Chapter 4
How to Know What They Want: Understanding Their Worlds (and the Forces Acting on Them)
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903
If you will work on any man, you must either know his nature and fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him; or his weaknesses and disadvantages, and so awe him; or those that have interest in him, and so govern him.
—Francis Bacon, 1561–1626
You have influence in getting work done and building relationships when you can give people what they need. But how do you know what they need? Knowing the concerns, objectives, and styles of the people you want to influence—all your important stakeholders—is fundamental for determining what to offer to gain cooperation. The more you know, the better you can determine valued currencies, the language they speak, and their preferred style for interactions.
For those you work with frequently, it is likely that you know their preferences and can proceed effectively. But if you're unclear about what matters to an important person or group, puzzled by resistance, stymied when “reasonable” approaches aren't working, or angry and assuming the worst about their motives, you may need to analyze their world(s) carefully.
The more stakeholders you must influence for a given objective or the greater your anticipated difficulty in finding the right approach, the more you should do in advance. This chapter focuses on how to analyze the world of those whose driving forces are not immediately apparent, so you can figure out how to build present and future win-win relationships.
Continuing to look at a situation only from your own viewpoint makes it easy to stumble into self-defeating actions that haven't worked or slip into tortured silence. When hopeful influencers intensely desire to do something significant or make important changes, they can easily become blind to a potential ally's critical concerns. The resistant ally seems difficult, impossible, or even irrational when the determined influencer doesn't understand his or her behavior. Don't fall into that trap.
Two Forces That Can Explain All Behavior
If you want to figure out an approach for influence, it helps to understand what might be driving the other's behavior. Few social scientists would tell you that all behavior can be explained by only two things, but we do: personality and everything else. Personality is surely important in understanding what matters to anyone, and if you are confident that you understand the other person's psyche and what makes that individual tick, you can devise your influence approach accordingly. But be careful. Research shows that we usually oversimplify our assessment of others.
Personality is hard to assess if you don't know the party extremely well, and even with extensive contact, personality can still be difficult to fathom. Furthermore, it is not easily changed. For both those reasons, we suggest you spend little energy on that territory.
The other forces, however, that drive what people care about arise from the situation they operate in as well as residue from events in past situations. In fact, situational forces are usually more powerful than an individual's personality. At work, for example, numerous factors might influence behavior. We explore these later, but consider one of the most obvious: the way people are measured and rewarded shapes a lot of behavior. Steve Kerr's classic article, “On the Folly of Hoping for A When Rewarding B,” makes it clear that the organization's actual rewards are more important than management's exhortations.1
This chapter's premise is that identifying someone's work context (mostly from a distance and even without knowing the individual or group) gives you a good tentative reading on significant factors driving the behavior of those you want to influence. Then you can develop a good working sense of the currencies they might value. Occasionally, an important party's personality will override all situational forces, but this happens less often than many believe. (One definition of mental health is the ability to alter behavior to fit the situation, which suggests that the person who treats everyone exactly the same—his or her boss, mother, lover, child, colleague, and subordinate—is not so healthy.)
With this background, we turn to the most universal factors at work that affect a person's or group's world and usually offer strong clues about their concerns and the trades they might make (Figure 4.1 gives a graphic summary of the common forces).
Figure 4.1 Contextual Forces That Shape Behavior along with Personality
How to Know What Might Be Important to the Other Person
Numerous factors can help determine what might be valued by the person or group you wish to influence.
The Potential Ally's Job Tasks
Understanding a potential ally's duties and responsibilities can be a key to influencing him or her. Think about the impact of the job on these seven simple, but basic, organizational factors:
- Does the person deal with numbers all day or with people?
- Is the work repetitive or highly varied?
- Does the person's job demand careful accuracy and replicability or originality and improvisation?
- Is the person subject to constant demands from others or constantly making demands on others?
- Is the person in a high-risk, high-visibility position or a secure protected role?
- Does that person control all information and resources needed to do the job, or does he or she depend on others?
- How much uncertainty is in the role?
