Chapter 4 Building Relationship

Chapter 4 – Building relationship

Two Behavior styles – Push (your point of view onto others) and Pull (pull people to your point of view)

Pull – Soft in tone and execution. Prominent in Early stages of relationship. Listening is much more difficult than speaking even though our listening instruments are more efficient than vocals. Influences listen more than they talk and listen effectively. Use smart summaries to clarify. Four Pull Behaviors: (FEWR)

Fishing – Fishing for common ground. I.e. background, interests, job. Small Talk. If you stop fishing relationship aborts. It is easier to influence when you have things in common. Mediation can be described as sophisticated fishing. Influences take interest in people they meet and fish for opportunities to make connections. Beware of interrogating someone on the first meet.

Enthusing – Next step – if a subject is identified in fishing – follow up further. (Do not be overly enthusiastic just in case it is something they are indifferent to). To succeed you need to convey a sense of excitement in your manners.

Wallowing – engaging in empathetic probing of incidents, problems, moods and doubts. It is counterintuitive to influencing – many think it is gossip and a waste of time. Those who allow wallowing are better influences. Effective sellers do not jump in with instant answers to problems. Recounting memories induces powerful emotions from the last time person experienced it. Sharing the memories and feelings strengthen relationships in influencing.

Revealing - Discreetly revealing “intimate” and confidential matters and personal feelings. Takes time and correct circumstances and is mutual, proportionate and balanced. It is not about confessions nor it need to include them. A main criterion is something that is revealed about you is not something that is revealed to others. Each person lets the other in their private territory. It is not gossip but what is intentionally revealed.

PUSH BEHAVIORS – Unlikely to be successful where parties are strangers. Relationships can be weakened or totally destroyed by applying push behaviors in a fragile relationship. Using push behaviors without relationships you will come across as arrogant, presumptuous, threatening and unbalanced. Need to use pull behaviors is a precondition before using push behaviors. Pull influencers earn “right” to use push behaviors. Using these behaviors inappropriately leads to counter-productive and some people resent and react to careless use of these behaviors. Some (Usually females) manages do not feel comfortable when using these behaviors and feel self conscious.

Four Pull Behaviors (RSAC)

Reasoning – Using logic and rational argument s to point to the required decision.

Suggesting – Making general recommendations. ‘Softest” of the push behaviors. It is different from advice as anyone can offer advise where as in influencing suggestion presumes a relationship. Suggestion is not an offer of impersonal and disinterested advice as influences we have direct interest in the outcome and our suggestion is usually geared to achieve the outcome we favor. It is a push behavior because it is a determination of what we think should be done by others and not what we jointly agree might be best.

Asserting – using assertions to identify the “correct” decision. A complex relationship is implied by the fact that assertion is made. Assertive behavior is not meant to be ambiguous. As in tit-for-tat you know where you are with assertive people therefore the language they use is clear and to the point. In appraisal behavior it is necessary to be assertive otherwise there is a less chance of the behavior being corrected because people are not sure of what they have to do.

Coercing – using pressure to compel someone to take a course of action. Influences put pressure on the target to act in a certain specific way or manner in pursuit of his or her goals. Difference between asserting and coercion is that asserting is direct advise (you must stand firm) and coercion is a direct command (you will stand firm or else) Use of coercion indicates some form of power over the target. It is a complex behavior similar to bullying and intimidations.

EPILOGUE

Linear presentation necessarily gives a misleading impression of the linkages between relationship behaviors. While it is true that we can speak of pull behaviors as being associated with the early, more tentative and fragile stages of a growing relationship and push behaviors as being associated with mature and more robust stages of a relationship, this is not to suggest that there is a strict linear one-way

Progression from fishing to coercion. You will combine and sequence the behaviors throughout a relationship to suit circumstances – sometimes fishing, sometimes suggesting and sometimes coercing. You are unlikely to exhaust the incidence of the repetition and elaboration of mutual revelations. As for wallowing, variants of it will be exercised sometimes with enthusiasm and sometimes in sadness (at the content). Exhibit 4.4 shows the linkages between the behaviors as crisscrossing the linear layout,

which corresponds more accurately to how they are related in practice. The eight behaviors discussed in this module are main headings with many subtle variations. They can be combined in many ways too. The key is to recognize how to behave to achieve the results you seek from the relationship. Concomitantly, it is necessary to know how not to behave when the circumstances dictate that certain behaviors are not appropriate. There is, for instance, nothing to be gained from push behavior when pull is called for, or from pull behavior when a more direct push behavior is required.

Influence- Module 4

Building Relationships

4.2: Two Behavior Styles

-  One useful simplification for influencers is to identify many complex behaviours by whether they can be said to ‘pull’ a person to your point of view or whether they can be said to ‘push’ your point of view onto the other person. Other people give different names for the behaviour sets: ‘authoritarian’ – ‘democratic’; ‘push’ – ‘build’; ‘hard’ – ‘soft’).

-  Pull behaviours are soft in tone and execution. They are usually prominent in the early stages of a relationship when the individuals hardly know each other, though they are by no means confined to near strangers. Harsh exchanges are not so easily tolerated between strangers, whereas long-time partners appear to tolerate fairly outrageous behaviours. Hence, pull behaviours are more about ‘pulling’ someone towards you and your preferences rather than ‘pushing’ your preferences on them. The courtship analogy is apt: ‘you let the boy chase you until you catch him’, as is the saying ‘softly, softly, catchee monkey’.

-  Behaviours can be more ‘pushy’ in execution. You ‘push’ your preferences onto people, not intending to destroy your relationships and hoping that their robustness will absorb the relative harshness of your behaviour. In the extreme, in a fragile relationship pushing may be entirely inappropriate.

