Successful employee development and engagement programs start by getting team leaders and members to understand how different people behave, and what values lie behind the behavior that could be driving it.
This is critical, because your outward behavior is all other people have to judge your intentions and competence. Plus, we all make judgments about people based not just on the behaviors we observe, but on the filters through which we observe them.
Modifying behavior changes the perceptions of others
For many years, the campaign to sell Sure deodorant has carried the line “raise your hand, if you’re sure.” The message: After using the deodorant in question, you raise your hand fully in class because you are “sure,” of your answer, and of yourself.
Whether they care or not, the marketers at Proctor and Gamble were on to something: Body language is not only a symptom of confidence, but can build confidence and improve a person’s relative power in a social structure.
Now there is research to back this up. An associate professor at the Harvard Business School, Amy Cuddy, has found a way to measure the impact of body language on interpersonal relationships. As she said in a recent Harvard Magazine interview:
Our own goal as employee development specialists is not to “produce power,” of course. It is to train people to apply their power in the most productive way for all concerned. At Bovo-Tighe, we have found the DISC process to be very practical and effective as part of our client engagements. DISC effectively focuses on having a person understand his or her own behavior and recognize different behavior styles in others.
The DISC approach finds support in Cuddy’s research
Professor Cuddy’s findings are intriguing, because they confirm that if we allow ourselves to understand more deeply how we relate to each other, we can fix problems faster and more permanently. Cuddy boils down how we make judgments on others to two areas: Warmth and Competence.
Warmth: Does a person feel warm or cold to me? What are their intentions towards me? This is the basic human instinct to try to assess whether a new person is “friend or foe”.
Competence: How capable is that person in carrying out those intentions? Here the person tries to weigh whether the new person can act on his or her intentions.
Here is a table that summarizes what Cuddy has found:
Here are some of the findings that hit me most strongly, because they validated my team’s own approach to leadership development:
“Leaders often see themselves as separate from their audiences. They want to stake out a position and try to move audiences toward them. That’s not effective.” This is spot on: I have spent twenty years trying to cure leaders of this “I’m right” mindset. It is destructive to the work environment because it quashes initiative by devaluing alternative ideas. (Indeed, the leader often sees other ideas as competition to be beaten off rather than possibilities to be evaluated.)
“We treat people in ways consistent with our expectations of them, and in so doing elicit behavior that confirms those expectations.” As Cuddy put it: If we think someone is a acting like a jerk, we will treat them as a jerk, and they will respond back by acting like a jerk, confirming our first impression. My hardest task as a coach is to force people to set those stereotypes aside, adopt a “golden rule” approach, and see what great stuff lies behind the stereotype.
“People tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related. If there is a surfeit of one trait, they infer a deficit in the other.” In other words, the more competent you appear, the less nice others assume you are. Conversely, a really nice person must not be too smart. These are mindsets you must resist, and train the managers under your care to resist also.
“Tiny changes (in posture) that people can make can lead to some pretty dramatic outcomes…Changing ones’ own mindset sets up a positive feedback loop…and also changes the mindset of others.” Good leadership habits can be just as catching as bad ones. People that seem both “warm” and “competent” set a good example, especially if they share the secret of their success.
While it is still true that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, it is also true that the people you are trying to work with may have already made up their minds based on completely superficial visual clues. Your first opportunity to improve your effectiveness is by studying and consciously modifying your style as perceived by others. Small changes in certain circumstances can often have an enormous impact.
Your second opportunity as a leader, and our job as employee development specialists, is to break your own superficial mindsets and replace them with an observable habit of reserving judgment and delving deeper, establishing a habit of building trust through the pursuit of truth and open communication. Only through deep trust can you engage the full talents of the people on your team. The good news is that there are great tools available to help you discover your path forward.
Do you have questions about how to apply DISC or other assessment tools? Comment on this article, or send me an e-mail. I have found them indispensible in maximizing the ROI of all of my client engagements and very much enjoy sharing the insights these programs have brought me.
David Tighe has been helping companies change mindsets to re-engage their employees for twenty-three years as a principal for Bovo-Tighe, LLC. Bovo-Tighe helps organizations solve leadership, productivity, and hiring challenges using its MINDCHANGE™ and Organizational Transformation processes, which have been market- tested in hundreds of real-world business situations. Contact Dave at dave@bovo-tighe.com.
