Dan Erwin

How to Recognize Someone Is Using You

It was a seemingly innocent question. But actually, he was just using me.

On Easter Sunday, after spending a rare day alone at home, I decided to grab a small bite and a glass of wine at a local pub. Since I would be alone, I took along a book that I intended to finish. A terrific little volume by Mark Edmundson: “The Age of Guilt.”

I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my cab and enjoying a crabcake, all the while reading and marking up this fascinating book. One of the most intriguing and enlightening works I’d read in years.

My reading habits began in elementary school, developed while I was in seminary, blossomed while I was in the pastorate and a seminary faculty member—and exploded in my consulting business. Although I am a lot more than this, I am my books.

I take a lot of time marking my books and papers, and putting notes in the front of the books and also outlining my research papers notes on an added single page, all making important substance available immediately. I’d be much less a person without my books and my studies. No question but that my effectiveness in church ministry, seminary—and especially in business—was tied to a substantially developing knowledge base and—I don’t want to ignore this—an extensive experience in the performing arts that continually shaped and reshaped my decision making.             

Sorry Counselor. Negotiating Boundaries Is What’s Needed.

Not setting boundaries.

What's the difference? Is it substantial? Or are they just two words for the same thing? And does it really matter? Prior to the 1950s, they would have been just two words for the same thing. That is, if anyone ever used the term “negotiating” boundaries. The practice of “negotiating” boundaries comes primarily out of the 1980s with the flattening of business hierarchies and the strong orientation to women’s rights. With the exception of sales negotiation, it was rare to talk about negotiating relationships until the mid-1980s. And since then, there have been tons of research and some training solely in the practice of negotiating interpersonal boundaries. In simple terms, setting boundaries is one individual determining boundaries for others. Negotiating boundaries is two or more creating a workable agreement on the boundaries between them.

So, there’s a significant difference between setting and negotiating boundaries. Major business leaders as well as many community leaders recognize these differences even without distinguishing between the two terms. But, ask the right questions and they can clarify immediately. I’ve learned, sadly, that these same professionals are typically incapable of using the negotiation competence in their family. Shifting competencies from one context to another without training is highly problematic—even for top business school grads. Similarly, lower-level bureaucrats, patriarchal families, pastors, the Roman and Evangelical churches, small and medium-sized privately held owner-firms lack insight to the distinctions and sometimes have a lot of resistance on their hands as a result of their ignorance.

A Call for Community: UCBerkeley

In an intriguing and very human response, two Berkeley profs--an Israeli and a Palestinian--got together to write a call for community. Though brief, I want publish the note from the Chancellor, Carol Christ and the two faculty.

October 12, 2023
Chancellor Carol Christ sent the following message to the Berkeley campus community Thursday afternoon.

We are increasingly concerned by the growing prevalence of online threats, doxxing and harassment connected to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. We decry any calls for violence in any form or support for terrorism as we continue to mourn the loss of innocent life. We understand this rhetoric is creating deep fear and concern among many members of our campus community. With that in mind, we want to share an extraordinary message, written by two of our faculty, one who is Palestinian and one who is Israeli:

To our students,

We are two professors on this campus who disagree, vehemently. But we have always treated one another with respect and dignity. We love this campus with its diverse communities and all of our students and are heartbroken to hear of incidents of near violence between students in recent days. We will not...

"It's Just African. . .

It’s a stereotype, a racial stereotype. But is it negative, positive or neutral? One thing is certain: identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff.

I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of information can be highly useful.

Double-Checking My Conversational Skills

Last Sunday, I headed to one of my restaurant haunts for a late lunch. Although I have a number of favorite restaurants, I usually head to NoLo’s for their weekend brunch, especially for the avocado toast and salad, a favorite of mine. Although I very often go with friends to favorite restaurants, my Sunday brunch is inevitably solo. As a consequence, I always sit at the large bar and order my meal. The place, as usual, was mobbed with late 20’s and 30s, along with a few “olders.” I inevitably take my male purse, stuffed with a couple articles or a small book, just in case. I took the only chair with two young black women on my right and two young black men my left, all obviously college grads. The neighborhood is young professionals and Sunday is a packed noisy crowd. The kind of happy noise that lets me know I’m still a member of the human race, even as a member of the so-called “elderly.”

