How to influence people and (maybe) make friends
So I love this post, “Stop Answering Your Own Questions: An episode of bad management habits,” by Camille Fournier (and on Twitter). In it, she catches herself stating an opinion thinly veiled as a question for clarification.
This is one of my bad management habits. I jump to conclusions. I pretend to ask a question but then make it clear that only one answer can be right.
As a Highly-Opinionated Engineer™ myself, this is a trap I am familiar with. I have a paradigm and a language for describing it, a set of patterns that I think are great, as well as a set of “anti-patterns” that are — in my maybe-not-so-humble-opinion — deeply problematic (i.e. lead to the pit of hell). With these opinions in hand, I’m constantly on the lookout for challengers, those who would undermine my quest to lead the organization to future glory through maintainable, robust, elegant code-oriented solutions and perfectly-optimized team structures.
Except.
Except that when I detect somebody who’s “doing it wrong”…there are a few problems with going ahead and just telling them so right off the bat. It turns out sometimes people don’t always react well to the “let me fix your stupidity” vibe. Oh, and the fact that you haven’t taken the time to ensure you understand what they’re really saying, or the context around it.
But there’s a deeper reason to avoid doing this. I can’t say it better than Fournier does:
By stating my preference up-front I cut off discussion. What’s worse, I make the receiver unlikely to honestly answer my question; unless, that is, they feel up to the task of debating me.
For better or worse, I’m pretty good at debating, and I don’t mind doing it. Apparently some people (read: almost everyone?) don’t like it and avoid confrontation. Also, in the context of a conversation, they may not be able to marshal all the pertinent points. So by jumping in early I’m short-circuiting discussion and increasing the likelihood that we will make a bad decision in this case, even though in most circumstances my initial instinct may be correct.
Well that’s bad. Thus,
If you are (or were) a highly opinionated engineer, practicing making space for information rather than quickly jumping in and sharing your conclusions is a must for leadership growth.
Listening
So learn how to listen. Ok, that’s helpful. I can do that. As it turns out, I have been reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He has a chapter on listening in which he quotes the psychotherapist Carl Rogers:
The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.
Peterson argues that most “listening” is an exercise in fitting the other person’s words into your own mental model, or even actively looking for conclusions to jump to. Or we prematurely guess what they are saying and spend the rest of the time formulating our response, instead of really listening. Rogers recommends a simple trick:
Stop the discussion or a moment, and institute this rule: “Each person can speak up for himself only after he has restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.
Peterson describes listening as an active attempt to shift your own paradigm to match your that of the person you’re listening to. From this perspective, listening is an amazing feat of mental gymnastics, an act of imagination. You step outside yourself, into the alternate universe of the other’s reality, and try to understand it deeply.
Then, feel free to talk.
As Fournier points out,
Making good decisions requires you to get as much information as possible, to understand the nuances of the scenario from all angles.
Put that way, it seems so obvious, right?
