There’s no question but that the psychologist, Daniel Goleman, has had a great run with his emotional intelligence. The fad struck a chord among business people and has shown itself to be fairly useful. Furthermore, the constant emphasis on the emotional response of empathy has sometimes resulted in better business relationships, all of which makes for better team and cross-disciplinary relationships. When, that is, people have the soft skills to use the emotional insights surfacing. But that, of course is a more complicated, but very learnable and coachable set of issues.
However, it should be very clear that political intelligence is a lot more important for personal and organizational success than emotional intelligence. By political intelligence in business, I refer to the ability to gain buy-in and/or support from people with differing or potentially differing agendas to achieve one’s own personal objectives and enable others to achieve theirs. The unstated fact about teams is firstly, that they hold together because they have a common interest in survival and success, and secondly, because they practice politics—not because they agree about “fundamentals” or “principles” or some such vague notion. That bottom line can, admittedly, be pretty dark. But bear with me. This is the kind of expertise that is often talked about in derogatory terms. And you may not recognize its real value and necessity until you have more responsibility than just taking orders and following through.
Far and away the most appropriate analogy for politics is sexuality. They are both activities with a number of unstated objectives that make more formal discussions unnecessary--and sometimes undiscussable. Granted, sexuality is a more widespread activity than political action. But the person who can live without either is either inhumanly sterile or an alien from another planet. Furthermore, in contrast to emotional intelligence, the basic characteristics of both politics and sexuality are absolute necessity and unpredictability. In addition, both politics and sexuality are activities in which the range of conduct is far greater than what we are willing to engage. But they both must be carried on to some degree or else both organizations and humanity will cease to exist..
Plenty of people don’t buy into what I’ve just written about business politics. But if you pay attention to these people over the long term, you’ll find that they never have the personal success or even job security of those who act politically. In fact, studies show that managing your boss politically is a lot more important for personal success than high performance. No matter what Goleman argues, emotional intelligence is merely one sub-discipline of political intelligence. Indeed, the wise actor makes emotional intelligence part of their political decision-making because they understand that politics, both personal and governmental, is the key to freedom. In fact, as Adam Gopnik commented, "politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons."
However, there is another subdiscipline of politics in which I see even more failure than in emotional intelligence—the sub-discipline which I label with the familiar term “mind reading.” So, in the remainder of this blog, I want to visit the competency of mind-reading, one of the base competencies very necessary for business politics and fulfillment.
Mind reading
Mind reading tools grow out of two disciplines: the rhetorical competency of "close reading" and the communication competency of “barrier resolution.” “Close reading” tools are competencies that enable you to hear what’s being said at the deeper levels of meaning—going beyond the words and evidence that's presented. “Barrier-resolution” tools are processes related to the recent stuff in the “ladder of inference,” beginning with assumptions and interpretations—as well as the complex tools of interpersonal negotiation.
Ultimately, mind reading is built on the well-accepted fact that ways of thinking tend to be systematic. People tend to hold well-connected kinds of values and convictions in their thinking. That’s because inherently we want our thinking to be consistent. Consistency is a very strong, often unconscious driver in our thinking and acting. For example, our basic attitude toward people may also share some basic assumptions and values with what we think about a specific boss or colleague. If you’re very trusting of people you’ll typically act trusting toward most individuals. But if you find it difficult to trust people until you’ve observed them over a long period of time, then that’s how you’ll usually act toward team members. And in political decisioning, too. So, understanding the other’s values can enable you to adapt and influence the other in your positioning and messaging.
What's especially useful about this competency is that once we identify a person’s value or conviction as, say, “early trusting” or “late trusting” we are able to predict how that person will think and behave related to other trust issues. Obviously, the competency is not foolproof, but it is highly valuable in nearly all political action.