I pulled a couple study articles out, looking at them briefly, turned to my left and started talking, a conversation that lasted more than two hours—and was great fun. But what made it especially insightful, creating the rationale for this post, is the three of us had several conversations, then together analyzed the relationships.

I began by commenting that the avocado toast that the fellow to my immediate left had just been served was one of my favorites. I usually have two eggs, sunny side, but he had scrambled eggs on top, providing another opportunity for small talk. And then, we were off. We talked about favorite restaurants, where we all lived and whether we ate here regularly. I asked about their work, learning they were sales people, both college grads and obviously successful professionals. After introducing myself as “Dan,” the fellow to my left introduced himself, providing me with his name—“Isaac”—to which I responded that Isaac didn’t fit any African Americans I knew. I was correct: he was Ethiopian. I couldn’t remember who colonized Ethiopia, to which he responded “no one.” And then I remembered, “Haile Selassie and all that stuff,” I commented. Yes, but he wanted to know how I knew that and I responded with my “don’t know shrug.” Both he and his friend talked so rapidly and so humorously that with my hearing deficit, I had to ask them to repeat, explain, rephrase, etc. They were quite OK with that.

Shortly, we had a ten-minute conversation on Detroit, my home in the 1940s. Detroit is inevitably a conversation for a lot of people. .

Why Is Real Collaboration So Very Difficult?

Today’s business world requires a great deal of collaboration. That’s especially true because technology is inevitably both intergroup and across groups and disciplines. Yet collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives, would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can become a really painful task with a lot of argument.

Hugo Mercier of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, has been looking at this issue all of his academic life. His conclusions are intriguing. Based on my own experience in a completely different context, he’s right on target.

In one of his earlier studies, Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning.  Remember that collaboration is about reasoning through options and differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. But for collaboration to take place, there must be a lot of joint reasoning. As you know, however, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem. Their reasoning, supposedly, has brought them to the best conclusion(s).

What Mercier and Sperber point out is that though reasoning is usually seen as the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions, it usually leads to distortions of meaning and poor decisions.

So they suggest that the entire use of reasoning should be rethought. In other words, they assume that people believe the purpose or function of reasoning is argumentative. So put reasoning in any group or collaborative setting and the people are going to automatically begin arguing. Reasoning take on a negative perception. The context motivates them to argue—so people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth, but after arguments that support their own views.

So, bear with me. A person's views—their conclusions--are simply old inferences, mental representations based on a lot of other ideas. Here’s how it works in architecture. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.

It's Even More Important Now to Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

When I first wrote this back  in 2012, it was just fairly relevant. Given the status of our culture today, this article is extremely relevant. People aren't talking to each other about their differences. They are not just marching, but sometimes they are rioting over their differences. The issues that divide are numerous: politics, science, education, religion, pandemic, etc. The list is seemingly endless. Now, more than ever, people are just ignoring those they know differ with them, and sometimes behaving like irreconcilable enemies.

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...

Understanding Relationship Barriers and Breakdowns

Communication breakdowns happen a lot more than most of us think. It may be obvious that with a wide range of organizational associates, relationship breakdowns are inevitable. But candidly, it also happens regularly with one-on-ones. The actual researched percentage of misunderstanding and breakdown in an ordinary work conversation is so high you won’t believe me without extensive explanation. So, I won’t share the percentage. But suppose a tech manager is relating to a colleague in sales. That’s a set-up for breakdown. Inevitably, they’re working on different timelines, based on different objectives. Furthermore, the rewards are typically conflicting, the techie on salary and sales on commission.

