Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Sixty years ago, Robert Lefton co-founded a discreet little firm called Psychological Associates. At first, he and his partner combined business consulting with a traditional psychological practice—at least, until a patient with paranoid schizophrenia plopped down next to one of the top CEOs in St. Louis and said he was about to set off a bomb. Lefton wound up focusing on sane communication, motivation, and leadership. He’s become a sort of “shrink to the stars” for the corporate world, and PA’s reach has gone global.
How did you move into workplace psychology?
Because we were in Clayton, most of the adults who came for counseling were business people. One client would go on and on about all the mistakes he made hiring people. He said, “Why don’t you come do the interviews and test them?” I said I didn’t know anything about the insurance business. One day he said, “Do you mind if I give you some feedback? You are risk-averse, overly cautious, fearful, and resistant to change. I’ve offered you this idea five times, and you won’t help me.” So I said, “OK, I’ll make a try.” We tested verbal ability, cognitive power, and the courage to close a sale—and by God, we picked far better than he had.
When you started training salespeople, you went back to Freud?
We were trying to teach selling by telling people they had to keep their id in check, because the id can drive us to things that are not very ethical, but it also gives a certain amount of energy, and that’s why we have the superego… We laughed at ourselves afterward, but it went over beautifully. People knew so little about behavior, they begged for another session, and several of the salespeople became more productive. Thank God for the placebo effect.
And you used new research in motivation and effectiveness to come up with your own model? We put it in quadrants. Interactions at work occurred along two axes: hostility and warmth; dominance and submissiveness. If your style was dominant and confrontational and you cared only about results, not people, your behavior fell in Quadrant 1. Submissive, cautious, structure-oriented behavior without much drive or sociability fell in Q2. Behavior aimed at pleasing other people, with little concern for structure or results, was Q3. The most effective interactions were in Q4: highly considerate of others and highly concerned with results. It isn’t as simple as it sounds—we all move among the quadrants—but it’s a great way to start.
You relied only on word-of-mouth—how did you develop a national, then international reach? One day I got a call from Motorola: Would I come to Tucson and talk to 16 of their most talented people about interactive behavior? I brought the film Twelve Angry Men for examples of different types. Next I was asked to speak at the American Society of Training and Development, and so many people showed up, they had to move the talk to an auditorium. I came back with a stack of cards from IBM, Coca-Cola, Dupont, Ford… Work with those companies took us overseas.
How did you refine your method? I used to help select A.G. Edwards select brokers. Ben Edwards paid for a sabbatical so I could develop a training program for them, and that moved us into role-playing and taping and critiques. Back then, sales was carnival barking—you do tricks, you tell dirty jokes, you fix the guy up with a girl. What we got into was the science of selling.
What were people doing wrong? People with a healthy dose of Q1 tended to use brief assertions or leading questions. They didn’t listen, they didn’t sum up what the person was saying, they didn’t reflect back the person’s feelings, and they didn’t pause or ask, “What else?” In sales, the goal is to learn the needs of the customer, and it’s impossible to do that unless you know how to inquire. Also, salespeople are always describing their product’s features. When we taught them to probe someone’s values and focus on the benefit to them, sales to tough customers went up 60 percent.
Why do so many bosses make bad hires? They’re terrible interviewers. They end up doing all the talking, and the candidate sits and listens, and in the end it’s amazing how little information’s been gathered. The two best ways to predict performance are background information and tests.
What’s the stickiest sort of job? CEOs who thinks they know everything about leadership and are oblivious to how they’re coming across. They’re managing in a chaotic Q1 way, intimidating and demeaning people, and everybody’s scared to give them feedback because it would mean putting their job on the line.
How has work changed in 60 years? It is so depersonalized. People sit in their offices and just read email all day. I know a leader who leads through email, and he feels he’s a great communicator. I think eventually that’s gonna bite him. Tech has made it easier to be Q2 and think you’re being Q4, because you’re sending things to people.
Is it tricky managing across so many generations? It’s not only multiple generations, it’s diversity of all kinds. I’m blown away by how inclusiveness and diversity have grabbed hold, and by the progress that companies are making when they have that as a priority. I remember going to New York for Merrill Lynch in the ’70s and ’80s. I never saw an African-American, and maybe I’d see one woman. I visited a couple years ago, and half the people in the room were women, and a significant number of people were people of color. Has there ever been a country that has changed its values as much as ours has?
The old loyalty’s gone, too; that sense of reciprocal obligation, and a job that’d last for decades… Even five years ago, it was seen as favorable when a person stayed at a job for more than five years. Today, companies like people who move around a lot. I think that’s a shame. We’ll get these resumes that say they were there a year and a half and they increased this or that by a million dollars—that’s a bunch of bull. Of course, the companies haven’t shown much loyalty either. A lot of companies say at orientation, “Don’t play to stay here for the rest of your career.” I don’t particularly care for that. It creates a funny kind of culture.
Centene’s one of your big clients—do you counsel its CEO? Oh, yeah. Their top leadership heavily endorses the concept of Q4 and trying to role model it as best they can. They have in their mission statement that they want to be a Q4 culture. We also do succession planning, helping companies identify their greatest potential leaders. Centene has an organizational room where all this data is kept, and a lot of it’s supplied by us.
What would you tell a CEO aspiring to be a great leader? That he’s got to develop a culture that’s open, candid, and transparent, and he has to believe that involving people is worth the effort.
Why do so many people resist transparency? Candor hurts. You hear what reality really is, rather than what you think it is.
What brings out the best from people? When an organization is under stress, and the company’s in peril. It’s like wartime. People come together, differences are minimized, and people think of the company’s welfare. You get more collaboration. Sometimes I kiddingly say, because some companies become so lethargic, “The only way you’re going to get any movement here is to create a crisis.” That’s one of the real issues we have with government: You have to work through a huge bureaucracy to get anything done, and there are massive doses of Q2 behavior, which is really passive-aggressive behavior. It’s a combination of hostility and submissiveness.
Does a bureaucracy somehow foster that response? Behavior is maintained by rewards. Follow the rewards, and you can understand the culture.
What do you dread dealing with? A dysfunctional team at the top. In one, the vice president of operations hadn’t talked to the vice president of marketing for five years, and the CEO didn’t know they hadn’t talked—which also tells you a lot about that CEO.
Are workplaces less fun than they used to be, in the days of three-martini lunches and pranks and sneaking off to play golf? I don’t have any data for that, I just have a feeling, but I do feel people are a little bit edgy and fearful. It could be because of all the change we’re going through. I’ve never seen change this fast. You couple that with all the mergers, businesses buying out other businesses—it creates a confusion in people, a lack of security. People say they love their jobs but they realize their company could be sold any day. They live with that fear. Now, couple that with the world situation and the political divisiveness. This is unheard-of divisiveness. You combine all those things, and it has an ugly feel to it.
