The LIFT Blog

By Ryan Quinn

In the past two weeks, I have spoke about the concepts in our book, Lift, to two different audiences. In both cases, people asked me specific questions about how to use the four questions for positive influence to help them manage difficult work relationships. These questions are also relevant to our February 22 blog entry: “Increasing Profit: How Far Should an Executive Go?” In that blog, we use Marcial Losada’s research to discuss how “executives can create more profit by altering how members of the management team relate to each other.” These questions often take the form of, “How can I lift people up when they are always dragging me down?” I will discuss the first if the two examples that people brought to me in these  presentations in this blog entry and the second example in a future entry to help us consider answers to this important question.

Case #1

In the first of the two presentations I mentioned, I shared a case with the audience in which a company needs its managers to collaborate in order to achieve its revenue and cost-cutting goals. One of the marketing managers, though, promises to deliver on a major operational shift in an enormous contract with a major customer without consulting her counterpart in operations. The operations manager’s instinctive response is anger, with an intense desire to call the marketing manager and scream at her. I used this case to help the audience discuss one of the four questions from Lift: “What would my story be if I were living up to the values that I expect of others?”

As we discussed this question, it became clear that the operating manager expected others to live up to the values of respect and collaboration. Otherwise, he would not have been so upset by the lack of collaboration and respect shown by the marketing manager. The next issue, is whether or not the operations manager is living up to those same values he is expecting of the marketing manager. If he is not, then the expectations that he holds for the marketing manager are hypocritical. And if the operations manager calls and screams at the marketing manager, he is clearly not living up to the values that he expects of her.

If the operations manager has an intense desire to scream at the marketing manager, how can he possibly be collaborative and respectful? This is why the word “story” is so important in the question, “What would my story be…?” a story has a plot and a moral. A moral, in this case, is a good reason for being collaborative and respectful when others are not collaborative and respectful in return. In this case, reasons might include more profit for the company, better working relationships, a better example set to employees, or less chance of a heart attack. A plot would be a description of what the operations manager could say when he talks to the marketing manager, such as not yelling, asking questions to understand why the deal was made, or suggesting that they take time to develop a better working relationship.

The Problem

At this point in our discussion, a colleague of mine in the audience expressed skepticism, asking what the operations manager should do if the marketing manager (figuratively or literally) spits in the operations manager’s face as he tries to be collaborative. In many companies, approaching someone calmly, with questions, and with an overture of friendship would be seen as a sign of weakness–a sign that you can walk all over this schmuck. How well do these Lift questions work when people are walking all over you?

The Problem with the Problem

This question is a common one. I often hear some variant of it in my MBA classrooms. In fact, I often get this question even after we have taught them the Thomas-Killman Conflict Mode Instrument. This model shows that collaboration is a response to conflict that is high on assertiveness as well as cooperativeness. Students (and executives) never forget that collaboration is high on cooperativeness, but they often forget that you cannot collaborate if you are not assertive. If you cooperate without also being assertive, your response to conflict is accommodation, not collaboration.

In other words, approaching the marketing manager calmly, with questions, and with an effort to build a relationship does not mean that the operations manager must accommodate everything the marketing manager wants in order to be collaborative and respectful. We cannot live up to the value of “respect” if we do not respect ourselves as well as others. From a negotiations point of view, calmly asking questions and building a relationship is critical to collaboration because two (or more) parties can seldom both get what they want unless they move away from haggling over positions and instead begin exploring each other’s underlying interests.

The Other Three Questions

The question, “What would my story be if I were living up to the values I expect of others” can help a person move from haggling over positions to exploring and pursuing each other’s interests because it requires people to make a plan (a plot, in storytelling terms) of what they will do in the conversation–and negotiations researchers are quick to point out that one of the common flaws negotiators make is to fail to prepare for their negotiations, or to fail to prepare them with valued outcomes in mind (i.e., the morals of the stories). The other four questions from Lift can help with this as well.

• What result do I want to create? [1] There are many results that the operations manager can pursue in his conversation with the marketing manager. He could try to brainstorm innovations for handling this new contractual obligation/opportunity. He could try to develop standards for working together so that he is not left in the lurch again and she is able to land new contracts more effectively. He could try to build new integrative mechanisms for working relationships between their departments. Any or all of these purposes would be better results than what the operations manager would create by calling and screaming at the marketing manager.
• How do others feel about this situation? Let’s imagine that the marketing manager was a bully who would walk all over the operations manager if he shows any kind of weakness. Even if this is the case, we can then ask ourselves, why do people engage in  bullying behaviors? Bullying often hides insecurities that people feel, and try to hide. When we empathize with those insecurities and help people meet hidden needs, it is staggering the kind of impact we can have on people. Further, if we consider the feelings of the new client, our own employees, or the other people in the organization whose work and lives and success depend on our ability to work with others, we often come up with powerful questions about and insights into people’s underlying interests–the very things we need to know about to collaborate effectively.
• What are three (or four or five) strategies that I could use to accomplish my purpose for this situation? Multiple strategies are important because they allow us to learn, change course, or improvise. And alternative strategies may even include aggressive strategies, such as petitioning to remove the marketing manager from her position if she chooses to be belligerent (perhaps as a last resort). If, after efforts to understand her interests and come up with collaborative solutions no headway is made, the most positive influence we can exert may in fact, be a negative action like punishing someone or removing them from their position. Sometimes negative action is needed to achieve the most positive outcome. But if we bring multiple strategies with us to a situation, we are more likely to find a positive action that leads to a positive solution, if a positive solution is possible.

Lessons

The operations manager that this case is about eventually developed a constructive relationship with the marketing manager, but he struggled to practice respect and collaboration in other relationships on a daily basis in a company that had a culture of aggressiveness and even bullying. His case is an useful one for helping to think about how to use the four questions from Lift in difficult work relationships. It illustrates a number of principles, three of which I will highlight here:

1. Collaboration requires assertiveness as well as cooperativeness. While collaboration is just one of many values that a person may be concerned with, if the issue is how to build positive relationships in situations where you are afraid that people will walk all over you, it is critical to remember that we need to be just as clear about and committed to our own interests as we are to others’ interests if we want to collaborate.
2. Positive influence usually requires taking the time to honestly answer all four questions for each difficult situation. There is a temptation to think we are better than we really are when it comes to positive influence. When we think through our answers half-heartedly, we are likely to revert to habitual responses, or to engage others in half-hearted or grudging ways. People will likely see through our veneers.
3. Relationships are created in many interactions over time. Miracles occasionally happen when we try to build positive work relationships out of negative ones, but the more common scenario is that such relationships are usually built over time, and are more likely to happen if we invest in each interaction by asking ourselves the four questions each time–or an exercise like that.

The moral of the story, though, is that the effort to exert positive influence in our work relationships tends to be worth it for the relationship and for the work.

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References

[1] Fritz, R. (1984). The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. New York: Fawcett Books.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 6:35 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.