How to Truly Gain Rapport

Daniel Goleman recently posted an interesting blog: Leaders: Learn the Art and Science of Rapport.  In the blog Goleman quotes a landmark article by Robert Rosenthal and Linda Tickle-Degnan that described the three essential ingredients for rapport:

1.      mutual attention,

2.      shared positive feeling, and

3.      synchrony or coordination.

Rapport doesn’t exist when only some of these elements are present.

Goleman then elaborates these factors in more detail:

1.      Mutual empathy is an indicator of rapport, where both partners are aware of being experienced. There is a difference between social ease and rapport. Social ease is comfortable, but we don’t feel that the other person is tuned in to our feelings.  Fully attending to someone, seeing eye to eye, opens the possibility of empathy.

2.      You need more than attention for rapport, you also need positive feelings toward each other. Such feelings are often shown nonverbally, through tone of voice and facial expression. Skillful managers can give their staff critical feedback while showing warm feelings nonverbally.

3.      Synchrony is the third element. When we are in rapport, subtle nonverbal cues coordinate the pace and timing of conversations and body movement. We become animated, our eyes meet often, the flow of our conversation looks almost like a choreographed dance.  According to Goleman we have ‘oscillators,’ neural systems that act like clocks, resetting over and over their rate of firing to coordinate with the periodicity of an incoming signal.

What can we do to intentionally build rapport with another person or within a team?  Goleman suggests we fully listen.  To do this we must give someone our full attention. Put down the phone, look away from the computer monitor, and tune into what the person is saying. Ask questions to understand the background situation. For that time, focus on the other’s feelings and needs, not your own preoccupations. 

Good advice but there is a much easier and better way.  First you need to know the Humm-Wadsworth components.  We have all seven components in our temperament but two are typically strong, three are average, and two are weak.  The golden rule of life is we like those who are like ourselves.  So if you are dealing with someone who a strong component the same as you then there is natural rapport.  Act naturally and you will both get along famously.

If however there is no overlap the next thing to check for is personality dissonance.  Compare your two strong components with the other persons and see if there is a problem.

Component: Risk Groups

Normal: H, M, D

Hustler: N, D, E, A

Mover: N, A, E

Doublechecker: H, M

Artist: H, M, P

Politician: N, A, P

Engineer: H, M

For example I have a strong P and have high personality dissonance with High As.  I have to leverage the strengths of my own temperament and also recognise and respond in appropriate ways to other person’s unique temperament.  It takes a day to learn how to this.

By the way I hope you enjoyed the image.  On the left is the cover of The Humm Handbook: Lifting Your Level of Emotional Intelligence written by me and published in June 2007.  On the right is the logo of Julie Engel Manga, Executive Coach, who wrote the following article in 2010 referenced by Goleman: Action Follows Attention, Part 2: Relationships.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

And finally thank you Rupert Bolton, one of my EQ coachees who alerted me to Goleman’s article.

My Favourite Book on Leadership

For my sins I subscribe to the McKinsey Quarterly and every year one article is published that hits the mark.  Not much impressed me in the past 12 months but the latest edition contained this wonderful article by Professor Jeffery Pfeffer: “Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature”.  Pfeffer, on his own, has written extensively about power.  Pfeffer and his Stanford co-author, Robert Sutton have written extensively about evidence based management theory.  In his latest book, Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time combines these two themes.

In the McKinsey extract, Pfeffer lists five books that he considers worth reading and extracts from them five core principles of successful leadership.

Core principle 1: Build your power base relentlessly (and sometimes shamelessly).

Book: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III By Robert A. Caro.

Core principle 2: Embrace ambiguity by being flexible.

Book: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York By Robert A. Caro

Core principle 3: Eschew popularity contests.

Book: Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson

Core principle 4: When the situation demands change—adapt.

Book:  Team of Rivals By Doris Kearns Goodwin

Core principle 5: Master the science of influence

Book: Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini

I have read the last three books but I consider Pfeffer omitted what is the best book on Leadership, his own.  If you work in a larger organisation, be it corporate or government and wish to become a leader in that organisation you have to read Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organisations (1992).  One of my most treasured possessions is a copy that Pfeffer kindly signed during one of his visits to Australia.  His chapter on Leadership is easily the best ever written.  Two great quotes from the book:

“To succeed as a leader it is necessary to be able to modify one's behaviour.  Flexibility is essential to success, particularly for managers.  People may not like flexibility in the abstract but they do like what it is able to accomplish.”

“Leaders are willing to engage, when necessary in conflict and confrontation.  Many people believe that to get along you go along.  This belief is inculcated from an early age.  However, leaders have discovered that conflict will often provide you far more power than pliability.”

Emotional Intelligence and the Autistic Spectrum Disorder

My eldest grandchild started school several weeks ago.  For the past five years one question that keeps reoccurring in family discussion is whether the child is autistic.  Given the number of articles in the various media outlets about autism it is not surprising that many parents are concerned about it. 

Recently a book review in The New Yorker, Seeing The Specturm discussed a new history of autism.  According to the article autism was discovered separately during the Second World War by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger.  This is not quite true in that Humm and Wadsworth in 1935 defined the Autistic component in their seven component temperament scale as including seclusiveness, shyness, suggestibility and the like, accompanied by an ability to visualize and to concentrate on special tasks, excluding diverting interests.  In addition according to Humm and Wadsworth everyone of us had all seven components in our temperament, the differences being where we are each positioned on the seven spectrums. 

Tragically this model was not widely known so that initially autism was viewed as a developmental disorder caused by bad parenting, particularly non-affectionate mothers.  However as later studies showed that identical twins were more likely to share autism than fraternal twins, the genetic basis for autism became more accepted.

The tipping point probably was Dustin Hoffman’s performance in ‘Rain Man’ (1988) (even though personally I think the Oscar should have gone to Tom Cruise.)  Since then there has been much work on analysing autism and developing behavioural treatments such as Applied Behaviour Analysis.  Unfortunately such treatments are expensive requiring around sixty hours of expert attention for  two to three years.  Tragically there have been quack treatments developed and various false hypotheses such as vaccines causing autism.

The conversion of autism to a spectrum disorder began in the mid-1960s and when British psychiatrist, Lorna Wing, demonstrated that Asperger’s Syndrome as being part of the autistic spectrum, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) began to define autism as a distinct mental illness and a spectrum disorder. 

The tragedy now is that some individuals who are positioned say two standard deviations at the high end of the autistic spectrum, particularly if they have high intelligence can lead relatively normal and productive lives and thus claim there should be no talk of pathology and medical programs. They refer to themselves as neuro-divergent.

This is of little comfort to parents with children at the 1% end of the spectrum.  It is estimated that around 240,000 Australian suffer from chronic autism which equates to 1 child in 100.  One can only sympathise with the parents.  One article described such children as having a volcano inside them that suddenly erupts into terribly disruptive behaviour.

If you want to learn more about the Artist (my name for the Autistic) component have a look at my webinar.