Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (19 page)

We have shown that apologies are critical mechanisms for repairing trust and restoring relationships. So why don't people apologize more often? Elton John was onto something when he sang “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.”

One obvious barrier to apologizing is a fear of liability. But perhaps a less obvious barrier is a fear of losing status and power. By apologizing, we not only make ourselves vulnerable, which is uncomfortable and risky, but we also put ourselves in a one-down position. When we worry about our standing and our status, we are reluctant to apologize.

In fact, as Tyler Okimoto of the University of Queensland has found, people who refuse to apologize feel a greater sense of power than those who apologize. Why? By admitting we are at fault, we grant others power over us, while diminishing our own power in the process. This is related to the third reason we refuse to apologize: a reluctance to acknowledge that we have committed a violation. When we apologize, we send the message that we recognize that we were wrong. And this can be hard to admit.

Even though these admissions can be hard to make, when they are quick and candid they can help repair the relationship and get us back on a cooperative path. So we need to set up systems that help us apologize even when our first instinct is to protect ourselves and justify our actions, just as Steve Jobs did in antennagate.

Part of what made the Ritz-Carlton, Southwest Airlines, and Baptist Hospital apologies so successful is that they were
prepared
to apologize. In fact, they had even set up institutional processes to help them apologize quickly and candidly with an action plan to change.

The Ritz-Carlton, for example, empowers its employees to address potential problems by allowing them to spend up to $2,000 each day to improve and repair relationships with their customers. The message they communicate with this policy is twofold: First, we care deeply about our customer relationships, and second, each employee is empowered to repair relationships when trust is broken.

Some organizations prepare their employees by creating rules to force candid disclosure when something has gone wrong. Throughout this chapter, we have given Baptist Hospital credit for their repair efforts, but the credit should really be shared with the Baptist Health system in South Florida. Shortly before Kaelyn's accident, the Baptist Health system had instituted a policy of full disclosure following a medical error. Although Baptist had made serious mistakes that contributed to Kaelyn's brain damage, they followed the disclosure policy to the letter.

Similarly, in 2006 the University of Illinois medical center adopted a policy of full disclosure for every medical error. They even set up a special service to help staff disclose errors and apologize to families. In contrast to the four years before adopting the policy, in the four years after adopting this policy, the number of lawsuits against the University of Illinois medical center dropped by 40 percent.

Organizations may be able to set up rules and hire people to apologize. But for us as individuals, we need to create our own rules and overcome our own hurdles. When we fall short, it is easy to blame others, blame the situation, or play down the harm we might have caused. But as we've seen, excuses and denials only make repairing relationships harder. For us, as individuals, we need to create a tripwire—a rule that guides our own behavior. Here is what we propose: As soon as you start to feel defensive or begin to rationalize some action that might have caused harm, take a moment of reflection. Take a step back and consider what an apology might accomplish. Even when we
are
justified in our actions and even when we acted with the best of intentions, there are times when an apology is the right course of action. By appreciating the powerful effects that the right kind of apologies can have, we can take steps to put the pieces of our relationships back together and regain our cooperative balance.

To overcome the psychological obstacles to apologizing and help get us back on the cooperative path, we need to feel secure with ourselves and we need to understand how others around us see the world. To help us do this, we need to master the art of perspective-taking, and we turn to this challenge next.

Imagine that you were the bank teller in the following real, high-stakes situation. A man walks into your bank. He has no visible weapon, but says he has a bomb in his backpack and he wants $2,000. What would you do?

Most people offer the following answer: Give him the money! This is the cooperative (and arguably much safer) approach. Others offer a different answer: Sound an alarm and try to tackle him to the ground. This is the competitive (and risky) approach.

