Jack was a civil tax attorney. By that, I don’t mean that he did civil law; I mean that he was mild mannered, respectful, even tempered, and calm in his dealings with the IRS for his clients. He was very successful because of his incredible preparation, not because of the force of his personality.

Despite Jack’s successful record, he came to see me because he wasn’t getting as much business as some of his less competent peers. It didn’t take me long to figure out why.

“When people hire a CPA to go up against the IRS,” I said, “they unconsciously want to hire a gladiator. That’s because they want to feel that whoever they hire could ‘kill’ for them if necessary.” For all his talent, Jack just didn’t come across as a killer. So even if he told people he could handle their cases against the IRS successfully, what they saw and heard in his manner didn’t convince them.

Jack said he didn’t think he could change his personality. “You don’t need to,” I said. “All you need to do is resolve the dissonance you create in other people by changing their perception of you.”

I suggested that when he met with potential clients and sensed hesitation, he should add this: “Oh, by the way, if you decide to hire me to deal with the IRS you need to know that I am a ‘killer,’ but I am not a ‘murderer.’”

I added that when they were startled by this statement, he should explain, “Many people who hire a tax attorney are scared that they’ve really messed up and the IRS is going to destroy them. They want an attorney who can go toe-to-toe with the IRS and win. Because I appear so even mannered, people may think that I can’t ‘kill’ for them, if I need to. They would be making a mistake. I’m very prepared to ‘kill’ for my clients through a preparation that usually overwhelms the IRS, but I am not a murderer who takes delight in destroying someone just for the sake of doing it.”

Jack tried this, with great success. He reported that using this approach caused more people to hire him—and it caused him to feel far more confident in his initial conversations with them.

What was the problem that had led Jack to seek me out? Dissonance. Dissonance occurs when you think you’re coming across in one way but people see you in a totally different way. Jack, for example, thought he came off as quietly competent, but in fact he came off as timid until he made people see him in a different light.

Dissonance also happens when you think you’re coming off as wise, but people see you as being sly—or when you think you’re coming off as passionate, but other people think you’re “over the top.” When that happens, the result is buy-out.

Dissonance works the other way around, too: it occurs when you think you perceive someone else accurately, but the other person doesn’t agree. There’s hardly anything more annoying to another person than hearing you say, “I know where you’re coming from,” when you don’t really have a clue. Often this happens when you aren’t listening deeply enough to know what the other person is trying to communicate.

Dissonance makes a person stop thinking “What can this person do for me?” and start wondering, “What is this person planning to do to me?” It also keeps you and another person from connecting—or, from a neurological point of view, achieving mirror neuron empathy—because you’re not sending the message you think you’re sending. People can’t reflect your confidence if it looks like arrogance. They can’t mirror your concern if it sounds like hysteria. They can’t mirror your calmness if they interpret it as apathy. And if you’re misperceiving them—for instance, if you mistake their legitimate grievances for hysteria—the results can be fatal to a relationship.

Dissonance is a common culprit in marital disputes. Take Robert and Susan, a thirty-something couple who visited me. The two of them often fought over Robert’s frequent failure to call to let Susan know that he’d be late for dinner, and about her being so controlling and rigid. (Sound like any people you know?)

As they talked, Susan frequently launched into accusations such as. “You never call to let me know about when you’re coming home. You’re so inconsiderate.”

Robert would respond, “You’re so pushy. You’re just too controlling.”

Finally I stopped them, and asked what they each heard each other saying. They both responded that the other person was saying, “I’m right, and you’re wrong.”

I responded, “Really? Are each of you actually saying, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’?’’

Susan looked at me and said, “No, that’s not what I am saying.” Robert agreed.

“So what are you saying?” I asked.

They both said, “What I’m saying is that, I’m not always wrong!”

“So each of you is actually defending yourself against the other’s criticism much more than you’re attacking the other person?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” they both agreed.

