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Festina Lente: Strategic Patience for Persuasive Communication

By Jack Malcolm / 8.12.2014 / 2 Comments

The first two articles in this series dealt with ways to benefit from exercising patience during persuasive conversations, on the time scale of seconds and minutes. Those time frames require tactical patience, and requires developing new habits, so that you can practice the skills without having to think about them in the moment. In this article, we turn our attention to the times between persuasive conversations, or the power of patience over days, weeks and months. This is strategic patience, and it may require a change in your attitude and in your thinking processes, as you navigate the intricacies of relationships, decision processes, preparations and negotiations over time.

Relationships take time. Last week, I experienced an example of strategic impatience which will probably be familiar to you. I accepted a LinkedIn connection request from someone I did not know; I was flattered because she said she enjoyed reading my blog. Then, not 24 hours after connecting, she sent me an email aggressively trying to sell her company’s services. In this case, her haste was not only ineffective, it was counterproductive. (It wasn’t a total loss for me; I learned how easy it is to remove a connection on LinkedIn)

My aggressive new friend probably knows that trusting relationships take time, but she let her hunger for immediate results override her common sense. Maybe it’s not her fault: I’m sure she’s under pressure from a sales manager who wants sales now.

We all want a lot of strong relationships at the top of the relationship pyramid, where people who are able to help you take your phone calls. But the problem for most people is that they only pay attention to others in their network when they need something. If they haven’t patiently nurtured their network by staying in touch and by giving instead of taking, that will be too late.

Acceptance time. One of the reasons that you need patience is that persuasion implies change, and change usually takes time. You may think your idea is brilliant, but you’ve forgotten that it took you time to arrive at that conclusion; you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to know what you know, and not to believe what you believe. If it took you time to get to that point, why do you think you can short-cut that process for others?

They will need time to absorb the new information, to think about it, discuss it with others, and quite frankly just to get used to the idea. It’s hard to get someone to change their mind quickly or too far in one jump. You might need patience to nudge the needle, or otherwise your efforts may fail or even backfire. Pushing too far, too fast, will activate their inner two-year-old, and they will assert their independence by shoving back.

Patience is especially critical when you are involved in complex sales. It’s natural to want to rush your customers through their decision process as quickly as possible, especially when your solution will have such an impact on their business that they leave money on the table every day that they don’t implement it. So you step over potential allies to try to get right to the C-Level where decisions are made quicker, you give incentives (i.e. drop your price) to close this quarter, and you save time on your presentations by throwing in stock slides and stale information.

Nemawashi is the Japanese name for the patient preparation of an idea by talking to all the relevant people behind the scenes, long in advance of when you need the decision to be made. It may seem like it takes extra time, but besides improving your chances of gaining agreement, it actually saves time by shaping the conditions for the agreement you want and by enabling much more rapid and focused execution once the decision is taken.

Measure twice, cut once. It’s hard to avoid a cliché on this one, but if you haven’t got time to it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over? The patience to prepare and plan is probably the most obvious – and ignored – application of the concept there is. Whether you’re preparing for a presentation, meeting, sales call or conversation, a few hours of preparation can save you weeks or months of work and worry. Whether it’s one more tough question you can anticipate, or double-checking your facts, or researching additional attendees, this can be some of the most profitable time you can spend.

Negotiation strength. In negotiations, the side in a hurry will lose, because there is no reason to accept a poor bargain until you have to. When time is on your side, impatience to get a deal closed is a form of unilateral disarmament. Unfortunately, this seems to be the dynamic at work in Afghanistan, as the US has announced a strict timetable for withdrawal by the end of 2014. As our adversaries like to say, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

It takes patience to build patience. If this series on patience in persuasion has inspired you to work on strengthening your patience, please realize that it will take time. Patience at the tactical level is a skill, and proficiency takes time.

The only impatience you should have is to get started immediately.

