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Influence Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

1052: Building Better Relationships through Radical Listening with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener

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Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener shares powerful insights on how to listen well and deepen your connections.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hidden barriers to listening
  2. Why we should interrupt more
  3. The secret to handling disagreements better

About Robert

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a researcher, author, and consultant with 75 peer-reviewed academic articles and has over 27,000 citations. His previous books include The Upside of Your Dark Side (New York Times Bestseller, 2014), and the 2007 PROSE Award winner, Happiness. He has presented keynotes to Lululemon, Deloitte, Humana, AARP, The World Bank, and others. In 2024, Thinkers50 named Robert one of the “50 Most Influential Executive Coaches in the World.” He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he enjoys drawing and rock climbing.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, welcome.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Thank you, Pete, so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear about your wisdom. And you’ve got the coolest nickname ever, one I think I would like for myself. You’re known as the Indiana Jones of positive psychology. So, I’m imagining rolling boulders, whips, all kinds of adventures. Tell me, what’s the source of this nickname? And can you give us an amazing adventure and discovery to back it up?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Like all nicknames, I did not give it to myself. That is important for everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
“They call me T-Bone.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Everyone should know that right up front. One of my colleagues said this about me because, unlike other psychologists, I wasn’t just running studies in the laboratory with college students. I was going out in the field, and pretty far field. I was studying happiness, among other things, with the Amish, for example, with Maasai tribal people. I stayed in the very Northern tip of Greenland where I was working with Inuit hunters. So, I spent several years, almost five years sort of traveling the world and studying happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Thank you. So, we’re talking about your book, Radical Listening, and I’d love to get to kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who upgraded their listening game and saw phenomenal results coming from that.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. There is a woman I interviewed, in fact, for this book, she’s a very senior leader, works in an international organization. In fact, they own a bunch of subsidiaries, which means their footprint is across industry, across linguistic groups, across cultures, across national boundaries.

And she always thought of herself as a fantastic listener, but then she realized, “I really can’t even understand the language of some of these people. I don’t understand the cultural fabric or context of many of the people I’m trying to listen to. And perhaps most importantly, my role suggests that I’m not even interested in what they’re interested in.”

So, she’s thinking big strategic ideas, and they’re often looking at just sort of day-to-day operations. And she realized that she kind of just fundamentally can’t understand them, that her role is an obstacle to listening. And one of the things she did was recruited listening ambassadors to listen on her behalf and become sort of like Rosetta Stones or translators of the line worker up to the senior leadership.

And so, the thing I think is so remarkable about that is not just that she recruited these ambassadors, which is kind of a cool idea, but that she recognized the limits in her own listening and moved to correct it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a fun thought, a listening ambassador, and, in some ways, it feels a lot more wholesome and upright than, I guess, the non-consensual listening ambassadors called a spy. It’s like, “Spy on people and gather the information,” as opposed to a listening ambassador is like, “Oh, we all know what’s going on here. And I feel appreciated because you have made an investment to have someone gather my perspective when it may be difficult because of a language barrier or geographic barrier or something to see what’s going on.”

So, that’s a fun idea in and of itself in its specificity, but also, in terms of a general concept of, “Let’s take listening seriously. Let’s invest in it. Let’s build some infrastructure and acknowledge how valuable this is and get after it.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let me just say that I’m very tickled that you used spy as an example. My co-author and I on Radical Listening used loads of examples of professional listeners, psychotherapists, managers, all sorts of people who listen for a living. And we did not include espionage as an industry among it, but only through oversight. As soon as you said it, I wish that we would have included that in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe the sequel, we’ll see. But I’m sure you’ve got boatloads of insights for us and we want to dig into it. Tell us, is there a key message or big idea that you capture in your book, Radical Listening, that folks who want to be awesome at their jobs should know?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. It is time for listening to have a refresh. Let’s start there. All of us grew up with or have been trained in so-called active listening. And active listening is a good start, you know, make eye contact, summarize what the person says, check for clarification, “Am I reading you right?” It really emphasizes comprehension and it positions listening as if it’s just about understanding.

And what we do to extend that is suggest that there are many intentions for listening, that you might listen in order to entertain a group, you might listen to just appreciate someone, you might listen to influence, you might listen to learn something, you might listen to argue or rebut. And whatever your intention is, that’s going to direct your attention. And it’s a very, very efficient form of listening. So, a courtroom litigator, for example, is not listening to validate opposing counsel. They don’t care how…

Pete Mockaitis
“It must be really hard for you, plaintiff. It must be really difficult.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
That’s exactly right. Just like, “Ah, I can really see that this must be difficult,” or, “Wow, even trying this case must be such a burden. I’m sure you had to stay up late,” all those types of things. That’s out the window. And you don’t even have to worry about what’s the emotional state of the opposition. Instead, you’re just focused on the things that are goal-oriented for you. So, weak evidence, spurious arguments, logical fallacies, inconsistencies, and that’s what you’re listening for.

And it turns out that whatever your intention, if you want to listen to validate someone, you are going to listen for their emotions. If you want to listen to learn, you’re going to listen, pay attention to key words, to connections between what they’re saying and your own web of knowledge. So, just the idea that there are multiple intentions, you should know your intention, and your intention guides your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Robert, is it fair to say that our limited human brain capacity can’t have it all, we can’t get all the logic and all the learning and all the education and all the emotion at once?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. I’m glad that you’re bringing that up because I do think it’s a common belief, and I certainly have held this belief in the past, that, “Oh, I’m a great listener, and I can just sort of sponge all of it up. I’m getting everything. I’m getting the motive behind what you’re saying. I’m noticing what you’re not saying. I’m noticing your tone of voice. I’m noticing everything.” And it’s just not the way that attention works. So, being a bit more judicious with this limited resource can be, I think, very productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s lay out the flavors of intention, just make sure we have the full menu documented here.

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, broadly speaking, you might think of there are sort of three umbrellas that we could put these intentions under. One is sort of pro-social motives for listening, so, “I’m listening to appreciate you. I’m listening to connect with you. I’m listening to partner with you to solve a problem.” Those would be three pro-social motives.

Three anti-social motives, “I’m listening to find fault. I’m listening to undermine you.” Those are kind of related. And, thirdly, “I’m listening to defend myself against you.” And then we also have three, kind of, we call them self-focused, although I’m not sure, to be honest, that’s the best way to look at it. But these are just three things that sort of help me. And that is, “I’m just listening to learn something new. I’m listening for comprehension,” that’s sort of the classic act of listening. And those are kind of the two big motives that are helpful to me as the listener.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a distinction between listening to learn something new and listening for comprehension?

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, listening for comprehension is, “Do I understand what I’m hearing?” Learning is, “Now that I understand it, can I integrate it? Can I find use for it? Can I synthesize it with my own existing body of knowledge and skill in usable ways?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then I suppose the implication of this is to thoughtfully choose your intention upfront in advance of the conversation, as opposed to just showing up in whatever brain state you happen to be wearing at the moment.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And where you see this go wrong, imagine a team meeting, for example, where you’ve got a pretty funny person on the team and they just keep cracking jokes. And it’s nice when it works because it cuts through tension, it lightens the mood, but maybe they default to it too often. And it’s because that’s just sort of a default listening mode for them, like, “I’m just listening to entertain people.”

So, those kinds of people listen for pauses because pauses are where you insert jokes. They’re listening for themes because themes are what you’re going to riff on. But it might not be helpful because that might not be what is needed. So, you also need some alignment with sort of what is contextually or situationally appropriate.

If someone wants feedback on a presentation, you should be directing your attention towards that, “I want to listen with a critical ear and see what works, what doesn’t. What do I know about you in terms of your ability to take feedback? How much do I need to sugarcoat it?” those types of things. So, a little bit of matching your listening intention with what’s being asked for.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s interesting how we may very well have that default mode. You mentioned entertainment, which I guess wasn’t on the menu. So, I guess there’s many flavors beyond the eight you’ve suggested is my takeaway there, is that we may very well have a default state all the time in terms of– I remember I had a sweet friend and mentor, Marilyn, and she just knew this guy who was a billionaire, and she just thought that was cool.

And she was working with some students and she just thought, “Hey, these students have an entrepreneurial interest. They might just have fun, you know, dinner with this guy. I know him, I know the students, let’s just do this.” And so, she’s talking to with the person, and he just says immediately, “Okay, so what do you want?” because that’s what he’s accustomed to. It’s like, “People tap on me to make requests of my resources.”

And she said, “Well, I’m sorry that this is just how life goes for you. We just think it’d be fun to hang out and get to know you and learn a little bit about your world.” And he’s like, “Oh, well, that sounds really nice. Let’s set it up.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And one of the things I like about that story is that what they’re trying to do in a very explicit way is just make sure that they’re aligned, “What is it you’re asking for? What is it I want?” We all know times that someone sort of complains to you and really all they want is a bit of validation.

They just want you to say, “I get it. You’re a victim. You’ve been done wrong here. I’m so sorry. You’ve put on a brave face. You’re doing great.” And instead, what we give them is a bunch of advice and try and solve their problem. And when that misalignment happens, it actually is a bit destructive to the relationship. It feels off and disconnecting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like a key benefit just right there. It’s like when you’re matching the intention appropriately, relationships are enriched because this folk, is like, “Oh, this is beautiful. This person is giving me just what I need in this moment, and it just feels good. And I like them more and I am less annoyed and frustrated with them.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And, look, I want to be cautious and honest. I’m not one of these people that writes a book, like, “Oh, I wrote a book on listening. And guess what? I happen to think that listening is the thing that’s going to cure the world and all the problems.” I don’t think that. I think listening is sort of like opening the door, but then you still have to walk through it and do some exploration. I think listening is a good start.

I think listening, in the way that you just mentioned, where you kind of listen with positive intent, you have respect, you both feel aligned, that’s a great place then to build a relationship, then to cooperate, then to engage in teamwork or change or whatever it is you’re going to do. So, I think it starts with listening, but I don’t think listening by itself is the whole picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s say we’re all in, Robert. That sounds great. I would like to do that and I would like to do that well and I could see the benefits. And yet, you also highlight a few internal barriers to listening. Can you lay these out for us?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. In all honesty, this is one of my favorite parts of everything my co-author and I have put down on the page. Some of the barriers, everyone’s going to already have an intuition about, “Oh, let me guess, distraction, technology, your phone.” Sure. All of those are barriers. But the ones that I think are really kind of almost the insidious ones are the ones that you may be less aware of.

So, for example, feeling that you’re right about something is a barrier to learn, “I mean, why listen, because I already know? I already have made up my mind and foreclosed on my own rightness about this.” Politeness can be a barrier to listening. Like, instead of really paying attention to you, I’ve just sort of dismissed in my mind what you’re saying and I’m just nodding along and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” even though I don’t mean it, and I’ve just checked out, but politeness is sort of this cloth that I’m swaddled in that protects me from real listening.

One that I find really interesting, I call it walk with me. In the book, we call it time urgency. And it’s this idea that you go to someone and you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got something I need to speak with you about,” and they say something along the lines of, “Walk with me. I’ve got a meeting here, it’s going to start in eight minutes, but come with me, walk with me.”

And it’s so well-intentioned. To the listener, the person saying “Walk with me,” it’s this idea that, “Oh, look at me, how gracious I am. I’m making time for you.” But it can really feel awful to the person who has this urgent request. They’re sort of saying, “There’s something very important.”

And you’re saying, “My mind is already to the next thing. At best, I’m wedging you in. I am already a bit distracted. I’m giving you a limited amount of time and we’re catering to my needs rather than your needs. In fact, you’re going somewhere you hadn’t even intended to go.”
And so, although it’s well-intentioned, I think it runs the risk. And there’s a whole bunch of these that are well-intentioned, but run the risk of just standing in the way of great listening.

Pete Mockaitis
More of those, please. Lay them on us.

Robert Biswas-Diener
These are cousins, conceptually speaking. One is comparing. And we’ve all done this. Comparing is when someone mentions an experience and then you’re like, “Hey, I’ve also had that experience.” And so, you share that with them. They say, “Oh, yeah, I went to Hong Kong last summer.” You’re like, “Oh, wow, you know what? I went to Hong Kong last summer, too.”

And again, it’s well intentioned because what you’re trying to communicate is, “Look, we have this common ground. We have a shared experience. Like, we’re cut from the same cloth.” And yet, what it does is it sort of shifts the spotlight away from them. It often does work, which is why we do it. But when it doesn’t work, it’s sort of like saying, “Enough about you and your Hong Kong stories. Let’s talk about me and my Hong Kong stories.”

And the cousin to it is competing. And this happens when, often in a complaint scenario, when someone will say something like, “I was up till 2:00 working on that report last night. I only got six hours of sleep, so I’m a little tired today.” And as a rejoinder, you say, “Six hours of sleep? I only got three hours of sleep.”

Again, it’s well-intentioned. You’re not trying to put them down or invalidate them. You’re trying to say, “We’re cut from the same cloth. We’re both people who are sleep-deprived,” but it comes across, oftentimes, as being dismissive.

So, there’s many of these things that are intuitively appealing to us as conversationalists that I think serve as these kinds of murky barriers that we might not even be aware of that, that often sort of burst the bubble of connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what seems the underlying theme of all of these is, “To what extent are we allowing our conversational counterpart, our interlocutor…” I’m thinking Plato, “…to take center stage?” versus, “Does it need to be about me?”

Robert Biswas-Diener
One hundred percent. And I think that is the core of Radical Listening is the idea that, “When I interact with you, I want you to feel like you do have a spotlight on you, that I do have genuine concern for what you’re talking about, that you do have the space to articulate your thoughts, agenda, ideas, opinions, whatever it is that you want to share.” And whenever we sort of grab the podium away, that’s where things get problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m reminded of, I had just a fun conversation with a midwife who said that she used to work in hospice, and she was amazed when the family arrived in the final days before someone was about to pass away. And she said, “I was astounded at everyone’s ability to make the dying person about them. It’s like, ‘You know, I just got the call. I had to change my flight.” Like all these things, like, as the hustle and bustle, as they get into the hospital room, like in the final days, because they’re like, “Hey, you better get here because they don’t have much time left.”

And she said, “I was amazed at how this happened again and again and again.” And I think it’s really telling because it’s an extreme situation and it highlights that, for many of us, I mean, it sounds bad, but I guess it’s maybe accurate language. We have such a self-centered preoccupation running in our brains, we don’t even realize how off-putting it can be. And that happens maybe, I don’t know, for some of us all the time and for some of us, you know, occasionally. But it’s sort of spooky how common this blind spot is.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And it’s all of us. It’s me. It’s probably you to some extent. We are the protagonists in the plays of our own lives, right? And if someone said, “Oh, by the way, do you know you’re actually just a supporting character?” That’s kind of an unsettling way of thinking. One of the things I noticed about you, Pete, I mean, as a professional listener, right, you’re listening to guests all the time, but you’re sort of doing this balance of it’s not only about the guest.

I mean, if you were just silent and then the guest spoke the entire time, that wouldn’t be very gratifying either. So, there is this sort of dance between you inserting key moments, but giving sort of the lion’s share to the guests. And, in general, I think that’s kind of how conversations go, that if you listen with respect, you really make the person feel valued in what they’re saying, then it will come back around to you and you will get to be the main character for a time. But then you also have to be ready to relinquish that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, Robert, it’s an interesting situation here because, I mean you no disrespect, but the most important stakeholder in this conversation isn’t here and it’s the listener and it’s all in service of them. And so, it just happens to work out nicely that we’re both fascinated by this topic that we’re in, because I get tons of pitches and we reject the vast majority of them.

So, the fact that we’re here means I’m into it, you’re into it, and that’s just good, and that’s good content for a listener. But, yeah, it’s interesting because that’s the game, is if you have the coolest story, but it’s not in service of the listener, I’m going to try to move us on and then the audio editors will remove it later. And that’s kind of the game we’re playing right now.

Robert Biswas-Diener
It’s so interesting. I never, in a million years, would admit to what I’m about to admit to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m into it.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, but I’m going to because of the direction that this conversation just took. During this conversation that we have been having, in my mind, because I’m also monitoring what I’m saying, a thought popped into my head and it was, “Be careful not to give away all the content of the book, Robert, right, because you want the listeners out there to be hungry for more and to go buy the book.”

And as soon as I had that thought, I thought of that as a disservice to the listener. And I thought, “Really, this is in the service of the listener. What we want is to give them as much usable content, as many fresh ideas as possible. And whether they buy the book, don’t buy the book, should not be my primary concern because that is that egotistical bias. But instead, I really should be doing this in service of them. Can I just tell you as much information as possible and you, the listener, can decide what’s useful for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re riffing on these things, that reminds me of, I’ve been reflecting lately. I think it was by this book by Marcus, somebody, called They Ask, You Answer, and it’s about content marketing. And so, he says, “Consumers find it very frustrating,” and I agree. If I’m on a website and I want to know, say, “Hey, what’s this thing costs?” and they will not give me a price, or even like a guideline of what the price might be, it’s frustrating.

Because, as consumer, it’s like, “You know the price or the price range, and I know that you know it, and you know that I know that you know it, but you’re choosing not to give it to me,” especially on a frequently asked questions, an FAQ, “Really the price is not one of the frequently asked questions? That seems like among the most frequently of asked questions.”

And so, likewise, there are some YouTube channels or podcasts, and I won’t, you know, poo-poo them by name, but it sits a little bit wrong with me when I know. I’m all about building curiosity and teasing and being intriguing. But if they say, you know, for example, if we were to tease this interview and we started with you with a clip saying, “And the number one most transformational key to listening is…” and it like bleeps it out and it like blurs it.

It’s like I, as a listener, a consumer, I find that troubling because like, “You know it, I know it, you’re deliberately withholding it from me. And I don’t like that. And in order to get me to listen, to watch more, to view the ads, or whatever. And I think it’s counterproductive. Because if you give me something mind-blowing, I’m like, ‘Whoa, Robert, this guy has got insights. I better listen to more of him.’” So that’s just my take on that practice.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I absolutely love your take. And I love the direction that this conversation has taken because it’s like a real moment of authenticity in, otherwise, what could feel scripted. You ask me some questions about the book. I’ve been on lots of podcasts. I give you lots of answers that I’m pretty practiced at. But here, suddenly, we’re getting into, I think, a very real example of listening and all the foibles around listening, which is sometimes I have my own agenda and it interferes with another agenda. Sometimes I’m not sure what to do. Sometimes I don’t have a clear intention.

And all of this is happening within us while we’re trying to be good listeners. And that just feels very realistic to me. So, I’m not a person that’s like, “Oh, go buy the book, learn these five steps, and I promise you, you’re going to be a transformed, perfect listener.” You won’t. I mean, I think that you’ll learn more about listening. You might appreciate listening more. You might experiment with some things. People might notice that you’re listening a bit better. And I think there is some mileage to be had in that kind of realism.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand that you cannot give us the magical spells, the super five things that will cure all listening foibles but, nonetheless, I do want some of your actionable tips. Do we have some big dos and don’ts that just make a tremendous difference in your listening and all the relationship goodness that unfolds with great listening?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. So, we present six skills and, again, let’s be honest, there could be eight skills, there could be five skills. We chose six. Three of them we think of are internal. They’re things that would be invisible to your interlocutor. They’re just happening within you mentally. And three of them are behavioral, things that your conversational partner would notice.