“Hmm,” I said. “So every time you try to protect yourself from being attacked, the other person feels as if you’re on the attack.”

Robert laughed, recognizing how this dynamic had played out time after time. He said ruefully, “Yeah … and we end up paying a shrink hundreds of dollars to sort it out.”

The greatest single cause of dissonance is the fact that people behave their worst when they feel most powerless. So when a man or woman is yelling at a partner, or when a child and parent are yelling at each other, or when a boss is yelling at a subordinate, or when a customer is yelling at a customer service representative, it’s because the person who’s yelling feels that he or she isn’t being heard or considered. In other words, the person who’s yelling doesn’t feel intimidating or scary (although that’s what the other person perceives). Instead, the yeller feels powerless and small. This is dissonance at its most extreme, and it always ends badly.

Dissonance keeps you from reaching people, and it keeps other people from reaching you. As Susan and Robert discovered, dissonance can create fractures in a relationship—and as civil Jack discovered, it can stall a career. That’s why you need to spot your own dissonance and correct it.

In my experience, the ten most common misperceptions that cause dissonance are the following.

BELIEVING YOU ARE:	WHEN OTHERS PERCEIVE YOU AS:
Shrewd	Sly
Confident	Arrogant
Humorous	Inappropriate
Energetic	Hyper
A Person with Strong Opinions	Opinionated
Passionate	Impulsive
Strong	Rigid
Detail oriented	Nitpicking
Quiet	Passive or Indecisive
Sensitive	Needy

But here’s the challenge: How can you know how other people perceive you? The answer is simple but uncomfortable: Ask the experts—your own friends or relatives. This isn’t fun, and you’ll need to have a thick skin. But the quickest way to pinpoint your issues with dissonance is to identify two or three honest (or better yet, blunt) people who know you well and whose judgment you trust, and ask them to describe your worst traits.

Typically, even blunt people will hesitate to do this. To get them talking, don’t say, “Do I have any characteristics that annoy or offend you?,” because they’ll just say “no.” Instead, offer them a list and say, “I need you to mark, in 1-2-3 order, the top three ways I might rub people the wrong way.” Here are the traits you can list:

   Arrogant

   “Hyper”

   Needy

   Overly opinionated

   Impulsive

   Rigid

   Nitpicking

   Passive

   Indecisive

   Demanding

   Hostile

   Stuffy

   Oversensitive

   Sly

   Untrustworthy

   Melodramatic

   Rude

   Shy

   Pessimistic

   Abrupt

   Excessively perky

   Closed minded

Odds are, if you ask three people to do this, you’ll discover recurring themes. If two different people mark “abrupt,” for example, believe them—even if you’re sure you don’t act that way. They’ll probably couch their comments in terms like this: “Oh, you’re not really that way, but…. Well, some people might see you as abrupt. I mean, not that I do. But I think some people could see you that way.” If so, don’t kid yourself: They’re really saying, “I think you’re too abrupt.” And if your friends say that about you, it’s probably true.

If you’re feeling stoic, ask these same people to elaborate on the failings they identify. For instance, ask, “What do I do that strikes people as abrupt?” or “How often do I do that?”or “Would I seem less abrupt if I said such and such?” (Do not argue with them or hold their answers against them. Otherwise, you’ll have to put a checkmark beside “closed minded” on your list.) With their answers in hand, study your own interactions with other people over the following days or weeks and try to spot the behaviors your critics pointed out. When you become aware of them, you can change them.

When you do this, you’ll find it far easier to reach people. That’s because dissonance makes people think uneasily, “there’s just something about this guy that I don’t like or trust,” causing them to get stuck in resistance. Remove that dissonance, and their distrust often dissolves.

FEEDFORWARD

One good way to overcome the dissonance-creating traits you identify is to use what renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith calls “feedforward.” Here’s how it works.

First, pick the behavior you most need to change. (For instance, “I want to be better at accepting criticism so people don’t see me as defensive.”) Now, approach anyone—your spouse, a friend, even a total stranger—and ask that person to suggest two things you can do in the future to change this behavior for the better.