Such information can provide a beginning guide to the currencies that potential allies value, how they see the world, or the style for approaching them. For example, the brand manager's tasks, which encompass every aspect of a product's positioning, presentation, price, and so on, differ from those of a market researcher, who works with statistics, validity, scientific method, focus groups, and the like. The brand manager must pull many elements together at once across many parts of the organization; the market researcher usually works alone or with a similar colleague and at a slower pace to discover significant results.
The Potential Ally's Environment
Other factors that shape task demands include degree of contact with:
- The environment outside the organization (clients, suppliers, regulators, financial institutions and the like)
- Top management
- Headquarters
- The salesforce
- The factory floor
- Exotic or temperamental equipment
- The media
Each of such contacts, or lack of them, is likely to create pressures that affect how the person looks at problems and requests. The manager who must deal with customer complaints regularly may be far more receptive to appeals that involve quality improvement than the manager who never sees customers but works closely with the controller's office.
Task Uncertainties
Another indicator of what might be important could be those aspects of the potential ally's job that have the most uncertainties associated with them.
In organizational life, control is valued. The bigger the uncertainty, the harder it is to keep control, so the areas of greatest uncertainty receive the most attention. You often can gain an ally if you can help the person control a part of the job that is currently uncertain.
But the demands of tasks alone do not account for all the pressures and concerns of individuals who are influence targets. Thus, it is useful to think about many other aspects of what might be important to the one you want to influence.
Who's Counting? Measurement and Reward Systems
As suggested earlier, how people behave is often strongly dictated by how their performance is measured and rewarded. Those who act “difficult” or negative may only be doing what they have been told will be regarded as good performance in that function.
Understanding the other people's performance criteria lets you determine how you might be able to add value or alter your request to fit their requirements. In some instances, it might be possible to question the reasonableness of the measure; departmental measures designed from the top or left over from the past may have unanticipated negative consequences. The organization might eventually alter the measures if their negative impact to the company becomes clear. In the short run, however, how the other person is judged is often a given you must work with or around.
Unit and Organizational Culture
Most people are affected by the culture of the organization where they work and sometimes by their immediate workgroup's particular subculture. Culture is the set of automatic assumptions that groups of people have about how the world should work including what should be valued and how people should interact.
Different areas may have their own set of “values in use” (values actually driving behavior) that are often stronger than the organization's espoused values. Even in the same organization, people might be operating under different sets of values.
For example, is the culture one of high blame, or are (prudent) mistakes seen as learning experiences? Is it an “up-or-out” system, or can one be successful staying at the same level? Are members expected to help one another, or is it every person for him- or herself? Is upper management respected or whispered about as self-centered and short-sighted? And is it different in different areas?
Major Forces Outside the Organization
Outside forces that can drive behavior include:
- The state of the economy
- How threatened or entitled people feel about jobs and mobility
- Major competition
- Legal rulings affecting the industry or company
These forces can affect everyone in the organization or differentially among departments. The threat of an SEC action, an injunction about discrimination in hiring and promotion policies, or a falling stock price can induce strong reactions. For example, if a software company is being sued for the acquisition of a competitor, legal department members may aggressively challenge practices previously ignored. Conversely, organizations that are geographically isolated or have dominant market positions may behave quite differently from most other organizations at the time.
Where Are They Headed? Career Aspirations and Personal Background
Besides the organizational factors that are part of the potential ally's world, many personal concerns will arise from the person's previous work experience and current goals. You might not know the person well enough to know his or her entire history, but you might gain valuable insight if you know or can easily ask about the person's former jobs. Although you don't want to pry for embarrassing revelations, often the comments people drop about past experience can provide clues about what is important.
Friendly or antagonistic, familiar or unknown, the potential ally's world will be more transparent if you can answer some critical questions:
- Is your ally on the fast track or stuck indefinitely in his or her current position?
- Is that person under pressure to shake up the department and produce internal change, or do they want to preserve a calm atmosphere in the department?
- How long will that person live with the consequences of cooperating (or refusing to). Is he or she likely to move on soon and, therefore, unlikely to care about the consequences?
While being careful to avoid stereotyping, you might also examine what you know about the ally's personal history. Was he or she raised in another part of the world? A first-generation citizen? Educational background can be helpful, including what the person studied and where. Managers lacking a college degree or, in some organizations, an MBA or other advanced degree, could be sensitive about their perceived deficiency or about possible slights to their intelligence.