But add four or five more people into the mix, all from different organizational disciplines, and you’re not just adding to the potential for relationship breakdowns, you’re both multiplying and speeding up the potential for misunderstanding and breakdown.  Inevitably, conflicts over personnel, resource allocation, timelines and turf, surface.  Differences of objectives, strategies, measures of success and even values can escalate the emotions.  We have a “communication breakdown" is not just Led Zeppelin, it remains a common buzzword for these differences.  In a real sense, however, the above relationships are not, strictly speaking, "communication breakdowns."  The parties involved understand exactly what's going on and they are effective at communicating their differences, and hopefully, negotiating them.  They involve trust and competition, usually over scarce resources of one kind or another. What makes interpersonal breakdowns especially difficult is that resolution often requires behavioral negotiation skills, skills more complex than negotiating products and dollars.

Candidly, the above differences that we label "communication breakdowns" are neither the most common nor the most personally painful.  There are, instead, some very common barriers and breakdowns that get in the way of effective relationships that can be even more damaging than the above list.  The really damaging barriers are about misunderstanding another person's point of view.  Indeed, I've found that that the most common barriers and breakdowns in organizations are inevitably about relational breakdowns.  What makes these interpersonal breakdowns so difficult is that dealing with hard products is a lot different than dealing with the barriers posed by soft people feelings. So, when the breakdown is interpersonal, these breakdowns can require behavioral conversations and at least basic behavioral negotiation skills. Behavioral skill of either type is not always available, so the breakdown remains unresolved or pushed up the ladder.

Attribution theory
The best way to understand these breakdowns is through what is known as "attribution theory" which deals with the ways people interpret observed facts and explain others’ as well as their own behavior. What’s significant about attribution is that the causes we use to explain another’s behavior impacts the way we think about, feel about and behave toward that person. The practice is so widespread that attributions can be made of others’ behaviors without an observable cause. Of course, it takes very little thinking to realize that observed behaviors can be interpreted in numerous ways.  Furthermore, research also shows that once we've created our interpretation, right or wrong, it's very difficult to dislodge.

The process has become so questionable that in response to the potential for erroneous conclusions social scientists speak about the “fundamental attribution error.” The attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others--while under-emphasizing situational explanations. In other words, people are almost inherently biased to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind of person” that manager or worker is rather than on the business context.

Let's say you're the manager of a technology team.  Noticing that one of your employees seems to be working particularly hard over the past few weeks, you wonder why.  You might conclude that his project timelines are causing his behavior.  Or maybe he is angling for a raise.  Could be that he's attempting to suck up.  Maybe he's just bored and wants to keep busy.  So, you decide he's angling for a raise, but a colleague tells you he's just sucking up. Whatever. You've drawn a potentially fallible conclusion based on observable fact. And, in spite of all that's been said, once you've decided he's angling for a raise, you'll reject most any other interpretation. And your relevant behavior will follow.

We also make positive inferences.  You might think your employee genuinely wants to see his team succeed.  Or perhaps, you decide, you've just never realized what a hard worker this guy is. But more often than not, it’s the negative attributions that follow, resulting in the relational breakdown. Bad is always more powerful than good. So, it’s rare for us to ask what’s going right about a situation? Instead, it’s what’s going wrong?

Those dangerous inferences
People draw their conclusions both from the work context as well as past history with a person when they come up with interpretations.  But. . . underlying those interpretations are just a few basic assumptions that drive most of them (I prefer "inferences" even though "interpretation" is the more familiar.  Getting used to the term "inferences" will support some other cool, problem-solving and decision-making skills.)   Anyway, these wrongheaded inferences cause us to flare up, get disgusted, get angry and frustrated, be ashamed or even walk away for another day--or week—or even years.  Some families have had major breakups merely because members interpreted the behavior of another using one of these inferences. Inferences, like conclusions are nothing more than opinions. The language just sounds more intelligent.

Thankfully, attribution theory provides us with a lot of insight into human relationships and communication.  Here are three recurring and dangerous assumptions...

Russian Trolls and the Information Wars

Surprisingly, the most powerful source of false information is neither Trump nor the Russian trolls. It’s a unique American business model that drives the false information.

With all the hullaballoo about false information, the Russian trolls and Trump's ritualized falsehoods on Twitter, I’ve been at a loss to understand the reality and the actual facts behind all that’s going on. So I was delighted to see the data and insights in an article by Vera Tolz in the December 3 issue (“Shortcuts”) of the London Review of Books. Tolz holds an endowed professorship in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester (UK). My review is indicative of a slight bias toward Brit scholarship on issues like this.

