5 Status, Rank, and Role Boundaries as Inhibitors

How we relate to another person, whether we tell or ask, whether we want to build more trust and openness, whether we just want acknowledgment or something more, is best thought of in terms of situations. In every culture children are taught how to behave and feel in a variety of situations. These situations are defined by the mutual intentions of the people coming together and, within a given culture, most of us know what is situationally appropriate—the rules and the etiquette governing the situation. Most of us are so thoroughly acculturated that we are unaware of these rules and how scripted we are. This is true especially in situations in which the participants are of different rank or status.

Status and Rank

In order to understand some of the inhibitors of Humble Inquiry, we have to examine particularly the rules pertaining to behavior between people of different status or rank. From the subordinates’ points of view, these rules can best be thought of as the rules of deference, or how subordinates are supposed to show respect for their superiors; from the superiors’ points of view, they are the rules of demeanor, or how superiors are supposed to act in a way that is appropriate to their status. For example, when the superior is speaking, the subordinate is supposed to pay attention and not interrupt; the superior is supposed to make sense and behave in a dignified manner.

We take these rules so for granted that we only notice them when they are situationally inappropriate, as when a subordinate speaks out of turn or a leader says or does something that is insulting or stupid. We have very clear expectations about what is the appropriate demeanor for a high-status person, and it arouses anxiety and anger when those expectations are not met. It is not accidental that higher-status people are given private bathrooms so that they can properly compose themselves before appearing in public.

Similarly, we have clear rules about deference, which vary depending on the culture. A dramatic case of misunderstanding such rules occurred years ago in the South African gold mines when white supervisors consistently viewed tribal workers as being untrustworthy because they were “shifty eyed” and “never looked you in the eye.” It took years of supervisory training to teach the white managers that in the tribal culture looking a superior in the eye was a mark of disrespect and would be punished.

When we enter a new situation or meet someone and start a conversation, one of the first things that we sort out unconsciously is the relative status distinctions that must be observed. Some might argue we are still biologically programmed to locate ourselves in the pecking order. We often start with Humble Inquiry in such a situation because it provides an opportunity to find out whether the other person in the conversation is of higher or lower status, whether we should be deferent or alternatively should expect deference. We start by asking general questions—what kind of work do you do? Where do you live? What brings you here? If the cues are that the other person is of lower status, as when some undergraduates approached me at a recent meeting and asked to have their picture taken with me because they had read and liked some of my work, I automatically assumed the appropriate demeanor of being flattered and posed urbanely with a big smile. On the other hand, this same kind of instant adjustment was illustrated when I was recently introduced to a fellow resident of my retirement complex and learned that he was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. I found myself feeling humble and asking very open-ended questions to learn more about him. Since we were of similar age and both residents in the same retirement community, he also took a more humble position well into the conversation, which reduced the status gap and led to a more informal open exchange.

In summary, situational rules determine the appropriate form of Humble Inquiry where there is a status or rank difference at the outset of the conversation. What we have to learn as we look ahead to more interdependent tasks is how to bridge those status gaps when we are in fact mutually dependent on each other. It will be easy for the subordinate to continue to be humble and ask for the help of the superior. The dilemma that will require new learning is how the superior can learn to ask for help from the subordinate. To begin to understand how to deal with that dilemma, we have to look also at different types of role relations.

TYPES OF ROLE RELATIONS–TASK ORIENTED AND PERSONAL ORIENTED

One determinant that defines the rules of a situation is relative status. Equally important in defining the situation is the role relationship of the parties or the purpose for which they have gotten together. Am I meeting a friend for lunch, approaching a salesperson to buy new shoes, visiting my doctor, or being introduced to my new boss (or subordinate)? My purpose defines the task and the kind of situation I want to create. When I then come together with others, we jointly define the situation—what is it we are here to do, what is our role in the situation, what do we expect of each other, and what kind of relationship is this to be?

Sociologists have proposed various ways to classify all the kinds of relationships that we get into. To understand Humble Inquiry, it is useful to distinguish particularly between instrumental relationships, in which one person needs something specific from the other person, and expressive relationships, which are driven by personal needs to build the relationship because one or both of the people involved are beginning to like the other. To simplify, I will call these task-oriented and person-oriented relationships. As I argued in the last chapter, U.S. culture is much more concerned with task-oriented relationships—getting together to get the job done. These relationships often are labeled “professional,” which implies working together competently but avoiding personal involvement. Getting personal is often viewed as “unprofessional.”

