The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard

Taking notes in long hand might sound a bit old school, in fact some of us were probably pretty good at it when we were in school. These days we probably go into a meeting with our tablet or laptop booted up and type away a summary of a meeting or update bullet points on a spreadsheet or email. If we have been put through a barrage of PowerPoint we may just request a copy of the presentation and use that as our notes. Scribbling notes on a foolscap page is literally a lifetime ago. That is not a good thing.

Several studies have looked at how note taking impacts on how we understand and retain information. One recent study by Princeton University looked specifically at how note taking using a laptop compared with long hand. The laptop note takers scored poorly and were associated with impaired learning and a reduced grasp of conceptual issues, when compared to their long hand counterparts. The shallower processing involved when we just retype what we hear compared to the more complex processing it takes to physically sketch and write notes is suspected to be at play here, or as psychologists call it, Levels of Processing Theory.

If you are hiring someone who will be customer facing, a business analyst or integration specialist, ask about how they take notes. A good note taker will be able to describe their own style, be that their own methods they have developed over the years, mind maps or something more formal (the Cornell Method).

Good note taking requires someone who can identify key words, is organised and can get into the flow of what is being discussed. These are all key skills if you are hiring someone to capture customer requirements, understand a business process or detail what was committed to in meetings.

If you do hire an analyst and are wondering how they are getting on, take a look at their notes. It could be a window into how organised and up to speed they are in their project work. As part of staff induction, splash out on a good pen and fancy jotter. It is not just a perk, it also reinforces the importance of note taking, by hand. If someone asks you for a copy of the presentation you just gave, you can assume they will recall very little of what was discussed. That may or may not be a good thing.

Figuring out Feelings

Understanding well-being and how we feel is very much in our consciousness. Organisations now see staff well-being and personal happiness as key components of a sustainable way of working and a big influence on staff retention. At a societal level we are concerned about how stressed and unhappy our youth are, how lonely our elderly might be and the increasing suicide rates in many developed countries. If we had a way of measuring and trending how people feel, that may go a long way in designing early intervention programs and reviewing the efficacy of the various initiatives deployed by organisations and society itself.     

I read something which got me thinking a little more about this. Researchers at the University of Manchester and Indiana University have put some science behind this idea of  ‘sentiment tracking’.

They looked at how global emotion and mood, as measured via something like Twitter, could predict stock market activity. They investigated whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large scale Twitter feeds, correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. They analyzed the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS)

Their results indicated that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions. If you want to predict closing prices on the Dow Jones, have an eye on the Twitter feed.

This raises some interesting questions about how we look at social media data or activity. It may justify a more qualitative approach. When it comes to social media marketing, we may need to look at how our followers feel, rather than just counting them.

While causation and correlation could be difficult to nail down, there is perhaps something in this for the Data Scientists among us. There is a plethora of online content generated by users across all forms of social media, text, images, video. 

Parsing online content and cross referencing this with behavior may create some predictive tools or highlight some change in public mood. Looking at which emoticons are used and how frequently may be one place to start. Too many ASAPs in emails might signal someone under a little stress, lots of work emails sent at night or weekends could be from someone on the road to burnout. 

The take away is that with a focus on the Internet of Things, we could be relying on devices to tell us more about the world and how we live our lives. However a lot of this information could already be out there, we just have to look for it.  

Anger Management

Some leaders in work or on the sports field (think Roy Keane or Bill Belichick) use anger as a tactic to get people moving, cut out mistakes and improve performance. And whatever you may think of it, it has been known to concentrate minds and get results.

I recently read a paper that put another perspective on this. In the Journal of Applied Psychology, Ella Miron-Spektor looked at how witnessing an angry outburst can dampen lateral thinking and blunt creative solutions.

Miron-Spektor works at the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. She got engineering students to imagine being a customer service agent and they were given a written problem to solve. Before working on the problem, they listened to another customer service agent talking to a customer. In some cases this conversation was neutral and well mannered, in other cases it was hostile and had plenty of anger from the caller.

