Heads I Win, Tails I Win (and the Same to You)

Negotiation is such a fundamental “threshold” skill that it’s nearly impossible for you to succeed long-term without developing skills in this area.  Unfortunately, many people get the wrong idea about what negotiation is and how works.

The distaste that some people feel for the concept of negotiation results from seeing negotiation as “win/lose” (I win, you lose) or “lose/win” (I give up rather than make an enemy out of you) rather than “win/win” (we both come out of the negotiation with our needs met).  In addition to moral or ethical qualms, the reality is that we leave someone unhappy, and that person is unlikely to forget.  We will have to deal with the leftover negativity at some future time.  “Win/win” approaches aren’t just nice, they’re necessary for our long-term relationships and performance.

But how is it possible to negotiate and have both parties win?

Understanding “win/win”

Negotiation isn’t simply about compromise (let’s just split it 50-50).  While sometimes a compromise solution in which each party gives a little bit is acceptable, often a compromise turns into “lose/lose.”

Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project point out that in many negotiations the participants see a “fixed pie,” but that it’s often possible to “expand the pie.”

They tell the story of “the proverbial sisters who quarreled over an orange.  After they finally agreed to divide the orange in half, the first sister took her half, ate the fruit, and threw away the peel, while the other threw away the fruit and used the peel from her half in baking a cake.”

In other words, “common sense” would suggest the orange could only be split in such a way that the parts added up to 100%, but this particular orange could have been split 100-100, not 50-50...because the two sisters had different yet complementary interests!

The “win/win” concept of negotiation emphasizes that preserving the relationship is an important goal in most negotiations, and that’s particularly crucial when the other participant in negotiation happens to be your boss.  You might be able to force your desires through his or her resistance, but you have to expect him or her to remember that in the future.  “If you wrong us,” Shylock says, “shall we not revenge?”

Win/win isn’t only ethically superior, it’s more practical as well.

“Hard” vs. “soft” styles

You can make a lifetime study of negotiation, and it will benefit you in every area of your life.  It’s worth adding to your list of areas for personal and professional development, because you will ultimately find yourself in continual negotiation situations.  Negotiation styles are sometimes divided into “soft” and “hard,” but that’s not a very meaningful distinction.

The Fisher/Ury Getting to Yes techniques are sometimes referred to as “soft” because they involve collegiality and teamwork.  But even in a “hard” negotiation program such as Roger Dawson’s excellent The Secrets of Power Negotiating, you’ll find his commitment to “win/win” negotiation, “a) Never narrow negotiations down to just one issue.  b) Different people want different things.”




Some key principles of win/win negotiation


As you study negotiation skills, you’ll find that different authorities have certain specific detailed and tactical suggestions.  However, some general principles of effective negotiation are common to the various styles and strategies.

1. Do your homework.

Before negotiating anything with anybody, there are a couple of things you should do.
First, analyze your own goal, making sure that you focus on your interests (the reasons you want what you want) instead of only your positions (the specifics for which you’re asking.  The position of the sisters was that each wanted the orange.  To find the underlying interests, you focus on why.  Why do you want the orange?  What exactly would you do with it if you had it all?  What would not be useful or necessary for you?

Second, determine your bottom line.  What do you need--and what is the best you can do assuming that the negotiation goes nowhere?  You need to know this so you’ll know when you’re getting results...and so you won’t take an offer that’s less than what you’d get if there is no deal.  Fisher and Ury call this your “BATNA”:  your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.”   Roger Dawson calls it “walk-away power.”

Third, put yourself in the shoes of the other person and do the same thing.  The more you understand the interests and goals of the other participant--and their own BATNA or walk-away options, the easier you’ll find it to locate win/win options.

2. Listen—for the real issues.

Being a good listener is a valuable negotiation technique for several reasons.  First, your understanding of the other person grows, which helps you in working toward the best outcome.  Second, when you listen, you automatically validate the other person, lowering their stress and emotions, and create a climate in which better results can occur.  Paraphrase what you’re being told to make sure you understand it fully.

