Five Dimensions of Win/Win
Part Two of Habit 4, Think Win/Win
This is the second part of Habit 4 from, The 7 Habits. In part one, we learned about the 6 Paradigms of Human Interaction, and that Win/Win is the ideal outcome.
But the question remains, how do we create Win/Win outcomes even if others aren’t operating with this paradigm? For instance, if they are operating Win/Lose or even Lose/Lose.
Keep in mind this lesson from yesterday…
You can’t change the fruits without changing the roots. Working on attitudes and behaviors would have been hacking at the leaves.
From a leadership perspective, it is the system rather than individual behaviors that should be our focus. However, this is only one aspect. To understand how to live the Win/Win paradigm, and not just how to use it to fix behaviors, we need to go over the five dimensions of Win/Win.
These are the roots at the base of the tree.
Character
Relationships
Agreements
Supportive Systems
Processes
Character
Covey identifies 3 traits that he considers essential to the Win/Win paradigm.
Integrity
There’s no way to go for a Win in our own lives if we don’t even know, in a deep sense, what constitutes a Win - what is, in fact, harmonious with our innermost values. And if we can’t make and keep commitments to ourselves as well as to others, our commitments become meaningless.
Maturity
Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration. If I’m high on courage and low on consideration, how will I think? Win/Lose. If I’m high on consideration and low on courage, I’ll think Lose/Win.
The basic task of leadership is to increase the standard of living and the quality of life for all stakeholders.
Abundance Mentality
Most people are deeply scripted in the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. They’re always comparing, always competing. They give their energies to possessing things or other people in order to increase their sense of worth.
The Abundance Mentality, on the other hand, flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing prestige, or recognition, of profits, of decision making.
Relationships
Remember the Emotional Bank Account? By making deposits and building trust with others, we can build the foundation of Win/Win.
Without trust, the best we can do is compromise; without trust, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.
This is especially true when dealing with someone who has a Win/Lost paradigm. We have to plan to communicate more and do so with genuine courtesy, respect, and appreciation for that person. Even when the point of view clashes with our own.
It is also important to listen with great depth. Not just to hear the words, but to really understand the roots of the other person’s worldview.
We need to approach Win/Win from a genuine desire to invest in the relationship that makes it possible.
And remember, No Deal is always an option.
Agreements
Covey provides 5 elements for creating Win/Win agreements.
Desired results - identify what is to be done and when.
Guidelines - specify the parameters within which results are to be accomplished.
Resources - identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational support available to help accomplish the results.
Accountability - set up the standards of performance and the time of evaluation.
Consequences - specify - good and bad, natural and logical - what does and will happen as a result of the evaluation.
In an organizational setting, the typical supervision style is authoritarian - Win/Lose. This creates an adversarial relationship where managers have to check up on employees and constantly direct the action.
We’ve seen this before in the form of “Gofer Delegation.” This style provides the employee (or child) with little ownership over the results. Covey also points out…
It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them. And in high trust culture, it’s much more accurate. In many cases, people know in their hearts how things are going much better than the records show. Discernment is often far more accurate than either observation or measurement.
Make sure to pay special attention to the 4 kinds of consequences (rewards and penalties) that management (or parents) can control: Financial, Psychic, Opportunity, Responsibility. Don’t play games with these rewards/penalties. Everything should be clear from the beginning.
Systems
What is the reward for not cooperating?
Remember this question from yesterday? If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values.
It does not matter whether dealing with a business, community, family, etc. If cooperation is the goal, the reward system must line up accordingly.
Let’s look at an example from Covey’s consulting work.
I worked for several years with a very large real estate organization in the Mid-West. My first experience with this organization was at a large sales rally where over 800 sales associates gathered for the annual reward program.
Out of the 800 people there, around 40 received awards for top performance. There was no doubt that those forty people had won; but there was also the underlying awareness that 760 people had lost.
We immediately began educational and organizational development work to align the systems and structures of the organization toward the Win/Win paradigm.
At the next rally one year later, there were over 1,000 sales associates present, and about 800 of them received awards. There were a few individual winners based on comparisons, but the program primarily focused on people achieving self-selected performance objectives and on groups achieving team objectives.
The remarkable thing was that almost all of the 800 who received the awards that year had produced as much per person in terms of volume and profit as the previous year’s forty.
Processes
You can’t say, “You’re going to think Win/Win, whether you like it or not.” So the question becomes how to arrive at a Win/Win solution.
By Processes, Covey appears to mean, how we solve problems. There is a 4-step process Covey suggests:
See the problem from the other point of view. Really seek to understand and to give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party as well as or better than they can themselves.
Identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved.
Determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution.
Identify possible new options to achieve those results.
Next week we’ll begin to explore Habit 5, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. This fits right in with the first step in the problem-solving process.