Students who heard the angry call, did better at problems that required analysis and diligence. The anger did focus minds on the task in hand (justifying Keane and Belichicks approach). However, these students performed worse at problems that required lateral or out of the box thinking (the candle problem).

Miron-Spektor then looked at the students emotional state and suggested that witnessing the angry exchange led to people being more defensive. People were keen to avoid punishment or being the target of anger. She felt this could cause them to narrow their focus on the immediate task in hand and get it complete, thereby avoiding anger. This narrowing of focus however closed their mind to broader solutions and hence a dip in performance for lateral thinking.

The takeaway here is that if we want people to think creatively we may need to provide an environment where they feel secure and don’t witness other people on the receiving end of abuse. If you want your software developers to complete their unit test plans, have them sit near the customer service people, if you want them to come up with the next big idea for your product, keep them well away from any conflict zones. 

This ties in with other studies which show that narrowing our focus ( such as through bonus schemes) kills creativity. In the open office and shared work spaces most of us now have, avoiding angry out bursts might be hard to do. Allowing anger, be that from co-workers or customers, to become part of the office landscape can create a risk adverse culture and blunt our approach to innovation or problem solving. 

Bad at saying 'No'? That's a probem

I read a good article by Peter Bregman about how to say 'No'.

This is a very under-rated skill to have. Saying 'No' is vital to keeping work and customer expectations at manageable levels.Failing to say ‘No’ when we instinctively know that we may not be able to deliver is a bad move that can come back to bite us over and over. What ensues is usually a lengthy and awkward process of realigning customer expectations and eventually telling them ‘No’. In the meantime, you probably have damaged customer relationships, frustrated staff and wasted time figuring out how to limit the damage.

This happens quite a bit in software start-ups that code their own product. Feature creep can set in and it’s easy to say ‘Yes’ to an important client when they inevitably ask for a function or change request. At start-up phase pretty much any client is an important client.However, you will find yourself making promises you can’t keep, burning the candle at both ends (working late / weekends) to come good on commitments when you should have said ‘No’. That leads to endless firefighting where you neglect the basics of making sure your strategic business systems are running properly (sales pipeline, support documentation, credit control, cost benefit analysis of activity).

Key staff will get demotivated at constantly working under pressure or jumping from one ‘priority’ to another and probably leave (if you have more than three priorities, you don't have any). You will more than likely rehire in a hurry because you need someone straight away. Because you have taken your eye off the ball on the fundamentals of the business you may neglect your sales process, prospect call backs etc, so the clients that made the initial request now become even more important (as other sales haven't grown as planned ). It then gets even harder to say 'No' to their next change request. On and on it goes.

If you are a start-up company in firefighting mode or constantly find yourself avoiding calls from clients, end up working weekends, late at night, ask yourself how often you have said ‘No’ to a request in the last week. Chances are it’s not very often. There is nothing wrong with being busy and firefighting, just so long as it’s for a strategic or commercially sound reason. If it’s purely because you could not say ‘No’, then it’s a problem. 

As someone once said, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions', failing to say 'No' might be just laying another stone on that road for your projects or organisation. 

It's not as bad as you think

Part of the human experience is to find ourselves in embarrassing situations. We have all been there. In the pub we have knocked over a drink, had the odd wardrobe malfunction, or made an embarrassing mumble when giving a speech or presentation. 

You wish the ground would swallow you up. However, it may not be that bad, research now suggests that we generally overestimate the extent to which our actions or appearance are noticed by others. This phenomenon has even been given a name, The Spotlight Effect.

ProfessorThomas Gilovich, at Cornell University gave the spotlight effect its name and did some of the early research in this area. In one study he had participants put on a t-shirt showing a large picture of Barry Manilow’s face, (deliberately embarrassing) and then briefly go into a room filled with students. After each participant left the room, he or she was asked to estimate how many people in the room would be able to remember who was on their t-shirt. The students in the room were also asked if they could remember who had been on the t-shirt.

Participants completely overestimated how many people would remember they wore an embarrassing Barry Manilow t-shirt. Gilovich followed this up with a further study to see if the spotlight effect extended not just to people’s appearances, but also their actions. He put people into groups to discuss inner city problems. At the end of the discussion each person estimated how the other members of the group would rate their contribution and the performance of other group members. In most cases people overestimated how much attention had been paid to them when they were speaking.

