Encouraging Collaboration by Saying "Yes And!"

Organizations can learn a lot from the world of improvisational theater – especially about what it means to work together in a truly collaborative way.

Above all, improv performers are taught to say “Yes And.” “Yes And” means that a performer must not deny the reality asserted by an onstage partner but must accept it and build on it during the scene. If your partner says there’s a net strung across the stage, you answer “Yes” and immediately start “playing tennis.” Saying “No” leads to onstage power struggles among the performers and blocks a scene from ever getting off the ground.

Similarly, adopting a “Yes And” attitude in an organization reminds people to keep an open mind and work together to discover the opportunities in each others’ ideas. “Yes And” doesn’t necessarily mean Agreeing with the Position, but it does mean:

(1) Accepting the Person (that is, treating each other with respect);
(2) Acknowledging the Possibilities (that is, being curious about where an idea could lead); and
(3) Advancing with a Positive Purpose (that is, incorporating everyone’s best thinking to create a great result).

Collaborating with others in an organization isn’t just “like” improv – it is improv! Reflecting the “Yes And” attitude in our team interactions can let our collective brainpower thrive, leading to successful “scenes” for us and our customers.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Many leaders have a strong, constant urge to control what happens in their organizations and their work groups. To what extent is this true for you? What would happen if you “gave the spotlight” to your fellow team members and let their ideas, actions, decisions, perspectives, approaches, experiments, etc., truly shine through?

Want a Bigger Paycheck ... Today? Consider Your Psychological Salary!

Is another company dangling a big paycheck in front of you? Are you tempted to leap after it and leave your current job behind?

Many people focus on money as the primary driver of their career decisions – even in the face of other factors that can contribute to job satisfaction. For example, surveys conducted by Career Systems International show that people repeatedly cite the following items as important factors in their decisions to stay in their current jobs:

·         Career growth, learning, and development

·         Being recognized, valued, respected

·         Having exciting, challenging, or meaningful work

·         Working with great co-workers or clients

·         Fun, enjoyable work environment

However, if you’re one of those people who would immediately jump ship from your current job if your magic dollar figure were offered, let me ask you this: Would you still accept that other offer if the following were true of your new workplace?

·         Movement within the company is discouraged

·         Training opportunities are limited

·         You do the same thing day in and day out

·         Your work is taken for granted – and so are you

·         A “reward” consists of the privilege to come back to work tomorrow

·         Your co-workers engage in backbiting, rumor-mongering, and bad-mouthing among themselves

·         You have little say in how you do your work

·         You work long hours under high stress in a deadly serious environment

If any or all of these factors were present, you might think twice about making the leap. Indeed, what you are doing is “factoring” each of these things into the overall value proposition. Viewed in this way, each of these factors carries a “psychological cost” that needs to be deducted from the salary in order to compute the true amount of the offer.

Now, let’s look at it from the perspective of the job you’re thinking of leaving. Even though your current paycheck might not meet your magic dollar figure, how is it being supplemented by the presence of other factors (such as those in the first list above) that provide a “psychological salary”? How could you quantify the benefit you’re receiving by working in a job where (say) you’re respected and valued, you have flexibility, your voice counts, and your work makes a real difference in others’ lives?

Everyone would probably assign a different psychological value to each of these factors. For example, some people might not mind the lack of variety or autonomy, whereas others might feel stifled.  The important thing, though, is to do the work of reflecting on each of these factors and compute its true worth to you.

You might conclude that you're really "making" more than you think!

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Many leaders who regularly ask their people about the factors that motivate and engage them report some frustration with an answer they frequently hear:

“Pay me more money!”

As a YES! Leader, what would happen if you discussed the “psychological salary” concept with your people, as a way to have them consider the full amount of their current “paycheck”?

The Red Boulder on the Tracks: Dealing with Barriers (Real or Imagined) in Your Path

You’re a train engineer. You’re at the controls of a locomotive when you suddenly see a large red boulder on the tracks ahead of you.

