The last few weeks I have been listening to Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people” – a book first I read and enjoyed many years ago. As is always the case in life, since I put the book down last, my experience, myself, and the World in general has changed in one direction or another. The effect of this is that different messages come to the fore, and I take very different things out of the content.
One aspect that interested me very much on reflection is Carnegie’s edict that you shouldn’t get angry with people, but you should appease them in the hope of bending them to your will, by the brute force of your niceness. It is a question that we could all ask of ourselves countless times every day – be that with a colleague, your spouse, your children or nameless call centre operatives.
If I look back over my last ten years in the corporate world, I can see three distinct phase I have gone through with respect to ‘be nice or nasty‘:
Innocent Infant
The first time you discover a concept, or are put in a situation, you seize it with all your might. You have a drive and enthusiasm that you’ll look back on with a reminiscent smile. When the majority of people around you are your senior, the ‘being nice’ approach has some real longevity – if you are the member of staff who owns up to their mistakes, and is magnanimous to those of others, then you are a stand out employee. Doors are left slightly ajar, and you do indeed have a better success to failure rate than those who continually throw their toys out the pram.
Terrible Teenager
Now it is your time to throw the toys out the pram. You have maybe gained a little more authority and are a little more worldly, but with this authority comes more responsibility and you can really begin to feel the pressure. All of a sudden you start taking people’s idleness and mistakes personally, and conclude that the nicely-nicely approach will only be seen as a weakness. You clench that iron fist and pound it into those you judge deserving. Only, in reality this doesn’t work as a blanket policy – the weaker people would have given you the same response with any approach; the better people will avoid working with you; this leaves you with the able-but-unwilling – a quagmire for productivity.
Mature Adult
Okay, so I’m the only one in the world who would refer to me as a ‘mature adult’, but we are talking analogies here. These days I use a hybrid approach which is to default to Carnegie’s approach 95% of the time, but acknowledge that for certain people or circumstances then a little stick is needed with the ample carrot. There are people who do see passiveness as a lack or urgency and something to be taken advantage of – and a little firmness is simply speaking their language. What do I mean by that? Well there is no perfect way to deal with all people – one holistic system that can be applied always. Whilst the majority of people react positively to being treated with kindness and understanding, there are others of us who prioritise based upon the amount of grief we are going to get. “If I don’t do Item A then I will get in real trouble, but if I ignore Item B then Rich will just have a nice chat with me and give me more time to do it”.
I would conclude that I have found the most effective approach to be the last. The overwhelming number of people will respond positively to the Carnegie approach, but we shouldn’t forget the minority for whom a different method works best.