So, I’ll just give you one that’s a little counterintuitive about what you would notice, one of the behavioral ones. We say that interjecting, or if you prefer, interrupting, is a highly engaged form of listening. And for most people that’s pretty counterintuitive. Most people have learned that politeness equals turn-based conversation, you speak, I speak, you speak, I speak, back and forth. And yet there are excellent reasons to interrupt.

So, I’ll just start by saying that if interruption is just overlapping speech, if that just means two people are speaking simultaneously, we’re all doing it all the time. So, if I say, “Mm-hmm,” while you’re talking, that’s a short interruption. If I say, “Oh, wow,” while you’re talking, that’s a bigger interruption. If I say, “What? Wait, I can’t believe it. No way,“ while you’re talking, that’s an even bigger interruption.

If I jump in and say, “Wait a minute. Say that again. What?” those are all forms of interruptions, and those are excellent because they show the person, “I care about what’s happening. I’m right here with you.” And the alternative is letting the person prattle on for 10 minutes. And then in return, you say, “There’s something you said 10 minutes ago that I’d like to go back to.” And that can feel really kind of dismissive to the person because they’re like, “Why did you just let me talk for 10 minutes if the thing that was interesting to you happened 10 minutes ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really strong perspective. But, again, following that principle of your conversation partner is taking center stage, the interruptions are in service of them and your understanding, like, “Wait a minute. He said what? But didn’t he just say the opposite?” Or we could go, “Yes, he did. And that’s why this is a big deal.”

And so, you could see how the conversational vibe goes into a very connected place with that interruption as opposed to waiting, and just makes sure you clarify. It’s like, “Wait, Robert? Oh, no, that Robert. Oh, okay, now I’m tracking with you. I’m on the same page.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And that clarification, that’s a perfect example, and we do these all the time. Another type is called an alert. So, let’s say you and I are both talking about that Robert, and here comes Robert, but you can’t see him because your back is to him. And I might say, “Pete, shut up. Here he comes.” That’s an alert and that’s an interruption, but you never think that’s rude because you think it’s in the service of you. So, anytime that I’m essentially jumping in, but then returning the turn to speak to you, people just don’t even clock it as rude at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, interruptions can be helpful. What else you got?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let’s do one on the other side of the fence. One of the internal skills. Let’s start with just, I think, a tough one, and that’s acceptance. This is probably the toughest skill we have, and I just say it like, “Oh, just accept the other person and what they’re saying.” But anyone who’s been alive for five minutes knows that that’s really, really a hard pill to swallow.

So, what we mean when we say acceptance is not that you are agreeing with the point of view. You’re welcome to present counter evidence, alternatives but, at some point, you have to sort of understand that the person you’re speaking with has a right to a point of view. And to do this, it requires some personal intellectual humility. And intellectual humility is like a cousin to actual humility.

Humility is thinking that you have no more fundamental worth than another person. But intellectual humility is a recognition that you are limited, that you haven’t figured it all out, that you do have some natural biases, that you do have a skewed vision, that your personal experience colors your vision of life. And it’s fine for you to come up with moral reasoning or professional expertise, but it’s equally fine for another person. And you can’t just assume, you’re wiser, you’re smarter, and you happen to have landed on the truth, lucky you.

You should think, “You know what, that person may have different values, they’ve had different experiences, they have a different professional role, and so they’re going to arrive at slightly different conclusions. I don’t ever have to agree with them, but I always have to respect their right to have them.” And that takes some work, but when you engage in that, you have more types of conversations and you open a door to conversations that you might otherwise avoid that can ultimately be productive conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I think, day to day, this happens at work all the time. And it’s just, you know, one person wants to greenlight a project and the other person says, “No, I don’t think we have capacity for it right now,” or, “I don’t think it’s fleshed out well enough,” or, “I don’t think the strategy is in place for it.”

And you have two totally opposing views. And often what happens is the two parties are embattled and they simply aren’t listening. It becomes this sort of feat of who can bully the other into getting their way, “If only I can lob so much evidence at you, so much passion at you, I’ll convince you that my chosen direction is the right direction.”

But it gets back to the kind of that seven habits idea, you know, first seek to understand and then be understood. Kind of like, “Look, I already know what I think, but I am curious what you think. What is it you’re looking at? What is it you’re seeing that I’m not seeing?” And when you do that, every once in a while, you’re surprised. It helps you retain a more positive view of the person you’re talking about.

They’re not just some, you know, bumbling dolt that that happen to arrive at something, that they actually are pretty thoughtful and pretty intentional in their approach. And you may or may not get what you want out of that, but it is going to lead to a better team dynamic in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Robert, tell me anything else you want to make sure to put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I’ll just mention that this applies, to some degree, across cultures, but culture is kind of interesting. We learn cultural scripts for interacting with one another. I’ve recently been traveling with someone. I’m American, and the person I was traveling with was not American. And I just realized that they didn’t have a script for some basic conversations.

Like, “How does this coffee shop banter work? The person asked me how I was, not just what I wanted to order. And I don’t know the level of depth I should be answering that question in, how much honesty I should be giving them.” Things that we would just take for granted because we have a good intuitive sense for those kinds of answers.

I was in the elevator with him and I was speaking to strangers on the elevator, and he’s like, “How did you know you could do that? What were you taking into account that made it okay for you to speak with strangers?” And I just started realizing, “Wow, this is really, really different across cultures.” And some of the things that listening does across cultures is, for example, the role of silence.

People interpret silence differently across cultures. So, for example, in Japan, just to use one instance, silence is often considered respectful. It is a sign of thoughtfulness and it’s usually perceived as something, not the absence of something, and you are kind of paying attention to silences. So, like, if people aren’t talking, maybe it means they don’t agree, but they don’t want to say it. And so, you are kind of trying to read the silence a bit.

Whereas, you imagine in the United States, silence is often felt as awkward and we rush to fill it in. So, some of these kind of communication exchanges, some of the communication technology is going to shift a little bit based on people’s cultural script.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Robert Biswas-Diener
It comes from George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Julius Caesar,” and it is, “Forgive him, Theodotus, for he is a barbarian, and thinks the ways of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” And I just love the idea of kind of intellectual humility built into that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Robert Biswas-Diener
One of my colleagues, Shige Oishi, had people shoot basketballs or shoot darts, and he saw how well they did at each. And he invited them back the next week and said, “Take your choice. Do you want to do baskets or darts?” And the Americans who did well at one wanted to stay with it and keep doing the one because they wanted, wanted to stay with the thing that they felt good about.

And the Asians and Asian Americans in his study, if they did well on one, they wanted to shift and do the opposite one because they were more inclined to want to master something new. And I’ve always just felt like that was a very clever methodology and a very interesting cultural study.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Robert Biswas-Diener
This is a recency effect, but I just finished Dracula and I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Robert Biswas-Diener
A pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Any particular brand or type or features?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I do a lot of drawing also, so I like anything that doesn’t smear, but I just use a lot of Bic roller balls.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, my favorite habit is to wake up extraordinarily early and draw for one hour before I start the day. I always prioritize my wellbeing so that I feel strong and centered before embarking on everything else I’m going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them put it back to you often?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, a recent one, and I stole this actually from my co-author, but just the idea that you should remember that everyone is in the middle of something. And if you just approach everyone all the time with, “You know what, they’re in the middle of something. I’m in the middle of something. They’re in the middle of something,” it can make you a little bit more forgiving and a little bit more patient.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I would point them to my website, IntentionalHappiness.com. And I’d love to hear from people.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. And let’s keep it thematically aligned with listening. I would pay attention to times that you, this coming week, feel really listened to, and note what the other person is doing. What’s happening that makes you feel so heard, so validated? And see then if that’s what you can do to pay it forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, thank you.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, thanks so much. This was super fun.

1038: Getting What You Need from Your Boss through Managing Up with Melody Wilding

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Melody Wilding breaks down the crucial conversations to have with your boss to improve your work life.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to differentiate yourself with one conversation
  2. How to build your pushback power
  3. The easiest way to improve your visibility

About Melody

Melody Wilding is a professor of human behavior at Hunter College and author of Managing Up. She was recently named one of Insider’s “most innovative career coaches.” Her background as a therapist and emotions researcher informs her unique approach, weaving evidence-based neuroscience and psychology with professional development. Her previous book is Trust Yourself.

Resources Mentioned

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Melody Wilding Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Melody, welcome back.

Melody Wilding
Thanks for having me again. So great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it is great to be chatting with you from the fine state of New Jersey, which we discussed is lovely.

Melody Wilding
That’s right. Beautiful state, very misunderstood, but we love our Jersey.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, let’s talk about managing up. We haven’t discussed this issue in quite some time and I think it is so vitally important. Can you share with us maybe an extra surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made as you researched this managing up stuff?

Melody Wilding
Well, I think, just like New Jersey, managing up is very misunderstood, and even when I began writing the book, I was resistant to the idea of calling it managing up and even zeroing in on that concept. I wanted to talk more about influence and persuasion, how do you build respect and recognition. And my publisher had to keep nudging me that, “Yeah, what you’re talking about is the skill set of managing up.”

And I think my resistance came, and what I’ve heard from many other people, is from these misconceptions we have. These old images of managing up from the ‘80s, the ‘90s, the person being the suck-up and running around with their boss’s coffee order. And who wants to do that? No one wants to compromise who they are or feel like they’re ingratiating themselves to the people around them. So, it’s no wonder why we resist this concept.

But what I know now, having done this work and researched this subject is that managing up is not something you do for your boss’s benefit at all. It’s really something you do for yourself to make your own work life, your own career, much easier, less stressful and on your own terms.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I dig that a lot. And while we’re talking about misconceptions, let’s clear them up, I recall, I think I was reading a piece by, Paul Graham, the Y Combinator guy, made a statement along the lines of “Professional managers are amongst the finest liars there are.” And folks are like, “Whoa, that’s some strong language. What do you mean?”

He’s like, “Ah, perhaps I should say, they are adept at managing up,” which sort of imply, well, more than imply, that managing up involves telling the folks above you a little bit of what they want to hear, and massaging their perceptions and expectations, and it really made it sound quite like it’s the art of deception in the professional, acceptable way that we can courteously do so in proper modern times,” Melody. So, have you picked up on those perceptions and how do you address that?

Melody Wilding
I think, again, that’s the older school way of thinking about it. And what I would argue is it’s less about massaging and contorting yourself to someone else’s perceptions and more about tweaking, or in the book I call it flexing, your approach so that your message is actually getting through to the people who need to hear it the most.

That may mean you do need to tweak how you present something, or the type of language you use so that it’s more resonant with the other person, but I don’t think, wholesale, it means that you have to change who you are or what you’re trying to say, because this book is really all about, “How do you have the tough conversations with your manager? How do you push back on extra work or give them tough feedback up the chain of command?”

That’s what managing up really is. It’s having those difficult conversations, sometimes having the courage to say what needs to be said, but doing so in a tactful diplomatic manner that actually earns you trust instead of just turning into a professional people-pleaser.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a nice story that inspires or brings this together in terms of what’s really at stake if we master this skillset?

Melody Wilding
Yes, I think the book actually starts with one of my personal stories which was a time I failed to manage up, and I think it’s a lesson in multiple ways. So, before I went full-time into my current business, I was working at a health care company, and I loved that job. I loved my boss. What I didn’t realize at the time that I saw in hindsight was that I had been hired to work on really a pet project of my managers that was kind of outside of the rest of the company’s scope, and my manager had been given a bit of budget and, unbeknownst to me, some timeline to see if this was viable or not.

And so, that was my first fail, was really not getting on the same page with my manager about “What was the context that this project came up in? What are the expectations? Who else needs to be bought in and on board with this?” And long story short, let’s flash forward, I ended up being laid off. My role was eliminated, and it felt like a shock to me, and it shouldn’t have.

And that is what’s at stake. That’s a very extreme example of what happens when you don’t manage up well, but I was really sideswiped because I hadn’t aligned with my manager. I didn’t have other advocates in the organization who were willing to fight for me and keep me because managing up has to go beyond your boss.

Do not make your manager your single point of failure. You might not get along with them very well despite all of your efforts. Who is leading you may change on a moment’s notice, so you need to make sure you have those other allies as well. And all of that was a very cautionary tale, but I think that’s what’s at stake, whether, again, in my case, it was extreme. I lost my role.

But every day, people feel like they’re overlooked for promotions and opportunities, it may go to someone else who seems less experienced, or we get into these minor frustrations that we end up taking personally, “You know, why does my boss cut me off? They never even allow me to hear my idea out,” or, “Why are they micromanaging me and on top of me about everything?” And so much of this can be solved by learning some key skills.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, tell us, you lay out 10 key conversations for managing up well, which I love. And so, we’ve got alignment, styles, ownership, boundaries, feedback, networking, visibility, advancement, money, and quitting. So, I really dig this because I just love a framework and a set of distinctions and a delineation of categories that just helps make sense of the whole universe of managing up conversations. It feels like, “Yeah, that’s a pretty fine job of summing them up.”

So, I suppose I’m curious, do you have a gauge for what percent of folks ever actually proactively say, “Hey, I’d like to have a conversation about some of the fundamental ways we work and communicate with each other, and what would be best for both of us”? In a way, that almost seems like among the most foundational things one might do in the world of managing up. Is that fair? And how often is that happening?

Melody Wilding
It’s definitely fair. It’s very true, that it is so fundamental that, I think, we sometimes assume it. We assume that this has happened and we overlook it because of that. So, to your point, I would say maybe 10% of people are having those types of explicit conversations about how they work together with their manager, and that is a huge, huge opportunity.

Because if you are in that small minority of people who are doing this, you’re not only going to stand out as someone who is thoughtful, conscientious, you’re driven, you’re taking initiative, but you’re going to have intel and build rapport and trust much more quickly than anyone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. I agree, and I’ve experienced it on both sides of the table. Because it’s rare, it feels very special, like, “Oh, wow, this person, I like them. They’re on top of things.” And I think it’s hard for that to go poorly. Maybe if you ask at just like the worst possible time, like, “Hey, that’s like the definition of a non-urgent situation and we’re in the midst of something on fire right now.” So, maybe that that’s one way it could go poorly. But tell us your take on that in terms of to what extent do managers welcome these discussions because I think there’s a bit of reluctance on the part of some folks to initiate?

Melody Wilding
There definitely is, yeah. And when I have this conversation with people, in the book, we’re talking about really the styles conversation, and that’s when we talk about how, “How do we work together? How do we communicate? What are your preferences? What are mine?” And going back to what I said a moment ago, when you understand the context of who your boss is, and also what your defaults are, you stop taking things so personally because you understand, “Oh, this is their style. This is their way of approaching and processing information.”

“And so, if they send a period instead of an exclamation point, I don’t need to make that mean that I’m getting fired, or they hate me, or they’re against me and they favorite somebody else.” We can be much more diplomatic and make those tweaks to how we communicate.

Melody Wilding
And in my experience, people are reluctant, yes, to bring this up, but when they do, their manager is overjoyed. And, of course, you need to bring this up in a tactful way. So, what I suggest is that you present it to your boss and say something along the lines where you show why this is in their benefit, to say, “I’m really committed to us being able to reach our goals together this year.”

Or, “I want to make sure that you can get the best performance out of me possible, that our work flows more smoothly, whatever it is. And to get there, what I would love to do is understand a bit more about how you work and how I can communicate with you better to get you the information you need. Does that sound good?”

And you can start by asking certain questions of your manager, whether it’s, “If I have to get certain updates to you, what format is best? Do you want those in Teams, in email? Should I present a slide deck? Do you prefer bullet points or should I do narratives?”

Understanding some of those preferences, when you are asking your manager questions, gives you opportunities to then say, “Great. Thank you so much for sharing that. From my standpoint, here’s what would be helpful. If you have feedback for me, take me aside after a meeting, or if you notice that I’m not being as concise as I could be in a presentation, shoot me a quick message on Teams so I can adjust on the fly.”

All of us have different preferences around that, but it turns it into more of a two-way street where, yes, you’re understanding what your manager wants, but you’re also finding opportunities to assert, or at least put on the table, “Here’s what I would like. Is that something that we can find a middle ground on together?”

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds great, yes. And as you say it, and I’m imagining the scene, that seems pleasant and welcome to hear such things. And I want to dive deep on a couple of these. I don’t think we could do all 10 in our time together, but one with regard to boundaries. I remember when I was reading through this, I recall a conversation I had with my friend, Kelsey. We were catching up at a wedding. It had been a long time.

And she was telling me all of, like, the cool things she was doing with, like, go to an Ironman Triathlon, and this and that. I was like, “Wait a minute. I’m sorry. Don’t you work in consulting?” And she’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “How on earth are you finding the time to have all of these adventures and do all of these things when I recall my days of consulting were so brutal with regard to the hours of the travel and the unexpectedness of things?”

And she was like, “Oh, well, you know, I just kind of talked to my boss and said, ‘Well, hey, here’s what’s going on, here’s the nights I’m not available, and here’s the thing…” She just sort of laid it out in terms of what’s up, in terms of, “I’m going to over-deliver on these key metrics and expectations, and these are the nights I will not be available to be doing things.”

And I was like, “And they went for that?” My mouth dropped, I was like, “You can do that? That’s possible? Even in client services? Wow.” And so, I was struck at just what a managing-up boundary conversation can do for transforming a life into being sustainable and enjoyable in what can be demanding fields.

So, lay it on us, Melody, if we want to establish boundaries but we’re a little scared and we think that we might misstep, or seem like we’re not a team player, or we’re lazy, or we’re not really committed, or any of these other negative associations we fear, how do we play the boundary-setting conversation game?

Melody Wilding
Well, that’s the tension with it, right? We need to protect our well-being, but we also don’t want to look like a slacker, so we have to find that balance there. And the thing with the boundaries-conversation is that “no” may be a complete sentence in many areas of life, but at work it doesn’t go over so well if you just say, “No, I’m not going to do that,” or “I don’t want to do that,” right? It’s going to hurt your reputation for you to say that so you need to be more thoughtful about how you approach it.

And what I think is so telling about what your friend did is it sounds like she was assessing, what I call in the book, your pushback power. And your pushback power is the invisible leverage you do or don’t have to push back, to say no. And we all fall somewhere on the spectrum, higher to lower. Your pushback power is higher if you have more positional authority.

If you’re more seasoned, tenured in your career, you have more credibility behind you, you are a high performer, or you offer a very specialized skillset that people may be more willing to make accommodations for because it could be hard to replace you. And even things like the strength of your relationship with your boss, how you build trust and rapport, your boss’s values, the state of the organization.

