Andrew Brodsky shows how to sharpen your virtual communication skills.
You’ll Learn
- What your emails and texts say about you
- The PING framework for efficient virtual communication
- Why in-person meetings aren’t always better
About Andrew
Andrew Brodsky is an award-winning professor, management consultant and virtual communications expert at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Poets&Quants selected Andrew as one of the “World’s 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40.” He is an expert in workplace technology, communication and productivity and serves as the CEO of Ping Group. Andrew earned a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School and BS from The Wharton School. He currently lives with his wife and two rescue dogs in Austin.
- Book: Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication
- LinkedIn: Andrew Brodsky
- Website: ABrodsky.com
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Hex Kitchen by Stephanie Fazio
- Sketch: When a Text Conversation Goes Very Wrong – Key & Peele
- Email Urgency Bias (Research): “You don’t need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails” by Laura Glurge and Vanessa Bohns
Thank You, Sponsors!
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Andrew Brodsky Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Andrew, welcome!
Andrew Brodsky
Thanks for having me on.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom of your book, Ping, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a particularly surprising discovery you’ve made as you’ve been teaching this stuff, researching this stuff, and putting the book together.
Andrew Brodsky
The most surprising discovery that I’ve seen in my research is that there’s a whole lot more nonverbal information we send in our text-based communication and low-richness communication, like email, instant messaging, than we realize we do. So, when most people talk about it, they’re like, “Well, you don’t send any nonverbal behavior via email,” but we do.
So, typos can relay emotion, time of day a message sent can relay power. There are things like how we interpret emojis is not as straightforward as one would expect. So, there’s a whole lot of other information we don’t even realize we’re sending that other people use to interpret what we’re saying.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Andrew, this calls to mind, have you seen this Key & Peele sketch, where they have an escalating misunderstanding?
Andrew Brodsky
I actually use that clip in my class to teach when I teach virtual negotiations.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent choice.
Andrew Brodsky
It’s one of my favorite ones.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess that’s part of what makes you one of the world’s best business school professors under 40, Andrew. Kudos.
Andrew Brodsky
Thank you.
Pete Mockaitis
So, absolutely, so that’s intriguing there in that there is more that we are sending. I guess we don’t even know that we’re sending it. And then I guess there is still the risk of misinterpretation of those signals, like, “Oh, he sent it at midnight, therefore, this means that,” whereas, that assumption or interpretation could still be off, but some kind of thing got embedded by the time itself of when it was sent.
Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite studies that researchers have on this, they use an example or metaphor to describe this process. So, what they do is, basically, tap a song out on your desk with your fist, and then imagine what, if you were to tap it out to someone else, what are the odds they’re going to guess it? And most people guess really high percentage. But in reality, very few percentages of people get it right.
The reason being is that when we tap out the song on our desk, we hear the music in our head as we’re tapping it, so it seems really obvious to us. The problem is, when someone’s listening to it, they’re not hearing that same music. They’re coming from their own set of assumptions, interests, and they’re like, “I don’t know what song it is.”
And the same thing happens with our email. When we’re typing out emails, we hear the emotion in our head as we’re typing it, so it seems really obvious to us. But the thing is, when someone else gets it, they’re not hearing the same emotion. For instance, if a boss sends a sarcastic email, they need to be humorous to their subordinate.
If they have an anxious subordinate, they’re going to be like, “Uh-oh, my boss is mad at me, or being condescending,” because they’re coming from somebody that’s very different. So, we all read information, whether it’s emails, or instant messages, with our different tone, so we gotta remember that they’re not hearing the same music we are when we’re writing this stuff.
Pete Mockaitis
That is a beautiful comparison point in terms of what’s in our head and what we’re actually transmitting that can go there. And it’s funny, my kids, we just got a keyboard, and they’re experiencing this right now, and they sort of spontaneously played the tapping game, and they were flabbergasted of their own discovery and how their sibling was unable to pick up on the cue, because, indeed, all you have is rhythm when you’re tapping as opposed to pitch, completely missing that I was doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” because there might be multiple things that would have somewhat similar rhythms.
