To work in a team environment, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to push others and remind others and annoy others and be on top of others to get them to do what you need. When you work all alone, this isn’t an issue, but in any real-world team context, you’ll have to get others to do what you need them to do. No one will be as excited about what you’re doing as you are.
Repeatedly reminding people to do what you need them to do has a common word for it: nagging. And you may even need to nag your boss. In fact, far too often, managers hire people to help compensate for their own lack of organization. How do you nag without being the person that no one, not even your boss, will like for all the nagging? It feels a bit like a catch-22 or a no-win situation: damned if you don’t nag (you’re not getting the others to give you what you need to do your job, not even your boss) but damned if you do nag (you’re the annoying, unbearable nagger.)
Here’s the trick to get the best of both worlds: to recognize that there is a very fine line between nagging and charm.
I used to think that nagging and charm were basically opposites. But perhaps like the high school intellectual’s observation that what they called Naziism and what they call communism were supposed to be extreme opposites on a continuum but it turned out to be a circle that wrapped around and the two extremes met and merged with only minor differences—I used to make that observation when I tried to impress people in my teenage years! —perhaps that same sort of reasoning does apply here. Maybe the two ends do wrap-around, with only a fine difference?
Nagging and Charm both come from the same spot: you want someone to do something (your mom nags you to eat your broccoli, but someone else really wants to convince the object of his-or-her affection that they should go out to a candlelit dinner together) and both use the same fundamental strategy: having one point and repeating until you get your way.
But it turns out, the way the repeating is done is what yields the opposite conclusions. The nagger says it directly, clearly, and repeats it again and again and again. Morgan, eat your broccoli. Morgan, eat your broccoli NOW. Morgan, no more fooling around, you need to eat your broccoli, or else you’ll need to go to bed right now!
But charmer also wants me to eat my broccoli, and perhaps even tells you upfront that they really want you to eat your broccoli. But then they’ll show up and tell you to have a song they wrote for you, and start strumming their guitar and sings, probably off-key, “Morgan ate his broccoli and felt so great. Then his stomach saw bliss and he could stay up so late!” Then the next day, the charmer says, “We’re going to build a tower of broccoli together, then knock it down, and eat it.” And so forth—until you just so deeply associate the broccoli with “fun” that you want to eat your broccoli.
But making something laborious into something fun is only one style of charm. There are many more—and what they all have in common is going about achieving the goal indirectly. These include the tone of your voice. The frequency of the requests. The subtexts of the words themselves. The body language. The reciprocity. The emotions associated with different acts, and how the different acts play together. And so forth, and so forth.
The details depend on your relationship with the characters involved and the context of the situation so it’s hard to advise in such a broad way. But merely recognizing and remembering that you will always be on this fine line and you want to fall onto the charm side goes a long way.
Of course, walking this tightrope is hard. So, if you can’t find that right nagging/charm balance, then you’ll be faced with the broader “to nag or not to nag, that is the question” situation. And with that, much better to nag too much than not nag enough. It is much better to have your boss view you as annoying, but you’re pushing all those other lazy bastards through to get what you need, even if it’s slow and takes time. On the other hand, if you just don’t want to nag or be annoying, nothing happens and you’re not even pushing hard to try to make it happen—that’s when the boss gets fed up with you.
