One effective strategy teachers use to encourage the uptake (adoption) of ideas by students is to pose tasks/ challenges/ ideas/ courses of action as “suggestions“. The psychology works like this…
Many people tend to:
a) Consider their own ideas to be superior to those of others.
b) Consider that their own ideas are most correct/ offer the best solution to a problem.
c) Act more readily (i.e. with less resistance) when an idea has come from themselves – rather than another person.
So, knowing this, in an organisation/ business context, if we would like someone else to perform a particular task/ activity an effective way of reducing resistance and increasing the likelihood of the task/ activity being carried-out is to transfer ownership of the idea to the other person. How is this done ? Through posing the idea as a “suggestion” (only) to the other person – rather than as a directive/ instruction.
For example, consider the situation where a person who is charged with the responsibility of stacking pallets of packed apple cartons makes a mistake – the wrong carton is mistakenly placed on a pallet and now the pallet has been built-up to a near-complete formation. The wrongly included carton is buried in the stacked pallet towards the bottom of the stack.
Management communication Option #1 – “How on earth did you manage to place a wrong carton on that pallet. We can’t release that pallet to the cool store until that incorrect carton has been removed and replaced – please proceed to un-stack this pallet to extract that incorrect carton.”
Management communication Option #2 – “I see the error – no worries, I’m sure we can put it right fairly quickly. What do you think the best approach would be to extract that incorrect carton ?”
Option #1 is a directive/ blatant instruction communicated by the manager to the subordinate, and attempts to move all responsibility for resolving the problem from the manager to the subordinate. Inadvertently what typically can happen in these situations is that a high level of resistance to do what the manager requests quickly develops and the manager loses the opportunity to strengthen their working relationship with their co-worker.
Option #2 is a “suggestive” approach. It achieves two positive outcomes: a) the manager demonstrates their readiness to work “with” the subordinate to resolve the issue (strengthening the working relationship in the process), and b) the subordinate is given the opportunity to take the lead role in determining the best solution to apply – thus strengthening the “bridge of trust” between themselves and the manager. A win:win all ’round !
This “suggestive approach” to managing the tasks/ activities of others (in my experience) more often than not results in stronger working relationships between individuals due to the person in the subordinate position being shown that their manager is prepared to work alongside them – and not over the top of them; and due to feeling a sense of ownership of the measure identified to resolve the given problem/ issue because they have been given the opportunity to take the lead role in determining what the measure should be.
I know what style of management I’d prefer to be on the receiving end of – do you ?