On the surface these would seem to be the only two options. Yet in 2010, one bank manager who found herself in this situation tried a third approach. She asked the man, “Why do you need the $2,000?” The bomber, Mark Smith, explained that he needed the money to help his friend pay rent. The bank manager then suggested that he apply for a loan to help his friend. She went to get the paperwork and while doing so also surreptitiously called the police. As Lt. Darren Thompson explained, “[she] kept the man calm and distracted him with some paperwork until we arrived.” By asking “why?” she gained insight into Mark's perspective, and this insight helped her identify a creative solution.

The point is that simply seeking another's perspective by asking “why” can help defuse even the most volatile of situations. Indeed, we found this to be true in studies we conducted with Will Maddux of INSEAD. In one study, we simulated a negotiation over the purchase of a restaurant. Some of the buyers spent time considering the seller's perspective before the negotiation. Specifically, we asked them to “try to understand what they are thinking; what their interests and purposes are in selling their restaurant.” We found that buyers who were led to take the seller's perspective were more likely to construct a creative deal. Simply urging negotiators to think about the other side's interests prompted them to ask more critical “why” and “what” questions, which led to innovative solutions that met both parties' needs.

To succeed in a negotiation, it helps to understand where the other party is coming from. Interestingly, as it turns out, empathy—actually
feeling
the other person's emotions—is less effective in a negotiation than is perspective-taking. Why? Because empathy tips the balance too far in the direction of accommodation and acquiescence. When people feel too much empathy, they make deep concessions and cooperate even when they're likely to be exploited.

To be successful, we need to appreciate the needs of the others…and at the same time we need to advance our own interests and concerns. Indeed, our research has found that perspective-takers both expand the pie
and
secure additional resources for themselves. That is, perspective-takers get a better deal—and they manage to do this without making their counterpart worse off! Empathizers, it turns out, often just lose.

Consider the power of perspective-taking in the presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, as Election Day approached and the campaign was coming to a close, Roosevelt decided to make one last campaign push with a train trip across the country. At each stop, Roosevelt's campaign planned to pass out pamphlets with a photograph of Roosevelt looking rugged and in charge. His campaign found the perfect photo and they printed nearly three million pamphlets. But just before they embarked on their trip, a campaign worker noticed that the photograph on the pamphlet had a copyright: Moffett Studios, Chicago. The campaign had failed to secure the copyright and faced a potential copyright fee of $1 per pamphlet. In 2015, this would equal more than $73 million. What would you do in this situation?

The two obvious solutions were to pay up or tear up the pamphlets. But Roosevelt's campaign chose neither of these options. Instead, his campaign manager considered Moffett's perspective. By doing so, he recognized two critical things. First, he recognized that Moffett did not know that the Roosevelt campaign had already printed the pamphlets. Second, he recognized that Moffett might benefit from this great publicity. Armed with these insights, the Roosevelt campaign cabled Moffett and simply stated, “We are planning to distribute millions of pamphlets with Roosevelt's picture on the cover. It will be great publicity for the studio whose photograph we use. How much will you pay us to use yours?” Moffett responded, “We have never done this before. But under the circumstances, we'd be pleased to offer you $250.” And the deal was done. Perspective-taking transformed a potentially devastating liability into a small profit.

One way to achieve perspective-taking is by consciously choosing to actively get inside the head of another person. But sometimes, perspective-taking is simply triggered by a few subtle movements by the person on the other side of the table.

You have probably seen couples who look eerily alike. It sounds a lot like an old wives' tale, but in fact, research has shown that couples
do
look more alike than two randomly chosen people. Now this could occur because two people select a partner with similar physical characteristics. That's actually why dogs often look like their owners. People choose, often unconsciously, dogs that reflect their own features; for example, one study found that women with long hair covering their ears prefer dogs with longer, lopped ears such as a spaniel or beagle, whereas women with visible ears prefer dogs with visibly perked-up ears such as a Siberian husky or basenji.

But human couples actually
grow
to look more alike over time. Robert Zajonc of Stanford University took photographs of couples when they were first married and again after they had been married for 25 years. After showing the two sets of photos to objective third-party observers, he found that the couples were judged to look more similar 25 years after being married than when they were first married.

