Employees Wired for Self-Interest: You Go First and Get Me Right
Did you realize everyone, including your employees, is wired for self-interest? Okay, consider the perspective of your employee, who’s thinking: “I need you to go first, ‘get me right,’ then I will happily focus on my teammate’s welfare. This feeling of connection comes from being fully heard and understood by you, which, by the way, we are all seeking. Trust-building energy emerges from being heard actually connects to my mind and heart unconsciously; it creates this intrinsic motivation to do right by you. As a result, I do want to keep that connection alive and well.
“The bottom line is when the connection is real between us, you offer me an emotional warm hug. So when you ‘get me right,’ I have this feeling of being truly heard and it feels like an emotional warm hug, which are almost indistinguishable to me. Having the hierarchal power—can you go first?”
What will it take for you to make the choices that create those connections your teams need to thrive? Humans require social connections to survive. Deep social connection is vital to our well-being and it contributes to emotional stability and stress reduction. Research finds that real and deep connection creates emotional safety or as I like to call it, “warm hug.” When it happens, we intuitively want more of it from others.
The Path from Self-Interest to True Connection
Matthew D. Lieberman, author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect informs us that people are motivated first (not only) by self-interest. Long-term, people are even more motivated by something beyond self-interest: the drive for social connection.
Our brains are devoted to social connection, yearning for acceptance and belonging. We have an innate desire to move towards it. As leaders, the more we realize how connecting with others in healthy and productive ways becomes vital for our mutual success, the more we can set up employees, teams and the organization for a thriving environment. It is a choice we make at every dialogue encounter. This is a tactical and strategic approach to shaping culture.
Building Bridges
“In addition to being highly self-interested humans, we are also interested in the welfare of others,” Lieberman writes. “This, along with self-interest, is part of our basic wiring.” There’s a vital urge for you as leaders to ‘get me right.’ In other words, by taking care of your team on a one-on-one level (by “getting them right” first), they can feel safe enough to focus on positive social connections and healthy dialogue with their peers and team.
Judith Glaser writes in Psychology Today that as a leader, there are two mountains you face every day: “1) creating and selling the vision, and 2) connecting with other people as we build the business around our innovative ideas. Connecting with others enables us to build concentric circles of engagement with employees and customers to expand the brand in magnificent and exciting ways. Leaders who put relationships before tasks and build bridges for connection become multipliers for success—a powerful path for getting to the next level of greatness.”
It starts with the leader or manager. Gallup found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is based solely on a manager’s ability to prioritize the employee connection, making it clear the leader’s connection is a critical component of the workplace connections conversation.
How You Show Up To The Dialogue Matters: Two Behaviors to Avoid
How you show up to every conversation matters. We humans tend to be driven based on our individual priorities. Leaders and managers in particular are hyper-focused on execution and have a finite amount of time and space in their heads for execution. What leaders don’t realize is that in order to sell their vision and ideas, they must first connect and ensure others feel cared for by being curious about their wants, needs and assumptions on the topic at hand.
When leaders slow down and become curious to engage with other’s ideas and learn, a deep connection can form. This healthy dialogue you are working to stay in requires each party to release judgment and the pressure of time that hovers around them. Instead, move instead to gain shared learnings and shared outcomes by avoiding these two behaviors that inhibit healthy connection:
1. Talking At or Past Each Other
Communication breakdowns happen when people talk to be heard and drive their own concerns, needs or positions. Leaders often fail to slow down to understand others’ perspectives, instead driving their own self-interest for the initiative at hand.
Instead, activate your empathy by appreciating others’ perspectives even if you don’t agree. When this appreciation is felt, the other person’s brain and energy shift to “friend” versus “foe,” thus creating a new feeling of emotional safety. This feeling opens the brain to a larger framework for thinking together and taking greater risks together for the sake of problem solving.
By literally verbalizing something like, “Let’s put judgment aside and brainstorm,” you can open pathways for deep connection.
2. Not Minding the Gap, Ignoring Others’ Needs
Healthy dialogue requires conversations centered on practices and rituals for how work gets done inside a culture. Leadership starts in the conversation space and requires that you make others feel connected, heard and valued in almost all interactions. Leaders must mind the gap and step into others’ worlds, shift from talking about themselves and their solutions, and start co-creating by focusing on shared success.
This involves actively identifying the stakeholder’s wants, needs and assumptions. If you miss these details, you will most likely make others feel ignored, undervalued and even trigger “foe” energy—resulting in resentment and ultimately, lost trust. The employee will operate out of a triggered state and you will not get their wholehearted commitment. This is where accountability begins to fall off the rails.
Final Thoughts
Many leaders are unaware there is a higher level of communication competency to attain. Conversations are powerful tools. Lacking this next-level communication competency prohibits you from consciously honing in on building and extending trust in each interaction, prioritizing relationships and “getting me right” over driving tasks.
Stop and think: How do I want this person to feel at the end of this exchange?
