‘Last time you delivered a report late I went to the board and got roasted for it. My credibility really suffered and I really don’t want to go through that again. So this time I’d like to know more about where you’re up to in terms of completing it?

It sounds to me as though you’re concerned you don’t have all the information you need from finance?

So you’d like me talk to the finance team and find out when those figures will be ready?’

As children, we learned about ourselves and others by talking with people about who they were and what they thought and felt. We asked questions and learned to listen and pay attention to the answers. This was an active process: it took perseverance to uncover ideas and feelings, to discover the meaning behind people’s words, and to involve them in solutions to problems. It sometimes took courage to ask them for help, especially when we felt vulnerable or unsure of ourselves. Along the way, we discovered an interesting paradox: that paying attention to others could help us achieve our own goals. People were more willing to work with us when we showed an interest in them. Their desire to meet our needs was greater when mutual trust was high. Connecting with others was not just a way of making people feel good, it was also a way of achieving tangible objectives and building good relationships.

Bridging is PULL energy based on involving others. It consists of three key Behaviours: Involving, Listening, and Disclosing.

Sometimes people refuse to cooperate or give us the help we need. Such resistance can be puzzling. Perhaps you did something in the past that alienated or offended them. Perhaps they feel at risk or fear losing something by working with you or by meeting your objectives. Still, in spite of people’s misgivings about working with you, you sometimes do need their help in meeting your goals.

Bridging can overcome people’s fears and win their commitment to working with you. It encourages people to collaborate. Through Disclosing, you develop a trusting climate in which others feel free to reveal their concerns. By Involving, you make them feel useful and valued as contributors.

By Listening, you build a foundation of mutual understanding that supports each step toward solving the problem. Bridging involves the target without sacrificing or compromising your own agenda. It opens up lines of communication. When you use Bridging, your targets will often mirror your Bridging Behaviours: they will disclose, involve, and listen to you just as you have been doing with them.

Bridging works to your benefit both during and after the influence attempt. By becoming involved in reaching your objectives, targets are likely to develop an investment in the outcome and to make a long-term personal commitment to the solution. By participating in the action, they can gain power and control over issues that may have frightened them in the past. Bridging fosters cooperative attitudes and mutual trust, thus helping you build and maintain a productive working climate over time.

Bridging has the highest impact when:

• You need the other person’s personal commitment.

Bridging can take more time and effort than the other Influence Styles. But the time and effort is worthwhile if you need the person to participate fully in solutions or action steps. In other words you are spending time now, to save time later.

• You value the other person’s contribution.

The other person’s ideas, skills, or participation may be vital to your success. Bridging elicits that person’s knowledge, opinions, and the critical data you need to meet your objectives. Most importantly, it draws him or her into the action with you.

• The other person can work with you without losing.

Involving people personally and gaining their trust carries one great danger: if you violate that trust, you may damage your chances of success, jeopardise implementation, and endanger that person’s future involvement.

• You are open and flexible about the final decision.

For Bridging to work, you must be willing to let the other person influence you in return. If you have made up your mind about the outcome or have a fixed idea about what the solution should be, you will not be able to use Bridging without Forcing. People will not cooperate if you manipulate them into agreeing with you, ignore their input, and exclude them from making decisions. Openness and flexibility about your Influence Objective does not mean that you must abandon your desired outcome – which would be Avoiding.

• You are unclear why the other person is resisting.

Sometimes it is easy to understand a person’s resistance; you can see it and work with it. Other times, it may seem puzzling or illogical. Bridging can help you get to the bottom of the other person’s resistance, uncover hidden concerns, and find efficient ways to solve the problem. It can restore good will and place you and the other person on the same wavelength.

• You are willing to admit past mistakes.

Through Bridging, you can turn a negative past experience into grounds for working together constructively in the future. If there is a valid reason for the other person to mistrust and resist you, then accept it, admit it, and begin the process of reconciliation.

• The other person is upset or visibly stressed.

Bridging can unblock this negative energy and rechannel it in a more positive direction. Bridging can help focus on positive results by legitimising (Disclosing), directing (Involving), and clarifying (Listening) the other person’s emotional response.

• The issue is emotional for you or the other person.

Bridging can help you uncover and handle unpleasant emotions constructively, with some degree of safety. It transforms emotional energy into cooperative action, making you and the other person better able to work together. Bridging enables you to channel your own emotions in a positive way. Your positive behaviour, in turn, gives permission to the other person to express emotions constructively.