A situation pitched to an improv troupe by a particularly creative audience? Well … it could be. After all, performing improvisational theater is all about solving “problems” (i.e., incongruous situations) posed by audience members. The fun comes from watching the performers try to perform a scene that deals with the problem in a seamless way.

In this case, though, the “red boulder” scenario is a thought experiment I created to help prime people’s creative problem-solving juices, especially with respect to career planning. This activity can help people overcome those internal tape loops (“I’m too old,” “I’m a victim of circumstance,” “I can’t do anything about it,” etc.) that paralyze and disempower them.  The activity works like this:

I first pose the scenario described above while drawing on a flip chart a (decidedly rough) picture of a boulder on a set of railroad tracks. I then ask, “If you were the engineer, what options could you think of to deal with this situation?” People usually come up with the following:

·         Find (or build) a parallel track.

·         Ask other crew members and even passengers to help you move the boulder.

·         Grab a pick-axe and start chipping away at the boulder.

·         Stop the train and back up to where you started.

·         Just ram into it!

I then ask how all of this relates to career planning. At this point, most people see that the red boulder represents a barrier preventing them from moving ahead on their career path. They then can usually grasp the connections between their red-boulder options and their career-planning options:

·         The parallel track. If your planned career direction is blocked, look for another similar path that might get you to the same destination – even if it isn’t as direct or as quick.

·         Ask for help.  In your career planning, don’t feel that you have to go it alone. Be open to enlisting the help of others – managers, mentors, peers, friends, family members – to provide assistance, advice, and support.

·         Start chipping away. Begin taking small steps on a regular basis to begin removing the obstacle. You may not be able to overcome the barrier all at once, but taking steady action is better than making ready excuses.

·         Stop and back up. A barrier is insurmountable only if it’s bigger than your will to overcome it. If it feels too big to tackle, that might be a sign that you need to reconsider whether your chosen path is really in line with your inner desire. Even retrenching and starting again is better than just sitting there and cursing the rock.

·         Ram into it! If anyone proposes this (and they often do), I then ask “If you choose that option, what are you assuming about the boulder?” Answer: “That it really isn’t as solid as it looks!” I then observe that it might just be a big red balloon that could be flicked aside with little effort.  I then suggest that many of the barriers that we perceive on the path ahead might not be real barriers after all; they may just appear that way to us (and often just in our own minds). If we don’t test our assumptions about their true nature, though, we might sit immobilized for no good reason.  As the saying goes, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

As you encounter your own (supposed) barriers on your career journey, do you keep your mind open to multiple strategies for dealing with them? Are you improvising “scenes” that creatively deal with the (supposed) incongruities you’re facing? Have you considered some of the following ways to regard and deal with some of the common (supposed) problems in your career development?

·         “I’m too old.” -  What are some examples of other people your age who succeeded in a similar situation? How can you connect with others of your generation to lend each other support and advice? What unique value can your experience and perspective provide?

·         “I don’t have enough education.” – What education do you need? What can you do short of entering full-time study (e.g., taking a community college class, doing self-study) in order to start working toward a degree or certification?

·         “There aren’t any promotion opportunities in my area.” – First, what will a promotion provide to you? What other options – a lateral move, special projects, service in a professional organization outside of work – might help you develop key skills and contacts to put you in a good position for the next promotion opportunity that does come available?

Everything's Negotiable (or Is It?)

Last time I discussed how the YES! Leader needs to demonstrate flexing behaviors in order to be effective in her interpersonal interactions. I also pointed out how flexing lies at the core of many different leadership models – specifically, Situational Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and the Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders (as described in the book The Leadership Challenge). These and many other models emphasize the importance of the YES! Leader’s shifting her behaviors with different people in order to appeal to each person’s unique set of needs and internal motivators.

