THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF BAD MANAGEMENT!

As most of you likely know by now, sometimes on this show we’ll venture outside of the traditional business realm into what seems like a completely unrelated area, only to bring it back and make a connection to your life and business. After all, this is the real value podcast, the podcast about business, about life, and about success, and about finding value in anything and everything, and also creating absolutely as much value as we can with the time we have. And quite often, finding value in everything requires a keen eye and, as I’ve said on this show many times, the ability to see connections between seemingly unconnected things. Some of the best businesses in the world have become the best by doing just that: making a connection between one thing and another thing in areas and domains that do not initially appear to overlap. Some of the greatest inventions have been the result of one thing being combined with something completely different and seemingly unrelated to the first thing. The modern smartphone is a great example of a mashup, or combining of completely unrelated things. The clock radio, a sea plane, a multi-tool, the cotton gin, a steam engine, and on and on that list goes. 

While those things are all inventions that have become useful in our daily lives, in producing something, or in traveling somewhere, sometimes great mashups happen when we take something from our personal lives and apply it to our business lives. In this case, we’re going to take extensive research from one of the world’s foremost marriage researchers, and the founder of a method of counseling that is being used around the world to help couples in their relationships. I’d like to introduce you all to Dr. John Gottman and the Gottman Method. Maybe some of you have heard of Dr. Gottman, maybe you’ve actually been counseled in the Gottman Method. Jolene and I have sought out relationship coaching from a variety of great professionals and our first experience was with the Gottman Method. Dr. Gottman is famous for being able to predict whether or not a relationship will last or not with 98% accuracy just by asking a series of questions and observing couples during arguments and times of conflict. You might be tempted to say, ‘no shit Blaine, I can predict that kind of thing too If I can watch a couple argue and fight!’, but many have tried and failed. Priests, Pastors, trained counselors, and all kinds of therapists have tried and the best they can collectively do is get to around 55% accuracy on their predictions. Dr. Gottman and his wife have honed their predictions skills based on observing 3000 couples over a 40 year period, some of those couples for more than 20 years. 

This episode is not necessarily about your marriage or your personal relationships, however, although there are some really good tips in this one in that regard, if you choose to take them. No, what I’m proposing is a little bit of a business test based on the Gottman Method. What the doctors Gottman have identified is something they refer to as the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse. After observing those 3000 couples over 40 years and seeing how couples fight, they’ve narrowed the dirty tactics down to 4 things that, if identified and worked on, could be the very thing that ends up saving the marriage or, if it’s not meant to be, ends up ending the relationship but helping both people in their next relationships. What I’m proposing is that these four horsemen can also be viewed as common business issues, both from a leadership standpoint, as well as a customer service standpoint. So, lets talk about them. 

The four horsemen are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, and we’re going to dig in a bit to each of them so that you can learn to identify these actions in your own behavior, potentially in your leadership and mentorship style, and possibly even in your customer and client service. These four horsemen infect almost everything everywhere because there are human beings involved in almost everything everywhere. These are human behavior traits that, most likely, all of us use or exhibit to some degree in our own relationships. Keeping in mind, of course, that the vast majority of our personal and professional relationships are non-romantic ones. The rest of your relationships are familial, friendly, casual, and/or professional. We learn these behavior traits and habits typically as children, either as a natural defense or response to how we were raised, or through subconscious observation of how our parents handled conflict. Without any kind of interventions or retraining along the way, many of us simply carry these behavior traits with us throughout our lives. They’ll be used in our interactions with all of the relationship groups I mentioned earlier. And, of course, since our work lives are typically extensions of our personal lives, it’s inevitable that we see these behavior traits become just part of how we respond to conflict there as well. So, lets identify each one of the traits and, as we go along, what I’m going to challenge you to do is to first be extremely honest with yourself. Ask yourself honestly which ones of these behaviors are you more prone to use in your personal life. And then, second, see if you can identify how they might just have carried over into your professional life and business practices and policies. 

