Warning: You’re About to Do Something Stupid
What does all this chest beating come down to? Let’s take it as a warning. The more we feel the need to apply force, the greater is the evidence that our own thoughts are the problem. To quote Seinfeld’s George Costanza, “It’s not them, it’s us.”
Of course, it starts with them when they aren’t motivated. We try and try, and nothing works. And then we become angry. We convince ourselves that we need to use power to solve the problem, and we enjoy doing it. That’s because we’re thinking with our dumbed-down, adrenaline-fed lizard brains.
Warning lights should go off every time we feel compelled to reach into our bag of influence tools and pull out a hammer: if we don’t catch ourselves before it’s too late, we’ll pay.
The Cost of Force
Force Kills Relationships
Every time we decide to use our power to influence others, particularly if we’re gleeful and hasty, we damage the relationship. We move from enjoying a healthy partnership based on trust and Mutual Respect to establishing a police state that requires constant monitoring.
Every time we compel people to bend to our will, it creates a desolate and lonely work environment. Gone is Mutual Respect and the camaraderie it engenders. Gone are the simple pleasantries associated with rubbing shoulders with colleagues who admire and pull for each other. Gone is the sense that we’re laboring together to overcome common barriers.
It’s a horrible thing we do when we decide to unleash our power as a method of motivating others. When we do, our relationship with others is forever changed. We move from respected partner to feared enforcer. And then we pay.
Force Motivates Resistance
When we quickly move to use force to influence change, people intuitively understand that we do that because we believe they have bad motives. We don’t respect them. In addition, it communicates that we care only about our goals, not theirs. In other words, it destroys safety. And when safety disappears, people immediately become defensive. Eventually they resist our ideas out of principle. Every time we leave the room, we wonder if they’ll actually do what we’ve asked. By destroying safety, the hasty use of force ensures that force will be needed to solve the problem and that a healthy accountability discussion won’t work.
Force Doesn’t Last
Back in the mid-1930s, Kurt Lewin, along with several of his colleagues, conducted a fascinating study that forever put to rest the notion that exercising one’s power yields lasting results. The researchers randomly assigned leaders to one of three leadership styles: authoritarian, hands-off, and democratic. The subjects then used their assigned styles to lead a production team. As expected, the authoritarian (power-based) style produced the highest results when the leader was in the room. Also as expected, force yielded the lowest results once the leader left the room.[10] When people produce solely out of fear, once the fear is removed, so is the motivation to continue to follow orders.
Be Careful with Perks
Now for the last of the common motivational errors: the hasty use of extrinsic rewards to motivate what should already be intrinsically motivating. Many parents have learned not to make this mistake through their failed attempts to reward actions that should be rewarding in and of themselves.
For example, if you want your children to read or, better still, love to read, what’s the best way to lure them away from their electronic devices? More than a few parents have chosen to pay their kids to read. The theory is that if you pay them, they’ll read, and if they read, they’ll learn to love reading. Unfortunately, extrinsic rewards often kill intrinsic satisfaction. These children learn to read for money, not for the love of reading. Then the minute the cash is removed, they’re off books.
Similarly, if you continually use special perks to encourage people to do what should be a routine part of their jobs, in effect “perfuming” the consequence bundle, you could be undermining or even destroying the satisfaction that comes from doing the job. It also takes attention away from the legitimate reasons for the work. When extrinsic rewards are applied to routine behavior, they confuse purpose. Special rewards should be reserved for special performance.
The problem with power, perks, and charisma is not that they never work or never should be used. The problem is that people turn to them too quickly, and there are almost always better methods. For instance, savvy parents and influential leaders use their ability to teach. They intuitively instruct by using part of the model we developed in Chapter 2.
Explore Natural Consequences
When you watch people who have been singled out by their bosses, peers, and loved ones as the best at handling accountability discussions (those highly valued positive deviants we introduced earlier), it should be no surprise to learn that they change people’s hearts by changing their minds.
Savvy leaders recognize that they could propel people to action by using their leadership authority or offering perks. They also know that within the three domains of personal, social, and structural, there are other factors that are far better motivators, that propel action without the leader pulling strings or making threats.
What are these compelling factors? They are the natural consequences associated with any behavior. For example, if you don’t manage your diabetes well, you are likely to face amputations later in life. That’s a natural consequence. If you fail to follow up on commitments, you create extra stress for your boss, who has to guess what will get done. That’s a natural consequence. If you make sarcastic and cutting comments when your spouse isn’t feeling amorous, she will withdraw and feel less spontaneous affection for you despite what your lizard brain is telling you. That’s a natural consequence.
All our actions put into play a chain of events that affects anywhere from one person to millions of other people. This sequence of events makes up the consequence bundle. Among these consequences, there is a subset of “natural” consequences that exist independently of the intervention of an authority figure. These methods require no force, no chutzpah, and no charisma. No parent has to wag a finger; no boss has to write up a disciplinary action. Natural consequences are always present and always serve as a potential source of motivation.
Of course, not all natural consequences motivate people equally. Here is an example:
“When you cut Jimmy off in midsentence, it hurt his feelings.”
“Good, I don’t like him anyway.”
Consequences provide the force behind all behavioral choices, and so savvy influencers motivate others by completing a consequence search: they explain natural consequences until they hit upon one or more that the other person values. As you start your own consequence search, your job is to find a way to make the invisible visible while maintaining healthy dialogue.
Make the Invisible Visible
When it comes to exploring natural consequences, your primary responsibility is to help others see consequences they aren’t seeing (or remembering) on their own. That happens because many of the outcomes associated with a particular behavior are long term or occur out of sight. Your job is to help make the invisible visible. Here are six methods for doing that.
10
Kurt Lewin, Ron Lippett, and Robert White, “Patterns of Aggressive Behaviour in Experimentally Created ‘Social Climates,’” Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939), 271–299.