Dan Erwin

Five Laws for Interpersonal Sensitivity and Success

It’s not very often that you can learn strategies for talking and communicating that always are true. Much of the time in psychology, communication or sociology, strategies are very context oriented. The strategy will work in one situation, but not in another. That means that you’ll have a lot to learn to be successful. But when the strategy is a rule or a law, you can apply it to all kinds of situations in many different contexts.

Back in 2015, I wrote about a fascinating study by Rod Hart and Don Burks who surfaced a relationship between “expressive” communication and “instrumental” or “rhetorical communication.” They emphasized that expressive communication is very attractive in business because it involves frankness, honesty, openheartedness and non-manipulative intentions. But they also pointed out that as attractive as it is, expressive communication rarely provides people with effective means for creating and managing relationships. In contrast, the research found that instrumental or rhetorical communication is based on rules or laws, working successfully in nearly all situations.

The study remains highly relevant. Indeed, the information that was laid out by Hart and Burks is even more applicable and useful today. It’s far more applicable because business is highly interactive and not nearly as hierarchical today as it was in when the study was first completed.  Surprisingly, their research was first published in 1972, forty-three years ago. Not only is that study still relevant, but other studies have revealed that their study also remains highly accurate. 

Uniquely, the research revealed central tendencies in interpersonal communication. And, as Rod Hart puts it, “the law of central tendency is a law.” Rather than focus on so-called transcendent moments of interpersonal rhetoric, they focused on ordinary communication. it’s far more interesting and useful to “scrutinize real people who act like real people. They do it all the time, after all, so why not pay attention?” So, Hart and Burks paid attention to the regular, the repetitive and created a science of human behavior by focusing on central tendencies. So interpersonal success inevitably follows their science—whatever your business or profession.

Three communication tendencies
The research surfaced three communication tendencies for interpersonal communication. The first tendency, which you see often in business, is the “Noble Selves” tendency: the notion that people should not adapt to other people or to situations in any way that violates their beliefs, attitudes or values. That’s the nice way of talking about these people. But maybe you’ll remember these people if I remind you that many of these people are those that Bob Sutton refers to as “assholes” in his book on Asshole Theory.  Sometimes this is a commitment or a sickness of the individual, but more often it’s an angry practice growing out of lack of awareness and adaptive tools. Whatever. These people are difficult to work with whether they’re assholes—or, in other situations, the “righteous.”

The second tendency, which can be seen as “sucking up,” is what Hart and Burks called the rhetorical reflectors. These are people who present a different picture of themselves to every person and in every situation. They are careful to reflect the image that they think others want them to present.  This is not only true in business and the professions, but especially obvious in students. Students belonging to the most religiously fundamental groups have significant differences from students outside that same group. They found a positive relationship between rhetorical reflectiveness and fundamental religiosity as well as a negative relationship between the rhetorically sensitive and fundamental religiosity. 

What Can the Use of Statistics Do For You?

For many the question about statistics may be whether there is any real reason to fully understand how to use statistics. After all, you may have only so much time in the day. But the answer to the question is a strong, absolute yes. Using statistics strategically can be an unusually powerful game plan in many personal and work situations.

But let’s begin with some very basic statistic examples, the kind Harper’s magazine publishes on a single page in every issue. To a significant degree they are more fun than relevant. Here are a few from the recent issue:

-Amount spent on the average U.S. date: $73

-Percentage by which Democrats are more likely to trust the Wall Street Journal than Republicans: 36

-Percentage increase last year in the amount of credit card debt held by Gen Z adults: 40

-Percentage of U.S. adults 50 or older who play video games at least once a month: 45
-Portion of U.S. adults who consider Michelangelo’s David to be pornographic: 1/5

-Percentage of Americans who currently own an electric vehicle: 4

-Percentage of Americans who say they’d never buy an electric vehicle: 41

-Minimum annual number of fortune cookies produced worldwide: 3,000,000,000

Well, so much for that highly relevant information!

These are the simplest kind of statistics. What really brought this post into existence was a recent episode with a colleague who was obviously distressed over what I considered an ordinary, flawed statistic. It became clear at that very moment that most people have little understanding of how evidence in the form of statistics works—what it does rhetorically. That’s especially true since very few have ever engaged in high school or college, or had college course in statistics.

So I thought, based on my own expertise, it just might be helpful for some of my readers to understand just how and why statistics often serve as powerful proof. And hopefully then, my readers will be able to make better decisions around statistics. . .

and most importantly, be able to use statistics for their own personal and career advantage.

