Peon_in_chief asked this question under my post about communicating with emotional impact.

The exact question is, “I understand not being overly emotional or direct with a co-worker or boss is best, but what if you really need to get something across to them, or you need a definite win? Sometimes being tough can get you the end result as opposed to really getting agressive to make your point. If you’re nice and tactful about it and your boss doesn’t take you seriously and you fail, your boss could always go back to you and say ‘you know, you really didn’t seem that upset by me not backing you on that issue.’ It’s like a lose-lose situation.”

Fantastic question. And now, a fantastic answer.

A: Peon,

Great point. Let’s break it down 3 ways.

One way to slice this is to recognize three ways to attack a situation like this: with power, rights, or interests. The emotional impact approach is a set up for an interest-based conversation, which takes time and has its risks… chief among them being that interest-based conversations tend to be played in the near-term at the lowest common denominator. This is a fancy way of saying that until you “train” the other side that you’re really about meeting mutual interests—and by interests, I mean “what people need” as opposed to “what people say they need”—you’re going to run into walls like you describe above. The only antidote for this is to start building relationships with people when there is no issue to discuss. (See my post on likability.)

But what if you didn’t do that, and now here you are, in a must win situation?

1. Power. You could go straight at the person. There are a number of forms of power, though if you’re a subordinate, formal power ain’t one of them. This means that you’re going to need to know your stuff to an extremely convincing degree, or threaten to go over the person’s head. And now hang on a sec… making an overt threat like that is only going to get you kicked in the proverbial groin, so don’t go thinking that I just advocated threatening your boss. I don’t. In this case, I’m talking about something far more subtle… like suggesting that the decision get opened up to a broader group… or talking to a peer in a different area and then mentioning as much to your boss. Both of these avenues use transparent communications to let your boss know that s/he may hear about it from other sources and therefore should “be prepared.“ Another form of power is entirely interpersonal and it goes like this: if your boss doesn’t like conflict, challenge him. If she does like to fight, stand your ground and earn your say. If she doesn’t like decisions, pre-sell your idea to a group and then go back and tell her that the team is unanimously behind it… and so on. This approach takes some huevos… but no one promised winning was nice.
2. Rights. ”The contract says.“ ”This is what’s fair.“ And so on. Using rights to force someone to see your point of view means focusing them on some objective standard. And after 19 years in various work environments, including several summers in a law office, and after 35 years of life, I can tell you: rights doesn’t work. People are not rational. Facts are meaningless until interpreted, and all interpretations are subject to the errors, omissions, quirks, and prejudices of the human mind.

Another way to slice this is purely at the interpersonal level: how can you get your point across most effectively? You have five options in this model:

1. Fight. Not with fists, but with directness and persistence. As in, ”Look, Boss, with all due respect, I’m not leaving this office until I’m convinced you fully understand me, because when you do, I think you’ll have a different course of action.“
2. Accommodate. This is what you’re currently doing. It won’t get you a win. Grow a spine.
3. Compromise. Splitting the baby is the ultimate in meh.
4. Explore. Another way of talking about looking for mutual interests. Works, but takes time and requires a relationship because you need to share information that could make you vulnerable along the way.
5. Stall. Postpone the decision by saying something like, ”Hmm… I’m thinking… that I should run a different slice of the data. Let’s regroup later today.“ Repeat as necessary until you’re feeling the flow and think you can sway the final decision.

And finally, there’s this perspective: don’t worry about it. You’re not paid to make the decision, your boss is. Let him/her make it. And if s/he screws it up, say, ”Don’t even think about blaming me for this. I sat here and told you exactly what was going to happen. So whuddya say you and I work on a communication plan that ensures you do hear the important stuff next time?“

Good luck!

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Self-Development

A: Ha! Trick title. People who don’t like you don’t work with you. They tolerate you.

Out of a lack of options.

Until a better option comes along.

In fact, the only thing that keeps them engaged with you is the fact that—while unlikable—you’re at least predictable, and they’ve figured out how to get what they need from the relationship… more or less. Eventually, they’ll give you the boot. And the more self-confident they are, the sooner that boot will come.

