The conversation goes like this:
"Your hair looks nice"
"Thank you"
"We all think you do a really amazing job"
"I do my best"
"And that meeting you ran the other day, it was super efficient"
"I thought we got a lot done"
"The rota that you organised means we're totally short staffed and we need two agency staff now."
When I told the class about the three-to-one ratio, this is not what I had expected, but apparently it seems to work.
Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, in their book "Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom" describe how our primarily emotional brain is geared to recognise threat more readily than opportunity, by a huge factor. Evolution dictates that it's always a better strategy to avoid being someone else's lunch, even if it means missing-out occasionally on some sex.
When I read this, I realise it reinforced research that I had heard that said we need a THREE-TO-ONE ratio of positive interactions to negative-or-neutral reactions. Some would put it even higher.
If you're the boss, what this means you need to have at least three positive interactions with every member of staff before you can get away with asking them do something difficult, give them more work, or even just walk past them without saying hello. That may not be difficult if you work with them every day, and your environment is not too stressful, but if you're not around much or the work means you're often asking a lot of your staff, you need to work hard to maintain positive relations with them.
Let me give you an example. I was working recently on the shop floor of my Emergency Department during a particularly frantic morning and one of our senior managers had come to "lend support" - or, as the staff were complaining "telling us how to do our job". I asked one of the very senior nurses if she could tell me the name of our visitor. "Her?", she said, scowling. "She's one of the EVIL ONES."
So, if you want to be effective as a leader, you probably need to do many more leadership rounds and to write a whole load more thank-you letters than you realise.
The conversation above came from one of my clients, who took my Three-To-One ratio to heart and have agreed that no difficult conversation should start without at least three compliments. This strikes me as the sort of "Open Club" approach to the rather more trite "sandwich conversation" idea so beloved of coaching courses. It wasn't quite what I envisaged, but they tell me it works.
"Your hair looks nice"
"Thank you"
"We all think you do a really amazing job"
"I do my best"
"And that meeting you ran the other day, it was super efficient"
"I thought we got a lot done"
"The rota that you organised means we're totally short staffed and we need two agency staff now."
When I told the class about the three-to-one ratio, this is not what I had expected, but apparently it seems to work.
Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, in their book "Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom" describe how our primarily emotional brain is geared to recognise threat more readily than opportunity, by a huge factor. Evolution dictates that it's always a better strategy to avoid being someone else's lunch, even if it means missing-out occasionally on some sex.
When I read this, I realise it reinforced research that I had heard that said we need a THREE-TO-ONE ratio of positive interactions to negative-or-neutral reactions. Some would put it even higher.
If you're the boss, what this means you need to have at least three positive interactions with every member of staff before you can get away with asking them do something difficult, give them more work, or even just walk past them without saying hello. That may not be difficult if you work with them every day, and your environment is not too stressful, but if you're not around much or the work means you're often asking a lot of your staff, you need to work hard to maintain positive relations with them.
Let me give you an example. I was working recently on the shop floor of my Emergency Department during a particularly frantic morning and one of our senior managers had come to "lend support" - or, as the staff were complaining "telling us how to do our job". I asked one of the very senior nurses if she could tell me the name of our visitor. "Her?", she said, scowling. "She's one of the EVIL ONES."
So, if you want to be effective as a leader, you probably need to do many more leadership rounds and to write a whole load more thank-you letters than you realise.
The conversation above came from one of my clients, who took my Three-To-One ratio to heart and have agreed that no difficult conversation should start without at least three compliments. This strikes me as the sort of "Open Club" approach to the rather more trite "sandwich conversation" idea so beloved of coaching courses. It wasn't quite what I envisaged, but they tell me it works.
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