I was discussing this concept with two different audiences lately and was struck by an interesting question that arose in both sessions. In essence, the question was:

Rather than acting differently around different people, shouldn’t a leader be consistent in his behaviors?

Implied in the question, I think, is the sense that a leader who’s continually shifting his behavior to achieve a certain outcome is being inauthentic at best, manipulative at worst. I think it also reflects a feeling that a leader needs to be grounded in certain core values that he (and others) can always rely on and that don’t change with the weather.

As I consider this question, it occurs to me that we have another example of a (seeming) contradiction between two different points of view. And as I’ve mentioned before, rather than make an “either-or” choice, we might look for a “both-and” path instead.

To start down this path (and I emphasize the word “start”), I’ll observe that there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between holding core beliefs and values and flexing your behavior in order to reach a principled outcome with another person. A principled outcome is much like a Win-Win result, in which both parties work together to seek a mutually positive outcome rather than engage in a game of “King of the Hill” in which the most powerful party (or the best arguer) prevails over the other. To achieve a Win-Win, each party needs to let go of entrenched positions and open himself to the viewpoints, interests, and needs of the other.

Certainly, engaging in a collaborative search for a positive outcome doesn’t render a person inauthentic or manipulative. And holding to an entrenched position in the name of consistency wouldn’t be a particular virtue in such a joint endeavor.

But does this mean that everything’s negotiable? That the leader should never draw a line in the sand and say “Do not pass”? No – and this is where the leader’s core values and beliefs come into play. There is virtue in a leader’s knowing when to make a stand, when to insist on having her way, when to be influential and not influenceable. 

For example, if the other party is advocating something unethical or illegal, the leader shouldn’t just treat the other’s view as an interesting idea worthy of further development. She should just say “No.” This is where consistency has its place – to show that the leader is principled, dependable, and guided by bedrock values upon which others can rely no matter what.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

·         What are your “non-negotiables” - the core values that guide you?

·         Do you know your non-negotiables well enough so that you can instantly determine when to draw a line in the sand?

·         Do your non-negotiables extend so far that they make you rigid and unbending rather than dependable and principled?

·         Do you leave yourself enough room for flexing so you can adapt your behaviors to the needs of the moment – or do you continually fall back on legalistic rules of conduct that you uniformly apply in the name of consistency?

Gaining Power by Flexing Your Style

The YES! Leader can use the ExploreFlexSupport model – derived from the world of improvisational theater – as a guide to thriving in the modern organizational world of “permanent whitewater.”  Exploring new possibilities, flexing your attitudes and behaviors to meet each new situation, supporting others on the journey … these are essential skills for the performance improviser and the YES! Leader alike. (You can learn more about the ExploreFlexSupport model here.)

The Flex part of the model is echoed in many other models of effective leadership, communication, and interaction – for example:

Situational Leadership. The Situational Leadership model is premised on the concept that one size does not fit all when it comes to leadership.  Situational Leadership recognizes that every individual has different needs that must be met for him to do his best work. For example, some people need close instruction and monitoring, while others need a light supervisory touch and a loosening of the reins. A leader who takes the former approach in all situations will quickly (and deservedly) get a reputation as a micromanager. A leader who always takes the latter approach in all situations will gain an equally strong reputation as an “abandoning” leader. A Situational Leader continually shifts her style and applies the right mix of task behavior (such as giving direction and setting standards) and relationship behavior (such as providing encouragement and inspiration) to meet each individual’s distinct needs.

Emotional Intelligence. Two components of Emotional Intelligence are the ability to recognize how one’s behavior is impacting others and the ability to regulate one’s behavior when interacting with others in order to achieve a mutually desirable outcome.  By contrast, many emotionally unintelligent leaders adopt a “what you see is what you get” attitude that expects others to mold themselves to the leader’s personality. Rather than do the more difficult work of navigating through the needs, expectations, and emotions of others, these leaders take an inflexible, one-note approach to interactions, not knowing or caring (or both) how they’re coming across.

