Win Over an Opponent by Asking for Advice

by Katie Liljenquist and Adam Galinsky  |   12:00 PM June 27, 2014

What do an inflated surgical bill, a fuming real-estate developer, and a dreaded performance appraisal have in common? All can be mitigated with one simple gesture: a request for advice.

We seek advice on a daily basis, on everything from who grills the best burger in town to how to handle a sticky situation with a coworker. However, many people don’t fully appreciate how powerful requesting guidance can be. Soliciting advice will arm you with information you didn’t have before, but there are other benefits you may not have considered:

1. Advisors will like you more:  Arthur Helps sagely observed, “We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.” Being asked for advice is inherently flattering because it’s an implicit endorsement of our opinions, values, and expertise. Furthermore, it works equally well up and down the hierarchy — subordinates are delighted and empowered by requests for their insights, and superiors appreciate the deference to their authority and experience. James Pennebaker’s research shows that if you want your peers to like you, ask them questions and let them experience the “joy of talking.” This is especially important because research shows that increasing your likability will do more for your career than slightly increasing competence.

One of us (Katie) recently put this to the test while dealing with a real estate transaction. After several phone calls to indifferent or discouraging county officials, Katie visited the Planning and Zoning office in person. Rather than pester the official with what would and wouldn’t be permissible, Katie asked for her advice on how she would handle the constraints. The official provided a bounty of insider information and guidance that Katie never would’ve obtained on her own. When Katie thanked the official for her invaluable insights, the official confessed that she was burnt out by constantly impeding people’s aspirations and dreams with zoning roadblocks.  Katie’s humble request for the official’s expertise was revitalizing, and she in turn helped Katie deftly navigate what otherwise would’ve been a very difficult situation.

2. Advisors are able to see things from your perspective. Think about the last time someone came to you for advice. Most likely, you engaged in an instinctive mental exercise: you tried to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine the world through their eyes. Our research has identified the extensive benefits of perspective-taking — it facilitates understanding and increases the odds of finding creative agreements in negotiations.

In another study, we simulated a performance appraisal and found that underperforming employees who asked for advice were able turn their bosses into better perspective-takers.  This shifted the tone of a hostile performance appraisal towards cooperation and nearly doubled their chances of being recommended for promotion (31% vs 58%)!

3. Advisors become a champion for your cause: A third benefit of soliciting adversaries for advice is that they become your champions. When someone offers you advice, it represents an investment of his time and energy. Your request empowers your advisor to make good on their recommendations and become an advocate for your cause.

One of our favorite illustrations of this comes from one of our MBA students, Clara, who received a shocking $18,000 bill for a surgery that was performed at an out-of-network surgical center (even though the surgeon himself was classified as in-network). Detailing her strategy for negotiating the bill, Clara wrote, “I called Fran (the nurse). Deep down, I really believed this was her fault. But instead of approaching it that way, I asked for her counsel and guidance with the mess. Knowing her personality (interested in having control over her domain and running the show), I enlisted her to help me with the personnel at the Surgery Center. This made her feel important and she took the ball from there.” Thanks to the championing efforts of the nurse, Clara was able to negotiate not just a reduction of her bill, but a complete waiver!

This approach captured all three benefits of seeking advice:  First, the nurse was flattered to have her authority acknowledged, quickly transforming the conversation from an argument to be won to a problem to be solved. Second, she was able to see Clara’s perspective and became sympathetic to her predicament. Finally, she felt empowered and committed to facilitating a resolution.

This same approach works in job negotiations. When one of us — Adam — negotiated his first professorship, he asked for advice from one of the professors he’d met during the interview. The professor immediately shared vital information (the university’s reservation price on salary!) and worked back channels with the dean to give Adam more research resources.  The professor become such an advocate that he even adjusted his own teaching schedule to accommodate Adam’s desired teaching schedule.

Whether it’s a high-stakes monetary negotiation or winning support for a proposal, the simple gesture of soliciting advice can make you more likeable, encourage your counterpart to see your perspective, and rally commitment. The beauty of this approach is that it costs so little.  So as you plan your next negotiation, consider how a targeted request for advice could turn an adversary into an advocate.

