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Clear thinking - Persuasive communication

If This Is What Passes for Scholarship at Harvard Business School…

By Jack Malcolm / 12.10.2010 / 1 Comment

Not the best way to prepare for a presentation, or is it?

Sometimes article ideas just fall into your lap, such as when you see something that sets you off. I’ve just viewed this video which is an MSNBC interview with Assistant Professor Amy Cuddy of the Harvard Business School, in which she explains the importance of appearing confident when presenting your ideas.

I actually agree with most of what she says: it’s helpful to use your posture and gestures to convey confidence and authority during a presentation. You can also “fake it ‘til you make it”: by adopting an expansive pose for two minutes (such as sitting with your feet on a desk and your arms behind your head) before a presentation or an important meeting you can increase testosterone levels (women too) and decrease cortisol levels which will cause you to feel more powerful and reduce your stress, helping you present a more confident and relaxed demeanor to the listener.

Where I totally disagree, however, is in the excessive and unwarranted claims made in the video, that “what you say is less important than how you say it and “style trumps content”. People have tried to get away with this thinking for a long time, which is why Lincoln stressed that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Yes, presentation is important, and yes, people make snap judgments of your competence based on how you present yourself, but in the end, as I’ve written before, content is still king.

I thought that maybe the video misrepresented Cuddy’s ideas, as the press has been known to do from time to time, so I dug a little further. I found this article on a Harvard Business School website which goes into further detail. In it, she describes the experiment which involved 42 people asked to adopt either “high-power” (HP) or “low-power” (LP) poses for two minutes, after which their testosterone and cortisol levels were checked. For the HPs, testosterone increased 19 percent and cortisol decreased 25 percent. The low power posers decreased testosterone 10 percent and increased cortisol 17 percent. (Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress.) The HPs also reported greater feelings of power and being in charge.

So far, so good (notwithstanding the small sample size and other questions about the experiment design). It’s been known for a long time that physiological changes can lead to psychological changes, and here’s some additional support. I’m OK with that and I also teach this in my classes.

Here’s where she goes too far, though:

“It does appear that even this minimal manipulation can change people’s physiology and psychology and, we hope (my emphasis), lead to very different, meaningful outcomes, whether it’s how they perform in a job interview or how they participate in class.”

“We hope”…Two words that speak volumes about the factual support for her ideas. There is no additional evidence adduced for this further claim.

Here’s another quote that makes me want to scream:

“People tend to spend too much energy focusing on the words they’re saying—perfectly crafting the content of the message—when in many cases that matters much less than how it’s being communicated. People often are more influenced by how they feel about you than by what you’re saying. It’s not about the content of the message, but how you’re communicating it.”

Let’s follow what she’s saying here: instead of putting in long hours thinking about your content and making sure you have sufficient data to back up your conclusions, just make sure you practice your posing for two minutes and you’ll have better results.

First, why does it have to be either/or? I would have no problem with it if the statement were to read: “It’s not only about the content of the message…”, which would lead to serious exploration of the relative weights of the two factors. Second, I would submit that if you had to choose, there is a huge difference between the type of confidence born of conviction and the type of confidence born of posing.

If you’re a poser, you will be found out.

Sales

Get Them to Put Skin in the Game

By Jack Malcolm / 12.6.2010 / 1 Comment

During the sales cycle, a lot of salespeople will do just about anything the buyer asks them to do, because they don’t want to take a chance on upsetting them. After all, as salespeople, we’ve been brought up to believe that the customer is always right. Although that’s usually a pretty good guide, it can actually hurt your sales effectiveness to give potential buyers everything they want.

First, astute buyers will recognize this and will lead you on a merry chase for the privilege of continuing to talk to them, even when they have no intention of buying from you. They will ask for more and more collateral material (which they will never read). They will get you to do one more demonstration for yet another group of people who have no influence at all in the buying process. Their favorite tactic is to get a demo unit to try out for an indefinite time—at the end of which they will (maybe) return it with some vague descriptions of why it didn’t work for them.

Second, it’s an excellent signal to them of how desperate you are to win the sale. Buyers can smell anxiety and desperation from a mile away. Either it will turn them off or they will use it to extract a ton of concessions from you.

Third, as we will see a little further in this post, it will make it much harder for you to walk away from a bad deal.

The key to qualifying the deal, and to increase your odds of success, is to get something back from your customer I return for complying with their request; in other words, sometimes you have to play hard to get.

If they want a demo unit, agree up front how it will be used, what the criteria for success will be, and what they will do if you pass the test.

