Likeability

Who Told You That Everybody Was Going to Like You?

October 24, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

From investor Joshua Kennon‘s perspectives on being disliked,

Years ago, a family member had to deal with a work colleague who utterly despised her to the point this colleague couldn’t conceal their disdain.

Exasperated, my family member called the prayer line of a televangelist and pleaded, “Please pray with me to have God to change this coworker’s heart so they like me. I’m friends with everybody. There’s no reason they hate me so much.”

The lady on the other end of the phone was quiet for a moment. When she finally spoke, she asked, “Who told you that everybody was going to like you? You weren’t promised that. In this world, there are going to be people who hate you for one reason or another, perhaps even without justification. As long as you’ve examined yourself and are sure it’s not something you’re doing wrong, if you’ll let me, I’d instead like to pray with you that God helps you find peace with the situation so it doesn’t steal your joy and you can move on to more edifying things.”

If others’ disapproval tends to nurture your self-dissatisfactions, question it. If you’ve made a mistake, try to right the wrong. Learn from it, pardon yourself, and move ahead.

If your quest for others’ approval is rooted in insecurity, remind yourself that your contentment in life cannot spring from other people’s perceptions of you; it has to come from an inner scorecard. Warren Buffett famously said, “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”

Striving to live your life to satisfy others always is an impossible aspiration. You’ll wind up losing your sense of individuality in the quest to conform to others’ expectations. “It is our very search for perfection outside ourselves that causes our suffering,” warned the Buddha.

Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression

October 10, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (1974,) the eminent University of Chicago historian William McNeill outlined how the Venetian Republic shaped European history. Describing the notion of trans-cultural diffusion, he wrote,

When a group of men encounter a commodity, technique, or idea that seems superior to what they had previously known, they will try to acquire and make their own whatever they perceive to be superior, but only as long as this does not seem to endanger other values they hold dear.

University of Washington’s Roger Soder quotes McNeill’s remarks in The Language of Leadership (2001) and supplies a case in point:

This is best illustrated by the technique of Jesuits who brought “new math” [including astronomy and mechanics] to China in the 1600s. They created the myth that the new Western mathematics had in fact evolved out of ancient Chinese ideas. The new ideas, they felt, would be accepted much more readily if they were seen as a natural progression of previously accepted methods.

That’s an important lesson on how to sell change: as a natural progression of the status quo.

Idea for Impact: People find themselves unable or unwilling to make fundamental changes in their lives. They tend to be particularly unwelcoming of ideas that they fear will alienate them from their core values. Tread delicately if you want effective change.

Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?

September 10, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Yes, you must develop the habit of excellence, even in little matters. However, the price of perfection can be prohibitive. A maniacal emphasis on excellence can lead to a blind obsession that can drain productivity.

If you’re a manager, insisting on perfection everywhere can hurt workplace morale, reduce employee engagement, and decrease opportunities for innovation and change.

Managers too often call for excellence in the small things because they’re unable to prioritize what matters most. These managers tend to be the ones who also struggle with delegation—given their exacting standards, it makes sense that they would have difficulty letting others do their job. And because monitoring people’s efforts is often time-consuming and difficult, perfectionist managers tend to just decide that it’s easier and quicker to do the job themselves.

Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence and Perfectionism? The smart managers I know of accomplish great things because they often have a “sixth sense” that reminds them that some activities matter more than others do and therefore merit more attention.

They give themselves permission to produce second-rate work on the road to doing a first-rate job.

They are very selective about when they push their teams to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when it’s entirely justified.

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

Expecting excellence in every detail uses up a lot of bandwidth.

Get comfortable with a little bit of lower quality now and then. Less-than-excellent is a satisfactory outcome. As the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham once warned, “only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

Making a conscious decision about where excellence matters and where it doesn’t is particularly pertinent to managerial success.

In the real world of limited resources, perfection is hard to achieve. The quest for excellence sucks up time, energy, and money that could generate better results elsewhere.

Managers, step back and look at the whole picture. You don’t have enough resources to do everything, so commit them where they’ll bring the greatest overall improvement (use the lens of opportunity costs.)

Have exacting standards, but don’t demand excellence in every idea.