3. Be persistent and patient.

You want to negotiate in order to achieve results for both parties.  Surrendering and giving in are examples of lose/win, not win/win strategies.  Keep your dignity and your personal strength intact by refusing to yield to hardball tactics and pressure.  One reason to study such tactics yourself is that it becomes easier to counter them in practice.

Being in a hurry to reach a deal often gives you a worse deal than you’d get with patience.  If a particular round of negotiation isn’t panning out successfully, maybe it’s time to walk away for now, think about what you’ve learned, and try again later.

4. Be clear and assertive.

You’ve heard it said, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”  That’s true even in cases where the other person isn’t necessarily hostile or negative to your interests.  If you don’t ask, there is a good chance the other person doesn’t even know what it is you want--and if he or she doesn’t know, how can you expect him or her to read your mind?  One of the most interesting elements of preparing well for a negotiation is how often you get your needs met without actually encountering the resistance you expected!


5. Allow face-saving.

When a negotiation or conflict situation ends up making one person be “in the wrong,” don’t be surprised if that person feels negative about it.  Being embarrassed or humiliated is not a positive emotion.  When you must show your boss that he or she is incorrect, or has made a mistake, or has make a bad decision, you not only have to get the situation corrected, you have to resolve the emotional issues in a way to allow your boss to “save face.”

Some techniques for face-saving include the “third party appeal,” in which you don’t say, “I’m right, you’re wrong,” but instead find a neutral third party (such as a reference book) that you’ll use to resolve the issue.  Another valuable technique is privacy.  It’s easier to admit to one person that one is wrong than admit it publicly to everyone.  (And never gloat afterward!)  A third is to find a way to allow the person to be partially right, or to allow yourself to be partially wrong.  (At least you can always allow for the possibility of improvement.)

You negotiate every day of your life and with all the people in your life.  Don’t wait until you are in a major conflict situation with the power dynamic stacked against you to develop this skill.



From Managing UP: 59 Ways to Build a Career-Advancing Relationship With Your Boss, by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson (AMACOM, 2000). Copyright © 2000 Michael and Deborah Dobson. All Rights Reserved.

Paul is Dead and Sewell Avery is Stupid (Part 13 of Cognitive Biases)

It’s been a few weeks since the last installment of our survey of popular distortions in thought, perception, and decision-making. This installment is brought to you by The Story of O.

Observer-expectancy effect

In September 1969, Tim Harper, a student at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, published a humorously intended article in the campus newspaper, titled “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” The article listed a number of supposed reasons, including the claim that the surviving Beatles had planted backward messages in various songs.

About a month later, a caller to WKNR-FM in Detroit asked radio dj Russ Gibb about the rumor, asking him to play “Revolution 9” backwards. Gibb did, and heard the phrase “Turn me on, dead man.”

Or so he thought.

The “Paul is dead” story quickly got out of control, and any number of people (some not even stoned) started to pick up clues. Even statements from Paul himself were not enough to stop the story. There are still claims today that photographs of Paul pre-1966 and post-1966 show significant differences in facial structure.

We see what we expect to see. If we’re looking for a particular answer, the cognitive bias known as the observer-expectancy effect results in unconscious manipulation of experiments and data so that yes, indeed, we find what we were looking for.

The use of double-blind methodology in performing experiments is one way to control for the observer-expectancy effect. Try this thought experiment: if you are wrong, what would you expect to see differently?

Omission bias

You know an opponent of yours is allergic to a certain food. Before a big competition, you have an opportunity to do one of two things. Which, in your judgment, is less immoral?

1. Slip some of the allergen in his or her food.
2. Notice that the opponent has accidentally ordered food containing the allergen, and choose to say nothing.

