In the reflective thinking pattern one assumes that people want to be part of a functioning, healthy work group, and have an intrinsic desire for achieving reasonable goals and meeting the expectations of their customers and supervisors.

Although this innate drive can be, and often is, extinguished by poorly designed systems and climates of hostility and disrespect, it can also be reactivated when conditions improve. Approaching problems with this assumption is critical to your effectiveness.

Whenever tension is high or morale is languishing, assume that something—a policy, workflow, anxiety, fear, miscommunication, negative reciprocity—is blocking the person’s or group’s ability to achieve, become part of a team, and feel valued. It’s rare that this assumption is not accurate.

People have strong needs for a sense of belonging. When workplaces don’t provide an opportunity for respect, camaraderie, and attachment, individuals make their emotional investments in unions, local bars, gangs, recreational activities, home-based businesses, faith communities, or families.

A manager of a customer service department told me, as a means of introduction to his direct reports, that they “only worked for the pay-check.” He viewed his 18 employees as working mothers who had taken jobs only to provide a second income to their families. Consequently, the manager made no investment in their development nor did he solicit their ideas for improving customer service. When I interviewed his direct reports, I checked his assumption and found that almost 50 percent of his group had part-time, home-based businesses, from craft shows to catering. He was right—they weren’t making an investment in work, but only because he had denied them the opportunities and experiences that allow those desires to develop.

People behave differently depending on constraints, pressures, peer pressure, anxiety levels, time urgency, and so on. This notion is fairly well-accepted in academic circles, but is not widely recognized by business leaders. Most individuals think about people as either good or bad, lazy or ambitious. In reality, people aren’t that static or one-dimensional. Every human being has a range of behaviors from which they choose. Even people who are deemed unsalvageable by the courts have the capacity to surprise. Felons with no hope for parole volunteer to raise seeing-eye dogs, or provide hospice care to aging inmates. Even Larry Trapp, the Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan from Chapter Two, who most people would dismiss as hopeless, was capable of changing.

The other side of human nature is also true. “Ordinary” people are capable of malfeasance when trapped in corrupt systems.

Personality is malleable. In the book The Cheating Culture, author David Callahan documents the decline of formerly trustworthy Sears auto mechanics in 1990s, when their compensation system underwent a dramatic change. Corporate decision-makers lowered the base pay of both managers and mechanics. Suddenly, workers were forced to compensate for their drop in income (and perhaps increase it dramatically) by selling parts and additional services. The mechanics and their managers were driven into the harsh position of having to choose between ethics and economic security.

Within a few years, Sears’s sterling customer service ratings plummeted, and 18 class-action suits and scores of investigations for fraudulent practices were brought against the company.

This is an important insight for organizations. Workplaces are constantly required to challenge, motivate, and mediate human behavior. At one level this insight means that, by changing structure, rewards, and performance criteria, organizations can change behavior. Or looking through the other side of the lens: if management isn’t satisfied with current behavior, they can go upstream and change the conditions that are causing undesired outcomes.

Philip Zimbardo, from Stanford University, explored a much darker side of how situations shape behavior. His findings, published in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm (1999), eerily foreshadowed criminal behavior at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War.

In the 1980s, Zimbardo turned the bottom floor of the University of California psychology building into a simulated “prison,” complete with iron bars and a solitary confinement cell. Zimbardo and his associates tested, interviewed, and identified 24 psychologically healthy college students to tak part in the experiement, and divided them into two groups consisting of “prisoners” and “guards.” The original plan was to run the experiment for two weeks.

However, on the sixth day of the mock prison experiment, Christine Maslach, a friend and colleague who hadn’t previously been involved in the project, stopped in to assist with interviews. Christine described what she saw with dismay, “I looked at the line of hooded, shuffling, chained prisoners, with guards shouting orders at them—and then quickly averted my gaze. I was overwhelmed by a chilling, sickening feeling.” Zimbardo wrote, “We observed and documented that the guards steadily increased their coercive and aggressive tactics, humiliation, and dehumanization of the prisoners day by day.”

