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Mar 04
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941: The Best Way to Hire Top Talent with Mike Michalowicz

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Mike Michalowicz reveals a surprising strategy for finding and retaining top talent.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The more effective alternative to job interviews 
  2. The key signs someone is perfect for your team 
  3. The three drivers of commitment and engagement 

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two multi-million dollar businesses by his 35th birthday. He is the bestselling author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He has built two additional multimillion-dollar companies and has become one of the world’s most popular speakers on small business topics. Fabled author, Simon Sinek deemed Mike Michalowicz “…one of the top contenders for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.” 

Resources Mentioned

Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.

Feb 22
0

938: William Ury on How to Thrive in Conflict

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Renowned negotiation expert William Ury draws from his extensive experience of working in the world’s toughest conflicts to help transform conflict into opportunity.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why we need more conflict, not less
  2. The true enemy to confront
  3. How writing the other side’s victory speech can help you win

About William

William Ury is one of the world’s best-known experts on negotiation, and co-author of Getting to Yes, the world’s all-time bestselling book on negotiation with more than 15 million copies sold. A co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, Ury has devoted his life to helping people, organizations, and nations transform conflicts around the world, having served as a negotiator in many of the toughest disputes of our times, taught negotiation to tens of thousands, and consulted for the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. He has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts ranging from Kentucky wildcat coal mine strikes to family feuds, from US partisan battles to wars in the Middle East, Colombia, Korea, and Ukraine. 

Ury is an internationally sought-after speaker and has two popular TEDx talks with millions of viewers. He lives in Colorado where he loves to hike in the mountains.

Resources Mentioned

William Ury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bill, welcome.

William Ury
Well, it’s a real pleasure to speak with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to kick us off, if you could, with a super-riveting tale about a high-stakes negotiation you participated in, and how a key breakthrough emerged.

William Ury
Okay. Picture it, it’s about 20 years ago, I’m face-to-face with the president of Venezuela, he’s furious at me and yelling, getting very close to my face, and yelling at me. I’m in front of his entire cabinet. It’s past midnight. I’m surprised. I’m thinking, “Oh, a years’ worth of work down the drain.” I’m feeling embarrassed and I’m about to react and defend myself, he’s saying, “You know, you’re a fool, you third-siders, you mediators, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t see the traitors on the other side,” because I had said, “I thought there was some progress,” and he really got ticked off at that. And I was thinking of how to defend myself.

And then I caught myself for a moment, and I went to, what I call, the proverbial balcony, which is that place of calm and perspective, just for a tiny second, bit my tongue, and I asked myself, “Is it really going to advance things here if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? What am I here for? I’m here to calm things down.” So, I bit my tongue and I listened, and he proceeded to shout, and rant, and rave right close to my face for about half an hour, but since I wasn’t feeding him anything, slowly his energy began to wind down. And then I watched his shoulders sink, and he said to me in a very weary tone of voice, “So, Ury, what should I do?”

That, my friends, is the moment that a mind begins to open up. That’s the very faint sound of it. So, I said, “You know, Mr. President, it’s almost December. Plans for Christmas have been canceled. Why don’t you give everyone a break?” what’s in Spanish called a tregua, a truce, “Just give it a break for this conflict,” because there were a million people on the streets calling for his resignation, a million of his supporters calling for him, there is fear of even civil war. It was a really tense situation in the country. And he looked to me for a moment, he said, “That’s a good idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech.” His mood had entirely shifted.

And what I realized then in that moment was that maybe the single greatest opportunity we have in negotiation, the greatest power that we have is the power, not to react but, instead, to take a step back, go to the balcony as if the negotiation is unfolding on the stage in front of us, remember what we really want, and listen. And that’s the key, to me, to unlocking a lot of the difficult conflicts that we face, whether it’s in our personal lives, or at work, or in the larger society.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Bill, I love that. And so, your genius move there was to say nothing.

William Ury
Exactly, to say nothing. Exactly. And maybe the easiest thing to do. It’s hard in that moment but it’s not like you have to come up with something clever. It’s to say nothing, and then, if anything, listen to yourself. Watch your own emotions. Watch yourself. Listen to yourself. How can we possibly listen to others if we haven’t really listened to ourselves? Tune in for a moment, and say, “Wow, I’m agitated. I’m feeling embarrassed. I’m angry. I’m pissed off.” Whatever it is, as soon as you start to listen to yourself from that little bit of a distance, your nervous system starts to calm down, and you can bring your best to the situation instead of your worst.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like the balcony a lot as a visual because, and maybe this is deliberately why you chose it, I have the experience, when I am overlooking a large expanse, and, in particular, actually, a lot of empty seats. I don’t know, maybe it’s like all those moments before the keynote, before everyone arrives. There is a sense of calm and power that comes from being in that visual kind of a space. And I don’t think that’s just me. That might be humanity itself. What’s that about?

William Ury
I think so. Actually, right now, I’m in a place, a little getaway in the mountains, and I can see about a hundred miles from here. And what it does in the brain, is that spaciousness, you’re looking over seats, is it gives you perspective. It’s what psychologists call perspective-taking. You could see the larger picture because, so often, in these conflicts, in these negotiations, daily, or small, or large, the biggest casualty is we lose our perspective.

And so, the ability to step back for a moment and see that larger perspective, and you may be in a closed office or something like that, but look out the window, or close your eyes for a second, and remember a beautiful scene that you’ve been in, and all of that will help your brain just recalibrate and tap into your inner potential to deal with that situation, that difficult situation, as hard as it is, with your maximum potential.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, zooming out a little bit, I guess getting some perspective from the balcony, your book is called Possible, and you say that you’re neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but rather a possibilist. Can you tell us what that means? And I’d love to hear the inspiring basis upon which you found your hope.

William Ury
Well, Pete, so, yeah, after all these years, I’ve spent about a 40, 45 years wandering the world in some of the toughest conflicts here in this country and around the world, from labors strikes and coal mines, to board room battles, to political disputes, to civil wars, Middle East, Columbia, Ukraine, North Korea, and people ask me, “So, you’ve seen some of the worst of humanity, how do you feel?” And I used to say I’m an optimist, and I’m an optimist, but now I like to calibrate a little more, and I say, “Actually, I’m a possibilist. I believe in human beings. I believe in our potential to transform conflicts, to change those situations.”

And the reason I believe it is I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen it in small situations, I’ve seen it in large situations, and I saw it in South Africa back in the ‘90s when blacks and whites were in a war, a race war, I saw it in Northern Ireland where there was a sectarian war. I’ve even seen it in the Middle East. I’ve seen it here in this country, and it’s that spirit of possibilism, of being able to see opportunities where others only see obstacles, that I think is key.

And it’s that spirit of possibilism, I think, that we need more and more in our daily lives, in our work lives, in our personal lives because the world outside seems to be, like, going a little crazy, and we need that mindset, which is, it’s not Pollyannish, it’s not like, “Okay, the world is all rosy,” but we look at the negative possibilities, but then we look for where those positive possibilities, we bring our curiosity, our creativity, and our collaborative potential to bear on the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And in your book, you mentioned you’ve been in a number of situations where most people said, “Yeah, this is going to end pretty poorly,” and yet there were surprisingly positive developments in how things unfolded with regard to potential global calamities.

William Ury
That’s right. I’ve learned so much from just watching how people do these things. Going back to, again, like to South Africa, like a guy like Nelson Mandela. Here he was in prison for 27 years, and what’s the first thing he does in prison is he studies the language of his enemies. He learns their history, he puts himself in their shoes, he learns how they think, how they feel, what their traumas are, and that enables him, actually, when he comes out of prison, to be able to persuade them to lay down their weapons and agree to a democratic situation.

And it’s those kinds of things I’ve seen over time that I think that’s what we’re going to need in today’s…We live in an age of conflict. Everywhere around us, conflicts seem to be increasing, polarizing us, even poisoning our relationships, and paralyzing us, and we need the spirit of possibility, of meeting animosity with curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you can tweet that, Bill. That’s nice. And within that, I’m curious, you’ve been doing this for a long, long time. Tell us, what are some of the most recent, surprising, and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about this human communication conflict thing that you’re capturing in your book Possible?

William Ury
Well, one thing is, for a long time, I’ve noticed the importance of going to the balcony, and I noticed the importance of building a bridge, but, in today’s times, often we need more of that. And the thing that’s kind of the hidden resource that’s all around us that we don’t see is what I’ve come to call the third side. Because in every conflict, we tend to reduce it to me versus you, or us versus them, there’s always two sides. And what we don’t see is that there’s always actually a third side, which is the surrounding community, it’s the whole, and that’s a huge resource to us.

If we’re stuck in a conflict, it’s really hard sometimes to go to the balcony, it’s hard to build bridges with some people, or in some organizations, or in some situations, but we can get help from the people around us. It may be our friends, it may be our neighbors, it may be our colleagues, it may be our allies, and it’s not just people to be on our side. That, too, is important, but people who can take the side of the larger whole. Let’s look at it from that larger perspective, who can help us, who can sit us down with the other side, who can listen to us. It’s engaging, building that, I call it a winning coalition for agreement. Building a coalition where we’re not alone in the situation.

And that, to me, is one of the great hopes for humanity, and for us individually in any of our situations, is to look beyond the two sides that we’re always being asked to take one side or the other. But where is that third side?

Pete Mockaitis
I love that notion, the third side, the winning coalition, and we’ve started to introduce some of these concepts, the balcony and the bridge. Could you give us that intro within the frame of the camel story which I really enjoyed?

William Ury
Right. Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories, Pete. It’s an old story, a fable that comes from the Middle East about a man who dies, and he leaves to his three sons, as their inheritance, 17 camels. And to the first son, the oldest son, he leaves half the camels, and to the middle son, he leaves a third of the camels, and to the youngest son, he leaves a ninth of the camels. Well, three sons go about it, and it turns out 17 doesn’t divide by two, and it doesn’t divide by three, and it doesn’t divide by nine, and they start to get into an argument, each one wants more. And you know how brothers can get, almost comes to fisticuffs and violence.

And, finally, in desperation, they consult a wise old woman. And she listens to them, like a good manager listens or whatever, she says, “You know, I don’t have the answer to this. I don’t know if I can help you, but if you want, I actually have a camel, and I’d be happy to give you my camel.” So, the three sons say, “Okay.” Well, then they have 18 camels. Well, 18, as it turns out, does divide by two, so the first son takes his half, and that’s nine; the second son takes his third, and that’s six; and the youngest son takes his ninth, and that’s two. And if you add nine, and six, you get 15, plus two, 17. They have one camel left over and they gave it back to the wise old woman.

Now, if you think about it, a lot of our conflicts, a lot of our situations are a little bit like those 17 camels. You approach it, there’s no way to divide it up, there’s no way to solve the problem. Somehow, what we need to do is, like that wise old woman, we need to step back to the balcony, look at that larger perspective, see if we can come up with a creative idea, a creative reframe, which, in this case, is the 18th camel, that’s the golden bridge, as it were, and see if we can transform the situation, and it often takes the help of a third side, which, in this case, is the wise old woman.

So, to me, actually that story, which I’ve been telling for a long time, I hadn’t realized, it has all those three ingredients, to me, which are the magic ingredients, the magic potentials, the magic victories that we need, which is, one, is a victory with ourselves which is ability not to react but to go to the balcony; the second is a victory with the other side, mutually agreeable solution, a golden bridge as it were; and the third is a victory with the whole, which is to engage that third side, the surrounding community. And if you can put all three together, that’s my aha in this book, then what’s seemingly impossible, and we’re facing a lot of seemingly impossible situations these days, becomes possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And I want to dig into each of these three in a bit of depth in terms of hearing some best practices and practical ways to implement, particularly in workplace scenarios. But first, I just want to go meta, or broad scale for a moment, and here you say that we actually could benefit from more conflict instead of less. What do you mean by that? And why is that the case?

William Ury
Yeah, it seems strange to say, particularly for someone who’s spent his whole life trying to help people resolve conflicts, to say that we actually need more not less. In the sense, I’m trying to say it to provoke people, is to say conflict is natural. We often kind of like, a lot of us, and me included, we find conflict uncomfortable and we try to avoid it, or we accommodate, we give in, we appease, or sometimes we go on the attack, and none of those three A’s, what I call them – avoid, accommodate, or attack – actually help us, really, get what we really want.

And so, to me, we’re not going to be able to end conflict. It’s part of life. There are a lot of conflicts, you may not even be able to resolve them, but the opportunity that we have is to transform them, it’s to actually, instead of avoiding it, it’s to embrace the conflict, transform it. In other words, change the form of it from what’s so often a kind of destructive fight or a sullen silence into kind of an engaged conversation where you listen to them, they listen to you, you come up with creative ideas. And if you think about it, conflict can be healthy. It can be productive. It can lead to better communication, more engagement.

They say that marriages, for example, benefit from some conflict, which get the issues that are, otherwise, under the carpet, engaged but in a constructive way. That’s the real opportunity, it’s to transform the conflict. And whenever you need change, whenever there’s something wrong, oftentimes you need conflict to be able to engage it. So, in that sense, when there are things wrong with the world around us, we actually need more conflict not less. Conflict can sometimes lead to innovation. It can lead to better ideas. The essence of what is a healthy democracy is conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now let’s dig into these three unique human superpowers. We’ve got the balcony. We’ve got the bridge. Can you start with the balcony?

William Ury
What I’ve discovered over the years is that the single biggest obstacle to me or to any of us getting what we want is not what we think of it. It’s not that difficult person on the other side of the table in the office or wherever it is. The biggest obstacle to us getting what we want is right here, it’s me, it’s the person I look at in the mirror every morning. It’s my own, our own, very natural, very human tendency to react, in other words, to act without thinking.

As the old saying goes, “When you’re angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret,” and that often happens. And so, the ability to not react, and that’s a choice that we have in that little moment, like I did with the president of Venezuela there, that little moment, we can choose not to react but to think about what’s going to really advance our objectives here, and we can respond creatively.

