Assuming the Best About Others is Hard—But Necessary

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.

ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ALISON BEARD: Adi, today, let’s talk about how to get along with people who make our lives harder, whose views conflict with our own, who we can’t seem to find common ground with, who maybe we don’t even really like or respect.

ADI IGNATIUS: Okay. This one’s going to get us in trouble, but okay.

ALISON BEARD: No, don’t worry. It’s still very much a conversation about good management because it’s about getting in the right head space to overcome all of these challenges at work, build better relationships and foster more productive collaboration.

ADI IGNATIUS: Oh, okay, phew. I was actually worried where you were going to go with that.

ALISON BEARD: So our guest today is Trinity University professor, Amer Kaissi, and he’s going to explain why more of us need to adopt a positive intent mindset, assuming that the people around us, bosses, peers, employees, clients, suppliers, competitors, all the stakeholders, have good intentions even when they make mistakes or they don’t behave the way we think they should.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so I think we’ve all heard the old joke about what happens when you assume, not safe for work. I don’t know, I’m not sure organizations really benefit from constant positivity to avoid conflict, but tell me more.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, so Kaissi would agree that you don’t want to be so upbeat all the time that you ignore bad behavior or let people off the hook for it. But he argues that there’s a way to adopt this mindset and improve teamwork, negotiations, all your workplace interactions, while still insisting on accountability.

He’s going to share both research on how this can help you and your team, and then also practical advice for making it work. He’s the author of The Positive Intent Mindset: Exceptional Leadership through Trust and Accountability. And here’s our conversation.

So we are living in a really divisive time. There’s lots of negativity in the headlines and on social media. How do you see that affecting the way people feel and behave in the workplace right now?

AMER KAISSI: We do live in a very negative, very divisive world right now. It’s made worse by social media, cable news and all of that. And employees, I mean, they can’t help but bring some of that negativity with them to work. And as a result, they start assuming negative intentions about their coworkers. They start feeling that everyone has a hidden agenda. And because of that, we’re seeing that employee engagement suffers, we see that collaboration diminishes, and trust is reduced. So all of that makes people just unhappy at work and we all feel miserable. So the world around us is definitely affecting our working relationships.

ALISON BEARD: And I imagine you bring it to your dealings with external stakeholders as well, with people who you might be a little bit adversarial, whether that’s suppliers or clients.

AMER KAISSI: Yeah. We did some research to test some of these hypotheses, and we did find that actually people tend to assume more negative intent towards people that they don’t know that well or that they may have some kind of a conflict with, such as clients or external stakeholders.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And this may seem obvious, but why is it important to try to force yourself into a more positive mindset at work, especially when it comes to how you’re thinking about the intentions of others? What does the research say on that?

AMER KAISSI: So we have proof from the research that trust is reduced, collaboration goes down, and engagement goes down. And people will take these seriously for sure, but I don’t think that’s the one factor or the factors that are going to make people change. I think what is more likely to make people change and assume positive intent is the fact that when we don’t assume positive intent, we just feel miserable, right? Our well-being is affected.

So yes, of course the relationships are important, but this is not just about that. It’s about us and how we are living and how we are interacting with others, and just the misery and the pain that we are in. There’s a well-known saying, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” And when we assume negative intent, we are subjecting ourselves to a lot of unnecessary suffering. One thing I say is when we assume positive intent and give others the benefit of the doubt, we are really giving ourselves the benefit of low blood pressure.

ALISON BEARD: Right. And why do you see this as an essential skill for leaders in particular? What does it do for a team and an organization when a leader operates in this way?

AMER KAISSI: For leaders, there are so many opportunities there to default to that setting and assume negative intent, to not be intentional about it. And leaders are impacting others through how they show up every day. So we find that especially for people in leadership positions, assuming positive intent is going to have ripple effect across the organization by creating what we call cycles of trust.

The research shows that positivity begets positivity. So leaders who go in assuming that others are trying their best, they’re going to find evidence that others are trying their best. Whereas if we do the opposite, if we go in with some biases, assuming that people are not trying, or that external stakeholders are trying to cheat us or whatever it is, we’re going to find evidence for that, right?