Maslach confronted Zimbardo with his complicity in a college psychology experiment that had dangerously deteriorated and needed to be terminated. At first Zimbardo disagreed with her. However, to his credit, he eventually acknowledged that Christine’s observations were accurate and ended the experiment. Later he wrote that his role as the chief researcher had been compromised by his role as a prison superintendent who had been eager “to maintain the integrity of my prison” (italics added).

Situations have a huge effect on human behavior. Competitive systems with harsh economic norms result in aggressive, and sometimes unethical, behavior. In contrast, systems that are seen as accessible, fair, rewarding, and cooperative bring out the best in people. In the book No Contest, Alfie Kohn documents this finding in detail.

Elliot Aronson of Stanford University also conducted experiments loaded with insight for workplaces. Aronson, a specialist in school shooting rampages, cites a study from the Secret Service. Analysing 41 student shooting rampage perpetrators, the Secret Service found no way to distinguish perpetrators from others based on their “personality, attitudes or demographics.” Aronson turned his attention to the context in which this act occurs. His conclusions are chilling. “The root cause of the shootings is the poisonous social atmosphere that exists in almost every public school in this country—atmospheres permeated by daily incidents of exclusion, taunting, bullying, and humiliation.” A comment from a Columbine football player after the shootings serves as a vivid example: “Columbine is a good, clean place except for those rejects.”

Of particular value to our purpose is Aronson’s ability to improve relationships between elementary students by simply changing the system in which the students learn. Aronson coached teachers to shift from a competitive to cooperative learning format, where student’s work was interdependent rather than competitive. Within two weeks, group-mates have gone from taunting, to encouraging each other. Lasting friendships were formed across cultural and language differences—differences that had been the basis of exclusion and taunting just days prior to the change.

This is another example of the difference between focusing on people (in our paradigm BO and BS) as the source of problems and focusing on the situation or system (BIBS).

In escalated conflict it’s difficult to assess the potential performance of any employee. During power struggles, everyone’s “evil twin” emerges. If management is unclear about an employee’s capacities during escalated conflict, I suggest that we reduce barriers to pride in work, eliminate system inefficiencies and waste, lower fear, and end power struggles. Then wait a reasonable period of time to assess performance. If, under ideal conditions, employees cannot meet realistic performance standards, management must proceed with consequences including, if necessary, termination.

With that disclaimer in place, let’s look at some of the situations when reasonable people behave poorly at work.

Always assume that the other party has multiple hidden constraints or pressures that are shaping his or her behavior. For a quick review of high conflict situations where one or both parties ignored this step, see Chapter Four. Of course, this assumption may be wrong, and there is no pressing reality of which you are unaware. But it doesn’t take much time to sit down with someone and ask for help in understanding his or her behavior.

When I’ve taken this step, I haven’t always discovered a hidden reason. Sometimes it takes time to build trust, or there is fear of punishment, or organizational retribution is too high. There are cases where clients are hiding illegal or unethical behaviors. However, I’ve never regretted asking. In the next chapter you’ll learn a simple technique for opening the dialogue and clarifying whether or not people are blocked by hidden contingencies.

There are many books and courses on system thinking and process mapping. These techniques are taught at universities, nonprofit organizations, and consulting firms. The information falls under different names and formats such as Total Quality, the Baldridge Award, Lean, manufacturing, and process improvement. Many organizations have gained tremendous improvements by learning how to remove waste from their processes and streamlining workflow.

In conflict resolution work I sometimes teach my clients an introduction to process-mapping in one day.My comments here will be limited to how you can use this perspective to eliminate the true sources of stress and conflict.

During the industrial revolution, organizational charts of the workplace were based on military models of command and control (figure 12). It’s no wonder—most of the men who built the first industrial workplaces were former officers during the Civil War. Traditional organizational charts delineate authority and responsibility, but they do not portray the interdependency of departments, or the flow of work through an organization.

In contrast, system perspectives (Figure 13) track workflow from the beginning of the organization’s processes to the end. It’s multifunctional, fluid, and loops back on itself.

A very simplified systems perspective of an automobile manufacturer might begin with market research determining the next sought-after features or vehicles; engineering completing feasibility studies, prototypes, and final designs; purchasing translating production goals into the necessary raw materials (circuit boards, steel, fiberglass, wiring) for operations, orders, and purchases; production taking raw materials and transforming them into outputs (finished cars); shipping providing transportation to dealers; distributors overseeing leases and sales; service and sales tracking warranty, safety, and service data; cross-functional teams studying after-sales information to feed back into their system. Then the whole cycle starts anew by the organization gearing up for the new generation of production.