So, that’s fantastic. Well, so we’re going to dig into a little bit of the pro tips, the do’s and don’ts, and the best practices. But I would love to hear, maybe, just what is at stake here in terms of whether we master this stuff or we limp along and do okay with it, like the average professional?
Andrew Brodsky
So, I’m guessing everyone who’s listening has seen some email from some executive gone viral that’s extremely embarrassing, or those videos during COVID of executives, like, doing a horrible job of laying off people. Like, we’ve all seen these things go crazy viral. But those are the mistakes we generally think about when it comes to virtual communication. Those like big ones that went viral, but there’s a whole lot of other interactions that are meaningful.
They don’t have to go viral for it to impact yourself, your relationship, your career. So just every day, how are you presenting yourself to your boss, to your clients, to your teammates, is meaningful, and these things add up. And, especially when we’re interacting virtually, and we’re not standing in front of the other person, communication serves an important role. So, there’s our work, and in most cases, there’s not objective measures for work, whether you’re in accounting, human resources, whatever else. Most of our jobs don’t have 100% clear objective metrics.
And then on the other side, it’s on evaluating that. And also, it could just be a simple conversation between two people, and they’re trying to evaluate how engaged you are. And the thing is, they’re making subjective evaluations of this, because there’s just no objective way to evaluate most of these things. And the filter between your actual work, your effort, your engagement in conversation, and their evaluations is your communication.
So, that is what drives how people perceive these things. So, making sure you can communicate effectively across any mode has been shown to change outcomes everywhere from building trust, to how productive, or how high a performer you seem, how good of a leader you are, how good your outcomes are in negotiations. These things are impactful because that’s what drives perceptions, often so more times in reality than the actual work or effort you’re putting into the situation.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really rings true. And we, humans, are not perfectly rational. There’s an understatement for you, Andrew, it’s so fascinating, and maybe you can share the actual science behind this to make it all the more real. But I find that our moods, emotions are not giving us reliably accurate information, you know?
And I’m not talking about, like, major sort of mood disorder diagnoses or anything. Just like terms if we are feeling cranky on one day and see the same stimulus, as we’re feeling well-rested and chipper on another, what we interpret about the stimulus is totally different, even though the objective reality or forecast is unchanged by our internal mood states.
And so, then, if there’s little things we’re doing that are annoying people with regard to our use or lack thereof of emojis, our grammar approaches, single spacing, double spacing after a period, the quality of our lighting or camera or microphone, any of these things that don’t really matter do impact the recipient’s mood, and then their evaluation or judgment of you, like, how competent and sharp you are as a professional.
And so, I’ve seen this on both sides of the table. And I’d love it if you could share, is there any super compelling research that shows just how powerful these effects can be?
Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, and there’s a ton of things I talk about in my book that, in theory, we shouldn’t have to do, but we all make these judgments of people, even though they’re not really rational. So, one of the good examples is when it comes to video calls, and, you know, we talk about email and instant message, let’s move to video.
There’s been a bunch of studies about video interviewing, and they show that eye contact during video interviews is significantly related to how the interviewer evaluates the interviewee. But here’s the problem, when you’re face-to-face, it’s very easy to maintain eye contact because you’re staring at the other person’s eyes.
For most of us, when we’re doing that on a computer, we’re staring at their face on the screen, so we’re actually making eye contact. But if you’ve got a laptop, if you’ve got a monitor set up where your webcam is above your monitors, for most of us, it looks like we’re looking downward, or we’re looking to the left, or to the right, because we’re looking at the person’s face on our screen as opposed to the webcam, which is kind of dumb because we actually are making eye contact, but to the other person, it looks like you’re just kind of looking off.