If the team is in free fall, in crisis, it’s going to be harder to say, “I can’t pitch in this weekend,” or, “I can’t take on more of this project for a colleague who just left,” versus if you’re in a time of stability, it might be a little more receptive to that. So, taking into account that pushback power allows you to gauge “How directly or assertively can I say no? And how frequently can I say no?”

And it sounds like your friend did that with her manager. Because she was higher in pushback power, she was able to say, “I have these commitments, and so can we find a solution to work my workload around these commitments that I have?”

Now, for those of us that may be medium to lower in pushback power, there’s a number of different things you can do. One of my favorite approaches that I talk about is called the trade-off approach, and this is great because it allows you to set up binary options. So, you may say, “Okay, thank you for sharing that, you know, Y has come down as an important priority from the leadership team. A few weeks ago, we had talked about that you wanted me to focus on X.”

“And so, if X is truly still a priority, how would you like me to reprioritize to make room for Y? Or what would you like me to slow down on? What would you like us to delegate or temporarily deprioritize in order to make that possible?” And the beauty of this is that you are setting the parameters. You are setting the decision options, subtly saying, “Both of these cannot happen at the same time. Which one would you like to choose?”

But ultimately, you’re approaching it more as a problem-solving conversation instead of just dumping a problem back in your boss’s lap to say, “I don’t know. I can’t do it, so figure out someone else to get it done.” You’re approaching it more as a collaboration, which that person will appreciate, and the ultimate authority is back in their hands.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s really handy because I think without the conversation, we can just assume, “Oh, I have to continue doing all the things we’ve ever discussed, as well as this new thing, and that’s just that,” and that is a dangerous, untenable place to live. So that’s handy with regard to the conversation. I’m curious, when it comes to increasing our pushback power over time, let’s discuss.

So, one of the levers is just the strength and quality of our relationship. Another is how special and wonderful and high-performing we are. Any others and what are the quickest, easiest ways to boost these so that we are growing in pushback power over time?

Melody Wilding
Well, let’s talk about the performance piece and building rapport and trust with your manager. There’s a conversation that comes before boundaries, and that’s called the ownership conversation. And that’s important here because the ownership conversation is all about looking for where can you take initiative of projects or problems you want to solve and run with, but by doing that really add value or solve an issue that’s a pain point for your manager, your team, the organization.

And when you do that, you build, you add to the pushback power you have because you’ve enhanced your value, you’ve shown you’re a problem solver, and that’s really valuable. So, the ownership conversation is all about “How do I not only spot those opportunities, but capitalize on them in a way that’s not going to step on the toes of other people around us?” Because that would backfire, of course.

And a lot of it comes down to choosing the right problem to start. And so, I talk about how there’s five worthwhile areas to look at. And a few of those may be bottlenecks. So, are there inefficiencies or broken processes, for example, that are slowing everyone down, including you, that if solved would make everybody’s lives much less stressful and easier?

Neglected needs is also a great place to look. What are the topics or agenda items that keep going to the bottom of the pile or keep rolling over month to month, quarter to quarter, that no one seems to have the time to get around to, but says, “Wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that? Or we really need to get to that”? Could you be the one to carry that torch forward?

And another one that I think can be easier to spot is feedback patterns. What are you hearing again and again from fellow team members, clients, your vendors, that if you took action on to make better, would add value to everyone else?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, could you give us a story of this ownership in action? Because I think you’re really keying in on something in terms of differentiating and growing a career, because it’s quite possible to go years at a time in reactive mode of doing whatever somebody asks for, or seems to be perilously on fire.

It’s hard to be distinctive in such a place, as opposed to, with ownership, it’s like, “Oh, you know, that’s a fantastic result. Yeah, that was, really, I’m the person behind that.” That’s hugely awesome. So, could you give us a story about ownership in action?

Melody Wilding
Sure, I have two that come to mind, if that’s okay. So, the first one is, I had a client about a year ago, who, his organization was acquiring a new one and he worked on the legal side of this. And so, because of that, when they acquired this new organization, all of his colleagues were running in the direction of all of the new opportunities that were created by this acquisition and trying to capitalize on that, chasing shiny objects, everyone was trying to meet with the three key leaders.

And what he saw was that that change actually created this vacuum where he could step in, and that no one was tackling, there was a neglected need, in other words, with due diligence matters of closing everything that had to do with that transaction, you know, wrapping up all of the contracts, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s to make sure the merger was complete.

And so, he said, “You know what? I’m actually going to zig while everybody else is zagging.” And he carved out that niche for himself as being the person who was buttoning up the deal, so to speak, which gave him a lot of exposure to not only he became a close confidant to his manager, but also his skip level, his boss’s boss, and some other key C-suite leaders in the organization who really cared about this going correctly, and who knew, “We have to get these compliance matters correct.”

And for him, that allowed him to build those relationships. He was seen as more of a partner to those people. And flash forward about a year later, he was actually promoted to partner because of that work that played a huge instrumental role. So, that’s one example that comes to mind of looking for opportunities that other people may be missing.

And then the other quick story I’ll share has to do with another client who, after the pandemic, was really interested in getting mental health days going for the organization, making sure that the team had time for development and rest, and weren’t just go, go, go, go, go all the time. And why this was ownership is because she had to create buy-in for this idea. This wasn’t something that others had thought of. This was something she was innovating from the ground up and had to push through.

And so, a couple things that she did really excellently was she came with proposals in hand, and so when she would have meetings with some of the key stakeholders and decision makers, she would come with a one-pager with talking points that they could use, just ready-made. She made their job easy, took the cognitive load off of them, and she proposed small steps.

So, in the book, I talk about this as the foot-in-the-door technique in psychology, where you propose, whether it’s a pilot project or a test or rolling something out to just a small sample. The people around you want to mitigate risk and potential exposure or failure. So, if you could say, “Let’s start with a mental health day and then we can actually roll that out to have these once a quarter and have more events around this.”

She just started with, “Let’s have this one day,” and that was easier for people to get on board with. And, eventually, she was successful in making it something bigger but I thought that was a great example of planting seeds, taking it step by step, and getting small agreements that lead to bigger ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool thing to take ownership of because, well, one, that’s just great for everybody, and two, boy, I sure would like that person in my organization, it’s like, “Oh, this is the person who got us all the mental health days. I want to do them favors whenever possible.”

Melody Wilding
Yes, great point. And that speaks to this idea of looking for triple wins. Is something going to be a win for you in terms of you’ll enjoy the work, it will add to your own credibility? Is it a win for your manager? Will it make them look good or advance their priorities? And, third, is it a win for the team or your organization as a whole?

Like you said, your colleagues are certainly going to love you, but, you know, at the end of the day, for everyone’s productivity, sustainability in their roles and long term the results of the organization, it was huge from that respect, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, within these 10 key conversations, could we pick perhaps one or two that seem to be super transformative and yet pretty easy to do? Any of your favorite tips here?

Melody Wilding
Let’s talk about visibility, if that’s good with you. Yeah, I think this is one that people know they need to do, but don’t quite know how to approach because it feels daunting. It feels daunting to feel like, “Ugh, I spend so much time working. Now you’re telling me I have to advertise that work as well and I have to bring more attention to it?”

And in some ways, yes, because we can expect our work to speak for itself. It’s not going to do that. We need to be the advocate for it. But there are some pretty simple, easy ways to build visibility into just the day-to-day of how you work instead of making it extra effort, and I think that’s the win-win. One way you can do this is by restructuring your one-on-ones.

So, I highly recommend that you start all of your one-on-ones with your manager with wins. And you can call it wins, you can call it progress or milestones or achievements, whatever language feels best to you, but the point of that is to not just dive into status updates of, “Oh, here’s where this project is. Here’s where this is. This is what’s coming up.”

But to more so utilize that time to show your manager, “Yes, here’s what we’ve done, but here’s what it means. Here’s the outcome, the results. Here’s also visibility into how I thought about solving a problem, the considerations that I made, or the people I talked to.” And all of that shows them, yes, you are actually getting things done. It gives them more insight into you operating at a more strategic, perhaps even higher level. And it also gives them information that they need to run up their own chain of command.

And so, it’s not really self-promotion to just puff yourself up. We really need to think about it more as, “I’m giving my boss the data they need to advocate for me, to advocate for the rest of the team, to have resources, opportunities, decision-making power at higher levels.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s excellent. And often, when we take ourselves out of the equation, there’s less self-consciousness, and it’s like, “Oh, this is this is handy. Like, if I were leading this organization, I would probably want to know about the skills, this asset, this resource, this person has in the mix to be deployed when useful and necessary. Otherwise, everyone just misses out.” And how about advancement?

Melody Wilding
Advancement, yes. And thank you for that great segue because visibility and advancement go hand in hand, right? And you can start to see how these conversations build on each other, intersect, because once people know more about what you’re achieving and know more about you, well, then you’re in a position to do bigger things.

And why I say that term “do bigger things” is because advancement doesn’t always have to be a promotion. It can be that you want to grow your scope, or the budget that you oversee, you want to go from two to four people on your team, or you want to work on a stretch project, or something that’s completely different from your current skillset.

For example, right now I have a lot of clients who are asking for stretch projects in AI, because that’s really important to them to learn and they know it will be a value-add to the organization. So, think more broadly about what advancement could mean, but also think about starting much earlier than you think you might need to.

Because I see way too many people get caught in the performance review paradox where they keep their head down, they think they’re sending signals to their manager about what they want and where they want to go, only for their performance review to arrive and no promotion, no salary increases, no being named to that committee. It seems to pass them by.

And that’s often because we either haven’t been explicit enough about what we want or we’ve waited too long to bring that conversation up, and your manager has already had to allocate headcount or resources or make those decisions. They were made months ago. So, this may mean starting three to six months in advance to plant those seeds.

Let’s say you did hit a big milestone. You may say, “This was such a valuable experience. I really loved getting to interact with these clients or that stakeholder or use this skill. I would love to do more of that. Do you think there’s an opportunity in the coming months?”

And so, you start to get that out there. You may even have more of a formal conversation with your manager to say, “In the next year, I would love to double the size of my team,” or, “I would love to move from manager to director level. What would you need to see to be comfortable with that change?”

And that allows you to surface objections because your manager may say, “Well, you’re not ready for that,” or, “We need to have these other people on this committee bought into this, so I need to rope other people in.” And it allows you to contract so that you can understand, “All right, by June, you need to see this. By December, you need to see that.”

And you can work against that and have follow-ups to say, “All right, I did what we discussed. Are we still on track here? Has anything else come up? Would anything else prevent us from making that decision at that point?” And so, it has advancement top of mind for you and your manager, and it prevents some of moving that goalpost that can happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. Well, Melody, tell me, any other final tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Melody Wilding
Let’s talk about, briefly, the money conversation because if you have advanced and you’re taking on more, you probably want the salary that comes along with that. Money can also be very loaded and very sensitive, something many of us are not taught how to discuss in our personal lives, let alone in the workplace.

And one of the big mistakes or missteps I see people make here is that they focus way too much on what they’ve done already and not enough on what they can do in the future if they were given more money to do it, and that’s very important. You need to think about, “What’s the potential ROI if the organization gives me five, ten, fifty thousand more dollars, what else would I be able to do? Does it serve bigger clients, manage a bigger team?”

You need to paint that future so that your manager, again, see a theme here, can make a case to their own leadership about, “Why should we give this person more money?” It’s not enough that you want it or you feel you deserve it. That may be true and there needs to be a business case there. So that, combined with, instead of just saying, “I deserve this. I work really hard,” approach it from the standpoint of fairness.

We humans, we are wired for reciprocity. We want to make sure that people feel like they are being treated fairly or correctly. And so, if you can use language around that to say, “I want to make sure that my compensation matches the level that I’m performing at or is commensurate with the amount of value I’m bringing to the organization.” If you can use that sort of language, it makes it feel less like this request that you’re demanding, and again more like a trade.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Melody Wilding
In the book, I actually cite some of this research around micro-yeses. And so, if you can get a micro-yes, let’s say you have to give someone feedback, and instead of just diving into, “So, in that last meeting, I felt like you talked over me,” ask for permission first. Get a micro-yes, “Will now be a good time to talk?” “Yes, sure.” “Okay, I’d love to chat about that client meeting. Is that good with you?” “Yes, sure.” Get those micro yeses along the way so someone is a bit more bought in and not as surprised by what’s coming next.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Melody Wilding
Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Fantastic book, as well as their other book, Thanks for the Feedback. Both amazing books that really break down the nuances, the anatomy of how to have these difficult conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Melody Wilding
I am a huge Oura user, so I have my Oura ring on here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Mine is on my charger.

Melody Wilding
Yes, I probably have to charge mine today, too. But I’ve had it for years, and I just, especially since they have added the heart rate monitoring throughout the day, it is so helpful for me to see what spikes my stress when I go into restorative time. It’s just helped me manage my own schedule and my own energy much better.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Melody Wilding
I am a go-to-the-gym-first-thing-in-the-morning person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quote it back to you often?

Melody Wilding
“You teach people how to treat you.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Melody Wilding
ManagingUp.com is where you can find all the information about the book. You can connect with me as well there, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Melody Wilding
Start today with having the alignment conversation, and that is a really simple entry point to begin managing up, to ask your boss, “What would success look like for you in the next three months? What does great performance look like in this role? Or, what metrics does your boss discuss with you?” Start there, and I think that’s going to establish a basis of trust and give you a lot of insight that will be really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Melody, beautiful. Thank you.

Melody Wilding
Thank you.

990: How to Advocate for Yourself and Get Noticed at Work with Jessica Chen

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Jessica Chen discusses how to get noticed even if you’re not the loudest voice in the room.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top misconception about career advancement 
  2. How to ensure your message always lands 
  3. The five elements that make your voice resonate 

About Jessica

Jessica Chen is an Emmy-Award winner, top virtual keynote speaker, and CEO of Soulcast Media, a global business communication training agency. Her client list includes Google, LinkedIn, the CDC, Medtronic, Mattel, HP, DraftKings, and many more. Prior to starting Soulcast Media, Jessica was a broadcast television journalist. She is also an internationally recognized top LinkedIn Learning Instructor where her communication courses have been watched by over 2 million learners and featured in Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. She lives in Los Angeles.

Resources Mentioned

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Jessica Chen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jessica, welcome.

Jessica Chen
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom. And I would love to kick us off by hearing something super surprising and counterintuitive you’ve learned over your years of studying how we can get noticed at work for the right reasons.

Jessica Chen
Well, I have to reference back to when I first started working. My thinking was, “As long as you work hard and you’re smart, you’ll get recognized, right? Your opportunities will open up. You’ll get that promotion. People will know about you.” But, funny enough, that’s not how the world works. And it was counterintuitive to many of the things I was taught growing up in a very traditional and conservative household, where it really was just about studying and putting your head down.

And so, when I began my career, which, at the time, was as a broadcast journalist, I really figured out quickly that I had to learn some new skills because it wasn’t just about being smart or being hardworking. It’s being able to communicate, put yourself out there, and advocate for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious, we’ve got to talk about the Emmy in particular. Congratulations. Not very many Emmy Award winners on the show. So, tell us, that’s sort of a very concrete, discrete achievement, accomplishment, which seems to suggest, “Hey, you’ve been noticed for your work. It is outstanding as recognized by the powers that be.” Was that also something that you had to advocate for? Are we to understand that awards are not granted just for being outstanding? What’s behind the scenes here?

Jessica Chen
So, the Emmy Award, as many of you know, is considered the most prestigious award in television and it was something that didn’t happen absolutely overnight. It took me about 10 years to actually win that award, and this was when I was at the ABC station in San Diego, California. And it’s funny because, and I think, you know, if we’re talking about awards and things like that, I never feel like it’s something that you are aspiring or trying to get. You just do good work and hopefully people will begin to notice it. But there is an element to you have to be able to talk about the work so people know about it.

So, I remember for this Emmy award, this was actually a culmination of, it really was a team effort, and I have to say that, where the story that got us that award was, so this was, gosh, this was when San Diego was experiencing a lot of wildfires. I’m here in California, and many people know California is quite dry. And so, in San Diego, during that particular year that we won that award, there were a lot of wildfires happening.

And so, for us, in journalism, and for me particularly as a journalist, as a reporter, when you have, like, for example, a fire breaking out, your job isn’t to run away. Your job is to run towards the fire, which is also counterintuitive to everything. And so, I just remember our entire team did such a great job in covering the fire, safety, what was going on, where do residents have to go, where did they have to evacuate.

And just the seamlessness in the execution of how everybody operated, how everybody communicated, it actually ended up being one of the, well, the reason why I won was because it was actually a really well-produced news story and newscast. And so, again, it wasn’t just about working hard, which, of course, you got to do, but after we finished that, it was about, “How can we make sure that we get the visibility for this amazing coverage that we had?”

And, of course, we submitted it to get nominated, and it got picked as the award winner and whatnot. But I think that Emmy Award is a good symbolization of, “Yes, execution is important, but being able to put yourself out there and talk about it is also very key.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really dig that story because I think it’s possible that you’re doing a ton of stories, you’re cranking them out day after day, and it is sort of special for y’all to step back and realize, “Oh, wait. This one was really particularly excellent. Let’s make sure that we put our best foot forward,” and pick your moment and rock and roll there.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think one of the, you know, a lot of things that I talk about, one of them is being able to celebrate your wins, and at the same time it’s not about always talking about the work that you do but it’s being judicious about, “Okay, I know this one I did particularly well in. How can I make sure to maximize the opportunity and ensure other people know it?” Because, yes, you don’t need to do it for every single project, every single thing that you do, but for the ones that really stand out to you, it’s thinking about how you can take that and leverage it for perhaps more opportunities, more recognition.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, your book is called Smart, Not Loud. Can you hammer home the main idea or distinction we should be thinking about here with that?

Jessica Chen
So, the thesis of this book, and I really wrote this book for those who were raised in what I call a quiet culture. So, people who are raised in a quiet culture were taught principles like valuing humility, modesty, not seeking the spotlight, avoiding conflict, for example. And I teased this earlier where, growing up in a very traditional and conservative family, my parents taught me to embody these quiet culture traits.

But when you go out into the working world, especially in many Western and corporate workplaces, you start to see that it’s the people who are able to speak, be the first one to speak, put themselves out there, talk about their wins. These are the things that people notice, which is what I call loud-culture traits. So, the question is, “For somebody who was raised to embody and value these traits, how can you still get noticed at work without necessarily changing who you are as a person?”

Because my whole thing is, if you naturally tend to be on the quieter side, or if being assertive, dominant, loud, and extroverted, if that’s not your style, I don’t think that’s necessarily what you should do because that feels quite inauthentic. But how can you still show up in a way for you to get noticed and still unlock those bigger opportunities?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds handy. Maybe before we get into the particulars of how that’s done, could you share with us a cool success story of someone who made a transformation doing this kind of stuff?