What I just described is a very, very complex, interconnected system. How well do most systems work? It depends. How savvy are the leaders about systems thinking? When problems occur, do individuals from other departments join together to solve them, or do they break into Cycles of Contempt? Do employees understand the delicate interdependence of their work and take other departments into consideration as they make decisions? For instance, does engineering invite shipping to their planning meetings to discuss changes in product dimensions and how those changes will impact the number of vehicles that can be transported by rail or container vessel?

Most workplace systems contain 2,000 or more processes. Each process requires that someone take what’s given to him or her (input) and transform and deliver a product or service (output). Output can be a design, a toaster, an ice-cream cone, a budget, an e-mail system, a document, or an after-school program. Service industries, schools, government bodies—any organization can draw their work as a system or series of linking processes.

When I’m doing team building or conflict resolution, I often create a simple process map with clients. Working in small groups and hanging our work on the wall, we use Post-it notes for each step and place them on big sheets of flip chart paper. Post-it notes are great because they’re flexible. They can be lifted and repositioned as many times as necessary. We create the process as it should be, and then how it really works. Lightbulbs flash when people see how much of their conflict is related to dysfunctional processes, not people.

For example, imagine a process improvement team wants to focus on improving the existing process for qualifying a new customer for credit. They would start by identifying the steps it takes to accomplish this task. Do they collect information from the customer? If yes, that’s the first step of the process. Do they verify the information? That’s the second step of the process, and so on. In process improvement we ask questions such as: What’s the sequence of the steps? Who’s involved? Where are decisions made that require a branch in the flow chart based on the outcome of the decision?

After we reach consensus about workplace flow, we look for sources of waste, delays, or unnecessary steps. The team might look for bottlenecks: does the application sits on someone’s desk for days or weeks? Is everyone doing the work the same way, or are there variations, rework, and confusion? How many delays, bottlenecks, shortages, or overruns can the team reduce or eliminate?

In most organizations, what percentage of the 2,000 processes would you guess are poorly designed or inefficient? Almost all of them!

Most workplace processes were never consciously designed, they just evolved. As a result, they are full of idiosyncrasies, poorly defined steps, or unnecessary tasks. For instance, a process improvement team at a manufacturing site questioned why the shipping department put a piece of cardboard on top of their products before they sealed the box. No one knew. The mystery wasn’t solved until a team member tracked down a retired employee who said, “Well, son, we started that practice in 1942 as a means of keeping the product clean, because at that time we sealed the boxes with a glue brush.” They had continued the practice for decades past its usefulness.

Imagine the improvements in efficiency and morale if organizations could improve key processes by even 5 percent! Dr. Deming, one of the most effective workplace change agents of all times, believed that 85 to 93 percent of workplace waste originates in systems, not people. He became famous for witty harangues of managers who had hounded employees to improve productivity when, in reality, most employees had zero authority to change systems and processes of their workflow. His colleague, Myron Tribus said, “Employees work in a system. It’s the job of management to work on the system and improve it, continuously, with their help.”

Whenever I enter a high-conflict situation, I always start with the assumption that the conflict’s root causes are in the systems, and act accordingly. The odds are in my favor. In resolving more than 120 conflicts, only twice have I found the root cause of the problem was a key person who lacked the capacity to do his or her job.

In every other situation I’ve stepped into, conflict escalated precisely because everyone involved had taken the position of “This is a mess, whose fault is it?” By starting with this question, the true causes of tension had been overlooked.

If you start with the assumption that people are reasonable and a constraint or pressure in the system is fueling tension and negative behavior, you’ll not only eliminate most of the systemic reasons for stress and blame at work, you’ll become remarkably efficient in solving your organization’s problems.

When problems and disagreements occur or chronic tension exists between two groups, is something in the system out of whack? Are systems bogged down with rework, bottlenecks, or ambiguity? Do differences in performance measures between one group and another put people at odds? Is there a more efficient way to do this job? What causes confusion and resentment?