A clear majority say the harmful action (1) is worse than the harmful inaction (2). The net result for the opponent is the same, of course. The reason is omission bias, the belief that harmful inaction is ethically superior to harmful action.

Part of the reinforcement of the bias is that it’s harder to judge motive in cases of omission. “I didn’t know he was allergic!” you might argue, and there’s a good chance you’ll get away with it. Every employee knows the technique of “malicious compliance,” whether or not we personally use it — that’s the tactic of applying an order or directive with such appalling literal-mindedness that you guarantee a disastrous result.

Even if no one else can judge your intent, you can. Don’t let the omission bias lead you into ethical choices you’ll later regret.

Optimism bias

Optimism bias is the tendency for people to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. Excessive optimism can result in cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and delays when plans are implemented or expensive projects are built. In extreme cases these can result in defeats in military conflicts, ultimate failure of a project or economic bubbles such as market crashes.

A number of studies have found optimism bias in different kinds of judgment. These include:

• Second-year MBA students overestimated the number of job offers they would receive and their starting salary.
• Students overestimated the scores they would achieve on exams.
• Almost all newlyweds in a US study expected their marriage to last a lifetime, even while aware of the divorce statistics.
• Most smokers believe they are less at risk of developing smoking-related diseases than others who smoke.

Optimism bias can induce people to underinvest in primary and preventive care and other risk-reducing behaviors. Optimism bias affects criminals, who tend to misjudge the likelihood of experiencing legal consequences.

Optimism bias causes many people to grossly underestimate their odds of making a payment late. Companies have exploited this bias by increasing interest rates to punitive rates for any late payment, even if it is to another creditor. People subject to optimism bias think this won’t happen to them — but eventually it happens to almost everbody.

Optimism bias also causes many people to substantially underestimate the probability of having serious financial or liquidity problems, such as from a sudden job loss or severe illness. This can cause them to take on excessive debt under the expectation that they will do better than average in the future and be readily able to pay it off.

There’s a good side to optimism bias as well. Depressives tend to be more accurate and less overconfident in their assessments of the probabilities of good and bad events occurring to others, but they tend to overestimate the probability of bad events happening to them, making them risk-averse in self-destructive ways.

Ostrich effect

The optimism bias is linked to the ostrich effect, a common strategy of dealing with (especially financial) risk by pretending it doesn’t exist. Research has demonstrated that people look up the value of their investments 50-80% less often during bad markets.

Outcome bias

At the end of World War II, Montgomery Ward chairman Sewell Avery made a fateful decision. The United States, he was sure, would experience major difficulties moving from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Millions of troops would return, all seeking jobs. At the same time, factories geared for the production of tanks, bombers, and fighting ships would grind to a halt with no further need for their production.

Let Sears and JCPenney expand; Montgomery Ward would stand pat on its massive cash reserves (one Ward vice president famously said, “Wards is one of the finest banks with a storefront in the US today.”) and when the inevitable collapse came, Montgomery Ward would swallow its rivals at pennies on the dollar.

As we know, it didn’t turn out that way. Instead of falling back into depression, the United States in the postwar years saw unprecedented economic growth.

Sewell Avery was wrong. But was he stupid?

Outcome bias describes our tendency to judge the quality of the decision by the outcome: Sewell Avery was stupid. But that’s not fair. The outcome of the decision doesn’t by itself prove whether the decision was good or bad. Lottery tickets aren’t a good investment strategy. The net return is expected to be negative. On the other hand, occasionally someone wins. That doesn’t make them a genius. Wearing your seatbelt is a good idea. There are, alas, certain rare accidents in which a seatbelt could hamper your escape.

As it happens, Avery was stupid — not because he made a decision that turned out to be wrong, but because he stuck to it in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary, even firing people who brought him bad news. But that’s a different bias.

Outgroup homogeneity bias

In response to the claim that all black people look alike, comedian Redd Foxx performed a monologue that listed some thirty or forty different shades of black, set against the single color of white. “No, dear white friends,” Foxx said, “it is you who all look alike.”

