CHAPTER 18

Make People Feel Understood

Shaquille O’Neal is one of the greatest basketball centers of all time, having led teams to four NBA championships, among other achievements. In seven seasons before 1999, though, he hadn’t won a championship. Instead, he was feuding publicly with a teammate, contributing to the team underperforming.

Things changed that season. He won the regular-season Most Valuable Player award. His team won the championship, and the next two, with O’Neal winning the finals MVP all three times. Many compare him favorably to Wilt Chamberlain, another dominant center.

What turned things around in 1999?

A major contribution was the leadership of Phil Jackson, who started coaching O’Neal that year. Jackson had coached many great players to many championships, so he knew how to bring the best out of players. He recounted one way he led O’Neal to greatness:

At one point five games into the season, he’s coming off the court, and I stopped him as he’s going to the bench and I said, “What was the greatest thing Wilt did in his career?”

“Oh, wow, he scored fifty points a game for an entire season.”

I said, “Yeah, that was great, but it’s not as great as he played every single minute of every game. . . . Do you think you can do that?”

And he said, “If he did it, I can do it.”

So I played him for maybe a week and a half, two weeks forty-eight minutes a game. And he got in really good shape.

[Teammate John] Salley, his emissary, came and said, “You know, Shaq’s having second thoughts about playing forty-eight minutes a game. Can you maybe cut him back down to maybe thirty-six, thirty-eight?” And I did.

It was one of the ways I tried to motivate him to really get himself into position for that season. And that was his MVP season. He was a tremendous player that year.

In other words, Jackson motivated O’Neal to play harder than ever—harder than he could maintain beyond two weeks—with enthusiasm and ownership of the effort. Jackson didn’t try to convince, debate, or coerce O’Neal.

Instead, Jackson connected O’Neal’s passion to compete with Wilt Chamberlain for historical greatness to his task for him to get more fit. O’Neal didn’t play harder for Jackson; he did it for himself.

How did Jackson know what passion of O’Neal’s to tap into? Today we can speculate that it was easy to know O’Neal’s competition with Chamberlain, but hindsight is 20/20. O’Neal could have had other passions, and Jackson tapping something O’Neal didn’t care about could have alienated him.

Making people feel understood and comfortable sharing their passions gives leaders powerful tools to lead people with—tools that people like being led by. Everyone has strong motivations—what I call passions. If you worked hard to get where you are, then your teammates did, too. They had to get high grades, sacrifice fun, work long hours, handle parental pressure, or whatever challenges they faced and overcame, as you did.

Something motivated them to get there. That passion was there before you met them and will motivate them more than any external incentive you could try to motivate them with. You’ll lead people more effectively with their existing passions than by creating new ones. When you do, they will feel ownership and MVIP and want to do the work for themselves. They will feel listened to and appreciated. When you don’t, they’ll resent you for ignoring them. People who don’t feel listened to and appreciated feel compelled to keep talking until they do, which feels like pushing back or insubordination, or they give up on communicating with you. When they don’t have to talk so much, they can focus on their work.

This parable illustrates the difference between external incentives and internal motivations:

Some children started playing ball in a park. Next to the park lived an elderly man. He went out on his porch and asked them to play more quietly. They said it was a public park and didn’t stop playing.

The old man went inside, came back out, and said to them, “If I can’t get you to play more quietly, then I’ll give you each one dollar.”

The kids were confused but accepted the money and went back to playing, more happy than before for the money.

The next day they came to play again. Again he called them over and gave each a dollar. They kept playing, more happily for the money.

The next day they played and he gave them each a dollar. Again the next day and the next and the next.

Then one day, as they played, they realized he hadn’t come out. They knocked on his door.

When he came out, they asked why he hadn’t come out and if he had dollars for them.

He said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any more money for you. You’ll have to play without the dollars.”

So they stopped playing and went home.

The old man knew he could undermine the kids’ internal motivations with external incentives. Many managers do what he did without realizing it. They don’t know that people have powerful internal motivations so don’t bother learning how to learn them. As a result, they don’t know how to lead in the most effective way for each person.

The leader’s challenge is to get them to share their passions with you. It’s a challenge because we’ve all learned from experience that our passions make us vulnerable, so we protect them. Classmates teased us in school. People manipulated or used us to their advantage. We’ve had our hearts broken. We get emotionally hurt by what we care about. More caring and passion means more vulnerability.

This chapter’s exercise, Make People Feel Understood, shows you how to make people feel comfortable sharing their passions in a different way than Meaningful Connection. Where Meaningful Connection led to conversation and open communication, this exercise leads people to share their passions so they’ll feel open to you leadership with these passions.