The following is another story about millions of dollars that were lost because individuals locked horns in a power struggle over personalities, rather than joining together to solve a catastrophic systems problem.

Rick, a technical genius, had narrowly escaped being fired after he “lipped off” to the company president. Most of the executive team viewed Rick as an unprofessional, undisciplined hothead who enjoyed exploiting the fact that he was central to one of their most important processes: customized machines.

One thing was clear; Rick’s job was critical. If a salesperson wanted a machine customized (the majority of the company’s sales), Rick was the man they had to deal with—but Rick’s average time for turning around an estimate for a customization request was three months! The sales people were livid—they told me they were losing 25 percent of their sales and millions of dollars to this delay.

The situation between Rick and the sales group had deteriorated so badly that during the annual sales meeting, Virg, the vice president of the division, told his sales team, “Rick is the organization’s number-one barrier to sales.”

The company president told me that Rick would have been terminated months ago if anyone else in the company came close to matching his capabilities. The president gave me carte blanche to do what I needed in order to fix him.

By the time I was done collecting background information, I half-expected Rick to be a surly, arrogant, sociopath. Instead, I found someone who cared so much about his work that he talked for four hours about his frustrations, resentments, multiple attempts to resolve his huge backlog, how hard he had tried to become more effective, and how stymied he felt in his attempts to obtain the resources and cooperation he needed to do his job.

Rick also told me that after he heard about Virg’s negative comment at the sales meeting, he lost all motivation to overcome the backlog, had quit working overtime, and had fallen further behind—a perfect example of negative reciprocity.

As Rick’s story wound down, I made it very, very clear that we were about to turn in his resignation as the company scapegoat, and take unprecedented steps to fix the problem at it’s true source. The company had a lousy process for securing quotes, and Rick couldn’t fix the process by himself.

During my initial conversations with Rick, I consciously used the power of appreciation and its ability to bond. It’s the fastest way to gain commitment to a hardheaded search for solutions. When Rick wrapped up his story, he knew I had truly listened and acknowledged the validity of his frustrations, respected his dedication, and been impressed by the many creative ways he had tried to resolve the backlog. He felt validated and appreciated.

Not until this point could I be successful in giving him the critical feedback he needed to hear. With a grin, I told him that although the organization could take the lion’s share of responsibility for the bottleneck, his defensiveness and “complete lack of social skills” with the president didn’t help.

I delivered my comments with warmth. The relationship we forged during our first meeting allowed me to speak to Rick bluntly. Even though I had only known him for four hours, Rick laughed good-naturedly at my frank, but accurate, remarks. He knew he had to alter his approach to achieve the changes he so desperately needed.

Rick lacked the skill and positional power to address a problem that deeply affected his reputation and relationships. The process needing repair spanned three divisions, and required the involvement of management four levels above him. Because Rick couldn’t fix the problem, his relationships with the sales group became more adversarial. He’d become bitter, sullen, “unprofessional,” and “undisciplined.”

Within a few days of our first meeting, Rick and I sat down with the vice presidents of engineering and sales. I asked Rick to share his perceptions of the root causes of his current backlog, and, as a group, using the PostIt and flip-chart paper method, we flow-charted the current process for procuring an estimate on a customized machine.

The VP of engineering was shocked to learn that when Rick approached an engineer for (yet another) quote, they ducked into offices to avoid him. As a result, every piece of information Rick needed to formulate his quotes entailed a laborious, time-consuming process of multiple, unreturned e-mails and phone calls.

Rick and Virg, the VP of sales, had their first ever prolonged, face-to-face conversation. Virg learned that the salespeople (with Virg’s encouragement) had been loading their requests for estimates with every conceivable feature, knowing full well the customer would never pay the premium dollars it took to build them.

However, customizations were the company’s market niche, and complex orders were one of the ways the sales group played up the organization’s capacities. Unfortunately, each one of these features complicated and delayed Rick’s work. When Rick tried to tell the salespeople that the extraneous features were making the problem worse, they dismissed him as a blowhard; especially, Rick continued, after their vice president had christened him “the number-one barrier to sales.”

Virg dropped his eyes when he realized that one of his salespeople had told Rick about the denigrating remark. Then Virg spontaneously—and with genuine remorse—apologized for the callous remark. A flash of relief crossed Rick’s face.

