Practical Eloquence Blog

Always Bring A Gift

By Jack Malcolm / 3.21.2019 / No Comment

Everybody loves gifts, especially unexpected ones, so if you want to raise your game as a persuasive communicator you should strive to bring a gift to every conversation or encounter that you have with someone, even if it’s a random bump into a stranger.

When you give someone a gift, they usually want to give you something in return. Robert Cialdini, the dean of influence, says that reciprocity is one of the most powerful human drives; we seem to be compelled to balance the karmic scales when someone gives us a gift. Especially today, where we are electronically accosted at every turn by someone is constantly trying to get, we treasure those rare individuals give.

What sort of gift am I talking about? Not something tangible like a bouquet or a bottle of wine, obviously; that would be tacky and possibly unethical in most business relationships. No, I’m referring to gifts that are less concrete but infinitely more important. And the best thing is, they won’t cost you a thing, except possibly a moment’s time to remember that you have them with you.

I’m referring to social gifts, which is a term I read in a the book: First Impressions: What You Don’t Know About How Others See You, by Ann Demarais and Valerie White. The four social gifts are: appreciation, elevation, connection, and enlightenment.

If providing value is the first rule of lean communication, social gifts are the icing on top of value. In LC terms, value is delivered by improving business and/or personal outcomes while preserving the relationship. Social gifts take it one step further by altering the definition of value by just one word that can make a big difference: instead of merely preserving the relationship, they enhance the relationship.

Appreciation is probably the most powerful of all. Even the humblest among us likes to feel important, and we bask in the feeling of being appreciated. And it’s so easy to give: you don’t have to fawn all over the person or even compliment them (although it helps). All you have to do is give them the gift of attention. Listen to them as if they are the most important person in the world at that particular moment—because that’s exactly what they are. Even easier, just use their name once or twice.

Elevation lifts someone’s mood. Have you ever met someone who was so positive that they just brightened up your day, even if only for a few minutes? Moods are contagious, and even grouches love to be around positive happy people and avoid wet blankets. This is where it can pay to be “inauthentic”. Regardless of how crappy you might feel, put on a positive, upbeat, happy present face—you’ll make others feel better and maybe even yourself as well.

Connection is about finding things in common. We all like to be part of the “in crowd”, and connection helps people feel understood and included when you point out things you have in common with them. It also makes people feel more comfortable around you when they focus on your similarities and not your differences.

Enlightenment is telling them something they don’t know that they can use. As the first requirement of lean communication it’s a simple standard to measure the effectiveness of any communication. Of the four, it’s the one that can leave them objectively better off, and feeling smarter for it too!

Any one of these four by itself is a nice gift to give, but Demarais and White stress that the importance of balance. People have different preferences, so if you meet someone for the first time you increase your chances of making a good impression if you have more than one of the social gifts. And if you know them for a while, they may get bored with the same thing every time.

And, just as people have different preferences, we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. Take a minute to reflect on which, if any of these gifts you tend to leave with others. Which are your strengths, and which would you like to improve? In my own case, I would say that my strength is enlightenment, and I need to do a better job of showing others I appreciate their good qualities.

So, that’s my plan to become a better gift-giver. What’s yours?

Podcasts - Success

Are You A Social Genius?

By Jack Malcolm / 3.19.2019 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I’ve been researching and thinking a lot about Social Intelligence in for a module I’m putting together for a client. The goal for that course is to work with a team of accomplished engineers and help them to develop stronger client relationships. I’m always wary of stereotyping anyone, but engineers in general can usually benefit from being exposed formally to the principles, skills and techniques of social intelligence. Why do I know that? Because any functioning human being can usually benefit from increasing their social intelligence.

What is social intelligence?

Social intelligence, or SQ as it’s also called, is the external counterpart to its better-known cousin, emotional intelligence, or EQ, a term which became part of the popular culture when it was used by Daniel Goleman in a book by the same name in 1995.

One of the reasons the term is not better known is that Goleman himself initially considered it a subset of emotional intelligence, but he soon realized two things. First, it’s a big enough topic in its own right, and second, you can be good at one without being good at the other. (We all know some people who are wonderful around other people but completely messed up inside, and others who have it all together emotionally but don’t feel comfortable in groups.) So he wrote another influential book in 2006 called Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.

