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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Michael Skapinker is an FT contributing editor and the author of ‘Inside the Leaders’ Club: How top companies deal with pressing business issues’
When I began a training course to become a counsellor, my classmates told me my nearly four decades in journalism were peeking through. In our “fishbowls” — simulated therapy sessions observed by the class — they said my counselling style was markedly interrogatory. There was an emphasis on facts: what had happened, why and when, rather than on how my client, played by a fellow-student, felt.
“Facts are your comfort zone,” one of the class members told me. It was an acute observation. I needed to learn to listen, not just to my clients’ words but to the emotions behind them. Practising now as a careers and retirement counsellor, I often see this workplace clash between facts and emotions, and the bewilderment of managers dealing with it.
Facts matter in the workplace: sales figures, measured customer preferences and market share. But I remember my frustration as a manager when I presented my team with the facts and explained the strategy we would pursue as a result, only to see them go back to what they were doing before.
You can, as a boss, give people direct orders: you have power over their pay, promotion prospects and whether they continue to have a job. But “do as I say” often results in sullen obedience or furtive undermining. In their book Rapport: The Four Ways to Read People, Emily Alison and Laurence Alison call such behaviour “malicious compliance” or “workplace deviance”.
The Alisons, psychology academics at Liverpool university (who happen to be married), research how to interrogate terrorist suspects, dangerous criminals, or perpetrators of domestic violence. But I was struck by the relevance of their findings to the workplace, and particularly the interplay between facts and emotions.
In the book, Emily Alison describes an incident early in her studies, when she accompanied a diminutive US policewoman to a homeless shelter where a worker was being harassed by her drunken ex-boyfriend. The staff had locked themselves and the residents in, while the man outside threatened murder and arson. The police officer asked him to tell her what was happening. He said his ex-partner was refusing to answer his calls or to come out and talk to him. “I get it — you feel upset and that made you pretty desperate,” the officer said to the man. “Love makes people act a little crazy sometimes.” But, she added, he was making criminal threats. She carried on speaking for about 10 minutes, as the man quietened down and then, as her back-up colleagues arrived, she said: “Now, you know I’ve got to take you in.” After a pause, he said: “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
The Alisons use the acronym “hear” — honesty, empathy, autonomy and reflection — to describe what was happening. The police officer had used all four: honesty about having to arrest the man, empathising with his frustration, giving him the autonomy to decide whether to quieten down and reflecting his words back to him.
How can we apply this to the everyday workplace? Can we learn to present the facts while engaging with our teams’ emotions? By following the Alisons’ example we can be honest about the realities, while empathising with people’s difficulties.
When people are told to switch direction at work, for example, they might perceive it as criticism that they have been doing something wrong. Emily Alison says one way to deal with this is to tell staff that, as we learn more, we need to change the way we work, much as researchers do in scientific advances, such as the understanding of DNA.
But we also have to empathise with how change feels. Empathy, in the Alisons’ words, is not just putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, but in their heads. Why do they feel the way they do? And the route to discovering that, Emily Alison tells me, is “professional curiosity”: asking people what is happening and reflecting back what they say.
We can also give people autonomy by outlining the goal and allowing them to decide on the best ways to get there. People engaged directly in a task usually understand the intricacies better than leaders do. They may persuade us that the facts we started with were wrong, the assumptions that led to our conclusions flawed. To cope with this, we need to add humility to the lessons above. When the facts change, we have to be ready to change our minds. To many leaders, that is a humiliation. But to their followers, an admission of fault usually wins respect and is a way to ensure their future engagement, both practically and emotionally.
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