• “Please feel free to contact me if you have questions.”
• “Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions.”

Those say the same thing, don’t they? Technically, they do. But the problem comes in with how they’re worded and how the brain deals with them.

When psychologists do research on memory and processing, they usually have some sort of a stress component. They’ll use a task to put the brain under a load, because that’s how the brain is usually working. You’re rarely fully focused on a task. You’re probably thinking about something else while you’re working, or you’re having to work quickly. As a general rule, you’re not perfectly focused on a task and nothing else, especially at work.

A very pertinent example of this and how this post fits in very well is linked with how long people spend reading a web page. On average, a typical person browsing the internet actually reads only about 28% of the information on the screen. In most cases, people scan what’s on the screen. This becomes more important as you consider how the brain processes negative modifiers.

When your brain encounters a sentence like “Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions” it processes the noun (“me”) and the verb (“contact”) for meaning before it processes anything else. When the brain is under a cognitive load, (for instance at work, scanning a web page) the brain may stop there. So, when you toss in a negative modifier (“not”), then the brain might miss it. So, the big take-away for a scanner from the sentence “Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions,” can be “hesitate.”

The brain has to process the first phrase to be able to apply the negative modifier and understand it, so in cases where the brain is under a cognitive load, the negative modifier can be missed. A number of researchers have tested this and found that this holds true in written language, as well as spoken language. So, the fix here is to take care in how often you use negative modifiers and in what situations. If you’re in a high stress situation and you’re giving someone instructions, teach yourself to give positively worded instructions, not ones using negative modifiers. The chance that you’ll be misunderstood will be much lower, and your stress level should be decreased as well because of fewer mistakes.

Not true.

It’s a great book for anyone who has anything to do with business. Think about it. How many times a day do you have to persuade someone to do something you need done. If you’re a leader, that’s all you do. How many times a day is someone trying to convince you to do something they need you to do?

Cialdini talks about the pieces of our brain that respond to these tactics as the “click whirr” portions. They’re very automatic, unless you understand them. If you know about them, you can circumvent them (most of the time) and you can use them to your benefit and also to the benefit of those around you.

He’s got a total of 6 principles that he talks about in-depth and I’m not going to cover all of them here, but I’ll give you enough of a taste that you’ll want to go get the book yourself.

For instance, in the book, one of the principles Cialdini talks about is “Liking.” That is, we respond better to people we like. That seems logical, doesn’t it? If it’s so logical, why is it that a lot of people seem to think that you can get better customer service by being brusk and abrasive? Give it a shot the next time you’re on the phone with someone at the cable company.

• Be pleasant
• Use the CSR’s first name
• Say “Thank you.”

Now, if you really want to be cooking with persuasive gas, do it at work. If you’re a leader, apply all that to your employees. I’m not saying that you have to become best friend’s with them, but if your reputation is like Donald Trump, try making them like you for a while. You’re very likely to see your production numbers soar, and when you need extra effort from them, you’ll get it without too many complaints.

Another of the principles, and one of my favorites is “Reciprocity.” It’s all prevalent in human society. In fact, it’s what a lot of what makes human society work, and you can see it every day. It’s the concept of “if I give you something, you owe me.” It’s a lot more subtle than that, but it’s very true, and we’re geared to automatically respond to it. I’d try to give this a detailed treatment here, but there’s really a lot more to this than I can cover in a blog post, so I’m going to give you enough to see the value in buying Dr. Cialdini’s book.

We’ve all been in a situation that he talks about. A co-worker needs you to help with something that they’re in a dire situation with, and they’ve begged you into helping them. You’ve helped them finish it, and you’ve saved them from a horrible day at work. Bring the last time you were in that situation into your mind. Close your eyes and think about it. Your co-worker says to you, “Thanks, a lot. You totally saved my bacon on that one.”