Ivy League liberal arts graduates might care more about high culture and polished manners than engineers from a big state university. In turn, engineers or accounting majors might prefer more careful discussions of data and detail than the marketing majors. Basing your approach entirely on such preconceptions would be risky, but might provide clues for more careful diagnosis:
- How successful was the person in previous jobs?
- Does the person see himself or herself as highly competent or still learning?
- Is the person a fast-track performer brought in to fix things, or moved slowly into each position and remaining there a long time?
- Was the person burned (or made successful) by a previous project that was similar to what you are pushing or for other reasons?
- Was the person a victim of arbitrary firing and a bad manager?
- Was the person let down by a subordinate in a crucial situation or back-stabbed after promised support?
Managers who have worked for Google or Facebook will look at problems differently from those who only worked for the same medium-size, family-owned company. And managers who have spent some time at European and Japanese subsidiaries probably will have different perspectives from those who never left Detroit.
All of these situations will likely affect how the person will react to new ideas, major changes, or large projects versus more modest ones.
The Potential Ally's Worries
In addition to looking at the environmental forces that affect your potential ally, consider what the person's anxieties might be. Ask yourself what work issues make your potential ally toss in bed at 2 a.m. At the least, you ought to be able to answer that for your boss. If you don't know, think about it. You never will get what you want from your boss if you can't quite pinpoint his or her biggest worries:
- Long-term competition from China? Or issues of outsourcing jobs?
- Meeting next week's payroll as demand shifts?
- Merger rumor mill?
- Fear of boss's wrath for missing a budgeted expense number?
- Impact of exotic new technologies? AI? Robotics?
- How to confront dug-in resisters on their nasty political games?
The answers to these and similar questions help determine your approach.
How the Potential Ally Defines the World
Although you cannot always easily detect them from a distance, knowing the potential ally's assumptions about key issues (leadership, motivation, competition, or change) helps you determine what that individual values. Often, people have made overt statements about such basic matters, making their views known. The manager, for example, who believes that people are inherently lazy and need to be closely watched is likely to value control and predictability, while one who believes that most people want to do a good job is more likely to value challenge and growth. The ally who believes that anything is negotiable operates quite differently from the one who holds fast to a few eternal truths, no matter what the situation.
To make these previous concepts come alive, think of a difficult-to-influence colleague, and fill out the Inquiry Map (Figure 4.2) about that person. After completion, how much did you know, and how confident are you that you are right? Was it enough to develop a reasonable hypothesis about that person's world and likely currencies? If not, how can you find out more? Based on your diagnosis, what currencies will that person most likely value?
Figure 4.2 Inquiry Map
Gathering Real-Time Data about the World of Others
A warning first: all these methods, including directly asking, yield helpful information, but you must be tentative in coming to conclusions before you act. Treat what you learn as working hypotheses to test further, not as final conclusions that let you leap without looking. For anything you discover, ask how certain you are that it's valid for the other's world and how to verify it. Often the direct act of influencing lets you discover important new currencies of that person, so listen carefully.
What Did You Say? Language as a Clue to Valued Currencies
As we have mentioned, any argument or request is more likely to succeed when framed in the currency the other person values, so any clues to important currencies will be useful. One of the best ways to rapidly learn about currencies is to listen closely to a person's language. When you are tuned in, you will be amazed at how often and how repetitively people broadcast their currencies—what matters to them.
People's choice of metaphors often can reveal their preoccupations. Does she use military (or sports) metaphors about battle, competition, and destroying the opposition? Does he use gardening metaphors, which show his concern for learning and development of the organization's talent? Does the person refer to everything in impersonal mechanical terms or use rich examples about people's foibles and accomplishments? Technically, the following two phrases about maintaining organizational change describe the same thing, but the people using them see the world differently:
- “I'm seeking an interlocking gear to lock in each bit of forward movement and prevent slippage.”
- “We need to capture people's hearts, so they will passionately persist.”