According to Gilovich this happens because we are completely focused on ourselves, what we are doing and how we look. We have trouble appreciating that other people might not be that interested in us. Ever had an embarrassing post or picture put up on Facebook but never got the ridicule you initially expected? We focus on our own profile way more than others do.

Gilovich found evidence for this self-consciousness or self-focus when he ran the Barry Manilow t-shirt study a second time. On this occasion half the participants waited for 15 minutes before they completed their estimations. By delaying the estimation process, the experimenters gave the participants time to get used to wearing their shirts. Once the participants got used to their shirts, and became less self-conscious about their fashion infringement, they were no longer as aware of Manilow’s face, and neither did they assume that everyone else would notice it.

You have probably seen this yourself where the day after an embarrassing haircut or black eye, we are sure the whole world is pointing and laughing, but a few days later when we have got used to the face in the mirror, we think everyone else has too, even though many of the people we meet are seeing if for the first time.

The next time you make that mistake in public, don’t feel you have to blush and hide. You are probably the only person who was really paying attention to your calamity. But this is a two way street. For the same reason we also have to understand that when we make a witty remark or wear what we think is a cool or clever t-shirt, we may not get the attention or compliments we think we deserve. People aren’t paying as close attention to our appearance and actions as we are. Like us, they are too busy paying attention to themselves.

Being aware of this Spotlight Effect is important. Hanging on to or continuing to focus on your embarrassing mistakes can impact on your self-esteem and how you think of yourself generally. The best response is to smile, even if it comes out as that weird smile of embarrassment and admit that it was a cringe worthy experience. Then let it go because people who display embarrassment at their social transgressions are also the most prone to be liked. We like honesty.

The take-home message is perhaps this. When you find yourself mortified, be aware that other people simply don't pay as much attention to you as you think they do. Your slip up will not loiter long in the memory and that peculiar stain on your shirt or character won’t be the hot topic in the canteen. 

Your legend will not be secured on the basis of one particularly brilliant or embarrassing remark. It is not that you won’t be noticed, just that people do not brood over your actions you as deeply as you do. In other words, while you're stuck on your current problem or predicament, everyone else has already moved on. Shine the spotlight somewhere else, it will make you feel better about yourself. 

The Smart Look - Eye Contact

We go to great lengths to put our best foot forward in meetings and demos. We get the agenda right, have all the props in place, make sure the environment is up to scratch and we are quick to remind our audience of our capabilities and track record.

This however may not be enough. A study at Northeastern University looked at how people rate our intelligence and capabilities. They found that making eye contact with the audience is key. The researchers had people watch short videos of strangers talking to each other. They were then asked to rate the intelligence of the strangers in the video. People in the video who made more eye contact while chatting were perceived as more intelligent.

This ties in with research from the University of Michigan which found that people who avoided eye contact were rated as socially awkward, deceptive and insincere. Interestingly though this was for men rather than women. Women who avoided eye contact were seen as unattractive and disagreeable. Not good results for either gender.

So even if you get the presentation right, the pricing right, making good eye contact is an important part of sealing the deal. You need to get the intelligence and sincerity message across.

While on the subject of perceived intelligence, being well dressed and looking good is a perquisite. Research by Zebrowitz and colleagues is one of many studies to establish a link between attractiveness and how smart people think we are. People who are seen as attractive are also seen as more intelligent. Scrub up, wear the good suit and make eye contact, you can’t lose.

Ever been interviewed by a bus driver?

When preparing for an interview, many people focus on having prepared answers for how they deal with challenges, how they maximise their experience and how they articulate what they can bring to the new organisation.

These are all important things. Equally, employers have interview questions prepared to get these answers and perhaps also have a few psychometric tests in reserve to identify the most suitable candidate.

