Press On — Do you add or subtract?
During a discussion in the newspaper”s weekly leadership team meeting last week in my office, one of the department managers brought up an issue that was very disturbing. She spoke about how she was treated rudely at a recent corporate meeting by one of the top managers in our group. After the manager from here made a comment, the corporate manager in charge of the meeting told her that she shouldn”t have opened her mouth; it showed her ignorance.
Why is it that some people, whether they hold a position of authority or not, seem to make an effort to bring people down rather than try to lift them up? Obviously, they have never read Dale Carnegie”s book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Coincidentally, the day after I heard the story from this department manager I was reading “Winning with People,” by John Maxwell. The book was recently given to me by Jeff Shute, from Kelseyville. Shute runs Future Vision Enterprises and is a person who has been involved in leadership training most of his life.
The chapter I happened to start that day was called “The Elevator Principle,” and it defined exactly what we had been talking about the previous day in the meeting. The premise of the chapter is that there are basically two types of people. There are those who take you to a higher level because they treat you with respect and in a positive manner. Maxwell calls these people “adders” or “lifters.”
There are also people, like the executive who mistreated our department manager, who appear to make it their objective to tear people down rather than to build them up. I have worked with a rather large number of people like this during the course of my career. I imagine everyone has encountered at least one. They seem to be just about everywhere. Maxwell calls these people “subtracters” or “dividers,” because they cause others to get less joy out of life.
According to Maxwell, the positive actions of adders are almost always intentional, while he believes that the negative actions taken by subtracters are usually unintentional. He wrote that, “If you don”t know how to add to others, then you probably subtract by default.”
Back in the 1920s, George W. Crane, an early professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago, had a student who was having an extremely difficult time with loneliness. She had moved to the university from another state and had no friends or family locally. Crane implemented a project he called the Compliment Club whereby every student, for 30 days, had to pay an honest compliment to three different people they encountered during the day. At the end of the month, their assignment was to write a theme about their experiences. Every student reported remarkable results due to the experiment. The lonely student gained a number of friends. One female student who worked as a secretary and had earlier claimed she hated her boss, wound up marrying him after paying him compliments during the month.
Crane wrote to his students, “Your praise may buoy up the morale of lonely souls who are almost ready to give up the struggle to do good deeds. You never know when your casual compliment may catch a boy or girl, or man or woman, at the critical point when he would otherwise toss in the sponge.”
In my entire life, I have never lived through a time in which more people were facing such difficulties as they are now. As a child, I remember my parents talking about how tough it was to grow up during the Great Depression. It may not be that bad right now, but plenty of people are struggling. A kind word or compliment will certainly do a lot more good than a remark that cuts someone to the bone.
Gary Dickson is the editor and publisher of the Record-Bee. E-mail him at gdickson@record-bee.com.