When a request for help is met immediately with an inquiry about who else will be involved, you know that political concerns are that person's currency. Another might ask directly, “What's in it for me?” which reveals concern for self and suggests that a blunt, direct response is probably best. Yet another manager will ask how the request fits in with the company's mission, which indicates that person values corporate over personal goals—and perhaps will welcome the opportunity to be a good citizen.
Expressed Concerns as Clues
Remarkably, the hopeful influencer will often completely miss obvious clues to the potential ally's hot buttons. Many resistant allies telegraph their core currencies when they raise concerns: “What I'd be worried about if we did that…” or “I don't think the finance people would buy it” or “My concern here is…” You can too easily read these as signs of stubbornness and intractability, but they can also be statements about what is important to that person and, therefore, an important currency. So rather than arguing them out of their concern, pay them in their concern! Could a few questions exploring what the potential ally is worried about set up the possibility of a win-win outcome? “What if we set up a meeting with the head of finance and if you are reassured, will you join the task force?”
The style of language used—metaphors, images, jargon—can be revealing, but tone and nonverbal signs also can be important cues to feelings and attitudes. Tuning in to others' emotions is a communication skill you should practice because it is especially informative when trying to figure out what is important to a potential ally. Whether you just learn to soften your tone when your boss's neck gets red or you watch for the widened eyes that indicate growing interest in the tack you are taking, careful attention to the nonverbal cues can help you determine which currencies to use and how to make your requests in language that will elicit the desired response.
Being sensitive to nonverbal cues is easier said than done. Time and again in our management training workshops, we find participants eager to demonstrate their skill in reading others' concerns, but then they promptly get sucked right into selling their own views rather than trying to determine the ally's views.
Other Sources of Data
Even when you seek help from a stranger, he or she may advertise so clearly that it is hard to miss what is important. Who hasn't encountered fellow employees who mention their (high-status) undergraduate college or MBA school within the first five minutes of conversation, no matter what the topic? It doesn't take great psychoanalytic insight to figure out that for them status is probably an important currency.
With a bit of ingenuity, you can often find someone you trust to be a helpful source. However, this approach has limitations too, as we will discuss later in this chapter.
Just Ask Directly
It isn't always easy to gain access to ask about a person's values or concerns. For troubled relationships, it can feel too risky, but we do not want to slight the benefits of a direct approach. We later discuss how to overcome relationship problems that get in the way of direct inquiry, but consider the possibilities of being willing to say to the person you want to influence: “I'd like to understand better the pressures you are under so that I can try to be helpful or at least not get in your way with what I am asking. Our areas are interdependent, and we both could benefit if we helped each other more.” You are paying the other in the currencies of better understanding and good working relationships. Often that works.
Just Because It Waddles and Quacks Like a Duck Doesn't Mean It's a Duck: The Dangers of Stereotyping
Sift through everything you hear and treat things only as clues, not certainties. Be careful not to assume any one factor determines all currencies; people respond to many complex pressures. The actuary who cut his teeth on numbers may indeed prefer crisp statistical reports, but we have worked with high-level actuaries who are eloquent about the limits of numerical analysis and the need for intuition when making important decisions.
We are not suggesting that you must compile a complete dossier on each potential ally. Often you only need a few pieces of information for a good idea of where to begin discussion. As we mentioned above but can't stress enough, you are doing an initial diagnosis so that the other will continue the discussion. It is in the ensuing back-and-forth that you often fully understand what is crucial to the other. But the more difficult the situation, the wiser it is to do your homework and spend time on a careful diagnosis.
Barriers to Acting on Knowledge of the Worlds of Important Stakeholders
Several things can get in the way of using the knowledge you gain from understanding the world of the person or group you want to influence.
The Negative Attribution Cycle
Having a difficult time getting the influence you desire can lead to a self- defeating cycle of negative attributions about the other person's intentions, motives, and even personality.2 Suppose you meet resistance you think is unreasonable, and all of your efforts are shrugged off. Because dealing with this person has been so unpleasant, you start to avoid any interaction. But you still need to find an explanation for the person's resistance. The tendency is to assume the worst, thinking that he wants to block you or is a selfish, inconsiderate ass. You are now at a place where influencing him will be extremely difficult. Figure 4.3, the Negative Attribution Cycle, depicts the process by which this occurs.