• Balance your Behaviours: use all three Behaviours to create the ‘bridge’.

Involve (ask questions), listen (paraphrase) and disclose selectively to reduce emotion or stress and build understanding and commitment. Maintaining balanced behaviour is critical. Omitting a Behaviour — Involving, Listening, or Disclosing — may result in missed opportunities and result in a negative impact. Infrequent Involving leads to unfocused discussion and reluctance to participate. Poor Listening results in limited understanding and superficial interaction. Absence of Disclosing reinforces low trust. On the other extreme, repetitive Involving can create an interview climate, making the other person defensive. Perfunctory Listening can seem insincere and manipulative. Overuse of Disclosing can come across as Avoiding.

• Interrupt as necessary to Listen, ensure understanding, and guide the discussion.

Look for opportunities to demonstrate or test your understanding of what the other person has said. Encourage the other person to prioritise concerns or resistance. Seek clarity when you feel you may have misunderstood, or were unable to hear everything the other person told you. Intervene in the flow of discussion to return to a topic the other person raised earlier but which you have not yet explored.

• Use Listening to summarise before moving to a new topic.

Asking one question after another may make the other person feel as if he or she is being cross-examined. Questions should be open-ended rather than leading. A new question should emerge only from active Listening behaviour: summarising or paraphrasing what the other person has just said, and testing your own understanding of what you have heard. Listening conveys respect and politeness; it signals to the other person that you are paying attention and that you are willing to correct your understanding if necessary.

• Disclose selectively to build trust or motivate the other to provide more information.

Setting aside your own defences entails some risk, especially if there is not much trust between you and the other person. Therefore, seek opportunities appropriate to the situation to share your own uncertainty, vulnerability, or empathy with the other person’s circumstance. Build trust one step at a time: when your act of Disclosing prompts the other person to Disclose or share privileged information in return, encourage that act of trust building with an additional disclosure. If you actively participate in managing the risk of Disclosing, you may motivate the other person to open up as well.

• Legitimise the discussion of feelings, needs, and implications.

If the other person’s resistance does not make sense to you, he or she may have fears or concerns about losing something in the outcome. Understanding and resolving such resistance is vital to your success. Involving puts a priority on exploring the other’s feelings, concerns, and anxieties. Listening and expressing empathy convey your acknowledgment of the other person’s feelings as real and important. Disclosing your own feelings sets the stage for the other person to do the same. Put yourself in the other person’s position and try to identify valuable implications in what you hear. Sometimes others reactions are governed by worrying future consequences that have not yet been verbalised, or even thought about clearly. Your willingness to patiently pursue these hidden concerns may help the other person identify solutions.

• Withhold disagreement: draw out the target without arguing.

Assume that you and the other person have different viewpoints, but do not focus on your own position during the influence attempt. Draw out the other person without arguing. Hear the other person’s concerns, justified or not, and integrate them into your own thinking. Give yourself time to consider the merits of the other person’s concerns. Express interest and request elaboration. Help your influence targets to express themselves constructively. Disclose your doubt or uncertainty and listen supportively to the other person’s doubt and uncertainty. Express openness and flexibility.

• Ask follow-up questions that help to develop meaning and explore implications.

Do not be satisfied with receiving an answer to one question. Without specific direction, your discussion will drift off course as energy is wasted in irrelevant conversation rather than focused dialogue. Keep your Influence Objective in mind. Interrupt to ask a follow-up question that helps provide shape and focus. Seek the other person’s involvement in proposing solutions that move you toward your Influence Objective. Helping the other person to participate in resolving the situation helps promote ownership and commitment to the outcome.

Sam is late completing a sales report that Margaret, his colleague, needs to finish her business forecast. Margaret’s objectives are to get Sam to complete his sales report by four o’clock this afternoon and to develop a plan for meeting future report deadlines. Margaret will try to reach her objectives by using the Pull Style of Bridging. By using Pull energy, Margaret will influence Sam to generate his own ideas on how to meet his deadlines. To use this Style positively, Margaret must be willing to be influenced by Sam.

PART ONE

Margaret: Sam, I know you’re really busy, but I need some help. I’m behind on my deadline for the business forecast. It’s due at two o’clock tomorrow, but I can’t get started until I have your numbers.

Sam: Well, I’m afraid it’s going to be a little late, Margaret, because I had some last-minute problems that I wasn’t expecting. But I’ll get the report over to you just as soon as I can. I’m heading back to my desk now. Maybe we can talk later.