Let’s define them first. Criticism is an expression of disapproval of something. It’s judgmental in nature because criticism is typically based on somebody’s perceived faults or mistakes of somebody else. I think you’re doing something incorrectly as part of the appraisal process and I tell you, ‘you’re doing it wrong! Why can’t you ever get this right, man? I’ve told you at least a dozen times how to do this!’ Criticism attacks the character of a person, which is called an ad hominem attack, instead of it’s kinder and more productive brother, a critique. A critique is about specific issues and is generally focused on a thing, not the person. One can be critical of a method, a specific thing, or a behavior and pointing it out is called a critique. Bringing a person’s character or personal feelings into a situation turns the critique into an attack called criticism. Criticism typically starts out with the word ‘you’ or ‘you’re, as in ‘you never, you always, you’re selfish’, or variations like, ‘why can’t you ever, why do you always, when are you going to …’ Critiques and complaints, although not necessarily pleasant either, are sometimes necessary, while criticism is almost always negative and destructive. Criticism is dismantling one’s whole being in an attempt to express some kind of displeasure with something they’ve done. What’s often masked in criticism, however, is not just your displeasure with what they’ve done, but your overall displeasure, disgust, or dislike of them as a person. 

Ask yourself if you use criticism as a defense mechanism when you’re upset. Ask yourself if, in your business, you use criticism of people and companies to express your displeasure or disgust. It’s not uncommon, by the way, for a business to hate it’s customers and clients. It’s pretty common in the appraisal business to hear incessant complaints from appraisers about the very people who are responsible for their paychecks. You have to ask yourself every now and then how many times per day do you get upset with, and then criticize your lender clients, your private clients, or your AMC clients. Is criticism of people and companies a common behavior around your office or with your people? Are you a regular complainer and a critic of things? What message does that send to the people around you? Do you use ‘you’ terms when talking with your people or those closest to you? Try to catch yourself over the next few weeks and months using critical language when talking to, or about, those closest to you, as well as those you do business with. By the way, the antidote to criticism in relationships is to use ‘I’ language instead of ‘you’ language, and then to express a positive need. In business this would sound like, ‘I really don’t like it when you text and call me 16 times per day to get updates on files in progress. It makes me less efficient at actually getting that work out the door. What I can do for you is update you once when I schedule, and once when it’s in process. If I’m late on a file, I’ll update you as to why and when you can expect the file as well.’ That’s using ‘I’ language and expressing a positive alternative to handling the situation. It’s not much different from one of the things on our ‘never/always’ list of company behaviors where we say, ‘never tell a client what you can’t do, always tell them what you can do’. It’s not that you aren’t allowed to say ‘no’ in our company, you just can’t stop there. You have to follow it up with something that can be done to solve the issue. With criticism, there’s very little positive that can come out of the interaction because it’s an attack on one’s character and it relieves the critic of any responsibility to change the situation. Criticism also paves the way for even worse behaviors, the next of which is contempt. 

Contempt is being mean, treating others with disrespect, using sarcasm, mocking, ridicule, name calling, mimicking, and eye rolling as a way to respond to and control another’s behavior. Where criticism attacks a person’s character, contempt takes an assumed position of moral superiority over another. With contempt, there is something that is beneath the person’s consideration, it’s worthless to them, and they feel it’s worthy of their scorn. We see this all the time, by the way, when appraisers are speaking about the people who work for AMCs and they refer to them as ‘flunkies, monkeys, desk jockey’s, taco bell workers” or one of the other derogatory references they might use to describe another human being on the other end of their scorn. They might not actually be saying it to the person, they might just be saying it in what they believe to be the supportive company of colleagues and fellow appraisers. Nevertheless, showing contempt for somebody who is essentially just doing what their job requires of them, as is the case for you as well, is taking a position of moral superiority and unhelpful in the grand scheme of things. You can imagine what contempt does in personal relationships, but imagine what it does to your professional one’s as well. Is it helpful? Does it solve anything? Does it propel you forward? If all it ever does is make you feel superior to another, it actually has the opposite effect in that, over time, you’re becoming less superior morally to one who doesn’t treat others in that way, especially if the person you have contempt for is objectively a better human being than you. What if that AMC ‘monkey’ as you call them, donates blood, gives their time at the local homeless shelter, and is a big brother or big sister for a kid in need? That’s what we would call objectively morally superior to someone who doesn’t do those things, yet you’ve judged this person simply on the limited information you have about them as an employee for an AMC. 

To take the contempt behavior a little further, this one comes with a huge warning. All of these four horsemen are somewhat negative behaviors and not conducive to building or maintaining good relationships, contempt especially comes with some potential really serious side effects. Studies have been done and have found a very strong correlation between contemptuous behaviors in people, and especially couples, and illness and heart disease. What they did was hook up sensors to people during therapy sessions, and also in their daily interactions with their spouse or significant other, and found the couples who utilized, as well as experienced the most contempt in their relationships had a very high incidence of illness and disease. When they read the sensors and tested their blood they found higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, as well as several other markers of disease. Bottom line, contempt for others makes you sick. The antidote? Use gratitude when thinking about other people and consider somebody’s positive qualities and traits instead of having for contempt for them. If you’re one of those people who loves to express your moral superiority over others on social media, just know that you’re also the most likely to be diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or disease. 

