Dear Crucial Skills,

I have a longtime friend who is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, experiences combat stress, and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was being treated at a Veterans Affairs hospital and things seemed to be going well. But recently, I’ve seen a change and increased symptoms—angry outbursts, avoidance, etc.—and can even see the strain reflected on his face. I tried to gently tell him I was worried about him and he told me he’s fine and “not going to group hug therapy.” And now that he knows I’m concerned, he is avoiding me.

I know many of the veterans who finally get appropriate help do so under extreme duress. Do you have any suggestions on how to broach this with my friend and let him know he should think about modifying his approach to managing his condition?

Signed,
PTSD & Me

Dear PTSD & Me,

I asked for some extra advice on your question from my father—a WWII and Korean War Veteran with a PhD in counseling who still helps dozens of vets from the past seventy years of conflicts, even at age 84. Yes, I’m proud of him. I want to be sure I don’t speak beyond my competence in your very sensitive situation with one of our beloved servicemen—so I forwarded your question to him.

He suggests your friend’s delay in getting help is quite common. There are a host of “stories” he may be telling himself in order to justify delay—anything from minimizing the symptoms, trusting time will heal all wounds, doubting the efficacy of treatment, or fearing a loss of self-esteem by admitting he has a mental health problem.

The line you walk in this crucial conversation is determining when you are exerting influence and when you are provoking resistance. Push too hard and your friend will resent your intrusion on his autonomy. Say too little and you’re enabling his illness and unwittingly prolonging his suffering. Each of us is likely in a similar situation with one or more loved ones. Here are some thoughts to keep in mind as you find the balance between influence and patience:

Make it about him not you. When someone ignores counsel, it’s easy to take it personally. You can tell you’re taking it personally when you start feeling hurt and angry rather than concerned and fearful. It’s so easy to begin with well-intended motives, but let them drift into a desire to control others—without even being aware of the seismic shift. Keep focused on what you really want, “For my friend to be as happy as he can be on the time schedule of his choosing.”

Make it safe. Make your motives crystal clear—and don’t just create present safety—create it for the likely future conversations you’ll hold. If your friend is resistant to being treated, get ready for the long haul. When you have your crucial conversation with him, anticipate the likely need of periodic conversations until he concludes he is ready to take action. If this were a dear friend of mine, here’s how it might sound. Please adapt to your own level of relationship and verbal style.

“Hey bro—I want to talk to you again about getting checked for PTSD. Would you please tolerate me for the next two minutes so I can make my pitch? If you think I’m full of it at the end, please know that I am okay with that. Even if you disagree with me, I just want to be sure you know that the only reason I’m bringing it up is because I love you. Also, I want to warn you in advance that if I continue to see things that make me think a real friend should speak up, I’ll probably bug you again. Is that cool?”

Your goal here is to clear a path for future conversations while asking permission to have this one. And of course if he says, “Back off!” you are obligated to do so. But even in doing so, I would make the following statement:

“Okay. I’m sorry to come across as crowding you—but I want you to know I am concerned and if you ever change your mind about involving me, I am here. Until you give me that permission, I’ll honor your request to leave it alone.”

Your goal here is to make sure he interprets your silence in the next few weeks not as agreement that there is no issue, but as respect for his autonomy. Of course, you should break this agreement if he begins to do something that puts himself or others in harm’s way.

Share facts not judgments. If he allows you to have this conversation, watch to see if your words sound like judgments or threats, or make him feel guilty. If so, you’ve crossed over to controlling rather than influencing. “You’re blowing it, dude” or “Your family can’t take any more of this” are attempts to coerce him not influence him. If he is defensive at this point, you cannot motivate him. All you can do is help him find his own motivation to get attention. An attempt to rush it will cross the line into provoking resistance rather than exerting influence.

When you hold a crucial conversation with your friend on this topic, come armed with a handful of the most persuasive facts you can find to help your friend self-discover the need to be treated. For example, you could share that:

Psychological injuries are common. A recent study showed more than one in five Iraqi war veterans received psychological injury.
Typical symptoms include . . . The Nebraska Government has a brief self-survey on their Web site—you could pick the two to three symptoms which are most akin to what you see in your friend and use them for reference in your conversation.
Treatment can help. Often people avoid taking action not because they aren’t motivated, but because they doubt the efficacy of solutions. So they try to cope with things as they stand. A brief factoid sharing the percentage of people who see reduced symptoms after a couple of sessions might give him more confidence in trying a new treatment. It could be that his mental image is of laying on a couch for five years regurgitating pain with no real benefit.

Invite dialogue about his views. The only way to help a resistant person find motivation to change is to help him or her discover his or her own reasons. You could open that possibility by ending this little monologue with a statement like, “Are things working out the way you’d like lately? If so, then I’m off base. If not, let’s talk about what’s going on, what you don’t like, and what it might cost you in the future if it continues or escalates. We don’t have to have that conversation now—but I’m here when you want to have it.”

I hope something in what my father and I have said provides a useful direction for you and for him. You have my heartfelt and sincere best wishes for your positive influence on this good man.

