CHAPTER 5

Write Others’ Beliefs

I ran into a friend, Christine, in Central Park. She worked at a small consulting firm. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we caught up. She told me how she looked forward to her next assignment—a two-person strategy project in Mexico City. She was studying Spanish and looked forward to immersing herself in the language. I was glad for her but didn’t think much of it.

I saw her again a couple months later. “How was Mexico City?” I asked.

“It’s weird,” she said. “We haven’t gone. The project keeps getting delayed. Things keep coming up.” Again, I didn’t think much of it and we moved on to other topics.

The next time we crossed paths, a few months later, I asked again about Mexico City.

“I finally found out what happened,” she said. “It turned out my teammate’s mother told her Mexico City was dangerous. When she told us, she explained that she felt awkward taking cues from her mother but couldn’t dismiss her mother’s anxieties, either. So instead of resolving it, she delayed us with things like passport problems and dentist appointments. I’m not even sure if she did it on purpose.” Christine explained that when this issue came to light, they handled it and the trip happened.

I first saw Christine’s teammate as the story’s antagonist for what seemed to me irresponsible behavior. Not confronting the situation inconvenienced the client and could have lost the project.

While I don’t endorse Christine’s teammate’s withholding information, I now see it as a detail. All teams have people whose beliefs conflict. If such conflicts are inevitable, then a leader who doesn’t take responsibility for handling them has abdicated that responsibility.

Now I see the engagement manager as the problem character, even though Christine only mentioned him in passing. In consulting, the engagement manager leads the team that works with the client. Like the coach of a sports team, the engagement manager doesn’t usually work on the deliverables. Without a coach, each teammate could have a different belief about what kind of game they’ll play: an offensive game, defensive, fast scoring, winding down the clock, or whatever.

Leaders set beliefs and strategies because otherwise each teammate can have different ones, which will affect their behavior and motivations. If Michael Jordan expects to get the ball each time, he’ll get annoyed at a teammate holding the ball to wind down the clock. If he knows the teammate believes he should wind down the clock, even if he wants the ball, Jordan won’t get annoyed.

Jordan’s job is to play basketball, not figure out his teammates’ minds. A coach who takes on that responsibility enables the players to play to their potential. A common way to illustrate the point is to ask which team will get more done, this one:

That happened with Christine’s Mexico City trip. Everyone involved wanted to do the project. Christine saw the city as an opportunity. Her teammate saw it as a problem. Same city, different beliefs, therefore different perceptions leading to different emotions, leading to different motivations, leading to different beliefs, leading to different strategies, which conflicted. The engagement manager didn’t uncover this difference.

You might ask: Is reading her mind the engagement manager’s responsibility? How should he know Christine’s colleague’s thoughts? She hid her beliefs for months. Doesn’t that excuse the engagement manager? Thinking that way may protect your job, but other teams will outperform yours. The point is to know that people choose based on beliefs and that their beliefs differ and then to lead based on that awareness.

Anyone on a team who recognizes this issue and fills the leadership vacuum will be seen as a leader, independent of title or position, at least in part. Christine seeing and exposing the problem might have enabled solving it and taken her a step closer to promotion to engagement manager. Same with you in your teams.

When you experience that everyone has unique beliefs, not just to know it abstractly, you expect everyone to act differently. You don’t believe that people are “just different,” which would allow you to blame them and maybe sleep better in the short term but disempowers you and limits your long-term growth. We know intellectually that everyone’s beliefs differ. You need experience to feel the difference, which is why this book gives you exercises.

In fairness to the engagement manager, uncovering others’ beliefs can be hard. People often protect them since revealing them makes us vulnerable. People obfuscate their beliefs to fit in, to please, to avoid conflict, and the like. Often they don’t realize they’re acting on beliefs, let alone suppressed ones. Christine’s colleague wasn’t necessarily lying. She might not have known her beliefs—one of the problems with low self-awareness.

You can never know another’s beliefs like your own since you can’t access their inner monologue, but you can improve your skill identifying them. You have to start by observing their behavior and communication. People behave consistently with their beliefs more than with what they say. The engagement manager sounded not sensitive enough to detect the signs nor experienced enough to act on them.

Let’s get you to see more of others’ beliefs than Christine’s engagement manager.

The Write Others’ Beliefs Exercise

Seeing How Beliefs Filter Others’ Perception Builds Empathy

This chapter’s exercise is like the exercise in chapter 4, which it builds on. Instead of writing your beliefs, this exercise has you write others’ beliefs. It builds on the self-awareness of Write Your Beliefs by putting your focus outward, to others’ beliefs. It also develops your sensitivity to how people’s beliefs show in their behavior. It’s our first empathy-developing exercise of several to come. It will also continue to develop your awareness of your beliefs.