How do you respond? If you’re like most people, you say, “No problem,” and you leave it at that. Cialdini points that out as the moment that you’ve lost the power of reciprocity. Instead of just leaving it there, tack on, “…I know that you’d have done the same for me if I were in that situation.” That doesn’t sound any worse, but it activates the “click, whirr” part of the brain, and gives you a better chance of persuading that person when you’re in need, without ever having to overtly refer back to the situation.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot more to Dr. Cialdini’s book than I’ve presented here. I’ve not even scratched the surface. Go get it. Read it. You’ll be better able to succeed in work and life after reading it.

Research is really clear on this topic. In the US, employees want to feel like their opinions are valued, they are valued, and that they’re involved. When you’ve got that going, your employees will be highly productive beyond your wildest dreams.

But… what is really important is that it’s sincere. In my series last week, I talked about how leaders can fail badly if they start to think that there’s a real class difference between themselves and their employees. Everything you think will come through in your actions and your behaviors. This is what social psychologists talk about as your implicit and explict attitudes.

Implicit attitudes are those little thoughts that nibble around at the back of your brain can (and do) come to visit when you’re not attending to them. If you don’t believe me, visit and play around with the IAT. But, keep in mind, the point of this test isn’t to tell you how many racial biases you have. It’s just to make you aware of the power of implicit attitudes. Don’t walk away from it thinking, “Wow… I’m a bigot.” Walk away thinking about how implicit attitudes can affect your outward behaviors. That’s how you defuse them.

The problem with implicit attitudes is that you can’t constantly attend to them. If you pay too much attention to them, you end up falling victim to them. The old trick for this is what I put at the beginning of the post about not thinking about pink elephants. How many times did you? You did it, because you were lured into it. By trying not to think about them, your brain does it anyway. It’s a catch-22 that can send your brain into a fit.

If you’re not sincere about your desire to be an involved employer, your employees are going to notice. Your brain will always tip your hand to them, no matter how much you act and try to pretend. So, how do you deal with it?

Get involved. Start thinking about your employees as people. See them as individuals. When you think about them as individuals, take note of what other thoughts come up associated with them. That gets down to how your neural network is arranged and it lets you see what implicit attitudes are being activated when you think of them. When you start thinking about those things and sincerely examining them, you’ll change how your neural network is structured.

Then act on it. Get involved and change.

So, now I’m going to tell you how to can become the worst leader possible, and in some cases (if you’re the boss) how you can make the worst leader possible.

1. Make sure that you think of yourself as completely different than, and if at all possible, better than your employees – I’ve seen this a number of times and it’s really disturbing to see. One job that I was at had a number of family members working in upper echelons of the company. This group of family members really started to think of themselves as though they were of a different class than their employees. After telling all of the employees that the company was losing so much money they couldn’t afford to give anyone pay increases, each of the executives showed up with brand new, very expensive cars. It didn’t take long for the employees to start performing worse, and theft of company property to increase. So, make sure that if you want to ruin things, start thinking of yourself as different and better than the people who work for you.

2. Have different rules for you and your employees - One thing that can happen (especially in industrial settings) is that your employees might be paid as hourly employees and you could be a salaried employee. If you really want to make sure that you can get your employees to rebel, if they’re scheduled to show up at 7 AM, be late a couple of times a week. You can also ocassionally take a late lunch every week. Employees don’t make the distinction between salary and hourly, so consequently, when you do this, you’ll insure that they feel like you believe point number 1, even if you don’t. Generally, I’ve found that employees will accept hard adherence to rules, as long as you’re just as rigorous yourself. But, if you try to enforce rules that you don’t follow yourself, then you’re going to get a lot of pushback.

3. Promote the wrong people for the wrong reasons - This can really take two forms. If you’re promoting someone into a leadership position, don’t think of it like it’s a form of reward. Too often, people who perform well in a line position are offered promotion into leadership without regard for what’s needed to be a good leader. When you do this, you could be setting a star employee up for failure. If you’re going to promote someone to a leadership position, make sure that they’re really management material. If they need help, make sure to train them to be a leader. Don’t just dump someone into management who’s never been a leader. The second form that this can take is with a supervisor who doesn’t want to lose a star performer. Change is never easy, but if if you won’t let someone advance, who really wants to because you don’t want to lose their productivity, you’re going to set yourself up for failure. Eventually, the employees who can’t get promoted will stop performing and those who see that the way to advancement is mediocrity will either perform at that level, or they’ll just move on to another company.

