Assume Positive Intent

One obstacle to approaching hard conversations with altruism is other people. Other people make us grumpy. They’re not good at their jobs. They have it out for us. They have secret agendas. They’re stuck in their ways. They will never admit if their team is wrong.

All those thoughts might pass through your mind in the run up to a hard conversation. Some might even be true. But often they’re not, and even ones that are true don’t have to stop you from having a productive hard conversation.

Many years ago I was a leader in a good sized IT organization. We had about a hundred people on the application development side of things, where I worked, and about another fifty or so on the operations and system administration side of things. The two groups worked in separate buildings a short city block apart and each group reported up to a vice president. 

Oh, the wars between those two organizations! Requests from application developers were met with eye rolls and sarcasm from system administrators. Admins paged at two in the morning were appalled at the shoddy development work that had released a buggy app in production while the admins were the first to get paged. We once had a leadership team meeting that involved all the leaders from both departments. In the spirit of peace, I brought some delicious homemade pumpkin bread. Only people from my department ate it, and the managers from the other department carefully ignored it. That pretty much summed up our relationship. 

Then my department got a new VP who was determined to fix this unproductive relationship. She worked with the other VP to turn things around. The VPs got the rest of the leadership together to develop a set of core principles that we would use to work together. These ten working agreements were printed on card stock and we all carried them around in our day planners, because yes, my friends, this was the early aughts and that’s how we rolled. 

Two of the principles were “assume positive intent,” and the even more pithy, “no stinking thinking.” Stinking thinking was the opposite of assuming positive intent. It meant projecting the worst possible motivations and actions on people you’re working with. 

Now at the time, I was as likely to enjoy a good gripe session as the next person, but I took these two principles to heart. When I did, I found it transformed how I worked with the mysterious teams in the other building. When an admin asked me a question I didn’t assume he was trying to make me look like an idiot. When someone turned down a request, I assumed they had a good reason and dug in to learn more. Simply by changing my point of view on this one thing I became more curious, learned more, and had better results working with these “difficult” teams. I gained a lot of empathy for the duties and work of the these other teams. I also opened a tiny crack in the window where they could see that I also was just trying to do a good job and build good software. We went from endless finger-pointing to actually working together to troubleshoot complex problems. It never got easy, but it did become possible.

My husband has his own way of saying this. He says “most people want to do a good job.” A lot of misunderstandings and disagreements simply come down to different beliefs about what constitutes a good job. When you assume the other person is trying to do a good job, it dramatically improves how you interact with them. 

Here are two final take aways about assuming positive intent and they are both super pragmatic.   

First, you can absolutely fake until you make it. If you can’t bring yourself to believe in your heart that this person has good intent, you can act as if they do. The key thing is to truly act that way. You can’t simply slap a fake smile on your face and then treat them like a venomous snake. But you can lock your misgivings away in your heart and then just get on with it. Lots of times before too long you’ll realize that you’re not even faking it any more, because you’ve had some insights that put those misgivings to rest. 

Second, assuming positive intent will save your ass from embarrassment time and time again. Have you ever gone in to a conversation hopping mad and knowing the other person is wrong, wrong, wrong—only to find out you didn’t have all the facts? Maybe they hadn’t done what you thought they had. Maybe they had done it, but with more context now you agree it was the right call. When you assume there’s a good reason for whatever is going on, you will save yourself from many apologies and fractured relationships. It’s a total bonus!

Your Dot Release: Pick one person that you need to work well with but who rubs you the wrong way. I’m not talking about someone who is truly a sociopath or has done you harm. I’m talking about someone who tends to throw up obstacles or slow you down or not give you time to think, i.e. someone you just find a pain to work with. Before your next conversation with them think about what assuming positive intent would look like in that conversation. Decide if you can get your head and heart there or if you need to “act as if” for this next encounter. Now go have that conversation and see how differently it goes.

As always, I love to hear from you. Hit reply to send an email right to me and tell me how it went! 

This article is part of a series about Hard Conversations. 

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