Warmly,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

My father-in-law is a very powerful person and I don’t feel comfortable speaking honestly about anything with him. If I ask him a question about an issue I want to resolve, he announces his opinion then cuts off any discussion by saying, “Well, that’s how life is sometimes” as he stands up to leave.

I think he is very wise and would like to learn from him, but I can’t get him to engage in any kind of dialogue. As a result, I leave feeling like I don’t exist and that he thinks he knows all. My husband seems to take after him so I feel like I’m in a communication desert all by myself. Do you have any suggestions?

Sincerely,
Craving Communication

  Dear Craving,

I would have given a different answer twenty years ago than I will today. I’m still very much a believer in people’s potential to change. However, some life experiences with a wonderful variety of loved ones have led me to conclude that everyone is a package. Myself included. We all have idiosyncrasies, habits, and proclivities—some of which are the source of our genius and some of which drive everyone around us batty. And sometimes, the genius and the quirkiness flow from the exact same attribute.

I say this as prelude because, while I will advise you to hold a crucial conversation, I will also encourage you to work on yourself first. Clarify your motives before even attempting the conversation. If your motive is to “fix” or “change” your father-in-law, you’re more likely to be disappointed than effective. If instead your goal is to share feedback then accept his freedom to accommodate or ignore it, you will not only come across entirely differently (i.e., not needy or pushy), but you will be more likely to have influence. Ironically, if your motive is to control, you not only fail to gain control, but you lose your influence. If you give up trying to control others, you gain influence in the bargain.

With that said, here is some advice about how to hold the conversation itself.

Hold the right conversation. Often, we fail at the outset because we dive into the wrong topic. For example, we talk about content—what just happened—when we want to talk about a pattern—something that happens regularly. This could happen in your case because you address something your father-in-law just said to you when your real issue is a pattern of these sorts of comments over time. Your goal needs to be to have a pattern conversation. And that calls for a special approach.

Timing is everything. Don’t wait until you’re bugged to talk. That’s what most of us do with our pattern conversations. We wait for yet another instance of someone behaving badly then we pounce on it; not to address what just happened, but to dump our laundry list of grievances from ages past. If you want to talk about a pattern, pick a time that is not clouded with a recent transgression. It not only helps you be in a proper mindset, but it helps avoid giving the other person an opportunity to make excuses about the pattern by pointing to special issues in the present instance. For example, your father-in-law might say, “I had to walk out just now because I have a conference call in half an hour!”

Make it safe. You have all the right information in your question to create safety at the beginning of this conversation. Read it again. You clearly care about your father-in-law. You respect him. You want something from him that he is likely to feel flattered giving, so that’s what you need to make clear as you start.

For example, you might say, “I’d like to talk about some ways I could have a better relationship with you. I value the relationship we have, and I’d like to be even closer and more comfortable. I admire you, sometimes to the point of feeling intimidated around you. I also see you as a great source of wisdom, something I’d like to take advantage of even more than I do now. And yet, there are some things in how we interact that don’t work for me. I’m hoping it is okay to share how I see it and find out how either you, or I, or both of us could communicate better.

Ask permission. One of the best ways to ensure others feel safe is to sincerely ask for permission before launching into the crucial conversation. If your father-in-law might be uncomfortable with this level of communication, it is all the more important to help him feel in control by asking his consent before launching into your concerns. All you need do is add, “Would that be okay?” to the above monologue.

Change media. Judging from your description, it may be that your father-in-law will be too uncomfortable to have this conversation face-to-face. If that is the case, you may want to try mixed media. If you choose to write a letter, I would make the same “make it safe” statement from above then add, “I think the best way to express some of what I wanted to say is in writing—so I’ve written this out. But my hope is that we can discuss it afterward if you’re comfortable doing so. If not, then I understand and will be fine keeping things the way they are now.” You’ll notice that the last phrase tests whether you have surrendered your hope of controlling him or not. Be sure you have or your words will ring hollow.

I hope these ideas help. It sounds like you’ve fallen into the same pattern with your husband, so I hope these suggestions are a step toward creating the relationship you clearly want to have with him as well.

Sincerely,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,
I have some very tough news to deliver and would appreciate your help. My colleagues and I have to tell some good performers in our company that pay increases are only going to a select few of the highest performers. I know they’ll feel the compliment is disingenuous and will wonder why they weren’t one of the few who got the increase. Any advice?

Sincerely,
Can’t Spare a Dime

  Dear Can’t Spare,
Yikes. This is not a fun conversation to have. All of us who have had to disappoint, fire, or critique a dear colleague sympathize with you. When my partners and I looked at the gloomy economic predictions for 2009, we faced some similarly uncomfortable conversations. We did not know what the year would bring, but felt a need to be honest about the prospects while expressing optimism about our incredible team’s capacity to rise to the challenge. We held everyone’s wages flat for the first half of the year while we leaned into the headwinds hoping—and working—for the best.

Your message is even trickier because you have some discretion to offer increases. It’s easier to say, “No one gets a raise” than it is to say, “We’ve singled you out as someone specially qualified to not get a raise!”

Here’s how I would approach that tender message.

