Juice. Brady G. Wilson
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the attitude of acquiescence. And that’s the grave reality of North American business: our leaders tend to push and our employees tend to acquiesce. The problem with push and equally with acquiescence? Both create costly fatalities. Great ideas get axed before they can be developed. People’s commitment and engagement get smothered. Important relationships get broken and destroyed. Ultimately, we fail to uncover the Bigger Reality, which means we forfeit the opportunity to release the intelligent energy that produces smart behaviors and great results.
Our leaders tend to push and our employees tend to acquiesce.
But, you may argue, isn’t there a time to advocate your own perspective? Absolutely. And when is that time? After you have pulled first. When pulling has created a willingness and capacity inside the other person, they will be willing to begin pulling from you. You will have earned the right to passionately advocate your point of view.
Mental Muscle Memory
A good friend of mine is a police officer. He tells me that the police academy has had to change the way they train their officers, especially in the area of disarming an assailant. Here’s how they were conducting the training: An assailant points a gun at an officer and the officer executes a swift technique of grabbing the firearm out of the assailant’s hand. Having successfully disarmed the assailant, the officer hands the gun back to the assailant and the cycle is repeated until the technique can be completed flawlessly.
You’re probably anticipating where this is going. There is video footage of a real incident in which an officer catches a crook in the act of robbery. The crook points the gun at the officer and the officer smoothly extracts the gun from the crook’s hand – and then hands the gun back to him! I regret to say that the crook then shoots the officer.
Mental muscle memory (MMM) is a powerful thing. You walk into your bathroom in the middle of the night and reach for the light switch. Without looking, you move your hand to exactly the right spot on the wall and your finger knows whether to flip the switch up or down to turn the light on. When you drive your car to work, you pass through vast portions of streets and highway without taking in what’s occurring. Did I go through a red light? I can’t even remember! That’s because your drive to work is 90% taken care of by MMM.
The problem with MMM becomes clear when we develop habits that make us ineffective, where we figuratively hand the gun back. Many of us have such a long history of pushing first in conversation that we have created MMM that is difficult to recalibrate. As if that were not enough of a challenge, there are at least ten other factors that strongly influence us to take a push first approach.
Top Ten Reasons We Push First
1 We operate from a powerful assumption that there’s not enough time to pull.
2 We feel the need to judge.
3 We feel personal responsibility. There’s so much at stake here, I have to push.
4 We cave in to our ego and pride.
5 We fall into the right/wrong trap.
6 We fall prey to insecurity and fear.
7 We lack modeling.
8 We don’t want to be perceived as a pushover.
9 Our culture seems to demand it.
10 We are steeped in competitiveness.
Police officer training is different now. After the assailant points the gun and the officer takes it away, he then points the gun at the assailant. That marks the end of the cycle. Officers practice this drill until they have fully recalibrated their MMM. And that’s the good news about MMM. Your neural pathways can be recalibrated. With practice you can create MMM that will systematically trigger behaviors that are highly productive.
Pulling Out a $1.2-Million Reward
Bill was a manager whose technical abilities were topnotch, but his inability to pull – to inquire into other people’s realities – was holding him back from the promotion that he desperately wanted.
As an engineer in a nuclear power plant, Bill had no choice but to become much better at working with and through others. Unfortunately for him, his lack of empathy and understanding had effectively alienated him from the rest of his colleagues. No one wanted to work with him. And no one wanted to manage him. Bill’s career was at a standstill and he was ready to go to the human rights commission because he believed that his company was discriminating against him.
Bill’s organization asked me to be his communication coach. After meeting him and interviewing some of his colleagues, I knew I was going to be the person Bill hated for a short time but respected for a long time.
Bill was so deep in denial that I had to be very direct. I set up this aggressive curriculum for him:
• Learn the principles of inquiry, especially the skill of pulling out and understanding others’ reality.
• Practice that skill in a low-risk situation and receive feedback from me.
• Practice in a medium-risk situation and receive feedback from me.
• Practice in a higher-risk situation and receive feedback from me.
In the first Pull Conversation, Bill didn’t “get it.” I had given him the clear mandate of pulling out and understanding the other person’s reality and not giving in to the temptation to justify his behaviors, defend himself, or make himself understood. Time after time I had to halt the process and bring Bill back to his mandate. Time after time he gravitated to pushing.
I gave Bill very candid feedback about his performance. So candid that at one point he looked at me and asked, “Has anyone ever struck you in a coaching session?” Perhaps I had watched too many cop shows, but I checked my rearview mirror as I drove home from that session to see if I was about to be run off the road.
The second conversation wasn’t much better. Bill just couldn’t seem to get the concept of pull. His habit patterns were deeply imprinted with a push-first style of communication. Once again I had to give Bill the very feedback he didn’t want to hear.
Something happened in the third conversation, however. Bill exerted significant effort. At last he was starting pull out the other person’s reality and understand where they were coming from.
Over a period of several weeks, Bill kept working on his curriculum. Imagine how juiced I was when I got a call from the human resources supervisor, who said, “You won’t believe it, but Bill just saved the company two million dollars!”
I definitely didn’t believe it, so I phoned Bill’s direct supervisor and asked, “Is it true? Did Bill just save the company $2 million?”
“Well, we thought it was going to be $2 million, but it turns out the savings is $1.2 million. The Atomic Energy Commission had proposed a course of action that was going to be far more expensive than it needed to be. Bill picked up on the areas of waste.”
The supervisor then, in effect, summed up the nature of Pull Conversations. He reported that in the past, Bill would have come in calling people idiots, getting their backs up. Bill would have pushed the proposal through despite his colleagues’ resistance. This time, the supervisor said, Bill pulled out their reality and understood their interests. Then he framed his concerns in ways that they could understand and buy into. He pulled them into his reality, got them on board, and the company was able to move forward with a modified process and substantial savings.
Communicate Less?
So many people have been battered with the injunction, “Communicate more. Communicate more.” But we’re here to say, communicate less,