Mr. Know-It-All

When you’re never wrong.

Photo courtesy of Treza Trisnandhy

No one person knows everything, right?

Not even Watson, the IBM cognitive technology computer that, in 2011, was the hands-down winner on the TV show, Jeopardy!

Well, Watson doesn't even qualify to be in the discussion since it’s not a person.

So, if very few will dispute the fact that no one person on earth knows everything, why then do we sometimes behave as if we do? Let's listen in on this dialogue that took place at a family dinner table.

Dad: What was that you were watching just before coming to dinner?

Son: “Ruthless Violations”

Dad: Isn’t that a bad TV show? Why are you watching it?

Son: I don’t think it’s bad. Have you seen it?

Dad: No, I haven’t. But I’m sure it’s bad. With a name like “Ruthless Violations”, how good can it be?

Son: It’s not really that bad. It was a show originally created by the CVS Network.

Dad: No, it’s not from CVS! It’s a bad show!

Mom: Are you sure it’s not from CVS? You’ve not even checked it yet.

Dad: Yes, I checked it! I know it’s not from CVS.

Mom: How did you know that it’s not from CVS?

Dad: I checked it last week!

Mom: Really?! So you knew that this discussion, about this particular show was going to happen, and you checked it then and could still accurately remember that it’s not from CVS?

Dad: Yes, I remember!

Mom: Are you sure about that? So, there’s not even a remote possibility that you could be wrong?

Dad: No, I’m not wrong! I’m very sure of it!

Finally, mom kept quiet and said nothing more. Later that day, she checked and found that truly, the show was created by CVS. But she said nothing to her husband. She knew him. Saying something will only lead to more arguments, and she didn’t want any more of that.

This slightly modified dialogue from a true-story is not meant to show how bad the make-believe show, “Ruthless Violations” is; nor is it to portray the fictional CVS television network as a good one. The purpose is to highlight this dad's behavior.

Are you like this dad? If you are, allow me to point out three things.

1. You may think you know, but you probably don’t

When you argue in favor of a point without entertaining the fact that you may be wrong, it’s a little disturbing. What you’re saying is that you know all there is to know about that situation or subject. This is highly improbable, even if you are an expert on the subject. Ask yourself the following: could there have been new developments that I’m not aware of? Do I really know all there is about the situation?

What’s more ridiculous is that you don’t just argue this way in areas you consider yourself an expert. You also do it even when you know that the other person you’re arguing with probably knows more than you.

Maybe you don’t realize it, but it seems your goal is just to win the argument. And it doesn't matter that you claim to know what you may not. You take the little you know about the subject, and argue it to its illogical conclusions.

2. You won’t learn

Because you think you’re right, you probably won’t take the time to check out the facts after the argument is over. To you, it’s done with. You’ve won. And that’s what really matters. As a result, you remain in your ignorant state on that subject. You don’t learn.

Someone who wants learn and grow from the experience will try to check the facts once the argument is over. But that’s not you. You don’t need to learn. You know everything!

3. People avoid you

No one would want to talk to you about anything of importance. That’s because they know all they will get from you is more argument. In fact, when they unknowingly say anything that triggers this behavior from you, they quickly recognize the symptom and throw in the towel. They let you win, even if they have facts that dispute your point. They just won’t go there. They avoid you.

So, what can you do?

Resolve to hear the other person out and consider their point of view. Admit you don’t know everything. Even if you do know a lot about the subject, you may still learn something.

Resist the temptation to argue. You already know that you have that tendency. Make a conscious effort not to, even when you’re a hundred percent certain that you’re right.

So, stop it already! If not, you won’t learn a thing about what you don’t know! And you only make people avoid you.

Trust me. I know.

Feel the Pain

Do you feel the need to show others that you’re in charge?

Jack arrived at work one day and on seeing Susan, started yelling at her. It had to do with something that happened a week earlier. He was her boss, and he had put on this show with some of Susan’s colleagues and customers present. She was embarrassed.

Have you ever had a boss who makes you feel you have no value? His goal is to belittle you and put you on the spot; to put you down. He wants you to know who’s in charge. And he wants others to know it too! When he enters the room, your heart skips a beat. His modus operandi is to keep you quaking in your boots.

When you’re a witness to situations such as this, you have to ask:

Why do people behave this way? Why would anyone in their right senses think they would get good engagement from team members that they treat in this manner?

Human psychology experts have pondered these types of questions for a long time. The fact remains that human behavior is one of those things in life that’s very difficult to understand.

“I’m the Boss!”

In some cases, a supervisor will behave in the manner describe above because he just wants to show you and others that he’s your boss, plain and simple. What made my opening story more curious is that a week before, Susan had a discussion with Jack. She told him about her business travel plans and asked him if he was okay with it. He had some hesitation but eventually, he said he was okay with the plan.

