Spotting a Psychopath in Your Network of Business Contacts – Part 2

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Last week I wrote about a topic that is typically outside the range of our more applicable subjects: How to recognize a psychopath when you encounter one in business…and knowing what to do about it.

As you may recall, my advice around this topic is to not lose sleep over it, and certainly to not start any rumors around who you suspect may be one. The point of this discussion is to help you gain an awareness of how to recognize these people so that you can keep your distance from them. You can’t be harmed if you don’t take their bait.

I promised to share the characteristics of psychopaths so you can recognize them in action. Remember, very few are serial killers, like Hannibal. On the contrary, most high-functioning psychopaths are smart enough to stay out of jail, are often successful in business, and appear to fit in. To help you identify red flags, know that psychopaths typically:

are prone to boredom and require more constant stimulation
lead a parasitic lifestyle
practice sexual promiscuity
lack realistic long-term goals
display extreme impulsivity
are glib
possess a grandiose sense of self-worth
are pathological liars
con and manipulate
lack remorse
have shallow emotions
lack empathy
fail to accept responsibility
And finally, and unfortunately, they carry the appearance of normalcy despite being guilty of the most destructive behavior.

What makes dealing with psychopaths frustrating is that they lack a conscience when it comes to inflicting harm on others. Research has found that they also have no fear of pain or of the consequences of their behavior. Please beware that these people are incredibly capable of assessing your needs and exploiting them for their own purposes.

For the two people who asked me about this subject matter recently….I hope this answers your questions. For the rest of you, I hope you’ll never need to refer back to this information. …

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

Spotting a Psychopath in Your Network of Business Contacts

Friday, September 10, 2010

This topic may seem a bit odd for WorkPuzzle, but stick with me—I think you’ll find it beneficial. Over the last few weeks, two clients have requested information about this topic. So, I felt compelled to distribute some knowledge about psychopaths to our clients and readers. Hopefully, this will prevent or minimize your exposure to these dangerous people who can wreak havoc on both your business and personal life.

Do you really need to be worried about psychopaths? It is not something I would lose sleep over, but chances are you’ve come in contact with a psychopath at some point in your career and you probably will do so again. Experts estimate that between 0.5% and 1% of the population fit this diagnosis. This means there are roughly 250,000 psychopaths (outside of prison) in the United States alone.

Professionally, I have performed psychological evaluations on well over 100 psychopaths during my career, and I unknowingly attempted therapy on three high-functioning psychopaths before figuring out their condition. I have also had the displeasure of trusting two psychopaths in my business network. The first was a former boss who was a well-respected and gregarious leader. The second was a financial advisor. In both cases, these individuals eventually left a wake of devastation in the lives of everyone I knew who trusted them in the context of a business relationship.

I’m sharing this information in hopes that you can avoid some of the pain I’ve experienced personally and have seen others experience because of these people. I’ve come to the conclusion that spotting a psychopath and then extracting yourself from any relationship you may have with such a person is a skill that could save years of heartache for you, your co-workers, and perhaps your family.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding psychopaths. In essence, they are people who don’t care about the irreparable harm they cause their victims. They lack any empathy for their victims. They have no conscience. No guilt. No shame.

The common thing people think of when they picture a psychopath is a serial killer. Serial killers are indeed psychopaths, but this accounts for a very small percentage of the total. Some criminals are psychopaths. In fact, many lower IQ psychopaths end up in prison. But, even the prisons contain only a small percentage of the overall number of psychopaths.

The type of psychopath you would be most likely to encounter is termed a “high-functioning” psychopath. High-functioning psychopaths can be very successful, appear confident, calm, and seem have their act together. In fact, most psychopaths are actually more engaging than the average person. They can be charming, knowledgeable and quite believable.

The primary characteristic that distinguishes a psychopath from the general population is that they are insatiable liars and skilled manipulators. The reason for the masterful lying is that they feel absolutely no shame or guilt about the deception. No regrets. In fact, science is discovering, through recent brain scans, that psychopaths don’t feel much of anything, with the exception of becoming quite irritated when things don’t go their way.

Because they are such skilled manipulators, they are exceptionally good at figuring out your weaknesses, exploiting those weaknesses, and feeling absolutely nothing regarding their actions. Even when their efforts are stymied, they usually return to test your willingness or gullibility to go one more round.

When research is conducted on psychopaths, they’ve been shown to repeatedly convince people they are worthy of trust. Inexperienced interns often describe a psychopath as “one of the wisest, most humorous and engaging men (most psychopaths are men) they have ever met.”