Having done a good few interviews over the years and seen this in action, I was impressed by an article in the Wall St Journal which took a simpler and perhaps a more insightful view on screening candidates.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh explained how they use the shuttle bus driver as a key part of the recruitment process. Many of their candidates come from out of town and they send the company shuttle bus to collect them at the airport. There is usually a full day of interviews before they are dropped back to the airport. Before any decision is made on hiring, the recruiter gets a report from the shuttle bus driver. Regardless of the formal interviews, if the bus driver wasn’t well treated, the candidate does not get the job.

What Zappos are doing here is gauging how well people interact with others in a real world setting, not some lab based personality test. The same idea could be applied by asking the receptionist how a person behaved when waiting to be called in or asking an administrator how the person acted when finalising the interview times, contact numbers etc.

As an employer this can compliment the more formal aspects of the recruitment process and perhaps cut through some of the prepared answers to get a real insight into the candidates social skills. As a candidate, be aware that you are always under scrutiny, even if it is the receptionist or bus driver asking the questions.

Motivation via The Goal Gradient Effect

Charting progress is important. If you are a software developer, keep a list of the bugs you fix and knock them off one by one. If you are cold calling, keep track of the calls made and hopefully a few sales too. This sounds a bit obvious, we are likely to track work we have completed. The point here however is that it’s a good idea to visually display the work completed as progress, so you can see a list or some other evidence that you are getting places. This is known as the Goal Gradient Effect.

An article on Business Insider explains this in a neat way. It cites a study in the Journal of Market Research which looked at a coffee shop that uses frequent buyer cards. Regular customers were given frequent buyer cards. Each time they bought a cup of coffee they got their card stamped. When the card was filled they got a free cup of coffee. However there were two different scenarios:

Card A: The card had 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card had 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

The research looked at how long it would take to get the card filled. Would it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you would have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The results say it does. Card B gets filled faster than Card A. It is the Goal-Gradient Effect in action.

The goal-gradient effect was first noticed in research with rats where they would run faster as they got to the end of the maze and closer to their food reward.

The goal-gradient effect makes us accelerate our behaviour as we get closer to our goal.

The take-way here could be these two points. Firstly, the closer we get to our goal the more motivated we are. Therefore structuring peoples work schedule (to have goals tangibly close and not weeks or months away) or sales targets becomes an important part of ensuring people are motivated and pushing themselves.

Secondly, the progression towards a goal can be an illusion or contrived (as shown the in coffee shop research). Giving someone a ‘head start’ or making it look like you can start progressing straight away improves motivation. Getting back to the software developer, give them some short ‘easy’ bugs first to get the ball rolling. For the cold caller, have the early targets based on getting the sales script right rather than closing any sales.

For the marketing people, maybe the coffee shop customer behaviour has lessons for how we distribute loyalty card points or explain bulk purchase schemes. We like our goals, almost as much as our coffee. 

Compliance is all about Freedom

We all try different persuasion techniques from time to time. It could be to get a sale, to get a colleague to swap shifts or to get a buddy to go for a beer. You may have some tricks or techniques that you think work better than others.

There is one technique however that seems to work best of all. It is the “but you are free” (BYAF) compliance-gaining technique. This operates by telling the target that he or she can refuse the request.

The key thing here is reminding people of their freedom to choose. By emphasising their freedom you are letting them know that it is OK to say No and you are not forcing them into anything. They have a free choice.

Christopher J. Carpenter reviewed 42 psychology studies (covering 22,000 people) using this technique. His meta-analysis showed that this simple idea can be pretty effective. Across all the studies it was found to double the chances that someone would say ‘yes’ to the request.

The meta-analysis shows how people donate more to good causes, are more likely to partake in surveys or lend someone the bus fare if they are caught short.

Try it for yourself, I think it's a good idea but it's up to you.

Truth & Photos

Ever been in a position where you were designing a brochure and wondered whether you should put in a particular photo? You might have decided against it because you felt a generic photo might look bland or you had trouble getting a photo that fitted well with the point you were trying to make.

It turns out that the choice of photo might not really matter that much, the important thing is to have a photo and almost any kind will do.