Margaret: So you’re saying you can iron the problems out. You’re on track, but you just can’t get it to me on time?

Sam: Well, yeah that’s it more or less.

Margaret: Sam, tell me what’s going on with your time schedule on the report. I’d like to understand the problem better.

Sam: Look, I don’t mean to make you late, Margaret. But the problem is I got inaccurate numbers from the field again. So, I had to phone back the sales organisation for corrections. Now I have to redo all my calculations.

Margaret: So you have a lot more work to do. And it looks like I’m pressuring you for the report and you’ve been let down by the field. If I were you, I’d be feeling panicked at this point — sort of caught in the middle?

Sam: Well, not panic exactly, more like extreme frustration. It seems I have this problem a lot. I don’t know, maybe it’s the way I work with them.

Margaret: Twice in the last year, if I remember correctly, right?

Sam: Yeah. Well, at least.

Margaret: Sam, the last thing I want to do is to add to your frustration. But I’m worried about what the management committee’s going to do if I try to postpone the meeting or hand in an incomplete business forecast again. Remember how angry they got the last time?

Sam: Oh, yeah. They went and complained to our boss. And ah, you took some criticism for that, as I recall. So did I.

Margaret: That’s right, it was quite unpleasant. And I feel that if I don’t get my forecast done this time, I’m going to get criticised again. I wonder how fast you think you could get it done?

Sam: Well, with all the data checking I have to do, I don’t think any sooner than tomorrow morning. You know, if I work all night I could do it, I suppose.

Margaret: Sam, are you saying you have to do this all alone? I don’t know exactly how it works in your department, but aren’t there others to help? It feels to me like you’re all alone with this. I sympathise.

Sam: Well, some of the work could be done by others, I guess. I mean, I don’t have to be personally involved with things like data-checking here. You know enough about the data that you could help.

Margaret: Well, I certainly have some time while I wait for your final calculations. Who are the others? What could they do? You know, I’m really thinking we could make that four o’clock…couldn’t we?

Sam: Not so fast! I need to work it out. It may be possible, but I can’t make any promises.

Margaret: Okay, Sam. Don’t let me get carried away. But, tell me how it would work?38

Sam: Well, if we have a few people helping with the data checking, we could get that done in about fifteen hours. I’d have to look over their shoulder for a little while, but still it would…

PART TWO

Narrator: Sam and Margaret lay out a work plan using some of Margaret’s time and people from both of their departments to help. Next, Margaret will use Bridging to get Sam’s ideas on how to meet future report deadlines. She will then use Bridging to disengage from the conversation at the end when it is clear that more time is needed to discuss the issue.

Margaret: Sam, I want to check something out with you. I feel really uncomfortable asking you for these last-minute crisis meetings. I’m wondering if there’s some way to make things go a little smoother.

Sam: Yeah, well, all this makes me stressed too — this crisis mode. Basically, I think we need a more systematic way of working together, so we’re a lot more on top of what each other is doing.

Margaret: Well, I’m open to suggestions on that. When you say ‘systematic’, what type of system do you think would work?

Sam: Well, first I need to figure out how to get more accurate numbers from the field, so I don’t need to spend all this time correcting them. That’s the main thing.

Margaret: So you think if you work on that first issue — getting good numbers from the field — that would be a step in the right direction?

Sam: Yeah, yeah, I think it would. I mean, that’s the main issue, right there. I don’t expect to get much cooperation from the sales organisation though.

Margaret: I see. Well, assuming that you can’t get their cooperation — or that their cooperation is minimal — could you do something else to stay on track and meet the deadlines? I feel uncomfortable being at the mercy of the sales organisation all the time.

Sam: Yeah, I am too. So the obvious thing would be to build more time into the schedule to troubleshoot problems with the field sales data. Ah, list out what the tasks would be. And then I suppose line up some people in advance, so we don’t go knocking on doors for help at the last minute.

Margaret: So it sounds like you need to revise the work process.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah, come up with some sort of game plan. I mean, we’ve always had an informal plan that we verbally agreed to, but it’s been so vague that it’s too easy to get off track. These reports are way too complicated now to just wing it anymore. Why don’t we draw up a plan now?

Margaret: Well, frankly, I’m too pressed for time right now. Plus, I don’t think I can really focus on that level of detail. I’m feeling swamped.

Sam: Well, when would be a good time to get together?