The Leadership Challenge. In their book The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner describe the “paradox of power” that exemplary leaders recognize: You become more powerful when you give your own power away.  It works like this: Providing others a degree of autonomy and decision-making authority gives them a chance to develop their skills and leads to more commitment to their work – which in turn creates better results for everyone, including the leader.  Leaders who deny or ignore the paradox of power tend to become nearly obsessed with gaining and maintaining control over people and situations. This in turn renders them rigid and intractable – the very opposite of a “flexing” leader.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Certainly there is a time and a place for drawing a line in the sand and holding firmly to your beliefs and opinions.  But whenever you find yourself taking an unbending stand, ask yourself: Am I truly acting from a clear sense of my values? Or am I just refusing to consider an alternative perspective because it will take too much mental “heavy lifting” to incorporate it into my worldview?

Finding the Driver of Your Motivational Engine

In my previous article, I described the way in which external incentives can “crowd out” a person’s natural, internal motivation to act. When the performance becomes all about the attainment of a carrot dangling at the end of a stick, the person can forget about the whole reason he started grasping for the carrot in the first place. If his original intrinsic drive becomes overshadowed, and if he decides a carrot just isn’t worth the effort, he may give up completely.

Last time, I cited some examples of this “crowding out” effect as described by Daniel Pink in his book Drive.  I think another good example can be found in the book Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Made to Stick deals with the crafting of “sticky” messages – i.e., ones that are understood, remembered,  and likely to impact people’s opinions or behavior. The Heaths note that many people equate “persuading” with laying out a rational case for why it is in a person’s self-interest to act in a certain way.  This type of persuasion can take the form of the types of extrinsic inducements that Daniel Pink describes in Drive – do this and you’ll get that (also known in legal-Latin as a quid pro quo). 

However, as the Heaths say, “Always structuring our ideas around self-interest is like always painting with one color. It’s stifling for us and uninspiring for others.” And, as the Heaths might have added, it can also produce the opposite effect from the one intended.

To illustrate, the Heaths describe a marketer who was promoting a new educational film on fire safety that was intended to help firemen. The marketer called several local fire units to see if they were interested in purchasing the film. Their answer: An enthusiastic “Yes!”

But in an attempt to sweeten the pot, the marketer then asked a couple of respondents if they would prefer an electric popcorn popper or a set of chef’s carving knives as a thank-you for reviewing the film. Their response (as reported by the Heaths): “Do you think we’d use a fire safety program because of some #*$@%! popcorn popper?!”

As the Heaths observe, the response made no sense.  If you accept the offer, you get a popcorn popper. If you turn it down, you get nothing. Why would a purely rational decision-maker looking to maximize his self-interest take the latter course?  The Heaths go on to explain the thought process at work:

“I’m a firefighter. You’re offering me a popcorn popper to get me to view a film on safety. But firefighters aren’t the kind of people who need little gifts to motivate us to learn about safety. We risk our lives going into burning buildings to save people. Shame on you for implying that I need a popcorn popper!”

In other words, waving a shiny little gadget in front of them crowded out their previously expressed inherent motivation to consider buying the film. I think this is an excellent illustration of Daniel Pink’s observation that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, ‘if-then’ rewards usually do more harm than good.”

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

(As I mentioned in my earlier article, anyone can be a YES! Leader – not just people managers. So this Reflection is addressed to anyone who wants to find more meaning in work.)

Here’s a little thought experiment: What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow? If you never had to work for a living again, how would you spend a typical day? Would it be all leisure, relaxing on the beach, hobnobbing with the rich and famous?

Or would you miss putting in the effort to create something, to coordinate and lead a project, to brighten someone’s day, to make the world a better place for others?

OK, in the first few months after landing the winning ticket, you may take that extended vacation in the tropics – but assuming that you’d eventually miss doing something that resembled work, what would that something be?