And, to me, that’s the key.

The ability to step back for a moment, before we react, I mean, we live in a very reactive culture and reactive times on social media. That ability not to react but to go to the balcony, and everyone has their favorite way of doing it. Some people, it might just be as simple as breathing, taking a walk, a workout, meeting a friend. Everyone’s got their favorite way. What’s your favorite way, Pete, to go to the balcony?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I was reminded back in the day when I was interviewing for jobs as a candidate, and when I felt nervous, I don’t know why, but I guess there’s some science behind it. When I put both of my feet firmly, squarely on the floor, and just became aware of the presence of my feet there, I just felt more solid, grounded, firm, rooted, and that helped.

William Ury
That’s great. That’s exactly it. Essentially, in that moment, you’re pausing, you’re probably breathing, which brings a little more oxygen into your brain. When you put your feet on the ground, you started to relax, and that’s one of the wisest things, pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. When you’ve got something hard to do, start by relaxing. And you were relaxing in that moment, feeling your feet on the ground, and that visual imagery helped some of your nervous system, and then you can bring your best to a difficult situation, like giving a keynote or dealing with a difficult issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay. So, that’s the balcony, it’s sort of the internal game, we take a breath, we focus, we don’t react, we don’t get defensive, don’t scream in anger. That sounds kind of easy, Bill. Any pro tips, do’s and don’ts about executing this well?

William Ury
Well, it sounds easy but when we’re triggered, when we’re reactive, when our emotions are taking us away, when we’re angry, when we’re fearful, when we’re anxious, it’s not so easy, it turns out, and that’s how often we feel when we’re in a tough situation, a difficult conflict, or an office spat, or whatever the situation might be. And so, that’s why we have to kind of cultivate it.

So, I’d say one thing is if you know you’re going to be in a difficult situation, you know you’re going to be in a difficult conversation with a colleague, or whatever the situation might be, with your partner, with your child, resource yourself. Everyone has their favorite way to resource themselves. I like to go for walks, ideally, in nature. Somehow nature fills me with a sense of awe and wonder. I relax. I can then bring my best. So, before any important negotiation, I go for a walk.

But everyone will have their favorite way of resourcing themselves so that you can actually have some natural resilience, so that when you go in, you’re going to be a lot less reactive when the other side starts saying things that press your buttons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, now let’s talk about how do we build that bridge?

William Ury
Just the same as with the balcony, you have to do the opposite of what you might naturally feel like doing, you might naturally feel like reacting. Do the opposite and take a step back, go to the balcony. The same is true with the bridge. What happens in difficult conflicts is we tend to dig into our positions, the things we say we want, the things we demand. The other side digs into their positions, they push us, we push back, it goes nowhere, or it escalates even.

And the opposite of that, actually, what you find successful negotiators doing is the exact opposite of pushing. Because when you push, for example, right now, if I were just pushing you, Pete, if I put up my hands, you pull up your hands, and I was just pushing you, what would you naturally do?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would push back, step aside.

William Ury
Right. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d probably be more shocked, like, “What is going on right now?”

William Ury
That’s it. Exactly. But people tend, when they’re pushed, to push back. It’s just instinct, and then we’re in a standoff. And what you find works is to use the power of surprise, which is to do the exact opposite of pushing, which is to attract. Because it’s almost like in a conflict, your mind is here, the other person’s mind is way over there, and you’re saying to them, “Hey, come on over to my idea,” whatever it is, “Come over to my position.” It’s not easy for them. It’s like there’s a big chasm, and that chasm is filled with, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t satisfy my needs, that’s not what I want. Other people will think I’d given in, or I look like a failure, or a wimp.” There’s a whole bunch of stuff in that chasm.

Our job is to build them a bridge over that chasm. It’s to start where they are for a moment, leave where your mind is, and this is not always easy, but leave where your mind is, and start the conversation where their mind is, where they are. You’re asking the boss for a raise, for example, “And I deserve that raise,” and you’re all there. Put yourself in the boss’ shoes for a moment, and imagine, “Wait, there’s a tough budgetary situation.” Start with your boss’ situation. How is the boss going to justify your raise to other people in the organization, and so on?

Think about their problem. Help them solve their problem so that they can help you solve yours. That’s the art of building the other side a golden bridge over that chasm of dissatisfaction. In other words, making it as easy as possible for them to move in the direction you want them to move. Attracting rather than pushing is the exact opposite of what we might normally do in a difficult conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And when you speak to helping to solve their problem, and imagining it from their perspective and their stakeholders, you’ve got a really cool approach called writing your other party’s victory speech. Can you unpack that a little bit?

William Ury
When I face a tough situation, it could be personal or it could be global, and it seems impossible, what I like to do is I like to start at the end, and work backwards. You might not be able to get from here to there, but you might just be able to get from there to here, and then work your way back to there. And the way I do that is I like to sit down and write the other side’s victory speech. In other words, I do a little thought experiment. I imagine, “What if the other side accepted my proposal? What if they said yes?” What if they said yes to your proposal? Imagine that for a moment.

Your boss says, “Yeah, I’ll give you the raise.” Your colleague says, “Yeah, I’ll help you on that project.” Whatever it is, you think about that, and then imagine that they, then, have to justify that to someone else, to their boss, or to their colleagues, or to themselves looking in the mirror, or to their board, or whatever the thing is. What’s their victory speech? They say, “Yeah, it was a good idea for me to agree with Pete, and this is why, because it’s going to do this, that, and this.” You write their victory speech, and you think about how they can see that as a victory.

Then you see your job as helping them deliver that victory speech. And by writing that victory speech, by imagining it, it becomes more possible. And then the job becomes, “Okay, what can I do right now to start to help them, put them in a position where they could deliver that victory speech?” It has to be a victory for you, too, of course. But their victory speech is why they decided to agree with your proposal.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And then, in so doing, that naturally will spark some ideas for, “Oh, wait. You know what, this would be really easy for me to put in my proposal. It doesn’t make any difference to me, but might make all the difference to them in terms of what they’re able to share in their victory speech.”

William Ury
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, can you talk about the third step, or should I say, maybe third superpower?

William Ury
Balcony is one of our superpowers. We all have that ability within us to, as you mentioned, say nothing, not react. We all have the ability to build a bridge, and a core part of building the bridge, I should mention, is listening. We think of negotiation as talking, but, actually, if you observe the behavior of successful negotiators, they listen far more than they talk. There’s a reason we’re given two ears and one mouth, is to listen twice as much as we talk. And so, listening is key.

Now, it’s not always easy to do all this stuff. It’s not easy to go to the balcony in a difficult situation. It’s not easy to build those bridges. And this is where we need help, and that help, as I mentioned before, is around us. We may not see it but there’s a tendency in almost every conflict to kind of reduce it to two sides. It’s like two sides, it’s us versus them. It’s Arabs versus Israelis. It’s labor versus management. Whatever it is, it’s husband versus wife, we reduce it to two sides. But, in fact, there’s always a third side, which is the people around.

And I’d learned this, really struck me once, I’m an anthropologist by training, and then I got into negotiation but I was studying anthropology to understand and figure out human beings. And I was visiting an indigenous tribe, in Southern Africa, in the Kalahari Desert, the so-called Bushmen, and I was watching how they deal with conflicts. When two people get into a conflict, it can get serious because the men all have these arrows that they hunt with, which have poisoned tips, and you can kill someone, and then that person takes three to die, will kill someone else. And pretty soon, you have the equivalent of a small-scale nuclear war in a small group.

So, what they learned to do, what I saw, is when tempers start to get high, and you notice that, and people notice that, someone goes and hides the poisoned arrows out in the desert, and then the whole group gets together around the campfire – the women, the men, the children – and they talk it out. And it might go on for a day, or two days, or three days. They don’t rest until they talk it up because they know what the consequences are if they don’t. It’s not just a question of reaching an agreement. There has to be a kind of reconciliation.

And what I realized is that’s our ancestral birthright, it’s that use of the community, of the people around us to help create a container, a space, within which even the most difficult conflicts can gradually be transformed. That’s the third side, and that’s a power that we all have to evoke, or we often play the role of third siders. We don’t think of it necessarily but parents are always playing that role of third sides among their kids, peers among their colleagues, or the odd managers among their employees.

It’s that third-side role of helping listen to people, help them cool down, helping them get into communication with each other, helping explain what the other side thinks. All that knitting together turns out to be key if we’re trying to transform the impossibly difficult conflicts that we sometimes come across.

And the third side is the help of the whole, that’s what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. That’s beautiful and a good reminder to seek that out, and to get that support. In the workplace, any pro tips on what might make for great third side collaborators to get in on the mix?

William Ury
It could be someone even outside your workplace, or just a friend and a colleague who can be a coach to you. You have a hard situation, sometimes we get blinded but the ability of using a friend or someone as a coach, to say, “How am I going to approach this difficult issue I’ve got with my colleague, or a coworker, or my boss?” That’s one. Another is there might be a colleague that you could involve. Sometimes, too, you’re not alone in these situations.

Imagine that you’re facing a difficult boss. If it’s just you, that’s one thing. But if it’s you with your colleagues, that’s the winning coalition, can approach the boss and sit down, and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this,” then you’ve got some more power. There’s real power in the third side, and sometimes you need that in situations because not everything in the workplace is fair.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you talked about the tribes, you mentioned it might take a day or two or three, and, in your book, you mentioned working through some negotiations, that could take months or years. How do you think about patience and how we can get more of it? Because I think, sometimes, we can have the frustration that, “We’ve had this conversation four times, and it’s going nowhere. I guess it’s just hopeless.” How do you think about those situations? It seems you think about things differently.

William Ury
I do. I just know that when you get into these real gnarls with each other, and we kind of know this in families and so on of how these kinds of disputes can go on for a long, long time. And this kind of negotiation, I’ll just say upfront, can be some of the hardest work that we humans can do, and it takes patience, it takes persistence because, when you’re looking for possibilities, you make little breakthroughs, and then you might make progress, and then you might have a setback, and then you got to go back.

And it’s that way that I see the little possibilities turning into large possibilities. So, it’s true, it takes some time. Human beings, we’re not like computers. We take time. We have our grievances, we have our wounds, we have our traumas. It takes time to work through those, and it does take some patience. On the other hand, I would say, if you do invest in those relationships, if you do build trust in those relationships, then you can operate very fast at the speed of trust.

I remember a long time ago, I had some funding from Warren Buffett to work on avoiding nuclear war, a long time ago, and he was telling me about a negotiation he got involved in with his partner about making a major investment. And it was hundreds of millions of dollars, and he said the negotiation took place in one minute over the phone, where the guy called him up, and said, “We’re about to make this deal. What are you thinking?” He said, “What do you think?” And they were able to make the deal quickly. Why? Because they had developed the trust beforehand. They knew that the other would not take advantage of them.

And so, to me, if you want to move fast, then invest in building trust and confidence because, then, you can operate at the speed of trust, which is very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. A lot of this has come back to when you say trust, patience, persistence, humility, calm, just sort of good human virtue stuff. Do you have any pro tips on how we can develop that within ourselves and our colleagues before we have a conflict or a negotiation that we’re getting into? Are there practices? You like going for walks. Is it meditating? Or is it reading, or spiritual practice? Or, how do you recommend folks get better at these just human goodness kinds of things?

William Ury
Well, the first thing, Pete, to recognize is that this is not rocket science. These are things that are inside of us. These are human potentials that each of us has. This is our birthright. So, it’s developing things that are already inherent in us. And, yeah, everyone will have their favorite ways of doing it. It might be meditating. Meditating can calm us down. It might be going for walks. It might be getting a coach or having a friend be a coach, coaching each other, all these kinds of resources. And then investing in the relationships around us by building trust.

It might be those little things where you put deposits in the bank of goodwill. You acknowledge someone. You thank them. You go out of your way to help them so that, then, when it comes to a difficult situation, you can withdraw a little bit, you can count on that, and say, “Look, we’ve got a hard situation here to work through.” But then you’ve got something to work with. And so, it’s that relational work that’s key to building the resilience that will allow us individually within ourselves, and then relationally in our organizations and in our work lives to be able to navigate some pretty stormy weathers sometimes.

And trust can’t be underestimated. It takes a while to build up trust but it can be destroyed in a second. So, what’s interesting to me is, even though sometimes people associate negotiation with kind of slight shading of the truth, or manipulation, the best negotiators I know, the thing they value most is their reputation for honesty and fair-dealing because, then, the other side will trust them, they’ll share more information, and you’re more likely to end up with a creative solution that works for all sides.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Bill, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

William Ury
One thing I just want to say is in a lot of these situations, there’s an element of power. We feel like there’s an asymmetry of power, we feel powerless. And so, one thing in negotiation, when you’re on the balcony, that you might want to think through is you’re trying to get the other side to do something, you’re looking for an agreement. Paradoxically, it’s helpful to think through what I call, what negotiation would call your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

In other words, imagine that you’re not going to reach agreement with the other side, what’s your best course of action for satisfying your actions if you can’t? Imagine the difference it gives you. BATNA, knowing that, it seems like negative thinking, but it’s actually alternative positive thinking. It’s like, “I’ve got an option here. If I can’t reach agreement with a person now, maybe I can reach agreement with someone else. If I can’t get this job, maybe I’ve got another job.”

Just thinking through that gives you confidence that you’re going to be able to satisfy your interests. And that confidence, actually, increases the chances that you’re actually going to reach an agreement. So, paradoxically, when you’re on the balcony, think not just about what you want, but what’s your alternative for getting what you want if, for some reason, you are not able to reach agreement with the other side. Think through your BATNA. BATNA is power. BATNA is confidence.

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

William Ury
A quote from a great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said, “We are continually faced with great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. And now a favorite study or experiment?

William Ury
My colleague, negotiation colleague at MIT, Jared Curhan, did some very interesting experiments where he was studying how people negotiate.

