Defining Your Operating Strategy

The following three questions will help you define your operating strategy:

1. What are you checking on? You can source what you tend to be checking on by working backward from the problematic behaviors that have motivated you to read this far in this book. For example, lets say you tend to get hooked every time you must confront someone. That might tell you that you are frequently checking for whether you are safe or whether you are loved. Or, if you tend toward controlling behavior, perhaps you frequently check whether people are doing things in the way that you define as right. Victims might be checking for what went wrong so that they can preempt any blame before it strikes.

2. What triggers your judgment ? Once you get a grip on what you are checking on during your day, direct your attention to what kinds of things trigger the judgment that you are in a problem situation. It is one thing to know that you listen for whether you are loved, but it is another thing altogether to know what exactly triggers your anxiety. Perhaps you come to the conclusion that you are not loved by others when you hear someone start to say ˜˜no to your requests . Or, maybe you reach this conclusion when people argue with you. Or when people make jokes in your presence. Or when they dont readily go along with your ideas. Knowing exactly what triggers your judgment makes you more aware when you are tempted to reach the same judgment in the future.

3. Whats your behavioral trend ? The final step in sorting out your operating strategy concerns defining your behavioral trend What do you tend to do once you have been triggered into action by your judgment? Do you take control? Do you move to defend? Do you ridicule others? Do you clean up? Cook? Eat? Hide? Fight? Get lazy?

Here is a dialogue I had with a person who wanted to understand her operating strategy. Judy is an operations director in a credit cardprocessing organization. She leads a team of seven managers, who in turn lead a total of 120 supervisors and front-line employees .

Judy was seeing me about her tendency to be controlling. I assigned Judy the job of trying in the period between two coaching sessions to sort out her operating strategy. She came to her next session with nothing to report.

˜˜I couldnt do it. I dont think I have an operating strategy, she said. ˜˜Well, lets see if we can do it together. I pulled out a pencil and paper to make some notes and encouraged Judy to do the same. ˜˜Okay, I said, ˜˜let me ask you a few questions. When you are at a meeting with the managers who report to you, what are you usually thinking about?

˜˜Whatever they are talking about is what Im thinking about. Thats what I mean. There does not appear to be any ulterior motive involved. I listen carefully for whatever the issue is and then I encourage dialogue about a plan of action.

˜˜So, would you agree that you happen to be task oriented? It sounds that way. You seem to be more focused on the issues at hand than on, for example, how people are feeling.

˜˜Well, its not like I dont care about people. In fact I usually notice if someone is not onside.

˜˜What do you do when you think someone is not onside? ˜˜I seek to uncover whats on their mind. ˜˜And then what? ˜˜Well, I try to be supportive. ˜˜Good. And what if they dont seem to want or agree with your support?

˜˜Thats when I get a little engaged. When people arent being reasonable, I do tend to get a little aggressive .

˜˜How so? I could see a door was opening. ˜˜Well, people say I get a little snippy. I dont know where it comes from. Its like there is a real crab apple inside of me.

˜˜And when people say you are controlling, does that relate to the same response?

˜˜Im pretty sure my style when I start to take charge of situations is the same as when someone is resisting me. My empathy seems to go out the window.

˜˜Do you get judgmental? ˜˜Well, I dont like to admit it, but, yes, I suppose I do. ˜˜Okay, lets see what we have here. When you are in a meeting you are pretty focused on the task at hand. Yes?

˜˜Right. ˜˜Do you have any sense of what you are checking for in addition to how the task is going?

˜˜I guess its something like, ˜Are these people onside? ˜˜And when you judge that they are not? ˜˜Then I get aggressive. ˜˜And what does aggression show up as? ˜˜Sarcasm. I get sarcastic . ˜˜Can you give me an example? ˜˜Okay. Last week Mary, the girl on my team who leads the retailer complaint department, received another complaint about her team from one of her peers at a meeting of my deputies. She heard the complaintit was about how her team keeps people on hold for longer than the thirty-second policyand she got defensive. I felt that she was being a bit of a victim. So I pointed it out. I said I thought she was giving excuses and she wouldnt actually confront the issue until she recognized that it was a problem. I said something like, ˜Well, with that point of view it sounds like your team is ready for the technical services department. It was a snippy thing to say, and I regretted it as soon as it came out of my mouth.

Judy and I managed to summarize her operating strategy shortly thereafter. It goes like this:

• I watch for whether people are onside.

• If I judge that they are not onside, I use various forms of aggression such as sarcasm to get control.