So how can you up the ante on your mind-reading skills? In short, how can you become a successful "predictor" of others’ thinking and behavior for political use? Begin by understanding other’s basic attitude or value, like autonomy or status, which have built-in values that can increase your prediction abilities in other of their issues. As you gradually build a base of single attitudes or values, then you can start to put together an understanding of major issues—the fundamental ideologies that characterize a person. Once you’ve determined a person’s fundamental ideologies such as politics, religious leanings and views on the environment, women’s rights, military interventions and so forth, you can make a good guess on who they voted for in the last election, military intervention, controls on firearms or offsite drilling. You can take a chance on predicting their decision on other issues because ways of thinking tend to be systematic. Once you’ve decided on a person’s ideology, then the next step is not to look for more supportive evidence, but to identify any evidence that dissents from their basic ideology. When you’ve got all this stuff put together, prediction of behaviors on other issues becomes fairly clear-cut.
Reading Jared Diamond
Here’s an intriguing non-business case that can provide insight into a person’s trust attitude and enable predictions around people relationships. In a fascinating interview, Jared Diamond provides some great stuff for building your mind-reading skills. Diamond is the author of some of the best popular science books. From the Sunday NYTImes magazine, here are three interview questions with his answers:
Is it true that you raised your sons, Max and Joshua, like Pygmies? “Yes, but we did not go to what I would consider the extremes. In traditional societies, children are allowed to make their own decisions, so we let them make their own decisions within reason, with some surprising results. When Max was 3 years old, he saw his first snake, and he demanded one as a pet. We bought him a nonpoisonous snake, and eventually he had 147 different pets: snakes, frogs, salamanders and other reptiles and amphibians.”
That approach to parenting could be seen as spoiling children. “Theoretically yes and in practice no. I think you get brats when you raise children who are told what to do for seven hours a day and in the remaining one or two hours they express their will, which has been frustrated all day. New Guinean kids are not brats, and my kids were not brats.”
Have your children been to New Guinea? “No, it’s too dangerous.”
If you're an effective listener and your antennae are up, this is great material for the basics of mind reading. Although you may want to read the rest of the interview, these three responses tell you an awful lot about Diamond and his fundamental ideology regarding relationships. Diamond is clearly early trusting, but he’s going to put obvious parameters around his trusting of the inexperienced person or the unpredictable context. Compare that with late trusting and those for whom trust is difficult. If you compare those with early trust to those with late trust, you can predict many behaviors for either within a team setting.
One’s general or basic attitude to trust is usually reflective of their underlying ideology--their web of convictions and commitments. That’s because trust is a primary orientation that impacts other behaviors negatively or positively, and becomes a fundamental ideology. Significantly, few are aware of their own ideologies. But a "close reader" can usually pick up on a person's ideologies in several different areas-- and know how and what the other thinks and will do or not do about a given issue. Once developed, I raised my predicting competencies another 20% to 25%. In my business that awareness enhanced my prediction skills, enhanced my political insights and behaviors and kept me out of trouble while creating new opportunities.
Ideology from start to maturity
A person's ideology is their broad, systematic network of beliefs, commitments, values, and assumptions—a broad set of characteristics that influence how power is maintained, struggled over and resisted. It drives both their thinking and behavior. As you build extensive understandings of values and commitment, you can gain much larger insights into a person, insights that reveal greater orientations called ideologies. To understand a person's ideology about child-raising, work, business, government, religion or most any subject, four questions are important in their conversations.
- What is the person saying? Start with the obvious. Don't get caught up in agreeing or disagreeing with what you hear. It’s very important to listen actively, effectively and accurately. Sometimes you may need to parrot or paraphrase back to be certain--or to let the person know you're listening.
People come up with all kinds of statements. Sometimes it's original with them, but just as often they're saying—and believing--what they've heard from others or read somewhere. The statement has lodged in their brain and they've given it credibility.
Diamond, very matter-of-factly, says he had decided to let his kid make his own decision "within reason." Paying attention to the Pygmies, to say the least, is freakish. But since his son, Max, had "147 different pets," there was a phenomenal amount of freedom given to his kid. Notice also that he supported his conclusion with the statement that New Guinean kids are not brats, and his kid was not a brat. Diamond is not mouthing off, but giving you a picture of his attitudinal and ideological set.
- What do a talker’s statements ask others to assume? This is what I call the subtext. Every argument or conclusion begins with some assumptions. Even the shout, "Run. The house is on fire!" is based on assumptions about the danger of fire, the idea that human bodies cannot withstand fire and so forth. Assumptions are those beliefs that a person takes for granted.