So, they might make assessments that, “Hey, this person’s not really engaged, or maybe they’re reading from a script, or they don’t care, or maybe they’re just looking up recipes for dinner tonight.” Whereas. in person, we don’t even have to make those guesses because we can see they’re paying attention. So, there’s like this dual problem virtually where they have to guess more because they can’t see what you’re doing because you’re not in person.
And then you’re trying to maintain eye contact, but it doesn’t necessarily align with your webcam. For this, there’s a bunch of easier and some harder fixes. So, just dragging your video call screen up to right under your webcam can be really useful for aligning. There’s more complex things. You can get a standing mount webcam that stands in the center of your monitor, or maybe just hanging webcams that you can actually stick onto your monitor. But just being attentive to these little cues virtually can be really, really important, even though, honestly, it shouldn’t have to be.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. No, that’s so well said. And if I could just throw out one more tip. I use, this is a fancy setup, podcast or life, but this, it’s a teleprompter, which is also a display, the Elgato prompter. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Andrew, but I’m looking right at you always because it is a display showing up in the teleprompter mirror immediately in front of the camera lens so that’s, I think, the ultimate.
And I’ve heard people as they talk about reviews of this product, they are amazed at their communities, “It’s like you’re looking right at me. How are you doing that?” And so, I’ve been sharing this with a sales consultant. Because I imagine, if it matters in video interviews, it probably matters in sales conversations too.
Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. I’ve got a more low-tech option myself. I just have a webcam stand that is bendable, so I put it right in the center of my screen. I’m a little less intense with it, but it’s the same thing, because this way, I can look at you and I’m looking at my webcam simultaneously.
But, yeah, these things matter everywhere because, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of like, we feel like we’re on a video call and we feel like someone’s not paying attention to us, and in many cases, they’re not. But this gets back to my point that I was saying, is the way people make these judgments is often more about how you’re communicating acting as opposed to what the reality is in some cases.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is powerful and eye opening. And if you could please share with us the eye contact video interview study, we’ll absolutely link in the show notes. That’s good stuff. And tell us then, are you aware of any cool stories of a professional who really took some of these principles and tips with gusto, and saw a cool transformation when they implemented them?
Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite ones was an organization I consulted with recently, so this is a large Fortune 100 tech org, and they were having a big problem with communication overload. They had hours and hours of meetings, they were doing emails, like all night long, and it was creating a lot of stress for them. So, one of the things I approach with them is trying to have more structured conversations within teams about “How can we communicate better?”
And there’s some interesting research, for instance, that fits into this about the email urgency bias. And what that research shows is that, when we receive an email, we expect that the sender thinks we’re going to respond, or they want us to respond quicker than they actually care about. So, for instance, if you sent me an email, you probably think, “Ah, if he gets back to me a day, that’s okay.” I get the email. I’m like, “Oh, here’s an important podcast host. I need to respond within 30 minutes,” right? And I think that’s what you’re expecting from me.
And the problem with that is it creates a stress. It creates this feeling of needing to check your email all the time so that we’re interrupting our work, we’re interrupting our time with our family, and it creates all these different issues. So, what I did with a number of teams there is I had conversations with them and said, “Okay, amongst your team, let’s figure out, what medium has what response time? So, as a team, what response time do we want for email? What response time do we want for instant message? If there’s an emergency, how do we do it? Do we do it via text message? Do we do it via an urgent tag on one of these things?”
And in those conversations, as a result of that, they were able to get more focus time because they weren’t constantly having to check their communication and interrupt what they were doing. And multitasking is one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. And just like one related study to this is there’s some research that shows it can take up to a minute after each email to get back in the zone of work.
And it doesn’t sound like a lot to say, “Oh, it takes a minute to get back in focus.” But if you’re like me and sending like 30 or 60 emails a day, that’s like half an hour to an hour each day of just getting back in focus for the tasks. So, by enabling them to better chunk their communication without having to actually constantly be checking email and instant message, they ended up having a lot more time for work, they were more productive.