Persuasive communication

Festina Lente: The Power of Patience Part 2

By Jack Malcolm / 8.7.2014 / 1 Comment

Put your money on the guy in green

In part 1 of this series, we began with an easy challenge: develop your patience muscle less than a second at a time. If you found that hard, stop reading right now; you’re not ready for this yet. Go back and work on your split-second patience – this will still be here when you’re ready.

But if you found the split seconds easy to handle, you’re ready to step up to the next challenge: developing patience on the minutes time scale. You’ll need it during conversations, where the challenge remains the same: how to improve effectiveness by curbing your impatience for immediate results.

At the seconds time scale, your weaknesses may work against you: caring more about your own needs and wanting to dominate the conversation. At the minutes level, ironically, it’s your strengths you have to guard against. Being passionate about your idea, adding value, solving problems, and planning ahead for the conversation are certainly good things, but they can also try your patience.

Let’s take one common example. Doctors would certainly seem to be models of wanting to help people, but a 1984 study found that the average time they listened to patients before interrupting was 18 seconds, and in 2001 another study found that the average was down to 12 seconds. What are the consequences? According to Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, by the time the doctor interrupts, he or she has already homed in on a diagnosis. About 80% of the time, the diagnosis is right, but the other 20% becomes less likely to be corrected either because the doctor has anchored on a diagnosis, or because the patient is unlikely to volunteer additional information.

In this example, the cost of misdiagnosis is clear and severe, but in daily persuasive communication the costs of impatience may be less clear yet still important. People may ignore good advice, customers may not buy the right product, and band-aids will get slapped over real problems.

The solution is not to abandon your strengths, but to recognize how they can make you impatient and then carefully guard against them.

If you like to solve problems, keep in mind that problems are often better solved at deeper levels than they are first described. The other person may not fully describe their problem, or may even need to work it out for themselves in the actual conversation. When you hear about something you know you can solve, hold off solving and ask a few more questions.
If you’re passionate about your idea, recognize that passion may be contagious, but it does require at least some incubation period in the other person. Don’t try to “close” them too fast.
If you want your advice to be heard, you can deliver it right away, but if you want your advice to be acted on, you have to find a way to make it the other person’s idea. That requires the patience to ask the right questions and let them work it out for themselves.
If you like to plan ahead for the conversation by preparing an agenda and list of questions, keep doing so, but allow for the conversation to take unexpected turns; use your prepared plan as a safety net, not a straitjacket.

If you can develop the habits of withholding judgment until you’ve heard the full story, of asking a few more questions before jumping to solution mode, and of keeping your attention on the process without looking ahead to results, the investment of patience at the minutes level will return you hours, days or months, in the form of more effective persuasion and more sustainable agreements. As the old saying goes, “you can speed up buying by slowing down selling”.

First the seconds, and then the minutes. The next section will address strategic patience at the level of days, weeks and months.

Festina Lente: The Power of Patience in Persuasive Communication

By Jack Malcolm / 8.4.2014 / 5 Comments

In this rushed and distracted time, prescription there seems to be more and more incentive to get results fast, solve problems, cut to the chase, and multi-task. We scan headlines, give continuous partial attention, consume sound bites, and then hurry on to the next shiny object, because we think it makes us more productive. In fact, most of you probably won’t finish reading this post – and you’re the ones who need it the most!

Is it possible that all this speeding up is just slowing us down? Or, medicine looking at it from the other side, can slowing down actually get us where we want to go faster?

That’s the idea behind the motto: Festina Lente, which means “make haste slowly”. In this series of articles, we’ll explore how old-fashioned patience can make us better communicators.

Patience is a personal quality; it’s a state of mind; it’s a habit, and – most importantly – it’s a skill that you can develop (over time). The good news about the skill of patience is that it’s scalable. You can get results in terms of improved learning, relationships, and persuasion from slowing down by less than a second, just as you can all the way up to the level of months or even years. I know you don’t have the patience to read through the entire scale, so we’ll start small in this article, and move up the time scale from there in other articles.