They will feel understood, which is very different from you feeling you understand them. This difference is worth clarifying: You will make them feel understood, which is different and more valuable in leading them than you feeling you understand them. You understanding them happens in your head. Them feeling understood happens in their heads and hearts. Their heads and hearts motivate them, not yours, no matter what you think should motivate them.

This exercise makes your conversation about motivations, and strong ones in particular. Again, as carpenters work with wood and programmers work with “source code,” leaders work with motivations. Not knowing someone’s motivations and emotions makes leading them difficult. Make People Feel Understood opens people to share their “source code” instead of the usual workplace facade. In time, openness feels more natural for everyone. It feels empathetic, compassionate, and friendly.

As you will see, people feel very good talking about their passions when they know the other person will support them and not judge, laugh at, use, or otherwise hurt them. This exercise enables you to give them that support, credibly and effectively. You will develop the skills of empathy and compassion. You will both feel comfortable with you leading them.

The Make People Feel Understood Exercise

Making people feel understood about their passions and then connecting those passions to their work creates for them MVIP in that work. Them feeling misunderstood will make that work feel meaningless, especially if you motivate with money, promotions, demotions, your motivations, or other external incentives that devalue their passions. That lack of MVIP is what people escape when they leave bad managers.

Others’ passions aren’t obvious. Although a team may have a common goal, people have unique personal motivations. One person may go to college out of a love for learning, another to play sports, another to watch sports. Others’ goals may be socializing, getting jobs, family, and so on.

Say you go to school because you love learning but someone assumes you’re there to get a job. If they suggest a class because it will get you hired but you won’t learn in it, you’ll likely feel misunderstood and less likely to follow that person’s lead.

The leader’s challenge is to lead others to feel you understand them so they feel comfortable sharing their passion and open to you leading them with it.

It takes practice. This exercise’s goal is to create the feeling in them of being understood for a passion. We’ll build on that skill to lead people in chapter 19’s exercise.

What to Do

Practice the script below at least a dozen times one way (you initiating step 1) and a couple times the other way (the other person initiating). In university, I assign students to do it twice a day for a week, like Meaningful Connection. You can start with people you know. You can show them the script too at first if it makes it easier, but work up to doing the exercise without it.

The Script

1.Ask, “What’s your passion?” or something similar, like, “I can tell you work harder on this than you have to. What’s your motivation to care so much?”

2.The person will usually give a cocktail-party answer.

3.Confirm your understanding.

4.Confirmation/Clarification Cycle:

•Let them correct you.

•Ask confirmation and clarification questions as necessary to refine your understanding.

•Confirm your new understanding.

•Repeat to Universal Emotion (see below).

Note that the exercise requires paying closer attention to the motivations the person describes than to the behavior he or she describes.

Example

Someone doing Make People Feel Understood with me might go like this:

PERSON: “You seem to like teaching leadership. What’s your passion there?”

ME: “Yeah, I do. Before I learned it, I thought I led well, but looking back, I made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t realize how important relationships were.”

PERSON: “So you like teaching leadership because of what you learned about how important relationships were?”

ME: “Yeah. When I started my first company, my background was science and analysis, not emotions and relationships.”

PERSON: “So leadership moved you from analysis to relationships?”

ME: “Exactly. I often say that nearly all of my relationships now are better than nearly any of them before. A lot of what I teach is how to make relationships more enjoyable and productive in give-and-take contexts like business. I think a lot of people are like I was and would benefit from developing like I did, only a lot faster.”

PERSON: “So teaching leadership is a lot about your growing and learning?”

ME: “Exactly. I think all leaders constantly develop themselves. This is one way I’m doing it. Teaching and coaching have helped me grow more than I ever would have imagined.”

Note how PERSON’s questions simply ask clarification or confirmation, not adding new information or asking for elaboration, and how my responses get longer and more personal each time. This pattern is typical of this exercise.

The script introduces two new concepts: the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle and the Universal Emotion. I’ll explain them below, but practicing the exercise teaches them best.

The Universal Emotion

The Universal Emotion is one of the core concepts of this book’s progression of exercises. It is an emotion and motivation that anyone at any time in any culture would recognize. It makes empathizing easy when you know how to make people feel comfortable sharing their feelings. Like any vulnerability, people protect it.

An example that is not a Universal Emotion is if you ask people why they work so hard or care so much about a task and they say they do it for the money. There are cultures that don’t use money. We’ve been human for hundreds of thousands of years but have had money for maybe a tenth of that time. So, to make money is not universal. On the contrary, we value money as a placeholder for universal things.

