What is manipulation?

I looked up “manipulation” on dictionary.com and it said, ‘the act of manipulating someone’ — Clearly their grade school teacher didn’t tell them you can’t use the word to define itself.

 

You might be accused of being manipulative when in fact you're only maintaining boundaries and arguing for your position.

 

To help find a definition, I turned to my insightful and intellectually generous guests on this edition of Quick Hits.

 

Learning and Development Executive Dr. Hannah Hartwell defined manipulation as “harmful influence. You’re leveraging the mental and emotional sides of somebody else to get what you want.”

 

Stewart Wiggins, a fractional COO at Induna Advisers, noted that manipulation “can be used as a positive if you project it as a positive. I’ve been in leadership roles before where people indirectly reported to me. I had to lead those people through influence. We all had to accomplish the same goal, but because they didn’t report directly to me, I had to influence them to achieve that goal.”

 

Tim Hawkes, Managing Director of Unlimited Potential, warned that the danger of manipulation is that you can never be sure when it’s happening to you. “If you get mugged in the street, your first thought isn’t, ‘Oh I’ve been mugged.’ Your first thought is, ‘I feel terrible. What am I going to do?’ Then you come away half an hour later and somebody might say, ‘Man, you’ve been mugged.’ And you’ll know that’s what happened. I think it’s the same for manipulation.”

 

How would you define manipulation? Maybe more importantly, how do you know if you are manipulating someone or if they are manipulating you? (that Quick Hits will be posted tomorrow)

 

Connect with the panelists:
Tim Hawkes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timhawkes/

Stewart Wiggins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewart-wiggins/

Dr Hannah Hartwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahrhartwell/

Dr Robyn Odegaard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robynodegaard/

 

Want a summary of the Quick Hits I post every week, plus the links to the LinkedIn pages of each of the panelist to show up in your in-box every week? Just let me know where to send it: https://drrobynodegaard.com/quick-hits-notifications/

 

#QuickHits are designed to exercise your brain by letting you listen in on an unscripted conversation to get other people's thoughts on pertinent subjects. If you would like to join a conversation or have a topic you would like to hear discussed, please message me. https://www.DrRobynOdegaard.com

 

#Manipulation #Influence #Negotiation