Jessica Chen
I’ll share my own story, because this is a personal journey for me too, and like I mentioned, that was how I was raised, and I experienced a lot of friction. I call it communications friction in the workplace. And, in many ways, when I started working, it was this culture shock.

So, I was trying to find this balance that I was talking about earlier of like, “Well, if it seems like the people who are loud get recognized, but that’s not necessarily my style, how can I do that?” And at the end of the day, a lot of it actually came down to one thing. It was communications.

It was learning how to be an effective communicator. And we know communications is a very broad topic, and there’s actually a lot to learn.

It’s about, for example, public speaking, getting comfortable standing up and presenting an idea. I think, for many of us, this is not something that we are naturally born with. It certainly wasn’t something that I naturally was comfortable with, or even finding that moment to communicate your idea in a meeting. I used to remember sitting in a meeting and being like, “Oh, gosh, I have an idea. I want to say it.” But instead, I’m in my own head creating this narrative of like, “Is it a good idea? Is it not a good idea?” And then before you know it, the conversation has moved on, right?

And so, it’s funny because I always joke, even though communications was something I struggled with, because I started out as a broadcast television journalist, there was no better industry for me to learn how to become an effective communicator. And so, this is to say, when you asked about the journey, like a person who had that transformation, I think, in many ways, it was for me being introspective, identifying these points of friction, and then really doubling down on leveling up my communication skills, because once I did that, I felt like opportunities, visibility, all that completely changed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to talk about some of the particulars of communicating well and sort of getting past these friction points. But could you first share with us what is it that we want to communicate? How might we go about identifying key things worth highlighting before we figure out the how, specifically, to execute that communication?

Jessica Chen
The number one most important thing anybody has to think about if they’re thinking, “How do I make sure my message comes across the way I want it to come across?” is to always ask yourself this question, “Who am I speaking with and what do they care about?” I think, for many of us, it’s not instinctive for us to think about that first question because many times we’re thinking about, “I have this idea. I’m excited about this idea. I’ve been working on this project and I know I want to talk about it in this meeting.” And a lot of it is coming from your own perspective.

And I always say you can be presenting or talking about one topic to this group. You’re at a next meeting, same topic, but different group of people. Even though your topic is the same, how you communicate and how you tailor that needs to be different because maybe the people in group A, the things that they care about might be a little bit different than the people in group B.

And here’s an example. Let’s say in group A, you’re talking to your immediate team, and your immediate team are people who just need to know what’s going on, the execution, the nitty-gritty details. But let’s say in Group B, you’re talking to senior-level executives. They probably don’t want all the nitty-gritty details. They just want to know the high-level key points and perhaps your recommendation.

Because if you boggle them down with all the details, they might go, “Okay, so what’s the point you’re trying to say, Jessica?” And I think, as an effective communicator, we’ve got to be really in tuned with our audience, what they care about, and tailoring our message to them. That can be our guiding light and our North Star.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about any number of times I’ve received an intriguing enough cold email that got me to hop on a call for a demo of something. And I’ve been amazed at how fairly often folks will walk me through a slide deck, this is just like a one-on-one kind of sales conversation, but walk me through a slide deck.

And I’m thinking, “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about your founder, or the history of the company, or your story, where the idea came from, like the inspiration.” It’s like, “I just want to know, can you really do the thing that you’re saying you can do? Is that going to make big results happen for me? And could you show me a cool case study or how this unfolded in practice with some charts or graphs or numbers?”

But help us out with that. So, we tend to get stuck in a world where we just think, “Okay, this is my presentation, so I’m supposed to give it,” or “I’m fired up about this, so I’m going to go for it.” What’s sort of the habit or practice or ritual we should use to stop and check in and get that audience info we need first?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because the story that you just mentioned, that experience you have, a lot of it is because this person is presenting you a canned presentation that they’ve created. It’s like, “Okay, getting on a call with Pete. Let me just pull up the presentation that I always give.” And here’s the thing, and let’s be real, nobody has time to recreate a presentation every single time they’re meeting somebody new.

But I do think the first few minutes of, and let’s just use the example of presentations, the first few minutes of you giving a presentation, that is the most critical time because, like you said, Pete, you’re ready to listen, you’re like, “Okay, you got me on this call. I am intrigued enough to talk to you, so I’m paying attention.”

And so, for folks who are thinking about, for example, leveling up their presentation skills, yes, we’re not talking about changing your entire presentation because nobody has time for that. But thinking about how you can tailor just even the first few minutes, “Okay, I’m getting on this call with Pete. What do I know about him? What is it that I feel, like, he cares about? And I can make sure that I start off with that because I want to capture his attention and get him really interested.”

And like you said, for you, you’re like, “I don’t really care to know about, like, the founders or, like, whatever, that kind of stuff,” but maybe to somebody else that is important to them. So, for the person who is engaging with you, for them to think about “How can I be strategic?” it’s being able to identify, “Okay, what are the things you care about? And how can I start it off to capture your attention?”

Pete Mockaitis
And it seems like it would be totally fair in a small environment where you can, like if it’s one or two or three people you’re speaking to, as opposed to hundreds, to just ask, “Hey, so where do you want to start first? What do you find most interesting? What made you intrigued to have this conversation?” And I suppose you can simply ask.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think a good way is to ask open-ended questions at the beginning, and this is kind of where like the art of small talk happens. Before you even dive into the presentation itself, before you even pull it up and start sharing your screen with somebody, it’s just kind of getting a temperature check of, like, this person. Maybe asking a few questions, and then that can give you some pretty key insight of like, “Oh, I know this,” or “Pete said this, so maybe I can kind of, like…”

And this can even be not just content. It can just be even tone and the vibe of how you present it. If you notice somebody is, like, pretty formal and pretty, let’s say, they just want to get straight to it, then you’re like, “Okay, I got to get straight into it.” Or, if you’re like, “Oh, in this small talk, I found that this person likes to chit-chat. They’re a little bit more casual,” then maybe in your presentation style, you now tailor it to that. It’s always basically meeting people where they’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you could intuit based on your observations of how things seem to be. That’s super. Are there any explicit questions you recommend just straight-up putting out there?

Jessica Chen
Well, I mean, I’m trying to think about very specific, but I mean, even just when we think about small talk, it’s just thinking about, like, “What have you been working on?” or, like, “Kind of what’s exciting?” And I think that can give you insight of who the person is, what they’re interested in, and then using that information, whether it’s in the beginning of your meeting or later on in the meeting, but using that bit of insight to make it feel like, “Oh, I heard what this person said.”

And so, in the middle of the conversation, you can even bring it back up. You can say, “Oh, yeah, and, Pete, when you mentioned that earlier, when we first jumped on that call, this point that I’m about to make actually relates to that.” So, it’s really making sure that you’re asking questions that provide insight into this person, but then also maybe even leveraging it during your conversation to show the other person that, hey, you’re listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am listening, Jessica, and it sounds, like, you’re kind of touching on some of the stuff associated with your 4A Sequence for speaking up at meetings. Can you lay this on us?

Jessica Chen
I have found that for some of us, being the first one to speak up in a meeting is not the most natural thing. Some of us tend to want to get a temperature check of the meeting first, or not the first one to speak, or they tend to just want to think about their ideas before they say something, versus some people are very much about they’re processing their ideas in real time as they’re communicating.

However, there is this 4A Sequence, and this is a communication strategy specifically for people who tend to have a hard time finding that moment to speak because, what we don’t want is for somebody to have a brilliant idea and they’re just keeping it in their mind, and they’re trying to figure out when’s the right time to speak, and before they know it, the conversation has moved on.

So, the 4A Sequence is a way of basically seamlessly inserting yourself into the conversation, and I’ll walk you through the 4A. It’s four As basically. The first A is active listening. The opposite of active listening is passive listening which is think about when you’re sitting on your couch watching Netflix. You’re passively listening and watching what’s but you have no intention to chime in. And I think this is a very important mindset shift, because when you go into a meeting with the intention of saying at least one or two things, it completely changes how you even sit in a meeting, whether you’re leaning in, and how you’re paying attention. So, going in with A, active listening.

Once you found that opportune time to chime in, whether it’s because of a pause or because somebody said something that is relevant to what you want to say, the next is you want to acknowledge. Acknowledging is you simply saying, “Hey, Pete, that was actually a really interesting point you just made,” or “What you just said made me think of…” You’re acknowledging the person by saying, “I hear you.” And you can even say those words, “I hear what you’re saying.”

But what is great about this is you’re allowing the person who just spoke to not feel like you’re cutting them off necessarily. Because when people feel like they’re getting cut off, or this is even more important to do if you have an opposing idea, is you want them to feel acknowledged so that they can go, “Okay, at least I was heard.” You acknowledge. And, by the way, acknowledging is not agreeing, it’s just letting the person know that you heard them.

Then the third A is anchor. Anchoring is repeating one or two words the person said right before you as a way to connect your point to their point, “Hey, Pete, that was a really interesting point you just made. And when you said the word data, it made me think of A, B, and C.” You said data, I repeated your word, data, and that creates a connection.

And then, finally, the fourth is answer. Now you make your answer, your pointed statement, or whatever it is you want to say. And I have found that when you can, like, present this acronym of the 4A Sequence, it’s especially helpful for people who tend to figure out, like chiming in and how to do it. So, it’s active listening, it’s acknowledging, anchoring, and answering.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like those little examples there. Could you give us a full demonstration in terms of we’re chatting, and, well, I guess I need to say something first that you can actively listen to. So, we’ll say, we’re chatting, “I’m really excited about the opportunity to put forward this content. I think it’ll be like testimonials on steroids when we interview our clients in this context.”

Jessica Chen
“So, you mentioned the word content and I know, Pete, you’ve been producing a lot of different content on this, and so it made me think of the next few episodes you’re going to be creating.” So, this is just kind of me using and repeating the word that you said. I was anchoring it to the word you said, which was content. I mean, I don’t really have a follow-up question to what you have to say, but if I did, I’d be like, “Okay, Pete, okay, content, oh, I did have a question about content.” So, this is how I would essentially seamlessly insert myself back into the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I think I’ve found is that when you’re anchoring and repeating a word or phrase someone said, if that word or phrase is somewhat unique, distinctive, original, fresh in some way, the person who said those words that you anchor to feels a little dose of, like, a pat on the back, or a high five, or a good job for saying that clever thing. So, I just get the impression that it increases your likability or maybe that’s just me and I’m super susceptible to this kind of flattery.

Jessica Chen
No, you’re totally right, and I think some of it can be very subtle. It could be also very unconscious. Like, if I had repeated something that you said, it kind of makes you feel, “Oh, wow, Jessica actually heard me.” And it’s not like I’m explicitly saying it, like, “Oh, amazing idea,” but it’s just like, yeah, it’s just kind of like a little like, “Hey, wink, wink, like I heard you.”

And when we think about being an effective communicator, I think we have to think about making sure we are capturing people when they’re most receptive to listen. And when they’re most receptive to listen, it’s generally when they are feeling validated, feeling acknowledged, feeling like they’re being heard. So, I think, yes, these subtle communication tactics, which we’re talking about right now, is the anchoring, repeating one or two words that person said, it can actually achieve that for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Chris Voss on the show, the FBI negotiation dude, and he talked about that very concept of repeating the last few words they said is almost magical, even if you’re doing it sort of as though you’re thinking it in, like, a soft thinking processing kind of a voice. It’s like, “Okay, you’re really considering what I’m putting forward, and I appreciate that. Thank you.”

Jessica Chen
Exactly. So, I think when we think about being an effective communicator, it’s leveraging things that are also, yes, explicit but also very implicit too, but it’s still getting the other person to feel, like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Well, me hear what Jessica has to say next.”

Pete Mockaitis
And you highlight five different elements of voice which I think is so cool. Can you walk us through these five things? But, first, tell us why do we want to pay attention to our voice and what it sounds like? Is it just sort of like our voice is our voice, and that’s fine? Or just how much of an impact does it make tinkering with these variables?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because I think, whenever I talk about tone of voice specifically, a lot of times people go, “Well, it’s just the sound of my voice, right?” Yes, but there’s actually way more we can do with our voice than we think. And the five elements, which I will go through, are, I mean, this is not something that I produced. It’s actually based off research and study and research.

And I remember, just for me, when I was a broadcast journalist, I remember we would have consultants come in and they would critique us on television, and they would say, “Do this, do that, change this, change that,” just like as consultants, that’s what they do. And I remember one time I had the consultant come in, and we’re watching me talk on camera, doing whatever story, and she kept commenting, at least for me specifically, like, the rate, the pace of my speaking.

Now, when I get excited, when I’m happy, I tend to talk very fast. I think that’s just kind of like who I am, like I’m just excited, so I talk fast, especially if I’m maybe doing a story that’s more upbeat. And I remember her saying, “Jessica, you got to slow down.” And, in my mind, I was like, “I actually thought I was talking much slower than I would normally do,” because I know being and talking fast is my one weakness. And she was like, “No, no, no, Jessica, if you really want to be impactful, you got to speak way slower.”

And that’s when I realized, your tone of voice has many different elements, and, yes, how fast you speak is the first one. So, I’m going to walk through the five right now. So, number one, your tone of voice, the first element is really what we call your rate, how fast you’re speaking. And that’s kind of like the one that we think of the most because when people are nervous or excited, which is in my case, we talk fast. So, the key is you can actually control and change it. In fact, you do want to have a variety.

The second one is what we call your pitch, and that is basically how high or how low your voice is. Now, we know men tend to have lower pitches, women tend to have higher pitches, but here’s the thing, we all have a range. If we’re maybe talking about something serious, something that we want people to understand the urgency, then we might want to modulate our pitch so it’s a little lower. But it’s not doing it in this unnatural way. It’s, again, knowing that we all have a range.

The second one or the third one is thinking about your intensity. So, intensity, essentially, is how loud or how soft your voice is. Now, typically, when we are mad or angry, we will raise our voice but sometimes when people are shy and timid, they might speak in a lower tone of voice. And the idea is you want to have variety.

And I think this is like very strategic if you’re thinking about, let’s say, you’re giving a presentation and you’re speaking, you’re speaking maybe in a louder voice, and then suddenly you want to get people to know that this point is the most important. So maybe you’ll slow down your rate, lower your voice because that gets people to lean into what you have to say.

The next one is what we call inflection, and that is essentially what words you want emphasized. So, as you’re speaking, you have a choice of, “This is the word that I want people to know.” Like, even I’m just kind of doing it right now, “This is the word I want people to know is the most important.” And that is part of your tone of voice. It’s that inflection on that word.

And then, finally, it’s what we call the quality, and that is inherently, “What does your voice sound like?” When somebody calls you, they’re like, “Oh, that’s Pete,” “Oh, that’s Jessica.” And we say, of the five, the first four, you can control. In fact, you should change and have variety, but you can’t really change what’s inherent, which for some people, it might be that squeaky voice, that hoarse voice, that raspy voice. That’s just inherently who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
In a way, I’m thinking about sort of like recipes. If I want someone to receive a message more, like, thoughtfully, “Let’s reflect on this thing here, and really kind of mellow out and be calm,” we’re going to have a slower rate and a softer volume intensity. And that sort of produces that, which is very different than, “Rally the troops! Onward!” It’s like we’ve got more volume and rate in that zone.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I don’t know if you’ve ever even, like, thought so intently about tone. Maybe this is the first time you’re really thinking about it because we’re talking about it, but you’re right, and I feel like because you’re, like, “I have a specific intention, then I need to talk and modulate my tone in this way.” And even when you were just doing those two different modulations, my feeling right now, as a person listening, like I felt a certain way. And that’s the thing, you controlled it, you kind of did that with your tone of voice.

Pete Mockaitis
And not to get on a rant, but people are amazed at AI speech-to-text these days, and it’s very impressive technology, I’ll give you that. Like, that’s pretty cool and that wasn’t around nearly as robustly and beautifully six years ago because I’ve tried over the years. But at the same time, boy, when I watch a YouTube video and it has an AI narrator, I can tell, I get irritated.

Because it’s, yes, you are saying the words, bravo. Bravo, robot. But it’s not giving me all the emotional things with words that are part of what make a video lovely. So, I don’t know, that’s my take for what that’s worth. What’s your take on how AI plays into all this, Jessica?

Jessica Chen
Honestly, it’s just going to get better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, over time.

Jessica Chen
It’s just going to get better. It’s going to get better over time. It’s going to sound so realistic and it’s going to be scary, in my opinion. But where it is right now, I think many of us can tell it’s very artificial. It doesn’t sound very natural. And, as humans, like, I think that’s actually a good thing right now. It does kind of scare me a little bit once you cannot differentiate between, “Is this AI talking or is this a human talking?” But right now, for us, as humans to humans, that is how we connect. It’s the emotion behind the words, the language that we’re using. That’s how it builds connection, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And then you got me thinking about news broadcasters, in particular, and connection. What do I call that, the down pitch, in terms of like at the end of things? And some folks, let’s see, for an example, I might say, “And Starbucks revenue has increased by 18%.” It’s like the “Do-do,” at the end. And so, sometimes I get the vibes, it’s like, “Okay, you’re done. That’s what you’re communicating with that, is that we’re done, we’re over with this.” But kind of my thought is, from like a connection building perspective, that makes me feel like the broadcaster is more robotic and artificial and less connectable. So, what’s your take? You’ve been in it.

Jessica Chen
Oh, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. And I have a lot of thoughts because I had to also get out of that broadcast mentality myself. Having worked in broadcast, you start to develop a “broadcasting voice.” And, in some ways, it’s good for maybe more of, like, the nightly news, where, really, it’s just telling you exactly, like, what’s going on.

But if you watch morning shows, for example, on television, it’s way more casual, way more conversational, and that’s the intent. Because in a morning show, the vibe is really to like connect with the audience versus, I think, in my opinion, when you’re watching the nightly news, it’s really about, “This is serious stuff we’re talking about. Like, this is what’s going on. This is breaking news, or whatever politics and crime, whatever’s happening.”

And I think, for most of us listening right now, we’re not trying to talk in that broadcast voice. Actually, a lot of people say, like, “I want to speak like the people who talk on television.” And I’m like, “Actually, you don’t. Yes, maybe in the sense where they’re talking very clearly, they’re enunciating the words, yeah, those are all really good things. But when you’re talking about just everyday speak, you really want to not talk as if you’re talking to a person. You want to talk as if you’re just having a conversation.”

And, honestly, Pete, I think you do a good job with this too. Even though we’re doing this recording together, and in some ways it’s “broadcasting,” but it’s really like we’re having a conversation, and I think that’s really the approach and mentality for everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Jessica, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Jessica Chen
I would say the number one most important thing that I want people to know is whether you grew up in a quiet culture, or a loud culture, or you find yourself a mix of both, where sometimes it’s easy to speak up, or sometimes it feels a bit harder, I think what we can do for ourselves is know that we actually can control our career brand.