And what he found was there was a very interesting correlation between how cooperative people were, how likely they were to reach agreements that were good for both sides, and the amount of silence that he noted in the negotiation. In other words, those little pauses, where people paused, they were a little more reflective, which is, of course, time on the balcony, so that silence turns out to be one of the great powers not when you’re talking but when you’re not talking. When you just even take that moment of silence, there’s a correlation with creative outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

William Ury
Favorite book that I’ve always liked is a book that was written 2500 years ago in China, the Tao Te Ching, which is kind of a book of paradoxical wisdom, but things like, I remember one quote from it, which is, and it goes back to your earlier question, “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” In other words, oftentimes, our minds are like these fizzy glasses, it’s full with fizz. Can we just take a moment, like when you planted your feet on the ground, to let the fizz settle so we can actually see more clearly, and, thus, act more effectively?

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

William Ury
Something that we all have, which is the ability to listen. But listen not just the way we normally listen, which is we normally listen within our shoes, like thinking, “Oh, I disagree with this, I agree with that,” or whatever it is. The kind of listening where it’s empathic listening, where you put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You try to imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes for a moment.

And if you can do that, if you understand where their mind is, you’re going to be much more effective at influencing them, of helping them move in the direction you want them to move. And it’s also, to me, it’s a sign of basic human respect. And I find that that’s maybe the cheapest concession you can make in any negotiation, is to listen and give them some respect. And it also helps you influence them more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you’re known for, people quote, Kindle book highlight, re-tweet, from you again and again?

William Ury
Well, I’ll give you a contrarian one. I’m known for “Yes,” for getting the “Yes,” but I also wrote a book about “No” and the importance of “No,” and what I call the positive no, which is a yes, followed by a no, followed by a yes, like a sandwich. It’s a no which starts a yes; a yes which is important to you, “I’ve got an important family commitment this weekend,” followed by a very calm and matter-of-fact no, so you say to your boss, “So, I can’t work through the weekend.”

And then on the other side of it is a yes on the other side, which is, “But I can work with John and Mary, and we can make sure the work can get done anyway.” Sometimes it’s important in negotiation to have that yes, but it’s very important also to have the no to stand up for what’s important for you.

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

William Ury
Just my website would be good, which is just my name, WilliamUry.com.

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

William Ury
I do, which is next time you find yourself in a little bit of a spat or a conflict with a colleague, or a coworker, or a boss, think about bringing that spirit of possibility; think about tapping into your innate human superpower of going to the balcony, of not reacting, but asking what you actually want; and the innate superpower of the bridge, of listening, of being creative, and the innate superpower of engaging the third side, the community around you. If you put all three together, you can transform your conflicts. And if you can transform your conflicts, you can transform your lives.

Feb 19
0

937: Speaking the Hidden Language of Connection with Charles Duhigg

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Charles Duhigg shares the simple secret that helps you build powerful connections with anyone.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What supercommunicators know that others don’t 
  2. How to ask questions that deepen and enrich relationships 
  3. How one sentence can dramatically ease workplace conflict 

About Charles

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. He writes for The New Yorker and other publications, was previously a senior editor at The New York Times, and occasionally hosts the podcast How To!

Resources Mentioned

Charles Duhigg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Charles, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charles Duhigg

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to be chatting. I read your prior book The Power of Habit many years ago, and you got a fresh one, Supercommunicators coming out here. I can’t wait to dig into your wisdom. But first, I got to hear, so in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and graduating from impressive places, you’ve also served as bike messenger. Tell us this tale.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, so before I went to business school, I was living in San Francisco and didn’t have a real job. And so, I was like, “You know what I could do, I could become a bike messenger.” And this was back in the late ‘90s when bike messengers were super cool. And so, I signed up for it, and I lasted, literally, one day. I actually got pneumonia from being a bike messenger for one day because San Francisco, of course, was filled with hills, and I was not physically ready to be a bike messenger.

It was interesting though because I would say probably about half, I mean, I did spend time with the other bike messengers, and probably about half of them were more active drug users and had some real serious health issues going on. And I do remember there was this one guy, I took the bus over with him in the morning, and we were driving over the bridge on the way to San Francisco, past the IKEA, and someone was like, “I hate IKEA. IKEA is corporate awfulness.”

And he’s like, “No, bro, IKEA is the best. They got that play area for kids. Me and the wife sometimes will just bring our daughter there, and then we just take off for like six or seven hours, man. It’s amazing.” And I was like, “Okay, this is bike messenger life.”

Pete Mockaitis

Bike messenger life. Well, I’m thinking you have to be in great shape. If they’re using drugs, which drugs are we talking about?

Charles Duhigg

I don’t know. I did not really ask. There seemed to be a lot of conversation about the various drugs, which, of course, I knew nothing about. No, they’re in great shape. Like, if you ride your bike all day long all over San Francisco, you’re in pretty good shape. The other thing is I just didn’t know how to navigate San Francisco, and it’s a hard city. There are ways around the hills and I knew zero of them.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, you lived to tell the tale, and I would be most terrified of getting hit by cars.

Charles Duhigg

Yes, I was terrified of a lot of things. That was definitely one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
But if you’ve got the cool bag, the bike messenger bags are the coolest. Like, the seatbelt buckle and that material.

Charles Duhigg

And at the end of that one day that I spent as a bike messenger, when I was on the bike coming home, I felt like the coolest thing on earth, I was like, “Yeah, I’m a bike messenger. Just, like, messaging stuff,” and then I got pneumonia.

Pete Mockaitis
Mercy. Well, I’m glad you’ve recovered and I’m glad we’re here now chatting about Supercommunicators. It’s a great title and a great premise, and you were something of a supercommunicator in your world, although I think you’ll tell us times that maybe that was not as much the case. But before we get into all that, can you maybe kick us off with anything particularly startling or surprising that you discovered as you’re researching and putting this together?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. This has really changed how I communicate. And you mentioned that I’m a supercommunicator. Actually, the truth is all of us are supercommunicators at various times. We all sometimes walk into the meeting and we know exactly the right thing to say, or a friend calls and they’re upset, we know exactly how to make them feel better.

And the point is that, actually, we all have this talent. In fact, it’s actually hardwired into our brains, it’s how we evolved but sometimes we can forget it. And so, the goal of this book is actually to remind people or teach them how to think about communication so that it’s easier to remember what to do to be a supercommunicator.

And, for me, this really started when I was talking to these marriage therapists, and one of them described the situation that I’ve had a lot in my own life, which is sometimes I would come home from work after a long and hard day, and I would start complaining to my wife. I’d be like, “My boss is a jerk, and my coworkers don’t appreciate me, and blah, blah, blah.” And my wife, very, very wisely, would offer some practical advice. She’d say something like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch, and you guys can get to know each other better?”

And instead of hearing what she was saying, I, of course, would like explode, and be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? I want you to be outraged on my behalf.” And so, when I was talking to these therapists, I was like, “What is going on here? We’re both bringing sort of our best selves in this conversation, we’re both bringing good intentions.”

And they said, “Look,” and this is the big insight of the core of the book. They said, “Look, most of us think about discussions as just being one thing, it’s a discussion about one topic but that’s totally wrong. Every discussion is actually made up of multiple kinds of conversations.” And, in particular, there’s these three buckets that most conversations fall into.

There are practical conversations, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch? Here’s a problem, let’s solve it. We need to make a plan for how we’re going to get to my mom’s for vacation.” Then there are emotional conversations. And in an emotional conversation, I do not want you to solve my problem. I want you, literally, to just kind of give me encouragement and validate how I’m feeling.

And then, finally, there’s also social conversations. And social conversations are about how we relate to each other, how other people see us, how sort of we exist within society. And, oftentimes, when we’re having a conversation, we will move, or having a discussion, we’ll move from conversation to conversation. But if we’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we really won’t be able to connect. And that was what’s happening.

Pete Mockaitis

We, meaning, like, party A and party B, both on the same page, the same style and level of conversation.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. When I came home and I was upset, I was having an emotional conversation and my wife replied with a practical conversation, and so I could not hear what she was saying and she got frustrated by what I was saying because we weren’t, what’s known within psychology as the matching principle, we weren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. And so, when you say, to complexify, often the conversation is not just one, it’s multiples.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Sort of simultaneously, or weaving back and forth, or all those things.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. You’re usually moving from emotional conversation, to practical conversation, to social conversation, and then back to emotional. And what’s important is just that everyone who’s in that conversation, whether it’s two people or many people, that we look for the clues about what kind of conversation is happening, and we match others, and we invite them to match us.

So, when someone says something really emotional and they’re sending us a signal about, like, “Look, we need to talk about how we feel. This is not about solving the problem. This is about airing out why the problem exists,” our ability to pick up on that and then match them, and then, after that, invite them to move to solutions, to move to a practical conversation, that’s really powerful. That’s how you connect with, really, anyone.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. Well, that sounds powerful. I suppose, if I may be so bold, can you prove it? Can you tell me, really, what’s at stake or what’s unlocked if we upgrade our super communication frequency from once in a while when I’m on fire to fairly regularly?

Charles Duhigg

It’s hugely powerful. Think about at work how many conversations you have that if the conversation goes well, things get so much better, and if the conversation does not go well, things don’t get better. Like, let me ask you. So, just think about the last week, what’s the most meaningful conversation you had in the last week?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m in the process of buying a company, so we had a meeting with the buyer-seller accountants, so I think that seemed important from just a dollars and cents perspective.

Charles Duhigg

That seems really meaningful. And I’m sure that that’s like taking up a bunch. Now, my guess is that a lot of those conversations are practical, but buying a company also brings up a lot of emotions. Like, it can be scary, it can be exciting, you can have partners who are saying, “I think we’re moving too fast,” or, “We’re not moving fast enough.”

A big transaction like that, have you found that some of the conversations you’ve had with your spouse, or with your partners, or anyone else that they’ve been emotional instead of just purely practical?

Pete Mockaitis

They have been emotional in that you see emotions are there but it hasn’t been super intensely emotional in either way.

Charles Duhigg

That’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, maybe between my partner and I, like, “Oh wow! This will be such a cool opportunity if we did this, or this, or this, or this. This will unlock this,” so there’s that. But never have we been super intensely emotional in terms of, like, angry, or, “You’re screwing me over,” which is great. None of us feel that.

Charles Duhigg

Which is great. And, by the way, most emotional conversations are not super emotional, they’re not super intense. We all have those conversations sometimes, and knowing how to navigate them is really important but most of the conversations we have every day are at a lower temperature, and that’s fantastic.

But if your business partner came, and he’s like, “I’m so excited. This is going to be amazing,” and you didn’t engage with that excitement at all, you didn’t sort of invite him to share that excitement, it’d be hard going forward. And then if you came in super practical-minded, and you’re like, “Look, I don’t care how excited you are, we got to figure out the dollars and cents on this,” and all he talked about was like the excitement and how he feels, it’d be super frustrating for you.

But just helping us recognize what kind of conversation is happening, that helps us figure out how to communicate.

Pete Mockaitis

It does. And what’s intriguing, though, is the interconnectedness. Like, let’s say, “I’m super excited about this specific possibility of integrating some staff here over there,” and they go, “Oh.” And so then, in some ways, the optimal response, for me at least in that moment, is not so much, “Yeah, that’s really cool,” although that’s not bad. I mean, I wouldn’t shun that, I’ll take it.

But I think, for me, I guess maybe next level stuff is hitting both, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, that is really exciting, and it will be so easy to just do this.” It’s like we hit the emotion and extended the practical at the same time.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. So, the book is filled with stories of sort of supercommunicators who are just normal people who sort of figure something out about a particular conversation. And one of them is about the CIA officer in his early 30s, he’s just been hired, and his job is to go recruit spies overseas. So, they send them to Europe, and they’re like, “Come back with some spies.”

And this guy, his name is Jim Lawler, he’s a great guy, he spends, like, a year trying and just strikes out again and again and again, and he is terrible at this job. He can’t make a real connection with anyone he’s trying to recruit. And then he meets this woman Yasmin who, she’s in town, she works in foreign ministry in her home country in the Middle East, she’s like the perfect, perfect candidate.

And he goes, and he “bumps” into her at lunch, and then invites her to lunch next day, tells her he’s an oil speculator, and eventually they get to know each other, and they kind of start investing in each other a little bit. And then, at one point, he’s like, “Look, I lied to you. I’m not an oil speculator. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Will you help us by telling us what’s going on inside your ministry because we want the same things you do? We want to stop the repression of women. We want to bring down this theocracy that’s ruling your country.”

And she just looks at him and starts crying, and she’s like, “They kill people for that,” and she just bolts out. And so, this guy, Jim Lawler, he’s told his bosses already that he’s recruiting Yasmin, and when he goes and he tells them, like, “I tried to close the deal and she ran away,” his boss was like, “You’re going to get fired. You’ve been here a year, she’s your only possible recruitment, and you just screwed it up.”

So, Lawler knows that he has one more opportunity, one more meal that he can ask Yasmin to have with him. And so, he takes her to the meal, and she’s really depressed, and she’s depressed because she’s about to go back to her home country, and she’s kind of depressed in herself. She’s depressed that she hasn’t changed more on this vacation, and he tries to cheer her up. He tries to tell her stories about when they were sightseeing, and it just doesn’t work.

And then towards the end of the meal, he just decides, like, “You know what, this isn’t going to happen. I’ve screwed this up.” And so, he just gets honest with Yasmin, and he says, “Look, I know that you’re disappointed in yourself. I’m super disappointed in myself. Like, I thought I was going to be a great CIA officer, and it turns out I’m terrible at this. And I see other guys who got hired with me, and women who got hired with me, and they’re doing so much better. They all have this confidence I don’t have.”

And he just starts talking about how he’s going to have to go back to Texas, and work for his dad. And his brother is a better salesman than he is. And while he’s describing all this, he’s just being as honest as he can, matching Yasmin, unintentionally she was glum and wanted to talk about how she felt, and now, finally, he is also talking about how he feels, she starts crying. And Lawler reaches across the table, he said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” and she goes, “No, no, what you want is important. We can do this together.”