Figure 4.3 The Negative Attribution Cycle
The “Selective Confirmation” Bias
Once you have a preliminary hypothesis, a common trap is listening only to information confirming the first hunch and ignoring data that contradicts it. It is too tempting to assume the bad impression is “the real person” and anything else is just putting on a show.
Distancing Difficult People
People tend to interact more with those they like (and to like and interact most with those who are like them). In turn, people tend to avoid interaction with those who are dissimilar. While this makes life more pleasant and predictable, because it avoids the discomfort of trying to overcome unfamiliarity or belligerence, it tends to cut you off from information about someone whose help you may need.
Thus, it is most important to discover the interests of the people you are least likely to understand. Difficult potential allies might well value currencies that make exchange possible, but you will find that difficult to know without contact or discussion.
Focusing on Personality and Ignoring Situational Forces
One natural way people explain puzzling behavior of others is to attribute to them motives that make sense of the behavior. Their explanation assumes the behavior is driven by internal forces rather than the organizational factors shown previously (Figure 4.1, Contextual Forces That Shape Behavior along with Personality).
When you don't like the way someone acts, you tend to demonize that person, labelling him or her a “jerk” or worse. Although almost everyone does it, premature negative labeling makes it difficult to understand the potential ally's currencies. And it never matters who started the negative attributions; once begun, they often take on a life of their own
Learn to understand others; don't be one of those who says, “He's so bright I don't understand why he doesn't agree with me.”
—Patricia Hillman, Retired Executive VP, Fidelity
Further Decreases in Interaction
Once assumptions about personality begin to harden like concrete, any inclinations to interact diminish. Why waste time on someone who you believe has negative traits and can't change? Isn't that the last person to lunch with? Because you have concluded that you would hurt or anger such an immovable person by discussing the offending behavior, you write off that potential ally for all time.
In the unlikely event, however, that you do raise the issue, it is extremely difficult not to be negative or accusatory. Doing that relieves your frustrations but doesn't help the colleague learn something useful. By then, even if you were wrong about the potential ally's inability to change, your attack just precluded any positive response, and you walk away from the exchange feeling vindicated in your negative beliefs. Such an outburst provides a momentary release of frustration but is not exactly a formula for building a trusting relationship where influence can flow both ways. (For a sad tale of an actual downward cycle of misunderstanding, see “Mutual Misinterpretation, Leading to Decreased Interaction and Understanding: Oliver and Mark,” on our website www.influencewithoutauthority.com.)
Alternatives to Creating Distance and Limiting Influence
One way to avoid the kind of negative cycle that limits influence is to recognize the pattern as it develops. Whenever you assign negative personality traits to an uncooperative colleague or boss, consider it a warning that you should investigate further. That difficult person may indeed be a totally immovable object, but without thoroughly testing that notion, you can't be sure.
You can develop intelligence about another person by asking colleagues whether they see him or her as you do. Their views might be more detailed, more detached, and more insightful, and can protect you from reaching inaccurate conclusions. Be sure they know you aren't fishing for a nasty answer but are genuinely trying to understand the person so you can work things out.
Unfortunately, colleagues are not always the most useful source, although their views, when different from yours, can prevent you from prematurely hardening arbitrary conclusions. There are two potential problems with colleague opinions. First, you trust most those who see the world the way you do. It is the sharing of biases and assumptions that usually makes for trusted colleague relationships, which increases comfort but reinforces distortions. Instead, is there somebody who actually works well with your difficult person? Can you find out exactly how they do it?
Second, even when the people you ask for an opinion are not so similar that your prejudices are merely shared and reinforced, they may not be able to provide better evidence than you already have. Their responses to queries may be based on limited observations and some rumors, not firsthand knowledge. Thus, it is not always as easy to get useful evidence from colleagues as it appears.
I Thought You'd Never Ask: Using Direct Inquiry as an Alternative
As suggested earlier in this chapter, a good way to understand others is to take the direct route—to the horse's mouth. Despite the natural fears of being bitten, when in doubt, just ask. However, you must make a genuine attempt to solve a problem, not a thinly veiled accusation.