As simple as this sounds, I think the answer will give you some insight into the true essence of your internal motivation. If the only thing that could possibly move you along is the “interest, creativity, or nobility” inherent in the task itself, then you’ve likely identified the driving wheel of your motivational engine.

Want Long-Term Commitment? It Takes More Than Money!

A few years ago, I was talking to the teenage son of a friend of mine about the upcoming season of his high school swimming team. Ever since he was a young boy, I had known “Chad” (as I’ll call him) to be inseparable from any body of water in his vicinity. Pool, pond, lake - you name it, he was in it. It only made sense for his parents to get him involved in organized competition at the earliest opportunity.

So when I asked him about his team’s prospects, I was shocked when he said, “I don’t think I’m going out for swimming this year.”

“You’re not? Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it just isn’t fun anymore.”

Now I suppose this is the point where a well-meaning adult could respond with something like “It isn’t all supposed to be fun. Anything worth having is worth working for.” But, as he described his situation some more, I got a sense that his real issue wasn’t so much with the work involved. It was that the whole effort had become more about winning trophies, shooting for scholarships, and pleasing adults than about the joy of swimming that had led him into the water in the first place.

I think that Chad’s experience was another good example of the downsides of relying too heavily on external incentives to motivate people.  Not only do incentives have their limitations as a means to spur performance but also – as Daniel Pink demonstrates in his book Drive - they can actually serve as a demotivator.

Pink surveys a variety of behavioral studies that demonstrate the discouraging effects of loading external inducements on top of tasks that people are inherently motivated to perform. In one study, researchers tracked a group of art students over the course of several years.  The researchers found that the students who pursued their painting primarily for the pleasure of the activity itself ultimately produced art that was socially recognized as superior to the art produced by students who were more interested in monetary rewards. In another study, a group who had expressed an interest in donating blood and then were offered a monetary payment as an added inducement were less likely to go through with their donation than a similar group who were offered nothing.  The reason, Pink notes, was that adding the monetary incentive “tainted an altruistic act and ‘crowded out’ the intrinsic desire to do something good.”

I think this sense of “crowding out” intrinsic desire can also explain what happened to Chad. As his participation in swimming became more about attaining external recognition and less about experiencing the sheer pleasure of cutting through the water, his intrinsic desire was gradually doused.

Pink cautions against drawing the conclusion that there is something inherently “evil” about extrinsic incentives.  The real point, says Pink, is that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks is a very dangerous game.” You may not get the results you anticipate – in fact, you may get precisely what you don’t want.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

So can you motivate your people by enriching them?  Yes – by “enriching” the job itself!  As Daniel Pink’s examples show, leveraging people’s internal motivators can result in long-term commitment to their work, as opposed to the short bursts of effort induced (or not) by external motivators. What you need to do is align the job with a person’s natural inclination to create, perform, and succeed.

In her book Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, Beverly Kaye includes an entire chapter on what she calls the “Enrich” strategy for engaging people.  As she writes, “Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current jobs or employers.”

Kaye suggests six questions to pose to people to help probe for possibilities of enrichment. What would happen if you asked your people these questions – and then found ways to take action on the answers?

·         Do you know how your job is important to the company?

·         What skills do you use on the job? What talents do you have that you don’t use?

·         What about your job do you find challenging? Rewarding?

·         In what areas would you like increased responsibility for your current tasks?

·         What would you like to be doing in the next three to five years?

·         In what ways would you like your job changed?

Loosening the Reins: It Just Makes Business Sense

The other day I happened to be browsing through one of the best-known leadership books of all time, The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. Remarkably, I landed on the following passage, which fits right in with the topic of autonomy about which I’ve been writing lately. I thought that Kouzes and Posner’s words were worth quoting in their entirety.