The proper name for this perception (in all directions) is “outgroup homogeneity bias,” the tendency to see members of our own group as more varied than members of other groups. Interestingly, this turns out to be unrelated to the number of members of the other group we happen to know. The bias has been found even when groups interact frequently.

Overconfidence effect

One of the most solidly demonstrated cognitive biases is the “overconfidence effect,” the degree to which your personal confidence in the quality and accuracy of your own judgment is greater than the actual quality and accuracy. In one experiment, people were asked to rate their answers. People who rated their answers as 99% certain turned out to be wrong about 40% of the time.

The overconfidence gap is greatest when people are answering hard questions about unfamiliar topics. What’s your guess as to the total egg production of the United States? How confident are you in the guess you just made? (The average person expects an error rate of 2%, but the real error rate averages about 46%.)

Clinical psychologists turn out to have a high margin of overconfidence.

Weather forecasters, on the contrary, have none.

Previous Installments

Part 1 — Bias blind spot, confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, denomination effect, moral credential effect.

Part 2 — Base rate fallacy, congruence bias, experimenter’s bias

Part 3 — Ambiguity aversion effect (Ellsberg paradox), choice-supportive bias, distinction bias, contrast effect

Part 4 — Actor-observer bias, anchoring effect, attentional bias, availability cascade, belief bias

Part 5 — Clustering illusion, conjunction fallacy, cryptomnesia

Part 6 — Disposition effect, egocentric bias, endowment effect, extraordinarity bias

Part 7 — False consensus effect, false memory, Forer effect, framing, fundamental attribution error

Part 8 — Gambler’s fallacy, halo effect

Part 9 — Hawthorne effect, herd instinct, hindsight bias, hyperbolic discounting

Part 10 — Illusion of asymmetric insight, illusion of control, illusory superiority, impact bias, information bias, ingroup bias, irrational escalation

Part 11 — Just-world phenomenon, loss aversion, ludic fallacy, mere exposure effect, money illusion

Part 12 — Need for closure, neglect of probability, “not-invented-here” (NIH) syndrome, notational bias

Failure *Is* An Option!

You probably won’t see the American Movie Classics channel run a festival of ‘‘Great Project Management Movies’’ any time soon, but if they did, Ron Howard’s motion picture Apollo 13, based on the real-life story, would be a natural candidate. Faced with a potentially disastrous accident, project teams overcome one potentially fatal barrier after another to bring the crew safely back to Earth, guided by mission director Gene Krantz’s mantra: ‘‘Failure is not an option.’’

But of course, failure is an option. Sometimes, it looks like the most likely option of all.

The odds in the actual Apollo 13 disaster were stacked against a happy outcome, and everyone—including Gene Krantz—had to be well aware of that fact. One of the key scenes in the movie involves a team of engineers trying to figure out how to rig a CO2 filter out of miscellaneous junk.

• The time constraint: before the CO2 levels overwhelm the astronauts. 
• The performance goal: to work well enough to let the astronauts breathe during the long trip home. 
• The budget: the junk on the table. 

And no one knows whether it’s even possible.

How do you balance the value of realism against the value of optimism in solving problems?

One way is to reject the false dilemma the question poses. Failure is not only an option, it’s a gateway to success ... if you fail in the right dimension.

If there is a trade-off to be made between the time constraint and the performance criteria, we know that ultimate failure—the death of the Apollo 13 astronauts—comes most rapidly from failure to meet the time constraint. That is, if we build a perfect CO2 filter, but we finish it too late, we’ve still failed. Perfect performance does not compensate for a failed deadline.

But wait! Why isn’t the reverse equally true? If you fail to meet the performance criteria, isn’t it irrelevant how quickly you fail to do so? Actually, it depends on the extent of the failure.