We think of task-oriented relationships as impersonal and emotionally neutral. Relative status is defined by the degree of dependence, which defines the degree of Here-and-now Humility that is appropriate. When I am buying a suit, the salesman is dependent on my decision and will be very deferent and humble. When I have bought it, and the tailor is measuring me for alterations, he tells me how to stand, and I become very Here-and-now Humble. We both know the culturally defined situational rules and try to stay as emotionally uninvolved as possible. When we deal with a salesperson, we expect a certain amount of emotional distance, conversation limited to the product, price, and delivery issues. We develop mutual respect based on the particular knowledge and skill that the salesperson has.

By contrast, a person-oriented relationship is expected to be more emotionally charged because one or both parties are interested in each other and expect or want the relationship to continue. This kind of relationship allows for, even expects, some emotional expression. When we want to get to know someone better, we are moving into a personal relationship. When we want our subordinates to maintain a respectful distance, we are defining the situation as task-oriented. As I mentioned before, one is not expected to fraternize with the troops.

For both types of relationships we carry within us cultural rules about what is and is not appropriate. The reason we are not supposed to interrupt the boss is that the boss-subordinate relationship is, in most organizations, defined as task driven with the hierarchy defining degrees and types of task competence. If the boss plays golf with the janitor, we raise our eyebrows and wonder what the implications are of this unusual relationship. In our surgical team described above, the rules at the outset are very clear about the status hierarchy and that each relationship in the team is instrumental, impersonal, and emotionally neutral. In other words, task interdependence requires Here-and-now Humility but does not in principle have to become personal or emotionally charged.

A huge question is whether with growing task complexity and cultural diversity it will be possible to maintain these status boundaries. Or will relationship building in the task arena inevitably require some degree of personalization?

We don’t notice these rules and boundaries until they are violated, as when parties in a task-oriented relationship do become emotionally involved. We can accept the boss having an affair outside the organization, but we become very punitive if the affair is with a subordinate or co-worker because it implies that special favors will be granted or, worse, that task performance will be compromised because incompetence might be tolerated.

As we think about our various relationships, they are, of course, not cleanly divisible into task oriented and personal. We develop feelings and liking for people with whom we have strict task-oriented relationships, and we find that sometimes our friends and lovers become crucial to some task accomplishment. However, when the rules are violated or ambiguous, as when different cultures are involved, relationships can be damaged. An extreme case I heard about recently involved a house owner with a Filipino maid. The owner liked the maid and wanted to personalize the relationship only to be rebuffed repeatedly. The maid quit, and the owner found out, through the maid of a mutual friend, that in the culture from which the maid came, it was totally inappropriate to hold any kind of personal conversation with the person employing you.

So, for our purposes, it is most useful to think of a continuum that stretches from the extremely task oriented to the extremely personal. The question we must then ask is whether the key to making interdependent relationships work is to personalize them to some degree. And, if so, how can Humble Inquiry make that happen?

PERSONALIZATION AS RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

Personalization is the process of acknowledging the other person as a whole human, not just a role. The minimal level of personalization in this sense would be to share first and last names. So when Dr. Brown is first introduced to his operating room nurse as Ms. Grant and his anesthetist as Dr. Tanaka, this would be an example of formal role introductions. In a formal traditional hospital setting, that is what would be done, and that would be the end of it. If the hospital head wanted to personalize the relationship somewhat, the initial introduction by the chief of surgery might be “Dr. Brown, this will be your nurse, Amy Grant, and your anesthetist, Dr. Yoshi Tanaka.” Such minimal personalization might have powerful effects if it is a change from past practice. And it may possibly bend the rules a bit as well, if the hospital tradition has been one of maintaining professional decorum. I know of one hospital that decided on first names among the medical staff but never in front of patients because the patient had to be reminded of the relative statuses of the medical team members. Would the patient lose respect for Dr. Brown if Amy called him “Rod?”

