What hidden forces really operate behind organisational decisions? Politics? Empire- building? Shareholder pressure? I would have to say “all and none of the above”. All of those are the evidence; the things that we see people doing. In reality, it’s the drivers of those things that we should be interested in: emotion. What we actually see are the disguises that people adopt to communicate their feelings about how things are going. We resort to political manoeuvring when they have run out of ideas for how to ask for something. We build empires when we are worried about getting lost in the machine and shareholders express their feelings by buying, selling and voting.

And all of these are proxies for proper emotional expression. But before I tell you about the more useful alternatives let me explain what I mean by ‘proper emotional expression’ because you may already be thinking: “oh-ho, getting emotional is ‘not me’ or at least it’s not done where I work.” I bet you’re right if we are talking about people putting on major displays of emotion (ranting, stomping about, going red in the face, bursting into tears, going quiet and moody etc.). What I am talking about is giving a clear, rational explanation of how I am feeling so that people know what is going on and can make an informed decision about what to do next.

Right, practical details next; how do you do it yourself or help others to do it if they are struggling? Three ways for you to experiment with:

Listen and mention – don’t just blunder on when you are talking with someone who is becoming unreasonable. Be brave – give them the chance to express how they are feeling – you don’t have to ask them outright – you don’t even need to mention the word ‘feeling’ (the f-word). Instead, try: “You sound/look/seem…” [the name of the feeling] and then pause to let them acknowledge your observation and to continue with their point. My guess is that they will become more open as you encourage them to be clear about what is driving their point (how they feel). You may need to do this repeatedly as they express their various views. Be patient – your time will come!

Notice and declare – if you notice yourself getting stuck in a particular position and sense that you are being taken over by your opinion (emotions, actually) give yourself the chance to be explicit about how you are feeling. Again, you don’t have to mention that f-word.

Try: “I’m getting worried/annoyed/frustrated about where this conversation is going/the change in plan/the loss of momentum… because…”

What’s left unsaid – we frequently leave difficult conversations half finished, or at least with important things left unsaid. This is often because someone has purposefully or accidentally shut the dialogue down prematurely. To make sure that it’s not you, you can say: “Before we finish I want to ask a question of us both – “what’s left unsaid?” You might think this is completely artificial, too off the wall. This way of talking is certainly unusual because it does not follow convention but it does give us access to immense opportunities to clear up bad feeling and thus make progress on issues that most of us can get for ever stuck on. Deal with the unspoken and the rest will sort itself out.

If we want to keep emotion in its proper place in our lives, and not least of all in our businesses, then we need to learn how to deal with them. Properly managed, emotions help us to make great decisions, to be worth living with and drive us to do amazing things. But left to run riot by lack of acknowledgement they can make things truly miserable. Emotions for business people are like water for a plumber; if we don’t channel them properly we will forever be plugging the leaks – occasionally getting flooded out without warning.

You have recently noticed that your line manager has been paying more attention than usual to your work, tasks and projects. Up until now Annette, the Country Manager, has always left you largely alone to get on with things. This has not always been the case with your VP colleagues but you assumed that she would leave you alone as long as she trusted you. Having said that, you have just taken on a global initiative that requires you to network with the Main Board and all the other Country Managers. Whilst this is interesting for you, and means a much higher profile across the organisation, you can’t help feeling rather crowded out by your boss’s attentions. What is she up to? Is she jealous? Worried? Has she stopped trusting you? Is she at some point going to start making your life harder locally so that you can’t focus on the global initiative?

What do you do next?