7 Ways Great Questioning Can Lead to Personal Success

In the vast majority of cases, whether you’re selling ideas to colleagues or a boss—or a product or service to a client--success begins with the ability to ask good questions and then listen--really listen--to the answers.  Contrary to these two basic facts, for most business people there is an "80% Syndrome" at work: 80% of the time, the person selling or attempting to persuade is doing the talking, and 20% of the time the other is talking.  The 80/20 syndrome is extremely common and counterproductive for anyone selling ideas or products. 

In point of fact, if the “seller” would reverse the "80%" syndrome, they would be much more successful.  That means 20% of the time given over to questioning and statements by the “persuader,” and 80% of the time given over to information giving by the client.

Four Reasons Why Managing Data Scientists Is Different. . . Even Unique

Managing smart professionals can be difficult, but managing data science professionals can be even more difficult. Cultural differences--understanding how a culture thinks--are rarely clear to most business people, other than when they surface in difficulties. So understanding these differences early on limits the potential for friction and conflict.

MIT’s Roger Stein lays out a number of issues impacting organizational relations between data scientists and other disciplines.

Dynamic and self-correcting.  As a result, timing and final project outcomes can be difficult to plan. Messy is the appropriate term. In contrast to

Five Keys to Interpersonal Sensitivity

In a fascinating study, Rod Hart and Don Burks studied the relationship between “expressive” communication and “instrumental” or “rhetorical communication.” Expressive communication is very attractive in business because it involves frankness, honesty, openheartedness and non-manipulative intentions. As attractive as it is, it rarely provides people with effective means for creating and managing relationships—very important tools for people in today’s flattened business environment.

The research surfaced three communication tendencies for interpersonal communication. The first, which you see often in business, is the noble selves tendency: the notion that people should not adapt to other people or to situations in any way that violates their beliefs, attitudes or values. Sometimes this is a commitment of the individual, but more often it’s a practice growing out of lack of tools to make adaptations. The second, which can be seen as “sucking up,” is what...

6 Steps for Women Who Deserve a Raise

One of the continuing inequities in the American workforce is the paygap between women and men.  Even though women, on average, tend to be better educated than men, those women who work full time only earn about 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. I suppose it's good news that the figure has gone up 2 cents since 2010.

FYI: To my amusement I've learned that a few women get frustrated by a man writing about this, but I have plenty of reasons, not least three daughters, who are professionals, as was my now deceased wife. At different times in their marriage all four made more than their husbands.  (Furthermore, it's important to take truth wherever you can get it.) ...

Performance Wisdom Meets Deep Smarts

In my previous post I reported on research indicating that neither age nor experience correlate with performance wisdom. No connection whatsoever. In Ursula Staudinger’s research on wisdom-related performance and review of related studies she emphasizes another shocker: neither fluid intelligence (inherent intelligence) nor crystallized intelligence (developed intelligence) has a significant relationship to wisdom-related performance either.

Staudinger defines wisdom as expert-level knowledge and judgment in the fundamental pragmatics of life (including business). Her elaboration of age and experience is especially pointed for assessing business people and professionals: experience and age are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for business wisdom. All experiences are not created equal. Random or reactive experiences fail to provide the business wisdom needed for the complex decision making in today’s economy. And so the gap between those with true business wisdom and those with mere competence is huge.

The ability to withhold judgment, recognize patterns and reflect about options is crucial for the development of wisdom-related business performance.

Deep smarts ...

The Power of Powerless Speech

Language is power in ways far more literal than most imagine. Check out your local bookstore’s business section and you’ll find a large assortment of books offering their prescriptions for leadership language. You can find books on “power words,” “power talking,” and even “sound like a leader.”

What underlies all of these books is the belief that your communication style impacts your status and productivity at work and in life. Simply put, those who speak assertively tend to get the goodies. It’s surprising to most that something as subtle and nuanced as speech styles should effect matters of great consequence. But it’s true that powerful speakers get hired and promoted faster, get quicker raises and command more respect than those who talk in a tentative, uncertain manner. So, not surprisingly, social scientists have documented a consistent relationship between speech styles and the attainment of status.  

In fascinating research, Alison Fragale, of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, argues that though assertive speech gains the rewards of status, powerless speech, too, can confer. . .

You Can "Catch More Flies with Honey Than Vinegar," But. . . .

Why Tone Matters and how to adjust it.

FYI: Tone is essentially the attitude you reflect toward your audience, whether one-on-one, team or even large group. (E.g.: tough/sweet/stuffy, personal/impersonal, authoritative/egalitarian, submissive/demanding, respectful/taken for granted, hopeful/cynical, friendly/distant, understanding/out of touch, etc.)  Furthermore, all these attitudes demonstrate or at least imply emotional content. It is emotion that most successfully drives attention, and tone carries emotion.

 

               It ain’t what ya do.

               Hit’s the way that ya do it.

               That’s what gets results. 

