How Do I Get Someone To…? Is Always The Wrong Question
Leaders and Managers are Held Accountable For Results Delivered By Other People
Being held accountable for other people’s behaviour is what makes creating psychological safety hard for leaders, managers, coaches, teachers, and facilitators. And parents.
It is scary to be dependent on others.
When don’t trust others to do their part, we build systems and adopt behaviours that pressure them into doing what will make us feel safe and punish them for anything else.
We try to influence them so they want to do what we want them to do.
We try to get them do what what we want.
We try to make them do it.
You Can’t Make Anyone Do Anything
Unless you physically manipulate their bodies, you can’t make people do things.
Of course, there are times when manipulating someone’s body is appropriate. When a toddler runs into the street after a ball and a car is coming, grabbing them and carrying them to the side of the road is a good thing.
But the number of situations where control of another person’s body is appropriate are very few.
What we do instead is set up situations where people are incentivized to do what we want.
“You can’t have ice cream until you eat your broccoli.”
“If the class gets 5 gold stars this week, I’ll show a movie on Friday.”
“The dress code for this role is skirts and heels for women, blazers and ties for men.”
“We’ll promote you when you’ve shown us you can do the new job.”
“Hand over your lunch money or I’ll get you on your walk home.”
“You can have some candy and I’ll drive you home.”
Did you notice that some of those sounded normal and acceptable and others didn’t?
As a society, we tend to accept the harm to psychological safety of some of these and reject others as absolutely unacceptable. The line shifts over time.
But if what we care about is psychological safety, they are all problematic. They are all based on the assumption that we are entitled to use someone’s desire to avoid pain and move towards pleasure for our benefit. They all set the conditions for acceptance, belonging, or physical safety
They all substitute external motivations for intrinsic motivations, defining the relationship as transactions between opposing forces.
Use of these techniques can even create harm: depression, anxiety, rejection sensitivity, imposter syndrome, gender dysphoria, dissociation, persistent emotional compartmentalization, and other mental health issues.1
How People Respond is Only Partially Your Responsibility
You cannot control how people respond to you. You can, however, increase the likelihood that you will do no harm.
Sometimes, people perceive an unintended threat even when you use all the right tools: mindful, nonviolent communication techniques;2 somatic presence;3 coming from above the line;4 and with a heart at peace.5 (Read the books in the footnotes for details about all of those terms if you aren’t familiar with them.)
This is because people have pasts and baggage and trauma. If they haven’t processed a past event to the point that it no longer carries an emotional stickiness, anything that reminds them of that past event triggers a response to the past event at the same time as the response to the present event arises.
You cannot stop that from happening.
But, using the tools makes it far less likely to happen and far more likely for you to be able to respond well if it does happen.
The Alternative to Coercion is Co-Leadership
When we see all people as our allies working together to solve business or social problems, we shift the dynamic.
We start by knowing who we are and what we stand for. Then we team up with people who know who they are and what they stand for to solve a problem that we cannot solve alone.
We look for the problems we can jointly solve. We trust that when we bring our different perspectives and skill sets together to solve these problems, even our disagreements are part of the solution process.
We choose to lead from a sense of US and not from US v THEM.
How Can We Scale This?
Scaling this requires a shift in how we think of people management, career development, and project management.
People don’t need to be managed. They don’t want to be managed. But they may need help healing from past experiences, explicit permission to self-manage, and training in the skills of self-management.
People of all ages want to accomplish meaningful things, feel a sense of agency, experience positive emotions, and have good relationships.6 Adults want to earn a living and provide for their families. They want companies to succeed and provide them with jobs in which they flourish. Psychologically safe work cultures assume that people are motivated and enable action.7
Unfortunately, the standard methods of education and training workers for the Industrial Age were designed to reduce quirky, complicated, unique people into fungible tools of production. The destruction of intrinsic motivation is a requirement in such a transformation.
Unless and until social, school and parenting cultures change, organizations that want the business results of psychological safety will need to help employees unlearn the habits they needed to survive the psychologically (and for many, physically) unsafe environments of their past.
This will require aligning HR practices with business practices and developing both from the perspective of co-leadership and broad-based trust of human beings.8
This will also require people who currently have power to give some of it away and learn how to use what they retain more responsibly. People who are scared of the misuse of power will need training in how to claim their intrinsic power and use it well.
An organization that commits to a coaching culture with co-leadership training for everyone and people operations practices that start from trust unlocks the means for collaboration that achieves more than the sum of its parts.
If The Goal is Worthy, People Already Want To
People come to work because they want to make a living.
People are at work because they chose to be there.
If the company is making a product that solves customer needs, the goal is generous and worthy.9
You don’t need to “make” people do anything. But they might value a co-leader ago can work with them to accomplish more than they could accomplish alone.
The Right Question is Always “How Do We…?”
The key to all of this is seeing everyone as partners.
The external goal of solving a customer need is a shared goal.
It is that simple.
And that hard, because when you are being held responsible for other people’s actions and they are struggling to deliver, it is so tempting to make them the problem that needs to be solved.
Making the other person the problem always backfires eventually.
These approaches appear to be especially likely to harm to creative, highly sensitive and neurodiverse people. Here are a couple of studies as examples of the research in this area.
Autonomy and autism: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11019-019-09909-3.pdf.
Autonomy and highly sensitive people: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10615806.2019.1580697.
Oren Jay Sofer, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication, Shambala Publications (2018).
Amanda Blake, Your Body is Your Brain: Leverage Your Somatic Intelligence to Find Purpose, Build Resilience, Deepen Relationships and Lead More Powerfully, Trokay Press (2018).
Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success, Dethmer, Chapman & Klemp (2015).
The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace, Fourth Edition: Resolving the Heart of Conflict, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2022).
Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, Free Press (2011).
Psychologically unsafe work places function with an implicit assumption that people are unmotivated and need to be manipulated into delivering value.
For a look at what this might look like in practice, a worthwhile read is Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini.
If the company isn’t making a product that solves customer needs, it either will fail or only exists to create wealth for some people from the labour of others, and that cannot be an environment with psychological safety.