And our career brand is the perception people have of us in the office. So, the real kind of takeaway point is when you go into work every day and you’re thinking about communications, for example, or you’re thinking about tone of voice, or any of those things that we’re just talking about today, ultimately though, what can really accelerate any of our careers in the corporate environment or whatever industry that you’re in is knowing how you can take the work that you have to do, things that people assign you to do, and how can you use it to really leverage it for more opportunities.

Of course, communications plays a huge role in that, but if there’s any kind of, like, one golden nugget, I want people to feel empowered when it comes to their work, and knowing that they have control. Otherwise, if you don’t control the narrative of your own career brand, other people are going to start controlling it for you, and then you start to be boxed into, like, this person who just does this one thing. And I think all of us are way more dynamic than that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jessica Chen
It’s the one where it’s about when you think about communicating, it’s not always about focusing on the words that you say. It’s really about how you’re making other people feel with that.

And I think that’s kind of the essence of why I do what I do. And when people ask me, like, “Oh, can you help me become a more strategic communicator?” a lot of times, I’m like, “Yes, the words that you say matter, of course, are really important, but let’s talk about delivery and how you’re saying it because that’s really what matters at the end.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jessica Chen
I recently read a good one by Tessa West, it’s called Job Therapy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Jessica Chen
And I actually really enjoyed that book. I mean, granted, I will be biased, we share the same editor, but I really liked her book because it’s similar to kind of, like, how I think about career. It’s a very proactive way of finding a career that makes you happy instead of the other way around, essentially.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jessica Chen
On my desk, I have a cup heater and love it because it just keeps my coffee hot all day. 

But, honestly, in all seriousness, I will say, and this is, they don’t pay me to say this but I do use this one app quite a bit to schedule meetings. It’s called Motion, and that has been huge for me. I’ve been using that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people seem to really connect and resonate with and quote back to you often, and say, “Jessica, that was brilliant. Thank you”?

Jessica Chen
I would say you got to be your own best cheerleader. I think, for a lot of us who are smart, hardworking, we do good work, sometimes we can just do the thing and then move on. And I think it’s important to remind ourselves that, from time to time, we got to celebrate ourselves, be our own best cheerleader, and it could be even like small little things.

And one quick tip that I love to share with people is if you get an email from somebody, and they’re saying, “Congratulations. Good job. Awesome work,” create what I call a “Yay” folder. Drag that email into your “Yay” folder, and that will effectively become the one place where you can find all the good work that you’re doing, which is very helpful for performance review season.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jessica Chen
I’m most active on LinkedIn, so do connect with me on LinkedIn, Jessica Chen. But I’m also on Instagram, so same thing, Jessica Chen, Jessica Chen page. Otherwise, our website, SoulCastMedia.com. That’s, like, another way to get in contact me and find out about the communications work that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jessica Chen
Yeah, find something to celebrate this week because you are going to be your own best cheerleader. So, think back to the last week, put something small that you did that you’re pretty proud of, and how can you highlight it so other people know about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Jessica, this is fun. Thank you and best of luck.

Jessica Chen
Thank you, Pete.

988: How to Elevate Your Status and Command Respect at Work with Alison Fragale

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Alison Fragale reveals the keys to improving others’ perceptions of you.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical missing piece for your advancement
  2. Why your response to “How are you?” matters more than you think
  3. The quickest way to get others to promote you

About Alison

Alison Fragale is the author of LIKEABLE BADASS: How Women Get the Success They Deserve and the Mary Farley Ames Lee Distinguished Scholar of Organizational Behavior at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School. As a research psychologist, award-winning professor, international keynote speaker, and author, she is on a mission to help others — especially women — use behavioral science to work and live better. Her scholarship has been published in the most prestigious academic journals in her field and featured in prominent media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Inc. She lives in Chicago with her husband and three children, who are all named after professional athletes.

Resources Mentioned

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Alison Fragale Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alison, welcome.

Alison Fragale
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting with you because you’re going to teach us how to become likable badasses. That sounds like something I think that we want. What’s the scoop here?

Alison Fragale
I think we should. You know, I will say when I put Likable Badass on the cover of my book, I get the same reaction from everybody. It’s, “Yes, that’s what I’m going for.” And people want it, and there’s a good reason that they want it, because there’s a lot of science behind how it actually helps us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, lay it on us. So, what is the benefit associated with, well, first of all, just define a picture of what that means, and then share with us the research on how that’s beneficial for us.

Alison Fragale
I’m going to take one step backward, and I’m going to introduce something that I care a lot about and I think everyone should care a lot about, and that is the idea of status. And status is how much we’re respected and regarded by other people. So, if we have high status, that would mean our audiences have high respect and regard for us.

And I know from my work and others, it’s what we call a fundamental human need. It’s something all human beings seek, and life is so much better with it, without it. Work is better. Life is better. Our physical and mental health, our ability to gain power at our job, to use the power we have, all these things. So, status is really important for us to understand and understand how we can influence ours.

Where does Likable Badass come in? Because when people look at another person and decide, “Do I respect that person?” when you do that to other people, those decisions that you make, that we all make, those aren’t random. They follow a pattern. There’s two things we look for when we’re evaluating another person to decide how much do we value them. And one thing we look for is how capable they are.

I often talk about that as our assertiveness. Not just, “Can we assert ourselves?” but a whole of skills that if I give you a task, can you get it done? Can you do it well? Are you competent? Are you organized? Are you efficient? Are you persistent? And so, if you have those qualities, I know if I put something in your hands, it’s going to get executed well and I value that. So, I’m going to respect you because of that. So, capability, assertiveness, that’s important.

And then the other one, is our warmth, or do we care about people other than ourselves? And that’s really important too, because I’m going to value people who aren’t just out for themselves, who are going to use their talents to benefit me. And so, if we see somebody who’s very caring and other-oriented, we value that too. We respect it.

So, those two dimensions in psychology are really critical. In fact, we call them when we create a little XY axis out of them, we call them the interpersonal circle of person perception. And “Likable Badass” is my catchy term for the space in the circle we all want to be, which is we all want people to see us as very capable and very caring.

Because when we do that, that’s how we gain status, that we respect people who are good at getting stuff done and who care about other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I suppose that, so is it fair to say these are the two dominant things that make us perceive a person as being respect-worthy, these are the two?

Alison Fragale
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I suppose there might be some third elements that are idiosyncratic to individuals. I was watching this comedy movie, where this guy was shocked and appalled that his best friend was a Republican, for example. So, I’m thinking, like, there might be certain dimensions of division or stereotyping that can cut across this for people. It’s like, “Okay, you’re very capable and you are very warm, but I still don’t like you for…” insert fill-in-the-blank personal bugaboo. Is that fair to say?

Alison Fragale
Yes, although I think you can actually probably shoehorn most of these judgments into capability and warmth somehow. So, I kind of question how good of a human you are. Or maybe I question your intelligence, because, “How could you possibly believe this is true or that is true?”

So, under capability, for example, is also competence and intelligence. So, it’s a circumflex, and there’s characteristics all the way around it. But a lot of times, we can take most of the judgments we have and say, “They do reflect on either how good I think you are at what you do, how smart you are, or how nice and caring you are.”

Again, I’m sure if we played the game long enough, you could find something, but even a political affiliation that people could say, “I don’t really respect that person,” you think, “Well, why don’t I respect that?” And it could come to something about, “Well, you can’t be that smart if you believe that’s true,” or, “You can’t care about other people if you’re willing to let A, B, and C happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. So, our deeply held beliefs about a political affiliation, or any sort of an issue, then colors the extent to which we think that they are likable and capable. And so, I guess the opposite of a likable badass would be a jerk-idiot. We’ll hyphenate it. Yeah, I sure don’t want to be one of those, or either of those.

Okay, so there we have it. Status is a fundamental human need, and if we are in the likable badass zone, then good things come to us. I guess we feel we have status, and that feels good, that human need is being met. We feel respected, which is cool and enjoyable. And so, what does it do for us in terms of our career, our progression, our being awesome at our jobs?

Alison Fragale
One thing it does is it opens up all of the things that we tend to want at work. It makes all those things easier to achieve. So if you want to climb a career ladder, if you wanted to have more responsibility, if you wanted to be paid more, all of those things are forms of power, which is related to status, and I spend a lot of time helping people understand the distinction.

Power is controlling resources that people value. So, if I get to spend my budget without having to ask for permission, if I get to make a decision about a work product without having to ask for permission, if I get to review your performance, if I get to hire and fire, all these kinds of things are resources that we value and we control. If I get to come and go as I wish at work, have autonomy, work from wherever, that’s a resource.

So power is also another fundamental human need. People want to be in control. The lack of control of your environment also damages our life satisfaction and our physical and mental health. But status, being respected, is a gateway to getting all of these other good things. Not only is it good to possess in and of itself and it feels good, it also is how we get the power and the resource control that we want. And not everybody wants power in the same way, but everybody wants control over their environment. Again, even if it’s just power over self, “I want the autonomy to be able to work when and where I want or how I want.”

So, we focus a lot on power when we try to help people navigate their careers. A lot of on “How do you advance?” But the piece of the conversation that I don’t think we’re having as explicitly as we should is, “Well, how do you get those things?”

And the way I started was teaching people negotiation skills, which are important. You think, “If I can negotiate really well, I can negotiate myself into the career that I want.,” and that’s helpful. But also, it helps if your audience really values what you’re bringing to the table, that if you’re trying to get something from somebody and that person who’s looking at you, rightly or wrongly says, “I don’t really value you, and I don’t really respect you very much.”

You’re kind of sunk at that point, there’s very little you could say or do from a strategy standpoint that’s going to get you a good outcome, because we don’t give rewards to people that we don’t respect. So, it opens doors for us to being able to control our environment at work in whatever way we want to do it, and that is also really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Alison, conceptually, that seems to add up and check out like, “Yep, sure, that follows.” Could you point to any particular studies or data that show perhaps just how eye-popping-ly powerful this status stuff is?

Alison Fragale
One of my favorites, looked at interruptions in a work group. and looking at gender and interruptions in the work group. So, this is a group, they had three men, six women, intact group, worked together for years, and the researchers studied the group, and they looked at who got interrupted and who spoke. And they found that everybody spoke at a proportional rate, and so everyone had about equal airtime.

But not surprisingly, the women were getting interrupted disproportionately, much more so. And an interruption is a marker of low status. So, when someone interrupts you, they literally silence you. And so, when you are cut off from even speaking, you can’t have influence. And so, who gets to talk and who gets cut off is a subtle way that we communicate whose ideas are worth hearing and whose aren’t, whose do we respect. So, an interruption is a status, a marker of status.

So, they find the women are cut off, and that is not necessarily surprising, given what you know that gender affects status. But what might be surprising is when I tell you the group, and the group in question is the United States Supreme Court. So, they found, this was the court at the time when Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were three justices. Those were the three out of the nine. They were interrupted disproportionately more than their male colleagues.

And so, this idea of, “Do they all have power and equal power?” Yes. “Do some of them might have more status than others, in this case, coming from gender as a determinant of status?” Yes. And so, what we see is that even when people have a lot of power, if they do not have the status, that power doesn’t necessarily raise their status, and it doesn’t necessarily protect them from being treated in these lower-status ways.

And so, I always say, if the power of being a Supreme Court justice is not enough to guarantee that everybody would respect you and listen to what you have to say, then we can’t expect that any of us are going to have it. So, we’d like to think that power, being in charge of stuff, is going to make everyone respect us, but what you see in that study is it doesn’t, that direction doesn’t work. The other direction of, “I respect you and, therefore, I give you power,” we see a lot more evidence of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. But I guess a follow-up is, is it the fellow justices interrupting the female Supreme Court justices, or is it attorneys?

Alison Fragale
Both. Both.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, I would be, “Whew!”

Alison Fragale
Yeah, it’s transcripts of these cases that appear before the Supreme Court. So, it’s both the justices and the people who appear before them. Yes, both.

Pete Mockaitis
I would not dream of interrupting a Supreme Court justice, male or female, which is maybe a whole other dynamic about personality in the mix there. So, yeah, I could chew on that one for a while. So then, point made, that there’s quite the distinction between power and status. And it’s interesting how much I really, really don’t like being interrupted.

And so I like that you’re pointing out that, okay, well, yeah, that’s really kind of like a fundamental human dimension is going on, as opposed to I’m just a cranky jerk. So, thank you for that. So then now unpack for us how having status results in great things unfolding for us from a data-driven perspective?

Alison Fragale
We see the status power link, which is, if I have status, so if we look at the groups, there’s been studies done in all kinds of work groups, groups in the military, civilian groups, and they measure at time one who are the really respected people in the group, and that’s a status measure.

And then at time two, they’re measuring who ends up, ultimately, getting the power at some point, like who gets to be the leader, who gets to be in charge. And in all those studies, what you see is that strong status power link, that the people who are the most respected at time one and time two end up being the people who get to be in charge. And I think, I really want to point this out, because not everybody necessarily wants a promotion, not everybody necessarily wants more money or more work. But, one, people do like autonomy over their lives and control, and that power and status are both resources.

Those resources do not just need to be used to benefit you. Those resources can be used to do all kinds of good things for the world. So, if I have power, I could use my power to hire the people who I think deserve to be hired but often get overlooked. I could use my power to elevate somebody in the organization who does great work but may not necessarily get the recognition. And so, power is a resource that we can do a lot of things with. So, that science goes that way.

And then the other piece is that if somehow you had managed to be one of the, you’d think, lucky few who didn’t navigate status very well, but managed to kind of get ahead in your career to the point where you were a person who had a lot of power, you were kind of a Supreme Court justice of your domain, you might think, “Oh, okay, well, I’ve made it, right? I’ve arrived,” but actually, and this is what I’ve spent a lot of my own research doing, we find things get worse for people.

And what we find is that when a person is in that situation, it’s a miserable existence.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like it.

Alison Fragale
Yeah. Well, you look at research on incivility, so that’s going to be the mistreatment that kind of goes below the radar. You’re not officially harassing somebody, but you’re doing something that makes them feel terrible. You roll your eyes, you cut them out of the information flow, you make some kind of snide comments about them, that kind of stuff. That stuff is disproportionately directed toward people who have power but don’t have status. And we see at work data that people, when they’re treated that way, they exit if they can.

So, I’m really struck by a lot that’s been reported lately about the exodus of senior women from organizations at greater rates than junior women. Because gender affects status, the idea of being a senior woman raises the idea that some of those people are in these low-status power holder positions. They control a lot of stuff and people don’t respect them.

And then we see they’re treated uncivilly and no one likes that, and so if they have an option, they eject, and we see people, senior women leaving at greater rates than they’re actually being promoted. So, it’s both the good things that can happen to you with it, and the bad things that could befall you without it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. So, lay it on us, Allison, status, how do we get it at work?

Alison Fragale
Some of the things that affect our status are things that are outside of our control and some things that we just might inherit, if you will.

So, it could be gender, race, an accent, an ethnicity, a religion, all these kinds of things, and they don’t have any bearing on our competence or our caring, but people think they do. We give them meaning and, therefore, some people get more automatic respect than others just because of how they look or show they up. So that’s part of it, and that’s why, so some people getting status is actually a little more work, and I want to acknowledge that because status comes from these two places.

But the part that’s very positive is that a huge amount of our status is very controllable. It comes from how we show up when we interact with human beings. And the part that we can control has been shown to have a bigger impact on how respected we are than the parts we can’t control.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good news.

Alison Fragale
Yes, it’s very good news, but what it means is that if we have some of these things that we can’t control that aren’t working for us, we want to be really sophisticated about controlling the controllables. So, here’s the deal. Status exists only in somebody else’s head. It’s their belief about you. So, what do we need to do to influence our status? We need to influence what they believe about us. Feels daunting, but psychology, this is what we study. We say, “Look, you can have a lot of effect on your audience.” It’s controlling the messaging that your audience gets.

So, everything that everyone in the world knows about you at this point in time has come from one of two communication channels. One is information you have put out in the world. Someone sat next to you on an airplane, they listen to your podcast, they know you from being your neighbor, whatever it is, they read about you online, social media, whatever. Those are things that you have originated, put them in the world and people see them.

So, one is we have to control that channel. And what I mean by that is making sure that we are putting information out there that says to individuals and the world at large, “I’m very capable and I’m very caring.” Sometimes that is being willing to self-promote to talk about positive things in a way that feels authentic and comfortable, and we can explore that piece of it. Sometimes it means not doing dumb stuff. So, there’s some stuff that we do that there’s a logic to it. We think, “This is going to be really good for my brand,” and it’s not.

So, one example would be hiding our successes. This is why self-promotion is effective. Hiding our success. Something good has happened to you. You’ve gotten an award, or you’ve hit a milestone on your podcast, or something like this, and you think, “I’m proud of that. That’s good. But I’m not going to go and tell people about that because I don’t want to be seen as a bragger. I want to be humble. And if I’m humble, you’ll like me more.” That’s how I convey the whole likable piece.

But if we’re chatting, and you have some good news and you don’t share it and then you leave, and I hear later, because the grapevine is efficient, that you didn’t tell me, is my first thought, “Oh, my God, Pete is so humble”? No. People think, “Why didn’t Pete tell me? Are we not that close? Or does Pete think I’m so petty I couldn’t be happy for him?”

And so, what happens is when we hide our successes, we actually do it because we think it’s going to get us at least the likable part, not the badass part, but it’s going to get us the likable part. But the research shows it isn’t actually true. It’s not what people infer when they hear that you had something good and you didn’t tell them. You actually end up being seen as capable when the news is released, but it damages the relationship.

So, a better strategy is, why is sharing our success actually a good thing for all that we’ve been told about telling our stories and self-promoting? It’s because you are seen as warmer when you are forthcoming with people and you’re seen as more capable because you’ve told them about the good things. So, that would be an example of starting to control your channel, to not do something that you think is helping your reputation or your brand, but the science shows that it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
If being forthcoming is a desirable attribute, we probably also want to share sort of major happenings in general, otherwise we’re not forthcoming, whether maybe something sad has occurred in your life, and then they find out about that through the grapevine and they say, “Oh, I was just talking to him. How come he didn’t bring that up?” I guess that same phenomenon could occur there.

Alison Fragale
That’s right. So, again, self-disclosure, you want to be authentic about it and decide where you want to draw the line. Some forms of self-disclosure help build our status. Other forms might not. You might share something personal to build the rapport and the warmth. But then you might say, “I’m going to tell you some things I’m not really good at,” and that’s self-deprecation.

But that is a behavior that is not status-building. Because when we cut ourselves down, we’re basically saying, “I’m not as capable as you think I am,” and we are the experts on ourselves. So, when people cut themselves down, they are seen as less capable as a result, on whatever dimension they just deprecated. But we often do it because it’s socially cohesive.

Cutting yourself down is a form of humor, and many comedians, that’s they’re bread and butter, right? They make fun of themselves, and we laugh, and it is a form of humor. So, being funny is actually cohesive, it builds warmth, but humor at your own expense doesn’t. And so, I think it raises the idea of when I talk about controlling a channel of communication, the balance between being authentic and being strategic.

