Do I look like I care?

Do I look like a person who cares? I hope so, says author and management expert Larry Johnson in the new issue of The Imaging Executive.

He writes: A friend of mine, I’ll call him Paul, recently went through the pain of a divorce. He came home one day to discover a note from Julie, his now ex-wife, saying she was unhappy and wanted out. In subsequent conversations, she told him that she’d grown tired of his bullying manner, the fact that he never listened to her, and that he always had to have his way. Paul hadn’t seen it coming. It never occurred to him that she perceived him this way. In fact, he said, she never complained about the way they communicated at all, so he assumed everything was fine. One never knows what really goes on in a marriage, but on the surface, it appears this was a classic case of opposite personality styles clashing. Paul’s aggressive, take-charge approach to life clashed with her lack of confidence and disinclination to speak up. What’s worse is that these style differences tend to exacerbate each other. Aggressive types like Paul will often make a decision and dictate it to their partners. “Let’s go to Fredo’s tonight for dinner, honey. You call them and make reservations for 8:00 p.m. and I’ll meet you there?” They usually will interpret lack of protest from the other person as agreement, so when she replies in a less-than enthusiastic tone, “OK,” the Pauls of the world assume she’s on board with the decision. Meanwhile, passive types like Julie often think that since they weren’t asked, their opinion is not valued; so they nod in agreement, but seethe with resentment inside. Repeat these kinds of encounters day after day, with no push back from her to let him know he’s being a bully and no inquiry on his part to find out how she feels, and eventually, the relationship will sour. “So,” you ask, “what’s all this have to do with managing people?”

Everything. In their bestseller, “First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently,” Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman published some remarkable results of studies they conducted at the Gallup organization.

They came upon a list of 12 critical perceptions employees have of their jobs that have a statistically significant impact on the levels of profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction ratings, and employee turnover rates for their teams.

Members of the Association of Imaging Executives (AIE) can read the rest of this article and more in the September issue of The Imaging Executive.

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