What does this mean for each of you? I’ll answer this question with two warnings:

Don’t get overly paranoid and begin suspecting everyone around you is a psychopath! And, don’t begin rumors out of pure speculation.
Take what I will teach you about this topic seriously enough to be able to identify someone with this condition when it’s appropriate. And when you do have strong evidence that someone is a psychopath, stay away from them. They can’t hurt you if you don’t trust them.

In the next edition, I’ll describe in much more detail how to spot a psychopath through a specific set of characteristics. I will also describe some interesting research regarding the lack of emotion that is routinely characteristic of psychopaths.

3 Labor Statistics That Could Help Save the Real Estate Industry

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

One complaint we commonly hear from hiring managers and company owners is that it’s now very difficult to attract new talent to the real estate industry. And since the real estate industry has received so much negative press over the last few years, there are certainly some elements of truth to these claims.

But difficult does not mean impossible, and the difficult often needs to be done to stay competitive. The remaining productive agents who make up the ranks of the companies who have survived the downturn continue to age. Failure to bring in “new blood” will significantly diminish a company’s prospects for long-term success. There are no shortcuts around this reality.

Before you sink into depression, I’d like to share a few interesting labor statistics that may help brighten your perspective. These labor statistics were compiled by Peter Weddle in his most recent recruiting newsletter.

1. There is a common perception in business today that the individuals who have jobs are not willing to give up those jobs to try something new (such as starting a real estate business). Not true.

“According to the U.S. Labor Department, between February and April of this year, more people resigned from their jobs (2 million) than were laid off (1.7 million). They had the courage to take their career into their own hands and chart a course that made more sense for them.”

If someone is laid off, they often do not have the resources to take on the expense of starting a real estate business. But, those who voluntarily leave often do so from a position of strength and confidence in their new prospects. Are you able to compete in the employment marketplace at large for this talent?

2. There is a common perception that those who have jobs are “hunkering down” and not investing in the future. Not true.

“According to the U.S. Department of Education, 92 million American adults are now enrolled in an education program. That’s over half of the workforce. These working men and women are brave enough to take personal responsibility for their own development.”

Why are all these people pursuing education at this point? Because many do not like their current jobs and they want to be prepared for opportunities in the future. Of course, these numbers are skewed towards younger demographics, but aren’t those the candidates you need to start focusing on? Do you have a way of getting your message in front of these 92 million people?

3. There is a common perception that those who have employable skills are not willing to take risks to make use of those skills. Not true.

“According to Time magazine, 40 million Americans move each year and 20 percent of them do so in order to take a new job. They are courageous enough to head off into the frontier of a new locale in order to stake their claim to a better future for themselves and their family.”

Moving yourself and your family to a new area is one the biggest risks a person can take. Eight million people are doing so each year for job related reasons. If people are willing to take this risk, are they willing to take the risk of working for your company?

Add all these numbers up and you have quite a few people who are willing to sacrifice to build their careers, take risks to potentially realize something better, and dedicate resources (both time and money) to better their chances of success in the future. The challenge for any real estate company who wants to successfully engage these people is to develop employment value propositions that are compelling. Are you up for this challenge?

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

Looking in Your Neighbor’s Windows: How Much Effort Does it Take to Produce a Hire?

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Comparing ourselves to others is something human beings have been doing since the beginning of time. At some level, we all need validation that our efforts are on par with those who have similar jobs and responsibilities.

If you are responsible for recruiting agents, have you ever sought to compare yourself to other offices within your company? Is your company doing as well as your competitors? How does your recruiting performance stack up to companies in other markets? These are all important questions. Hopefully you’ve spent some time contemplating and researching this issue.

One of the things you may not have studied is how your recruiting efforts compare to other industries. Is it possible that the real estate industry operates at one level, but the insurance industry operates on a higher performance plane? On the other hand, you could be pleasantly surprised to learn that your hiring systems and performance far surpass typical performance in the medical industry.

Of course, this type of data is very difficult to collect and analyze. So, when I came across the question below and subsequent answer on this topic in the Electronic Recruiting Exchange (ERE), I thought it was worth sharing. The contributor is Richard Newsom, the VP of Recruiting Operations for Fifth Third Bank, and the question is shared by an anonymous reader who works for a publically-traded company. Here is the exchange:

“Question:

I manage our company’s recruiting organization. We are a four billion dollar company, publicly traded, and employ 4,000+ employees. I have a team of seven full-time recruiters and just recently brought on two contract recruiters. Here is my challenge:

I am being asked to show that my team is at capacity, and what it would take to complete the recruiting team to address the business needs (requisitions). When I joined the company two years ago, we had 15 recruiters. In the last two years we have had three reductions in force, hiring freezes, etc. It made sense for the company to decide that we could downsize the recruiting organization. Last year with seven recruiters, we filled 774 requisitions. Is there anyone who could help me build a business case that we are working at capacity?