And she becomes one of the best assets in the Middle East over the next 30 years, and Lawler actually goes on to be one of the top recruiters in the CIA. But I think the point here is that, unless we know how to look for what’s happening in a conversation, unless we are a little bit conscious, and it’s not hard to get conscious of this, a little bit conscious about how to match someone, we can totally miss what they need, and they can miss what we’re asking them for.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, thank you, that’s a lovely tale. And so, let’s just go ahead and do more, please, Charles. So, that’s a demonstration of the emotional vibe, like, “What’s up?” And so, in that instance, there’s crying, there are some dramatics. So, give us more of the tale showing how that unfolds marvelously in the practical flavor and the social flavor?

Charles Duhigg

Well, okay, and I would actually say that conversation, there are emotional aspects but there’s also practical aspects because she’s agreeing to become a spy for him. So, one of the things that we know is that when researchers have looked at people who are consistently supercommunicators, they found that these kinds of people, on average, ask 10 to 20 times as many questions than other people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, no kidding?

Charles Duhigg

But we’re oftentimes not aware of it because the questions are like, “Hey, that’s interesting. What do you think about that?” or like, “Huh, what did you do next?” or just little things that make it easier for us to enter a conversation. And there’s actually an experiment I like to do. So, think for a second, if you were having, like a really bad day, like just a terrible day, who would you call that you know would make you feel better?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, we got a few options.

Charles Duhigg

Sure, but I don’t know, who comes to mind first?

Pete Mockaitis

I’d say my wife.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Now, let me ask you this, is your wife, like, the funniest person you know, like standup comedian funny, like just kills it every time?

Pete Mockaitis

She is among the funniest people I know.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Okay. But you described her as a wife, you don’t describe her as, like, my comedian wife.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg

What about is she the most successful person you know, like earns the most money?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, depending on how we measure success, yes. From an income-generation perspective, she is not.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. And what’s interesting is the audience probably thought of someone that they telephone to make them feel better. And that person probably is not their funniest friend, or their smartest friend, or their most successful friend, so why telephone that person? What’s that person doing that makes us feel so good?

And the answer is what they’re doing is they are inviting us to share who we are, and then they’re proving to us that they are listening. So, you asked for an example of how this happens in the everyday world. There’s a guy named Nicholas Epley who’s a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the things that he’s done a lot of work on is trying to figure out, “What kinds of questions can we ask that make people feel closer to each other, almost like without it being obvious?”

And what he found is that there’s this category of question known as a deep question. And what a deep question is that it’s something that asks you about your values, or your beliefs, or your past experiences in a way that invites you to open up and explain who you are. So, an example of this is to say to someone, like, “Where do you work?” and then they say, “I’m a lawyer.” You say, “Oh, have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Like, do you love practicing the law?” Those are deep questions.

Now, they don’t seem like overly intrusive or awkward but they’re deep questions because they invite the other person to expose something a little bit that’s vulnerable. And if when we hear that vulnerability, if we reciprocate that vulnerability, that other person will feel closer to us. So, my guess is that a lot of the conversations you have with your wife, and tell me if I’m getting this wrong, involved you asking her the deeper question rather than the surface question, her telling you something that’s real, and then you responding with something real yourself, and that you probably feel closer as a result. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, sure, that happens.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. But we don’t think about asking deep questions, and yet it’s something that we know helps us figure out what the other person wants to talk about, it helps us align.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s hear some more examples of these deep questions. So, “Have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Do you love practicing law?” What are some other examples here?

Charles Duhigg
Really, I mean, anything. Like, where did you grow up?

Pete Mockaitis

Danville, Illinois.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Like, what was the best part of growing up there?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, what’s deep is that I have to think for a while. There’s a lot of good things.

Charles Duhigg

That’s a good sign though.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s so funny. When I hear questions, I really like to answer them masterfully or accurately. But, in some ways, I could say any great thing about growing up in Danville. So, I’ll say. I just had a lot of fun meeting so many different folks. And it’s almost like divisions of, in my experience, like divisions of race or class or whatever didn’t even matter. It was just like, “Oh, well, Ruhini’s parents have a huge house. That’s kind of cool,” and that’s that. And then onto the next. It doesn’t matter.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s what’s interesting about the answer you just gave me. First of all, you’re telling me a little bit about what it was like to grow up in this place. And so, you’re telling me about your experiences. You also told me about your values, like you value people who are kind, you value kindness. It sounds like you value kindness more than financial success or professional success.

It sounds like you’ve had some experiences where, like, you’ve had friends who are more wealthy than you and probably friends who are less wealthy than you but you found something really meaningful in creating friendships that aren’t defined by demographic lines. That’s a pretty easy question for me to ask, like, “What’s your favorite part of growing up there?” And yet, when you answered that question, I now know so much more about you, and you also told me something kind of intimate.

Now, in the language of psychology, you’ve exposed a vulnerability. Like, you put me in a place where I can judge you. You might not care what my judgment is, and you probably don’t, like if I was, “Oh, man, that sounds like a terrible place to grow up,” you wouldn’t care because I’m some idiot that you just met.

But the fact that you opened yourself up and exposed little bit of vulnerability means that you’re ready to feel closer to me, and if I reciprocate with vulnerability, if I tell you that I grew up in New Mexico, Albuquerque, which is true, I’m going there pretty soon, and one of the things that I loved most about it was that it was a place, like my high school was on 89% Hispanic or Native American. And that’s true of a lot of New Mexico and to grow up as a white guy, to get a chance to feel like a minority is really powerful and it creates empathy.

Like, A, I’ve told you something about myself by answering the question that I asked you, but, B, by reciprocating your vulnerability, we feel closer to each other. We can’t help but feel closer to each other. Literally, our brains are hardwired to feel closer to each other.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, and what’s interesting is, as we super-communicate with each other, is that it’s funny how the monkey mind just has all these associations, in like, where it just might naturally want to go. So, you say Albuquerque, I’m thinking, “I love the show Breaking Bad,” and so I have a desire to say something about “Breaking Bad.” But, really, from a connecting perspective, that doesn’t really do much for us here.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s a good example here. I said I’m from Albuquerque, you definitely could’ve broken in and been like, “Oh, my God, I love Breaking Bad. That’s the best show ever.” But because you are a good communicator, you intuit it, like, that would actually disrupt the flow of this conversation. That’s a fun conversation, maybe a practical conversation, and I’m revealing something about who I am. It’s an emotional conversation or social conversation. And so, instead of interrupting me and stealing the spotlight in saying, “Man, I love Breaking Bad. Do you like Breaking Bad?” you knew to match the kind of conversation I was having.

Now, think of how many times we sometimes get this wrong. Like, I get this wrong with my kids all the time. Like, if my kids come to me with something they want to talk about, they’re upset about something, or they want to talk about the social scene at their school, and instead of listening, and asking questions, and matching them, and meeting them where they are, I start trying to solve their problems, like I have all these lessons in my head that I want to shove into their head.

And, of course, they’re like, “Whatever, dad.” It’s like you breaking and being like, “I love Breaking Bad.” It’s me being like, “Well, here’s a lesson that you can learn.” I do this all the time. I still make this mistake but the more we become conscious of it, the more that we’re aware of listening for what kind of conversation is happening, matching other people, inviting them to match us, the more we end up having those special moments.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, I think if we weren’t primed in the world of, I’m thinking about deep questions and matching, and practical versus emotional versus social, I might very well have just let her rip with “Breaking Bad is awesome.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Or, I might’ve like talked about growing up in Albuquerque. I mean, this is something that definitely happens, someone says. My dad passed away about five years ago, and I found that when I came back, I was living in New York at the time. When I came back to New York after the funeral, it’s the most interesting thing that had happened to me that year. It’s sad and it’s hard but it’s also just interesting and complicated.

And one of two things would happen. I would tell people that I was just back from my dad’s funeral, and they would say, “I’m sorry,” and then change the topic. And they’d usually change it to something that’s totally unrelated or totally different emotional attitude, or they would just not respond. That happened all the time. And what I really wanted was I wanted people to be, like, “What was it like? What was your dad like? Tell me about your dad.” That’s amazing when someone has passed away and someone else asks you what they’re like, you love describing them.

And I think that, to your point, oftentimes during the most meaningful conversations, we have this instinct to do that, “Hey, Breaking Bad, I love Breaking Bad” because we feel so uncertain, we feel so unsure of ourselves in the conversation. But the more that we can recognize how the conversation works, what this other person is asking for, the more certain and comfortable we become in giving it to them. And that can be incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. And I think there’s uncertainty or fear or trepidation, whatever the vibe is, in that moment. It’s like the risk is really, I think, lower than what we perceive it to be emotionally.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because if I were to say, “Oh, man, I’m sorry. That must’ve been really hard. Tell me what are some of your favorite memories of your dad that came to mind.” I’m thinking, like, at worst, you might say, “I’m really just not comfortable telling you about that.” You’re not going to scream at me or assault me. You might just shut that down if it’s like, “Dude, I barely know you. I don’t feel like crying in front of you at this moment. It’s been a day. I’m just going to terminate the conversation.”

Charles Duhigg

And, by the way, it’s been five years, and so when I bump into other people who have been to the funeral, I ask them, like, “Tell me a little bit about your dad or your mom.” Literally, not once has someone ever said, “I don’t feel like talking about it right now.” People love talking about it. It’s like literally this thing that just happened to them. It’d be like if you got married and none of your friends asked you about the wedding, like when you get married, you want to talk about the wedding, “It was overwhelming.”

And, honestly, like going to a funeral for a parent is just as overwhelming, and sad instead of happy, but you still want to talk about it. And I think that you’re right. I think that people perceive a risk that not only is overblown, oftentimes it actually isn’t even there.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, so then social, who are we, this category, it sounds like we’ve touched upon it in terms of it’s unveiling values and what we’re about.

Charles Duhigg

It’s a little bit different. So, when we’re having a social conversation, what we’re really talking about is, “How do I relate to other people? How do they relate to me? How do I see other people? How do I think other people see me?” So, think about, for instance, there’s a story in the book about Netflix. So, Netflix had an executive who, about five years ago, he used the N-word in a meeting, and he used it in a kind of benign way.

He was trying to describe something but many people in the meeting, for good reason, were offended. He ended up getting fired because of this, but it set off this whole controversy within Netflix. And they hired someone to come who was a supercommunicator, understood how communication works. Her name is Verna Myers, she’s amazing.

She kind of transformed how the conversation, across the entire company, thousands and thousands of people. She transformed how the conversation is happening to help people understand, “It is okay to say to someone, ‘I see something differently than you because of my background, and that doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right.’”

If I’m a black parent, I might very well see cops differently than a white parent. And that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong or I’m right. It also doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other. But understanding that difference, that’s a social conversation. It’s a conversation about identities, and how identities shape how we see things. That’s actually a huge part of understanding. And if we’re comfortable having that conversation, then it makes it a lot easier to come together.

Secondarily, as part of that conversation is this emphasis on belonging, that every single person has the right to participate in a social conversation and to have an identity. Everyone has had a racial experience, a gender experience, whether you’re black or white or man or female or nonbinary. We all have these experiences that shape who we are. And sharing that with other people, it feels really good. That’s a social conversation.

A social conversation is sharing how we see ourselves in an attempt to align how others see us with our self-image, and to hear how they see themselves and how that might differ from how see them.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some more examples here?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Well, so a lot of social conversations are like office gossip. There are actually these really interesting studies on gossip. And what they find is that gossip is really important within companies because gossip is how we not only learn information, it’s how we establish moral and social norms without having to be overbearing about it.

So, if someone is, like, “Oh, my God, Jim got so drunk at that party last night,” and they seem critical of it, then we know, actually, drunkenness is not a norm that’s accepted at this company. And it gets even down to smaller things. And once you start thinking about these kinds of conversations and the powerful role that they play, you can begin thinking about how to make them better.

So, there was a study that was done of an investment bank, and this investment bank was like a place for people who are at each other’s throats all day long. They were competing for deals, they were competing for bonuses, they would have these screaming fights on a regular basis during meetings.

So, these researchers come in, and they tell everyone, “Okay, look, before every meeting, for the next week, what we want you to do is we’re going to give you some notecards. Before every meeting, just write down, literally, one sentence on the notecard, and write down what you hope to accomplish in this meeting, your goal, and what kind of tone or mood you hope the meeting will have. And then when you start the meeting, if you want, you can read it, you can share it with other people, or you don’t have to.” Most people didn’t.

And what they found is that, when they looked at the cards people wrote, what people would write were things like, “I want to ask Maria if she wants to come on vacation with me but I want to make it easy for her to say no,” or, “I want us to figure out the budget for next year…” a pretty practical conversation, “…but I want everyone to get everything off their chest because there’s been some tension.”

Just by asking people to write that sentence before each meeting, the incidence of conflict went down 80% within the firm that week. Now that did not mean that people agreed with each other, it did not mean they stopped fighting, it did not mean that they were less competitive, but because everyone knew what they wanted out of that meeting, and because they knew what kind of mood they were looking for, they were able to signal that much more easily to other people, and we pick up on those signals.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Well, that’s my favorite kind of thing, Charles. We have a minor intervention with a huge result, that’s cool. So, we’re writing that down, and, in so doing, that gets to the “Who are we?” in terms of, I guess, “Who are we?” in that moment in terms of how we’re showing up right then and there.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. We’re coming together and we’re working for this firm together. We are all here trying to remind ourselves that we are on the same team as opposed to on different teams. And if I’m talking to you in a meeting, and I’m saying, like, “I want to discuss the budget but I want to give everyone a chance to get things off their chest,” then what I’m saying to the other people is, “I understand you’re frustrated. I’m your boss. I could tell you we’re just going to do the budget. It’s my way or the highway. But I’m signaling to you, in a social context, I understand you are frustrated. I understand that you don’t feel like I am being the boss I ought to be right now.”

