What Behavior Tells Me About Potential Partners (Business and Otherwise)

Everyone has a timetable — so consider theirs as well as yours, especially if they are in control of what you want. 

I can’t help it. I am trained to analyze behavior and I do it in all parts of my life. I’d be a fool not to, because I know that behavior, combined with what a person says, are all I have to go by when interacting with them.

In addition to being a life coach and CBT therapist, I am also the CEO of Darien Wellness, a group of mental health experts in Darien, CT. I have learned over the years to be very careful about who I partner with, as they are a reflection of the brand we have built in our region.

Yesterday I logged in to look at our current pool of applicants and found a man I will call “George.” He had a stellar resume and offered some skills that I think would really be a value-add for our group. At 1:26 PM I wrote him a note telling him I was impressed with his resume and asking if he had 20 minutes to discuss the possibility of joining our group. I told him I knew it was last-minute, so I also offered the following day as an option as well.

About ninety minutes later he replied and was perfectly cordial. He followed the directions of my request and did so in a professional fashion (greeting, closing, no misspelled words — all good signs).

Because I practice what I preach, he immediately got this auto-reply from me:

I appreciate you writing.

Because of my commitments with staff and clients I usually check this email once daily on workdays (Monday to Friday, save for vacation days and personal off days).

If this is a more pressing matter, call the office line at 203–883–0464 and leave a message.

PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL ABOUT A CLIENT CRISIS OR AN EMERGENCY. If this is a medical emergency, do not notify us via email. Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

You see, I teach my clients that living by email is a way to look very busy and get very little done. I have a full agenda from the moment I rise to the moment I lay back down, and behaving like Pavlov’s pup every time I hear an email bell “ding!” means getting very little done.

That said, I was fully aware I had written to him and another potential applicant about speaking. Keeping that in mind, I looked at my email at 6 am this morning to schedule anyone who may have replied. 

I was surprised to see that George had written me the first time, and then again, exactly twelve hours later (!?) at 1:26 AM. Keep in mind he had already been notified that I only check email once a day. But he wanted me, the person who is extending a potential offer to him, to conform to the typical practice of checking email all day and night (some studies show up to 150 times a day). And because I did not do so, he was mad and told me so.

I’m not going to repeat the content of the email — it’s not explicit, it’s just negative and dismissive because I did not reply on his schedule. Needless to say, I will not be speaking with him today, tomorrow, or any day, about working with us. If he acts like this about scheduling a call, how healthy can be? What he be like in a crisis? 

Folks, smart employers and business folk look at details. When you are looking at partnering with someone, keep in mind that your idea of the time for an appropriate response may not be the same as theirs. We all have ideas of what’s right in varying circumstances, so think carefully before you hit that “send” button. Write out what you are feeling — your frustration or anger — in Word or Pages and then sleep on it. I am willing to bet you may want to edit it, or throw it away, when you wake up the next morning.

An Example from Starbucks of How to NOT Get What You Want

 (requests) + (incentives) = results

I was going through my email today and got a request from Starbucks (edited for space considerations):

Dear David,

Thank you for being a Starbucks customer. As a customer, you canprovide a unique perspective on the products we offer. We would like you to participate in a brief survey about your away-from-home preferences for coffee, espresso and tea beverages, last occasion at Starbucks and interest in select special offers from Starbucks.

We know how busy you are, and with that in mind we have structured the survey to take no more than 5 minutes of your time. When you are ready to start, please go to the survey by either clicking on the link or copying and pasting the address into your browser.

Thanks for being a Starbucks customer, and we look forward to serving you in our stores!

Warm regards,

The Beverage Team

Starbucks Coffee Company

What's wrong here? No reward, no incentive for me to comply. Why in the world would I take five minutes of my time to give one of the wealthiest multi-national companies in the world my information with no compensation? For a second I thought they were going to give me a reason (We know how busy you are....) but what was missing was the second half of that sentence (created, obviously, by moi):

and to thank-you for your time and assistance, we will give you a code for a free drink of your choice in any or our stores.

But that carrot was not there so I hit the delete button and moved on. All stick does not work for me, and doesn't for most people.

Want results? Give someone a reason to act. Otherwise, they will probably hit delete too.

Why Doesn't Supernanny Spank Those Rotten Kids?

(structure) + (love) + (praise) + (consistency) + (communication) = happy families

Over the years, either via Hulu or during a late-night workout,  I have seen ABC's program, Supernanny, on several occasions. It is a little one-note for me, with the same premise week after week but the ratings blockbuster keeps on rolling along (like so many others...).

For those of you who have not seen it, here is the outline of most, if not every, episode:

Jo, the titular character, is invited into some poor schmo's house that is overrun with awful kids. The children are everything adults dread--loud, ill-mannered, disrespectful, indolent. Jo observes, has a few meetings with the parents on a new behavioral method and then that method is applied. The kids raise hell, the parents almost waffle and then, in the end, Jo's method works! Another family saved.

Supernanny is a money machine with an apparently endless supply of bad families who need some nannizing. And Americans seem to love it as they watch those snotty unappreciative brats get their comeuppance from Ms. Jo.