ALISON BEARD: What do you say to someone who argues that, well, staying vigilant, trusting only people who have earned it over a long period of time, avoiding risks, that’s what made me successful.

AMER KAISSI: I mean, certainly we have to be vigilant. This is not a naive approach. This is not about saying just assume positive intent and everything is going to be great. In the book, I talk about this concept of accountable positivity. We start with the default of assuming positive intent provisionally, and then we check with others. And then we see if the positive intent is there. We start by saying, “What if they’re trying their best?” And then we go see if they are trying their best. We start with a question. What if they have a valid reason for acting in that way? And we go and check with them to see if they do actually have a valid reason.

ALISON BEARD: And apart from all the negative news we’re seeing and the divisiveness, why is it difficult for us to start from that perspective when it comes to other people, particularly in the workplace?

AMER KAISSI: There are some internal psychological reasons that make it for us that we assume negative intent as our default setting. First, there’s obviously some evolutionary processes in there. If you think of cave people and ancestors and all of that, they assumed negative intent when they went out of the cave and they saw another creature that they haven’t seen before or an animal that looks scary. In that moment, that was the right thing to do to save their lives.

Now, in our current work interactions and our own personal relationships right now, the stakes are not that high in terms of someone is going to threaten our lives, but we still assume negative intent as a maladaptive way of dealing with other people.

There’s also another deeper psychological phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error. When we observe someone acting in a way that is questionable or wrong or we can’t explain it, we judge them by their actions, not by their intentions. However, when we are acting in those same ways, we judge ourselves by our intentions.

And the simple example here, you’re driving on the highway and someone cuts you off. In that moment, you immediately think that person is a jerk, that person is a reckless driver, because we judge them by the action. There’s no time. There’s no space to ask what is their intention. Could they possibly be taking their sick child to the hospital? However, when we are engaged in the same behavior, and many of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, we do engage in the same behavior sometimes, we judge ourselves by our intentions. I am rushing and I cut them off because I need to get to the doctor’s appointment on time.

ALISON BEARD: I chuckled when I read that example, because I am definitely guilty of cutting people off from time to time, and definitely guilty of being annoyed with people for cutting me off.

AMER KAISSI: Well, beyond just that example, one of the powerful questions that I learned when I was doing research for the book is when we see someone acting in a way that we think is wrong, to ask ourselves, “Have I myself acted that way in the past?” Right? Your colleague does not reply to your email in 24 hours, or your colleague forgets to invite you to the meeting, and we get annoyed and we think they have an agenda and they want to keep us out of the conversation. And then go back and ask yourself, “Have I done that myself in the past, intentionally or not?” And most of the time, the answer is that, “Yes, I have done it.” So if we’ve done the same thing in the past, who are we to judge that other person? Maybe they do have a valid reason for doing it. Now let’s go check with them.

ALISON BEARD: And it seems like that process of asking yourself questions, reflecting on your own assumptions, and then also what the intentions of the other person might be is the first step, this move toward curiosity. So what are some other questions that you can ask yourself to push yourself into a more positive intent mindset?

AMER KAISSI: We start with this provisional position of assuming positive intent. We pause. We replace judgment with curiosity. And then we start first checking with ourselves: “Have I done something like this?” And then we check with the person in question. We go and talk to them in a neutral tone, in a curious way and say, “What are the reasons that led you to behave in this way? I noticed that in the meeting yesterday, you rolled your eyes at my suggestion. What is going on there? Are there some concerns that you have?

We can also ask other people who were around when the situation happened and say, “You know what? I misperceived her comment to be a little bit negative,” or, “I misperceived his comment to be a little bit aggressive. Can you confirm that? Did you hear it the same way?”

ALISON BEARD: And you also talk about five key skills that we can all build to move us toward more positivity and not making negative judgments about others personally and as teams, and also as organizations: realistic optimism, empathy, humility, reality testing, and forgiveness. And I’d love to quickly go through each of those. So how do you define realistic optimism and how do you develop it?