Answer:

There are many different ways to approach this, and not every solution works for every company. I’d like to discuss one particular approach…. Using your example of 774 hires (and making some broad assumptions that you’ll need to validate)…

Assumptions:

We need to hire 774 people in 2011
90% of the offers extended result in a hire
25% of the interviews conducted result in an offer
80% of the candidates submitted to a hiring manager get interviewed
It takes 1.5 hours to source a candidate worthy of submitting to a hiring manager
Each recruiter has 2.5 hours per day dedicated to sourcing candidates for submission
There are seven recruiters dedicated to recruiting throughout 2011 — thus seven recruiters X 2.5 hours per day for sourcing = 17.5 sourcing hours per day total

Calculations:

774 hires needed/90% acceptance rate = 860 offers need to be extended
860 offers/25% offer rate = 3,440 candidates need to be interviewed
3,440 interviews/80% interview rate = 4,300 candidates who need to be submitted to hiring managers
4,300 submissions X 1.5 hours per candidate = 6,450 sourcing hours needed
6,450 sourcing hours needed/17.5 hours per day = 369 business days to source all candidates (516 calendar days)

Using these assumptions, it would take your team of seven recruiters nearly a year and a half to fill all 774 positions….”

Hopefully, this recruiter will be able to take this information and fend off another reduction of staff among her recruiting group. Even if she maintains here current staffing level, I’m not sure I’d want to work there—it sounds like a death march!

But, that’s not the point. Through his assumptions, Richard Newsom has given us some insight into hiring practices in the banking industry. In essence, we have the opportunity to look in his office window and see the recruiting conversion metrics of one of the most prominent companies in the financial industry.

How do these benchmarks compare to what you experience in your company? For high performing companies in the real estate industry, we commonly see an interview-to-hire ratio of 25% to 35%. While this is similar to Newsom’s bank, their candidate-to-interview ratio is very high compared to most real estate companies. To secure 3,440 interviews, most real estate companies would need to source 15,000 to 20,000 candidates. Analyzing the hours dedicated to each task is even more interesting, but I’ll leave that for you to consider on your own…

The bottom line is that we all need goals in order to exceed. If these goals are set with a limited exposure to what others are accomplishing, we may not reach high enough. I encourage you to use all the information you can possibly collect to establish your personal expectations, and then push yourself to succeed.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jet Blue Moments and Resilience

Thursday, August 26, 2010

As I pointed out in my last blog, when people are undergoing economic and job-related stress, evidence confirms some important principles that determine what direction one takes. Namely, that under economic and job-related stress, either people grow and go on to achieve, or they regress and become physically and emotionally unhealthy.

I used the Jet Blue incident as a backdrop to launch some learning on what happens to people who respond like Slater and alternatively, what happens to people who actually reframe their current job-related stress in a different way. I actually received a comment from someone that implied that Slater (the airline attendant who threw a public temper tantrum) was not in the wrong. If you share this opinion, you are headed in a precarious direction. There is more than ample evidence that adulthood stress can help you grow, if you're willing to reassess how growth and achievement takes place.

Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz makes it clear that you are going to need resilience if you are going to maintain a clear head during tough times:

“Many psychologists consider [resilience] a key component of emotional health. Resilient people, they have observed, are naturally better at containing their anxiety. And that enables them to see in hardship the seeds of opportunity. What would emotional resilience entail in the face of the current crisis? The ability to resist being swept up in the global state of panic and to adapt as creatively as possible to one's setbacks and losses.”

We see this principle played out with our clients every day. Some people are not very good at containing their anxiety and they become paralyzed as a result. But, others are busy working to find new opportunities. We all feel the strain, but certain people have figured out how to use that strain as a catalyst for action.

If you find yourself in the former group, Dr. Sulkowicz has some advice for you:

“But just as there is no shortcut to emotional health, you can't become resilient overnight, or by sheer will, or by reading the latest book on the subject. Instead, resilience is acquired through increasing self-awareness. You must connect with trusted and candid intimates who help you build confidence. You need to repeatedly expose yourself to a range of difficult circumstances and then overcome them.”

If you are responsible for coaching those around you, you have a great opportunity to put this into practice. You are the “trusted and candid intimate” your protégés need to overcome their anxiety. Can you help them identify the things they are already overcoming? This is the foundation to build upon that can give them courage to take on the next challenge.