Why before what. Don’t share the policy until you’ve outlined the principles. Be sure you, as a management team, have made principle-based decisions; then share the principles. For example, you might say, “One of our principles in determining increases is that we must be market-competitive. Our only hope for getting through tough times is keeping the team together, and the truth is some positions are at greater risk of turnover due to wage discrepancies than others. It would be bad for all of us if we failed to address that and lost precious capacity in those priority areas. This is NOT about who we value more, it is a simple question of externally determined economics.”

Don’t say it if you don’t believe it. As you share the principles behind the policies, be sure you keep your integrity in check by describing only those that have been consistently applied. If, for example, you have cut special deals with certain people that violate principles you are comfortable stating publicly, then do not claim you have been consistent. If you do so, you will certainly be found out and will violate trust in a way you are unlikely to recover from.

Invite feedback without compromising authority. After sharing your principles and your policy, invite feedback. Be clear that the decision is already made and that it could not be made by consensus, but demonstrate your willingness to learn by allowing people to share how they see things similarly or differently. Don’t put yourself in a position of trying to convince anyone you’re right. Rather, begin by saying, “I’d like to just listen to your views. I know I won’t satisfy many of you, so I’m not going to try to make excuses or explain this away. But I care about your opinions and I’d like to hear them if you want to share. Perhaps, at a minimum, they may influence our decisions in the future.”

Acknowledge disagreement. It is likely that, following your candid description of principles, reasonable people will disagree—especially if the principles mean they get the short straw. Few people listen to such a description and conclude, “I see now that I am worth less than others. I am happy that they got the increase.” Your goal is not to garner applause. It is more modest. Your goal is to build trust by sharing your thinking and listening to that of others. After sharing the principles and policy, just listen. Acknowledge views that have merit without suggesting you’re revisiting the decision. Remind them this is a leadership decision and involved tough tradeoffs.

Ask for the long-term view. Conclude the discussion by orienting your employees to the future. Apologize for any hurt or disappointment you’ve caused, but do your best to engage them in contributing in a way that makes the pie bigger for all in the future.

Good luck with this very crucial conversation.

Joseph

Did you already blow your New Year’s resolution? You’re not alone. It turns out that fewer than one in twenty of us succeed at changing a longstanding habit that has kept us from advancing our career, improving a relationship, getting healthier, or becoming financially fit.

Generally, our change plans fall into one of two traps:

The Willpower Trap—Most of us fail to change because we believe the best predictor of our capacity to change is the quantity of willpower we possess. This common approach to change is all about learning to deny ourselves of a “thrill.” After a few weeks of torture, we succumb to temptation, conclude we lack the fortitude to make it stick, and fall back into bad habits until some life crisis forces us to get back on the cold turkey treadmill.

The Magic Bullet Trap—When we finally give up on willpower, we hope we can kill bad habits with a single new pill, surgery, gadget, or fad. For example, a friend loses weight, and we buy the same diet book. A neighbor gets out of debt with a new iPhone app, so we download it too. It’s only a matter of months before we’re back to bad habits and looking for the next quick fix.

The problem with the magic bullet approach is that it assumes one simple change will get us to overcome deeply intractable patterns of behavior. These change strategies fail because there isn’t one reason we’re doing what we’re doing—there are six sources of influence that shape our choices. Unless we address all six sources, we’re as likely to win at change as a person in a one-against-six tug-of-war.

Luckily, there’s a better way to influence personal change than either willpower or magic bullets. In fact, there’s a way to design personal change that makes you ten times more likely to succeed. This method is based on three simple but powerful ideas that help you understand and engage all of the sources of influence that affect your choices:

Escape the willpower trap. The first step to succeeding at change is realizing the problem is not that you lack will; it’s that you’re blind to the many forces that shape your behavior, and you’re outnumbered six to one by the forces you aren’t taking advantage of.

Become the scientist and the subject. Most of us shop for magic bullets as though someone else might have figured out the key to changing you. They haven’t. No one knows all of the unique dynamics that affect your relationships, career, finances, or health. You’ll have to embark on a scientific study of your own behavior to discover the key to changing you. The science of personal success teaches you an easy way of both understanding and engaging all six of the sources of influence that lead to rapid, profound, and sustainable change.

Turn bad days into good data. When you fail to change, the problem is not you—it’s your plan. When things don’t go well, the science of personal success helps you analyze what was missing from your plan, add it to what you already knew, and move forward to predictable success.

Change literally becomes inevitable when all of the sources of influence that provoke you into bad habits are turned in your favor. It’s time to leave behind failed dependence on willpower or magic-bullet solutions. The dismal record of those approaches speaks for itself. By learning the new science of personal success, it becomes possible to change anything.

Dear Crucial Skills,

I live in a very nice, quiet, upscale suburban neighborhood. A new family recently moved into one of the homes and is doing some things that distract from the value of the neighborhood. We have covenants that restrict what is permitted, but enforcing them could be difficult and possibly costly. How can I approach my neighbors personally and express my concerns without making an enemy out of them?

Sincerely,
Not in My Backyard

  Dear Backyard,

This will be the shortest answer I’ve ever written. Not because the issue isn’t crucial, but because your options are limited. I say this because I feel your pain!

With that said, here’s how I would approach this situation.

