How To Get People To Do What You Want- Without Telling Them What To Do

When we tell a teenager to “go and clean your room”, do they ever actually do it?
Why not?
Is it because they have an aversion to housework or is it because like every other human being on this planet they just don’t like being told what to do?

If we want to get a teenager to clean their room our first instinct is to tell them to do it. They are children, we are adults. It is our function to prepare them for life and part of that preparation includes telling them what to do, because we know best.

Yet how often when teenagers are told to clean their rooms do they actually do it?

Unless there is a very heavy threat attached to the order the chance of any teenager actually cleaning their room is practically zero.

We know this because we ourselves never used to clean our rooms and, based on the evidence of our own eyes, neither do our offspring.

So why, when we are faced with overwhelming data demonstrating the utter futility of telling our teenagers to clean their rooms, do we still persist in creating pointless conflict by telling them to do things that we know they never will.

At least we are right about one thing.

Telling teenagers what to do does prepare them for life because when they find a job they will discover that their managers will spend most of their time creating pointless conflict by telling them what to do.

Their managers, whether the object of their own teenagers antipathy or not, are unlikely to have understood that what makes a teenager resist being told what to do also holds true for the rest of the population.

Their managers will continue telling the workforce what to do believing that it is only as a result of this constant instruction that anything is done at all, not realising for a minute that by telling their workforce what to do the manager causes them to react in exactly the same way that the teenagers do when told to clean their rooms.

Telling people what to do actually destroys their ability to do it.

People enjoy challenges; we enjoy achieving our goals and being proud of what we have done.

What we hate is being told what to do.

So when we are told what to do we resist, not because we object to what we have been told to do, the resistance occurs because we object to being “told” what to do.

If management set a target for the workforce it appears to the workforce as an arbitrary statement, not based in reality, telling them what management think that they should be doing. Management are essentially telling the workforce what they should be doing and the workforce react against their desire for control by seldom, if ever, achieving the management target.

The workforce are accustomed to management setting unachievable targets and management are accustomed to the workforce failing to achieve their targets, never once doubting that the failure is the fault of the workforce and not the fault of management for setting the target in the first place.

By setting the target management almost guarantee its non achievement.

Catch 22,
By setting targets, by telling people what to do, we are actually creating the conditions that prevent them from achieving the very thing that we have instructed them to do.

How then can we get people to do what we want if we cannot tell them what to do?

Consider the teenager, they do not want to live in unsanitary squalor, they are forced to do it because they are continually being told to clean their rooms.

In the same way the workforce do not want to be perceived as unmotivated failures but this is what they are forced to be in reaction to the attempts of management to exert control.

The problem is “telling” people what to do. If instead of telling other people what to do, we listen to what they want, we can then help them to achieve something.

The “something” that is achieved may not be exactly what we wanted but it will be an achievement that everybody can take pride in.

It will be orders of magnitude better than the destructive resistance that is created every time we try to get our own way by telling other people what we think they should be doing.