What's going on here?

Couples grow more physically similar over time because of something called facial and bodily mimicry. Years of subconsciously mimicking the expressions of our spouses actually produce changes in the movement of facial muscles that can permanently alter the physical features of our face.

But why do husbands and wives mimic each other's facial expressions in the first place? Because mimicry facilitates perspective-taking: It helps us truly understand what another person is experiencing. And as a result, married couples with a greater capacity to mimic each other's facial expressions form stronger bonds. It is why couples that become physically similar over time report more joy in their marriage.

Mimicry also explains why Botox can make us beautiful but ultimately lonely. One way that we understand what another person is experiencing is by subtly and unconsciously mimicking their expressions. David Neal of USC devised a clever experiment to demonstrate this by having some participants receive Botox injections while others received Restylane injections. Both are designed to reduce wrinkles. But there's a key difference between the two: Botox paralyzes expressive muscles, whereas Restylane is simply a dermal filler that does not alter muscle functions. Because Botox injections impair facial mimicry, they actually reduce the ability to accurately detect others' emotions.

Not only does mimicry lead to more effective perspective-taking; perspective-taking also increases mimicry. Tanya Chartrand of Duke University found that skilled perspective-takers are particularly artful at mirroring others. She measured perspective-taking ability by asking people how much they tried to get inside the head of others in general. Then she had two people work on a task together. She found that people high in perspective-taking were more likely to match the posture of their partners and more likely to engage in the same behavioral movements. So if one person rubbed their face or tapped their foot, those who were high in perspective-taking tended to engage in those same behaviors themselves.

People like being mimicked…as long as it is subtle of course. When Tanya Chartrand had a research assistant mirror the behavioral mannerisms of participants as they worked on a task together, she found that when participants had their mannerisms subtly mirrored—for example, if the participant crossed their legs, so did the assistant—they liked the assistant more and felt that their interaction went more smoothly. And Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks of the University of Michigan found that when people were mimicked during a work-related interview, they became less anxious and their performance improved.

Because mimickers seem cooperative, they engender greater trust and cooperation, and this in turn enables them to secure more resources. Consider a negotiation. In research we conducted with Will Maddux of INSEAD, we found that when one negotiator physically mimicked the other, they secured more profitable deals.

So how can we put mimicry into practice? This is how we instructed our students in the negotiation study we just described.

We want you to mimic the mannerisms of your negotiation partner. For example, when the other person rubs his/her face, you should too. If he/she leans back or leans forward in the chair, you should too. However,
it is very important that you mimic subtly enough that the other person does not notice what you are doing
. Also, do not direct too much of your attention to the mimicking so you don't lose focus on the outcome of the negotiation.

And it's not just body mimicry that yields these benefits; we also benefit from mimicking others with our words. This certainly works for waitresses; in one study, waitresses instructed to verbally mimic their customers received 100 percent more in tips! In another study, Roderick Swaab of INSEAD told some negotiators to mimic their opponent during an e-mail negotiation: “When the other person uses emoticons in their message like :-) you should too. If he/she uses certain jargon, metaphors, grammar, specific words, or abbreviations such as ‘y'know [you know],' you should do the same.” In both Thailand and the United States, mimickers secured more profitable agreements in their negotiations.

Even on the presidential stage mimicry can come in handy. Along with Daniel Romero of the University of Michigan, we analyzed the transcripts of all U.S. presidential debates between 1976 and 2012 and found that the presidential candidates who matched their opponent's linguistic style increased their standing in the polls. Mimicry helped them seem smooth and in touch.

By appreciating the link between perspective-taking and trust, we can understand why mimicry helps us both cooperate and compete more effectively. It helps us understand another person's perspective, create trust, and produce smooth interactions. Mimicry can lead to a competitive advantage while making us appear more cooperative as well.

Perspective-taking not only makes us a better mimic, it can also help us become a more successful entrepreneur.