The BPS reports on a study involving New Zealand and Canadian students which found that including a photo with a statement made us more inclined to believe a statement accompanying the photo was true. The participants were given a series of statements saying if well known and obscure celebrities were either dead or alive. As fast as they could, without compromising their accuracy, the students had to say whether each statement was true or not. Crucially, half the statements were accompanied by a photo of the relevant celebrity and half weren't.

The statements with the photo were rated more likely to be true. As the researchers put it, the presence of the photo seemed to "inflate truthiness".

Another study with 70 New Zealand undergrads was similar but this time uninformative photos accompanied obscure general knowledge facts. For example, "Macademia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" was presented alongside a photo of macadamia nuts that provided no clues as to the veracity of the statement. The same effect was found - the students were more likely to wager that a fact was true when it was accompanied by an uninformative photo

So if you are designing a brochure and have testimonials that say your software is best of breed or your customer service has an approval rating of 99% or your deliveries are always on time, include a photo of a PC, Customer Service Agent or Delivery Guy. Generic non-descript photos are no problem, it need not be actual people or items. People will be more likely to rate your claim as true.

The same could be true for how you design websites, how politicians design election material or how you organise your eBay shop or any other on-line profile you may have. Any kind of photo will "inflate” the "truthiness" of your proposition. Guess I should have included a photo as part of this post.

An Initial Boost

These days is it not unusual to see CEO’s giving presentations in casual tee-shirts or jeans. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg do it, Steve Jobs often strode the stage with his sleeves rolled up and Michael O Leary of Ryanair only seems to wear a suit when he is watching his race horses run. Even the average SME CEO is more likely to wear an open neck than a tie. Informal is the new formal.

This move away from formality involves more than fashion sense. There is also a tendency to informalise names. We see it in politicians with Tony Blair or Chuck Hagel, in business with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Brad Smith from Intuit, Larry Page at Google. It is not hip to be square or so it seems.

I recently came across some research which put me thinking about this. It is possible that formality is not completely dead. The research suggested that middle initials are associated with intellectual ability. A professor might be Michael D. Clark, while your local shopkeeper might be Michael Clark.

A publication in the European Journal of Social Psychology looked at seven studies and found that the display of middle initials increased positive evaluations of people's intellectual capacities and achievements. The people with the middle name were thought of as smarter and more likely to be serious professional achievers.

It seems that if you are looking for some credibility in a professional or academic setting, it’s possible that an initial might give you a boost. If you are considering writing few magazine articles or blog posts on serious topics why not throw in your middle initial and bask in the academic glow. If you want to add a bit of gravitas to the business card, put it in there too. In this case it is hip to be a little bit square and use that initial. You can still wear the tee-shirt.

Wish you were here

I came across an interesting BPS Research Digest post which looked at a study by Belgian psychologist Saartje Cromheecke.

Working with a Belgian technology company Cromheecke’s  team sent out a real job opportunity to 1,997 potential applicants. Half got the standard email we all see every day and the other half got a hand-written postcard showing a coffee mug and a blank daily agenda. The email and postcard message featured the same layout and included the same written information and content about the job vacancy. Both type of applicants now had the same chance to apply.

Over all 62 of the those contacted applied for the job. But 82% of them had received the postcard, just 18% had received the email. Put another way, only 1% of those emailed actually applied for the job compared with 5% of those who received a postcard. Follow up research also suggested that respondents to the postcard tended to be better educated, consistent with the researchers' prediction that a recruitment message sent via a "strange" medium will be more likely to grab the attention of better-qualified personnel who aren't actively looking for new opportunities.

The BPS post does make the important point that Cromheecke's team aren't saying that postcards will always be the answer. Rather, "this field experiment puts forth 'media strangeness' as a more general evidence-based principle, which recruiters might take into account when selecting media for communicating job postings."

Recruitment aside, this could also play a role in other customer or client contact situations. Would potential targets respond better to a postcard or some other ‘strange media’ than an email? Would you be better off sending a special offer on a cup, coaster, postcard? The ‘strange media’ does not have to be the last word in graphic design, it just has to be different and convey the necessary information.

If you get the time, try it out. For the price of a few postcards you could see the improved response levels Cromheecke's team did. If they relied on email, they would have had nothing like 62 candidates to choose from. 