“And once we have that conversation out in the open, then we can start talking about how do we resolve it? Are there things about how we run the social organization that is this company, that we run it in ways that make it hard for people to speak up or to bring their best selves to work? If we’re having conversations with someone else, and we’re talking about ‘How does Jim see this?’ or, ‘I have a problem. Here’s my solution.’ That’s a practical conversation. “Now let’s think about how the rest of the firm is going to react when I bring up this solution.”

That’s a social conversation because the way that other people react will not be based entirely on pragmatics and practicality. It won’t be based entirely on emotions. It might be based on power differentials or on structural issues. But once we sit down, and we’re like, “Look, let’s talk about how this is going to play out at the company from a social perspective,” then suddenly we’re having a slightly different conversation than an emotional conversation or a practical conversation. We’re trying to anticipate how other people see themselves and how that shapes what they believe.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Thank you. Well, tell me, Charles, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Charles Duhigg

No, the thing I would say is the book is filled with stories, and the reason why it’s filled with stories, there are stories about there’s this awesome study called the 36 questions that lead to love. It’s known as the Fast Friends procedure, and it was this study that try and make strangers into friends, and it worked. It worked by getting them to ask each other deep questions.

There are stories about conflict, like, “What do we do when we’re in conflict with someone?” And the answer there, and that story takes place in part online in Facebook. It’s this group that was put together of gun rights advocates and gun control advocates. And what we found is that, in conflict, it’s even more important to prove that we’re listening.

And one of the ways we can prove that we’re listening is by this thing called looping for understanding, which is pretty instinctual. It’s, ask someone a question, repeat back to them what they just told you in your own words. And then the third step, and this is the step that most people forget but it’s the most important, ask them if you got it right.

If you do that and you continue looping until they agree that you’ve gotten it right, it’s almost impossible for people to be angry at each other no matter how big their difference is. And that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with each other but it means you can take anger out of the equation. And so, my goal with these stories is, and there’s a lot of practical tips.

There are sorts of the bullet points after each chapter, but my goal is to give people these skills that they can use to become better communicators because, as I mentioned, all of us are supercommunicators. Sometimes we just do it by instinct, sometimes we’re just lucky and it comes out, but if we learn the skills then we can do it whenever we want. And for the most meaningful conversations, we can really connect with someone else.

Pete Mockaitis

Just a follow-up on the looping point, I understand you’ve also got some research associated with the asking of a follow-up question is another super powerful thing that people did.

Charles Duhigg

Absolutely. And that’s actually a form of looping. Like, sometimes if I ask you a follow-up question, it’s proving to you that I was listening to what you were saying, and that’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. And so then, the good follow-up questions do just that. They prove that you were listening to what we’re saying as opposed to, “So, tell me more about that” which still is a decent question when you got nothing else. But, ideally, for a follow-up question, we want to have some content. I sort of think about it like when I’m getting emails, it’s like, “Was this a mass email sent to the whole world or was it sent specifically to me, Pete Mockaitis?”

And there are little indicators of that in the note. And so, too, with the question, one would have to have listened and shared some bits, like, “Oh, you said you think guns are a great way for teachers to prevent violence if they were all armed. Is that right?” “Yeah, that’s what I said.” It’s like, “Well, are you aware of some incidences in which folks armed up the teachers, and they saw the desired results?” So, there’s a follow-up question that shows I was listening.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, that’s a question where you are presupposing the answer, so I would say one thing that’s important is…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I really wasn’t. I was like “Do we have that information?” “I’ll tell them and then no more problems.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, if you’re genuinely and curiously asking, that’s the key to ask curious questions. But you had said something like, the generic question is like “Tell me more about that.” But, again, getting back to deep questions, instead of saying, “Tell me more about that” like an easy way response, if you’re not certain what to say, is to say, “What did you make of that? You just told me about this thing. Why was it important to you?”

And that’s a deep question. It doesn’t appear deep. It doesn’t appear intrusive or it doesn’t appear overly intimate but, again, it’s asking me to explain about my values, or my beliefs, or my experiences. It’s giving me a chance to tell you about how I see the world. And I guarantee you that once you hear that, the follow-up questions are going to be almost automatic.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Charles Duhigg

I think the quote that I use most with my kids is, “It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn something from it.” And I realize this is kind of a cheesy quote. But honestly, I make mistakes all the time, we all make mistakes all the time, and it’s so easy to get down on yourself, that if you tell yourself, “It’s only a mistake if I don’t learn from it,” then it stops being a mistake. It starts being an experiment. And not all experiments are supposed to go right.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Charles Duhigg

Actually, I mentioned the 36 questions. This is an awesome, awesome study. So, what they did, it’s these two researchers at the University of Rhode Island, they took all these people in pairs, and they put them in a room, total strangers, and they would have them ask these 36 questions back and forth. And they designed the questions to be deep questions without appearing…many of them didn’t appear very deep, particularly at first.

And then they send everyone home, it only takes an hour, they send everyone home. This is pre-internet, by the way. And then seven weeks later, they tracked down everyone who’d been in that study, and they asked them one question, “Did you ever seek out the person that you had that conversation with?”

Now, they had not given them any information on how to find each other. There was no exchange of business cards or anything like that, so finding the person you had the conversation with was actually kind of hard. They found that 70% of people who had engaged in those conversations had sought out their conversational partner. They’d go out to beers and movies together. Three people ended up getting married to the person that they had the conversation with.

And it’s because of this emotional reciprocity, it’s because if we ask deep questions, and then we answer them, we feel close to the other person. And so, I just think it’s a wonderful study.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. I actually went through that list of questions on a date.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, yeah?

Pete Mockaitis

We didn’t end up getting married.

Charles Duhigg

It’s okay. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis

But, in a way, it was a good outcome, and then I think we…I don’t know how much that exercise contributed to things but I think we parted on good terms not too long thereafter.

Charles Duhigg

Excellent.

Pete Mockaitis

And I guess we knew some new things. And a favorite book?

Charles Duhigg

I used to always say The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which is just one of my favorite books. And for anyone who hasn’t read it, there’s a chapter on the religion of happy-mindedness. William James, of course, is like the father of American psychology. And the religion of happy-mindedness is about people who are just happy. Like, why are they happy? And what did they know that we don’t?

But the other book that I love, that I’ll make a plug for, it’s actually a novel. It’s by Jennifer Egan, and it’s called A Visit from the Goon Squad. And very similarly, I think it’s about how we create happiness in life, and how we recognize it and sometimes fail to recognize it even when it’s right in front of us. So, it’s a wonderful book.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Charles Duhigg

So, I just read an article about AI for The New Yorker, and part of it is about Microsoft’s Copilots that are coming out. And so, I’ve been using all the different AI products, and I will say, like, I don’t think that it’s making me more productive. It’s just super fun though. Like, I sent out an email this morning, and I made an image on Midjourney for it. So, I would say, right now, AI is the tool that I’m enjoying very much.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so lay it on us, ChatGPT, Midjourney, what else is cool and interesting?

Charles Duhigg

Oh, the Copilots. There’s going to be an explosion of Copilots over the next couple of years. And Microsoft is releasing them right now, but every company is going to be creating agents or copilots. So, in three or four years, this is totally feasible. We will wear a device that records every single conversation, and that conversation will be digitized. It will all be our data. No one else will have it.

And then 10 years from now, you’ll be like, “You know, I was once doing a podcast, and this guy talked about AI, and I can’t remember who he was, but he mentioned Midjourney. Go find that conversation.” And the AI will be able to find it. It’s what large language models index and search very, very efficiently with even vague guidance.

And so, if you think about it, our conversations are a huge corpus of knowledge, it’s a huge database, and it basically only exists between two people, or if you happen to be recording it, it exists between two people and whoever is listening to the conversation, but it’s hard to remember and you don’t know exactly who said what. And once we’re able to unlock the database of conversations, it’s going to be awesome.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And you are a habit master. Tell us your favorite habit?

Charles Duhigg

So, in The Power of Habit, there’s this whole thing about keystone habits, which are habits that set off chain reactions of other behavior changes. So, for me, I would say my keystone habit is definitely exercising in the morning. And I really dislike exercising, so what I do is I sign up for half marathons. And, by the way, I hate races. There’s nothing I enjoy about it.

But I sign up for half marathons because I’m so scared about how bad it will hurt to run that half marathon if I haven’t trained. And that gets me to go train every morning. And then after I train, I’m like, “Oh, man, I feel great. This is really good.” So, I would say my big keystone habit is trying to exercise at least once each day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

As I’ve been working on Supercommunicators, the story with my wife, I think, is something that really resonates with people, because I think we’ve all experienced that. Like, someone comes to us with a problem, and we try and solve it for them, and then they’re frustrated, and then we’re frustrated. And so, I find that explaining, “Oh, it’s actually two different kinds of conversations are happening here,” that that’s been really powerful for a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

If you Google me, I’m at CharlesDuhigg.com. If you just type Supercommunicators into your Google browser, I’ll probably come up, or Power of Habit. And then my email address is charles@duhigg.com, and I read every single email I get from listeners and from readers, and I respond to every single one, so feel free to drop me a note, and I will definitely respond to you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

I think that, here’s the thing that I would say, is think about your job right now, and think about where you’re not communicating as well as you can. Maybe it’s with a coworker, maybe it’s with your boss, maybe it’s with a client, maybe it’s when you’re doing pitches. There are some times in your life where you wish that you could be an effortless supercommunicator, and it’s not happening on a consistent basis for you.

And my guess is, as a result, you’re shying away from that opportunity because you’re worried that it’s not going to go as well as you want it to go. So, just break it down. Try and think about the last conversation you had where it didn’t go as well as you wanted it to go, and try and figure out, “Were we having the same kind of conversation? Was I asking enough questions? Was I asking the right kinds of questions? Was I proving to this person that I was listening to them? Were they responding to me and inviting me to match them?”

If you do that, you’ll find that there’s this part of your work life that you probably don’t like as much as you should, but it is an absolutely solvable problem. Nobody is born a great communicator. It’s just a set of skills that anyone can learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Charles. Thank you. I wish you much luck and super communications.

Charles Duhigg

Thank you so much.

Jan 15
0

928: The Introvert’s Powerful Approach to Networking with Matthew Pollard

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Matthew Pollard shares networking wisdom that anyone, particularly introverts, can use for great benefit.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The best way to answer “What do you do?”
  2. The two relationships that will transform your network
  3. The simple trick to get people interested in your expertise 

About Matthew

Matthew Pollard, known as “The Rapid Growth Guy,” works with businesses around the world, from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and Capital One. Responsible for launching five zero-to-million-dollar businesses, he also founded Austin’s Small Business Festival, which is now a nationwide event. A native of Australia, he splits his time between North Carolina and Texas.

Resources Mentioned

Matthew Pollard Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, welcome.

Matthew Pollard
Mate, I’m ecstatic to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I want to know, you’re the rapid growth guy, so why are we writing a book called The Introvert’s Edge to Networking?

Matthew Pollard
It’s funny. People would assume that rapid growth, sales success, networking success, is kind of an oxymoron with the concept of introversion. And while a lot of people think that, it’s totally not true. Let’s confront the stigma head on for a second. Most people think that introverts are terrible at small talk, yet David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey are introverts, so that makes no sense.

And then, “Oh, yeah, but we definitely can’t sell.” Well, Zig Ziglar, the most well-known sales trainer on the planet, who’s no longer with us, but him and his son, Tom Ziglar, are very introverted. And then you’ve got, “Oh, okay, if we can sell and we can do small talk, networking is the thing we definitely can’t do.” Well, that’s also not true. Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, the world’s largest networking group, is an introvert as well.

So, really, I’m known as the rapid growth guy because I’ve been responsible for five multimillion-dollar success stories, and I help organizations, predominantly introverted small business-based, small business owners, obtain rapid growth in their business because I find them, they get stuck in this endless hamster wheel of struggling to find interested people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale, and always fighting on price, but also corporate executives. They have no idea how to sell their value.

And I find that the same methodology applies for people to create rapid growth in their careers as well. So, that’s how I’ve got the name but I spend my life trying to help introverts realize they’re not second-class citizens. Their path to success is just different to that of an extrovert.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, could you perhaps share a tale that lays it out in terms of what’s at stake for introverts, and whether they are networking well or not so well?

Matthew Pollard
Well, I think for a lot of people, there’s that old adage that, “If people don’t know your value, then it doesn’t matter how much you know. You’re never going to succeed in your career.” So, your network is directly related to your net worth. I think that’s changing a lot in the digital forum, but the truth is that I’m always pushing people to learn how to articulate their value in the networking room, whether they’re a career professional, whether they’re an executive, whether they’re just getting started in a career right through, and more especially for small business owners.

Because if you can’t articulate your value, and somebody’s politely listening to you in a room for two, two and a half minutes, you just got no chance online because people, then, give you fractions of a second. And I’ve seen people that we allow, or help get their messaging right in a networking room that have then gone on headhunted and get six figure increases in salary just because they’re getting their message correct. But without that in-the-room validation, it doesn’t work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s double click on that for a moment. Six figure increases in salary, that’s lovely. So, if someone’s going from 125,000 to 225,000, for example, near doubling, all based upon effectively having a good two-minute exchange with somebody?

Matthew Pollard
This ideology actually started in the small business space. And what was funny is I actually had a lady that read my book, she reached out to me, and she was a small business owner at the time, and she said she was trying to get a corporate job. And I actually responded with, “You know, that’s not what I do.”

And she got upset with me, and she literally said, “Look, I know your ideology will work for corporations, and because there aren’t many authors in the introverted space, I just believe that you can help me.” And she said, “Really, I’m just trying to get one customer, one corporation to hire me.” I mean, “That’s kind of true but I can’t give you my online program. We have to work one-on-one. I’m willing to give it a shot if you’re up for it.”

And what was really interesting is we applied the methodology. And what I always focus on is you need to know the niche that you’re going after. And so, for her, what we’ve helped her realize was her real love was education technology. So, we got her to focus on education technology, we created a message for her, and she actually got a job that paid 180,000.