So a question; why doesn't the nanny, a guru to millions of child beating Americans, ever spank those brats? After all, doesn't spanking work?

Could it be that she is a foreigner with snooty ways? Possibly but probably not. Is it because she is a socialist? No, but nice try.

The reason is that spanking does not work. Hitting a child to produce good behavior has never worked and it never will. I know, you were spanked. That is called anecdotal evidence and does not prove anything. Striking a child does nothing but make them sneakier and a bit afraid of the person who is, ironically, supposed to be protecting them.

Next time you watch Supernanny, look at the method she applies. She creates systems with incentives and focuses on praising and rewarding good behavior. And week after week after misbehaving week, her approach works.

Catch your kids doing something good. It will go a great deal farther and eventually create a better relationship between the two of you as well.

Does Money Really Equal Happiness?

(work) + (love) = happiness

I just read a post that made me think.

In the post, the author (the piece is unsigned, which is a tad troubling) claimed that there is not a direct correlation between doing what you love and making more money.

That may be true. However, I do not think that is the issue. 

I find that belief is based on a faulty, and very American, assumption that a grande paycheck translates into mucho happiness. I can testify, at least at the anecdotal level (my own and my clients), that that is simply not true. I think job happiness equals life happiness--and if riches appear, that is gravy.

Behavioral psychology tell us people do what they want to do. Knowing this is true, that means that having a job that you like or love means you are more likely to work harder and succeed.

Which challenges the concept that money equals happiness. I think it can give one security, but it does not ensure happiness in any way. A person can have a job they hate, make a ton of cash, and be miserable every day all day long. Meanwhile that same person can barely get by, love their work and work long hours, and I am willing to bet they would rate themselves as being far more satisfied with their life. Based on scientific facts, I think the second scenario is much more likely to create a happy life.

So career-changers beware. Believing that BIG PAY = SMILES is a dangerous philosophy that my work tells me is simply not true.

Read the original post here.

Anticipating Behavior vs. Predicting the Future

I knew my godson was going to do what I had just told him not to do. The then 3-year-old boy held his body differently, he walked faster and his little hand, which usually hung at his side or held a truck or plastic hammer, was clenched tightly. He raced by and did not even acknowledge me, something I had never seen before.

What did I think he was up to? I had just told him he could not have any cookies. It was less than thirty minutes before dinner and he had no business eating anything with a chocolate chip baked inside.

Sure enough, within 20 second I heard the “clink” of the cookie jar lid as he attempted to place it quietly back in place. But, I let him slide. He was, all things considered, a great kid who usually followed rules and worked hard to behave as well as a little boy could.

Why am I talking about a cookie swiped when Bill Clinton was still in the White House? I wanted an example of how we can use our experience with a person to note something is out of order. He walked differently; he held his hand in an atypical fashion. And he did not look me in the eye. Tada, I knew he was going to swipe a Chips-Ahoy!

That is not fortune telling. It was based on observations of past behaviors and compared to present action. When comparing all my prior observations to what I saw I knew something was afoot. And since we had just had a cookie talk, my best guest was a pretty solid one.

Many times we know someone well and if we pay attention, we can sense change is in the air. They may dress differently, sit on the couch with a different posture or smell better (or worse). That is how impressions are formed and suspicions are raised.

But anticipation will only take us so far. We cannot predict the future, which is a very different concept. With fortune telling, a person attempts to predict the outcome of investments, dates or job interviews. I have a client who frequently attempts to tell me if he was hired or not based on the interviewers behavior. But see the problem? He has an N of 0. The observations he is making in the interview are the only ones he has. So he sees someone sitting upright and smiling as a cue that he will be filling out W-2s next week.

We cannot tell the future but we can note changes in the folks who inhabit our world. Recognizing the difference will make your life infinitely easier and maybe give you an advantage over someone trying to mislead you or cause you harm.

(experience) x (statistics) + (a hungry little boy) = we can anticipate behavior

(Aaron Beck) + (statistics) = we can’t predict the future

"We All Pay for Sex"

Woody Allen pithily made that remark years ago and the minute I heard it I knew it was true. We all pay for access to the mate we want, regardless of if that pay comes in roses (or "roses"), hours at the gym, an expensive haircut or a job that pays big bucks.

Based on a discovery earlier this week, it seems science has confirmed the fact that this has always been the case. Anthropologists have discovered a possible human ancestor that, if their hypothesis holds, is our oldest identified relative.

One of the things that sets this female, nick-named Ardi, from other homonids is the size of her canine teeth. They are small, like ours, which is quite different from our ape cousins who used big teeth for fighting. The theory is that smaller teeth indicates there was not a need to fight to get what they wanted. Through evolution they lost the large canines in favor of the ability to barter.

"So females are picking males that are using some other technique to obtain reproductive success, and that technique is probably exchanging food for copulation," Frank Lovejoy, one the leaders of the team who found her, said.

So the Woodman was right...and like any truth, it holds up 6 million years ago, as it does today.

(Woody Allen) + (Charles Darwin) x (Behavioral Psychology) + (Ardi) = we all pay for sex