The four of us turned our attention to the wasteful and haphazard process. During the next hour and a half we generated several significant changes for streamlining it and clearing up Rick’s backlog. The next morning the two VPs met with their teams and announced the changes. Rick began a daily 8 a.m. staff meeting with a cross-functional team consisting of engineering, software, and sales. The meetings averaged an hour. With everyone in the room to review requests and rough out estimates, the process went from days to minutes.

The VP of engineering designed a rotating roster that assured at least two of his engineers and a software designer would be available at the start of each day. Virg appointed a gatekeeper within sales. All requests for customized machines had to pass muster for extraneous features before they left the sales group and reached Rick’s desk. Over the next few months Rick’s backlog dropped from three months to a few days. The sales team was ecstatic. This gave them a tremendous competitive edge.

Six months later, Rick was an honored guest at the annual sales meeting. He took the podium to talk about the next generation of possibilities in customized designs. The president of the company later told me that he estimated they saved $1.5 million in sales the first year after the changes were implemented.

This story is a perfect example of the cost savings that can be realized by shifting from reflexive, inflammatory thinking (BO) to searching for the reasons (BIBS) in processes and systems that drive people’s behavior.

In another situation, a vice president, desperate to resolve a widespread problem in his service department, told me privately that I needed to come in and “fix Molly,” the service technician coordinator. Molly, he confided, was going home early twice a week in tears. “Problems with menopause,” he whispered.

When the leadership team and I shifted the focus from her “unreasonable personality” onto their poorly designed systems, the cost savings her department accrued ran into the millions. It was another situation where the people who were suffering the most also were the biggest contributors to the problem. Once we gathered a cross-functional team of decision-makers, the process problem was embarrassingly easy to fix.

The current generation of workers and senior executives will probably be the last to have finished formal education without systems thinking. If your company isn’t learning process mapping or systems thinking, I would highly encourage you to search out a competent training program and add those techniques to your skills-set. Once employees and leaders begin to view work through a systems perspective, interconnectedness of efforts is highlighted, and they self-correct behavior that causes problems down-stream.

Pay attention to the type of behavior your systems feed. Avoid performance measures and bonuses that emphasize competition and pit individuals against each other.

I have more than once found that the root cause of conflict between executives is often embedded in the criteria upon which their bonuses are calculated. Each person is working specific criteria to maximize their bonus, but at the expense of cross-functional collaboration.

Often, by working with a company’s CFO and CEO, we’ve changed team dynamics from adversarial to cooperative by backing away from individual performance measures based on departmental accomplishments, to basing everyone’s bonus on the same measure—such as year-end profitability.

In one setting, within 24 hours of the change, the VP of sales offered the VP of operations—his previous scapegoat—an unfilled employee position to help allieviate his staff shortage. Why did the formerly self-oriented executive suddenly become so cooperative? Because we made it in his best interest to help his colleagues succeed! These results are similar to what Aronson experienced when he changed the system of learning in schools.

If bonuses, systems, award programs, and performance measures encourage cooperation and interdependence, then those type of behavior are amplified. In Chapter Eleven we’ll look at strategies that maintain cultures of cooperation and respect.

First, let’s unravel blaming, inflammatory thinking. It’s a thinking pattern that assumes there’s no possible way to reason with another person or group—they are flawed beyond hope, and therefore our aggressive and exclusionary behaviors are justified. Before we focus further on this thinking pattern I need to tell you a story about blame’s stinky twin—depression.

In 1978 a team of psychologists (Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdal) specializing in cognitive therapy—the study of thinking patterns, or self-talk—were contacted by a company that had terminated a significant number of employees. Most of the former employees began a job search in a relatively short period of time, and took full advantage of outplacement resources.

However, a small group of former workers had become depressed and were managing their job search half-heartedly, or not at all. The company asked the therapists to help. Because the psychologists specialized in cognitive therapy, they assumed the reason the sub-group became lethargic was because of what they were saying to themselves about the cause of their terminations.