Talk to the right person. If you have a Home Owner’s Association, the association should inform your neighbor of the rules and the penalties for breaking these rules. They should then hold your neighbor accountable. If they aren’t doing this, your conversation should be with the association.

Do your research. You mentioned that your community has covenants, but you need to be sure the covenants are in force. Just because they are in the original neighborhood documents doesn’t mean they’ve been enforced over time. And if they have not been enforced, they may have no legal validity today.

Build the relationship first. If possible, you should build a relationship with your neighbor before you confront him or her about his or her distracting behavior. If your first conversation with the neighbor is about his or her transgression, it will be harder to create safety. To the degree you can help your neighbor unpack boxes, mow his or her lawn, or provide any other kind of assistance, he or she will be less likely to hear your concerns as attacks and characterize you as an enemy and more likely to actually change his or her behavior.

Be direct and polite. If there is no enforcement body and it’s up to you to speak up, then do so. But work on your story first. See them as reasonable people with different habits and perhaps no understanding of your covenants. Do whatever it takes to feel respectful and caring toward them before opening your mouth. Be friendly and polite, but don’t water down your message. If your bottom line is that this is a rule and they have to follow it, say that. For example, “Hey Pat, there’s a goofy thing in our covenants that you may not know about. Trust me, this isn’t a persnickety neighborhood and we’re glad you’re here, but I thought I should let you know before you get too settled so you’ll know how to address it . . .”

Finally, you should decide if this is important enough to you to deal with legally should they refuse to comply—or whether after your attempt at a crucial conversation you prefer to let it slide.

Good luck with your conversation. I’d tell you about mine but I worry about 140,000 of my closest friends finding out!

Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

It’s my job to influence the people in our company to improve quality—both of incoming raw material and of our outgoing products—and it’s hard.

We’ve got all the “head” stuff right—technical expertise and good quality tools—but we don’t have the heart. And to make it even more difficult, the people I need to influence don’t report to me and are too busy meeting other goals. So I can’t get them to commit to our quality goals—or worse, they commit with their mouths but then don’t deliver. Please help!

Signed,
Sick of Sigma

  Dear Sick,

This is a classic influence problem. And most companies never see it that way.

During the 80s, my partners and I worked with many of the storied U.S. manufacturers who lost their way because of poor quality. We saw stark differences in those who developed a true culture of quality and those who simply went through the motions. Much of that experience informed our writing of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Our hope in writing that book was to help leaders become conscious of the fact that leadership is skillful influence. It is the fundamental work of leaders to influence the behavior of people in an organization (it is not the role of HR, the quality department, the ethics department, etc.). And sadly, far too few leaders 1) realize this is their job or 2) have the skill to do so.

So congratulations on the fact that you don’t suffer from problem #1! However, it sounds as though your organization may have a chronic case of problem #2.

Few leaders have an articulated and systematic way of thinking about the insightful question you raise—how do I influence the behavior of a handful, a few hundred, or many thousands of people?

So let me frame your challenge in this way: your job is to influence the influencers. Your job is not, as you said above, to influence the people in your company. You can assist leaders in doing this, but attempting to do it yourself will only lead to frustration and failure.

Here are some suggestions for influencing the influencers:

Help leaders make a connection. Most leaders don’t care about influencing behavior because they don’t see its relevance to results. We’ve worked with some pretty cynical leaders over the years who dismiss influence work as “soft stuff,” but that attitude changes the instant they come to see a connection between behavior and the results they are sworn to achieve.

Too often, those of us who try to influence these influencers make vague arguments about empowerment, teamwork, trust and so forth that require leaders to make a leap of faith in some philosophical argument in order to engage in leading change. That leap isn’t necessary when they can see how concrete, specific, and measurable behaviors are the root of their frustrations.

For example, in one large manufacturing area we found an executive who was a little more accessible than others and we asked him to join us in interviews with the five departments in his factory that consistently produced the highest quality output as well as five average teams. We conducted hour-long focus groups in each of these teams to elicit the behaviors the team thought were helping or not helping.

At the conclusion, it was clear to this executive that one of the most damaging behaviors in the mediocre teams (and even more so in the poor performing teams) was a lack of peer accountability. He heard story after story of peers witnessing others shipping poor quality goods or skipping quality processes without so much as raising a finger, let alone a concern, and left a zealot about changing this behavior. Once he saw the connection between concrete “vital behaviors” and his critical results, he was spurred into action.

Focus on results. Your job is to help leaders see the connection between behavior and results. If you do this right, your senior leaders will begin to realize you have “mutual purpose.” They’ll see you aren’t just nagging them about quality, but that your interest is in improving results overall. Never let yourself get pigeonholed into a smaller agenda than that of the larger enterprise or you’ll lose influence with those you most need to engage. Always present your proposals in a way that demonstrates how your entire motivation aligns with that of your senior leadership team.

Influence with data. So let’s say you’re trying to involve some more accessible leaders in exploring the relationship between behavior and results—and they aren’t biting. You’re framing everything you present in terms of enterprise interests—and it’s still not working. You don’t have the formal authority to compel anyone to pay attention to your objectives. What can you do?