Better yet, say to this person that you are looking to improve yourself as a boss, subordinate, friend, or whatever your relationship is with that person. Say that you’d like specific suggestions about something you could do differently going forward to improve the relationship from the other person’s point of view.

If the person knows you, ask him or her not to talk about what you’ve done wrong in the past, but only about how you can do better from this point on. Listen to what the person says, and respond with only two words: “Thank you.” Then repeat this process with additional people.

The great thing about this approach is that while most people are closed off to criticism about a mess-up in the past, nearly everybody is much more open to great ideas for future success. As Goldsmith says, “It works because we can change the future but not the past.”

By the way, if you’d like to super-charge this feedforward process, read Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. I don’t gratuitously recommend books, but this one is a must for any manager (and I recommend it for any human). In the book, Goldsmith outlines 20 behaviors that can keep you from getting ahead and tells you how to address each one using feedforward and other techniques. Three of my favorite behaviors from the book are “adding too much value,” “starting with ‘no,’ ‘but,’ or ‘however,’” and “telling the world how smart we are.” I love these because (a) you can just see the mirror neuron gap they create; (b) they are wonderful examples of not listening; and (c) I sometimes suffer from all of them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if you have counter-productive or toxic behaviors you need to overcome, this book can change your life.

THE PERILS OF CORPORATE DISSONANCE

Just like married couples, companies can fall into the dissonance trap if they think they’re sending employees one message but those employees hear something very different. CEOs who think their firms are great places to work often are stunned when I tell them their staffs find these companies stifling, unrewarding, unfriendly, or just plain awful. This is a bad situation because it’s an open loop: There’s no feedback to correct the dissonance, so it grows worse over time. The CEO typically grows bitter, decides that “these people are underproductive whiners,” and implements punitive changes that make matters worse. The employees, in turn, grow even more annoyed or angry. Left uncorrected, this can lead to the worst-case scenario of a CEO giving people the least possible incentive to keep them working and those people doing the least they can to just hold onto their jobs, a situation that can bring a company to its knees.

After witnessing this scenario time after time, I developed a procedure called the PEP CEO Challenge to solve the problem. It’s meant for corporate leaders, but you can tweak it to diagnose and repair dissonance in a smaller work group—or even in your own family, if they’re willing. But one warning before you start: This tool is not for the faint of heart or for people who, in the words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “can’t handle the truth.”

I created the PEP CEO Challenge with the help of the CEO of a children’s book company (I’ll call him Manuel). He ran a great company, but he knew it could be better. To find out how, I asked him to send out a memo to all his employees saying something along these lines:

1.   I need your help in making this a better company. Anything you say to me will be totally anonymous.

2.   Suppose you attended a dinner party and overheard someone describing his or her company as a “perfect 10” in the areas of Passion, Enthusiasm, and Pride. How would you feel if you scored your feelings about your company lower? If it were me, I know I’d feel envious and feel less happy about where I worked.

3.   If I were to ask you to score your own level of Passion, Enthusiasm, and Pride in regard to your job and our company on a scale of 1 to 10, what would you write down?

4.   If you wrote down anything less than 10-10-10, what things would need to change, and in what ways, in order to raise those scores? Please give me your answers anonymously and please do not use this as an opportunity to single out individuals with whom you have a grievance.

5.   When we receive your replies, we’ll identify the most commonly reported suggestions for change going forward, tell you what they are and what we’re going to do in response to them, and give you a time line for doing so.

Thanks for helping us to turn this company into a place for which we can all feel Passion, Enthusiasm, and Pride.

I explained to Manuel that the PEP CEO Challenge sounds simple but reveals deep truths that can change a company’s future. That’s because:

   Passion is about the vision of the company. People want to believe that they’re doing an important job that makes a difference to their customers and clients, and puts a smile on their faces.

