HOW TO BE UNDERSTOOD AND INFLUENCE OTHERS

PAUSE A MOMENT

LONE RANGER OR TEAM PLAYER?

I have a couple of questions for you, about you – questions you might usefully like to assume you do not know the full answers for – yet...

1. How well are you understood by others, and how well are you able to read what it is that others are trying (not) to tell you?
2. How well are you able to influence others to see things, at least temporarily, from your point of view.

Hello. This is Pause a Moment and I'm Barrie Barkla. Tonight it is my kindly intention to show you, if you're up for it, another way of looking at yourself and others, that may answer some of your questions about why things happen to you the way that they do. Are you interested? Yes? OK, let's go....

[All Come Together – Prinnie & Mahalia]

We’re looking tonight at one particular set of background operating systems that are chugging away right now in the basement of our minds. These operating systems filter our perceptions, govern our choices and decisions and determine the ways we communicate and attempt to influence our world. In particular tonight, we’re going to examine how people sort themselves by social orientation, and how knowing this stuff can help you function with others, happily and fruitfully.

The principles go back to some particular skills I learned as a farm boy on the backblocks of central Victoria, skills needed for building teams of horses so that they can work effectively together to get a big and complex job done. In later years I graduated from horses to people, but found many of the principles quite similar. 

For instance, I found I may have the right people in front of me on a particular project, but if I put them into the wrong slots, I might just have well have hired the wrong people – the consequences will be similar. On other projects, where I have no say in selecting the people, the question remains – “How do I assemble this bunch so that everyone gets their real needs met in the best possible way? Similarly, if you are applying for a position on a team, you may well have turned up to the right address, but if you're applying for a job for which you are not suited, or you are put in the wrong slot by some dickhead with ambition, degrees and diplomas but no actual ability or people-sense, you are not going to be happy and fulfilled.

Our Predominant Social Orientation

Sometimes interactions with another human being will be primarily in terms of what’s in it for me personally; what does this person want, and is it going to be good or bad for me? What do I want, and is this person/group going to be able to deliver?

Some other interactions happen in a climate of what I can do for others; still others fall into a looser, more fluid context of what I can do for myself and others.

So, in this we find ourselves on a triangular playing field – at one apex is Self/Process orientation, another apex is Other/Relationship orientation, and the third is a Self-and-Other mix of the two. 

Of course, people don’t usually fall into one extreme of the triangle or another. But for the purposes of illustration, if you sort only by Self, you can become a task-oriented, a geek or (negatively) a self-absorbed, self-important, egotistic psychopath. If you sort only by others, you become a Carer, mentor, or (negatively) a self-denying Sacrificer. If you sort by self AND others, you become a Sharer, or (negatively) an unfocused drop-kick. Of course I am generalising and over-simplifying here but, bear with me please -- I think you'll find this enlightening if you're trying to understand why some people have volunteers lining up to work with them while others find people looking the other way or have other commitments when the call goes out.

If you’re involved in interacting with people, wouldn’t you want to know where the person you're relating with fits on this triangular scale? Well, yes. But first you have to tell the truth to yourself about where you fit on the triangular scale. If you don't get that right, where others fit won't matter.

[Come Fly With Me – 101 Strings Orchestra]

Not long ago a major airline found that 95 percent of its complaints involved 5 percent of its employees. After profiling, it was found that these 5 percent sorted themselves strongly by Self; they were most interested in the processes, the nuts-and-bolts of their work, and looking out for themselves in the process, ahead of the effect they were having on others. They were more interested in efficiency and self-satisfaction than effectiveness. As others of us know when you're dealing with people, humans-being do not function efficiently, like robots; there are other forces that come into play. Does that mean that the Self-sorters were poor employees? Yes, and no. They were mostly smart, hardworking, and sometimes calculatedly congenial in what they were trained to do, but not very effective at actually connecting with people.