AMER KAISSI: Realistic optimism is about seeing others when they make a mistake and not assuming that they’re always going to make the same mistake, that this mistake is a representation of all of their skills, and that they made the mistake because of something wrong with them, with their skills, with their characters. So we talk about thinking about others’ mistakes as short-term, specific, and impersonal. You assign a task to one of your team members to do some financial analysis for a project, and they bring back the analysis with a mistake. Realistic optimism is about saying, “Okay, they made this one mistake. That doesn’t mean they’re always going to make the same mistake. It’s a mistake in the analysis. It doesn’t mean they’re going to make mistakes when they present the proposal.”

And finally, maybe the mistake is due to overwork, or maybe the mistake is due to the fact that they’re overwhelmed. So it’s about thinking about it short-term, specific, and impersonal, and checking with the other person. So we are not getting away with accountability. We’re not saying, “Oh, let them get away with the mistake.” But the initial position is that realistic optimism towards other people and their actions and then checking with them.

ALISON BEARD: How do you have those conversations, asking the other person what their intent was without it becoming contentious?

AMER KAISSI: There definitely are a lot of ways that we can do that. To keep it very simple, I think replacing why questions with what questions tend to do the trick most of the time. “Why did you do that?” puts the other person on the defensive, right? They’re going to become defensive. They’re going to think that you are questioning their judgment. “What were the reasons that led to you doing this?” Or, “What are some of your concerns when you did this and that, or when you said this and that?” tends to be a much better way of at least starting that conversation and making it go a bit smoother.

ALISON BEARD: And then the second key skill, empathy. We’ve heard a lot about the importance of having that for trust and collaboration, but we’ve also heard that there are downsides of having too much empathy, especially at work. So where is the sweet spot and how do you get to it?

AMER KAISSI: Before we get to the sweet spot, the starting spot is humanizing others. And this goes back to the divisiveness and the negativity that we see around the world right now. We don’t humanize each other anymore. We belong to our own tribes. I belong to my tribe of my own political party and people who share my religious beliefs and people who work with me in the same department. These are our tribes. Now, we need these tribes to belong. We need these tribes to thrive. But the problem becomes when we start thinking that my tribe is always good and my tribe is always right, and the other tribes are always bad and always wrong.

So the starting point for empathy is to humanize others, is to see them as human being. I do that as a simple exercise when I’m watching my favorite sports team. I’m a huge soccer fan. And the exercise is, when you see rival fans on TV, to try to humanize them. And it’s a very hard exercise with rival fans.

ALISON BEARD: I will do that with everyone but Knicks fans. Sorry, Juan Martinez, my dear colleague. Except for you, Juan. Except for you, Juan.

AMER KAISSI: For me, it’s with soccer. And my team is Manchester United, and the rivals are Liverpool, right? If I’m watching a Liverpool game and I see their fans, my immediate reaction is to think of them as, “Oh, they’re violent, they’re whatever. They’re superficial. But they’re just like me. They are supporting their team. When this team wins, it brings them happiness. When it loses, it makes them sad. So humanizing others.

There’s a lot of tribalism at work, us versus them. I do a lot of work in healthcare. And in healthcare, the main source of conflict in healthcare organizations is administrators and clinicians. There’s always tribes that we belong to, which is good, as long as we don’t think the other tribe is always wrong.

Now, what is the sweet spot? I think the sweet spot is, empathy in terms of understanding the other person’s position and being curious about why they reached that position, but not necessarily taking on their emotions. We don’t have to take on their emotions. We don’t have to be paralyzed by those emotions. And there needs to be accountability in there.

Yes, we took the time to think, what if they’re trying their best? We took the time to say, why would a reasonable decent person act this way? And then when we check with them and we find that there was no positive intentions, we have to have the difficult conversation. So I say that this approach, assuming positive intent does not replace conflict resolution, does not replace difficult conversations, but in fact, it enhances it.

ALSION BEARD: So humility, the third piece, we talked about that the last time you came to the show. But remind us how you develop it if it doesn’t come to you naturally or you didn’t learn it growing up?