The best strategy you can use is to influence with data. Leaders’ mental agenda is set by the “data stream” they live within. The kinds of reports, measures, and indices served up to them regularly determine what they think about. That’s why leaders appear to have different “values” than frontline workers. Those on the front line accuse leaders of only caring about the bottom line, while those at the top can sneer at the frontline workers who don’t see the “big picture.” This predictable conflict doesn’t happen because DNA is different at the top than at the bottom. The problem isn’t one of IQ or values. It’s one of data. Senior leaders receive a steady stream of enterprise level data. Those on the front line are influenced by data about product, schedules, rework, or other in-the-trenches concerns. So if you want to change someone’s mental agenda, change the mix of data they receive.

One of the best examples of influencing without authority I’ve seen was led by Donald Hopkins—a brilliant but humble MD who wanted to get the attention of heads of state in twenty countries in order to eradicate Guinea worm disease. Most of these leaders didn’t care a whit about the Guinea worm because it was a rural disease. These leaders saw, thought, and cared most about urban issues—where the bulk of their populations lived. So Hopkins had to get their attention. He started by developing a nationwide measure of Guinea worm infections. When it appeared to be one villager here and another there, the scale was hidden. But when the president of Nigeria, for example, saw that there were 3.5 million infections each year in his country. He began to sit up. Then when he saw that his country was doing worse at addressing this than neighboring countries, he began to lean forward. From there, Hopkins was able to suggest ways he could influence change and remove this awful scourge.

I hope some of these ideas are useful as your work to influence your influencers. Your role is crucial in your organization—and influence is your primary skill set!

Best wishes,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

I am the CFO of a small business. Our president spends money in a way that many of the employees see as wasteful—for example, a landscaping project at the back of the parking lot. Most of the projects relate to the importance he places on the image of the business such as landscaping, updates to the interior, etc. I think this is due in part to a level of affluence and prestige he is accustomed to.

How do I talk to my boss about an issue he feels is very important but that lowers the morale of many employees? Ideally, I would like to see a process implemented where the top management team approves expenditures in excess of a set amount, but I don’t think he would be willing to go this direction.

Signed,
Following the Money

  Dear Following,

Your question brought back memories—both good and bad. Good because I can relate to your issue. Bad because my advice might be colored by the specifics of my own situation. So with that warning, here goes my walk through memory lane with you!

I once consulted with the president of a very large organization who was accused of the same thing. After taking charge, he began a major face-lift of the company’s facilities at the same time the organization faced major revenue declines and likely layoffs. While people speculated about how many thousands of employees would lose their jobs, they watched the company lobby become a marketing masterpiece of high-tech interactive displays and pricey designer appointments. While they worried about paying their mortgages, they saw the simple greenery lining the approach to the facility torn out and replaced with full-grown, non-native, high-maintenance flora. The parking lot was spruced up, the guard booths redesigned, and on and on. Employees began bitterly describing the effort as a pure ego trip for the sophisticated boss.

While your crucial conversation may have much different issues at play, I’ll offer a few things I learned from this similar situation.

One person’s story can be another’s strategy. The first is a caution. The problem here could be less your boss’s ego than your judgment. It could be that, in his mind, these investments are a very smart decision for the company that he believes will provide a great return to shareholders. In my situation, this was exactly the case. High-end customers regularly visited the facility and the president concluded it was important to create an image that supported their high tech and sophisticated brand. A frumpy lobby and weedy grass conflicted with this image. In fact, the president argued the only way to save jobs was to increase revenues—which meant, in part, positioning the company as a leading-edge player. He felt that if they had not made these investments, they would have appeared to be on the decline.

Now, reasonable people can disagree on either this principle or on the amount spent on the principle. But if you tell yourself a story that the primary reason for your president’s expenditures is ego or detachment from the way real people live, you might feed conflict and resentment rather than understanding and unity in how you influence others who are critical of the president’s policy. I worry you are heading down this path when you attribute his fiscal bias to his personal affluence. Choosing to see it this way sets this up as a character issue when it doesn’t have to be.

Likewise, when you hold this crucial conversation, if the story in your head is that this is about ego, your resentment and sense of moral superiority may color your approach and undermine your effectiveness. It’s much better to come from a story that says, “I think there is merit in this strategy, but there is more merit in spending elsewhere.” This will tend to make the conversation about different assumptions rather than different values—a much easier conversation to hold.

Dialogue is not decision making. I applaud your desire to be a good CFO. I assume from your description of the size of the company that you report to the president, not to a board. If that is so, then your job is to be a strong financial partner to the president, so your question is a mark of your integrity to that role. Being a great CFO means challenging his judgments at times—which is precisely what you are preparing to do. However, be sure you prepare for the fact that you may need to change if he doesn’t. Ultimately, this decision is his and not yours. In fact, if you make a strong case for redirecting capital in other directions and fail to persuade him, there is a risk that your judgments about his motives for the spending policy could subtly mix with your disappointment at “losing” and cause you to feel even more judgmental about his legitimately different point of view. You risk making it an issue of “who is better and who is worse” rather than “what policy is best for the company.”