So what did the airline do? It replaced them with people who sorted by Others. How did they find them? The company did something very smart; they identified people who sort by Others through group interviews, in which prospective employees were asked in a group session to tell the group why they wanted to work for the airline. The employees thought they were being judged by the answers they gave in front of the group, when in fact they were being judged by their behavior as audience while others had the floor. That is, individuals who paid the most attention and gave the most eye contact, smiles, or support to the person who was doing the speaking at the time, were given the highest rating, while those who paid little or no attention and were in their own world while others were talking were considered to be primarily self-sorting and were not hired. The company’s complaint ratio dropped over 80 percent as a result of this transformation. I also learned that I can find out more about a person by watching them while they're supposed to be listening than while they're talking

[You Move Me – Shani Judd-Diehl]

How can you accurately evaluate a person's potential if you don’t know what motivates him? How can you match the job you have available with the correct person in terms of required skills, ability to learn, and internal makeup? A lot of very smart people spend their careers totally frustrated because they don't know themselves, and have chosen jobs that don’t make the best use of their inherent capabilities. That doesn't invalidate them: a valuable asset in one context can be a liability in another. This is the basis of what's known as The Peter Principle – the management theory which suggests that organisations risk filling management roles with people who are incompetent if they promote those who are performing well at their current role, rather than those who have proven abilities at the intended role. It is named after Laurence J. Peter who co-authored with Raymond Hull the 1969 humorous book The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. They suggest that people will tend to be promoted until they reach their "position of incompetence". It happened to me once, when I was moved from Marketing Director (successful) to Managing Director. Big mistake. Fortunately, I learned from it and haven't (so far) fallen into that ego trap since.

[You Move Me – Chris Botti]

In a service business, like an airline, you obviously need people who sort by Others at the service desk and in your cabin crew. If you’re hiring an auditor, though, you might want someone who would sort by Self. I went to a doctor's surgery the other day to find the usual receptionist was away, and the bookkeeper was filling in taking care of the patients. It wasn't a pleasant place to be. But that really wasn't the bookeeper's fault.

How many times have you dealt with someone who left you in a confused state because he did his job well intellectually but communicated poorly emotionally? It’s like a doctor who sorts strongly by self (wickedly portrayed by Martin Clunes in the TV comedy “Doc Martin”). He may be a brilliant diagnostician, but his bedside manner is non-existent. Unless you feel someone like a doctor cares about you, he won’t be totally effective. In fact, someone like that would probably be better off as a researcher than as a clinician.

Putting yourself in the right job, and putting other people in the appropriate job remains one of the biggest problems in business. But it’s a problem that could be dealt with if people knew how to evaluate the ways that each job applicant processes information.

At this point, it’s worth asking, "Are you better off moving toward certain things rather than away from other situations?" Perhaps. Would the world be a better place if people sorted more by Others and less by Self? Possibly. But we do have to start dealing with life the way it is, not the way we wish it were. That hasn't made us any happier. For example, you may wish your teenage son or daughter moved towards things rather than away. But that isn't going to happen: the teen years are that scary time when “moving away” becomes an imperative, and it happens often without a solid sense of what to move towards. It's a time of experimentation to find out what works and what doesn't, for teens and parents both.

If you want to effectively communicate with your teens, you have to do it in a way that works, not in a way that plays to your idea of how it should work. Your children are not you; they are developing as independent beings, like it or not. The key is to observe The Person as awarefully as possible, listen to what he says, what sorts of metaphors he uses, what his physiology reveals, when he’s attentive, and when he’s bored.

People gradually reveal their inner programming on a consistent, ongoing basis. If you're committed to Awareness, it doesn’t take much concentrated study to figure out what people’s tendencies might be or how they are sorting at the moment. But if you're getting through your life in some sort of self-righteous trance in the company of similar zombies who'll be nice to you – you're just living out The Peter Principle for yourself.

[Wake Up! – Deni Hines & James Morrison]

If you want to know if certain people sort by Self or Others, see how much genuine, empathetic attention they pay to other people. Do they lean toward them and have facial expressions that naturally reflect concern for what others are saying (Other-oriented), or do they lean back and remain bored, blank, detached or unresponsive (Self-oriented)? Is their body langauge including or excluding? Learn to tell the difference between genuine concern of one person for another, and fake sympathy.

Look, everyone sorts by Self some of the time, and there are times when it’s important to do so. It's also important for you to know – a) under what circumstances you're most likely to go Self-ish, and – b) when you are doing it, and to become aware of how being self-centred is limiting your freedom to choose and perhaps respond more appropriately. The key to being effective in whatever you're doing is to know what style you do more consistently, and whether your default sorting procedure is enabling you to produce, or hindering you from, getting the results you desire. As Dr. Phil says – “How's it working for you?”

[Change – Kate Ceberano]

It's your story. Unfinished. Like any dream, you can change anything you like, when you like. Re-write it completely if you wish. Start now.

[Starting Here, Starting Now – Barbra Streisand]