6. Be Fair and Honest with your Employees – When a new person would come on board with me, I’d always take a couple of minutes to talk to him or her about this. I’d always say, “I’ll be honest with you. I will probably be the best boss you’ve ever had, or the biggest jerk you’ve ever dealt with. If you’re on the up and up with me, I will be too.” The key to this is that you have to check your worries about your career at the door. Expect to get into a tangle with upper-management or your peers, but if your employees have earned your protection, give it to them like a pit-bull. One of my experiences involved a confrontation with a vice-president who’d gotten me to promise a group of employees a free lunch, if they worked a 12 hour shift at a point when we really needed them to, in order to get a shipment out. Then he turned around and reneged his part of the deal in a meeting with me. When I stood up to him and said, “Someone’s buying my shipping crew lunch tomorrow, and if it’s me, you can be damned sure they’ll know that.” It made life harder with him, but I found out later that it bought me points with his boss.

7. Be willing to be wrong or make a mistake - A lot of young managers get into this cycle of stress. A new manager is going to make a lot of mistakes in their job, but they feel like they can’t let themselves be seen as being wrong in front of their employees. However, you’re human, just like the people who work for you. If you allow your employees to make mistakes and learn from them, when you fall down, they’re going to be willing to forgive you. When something breaks, start fixing it. Don’t start trying to figure how to keep anyone from seeing that it happened. When you need help, go get it.

8. Recognize that all of your employees are different – This sounds really easy, but it’s dismissed too quickly by many managers. All of your employees are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. Learn to leverage those best. I’m not saying to molly-coddle your employees, but if an employee is really deficient in one area and it’s not absolutely necessary that they be exemplary there, don’t force them to be. You also need to learn what motivates each one of your employees. Earlier, I talked about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. You need to figure out what motivates who and use that to your advantage.

9. Do not rely on your own memory - I don’t care how good you think your memory is, it’s not good enough to remember everything that every employee has done over the last year. There are two psychological artifacts that you can remember that will help you understand this. One is Recency (the natural tendency to remember only the most recent things) and Primacy (the natural tendency to remember the first thing you were presented with). This means that if you rely on your memory, you’ll only rate people based on your first impressions and on what you recall in the last couple of weeks. If your employees are bright, they know when their performance evaluations are, and they’ll be perfect angels about two weeks before them. Do yourself a favor and carry a pad of post-it notes with you while you’re working. When you see something (positive or negative) make a note, write the date, then stick in a file at the end of the day. When the review rolls around, you’ll have a lot of information to draw on.

10. Be aware of the signals that you send - I’ve not been all that great on this one in the past, but it’s something I’m working on. If you’re talking to an employee, be in that moment. Don’t look at your watch, or appear to be ignoring them. Even if you’re really not interested in what they’re saying, at least look like you are. If you’re fiddling with something and not paying attention, employees will pick up on that. All of this also goes into how you carry yourself. If you’re not happy with a fellow supervisor or manager, keep that hidden. If you send the signal that there’s dissention, that will let your employees think that it’s okay for them to fight amongst themselves, or–worse–play your fellow manager off against you.

1. Treat everyone around you with respect – This goes for everyone. Your employees. Your fellow leaders. Those above you. For the most part, this is infectious. If you’re treating everyone that you work with respectfully, then you’re probably going to get similar in return. This isn’t meant that you should take abuse, but to foster a good working relationship with those you deal with on a day-to-day basis.

