Before asking people for something, ask yourself if you have met their needs.

Today I was listening to a colleague discussing some lessons he'd learned from research. The one that jumped out at me was a meeting with some college instructors, at which lunch had been provided to sweeten their involvement in a project - but the food provided hadn't been great (greasy junk food, basically - crisps and sausage rolls and so on) and had cost £200. The people who actually attended the lunch had thought it was a terrible waste of limited resources - they would have been much happier if that money could have been spent on a pub lunch for each of them (and then they could have eaten something they actually wanted). And it set my colleague's project back by the simple act of eroding goodwill. He said that it actually put that part of the project behind, relative to project partners at other institutions.

And it's easy to cast judgement on a bunch of teachers for being picky about what they got given to eat (because hey, at least it was free, right?), but actually, it does matter a great deal to people that you spend money appropriately; resources in education are notoriously scarce. And regardless of your budget, it's important to show colleagues that the work you're doing together - their involvement and their opinions - matters to you.

This made me think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The meeting my colleague described was pitched somewhere towards the top of Maslow's pyramid: it dealt with some higher-order, conceptual issues which assumed that people's needs were being met at the lower levels. But if you don't address the the fundamentals - the things that form the base of the pyramid - then what people will remember about a meeting or workshop is the stuff that impacts on those basics: that they were freezing cold or the food was awful or that something was wasteful or inappropriate. You need to satisfy all those needs at the base of the pyramid before you can start addressing the higher issues and still expect to have people's complete attention and respect.