But the one specifically I was talking about was another gentleman that we worked with around the same time, and he actually was going to start his own business, and then he actually got hit by hurricane Katrina out in Texas. And I was like, “Mate, you’ve got scarcity in your life and uncertainty everywhere. You shouldn’t be starting your own business now.” He said, “But I want to start my own business. I don’t want to work.”

He was working for a large bank, and he said, “I’m traveling 250 days a year, and, on top of that, I’ve got to deal with all the stuff back home, and I feel like I’m always dealing with the same problem over and over, and I want to deal with lots of different types of clients.” And I said, “I don’t think you want to go and start your own business. I think that what you really want to do is work with an organization that has lots of business units. Then you can have the safety and security of an employment job but you can still work in lots of different business units and apply your ideology. But let’s understand what your ideology is.”

And what we realized is what he loved to do was create customer-centric moments that created organizational growth, so create that special contact moment that allowed that person that had that special contact to, then, share the praise with other people that created referrals and become more stickier customer and buy more stuff. So, I said, “What I believe you specialize in is creating these customer-centric moments which, then, creates a growth velocity for the organization that you work with, but you don’t need to work in your own business to do that. You can do that in a corporation. What we need to do is call you something like,” and I came up with the term the velocity architect.

And I said, “Call yourself the velocity architect, don’t call yourself a marketer, because when you say you’re a marketer, they put you in a box with everybody else. And while that may be what you need to do to get your first job, the people that go from middle to top-level management, they need to separate themselves. They’ve got to have something unique.”

So, we called him the velocity architect. We created the three major problems that most organizations have where they struggle to create customer velocity because they don’t create these customer-centric moments. And following up, he went from an interview with an energy company that had multiple business units, and it was a six-figure job but it was low six figures. I think it was about a $150,000-$190,000 job. And when he went for the interview, he introduced himself as the velocity architect, he talked about these customer-centric engagements, and he learned how to tell stories.

Because a lot of people try to educate on their value, and stories work far better. But once he did that, the person that he was doing the interview with said, “Look, you’re overqualified for this job but my CEO needs to meet you.” And they actually created a job for him that actually paid. It was over 100,000, it was in the 200s, more than the job he was applying for.

Because what you’ve got to understand in today’s world, people are looking, and I’m not talking about low-level jobs. I’m talking about medium to high-level jobs. They are looking for people that have ideologies that give their organizations value, and they’ll create jobs for you. They’ll headhunt people that have unique points of view. And in today’s digital world, if you can learn how to articulate that clearly and concisely in a networking room, you can leverage that online, you’ll find yourself getting headhunted. You’ll be able to leverage that message online and have people all over the world trying to recruit you.

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, this is an intriguing thesis. You’ve got some juicy case studies and examples. Do you have any other compelling evidence that suggests that, in fact, this unique point of view that you have about unique points of view is dead-on true?

Matthew Pollard
The truth is that when you’re looking to go to a networking room, and, if you’re a small business owner listening to this, you should never be going to a networking room to try and find clients. I know you think that that’s what you need but, for me, finding another client is the wrong direction to go.

My belief is that finding, what I would call, momentum partners and champion relationships are where the power is and for career people listening that have got jobs, this is just as powerful for you because if you go to a networking room, and you’re looking for that next person that’s going to hire you, well, if you’re not looking for a job right now, it’s going to convince you that don’t need to be networking.

But then, on top of that, the biggest relationships that I have found useful in everything that you do, firstly, momentum partners, people that believe in what you do, and are willing to talk to other people about it, and you believe in what they do. And because of that, this ideology works much more effectively because if I said, “Oh, you’re looking for a marketing person, or a senior marketing-level position, you need to talk to this person.” It’s like, “Oh, I’ve already got a few people. I’ll get them to submit their resume,” as opposed to, “Oh, my gosh, you need to speak to the velocity architect.”

All of a sudden, this person is different and unique. They stand out. You’re at least willing to entertain having a dialogue with them. And then the next thing is this concept that I came up with which was a champion relationship, which is somebody that is far more advanced than you, that’s willing to share your praises and willing to endorse your work and give it credibility. Because if you’re the velocity architect, and you’ve got other people talking about what you do and why it’s amazing that are highly credible, and you network to find those people, then those people will allow you to constantly land work and create greater and greater success.

But what I really want to do is take a step back for a second and imagine that I’m a brand-new person. I’ve never had a job before. And I’m moving into just a customer service role. I’m just looking for a customer service role. If I applied for every customer service role under the sun, then I’ve got to have the best resume, I’ve got to interview really well, I’ve got to cite all the right things. I’m relying on a lot of luck to get that job, and, especially if I’m introverted.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe that introverts actually make the best salespeople, the best networkers, the best public speakers, the best leaders, but if I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t plan and prepare, which introverts are great at, but most often they prepare and plan in the wrong way, I might go and bumble my way through that interview, and hope that they can see the real value in me to hire me.

But if I, instead, said, “You know what, what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to focus on my passion. Maybe I’m really passionate about manufacturing organizations, and changing customer service in a manufacturing business. Well, then maybe I’ll only go for manufacturing-based interviews. And because of that, I can talk about my passion for the manufacturing space. I can talk about the mission that I’m on to transform the space. I can do more research to understand it more, and it makes me more relevant and more employable to that organization.”

And that is why it allows you to create far more success. This isn’t new stuff. If you say, “I’m a person that’s trying to get a client, and I’m a small business owner.” Well, if you niche down, you’re, of course, going to be seen as far more likely the only logical choice. And if you’ve got a message that resonates to that marketplace, of course, they’re going to be willing to pay you as a premium. Well, why is that different for a corporate job?

It’s not different. The truth is if they’d never heard of you, then separating yourself from the pack is the only thing that’s going to make sure you’re in the top three candidates to get that second interview. And that is why I recommend that you do this because what you want to do is you want to shine on your differences, and you want to be able to talk about your unique passion, your unique mission.

Oh, by the way, if you are going for an interview, the other thing you really want to understand is that in an interview, you think it’s all about you. It’s not. The biggest mistake you can do when you go into an interview is make it all about you. And, by the way, introverts hate talking about themselves, which is why interviews goes so poorly because they go into an interview and they think they’ve got to brag on themselves and talk about their credibility, yet, the truth is, the best way to be successful in a networking room, and in an interview, is to understand the organization that you’re working for and the objectives that they have, and then make your experience relevant to them, and talk about your care for helping organizations like them.

And, again, to do that, you have to think about your differences, your unique value, the specific marketplace that you love helping, like manufacturing, or the specific outcome that you love helping people get, like customer-centric velocity, and then make that relevant to the organizations you’re going for interviews with. But truthfully, it doesn’t just work for going for interviews. Getting promotions within current organizations has also worked tremendously well for us as well because you can share your difference and get stakeholder support within the organization for new initiatives or to create jobs within an organization you already work with. And we’ve seen that happen time and time again.

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, that’s beautiful. There’s a whole lot here. Boy, let’s chat about coming up with your unique point of view. And you said one way is that you kind of find the intersection. We’ve got an issue that you’re into, and an industry that you’re serving. So, not just customer service for anybody but customer service for manufacturing companies or whomever.

So, can you give us some examples of additional articulations of unique point of view? So, we got the velocity architect as one example. And how we come to land upon what that articulation is.

Matthew Pollard
Absolutely. So, I would say that you need to focus on what you’re absolutely passionate about. And there’s a quote by Jim Carrey that I think is great for those people that are worried that it’s not going to work. And he said, “I learned a great deal from my father but nothing more valuable than you can fail at what you don’t want, so why not take a chance at what you love?”

And so, I’m going to suggest to everybody when they’re looking at this articulation, to really think about what they’re passionate about, what they really care about. So, for somebody that really cares about manufacturing, go into the manufacturing space and build your messaging around that. If you’re really passionate about technology then build it around something specific that you do in the technology space. I’ll give you an example on that.

So, let’s imagine you’re a managed service provider, you work in an organization that you just love technology and you help people fix all their computers and systems, and you’re looking for a high-level CFO job, sorry, a CTO job. Well, maybe that what you really are passionate about doing is helping those companies obtain hyper growth. So, maybe you want to go and get a job at like an accounting organization that has a growth-through-acquisition mindset, or a lot of accounting firms grow by buying other accounting firms and taking on their books of business, or a manufacturing business will say, “Okay, we’ve got all these products. Let’s go and buy other manufacturing firms so that we can take on all their products but also cross-sell all the products that we have.”

So, growth through acquisition is really, really prevalent in those industries. So, if I was a CFO, and I was looking at those kinds of industries, and I love working with hyper growth companies, what I would say is the biggest problem that they have, though, and this happens a lot with organizations like that, is they buy a book of business, but then they’ve got to mix the technology. And what you’ll find is there’s licensing issues. The organization is building this fortress to make sure no one can hack in. And now they’ve got to build this hyper freeway to have all the data transferring between all these different offices, and it creates all these issues and conflicts.

Well, if I was going to sell to myself as an employee, I might position myself as the acquisition lifeguard because I know they want to grow through acquisition, and I know the technology is one of the biggest hassles that causes the organizations to almost drown in the minutiae of doing this that causes CEOs to lose their support. So, I might call myself the acquisition lifeguard in order to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, you’ve got that clarity such that you become the only logical choice for a select few. And then it’s sort of like you have a moniker or a role or a title that goes there. Any tips on fine tuning that articulation? I think it’s so funny, I remember one time I was talking to someone, and he tried this. He said, “You know what, we’re a financial quarterback. You come to us and we’re going to find the best fixed income guy, the best stock picker, the best whatever.”

And it was so funny because I watch so little sports, I didn’t even understand the metaphor until much later, it’s like, “Oh, as a quarterback, your role is to throw the football or to pass a portion of my portfolio onto a specialist in different respects, much like a quarterback might throw to different players on the field.” I felt kind of like an idiot.

So, I guess, in a way, there’s a risk there that if you use a word that your target audience doesn’t have as much familiarity with, watch out for that. Any other pro tips on refining your moniker?

Matthew Pollard
So, there’s a couple of answers to that. So, firstly, you’re talking to an Australian with NFL terms so I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Matthew Pollard
I’ve lived in the United States for 10 years but I will tell you, I’m still getting my head around the NFL. But, yeah, I’m careful with the word quarterback. Also, I’ve worked with people in Germany, that you have to be careful about the word capitalist because it used to be a socialist society. You’ve really got to think things through.

But the thing that I would say is that if you use your functional skill in the unified message, then it’s not a unified message.

So, if you are in data analytics, and you call yourself the data wizard or the data guru, that’s not going to work for you and here’s the science behind it. People’s brains are focused on putting you into a box to disqualify you or to say, “I need that.” I’ll give you an example. If I go into a networking room, and I say I’m a sales trainer, people will look at me like I’m one step above a scam artist.

And if you’re my ideal avatar, you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m an introvert. I am never going to learn how to sell.” And then I’ve got to dance around that topic and explain how I’ve got a book that sold 100,000 copies helping introverts succeed at sales, and I’ve got to convince you. I’m already starting from behind. That doesn’t work.

And here’s the real key. The goal of the unified message is to do only this, “Hi, my name is Matthew, and I’m the rapid growth guy.” And I say it just like I said I’m an accountant or an attorney. The goal is for you to say it in a way that it feels like it really encapsulates the value of what you do. It feels more authentic. Like, for me, if I say I’m a sales trainer, it doesn’t incorporate the value of what I provide really at all. It’s just a functional skill. It’s like me reading a book, like Emeth, and saying, “Oh, I’m an Emeth person.” It doesn’t define you.

Everyone has got unique talents, unique skills, unique past backgrounds that perfectly qualify them to provide a certain value, and, more specifically, provide even more value to a specific demographic that they’re passionate about. And because of that, what you want to do, and the only thing that you want to focus on, is making sure that your unified message does one of two things. Either get them to say, “How do you do that?” or, “What exactly is that?” It’s to make it vague enough but also to provide interest.

Now, if you’re in a networking room and you’ve read my book, then you know to be interested before being interesting. So, if you’ve been talking to them for 20 minutes, and they say, “Oh, my gosh, Matthew, I’ve been talking to you for the last 20 minutes. I haven’t even asked you what it is that you do.” And you say, “Oh, thanks for asking. I’m the rapid growth guy.” Well, of course, they’re going to want to ask what that is for two reasons.

You’re a puzzle they need to solve, and, secondly, you gave them so much value by being interested in them, they want to give you value back by listening to you. So, that when people then respond with, “What exactly is that?” I can then say, “Well, one of the things that I love to see more than anything in the world and go into my passion mission statement.” Now, notice, I didn’t say, “Well, I do this and I do this, or I have this skill set,” because, again, networking isn’t about talking about you. It’s about expressing your passion and your mission for transforming the world in some way, shape, or form, which is intoxicating for people.

So, let’s look at what a good unified message looks like. A good unified message has a word, and I’m always cognizant of using things like point guard or you said quarterback because those are country-specific, and also sometimes gender-specific, and also whether they’re interested in the sports. It’s complicated. Maven, architect, catalyst, all these kinds of words are, again, above an eighth-grade reading level but, truthfully, a lot of people that are trying to get high-level jobs, most of the people that you’re talking to will understand what they are, but also expresses the value of what you provide in some way, shape, or form.

And, look, you don’t need to hire me to do this. If you’re a small business trying to come up with your version of the rapid growth guy or a career executive, there is a template that I share at MatthewPollard.com/growth, and that will give you a five-step process which will help you, firstly, determine the niche.

And, by the way, if you’re a career professional and you think that you don’t need to niche, you are 100% wrong. If you specialize in an industry, especially when you’re first starting, you’re always going to get paid a higher premium, you’re always going to be able to get headhunted more effectively, and then, over time, you can broaden that niche but this will show you how to niche down as a career professional or as a small business owner, and discover your niche of willing to buy clients or willing to buy employers. And then it will show you how to create your unified message that will excite and inspire people to want to know more.