2. Follow through on what you say you’ll do – Again, this goes for everyone. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. I’ve seen a number of managers fail because they end up saying “yes!” far too often. They have the right intention in mind, but they forget to think before they engage their voices. If an employee asks you to do something, unless you’re absolutely sure that the outcome is completely in your power, hedge your bets. Say you’ll look into it and get back to them, but then… make sure that you do. The number of times that you fail to come through on things that you promise to do are probably directly proportional to your success as a manager.

3. Know and be able to do the job that your employees do – When I was working in an office furniture company as a plant manager, I came from the manufacturing floor. So, every so often, when we were in a time crunch, I’d tuck my tie into my shirt, grab a file and work. I may not have been the best line worker, but you can gain a lot of respect by being interested in what your employees are doing. Also, you’re a lot less likely to take them for granted if you feel the pains that they do. Additionally, you can’t buy the effect that you get by the level of respect this sort of thing garners you. For a long time, every supervisor that worked for me had to know (and be able to do) every job that was in their departments. I didn’t expect them to be terribly productive at it, but I did expect them to be able to do it.

4. Say “Thank you” to your employees – This is a big deal to me and it says a lot about the person. When I see a manager never thank their employees for a job well done, it sends a signal. And if it sends a signal to me, you can bet that it sends a signal to the employee. A lot of employees are motivated more by intrinsic (thanks, pats on the back, etc) rewards than extrinsic (money, time off, etc.) rewards. This is counter to what a lot of us believe, but you can get a lot more out of a group using respect, honest thanks than you’ll ever get by waving money at them.

5. Be willing to train yourself right out of a job – One of the jobs I held at an industrial film-processing plant had a performance management system that competively placed all of the plants against one another. I held the #1 ranking in my region for a very long time by making sure that I cross-trained as many people as I possibly could. I also made sure that I had employees around me who could step in and do my job if they needed. Too many managers are worried that if they train their employees to be too good, they’ll lose their jobs. That is a definite possibility, but if you ever want to be promoted, it’s critical to be able to show that your department can be handed off to someone else, without an hiccups. Have the confidence in your own abilities to teach your employees not to need you, then aim for the next promotion.

I’ll continue with this theme in the next post, and possibly the next one after that. So, I hope you enjoy it.

But, when I see things like this article from the Wall Street Journal. I begin to believe it more and more.

Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win

I was in a Wal-Mart this weekend and every time I’m there, I can’t get out of my head everything I’ve read about Wal-Mart’s business practices. By the time I’m done thinking, I can’t bring myself to spend money there, because it feels too much like I’m compromising my business ethics. Coming up in a couple of weeks, I’ve got a series about how to be a good manager. In the last part of the series, I do a bit of a twist and talk about how to utterly fail as a manager.

In all honesty, if you’d like to see how you can skirt the lines of unacceptable business ethics and even drift occasionally into the sort of area that will (and should) get you sued, do an examination of Wal-Mart. I used to really like Wal-Mart, but ever since the death of Sam Walton the company has completely forgotten the business ethics that it was founded on. This particular story is about Wal-Mart trying to strongarm its employees into voting Republican to avoid the oncoming unionization of Wal-Mart, and the entire argument is based in half-truths.

Sam Walton’s philosophy was to keep unions out of Wal-Mart, but his was one of active, positive engagement with the employees. Basically, you keep the unions out by making sure that your employees have what they need to be happy and productive. The new executives at Wal-Mart have taken Walton’s philosophy and turned it on its ear, bastardizing it into a mantra to use the sleaziest tactics possible.

“When IT’s Success Is A Flop”

As a part of his treatment of the subject, he talks about how there can be numerous reasons why an IT project might fail, and theyr’e not always obvious. Basically, many people may have a different idea of what “success” means, and depending on your perspective, one person’s “success,” may be another person’s, “aw, man… I need a new job.”

So, it’s really important, no matter what business you’re in, to really keep an open mind about everything that’s going on around you. You can frequently avoid an office land mine by just being aware and thinking about how someone else might see something that’s taking place.

I’ve frequently advocated that leaders should always work out on the production floor or sit in the cubicle farm for a while. They need that perspective to operate effectively as a leader. As soon as a leader forgets what that perspective looks like, it becomes hard to think like an employee and you have no ability to empathize.