You know why?

Because they don’t like you, Silly!

Beware: the context in which you work affects how your unlikability will impact you:

If you are an unliked manager…
You actually may be OK, as long as your abilities are respected and the results are there. In a role of formal power, we need to distinguish between personal like, which is almost irrelevant in this case, and professional like—a.k.a. respect—which leads to loyalty, peace of mind, and, ironically, personal like. We must also distinguish respect from fear, as the two are often confused at a practical level. Fear occurs when respect for your power outlives respect for your ability to wield it responsibly, and it is unhealthy on many levels: it closes off lines of communication, it sends your best people looking for new jobs elsewhere, causes people to start “going through the motions” at work (you know how some people just won’t invest personally, won’t quit, and won’t say anything about what they need or want?).

There’s a colorful term for how people treat a boss of whom they’re afraid, which is NSFW (not safe for work). It’s a compound slang word. The first half is “grin.” Let’s just say the second part rhymes with “ducking.” Rest assured, this technique creates miscommunications galore for a boss.

If you are an unliked subordinate…
Your options are limited. You may be the world’s greatest at your job, but that’s all you’ll ever be, because once you hit the management ranks and find yourself in need of relationships with clients, peers, subs, bosses, and vendors for advancement, you’ll find yourself with nothing.

And if you’re an unliked salesperson…
You’re toast.

So how do you know if you’re liked? It really doesn’t matter what people say, and it really doesn’t matter what you think. The only thing that matters is how people act, especially in that split second after you’ve said something, before the controlled, practiced, purposeful reaction takes over. Watch for that slight hesitation before a smile, a smile that you could swear starts off like a sneer, or fidgeting of any kind that doesn’t precede interactions with others. (You’re not dumb. You know when someone doesn’t like you. You’ve known how to pick up that vibe since junior high. Trust yourself. If you need help, read Paul Ekman’s research on micro-expressions.)

Here’s a three question likability quiz:

• Do I take genuine interest in others, or are people a means to achieving personal goals?
• Do I enjoy helping others, or are they lucky enough to know me?
• Do you live in a good world, or a brutish world in which it’s kill or be killed?

How do you get liked? Work on your world view (until you find you take a genuine interest in the people around you, enjoy helping them, and see the world as filled with more good than bad… I’ll even cut you some slack, and say you really only need to be deep in two or maybe even just one of these areas). Regardless of how smooth you think you are, the way you see the world will reflect outward. Like you, people aren’t stupid. They may not call you out on bad behavior, they may excuse it for you, they may lack the self-confidence to stand up to it, or they may not care about it, but they see it.

And eventually, they’ll have seen enough.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics

A: You’ve been rejected… now what?

Do you persevere and ignore it? Or do you stop and digest the lesson hidden in the rejection? Can you do both… can you learn from the rejection but still ignore it?

Of course you can do both. Silly question.

But of the two, one side is more important, and it’s not—repeat not—learning. The single most important thing you must do after being rejected is keep moving forward. If you want to be successful, quitting is not an option. Learning from your mistakes after taking yourself out of the game will just get you to start spewing stuff like “I knew that,” “I could’ve done that,” and “No, I’m not bitter… why do you ask?”

As Woody Allen once said, “90% of life is showing up.”

So stay in the game. Whether you should accept the feedback or ignore it, we’ll figure that out later. Right now, you’re number one priority is to wake up tomorrow, take a shower, and get yourself back to work.