4.3: Pull Behaviors

-  The capacity to listen is a behaviour common to all effective influencers. People can listen faster than they talk, which leaves large gaps in a conversation with nothing for the listener to do. Boredom is inevitable. You are waiting at the end of a sentence before the speaker completes it. You jump over complex word patterns and interpolate what you ‘know’ he is about to say. You ‘switch off’ listening in the gaps and let your mind wander all over the place, with occasional ‘sound tests’ for key words you expect your speaker to say. You are present but not listening.

-  When you mishear something that’s said and act accordingly, you expose your lapse by failing to heed what has been told to you. Hence, listening is much more difficult than speaking, even though (or because) your listening instruments (ears, etc.) are much more efficient than your vocal apparatus.

-  Influencers listen more than they talk. And they listen effectively and not just as an affectation. Influencers use the simple technique of ‘smart summaries’ to clarify sympathetically what they are told and to signal to the speaker unambiguously that they are listening actively to what he or she says.

-  Smart summaries are brief, timely and focused and they have a strong assurance effect on a speaker. They properly belong to the pull set of influencing behaviours – in fact it is difficult to conceive of listening being absent from any of the pull behaviours, or of any pull behaviours that could be improved without simultaneous improvement in your listening skills.

-  Listening carefully takes effort, and there are distractions of all kinds. You may not be interested in what somebody says or you may disagree strongly with the content of the message. Disagreement induces the silent composition of a reply or a rehearsal of why you believe the person to be wrong and sometimes, though you are silent, you give your feelings away by your body language (head shaking, facial grimaces, narrowing of eyes). If it is boring, you glance around as if looking for something or someone else to relieve your misery, and you make token noises to hurry the speaker to a conclusion.

-  Trying to influence others while failing to listen is an uphill struggle. The best way to react to views with which you disagree is to ask questions with the sole purpose of increasing your understanding of what other people are saying, what they believe and what they want.

-  Disagreements are like obstacles on the terrain between you and the people you wish to influence. The disagreements may be profound or slight. Questioning reveals the depth of their convictions and how they feel on the subject of your apparent disagreement.

Table 4.1 / Pull relationship building behaviors
Behavior / Description
1- Fishing / Fishing for “common ground”, such as in background, experiences, interests, and feelings and what can be agreed where there are disagreements
2- Enthusing / Enthusing about personal predilections , goals, aspirations, hopes, concerns, beliefs and future prospects.
3- Wallowing / Engaging in empathetic probing of incidents, problems, moods and doubts
4- Revealing / Discreetly revealing “intimate” and confidential matters, and personal feelings

1-  Fishing

-  Almost the first thing two people do when meeting for the first time is to establish who they are, what they do, where they come from and where they live. This is sometimes called ‘small talk’.

-  Almost automatically each fishes for the other’s short ‘autobiography’. Mostly you use this rock bottom ‘c.v.’ to decide whether to get to know more about the person. If you decide that you want to know more, you fish for supplementary opportunities – if you can think of any. If you do not wish to know more, you change tack, make your excuses and break off the contact.

-  Uncovering anything you have in common is an opportunity. Whether to pursue these opportunities at all is the first (and sometimes the last) decision in a relationship.

-  From the influencing angle, it is more likely that you will have influence with someone with whom you have or can create something in common than if you have absolutely nothing in common at all.

-  Those who deny they have ‘anything in common’ mostly cannot be bothered to fish because they see no benefit in making the effort. For influencers it is difficult to make progress if the party has made up its mind and resolutely resists revising its stance. Even a fish cannot be caught by rod and line unless it opens its mouth.

-  Influencers take an interest in the people they meet. They fish for opportunities to make supplementary connections, either at a first or later meeting. Fishing for common ground is the first step in a relationship which, once found, is explored.

-  People resent over familiarity on a first meeting and they are cautious about going into too much detail about their personal circumstances. It might also be an error to shout ‘Eureka’ on uncovering some trivial connection between you both, such that you are both of the same sex, you both breathe and you both bleed when cut.

2-  Enthusing

-  The next step in a developing relationship is to encourage them to enthuse about a personal interest and to do likewise with them.

-  To succeed in enthusing you had best convey a sense of your excitement in your manner. An emotionless tone does not energize those you wish to enthuse.

-  People like to talk about their enthusiasms but are often discouraged from doing so, either from mocking reactions or from brutal cut-offs by insensitive people who are not interested in anybody but themselves.

-  That you overtly encourage people to talk about their special interests – by fishing – contrasts with their normal experience. They will note the difference. This alone does not amount to a major breakthrough but it could lead to one. You grow your relationships with people precisely because they behave differently from those with whom you choose (and you do choose) not to grow a relationship.

-  From the influencing angle, it is more likely that you will influence someone you encourage to relate enthusiastic accounts of their special interests, predilections or experiences.

-  It is, as always, a question of striking the right balance. But the more relaxed they feel about your interest in their enthusiasms, the more likely they are to be receptive – in due course – to your influence about your enthusiasms. Their reaction to a perceived lack of interest or, worse, a mocking rejection of their enthusiasms, limits the extent to which you will be able to exert influence on them.

3-  Wallowing

-  ‘Wallowing’ is engaging in empathetic probing of incidents, problems, moods and doubts. Wallowing is counterintuitive as an influencing behaviour. Many think wallowing is pointless and time-wasting gossip.

-  Wallowing has many applications in influencing, persuading and the management of meetings. It is also widely used between friends, though few probably call it wallowing. For that reason, wallowing is barely mentioned in management literature.

-  Wallowing is too easily dismissed as self-indulgence, and is easily – and frequently – discouraged. People in a hurry have no time to waste listening to someone ‘moaning’.