Before you begin the conversation, Start with Heart. Erase any hope of “winning” or “being right” from your gut. Go in for the sole purpose of providing honest counsel, then be a loyal subordinate if he disagrees. Drop your judgments and accept that you are reasonable people who disagree. Getting to dialogue does not mean you get to make the decision.

Motivate with natural consequences. It sounds like you have two reasons for speaking up. The first is that you disagree with the president’s judgments. The second is that you see it having a negative effect on morale. If the second is truly an issue, that is an entirely separate but equally crucial conversation. If the spending policies are alienating staff, the president should be aware of that. In fact, if you share this information in a safe way with him it may also persuade him to temper his policy. But do not “use” this information to get him to do that. This second conversation is not about whether the policy is right or not. Strategy is not a popularity contest with employees, it’s leaders’ judgment about what is best for the company. And at times (as in my case above), that means doing things people don’t like in order to produce the best long-term result. This second conversation is about leadership not spending. Your goal is to bring the moral issue to his attention and make recommendations for influencing people to help them understand and support the direction more willingly. Period. If the president uses this issue as a reason to question his decision, that’s his personal prerogative.

Call foolishness “foolishness.” Finally, if after reflecting on all these points you truly believe his policy is damaging and self-serving, then you need to have two conversations. The first is with him. You need to make the strongest case possible about demonstrating why this spending is measurably damaging the company.

The second conversation is with yourself—about whether you’re willing to be part of incompetence or malfeasance if this issue rises to that level. From your question, it doesn’t sound as though it does—but I’d be letting you down if I didn’t challenge you to call it what it is if this is the proper characterization.

In my honest consideration, one of VitalSmarts’ greatest assets is our CFO, Yan, who I believe is the best CFO we could possibly have. She has created a culture of financial accountability that has fueled our success for fifteen years. It sounds like you are working to play the same role in your company and I applaud your integrity.

Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

Help! I am the wife of a hoarder. My husband buys and keeps everything. He has a hobby room, garage, and a rented storage unit full of stuff, including twenty-year-old key chains from vendor booths, console TVs from the 1970s, empty boxes, old magazines, plastic silverware, and anything others don’t want or need. It is in no particular order and the spaces are chaotic and embarrassing to the rest of the family. His space at work is in the same condition!

I spoke to him about cleaning up, sorting through, and getting rid of unnecessary items with no success. Do you have any advice on how to approach this?

Signed,
Stuffed Full

  Dear Stuffed,

Yes, I have advice!

Before I start, please note that my response won’t give you specifics on dealing with hoarding—which is a psychological problem with its own characteristics and about which I am not an expert. I hope some of what I’ve written helps you think about the common challenge every reader of this newsletter faces—the challenge of influencing those we love to change habits that are far larger than a crucial conversation.

This is not a Crucial Conversations issue, it’s an influence problem.

Crucial conversations are great at influencing change when all it takes to change is surfacing an issue and providing straightforward advice and accountability. We have spent twenty-five years studying and writing about these methods because they are often the simplest step forward and the step people are most reluctant and incapable of taking.

But sometimes the behavior won’t yield to a ten-minute conversation and a bit of follow up. For example, a dear friend recently suffered his third heart attack. After his first, his doctor counseled him to change his eating habits, exercise more, and take blood pressure medication. Terrified of the heart attack, he complied with this advice. For a while. But within a few months, he was eating cheesy burritos, channel surfing, and failing to take his medication. Then came the second heart attack. And the second recommitment to changing his behavior. And the second descent into old ways. And so on.

As all this happened, his children and wife had many crucial conversations with him—pleading with him to change, reminding him of how they had almost lost him. But the more they tried to help, the more resentful he became. They became nags, and rather than influence change, they provoked his resistance to change.

When we treat an influence problem as a crucial conversation, we not only fail to produce change, we can (with all the best intentions in the world) become nags in the process. Perhaps you haven’t crossed the “nag” line yet, but if you continue down this path, it is most likely coming!

So how do you escape this trap?

Recognize the size of the problem. The problem is not only that your husband lacks the will to change. The problem is that he is blind and outnumbered. And so are you! He’s blind to how many sources of influence are sustaining his hoarding habit. And he’s outnumbered because there are far more sources working against him than for him.

We often think overcoming a habit like hoarding is just about personal motivation (The first source of influence), but it’s not. It’s also about personal ability (the second source of influence). Your husband likely has powerful impulses that drive him toward this behavior and lacks the skills he needs to retrain those impulses. He needs coaching and mentoring—and maybe even professional help—not just encouragement. If you try to motivate someone who is unable, the result is not change but depression. If you want to help him increase his ability to change, you’ll need to identify the strategies people use to successfully escape hoarding.

Please note that this is an example of just one of the six sources of influence that are likely at play here. Make a study of the six sources of influence and reflect on which are part of the problem. Our forthcoming book, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success, will be a useful tool in helping you explore all six sources in the context of personal change.

Control your own behavior. The most powerful human impulse is the need for control. People resist any attempt to constrain or force their behavior. Untold millions have gone to war and given their lives rather than submit to tyranny. We do the same, even when defending our autonomy to behave badly.