More blog posts by Katie Liljenquist and Adam Galinsky

More on: Negotiating, Personal effectiveness

KATIE LILJENQUIST

Katie Liljenquist is on the faculty of Brigham Young University’s Department of Organizational Leadership and Strategy. She studies decision making and interpersonal influence.

ADAM GALINSKY

Adam Galinsky is the chair of the Management Department and the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School. His research focuses on leadership, power, negotiations, decision-making, and ethics.

Say No Without Burning Bridges

by Holly Weeks  |   9:00 AM June 24, 2014

Many of us don’t like to say no to a coworker or a boss—for instance, when the boss asks for a tighter deadline, or a team member needs a longer one—because we’re worried about damaging the relationship. That’s because it often feels synonymous with confrontation. And whether you are conflict-averse or conflict-ready, your counterpart may not always handle hearing no the way you’d hoped.

Some counterparts will to try to “yes the no,” even when you’re hoping for minimal friction, because they have learned early on not to take no for an answer and feel like pushovers if they do. Or he might get angry, push back, or go silent, because that’s how he always handles hearing no.

There may also be something about the circumstances that makes it particularly difficult to accept your no. For example, someone who might be able to deal with a no privately could be embarrassed to hear it in front of others and may want you to back down so she can save face.

With all of these obstacles, there is no single trick to saying no while keeping your relationship intact. You can, however, change your perspective on what you’re trying to do. Don’t look at it as a choice between confrontation and preserving a relationship. There’s a middle option: the neutral no.

A neutral no is steady, uninflected, and clear. It is mostly notable for what it is not: harsh, combative, apologetic, reluctant, or overly nice.

Going neutral may not be your default manner of speaking, but it is well within your reach. A neutral no protects you and your counterpart from the elements of no that are really hard on relationships, such as:

Giving false hope. If you say no tentatively, it’s easy for your counterpart to hope that you’ll change your mind. It sounds like your no is about to tip over into a yes, so your counterpart is encouraged to keep pushing. That false hope, even more than the no, may damage your relationship.

Weakening the no. People often argue their no backwards: they start with lightweight reasons, holding back the real reason why they’re saying no. But the little explanations are not persuasive and are easily batted aside. To limit frustration—and to avoid appearing disingenuous—give reasons with good weight up front.

By sticking with neutral, you are concentrating on the business end of no, not the personal. You should be aiming for a referee’s kind of neutral demeanor. A ref makes a call, regardless of strong feelings on both sides. His job is to give his decision and stay with it if challenged.

You can also speak directly about the friction between you and your counterpart. To address the situation, try saying something like: “It’s hard for me to tell you no. It must be hard for you to hear.” Use your own language, but check that what you say is steady, uninflected, and clear. If you get pushback, keep these points in mind:

• Stay on topic. If you think you know why your counterpart is pushing back, you can speak to his concern honestly: “You have a lot invested in what you’re asking, and it looks like I’m personally blocking you.” You can also give a good reason for your refusal: “I see my job as balancing valid, but competing, needs. That’s my focus.” If that creates an opening for an argument, it’s OK to have the discussion. Saying no shouldn’t be a monologue.

• Stick with it. If you have a good reason for saying no, stay with it. For example, I knew a young woman who went into mediation over a faulty used car that she’d just bought. The person who sold her the car was a volatile counterpart who gave many reasons why he shouldn’t be responsible for returning the woman’s money or repairing the car. The young woman listened, and to each argument she replied, “I understand. In [this state] the seller is responsible for repairing or refunding the cost of a car that cannot pass inspection.” In the end, the seller paid, and even took the young woman out for lunch.

• Be realistic. People hoping to preserve a relationship often want to both say no and have their counterpart be happy. But the realistic response to hearing no is often anger, unhappiness, or concern. If we distort our message in trying for an unrealistic response, our counterpart is likely to miss the point and we will have to say no twice.

Saying no neutrally doesn’t necessarily come naturally. To get better at it, practice ahead of time with someone who will push back. Eventually, it’ll become easier to say yes to saying no – without destroying important relationships.