The findings of these practitioners changed the field of psychology. Through interviews with depressed former employees, the psychologists identified the concepts of personal, pervasive, and permanent. First, the depressed, unemployed workers concluded that their loss of employment was personal, despite the fact that many people lost their jobs. The depressed, passive group attributed their loss solely to their own behavior. They used self-talk statements such as, “This was my fault. I should have worked more overtime,” or, “I should have seen this coming and left that sinking ship a year ago.” The tendency to blame a misfortune solely on one’s personal behavior is called personalization—the assumption that a negative outcome is totally the fault of the individual.

The second thinking pattern psychologist identified was a tendency to make self-criticisms pervasive. They judged every element of their lives in a negative light. “Not only can’t I hold down a job, I’m a bad parent, and my garden is dead. I’m a complete failure.”

They magnified their feelings of unworthiness by telling themselves that their job-loss was permanent. “Never again will I have interesting work.” (As the comedian Robin Williams quips, “Whenever I start feeling unmotivated to look for work there’s always one thought that immediately shifts my mood, ‘Want fries with that?’”)

These three conclusions—personal, pervasive, and permanent—are deadly in combination. When people fall into this trap they are overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness and failure.

These statements are also the thinking patterns of blame. The only difference is the direction of the arrow. In depression, the arrow of contempt points inward. In blame, contempt points toward another person or group. Anger, irritability, and the automatic assumption that someone is to blame, become invisible habits that sap people’s energy, relationships, effectiveness, health, and vitality. A downward spiral ensues.

Depression, or self-loathing, is a worse state than hostility. It feels awful and it lacks energy. While hostility is emotionally stressful, it has an advantage over depression in that it carries a jolt of energy. At work, people often use the energy of hostility to escape the numbness of depression. One of the most common ways to escape debilitating depression is by turning contempt toward an external target, activating adrenaline, and pumping up feelings of superiority. The same thinking pattern results in both hostility and depression, depending on which way the pointing finger swings. Neither one of them solves problems. As a result, problems accumulate and intensify. Life becomes more unmanageable and lonely. When you react to frustration with blame, either toward yourself or others, you set up a reoccurring dynamic between depression and hostility.

Now we can see exactly why hostility and depression are linked. The thinking patterns are identical; they have the same DNA; it’s all your (my) fault, it’s everything about you (me), you (I) can’t change.

So, what’s the alternative? How does one think about others’ destructive or inappropriate behavior in a more useful way? Destructive behavior on the part of other people is not going away, and there’s plenty of it.

Again, in order to be more effective you don’t have to take a “Pollyanna” approach, covering your eyes to block out reality, and think, “Isn’t everyone WONDERFUL!?” In fact, the opposite approach is more useful. Assume everyone, including you, is a nutcase. Everyone is flawed. So what’s to be gained by getting indignant and flooding?

Every day, each of us hits a “growing edge” where we don’t have what it takes to do the correct thing or make the right decision. Ironically, the original meaning of the word “sin” is to miss the mark. No one does things perfectly every time.

This is not saying anything goes. The ability to articulate and enforce clear boundaries and standards is essential. Clearly communicated standards and methods for holding people accountable are basic building blocks of healthy groups and organizations.

In order to discuss effectiveness in addressing problems, we need to add assertiveness to our conversation. Assertiveness can be low or high. In combination with hostility and warmth there are four possible combinations: 1) When high hostility is combined with high assertiveness, it’s expressed as hot contempt. In this style, people are intimidating, confronting, insulting, and working actively to undermine another person or get them fired. 2) When hostility is combined with low assertiveness the result is cold contempt. In work settings the two primary behaviors of cold contempt are a) avoiding others and b) backstabbing. 3) Warmth is combined with low assertiveness. I call this the doormat quadrant! In this style, the boss (or parent) abdicates his or her responsibility to lead or shape behavior.

None of these three approaches are effective! In the first two combinations the other party responds with defensiveness and negative reciprocity. In the third, they get away with murder—and others resent the supervisor or parent for not setting and enforcing healthy standards of behavior or performance.

The remaining combination consists of warmth in combination with high assertiveness. This option is very effective—and it’s the style that people use the least! It’s amazing to watch people gossip, stew, explode, rant, shame, stonewall, avoid, steam, lie, excuse, go numb, vent, roll over, use sarcasm, undermine, tease, pretend, retaliate, and suffer—reactions that take enormous physiological and emotional energy—rather than approach the problem with warmth and clear expectations. Asking for different behavior while treating a person with acceptance increases the odds we will maintain the relationship and work through the problem—together.

