7 Give a Dog a Good Name

There is an old saying: “Give a dog a bad name and you may as well shoot him.” It means that we respond to what others believe about us. If a young person is labeled a “troublemaker” or a “delinquent,” you can bet that they will live up to that reputation! And, by God, why shouldn’t they? They have already been condemned and feel they have nothing to lose.

But what would happen if instead, a person took the time to find something redeeming in that other person? Something fine and good, something to be nourished? Everyone has at least one quality that can be respected and admired. So why not offer people the opportunity to demonstrate their strengths rather than find fault in their weaknesses?

Someone who put this philosophy into action brilliantly was a fourth-grade teacher from Brooklyn, New York, Mrs. Ruth Hopkins. On the first day of school, she looked at her class roster with the excitement and pleasure of starting a new term. But as she went down the list of students, her heart sank. In her class this year she would have “Terrible Tommy,” the school’s most notorious “bad boy.”

His last teacher had constantly complained about him to colleagues, the principal, and anyone else who would listen—to no avail. Tommy was not just mischievous; he caused serious discipline problems in the class. He picked fights with other students, was fresh to the teacher, and seemed to grow worse as he got older. His only redeeming feature was his ability to learn and master the schoolwork easily.

Mrs. Hopkins decided to face the “Tommy problem” immediately. When she greeted her new students, she made little comments to each of them: “Rose, that’s a pretty dress you’re wearing,” “Alicia, I hear you draw beautifully.” When she came to Tommy, she looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Tommy, I understand you are a natural leader. I’m going to depend on you to help me make this class the best one in the whole fourth grade this year.”

She reinforced this over the first few days by complimenting everything he did, and commenting on how this or that showed what a smart, talented boy he was. With that reputation to live up to, even a nine-year-old couldn’t let her down—and he didn’t.

I once talked to an officer of the Exchange Buffet, a chain of twenty-six restaurants that operated on the honor system. The Exchange Buffets were founded fifty years earlier and had never handed a customer a check. As you leave you simply tell the cashier what you owe—and that’s what you pay.

“But don’t you have anyone to watch?” I asked the officer in amazement. “Certainly not all your customers are honest!”

“We keep no watch at all,” he replied. “Maybe some people do cheat—we really don’t know. But we know the system works. If it didn’t, we could hardly have stayed in business for half a century!”

The Exchange Buffets let the public know that they feel their customers are honest, so everyone—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief—everyone lives up to the reputation of honesty that is bestowed upon them.

But what if you have a situation where a good worker begins to turn in shoddy work? Of course you can fire him or her, but is that the best solution? You can berate the worker, but that usually causes resentment. Here’s how Henry Henke, a service manager for a large truck dealership in Lowell, Indiana, handled it:

Mr. Henke had a good mechanic whose work had been less than satisfactory of late. It had become slipshod and not completed in time. But instead of bawling him out or threatening him, Mr. Henke called him into his office for a heart-to-heart talk.

“Bill,” he said, “you are a fine mechanic. You have been in this line of work for a good number of years. You have repaired many vehicles to the customers’ satisfaction. In fact, we’ve had a number of compliments about the good work you have done. Yet, of late, the time you take to complete each job has been increasing and your work has not been up to your own standards. Because you have been such an outstanding mechanic in the past, I felt sure you would want to know that I am not happy with this situation, and perhaps jointly we could find some way to correct the problem.”

Bill responded that he hadn’t realized he had been falling down in his duties and assured his boss that the work he was getting was not out of his range of expertise and he would try to improve in the future.

Did he do it? You can be sure he did. He once again became a fast and thorough mechanic. With that reputation Mr. Henke had given him to live up to, how could he do anything else but turn out work comparable to that which he had done in the past?

So if you want to influence a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait was already one of his or her outstanding characteristics. Shakespeare said, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” And it might be well to assume and state openly that the other party has the virtue that you want them to develop. Give them a fine reputation to live up to and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.

Just ask Dr. Martin Fitzhugh, a dentist from Dublin, Ireland. One morning he was shocked when one of his patients pointed out to him that the metal cup holder which she was using to rinse her mouth was not very clean. True, the patient drank from the paper cup, not the holder, but it certainly was not professional to use tarnished equipment.

When the patient left, Dr. Fitzhugh retreated to his private office to write a note to Martin, the man who came twice a week to clean his office. He wrote:

My dear Martin,

I see you so seldom, so I thought I’d take the time to thank you for the fine job of cleaning you’ve been doing. By the way, I thought I’d mention that since two hours, twice a week, is a very limited amount of time, please feel free to work an extra half hour from time to time if you feel you need to do those “once-in-a-while” things like polishing the cup holders and the like. I, of course, will pay you for the extra time.

“The next day, when I walked into my office,” Dr. Fitzhugh reported, “my desk had been polished to a mirror-like finish, as had my chair, which I nearly slid out of. When I went into the treatment room, I found the shiniest, cleanest chrome-plated cup holder I had ever seen nestled in its receptacle. I had given the cleaning man a fine reputation to live up to, and because of this small gesture he outperformed all his past efforts.”

Remember, if you want to change the attitude or behavior of others without arousing resentment or giving offense, use…

PRINCIPLE 7

Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.