A. “These things happen”, you tell yourself. Annette is bound to feel anxious about being overtaken – it’s quite natural. You are just going to have to tough it out and stay out of her way and hope that she doesn’t overload you with other tasks so that you fail in the global project.
B. You ask for a meeting with Annette to probe her on what has changed in your relationship. This is one opportunity that you can’t afford to have scuppered by a jealous boss. You need to find out what is going on.
C. You decide that Annette needs to be persuaded to trust you with this massively high-profile task. On the basis that she is out to protect her reputation, and maybe even yours, you are going to keep her well fed with information, updates and little bits of HQ gossip and reassurance until she realises that she can loosen her grip on your schedule.
D. You conclude that 1. You really are not prepared to put up with being micromanaged and that 2. You really don’t know what is going on. You decide that you need to have a very frank discussion with Annette about where she is with the project and to find out what she is most worried about. Hopeful you will then be able to sort out a game plan for how to make the most of the opportunity without having to worry about being stabbed in the back.

I’ll publish my chosen option here on Monday afternoon. Let me know yours as soon as you like.

What would you do next?

She’s done it again. The Marketing Director, Jane Shaw has just taken credit for another one of your ideas. It first happened soon after you arrived in your post as Head of Sales.  On that occasion you decided to take it as a compliment, a way of currying favour with your new boss and an opportunity to build up brownie points with someone who would probably turn out to be your ally for the radical agenda that you were hired to execute on – to increase individual client spend. But in the last nine months it has happened again and again. Today it was during a Board meeting when she essentially trotted out the outline of an idea that you had floated past her just a couple of days before as part of a strategy for achieving your objectives. Having said that, there was no denying that Jane sounded incredibly plausible and actually added usefully to the idea with her own input – she really knew how to get John on Board!

Would you…?

Would you confront her with an assertive statement ? Would you let it go and just have more good ideas? Would you communicate empathy with her position as a Marketing Director under pressure? Or would you stop telling her your ideas and go to the MD first? There is certainly more than one right answer – each of us can carry different things off by force of personality, choice of words and by moral conviction.

Different strategies carry different levels of short and long term risk. What would you do next? Let me know with a reply or go to www.originalsoftskills.com for some options and the answer.

I was doing a spot of wiring at the weekend and whilst grovelling around through piles of dusty (and terribly itchy) ceramic insulation, in a part of the attic that I had never to, I stumbled across a large control panel bolted to the wall.

This shoebox-sized box sprouted a wild assortment of about twenty cables and was covered with an array of red LEDs – all lit. This large gadget had evidently been hanging there for the past three years, since we bought the house, fully powered up, doing it’s thing. What’s its ‘thing’ was I have not discovered but I do know that it did it quite without anybody’s help. No reset buttons to press, no dials to adjust, no displays to monitor. How clever of it, how resilient and independent; what a little stalwart. Not all machines are like this. The more we design machines to do, the more help they seem to need from us. Computers need upgrades, software needs patches, cars need servicing (oh, how they need servicing), bikes need mending and microwaves, well they just get thrown away – sorry. But we fully accept this maintenance burden; when we buy a machine we buy an uncertain future and usually a big fat warranty to ‘protect’ us from that future. But people, ah, now you’re talking.

"Come on ol' girl"

The beauty of buying, or as we like to say these days, ‘hiring’ people is that you just get them in the building, tell them where the coffee machine is (they always manage to find the toilets by themselves) and let them get on with whatever it said in the advert. Job done. Sometimes. The tricky ones need maintenance (oh gawd, here we go – should have bought another bloody machine instead).

Fear not, here is the Quick Start guide to help you get the best from your new person or ‘human’ without wasting valuable business hours.

1.  No need to read a book about ‘leading people’ instead ask it what it needs to operate properly: what turns it on and what makes it malfunction. Then believe it and do as it asked.

2.  Be aware that it will need a reasonably nice place to work properly: space for its cables and attachments, daylight, access to fresh air, a chance to eat and freewheel for a few minutes a day; in essence, somewhere that it is pleased to come to.

3.  If you are going to connect it with other people units make sure that all of them know why they are being connected and find out from them, or at a push, tell them, which person is going to do what. Of course, do make sure they are talking the same language. It doesn’t matter that they are different (you probably chose them that way), it does matter that they can make sense of each other.