• When they are under control, I feel safe.

Judy had a pretty normal reaction to getting her operating strategy clearly defined. After saying, ˜˜yup, thats me, she admitted to feeling a little embarrassed.

˜˜I wanted to think my strategy was something a little nobler than that. I acknowledge that its true, but its a little humiliating. Is that all I am?

˜˜No, Judy, I said. ˜˜You are much more than that. Your operating strategy is only one key line of thinking that goes through your head when you are on the job. But it is part of your thinking. And when things are in fact quite onside with your direction, you dont stop listening. You deal with things, of course. You are also, well, Judy. You have your job, your family, your compassion, your interests. But you do have this little routine.

Finding out her operating strategy was just the start of our relationship. We used the concept only to get focused on what triggered her to behave in the problematic way. The larger challenge was to locate the feelings that accompanied her aggressive, sarcastic responses.

But knowledge of her operating strategy helped Judy to self-observe while back on the job. It got to the point where she could actually predict her programmed response and then actually observe herself becoming sarcastic. She reported that she was amazed by this process of witnessing herself. ˜˜Its like there is a little me standing on my shoulder watching the other me go at it.

Judy is also a good example of what can be done after an operating strategy is defined. Our next challenge was to get her to be nonjudgmental of her own behavior. As indicated, her first response to discovering her operating strategy was to judge herself unfavorably. My job was to get her to stop judging the operation of her operating strategy. She had to become a nonbiased observer of herself. When she let go of the bias against her aggression, she was able to gain greater control of herself.

The next challenge was to get Judy to be less judgmental of the allegedly noncompliant employees. This involved helping her to connect with what was going on in her head when she was hearing resistance in others. Over time she became aware of her true feelings. When people didnt satisfy her criteria for how one ought to behave, she felt that her own success was at risk. And her success had a lot of baggage attached to it. Judy had a lifelong competition with her siblings for her parents love. When she sensed that she might not be succeeding at gaining someones affection, she wheeled out the sarcasm, just as she had done when she was a kid.

This analysis of Judy started with the simple definition of her operating strategy. It was a great way to direct her attention to what goes on in her head when she was triggered. It was an entry into her thoughts and beliefs. It brought forth feelings of humiliationtherapeutic humiliation, if there is such a thingthe feeling of embarrassment over the transparency of her behavior. However sad she may have been to discover her operating strategy, the discovery did shine a light on how and why her meta-thoughts got her into trouble.

Another way to get at your operating strategy is to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What thing do I frequently complain about?

2. What payback do I get from making that complaint?

3. What price do I pay for that complaint?

These three questions wont instantly define your operating strategy, but they might get you moving if you find yourself stuck.

If I had taken this route with Judy, she would have arrived at the same conclusions. She would have identified people not doing things professionallyand as they were instructed to doas what she frequently complained about. As for what payback she probably got from this complaint, she would have reported that she got peoples respect. Her answer to the price question would have been that she sometimes had problematic relationships. From these three questions she would have arrived at how her operating strategy is to check whether the complaint was about to arise yet again, and, if she judges that things are off the rails, become aggressive to get them back under control. By so doing, she would make people sometimes dislike her. But her motive to feel validated was satisfied.

There is no reason to believe that you must work to add to or change your operating strategy. Sometimes just knowing what it is empowers you to override it if you choose. That freedom grants you huge potential. For example, an attention-seeker I know concluded that his operating strategy was to check whether he was loved. When he judged that he was not, he would seek to win people over. Even after he learned of this approach, he was inclined to keep it.

˜˜Sure, he said to a customer of his, ˜˜I am looking for your love and respectthats how I operate . It makes me feel whole. It makes me the lovable guy that I am. His customer liked the full exposure and the kind of sweetness that went with it.

In a sense there is clearly nothing profound about operating strategies. The notion that people move toward security and away from feelings of insecurity explains it quite simply. In fact there is a generic operating strategy whose logic dictates the flow of all the individual versions. The difference between one persons operating strategy and that of another relates to each persons beliefs about what exactly makes the difference between feeling okay and not feeling okay. The generic version goes like this:

I check whether things are leading to my security and if I dont feel that they are, then I do what usually works for me to either get them on track, or avoid the matter entirely. I do these things so that I can feel whole.

In another sense, in as much as an operating strategy is one more example of an artificial construct created by a lifetime of meta-level thinking, labeling it is a profound opportunity to rise above the judgment game and, paradoxically, to stay down to earth at the object-level . Recognition can make all the difference.