Devora Zack

In reality, inspiring people to do good prevails over the goal of making them merely feel good. Here’s the clincher: Do-good leadership makes teams feel better than feel-good leadership.

Sometimes in this activity a participant will short circuit. He will cling to the notion that the challenge is impossible. Even as other teams around him triumphantly announce success, he will continue to pronounce this an unsolvable task doomed to failure. Over and over, he will repeat his conviction.

From experience, I know his team will fail. They always do. One vocal naysayer will smash any hope of success to smithereens. The most common mistake I see in these situations is the manager letting the negative voice go on too loud and too long before addressing or mitigating the situation. Negative energy can jeopardize the outcome of an entire team.

When you ignore or downplay the significance of a single person’s negativity, the result spreads far beyond that individual. Speak to that person, look for the cause, discuss alternatives, ask for support. Don’t let a small flame turn into a wildfire that destroys everyone’s best efforts.

The Platinum Rule upgrades “Treat others how you want to be treated” to “Treat others how they want to be treated.”10 Plenty of people you manage don’t want to be treated in remotely the same way you want to be treated. Tailor how you interact with others to their style, not yours.

Criticism isn’t at all the same as providing useful constructive feedback, by the way. The skill of meaningful feedback is a valuable tool of superior managers. Criticism = judgment. The purpose of criticizing others is to insult them. The purpose of providing feedback is to improve them.

Work hard, reserve judgment, don’t jump the gun. At the same time, a prime management skill is the ability to realize when to stop pouring energy and effort into an unmanageable individual.

When someone asks if you have time to talk and it’s not a true-blue emergency, tell him you have ten minutes. During this time, give him your complete attention. When ten minutes are over, wrap it up. It’s far better to give your full attention for a previously disclosed short time frame than to provide partial attention for an hour, hoping he’ll take the hint.

I observe managers overpromise and overdeliver because they make offers rather than inquiries. When someone says she is overwhelmed with an assignment, the well-meaning manager often reacts by offering to help rather than asking, “What do you want?” Sometimes the answer is the employee just wanted to let off some steam so she can get back to tackling the work.

The Platinum Rule mandates treating others not as we want to be treated but as each particular employee wants to be treated. I recommend the ancient system of asking people what motivates them. Use that as a guide.

The rub is that to succeed at flexing your style you must hone the dual skill set of capturing subtle data about how others like to be treated (if you’re not in a position to ask directly) and matching your behavior to other people’s preferences. Takes practice, though definitely doable and pays off!

Happiness is relative, marked only by changes from the recent past. Through more expansive studies, Brickman discovered that we adapt to life circumstances, good and bad. After a windfall, the satisfaction fades, replaced by indifference and new striving. Constant adaptation to a cushier lifestyle leads to what he dubbed the hedonic treadmill, as we seek out higher levels of reward to maintain the same subjective pleasure.12

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

—Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People