4.  If they start getting dusty or crusty it is probably because you haven’t been near them for ages. As with any good machine, the better you get to know your person (and the better they come to know your preferences), the more productive and maintenance-free you and they can be.

5.  Preventative maintenance. This comes in a variety of forms; here are 3 critical ones:

• Communication. If there is an instance of good productivity or a malfunction – talk (like with the car).
• Time to think. If you load your machine with ‘stuff’ don’t expect great results. Like a washing machine – put too much in and it all comes out dirty.
• Be nice to it. We all talk to our cars and that works really well on an icy road or on a cold morning doesn’t it? (I hum to the microwave too – it helps the food to heat quicker). So be nice to your person and they will be nice back to you.

But if you are not entirely satisfied with your person, whatever the model, simply return them to where you got them and there is a good chance that there is someone out there who can successfully give them a more suitable home where they can function at their peak.

In the last 24 hours I have learned how a dual-winding system works in a modern alarm clock. I have also mastered the finer points of expanding versus non-expanding text on my web site. Oh and how to set the timer on my oven to come on, cook the food and turn itself off again.

When I started the week, I had no ambition to learn any of those things. In fact, there were several other things I really would have liked to master – like how to play a full twelfth of the A flat major scale on my trumpet without looking at the book. Or how to not bite when my eldest daughter complains that her little sister won’t play with her at 06:15 in the morning.

And it’s not the first time these lessons have been thrust upon me. It seems that my attention and consequently my time is more often grabbed by a piece of technology waiting to be understood than by some really important human thing.

Where do I put the soap?

I love a gadget as much as the next man but why does it leave me cold when I get mail about the new version of this or that or when a friend of mine thrusts their new pda (pdf?) under my nose for approval (there could be some jealousy at play there of course).

There are 22 objects on my desk; 7 of them need electricity and an operating manual. I would like to direct my attention, and that of anyone else who will listen, towards getting the really important stuff right. Learning the tricky business of being really good at being human, a little more of my waking hours. I want to concentrate more on repairing family relationships and less on learning how to Twitter. I want to become a better beekeeper and not quite so good at doing things on the web. I want to learn my Uranus from my Andromeda and not my bits from my Bytes.

Technology is super but there are more challenging things for humans to do than to learn how to get to levels 6 of Left 4 Dead (although the accompanying music ‘Te quiero Putta’ by Rammstein is quite a foot tapper – but for heaven’s sake don’t play it in front of your Spanish-speaking elder relatives). Come to think of it, about the best thing technology has to offer us is unprecedented access to all the music there is out there! Crikey. What a thought.

I take it all back.

Technology is the best. I love it.

Except anything that doesn’t make a nice sound – and that you can keep.

Everyone wants to know how to motivate their people to perform better in the current climate. It’s a pity they weren’t as interested before – had they been they would have been in better shape right now. What they should be doing now is no different to what they should have been doing originally, only now, it’s not really optional.

In brief – there’s more to each of these than meets the eye, BTW, so think before you dismiss ; ‘ )

Exceptional performance in tough times – what does it take?

The boss needs to know these few things:

1.    What is the No.1 preoccupation of each individual who works for me – ‘insights’ that start with “I think…” don’t count.
2.    If my people were unpaid volunteers what would I need to do to keep them? Am I doing it right now?
3.    Do I tend to clear the way or get in the way? How?

The report needs to know these few things:

1.    What frightens me?
2.    What feeds me?
3.    How to get through to the boss

• The report with their own people needs to know all those things.
• The boss and report both need to be prepared to act on what they know or to work at why they won’t.