One of the team leaders came back to me afterwards, and was like, “My family hated me because I was on my smartphone all night long. And now I finally get to enjoy my family time because I know, if there’s an emergency, I’m going to hear the text chime, and I do not have to look at my email or instant message anymore whatsoever during the night, because we’ve actually made the implicit more explicit.”
Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. And I have ran seminars where I have seen similar results with teams, so I will just put a big check mark on that one, is this assumption about the expectation that is far from reality causes all these angst and interruption and unnecessary multitask and unpleasantness. And it is such a wave of relief for folks when you can have that conversation, like, “Oh, wow, I don’t have to do that? This is amazing.”
So, that’s a great feeling and liberates all kinds of good stuff. Well, that sounds like a master key right there, Andrew, with this stuff, is, “Hey, how about we get aligned on what our expectations and preferences are with regard to how we’re using all these tools?”
Andrew Brodsky
And it’s great, because on the back-end, too, someone’s not taking two weeks to respond to your email because you said, “As a team, hey, we’re going to respond to every email in a day or two.” So, it kind of not only gives us more time to focus. We don’t have that dangling email for over a week because we said, “You need to respond at least a day or 24 hours, even if it’s, ‘I’m going to get back to this by X date,’ so we’re not left wondering.”
And when it comes to virtual interactions, silence is a whole lot more awkward than it is in person because we don’t know what’s going on in person, if they’re clearly thinking. Virtually, we don’t know if they just deleted our email. We don’t know if they don’t care at all. So, having those norms, and then at least within those norms, having a set of practices where we send something within the given time to say, “I’ll get to this by X,” really helps erase all that ambiguity that can harm relationships very seriously in the workplace.
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Cool. Well, how about you take us through your favorite tools and tips for how we do all this stuff masterfully?
Andrew Brodsky
Sure. So, my favorite tool is the framework that I made for this book. So, whenever I read a self-help book, a business book, personally, I really like when there’s a framework because there’s often so many suggestions that I never remember all of them. So, in writing my own book, I did what I like to do, and I need one. So, for my book Ping I’ve got the “Ping” framework.
P for perspective taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal, G for goals, and all the recommendations and research in the book fits into these four things. So, for instance P for perspective taking, this is the idea that when we are engaging in virtual communication, we tend to end up more self-focused because we’re maybe just looking at text on a screen, or even if we’re having a video call, they’re a small square on our screen as opposed to this big person standing in front of us, so we’re less focused on how the other person’s going to react, how they might think.
You would say things online often that you wouldn’t say to the person when you’re right in front of them because you’re more focused on how they’re going to react when they’re standing physically right in front of you. So, it’s really important to take a moment and try and think about how might someone see this from their perspective.
And going back to that emotion research, one of the good recommendations that came out of that is, if you take your message and read it in the exact opposite tone out loud than you intended. So, if it’s a sarcastic message, read it as serious. If it’s a serious message, read it as sarcastic out loud. Suddenly, people tend to be much less likely to be overconfident about how clear their message is. When they do that, they realize, “Oh, wow, my message is not as clear as I intended it,” and they fix it.
And then I for initiative. The idea here is you need to think about, “What can I add back in here into this mode that might be missing?” So, an example I give in the book of this is small talk. Many of us hate small talk, and for good reason, it’s not productive. And research shows that small talk decreases productivity. But it does have a benefit.
Small talk improves trust. And the reason being is we trust what we know. If I know nothing about you, if I don’t know about your family, what you do for fun, what your hobby is, I don’t feel like I have an understanding of you, so I don’t feel like I can trust you. Small talk is one of these ways that helps us feel like we get to know somebody else and we trust what’s familiar.