AMER KAISSI: When leaders get to their positions, they become subject matter experts. They know a lot about a lot of things. And that, sometimes, comes with blind certainty. They start assuming that they know everything about every situation, and they know the reasons why people are behaving in certain ways. And humility is about replacing that blind certainty with curiosity. Assuming that you don’t know everything. Asking open-ended questions that can help reframe the situations.

So that open-mindedness there, that curiosity is key to going into conversations and saying to yourself, “I know a lot of things, but I don’t know everything, so I’m going to go into this conversation assuming that I’m going to learn something new from this person.” So that’s the connection between the concept of humility and assuming positive intentions.

ALISON BEARD: And then reality testing. I think you’ve talked a little bit about how you can ask questions of others and the person that you’re interacting with directly to see if what you’re perceiving is true. Are there other pieces to reality testing that you want to share with our listeners?

AMER KAISSI: There’s one more aspect of it that we haven’t really talked about, which is to consider the other person’s track record before judging them harshly. So again, it’s about pausing and replacing that judgment with a little bit of understanding and saying, “Okay, yes, you made the mistake and we need to talk about this mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Or you said that word that was offensive or insensitive.” And remembering that this person actually, over time, has had a great track record in their relationship with us and their relationship with the team and the contributions that they have made with the team.

ALISON BEARD: And then finally, how does forgiveness play out in this context? I think there’s two scenarios when you’ve gone through all of the other things that we’ve talked about. One is that you find, okay, someone was trying their best, but they still messed up. Or you find that the person actually wasn’t trying their best. So how do you deal with both of those scenarios?

AMER KAISSI: With forgiveness, I think most of us are a bit resistant to the idea of forgiveness. Because we may think that, on the one hand, it means forgoing accountability. We’re just going to forgive mistakes. It’s going to be toxic positivity, right? “So what if they said this. Let’s just get along. Let’s sweep it under the rug.” So that’s not what we’re talking about.

The other aspect of it is that when we decide to forgive, it’s not for the other person, it’s for ourselves. So I was working with a leader in a coaching engagement, and she was telling me about a boss that she worked with in the past who was a very toxic boss. And she was going in detail about what that boss made her feel, the impossible work assignments he gave her, how he tended to humiliate her and grill her in meetings in front of others, and on and on and on. And finally, Alison, I asked her, I said, “How long ago did you work for this boss?” And she said, “18 years ago.” She was still holding that baggage with her. She’s still allowing that person to occupy so much space in her head. And then we started talking, and I asked him, I said, “Are you willing to forgive that boss?” And she said, “No. Of course not. I don’t want to reconcile with him.”

And I said, “It’s not about reconciling with him, it’s about forgiving him for yourself.” And that’s the new understanding of forgiveness that Fred Luskin talks about, which is, “It’s you forgive not for the other person, you forgive for yourself, because you don’t want to continue to suffering from the actions that have happened long time ago.”

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. But in an ongoing work relationship, if you’re trying your best to assume positive intent, and you consistently find that there isn’t positive intent, with whomever, the supplier, the client, the colleague, the boss, the employee, how do you respond then?

AMER KAISSI: The difficult conversation has to take place, right? It starts from a neutral perspective where we go in and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And then if the offense is repeated, if the person keeps on acting in ways that demonstrate that they do not have positive intentions, then in that case, maybe with an external relationship, the relationship has to be reconsidered, with an internal team member also, their employment has to be reconsidered. So again, it is not a naive approach. It’s not an approach that lets people get away with negative actions. It really is followed by the normal process of holding people accountable for their words and their actions, whether they are external or internal.

ALISON BEARD: The one example you had in the book that really stuck with me was the restaurant owner and how she dealt with employees that had come in late in a way that really made them change their behavior because they realized the impact it was having on others.

AMER KAISSI: Yeah. This story is from Erin Wade who started this restaurant that only serves mac and cheese. And the restaurant became so popular and very well known. But it wasn’t just about the quality of the food, it was about the culture that she built in within the restaurant. One of the issues that they had, which every restaurant has, which is people coming late. So she tried to do what most other restaurant managers would do, which is to reduce the pay when someone showed up late. Except there was a problem that it didn’t solve the problem. People kept on coming late.