Or to put it another way, we of all the animals, probably find it the hardest to learn new things – much harder than do the other animals. Why? Because thinking gets in the way. Thinking and having feelings about what we are being ‘taught’. Oh, and there’s that problem of reflexivity too – we can think about ourselves, or to be more accurate, about our ’selves’.  Because of that we end up also wasting quite a lot of time thinking about what other people think of us. All of these capacities  – they’re not skills because we don’t choose to have them or seek to practise them – result in us getting very caught up in ourselves and our thoughts. As time passes and we grow up (or at least grow old) all these thoughts and the feelings that accompany them shape our repertoire of thoughts, feelings and actions. Every time we are faced with a situation, we more or less pull our feeling, thinking and behaviour ‘pattern’ out of the bag and do it without a thought.

Training is supposed to interrupt these patterns – does it? A good question – Can you train someone not to be aggressive for example? Go and read about that. Mostly it does not because it only very rarely addresses what is going on in our heads and ‘hearts’. The other animals, however, can learn the new tricks much more easily because they have all that internal stuff going on. Animals react and ‘do’. Plain and simple. We are much more like them when we are frightened or angry – then we do ‘think’ with something more akin to their level of sophistication. If you can remember what it was like the last time you were angry or frightened or very sad you will realise that functioning at that level is indeed to experience functioning at a very basic level. Straightforward alright; quick; reactive; brutal. We could even say ‘thoughtless’. Not nasty or uncaring, just free from thought, in the human sense.

So why should you give a fig about any of this? Perhaps for two reasons:

1.    So that you can realise that it’s not your fault that the course on emotional intelligence you were sent on had little or no effect (just as the course on ‘developing your  assertiveness’, ‘listening skills training for managers’ and ‘developing leadership skills’ didn’t either). You’re not being thick – in fact, quite the reverse.
2.    So that you can spot yourself more easily in a situation when you are behaving like one of the other animals – in the nicest possible way of course. You might just notice in time to get your humanity back before it’s too late.

Hmm…

Some things just look right don’t they? They look like they are going to work. Some medicines look powerful. Some people seem plausible, like they are going to be dependable or creative or knowledgeable. Some graphs look really informative, you just know they are telling the truth. Sometimes you come across an argument or line of reasoning that strikes you as logical, truthful, accurate, honest, helpful. This is what psychologists call face validity.

Face validity.

It’s what something has when it looks ‘right’. Face validity is the thing that makes us trust a particular thing, person, piece of paper, concept or whatever. It is probably something that most people don’t acknowledge as being present in their decision-making processes – chiefly because it doesn’t have much to do with supportable logic

An example: Tomorrow morning you walk into a car showroom on the way to the service desk of your car’s brand dealership. You spot a car you really like the look of. Crikey, it’s just so, well, shiny. It smells so new and the doors – ooh, so heavy and clunky. I think I’ll open and shut it again. Clunk! CLUNK! Ooh, “I want it” you think. Then you ask for a brochure. You are given a badly photocopied sheaf of pages, stapled at the top right-hand corner. No, this isn’t a photocopy, you are assured, this is what the marketing department has sent us. This is a £25,000 car you protest. Oh, yes, the salesman retorts, and worth every penny. We’ve decided to put all our effort into the car and not really bother with marketing blurb – we thought the car should speak for itself. Do you take it for a test drive?

‘Thin slicing’.

Face validity, and our tendency to judge things against this subtle criterion taps directly into what the author of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, refers to as ‘thin slicing’. It is about picking up lots of data subliminally and putting it to good (and bad) use in making complex assessments very fast. Experienced soldiers thin slice all the time in battle. Racing drivers do it a hundred times a lap. Art dealers do it with every major painting they examine; gamblers when sizing up every new opponent. So, the problem with this thin slicing is not that we do it or don’t do it.

A face validity – good or bad?

The problem is that we either don’t know we are doing it or choose not to own up to it. If we are unaware of how we are making a decision then thin slicing and the corresponding face validity ‘rating’ of what we are judging can get the better of us. So, ‘thin slicing’ + self awareness = good quality deciding. As for face validity itself – just remember about books and covers.