People still buy from people

We have all heard the cliché ‘People buy from people’, in other words, being able to personally connect with your client really matters. Yet many organisations send sales people into the market with this personal connection way down their list of priorities.

An example of this would include meeting time wasted on overly complex power point presentations that quite frankly bore people (even if it is all true). There is too much thought put into the pitch not not enough into the people you will be interacting with. Other examples are tactics employed by ‘inside sales’ teams where social media or other on-line tools are used to inform and connect with clients or prospects. These include tweets, special offer emails, circulating white papers, hosting webinars. While they may convey a very credible sales pitch or business case, these channels lack real personal context. 

I recently read a paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology which looked at interview candidates seeking employment. When candidates completed an interview they answered a series of questions on how they behaved, if they made eye contact, if they had demonstrated a keen interest in the company or job. The interviewers also answered a number of questions on what they thought of the candidate, their skills, if they would be hired.

For those that did get hired, the interviewers did not necessarily go for the best skilled or prepared. They went for ‘pleasant people’. They hired people they liked. People they connected with. Answers to complex technical questions or specific skills mattered less than how the candidates came across.

This is in line with the ‘People buy from people’ school of thought and no great surprise. What struck me however is that the paper was 10 years old (2004) and rather than that making the findings less relevant, the opposite is perhaps the case.

It is not unusual to do sales meeting on-line, via Skype or via a webinar. When we are not physically meeting there is less ad hoc personal interaction than there would be in a ‘real’ meeting, the handshake, the small talk when taking seats, chatting when waiting for someone else to join.

So if you do meet or sell on-line, still try to fit in some of the small talk rather than sticking to the webinar script. Perhaps make it your business to phone someone up with the meeting confirmation or check if they got the log in details. While technically this may be unnecessary, it could be your opportunity to kick off some small talk, be nice and come across as a pleasant person. Technology aside people still buy from people. Don’t let the on-line line omni-channel world get in the way of that, it’s not an either or scenario. Make that connection. 

Memory and open doors

After a meeting or sales demo do you sometimes gather people for a review and get them to recall what happened? If you are trying to get people to recall events or key points you might be better off doing this in the room where the meeting or demo happened.

Research by Gabriel Radvansky at Notre Dame University suggests that memories are stored as a series of successive events. You could almost think of them as chapters in a book. It is easier for us to recall events (or chapters) which just happened. This is fair enough.

However what is interesting in Radvanskys research is that walking through doorways seems to create a new memory episode (or chapter) and therefore making it more difficult to recall details that we literally have left behind in the room (previous chapters).

His research used a virtual reality environment with several rooms containing various objects. When participants entered a room they saw a table and picked up an object, once an object was picked up, they could no longer see it. At the next table (sometimes in the same room) they put down the object and picked up another one. Memory tests were carried out (on what people were carrying) when they entered, left or had been in a room for a while

The research found that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. The authors said "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]".

So if you have ever walked into a room and forgot something, this may explain it. There is another aspect which suggests that we recall information better in the context in which we experienced it. There is a long list or research in this area including the famous Godden and Baddeley study on divers superior recall under water, if they were trained under water.

This could have implications for how we train staff. You may be better for example, training staff at a desk or in the room where they will actually be working. When we study we may be better studying at a desk with the pens and instruments we will have on our desk when we do an exam. If you are rehearsing a demo, do it in the boardroom where you will be presenting, you may recall your lines a bit better.

To get back to where we started, if you have just had an important meeting, interview or conference call, no one leaves the room until they write down the key points and better still have the review there and then in the room. Keep the door closed. If you have another review later, use the same room. 

Unfriending online matters in the real world

Well, whatever your views on social media etiquette, it appears that online rejection has real world consequences. A study from the University of Colorado Denver suggests that you need to be prepared for the real life cold shoulder when you reject online.

In their research, 40 percent of people surveyed said they would avoid in real life anyone who unfriended them on Facebook. Thankfully, some 50 percent said they would not avoid the person and the remaining 10 percent were unsure.