Suddenly, a week later, Jack had decided that he was no longer okay with the plan. But instead of calling Susan aside to discuss it, he lashed out in the presence of a group of people. He decided that was the perfect time to appear tough so no one could accuse him of being soft or favoring one person over the others.  At least that’s one of the reasons that he gave her later when she asked him.

This was a discussion Jack could have had with Susan in private, but he needed to show others who was in charge. His ego needed some stroking.

No Apologies Needed

After sleeping over that exchange for a day in order to cool down her emotions, Susan asked to meet with Jack privately. She told him how his comments made her feel, especially when done with many onlookers.

“I felt blindsided by your comments. It looks like you intentionally decided to belittle me for no apparent reason. We had discussed my travel plans last week and you said it was okay. If you now had a different feeling about what we discussed, I thought you would have called me and discussed it in private.  I took the last 24 hours to think about what happened yesterday, and I was not able to come to a good reason why you behaved that way. I had to conclude that you did this just to put me down.”

The curious thing was that during this discussion, Jack did not refute any of Susan’s conclusions. Neither did he apologize for his behavior. He simply explained it away. So, Susan concluded that her assertion was true. Jack behaved that way just to show her and others around that he’s the boss; that he’s tough and an equal opportunity pain-in-the-butt. To Susan, a simple apology would have sufficed. But she didn’t get one.

We all make mistakes from time to time. Good leaders admit it when they make them, apologize and move on. They don’t try to explain them away. As a result of this experience, Susan decided that she couldn’t continue to work with Jack. She changed jobs a few months later. The organization lost a dedicated and valuable employee.

Share the Pain

Another explanation for this type of behavior has to do with how we handle pain and pressure. Some of us make those around us miserable just because we’re miserable. We feel pain, and then dish it out to those we come into contact with.

In the discussion with Susan, Jack admitted that he wanted others to feel the pain he was feeling. He had been stuck on a project that’s fraught with problems; inherited problems. As a result, he’s had to spend long days and weekends away from his family. So if he had to be away from home, others needed to feel it too. He even admitted that this wasn’t fair, but that was as far as he was willing to go. There were no apologies for behaving (or even thinking) this way.

While many of us will be taken aback by Jack’s behavior, we all have a little bit of Jack in us. The issue is whether or not we let him loose; or how far we let him loose. Sometimes, we act on the spur of the moment without giving adequate thought to the impact of our behavior. But knowing how to control our impulses is a behavioral trait that can be learned. It must be learned by anyone who seek to harness the power of their emotions to be a better person. And a better leader.

Are You Present?

You’re sitting at a meeting; but are you really there?

Photo courtesy of Tim Marshall

I was in a meeting a few years ago, and my boss, who called the meeting, was speaking. My colleague, Jesse was sitting across the table. He had his laptop, and kept tapping away on the keyboard. A few minutes later, he took out his smart phone and tapped and swiped some more. Suddenly he heard his name.

“What do you think, Jesse?” My boss was asking.

Not knowing what had been said, Jesse looked flustered and asked, “Could you repeat that?”

Multi-tasking is everywhere. We try to be more efficient by juggling tasks at the same time, but what’s the value of it? Maybe the right question is, “How much are we losing by multi-tasking?” In these days of smart, mobile devices, people seem to be engaged more in what’s on the screen in the palms of their hands than what they could learn from engaging others in a normal conversation.

Multi-tasking was a computer term coined many years ago to show that a computer’s microprocessor could do multiple things at the same time. Even at that time, engineers knew that a microprocessor could only execute one instruction (task) at a time. But they do it so fast and could jump between multiple tasks that it gives the illusion of doing many things at the same time. Those are before the days of dual and quad processors that are now so commonplace.

Because we can really do only one thing at a time, every other activity that we “pretend” to be engaged in fades into the background. So much is lost when we occupy ourselves with activities in a half-hearted manner. The result is that we become less productive. Because Jesse wasn’t paying attention during a discussion in which he was supposed to be a contributor, the question and the reasoning behind it had to be repeated. As a result, valuable time was lost and the team was not as productive as it could have been.

Sometimes, the person not paying attention may not be have been asked a direct question. But they leave the meeting without any awareness of the decisions that were made. Focus is lost on what is needful, and the organization pays the price in lost productivity.

Have you ever talked to someone that didn‘t seem to be paying attention to you? How did it feel? It felt as if you were not being listened to; as if you had nothing of value to say. You felt disrespected. That’s exactly what happens when someone is in a meeting and does not pay attention to what’s going on. Here's what they're communicating:

“There’s no worth in what you’re saying.”

“You can’t add any value to me.”

“I don’t really care.”