Once the process of personalization has been launched and accepted, in that both parties display comfort with first names, the Pandora’s box is opened to endless other personal questions and revelations. But this process is not without its own situational propriety that we all live by. Staying on the role/task level, Dr. Brown might ask Amy where she got her training, what other doctors she had worked with, whether she was headed for a particular specialty, and so on. If he wanted to become more personal, he might ask some questions about where she lives, whether she has a family, where she is from, and what she thinks of the hospital in which they both work. The question about her view of the hospital might be pushing the boundary in that she might not know how safe it would be to tell Dr. Brown exactly what she thought and felt, especially if she had some criticisms.

How personalization might proceed from this point on might depend very much on when and where this conversation was being held. Amy Edmondson, in her study of cardiac surgical teams doing open-heart surgery, reported that some of these teams functioned better in doing this very complicated surgery than others.⁸ At a recent meeting, she mentioned a detail that is central to this analysis. Edmondson was in the cafeteria where all the staff tended to sit by rank and occupation, and she noticed that one of these successful teams was sitting at a table with each other. Evidently they had decided that spending time with each other was more important than for each of them to eat with their professional peers. This decision enabled them to explore getting to know each other at a more personal level, something that they evidently felt they needed to do in order to function well as a team in the OR. Edmondson’s study showed that the teams that were able to adopt and successfully utilize the more complex surgical process had made a special effort to learn together as a team and, thereby, reduce status differences and make everyone aware of their mutual interdependence. Eating together was just one of many activities that personalized their relationships.

The point is that a small change—whom one eats lunch with—has huge symbolic implications for relationship building in that the senior doctor is publicly humbling himself by sitting with his subordinate staff, thereby empowering them to be more open with him.

In another example, one of Edmondson’s doctoral students, Melissa Valentine, studied hospital emergency rooms that were overloaded and needed to find a solution to the long times that patients spent in the emergency unit.⁹ One hospital decided to create small “pods” consisting of one of every kind of intake professional needed to treat emergency cases. Patients and staff would be arbitrarily assigned to pods based on where there was a vacancy at that moment. What this meant was that, over a period of time, each doctor, nurse, and technician would meet many other doctors, nurses, and technicians but always in a small-group context that facilitated personalization. Instead of a nurse having to find a doctor when a patient was ready to be seen, there was always a doctor available in the pod. The smaller size of the pod created more opportunities for face-to-face interaction, which made Humble Inquiry and personalization easier.

Humble Inquiry is by definition more personal because it hinges on being curious about and interested in the other person, but the choice of topic can range from task related to very intimate. That choice also has to take into account various cultural factors because what is considered personal is itself determined by rules that derive from organizational histories, the cultures of occupations, and national cultures.

Organizational, Occupational, and National Culture

Situational proprieties are influenced by the history of relationships in the particular organization in which the tasks are to be accomplished. Organizations and occupations with a history do develop their own traditions and rules within the traditions and rules of the larger society. Within the organization there will be occupational units with their own cultural rules about deference and demeanor. Among scientists and engineers there tends to be much more open communication and mutual respect based on what people know and can do. Even within occupations such as engineering, there will be different rules—electrical engineers work with a here-and-now technology that lends itself to experimentation and frequent open communication; chemical engineering is much more formal and hierarchic because chemistry does not easily lend itself to casual experimentation.

In medicine there are occupational traditions among doctors and nurses, which create professional distance. A structural intervention, such as changing the size and composition of units in the emergency room, might be a seemingly sensible change to implement for more personalization to occur, but if the hospital’s culture is firmly anchored in a very strong tradition of professional distance, the members of this hospital would find the pod system uncomfortable and unworkable. In other words, the situational proprieties defined by the culture of the organization and the occupations might well override efforts by some members of the team to attempt to personalize relationships. Amy might have come from a personalized system, and when she suggests to Drs. Brown and Tanaka that they might all have lunch together, she might find herself firmly rebuffed. In fact, Melissa Valentine reported that in her research she encountered hospitals that refused the pod system because it would force more closeness than that staff was ready for.¹⁰

The nuclear industry provides an interesting example of occupational culture because most of the officers and plant managers who populated the industry for the first few decades were products of the nuclear submarine fleet that had a very strong culture based an Admiral Rickover’s absolute concern for safety. As they retired and new managers came in with different backgrounds, communication problems arose. The absolute respect that the old managers had for safety based on their intimate knowledge of the technology was sometimes not shared by the new plant managers who came from law or finance.