Addressing behavior that “misses the mark” in this manner has overwhelming advantages. Similar to the story of Rick in customized machines, when you give feedback with another party’s interest at heart, they are tempted to listen and consider your input.

Attack and withdraw behaviors don’t work because the whole personality is targeted, not just actions. People don’t change unless they feel accepted.

As the following story shows, you can be warm even in situations that require dramatic corrective action.

When I met Mary Jo she managed a government subsidized, low-income apartment building—a tough job that requires tremendous skill. After she heard me talking about the potency of warmth combined with high standards, she told me the following story.

On the way to a meeting one morning she was walking through the county courthouse with an attorney. Coming toward them from the opposite direction was a middle-aged woman Mary Jo recognized. The two women embraced, talked enthusiastically, gave each other quick updates on their lives and families, expressed delight in seeing each other, and chatted for a few minutes before continuing on their separate ways. As Mary Jo and her colleague resumed their journey to the meeting, the attorney said, “That was neat. How do you know each other?”

“Oh,” Mary Jo replied, “She was one of my former tenants. I had to evict her.”

Mary Jo was a master at setting clear limits and enforcing consequences, while maintaining a warm and caring relationship. This allowed her to evict a tenant, yet retain their connection and avoid negative reciprocity. In Chapter Nine you’ll learn several techniques that will help you master this valuable skill.

The following is a true story about a time I was caught off-guard by the destructive behavior of a client, flooded, caught my error, backed up, and approached the problem more effectively. It’s a good example of the power of thinking to change behavior and outcomes.

I conduct seminars and keynotes on this material titled the “Self-Defeating Habits of Otherwise Brilliant People.” After a public seminar, a director from a large nonprofit agency in Rochester, Minnesota, approached me. Roxanne loved the class and asked me to come to her organization and conduct sessions for their managers. She said their organization was full of negativity and blame and could definitely benefit from my message.

On the first scheduled session at her organization, I was pleasantly surprised to see Roxanne sitting in the audience, ready to participate for the second time. “Wow, she must be a big fan of the material,” I thought naively. “It must have made a big impact!”

In the few minutes before the presentation began people were chatting and enjoying coffee and rolls. A small group of managers sitting near the front of the room began discussing an organizational disaster that had occurred a year ago, which had delayed their paychecks for more than two weeks. (I later learned the error, which occurred right before Christmas and caused significant problems for most of their employees, originated in Roxanne’s office.) Roxanne, who was sitting near the back of the room, overheard their private conversation. From across the entire room, she said loudly, “Are you still talking about that?! Do you know why this organization is so screwed up? Because all the managers in this agency are immature!”

The room became dead quiet. As the presenter, I was in an awkward spot. I didn’t have the background information necessary to understand the underlying conflict, I didn’t have permission from the key players to make this the focus of the day, and the agency hadn’t hired me to resolve an active situation; I was there to facilitate a seminar. However, I didn’t feel I could ignore Roxanne’s comment.

I did my best to smooth over her statement and help alleviate the negative impact of her remarks, but when I left at the end of the day, I knew the group hadn’t fully recovered from the sting of her accusation.

While I was on-site I stayed upbeat, but once I was “off stage” and on my way home, I found myself rerunning the “tape” of Roxanne’s words. I thought, “What a jerk!” In an effort to justify my feelings of self-righteousness and anger, I went on a classic “search for stupidity.”

It wasn’t difficult to find facts to support my negative thinking. Despite the fact that Roxanne seemed to value my message about B.O., B.S., BIBS, flooding, and reciprocity, she started out the day by attacking everyone in the room—the very behaviors she had brought me in to alleviate!

Suddenly I remembered I had to do two more seminars at her agency. Aghhh! Maybe she’d be on vacation. I wanted to avoid her.

Then the arrow of blame turned inward. Maybe I was the problem! I hadn’t exactly saved the day. Maybe I was a fraud, and I’m the one who should be serving fries! If I had been Nelson Mandela or Bishop Tutu, the situation would have been a piece of cake. Why hadn’t I fixed it?