Because you might say, “I had a really bad day today and I really messed something up. And I didn’t do a good job and I got really bad feedback at work.” And the question is, like, “Do I share it? Do I cut it? Or do I keep it to myself?” And I think everybody gets to make their own decision about what they want to put out there and what they don’t.

But what I’ve had to coach myself on is a lot of the self-deprecating I was doing was done solely for the purpose of trying to be funny. I mean, I believed it to be true, but I was like, “Oh, this is my way of being funny.” Not fully appreciating that that form of humor wasn’t having the effect that I was hoping it would have, which is people would respect me more because of it. And so, now I’m more thoughtful that, if I’m seeking advice or support from somebody, and I say something has gone really wrong, I will tell them because I want their advice or their support in the moment.

But there might be other moments where my goal in the interaction is to show up in a way that’s going to get people to respect me, and I might say, “I’m going to tell a different truth, maybe something that is also equally true, but showcases my capabilities and my concern for others a little bit more.” So, controlling our channel is going to be a big one. And then thinking about easy ways that we can show up to other people and showcase how capable and caring we are.

And what I always tell people is, “Look for opportunities to solve other people’s problems using your unique skills and talents, things you are naturally good at, you really enjoy, and doesn’t take you very long to solve their problems. If you do that in life, and that’s all you do, you will build your status because as soon as you solve their problem, you’re capable, and you’ve spent your effort to solve something that matters to them, so you’re caring.”

But those things can sometimes be done in seconds. So, introducing two people, for example, is a form of solving somebody’s problem, “Hey, let me connect you with somebody who can do the thing that you’re looking for.” And I’m showing that my network is really valuable and it’s really robust, and I’m using my network for your benefit.

Taking something you like. I was very struck recently by a woman that I saw in an event, and she was the unofficial-official Instagram documentarian of this event, and she was taking videos and everything, but she said, “You know, I love being on Instagram, but I think a lot of my older senior colleagues don’t value this. They think it’s, like, personal and silly and it doesn’t really matter. And so, so how do I balance, like, that I really care about that with the fact that that they don’t?”

And I said, “You know, I would love someone who knew better than I did, to say, ‘Hey Allison, I know you’re on social. I have some ideas about how I could make your social more fun for you or more effective or better and, like, increase the impact of your messaging. Could I help?’” Well, all of a sudden, “Oh, sure.” Now it’s not just this silly thing you do. It’s you using your natural talent to help me.

And a lot of those things are fun for people and they’re easy.I always joke, you can buy someone’s coffee if you meet for coffee, but it’s a pretty forgettable act. It doesn’t showcase your capability. But if you make an intro or you give someone feedback on their Instagram, it’s not that much more effort than buying the coffee, but it’s allowing you to showcase yourself in a way that is more unique while still helping them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so these fundamental principles make good sense. We can control the channel, make sure the good stuff gets out there and we don’t hold it back, as well as being helpful. We’re helping people, thus being warm, and we’re helping them using our unique skills, thus being capable at the same time. So, I think those are great things to get our radar up and being on the lookout for such opportunities. You mentioned introductions are great. Do you have any other super favorite things that anyone can do that are great?

Alison Fragale
A hundred percent. So, first, always have good answers to what I call throwaway questions. When people say to you, “What’s new? How is it going? How’s work?” A lot of times we just throw those questions away, “It’s fine. I’m busy. It’s good. How are you?” And at that moment, someone’s giving you a chance to tell your story. Now, do they want a 30-minute answer to that question? They do not.

But something that is better than “fine” or “busy” but gets them interested, like, “I had a great win at work today.” Something that sparks a little curiosity and gets them to actually pause and ask you a little bit about your story. That can be a really good one is, don’t throw those questions away.

The second one is to use the updating that you’re naturally doing as a course of your job to build your status. So, we often have to give people status updates. Use those kinds of things as storytelling opportunities. And one effective way to do that is, in psychology it’s called dual promotion, I call it brag and thank. Anytime you have an update, you’re going to talk about a success or a win that you’ve had, and you’re also going to talk about the great work of other people who helped that win be possible. I’m telling you something great about me and I’m also telling you something great about other people.

That turns out to be a really winning strategy because when we promote ourselves, we’re seen as more capable, and when we shine the spotlight on somebody else, we’re seen as more caring. So anytime we can put those two things together in a message, whether it’s an email, or stopping somebody in the hall, that’s going to be a really easy one for us to be able to do.

And then the other, I’m going to kind of go over into this second channel, because if you remember, I told you there were two channels of communication. One is us and the other is things other people have said about us. So, everything that’s known about Pete is things Pete has put out into the world or things that people have heard or known about you and they’ve repeated. And so, a lot of our status is not built by us. It’s built by other people talking about us in positive ways or they could tear our status down if they’re talking about us in negative ways.

But if someone else is talking about your status in a positive way, they’re doing a lot of your work for you, and they can brag about how capable you are all day long, and there’s no risk to you.

So, one simple thing is finding ways to meet more people. I always say people cannot sing your praises if they do not know you exist. And so, this whole idea that we’ve always been told to network and to meet more people, put yourself in situations to meet more people. There’s a million ways to do it and I’ll tell you the stories if you’re curious, but I’ll just start with this.

Some of the people who have been the most helpful in my career, I met them in airports, like strangers that you have a random conversation with, and next thing you know, within five minutes, something gets uncovered and you’re like, “Huh, okay, maybe we should stay in touch,” and you stay in touch and then the relationship forms.

The other one that I want to offer because it’s just the right way to be, and it’s also very valuable, is the easiest way for you to get someone else to go build your status for you is for you to build theirs first because human behavior is reciprocated. So, a simple daily practice that we can have, to be awesome at our job and build these relationships, is every time you observe someone and you think, “Wow, that was great,” whatever it was, tell somebody, put it out into the world, promote them, and say, “This person is amazing.”

It feels great to do it, but also because the grapevine is efficient, they will eventually find out that you were saying nice things about them, and human behavior is reciprocated. So, one of the easiest ways to build other promoters is for us to just cultivate a daily practice of promoting other people first. So, I have a rule and I always say, if I have a nice thought about somebody in my head, I do not let the thought die there. I put it out into the world somewhere. And that alone, as a simple practice, if that was all a person ever did, would garner them a lot of reciprocal other promotion in spades.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s say I have a nice thought like, “Oh, my buddy, Dave, is so funny.” I mean, I’m not sure where I would park that. I could just text Dave, say, “Hey, I really appreciate you. You’re funny.” Or, I mean, I could put a glowing message on a post on LinkedIn, he might be like, “Pete, what’s going on here, dude?” I don’t know. Where would I park that?

Alison Fragale
Yeah, so I think it depends on the context. One, sometimes I can just go back to the person to say, like, “I was thinking about this today, and it, you know, what your humor is just always like such a joy and cracked me up I was thinking about that.” So that could be appropriate. It doesn’t necessarily have to be, “I do it the moment I think of it.” Like, if I have a thought right now, I’m not going to hop off the podcast and go do something else, but I keep it there and I think about where it has an opportunity.

One of the things I often do is I’ll think about a mutually beneficial introduction that I could make, and when I make that introduction and I think, like, “Dave is hilarious. And what would advance Dave’s interests? And how would him being a funny guy actually be value-added to somebody else?” Even if it’s just two people who have a shared personal connection, I think they would really, really like to be friends.

So, I could introduce Dave to my other funny friend and that could be it, right? And so now, even if that intro goes nowhere, at least you’ve put to the other person in the world, “Hey, Dave is this funny guy.”

And I think when we do those kinds of things, a lot of them don’t go anywhere at the time. If it’s somebody you work with, then you have a lot of opportunities to think about this in terms of hallway conversation and things like that. The next time you’re in a meeting and let’s say you work with Dave, and Dave’s in the meeting, you could think about amplifying something Dave said, or to think about, “Dave is really good at doing X because Dave’s always the person who can put somebody else at ease. And so, I think we should be thinking about letting Dave lead this because he has great skills.”

So, it doesn’t have to be instantaneous. It could be just back to that person. But to think about, “If I think positively about this, who else would benefit from that person’s skills in a way?”

So, again, most people have a lot of positive thoughts about people and they aren’t using those positive thoughts to build that person’s status, and that’s an oversight that we should correct as much as we can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super. And when you talk about introductions, I’m also thinking about just when you happen to be at in-person events. I remember I was at a funeral banquet, and someone was just introducing me and others to each other, and it didn’t take long. It’s like, “Hey, this is Pete. He has a tremendous podcast which helps people do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s a thought leader, this and that.” I was like, “Oh, well, thank you.” It was like, “Oh, I like you more!”

Alison Fragale
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And then vice versa, the person who introduced me, “This person has a tremendous Star Wars memorabilia collection.” It’s just kind of fun and interesting. I mean, I’m not super into Star Wars memorabilia, so I don’t necessarily think that that person with a Star Wars memorabilia is extra amazing. But I’m more interested, like, “Oh, wow, huh, a collector. Okay. How did you get into that?” And so, it just seems like everybody wins when we just give a little bit more positive, good detail about who is this person when we introduce each other.

Alison Fragale
Exactly right. You’ve got it. It doesn’t take much. And even with something like Star Wars memorabilia, you might say, “This is the person who knows more about the Star Wars, like, canon and all the memorabilia than any person I’ve ever met.” And so, you would at least then respect some capability. It’s not a capability you would need to have yourself, but you’re like, “Huh, someone had to probably dedicate some actual effort, right? And so, now I see them as a more capable person, even if their skillset is not what I need.”

And you’re right, that we can do that quickly, we can do it authentically, and we can do it in person, we can do it over email, and just thinking about those positive things that we can say when we have our moment can be a great start to being able to build other people’s status for us. And then to your point, you said, “Oh, I had that moment where I thought more positively of them.”

I just had an email when my one of my oldest kids went to a Sleepaway Camp. He got an injury. I was emailing with the camp director to make sure the injury wasn’t going to keep him from being able to participate in camp, and it wasn’t. But when the camp director wrote back, he basically said, “By the way, I just got to tell you, like, how much I have really loved getting to know your son this year. What a leader he is among his peers. What a huge asset he is to camp.” It’s like two sentences.

But I observed, I was like, “Oh, I really like this guy now.” And so, I thought if the email had come the next day saying, “Our camp needs money,” I guarantee you I would have written a check and probably a bigger check than I would have written without that email. And so, I thought, “Oh, he complimented my kid. Oh, okay.” That makes me think he’s really smart because everyone thinks our kids are brilliant and “Oh, how nice.”

So, when I have these moments, like you had at the funeral luncheon or whatever, I unpack them to think, “Why did I feel so positively?” And the same, if I feel negative towards someone, “I like you as I think you’re an idiot.” What did they do? Because I don’t want to unintentionally be doing that thing. So that’s the armchair psychology that we all have in us, is unpack it when you experience it, because everyone else, we’re all like everyone, everyone else is just like us. So, if we felt that way, other people will too.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when we talk about doing self-promotion, what’s the right and the wrong way to do it? So, if someone says something like, “Oh, hey, how have you been?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m just absolutely crushing it. I’m going to have record-breaking income, maybe three or four mil this year.” It’s like, “Okay, good for you, dude, but this is kind of off-putting.”

So, I mean, one, based on your cultural context in the U.S. and some other places, sharing how much money you have, good or bad, is often kind of frowned upon and makes people uncomfortable. But in other cultural contexts, that’s sort of normative. How do we know some of the do’s and don’ts? We want to put the good stuff out there, but we don’t want to do it in an off-putting way.

Alison Fragale
So, look, this is where the art comes in of understanding your audience and thinking about what feels authentic for you. If it feels icky and you’re doing it as a strategy, I guarantee you it’s going to come across poorly. But if it feels natural, or it can start to feel more natural if you practice it a little bit, it’s better. First is, again, always think about, “Is there a way to do both? Say something good about myself and something good about another person.”

So, if I say, now the tone of voice, whatever that was, don’t do that thing again because that wasn’t going to work. But just the content of it, you know, the, “I’m on track to break three million, etc.” or, “I might have my best year ever, and I lead, as far as I can tell, the world’s best team. Like, this team is showing up in so many amazing ways, and I am just so excited about the success that I’m going to have and they’re going to have, and I don’t know how I got so fortunate.” Something like that where you can shine a spotlight on another person. That can be one way to do it.

The other is to say just a little bit and tease it and let someone else draw you out. Because if they’re asking you questions and you’re answering them, then it’s much more normative. Like, “How is this year compared to last year? Are you doing better?” And you say, “Yeah, I am doing better.” Then that doesn’t feel weird because you asked, but they have to make you curious about it. Like, “I just feel like things are really coming together at work in a great way that is making me really excited.” And you might be like, “Oh, well, what way?”

So, something that could pique a little bit of conversation, and then it’s not a dialogue. But another, you know, this is specific, but I’ll say the idea is to think about how to get that information out there under other purposes, like under the guise of other purposes. So, one example that I share with a lot of people is turning on your out-of-office message, which I’ve seen some people do really brilliantly, and it’s not a strategy I ever used, I still don’t use it as much or as brilliantly, but I’ve seen people, where whenever you’re out of the office, you turn on your message, “I’m gone. Please reach out to so-and-so. I’m back on this date.”

But other people have more flair in their out-of-office messages, and they communicate that the response will be delayed, but they say, “Here’s the exciting thing I’m doing.” Like, if you’re traveling to a conference, if you’re speaking at an event, if you’re, whatever it is, if you’re off talking to three clients, you can say, “Here’s what I’m doing,” and then add in some warmth, add in humor, add in some, “Here’s how I’m actually, like, the work that we’re doing is going to enable us to, like, grow in these markets is going to enable us to serve even more people who really rely on our product to be able to live their best lives,” or something like that.

And that’s an example of how you can start to use all your channels of communication. If you’re on social media, you can use your social media to talk about what you’re doing in a way that doesn’t feel as self-promoting as running around the office telling everybody, “Guess what I got to do?” or, “Here’s something,” you can just celebrate it.

Thinking about all those different ways to do it, but 100%, you have to know you and you have to know your audience because there’s not a script that’s going to say, “Oh, talk about it exactly in this way.” But the idea is if you don’t say anything about your capabilities, how will anyone ever actually know what they are?

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, before we hear about your favorite things, I want to quickly get your hot take on what about things like clothing, the fit of the clothes, the brands, or the up-dress, dress up, dress down-ness of them, and/or height, or vocal intonation, body language, posture, like these kinds of presentation things? How much of a status impact do they make?

Alison Fragale
They have a lot. They’re all channels. People are drawing conclusions from everything you put out into the world – your eye contact, your gestures, your tone of voice, your clothes, etc. Now, does that mean you can only speak in one way, that you should only gesture one way, you should only wear one outfit? Absolutely not. Authentic and strategic can coexist. But you should be aware, and this is one of the things I help people do, is understand all the different behaviors that are linked to status.

So, a common one is, “Why is it that the person who comes in the meeting and just yammers on about nothing all the time, always is considered so smart? It’s so annoying.” It is annoying. But it’s also from science, it’s true, that we associate quantity of communication, speed of responding, speed of speech as markers that somebody is more capable. And so, you don’t have to do those things, but you should understand the relationship.

And so, what I always say to people is, first is just do an audit of, “What signals am I putting out into the world?” And say, “Some of these signals are helping me show up as capable, some are helping me show up as caring, and some are actually doing neither, they’re taking me backwards.” Then the question is, “What do I do about these things, if any?”

I say you need to signal something in every as many interactions as possible that says, “I know what I’m doing,” and you need to signal something that says, “I care about other people.” But it doesn’t need to be all the signals, and you can have a couple that are counterproductive and still overcome them as long as you’re thinking about what else you would do to compensate.

So, I’m a really big apologizer. I say I’m sorry all the time for all kinds of things and just use the word. And I try to coach myself out of it. It was requiring way too much conscious effort and I was just getting annoyed, and every email was taking 36 minutes to write, because I’m like, “Oh, there’s an apology there. Oh, no, then what should I do with these exclamation points? They seem kind of, you know, not so strong either.” And like, then I got smiley faces. So, I said, “Forget it. And I’m going to do the apologizing. I don’t worry about it anymore.”

It’s a more submissive behavior, the opposite of assertiveness, but that’s okay because I have other things that signal capability. I happen to have some credentials that are good signals of credibility. I’m a professor, I have a PhD, things like this. And so, what I concluded was I have enough signals of assertiveness in the environments that I need to function, that I can have a couple of things that work against me that feel natural and authentic, and I can let them go.

So, that’s my general answer is. Those things do affect status. Yes, you should be aware of what the effects are. And then it’s for each individual to decide, “Do I want to change that or do I not?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alison Fragale
One that I will offer you here that relates to this is from Julia Child. “Never apologize for the food you serve. No one knows how it was supposed to turn out but you.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Alison Fragale
Deep Work by Cal Newport. I think his work really speaks to women and anybody else who is marginalized because we know that people who lack status are basically given the worst work. They’re given the non-promotable to do.

And so, I think the idea, the challenge of working deeply, and being able to work on things that matter, things that bring you joy, things that have high impact in the organization is harder for some people than others because they’re saddled with all the office housework. So, I really love Cal’s, all of his stuff, but Deep Work for that reason, because I think it has an important message for status, even though that’s not how he talks about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that people really seem to resonate with and connect with, an Allison original gem of wisdom?

Alison Fragale
Strategic and authentic are not opposites, that you can and should be both.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alison Fragale
My website is a good place, AlisonFragale.com. When you’re on it, I have a free newsletter that I put out on Substack. It’s called “The Upper Hand” and it is behavioral science directed toward helping women advance. But as we talked about today, none of the things that I talk about are ever really only applicable to women. I talk about behavioral science that is tools people can use. So, if people are curious, it’s free. It’s on Substack. I write as often as I can, and I love sharing those kinds of ideas with people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alison Fragale
Ten, 10, 10. All right. Meet 10 new people. Make 10 small deposits, which is going to be an easy little thing you can do to show up as capable and caring, so, like, an introduction or solve their problems, something you could do that’s easy. Ten people, 10 small deposits, and promote 10 people to other people. So that was that tell them to say the good things that you think, and/or ask 10 people to promote you. Ask them to go build your status. That’s a scarier one that we haven’t talked about yet, but it’s really, really effective.

If you say to somebody, “Hey, person B really respects you. Will you go talk to person B and introduce me, talk me up, etc.?” So, 10, 10, 10. Meet 10 people, show up as capable and caring 10 times, same people, different, doesn’t matter, and promote 10 people, ask 10 people to promote you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alison, thank you for your wisdom. You are a super ultra mega baller. See what I did there?

Alison Fragale
I did. I love it. I’ll take it. Hey, there’s another thing. One of my favorite studies in social psychology, self-serving interpretations of flattery. It’s why flattery always works, is because people think, “Done to another person that might be considered flattery but to me it’s just accurate.” So, self-serving interpretation, so you can flatter people all day long. They never get tired of it. I love it. You’re amazing.