I have focused this analysis on the United States and Western culture, but the example of Dr. Brown and his team reminds us that different nationalities and ethnic groups are increasingly involved in the various kinds of tasks performed. How to be humble and how to explore more personal issues in order to build a positive relationship becomes even more important and difficult if we don’t know the norms of other cultures. For example, I know of one surgical team that consists of a U.S. surgeon, a Muslim nurse from Tunisia, a Muslim Tech, and a Latino anesthetist. When I interviewed this doctor, he not only admitted from the outset that “he was completely dependent on them,” but then told me of the many ways he had worked on getting to know them and spent time informally with them. Now he feels that they are completely at ease with each other, and he trusts them to be totally open with him. Knowing about these other cultures in the abstract did not help, but systematically personalizing his relationship to his team members did.

Trust and Social Economics

To be humble, to ask instead of telling, to try to personalize the relationship to some degree requires some level of trust, yet trust is one of those words that we all think we know the meaning of but is very hard to define. Trust in the context of a conversation is believing that the other person will acknowledge me, not take advantage of me, not embarrass or humiliate me, tell me the truth, and, in the broader context, not cheat me, work on my behalf, and support the goals we have agreed to.

The importance of basic acknowledgment can be seen in our daily routines in terms of whom we look at, bow our head to, and speak to. If I pass a stranger on the street and make eye contact, and then we both go on without further expression, that feels normal because we don’t expect acknowledgment. But if I see someone I know, we make eye contact, I smile, and the other person shows no sign of recognition, I feel that something is amiss. I have not been recognized or acknowledged. Why not? What is wrong? It is this feeling of something being amiss that reminds us how much we count on mutual recognition and reciprocation. We may not remember someone’s name, but our greeting and our demeanor tells the other person that we acknowledge them. Becoming socially invisible can become traumatic.

Society is based on a minimum amount of this kind of taken-for-granted trust. We trust that we will be acknowledged as fellow humans and that our presented self will be affirmed. It is taken for granted in the sense that when we say hello to someone with an actual greeting or just nod of the head, we expect a response of some kind. If we ask a question, we expect some kind of an answer. If we ask for help, we expect either to be helped or to be offered an excuse as to why we cannot be helped. If we ask others to do something, we expect them to do it or to offer a reason why they cannot.

Life in civilized society is reciprocal, and we all learn the rules of the culture in which we grow up of when and how to reciprocate. We think of those behaviors as good manners, etiquette, and tact, and sometimes forget that it is not optional—it is the very basis of society.

Basic trust is learned and constantly tested as we grow up in civilized society. The basic rules will vary from culture to culture, but every culture will have such rules. As adult members of society, we know how to acknowledge each other, how to be polite and tactful. All this is taken for granted and makes daily life smooth and predictable. And most of the time we don’t think about it unless something goes wrong or we want something more out of others—we want to influence, help, dominate, seduce, teach, learn from, or in some way enter a relationship that is more than mere acknowledgment.

If we want to build a higher level of trust because we recognize our dependence on someone or are personally attracted to someone, how do we convey that? How do we show interest? If we want to convey to others that they can trust us, how do we convey that? If we want to be helpful and caring, how do we convey that without unwittingly offending the other by offering something that they don’t need or want? If we fall in love, how do we build the relationship? In all of these cases, a key element is to learn to make oneself more vulnerable through Humble Inquiry and personalization. This can be difficult because one risks being snubbed or ignored, which can be humiliating. But it is essential because it shows the other person that you are willing to invest something, to go farther than just a minimum task-oriented relationship. Your self-exposure, your vulnerability is the key ingredient in making the relationship more personal.

In Summary

Humble Inquiry is necessary if we want to build a relationship beyond rudimentary civility, because we may find ourselves in various kinds of interdependencies in which open, task-relevant information must be conveyed across status boundaries. U.S. culture’s emphasis on task performance, interpersonal competitiveness, and telling rather than asking makes it more difficult to be humbly inquiring because that may show weakness and, in fact, makes one vulnerable. But, paradoxically, only by learning to be more humbly inquiring can we build up the mutual trust needed to work together effectively and open up the communication channels. Such opening up can occur around the task itself by becoming more personal. How this process of relationship building works out depends on yet another complexity to be explored in the next chapter—our own intrapsychic dynamics, how open we are willing to be, and how much insight we have into our own cognitive and emotional biases.