Although many execs take tone seriously in face-to-face conversations, often manipulating it for their own advantage, it’s rarely discussed for business materials other those of public relations. Yet tone is just as valuable for the achieving of objectives in our writing of emails (and similar missives) as in face-to-face delivery.

Influence 101: Analyzing Your Audience for Personal Success

The most entertaining part of Super Bowl Sunday is not the game, but its television advertisements. That’s not especially surprising when you consider that the average cost of a Super Bowl ad was $3.7 million. All that Moolah, much of which was spent on analyzing their audience and trying to determine what will pique interests and sell products.

Over the years and despite the big bucks, businesses have made some pretty big blunders in their analysis of audiences, especially when they’re marketing to different cultural groups.

• The Coors slogan “Turn it loose” when translated into Spanish read “suffer from diarrhea.”
• Schweppes Tonic Water” when translated into Italian read “Schweppes toilet.”
• In the United States, the Japanese tried to market a baby soap called “Skinababe.”

Sometimes, however, a correct analysis of a client need can get you into trouble. A few years ago, Target created a pregnancy-prediction model based upon big data science and sent coupons for baby clothes and cribs to their customers. It turned out that one recipient was a high school teen who had not yet informed her father of the pregnancy. The man walked into a local Target store, asked to see the manager, and gave him hell. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. The father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter. It turns out there been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

The lesson here is simple: If you want to be influential, know your audience and adapt accordingly. There’s a great deal of research about the necessity of being able to see the world from other people’s point of view. This is exactly what influence is all about: adapting or framing a message so it coincides with the receiver’s point of view. In today’s career world of flattened hierarchies and social networks, success often goes to those who can influence others.

Although there are a number of tools for understanding and influencing your audience, whether your boss, your team or your colleague, they reduce to four big picture insights:

Pay attention to the situation. I put that first because too many professionals analyze the characteristics of the individual and ignore the situation and the context. All the research reveals that situation is just as important, and sometimes more important than the receiver’s attitudes and objectives. Obviously, situations vary for teams, colleagues and bosses. So when you need to influence someone, stay focused on the situation. Is the team new to a project or are they loaded with the given project expertise? Is there a tight deadline? Are some people on the team at risk for lay-off? Is it nearly 6pm and most tired from the long day, or early in the morning? Is the setting noisy, hot, cold? Is the team under a lot of stress, or ready to rethink some previous project commitments? How well do the team members know each other, and have they worked with each other before? Who has the power? How diverse are the views of the team members?

Obviously, the number of possible situations is endless. Even so, recognizing the facts on the ground can help you adapt. It’s important to try to put yourself in the shoes of your receivers. Try to figure out what the present situation of your team mates is doing to your message and adapt accordingly.

Keep your team’s (individual’s) mind in mind. In the movie What women want, Mel Gibson plays a chauvinist advertiser who, after a freak accident, is able to read women’s minds. So Gibson not only becomes an expert at attracting women, but can design advertisements that they can’t resist. The movie visually illustrates how much easier influence might be if you can look into people’s minds. That would make it possible to know and understand their attitudes, values and needs, and then, like Mel Gibson, adapting your message would be simple.

Although you’re not liable to be The Mentalist’s Patrick Jane, you can learn to make educated guesses about a person’s values and objectives in a given situation.  Anthropologists have taught us to watch people’s behaviors because behaviors tell us what’s going on in the mind. Sure, some managers keep their cards close to the chest in many business settings, but there all always settings where their behavior tells what’s going on. It pays to be observant, and to occasionally ask questions. You’ll be surprised how often a manager will answer an “innocent question” that tells you a great deal.

In a team setting, teams that have worked together for some time take on a fairly uniform consensus, but there’s usually an outlier that makes her values clear. And often, there’s a “four-year-old” on the team who’ll tell all. There are really just three things that you need to know about an individual or about a team’s mindset.

• What do "they" want that you can give them? 
• What do you want? What are your own goals and priorities?
• What are the resources you have to offer them to give you what you want?

Audience and communicator states and traits play a big role in influence. There’s a ton of systematic research finding that the most successful influencers are perceived as both likable and competent. The two go together and merely one characteristic eventually sabotages the influencer. Likable, but not perceived as competent will eventually result in being ignored. Competent but not likable will result in being distanced and avoided.

There are a number of audience and individual states that offer influencing opportunities. Anxious people require specific recommendations, otherwise they’ll become unpredictable. High self-monitors respond well to messages that promise to help them succeed and “fit in.” Ego-involved people, those whose self-esteem is up front and may be fairly defensive, have narrow latitudes of acceptance. Authoritarians, those who are inevitably obedient, respond better to people in powerful positions. They’re looking for what “the boss thinks.” Cognitively complex people, in contrast, are more willing to tolerate perspectives that are inconsistent with their own.