979: Building Greater Trust and Connection through Storytelling with Scott Mann

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Retired Green Beret Scott Mann shares battle-tested strategies for motivating people in low-trust, high-stakes environments.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why storytelling is super powerful 
  2. The key shift that makes stories memorable
  3. How to regulate emotions (both yours and others)

About Scott

Lt. Col. Scott Mann is a retired Green Beret with over twenty-two years of Army and Special Operations experience around the world, and a New York Times bestselling author. He has deployed to Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is the CEO of Rooftop Leadership and the founder of a 501c3, The Heroes Journey, committed to helping veterans tell their stories in transition. Scott regularly speaks to and trains corporate leaders, law enforcement, and special operations forces on best practices for going local, storytelling, and making better human connections.

Scott has frequent appearances on Fox News, CNN, and other national platforms as a thought leader on building organizational relationships, restoring trust in our communities, and a range of national security issues. He is also an actor and playwright who has written a play about the war called Last Out—Elegy of a Green Beret on Amazon Prime. Scott lives in Florida with his wife Monty where they are deepening their skills on empty nesting.

Resources Mentioned

Scott Mann Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, welcome.

Scott Mann
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a riveting tale that’s also instructive about your time in Afghanistan.

Scott Mann
Build trust when risk is low, leverage it when risk is high. That was the one thing that has stuck with me, yes, Afghanistan, but pretty much every tough place that I went to. It was something that I think is very true here. As a Green Beret, we’re a little different than Navy SEALs and Delta Force and those kinds of outfits in that our whole focus, everything we do, is to work by, with, and through indigenous people. That’s what we do.

And all of that, it’s kind of a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia approach. So, most of it is around social capital, building trust, interpersonal skills in really, really, really low-trust environments. And one of the things that I learned in Afghanistan, on multiple tours, was that when things get really difficult and really dangerous and really hard, it’s the trust that you built back when risk was low that will serve you in those high-stakes moments, and I frankly think that’s true in everything that we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good principle. And can you share with us how you saw that come to life?

Scott Mann
Most prolifically, I would say it was in the recent abandonment of our allies, almost three years ago to the day, it was in August of 2021, our government made a decision to leave Afghanistan, and I mean leave Afghanistan, like immediately. And as a result of that, probably close to 100,000 Afghan allies were completely left behind. Many of them on the run, hiding. One of them was my friend. His name was Nazam. He and I had fought together in Afghanistan in 2010. We had remained friends for many years.

He was shot through the face defending U.S. Green Berets. That’s the kind of guy he was, and then five weeks later, with a pair of U.S.-made dentures, came back to the firebase and continued to operate. You know, just the kind of guy that the most loyal friend you could ever ask for, and he was one of those guys left in the dirt, you know, left on the side of the road. And when the government didn’t pick up the phone and he was on the run, he called me, and basically said, “You know, sir, I never really worried about dying. It kind of comes with the territory, but I never thought I would die alone.”

And at this point, the Taliban were texting his phone. He was hiding in his uncle’s house, like Anne Frank, and they were circling the driveway, and that just, I don’t know, as I was watching the Taliban roll into Kabul, Pete, it hit me so hard, you know, all those years of fighting there and now my friend, who had stood up for us on so many occasions, was just going to be executed. I couldn’t live with it.

So, I made a commitment to him right there on the spot that we were going to do everything we could to get him out of the country and get him back to the United States. I called up some buddies who were ex-Green Berets and we started formulating a plan using cell phones and relationships, and we helped move him surreptitiously across the city, got him close to the gate. He got himself close to the actual location where the Marines were, and then we started working our contacts to get him pulled inside. And, ultimately, right at the last second, as they were about to throw him out, we got in touch with a State Department guy on the inside who said, “Tell him to say pineapple.” That was the code word.

And so, we’re screaming it to him to say that, and he does, and he gets pulled in, and we became Task Force Pineapple at that point, and that set in motion about a five- or six-day operation of 120 or so veterans to move about a thousand Afghan commandos and their families through a sewage canal and a four-foot hole in the fence, and then ultimately on to the United States where they are today.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, that illustrates trust right there.

Scott Mann
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You built it by taking a bullet to the face and more, and then, when the risk was high and in desperate need, there you were.

Scott Mann
And no authority, no resources, no time. We weren’t on the ground, so none of the things that you would want as a special operator, and, by the way, I’d been retired for 10 years. I’m a storyteller and a playwright. I’m not exactly your number one draft pick for hostage rescue, but what we did have were relationships. We had a very large portfolio of social capital in that country that we had built over the years, as did the other Green Berets that jumped into the fray.
And, you know, Pete, what I saw in that moment, it was just the worst case of duress that I had ever seen. I did not have answers, I did not have solutions, but what amazed me over and over again was how people were showing up for each other based on years of friendship, trust, and even people that didn’t know each other who were unified around this notion of just honoring a promise. Just honor a promise to our guys and get them out of there, and what lengths people were going to cooperate in real time in just complete chaos.

And, really, I don’t know, it drove home to me that, even in the worst of situations and chaos when nobody’s coming, human connection is the absolute underpinning of getting big stuff done. And it doesn’t matter what the context is, we’ve got to have that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you.

Scott Mann
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m curious, your company’s called Rooftop Leadership. Do these principles factor into the name? Where does that come from and what’s the big idea here?

Scott Mann
That’s a great question. Where that came from is back in 2010, we were losing the war in Afghanistan. We had already been there for 10 years and we were so angry after 9/11 that we had spent most of our time focused on targeting the enemy, including the Green Berets, who, really, our job is to work by, with, and through Indigenous people. We kind of got focused on this top-down targeting approach, and we needed to get back to our roots.

So, we established a new strategy of basically living out in the villages, growing our beards, indigenous clothing, and living and working the way we had done for decades, really, out in these rural communities, helping them stand up on their own. The only problem was, at this point, these communities had seen so much war and violence, and, frankly, we had kicked their doors in for 10 years. It was very hard to establish trust there, but we did, one village at a time, one community at a time, we persuaded them to allow us in small teams to live in their villages, kind of a modern day Magnificent Seven.

And what would happen is the attacks would come from the Taliban as soon as we would move in and live in this community, the Taliban would attack our compound and the village really, and we would go up on the rooftops and we would fight. The Afghan villages would not. They would stay down below and they would hide with their families.

But then after the attack was over, we’d come down, we’d tend to our wounded, and then the next day, you know, we’d go out into the village, we’d meet with elders, we’d drink chai, we’d help them in their fields, we’d try to help them find solutions to food shortages or any low-tech farming problems they were having, dispute resolution, whatever and wherever we could plug in and be relevant, and be relevant guests in their community.

And then two, three, four weeks after getting an entry in that community, there would be a muzzle flash from up on another rooftop shooting in the same direction we were, and it’s not one of our teammates, but it’s a farmer that’s climbed up there and he’s now defending his home – one dude. But usually that would be the tipping point. The next night, you would see three guys up on their roofs. The next night, you would see 10. And ultimately, until the whole village was collectively doing what it had always done, which was stand up on its own.

And over the years, I saw this again and again and again in these really trust-depleted places. And so, one of my jobs was to bring out senior leaders to see this and to talk to them about funding and resourcing, and I would call that rooftop leadership, this ability to move people up onto a proverbial rooftop when it’s hard, when it’s scary, when they don’t want to go, based on doing the right thing, even when people don’t follow you, and human connection, social capital, people taking action because they want to, not because they have to.

When I came back to the United States and I saw how divided we were as a country here and how disconnected, I thought, “Well, we could probably use some rooftop leadership here in America.” So, I started bringing those same skillsets to corporate leaders and associates here at home.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. So, you said they were doing it before, but then it was a big deal when the first guy started getting on the roof. So, can we clarify that?

Scott Mann
Yeah, so let me clarify that. So, these were communities, most communities around the world, most collectives, have a tendency to stand up on their own, and that is one thing I should have clarified, is that these communities had seen so much war and so much violence that they had just lost their purpose. They had lost their collective focus. They have lost their collective will to stand up for themselves, and they’d lost trust in each other, trust in their government, and so that’s kind of what we walked into, you know, and it was very difficult to persuade them in the beginning to take any kind of overt action on their own behalf.

And even though they had a long history before the 40-year war of doing that, and so a lot of this was simply holding space, building human connections, and enabling these individuals to do what they were predisposed to do. Most humans are predisposed to take action. It’s just that when we’re inundated with conditions that cause low trust and low morale and lack of purpose, at some point you start to kind of throw your hands up and check out, and that’s what we were dealing with. Those are the kinds of conditions that Green Berets typically get inserted into. And we turned that around using relationships and bringing one person up at a time to kind of make a stand.

And those same social conditions, although the stakes were different, I see here at home. I saw them when I retired in 2013, the same kind of disengagement and distrust and division that was permeating society over there, it’s terrible over here. We have a lot of disconnection and distrust here at home, a lot of disengagement. I found that that same approach, these old-school interpersonal skills, putting an emphasis on human connection, that’s what people are starving for.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Well, I’m curious to hear then, when it comes to this trust-building stuff, I mean, some of it sounds pretty straightforward, yup, just go ahead and courageously put yourself at tremendous risk, and they’ll see you doing that and they’ll notice and appreciate it, like, “All right.”

But in business context, that may not look like shots being fired, so much as, “Hey, I am actually going to vulnerably admit that I made a mistake, that I need help, that I don’t have all the answers, that I desperately need everyone’s best efforts for this thing to work, and I’m going to give my best efforts. That I, as owner, am going to not receive distributions for a little while, while we’re in this tough economic time and we’re sorting things out.”

So, it’s just like kind of put your money where your mouth is, or your heart, your courage, your risk where you want to display that, “I am in this.” That’s a huge trust-builder, in general. Can you tell me, do I have that right or any kind of nuances or elaborations you want to put on that?

Scott Mann
No, I think it’s really good framing that you just did. I’ll just build on that framing, if it’s okay, in the sense that one of the things that Green Berets do and that I’ve done for 30 years is we really study closely what I call the human operating system, the way that humans navigate the world in terms of civil society and their day-to-day life, because we mostly deal in influence and social capital. And by social capital, I mean the oldest form of capital in the world, the tangible and intangible linkages between humans that causes them to take action because we’re social creatures.

And the reality is, Pete, what I’ve learned is that, what works in life and death, the kind of stakes we were talking about in Afghanistan, works even better in life and business, and the reason is because we’re remarkably similar in how we’re wired to navigate the world. Humans we’re very primal. We’re very primal, even though we like to think that we’re sophisticated and that we navigate this modern world and, you know, highly technical creatures, and we are.

The way that we actually navigate the world, the way that we actually take action, is around meaning and emotion and social connection and storytelling and struggle. I mean, we are very, very primal. In fact, I think it was Jared Diamond, an anthropologist who wrote The World Until Yesterday, he said that humans have been primal far longer than they have been modern. And we still have so many of those tendencies with us.

And so, what I’m trying to say is, you know, what I dealt with in terms of tribal dynamics in different villages, and how these tribes and interacted with each other, you see the same tribal dynamics in a merger. If two companies are smashed together, you are essentially putting two tribes together. You’re putting two collectives together with two distinct cultures.

And no matter how good that looks on paper for the associates, for the people that have to go through that merger, it elicits the same primal response of resource scarcity and status and fear-based behavior that our ancestors experienced 20,000 years ago. The amygdala, the ancient part of our brain, doesn’t know the difference. It goes into survival mode.

And what I’ve found is the more that we can understand those primal realities about how we are as humans, how we navigate the world, how we operate, how we take action, the fact, again, that we are meaning-seeking, we need meaning in our lives, the fact that we are first and foremost emotional, and that logic usually follows emotion, those kinds of things that when we do stories, that’s how the brain makes sense of the world.

If you use PowerPoint slides, a recent study showed that an audience will forget 90% of your content 30 per seconds after you say “Thank you for your time” because you’re engaging working memory. You’re not engaging long-term memory. The brain actually needs stories to make sense of things. So, there’s just so much available to us in this primal reality that, if we can tap into and understand that human operating system, it really makes us better at leading ourselves, our family, our co-workers. And it’s the same stuff we use in those rough places, it’s just as relevant here in just about any situation that you could think of at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, could you give us a key principle and then a story of that in practice at work?

Scott Mann
A hundred percent. I’m going to pick storytelling. Storytelling is, there’s different principles, but I’ll start with storytelling, and the reason is because we’re story animals. If you think about what most people have to do at work, I mean, we have to communicate in a strategic way. We have to influence, we have to convince people to believe in our ideas, our products, our vision. And whether that’s communicating internally to other associates or teammates, or whether it’s communicating externally as a salesperson or a client-facing professional, when you think about how distracted, and disengaged, and disconnected we are as a civil society today, I mean, just look around.

Look at how people are, they roll in kind of already skeptical. We’ve got our work cut out for us and you know most people are phones out in an environment where you have to get in front of people. If you’re not compelling right out of the gate, people are on their phones. So how do we how do we hold people’s attention? How do we actually engage them in a way that lends itself to authentic influence? And I have found that storytelling is absolutely at the heart of all of it. The storyteller is going to own the room every time.

And the problem is, our modern society has conditioned us for podiums and PowerPoint, which they’re kind of manifestations of the modern world, but they actually detract from good communication because we don’t understand what really makes humans communicate well. We don’t really have a language for it like we used to. And so, storytelling is such an essential skill. Whether you’re getting up and giving a presentation, whether you’re trying to pitch your boss on something or a sales engagement, narrative is everything.

If you could present your ideas in the form of a story, it’s far more impactful than if you just give facts and figures and PowerPoint, if you can lead off your PowerPoint presentation with a story. What do I mean by a story? I don’t want to be nebulous on that. Basically, a story should have a character. A story should have a character trying to meet some goals, who faces obstacles, and then ultimately overcomes those obstacles. We’re all natural storytellers. We really are. And if you can just integrate stories when you’re talking to your teammates, if you can integrate stories when you’re talking to your boss, it’s a much more effective way to connect with them.

The general rule is what’s personal is universal. Stories of struggle, stories of overcoming pivotal moments, stories of lessons learned, this is what people actually crave, and it kind of doesn’t feel that way and it feels awkward in a business environment, but it’s actually what we’re drawn to. And when you do that, and I’ll end on this, when you lead with story and how you engage people, it makes you more relatable to their pain, and it makes you more relevant to their goals, and that’s actually what people follow, way more than they follow experience or title or the money. We follow people who are relatable and relevant, and storytelling, by definition, makes you that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Scott, give us an example of a story you’ve heard someone tell in a work environment that was just phenomenal at illustrating these perspectives and building trust.

Scott Mann
I like to see it in the day-to-day. It’s great if you can get up on the stage and you’re the boss and you can speak a story of your vision. That’s great. That’s awesome. But for most of us, that’s not where we’re living. What I like to see is what I call narrative competence, the employment of storytelling, purposeful storytelling in real time to meet your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Give me one.

Scott Mann
For example, how many of us have the opportunity to recognize people that we work with? I mean most of us do. Most of us have opportunities to recognize our co-workers, to recognize new team members, to recognize people when they leave our team, to recognize people for achievement. I mean, those are just a few. And you don’t have to have a title to recognize people. You can do it in any social situation on your team.

But if you are a people leader or a supervisor, recognizing people on your team, there’s actually a very powerful way to do this, which is when you’re going to recognize somebody in front of their peers, is to meet with them a little bit ahead of time. I like to say 24 hours, but it could be a couple of hours before you’re going to recognize them, say farewell to them, welcome them to the team.

And when you do that, ask them a couple of thoughtful, open-ended questions about their recent experiences. If you’re going to recognize them, for example, for the work that they did on your team before they departed, ask them some thoughtful, open-ended questions that start with how and what, that have to do with their experience while they were on the team.

“What were some of your most fond memories while you were on the team? What was the most embarrassing thing that you had to overcome that really taught you a lesson while you were on the team?” And then just listen, just shut up and listen. You don’t need to take notes. You don’t need to write down bullet comments because the story brain is wired for narrative. It will remember everything. You just listen with pure discovery.

And then when they’re done, you say, “Would it be okay if I share a few of these with some folks when I recognize you?” They’ll probably say yes, I’ve never seen them say no. And then when it’s time to recognize that individual, you get up there and you share a couple of narratives or stories about what that person told you and why you think it matters to the people you’re talking to. And what you’ll see is a level of an immediate trust acceleration between the two parties. You’ll see a level of reciprocity with this person that you’re honoring, and there’s just no greater way to get that serotonin flow and build credibility with your people than something like that.

You can do the same thing with introductions. If you introduce somebody at a mixer or you’re going to introduce somebody on the stage, rather than get up there and read their bio, which is just so off-putting, meet with them a little ahead of time, ask them some thoughtful open-ended questions, and then tell their story. Tell their story. The one thing that just resonates so deeply with people we lead is when we tell their story better than they do. And no one does it.

And when you do, man, it’s an immediate trust accelerant. It opens doors. It’s sacred. I’ve seen it work in so many different situations, and it’s just a great way to use story in the day-to-day and elevate your role in your position, no matter what that position is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. So, one great storytelling tip is just ask people those open-ended questions so that their stories bubble up and we can hear them and be enriched by them. Well, Scott, give us an example of when you told a story to introduce someone that was awesome.

Scott Mann
I actually did it recently.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear the story.

Scott Mann
We were traveling around, and we were doing our play, “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” and we travel around the country performing this play. And there was a Gold Star family member who had lost a family member in in combat, who had really been through a lot.

And so, meeting with this individual a little bit ahead of time, I was able to ask some questions, and just get to know and some things about their background. And then to recognize that individual and tell their story up on the stage in front of a group of other people that were there to attend the play and that were there to basically attend this play, but what it transitioned into was an opportunity to really recognize a Gold Star family member that had been through immense loss, and who was really trying to find her way in the world.

And, all of a sudden, she hears her story told and the story of her loved one, and she’s immediately immersed in the social connection of this group, and the group feels an immediate connection to her. And, in that case, I’m just the vessel. I’m just the storyteller. I’m just sharing a beautiful narrative of this woman’s life and her loved one with these people that I know are going to care. I’m just that bridge. And as soon as that happened, it was an accelerant for trust. It gave her access and placement to a group of people that she really needed to be around.

So, it doesn’t have to be like epic, or it doesn’t have to have like an ROI to it that we typically evaluate engagements. It could be something as, it’s just a small touch point like that, but extremely profound in somebody’s life. And when we do that, we’re building social capital. One other thing I’ll just say, Pete, to this, and I think it’s a pivot to the same topic, a lot of times it’s not the stories we tell. It’s the stories we ask to hear, particularly in low-trust environments where everybody’s really going through it, or there’s a lot of stress.