To illustrate, let’s look at this scenario: You’ve managed to come up with an inefficient partial solution that will last only half as long as it’s going to take to get the astronauts back home, but you’ve done so within the original time constraint. Do you take this solution? Absolutely!

Although you have failed to make the performance goal for the project within the original time constraint, you’ve reset the game clock. With a day or more to work instead of mere hours, your chance of finding a solution that solves the remainder of the problem has become that much more possible.

The right kind of failure is not only an option, but sometimes a desirable one. In this project, we can’t accept a failure to meet the time constraint, but we can live with a partial performance failure and stay in this game.

This piece was written for Federal PM Focus, a newsletter published by Management Concepts. Click the title above to register for a free 30-day trial.

Adapted with permission from The Six Dimensions of Project Management: Turning Constraints into Resources, by Michael Dobson and Heidi Feickert, © 2007 by Management Concepts, Inc.  All rights reserved. www.managementconcepts.com/pubs

Understanding Politics (Office and Otherwise)

“Politics, n.  A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.”

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906 -

Take this test to see if you have office politics in your organization.

        1) Count the employees.

        2)  Does the number exceed 3?

        3)  If the answer to #2 is “Yes,” you definitely have office politics.

Within this concept of politics you can play many different ways for many different goals.  Some tactics are unethical, others ethical.  Some goals are unethical, others ethical.  You must still use office politics as the vehicle to achieve your goals, because it’s the ultimate arena in which the necessary decisions and consensus will be made.


Most definitions of politics (or of any controversial topic, for that matter) reflect the moral outlook of the definer.  The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, describes a politician as “one who is interested in personal or partisan gain and other selfish interests” and politics as “partisan or factional intrigue within a given group.”  But the root word “politic, ” from Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary, means “in accordance with good policy:  acting or proceeding from motives of policy:  prudent: discreet.”

Motives


Consider these truisms about people and organizations:

• People have principled disagreements about policy and direction of the organization.

• People have different visions and goals.

• People have different personal and selfish interests.

• People have egos and like them recognized and stroked.

• People have different personalities that others react to in different ways.

• People remember past actions and behaviors.

There’s nothing very radical, nor inherently unprincipled or evil, in these statements; most people will easily acknowledge their truth:  that people don’t check their humanity at the door when they punch in on the time clock.

Scarcity

The second truism to consider is the concept of scarcity.  From the days of the pyramids to the present, every organization, company, or government has lived with the reality that there are far more desirable projects and activities than there are resources to manage them.  In other words, work is infinite but resources are finite.

Every time senior management gives you a dollar, or a person, or a week, it becomes a dollar, a person, or a week they can’t give to someone else for something that also has value.  (In financial terms, this is known as “opportunity cost.”)  That sets up an unavoidable competition, as we each strive to get the resources we need to accomplish our objectives, and the playing out of the informal competition is what we know as office politics.  And if our organization is under stress or financial challenge, the struggle gets that much worse.

It also gets worse when what’s at stake is competition for access to status, which is also a kind of limited resource.  For most people, when their personal status is at stake, the kid gloves come off.


Office Politics Defined  

This leads us to the following operational definition of politics:

Politics (\ˈpä-lə-ˌtiks\):  The informal and sometimes emotion-driven process of allocating limited resources and working out goals, decisions, and actions in an environment of people with different and competing interests and personalities.

This definition is intentionally neutral, as simply descriptive as we can make it.  It helps us understand what we’re about.  Here are the key points of this definition amplified:

• informal and sometimes emotion-driven.  Office politics is separate from the formal organizational structure and involves human dynamics and emotions in addition to facts and reason.

• allocating limited resources.  The ultimate outcome of office politics—and how success and failure are measured—is how the organization’s resources—time, money, people—are allocated.

• working out goals, decisions, and actions.  The purpose of office politics is to work out goals, decisions, and actions that can turn into reality.  This often involves negotiation, compromise, and application of power.