“If leaders want higher levels of performance and greater initiative from their constituents, they must be proactive in designing work that allows people discretion and choice. In another word, latitude. [In yet another word, autonomy - JK] To feel like they’re in control of their own work lives people need to be able to take nonroutine action, exercise independent judgment, and make decisions that affect how they do their work without having to check with someone else. It means being creative and flexible – liberated from a standard set of rules, procedures, or schedules. It means having more broadly defined jobs, offering more alternatives. Narrow job categories confine choices; broader categories permit increased flexibility and discretion. Those who hold broadly defined jobs have more options about how to accomplish the assigned objectives.

“In this dynamic global environment, only adaptive individuals and organizations will thrive. This means leaders must support more and greater individual discretion to meet the changing demands of customers, clients, suppliers, and other stakeholders. With this increased discretion comes an increased ability to use and expand one’s talents, training, and experience.”

As I read these words, I was particularly struck by Kouzes and Posner’s observation about the connection between latitude and adaptability. This shows that allowing autonomy is not simply a matter of providing more personal satisfaction for individuals; it’s also necessary for organizations to survive – and, if fully embraced, to thrive.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Certainly leaders need to be aware of how well their people are progressing toward work goals. But are your actions in monitoring your people’s work really coming across as “looking over their shoulders”?  You might find another opportunity to provide autonomy by easing up a little on the supervisory reins.

What would happen if you were to do the following?

·         Focus less on your people’s activities, focus more on their results.

·         Extend the time between “check-ins” on your people’s work.

·         Hold a brainstorming session with your people about how they can keep you in the loop without having to provide a play-by-play account of their activities.

What's the "One Best Way" to Lead? Trust Your People!

In one of my first articles, I defined the theme of this blog as: Frederick Winslow Taylor – NOT!

As I previously noted, Taylor was the consummate efficiency expert whose basic message for early 20^th Century organizations was:

Thinkers think. Planners plan. Workers work.

In other words, under Taylorism, the role of management is to define the “one best way” to perform any task through rigorous measurement, analysis, and planning, while the role of the worker is to perform the task exactly as designed – no questions asked, no suggestions accepted.

Since my earlier article, I’ve repeatedly noted how Taylor-influenced thinking stands in direct opposition to The YES! Leader’s practice in areas such as structuring work, influencing, motivating, rewarding, and collaborating. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink also notes some of the practices held over from Taylorism’s heyday that still underlie much current business thinking.

Pink notes that Taylor’s ideas might have been appropriate in an age when tasks were primarily algorithmic in nature. “An algorithmic task,” says Pink, “is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.”

Most 20^th Century work, says Pink, was algorithmic in nature – and not just manual, blue collar tasks:

“Even when we traded blue collars for white, the tasks we carried out were often routine. That is, we could reduce much of what we did – in accounting, law, computer programming, and other fields – to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a series of steps that produced a right answer.” (emphasis added)

Nowadays, however, problems (and the solutions needed to address them) are rarely so simple.  The complexity of the world poses continually unique challenges to anyone trying to define and perform a piece of work.  Because of this, says Pink, tasks are becoming more heuristic in nature - that is, no simple formula exists for carrying them out. Such tasks require the application of heuristics – general guidelines and rules of thumb – in a trial-and-error fashion in order to find a creative solution.  

If the approach to an algorithmic task resembles writing a script, then the approach to a heuristic task is more like performing improvisational theater. The performer of the task becomes thinker, planner, and worker all rolled into one. The performer must use a high level of creativity to craft the best solution for each unique situation.  And, as in improv, the performer doesn’t just create on a totally blank slate but can draw on heuristics (such as the ExploreFlexSupport model) to help inform his actions.

Pink notes that many organizations are still trying to apply Taylor-based practices to heuristic tasks, usually with ineffective or even counterproductive results.  Some examples are listed below.

Structuring work: Defining tasks (and the roles of the people who perform them) as narrowly as possible, rather than giving people a broader scope of task responsibility.

Decision-making: Reserving decisions about task performance for people in management roles, rather than allowing the people actually performing the task to make in-the-moment decisions about how they’ll achieve the objectives of the task. (Note also my earlier article on providing people autonomy in their roles.)