I know these conclusions seem a bit extreme, but that’s what is being said without any words. That’s what happens when we allow ourselves to be controlled by devices that are meant to be tools in our hands. That’s what we get when a buzz, chime or vibration from these devices make us jump to be at their every beck and call.

A few weeks ago, I was driving home from work one evening when my phone chimed, alerting me that I’ve just received a text. It was from my wife. I picked it up from the cup holder, swapped glances between the screen and the road in front of me.

I need to respond to this immediately, I thought.

As I pressed the Reply button and started fidgeting to find the first letter of the first word in my reply, it hit me. This is dangerous! It would take only a split second of not keeping my eyes on the road for an event with catastrophic consequences to happen.

My mind immediately went to my wife and children. What happens if I don’t make it home while trying to answer this text? Suddenly, I realized that responding to that text message while driving is not worth the huge risks to my life. I dropped the phone and concentrated on the traffic around me.

Sometimes, we need just a few seconds to ponder the potential consequences of an action, for us to realize whether or not it’s worth it. Peter Bregman used a hilarious experience to outline a two-step plan for changing bad habits. Not being present when you need to be is a bad habit that definitely needs broken.

Your life may depend on it.

How Do You See?

You can judge a man's character by the way he treats people who can't hurt or help him.

It was the first day back at work after the Christmas and New Year holidays. I was standing in line at the cafeteria checkout, lunch in hands. When it was my turn to pay, I smiled at *Nancy, the cashier.

“Hi! How are you today?” After she responded, I continued, “How was your holiday? Did you travel or stayed in town?”

Her face lit up with a smile as she told me that she spent the holidays with her son in India. He’s an engineer and had been in India for about a year on a 3-year contract. She was happy that she could spend the holidays with him, his wife and their little boy.

Later, as I settled down to lunch with *Frank, one of my colleagues, he asked, “What’s going on with you? I saw you talking excitedly to the cafeteria lady” I responded that I was just asking if she had a good time away from work, and wanted to know how she spent her holidays. His next comments baffled me.

“Why? You don’t have to talk to her! She’s just a cafeteria worker!”

I wonder how many of us see others the way Frank saw Nancy; people to be seen, not heard. We treat people as objects to be used for our purposes. But there’s something to be said for treating others with courtesy and respect; for valuing them as people with hope and dreams.

Some of these behaviors are so subtle and unconscious that we don’t even realize that we exhibit them. This could have their roots in our upbringing and the culture we grew up in. Frank grew up in the type of Middle Eastern culture where the elite do not typically mingle with middle-class and low-class people. His parents were rich, and they had several helpers or servants in their home. These people just worked for them; they never saw them as people. The entire family knew nothing about the personal lives of those who worked in their expansive mansion.

Now a leader in the organization, Frank is yet to learn how to relate to people appropriately; how to treat them with respect. Unfortunately, today’s American culture further diminishes the impact of respect. It’s filled with music, books, television shows and movies that elevate disrespectful attitudes and with behaviors that are borderline abusive towards other people. As a result, we are becoming numb to the effects that these have on meaningful relationships.

When you don’t respect people, you don’t see the value in them. When this happens, you are not able to benefit from whatever insights they may have and what value they may be able to add to your life.

I recently came across an anonymous quote that says, “You can judge a person's character by the way he treats people who can't help him or hurt him.” There are some people who would be polite to others they consider better than themselves; to those who have something that they want. It may be a boss or someone they want to do business with. But to others that they see as beneath them socially, politically or economically, they become very disrespectful. They think these people have no value to add to them. So they treat them as if they don’t exist. They don’t recognize or acknowledge them.

As a result, they miss whatever value these people could have added to their lives. In his book, Leading Change, James O’Toole proposes that “what creates trust, in the end, is the leader’s manifest respect for the followers”. When leaders do not respect those that they lead, this is a symptom of more fundamental problems such as insufficient humility and too much ego. Disrespecting people you consider unimportant says a lot about your character.

Have you heard of what is known as the Waiter Rule? It refers to a common belief that a person’s true character can be gleaned from how he treats service workers, such as a waiter. A USA Todayarticle by Del Jones in 2006 described some interesting experiences a few CEOs had when they were younger. They contend that how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about your character. Part of the article also described how this could be tied to the way people were raised.

About two years ago, I was having lunch with a friend, who is a Pastor. As we settled down to place our orders, he asked our waitress her name and asked if she had anything that she’s worried about, for which we could pray. She lit up immediately, and shared her concern with us.

Could you imagine what could happen if we all treat people who provide service to us in this manner? Or what the impact would be when leaders, in the true spirit of being servant leaders, extend some courtesy and respect to the people they lead?

What a revolutionary behavior that would be!

*Names have been changed.