In today’s highly diverse business cultures, pay attention to the differences.  A person who can adapt to people of different ages, backgrounds, education, genders, religions, political orientation and cultures has a leg up on influencing. Research shows that if we were to name the three people, outside of our family, who are best friends, the values would be very close and often identical. And living in homogenous communities teaches us little about the skills of adaptability.

To learn how to influence and adapt to a diverse group, we need to take time to get to know people very well. And, in spite of our love for social media, relationships that are face-to-face continue to provide the best opportunities for that exercise. Over the last five years of the Great Recession thousands of people have found themselves rather unexpectedly out of a job and walking the streets. Far more often than most want to believe, professionals in the streets have often been patsies. They have no one to blame except themselves, while their influential colleagues stand smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.

Flickr: SuperBowl by Chris Vaccaro

Big Data: The IT Fumble

If you read my recent blog, True data about big data, in which I proposed that Zero Dark Thirty’s lead character, Maya was a near perfect example of a data scientist, you’ll understand today’s blog title. The unstated subtext of that blog was that it’s unwise to turn big data over to the IT group. Sure, you’ll need them around, but their discipline differs significantly from what’s needed. And. . . I’ve found plenty of IT execs who understand that reality.

I argued the case from my experience and knowledge about the thinking styles and knowledge base of IT and other business functions. My cognitive approach is one way to go at the issue. But Marchand and Peppard arrive at the same conclusion from still a different tack in their October HBR article, entitled Why IT Fumbles Analytics. They got right to the crux of their understanding in the first paragraph:

In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytic projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals.

What this implies is that rather than emphasizing information in the big data, information is viewed not as a resource that makes possible the design and implementation of more IT systems, but, rather as something that people themselves make valuable in their discipline and for their customers. To go back to the CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Maya’s task as the most knowledgeable analyst was to question the validity and usefulness of the data. Inevitably, that’s a difficult task because she had to be able to ask “what” the data means, “why” the data is in such form and why and how it’s taking such a shape before she could get around to “what next?” Her questions were constantly iterated for years. What more data do I, as knowledgeable CIA agent, need? What conclusions can I draw thus far, and is this enough data to make a decision? Then, as I emphasized strongly, she had to sell her conclusions.

Strategic approach to big data
Without focused theory development, the data scientist will be overwhelmed by the amount of data available. All the IT processing power in the world won’t help. Maya’s theory, of course, focused upon a strategy to locate Osama Bin Laden. Her fundamental hypothesis was that if she could locate his primary couriers, she locate him. The film began with torture tactics for gathering courier identities, and, essentially stayed on that fascinating and difficult track for nearly two hours before actually finding the terrorist. Then, she faced the intriguing task of selling her conclusions to the State Department, an issue that was just as difficult, perhaps, as locating the terrorist. In sum, the first steps after creating a hypothesis are acquiring, harmonizing and mining the data sources. Of course, in the iterations of this process, you will inevitably find new, exciting insights. That also implies, as David Meer has written, that as you gather these insights, it will be important to be open to new approaches and to challenge sacred cows.

If you’ve ever done a major hypothesis-driven, research thesis, the strategic approach to big data is exactly the same iterative process as the Zero Dark Thirty portrayed. The distinction between my two analogies (Maya and hypothesis driven thesis) and the “big data approach” is that once the hypothesis is in place, IT tools are necessary to mine the data.  

At the heart of the initiative
It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that people are at the heart of the initiative, not IT tools, big data initiatives or the IT group. Marchand and Peppard are devastating in their critique of the IT logic:

The IT approach assumes. . . that giving managers more high quality information more rapidly will improve their decisions and help them solve problems and gain valuable insights. That is a fallacy. It ignores the fact that managers might discard information no matter how good it is, that they have various biases, and that they might not have the cognitive ability to use information effectively.  

As I have argued previously, most IT professionals come from computer science, engineering and math backgrounds resulting in a focus on technology and the use of different cognitive approaches rather than what’s necessary. Thus, a different animal will be needed to create and make the best use of information. I have no doubt that Marchand and Peppard are correct in their recommendation of the use of cognitive and behavioral scientists. But that’s a personnel expense only the largest of firms are currently willing to fund. People who have a deep and rich understanding of the business are absolutely necessary for big data success. And then, gradually, as business understands the opportunities provided by big data, they will need to add the cognitive and behavioral scientists who. . . understand how people perceive problems, use information, and analyze data in developing solutions, ideas, and knowledge.

The evidence is already clear that data-driven decisions tend to be better decisions. Thus, I’ve attempted to lay out a big-picture of the fundamental processes to make advanced analytics work for a company. The process—simplified--is to get the right hypothesis from the appropriate people, mine the data iteratively, create the new business information, sell it to the relevant executives and implement.

Flickr photo: UWWW ResNet