If you want to increase your influence, give up any desire to control your husband’s behavior. In fact, the first question you should ask yourself is, “How can I prepare myself for this behavior to continue forever?” You need to get to the point that you decide how you will control your own choices without centering your life on his choices. If, in the extreme case, you would prefer to live without him rather than with his hoarding, you need to be clear on that. If you can cope with the hoarding and would prefer to continue the marriage, lovingly, maturely, and respectfully set boundaries to make it work. Don’t “use” these boundaries as a way to manipulate him.

Help him motivate himself. The most common question we’re asked by those trying to influence a loved one is, “How can I help them want to change?” When it comes to personal change, the answer is, you can’t. However, you can influence their personal motivation in two ways:

Stop standing between him and consequences. Direct experience is life’s great teacher, but we often undermine people’s motivation to change by standing between them and the natural consequences they would otherwise feel. For example, a drug addict who is financially supported by those who want him to change is protected from the financial misery that might help him connect his choices with consequences he doesn’t like. The first thing you and your family can do is examine the ways in which you enable your husband’s actions by not letting him experience the natural consequences of this habit. If you are doing this, find a healthy way to change. If the change will be jarring to your husband, be sure to have a crucial conversation to help him understand what you will change and why.

Help him find his own reasons to change. With most bad habits, people have moments of clarity. Moments when we feel a desire to change. Skillful influencers can help others extend the potency of these moments by reacting with a motivational interview rather than a motivational speech. A motivational interview is a simple, structured way to help others explore and crystallize their own reasons to change and plan for doing so rather than taking control and forcing our own agenda on them. How you react during small moments of motivation can either help others capitalize on them or overpower them with your own well-intended but overwhelming motivations.

Again, I am not an expert on hoarding, nor is this a complete plan for change. However, I hope some of these insights help in the challenge of influencing a loved one to change potentially destructive behavior.

Best wishes—and please let me know what you learn about influence in the coming months and years.

Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

The new skills I learned from your training have been priceless to me. I regularly come away from conversations feeling proud of my own conduct, but I’m getting mixed reactions from others. I’m finding that even when I’m at my best people resist having crucial conversations with me. Sometimes my efforts are met with apathy.

How do I handle those people who don’t seem to have an interest in improving working relationships? I keep watching your demonstration videos, but I’m just not getting the same reaction from my colleagues in my real-life crucial conversations. Please help!

Signed,
Dancing Alone

  Dear Dancing,

Wouldn’t life be wonderful if everyone responded the way they do in videos? If only they’d let us write their script for them! Darned humans.

I’m sorry you’re not yet getting the results you want from applying your crucial conversations skills. I’m impressed with your sincerity and trust that if you continue to “Work on Me First,” you’ll find options to help you gain greater influence in positive ways.

I always struggle to answer questions people ask me about why others don’t respond, because the “truth” is probably so specific to their situation and I have no visibility into what’s truly going on beyond the short description I get from them. The same is true in your case, so I’m going to offer you a shotgun answer—hoping some fragment of what I say might hit a target you care about.

I can think of four broad reasons someone might not respond positively to your attempt to hold a crucial conversation with him or her. I’d encourage you to reflect on each and examine whether one or more might be contributing to your challenges.

1. Lack of safety. You’ve already highlighted this one. The other person may either not believe you care about his or her interests or feel disrespected in some way. I won’t dwell much on this one because you seem to be exploring it pretty skillfully.

2. Lack of time. We sometimes differentiate between situational safety and relational safety. Situational safety means that in this conversation someone doesn’t feel safe with you. The solution to this is to use your safety building skills.

Relational safety means that, over a sustained period of time, the other person has concluded that you either don’t respect him or her or don’t care about his or her interests. This problem won’t yield to the simple application of a few skills in a single conversation, but it can begin there. It can begin with acknowledging how you may have hurt safety and with your unilateral commitment to change your behavior in the future. That crucial conversation will be a good start, but safety won’t be fully restored until you change your behavior. Over time, you’ll find that your colleagues feel safer with you and engage more trustingly in your crucial conversations.

3. Lack of hope. Sometimes people don’t engage because they don’t think it will change anything. Perhaps they’ve had experiences with you in the past where they felt like the loser in the conversation—and had no alternate experiences where they felt that it served their needs to invest in the conversation. Let’s face it; a crucial conversation takes effort, and who wants to make that kind of emotional investment if it doesn’t do them good? If you think your colleagues might be in this camp, the way out is the opposite of the way in. You’ll have to find ways of demonstrating your openness to their needs and views in smaller conversations. Over time, their hope will be restored that conversations with you can benefit them.

4. Lack of upside. Another possibility is that others feel fine about having some crucial conversations with you. They may even hope that talking about tough things with you is productive—on some topics. But this crucial conversation—the one you keep trying to tee up—holds no upside for them. In this case, you have a mutual purpose problem, and the crucial conversation you need to hold is one in which you help them see the significant benefits of engaging in dialogue with you.

5. Fatigue. There are some people with whom crucial conversations become a daily occurrence. It seems like there is always some tumultuous and emotionally draining issue that they need to address. If you fall into this category, people might see you as a high-maintenance relationship and begin to avoid you. They feel weary when they see you and just don’t want to work themselves up for the chore of dealing with yet another tough conversation.

