Do you ever feel like managing your people is like a constant series of games?
Motivating others to go where you want them to go is a challenge and sometimes when we are faced with these challenges we revert to are most basic instincts and try to handle our employees like we were managed as children. Famed phycologist Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis theory helps us understand where this behavior comes from and his book Games People Play brings many of them to life.
Some of the games he describes are so common we don’t even realize that we are playing them when we are trying to get our team members to “do the right thing.”
One is the “I am only trying to help you game.” This one is quite common in management situations. Let’s consider this game when thinking about teaching our teams’ to prospect. We may discuss the importance of it followed by teaching techniques to be more effective. Then we raise the stakes on them with a contest to drive the behavior. When one of your employees expresses frustration, the manager may press them to keep trying because of the fact that this program is only designed to help you when you do the right thing and follow your prospecting plan. Essentially it’s the child asking what should I do and the parent happily telling them. We all know how well that works!
Another is the “why don’t you” - “Yes but…” game. With this one the manager may be helping an employee through a challenge by making many suggestions for a solution. Employee: “I can’t keep up with all this administration.” Manager: “Why don’t you take a class in excel to help you be more efficient?” Employee: “Yes, but they are expensive.” Manager: “I will pay for it.” Employee: “Yes, but I just don’t have the time.” This is a closed loop where the manager is assuming a parental role by offering solutions and the employee become childlike with several excuses as to why they won’t work.
Who has ever lost their cool with an employee who took slight liberties with an expense or discount policy? Perhaps an employee who knows the rules makes a small exception that in the grand scheme of things is meaningless but we use it to make a future example to prove a point. This is a classic example of “Now I’ve got you!” The employee is playing the role of child and testing the manager which can quickly to flip on the parent mode to show them who’s in charge.
These are just a few examples and they probably sound like fairly standard business interactions. As manager, we sometimes drift easily into the patterns learned from how we were parented and not stay in an ‘adult to adult’ conversation. Employees will sometimes bait us there by testing authority, sabotaging situations to prove their points and frankly acting like children. A lot of the time they are unaware they’re even doing this.
Struggling to keep and ‘adult to adult’ dynamic with your team?
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