Use this Technique to Praise At Least Three People Every Day

July 2, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Scott Adams, the American cartoonist who created Dilbert, writes in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013),

Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

Lavish Praise on People and They’ll Flourish

In his masterful self-help manual, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Dale Carnegie quotes the American steel magnate Charles M Schwab who was renowned for his people skills,

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people, the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. …

I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise. …

I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.

Carnegie suggests, “Be lavish with praise, but only in a genuine way … remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. But nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery.”

How to Praise No Less Than Three People Every Day

Here’s a simple, effective technique to unleash the power of praise and honest appreciation:

Start each day with three coins in your left pocket.
Transfer one coin to your right pocket each time you praise someone or remark about something favorably. See my previous article on how to recognize people in six easy steps.
Make sure that you have all the three coins in your right pocket by the end of the day, but don’t give compliments willy-nilly.

Avoid flattery and pretentiousness, especially when someone thinks that they truly don’t deserve the praise. As well, don’t undercut praise with criticism (as in a sandwich feedback.)

Idea for Impact: If you can’t be bothered with opportunities to elevate others’ day with a few simple words of appreciation, perhaps you’re just too insecure or emotional stingy. Even if praise is directed on others, it emphasizes your own good character—it shows you’re can go beyond self-absorption in the self-consumed society that we live in.

How to Make Others Feel They Owe You One: Reciprocity and Social Influence

September 18, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Reciprocity, as described below, is a manipulative technique. My aim for this article is twofold: firstly, it sensitizes you to one of the many things people can do to get you to do their bidding. Secondly, reciprocity is a handy technique for those circumstances where certain ends can justify certain means.

Reciprocity is treating other people as they treat you, or for the purpose of this article, as you wish to be treated—specifically with the expectation that they will reciprocate your favor in the future.

In other words, reciprocity is a sneaky trick that permits deliberate interpersonal influence. Do something for other people and they will be willing to do something for you, partly because they’ll be uncomfortable feeling indebted to you.

The concept of reciprocity is ingrained in human nature. As part of our upbringing, we are taught to give something back to people who give us something. Reciprocity and cooperation are the underpinnings of a civilized society—they allow us to help people who need it and to hope that they will help us when we need it. Research suggests that the desire to repay goodwill is hard-wired in the human brain.

Jack Schafer’s The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over (2015) offers a clever technique to put reciprocity into action:

The next time someone thanks you for something, don’t say, “You’re welcome.” Instead, say, “I know you’d do the same thing for me.” This response invokes reciprocity. The other person is now predisposed to help you when you ask them for a favor.

The effects of goodwill are short-lived. A long-forgotten reputation for helpfulness gets you nothing. You have to renew your reputation by helping others regularly.

To learn more about reciprocity, read social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984.) He identified reciprocity as one of six principles that can help get others’ compliance to your requests.

The Dramatic Fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes: Summary of John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood”

September 10, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018) is Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou’s remarkable exposé on Theranos, the former high-flying Silicon Valley tech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes.

Theranos formally dissolved last week after a high-profile scandal revealed that the company not only deceived investors, but also risked the health of thousands of patients.

A Gripping Narrative, A Charismatic CEO, and A Big Fraud

In 2015, Theranos was one of Silicon Valley’s superstars. Valued at some $9 billion, Theranos claimed an out-and-out disruption of the $73-billion-a-year blood testing industry. Elizabeth Holmes pitched a revolutionary technology that could perform multiple tests on a few drops of capillary blood drawn by a minimally invasive finger prick, instead of the conventional—and much dreaded—venipuncture needle method.

The Story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes received much adulation by the media Theranos has its origins in 2004, when the brilliant Holmes, then a 19-year old Stanford sophomore, dropped out of college to start the company. Her missionary narrative swayed just about everyone to believe in the potential she touted.

Over the years, Theranos attracted a $1 billion investment, an illustrious board of directors, influential business partners (Walgreens, Safeway, Cleveland Clinic,) and significant amounts of adulation by the media—all of this lent credence to Holmes’s undertaking. She was celebrated as the youngest, self-made female billionaire in the world.

Nobody Asked the Hard Questions

Theranos’s castle in the air started to crumble in October 2015, when Carreyrou’s first Wall Street Journal article reported that the company was embellishing the potential of Theranos’s technology. Based on past employees’ disclosures, the article also cast serious doubts on the reliability of Theranos’s science. Behind the scenes, Theranos performed a majority of its blood tests with commercial analyzers purchased from other companies.