No matter how painful it is, get back in the saddle. That’s the part that takes guts. When you can get yourself back to work after sustaining a crushing blow to the ego, believe me, everything after that is a cakewalk.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Self-Development

A: “Funnel coaching“ is a technique I use to add increasingly more structure to coaching engagements so that people learn to handle ambiguity. It’s the opposite of the typical approach of starting with all kinds of structure and then peeling away layers, and frankly, I think it works better. (1) it creates a live experiment in which the coaching engagement itself is ambiguous, (2) it provides crytal-clear feedback about how much ambiguity the the coachee can and can’t handle (the coachee goes from uncomfortable to comfortable as more structure is applied during the live experiment, making it hard to claim, “Yeah, but I’m normally good in those situations…” No, you weren’t, you needed additional clarity, now let’s help get you to where you want to be!), and (3) the coachee is forced to struggle, which is where real learning takes place. The coachee is funneled to the level of structure they need, so that s/he receives no more structure than is necessary. In this way, the coachee learns to grasp with ambiguity at the level of his or her ability.

You can’t learn to swim by reading about it, and you can’t learn to handle ambiguity by only studying models. At some point, you need to engage. And since everyone engages with ambiguity at a slightly different place, this method allows me to dial in to what’s right for the coachee.

Is this model for everyone? No. It’s only for people who aspire to lead. If you don’t want to lead, don’t do this—it can be frustrating, it provides too much unescapable feedback about how you stack up, and it requires too much work. You don’t need the grief if it’s not part of a larger goal; you don’t need the stress if you don’t care to build your confidence through frequent, small, tests.

Funnel coaching is based on a teaching model that I found consistently employed in my best classes at school. By “best,” I mean those classes I really learned something in, that I can still remember today as having made an impact. For instance:

• Financial Decisions at Kellogg: Each week was a case study that required some sort of valuation or NPV analysis, and there was always a problem of some kind in the analysis for which we were unprepared (like how to indirectly value a piece of a private company). We’d learn how to handle the “trick” of the case in class, after debriefing what we had done and looking silly.
• Negotiations at Kellogg: Each week was a case study, and the order of the exercises was set up so that if you tried to use what you had learned the week before, you walked straight into a new trap. In this way, we came to see exactly the impact that emotion, multiple parties, ethics, power, culture, financial incentives, agents, etc. have on the negotiations process… and how to recognize them in real time. Of course, this was after we posted our results publicly and defended our process in front of the class, fully aware that we had probably fell for the trap.
• Highland Park High School: I had two English teachers who would put me on the spot and ask me (and others) to defend or interpret a piece. I distinctly remember being asked to explain Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle” the moment I finished reading it aloud. I took a guess, and the teacher asked why I had interpreted the way I did. I had no place to hide. Then he told me where I was right, what I had missed, and where to look for clues while reading. He wasn’t being Socratic—he was incredibly supportive—and I walked away with a deeper appreciation for a piece of poetry than I had previously thought possible for a 15 year old boy to have. No place to pretend, “I knew that.” I was forced out of my comfort zone, and I learned as a result.
• 4th Grade at Red Oak: The first time I was exposed to this method was in 4th grade in Paul Grant’s class. I don’t think I’ve ever felt smarter than I did in that class, but I also don’t think I was ever confronted with how much I didn’t know as much as in that classroom, either. Mr. Grant was a master at helping people learn by making brutal honesty fun. “OK,” I’d think, “I guess I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Now how do I learn that so I can get that smart?!” Mere mention of that year makes me smile, as it does the others who were in that class with me. I’m not sure I’ll ever do it quite as well as Mr. Grant, but it’s a goal.

Is the process of making someone uncomfortable and frustrated unfair? No way. Shouldn’t we be building students up, making them feel smart every step of the way? At every step of the way, no. On the whole, yes. When we get comfortable, we get lazy. We begin to overestimate ourselves. Constantly telling a student she’s bright can actually close down the learning process because it can cause her to ask fewer questions and make more assumptions. The way to build someone up is to create a safe place for them to fail, and then help them iterate through failure until they achieve mastery. Celebrate the successes along the way, celebrate the final win big time, and be supportive during the failures, but don’t ever pretend that failure alone is a good thing. It’s not. It’s just not a bad thing, either… it’s a natural part of the learning process.