So, finding ways to add in a little bit of small talk into your virtual communication, whether just a couple lines of email, asking them, you know, “Hey, I know you mentioned you’re going on a trip. How did it go? Here’s what I did,” can be really, really useful for building that trust, if that’s your goal. I’m not saying write 10 paragraphs of small talk because everyone’s going to hate you for it and it’ll backfire, but the idea here is a little bit of this stuff, taking the initiative to add those things back in, can be incredibly useful.
And the nonverbal behavior, just being attentive to all the different cues you’re sending, and we’ve talked about a bunch already. So, eye contact during video calls, typos, emojis, which I can talk more about if we want, all these different cues and understanding, “What information am I sending without potentially realizing?”
And then, lastly, G for goals. I wish there was, I could just say this is the best mode of communication. There’s one mode to rule them all. It would be a very short book if I did. But the best mode really depends on what your goal is. So, let’s say video calls, for instance. There’s this big debate – cameras on, cameras off.
And my answer to that, when executives or teams or anyone else asks me about that, is it depends on your goal. So, research shows that having your video on can be useful for building relationships, for showing engagement, because it shows, “Hey, I’m listening. I’m paying attention to you.” But on the other side of that, there’s Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue, where research shows that being on video can be really exhausting.
You’re staring at yourself. You’re observing all your nonverbal behaviors. It can be really energy depleting and that gives you less energy in the meeting, less energy afterwards, could lead to burnout. So, there’s these pros and cons. But if you think about it this way, if your goal is to show engagement, build a relationship, camera on. If your goal is to save energy to be able to focus better, then camera off is better.
So, maybe cameras on is better when you’re interacting with someone you don’t know really well. But when your team already has strong impressions of each other, we already know everyone’s engaged, we already have good feelings of each other, and having our camera on or off really isn’t going to change those things for a one-off meeting. It might be better for us all to have our cameras off so we can focus more on the task at hand.
Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you mentioned multitasking being bad news, and my understanding of the research is that if the multitasking is really close to mindless, like, “I am also walking on a treadmill,” or, “I am also folding laundry,” or, “I am also tidying up some of these items on my desk, like the pen goes in the pen drawer, the cups can be gathered and placed to the side.” Like, my understanding of these matters is that you’re actually not having a cognitive deterioration when that is the case. Is that accurate?
Andrew Brodsky
I would say it’s better for some people than others. So, there’s a personality trait like multitasking ability, technically, where it works better for some than others. In some cases, communication can be mindless, but in many cases, the communication is involving something that you’re not immediately working on, so your mind has to switch to a different task in the meantime.
So, it’s not like you could be doing your emails while you’re simultaneously brainstorming something unrelated altogether. If you’re really, really good, maybe you can, but for most of us, it kind of interrupts that process pretty badly.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. And when I said mindless, I was referring to the secondary activity, the walking your feet on a treadmill is the mindless piece.
Andrew Brodsky
Oh, of course. Oh, yeah.
Pete Mockaitis
Such that it’s quite possible to pay attention well if the secondary activity is not communication-related and doesn’t take much conscious attention whatsoever. Is that a fair way to think about multitasking?
Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. And one of the, I think, funnier, more absurd examples I get is, you’d be surprised how many executives have told me that they email from the toilet, where they’ve basically got their smart phone there and they’re taking out their communication. A little bit less exercise fun than being on the treadmill, but, yeah, I mean, I guess you get the job done there, right? So, yeah, so using those times otherwise, like if you can get some physical activity in, that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and that’s kind of how I think about the cameras off-on exactly as you’ve well-articulated in terms of, it is more tiring, it requires more of me, but perhaps if we are building the relationships, then that’s a great use of energy from the team is to do just that, versus, it really would be nice if we gave people a little bit of a break and we’re able to handle a little bit of the things simultaneously so long as they’re not messing up their ability to concentrate.
Andrew Brodsky
That, and if the only way you can keep your team’s attention is to forcing them to keep their webcam on, you’ve got bigger problems than that. You should be having deeper conversations about “Why is our team engagement low? How can we increase it?” If the only way you could do it is forcing people to keep their cameras on, you’re basically fixing the symptom rather than the cause, and you’ve got an underlying team problem there, and you are kind of treating the team more like children in many of those cases, where there isn’t that added value.