The persistent question in Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is how the many smart people who funded, endorsed, defended, and wrote about this company never set aside their confidence in Holmes’s persuasions and looked beyond her claim of “30 tests from one drop of blood.”

Without much independent due diligence, Theranos’s supporters possibly assumed that everyone else had checked out the company, its founders, and its science. Theranos got away with its actions for as long as it did because no one could conceive of the idea that the business would simply lie as much as it did.

The Story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes Appeared so Promising That Everybody Wanted it to Be True

Bad Blood also draws attention to Silicon Valley’s many failings, including the cult of the celebrity founder. Holmes’s smoke and mirrors was enabled by the notion of a “stealth mode” in which many Silicon Valley startups operate to protect their intellectual property. Theranos never proved that its testing technology really worked. It was performing tests on patients without having published peer-reviewed studies, getting FDA certification, or carrying out external evaluation by medical experts.

Carreyrou acknowledges that Holmes’s initial intentions were honorable, even if naïve. What triggered Holmes’s downfall was the characteristic entrepreneurial “fake it till you make it” ethos—it inhibited her from conceding early on that her ambitions were simply not viable.

When things didn’t go as intended, Holmes exploited the power of storytelling to get everyone to buy into her tales. She continued to believe that the reality of the technology would catch up with her vision in the future. Trapped in a web of hyperbole and overpromises, Holmes and her associate (as well as then-lover) Sunny Balwani operated a culture of fear and intimidation at Theranos. They went as far as hiring superstar lawyers to threaten and silence employees and anyone else who dared to challenge the company or expose its deficiencies.

Book Recommendation: Bad Blood is a Must-Read

Every inventor, entrepreneur, investor, and businessperson should read Bad Blood. It’s a fascinating and meticulously researched report of personal and corporate ambition unraveled by dishonesty. This page-turner is a New York Times bestseller and is expected to be made into a movie.

To Micromanage or Not?

June 12, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Micromanagement—any unnecessary meddling in someone else’s responsibilities, decision-making, and span of authority—is one of the most common gripes that employees have about their managers. No manager’s participation, influence, and authority should chip value away from an employee’s work.

Nobody Likes a Meddling Boss

To Micromanage or Not? There’s a thin line between appropriate questioning and micromanaging. What characterizes micromanaging is not whether a manager is questioning the minutiae, but whether the fine points are significant enough to be probed into and to what end the manager is probing.

For instance, is a manager making a point of a certain inconsistent operating expense, or is the manager examining bookkeeping details that may help bring to light a bigger-level problem such as a defective accounting system? Asking questions doesn’t in and of itself signify micromanaging, as long as those questions lead to insights of some substance.

If a manager hones into some trivial detail and challenges it with an intention of establishing an employee’s error, it’s reasonable to assume that the manager is micromanaging.

When micromanaging happens in the area of the manager’s expertise, his nitpicking is usually provoked by an egotistical need to emphasize his knowledge or experience on the subject, especially if the manager is insisting on his pet course of action.

Idea for Impact: When tactically applied, micromanaging can be a powerful tool to get the right things done

The ability to pose broad, open-ended questions (try the Socratic Method) and help an employee uncover crucial details—and to do this without creating the perception of micromanaging—is a particularly valuable managerial skill.

The smartest managers I know of do away with as many unnecessary reports, reviews, and approvals as possible. They ask the right questions about the right subjects in the right tone to help refocus an employee’s attention while deferring to the employee’s decision-making prerogative. They don’t delve into the fine points of everything—they selectively micromanage only if they must.

Here’s How to Improve Your Conversational Skills

March 8, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A year and a half ago, I wrote a popular article titled, “Stop asking, ‘What do you do for a living?'” The crux of my argument was,

Chatting with somebody in socializing situations should be less about discerning the details of the other’s life to size up the other’s socioeconomic status, and more about building a bit of familiarity to initiate stimulating conversations about topics of mutual interest.

A recent Harvard Business Review blog article on networking argues that the ‘what do you do?’ question may not be the best way to build rapport with someone else.

Research findings from the world of network science and psychology suggests that we tend to prefer and seek out relationships where there is more than one context for connecting with the other person. Sociologists refer to these as multiplex ties, connections where there is an overlap of roles or affiliations from a different social context. … We may prefer relationships with multiplex ties because research suggests that relationships built on multiplex ties tend to be richer, more trusting, and longer lasting.

