Giving or asking for help

What does it mean to offer help to a coworker, subordinate, or superior?  In the June issue of ISHN, James Leemann has a column that takes a very interesting perspective.  He explains that it is a lot more complex than it seems, citing some extensive work in a new book by Edgar Schein.   But rather than have you read the article or the book, here is what you need to know.

The first thing is that it is a two way human connection.  It is not just one person asking for help and the other one giving an answer.  It is a reciprocal process that must build a relationship between receiver and giver.  The way the help is provided has to match the way the receiver wants to be helped.  He describes three ways to give help, all of which I have seen many times while consulting in a variety of workplaces. 

• The doctor diagnoses the problem, determines the treatment, and tells the receiver what to do. This is the most authoritative mode of helping.  It works best when there is a clear power distance between the help giver and receiver. 
• The expert gives the person all of the information needed to make a decision, but leaves the decision up to him/her.  This leaves some flexibility with the recipient.  It helps them feel more in control of the process and less dependent.
• The consultant teaching the recipient how to decide and lets them go through most of the process on their own.  This gives the most freedom and authority to the recipient.  It is best when helper wants to empower the receiver.

There are many things that can go wrong in their process, either because of the helper or because of the receiver.  For example, the helper:

• Gives advice before the receiver is ready.  As you may have personally experienced, when you don’t want help, you throw up a barrier and resist it.
• Uses a more authoritative helping style than is wanted by the recipient.  If someone is looking for some insight into the process (i.e. a consultant), being an expert or doctor may not be welcome.
• Uses a less authoritative helping style than is wanted by the recipient.  If someone is looking for an answer, they may feel like they were left hanging if the helper just gives them some insight and leaves the decision up to them.
• Takes control of the situation and makes the recipient feel out of the loop or dependent.
• Doesn’t take the time to understand the problem before offering help.  In this case, the method may be fine, but the help is useless.

On the other hand, the recipient can also hurt the relationship.  He/she can:

• Not trust the person giving help and disregard the information provided.
• Seek reassurance rather than real help.  In this case the recipient will ignore the actual advice/help.
• Become defensive if the help is not what was expected. 

So the next time you are asking for help or offering help, think about the type of help that is needed (doctor, expert, or consultant) and make sure that there is enough mutual trust and understanding of the problem before you get started.

Create positive expectations and the team will excel

An article in the June ISHN talks about the power of expectations.  In a column by John Kello, he talks about several studies that sound like valid research, but doesn’t cite the research specifically.  But the results coincide with others that I have read.  This research looked at workplace teams and how they perform.  The workers are randomly assigned to a team.  They both do a baseline task and have about equal levels of performance.  Then one group is given a “positive spin.”  They are told that the first task was just a warm up and they will probably do better the second time.  The other group is given a “negative spin.” They are told that they may be tired, so their performance the second time may not be as good as the first time.  Other than the spin, both groups are identical.

But guess what happens?  The team that expects to do better the second time really does better.  And the team that expects to do worse really does worse. So there is a huge margin between the performance of the positive group and the negative one. 

This has some great insights for any team leader.  Give your team positive expectations and they will perform better.  A positive coaching style is much better than a negative coaching style.  I have seen the same results with elementary school teachers before standardized tests, sports coaches, and random lab experiments.  And so on and so on.

I would love to hear your own stories either supporting or contradicting this idea.  Feel free to put them in the comments.

Eagleman on humanity's purpose

On a completely different note (which is why I separated it into a different post), the last chapter of Eagleman’s book takes on a different part of losing the idea of free will.  He goes through a series of “dethronements” that humanity has gone through.  We were the center of the universe until Galileo.  Then we were at least the center of G-d’s plans until James Hutton discovered the true age of the earth (and that the bible wasn't literally accurate). We were at least G-d’s highest priority until Darwin discovered we evolved through natural selection.  So now we realize that we aren’t even in control of ourselves.  Our own consciousness is just a figment of our imagination. 

So will this be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back of humanity’s higher purpose?  Will we lose our sense of self-worth and self-importance and go into a society-wide black depression?  Will we all commit mass suicide or revolt against the absurdity of life (asked by Albert Camus)? 

He concludes the book by taking the opposite side of this hypothetical.  The smallness of humanity’s role in the universe is only because of how big the universe is. Let’s use our newfound insight into human nature to develop better procedures, better teaching methods, better motivation, better laws.  We may not have a soul in the religious way, but we have an incredible network of complexity and emergent properties that we will likely never understand completely.  He says we should revel in wonderment and awe. 

I am not sure about the soul part, but I like his positivism.  

Eagleman on free will

When I originally blogged about this, I had just heard an interview with David Eagleman on NPR.  He is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine and runs the Laboratory for Perception and Action there.  The interview was on remodeling the prison system using what we have learned about neuroscience.

But now that I have read his book Incognito, which deals with mental function in much wider detail, I want to expand a bit on the subject.  This is really interesting whether you are into psychology, ethics, philosophy, or just human nature in general.

Much of the book delves into the nature of consciousness and the idea of free will (he is a neuroscientist after all).  He uses a newspaper analogy, but I think a caucus illustrates his ideas a little better.  Imagine a really large organization (e.g. the Republican party) making a decision (e.g. passing a law) on a particular subject (e.g. the ceiling on government debt).  The brain is made up of all the people in the party.  They all may agree, or there can be dozens of different opinions on the subject.  Some people might have more influence than others.  Most of the wrangling goes on behind the scenes.  It's like the proverbial sausage-making.  A disorganized process that creates something that looks organized when it comes out.  