What counts as assumptions varies widely and it can tell us a lot about the person. It used to be that when I met people for the first time and they knew that I’d been a Baptist minister, they assumed I’d be rules-oriented. A person’s rules orientation impacts all kinds of experiences like work, finances, religion, etc. Though most Baptists and many religious folk are rules oriented, that's not true of all. Rules-oriented parents, for example, typically believe their high school kids lack the maturity to be trusted. Such an assumption fit neither me nor my wife.
Diamond, too, assumed that his son could be trusted to make his own decisions except in extreme situations. Definitely not a rules-oriented guy. So if you were hiring him to do some research for you, he could be counted on to go beyond the normal research strategies, and pick up on things that others might miss.
When you work with people regularly, you’ve got a lot of data in front of you if you just pick up on it. It’ll help you make more accurate predictions about a person in the future—and guide you in your political decision making. At the extremes, people who have a strong rules orientation can also be highly conserving, inflexible, orderly, perfectionistic and sometimes controlling. That’s certainly not all bad stuff. Order, for example, is much to be preferred over chaos. Kids with a little bit of structure (order) tend to do better in school and life. At the other end of the continuum are people without rules: highly changeable, lacking order and time wasting. And that, too, is not all bad stuff. The highly changeable can be adaptive and willing to look outside the box. One of the things I like about perfectionistic, highly ordered people, is that they’re very predictable. What I don’t like about them is that they’re very difficult to get to change their minds once it’s made up. They thrive on certainty and are often not open to change. In fact, they have difficulty making change and adaptations. And it sometimes requires a fair amount of persuasive/political smarts to get them on board with an issue that is a major change from the past. Obviously, if I’m searching for a person who’s going to lead a change effort, it won’t be a highly ordered person. And it will also not be someone who lacks order and is too changeable. They won’t be good at process or leadership.
The previous paragraph reminds me of a very important warning: Never, never try to mind read and predict behavior solely on the basis of one or two experiences with a person. You’ll always need to further check out your insight into their assumptions and ideology. I recommend you check out their ideology in at least 4 or 5 conversations within several contexts for similarities. Try to assess when your assumption is true and when doesn’t it hold water. None of us are fully consistent in our thinking or behaviorally consistent in our actions. What you’re after is to understand the person’s basic ideological pattern, including the few areas where he’s not consistent and breaks his ideological pattern.
Once you’re comfortable identifying this level of assumptions, you can take a third step and go still deeper into a person’s ideology. And that’s where the really good stuff resides. After several conversations, you can begin to get a lock on the person’s more profound views and behaviors about being fully human, the nature of relationships and reality, and how they typically go about their decision process—whether it’s thoughtful or haphazard.
Fundamental: Freud believed that anxiety is our most common feature. In contrast I believe that trust and distrust are the most common human features, the features that support and drive their behaviors in fairly obvious directions. Anxiety, like many psychological characteristics, doesn’t tell you how a person will behave. But trust will give you a lot of immediate insight into potential behavior.
In business, I’m inevitably thinking about whether a person fundamentally trusts reality or not, or whether a person initially trusts people or not. A proportion of bosses, for example, trust people until they’ve screwed up on several occasions. Other bosses start out not trusting people and won’t move to trust until a person has proven himself. Those deeply underlying assumptions and attitudes provide me with the predictive ability to determine how I make a proposal, when and where I can disagree, even whether or not I can count on a person to follow through on an agreement.
Talking to one potential client, I decide, based on her underlying reality structure, that I need to write up a three-page proposal and hold off the cost summary until we’ve had further conversation. Talking to another potential client, I figure out that all that’s necessary is to write a brief paragraph and attach a bill. I can also tell one client that I think his idea is full of shit—making it possible for us to get to work quickly. While with another client, I’m very cautious about disagreeing, realizing that it’s going to take a lot of time for him to trust me and my ideas. It’s knowing the person’s ideological mindset and underlying values and convictions that enable me to move on my political insights.