Nearly every first answer people give about their passions and motivations is a cocktail-party answer—comfortable and acceptable while hinting at deeper motivations. Since we’ve all been hurt, used, laughed at, humiliated, brokenhearted, and so on, we have learned that greater pain comes with greater openness about stronger motivations. We’ve learned to protect our emotions, usually by not sharing them. Sometimes we make light of them or act as if we don’t care, but we all care about some things deeply.

You reading this book means you care about your work, relationships, and emotional well-being. You worked hard to reach where you are—you took risks, worked late, put off fun, challenged yourself, or made what looked like sacrifices to others but you saw as investments. You may be only vaguely aware of what deep motivations are keeping you going, but they are there. Your hard work means you are also surrounded by people who have worked as hard or overcome comparable challenges, motivated by equally strong emotions.

These strong emotions will motivate people more than any motivation you could layer on top. In fact, motivating people by other means will imply you don’t value their motivations. You neglecting their passions will feel to them like you imposing your values on them, which we learned to avoid in Unit 2. They will also feel like the kids the old man discouraged from playing ball by giving them dollars. People whose passions you neglect will feel like you’re dismissing or overriding their internal motivations with external incentives. Not connecting their passions—their Universal Emotions—to their work deprives them of MVIP in their work and contributes to them feeling like they joined a good company with bad managers.

Later chapters will describe how to lead people with their Universal Emotions. For now our goal is to make people feel comfortable sharing them. We do so with the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle.

The Confirmation/Clarification Cycle

The Confirmation/Clarification Cycle is a deceptively simple technique to make people feel comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities with you and is as effective for what it doesn’t do.

What it does is have you confirm and clarify your understanding of their motivations iteratively, leading them to share more each time, in a way that makes them feel good. It works because people love sharing their motivations when they expect the listener will support them. Meaningful Connection achieves this goal by showing them you support people like them in your world. The Confirmation/Clarification Cycle does it by consistently putting their interests before yours.

Once you ask about people’s passion or strong motivation, they think of it, putting it in their thoughts for a while. They want to talk about it. They also want to protect it. Trying to increase their motivation to share rarely overcomes their protection since talking about passions is already a high motivation. You can’t increase it much. Decreasing their protection works more. Instead of pushing them harder over the wall, lower the wall. Simply saying you’ll support and won’t judge or hurt them isn’t credible to people who don’t already know you well because people who would hurt them would say the same thing.

The Confirmation/Clarification Cycle works like this.

The first time people tell you of a passion, they share only part of it, the cocktail-party answer. You confirming your understanding will sound wrong to them, no matter how accurately you repeat what they said. Unless your nonverbal communication is objectionable, they’ll correct you. Most people, on being corrected, feel they got it wrong and move on to other topics. In the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle, you expect them to correct you. You know that even if you repeated their words perfectly, your words could never match their thoughts. Your goal isn’t to restate them perfectly. The exercise is 95 percent to make them feel comfortable sharing and 5 percent for you to understand. Leadership is about them, not you.

Next, respond to their correction by refining your understanding and confirming your new understanding. Each time they hear you put their communication and interests before yours, they feel more comfortable to share more. Words are cheap. You show through your behavior that you care about what they say. The barrier that protects their Universal Emotion lowers, and they eventually share it.

Note what the cycle prevents you from doing. It prevents you from talking over them, interviewing them, injecting your points or judgment, changing the subject, judging them, or anything besides showing you care about understanding them.

Before doing it, many students ask if it’s pushy to ask similar questions over and over. On the contrary, for the person being asked, it feels like you care about her (I assign doing the exercise in both directions for you to experience this feeling). It puts the other person’s interests first.

The cycle will give you a strong, unmistakable feeling that you understand the other person on something deeply important to them. You’ll feel interested in their passion. (One of the reasons you’ll never tire of the exercise is the unique interest each person’s passion creates.) They’ll talk with increasing openness and enthusiasm. They’ll show appreciation for your insight, listening, and persistence. You’ll also sense the feeling evaporate if you deviate from the script, and digress from their interest and put yourself first.

For example, people might first say that they like their work because it pays the bills. Since there are many cultures without bills, you haven’t reached a Universal Emotion so you’d continue with the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle. They might then say they want to get rich. Again, there are cultures without money, so you’d keep clarifying and confirming. If they then said that they want to give their children a happy life, I’d say that sounds like a Universal Emotion. Now you’d know one of the passions driving them.

Reaching and stating a Universal Emotion often leads people to personal insights, often deep. They may feel an epiphany and thank you for it or for connecting parts of their lives they hadn’t before, as if you had seen an insight that prompted you to persist with the cycle. They don’t know that you followed a structure. They tend to conclude that you persisted because you saw something below their surface that was meaningful enough to put your interests aside.