And it really is about leaning in to your unique passions, your unique skillset, your unique past customers or past employers, and saying, “What was I really good at? What unique situations caused my employers or my past customers to sing my praises, to talk about me in a really positive way?” and really looking at how to then articulate it.

Now, once you’ve got that, you then need to know how to articulate your passion and mission in a way that gets people to be even more interested, and then you need to explain your value for the first time, the jargon of what you do in a story. And if you can do all of that in an interview, in a networking event, or a podcast interview like this, then people will chase you from all over the world to hire you or to get you to be their consultant or their small business guru.

You pick your profession because people these days are actively looking for a message that they identify with. And for that, they’ll pay a premium. The problem is that in today’s overly cluttered world, most people still only push vanilla content, like they come at high skill, or, “We know insurance,” or, “I’m a marketing person, and I’ve got 20 years of experience,” and the truth is, if you can’t be the clearest, you have to be the loudest.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you mentioned building relationships with momentum partners and champion relationships. Any pro tips on identifying these people and making the approach?

Matthew Pollard
Absolutely. And, by the way, introverts listening to this, you should love the idea of this because it means you’re going to networking events and not looking to be transactional. What I find is a lot of extroverts do this, which is they’ll go into a networking room, and they’re like, “Do you want to buy from me? What about you? What about you? Or, are you looking for somebody to hire? What about you? What about you?”

A lot of extroverts don’t like doing that either. They feel like it’s transactional but that then leads into what I call endless networking, which is where you don’t kind of downplay yourself. It’s, like, somebody asks you what you’re doing, you’re like, “Oh, my day job is this.” I mean, who wants to hire someone like that?

So, because of that, what I suggest is be more strategic about the networking events that you go to. So, firstly, a lot of people that go networking, they don’t do any research before they go, and that drives me crazy. It’s, like, if you’re going to go to a networking event, especially if you’re an introvert, which means it’s a little bit more uncomfortable, I want it to be more like a bunch of pre-planned meetings than anything else.

So, let’s talk about how that actually works. I spoke at Intel a few years ago, and I deliver this presentation about how storytelling could be used for marketing and from a sales perspective.

One of these executives came up to me afterwards, and he said, “Matt, look, I’ve really loved my conversation with you.” He said, “I can’t talk to anyone that’s here as easily because I don’t know anything about them. Like, after your presentation, I had lots of things to talk about. As an introvert, I had lots of questions I wanted to ask.”

And I said, “Well, I’m confused. Like, from what I know about Intel, you’re classified as a newbie if you’ve been there for less than 20 years.” I said, “You’re part of the top 100 senior leaders in sales and marketing. I would assume that you’ve done this before.” He’s like, “Oh, we do it every year, but every year I still awkwardly connect with people.” And I’m like, “Well, isn’t there like a guest list? Like, couldn’t you connect with them beforehand, find out strategically which people are a part of internal groups or associations that you might be interested in, and then research what books they’ve posted about, or what they’re posting on their LinkedIn profiles?”

So, if you’re an executive that’s listening to this, I don’t want you to think that internally this is impossible. You can, these days, search everything about a person. I remember I was trying to get sponsorship off Dell, and I found one of the senior leaders had an open Instagram profile, and all he did was publicly talk about how much he loved Peloton.

Well, I’m a runner, and it was wintertime in Texas. It’s freezing to run outside. So, we were in a conversation, and he said, “How are you?” I said, “Oh, I’m great. I wish I could go running. The weather is terrible.” And for the next 20 minutes, all he did was talk to me about Peloton and how amazing it was. He would’ve bought anything I said to him after that because I was so interested in what he was talking about.

So, the first thing is that all relationships come from pre-research so that you go into networking events with a little bit of due diligence. And if you go into an interview, by the way, if you know who’s interviewing you, you do some due diligence on the person, not just the company. But then when you go to a networking event, you’ve got to look that people really fit into three boxes, “Who could be a potential client or who could potentially employ me?” And that will get you a short-term win, if you’re a small business owner, of money coming in the door.

But momentum partners, they need to hear something different. They don’t want to hear about your functional skill. They want to understand the difference you want to make in the world in a way that they can articulate to other people. And then they want to understand a simple way of sharing that. Now, a momentum partner is, and these are informal relationships, it’s not a tit-for-that thing. But if I believe in what you do, I might start recommending you to other people that I know that you would get value from connecting with, and you would for me. These are people that are around the same credibility level as me or lower.

On the other hand, champion relationships are a kind of like the senior leaders. For me, Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, is an amazing champion for me. He’s endorsed my books, he’s had me speak at his conference, he’s constantly talking about how great my work is, he’s had me on his podcast twice. He and I are great friends but, truthfully, if he called me tomorrow and said, “Fly to Texas. I need you to pick up my drycleaning,” I would do it. These are the relationships you want to foster.

So, what you need to understand about these relationships is they don’t want to know how much you know. They want to know how much you care. So, I’ll give you an example. If I’m in a networking event, and I introduce myself as the rapid growth guy, well, most people would say, “You know, I’m a marketer, and I specialize in customer-centric engagements for a large corporation,” or something horrible like that. It’s so, “I, I, I,” it’s so transactional.

Where what I will do is I’ll say, “I’m the rapid growth guy,” and when people ask me, “What exactly is that?” I will say, “Well, one of the things I love to see more than anything in the world is an amazing introverted service provider with enough talent, skill, and belief in themselves to start a business of their own. But what I find, more often than not, is they constantly get stuck in this endless hamster wheel of struggling to find interested people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale, feeling like people only care about one thing – price. Do you know anyone like that?”

Now, if I’ve done my research before, I’ve likely connected with these people in advance, there’s familiar faces in the room, I’ve walked up to them to talk to them. I know they’re like that. So, because of that, they’ll respond in the affirmative. And then when they say, “Well, yeah, absolutely. I’m like that,” and I’ll say, “Well, I’m on a mission to help introverts like yourself, realize you’re not a second-class citizen.”

“Your path to success is just different to that of an extrovert, and rapid growth really comes down to three steps outside the scope of your functional skill, which you’re usually amazing at. And if you just focus on these three steps, you really can build a rapid growth business that revolves around you, your family, and your life, not the other way around.” 

And because of that, momentum partners and champions will go, “Wow, I want to introduce you to so-and-so. Or, have you thought about joining this association or this support group or this initiative that we’re having? I want to have you as part of it.” Because people are so used to getting so bored with these mundane introductions of what you do.

And when they hear passion, “I love to see this, I hate to see this, and I’m on a mission to do this,” for the first time, it is intoxicating and they will open up their rolodex for you. And, depending on whether they’re a momentum partner, i.e., the same level or below as you, or a champion, a higher level, the doors that they will open will be compelling. And, especially, you’ve been interested before interesting, and offering people in your rolodex, offering to just give them value in any way, shape, or form that you can beforehand, you will find that all of the doors will open for you, and you’ll create relationships like you’ve never seen before.

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

Matthew Pollard
Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert. But, secondly, it’s not something you can change. 

Introversion is just this – where you draw your energy from. That’s it. It doesn’t mean you can’t engage in small talk. It doesn’t mean the strategies of small talk are different. And if you try to copy extroverts, my gosh, it’s going to be a really uncomfortable inauthentic feeling that you’ll have afterwards, and that’s why a lot of us ruminate afterwards.

But what I want you to know if you’re an introvert is, firstly, you’re not a second-class citizen.

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

Matthew Pollard
My favorite quote, is that “We can change who we are at every moment.” We get a second chance every second.

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

Matthew Pollard
There’s a Stanford study that says when we tell a story, it activates the reticular activating system of the brain, which means that the brain, between the storyteller and the story receiver, actually synchronize. It creates artificial rapport which we introverts can create into deeper rapport.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matthew Pollard
I really loved Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I felt like that was a really great book for all people, whether they’re entrepreneurs or career professionals. I feel like it’s a really great book for everybody.

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

Matthew Pollard
I actually love at the moment ChatGPT. It’s providing a ton of value for a lot of different things at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Matthew Pollard
So, for me, I think planning is my favorite habit. And I think for introverts, I think that planning is absolutely essential because, otherwise, you’ll go into a sale and you’re uncomfortable. For me, any day that I feel like I’ve got anxiety or stress, it means that I’m moving away from my goals. So, I will re-read over my goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they tweet it, they Kindle book highlight it, etc., the say, “Matthew, that was so brilliant and touching when you said this thing”?

Matthew Pollard
The words “Introverts are not second-class citizens. Our path to success is just different to that of an extrovert.” And then you say right after that, “And I am an introvert, I should know.” And then tell your personal story, and my bet is you will find out that many of your bosses are also introverted so it will help you move up the ladder but also will inspire so many people below you to believe they can.

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

Matthew Pollard
Go to MatthewPollard.com/growth, download that template, and create that unified message, and discover your niche of willing to buy clients, or discover your niche of employer, and create a unified message.

My books are a great resource. Just go to TheIntrovertsEdge.com, download the first chapter, and I literally help you believe that you can sell, and then give you the exact process.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Matthew. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun networking.

Matthew Pollard
It was my absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Jan 11
0

927: Fixing One-on-One Meetings Improves (almost) Everything with Dr. Steven Rogelberg

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Dr. Steven Rogelberg explains why one-on-one meetings are so critical—and shares best practices for both managers and employees.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why having more one-on-ones actually saves time
  2. How to create a meeting agenda that works
  3. The right way to ask your manager for help 

About Steven

Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist, holds the title of Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte for distinguished national, international and interdisciplinary contributions. He is an award-winning teacher and recipient of the very prestigious Humboldt Award for his research on meetings. Adam Grant has called Steven the “world’s leading expert on how to fix meetings”.

Dr. Rogelberg’s previous book, The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance (Oxford) has been on over 25 “best of” lists including being recognized by the Washington Post as the #1 leadership book to watch for.

He was the inaugural winner of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Humanitarian Award and just finished his term as President of SIOP, the largest professional organization in the world for I-O psychology.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Steven Rogelberg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Steven, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Thank you. It’s really great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m stoked to be chatting about your book Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings. But first, I have to hear from you, can you think of a particularly transformational or consequential one-on-one meeting in your own life and what made it so special?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Yeah, it was really the experience of leading one with one of my directs, and just seeing how it impacted her. So, she came into the one-on-one in a really bad place, and then, by the end of it, she was in a different place. She was kind of charged up to address the challenges that she was confronting, and I was just grateful. It feels great to help one of your directs who is struggling.

Pete Mockaitis

Totally. And can you tell us, broadly speaking, and not just in your own experience there but in your research and across workplaces, really what’s at stake if we have one-on-one meetings go amazingly versus okay?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Well, the research is clear and powerful. Leaders who do one-on-one meetings well, the gains are tremendous. We see it positively affecting employee experience, employee engagement, even retention of your top talent. From a team perspective, there’s a strong linkage between good one-on-ones and team performance, inclusion efforts are enhanced, and the sweet composite of all this is, is that this is really good for the manager. Because as your people, and as the team thrives, it only reflects well on you. So, one-on-ones are one of these activities that everyone benefits from.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, as you did your research, tell me, did anything really surprised you, or strike you, or seem shocking?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

I thought it was really interesting that when we surveyed employees about how often they’d want a one-on-one meeting with their manager, well, let me throw it back at you, Pete. What do you think? What do you think the typical responses? How often do people want one-on-ones with their manager?

Pete Mockaitis

More than they’re getting is the theme, I would say.

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

That’s a really good response. So, the typical response was, “Weekly.” And what was so interesting is that more senior employees actually desired even more one-on-ones than more junior employees. So, counter to generational stereotypes, we see a reverse of that.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s right. That is a great reversal of generational stereotypes

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

I think that everyone wants to be seen, and one-on-one meetings are that opportunity to be seen. And I think with the senior-level folks, they know with their experience how critical it is to have this contact with their manager that really focuses on success, alignment, removing barriers and obstacles, so they get it. And because they get it, they want it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, they know it matters and they want it all the more. So, that’s what we want. Well, what are we getting?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Well, the cadence out there is very variable, some managers are meeting with their people once a week. Many others are doing it once a month. That’s very common. Still, others do it quarterly, which is basically a no-meeting cadence. But more concerning is our research generally shows that around 50% of one-on-ones are rated sub-optimally, so we’re not realizing their full potential.

And then, Pete, the thing that’s crazy is that if you surveyed these two individuals leaving the meeting room, the manager thinks it went much better than the direct. They seem to have a little bit of a blind spot.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s quite a confluence of forces, a perfect storm here. People want lots of one-on-one meetings, they’re not getting those one-on-one meetings. When they happen, they’re usually disappointing, and yet, the manager thinks that things are going just fine and dandy all at the same time.

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Exactly. Pete, you literally just nailed why I wrote this book, it was to address that statement exactly.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, lay it on us then, Steven, if we are hurting on this dimension, what are the tops things we can do to improve it?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

So, some of the common mistakes is people don’t prepare, they don’t try to find this connective tissue between one-on-ones, and that’s really the wonderful value of one-on-ones is that you can create this connective tissue and to build momentum.

They’re not doing them at the right cadence. They are making the meeting more about the manager and less about the direct. They can’t help themselves. They talk more than the direct, which is one of the greatest predictors of one-on-one ineffectiveness. They don’t have a plan of action. They don’t involve the direct in creating that plan of action. They don’t kind of create an environment that’s psychologically safe, so the directs don’t come in there and actually share what’s important to them. They don’t, at the end of the one-on-one, recap what was agreed upon. And they don’t follow through on the various commitments.

So, those are some of the plagues that happen, but there are so many more. We could go into cancellations, for example. One of the biggest mistakes that managers do is they cancel these one-on-ones frequently. And think about what a signal that is to your employees, that basically you have this activity that’s about them, but if something else comes up that’s pressing, you cancel. You immediately lower the importance of your employees.