Providing incentives: Assuming that external motivators (primarily money and fear) are the only incentives to which people respond, rather than drawing on the inherent enjoyment of the work itself (and structuring the work accordingly) to connect with people’s internal, self-generated motivators.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

What would happen if you were to do the following?

.·      Find opportunities to define work more broadly for your people – for example, by giving them more front-to-end responsibility in their roles.

·         Manage their performance of their roles with a light touch rather than a short leash – i.e., don’t rush in to penalize them for mistakes but provide them support and create an environment where they can learn from their successes and missteps.

·         Conduct coaching conversations with your people and ask them to reflect on what makes them leap out of bed each morning, energized and ready to tackle the day’s work. (And if they can’t answer, ask them what would make them do that.) Use their answers as a guide to their internal motivators. Then do what you can to help them create those motivating elements in their work and lives.

.

Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: A Lesson in Essential Communication

Dr. Benjamin Spock became a household name based on his book Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, published in 1946 just as the United States was embarking on one of the great demographic events in its history, the Baby Boom.

Dr. Spock’s book represented a break from traditional thinking (and writing) about baby and child care, which usually took the form of strict directives from expert practitioners about what parents must do (no wavering!) to raise good citizens. By contrast, Dr. Spock wrote in a folksy, calming style that dared to suggest that parents should trust their instincts rather than always falling in line behind the expert wisdom.  As Dr. Spock put it in one of the book’s most famous sentences: “You know more than you think you do.”

Yet in adopting this soothing approach, couched in conversational, everyday language, Dr. Spock actually was consciously downplaying one of the major influences that underlay his child-rearing philosophy. And in doing so, he exemplified one of the hallmarks of effective communication that would be cited more than sixty years later in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.

For Dr. Spock was in fact a firm believer in Freudian psychology, which was still quite controversial in the 1940s. A large part of Dr. Spock’s intent with his baby book was to meld child-rearing advice with Freudian theory, with its emphasis on observing certain natural phases of development rather than adhering to strict timetables regarding eating, thumb-sucking, and the like.

But Dr. Spock avoided the use of technically accurate Freudian terms such as “id,” “ego,” and “Oedipal complex,” which he knew would put off the average reader of the time. Instead, as his biographer Thomas Maier writes, “Spock improvised fundamentals of Freudian theory throughout his baby book’s prose, like a leitmotiv, without identifying the composer by name…. The psychological reasons for children’s behavior were put forth like the acquired wisdom of a Yankee country doctor, not like a man who had been psychoanalytically trained.”

“I wasn’t particularly trying to hide the Freudian origins,” said Dr. Spock, “but I was aware that I would lose my audience if I tried to drag in Freud too much.”

I think Dr. Spock intuitively realized something about effective communication that the Heaths later emphasized in Made to Stick: Useful shorthand is better than useless accuracy. Dr. Spock understood his audience (typical new parents) and his purpose (to popularize a more humane approach to child-rearing) with crystal clarity. He knew that using technically correct (and highly charged) Freudian concepts in a mass-market book would undermine that purpose. Instead, by using an accessible style that appealed to his audience, and by focusing on the underlying core message of the theory rather than on the theory itself, Dr. Spock was wildly successful in achieving his purpose.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

What drives the people in the front lines of your organization? Do you think they’re motivated to jump out of bed every day, charge in to work, roll up their sleeves, and solve important problems with energy and creativity out of a burning desire to “maximize shareholder value”? 

If you don’t believe that’s the conscious driver of their actions – even though it may be a technically accurate description of what they’re there to do – then what can you do to translate the organization’s strategic goals into language (including metaphors, stories, and images) that will connect directly with their hopes, dreams, desires – and motivators for action?

For another example of someone who tilted against the same conventional child-rearing wisdom that Dr. Spock countered in his book, see also my article on Harry Harlow.