BOOK REVIEWS
How to Win Friends and Influence People
The seminal text on interpersonal relationships. But is it still relevant in the modern age?
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE BY DALE CARNEGIE
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
Deception in marketing was clearly not a thing in the 1930s. This book is exactly what it says it is - a guide to winning people towards you and your way of thinking. There is a reason it is so popular. Despite the better part of a century having elapsed since it was written, it is still amazingly relevant. Carnegie does a fantastic job of distilling his observations of human relationships and providing advice for how to better relate to others. One of the best things about this book is seeing the advice that was developed by Carnegie through observation and practice validated by modern neuroscience and psychology.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. People work better under a spirit of approval than a spirit of criticism. Our need for self-esteem is as potent as our need for physical nourishment.
2. People are interested in their own wants over those of others. If you want to get someone to do (or guide them away from doing) something, help them see it as being in their own interest.
3. Everyone wants to feel important. If you listen to them, take interest in them and demonstrate an empathy for their concerns, you will provide this sense of importance. If they can’t get a sense of importance through inter-personal validation, they may well seek it through other actions (like complaining).
4. People will never attribute malign intent to their own actions. It is futile to try and convince someone that they are acting in a manner that is inherently bad - they will never accept that they act out of anything other than good intentions.
5. Actions and feelings are mutually reinforcing. Putting a smile on your face lifts your mood, and lifts the mood of the team around you.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The sound of our own name is, to us, the sweetest sound of all. Get to know your team, and take a real interest in them as people.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
You will never understand someone if you can’t empathise with them. You need to look at things from their point of view, which means letting go of your own and admitting when you are wrong. Unless you have proof to the contrary, assume people act with good intentions and that they are trustworthy and competent.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
Any fool can defend their mistakes, and most fools do.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Listen attentively. Phones weren’t a distraction when this book was written, and if they had been around, I think Dale Carnegie would have changed very little in his book. Put away your distractions and listen to people.
2. If you don’t know them already, learn about your team. Learn their names and what they are interested in - and make sure they know you are genuinely interested.
3. The hardest one for me personally - don’t criticise. No-one was ever scolded into changing their beliefs, and at best, they can be cajoled into temporary alterations of behaviour. Instead of pointing out mistakes, look for and call out effort, improvement, and successes.
INSPIRED READING
This inspired me to go back over the neuroscience and psychology books about leadership. It’s amazing how much of Carnegie’s work is reflected (and repeated) in modern research.
LINK TO BUY
Quiet Leadership
David Rock is a legend in the field of neuroleadership. This book is a distillation of his in-depth research and deep experience.
Quiet leadership by david rock
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This is a user manual for the brain. But, there’s a twist - it’s not a user manual for YOUR brain. It’s a user manual for everyone else’s brain. We know that everyone thinks differently. Quiet Leadership is a guide to understanding how people think, and more importantly, that only you thinks the way you do. This is a fact that is hard to recognise, and we tend to overlook it most of the time. David Rock draws out all the ways that fact affects our interactions with other people, and gives some guidelines for recognising and adapting your interactions with people who aren’t you.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. When we are trying to help a colleague think anything through, we make the unconscious assumption that the other person’s brain works the same as ours. So we input their problem into our brain, see the connections our brain would make to solve this problem, and spit out the solution that would work for us. We then tell people what we would do and are convinced it’s what they should do.
2. Diversity isn’t important only because it’s the right way to grow as an organisation. If you need a transactional justification, remember that the different wiring of other people’s brains means they see things from a fundamentally different position, and therefore will bring value that you could never have contributed.
3. You can’t advise someone to get out of a problem you didn’t advise them into. You cannot form the neural pathways in someone else’s brain that are needed for them to solve a problem. Instead, you need to help them think through it themselves, and let their brain forge the connections needed to arrive at a solution.
4. Negative feedback is easy for people to give, and hard for people to receive. Positive feedback is hard to deliver - we tend to overlook those areas where people are performing well - and it has an uplifting impact on people’s performance. Positive feedback is more powerful, and more useful, than negative feedback.
5. Email is not a good form of communication where emotions are involved. You have no way at all of knowing how the message will be interpreted.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Challenging people’s contributions, rather than their thinking, is a challenge to their social status. This is integrated mentally as an attack, and they will defend their position rather than concede to the attack. Determining how the contribution was determined as appropriate, and altering the path from through to action, will avoid the challenge and the automatic defence.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
People usually know when they’ve made a mistake. They can deliver that feedback to themselves. Leaders need to recognise when their team are already in a place to improve, and help them move on from there. Offering another critique on the past performance helps no one. Instead, focus on what was learned. This reinforces the mental map that people develop to avoid the mistake in the future, and increases the chances of not repeating a mistake.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
If we want people to think better, let them do all the thinking, then help them think.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Stop critiquing your team’s performance. Focus instead on what was learned, and reinforcing the positive aspects of performance.
2. If your email is more than five sentences, use another form of communication.
3. Use visual metaphors to describe problems. This helps offset the difference between your approach to a problem, and someone else’s. You can both build new mental models to interpret the issues, and to develop solutions from a common understanding.
Inspired reading
The Good Listener by Hugh Mackay