Others’ Beliefs and Leadership

People often lead and manage people through external incentives, like bonuses, promotions, and vacations for success and threats of loss of responsibility and demotions for failure.

While external incentives motivate, they do indirectly, through internal motivations, which motivate directly. Connecting with people’s emotions motivates them directly. This exercise develops the skill to connect with other people’s motivations through their beliefs.

This exercise is only about identifying and recording beliefs, not judging or disproving them, which hurts your ability to lead. We reason from beliefs, not to them. We often don’t notice them because they feel like truths about the world. People with different beliefs believe different things are true. That’s a problem for a command-and-control authoritarian manager who would prefer everyone to follow orders but an advantage for leaders who see how teams contributing diverse strengths can lead to outcomes beyond what they could envision alone.

The best way to see others’ beliefs is through practice. Most of you will struggle at first. It’s easy to read my words and think, “That’s useful to know. Next time someone has a different belief than mine, I’ll notice it and avoid problems like Christine’s,” but you’ll forget soon if you don’t practice and revert.

After you do the exercise for about a week, you’ll start sensing beliefs other people may not know they have. You’ll start to discern beliefs from increasingly subtle cues. That is, you’ll develop intuition, like a baseball batter who can hit a ball thrown faster than he can consciously react. People will think you were born with it.

Later exercises will use this awareness to inspire people. For now, we’re still focusing on awareness.

What to Do

1.Carry something to write with for a week.

2.When something leads you to notice another person’s belief, write it down.

3.When something leads you to notice a belief of mainstream society, write it down.

You can’t directly access others’ thoughts, so you have to deduce them from their behavior and communication. You can’t verify your conclusions, either, but you’ll likely find your skill improving.

At the end, you’ll have two lists of beliefs—one of other individuals’ beliefs and one of society’s. It may take a couple days to get the hang of it, like Write Your Belief, but you’ll get it.

Examples

If your parent once said, “You should become an accountant. Then you’ll never have to worry about a job,” you might write, “My parent believes stability is the most important consideration in choosing a job or lifestyle.”

If a TV commercial touted the safety features of a car over everything else, you might write, “That car company believes potential buyers care primarily about safety for that car model.” You might also write, “Society takes for granted that having a car is normal.”

What Not to Do

You’ll find yourself judging others and their beliefs. You can’t help it, but as in Write Your Beliefs, write the beliefs without judging, evaluating, agreeing, or disagreeing—only with awareness.

Also, ascribing people’s behavior to their identity doesn’t get to their beliefs. The exercise is not to write “John interrupted me because he’s a jerk,” which describes your belief, not his, and is the opposite of empathy. You would write something more like, “John believes what he says is more important than what I say.”

More Difference Between Belief and Strategy

Since you can only observe others’ behavior, you’ll notice their strategies over their beliefs even more than in yourself. If you find yourself writing strategies, no problem. Most of us start that way. Strategies are close to beliefs. Work backward from behavior and strategy to beliefs.

For example, if you notice your manager chastising someone for poor performance, you might at first write, “My boss likes to berate people to try to get them to perform better.” That’s a belief of yours about your manager. Asking, “What belief would make that behavior make sense?” usually helps reveal the belief. You might then write something like, “My boss believes that pointing out someone’s flaws is an effective way to help them improve them” or “My boss believes that punishing people for their behavior stops people from doing it.”

Beliefs offer different perspectives than behavior alone. Understanding beliefs creates more empathy than just observing behavior and helps you lead more effectively.

Post-Exercise

I’ve found people get several types of results from this exercise.

First, they improve their skills to recognize and identify others’ beliefs in general.

Second, as they learn to identify others’ beliefs, not just their behavior, they stop thinking things like, “John acts like a jerk because he’s a jerk.” Instead of believing that people are crazy or different when they do things they don’t understand—the opposite of empathy and compassion—they find commonalities, to explain others’ behavior so it makes sense.

Third, this exercise leads people to look to learn about others when they don’t understand their behavior, often replacing judgment with curiosity.

Fourth, students often describe themselves as having more empathy for others after doing this exercise. The more they see someone’s motivations based in belief rather than innate differences, the more they see others like themselves.

This exercise also led me through a series of transitions about society’s beliefs. First, I noticed how large parts of society tried to influence me for their benefit, like advertisers, politicians, religions, and other big institutions, often at my expense: Coca-Cola wants to profit off ruining my teeth and health!

As I continued the exercise, I came to see each person acting on beliefs that made sense to them, making them seem more human and enabling me to connect with them. That is, people working at Coca-Cola feel like they’re selling happiness or something like that. I may disagree with them, but understanding them at least decreases my stress from things I don’t have resources to act on. I’m sure many people think that things I’m doing don’t make sense. This set of realizations decreased a lot of frustration and misunderstanding.

Disliking something I can’t change doesn’t improve my life. Understanding it does.