So be a bit more careful turning down friend requests or cutting ties online when it comes to clients and work colleagues. They could be in the 40% that take it rather badly. While it is a minority, it is a sizeable one.

A Blog a view when recruiting?

I recently came across an article on the BPS Research Digest about linking bloggers words and their personalities. It looked at a study by Tal Yarkoni who analysed the content of 694 blogs, containing an average of 115,000 words written over an average period of about two years. It then matched this with the authors’ answers to on-line personality questionnaires.

The trawl of data by Tal Yarkoni allowed him to zoom in on how certain words were used. Some strong correlations included Neuroticism with use of 'irony', Extroversion with 'drinks' and Openness correlated with 'ink'. While the specific correlations may or may not be important, the interesting point here is that blogs and other parts of the internet now allow new ways of examining and studying our personality types. Contrary to the idea that we use some idealised or false alter ego when on-line, our use of words and other on-line behaviours may in fact betray our real personality.

This got me thinking. In many different industries today, roles involve some customer or market facing activity. Increasingly our Facebook, Twitter or some other social media presence are part of our professional identity. I began to wonder if we should ask  some job applicants to write a blog or maintain a Twitter feed for a few weeks as part of the recruitment process? The subject matter may or may not be related to a specific job.  Rather than focus on just the content, it would be an opportunity to see how engaging, relevant and professional the candidate can be in their on-line presence. You could throw the proverbial cat among the pigeons and introduce a few trolls or incendiary comments and see how they are handled.The level of effort put in may also show how badly the candidate wants the job. The end result would inevitably be subjective but would give another understanding of the candidate, outside the comfort zone of the rehearsed interview and sanitised CV.

On the flip side, if you are hunting down the ideal job in a company you would like to work for, a blog or Twitter feed about the market or technology used in that ideal job could be a way of showing how competent you are, how badly who want it and the type of new thinking you could bring to an organisation. This is especially the case for many new jobs that previously didn't exist and don't have a defined qualification profile e.g. Social Media Marketeer, Data Scientist, SaaS Analyst. There is no one degree to qualify you for these types of jobs, you need to qualify yourself and get that across to employers. 

The take way here is that a blog is another window into who we are as people, how we behave and beyond that a source of information about how motivated, competent and suitable we may be for some jobs. This can work if you are hiring or want to be hired.

The No Empathy Sandwich

Having worked in software for a number of years I often noticed how my workload seemed to accumulate almost from no where (I use that term deliberately). I’d find myself with multiple ‘mini’ projects on the go, tight deadlines and a fair amount of pressure. I’d sit back and wonder ‘how it came to this?’. The answer could usually be traced back to a conversation about a proposal, change request or upgrade where I agreed to take on something that in hindsight was not a good idea. It was driven by a reluctance to say ‘No’.

Where this reluctance came from, I’m not quite sure. I worked in a few start-ups where nothing was impossible, crazy deadlines and late nights were par for the course. Saying ‘No’ was not part of the culture in that environment and the customer was literally always right. Not saying ‘No’ and always acceding to customer demands, can lead to a situation where your customers run your business, not you. That is not a good thing, even in start-ups. Product road-maps get hi-jacked, innovation suffers at the expense of piecemeal tweaking and delivery.

So assuming saying ‘No’ needs to be done every now and again, is there a good or bad way of delivering the potentially bad news? Turns out there is.

I came across a neat article which explained it in an equation called the ‘Empathy Sandwich’ as “No= Empathize + Decline + Empathize Again”. For example a client says  ‘Can you add a new screen to report on XYZ?, it takes me ages to do it manually‘ . First comes a little bit of empathy ‘Ok , I see where you are coming from, it’s not easy to get time for that every week’. But then comes the Decline – ‘But I don’t have a project team I could put on that change‘. Followed up by some more empathy  ‘I hope your workload levels out, you guys do a really great job over there’.

That example might sound a touch contrived but you get the point. Saying ‘No’ in a way that shows some consideration and understanding beats a dismissive tone and helps keep the relationship going, despite the refusal.

