Even positive qualities can be overdone
Three of the best qualities a persuasive communicator can have are passion, goal focus and a problem-solving orientation. But these positive qualities can actually get in the way of effective listening if they’re overdone.
Passion: Passion is great; it can be contagious and we can be more believable when we let the listener see how much we care about the topic. But everything carries a cost, and passion for your idea can easily turn into arrogance and missed opportunity. The reality is that no one else is passionate about your pet project as you are, and they will ultimately agree for their own reasons—not yours.
The other problem with passion is that you just don’t shut up. You have to tone down the passion long enough to listen to the other’s point of view. You will have plenty of time to dial the passion back up when you go into transmit mode, so squelch it while you’re in receiving mode.
Dial down the passion and dial up the empathy.
Problem-solving: We love to solve problems for others; and that’s a good thing. But we have to tone it down during the listening phase. Rushing in too early with a solution can create problems for you. First, you may be wrong; you may solve the wrong problem, or provide an incomplete solution because you don’t have enough information to understand it completely. Second, even if the answer is exactly right, your credibility may suffer if the other person gets the sense that that’s what you were going to say no matter what.
If you want your solution to land on willing ears, slow down, ask a few more questions to either dig deeper into causes or to bring out the costs of not solving, and–best of all—to let the other person arrive at the solution and make it their own.
Dial down the rush to solve and dial up the patience.
Goal focus: It’s great to have a specific goal in mind for a presentation, sales call, or conversation. But being too focused on your goal is like driving down a busy highway only looking at what’s in the lane in front of you. It’s called inattentional blindness, and it’s illustrated by the now-famous “invisible gorilla” video and Richard Wiseman’s research into what makes some people luckier than others. Similarly, we want to ask excellent questions, but sometimes we’re so focused on the answer we’re looking for that we miss other important information.
By all means, keep your goals and your questions, but use them as a safety net rather than a straitjacket. By getting them out of your head and putting them on paper, you can focus your full attention on your counterpart, knowing that your written goals and questions will be there if and when you need them.
Dial down the searchlight and dial up the floodlight.
Amos Tversky said that we don’t choose between options; we choose between descriptions of options. So, just because you’ve done the critical thinking to figure out the best option to recommend to someone does not mean you’re done. You then have to figure out the best way to frame it so that it is likely to be chosen.
One of the most effective ways to frame your recommended option is to sandwich it between two other plausible choices.
There’s something about a happy medium that is attractive to our minds. It’s even seen in infants as young as 7 or 8 months old, who tend to prefer stimuli that are not too simple or too complex. Just like Goldilocks, we don’t want too much or too little, we want it to be “just right”.
Or maybe (with the exception of our present political scene) it’s that we tend to shy away from extremes. It’s possible that our natural risk aversion makes the middle seem the safer choice: if the choice goes wrong it’s harder to justify the more extreme option.
In addition, making decisions can be hard work, so our minds tend to seek the path of least resistance. We like easy decisions, and the outside choices act as guardrails funneling us into the fast lane.
There is no logical reason that the middle choice is the best bet every time. Sometimes, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, extremism is no vice and moderation is no virtue, especially when the definition of “extreme” can be so easily manipulated. In a perfectly rational world, each choice would be evaluated on its own merits, carefully balancing costs, tradeoffs and rewards.
But decisions are never perfectly rational, and even if they were, we never have perfect information, so we look for clues to help us judge and the reference points we use to evaluate a choice exert a strong gravitational pull on the decision.
That’s why a smart persuader puts just as much thought into the reference points as to the recommended option itself.
Here are some examples of how Goldilocks framing is used in persuasion:
Pricing: Marketers apply the idea all the time with pricing, especially by retailers. Williams-Sonoma once offered a breadmaker at $279, which sold OK. They introduced a bigger model at $429, and few sold…but sales of the $279 model nearly doubled. It’s also why restaurants will have an expensive bottle of wine at the top of the list, to make the next-highest priced seem more acceptable. The highest priced seems extravagant, and the lowest makes you wonder what you’re giving up.
Presentation of options: Henry Kissinger said he always presented Nixon with three alternatives; his favored one was always in the middle and was invariably the one selected. It’s also becoming much more common in presenting options online.
Negotiations: One example is when two sides in a negotiation reach an impasse. Often the stalemate is resolved by offering to split the difference. It “feels” fair, even though either side can determine the middle ground by making their own offer more extreme.
Goldilocks framing can be so powerful that it works even when one or both of the endpoints is highly implausible, such as when a restaurant puts a $100 hamburger on the menu. However, if you’re recommending a course of action, I think it’s important for your personal credibility that the presented options are at least plausible; otherwise the framing will seem like a transparent ploy.
It’s what goes on in between that counts
One of the most common sayings in sales is that God gave you two ears and one mouth, so you should use them in that proportion. That’s true, but it does not go far enough.
We hear with our ears, but we listen with our brains. There is a big difference between hearing and listening. It’s like the difference between seeing and reading. One is passive, and goes on without having to think; the other is active.
Your ears can only pick up the sounds of language, not its physical expressions. Your brain simultaneously processes and synthesizes signals from the eyes and the ears, picking up “micro-expressions” and other cues, often much faster than conscious thought.
Your ears can only hear what is being said; they faithfully pass on the signal to the brain. Hearing what is not said only takes place in the brain itself.