When Seconds Count

When someone else is speaking, do the spaces between their words sometimes seem interminably long? Do you begin formulating your response to the other person before they even finish their sentence? That’s because you can think much faster than they can speak. Although that sounds like an advantage, the problem is that after you begin thinking about your response, you are now listening to a different conversation, and you tune out of theirs; maybe you even interrupt. Either way, the price of impatience is missed information or making the other person feel slighted.

Cultivate the habit of listening fully and intently to the other person, focusing on the words and the non-verbals; try to extract every gram of meaning that you can. Don’t worry about not having enough time to compose a response, because the speed of your thinking will give you plenty of time to do so when it is your turn to speak.

Probably the most valuable split second in persuasive communication is the space between the other person finishing their sentence and you opening your mouth to speak, because that’s when you either react or choose to respond. Unlike Jeopardy, you don’t get points for speed of response. In fact, pausing even for less than a second can help you tremendously. It gives you time to formulate a more thoughtful response; if the conversation is difficult or emotional it gives you time choose your response; it makes you look more thoughtful. In addition, because so many people have what Tom Wolfe called information compulsion, they may have an overwhelming need to fill that small moment with additional information.

The third opportunity to use patience on the seconds time scale is during your presentations and speeches. Some of the most eloquent and powerful moments in speeches are the pauses. I’ve seen too many people deliver a major point – and then ruin the effect by rushing on to their next point before the audience has had a chance to take it in. Small pauses will seem long to you as the speaker, but they will appear natural to your listeners and make you come across as confident and in control.

If you want to work on developing patience, these small split-second intervals are a great place to start. Work on these ideas for the next couple of days, and then we’ll move up the scale to minutes, and after that, focus on strategic patience, or the days, weeks and months.

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Sales Moments

By Jack Malcolm / 7.28.2014 / 1 Comment

Last week, I attended a conference call with the top sales management of one of my clients, to discuss ways to more deeply embed the culture and practices of consultative selling techniques that we’ve introduced to their sales force, including sales call planning, questioning, understanding customers’ needs, etc.

Before we began the formal agenda, the COO began the call with a safety moment. For those who are not familiar with the concept, the leader of the meeting usually invites anyone to share a specific topic or incident that relates to safety. Someone will speak up and tell about something they may have observed in the plant; maybe it was a new idea that someone suggested, an accident averted, or unfortunately sometimes an incident where someone got hurt.

The immediate purpose of safety moments is to share a useful lesson and to get everyone to focus on the importance of safety. The long term purpose is to foster a culture of safety, where everyone at all levels makes safety a priority and a natural part of their business day.

What I’ve found interesting in listening in to these safety moments is that everyone takes them seriously. You would think that a practice like this might become routine, or cause people to roll their eyes and tune out during this automatic part of the meeting, but I’ve never observed that. People seem to be eager to share their stories and to hear others.

As soon as one of the participants began sharing his safety moment during the call, the (now) obvious thought hit me: if a safety moment can be used to create a specific culture and change behavior, why not have a consultative[1] sales moment?

Why not lead off every one of your meetings by having someone share a specific instance they have seen of someone successfully using the ideas learned in your latest training class, or publicizing an important win, or of developing a C-level relationship, or so many other possible topics?

One of the major reasons that sales training loses its effectiveness is the lack of management attention after the training event. There’s a lot of attention and fanfare devoted to the concept of a new sales approach before the training, but it’s human nature to turn attention to something else after that particular box is checked. After the initial learning curve, the forgetting curve begins to kick in immediately, unless everyone maintains focus.

Safety is paramount, but for many companies, an effective sales culture is also critical. Consultative sales moments may be an easy way to keep everyone’s focus on a topic that should be front and center in everyone’s mind.

Has anyone tried this, and if so, how has it worked for you?

[1] Call it a solution sales moment, or challenger moment, or insight moment, or whatever you want to.