And what we found in the research is a much better practice is if you have to cancel, move up the meeting as opposed to move it back even if you only meet with that person for 10 minutes. But that type of a behavior, as opposed to being a negative signal, it becomes a positive signal, that no matter what, you’re going to find that time for your people.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s huge. And it’s so funny because it does happen all the time, I’ve seen it, and I’ve been guilty, I guess, on both sides. And it’s so interesting, I think the manager’s perspective is maybe something like, “Ah, well, this is something within my control, my people. I have some flexibility and leeway to move this around,” versus, “Super big deal client. That? Oh, no, I have to bend over backwards and deal with them, pronto. Like, I have no choice in that matter,” versus this meeting with my people, “Hey, man, we’re cool. Yeah, we’ll could shift that around. No problem.”

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

But that’s not so cool.

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

It’s not. It’s one of those things. People go through their workdays, they’re looking at signals, signals about their values, signals of their importance, signals about who their manager really is, and we have to be careful. Like, sometimes we say one thing but our signals and behavior suggests something very different.

And so, one of the things I really get into in the book is that this is not an optional activity. This is a core requirement of leadership, and the alternative title for the book that I played with is “This is the one meeting that should not be an email,” because this is a stage for leadership. This is where leadership really happens.

Now, we’ve all heard the old adage that people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses. And one-on-ones are this opportunity to display awesome leadership, to foster these meaningful relationships with your people, to help them on their path and on their journey. And by doing so, all boats are raised.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, previously, you used the term connective tissue. Just to make sure we don’t lose that, what precisely does that mean?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

So, basically, one-on-ones really move to the next level when each one-on-one kind of connects with a past one-on-one. So, let’s say that you and I are having a one-on-one, Pete, and as part of it, it emerges that you are struggling with conflict management types of tasks, that it really brings you down, it drains you, it just takes this really big toll. So, we spend some time talking about it, we share some resources, what have you.

Well, at our next one-on-one, if I start the one-on-one by saying, “Hey, Pete, I know you’re working on some of the conflict management stuff. How’s that been going for you?” that conveys that I’ve been listening, that I care, that I’m tracking these things. So, to the extent that the story, the story of your career, the story of your success continues, it just becomes a much more powerful conversation. It’s like imagine a relationship with a friend who completely forgets everything that you both talked about last time. That friendship would not thrive.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Steven, it seems like a huge part of this value and goodness can be unlocked simply by deciding, “Okay, this is a priority. I’m going to make the time. I’m not going to shift the meetings around. I’m going to take the time to thoughtfully prepare. I’m going to listen.” So, let’s say that someone is committed, they’ve got the will. What are some of the practices that even then they might overlook?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

So, one of the things is that I found it pretty surprising. When we were looking at some of the design factors around these, and I wasn’t sure about the importance of an agenda for one-on-ones. And it only happens around 50% of the time, but what the research showed is that when there was an agenda, but a lightweight agenda, those one-on-ones seem to excel much greater.

And so, when we think about what that agenda could look like, I want to share a couple approaches that seem to be most well received. One is the listing approach where you tell your direct, “Come to the one-on-one with a list of topics that you want to talk about. I’ll create a list as well but, please, know my list is secondary. I’m only going to bring up my list if it measures with yours or if we have time.”

“Also, when you’re creating your list, I want you to think big, small, long term, short term, you, your team, your organization,” because we want the employee to do a broader scale when they’re creating their list. So, that’s the listing approach, and that would be a great thing for a manager to facilitate. And the more you involve the direct in creating this process, the better.

The second approach is called the core-question approach, and this is where, with your direct, you basically identify four or five core questions that form the foundation of the one-on-one. For example, “What obstacles are you experiencing and how can I help you?” So, you create these questions together, and then the direct has the ability to really guide the meeting in lots of different ways.

Now, in both of these approaches, there’s a few things to keep in mind. One is we don’t want these meetings to turn into a status update, fall into a status update trap where all we talk about is, “What’s going on in that project? What’s going on in that project? What’s going on in that project?” because that is not truly a meeting for the direct. So, therefore, we want to make sure that we rotate questions over time.

It might be the case that we even dedicate certain amounts of time each one of these one-on-ones for a longer horizon career-based discussion. That’s totally fine. So, we want to make sure we’re flexible. We want to ask good questions but we even want to think about the response options associated with them, and let me give you an example, and maybe this might also fall into your category of surprise.

So, a very common question is, “How are you?” Well, it sounds like a reasonably good question. Sadly, it doesn’t work. When you ask someone “How are you?” they typically have automatic responses, “I’m fine,” “Pretty good,” “Great.” It doesn’t really tell you much. But if we changed the response options, if we asked the individual, “I’m interested in how you are but I want you to let me know, on a scale from one to ten, with one being horrible, ten being great, how are you showing up today?”

Now, you get responses of fives, of sixes, of sevens. Now, you have something to work with. You can explore it. You can understand it. So, we need to think about these questions. We want to have really interesting, important, relevant questions that your direct is really strongly informing. And then it’s about good facilitation, good engagement, asking lots of questions, “Tell me more about this,” “What are your thoughts about it?” because we, ultimately, want to give the gift of communication to the direct.

But I will say this and then I’ll pause, is that it is hard. The research has shown that people talk a lot because it activates the same parts of the brain as good food. So, we talk a lot because it feels kind of good, and we need to give that gift to someone else, namely the direct, for this one-on-one to truly shine.

Pete Mockaitis

Great perspectives here. And I love it we jumped right into some very precise practices. Maybe take a step back. What should be our mindset, our underlying goal, our approach, like, “I am doing this one-on-one in order to blank. Therefore, I will do it in the following style or way”?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

When rolling out one-on-ones, it’s really important to tie it to values, and we did this. If you ask managers about what they value, and you look at organization value statements, they are basically shouting one-on-ones. You invariably will see value such as helping others, supporting, leveraging team, all these things. Well, one-on-one is a manifestation of those values.

So, when you’re rolling this out to your folks, you want it to be about values, and that you are committed to their growth and their success, and you’re engaging in one-on-ones to basically live these values. And you’re going to be nimble, you’re going to keep changing these up based on their feedback, their ideas because you want them to have this large shaping influence for this to truly work.

And it’s constantly reminding yourself that this meeting is not for you. This is that one time where you are just fully focused on what’s on the mind of the directs. As a manager, you have power, you can meet with your direct anytime you want. You can send an email asking, “Hey, what’s going on with this project?” You can do that in an asynchronous document. There’s lots of mechanisms for you to have your needs met. This is just your mechanism to make sure their needs are being met.

And when we think about their needs, it’s not just their practical and tactical needs, but it’s their personal needs, the need to feel respected and trusted. These are fundamental kind of human needs. And when the one-on-one can address both of those sets of needs, then the direct leaves the one-on-one feeling pretty good. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to leave there with a big smile on their face because, who knows, maybe you talked about really hard stuff but at least they’ll feel truly seen.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you share, with these needs, is there a sort of taxonomy, or set of key categories, or top needs that should really be top of mind as we’re trying to deliver on these in the one-on-ones?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Love it. I provide a taxonomy in the book, and I lined up questions for each one of them, because you’re raising such a key issue. Really, the types of needs could be around the individual’s work, it could be the obstacles to their success. So, if we want to think about it as levels, so they have needs around their individual work, there could be needs around the team, there could be needs around the organization, better understanding organizational strategy, organizational priorities, organizational communications.

So, you have this individual, team, organization, and then you have the time horizon associated with each of them, they’re short term and long term. And in each of those boxes, that’s where you have those practical needs, and then underlying that are those personal needs, those psychological experience of the conversation. And those things together is really what a complete one-on-one is.

Now, with that said, you can’t do everything in these one-on-ones. You can only do so much. If your one-on-one is 20-25 minutes, which is okay if that’s what you need to do, we want quality over quantity. And if it turns out that the direct just wants to focus on one particular issue or one particular need, so be it. If that’s what’s on their mind, we want to go with it. We will remind them that, “Hey, I know you want to talk about some other things. It looks like we’re not going to get to them. Is that okay with you?”

So, again, we’re constantly signaling, “This is your meeting.” And because it’s their meeting, they can choose to spend as much time on any particular topic that they so desire.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, let’s shift gears for a moment, and let’s say you’re not the manager. You are the direct report who would like to have one-on-ones with more frequency, or you’re having the one-on-ones and they’re not hitting the mark. How do you recommend we show some initiative, some proactive shaping to get what we’re after here?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

So, how I frame it in my content is really it takes two to tango, each party does have responsibilities. While the manager has the most responsibilities, the direct does, too. And in our research, we’ve identified 10 key behaviors that directs have, and we don’t have time to go into all of them but let me share a few.

So, first of all, you can’t get what you need unless you know what you need. And so, before that one-on-one, the direct actually has to really think, really, really think about what their challenges, issues, problems are, needs are. And that takes a little bit of thought. And so many times, directs go into these one-on-ones not doing that. And by doing so, they’re violating the spirit of the one-on-one, and the void, the gap will be filled but with managers’ needs. So, know what you need, that’s first.

Second, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Asking for help is critical to human success but the research generally shows that there’s two types of help-seeking behavior. There’s autonomous help-seeking behavior and dependent. Now, dependent help-seeking is really where you ask the other party to solve your problem. Autonomous help-seeking is really about acquiring information or insights so you can solve your problem yourself.

An autonomous help-seeking is associated with long-term success; dependent is not. So, when you go in there, you know what you need, you’re asking for help in an autonomous way, you’re getting ideas, you’re listening to feedback, you’re checking yourself to not be defensive, you’re engaging in really good rapport behaviors because, who knows, maybe your manager is not good at establishing rapport so you’re jumping in to make sure there is good rapport, and you’re expressing gratitude.

You might even offer help to your manager because one of the things we know about help behavior is when you offer help to other people, they tend to offer help back to you. So, the direct has an active role to making these things truly work. But in so many regards, the direct is going to look at the signals, the signals of what the manager is doing and not doing, and those signals are really going to drive how seriously they enter into that one-on-one.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Steven, tell me, anything else critical you want to make sure to cover before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

I think there’s a few things that I’ll just kind of throw out there. One-on-ones are truly an essential activity, especially in a more distributive workforce. Everyone is craving feeling seen, and one-on-ones are the mechanism. I also want to put out there that one-on-ones are an investment of time that actually saves you time.

Namely, what has generally been found is that when you have these regular one-on-ones with your folks, you tend to get less spontaneous interruptions because people seem to save their issues. Furthermore, because one-on-ones elevate the direct’s performance, there’s less time spent on rework. Furthermore, because when one-on-ones are done well, employees are more engaged and they’re less likely to leave the organization.

So, the point being is that you have many managers who say, “I just don’t have time.” Well, the fact is this truly is going to make time. And one of the things I do in the book is I talk about other areas where you can drop activities to find time but this is just not one of them. This is a core activity of being a leader.

And then I want to say one other thing, which I think you might get a kick out of. The core elements of the book really lays out, it gives the manager choices. So, I’ve identified all these evidence-based techniques that can make these better, but I don’t prescribe. I don’t say, “Do A then B, then C,” because the science doesn’t align with that. This is also why I stress both the art and the science.

So, you know your values, you know your people, so you have choices, and you could take these choices and make them work for you. And there’s another interesting application of all this. One-on-ones could actually be done with your children. And I know that sounds crazy, and I’m not at all suggesting you have these rigid calendar holds with your kids, but the fact is a lot of the core elements of one-on-ones do apply to these familial relationships.

It’s so often that parents don’t actually truly talk to their child on the child’s terms, really exploring what’s on their minds, and just finding that dedicated space. And clinicians have been talking about this for a long time that when a parent does a lot of these same practices with their kids, it builds better relationships, more self-efficacy for them, and they thrive. So, I think that what’s cool about the book is that it’s not only good for your career, whether you’re a leader or a direct, but you can apply it to these other contexts.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, Steven, that’s powerful. And I recently asked my five-year-old son, “What do I do with you that makes you feel the most loved by me?” And he said, “When we have Dada-Johnny time, one-on-one.” And that’s powerful because it’s just like for the manager, it’s very easy to not do that in the midst of “This house is a mess, and there’s two other siblings crying out for attention.” So, it’s like you really got to conscientiously have to stop the world, and say, “No, this is what we’re doing right now.”

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

“And me and Johnny are chatting, and no one else is allowed in the room. That’s what we’re doing now.”

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Oh, man, Pete, that is a beautiful story, by the way, and you just nailed it. That’s just a great example. It’s just as a young human to an old human, we all just want to feel seen. The thought of people taking an interest in us is so incredibly meaningful. And if we want to elevate work, people, teams, and humanity more broadly, we need to make time for these conversations.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

I like the quote, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

There’s this book, and I don’t know the author, it’s called Postmortal. And, basically, it’s this dystopian novel that gets to a point where all humans can live forever, assuming they don’t fall off a building. And what is so cool about it is it just talks about the implications of a society that doesn’t die. And, clearly, that’s not sustainable.

But, at the same time, when people don’t die, it creates great challenges to institutions that we kind of take for granted. For example, what’s marriage if you don’t die? So, I just really liked the story and I liked some of the more intellectual kind of dilemmas that it created.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And, Steven, is there a particular quote that you share, a Steven original, that seems to really connect and resonate with folks?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

It might be something around the notion of stewardship. So, this is something I talk about a lot, that the best meeting leaders recognize that they’re inherently a steward of others’ time.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Make meaningful time available to those on your team, in your network, and do as much good as you can do, elevate as many lives as you can. And, ultimately, through both of those, the wonderful benefit is that you will thrive as well. And I always go back to one of the greatest predictors of life satisfaction is helping of others. And one-on-ones, that opportunity, sincerely and truly help others.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Steven, thank you for this. I wish you many transformational one-on-ones.

Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Thank you very much. And, definitely, folks can check out my website, StevenRogelberg.com. I have a ton of resources there for people, lots of things, checklists that they can download. I obviously have links to the book. The neat thing is I just want to get this book out there. I’m donating all my royalties to the American Cancer Society, every penny of them. So, check out the book if you want to have transformative one-on-ones, or check out the book if you want to help eradicate cancer.