   Enthusiasm is about execution. Even with a great vision, people lose their enthusiasm and fail to accomplish what they’re capable of doing if their leaders are dropping the ball.

   Pride is about ethics, because few people feel proud if their company is doing something dishonest. It’s also about doing something meaningful, because as people grow older, leaving the world better than they found it becomes more important.

Manuel followed my suggestion and did this exercise with his company. People responded to the survey by saying they wanted better rewards for merit and fewer rewards for people who played office politics. They wanted less gossip and backstabbing and more cooperation. And when it came to the company’s products, they wanted to deliver better on their mission statement, which was to create books that helped parents teach children how to succeed and be happy in a competitive and often cynical world.

Manuel committed himself to addressing all of these issues. The payoff: He increased his company’s results and bottom line 40 percent in the next year. In particular, he took the suggestion about backstabbers and office politicians to heart, and he was able to ferret out the negative people and terminate them. More importantly, he doubled his own Passion, Enthusiasm, and Pride.

You can use this same tool to ask your employees, team members, directors, clients, or vendors to anonymously rate how much Passion, Enthusiasm, and Pride they feel about your services, products, company, and YOU on a scale of 1 to 10. Modify it a little, and —if you’re feeling really brave—you can use it to ask your partner or kids how passionate, enthusiastic, and proud they feel about their family. The answers might not always be what you want to hear. But I can guarantee you they’re what you need to know.

WHEN YOU CAN’T AVOID DISSONANCE, ANTICIPATE IT

So far I’ve talked about the kind of dissonance you can prevent. But not all dissonance is your fault and not all dissonance is avoidable. If you travel abroad or you work or live with people from many cultures, you’ll eventually say or do something offensive to someone—even if you’re trying your hardest not to.

You can’t do a thing to avoid this. If you’re not fluent in a language, the number of embarrassing mistakes you can make in trying to speak it is limitless. Or maybe you’ll make a hand gesture that means “okay” or “stop” in your culture, but means something very different (and very bad) in another one. Or maybe you’ll talk too long, or seem too abrupt, even if you’re acting in a way that’s polite in your culture. So there you’ll be, radiating goodwill and politeness, and the other person will be thinking: “This person is a jerk who doesn’t respect me.”

This is no small problem. Entire business deals, and sometimes personal relationships, can founder on such small things as making too much (or too little) eye contact or picking up a roll with your left hand instead of your right.

Fortunately, preventing this problem is surprisingly simple. Being able to articulate awkwardness while being polite and respectful plays well in any culture, so here’s all you need to do: Simply admit up front that you’re likely to screw up. For instance, say, “I’ve read up on your culture and the differences between both of our cultures, and yet I am certain I will say and do things that may not fit. I’m not planning to, but it may happen—and the last thing I would want to do is embarrass you in front of your peers by making you have to explain my offensive behavior. If you tell me the most common things my culture does or doesn’t do that offend your culture, I will try my very best to not act in those ways.”

This type of humility totally disarms most people. It also erases dissonance even before it happens, because your advance apology will cancel out just about any mistake, from using the wrong fork to accidentally calling your host’s wife a cow. So if you travel, and particularly if you participate in crucial cross-cultural business meetings, remember the art of “preemptive dissonance defusing”—and never leave home without it.

  Usable Insight

To paraphrase Warren Bennis, “When you really get where people are coming from—and they get that you get them—they’re more likely to let you take them where you want them to go.”

  Action Step

The next time you start sliding into an argument (especially if it’s one of those chronic, simmering arguments that crops up constantly), stop and say to the other person, “Right now I feel like you’re attacking me, and I’m guessing you feel like I’m attacking you. But in reality I think we’re both defending ourselves. So I want you to know that I don’t want to hurt you—and I know you don’t want to hurt me. If we can start fresh with that agreement in place, I bet we can solve this problem together.” When you do this, you’ll replace your mutual dissonance (“this person is being a jerk”) with mutual respect (“this person truly wants to solve our problem”).