Emotional intelligence is the capacity to know, understand, manage and express your own emotions effectively. It’s internally focused. Social intelligence is externally focused, and it’s the capacity to understand, manage and express yourself among others. Here are a couple of other definitions. Edward Thorndike called it (in 1920—so the term is actually much older than EI), “the ability to understand and mange men and women”; he also described it as “acting wisely in human relationships.” Karl Albrecht, who also wrote a book called Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success in 2006 (I wonder who came first?), defines SI as “the ability to get along well with others and to get them to cooperate with you.”

That’s the general definition, and if you don’t buy in to the idea that it’s quite at the level of intelligence, like IQ, we can just go with the broad term, people skills.

Is it just common sense, or something you need to work on?

The simple answer is yes and yes. People skills are common sense in the sense that everyone can generally agree whether someone has them or doesn’t, and in the sense that you pick up a lot of it as you make your way through life and learn to fit in with whatever group you’re a part of. Some you learn by watching others, some by hard experience; some by taking advice from parents, peers, then maybe bosses and maybe even from trainers like myself.

But they are also skills that you need to work on. The word “skills” is important because it’s the only way to but it won’t be useful unless we look under the hood and break out the various components and skills that go into it. Skills are useful, measurable and learnable.

Goleman lists seven component skills, under two general headings: social awareness and relationship management.

Social awareness

Empathy
Organizational awareness

Relationship management

Influencing skills
Coach and mentor
Conflict management
Inspirational leadership
Teamwork

Albrecht’s model is a bit simpler, and has the added advantage of forming the acronym SPACE.

Situational awareness
Presence
Authenticity
Clarity
Empathy

As you can see, there’s a lot of overlap among the different models, but they both make sense. What’s my point? If you laid out each skills on the left hand side of a page, and then honestly scored yourself on a 1-10 scale of your effectiveness, you would find plenty of opportunities to improve your own skill and thus your social outcomes. That brings us to the third question:

If you do need it, is it something you can learn?

Obviously, you know my answer is going to be yes, but you have to take it with a grain of salt because I make a living by teaching these skills. I don’t think you need much convincing, thought, because just by listening to this podcast you’ve proven yourself to be someone who cares about self-improvement, personal effectiveness, and growth. So that’s the good news.

But the bad news is that it’s not easy. You don’t get better at social skills just by listening to a podcast, or even reading a book or taking a course, no more than you get better at golf or tennis by taking a lesson. The information helps, but you have to get out into the field and actually practice these skills. Here’s a useful process to improve your skills.

Mindset and Attitude

First, adjust your attitude and mindset. You probably already feel it’s important, but it always helps to remind yourself, at least until you turn it into a habit. There is one mindset you must have and two attitudes. The mindset is a growth mindset: you can’t think of social intelligence as a trait that you’re born with, but as something that you can change and improve if you set your mind to it.

The first attitude you need to have in the front of your mind at all times is that’s it’s important to pay as much attention to the relationship as to the task at hand. Because if you work with people or they’re clients, there will be many more times beyond just this transaction to get things done with them, and everything you do or say is cumulative—it either adds or subtracts. The second attitude is to care about adding value to the other person: if you go into every encounter with the sincere intent to leave the other person better off for having spoken with you, a lot of the techniques will take care of themselves. And even if they don’t come off perfectly, the other person will detect your sincerity and genuineness and respond very positively.

Awareness

Take honest stock of your skill in each of these areas. Try to see yourself through the eyes of a disinterested observer, which is harder than it looks. The thing is, most of us think we know how others see us, but according to psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, we’re mostly wrong. So, painful as it may be, you need to ask someone you trust, to be honest and helpful at the same time.

Knowledge

This is the easiest thing to pick up. Some of the skills have excellent articles, podcasts, books and courses which address The knowledge is out there. Pick up a book on speaking, or join Toastmasters. Google Active Listening and jot down some tips you’re going to try in your next conversation, and so on.

Practice

Get out of your office and tear your eyes off your device, and just talk to people. Don’t try to do too much at once. Pick one skill at a time and concentrate on it for the next few weeks.

Reflect

Try to set time aside after every important meeting or conversation and do a quick after-action review, specifically thinking about the skill you wanted to work on. Did you remember to work on it? How did it feel? How do you think it felt to the other person? What can you do better next time?

Is SQ more important than IQ in your career success? Maybe, maybe not. But look at it this way: IQ gets you on the ladder, but SQ can help you rise. At the very least, it will make the climb much more pleasant.

