Exaggerating the Cost of Expressing Our Views
Let’s look at how we routinely overestimate the costs we might experience if we did talk about a broken promise. Human beings are downright gifted when it comes to conjuring up bad things that just might happen to them. In fact, when contemplating what we may be setting into action by opening our mouths, we often imagine (and then get obsessed about) appalling outcomes no matter how unlikely they may be. When we trump up a horrible chain of events, we use lots of “and” thinking, only the wrong kind of “and” thinking. Here’s how it works:
The boss has asked us all to chip in 20 bucks to buy a present for a vice president we don’t even know. That’s a certainty, and it’s bad. None of us want to do it. But if I speak up, I won’t win the argument, and I’ll still have to come up with the money, and my boss will despise me, and I’ll lose my job, and my wife will leave me.
We lose all sense of reality when we fixate on the horrific possibilities that might befall us. The severity of the possible outcomes distorts our view of the probabilities. If an unlikely outcome is bad enough, we often describe it as a certainty rather than a possibility.
Perhaps the largest error we make in exaggerating the cost of confronting an issue stems from the erroneous belief that the existing world always punishes people who are naive enough to speak their minds. We’ve watched people speak up and get punished for their honesty and find it hard to imagine any other possibility. In fact, when the authors suggest in public forums that this book teaches people how to talk to almost anyone no matter how touchy and powerful that person may be — and with good results — people think we’re fooling ourselves: “Maybe the pumpkin wagon you just fell off allows you to speak honestly and boldly to the driver, but our driver carries a whip and loves to use it.”
At first we wondered if the skills we had seen demonstrated so often wouldn’t work in certain instances, and so we started asking, “Are you saying that there is nobody in your company who could talk about this particular issue or person and get away with it?” After an awkward pause, someone would name an individual who didn’t have the position power that granted him or her the right to speak but somehow found ways to talk quite frankly and not get into trouble.
When you’ve gone to silence and are trying way too hard to convince yourself that you’ve done the right thing, you might want to examine whether you are intentionally minimizing the cost of not speaking up and exaggerating the risks of doing so. Did you start with a desire not to speak up and back into a justification, or did you arrive there after careful consideration? Learn to notice the difference, and you’ll do a much better job of deciding if you should talk to someone about an issue.
Am I Telling Myself That I’m Helpless?
At the heart of most decisions to stay quiet, even though we’re currently suffering, lies the fear that we won’t be able to make a difference. We believe that either other people or the circumstances themselves make the problem insoluble. That puts the issue out of our control. It’s not us; it’s them: “Have you ever tried to talk to that guy? He’s a maniac!” “Have you ever attempted to tell a senior executive that she doesn’t really know how to do her job? Like that’s going to work.”
The truth is that many accountability discussions fail not because others are bad and wrong but because we handle them poorly. It’s our fault. We decide to step up to a failed promise and subtly attack the other person. He or she then gets hooked, and we’re now in a heated battle. Naturally, we see the other person getting hooked but miss the part we played in escalating the problem by doing such a shoddy job of bringing it up in the first place.
We’re like the young boy who refused to see his role in an argument by explaining to his mother, “It all started when he hit me back!”
Even when we do see the role we’re playing in a problem by owning up to the fact that our accountability skills aren’t that great, we often act as if we were as talented as we’re ever going to be. We’ve peaked; we’ll never get better. We make this assumption because most of us aren’t exactly students of social influence. We’ve spent more time memorizing the capitals of Europe than we have examining the intricacies of human interaction. We rarely think of accountability skills as something that a person should and can learn through actual study. But as this book asserts, these skills can be learned and improved.
When you’ve gone to silence because you’re afraid you’re not skilled enough to have an accountability discussion, your assessment may be correct. If this is the case, enhance your skills. There’s no use suffering forever. Be careful not to let fear taint your judgment. You may have the skills to deal with a particular issue but are letting your fear keep you from speaking up. When you’re thinking about going to silence, ask yourself if you’re copping out rather than making a reasoned choice.
Responding to the Signs
Let’s summarize the clues that you’re hastily going to silence and explore what to do with them. Telltale signs that you should be speaking and not clamming up include the following four:
• Sign 1. You’re acting out your feelings. You think you’re suffering silently, but you’re not. To spot this mistake, ask yourself the following: “Am I really expanding my zone of acceptance, or am I actually upset and sending out a barrage of unhealthy signals? Are others getting hooked?” If this is the case, you’re probably not suffering silently but are acting out your concerns and making matters worse. Your nonverbal behavior is already speaking for you. Consider taking charge of the conversation instead.
• Sign 2. Your conscience is nagging you. You keep telling yourself that it’s okay to say nothing — besides, other people aren’t saying a word — but you know in your gut that you need to say something. Listen to that voice. It’s telling you to step up to the plate. Take the internal prodding as a sign that your silence isn’t warranted.
• Sign 3. You’re downplaying the cost of not taking action (embracing the devil you know) while exaggerating the dangers of speaking up. You’re trying way too hard to persuade yourself to stay away from an accountability discussion because you fear it will be painful. Don’t confuse the question of whether the conversation will be difficult with the question of whether you should deal with it.
• Sign 4. You figure that nothing you do will help. Either others are impossible to talk to, or you’ve already achieved the height of your accountability prowess. In truth, the problem is less often that others are impossible to approach than that we aren’t sure how to approach them. The authors have watched people deal with some of the most difficult problems and succeed because they knew what to say and how to say it. If you improve your skills — even just a little — you’ll choose silence far less often and succeed far more routinely.
Speaking Up When You Shouldn’t
Let’s turn our attention to the other side of the if coin. You confront a problem that in retrospect you probably shouldn’t have dealt with in the first place. This seems to contradict what we just discussed, but it’s true. There are times when it’s better not to bring up a problem or at least not to do so until you’ve done some preparatory work.
Often, when you’ve weighed the consequences of speaking up, it is a better option to remain silent. For example, you’ve had difficulty working with a certain vendor and the process could have been much cleaner, but you were working on a one-time-only project and probably won’t ever see the vendor again. In this case, it may be better to avoid rehashing an issue that will never come up again.