The data presented and the resulting conclusions offer a far better background for our understanding of fake information and Russia’s supposed role in it. In addition, given the Washington riots of January 6, which happened after the article was written, we now have a far richer understanding of the role of the internet.

As Tolz argues, Trump’s November 5 press conference in which he claimed he won the election and there had been massive voter fraud are indicative of the fact that we had learned nothing from the election of 2016. The left claimed the press and broadcasters were indulging the right. In contrast, the right claimed that the media hadn’t indulged them enough.

Russian trolls?
By that time, there was a strong liberal consensus that much of the internet misinformation had come from Russia. Pro-Trump Russia wants to disrupt elections, create chaos and interfere with balloting. Tolz points out that both the States and the UK have fallen into the trap of believing in this “information war” paradigm. The paradigm assumes that the main threats to both countries come from the outside. A fact the data does not support.

It’s true that a history of Russian trolls attempting to

“If humans don’t keep on exercising their lips. . .their brains start working?”

Seeking solitude can be a serious mistake.

Ford Prefect, that alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse never quite understood earthlings’ peculiar “habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day,’ or ‘You’re very tall’.” He considers, then rejects the theory that human mouths seize up if not continually utilized.  He finally concludes that if human beings “don’t keep on exercising their lips…their brains start working.”

That was how the late Douglas Adams expressed a common high-flown opinion about “empty chatter”: it is trivial, or perhaps worse, a substitute for real speech and thought. “Should we talk about the weather?” sings Michael Stipe of REM in “Pop Song 89.”

As a business consultant, I learned that plenty of managers—and execs held that view in spades, that is--until I educated them. Evidently my education worked rather well, because probably twenty-percent of my several hundred clients over the last 15 years of my business consulting wanted help in small talk. One CFO at a multi-billion-dollar firm hired me for only that purpose. His wife had told him on several occasions after cocktail parties that he needed to learn how to do small talk. She was right on. It took eight to ten sessions to learn how. I never quite got over laughing all the way to the bank over teaching a business person how to do small talk.

But I eventually realized my judgment was unfair. Until I got started in the pastorate in the 1960s, I didn’t know how to do it either. But I quickly realized in the very first year out of seminary that I’d be in deep-doo-doo without small talk. So, I eventually became an expert in the subject. In the 1960s no one had ever written about small talk.  But today there are plenty of books on the supposedly inane subject of small talk, many of them quite inadequate. Inadequate because they are tone deaf to the subtexts of small talk.

A Gorgeous Black Voice

Expecting silence, I got the glories of Saint-Saens from Samson and Delilah. I was on my phone, holding for a technician to help me resolve a computer problem. The song went on with the rich, emotionally dark sounds of “my heart at the sound of your voice,” with even the harp and a wailing clarinet or oboe in the distance. And then the half-falsetto of the tenor’s response.  Entranced I hoped the technician wouldn’t come on too soon. I wanted to hear the end of the aria.

So it finished. Then the technician came on, “how may I help you sir?” I was stopped in my tracks by her voice.

We interacted for probably thirty seconds, then I interrupted. “You have an absolutely gorgeous Black voice,” I said. I could hear her smiling over the phone as she said, “Why, thank you sir.” Without waiting, I asked that she send kudos to the choice of music. “I’d never heard Saint-Saens while waiting for a technician.” 

Then she went on with her questions and directions. In the middle of it, she stopped and without any context, she asked, “how did you know?” “I used to be a singer,” I said. “And I first heard Leontyne Price in the early 1960’s. I’d never heard such gorgeous sounds. I learned that only Blacks can make that sound. And that it is present in their linguistic placement of sound.” To my surprise and delight, she confessed, “I wanted to do opera, but I wasn’t good enough.” She was oozing with warmth and intelligence. You could recognize it in the vocabulary she chose, the arrangement of her words, the way she framed her questions and answered with unusual clarity, quite capably moving the conversation along to achieve both our objectives. And so, she fixed my computer problems, then taught me how to do it for myself—and wished me happy holidays.