If you are struggling yourself, then you need to connect with others who can provide you support. The first tendency will be to just talk with those who will compassionately identify with your circumstances. Slater has an entire fan club filled with this sort of support….all people who are going nowhere fast. While sympathetic support is important, but we also need those “tough love” friends who can give us the push we need to take on the next challenge…

Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

How to Prevent your own Jet Blue moment: And Succeed

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Our recent blog regarding the Jet Blue incident was more popular than we had anticipated. Last week we wrote about the bizarre behavior of Steven Slater, the now infamous Jet Blue flight attendant who decided to grab two beers and take the short cut home from work. (If you need a quick refresher on what happened, here is a quick video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mNRhlrBqOc)

Feedback we received shortly after our posting suggests that frustration is gaining momentum in the Real Estate industry as well.

Here is one of the responses we received:

"I have noticed frustration, anger and impatience toward other agents, clients, staff, and managers. Deals fall apart frequently, obsessive agents hound each other to try and keep a deal, disputes are abounding, and rudeness seems to be a daily dose of medicine."

Clearly this outlandish display of immaturity by Slater is somewhat of a "cannery in the coal mine" when it comes to today's stress in the services industry sectors. So, if you can at all sympathize with Slater's frustration or have experienced some growing frustration toward clients, other agents or managers, it may be time to take a deep breath, and really try to figure out what is causing your stress and what you can do about it, before you have your own Jet Blue moment.

Psychologically if you have been more irritable and angry on the job, it can mean a variety of different things, as these are symptoms and could be completely personal in origin. But, when it happens to an entire culture it points to something much more general in nature regarding stress from factors that are probably inherent in the culture itself. Instead of delving into factors such as economic conditions, changing customer solutions, change in lifestyle related to the above, etc… I'm going to address the consequences of these stressors and the solutions to reducing stress by reframing your current condition.

The research on resilience tells us there are two potential outcomes when it comes to responding to today's economic stressors: Either you’ll become stronger and more successful, or you’ll become weaker, less mentally healthy, and less likely to do great things in the future.

Which outcome best describes you? The answer to this question will depend on how you’re able to handle job-related stress and whether you can become a resilient person.

Management consultants, Salvatore Maddi and Deborah Khoshaba, conducted a 12-year study of the Illinois Bell Telephone (IBT) company staff who were enduring almost constant organizational change during the de-regulation changes in the telephone industry.

Every year for 12 years, 450 IBT employees (including supervisors, managers and executives) were interviewed, evaluated, given psychological tests, and given medical examinations. While everyone in the organization was feeling stress, almost 50% of those sampled lost their jobs. The purpose of the study was to research how people under job-related stress handled these difficult conditions.

The research revealed that the employees reacted to the stress in two distinct ways:

65% of the employees suffered additional serious stress-related events in their lives such as divorce, heart attack, depression, anxiety, and drug/alcohol abuse.
35% of the employees thrived under the stress. If they stayed at IBT, they rose to the top of the heap. If they left, they either started companies of their own or took strategically important employment in other companies.

When the data started to show a distinct difference between the two groups of employees, the researchers then attempted to quantify what caused a person to be part of the second group.

In their book, Resilience at Work, the researchers outlined their findings. A “resilient person” is someone who possesses and embraces the following: commitment, control, and challenge.

“As times get tough, if you hold these attitudes, you'll believe that it is best to stay involved with the people and events around you (commitment) rather than to pull out, to keep trying to influence the outcomes in which you are involved (control) rather than to give up, and to try to discover how you can grow through the stress (challenge) rather than to bemoan your fate.”

In short, a steadfast commitment allowed the resilient employees to engage more fully in the job at hand (or with a new opportunity for those who lost their jobs). This helped them to understand and interpret the events that were having an impact on them.

Their sense of control empowered the resilient employees to consider ways that they could proactively influence the changes that were affecting them. Their less resilient colleagues tended to passively withdraw effort, believing there was little they could do to impact what they believed was their fate.

Furthermore, the resilient employees interpreted the stressors and changes as a challenge, and tended to look for the potential opportunities that change would bring about. They took the outlook that change is an inevitable part of life. It didn’t mean that these people enjoyed the stress, but the positive outlook they took positioned them to keep an eye open for new opportunities.

My hunch is that Steven Slater didn't view his stress in this way. The brain simply can't sustain any problem solving when your fight or flight response is firing as if your being chased by a saber tooth tiger. You have two choices: remain frustrated and take it out on yourself and everyone else, or GROW! Anyone can act like they have their act together during good times, but only people who want to develop great strength of character will respond well when times are tough.

In the next blog I'll write more on the characteristics of resilience.