Thoughtful, open-ended questions to the other party that just let them respond in story about what’s going on with them in their life, what’s going on with the merger, “How are you feeling about what we’re doing here? What’s the latest thing you’re seeing with this?” and just listen with pure discovery, trying to just see the pictures in their head, pain and goals, pain and goals. And I just keep asking how and what until I really get a sense of what the pictures in their head are.

And that alone, Questionology, Warren Berger calls it, using the reverse where you ask questions that let them tell you a story. It’s like a dance. Narrative competence, the integration of stories and everything that we do, and, hell, two-thirds of the time, it’s stories we’re hearing, not saying, that will really elevate our effectiveness in how we lead.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a great perspective. So now, can we hear you tell a story that’s awesome?

Scott Mann
Well, there can be short stories that are like super short, even when we’re doing social media and things like that. There was Hemingway, had a bet with a reporter, when he was alive, that he could tell a sad story in six words. And the reporter said, “There’s no way you can do that.” So, they had a typical Hemingway wager over a bottle of rum, and Hemingway said, “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I have heard this.

Scott Mann
And I think the larger point is that there is a way to tell stories that, if you train on it, you can integrate even your toughest struggles, your toughest scars. I tell a story, Pete, about my mental health when I came out of the military after almost 23 years. In 2015, I nearly took my own life, and right in this house, in my bedroom closet. I had reached a point after years of combat, and then coming home to a world, it was like a different planet to me.

The people that I looked everywhere were as divided as they were in Afghanistan. They were tearing each other apart, and my purpose and perceived sense of purpose was gone. Everything that I’d known about my life was no more. I’m walking around the house in a bathrobe and not having showered in two weeks, and just like two weeks earlier, I was a high-performing Green Beret. And I lost my way in a very short period of time and found myself in a closet holding a pistol.

And had my son not come home when he did, I don’t think I’d be here. But he did, and thank God I wasn’t able to go through with it. And as a result of that extremely dark low point in my life, it put me on this path to try to find an answer. I knew I had something to say. I knew there was something for me to do in this world. I still had relevance. It’s just that every time I would try to talk about, for example, my lessons that I’d learned as a Green Beret, about human connection, I would jam up when I got in front of people, when I started to talk about those lessons and the battlefield. I would lock up.

And so, I became convinced that there had to be a way for me to bridge that gap. And eventually I ended up finding a mentor, a civilian mentor who was a storyteller himself. He was a former NFL football player named Bo, and he had become an actor and a playwright and a storyteller, and a really good one. And when I saw him on the stage, and I saw what he did, I just thought, “Man, that’s what I ought to be doing. That’s how I can find my way again.” I just knew it like in my chest cavity. And he listened to me and he said, “Okay, I’ll train you.”

And he trained me for two years in the art and science of storytelling, and how to bring the physicality of it, and the struggle, the tough stuff, the scars. And that really was what I locked onto, was taking the struggles and repurposing them into stories that first healed myself, and then I started to use those stories as ways to bridge gaps with bankers, with associates in the tech industry, small businesses, because we’re all wired for struggle. We all go through it. We all struggle.

And when we hear stories of struggle, we listen autobiographically, we locate ourselves in them. And before I knew it, I had done three TED Talks, I had done hundreds of keynotes, I wrote a play about the war to complete my midlife crisis, I learned how to act at age 50 and took the play on tour with Gary Sinise. But at the heart of all of it, Pete, was storytelling, what we’re doing right now.

And it’s just crazy because, at this primal level, we all locate each other in our stories. And if we can just unleash that thing, unleash that muscle and put it into the world, there’s just no ceiling for what you can do. It’s a powerful, powerful tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, I like that a lot. Well, one, I’m so glad you’re here, and thank you.

Scott Mann
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And, two, thank you for sharing that. And, three, as we think about story, it’s amazing how, boy, it’s night and day in terms of like the impact of storytelling when you say, “After I returned from Afghanistan, I struggled with my mental health.” Now, a lot of times when we express ourselves, we kind of leave it at that. But when you actually paint the picture of you are in a closet with a pistol to your head, and your son walks in, it’s night and day.

And both of these descriptions, there is a person struggling with their mental health. But in the latter, in which you’re really sharing what went down, you, a human being in a physical place with objects that we can visualize, it ignites something inside of us, inside of me, and I imagine every listener with a heart, and I think there’s science on this in terms of like mirror neurons or biochemical stuff going on in there. And I think that’s a huge takeaway right there.

And it takes a whole lot more vulnerability as well and courage to share that, not so much, “I struggle with my mental health when I returned from Afghanistan” to painting that picture. And in so doing that, like the connection is like night and day. It’s like ten, a hundred-fold.

Scott Mann
I appreciate you calling that out. And what I want to get across here is this is available to every single one of us. When I was first exposed to this, I thought, “There’s no way.” I watched Bo do this, and I thought, “I could never do that,” and I had the stuff buried deep inside me that I hadn’t even told my wife.

But, Pete, I mean, I’ve lost nine friends to suicide since I got out of the Army, nine friends. And these were, look, these were Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Rangers. These were highly resilient individuals. And then I looked around, that’s what’s happening to mental health in our workplace today, two plus years of COVID, prolonged isolation. Honest to God, I feel like, in so many ways, what we’ve gone through as a society of employees and associates, post-COVID, is like coming home from a two-year deployment.

It’s very similar because people have had these different lived experiences and we don’t know what they are, but there is a, I know this, there is a mental health tsunami in this country right now that we’re dealing with in the workplace, and people are going through it. They’re dealing with stuff. And what I feel like is, “Okay. Well, if my story of how I’ve coped and went through this and struggled and overcame it, and found my way out, if that can allow a young associate somewhere in the country to hear that and locate herself in my story, that’s what I call the generosity of scars.”

It’s when we can repurpose our struggles through stories in the service of other people, and the cool thing is, it is actually why storytelling was invented. It’s what happened. You nailed it when you said the mirror neurons. When we hear a story of struggle, the armor comes down and we listen autobiographically to the person talking. And, all of a sudden now, yeah, you have the context of me in that closet, but there might be some version of you in that closet or someone you knew in that closet.

We start to make sense of, because story is a sense-making tool, we start to make sense of our lived experience, the tough parts, in the safety of somebody else’s narrative. And that’s where the love and the courage and the relatability comes in because, now, you’re holding space so somebody else can make sense of their life in the safety of your story. And, to me, it’s just like, “Man, what a gift to have gone through these things and then be able to repurpose them so that somebody else can make sense of it for their own journey.”

I mean, as far as I’m concerned, that saved my life. It saved my life in so many ways. It gave me my life back, and I love talking to people, like you who get it, who have an audience of people who, I know, will be capable of doing some version of that themselves, and who knows what that can lead to.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say it’s a gift, that really resonates. And I’m thinking that so often, this gift is sort of wrapped up so tight in opaque brown wrapping that we can’t even appreciate it in terms of like, “I struggle with my mental health when I returned from Afghanistan,” or I could just say, “I’m disappointed that I don’t seem to have as much energy, drive, and motivation for my work as I did in 2019.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s something.”

But then you can really share a story in terms of, “I remember when I used to be able to crank through 11 one-hour coaching calls in a day, and say, ‘That was awesome.’ And now, I’m struggling to roll off the couch at 2:30 p.m. after a hefty afternoon nap, just to make it through my inbox,” for example. So, now, it’s sort of like, it’s again, night and day in terms of, “Okay, it’s almost like you’re telling me about the situation versus you’re really telling me here’s the situation.”

Scott Mann
A hundred percent. And, look, the former, to me, is unwatchable. This is what we get all the time. We get this all the time, and we all know it’s false, and frankly, social media, the 24/7 news cycle, this represented reality that we live in most of the time, it’s all performative. It’s all performative. Everyone is giving a performance all the time. And when you’re dealing with that and you’re dealing with a growing level of disconnection in the country and different levels of distrust, you start to isolate.

That starts to have a really profound effect on every aspect of how you do your job, of how you think about your work, how you think about your purpose at your work. And we’re hungry for people, not even leaders, we’re just hungry for people who authentically connect to us. And I get it, some people worry about vulnerability, particularly like in corporate environments, in the military, and the V word gives people a lot of angst because you feel like you’re sticking your jugular out, and I get it.

And what I tell people is, “Okay, cool. Let’s reframe it. Rather than get wrapped up in the vulnerability or the signaling vulnerability, think about relatability. Humans are social creatures. We are actually wired to be social. It’s our superpower, and we connect to the other humans who are relatable to our pain, and that’s what we’re looking for.” And so, if you just focus on asking yourself, when your teenage daughter has been bullied on Instagram, “Am I being relatable to her right now?” You will automatically demonstrate the appropriate level of vulnerability for that moment.

And I found, at least for me, that’s a very, and I teach this to Green Berets and FBI, is it works. It still allows you to bring vulnerability in at just the right level. But as a metric, focus on just being relatable. Just be relatable to somebody’s pain. Be an empathetic witness, as Dr. Benjamin Hardy says. Bear witness to their pain just for the sake of discovery and curiosity, just to see the pictures in their head. No one does that. And if you do that, you’re immediately going to help them drop the body armor, there’s going to be a biological element of reciprocity, and you can start to connect.

We’re actually wired to do it. We just haven’t done it in a long time. And, unfortunately, this transactional world we live in drives us away from it. So, to bring it back to that Nobody’s Coming to Save You, that’s why I wrote the book, it’s just to give as many tactical tools as I can to folks that are having to do this with their teenagers and their spouse and their PTA. We need leaders that connect, and it’s not a foregone conclusion, that instinct is going to get you there.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, when you say, when you respond, just be relatable, could you maybe give us some examples of snippets of dialogue, which would be put in the relatable column and the not relatable column?

Scott Mann
Right on. So, let’s break it down this way. The guy that I studied negotiations under is a guy named Professor Stuart Diamond, and he wrote the book Getting More. One of the things I like that Stuart always said is, “You want to see the pictures in the head of the other party.” Humans operate off the transfer of imagery. It’s just what we do, theory of mind and all that. So, it’s really important to see the pictures in the head of the other party.

A great example of what you’re talking about with the relatability, Chris Voss talks about in Never Split the Difference. When you talk about relatability, I want to see their pain and their goals. I want to be relatable to their pain and relevant to their goals. If I can just get some sense of the pain points that they’re going through, if I can just get some sense of what they’re experiencing internally, of what it is that’s jamming them up, and just ask thoughtful open-ended questions of how or what, that allow me to ascertain what that pain is, and it can be incremental in the beginning.

Like, for example, if my son, Brayden, who’s my youngest, if he’s having a really rough day, I might just start with, “What’s going on, man? How are you feeling? What’s up?” It could just be as simple as that. And, usually, you’re going to get something, you know. And then, a lot of times you could just reflect back, reflective listening, “Really? Really, that’s what she said?” Just be curious. Just show discovery.

And, again, not from a transactional creepy kind of way. I really want to see the pictures in their head, like, “What’s the pain going on here? What’s happening?” And I want to get a clear picture of it, and my end game goal is that I get clear enough on what it is that’s going on with them that I can articulate it back, and they say something like, “That’s right. That’s right.” And when you hear “That’s right,” you’re probably really close to where that person’s ready to listen to what the hell you have to say.

Pete Mockaitis
So, for a teenage bullying situation, so lay it on us, what does relatable sound like there?

Scott Mann
The thing to remember in this is, see what a lot of people try to do when they’re negotiating or influencing is they try to just look at the Questionology aspect of it. In other words, they try to look at the formatting of the questions, and that’s cool, but what I like better is a, “What’s your approach? What is your approach to this situation?” Because, you know, every situation is different with every teenager.

However, there are some universal singulars at play here. For example, if your teenager has been bullied, then it is a foregone conclusion that they are in a sympathetic state. The emotional arousal is somewhere between fear and anger, and there’s pain, and it is a highly aroused state, trance-like state that they’re likely in. They are agitated to a very high degree. If it was a thermometer, they’re high in the red.

And the problem with that is when someone’s in a sympathetic state like that, they can’t hear you. Physiologically, the ears don’t work. Bullets get quiet in a gunfight because you don’t need to hear them. The body moves energy where it needs to move it so that it can handle the situation for survival. It’s an autonomic, physiological response. The sympathetic nervous system clicks in.

Think about if you’ve been in a car wreck or if you get in an argument with somebody, and you’ve heard the term “seeing red” why is that? It’s because you’re elevating your emotional temperature to such a degree you’re preparing to survive. You’re preparing. This is a primal 250,000-year-old response. So, it’s not conducive to reflective listening or cognitive processing and certainly not shared perspective.

So, if I’m a parent, the first thing that I want to remember is what James Claussen says, from Darden University, “Leadership is the management of energy.” Humans are mostly energy. It’s the management of energy, yours and then theirs. So, when I get in front of my kid, “What’s my emotional temperature?” What do most of us do when we see our kids bullied? We mirror. We go in the red, too, right?

And so, I look like I don’t trust myself as I go in, and what I’m trying to say to Brayden, I’m really scared for him, but I just want him to be okay. It comes across as what? I’m telling him how to do it. I’m telling him what he needs to do. It comes across as prescriptive, which immediately agitates him, and he goes up. So, a lot of it is the approach of three diaphragmatic breaths, say, “I have time” three times. Ask yourself these three questions, “Who am I? Why am I here? What do they need from me?”

Just those three steps, three diaphragmatic breaths, belly breaths, three “I have times,” and then “Who am I? Why am I here? What does Brayden need from me?” It will bring you down into a parasympathetic state, calm and connect.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting, the “I have” times.” I’ve heard other things such as “I am safe,” “I am enough,” “I am loved.” If you went for “I have time,” can you expand upon that?

Scott Mann
It’s called temporal pacing. It’s actually something. And a lot of the techniques that I’ve actually learned for high-stakes engagement, I actually learned in acting, because in acting, when you get up in front of people, you go into a sympathetic state. Because we’re status creatures and we’re worried about how we’re being judged, and so we start to speak faster and we start to move up. The same thing when we get up in front of people to give a presentation and a briefing. We have to pace it down. We have to slow it down, which feels unnatural. It’s called temporal pacing.

So, just by verbally saying, “I have time,” I regulate my own emotional temperature. I slow my pacing down, and all of that crap that I just had in the last meeting that is jamming me up, by doing those three “I have times,” I can leave that at the door where they belong and not in the next meeting and projecting it on someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love this, the effect of the rate of speech. And I see this in my own world if I’m listening to an audiobook, sometimes I will crank that bad boy at over 2X speed, and that produces one effect, like “Okay, I’m dialed in. We’re doing this.” And other times, I will crank it all the way down to like 0.7 speed, so slow.

And Audible is amazing at this with their algorithms to not make the pitch get weird. I’m an audio dork in that way, and so it’s just very slow. But, sure enough, that gets me sleepy. It is fantastic when I want to fall asleep, it’s like, “We’ll make that super slow.” And, likewise, “I have time,” slowly to yourself, it would make sense, it follows then, that that would get you in that groove of, “Oh, okay, no need to rush and speed through this, because I have time.”

Scott Mann
It’s the coolest thing. And I’ve had guys take this into Afghanistan, Syria, acting, Broadway shows, interrogations, presentations. Like, it works, and I call it pre-engagement preparation. If you want, I’ve got it on a little video, I’ll flip it over to you, and feel free to share it with whoever. I think we need all the tools we can get, and that one does work.

But taking it back to the bullied teenager, regulating your own emotional temperature is essential, and then getting a sense of the emotional temperature of the teenager across from you, “What is her emotional temperature? Is she in the red?” And the ultimate question I want to ask myself in this moment, and it’s not just for bullied teenagers, it’s for any high emotion situation, “What’s it going to take to get her ready to listen to me? What does she need? What is it going to take to get her to a place where she’s ready to listen to what I have to say, because she’s clearly not. She’s clearly not.”

Nine times out of ten, someone is dealing with something, the last thing they want is another party coming in and chirping in their ear. They’re not ready for it. They’re still in a state. They are in a trance state of fear or anger-based behavior. So, the responsible thing is to show up, “Okay, how can I hold space here and help her bring her emotional temperature down to where she’s ready to listen to what I have to say?”

Now in this case, the most important thing is just, make a human connection first. Don’t try some questioning technique. Don’t try, you know, whatever. Just make a human connection, and your instincts will guide you in that if you’re open to it. Is it just sitting there in silence with them? Is it just putting your arm around them? Is it just letting them know you’re there? And is it just saying, “Are you okay? How can I help?”

But if we can ask these open-ended questions of how and what, even if they’re irate and angry, Pete, what will happen is their emotional temperature, they’re expending energy, right, so the emotional temperature from the sympathetic state will start to drop, and that’s why questions are so important instead of statements. How and what questions allow them to respond in narrative, which is the natural way to respond, and their emotional temperature will start to drop from sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze to parasympathetic state of calm and connect.

And then, at some point, and again, what am I looking for? I’m just trying to ascertain pictures in their head, pain and goals, pain and goals, what’s going on. And the more that I can get clarity on that with pure discovery and curiosity, and that’s it, at some point, when I articulate back to them, and they say, “That’s right,” “Would it be okay if I shared something with you?” like, then you’re probably ready to engage, really engage, and maybe offer something. Nine times out of ten, that’s what people need. They don’t need you to sit there and spew at them. They need two-thirds of every engagement, if it matters, is questions.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Scott Mann
He’s sitting right outside the room here listening to my podcast because that’s what he does. My dad, my hero, a 42-year firefighter in the Forest Service on his third bout with cancer, a stroke, my biggest fan, and I’m his biggest fan, “Leave tracks. Leave tracks.” That’s what my dad says that all of us should be doing in this world. And it is this notion that we’re all here to do something bigger than ourselves, that we’re all meaning-seeking, meaning-assigning creatures, looking for that impact, and our legacy is the most important thing that we can do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Scott Mann
I would say mine has been in the generosity of scars. It’s been in noticing how storytelling works with deep grief and trauma and loss, and how it’s allowed people to come out of the darkness and really find new meaning in their life by repurposing these stories in the service of others. I think it’s not the silver bullet to mental health, but it is definitely a hugely helpful tool that we’re not tapping into and we need to.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Scott Mann
Let’s see, favorite book would be this one right here, Steven Pressfield, The War of Art. He’s a good buddy of mine, and I’m a big fan of Steve and his outlook on resistance and overcoming self-sabotage for something greater than yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Scott Mann
I would say my PEP, pre-engagement preparation is my favorite tool. Yeah, what we just talked about, “I have time” and those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Scott Mann
I do a thing called the Tribal 12 every morning where I wake up and I work on my instrument as a storyteller. And it’s a series of 12 rituals that I do that involve everything from diaphragmatic breathing, to voice and articulation drills, to physical movements and character gestures, that no matter what I face that day, my instrument for communication is ready to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Scott Mann
“Meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Scott Mann
ScottMann.com. It’s all right there.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Scott Mann
See if you can get somebody to say “That’s right” in the next 48 hours that’s going through something.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, this has been a treat. I wish you much good trust conversations.

Scott Mann
Thanks, Pete. Appreciate you, man.