And, again, that’s not to say there aren’t situations where having camera on is really useful. I use it for teaching, especially when meeting new people, it’s really important, but there are many situations where it just isn’t adding value and it can really take away from the interaction.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. You’ve got a perspective on strategic silence in meetings. What do you mean by this and how do we do it?
Andrew Brodsky
So, strategic silence can be useful in a whole lot of situations. So, negotiating is often a fun one in these scenarios where silence is this great thing where it causes other people to fill the air. We feel a bit awkward during it, especially during virtual meetings, too. So, if you’re in this situation where you’re hoping someone’s going to disclose something, letting them do some of the talking and just being silent can be really useful. You don’t want to go to an extreme about this.
The other thing, too, is it becomes, in some ways, easier to speak over each other in certain modes of communication. So, some people will say, “Oh, video is pretty much the same as face to face.” And what I’ll say is, “Well, there’s pros and cons to each. There isn’t one better than the other.” But one of the things that happens with video is there’s often this slight lag, you know, we’re talking like milliseconds here.
But the problem with that slight lag is that research has shown that it messes up conversation turn-taking, where you kind of have these more awkward silences, you kind of interrupt each other more, so sometimes having a little bit more of a pause can be useful in video calls just to make sure you’re not constantly interrupting the other person, especially if you’re somewhat of a fast talker like myself.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And are there any common things that we’re all doing wrong and we should just fix it?
Andrew Brodsky
I think there’s a lot of things I’d say we’re all doing wrong, myself included, but the biggest one that I would say is that we often don’t take the time to stop and think, “Am I approaching this communication the right way?” We’re so busy and overloaded with meetings, with emails, that we don’t pause and say, “Should this really be an email or should this really be a meeting?”
And this lack of mindfulness is one of the main factors that drive people to have hours of wasted meetings each week that should have been email. And on the other side of that, too, that people often forget is there’s a lot of emails that probably should have been meetings. So, like this interaction we’re having now, you’re asking me a bunch of questions, I’m fairly talkative, so each answer is like five plus paragraphs.
If you’d emailed me these, I would probably take days writing up the answers, editing them, crafting them, but we can have this conversation live in under an hour. So, emails can also be really unproductive too in certain situations. But people just do whatever has been done, “So, we always have a meeting for this, so we’re going to do a meeting,” or, “We always have email for this, so we’re doing email,” or, “It’s already an email conversation, so I’m not going to ask to switch to phone saying, ‘Hey, can we get on the phone for a second just to resolve this?’”
So, taking that moment to think, “Is this the right mode and am I using it in the best way possible?” Even though you’re taking some time and losing some productivity to engage in that thought process, it actually saves you a ton of time in the long run and can really help improve your relationships in the process.
Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. I also want to get your hot take on these AI meeting tools, the transcribing, the summarizing, what are some pros and cons here?
Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to these AI tools for, let’s say, summarizing for now is what we’re focusing on, I think, again, it kind of cuts both ways. It’s awesome being able to have a summary of the meeting afterwards because it frees your mind up from having to worry about every single thing that’s being said in the meeting. You can focus on the conversation and you can go back afterwards.
The problem is that there’s research on something called cognitive offloading, which is this idea that when we offload tasks to technology, so we just have the technology do it for us, we tend to remember them less and we tend to learn from them less. So, if I have one of these tools summarizing every single meeting, so I’m not making a point of remembering what was said, for the most part. I’m not writing down the notes myself that helps me increase my memory, and I’m probably not even checking those notes afterwards because I know they’re available somewhere.
Then some client comes to me and asks me about something we talked about three weeks ago, but I’ve had tons of meetings since then, and because I wasn’t as focused on remembering what happened during that meeting, I don’t have a good answer. So, we can end up becoming a bit lazy mentally as a result of this.