More blog posts by Holly Weeks

More on: Communication, Conflict, Difficult conversations

HOLLY WEEKS

Holly Weeks is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based communication consultant and the author of Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them (Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

The Future of Marketing, as Seen at Cannes Lions

by John Winsor  |   10:00 AM July 16, 2014

Last year I wrote a post titled The Dinosaurs of Cannes about the scene at the Cannes Lions Festival, the ad industry’s star-studded annual awards show. I said, “As you walked down La Croisette the rest of the week, you could see lots of dinosaurs basking in their glory while asking what all the furry and feathered things running around at their feet and flying around above them were.” This year the new mammals and birds of the industry have begun to strut their stuff.

What these new species have in common is that they’re based on open systems. These systems are digital at their core, and leverage network effects and the ability of the “digital democracy” to find the best talent and ideas wherever they exist. Unlike closed marketing systems, characterized by agencies that wall off their in-house talent (creating a scarce and expensive resource), open marketing systems seek talent from anywhere in the world to solve problems, and then curate the best answers.

Such systems are taking on incumbents in every industry. Airbnb is not only challenging the biggest hotel chains but also challenging the bureaucracy, going after the New York City housing and tax laws that stand it its way. Now, with a valuation of $10 billion, Airbnb has the capital to take on the hotel industry and its supporters globally. The app-enabled car-sharing service Uber has also become a global phenomenon with a valuation of over $18 billion. In an ironic turn, cab drivers in London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid decided to strike in June, 2014 to protest Uber. The result: Uber gained several hundred thousand new members. Quirky is disrupting incumbents in consumer product design and innovation, Local Motors in the automobile business, Relay Rides in car rentals and Kickstarter and AngelList in the financial sector. Name an industry and there is a new open-system player leveraging the power of the networked world to build a paradigm-shifting competitor.

As established players focus on exploiting opportunities by applying their tried and true business models, these new players, especially those being built on the Internet, take the opposite approach. They start with a market opportunity and explore ways to build a new business model that can be applied. Uber, for example, saw the gap between the demand for cabs and their availability and devised a novel and disruptive car-sharing model.

This year at Cannes it felt like the light finally went on. A slew of new open-system marketing startups made an appearance, but Cannes was also jammed full of newer tech companies built on open principles, from Spotify to Jingle Punks and MoFilms. All of these are taking a piece of the traditional marketing spend.

These open-system mammals and birds have evolved to a point where they are beginning to articulate and deliver on the new paradigm while the dinosaur guardians of the old, closed marketing world are starting to acknowledge the shift. Many of these dinosaurs – agencies in particular — seemed a bit panicked about being disintermediated. They are realizing that the open marketing systems gives brands the ability to do what agencies did themselves by creating their own marketing content and media channels. Brands can now build their own agencies based on connecting to the open marketing systems.

There are a few things that brands can do to take advantage of the emergence of these new open-system species.

1. Adapt your business models to exploit new opportunities rather than try to apply your existing one. As discussed, open-system species are agile in part because they see opportunities and create new models to go after them.

2. Take more control. It used to be that brands needed an agency to communicate with customers. Today, with the falling price of media and the real time nature of the two-way conversation with consumers, brands can do more of this themselves. Some of the best-known brands including Patagonia and Apple are building their own in-house strategic agencies, taking control of strategic and creative leadership while using an open system to collaborate with great outside talent. Those brands realize that one of their most important assets is their relationship with consumers. There will still be a place in the ecosystem for lots of players and collaboration, including agencies, but brands increasingly can take the lead.

3. Seek out great ideas wherever they are. Companies and their brands need to get away from idea myopia, the notion that one outside organization, usually an agency, must be the sole creator of marketing ideas. Not only do your most passionate fans have great ideas and the tools to communicate them but there are ideas to be found from retailers, distributors and other outside partners. Likewise, internal team members have some of the best creative ideas but are sometimes afraid to participate.

This year’s Cannes Festival proved that the new, open marketing world is much more sophisticated than it was even a year ago, with many more players fighting for the same space. We can expect that Cannes Festivals to come will be filled with even more species of open marketing organizations. While some of the old guard will go extinct, as in any ecosystem, more diversity will bring more growth and vitality to brands, and create relentless pressure for the remaining ones to adapt.