And, you can apply all of this to department on department interactions. Spend time with the IT people, or the design people. At least understand their world a little bit, and also get a little bit a personal connection with them. When conflict arises, it’s a lot easier to bark at someone you barely know or don’t know at all; it’s a lot easier to see another person’s perspective when you have some degree of connection with them.

Sometimes, success in business–and for that matter, life–is being able to step outside of your comfort zone and look at how another person lives.

Everyone, at some point in their careers, has heard some advanced representative of a company they’ve worked for utter these words. And, if you’re like most employees at most companies, you’ve groaned inwardly. Those words have become tinged with a negative reaction because many companies say them, put them on their website, and put them on slogans around the office. But when it comes time to actually put those words into action, they balk.

There are numerous reasons for companies stopping short of actually considering their employees to be their most valuable resource, but the effect is the point of this post. The inward groan I mentioned earlier has become almost automatic. In the wake of layoffs and jobs being moved to where cheaper labor can be found, there should be little surprise that the burden of proof for this value proposition is on the employer.

Actually treating employees as though they are your greatest asset takes a lot of work and money, and that’s why many companies fail to do so. For a lot of companies, it’s very hard to look beyond the next quarter, much less the following year, or the next decade. And it’s the long look into the future where the companies who do embrace the idea of employees being their greatest assets have the most impact. When they keep their eyes on the ball and don’t waver from it, they find great success.

If you want to see it in action, go take a look at Fortune’s list of top 100 companies to work for. Specifically, look at the top 10 companies in that list. These aren’t a bunch of philanthropic organizations that barely scrape by. At least half of them are brands that almost every person you encounter will recognize instantly. Every single one of them have yearly revenues that are well in excess of a billion dollars. Cisco Systems (#6 on the list), has conducted numerous buyouts and mergers over the last few years. Mergers and buyouts have been statistically terrible for many businesses, but Cisco has managed to be successful and be one of the best companies to work for.

It is possible to be successful and treat people as though they’re your greatest resource. It’s not easy, but it is the path to success.

I started out working in management in the early 1990′s, and even then I still experienced a lot of pressure from upper management to make sure to keep an iron hold over my employees. Essentially, there’s a lot of weight given to Machiavelli’s idea about being feared and loved, with a lot more weight given to being feared.

Take a look at the people who popular culture likes to look to as management icons. We put people like Donald Trump on television and they end up popular by insulting and berating their employees. But is that what it really takes to direct people? Do you really have to be that nasty?

The answer to that is, “sometimes.” Or more accurately, you need to make sure that when you push, it’s at the right time, with the right amount of gusto. Roderick Kramer has a great article on this topic called, “The Great Indimidators.” He presents the idea that the difference between being a bully an intimidator is careful planning and vision. A leader who uses intimidation to lead makes their decisions to turn up the heat based on their vision and goals. There’s a lot that can be done in an organization with persuasion, but sometimes it does have to be with a pretty firm hand.

But, being an intimdator can be its own minefield. As Kramer points out, when you do it right, you can get far; when you don’t, you’re going to go down quickly. A lot of that is because of the sort of job market we have now. Employees are more mobile. They have more connections. And the unemployment rate we have is relatively low when compared to history. The control over the employment equation really is more on the side of the employee.

While the job market may not be ideal, it isn’t anything like it was near the beginning of the industrial revolution. When your boss is a bully, while it might be a hardship, you can get up relatively easy and find a new job. So, the best leaders today end up using strategic tactics of persuasion that make them somewhat more like salespeople. It takes a lot more work than scaring employees into submission, but the rewards end up creating a sense of loyalty amongst your subordinates. That sense of loyalty will serve you well as you work on moving up in the organization.

I’ll spend some more time in a later blogpost talking about the details of persuasion, but for now, I think we can edit Machiavelli’s quote for the modern age.

“If you cannot be both feared and loved, it is better to be loved.”