So she borrowed a concept from restorative justice where she said to herself, “You know what? It’s not about docking their pay. It’s about making them realize how coming in late is affecting their team members and is affecting the customers.” So they changed the procedure where if someone came in late, the first thing they had to do was to go and apologize to their team members for being late, and then they had to apologize to the customers because the customers had to wait longer for their food to come because the restaurant was short-staffed.

And that change, that little tweak that they did resulted in significant introduction in the number of people who were showing late because they were starting to feel more responsible. So an underlying factor there is assuming that people have positive intent, assuming that wait staff are adults, they’re professionals, they want to do a good job, but just putting them in a situation to understand the impact of their actions on others, be it their teammates or customers.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And accepting that maybe there was a good reason that they were late. But it still did affect others. And so an apology is necessary. I’d love to hear a story of an executive who started out not this way at all, was mistrustful, was risk averse when it came to relationships with people, and then worked on all of these aspects of positive intent mindset in a way that improved their career and their team’s performance.

AMER KAISSI: Yes. I was working with a leader who was American, but went overseas to work in a European company. And when she started her work, because of a lot of cultural differences and a lot of different norms in the organization that she was not used to, a lot of distrust was generated between her and some of her team members.

So we talked about a number of different strategies. And one of them was assuming positive intent. One of them is withholding judgment, being curious, holding some of those one-on-one conversations in a way that is neutrall in a way where you’re not accusing others.

Six months later, after we had put this into practice, I mean, she came back and said, “It has been a game changer” – not only how she sees others, but how others see her as well. When you start extending those charitable assumptions towards other people, then they start also reciprocating, and then they extend similar assumptions toward you.

So this is on the professional side. I will also share one on the personal side. And this happened with one of my colleagues who was having some issues with her significant other. And applying the principles of positive intent, she came back in a few months and said, “These principles that we’ve talked about over that dinner have really saved my marriage.”

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point also. Because as we think about creating better relationships through assuming positive intent, it definitely does start in your personal life. And anything you can do in your personal life to improve it will enhance your professional life. So if I start the morning angry with my husband because he’s left his towel on the floor, and instead of thinking, “He’s so lazy,” I think, “Oh, he must have really been in a rush this morning.” Then when I open up my email and I see a colleague say something that could either frustrate me or not frustrate me, I’m less likely to get frustrated. Right? So if you start at home, you carry it through to work, and probably the reverse too.

Moving back into the professional, when a leader, particularly a C-suite leader, even the CEO, when someone like that models this kind of behavior and tries to spread it through the organization, even talking about it directly, what effects do you see? Have you seen companies greatly enhance performance and productivity and collaboration and all the things we want because of shifting to a positive intent mindset?

AMER KAISSI: Absolutely. There are a lot of examples. One of them is Axios, the company that does political articles. One of their principles is assuming positive intent. That’s one of their values. And when CEOs, when C-suite leaders start with that, they start with assumption that everyone is trying their best, they start with the assumption that team members are professionals, team members are here, are motivated, are engaged, they’re not just here for a paycheck, and that will help them see those team members in that light.

As a result, the team members start confirming that, and they start acting in those ways where they are going above and beyond. They are collaborating with others when they don’t have to collaborate. So they start confirming that. And that creates those cycles of trust. And as a result, we start seeing engagement going up. We start seeing trust becoming stronger, collaboration becoming better, but most importantly, people feel happier at work.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Well, it is a very difficult time to be assuming positive intent about the actions of others, Amer. So thank you so much for teaching us how to do it.

AMER KAISSI: Oh, this has been a treat. Thank you for having me.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Trinity University Professor Amer Kaissi. He wrote the book The Positive Intent Mindset: Exceptional Leadership Through Trust and Accountability. Here’s our conversation.

Next week, Adi checks in with HBS professor Linda Hill about the latest research on innovation and scaling.

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Thanks to our team: Senior producer Mary Dooe. Audio product manager Ian Fox. and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.