More blog posts by John Winsor

More on: Advertising, Marketing, Talent management

JOHN WINSOR

John Winsor is the CEO of Victors and Spoils and Chief Innovation Officer at Havas.

We Can’t Always Control What Makes Us Successful

by Peter Cappelli  |   8:00 AM September 8, 2014

The 2002 movie Minority Report told the story of a future in which law enforcement could tell who would commit crimes in the future.  The police then arrested those people before they could commit the crimes.

A good deal of work in the social sciences tries to do the same thing, albeit without clairvoyance or Tom Cruise.  The idea is to identify the attributes of individuals that cause them to act in certain ways in the future: What causes some students to do well in school, why are some patients bad at taking their medicine, and, for our purposes, what causes some candidates to perform well in jobs?

Most of the studies in the workplace have been done by psychologists.  Despite the new hype about big data as a means to build such models, psychologists have been studying questions like what predicts who will be a good performer since WWI.  Over the generations, we’ve gotten used to the fact that tests most applicants don’t understand, examining attributes such as personality, determine who gets hired.

Of course, there are lots of other tests that are not as well known but sometimes used by HR in the workplace, such as “integrity” tests that try to determine who will steal at work, something very much like the Minority Report movie.

But a few things have changed with the rise of big data.  The psychologists have lost control of the effort. It’s now done by economists, data engineers, IT operatives, and anyone who has access to the data. It also migrated outside the firm to an ever-growing crowd of vendors who offer enticing claims about the benefits of their prediction software.  Rather than giving tests, the new studies look for associations with background data.  The better ones worry about actual causation.

As data has gotten easier to access and software has made analyzing it simpler, we can examine every aspect of employee behavior.  My colleague Monika Hamori and I did a study of what determines whether executives say “yes” when headhunters call to recruit them; in work underway, a colleague recently identified the attributes of individuals who get laid off in a consulting firm based on email traffic; another is looking at the attributes of supervisors that predict which ones do the best job of training. You name it, it’s being studied now.

The promise of big data means that we are likely to get better at prediction in the future.  Even a small improvement in predictive accuracy can be worth millions to companies that hire tens of thousands of people per year. These tools are especially attractive to retail and service companies because they have so many employees and such high turnover, which means they are hiring all the time.

Here’s the issue, which is not new but it has grown more important with the developments above:  Many of the attributes that predict good outcomes are not within our control.  Some are things we were born with, at least in part, like IQ and personality or where and how we were raised.  It is possible that those attributes prevent you from getting a job, of course, but may also prevent you from advancing in a company, put you in the front of the queue for layoffs, and shape a host of other outcomes.

So what, if those predictions are right?

First is the question of fairness. There is an interesting parallel with the court system where predictions of a defendant’s risk of committing a crime in the future are in many states used to shape the sentence they will be given. Many of the factors that determine that risk assessment, some of which include things like family background that are beyond the ability of the defendant to control. And there has been pushback: is it fair to use factors that individuals could not control in determining their punishment?

Some of that fairness issue applies to the workplace as well. Even if it does predict who will steal, what if, for example, being raised by a single parent meant that you did not get a job, all other things being equal?

Second is the effect on motivation. If I believe that decisions about my employment such as promotions, layoff decisions, and other outcomes are heavily influenced by factors that I cannot control, such as personality or IQ, how does this affect my willingness to work hard?

And finally, unlike the Minority Report movie, our predictions in the workplace are nowhere close to perfect. Many times they are only a bit more accurate than chance, and they explain only a fraction of the differences in behavior of people.

The field of psychology has long thought about the ethical issues and moral consequences of their tests. At least as of yet, the new big data studies and the vendors selling them have not.  How we balance the employer’s interest in getting better employees and making more effective workplace decisions with broader concerns about fairness and unintended consequences is a pretty hard question.

More blog posts by Peter Cappelli

More on: Human resources, Information & technology, Talent management

PETER CAPPELLI

Peter Cappelli is Professor of Management at the Wharton School and the author of several books, including his latest, The India Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).