Persuasive communication - Podcasts

First, Do No Harm

By Jack Malcolm / 2.19.2019 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In my work, I generally prefer to provide positive advice about what to do to be an effective communicator/salesperson and all-around good person, but occasionally we need a reminder that the most important rule in effective communication is “don’t screw it up”. And unfortunately, it’s so easy to do.

One of the strongest ideas in psychology is that bad is stronger than good, which is the title of an influential paper written in 2001 by Roy Baumeister and others. As they tell us, “Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” That means that when you’re meeting someone for the first time, it is much easier to offend or put them off by one simple fault or mistake than by doing a lot of things right. And over the long term, it’s more important to avoid doing bad things than it is to do good things. The implication is that the long-term success of a relationship depends more on not doing bad things than on doing good things.

Relationship mistakes can be costly for three reasons:

Strength: Our minds react more strongly to bad events because that’s the way they’ve evolved. Our ancestors, in order to live long enough to pass on their genes to future generations, had to respond differently to threats than opportunities. Quite simply, it’s easier to recover from missing a possible meal than from becoming a meal! Positive opportunities can help you in the long term, but negatives can kill you now.

Speed: That’s why threats are actually processed in a different part of our brains, and are therefore much faster to be detected than positive emotions and actions. We detect negative emotions in others faster than positive ones. Negatives are also more immediately obvious because they generally don’t fit the pattern we’re expecting. When we are in a professional/business meeting, we expect a certain level of behavior; when we get it, we don’t pay close attention, but we focus immediately on anything that appears out of place.

Confidence: We all make mistakes about others from time to time, and it shouldn’t be a big deal because we should be able to correct our initial negative impression as we get to know someone better. Unfortunately, we also tend to be more sure of our negative judgments than our positive ones. One reason, is that you can’t prove a negative. If I never catch you in a lie, that doesn’t prove you’re honest. But one lie can easily tell me you’re dishonest. And once I form that first impression, my natural confirmation bias kicks in, and I interpret everything else I see and hear through that negative lens.

That’s why, according to psychologist John Gottman, it takes about five good events to outweigh one bad event.

So, what are some of the things we may do that can be turn-offs to others?

People vary, of course, but the average person we meet has highly effective and ultra-sensitive social radar that is constantly alert for threats to their interests or feelings. The following list may not be scientific or comprehensive, but I believe that in general, people are looking for four things: intentions, respect, honesty and competence.

Obviously, it helps tremendously if you have each of those four, but even if you do, it’s possible to be misinterpreted or misunderstood either through carelessness or mistakes…

Intentions

Not listening
Making it about you
Treating someone like a thing
Talking too much
Getting angry or otherwise letting emotions take over
Trying to develop intimacy too quickly
Excessive task orientation, like you don’t care about them as a person

Respect

Not listening
Trying to show how smart you are
Arguing
Distraction/not listening
Interrupting
Excessive directness
Impatience

Honesty

Being inauthentic/sincere
Lying
Lack of candor
Signs of nervousness

Competence

Lack of preparation
Mistakes
Vagueness/overpromising

What can you do about it?

Be self-aware of your inclinations and habits. Review the list above and honestly choose one or two that you know you can do better with. Ask a mentor or trusted peer or coach for input to help you see past your own blind spots.

Prepare. Preparation has a direct effect on the competence you demonstrate, but it also has the indirect benefit of increasing your outside-in focus.

Adjust your attitude. Intentions trump techniques; if you go into every encounter with a sincere desire to add value to the other person, you will be well on your way.

Always be mindful. Reserve a portion of your mental bandwidth to monitor your own thoughts and behaviors during the conversation.

Relax. Trust your preparation and intentions. If you try too hard, that can easily come across as insincere.

Clear thinking - Podcasts - Thinking Books

When Smart People Do Dumb Things

By Jack Malcolm / 1.31.2019 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at spotting when others are trying to scam you?

If you rated yourself higher than a five, you’d better stay with me for this entire post. It’s a story of some very smart people—people who should have known better—who were fooled for a very long time and lost millions of dollars in the process.

I’m switching sides for at least one episode because I’ve recently become fascinated by how con artists work. I first became interested when I was preparing for my podcast on instant trust, and I read a book called The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova, At about the same time, my son recommended that I read Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. Both books are stark reminders that persuasive communication can be used for evil as well as for good, and it’s helpful to know how people pull off cons that seem unbelievable in retrospect.