If they ask for collateral material to read, get a commitment to take your call within a few days of sending it to discuss what they’ve read.

If they want you to fly in from out of town for a meeting, make sure they invite others to the meeting as well. This will make it less likely they’ll cancel at the last minute. I learned this the hard way after paying my own way to fly to Atlanta for a meeting. When I got there, the guy’s assistant told me he had left for the day, and she didn’t even have the decency to at least pretend to feel bad about it.

Like all expensive lessons, that one stuck with me; a few months later when a prospect (whom I had chased for months) asked me to come to Detroit to present to him, I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. He was incredulous: “You’ve been trying to get through to me for months and now you’re not sure you want to come?”

I said, “I’m not convinced you’re serious. I don’t want to waste my time or yours unless you’re serious about this. Who else will you bring to the meeting?” In answer to my question, he agreed to give me time at his monthly meeting with all of his direct reports, and when I pressed further, allowed me to contact them before the meeting to make sure I could address their individual issues.

Did I take a risk in that situation? Of course; but I’d rather get a fast no than a long maybe. I pushed my luck a little in that situation, but here’s what it did for me:

It helped me gauge how serious he was
It earned me some respect and leveled the playing field between us
In setting up the meeting, he was in effect “selling” me to his direct reports
It gave me an opportunity to develop allies before the meeting

Let’s take a look at the psychology of why this works. While it seems logical that our attitudes determine our actions, the formula often works in reverse: our actions determine our attitudes. We observe our behavior and appraise ourselves accordingly. For example, if we do something for someone, it must mean that we like that person. It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes getting the buyer to do something for you makes them like you better than you doing something for them.

In his book, Influence, Robert Cialdini says commitment and consistency are extremely powerful factors influencing our behavior. Simply put, we want to be and appear consistent in our actions. In one fascinating experiment, researchers found that bettors at a race track, who might have been uncertain before placing a bet, were far more confident it was the right bet after they had put their money down. Consistency is also one of the main explanations for the fierce loyalty among members of elite and exclusive groups; the difficulty they undergo and sacrifices they make to join strengthens their commitment. In fact, we all feel the power of commitment when we get are placed on telephone hold; it’s a big step to hang up after you’ve invested a few minutes of your life! Commitment is one of the main reasons that companies keep dumping dollars into lost causes when the writing is on the wall.

When you get your prospects to do something for you, instead of only doing things for them, you draw them closer into a web of commitment. When your prospects ask you for something, get something in return. Although you don’t want to push too hard, the tendency is to err on the side of not pushing hard enough.

Don’t forget to look at the power of commitment from the reverse angle. The more the buyer gets you to do for them, the more committed you will be and hence the more eager to deal when final price and terms are negotiated. The best approach is a balanced one in which both parties signal and strengthen their commitment to a deal by putting skin in the game.

Clear thinking - Persuasive communication

Your Biggest Relationship Mistake–And What You Can Do About It

By Jack Malcolm / 12.1.2010 / 6 Comments

When someone cuts you off in traffic, what do you think about that person? When it happened to me yesterday, I made some choice observations about their character, their parentage and their upbringing. On the other hand, have you ever inadvertently drifted into someone else’s lane? Did you make the same observations about your own character? Of course not—you were momentarily distracted by something, or you had a lot of important thoughts on your mind as you planned your day, or a thousand other possible excuses.

It doesn’t stop when you get to the office. If you interrupt someone in her office and she is short with you, it’s because she’s a jerk; but when you do the same thing it’s because something’s going that requires your closest attention.

Both these examples illustrate one of the most common thinking mistakes we make, and one which has the greatest impact on social interactions. It’s called the fundamental attribution error.

Persuasive communication - Presentations

Get Their Attention, Part 2: Dealing With A Skeptical Audience

By Jack Malcolm / 11.29.2010 / No Comment

In 1983, Ted Kennedy accepted an invitation from Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, to speak at Liberty Baptist College in Virginia. It could have easily been a disaster—one of the most liberal members of the Senate speaking to a group that was actively opposed to most of what he stood for.

Kennedy may not have changed many minds that day, but he did accomplish something very important: he got his audience to listen to him.

In an earlier article, I proposed a number of ways to earn your audience’s attention. Those techniques work very well when the audience is neutral or favorable to your point of view, but when they are skeptical of your position to begin with, or downright hostile to it, the game changes. In this article, we raise the bar and consider principles for engaging your audience’s attention when they really don’t want to hear your message.