If this is the case, then you’ve got two challenges. First, you’ll need to rebuild your relational safety by creating dozens of nourishing interactions—experiences others will feel are fun, light, enjoyable, or rewarding. If the work required in a relationship far exceeds the fun, people start to think of you as medicine instead of pleasure—they’ll take you when they have to, but not when they can avoid it. You’ll need to change their perception by changing the mix of interactions they have with you.

Second, you may want to read the Choose What and If chapter of Crucial Confrontations. This chapter gives a good treatment of when we should—and should not—hold an emotionally challenging conversation with others. You may have fallen into the habit of dealing with everything rather than letting some issues slide—and expanding what we call your zone of acceptability. A bit more tolerance and patience may help you become easier to talk with.

I hope these ideas are useful as you reflect on what you can do to create the results that are important to you. And, if all of these fail, please remember our bottom line statement about crucial conversations: the skills don’t guarantee everyone will behave the way you want. They just increase the likelihood that you’ll be heard. At some point, it’s perfectly appropriate to say, “I’ve done my best. And I’m done!”

Best wishes,
Joseph

Dear Crucial Skills,

Our company is going through tough times in the midst of the current financial downturn. We are not downsizing but have been instructed to cut expenses, work more efficiently, and basically do more with less. We have implemented many initiatives—including staffing to workload, reducing overtime, and purchasing more efficiently. All of these initiatives have caused a decrease in employee morale and management is now seen as the enemy.

We have tried to communicate the reasons we are making these changes—including trying to avoid layoffs—yet the anger and overall unhappiness continues. What more can we do?

Signed,
Misunderstood

  Dear Misunderstood,

First of all, let me set your mind at ease that you are normal. And your employees are normal. And that’s the problem.

There’s nothing more normal than resenting those whose decisions create pain or disappointment for you. In fact, that very instinct has been key to the survival of our species for millennia. Evolutionary biologists explain that the human tendency to rationalize our pain by blaming others is inherited from a time when our survival was dependent on being suspicious of those around us. When you and I meet a stranger for the first time, we are hard wired to assess two things: 1) Do they mean me harm? and 2) Are they capable of carrying it out? By perpetually scanning our environment for threats, we live to enjoy another day.

However, in the last couple of hundred years, this tendency became very maladaptive. In complex organizational life, our knee-jerk tendency to assign bad motives to those who inconvenience us creates rampant mistrust, dysfunctional conflict, and as you point out, resentful disengagement. All of that is a long way of saying, welcome to the human race.

It’s also a way of leading to my main point: overcoming this natural tendency requires extraordinarily skillful influence—the kind few leaders practice. Most leaders harbor a naïve hope that a few PowerPoint slides and a perky e-mail or two will overcome this massive genetic inertia toward the negative. Fat chance.

Your only hope—as we describe in Influencer—is to change how you change minds. Here’s how.

1. Discard verbal persuasion. Most of our influence attempts in these circumstances value efficiency over effectiveness. We hope that if we simply reason with people and share logical information they will see the wisdom of our decisions. Give it up. That’s just not going to happen. When you cut costs by reducing people’s overtime, decreasing their discretion and forcing them into unfamiliar tasks, they’re going to want someone to blame. And there is a short list of suspects. You can’t talk them out of conclusions they are hard wired to draw.

2. Create an experience. Your hope lies in engaging your employees in the problem before you present a solution. Before they will appreciate the insoluble tradeoffs you faced as you tried to make humane decisions, you’ll have to put them in the exact emotional and intellectual position you were in and give them the opportunity to mentally appreciate the predicament. And this isn’t the work of a five-minute announcement. You need to set up the problem, involve them in struggling to find solutions, help them confront their simplistic tendencies, then agonize all over again about additional options.

For example, I worked with a large aerospace company that had to make drastic changes in benefits in order to remain competitive. The leaders knew the decisions would be unpopular but wanted to help people understand they did not make the decision exclusively on behalf of shareholder interests. So they gathered groups of opinion leaders from across the company and treated them to the same agonizing set of tradeoffs they had faced. At the end of these three-hour sessions, they asked the group to make a recommendation that satisfied all the criteria the leaders had to address. Every one of the opinion leader sessions ended with a highly split vote about what to do. After a half dozen of these sessions, the story went out through the grapevine that “This was a really tough decision and our leaders did their best to get it right for us and all our stakeholders.” There was hardly a complaint when the tough changes came down—because key employees were not given a lecture, they were given an experience.

If you want to create understanding, you need to create the problem in people’s minds before you present the solution. They need to experience it, own it, play with alternatives, then feel the weight of balancing the tough tradeoffs.

Now let me be clear, I am not suggesting that leaders abdicate decision making. I am not attempting to describe a process for democratic deliberation in organizations that must make fast-paced decisions. The process used at the aerospace company gave employees an opportunity to critique a decision that was already made. If leaders had the time, they might have used this as a consultative process as well as to give them input. But in the end, they would have still made the call.

I applaud your efforts to analyze what you have done well and what you could improve. It is clear that you have a deep concern about the welfare and sentiments of your team. I’m confident that, with continued reflection, you’ll increase your influence for good.

Warmly,
Joseph