Let’s start with Bad Blood. In a nutshell, the story is this: a company named Theranos started by an attractive and charismatic 19-year-old Stanford dropout sets out in 2003 to make a huge dent in the universe of healthcare by developing a revolutionary technology that makes it possible to perform hundreds of blood tests using a single drop of blood. It’s a powerful promise, and it attracts investors from professors, seasoned tech entrepreneurs, and the likes of former Secretary of State George Shultz, retired General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and also signs contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Walgreens and Safeway. The company raked in over $700 million in capital and was valued at one time at $9 billion, making its founder Elizabeth Holmes the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

Holmes may have initially had sincere aspirations to deliver on her dream, but somewhere along the way it turned into a big, bad, elaborate deception. It finally got exposed and began crashing down in 2015, when Carreyrou wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal.

How did a company fool so many sophisticated people for so long? If people with such smarts and experience can be so easily fooled for so long, what hope is there for us ordinary mortals? Actually, as I will talk about, being smart is not necessarily a defense. In fact, being of above average intelligence may actually be a liability.

I believe any elaborate deception requires active participation by both sides in the transaction. This is no way implies that there is anywhere near moral equivalence between someone who deliberately sets out to deceive and their victims, but the thoughts and behaviors of the victims are certainly contributing factors. Let’s look at both sides and see how Elizabeth Holmes was able to pull it off for so long:

She was extremely charismatic. very intense way of looking at someone; spoke with great sincerity and conviction
She looked the part. She fit the story she was telling, and people had heard the story before: the gifted passionate dropout who transformed an entire industry, a la Bill Gates and especially Steve Jobs. In fact, she encouraged the similarity by dressing only in black turtlenecks.
She was totally ruthless with the truth. Could easily look someone in the eyes and tell the most outlandish lies.
She showed no empathy or conscience. She was willing to do anything to protect her version of the story, from hiring lawyers to intimidate and harass those who expressed doubts to even putting patients at risk.

Even smart people fall into common mental traps

Even the most analytical and careful thinkers take shortcuts or bend to certain biases, and here are just a few of the factors that Holmes exploited.

Social proof. Even smart people don’t have time to research the biochemistry of blood analysis, so they take a shortcut by relying on the words and actins of people they trust.

Halo effect. When someone exhibits positive outward qualities, such as looking and sounding professional and competent, it’s much easier to think they’re good at other things as well, such as being a good manager or scientist.

Confirmation bias. Once you build an attractive story in your mind, it’s almost guaranteed that you will ignore evidence that does not fit that narrative, or you will find convenient explanations.

Fear of Missing Out. If you’re Walgreen’s and you don’t take the plunge, what happens if CVS does and makes millions?

Highly intelligent people may be more vulnerable

Anyone can fall into the mental traps listed above, but highly intelligent people also have two additional handicaps, which may make them even more vulnerable.

Ricky Jay, a professional magician, says, “For me, the ideal audience would be Novel Prize winners…their egos tell them they can’t be fooled.”

But one Nobel prize winner, Richard Feynman, said, “The first principle is not to fool yourself. And you’re the easiest person to fool.” And keep in mind that he was speaking to the 1974 graduating class of CalTech when he said that.

What makes smart people so easy to fool? First, it goes to what Ricky Jay said. They know they’re smart, so they think they can’t be fooled. They don’t actually imagine that the person sitting across from them is smarter than they are (at least in this particular situation). That means that they won’t even listen when someone tells them they’re wrong. George Shultz’s own grandson was one of the first to blow the whistle on what they were doing, and Shultz sided with Holmes. He actually told his own grandson, “I don’t think you’re dumb, but I do think you’re wrong.”

Second, smart people are very clever at coming up with rational explanations for things that don’t look right. No peer reviewed journals? That’s because it prevents others stealing their advanced ideas. Negative press? That’s caused by competitors trying to stop them. Missed deliveries? That’s because of the earthquake in Japan. Those types of explanations are easier to think of than the simple fact that they may just be wrong.

So, what can you do about it?

Konnikova says the key to resisting persuasion is to have “a strong, unshakeable, even, sense of self. Know who you are no matter what, and hold on to that no matter what.”
Be objective. There’s a simple hack to help you distance yourself emotionally from the decision. Pretend that someone you know came up to you and asked your advice on whether to invest or not.
Have an exit script. If you start losing money it can be tempting to throw more in to salvage it. Know what your limits are before you enter into the transaction and stick to it.
Be very suspicious of secrecy and time pressure.
Search for disconfirming information; actively search for evidence that you may be wrong.

OK, now that I’ve armed you with the tools, go ahead and listen to the rest of the podcast and see if you pass the test at the end!

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