How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Part I
, swears by this “good person,
bad circumstances” approach. It’s part of his responsibility to make sure that
unhappy customers get their issues resolved—which means he often finds
himself in the middle of challenging conversations with colleagues. He says:
“People might act like jerks, but you often don’t know what’s really causing it.
That insight came to me years ago, when I was wheeling a suitcase down the
middle of a road because the sidewalk had terrible potholes. A car came up
behind me, and to the driver I obviously looked like an idiot. Why on earth was I
walking in the road? Then I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that from the car,
he couldn’t see that the sidewalk was impossible to navigate. Since then, I’ve
used that as a metaphor for the fact that nobody ever has the whole picture. If
someone doesn’t seem to get where I’m coming from, I remind myself, ‘He’s
just in his car.’ But often I’m the one that’s ‘in the car,’ when I have to remind
myself there’s probably a good reason that someone’s doing something that to
me looks annoying.”
In general, therefore, Russell says he reminds himself to go into challenging
conversations assuming the best about people. “I presume most people are trying
to do a good job. I think that’s a way of taking control of a situation, to decide to
attribute good intentions to someone. If you treat apparently difficult people as if
they’re coming from a good place, you see more of the good things they do. And
they can sense it, which means they’re likely to respond well, which fulfills your
expectations.”
Russell gives a recent example. “I had a colleague who seemed to be
jockeying for position. He’d invited himself along to a brand strategy meeting
that I chair, and in the middle of it he questioned the actual purpose of the
meeting—why it existed, how it related to other parts of the corporate strategy
process. Instinctively I interpreted it as a power grab. I thought he was trying to
undermine me. But then I realized that I was ‘in the car,’ attributing bad
intentions to his behavior. So I decided instead to assume that he was raising a
genuine question. I drew him a diagram to show how the meeting would feed
into the broader strategy process. He appreciated it, and told me afterward that
he’d really enjoyed the meeting. It could have gone down a very different track
if I’d assumed he actually had bad intentions.”