• different and competing interests and personalities.  People have different ideas and desires about what should be done, some based on reason and analysis, some based on emotion or personal agenda.  Personal likes and dislikes inevitably affect decisions.

There's no point in getting too wrapped up about the negative side of politics; it's inevitable wherever human beings gather together. Instead, it's better to learn how to play in a principled, positive, and above all effective manner.

Adapted from Enlightened Office Politics by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson (AMACOM, 2001).

Career Proofing

Today's SideWise Insight is a reminder that in uncertain times, it's always wise to "career-proof" your job environment. This piece is focused on Federal employees, but there's good advice here no matter what field you're in.

In the career services field, it’s not uncommon to meet people who haven’t looked for a job in literally decades. They are long out of practice, their skills are rusty, and it’s often a desperate job situation that has driven them to this extreme.  Such people often have a difficult time in career transitions, even though they often have tremendous skills and experience to offer.

A job isn’t a marriage, so continuing to date a little on the side isn’t cheating.  The job, let us note, has not made a marriage commitment to you.  It is a professional relationship that may be very pleasant and very successful, but it is situational and capable of being set aside by either party in the event circumstances change.

Job hunting is not just the narrow activity of sending out résumés in response to vacancy announcements and going on interviews when asked.  After all, at certain points in your career, you may not actually want another job.  Should you still job-hunt?  Absolutely yes, although the job-hunting activities a career-proofing strategist uses in such a case may be different.  You don’t want to be caught unprepared in case of an emergency, and you don’t want to miss that perfect opportunity when it reveals itself.

Keep up with the market.  Whether you are actively seeking a new position or not, you should always stay up to date with what’s actually going on in your field, in your agency, in your market, in your private sector equivalent, and in other agencies that employ similar specialists.  What newspapers or newsletters cover your areas?  What websites or professional organizations or other resources can you follow that will give you the news?

Read postings in your field; track job offerings in various agencies and programs to see what kinds of skills are in demand, and what kinds of skills are on the wane.  That’s often a good leading indicator of the kinds of skills you should work at acquiring.

Check whether Federal publications are released covering agencies and programs that concern you.  Monitor Congressional committees whose work impacts your agencies or programs.  Which lobbying groups or public interest groups focus on issues that have an impact on your field?  (Don’t only study the side with which you may sympathize; learn about the other side(s) as well.)

Remember that “lunch is a verb,” and use some of your lunch hours as networking opportunities.  Try to expand the number of people with whom you lunch at least occasionally just to trade general gossip about what’s going on.  While you don’t share confidential information, of course, there’s a great deal of general information that can be shared quite appropriately.

As you develop your sources and your network, you’ll find yourself increasingly in demand as someone “in the know,” and knowledge is an important ingredient in practical political power.  What is most interesting is how it makes you more effective at your job and in your organization as well.  In-the-know people understand the bigger picture.  They tend to have influence.  They can get things done.  They often panic less when bad news (or bad rumors) happen.  And valuable news sources are valuable to their bosses and others in the organizational hierarchy.


Adapted from “Federal Career Development: A Strategy Guide,” by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson, from The Federal Résumé Guidebook: Second Edition, by Kathryn Kraemer Troutman (JISTWorks, 1999; article copyright © 1999 Michael Dobson). Current editions are available from The Résumé Place at http://www.resume-place.com/books/.

Why We Work With Jerks

BRITANNUS (shocked). “Caesar, this is not proper.”

THEODOTUS (outraged). “How!”

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). “Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II, (1900)

If you're surrounded by difficult people, you may wonder why the organization doesn't take more of a lead in dealing with difficult people in its midst?

Surely the costs of inappropriate behavior should compel the organization to action—and yet it’s seldom the case that the organization acts except in the most egregious of situations.

Sometimes it’s because the organization itself is part of the problem.

