The Ghosts of Clients Present

Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., PhD

President, Ascent Leadership Networks

A year ago, Ascent had a dozen proposals in play. Clients asked for them, and we provided them. Once I have provided a proposal, I always receive an answer, whether yes, no, or “let’s discuss further.” That’s been true for over thirty years in this business.

Until this past year.

In the past year, half of the clients with our proposals “ghosted” us. In other words, they simply ceased to communicate with us, no matter how many emails we sent or calls we made. Others delayed months longer than expected before finally informing us that the project would not move forward.

These are not random cold call sales efforts; these are known clients with whom we have had discussions over weeks or months, and who requested a specific proposal from us.

Winning and losing deals is normal – many people marketing their services get their satisfaction out of “closing the deal,” and failing some just increases the satisfaction of successes.[i] But being “ghosted” is a new phenomenon to me. Was I doing something wrong?

I know many people in the professional and business services industries – 975 connections on LinkedIn, in fact – and almost every time I spoke to one, I asked about their experiences. Virtually everyone had had the same experience. Deals were talking longer and longer to close, and some clients were disappearing rather than closing. When standard business practice shifts this dramatically and on this scale, there’s a reason:

Affiliation motive.

Say What?

Affiliative motivation is defined as “an [emotional] concern over establishing, maintaining, or restoring a positive affective relationship with another person or group of persons.”[ii] In other words, people with a lot of this implicit motive want to have friendly relationships with others.

It’s probably the commonest of the Three Social Motives that occupy 85% of our daily thinking time; after all, we’re social animals by nature. People who are particularly high in this motive generally want to protect personal relationships and worry when they are threatened. In other words, they are emotionally engaged in making sure they have and maintain friendly connections.

But if people with this motive care about relationships so much, how can this explain “ghosting?” Shouldn’t people with this motive be especially focused on maintaining a relationship, and thus respond? And why just this motive, if there are three? Why would this one predominate?

Motivational Arousal

Some situations pump up one motive selectively, enough to overwhelm the other two, and sometimes the person. Such situations can produce atypical patterns of behavior, especially if they last long enough, and even lead to small permanent shifts in one’s motive pattern.

If you see friends and families at risk – severe threats to strong affiliative relationships – it will strongly arouse the Affiliation motive. If a threat occurs to most people, you’ll see a shift in the market overall as well, as most people suddenly have more Affiliation motive energizing them than before.

Starting in 2020, we faced a massive, global pandemic. As of this date, nearly seven million people worldwide have died of COVID-19, and there were at least a hundred times that many cases, many of which led to hospitalization and long-COVID cases among the survivors.[iii] We expect to need regular boosters, as we do with influenza, so despite the remarkably fast development of effective vaccines, this major threat is not yet ended, after over three years.

Paradoxical Results

Implicit motives can sometimes seem to act in reverse, because not only do they create positive energy towards their goals, they also create anxiety around failing those goals. Achievement motive, for example, energizes someone to meet and beat goals, but also leads people to avoid goals that are too difficult through a “fear of failure.” Influence motive energizes someone to make an impact on others, but arouses anxiety about making a poor impact. Coming back to Affiliation and our ghostly clients, if you are especially anxious about threats to a relationship, what might happen to that relationship if you tell someone “no” for something they want?

And here is the solution to this conundrum. When weighing the emotional cost of avoiding someone – “ghosting” – versus confronting someone with a negative, avoidance may feel safer, or at least less threatening, than a confrontation that could, in theory, end a relationship.

“How irrational!” you may be thinking. “It’s just business – rejecting a project, not a person.” Quite right. It’s not rational: it’s emotional. Implicit motives are nonconscious emotional drives, which can catch you off guard precisely because you are not consciously aware of them; you only know how you feel in the moment. And the higher the anxiety level, the more likely that you will act out of your emotions and not from your thinking, even if you fully understand the situation consciously. Emotion drives out thoughts; accepting logic intellectually does not necessarily make it easier to act against motives.

The pandemic increased the amount of general anxiety found across the population – one study found it to be prevalent in as much as 27.3% of the population, and higher in particular subgroups – which meant we had an overall “noise level” of anxiety, which might be further triggered by other recent world events, or aroused in more of the population.[iv]  The real relationship threats we have faced aroused anxious Affiliation motive in particular.

Thus, the profound relationship threats we have faced have made it harder for people to face even a minor threat to any relationship. The prevalence of anxiety and even fear have caused people to make a judgment call about what emotions – and how much of them – they can face now. Sometimes, people decide to avoid them entirely.

Ghostbusting

Is there a way to counter this? After all, if someone refuses to engage at all with you, how can you even affect them? It’s a tricky question, and our informal survey of people in this field suggests it’s a widespread challenge, with no easy solution.

But again, Affiliation – like any motive – works in both directions. It can arouse anxiety, or it can build stronger connections. Expressing concern for another person as a person on that level can confront the fear and anxiety at its source, and reduce it. Wondering if you are liked is the source of this anxiety; knowing you are drains it away.

The world has undoubtedly changed in many ways due to the pandemic, ranging from remote working patterns to dealing with client ghosts; we cannot yet know to what degree this change is permanent, but for those dealing with client engagements we may need more tools in the toolbox than we had in the past. New precedents have been set, and we must learn to respond to them. One way is by using Affiliation instead of letting it derail you.

Business people often see affiliative behaviors as separate from business, and understandably, but human beings are not so neat. We feel that awareness of the whole person, and empathy for them, can help both the business and the people behind it.

Notes

[i] Achievement motive is the cause of that – if you win every time, it’s not a challenge. Studies have shown that the most energizing point for many tasks is around 70-80% chance of success.

[ii] Heyns, R. W., Veroff, J., and Atkinson, J. W. (1958). A scoring manual for the affiliation motive. In J. W. Atkinson (Ed.), Motives in fantasy, action and society . Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1958, pp. 205-218

[iii] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[iv] Saeed, H., Eslami, A., Nassif, N.T., Simpson, A.M., and Lal, S. (2022). “Anxiety linked to COVID-19: A systematic review comparing anxiety rates in different populations. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Feb; 19(4): 2189. (doi: 10.3390/ijerph19042189).