Fit your response to the level someone is operating from

When someone does not respond to your approach, ask what they need from their current way of living before trying to change what they believe.

Perché funziona

Graves’s account, in the reprint’s management section, says that a worker with a closed personality normally prefers to be managed in the style congruent with his level of existence. A worker whose personality is still open and growing, the account says, prefers to be managed by a supervisor at the next higher level. It also says that management programs which try to change managers’ beliefs, rather than fitting development to those beliefs, can cast the manager into a severe value crisis. The practice starts from matching the approach to where the person is.

Come farlo

1. Describe the person’s pattern in plain words: what they keep doing when you give them the same explanation.
2. Ask what that pattern would make sense for: what problem it might be solving in their current life.
3. Change your approach to fit that need, such as concrete steps and immediate feedback, rather than repeating the argument.
4. Check whether the change in your approach has changed what they do, not only what they say.

Prove scientifiche

The reprint marks this management section, headed “Applying Graves’s Theory to Management,” at .5in, the indent its prefatory note clearly covers, and that note says indented passages carry heavy editorial involvement by Ed Cornish. The closed and open personality sentences sit inside that section, so this practice rests on editor-marked text. (anecdotal)

Because the whole section is editor-marked, these are Graves’s ideas as the editor applied them to management, not a tested method. The reprint itself says Graves was not entirely satisfied with the piece. Treat the matching as a check to run on the person in front of you.

Fonti

• Graves, C. W. (1974). Human nature prepares for a momentous leap. The Futurist, pp. 72–87. Reprint edited with embedded comments by Edward Cornish.

Errore comune

Explaining the same point more clearly, as if the person only needs better information, when the response is coming from a different need.