Home | Business | Communication
Some people need to be right whether they are or not. No matter what you say to them about a problem, they can explain... Why they couldn't help making a mistake... Why they are not to blame because they meant well... Why it's your fault that they made the mistake.... They're so defensive, it's a real challenge to get them toaddress any problem. David, an engineer who leads a team of prickly Ph.D. researchers, sidesteps this defensiveness, and you can too. He has developed a strategy of asking penetrating questions that almost force people to think through situations in depth. Then he listens very carefully to their responses. David explained: "I ask questions in order to get very clear about what is happening." These are questions about details.Questions like: "What happened first?" "Then what happened?" "How did you recognize that there was a problem?" David wants to make it safe for the people he works with to tell the truth. He never blames anyone else for a problem or a miscommunication. If there is any blame, he assumes it himself by the way he asks his questions. He demonstrates taking responsibility for learning by modeling that responsibility for others. He is likely to preface a question with a disarming statement such as "I'm really confused here." "I'm sorry, would you mind going over that again?" "I must have heard this wrong before." "I must have really screwed up." David reports that whenever he offers to assume blame for a problem, others are quick to argue that they are responsible for the problem themselves. Use some of David's techniques next time you must solve a problem with someone who always insists on being right. Excerpted from Lesson 16 of "The Integrity Course," Copyright 2005 Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com
Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.
A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points.
