GETTING MANAGERS TO EAT THEIR GREENS

When I work with leaders to unpick the real-life interpersonal challenges they face, about half of them involve dealing with emotions in some form, which we looked at a couple of months ago (see www.facetofaceleadership.com/f2flift/2_intelligentemotions.htm) Of the rest, a significant proportion boil down to "I asked X to do Y and they said they would, but they didn't".

This situation is a particularly irritating one, not just for the leader trying to get X to do Y, but for someone like me who is one step removed. The tendency of 'other people' (never us, obviously) to renege on commitments to action undermines the credibility of influencing 'techniques'. You know how it is: you want to get X to do Y, you go on an influencing or people management workshop (depending on whether X reports to you or not), you throw every tool known to man at X, X says yes of course s/he will do Y, you write a large cheque to the person who gave you the technique.... then you go to follow up with X and find they never did Y at all. Clearly the techniques are flawed.

Of course I would say this, wouldn't I, but this kind of situation is not really about technique. It is all about the inability of human beings to do something when doing nothing is easier. And I'm not just talking about X here, I'm talking about you. Sorry, but it's too easy to assume it's X that needs fixing here. The truth is you share the guilt between you.

Getting X to do Y (I'm sorry, X, to keep harping on about your failure to do Y, but if you'd only done it in the first place I wouldn't be hanging you out to dry publicly) is not so different from getting a 2 year old to eat her greens before giving her any ice cream. By which I mean that Y must be either difficult or distasteful, otherwise X would have done it without being asked. It is, in short, a war of nerves. Asking a toddler to eat her greens involves (a) making the contract clear (consumption of greens = pleasure in form of ice cream, non-consumption = suffering, i.e. no ice cream; also by when will the greens be eaten?) and (b) following through on that contract (which means, basically, banning the phrase 'oh alright, just this once' from your vocabulary.)

Not that I'm saying your colleagues and staff are like toddlers (well, if you insist....) but the principle is the same. X will not do Y unless doing Y leads to pleasure and/or not doing Y leads to pain. If X isn't doing Y, it means doing Y is more painful and not doing it more pleasurable. Chances are they agreed to do it because having you sitting in front of them waiting for a yes was sufficiently painful at the time. As soon as they said yes and you went away, they were free to revert to normal behaviour. In setting up the request you make, be it for a change of behaviour or a task they are to perform, make it easy for them to say yes by linking success in the task with something that is important to them (not you); make it hard for them to say no by conjuring up the dark consequences of not doing what you ask. I don't mean threaten them, I mean something a little subtler. A client of mine, who had tried and failed to get a team member to rein in his short fuse in meetings with stakeholders, turned the corner when he said to him: "You see, what concerns me is when people see you behaving like that, they will rightly or wrongly make overall judgments about you, especially around your suitability for senior positions..." Click. The individual in question had made no secret of a desire for promotion; by having the link spelled out (greens=ice cream) he found a clearer, personal motivation to change.

Once the reasons are clear (and remember, people do things for their reasons - not yours) the next essential step is to establish the fine print of the contract. By when will this be done? What will happen if they hit a problem? The clearer a contract you have, the easier it is to (a) know when it's been broken, and (b) follow it up. I know it's a cliche, but summarising what was agreed in an email never does any harm. It stops saying 'yes' to your requests being an easy option, for a start.

And finally, when you get the workplace equivalent of a toddler tantrum (which is basically any kind of emotional lever - I've been snowed under, sorry but the end of month figures had to take priority, etc) you know they are giving you the cue to say "Oh alright, just this once." But you won't, of course. Because they agreed a contract with you, and they have broken it. What you do about that is up to you and dependent of course on the context, but at the very least you can educate them that it is less painful to contact you before it's too late and renegotiate the agreement than have you follow up and make it clear they have let you down.

A client once pointed out to me the truth that dare not speak its name: that influencing is hard work. It is, undeniably, in the same way that toddler taming is hard work. But it's usually only hard work if you keep starting from scratch all the time. A little consistency in closing your discussions with a contract and then following it up should take care of that rather effectively.