I was really on a roll. I felt angry and powerless, and I was starting to feel sick. The queasiness in my stomach shifted my attention. I wondered if I was getting the flu.

Oh thank heavens! I was just flooding! Once I realized that I was feeling miserable because of my inflammatory thinking, I knew I could alleviate my distress simply by changing my thinking.

Before I understood these principles, the thinking patterns of blame, self-criticism, and their accompanying physical reactions were daily experiences for me. However, for three years I had been practicing “baby in the back seat” and paying attention to my thinking. Now it was relatively easy to become aware of the change in my body chemistry and identify the cause.

I realized I was blaming Roxanne, because she had blamed the supervisors, because the supervisors had blamed her department. There were three Cycles of Contempt in one situation. I started my analysis over, dragging my thinking away from reflexive reactions, toward a more reflective problem-solving approach.

In the reflective orientation we assume that others fall short not because of malice, but because there’s a baby in the back seat, or because they lack skill, insight, or courage (self-confidence). Whenever I witness an act that seems callous or destructive, I ask myself, “Is this person lacking skill, insight, or courage?” When I make a mistake, I analyze it using the same set of questions. These six words—lack of skill, insight, or self-confidence—have saved me many hours of useless fuming and negativity.

Let’s return to Roxanne’s behavior. Might her actions reflect a lack of skill? Could she have accomplished her goal by talking to the group privately and saying something similar to, “Are you talking about the mistake Judy made last year in payroll? I know it caused hardship, but when managers keep circulating the story a year later, it reopens an old wound. We were coping with some very unusual circumstances, and it won’t happen again. I’d appreciate it if you could let it rest in the past.”

Roxanne didn’t have that much skill and self-control—at least not that day, not in that moment.

How about lack of self-confidence or courage? Roxanne’s group hadn’t formally apologized to those affected by the error. The managers were still discussing the incident nearly a year later because they were still angry, and the extent of the snafu had not been acknowledged. Sometimes it takes tremendous courage to say, “I’m sorry,” especially when others are harmed by our behaviors. At the time, Roxanne and Judy had withdrawn. They became defensive as a means of deflecting attention away from their department’s behavior, hoping to avoid becoming the organization’s next scapegoat.

Then I considered the possibility that Roxanne’s behavior was the result of lack of insight. I don’t think at any time Roxanne understood how deeply her outburst offended the managers or fully comprehended the steps necessary to put the incident to bed. Instead, she continued to feed the controversy by blaming and withdrawing.

Once I looked at her behavior with a less inflammatory eye, I was also able to look at my own behavior with more objectivity. I too lacked skill, insight, and courage in that moment. After her outburst, I literally did not know what to do. I had hit my growing edge and “missed the mark.” That’s what human beings do—over and over. If we receive warm, competent feedback about errors, we learn, and try again. If we make an error and the other person attacks, we reciprocate by retreating or countering his or her accusations.

After a few minutes of looking at the situation with different assumptions, I realized my nausea was gone. When I thought about returning to Roxanne’s agency for the remaining presentations, I no longer felt a need to avoid her. I learned a visceral lesson that day about the power of the subtle choice we make every time we are frustrated. Do we search for stupidity? Or do we analyze the situation in a more reflective light?

I would suggest you have these six words tattooed on your hand: Lack of skill, insight, or courage. In lieu of that, at least memorize them. Use those half dozen words for the next few days every time you see someone behaving rudely, defensively, or destructively. See if you can’t view their behavior as a lack of one of these three qualities. This practice will allow you to maintain a non-judgmental attitude toward them, and the absence of negative energy will make you more effective. Wire your brain to think of these words every time someone near you behaves inappropriately.

You can also use the same words to analyze your own behavior when you make an error. Rather than disparaging yourself for “being a bad person,” “an idiot,” or a “complete bungler,” you’ll find yourself analyzing how you could approach the situation with more skill, insight, or confidence. Once your thinking becomes more objective, your mood will lift, and you will be more motivated to change and more confident that improvement is possible. Self-induced bouts of depression will become a thing of the past, as will your need to escape them by targeting someone else.

In the next chapter you’ll learn how to improve your problem-solving abilities even more, by using a powerful technique to open the dialogue with warmth and clarity—an approach that is loaded with benefits.