same offense yourself. You are creating a kind of conditionality for this person. He punishes his people with his terse blurts; and you punish him with implicit threats of ‘change or else!’”

And then I admitted that I was doing the same kind of thing myself. I react strongly to images of swatting a dog and all the stuff surrounding that metaphor.

Then we laughed. And he assured me; I was okay. However, he added with raised eyebrows, “But I’m NOT going to say I love you.”

It's Smart to Manage Your Feelings

Since the early 1990s academics have argued that your skills in self management directly impact your health and your career progression. Some recent studies have further affirmed both claims. Very exciting. Not only do they offer more ammunition for fans of the relatively new field of “emotional intelligence”, but they are more precise in explaining the physiology behind the results and so are perhaps more credible in their claims.

A recent study (University of Ohio) involved giving a bunch of people a blister (I don’t even want to think about how you give someone a blister). The researchers sought and found a significant correlation between speed of full recovery from the blister and how well the blisterees (if you will) processed anger. They specifically linked delays to higher level of stress hormones (interleukin-6). This result was consistent with previously published work (Archives of General Psychiatry) that drew a correlation between marital spats and slow physical wound recovery. A half hour fight with a spouse can cost a day in the healing duration of a minor wound!

Maybe this explains why I sometimes bemoan the presence of paper cuts, hang nails, bruises that never seem to go away!

Here’s one for you, another study showed that someone caring for a loved one with dementia heals more slowly from simple wounds (Dr Ronald Glaser, from Ohio State University College of Medicine).

Anyway, Steven Bloom, a professor at Imperial College London says, "Your body prioritizes and sorts one thing out at a time, so if you are stressed ... your body works through that before it gets on with the process of healing.”

Okay, so that’s the health part. What about career progress?

Harvard Medical School (led by Professor George Vaillant) has followed a group of 824 people over 44 years and currently claims that people go further in their career when they neither repress anger nor express it in an explosive fashion. The trick, apparently, is to process it in a healthy fashion. Fury doesn’t work; it is bad for your health and counterproductive. Staying quiet (repressing) is bad for your health. What works, in terms of career progression, is being assertive — expressing yourself (essentially, honouring yourself) calmly, standing your ground and asserting your stance. Presumably exhibiting this self management skill makes you more attractive to people with the power to promote you.

There you go.