You may have noticed that a lot of people describe their office environment as if it’s a war zone. We take flak, someone gets shot down, the boss is out for blood, someone’s getting the ax—it’s a pretty violent place. And, of course, some people work in offices that are all too reminiscent of a war zone.

There’s the official corporate culture and the real culture. The official culture is usually embodied in a vision or mission statement: “We value honesty, diversity, and hard work.” If in fact people are praised and rewarded for honesty, diversity, and hard work, then the match between the official culture and the real culture is close.

But sometimes there’s a mismatch. If honesty is punished, diversity nonexistent, and nepotism is rampant, then the official culture isn’t real. You often still need to give lip service to the official version, but the real culture is reflected in the behavior you actually witness day in and day out.

Look at the very top of the organization. Does verbal abuse start there and go down through the ranks? If so, it’s hardly surprising to see the same behavior reflected in middle managers.

If you are part of an organization whose culture rewards difficult behavior, your attempts to modify the behavior will be less effective, and may not work at all.

If that’s the case, your options are limited. Depending on your organizational rank and power, you may be able to force a change in the corporate culture.

If the difficult behavior violates laws against harassment and discrimination, you may be able to force change even if you’re in a lower-ranking position. Be extremely careful with the threat of legal pressure. Even if you succeed in forcing the organizational change, you may suffer negative career consequences. It’s all too common for other people—not you—to reap the benefit for such a sacrifice.

If you can’t change the culture, or the cost of forcing change is unacceptable, the two remaining choices are (a) learn to live with it and (b) get out. If your decision is to leave, prepare your exit carefully. If you’re going to stay, make sure the consequences to your mental health and happiness are within an acceptable range.

One word of caution: If you’ve generally had good working relationships and this job is poisonous, it’s probably them.

If, on the other hand, you encounter the same difficult behavior over and over again, it’s probably you.

From: Work Smart: Dealing With Difficult People (2nd ed.), William Lundin, Ph.D., Kathleen Lundin, and Michael S. Dobson (AMACOM, 2009)

Highly Motivated

Ever met an unmotivated person?

Think again. If someone spends more time and energy each day scheming to get out of work, they're motivated, all right. Just not in the direction you would prefer.

If someone isn’t helping you to achieve your goals, there are three possible reasons.

a) Ignorance: They don’t know what you want.

b) Inability: They can’t do what you want.

c) Choice: They won’t do what you want.

Ignorance. If people don’t know what you want, the problem isn’t with them; it’s with you. Even if you know you’ve told them, don’t assume the message has really gotten across. You may not have been as clear as you could have been, and they may not have been listening as well as they might have. It's always a good idea to check to make sure people really do know what you want. If that's the only thing standing in the way of their action, you're done.

Inability. When we say “can’t do,” it’s a literal “can’t do”: if we offered a million dollar bounty, nothing would change. “Can’t do” situations can sometimes be fixed by training, by access to necessary resources, by going to a different person, or by altering your request. There’s nothing personal here, but merely a problem. You can fix it or you can’t.

Choice. If someone knows what you want and can do it, then they get to make a choice about whether to do it. Why would they choose not to do it? Again, three reasons:

a) Performance is punished
b) Failure is rewarded
c) Performance doesn’t matter

Watch out for “perverse incentives,” ways in which we inadvertently push people in the direction of the very behavior we want them to avoid. If you get rewarded for doing a great job with even more work, perhaps that great job isn’t completely in your own interest. If failure to exceed your quota for the month gets you better liked by your colleagues, and there’s not much consequence from management, failure may give you the greatest personal reward. If you think no one reads or cares about that weekly report, it doesn’t seem to matter much if you do it well or poorly.

When you’re in a leadership role or simply need help and cooperation from your colleagues, try to find out why they’re behaving as they do. If you know whether their behavior is a choice or not, you can pick the best strategy for getting results.

From Work Smart: Goal Setting (2nd edition), by Susan B. Wilson and Michael Dobson.