So, the trick is finding that right balance where you can use them as a resource, but you’re not cognitive offloading so much that you’re not using your brain’s memory or storage itself. You’re only using your computers in that situation. So, you want to get that nice middle ground of using both your brain’s memory and your computer’s memory for storing what was in the meeting.
Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that is a great principle to bear in mind, in general. When we do cognitive offloading to the machine, we learn and remember less, and I think that applies to so much stuff – your GPS, the calculator. I was watching a chess YouTuber, international master, Jonathan Bartholomew, and he said, “I always recommend you analyze your chess games yourself first before you make the computer do it in order to learn more.”
And so, I think, boy, you could apply this in many, many contexts, so that’s a nice little master key right there. And I’ve also observed, sometimes these meeting recorders continue recording when some people have left and, oopsies, the parties did not intend the other people to hear that part of the meeting. Oh, my.
Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, there’s definitely been a number of those communication whoopsies. There’s always the funny one, I’m seeing a CEO get up and, suddenly, they don’t have pants on during the call, accidentally. Like, that’s the good meme, right? That started with the naked shorts hashtag, I believe, that actual example there.
So, these virtual communication blunders, in many ways, can be more problematic because virtual communication is just so permanent. Whereas, if all this stuff happened in person, there isn’t going to, generally, be a record of it. So, virtual communication is great because that record’s there when we need it, but, unfortunately, often it’s there when we don’t want it to be there as well, which is part of why it’s so important to get this stuff right.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Andrew Brodsky
The big thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is artificial intelligence and actually writing your communication for you. So, as opposed to just summarizing meetings, do you just have it write your emails for you? Do you have it write your messages for you? And in my view, artificial communication can be really useful for the brainstorming, helping to edit, but I, generally, recommend to others that you do want to make sure the communication is your words because most of the time no one’s going to figure out you’re using AI, but they might one time.
Maybe it uses the word you don’t, like, elevate. Maybe you would talk about something in person. Maybe they mentioned they had a car accident the past weekend, and then you just copy and paste an AI email that starts with, “I hope you had a great weekend!”
Pete Mockaitis
“Do you remember what I told you about my trauma?”
Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. Exactly. And the problem is, if there’s one slip-up and they realize that you’ve been using AI for communication, their assumption is going to be, “Well, they’ve been using it every time I communicate with them.” And then their next question is going to be, “Well, why am I even communicating with this person?”
So, there’s such a risk of removing yourself and your own words from the communication that even one slip-up could really, really massively backfire. But I do think this human component of communication will continue to be incredibly valuable, at least for the jobs that require humans in them. If you’re required to be in that job, then people are going to want to communicate with you.
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This has been my AI thing over and over again. It’s, like, AI can be a handy tool in the drafting phase, like, “Ooh, there’s a great word or phrase or sentence here and there.” But, oh, man, you are asking for trouble if you just outsource the whole of anything to AI without some careful checking, editing, curation.
Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. And AI is never going to know everything that you know, at least until we get to that distant future’s phase, maybe where we get brain chips and all that, right?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, brain scanning.
Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I think we’re a good aways away from that and from people actually being comfortable with that, even if for some reason that tech companies can get it to work. But the idea here is it’s just not going to know everything you know, so it won’t know everything you know about the other person, it won’t know everything about your goals that you want to achieve, so it just won’t be able to do this as well as you can. And the relational risk of over-relying on these things can be really, really severe.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote?
Andrew Brodsky
I’m kind of a cliche one. I like the Golden Rule. So, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Andrew Brodsky
It’s one from the ‘60s. It’s about the pratfall effect. This study involved people listening to quiz show contestants, and they had someone get all the questions right, and they had someone get a bunch of questions wrong. The person who got every question right, people rated them as really competent, but not very likable.
