How To Win Friends And Influence People Part 43

"I recently decided to let our seasonal personnel go with a little more tact and consideration. So I call each one in only after carefully thinking over his or her work during the winter. And I've said something like this: 'Mr. Smith, you've done a fine job (if he has). That time we sent you to Newark, you had a tough a.s.signment.

You were on the spot, but you came through with flying colors, and we want you to know the firm is proud of you. You've got the stuff - you're going a long way, wherever you're working. This firm believes in you, and is rooting for you, and we don't want you to forget it.'

"Effect? The people go away feeling a lot better about being fired. They don't feel 'let down.' They know if we had work for them, we'd keep them on. And when we need them again, they come to us with a keen personal affection."

At one session of our course, two cla.s.s members discussed the negative effects of faultfinding versus the positive effects of letting the other person save face.

Fred Clark of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, told of an incident that occurred in his company: "At one of our production meetings, a vice president was asking very pointed questions of one of our production supervisors regarding a production process. His tone of voice was aggressive and aimed at pointing out faulty performance on the part of the supervisor. Not wanting to be embarra.s.sed in front of his peers, the supervisor was evasive in his responses. This caused the vice president to lose his temper, berate the supervisor and accuse him of lying.

"Any working relationship that might have existed prior to this encounter was destroyed in a few brief moments.

This supervisor, who was basically a good worker, was useless to our company from that time on. A few months later he left our firm and went to work for a compet.i.tor, where I understand he is doing a fine job."

Another cla.s.s member, Anna Mazzone, related how a similar incident had occurred at her job - but what a difference in approach and results! Ms. Mazzone, a marketing specialist for a food packer, was given her first major a.s.signment - the test-marketing of a new product.

She told the cla.s.s: "When the results of the test came in, I was devastated. I had made a serious error in my planning, and the entire test had to be done all over again.

To make this worse, I had no time to discuss it with my boss before the meeting in which I was to make my report on the project.

"When I was called on to give the report, I was shaking with fright. I had all I could do to keep from breaking down, but I resolved I would not cry and have all those men make remarks about women not being able to handle a management job because they are too emotional. I made my report briefly and stated that due to an error I would repeat the study before the next meeting. I sat down, expecting my boss to blow up.

"Instead, he thanked me for my work and remarked that it was not unusual for a person to make an error on a new project and that he had confidence that the repeat survey would be accurate and meaningful to the company.

He a.s.sured me, in front of all my colleagues, that he had faith in me and I knew I had done my best, and that my lack of experience, not my lack of ability, was the reason for the failure.

I left that meeting with my head in the air and with the determination that I would never let that boss of mine down again."

Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: "I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes.

What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime."

A real leader will always follow . . .

PRINCIPLE 5 Let the other person save face.

6 HOW TO SPUR PEOPLE ON TO SUCCESS

Pete Barlow was an old friend of mine. He had a dog-and- pony act and spent his life traveling with circuses and vaudeville shows. I loved to watch Pete train new dogs for his act. I noticed that the moment a dog showed the slightest improvement, Pete patted and praised him and gave him meat and made a great to-do about it.

That's nothing new. Animal trainers have been using that same technique for centuries.

Why, I wonder, don't we use the same common sense when trying to change people that we use when trying to change dogs? Why don't we use meat instead of a whip? Why don't we use praise instead of condemnation?

Let us praise even the slightest improvement. That inspires the other person to keep on improving.

In his book I Ain't Much, Baby-But I'm I Ain't Much, Baby-But I'm All All I I Got, Got, the psychologist Jess Lair comments: "Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise." *

* Jess Lair, Jess Lair, I Ain't Much, Baby - I Ain't Much, Baby - But I'm All I But I'm All I Got Got (Greenwich, Conn.: (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1976), p . 248.

I can look back at my own life and see where a few words of praise have sharply changed my entire future.

Can't you say the same thing about your life? History is replete with striking ill.u.s.trations of the sheer witchery raise.

For example, many years ago a boy of ten was working in a factory in Naples, He longed to be a singer, but his first teacher discouraged him. "You can't sing," he said.

"You haven't any voice at all. It sounds like the wind in the shutters."

But his mother, a poor peasant woman, put her arms about him and praised him and told him she knew he could sing, she could already see an improvement, and she went barefoot in order to save money to pay for his music lessons. That peasant mother's praise and encouragement changed that boy's life. His name was Enrico Caruso, and he became the greatest and most famous opera singer of his age.

In the early nineteenth century, a young man in London aspired to be a writer. But everything seemed to be against him. He had never been able to attend school more than four years. His father had been flung in jail because he couldn't pay his debts, and this young man often knew the pangs of hunger. Finally, he got a job pasting labels on bottles of blacking in a rat-infested warehouse, and he slept at night in a dismal attic room with two other boys - guttersnipes from the slums of London. He had so little confidence in his ability to write that he sneaked out and mailed his first ma.n.u.script in the dead of night so n.o.body would laugh at him. Story after story was refused. Finally the great day came when one was accepted. True, he wasn't paid a shilling for it, but one editor had praised him. One editor had given him recognition. He was so thrilled that he wandered aimlessly around the streets with tears rolling down his cheeks.

The praise, the recognition, that he received through getting one story in print, changed his whole life, for if it hadn't been for that encouragement, he might have spent his entire life working in rat-infested factories.

You may have heard of that boy. His name was Charles d.i.c.kens.

Another boy in London made his living as a clerk in a dry-goods store. He had to get up at five o'clock, sweep out the store, and slave for fourteen hours a day. It was sheer drudgery and he despised it. After two years, he could stand it no longer, so he got up one morning and, without waiting for breakfast, tramped fifteen miles to talk to his mother, who was working as a housekeeper.

He was frantic. He pleaded with her. He wept. He swore he would kill himself if he had to remain in the shop any longer. Then he wrote a long, pathetic letter to his old schoolmaster, declaring that he was heartbroken, that he no longer wanted to live. His old schoolmaster gave him a little praise and a.s.sured him that he really was very intelligent and fitted for finer things and offered him a job as a teacher.

That praise changed the future of that boy and made a lasting impression on the history of English literature.

For that boy went on to write innumerable best-selling books and made over a million dollars with his pen.

You've probably heard of him. His name: H. G. Wells.

Use of praise instead of criticism is the basic concept of B. F. Skinner's teachings. This great contemporary psychologist has shown by experiments with animals and with humans that when criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention.

John Ringelspaugh of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, used this in dealing with his children. It seemed that, as in so many families, mother and dad's chief form of communication with the children was yelling at them. And, as in so many cases, the children became a little worse rather than better after each such session - and so did the parents. There seemed to be no end in sight for this problem.

Mr. Ringelspaugh determined to use some of the principles he was learning in our course to solve this situation.

He reported: "We decided to try praise instead of harping on their faults. It wasn't easy when all we could see were the negative things they were doing; it was really tough to find things to praise. We managed to find something, and within the first day or two some of the really upsetting things they were doing quit happening.

Then some of their other faults began to disappear. They began capitalizing on the praise we were giving them.

They even began going out of their way to do things right. Neither of us could believe it. Of course, it didn't last forever, but the norm reached after things leveled off was so much better. It was no longer necessary to react the way we used to. The children were doing far more right things than wrong ones." All of this was a result of praising the slightest improvement in the children rather than condemning everything they did wrong.