To do that (and not just fake it, which seldom fools anyone), you must set aside any of your negative judgments and assume that the potential ally does not view his or her behavior as deliberately bad. Most people view their own behavior as reasonable and justified, no matter how it may appear to others. Rarely do people get up in the morning and say, “I am really going to be a total jerk today.”
The trick to unhooking yourself from your negative views is to assume that the potential ally thinks his or her behavior is reasonable, so you must understand that reasonable person's rationale to pursue a win-win resolution. In other words, can you see the world through his or her eyes? Try stepping back and (temporarily) taking a novel approach: “Let me assume this is an intelligent, reasonable person who, for some reason that I don't understand, is not cooperating. I am beginning to act as if his motives were intentionally bad. What if that weren't the case? How can I understand better?” What questions can you ask to open up the discussion? Table 4.1 provides sample questions that do not assume negative motives.
Table 4.1 Sample Questions That Do Not Assume Negative Motives
| I'd like to understand more about the forces you are responding to. Can you help me understand your job and its demands? What about your job keeps you awake at night? Tell me more about that. You seem concerned about _________; what makes that a concern? How can I help make that less of an issue? |
Often, a direct question may be all you need. But you get into trouble when a negative view ensures that the only question you can think of would make things worse. Ask open-ended questions, not closed-ended loaded questions that only provoke the recipient rather than begin an exploratory discussion.
Once you have a negative opinion about someone, it is difficult to go back to neutral inquiry. Work on understanding an ally's world when you are still puzzled, rather than after you have tried and convicted the person in your mind.
The Benefits of Asking
Despite the natural fear of openly admitting you don't understand something (especially to someone you think might want to get you), such openness works well for several reasons. First, the potential ally is likely to be surprised by your genuine interest. Because people in organizations rarely bother to ask others exactly how they see the world, those asked are often grateful. They appreciate your willingness to show confusion and, in return, give you the information you need.
Second, most people appreciate the chance to “tell their story” and explain themselves and their situation. This works, however, only if you have genuine interest in the other person's story and aren't just going through the motions with a technique described in some book. Oddly, many organizational members believe they can fool anyone when they want to but that nobody can successfully fool them. (That leaves too many who are nobody's fools.) In general, few are taken in by insincerity, so don't fake interest or confusion if you don't feel it (or can't drop the negative assumptions you've made).
Finally, sincere, direct inquiry builds openness and trust in the relationship, aiding all future transactions. It is easy to get so caught up in influencing potential allies that you fail to learn from them. Asking what is important to them helps keep you in a posture more open to mutual influence, which increases their confidence in you.
Conclusion: Barriers to Understanding the World of Others
What keeps people from reaching mutually satisfying understanding? Why is asking about something crucial so difficult? If you can explore others' concerns and situations directly, then it is far easier to find possibilities for exchange. Even when the relationship is not well developed, inquiring can be useful. Why doesn't it successfully happen more often? Table 4.2 provides a summary of self-inflicted barriers to understanding the worlds of others.
Table 4.2 Summary of Self-Inflicted Barriers to Understanding the Worlds of Others
| Factors Requiring Only Your Awareness in Order to Change |
| Preoccupation with what you want, so you are not tuning in Assuming all resistance comes from personality, not organizational factors, then demonizing the person's character, motives, or intelligence Unfamiliarity with the other person's world, so you have little clue or you are filling in with assumptions Not listening carefully to the other person's language, especially about concerns Not asking; not wanting to give up your comfortable answer |
| Factors Where You and Your Attitudes Are the Problem |
| Asking in an accusatory way that causes defensiveness or anger Avoiding the person whose behavior is difficult or resistant to influence Leaping to conclusions from one piece of information Disapproving of the other person's world rather than understanding it and how it affects behavior |
If you have the patience to work toward understanding, you can find opportunities for exchange where at first there appeared to be none. Knowing the potential ally's world, however, is only part of what you need. You must also be clear about your own needs and interests to increase the likelihood of finding currencies to offer for those valued by the ally. Chapter 5 covers understanding your world and the power you control.