It’s like that kid in middle school who was raising their hand all the time and got everything right. You thought they were smart, but kind of everyone hated them. It’s also why I didn’t have too many friends in middle school. But there was a third condition in this study where they had the person get every question right, but they spilled coffee on themselves, and that person was rated as just as competent as the one who got everything right, but just as likable as the person who got some questions wrong.
And the idea here of this is that making mistakes in not your domain of expertise or work expertise can make you seem more human and more approachable. So often at work, we feel this need to put our best foot forward or best face forward, but the key findings from the study is that makes you feel unapproachable, especially if you’re a leader or a manager.
And, actually, showing that, “Hey, I’m a human, I make mistakes,” especially in areas where they don’t matter, so it doesn’t make you look incompetent, can be a really good way for making you seem warmer and more likable in the process. So, don’t try and hide your true self in the process.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m thinking, as a callback, when you’re doing a video interview as a candidate, make sure to spill a beverage.
Andrew Brodsky
I might not do it in that short of an interaction, especially when you’re low power, because I think in the video interviews, they’re searching mostly on confidence, at least in the early rounds of them. But if you’re in a later round, you are kind of with a group socializing, one of those situations, that might be a better situation to try and pull one of those things.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m sure we’ll make enough mistakes without having to engineer beverage spills along the way. And a favorite book?
Andrew Brodsky
So, my wife was an indie fantasy author, and so I’m biased. I like her stuff better. So, my favorite book of hers was one called Hex Kitchen. H-E-X K-I-T-C-H-E-N. So, it basically took Hunger Games and “Magic” and “Hell’s Kitchen,” and it was a magical cooking tournament. And for me, getting to read fantasy is just such a nice escape, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I leaned on her expertise in helping to write my book so that the stories are a bit more fun. Because me as an academic with bland lame writing, having her on my side was just incredibly useful in the process.
Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite tool?
Andrew Brodsky
My favorite tool probably is one that I don’t necessarily want to admit fully, but it’s probably the undo send function in email, and also the delay delivery function in email. At least for the latter one, I’m not as embarrassed about that one. But I like using the delay delivery one often because I sometimes will just try and knock out all my emails, like at one or two points of a day. And by delaying it and communicating a little bit more frequently, or seeming I’m communicating other times, or it can make me seem more present.
So, as opposed to all my emails going to my boss always only at 10:00 a.m. and never going at any different hours for instance, it might make me look like I’m not doing anything the rest of the day. So, sometimes I’ll strategically have my emails go at different times of the day to be like, “Hey, I’m here all the time.” And if I was giving recommendations to managers, I would talk about how to avoid those biased evaluations.
And this stuff is called productivity theater, and I talk about in the book, but the idea here is, unfortunately, human beings like theater, so knowing how to perform in it can be incredibly valuable to making sure that you’re achieving your goals.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?
Andrew Brodsky
Going on hikes. There’s a good research that shows just going outdoors, especially when you’re sitting at a computer, and having physical activity can be one of the best ways to disconnect.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?
Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to virtual communication, don’t underestimate the value of removing visual cues. This is what I would call the in-person default bias, where we assume in-person is best, and we compare everything to in-person, but there’s a whole lot of advantages to not meeting in-person, to not having video on, that you can leverage by using email and text-based communication better, the least of which is getting rid of tons and tons of unnecessary meetings in the process.
Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Andrew Brodsky
So, you can check out my LinkedIn, Andrew Brodsky, you’d find me over there pretty easily. And then if you Google me, you’ll find my website as well where you can reach out to me directly.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have any final challenges or calls to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I would say try and think about your communication overload, and not get caught up in it, and take a step away for a moment and try and engage in some meta thinking, a level above, and think about “How can I do this all better?” As opposed to just accepting this stuff as a fact of life and a fact of work, think about “How can I improve my communication habits in ways that will make me more effective and make me happier in the process? Is there ways to do this that I won’t feel as stressed out and I can actually enjoy it more?”
Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Andrew, thank you.
Andrew Brodsky
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.