The third of the four horsemen is defensiveness. Defensiveness is typically a response to criticism and it’s usually the defensive person’s attempt to reverse the blame and put it on the other person. It’s an attempt to flip the argument or the behavior being criticized and make it all about the person who brought up the issue. When somebody feels accused, if defensiveness is their primary fighting tactic, they’ll tend to make up excuses for something and play the innocent victim to take the focus off of themselves. In our personal relationships, defensiveness and excuses send the message to our partner that their concerns, however valid they might be, aren’t really valid. It’s a way to shut down conversation and make the other person feel bad for bringing it up. The question for you as a business owner is, in what areas might you find yourself getting defensive? If a client calls or emails you for a revision request, do you find yourself getting defensive as if it’s an attack on your own character or your ability to do the job right? Do you feel like they’re attacking your training and experience? I know I’ve been there many times! And then, primarily from having my own defensiveness habits pointed out to me during relationship coaching, I started to recognize how it had crept into my business. It had crept into my training of others, it had crept into how we would handle certain things, and I recognized that it wasn’t helpful.  There is a simple antidote to defensiveness and it’s simply to remain open to the views of others, remain open to our nature as human beings as fallible creatures who make mistakes, and be open to saying you’re sorry… a lot! I’m quite happy to share that when I opened myself up to the critiques of my staff, as long as it is done in a positive way and with positive and productive solutions, the respect for my leadership style grew and we found that people felt much safer over time expressing themselves and coming up with solutions to issues much more frequently. 

The fourth of the four horsemen is something referred to by Dr. Gottman as stonewalling. In a personal relationship, stonewalling is simply shutting up, shutting down, and shutting your significant other out of the debate. Stonewalling is most commonly a response to contempt and a sense of judgment, and it’s most commonly characterized by withdrawing from the conversation, shutting down, and basically just stopping from responding in a conversation or argument. The person stonewalling will often use words and a tone like, “fine! Whatever!’, and maybe walk away. Of the four we’ve talked about in this episode, my two primaries were defensiveness and stonewalling.  I wouldn’t just stop taking and walk away during an argument, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to kinda just get quiet and withdraw to end the debate. It’s not because I didn’t or don’t want to keep arguing, I love to argue, but if I sensed there was any kind of contempt or judgment and I didn’t want to play in that arena, I’d just withdraw. I’ve learned how that looks in my personal relationships and now I’m better able to express what I might be thinking or feeling in that moment and propose a more positive way to discuss the issue instead of withdrawing from the discussion. The thing about all of these behavior traits is that, since they are often just unconscious behaviors and the way we learned to fight and argue, they become our habits and we don’t recognize them in ourselves. We recognize them right away in others, by the way, we just can’t see them in ourselves. This is something called a fundamental attribution error, or a correspondence bias where we tend to overemphasize the dispositional or character reasons for somebody else’s behaviors, and less on the situational reasons they may have behaved that way, and we do the exact opposite with ourselves. If somebody cuts us off in traffic, we immediately get angry, we flip them off, and we instantly assume they’re an asshole and did it on purpose. When we cut somebody off in traffic, we attribute it to a situational reason like an immediate traffic response, a simple error in not seeing the car behind you, or some other reason that has nothing to do with our intentional cutting them off. However, the person you just cut off is flipping YOU the bird and now you’re the asshole. You see, we just cant see it in ourselves, yet we can very easily see it in others. It’s simply the human condition and the way our human brains work. 

The question is, where might you find these four horsemen being used in your personal life AND your business? Are you defensive, critical, contemptuous, or stonewalling with your customers and clients? Are you behaving in these ways with your talent? As a leader, do you use criticism to keep those beneath you always beneath you? Do you get defensive when a client has a question about something on a report? Do you stonewall when somebody wants to have a discussion about an appraisal report? And maybe the worst of all, in my opinion, do you show and treat people with contempt? Do you speak about people in a manner that would lead somebody to believe you think you’re superior to them in some way? What message might this send to your clients, colleagues, and co-workers? Ever wonder if your behavior in this way is the real reason people don’t stay with you long term? Ever wonder if this is one of the real reasons why apprentices don’t stick around when they get fully licensed? Might it be because of one, a couple, or maybe even all of the these four horsemen trampling all over your interactions and relationships. Just think about it.

Until next week my friends, I’m out…