By saying ‘No’ you will free up more time, finish more projects, deliver higher quality work and end up fire-fighting a lot less. That will make for happier customers in the long term as you can focus on innovative product development, meet the deadlines you do commit to and not get pulled between multiple piecemeal requests. You will be happier too. Who could say ‘No’ to that?

Make the first move

When it comes to negotiating, many people believe that it's usually best not to make the first offer. They wait for the other guy to say how much he is willing to give or ask for. A lot of people assume that by encouraging the other person to make the first offer, they gain an information advantage.

This assumption however isn't quite right. Adam Galinsky, at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management has looked at the research and found that: “more often than not, negotiators who make first offers come out ahead.”

One explanation for this is ‘anchoring’, which we have discussed in previous posts. The first offer act as an 'anchor'.  Once the first offer is made, that becomes the focal point and it gets more difficult to get it off the table and discuss a completely new number. We end up spending the negotiation trying to adjust the opening offer.

This was well demonstrated in an experiment by Greg Northcraft and Maggie Neale at the University of Arizona.  They got experienced real estate agents to inspect and estimate the independent value of a house. In what appeared to be accidental, the estate agents saw one of two different price lists for the house in question. The price list was done up by someone else. Half of the agents saw a listing price of $119,900. These agents then estimated that the house would sell for just over $114,000. The other half of the agents saw a listing price of $149,900, and they came in at a figure of $128,000. The list price should have been irrelevant but it anchored their appraisal and valuation.

So when it comes to negotiation, don't be afraid to ‘play your card first’ and put a number on the table. You don't want to spend the negotiation process counteracting the other sides opening offer and not get the chance to explain your number and its worth.

Beware of the guy with nothing to lose

I recently read a post by Alex Fradera at the BPS Occupational Digest which looked into how two different types of employees working in the same organisation would respond to change. One employee was well paid, felt valued and had an attentive boss. The other was poorly paid, under valued and disconnected from their boss.

If change was being introduced to the organisation you might expect the happier employee to be more resistive, as they have more to lose. It turns out that research specifically asking this question suggests that the better you are treated, the more open you are to change, even though you have most to lose.

The better employees felt they were treated, the less anxious they became. They had good reason to expect that if they were treated well before the change, they would continue to be treated well afterwards. The employee treated badly is already in a mind-set where they expect to be taken advantage of and the forthcoming change agenda was just another way for that to happen.

I was surprised by this, I had assumed that those with most to lose would be most anxious about losing their current cushy number. Then I thought about a large multi national insurance company I had worked in where there was a merger and major departmental changes.

The overriding feeling at the time was uncertainty as to how individual roles would turn out. We were reassured by management euphemisms about synergies and stability. Not being completely naïve, my colleagues and I viewed this as spin and PR, the real proof would come once the change was implemented. The feeling of uncertainty came down to trust, did we trust what we were being told?

This could be at play in the research cited by Alex Fradera. The person treated well probably trusts the employer and their change agenda, the other guy is probably very cynical and has no reason to believe that the change will lead to any good. It just means even more hassle.

So if you are changing how things work, watch out for those with nothing to lose, they could be the most resistive. If you want the change to go a little smoother, make an extra effort so that staff feel valued beforehand.
 

Avoid being a softie in negotiations

I recently read a very good post on the TipTapLab where it discussed haptic experience and how the way items feel influences our behavior. It highlighted a study by Ackerman, Nocera, Bargh from 2010  which showed how the weight texture and hardness of objects we come into contact with or hold, affect our decision making.

For example, the study found that heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, so maybe walk in holding brief case rather than a notepad to your next meeting or interview. It also found that hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations, so perhaps use flexible plastic glasses for drinks in your meeting rooms if you need to cut a deal. 

Interestingly on this hard/soft influence, the study found that potential car buyers were more inflexible in their price negotiations when sitting in hard rather than soft chairs. It might be worth investing in a few luxury seats and few cushions in your meeting/show rooms or sitting on a wooden chair at home when bidding on eBay.

Guess the point here is that we have impressions of hard, rigid, soft that follow into our subconscious when we physically experience them. Beware of the car salesman with the comfy chairs.