Nonverbal communication and body language play a big role with the Universal Emotion. You will almost always see several clear changes when you reach their Universal Emotion: They will lean forward to talk and their face will light up. They will also tend to switch from short, reserved, protective answers to longer, expressive, explanatory answers. You’ll sense that they suddenly want to share something they want to but rarely get to, like, “Finally, I can tell someone why I’m really doing this!”

You’ll probably note feelings in yourself of understanding and also something like, “I bet if I led the person with this, I could get them to do a lot more.” You may have a Machiavellian feeling that you could use this insight to your advantage but also a compassionate feeling that you wouldn’t.

Is Evoking Their Passions Prying or Too Personal?

People often ask if the technique is too personal for the workplace. Learning experientially works best here. After you’ve seen a few people share Universal Emotions, you see how much people love it and learn about themselves. Even more, after someone leads you to some Universal Emotions of your own, you’ll feel how liberating, comfortable, satisfying, and friendly it feels.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

Make People Feel Understood has transformed my life, relationships, and emotional awareness as much as Meaningful Connection. Connecting on passions instead of facades improves everything from fleeting interactions to my most important long-term relationships. Putting others’ interests first is humbling, which helps me learn, grow, and lead.

The feeling Make People Feel Understood gives people—feeling understood, being on the receiving end of empathy, compassion, and understanding, and knowing it—is incredibly powerful. Empathy, compassion, and understanding are valuable for leading, but you feel them, not the people you’re leading, and your feelings don’t influence others. Make People Feel Understood creates, or rather reveals or unleashes, emotions in others, which motivates them, which means you’re leading them. I compare the emotion of feeling understood with love, which society values among the most powerful desired emotions, maybe the most. The more I see of the emotion of feeling understood, the more I see it to be as powerful and meaningful as love. The emotion doesn’t have a name and I think we’d benefit from naming it, which I believe would create a lot more empathy in the world.

I can speak from experience of people doing Make People Feel Understood with me in workshops many times. Even knowing they’re following a script with a room of people watching, it feels good to open up about a passion and feel understood and supported for it. You feel connected and look up to the person who evoked the feeling. You feel liberated and grateful to him or her.

The emotion’s opposite—feeling misunderstood—is as important for leaders to know about. Since people communicate to be understood, people who feel misunderstood about something they care about will talk at you until they feel understood or give up, destroying your ability to lead them. Being able to make them feel understood enables you to lead them. Again, I distinguish making them feel understood from understanding them.

I recommend not telling someone, “I understand you,” especially when they seem to feel misunderstood. You risk your credibility by setting an impossible standard for yourself since you can’t understand others as well as they understand themselves. If you say you understand them and then do something they wouldn’t expect you to do if you did, they may see you as confused, lying, or the like. If you feel compelled to tell them you understand them, I recommend saying instead, “If I understand you right . . .” or “Let me see if I understand you . . .” and then confirming your understanding. Still expect them to correct you. You can’t put their thoughts and feelings into your words. More effective is to do Make People Feel Understood until they say, “Yes! You understand me.”

You’ll be amazed by how many arguments and how much turnover and lost loyalty arise from people not feeling understood. Since emotions get intense when people don’t know how to achieve their goals, depriving someone of feeling understood can escalate minor misunderstandings without limit. People feeling misunderstood have to keep talking to make themselves feel understood, escalate to yelling, or give up. If you have authority over them, they may instead silently resent you, protect their vulnerabilities for good, withdraw, and start looking for work elsewhere. If you want to break up with someone but don’t want to initiate, intentionally misunderstand them. Do it enough and they’ll want to initiate breaking up.

Creating in others the emotion of feeling understood overcomes facades and protections. The more deeply people and teams overcome such barriers, the more closely, effectively, and productively they work, the higher their morale and satisfaction, and the more they support each other, in addition to other benefits.

You’ll also be surprised by the conflicts you can resolve or diffuse with Make People Feel Understood. You can apply it the same way I suggested using Feedforward to resolve arguments. It would have worked in the example with my girlfriend on Sixth Avenue. The challenge is having the presence of mind to overcome your feelings of self-righteousness or whatever is motivating you to argue. That presence of mind, followed by using an effective technique, puts you in the leadership role, with them responding to you.

By the way, people are motivated by more than one Universal Emotion. You can do the exercise multiple times with the same person. Doing so is effective. It makes him or her feel good; makes the relationship deeper, richer, and more complex; and gives you more tools to lead him or her with.

In the next exercises we’ll attach people’s passions to tasks, which will make their work feel meaningful. We love leaders who make our work feel meaningful.

For now, I hope you start to abandon the relative superficiality of talking about the weather, sports, current events, and other topics that avoid what people care about. And that you feel more skilled and comfortable at making people feel understood about things they care about.