Recently while delivering a safety course we were greeted with the phrase, “yeah but this is all just manipulation,” which caused us to go back to the dictionary and find out. The dictionary wasn’t conclusive as to whether manipulation means good or evil. The person who said it had some reason to dislike what we were saying, and to this day we’re not sure what it was, but their label of manipulation (we can only assume) had negative connotations. From our view, yes, you could call all acts of influence and leadership “manipulation,” even cooking is just the manipulation of food to make it taste good.

Here are some examples of positive manipulation:  

  • Distracting the kids because they’re just about to find all their Christmas presents and it’s three weeks till the 25th  
  • Getting someone to come down from a ladder that is very dangerously set up and risks them falling  
  • Putting signs up so people can find their way  
  • Interjecting in a meeting to pull it back on topic  
  • C.P.R.
  • Posing questions to enable a team to come up with new ideas  
  • …etc.  

The punchline here is, yes, you can use science and leadership skills for good, or evil, but that doesn’t mean the tools are one, or the other, it’s what you do with them.

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