Margaret: How about a victory lunch tomorrow, after the report’s in?

Sam: Okay. That sounds like a great idea. Ah, lunch tomorrow on me?

Margaret: Great.

STYLE: Bridging

BEHAVIOUR: Listening

12 Angry Men / Nose Marks

Summary:

Joseph Sweeney bridges with E.G. Marshall over his eyesight, before uncovering a major flaw in the testimony of a key witness.

Excerpt:

Juror 9: Now, why were you rubbing your nose like that?

Juror 4: Well if it’s any of your business, I was rubbing it because it bother’s me a little.

Juror 9: Oh I’m sorry. Is it, is it because of your eye glasses?

Juror 4: It is. Now could we get on to something else?

Juror 9: Your eyeglasses made those two deep impressions on the sides of your nose. I hadn’t noticed that before. That must be annoying.

Juror 4: It is very annoying.

Juror 9: I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve never worn eyeglasses. Twenty twenty!

STYLE: Bridging

BEHAVIOUR: Disclosing

Kramer vs. Kramer / Ted’s Plea

Summary:

Dustin Hoffman discloses his parenting faults as he fights for custody of his son.

Excerpt:

Ted: There’s a lot of things I didn’t understand, a lot of things I’d do different if I could. Just like I think there’s a lot of things you wish you could change, but we can’t. Some things once they’re done can’t be undone. My wife, my ex-wife, says that she loves Billy, and I believe she does, but I don’t think that’s the issue here . . .

Ted: . . . Billy has a home with me, I made it the best I could. It’s not perfect, I’m not a perfect parent. Sometimes I don’t have enough patience and I forget that he’s a . . . he’s a little kid. But I’m there. 

Exercise 1

Use Bridging to influence another person in the group to spend a half-hour with you today to review your ISQ analysis. Define your Influence Objective clearly to yourself. Use Disclosing to reveal your need or concern. Use Involving to guide your partner’s contribution. Use Listening to work through any problems that arise. The other person should respond on the basis of interest, time, availability, location, a personal need or concern, and so on.

Exercise 2

Use Disclosing with another group member to reveal strong feelings you have on a current topic. Focus on a specific Influence Objective (for example, ask your target to take some personal action such as joining a special interest group or writing a protest letter). The target should be especially critical and play “devil’s advocate” to your position. Use Bridging to respond to all criticism. Involve to identify the other’s needs and concerns. Disclose to encourage trust. Listen to the target’s comments and remain non-defensive to criticisms while maintaining the essence of your idea. Get your target to help problem solve. Do not offer suggestions or defend your position.

Exercise 3

Describe to another group member a problem you are having at work. You normally would not discuss this problem with other people (Disclosing). Your partner should briefly make an extreme or hard-to-take suggestion to resolve the problem. Use Bridging to explore your partner’s thinking. Use Involving and Disclosing to influence your partner to tailor the suggestion to your specific situation and temperament. Use Listening to clarify and expand on the suggestions offered.

Exercise 4

Use Disclosing to identify someone in your group who is really about to make a major decision (change a job, move, end a relationship, and so on). Use the Bridging Behaviours to influence that person to take action and move ahead. Make your Influence Objective as specific as you can. For example, Disclose to encourage the person to reveal to you the nature of the problem. Involve to explore specific action opportunities that you hear. Listen to help your target build a committed plan of action.

Exercise 5

Select a group member whose job, occupation, or profession you understand least. Use Bridging to learn more about how this person’s experience may be relevant to your own job or personal life. Disclose your lack of understanding. Involve the other as a personal consultant to help you achieve a work objective.

Exercise 6

An important customer has just called you with some unjust criticism. The person is angry but not emotional, and wants you to know what he or she expects of you. Choose a group member to play your customer with a specific complaint. Use Bridging to get this person to participate in resolving the situation, which is not your fault. Do not argue or become defensive. The other person should respond forcefully but realistically.

Exercise 7

You are responsible for chairing a key interdepartmental meeting each month. Few people from the other departments attend on a regular basis, and one person has not shown up for the last six months. You need that person’s attendance at the next meeting. Use Bridging to get this person’s agreement and commitment to attend.

Exercise 8

Your group works closely with another group. Though the two groups contribute to the same overall organisational goals, actual group objectives differ significantly. As you see it, the other group’s procedures slow you down and keep you from being efficient and productive. Use Bridging to influence your peer in the other group to modify the procedures to better meet your needs.