Learning happens in the struggle! If you walk around with a model in your head, you’ll use that same model for every problem, including problems for which the model is inappropriate. (As they say, “If all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”) It’s not enough to have the model; you also need to know when to use it. Struggling through issues helps you asses when and where to use those precious models and creates linkages in your mind between them… and guess what: handling ambiguity is being able to do just that.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Self-Development, Leadership

A: Ah, if not for the word “useless”, this would be an entirely different answer! But, there it is, signaling to me that you are head-down, get-it-done go-getter who’s “all business”… and who is primed for a violent crash into the proverbial glass ceiling because you have no idea what it takes to actually run a business.

How do I know that?

Because people with more savvy would have asked a different question… they would have asked, “Why don’t my meetings start on time,” or “Why can’t my team transition from chit-chat to business,” or even, “How do I steer chit-chat away from golf and more to something that I can engage in?” These folks would have had a problem about the way in which the chit-chat occurred, but not with the chit-chat itself… because they know something you don’t know.

What they know, and what you will soon learn, is that chit-chat serves a very real, very important function. To understand that function, imagine—for a moment—a meeting from the perspective of your company’s CEO:

You (CEO) walk into the meeting, surveying the 11 other people in the room. You immediately have questions, such as:

1. Who’s competent, and in what areas?
2. Who sees the bigger picture?
3. For those who don’t see the bigger picture, what are their motivations?
4. Who’s in a bad mood today? Who’s in a good mood? How are those moods influencing decisions and perspectives?
5. What are people’s personal interests… who’s looking for a promotion, who wants to coast, etc.?
6. Is anyone here trying to sandbag someone else? (And are they doing it to protect themselves or hurt the other person?)

You want the answers to these questions because it will help you frame the conversation that follows… it’s hard to talk tactics if you don’t understand your goals, your environment, and your people. It’s like when your girlfriend starts complaining about her friends, but you know from some subtle, intuitive vibe you pick up that she doesn’t actually want help with her friends, what she really wants is reassurance that you’re interested in her life. This knowledge helps you see that her goal has more to do with establishing a bond with you than with solving a problem… which is helpful knowledge because it allows you to avoid the trap of solving the wrong problem. (BTW, the correct response here is, “No kidding, that’s weird, then what happened?” It’s not—repeat, not—“Well, the answer’s obvious, she’s a moron and you need to stop calling her.” Don’t worry about how I know this. Just trust me.) In a business setting, this same dynamic is at work, and you, as CEO, need to find out the answers to these questions so that you can know how to respond the real, underlying issues, and not react to whatever you see on the surface.

What makes life challenging, in business and elsewhere, is that you usually can’t ask these questions directly. Very few people would look you in the eye and say, “Hey, CEO, this morning, I think I’m predisposed to see things through rose colored glasses because I had a really great date last night,” even though that might be precisely what is happening. Likewise, no one with any designs on keeping his or her job would tell you outright, “Ms. CEO, be aware that I am going to show you only information that makes me look good today, while simultaneously painting my peers here in the most negative light possible.”

So since you can’t ask these questions directly, how do you get at the answers?

That’s right, you guessed it: chit-chat.

People are constantly sending out subtle clues about their true feelings, motivations, and intentions. Some of us are trained to concretely identify those clues, but all of us sense them… and we know—in that reptilian, primal part of our brain—that the clues are easiest to spot when people are relaxed and unguarded. In other words, people’s true colors tend to show brightest during casual conversation… during chit-chat. Ffrom the perspective of the CEO, there is no better way to size people up than in the few minutes before a meeting starts, before people have adopted their formal roles and have started going into a more scripted mode.

If you are just starting out in a management position, you don’t need chit-chat for such political reasons. Or do you? Failure to engage can signal that you are, as I stated before, an “all business” go-getter with no interest and no idea about the politics; it sets you up to be the person the CEO looks at and says, “This person is a doer; I’ll wind her up, point her in a direction, and she’ll take off!” Also, if you avoid learning the skill of engaging in casual conversation now, when it is merely a social endeavor, you won’t have that skill when you need it later.

So relax! Engage in a little small talk, it just might make a big difference in your career.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Communications