Consciousness is a reading of the law that gets passed.  Consciousness doesn’t know what all the opinions were or how many people lobbied for each one.  All consciousness knows is what got passed.  Most of our mental processing is made up of the unconscious caucus/sausage making while our consciousness is limited and often a misrepresentation of what happened in the unconscious processing (what sensations and ideas pushed the unconscious to make a decision in a particular way).  We constantly make up explanations to justify why we do what we do, but often these are wrong.  We don’t realize they are wrong, it’s just that we only had access to the final law that was passed, not the original debate.  We try to make up logical explanations for why such a law was passed, but as with real laws (and sausage making), the final result rarely looks like what went in.  Or to paraphrase A Few Good Men, “you can’t handle the truth.”  It is way too illogical.

This is a problem for free will.  What does that term even mean?  Our consciousness thinks that we are exerting free will, but much of the processing is going on unconsciously and is based on genetics, pre-natal and growing up experiences that were beyond our control, and other things that go against the idea of “free.”  It is not just nature versus nurture.  Even most of the nurture is really beyond our control.  So he can’t answer the question of whether we have free will, he doesn’t think that the concept really makes sense epistemologically. 

The reason I love this particular book is that Eagleman is a real neuroscientist. He takes a very  complicated subject and makes it accessible.  But unlike Gladwell’sbooks, he is much more than a journalist so his descriptions, analogies, and explanations are more accurate.  Nothing against Gladwell, but there is always a book on the same topic, written by a real scholar, that is better.

In Chapter Six, Eagleman applies these ideas to punishment, particularly in the legal system (like the interview I blogged about earlier).  Imagine a 6-year old girl who writes with crayon all over the wall (his example).  You would expect her parents to punish her to teach her a lesson.  But what if she was sleepwalking when she did it?  You would instead expect that her parents would seek treatment.  But these are just two ends of a continuum.  What if she was awake, but had never been taught that this was wrong?  What if she had limited cognitive ability and couldn’t understand the difference between allowed and unallowed behavior?  What if she is a bad girl because of genetic influences that originated from her parents?  In fact, each of these are continua.  People aren’t absolutely good or bad, they are somewhere along the spectrum.  People are cognitively able or unable, they are somewhere along the spectrum (or many spectra).  People aren’t knowledge or unknowledgeable, they are somewhere along the spectrum.  And on and on.

Now extend this to our legal system.  As Eagleman describes, we (the U.S.)  assume that people either had the capacity to understand their crime or they didn’t.  They either had the intention to do the crime, or they didn’t.   They either understood the consequences of the crime, or they didn’t.  If the answer to any of these questions is no, we don’t prosecute the perpetrator of the act criminally.  Either they get off completely, or they get “sentenced” to medical treatment which ends when/if they get better.

What does he recommend instead?  He says instead of focusing on blame and culpability based on a concept of free will that doesn’t exist, we should focus the legal system on modifiability.  We should take the steps that will modify the person so they don’t do it again.  This may involve prison time.  It may involve “pre-frontal workouts” to give the person better impulse control.  It could be surgical intervention to remove a brain tumor that is causing a mental defect (he cites lots of these in the book, including one where a tumor caused pedophilia to appear out of nowhere, and then disappear when the tumor was removed.  Luckily this person had a smart wife who got him surgical treatment before he committed a crime.).  

There are other components of criminal punishments beyond rehabilitation.  There is some value to society of getting a feeling of retribution.  There is some amount of punishment needed for deterrence.  He is against the former (considering it the equivalent of vigilantism) and ignores the latter (I think because he assumes nobody would commit any behavior they knew was wrong if they had impulse control, no matter how valuable the results might be). 

I am not sure if I am 100% on the same page as he is, but it definitely brings up some very interesting points.  I would recommend to anyone interested in the psychology of human mental processing, the philosophy of free will, or the ethics of the legal system to read this book. 

Strategic Use of Twitter

When Twitter first came out, I thought it was the silliest thing ever.  And the way it was first used was pretty silly.  Even founder Biz Stone didn’t know what it would be used for, and if Paula Poundstone thought it was narcissistic, something must be wrong.

But there are some strategic uses of Twitter that I strongly recommend.  These uses can be used for career advancement, advancing a hobby or just learning something new.  140 characters is too short to present anything real.  But it is enough space to include a title and link.  In essence, Twitter is the ultimate tool to filter the immense volume of content on the Internet and present only what is really valuable.  Google searching is not precise enough for this.  And scanning through full blogs takes too long.  But with Twitter you can scan a hundred tweets in five minutes and either read the good links or save them for later.  But you will have found them.  And the person you are following who showed it to you gets some of the credit and branding. 

So for me, one of my hobbies is the intersection of technology and business.  So I follow Wired magazine, Fast Company magazine, and Harvard Business Review.  There are very few friends who’s minute by minute activities are worth following, so I can limit my feed to just them. 

And as a tweeter, I can provide my followers with just what I think will be really valuable to them.  If I am good at that, I will create a brand for myself.  I have no data to back this up, but I would stake a big chunk of my social networking reputation on the fact that I am more likely to get a consulting job when the client follows me on twitter.  And if you are applying for a job, if half the team follows you on twitter you have a big leg up on the job.