This shift to an analysis of assumptions is difficult for most listeners. Some think it’s being judgmental—and they don’t want to think of themselves as judgmental. In contrast, I view the analysis as clinical—not judgmental. Once you’ve gathered a lot of clinical data, you can start to determine political direction and put your behaviors into play.
I’m aware that most people just don’t automatically go to assumptions. And unless you've had courses in philosophy, psych, argumentation or rhetoric and communication, you're probably not used to thinking about a person’s assumptions. Still, if you want to ramp up your predictive competencies and do the political action to get what’s needed, this is exceptionally important—and absolutely necessary.
- What should the listener think or do? This question focuses on what the talker expects the listener to do. It emphasizes the conclusions or behaviors the talker is asking for. Sometimes these are clearly spelled out, but not always. The value of close reading is that you have a far richer understanding of a person, going well beyond what he is saying or proposing. In fact, with a close read of a person, your analysis can go well beyond the particular subject of the conversation, and predict thought and action far beyond the talker’s current issue.
Indirect persuasion: In the interview, Jared Diamond never directly tells others to raise children his way, but he explains his behavior. Though he does not ask for the reader to raise children in a permissive atmosphere, he certainly affirms that such an atmosphere does not spoil the child, creating brats. Actually, Diamond’s statements should be perceived as an act of indirect persuasion. So don't ignore the fact that though a talker doesn't ask you to think or behave the way he or she does, persuasion is implicit within plain information, especially when the behavior is considered to be better than previous behaviors.
Interconnected assumption: It's important to understand that ideologies are interconnected assumptions. To ask someone to think or do a thing implies a wider moral or behavioral standard that the speaker desires. If, for example, your executive tells you he manages employees tightly, that probably implies that he controls finances, job expectations, scheduling and deadlines the same way. And he was expecting the same of you.
In contrast, I grew up in a family where my father told me how he managed things, but there was no expectation on his part that I should manage time, schoolwork or relationships his way. I’ve found, often to my chagrin, that’s not the way most managers and execs think. Sheer information passed on by managers is often expectation—not merely neutral.
- Who is empowered or disempowered? Successful mind reading begins with understanding the speaker's assumptions and figuring out their orientation to power. Power is always at work to some extent in a person's statements. Even an advertisement for soup empowers the people selling soup. Diamond's statements point to the empowerment of his children. In contrast “rules-oriented" parents will keep the power for themselves and not give it to their children. The long-term consequences of that approach can be seriously negative and sometimes include adult estrangement.
Another way to get at empowerment is to ask what sort of hierarchies are implied by the text: who it says ought to "be in charge" and who not. If you understand a person's attitude toward power, you've got another finger on how he views the world, his personal and institutional relationships. Even his organizational politics. Significantly, understanding a person's attitude toward power tell you how he categorizes: how he grades, rates, classifies and groups individuals, organizations and even competencies or skills.
Obviously, this question gives you a lot of insight about your manager, the organization or even the company business. Think, for example, about who's empowered or disempowered at Walmart? And contrast that with Google, a very flat organization. Then think about your own management and colleagues.
A very important caveat
Once more: never, never attempt to act on one mind-reading experience. Before you decide on a person’s ideology, be sure to have identified several different cues supporting your decision. Four to five cues can usually be trusted.
In today’s business world you need to know especially how a person goes about problem solving and decision making, their adaptability and flexibility, motivation, thinking skills, creativity and innovation, orientation to learning, managing of people and such things. All of this information is available for the thoughtful observer. In fact, my experience coaching clients reveals that the use of these four keys can eventually point to necessary political action for 75% of the time.
Although I personally use a more full-orbed model that includes rhetoric, clinical psychology, communication, anthropology and business processes, business folk don’t have the education, time or the will to learn all that. Yet, I always start with these fairly obvious mind-reading strategies. Again, I believe that the political issues are far more important in reading people than the emotional.
In sum, you don’t need to be able to read a person like a book for political success. Instead, take a small risk or two at a time, based on your observations, and double check before moving on. Save the rest for the highly educated professionals who engage in the business of executive assessment or jury selection. Realize also that politics is stress--and the purpose of it is to keep the stress from going into cardiac arrest.