It may seem strange that something we’ve done naturally for our entire lives could stand improvement, but when you analyze what’s actually happening as your brain is listening, you realize that there is a lot of complicated processing going on. Let’s take a look at what happens when someone is listening. There is a model called SIESR[1], which stands for:
Sensing: We receive the incoming signals, including expressions, body language and tone of voice.
Interpreting: We figure out the sender’s intent.
Evaluating: We evaluate what it means to us, in this particular context.
Storing: We keep incoming information in working memory so that we can respond properly.
Responding: We do or say something in response.
Out of the five steps above, the first involves the ears, and the last involves the mouth. But the real meat of the sandwich is the three steps in the middle. That’s where the quality and effectiveness of the dialogue takes place.
Interpreting: Have you accurately interpreted what the other person said? Is their meaning clear? Have they told you the entire truth and nothing but? Do their other signals match the words that are coming out of their mouths? What have they left out? Why did they say this and not that? Are we so focused on getting what we want to hear that we miss something important but unexpected?
Evaluating: Is this what we expected them to say? Does it fit with what we already know? If not, how does it change what we thought we knew? What’s the quality of their evidence? How do we know it’s true? If we don’t think it’s true, what are they missing or hiding? How does it fit with our intentions for the conversation?
Storing: Some variations of the model leave out this step, maybe because they take it for granted. But as we become more scatterbrained and attention-deficient, it becomes more and more important to reinforce this step. Are we getting everything they are saying? If they are going on for a while, have our minds wandered in the middle of their soliloquy? Are we taking effective notes?
Keep in mind that these mental operations are going on while the other person is speaking, which is only possible because our minds can process words about four times as fast as the other person can speak them. This means that we have plenty of bandwidth to run these operations while the other person is speaking. Unfortunately that can also be a big disadvantage, because or attention can flit in and out; what often happens is that we either let our minds wander to something else, or we think we know how they’re going to finish the sentence so we either sneak a quick peek at our email or we begin formulating our response. Anytime these things happen, it’s easy to lose the thread of the conversation, and can be difficult to get it back.
How to improve listening with your brain?
Prepare for the conversation. If it’s a sales call, of course you want to have a call plan. But even for personal conversations, you can review your notes or refresh your memory for previous conversations, and have an intent for the dialogue. Put away whatever was on your mind up to that point and remind yourself to listen actively.
Get physically involved. Sometimes the mind takes cues from what the body is doing. Face the other person squarely if you’re face to face. If it’s on the phone, make sure you’re not positioned with a screen in front of your face. Use following skills. While this is not “thinking”, it will keep your focus locked onto the conversation.
Use your faster thinking time to your advantage. If the person is talking at length, use the extra processing bandwidth to summarize and repeat the message. Use that time to monitor your own listening behavior. Focus fully on what they’re saying, not what your response is going to be—you will have plenty of time for that when they’re done.
[1] Lyman Steil, Larry L. Barker, and Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening: Key to Your Success. In their book they call it the SIER model, but I believe the Storing component is just as important.
[1] Lyman Steil, Larry L. Barker, and Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening: Key to Your Success. In their book they call it the SIER model, but I believe the Storing component is just as important.
Lawrence Foster died on October 17th. You may not recognize the name; I certainly didn’t, but I knew who he was and what he did. Foster ran the PR department at Johnson & Johnson and crafted the strategy that set the gold standard for corporate communications in a crisis.
As a quick reminder, in 1982 seven people died in the Chicago area after taking Extra Strength Tylenol. It wasn’t a bad batch—someone was deliberately injecting cyanide into capsules and putting the packages back onto store shelves. (For my younger readers: we didn’t have tamper-resistant packages back then; they were invented in response to this incident.) Although it wasn’t the company’s fault, the publicity threatened to kill the brand.
As the New York Times obituary reports, Foster advised the J&J Chairman to: “…put consumer safety first, to respond to the media with alacrity and to be entirely honest.”
Let’s break it down:
Put consumer safety first: This is the most important part of the strategy. Foster did not see this as just a communications problem. The bigger picture was that seven people had died, and no one knew how many others would be at risk. The first priority was not “spinning” the news, it was saving lives. J&J showed its commitment by spending over $100 million to immediately pull over 30 million bottles of Tylenol off the shelves. The public saw them as sincerely caring about doing the right thing.
Respond to the media with alacrity: Foster knew you can run but you can’t hide, so he urged the company to run to the problem. When the news is bad, it’s a natural reaction to want to circle the wagons and try to avoid the hard questions. Generations of politicians and CEOs have learned that this is precisely the wrong approach. The more you try to hide, the harder the media will dig for the story, and when they find it, they will dictate the terms of the story.
Be entirely honest: The risk in responding quickly is that you don’t have all the facts, so even well-intentioned statements may look like prevarications when the complete picture emerges. Foster’s approach is worth quoting verbatim:
“This is the principle we’re going to follow. We’re going to tell them what we know, and we’re not going to tell them what we don’t know. We’ll tell them we don’t know, and we’ll get back to them when we do know.”
Any company, especially one that earns a living selling stuff that people put in their mouths, lives and dies on trust. When trust dies, no amount of corporate spin or advertising dollars can resurrect it. So, when trust is threatened, the only way to preserve it is to show you care, have the courage to face the problem, and be completely transparent.
Do you think we could use some of that in Washington today?