The article gives examples of open-ended questions that could elicit non-work-related answers.

What excites you right now?

What are you looking forward to?

What’s the best thing that happened to you this year?

Where did you grow up?

What do you do for fun?

Who is your favorite superhero?

Is there a charitable cause you support?

What’s the most important thing I should know about you?

These inquiries could be helpful once you have a conversation going—they don’t make good initial questions. I’ve found it helpful to start with simple questions (“how do you know the hosts” or “is this your first time in this city”) and wait for personal details to flow into the conversation naturally.

Another practice I’ve found helpful is to ask to be introduced. Request your host to mention common interests when you are introduced to a new person in the gathering.

Susan RoAne’s How to Work a Room and Do I Say Next? provide great guidelines on how to make your business and personal conversations more effective.

Stop Trying to Prove Yourself to the World

October 9, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When you assess your life and become conscious of how you look at the world and how you look at yourself, you may realize that you often obsess about what people think of you.

In the delightful and poignant Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart, the Soto Zen teacher Blanche Hartman (1926–2016) explains that freeing yourself from being controlled by what other people think is the key to living life with a composed and peaceful mind:

I noticed somewhere in the early years of my [Buddhist] practice that my big effort was to get people to love me. I really wanted people to love me. And what I discovered in practice was that it really didn’t matter what other people thought. The one whose love and appreciation and approval I wanted was right here, and I wouldn’t give it to myself. What I found out was that no matter how much approval I got from outside, it didn’t count if I was not able to appreciate myself and be willing to be who I am. Whatever this is, it has becomes this over an accumulation of the actions of body, speech, and mind of more than eighty years. It’s my creation in a way. And yet it’s really helpful if I acknowledge it and befriend this being that I have created with the help of all the beings with whom I have shared my life.

Be Your Own Person

Stop trying to prove yourself to the naysayers and critics. Avoid assertive behavior and insubordinate conduct that intends to prove you’re worthy to others. You don’t need others’ approval.

Idea for Impact: Don’t fritter away precious time and energy seeking to prove your worth and worrying that you could fall short. The right people will love you for who you are.

How to Increase Your Likeability: The 10/5 Rule

December 16, 2016 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Air India Maharajah illustrating the 10/5 Rule of Customer Service The 10/5 Rule, also known as the “Zone of Hospitality Rule,” is a well-known guiding principle for extending courtesy to customers in the hospitality, healthcare, retail, and other service industries. The rule instructs,

Whenever a staff member is within ten feet of a guest, the staff member must make eye contact and smile to greet the approaching guest.
When a staff member is within five feet of a guest, the staff member must also look the guest in the eye and acknowledge him/her with a salutation such as “Hello” or “Good Morning, Mrs. Smith.”

Many companies have adapted versions of the 10/5 Rule to improve friendliness, customer-service, and responsiveness. As I’ve written in a previous article, Walmart’s iconic founder Sam Walton instituted the ‘Ten-Foot Attitude’ and said, “… I want you to promise that whenever you come within 10 feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him.” At Disney theme parks, “cast members” are encouraged to make eye contact, smile, greet, and welcome each guest as part of Disney’s famous “Seven Service Guidelines.”

Courtesy is an Influence Technique

As expounded in Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help book How to Win Friends & Influence People, we are much more likely to feel warmly toward any person who sincerely makes us feel good about ourselves.

Likeable people not only succeed in their personal relationships, but also tend to be more successful at the workplace. Indeed, highly competent but unlikeable employees do not thrive as well as their moderately competent but more likeable peers.

Idea for Impact: Be courteous. Even simple acts of courtesy (making eye contact, smiling more, listening, showing sincere interest in others, for example) work as an influence technique because folks are much more likely to do things for—and accede to requests from—people they perceive as likeable.

Likeability

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Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

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Lavish Praise on People and They’ll Flourish

How to Praise No Less Than Three People Every Day

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A Gripping Narrative, A Charismatic CEO, and A Big Fraud

Nobody Asked the Hard Questions

The Story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes Appeared so Promising That Everybody Wanted it to Be True

Book Recommendation: Bad Blood is a Must-Read

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Nobody Likes a Meddling Boss

Idea for Impact: When tactically applied, micromanaging can be a powerful tool to get the right things done

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Be Your Own Person

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Courtesy is an Influence Technique

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