On Trying to Remake Others

Do people ever change?” It’s the question I’m asked most frequently by frustrated members of family businesses. They may be referring to a sister’s rigidity about policies and paperwork, or a brother-in-law’s lack of respect for others’ time. It may be Mom’s explosiveness toward employees who don’t measure up, or Dad’s closed-mindedness.

Those who ask always seem to be stuck with a family member or key employee whose behavior has become intolerable. Some are hopeful that a psychologist might be able to cure the person, but on the whole, lay opinion seems to be: “No, people don’t change; you have to just live with them or replace them.”

Is that sadly true?

It cannot be absolutely true, because most of us clearly continue acquiring knowledge and skills all our lives. Take Walter, for example, a 35-year-old who’s been working for 10 years with his father, brother, and sister. All three of them say the same thing: Walter is the nicest guy in the world, but he can’t keep a deadline of any kind, and he always has an excuse. They even know a label for Walter’s behavior: “passive-aggressive.”

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Walter’s learning didn’t stop 10 years ago. He is the computer literate member of the family. He flies hang gliders. He buys boat engines, which a division of the company rebuilds profitably thanks to Walter’s continually growing technical expertise and market tracking. During the years when his family has been bemoaning the lack of change in him, Walter has married and become a parent. Curiously, his wife seems not to have noticed the annoying pattern that drives his family nuts.

Walter’s family expressed the question as one of personality: “Do passive-aggressive people ever change?” This implies that it isn’t a matter of Walter changing specific kinds of behavior. They assume it’s the whole person that needs to be changed. Can we change him into a different kind of person?

The answer to that is no. But can people change their attitudes and behavior? Of course they can, within limits, if they acknowledge they have contributed to the problem. People who are unfortunate enough to blame every one but themselves for in terpersonal problems are beyond treatment by any intervention known to the behavioral sciences. (I predict that the first psychologist to win a Nobel Prize will be whoever, in the next century, finds a cure for people who insist there’s nothing wrong with them.) Will Walter acknowledge that his deadline failures and excuse-making in the family business are problematic behavior? Does he want to change?

We all have a range of behavior from which we select our customary responses to different situations. For example, people who are rude and belligerent when they feel threatened also have in their repertoires the ability to be patient and considerate. It’s not that the person is incapable of considering others’ sensitivities; it’s just that he does so under some circumstances and not others.

An example would be the guy who is constantly making racially and sexually offensive “jokes.” “That’s just the way I am,” he says to those who criticize him. The critics, however, might then ask: “Do you tell those jokes to your mother-in-law? To your minister’s wife?” No, he admits, he doesn’t, which proves that, when he wants to be, he can be selective about where and to whom he tells such jokes. The behavior is under his control.

I apply this principle when working with business partners who don’t communicate well with each other, who are “bad listeners.” Often these partners listen quite attentively when dealing with customers. Instead of trying to teach them whole new patterns of behavior, I learned to focus on the communication skills they routinely apply with customers. It’s infinitely easier to coach people to extend their existing repertoire to new situations than it is to teach them entirely new forms of behavior.

In Walter’s case, the challenge would be to persuade him to be as responsible in his business relationships as he is with his wife and children. “I don’t disappoint my wife,” he freely admits, “because when I disagree with her I say so in the first place.” When he’s given an assignment he’s not comfortable with in the business, however, he doesn’t show the same assertiveness. He keeps quiet about it, and his resentment shows up in his attitude toward deadlines. Walter’s task, then, is to learn to express his disagreements with family members openly, as he does with his wife.

People change in small steps. No one in her right mind is going to abandon all the defenses she has built up over years of experience—for example, with her siblings in the family business—just because some family therapist pinpoints her defensiveness as part of the problem. What she might do, though, is lower her defenses just a little in an area where the risk is small. Then, if her slightly greater openness meets with responses that are slightly more constructive—or more respectful, or more dependable, or less insulting—she may move in the direction of lowering her defenses just a touch.

Walter’s behavior is another kind of defense. He isn’t going to abandon the whole strategy that has protected him for years. But he can watch for the occasion to test a different approach, in circumstances where the risks aren’t too great and there’s a chance family members might notice and appreciate the change. In order to encourage Walter to change, we have to give him a different aspect of ourselves to respond to.

Change needs to be gradual for another reason: If it isn’t, the group is likely to undermine it. Everyone claims to believe in change, but this usually comes down to wishing that other people would change their obnoxious ways without substituting anything new. When it comes to positively supporting the changes their family members actually make, it can be another story. The reality is that families, like all human organizations, resist radical change more effectively than they promote it. “Better the devil ye know than the devil ye know not” seems to be a universal principle.

Finally, people change developmentally. They enter new stages of life with different agendas and concerns. They mature. A change in behavior that would be very difficult at age 30, when a young adult is struggling to define his identity and individuality, may be easier at 45 with the desire for rejuvenating challenges. More than one 70-year-old who can’t be convinced of anything has softened considerably by the time he reaches a ripe 80.

When researchers say that personality is relatively stable over the life span, this only means that how Walter compares with other 35-year-olds is similar to where he will stand relative to other 45-, 55-, and 65-year-olds as the years go by. It doesn’t mean there isn’t any change with age.

I have known many Walters who did change. One learned to recognize his habitual impulse to react “passive-aggressively,” and, instead, to express his objections openly before accepting a commitment. Another eliminated his constant “kidding” put-downs of his wife and sisters. It isn’t at all unusual for men and women whose eyes have been opened to the problems they are causing to start taking the initiative to communicate proactively, or dress more professionally, or take more responsibility.

So although we therapists have no magic wands for changing personality, we are able to help the Walters of the world, if and when they acknowledge they contribute to the problem. We can help them extend their repertoire of effective social skills into domains and relationships where they have not chosen to use them in the past. We should expect them to change only gradually, however, taking small risks, testing the waters, and seeing what kind of responses they get from their families and co-workers before developing new habits. Finally, the degree of change they are capable of will depend on whether they have mastered the developmental challenges up to that point in their lives and achieved an appropriate level of maturity.

Those of us who toil in the realm of family dynamics have learned to push for slow, evolutionary shifts rather than a revolution in anyone’s basic personality. No, a person doesn’t change into someone else. But we can all stand a little refinement.

Ken Kaye of Kaye & McCarthy in Skokie, IL, is a family therapist who works exclusively with family businesses.

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