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Liane Davey
December 16, 2015
Imagine the colleague with whom you have a very challenging relationship, the
person who makes the most innocuous conversation tense and uncomfortable.
Regardless of the topic, this person opposes you and approaches things as an
adversary rather than an ally.
Once you can visualize that person vividly and even viscerally, imagine the
following scenario: You re sitting at your desk working away when a message
from that person pops up on your screen. You open the message and it reads: I
got the draft presentation you sent. I caught a couple of mistakes, and I have
some ideas for how to make it better. I ll drop by your office at 3 PM to
discuss.
How does that email make you feel: angry, defensive, or anxious? Are you
suddenly looking for an excuse to be out of the office at 3 PM? All of those
are very common reactions. Many people would think, What a jerk, looking for
mistakes in my presentation! or Yeah, I BET she has a few ideas she thinks
she s so smart!
Now, wipe that person out of your mind. Instead, conjure up the colleague with
whom you get along really well, the person who always has your back. This is
the person you go to when you want to calibrate on an important issue. Once you
have that person in mind, imagine this scenario: You re sitting at your desk
working away when a message from the person pops up on your screen. You open
the message and it reads: I got the draft presentation you sent. I caught a
couple of mistakes, and I have some ideas for how to make it better. I ll drop
by your office at 3 PM to discuss.
Now how do you feel: Relieved? Grateful? If you re like the thousands of people
I have posed this question to, you re probably interested in and looking
forward to the conversation. You may even fill up the candy dish on your desk
in anticipation.
You and Your Team
Mindfulness
How to bring calm and focus to your work routine.
That s how profoundly your assumptions and prejudices affect your perceptions.
What s worse is that if you consider how differently the meeting at 3 PM will
go, the exact same message from two different people leads to radically
different outcomes.
In the meeting with the supposed adversary, you assume the worst, and perhaps
without even realizing it, your mindset, your response, and especially your
body language become negative and resistant. Seeing your behavior, your
colleague gets defensive and hostile in return, which begets (and justifies)
more deeply adversarial behavior from you, and so on. The result is that you
both shut down, trust erodes, and the organization loses a chance to get a
better outcome.
In stark contrast, in the meeting with your perceived ally, you assume the
best, and your words and actions demonstrate openness and even enthusiasm for
the ideas. You share and learn, the quality of the work improves, and the trust
between you grows.
The best antidote to this destructive dynamic is mindfulness. Being aware of
the assumptions you re making gives you an opportunity to reverse the ill
effects of your prejudices.
For the next few days, pay attention to how you react to things your colleagues
say and do. Tune in to your body, because it will give you the clues: When does
your heart race? What makes you clench your fists? When do you raise your
voice? When do you aggressively lean into the table, and when do you shut down
and back away?
Each time you feel yourself reacting, stop and think about what s going on with
you. What are you assuming or inferring that is leading to the negative
reaction? Notice that the most intense reactions are triggered when you assume
things about the other person s character or motives or make inferences about
what the person thinks of your character or capability. Did you assume that
your teammate is a jerk, or stupid, or out to get you? Did you interpret his
comments as suggesting that you re not smart enough, not likeable, or not going
to make it? Just becoming aware of your negative assumptions will be a valuable
(if somewhat uncomfortable) step.
Once you re aware of your default conclusion, try a more productive hypothesis.
The simplest approach is to replace an assumption about the person s character
with an attribution about the situation. Instead of He s a jerk for pointing
out the mistakes, you might instead think, Maybe the importance of this
presentation caused him to have especially high standards. This will make you
more generous and empathetic and generate a better conversation.
The same holds for inferences you make about yourself. Instead of concluding
that your teammate thinks you re stupid (a blanket statement about your worth),
make it about your behavior in the situation: Maybe she thinks I didn t
present enough evidence for why this is the best approach.
Framing concerns as situational doesn t preclude negative feelings about your
colleague s behavior, but the situational interpretation will feel much less
adversarial and judgmental and will lead to a more productive interaction. If
you master that approach, push yourself to the next step and search for a
positive motive behind words and actions that you resent.
For example, the most common reaction to the email above is to assume that the
person was out to get you. You could choose instead to assume that your
colleague was looking out for you by making sure you didn t present a document
with errors in it. You could choose to believe that the 3 PM meeting shows the
person is interested and invested in your work and wants to collaborate. These
aren t preposterous, Pollyanna assumptions you made them naturally when the
offer of help came from someone you trusted. By becoming more mindful of your
thoughts and then substituting positive assumptions for negative ones, you ll
improve the dynamic on your team without even opening your mouth.
Still, to reap the full benefit of this mindful approach, you have one more
step: Show outwardly the curiosity you re modeling internally. Ask a question
to demonstrate your openness to your colleague s perspective: You think I
should take the presentation in a different direction. What is your vision for
where to take the story? Or You disagree with me about a couple of the data
points in the document. What are you basing your numbers on?
See how the conversation is immediately transformed? Now it s two people trying
to solve a problem together instead of two people in a tug-of-war over who is
more right. As soon as you change this framing for the conversation, you engage
a different part of the brain, leading to a much more constructive discussion.
(For interesting evidence on how reappraisal draws upon the prefrontal cortex,
away from the adversarial process of the amygdala, see this research on
self-control from Hassin et al., 2010.)
Only when you become mindful of your biases can you choose a more constructive
path. Positive assumptions make you open to progress; negative assumptions mire
you in the past. It s time to get over your prejudices and start being mindful
of how to get value from everyone on your team.
Liane Davey is the cofounder of 3COze Inc. She is the author of You First:
Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and a coauthor of
Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on
Twitter at @LianeDavey.