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In part 1 of this series on Lean Communication for Leaders, I talked about the ethos trap, which is the tendency of people in powerful positions to rely on the big stick of their title and authority to influence others, and less on convincing others through the logic of their idea. In short, leaders get lazy.
But laziness is easy to overcome as long as you care about getting the job done right. If you truly care about putting together the best possible message for your followers to hear, you already know how to do it—you’ve done it countless times in your career, or you would not have risen to the level you have. As long as you care about what your followers think, you can avoid the ethos trap.
But, what if you stop caring about what others think? What if you start seeing others more as tools to exploit to get your way? It’s a form of “altitude sickness” called empathy erosion, and unfortunately it’s a condition that is likely to become worse the higher you go.
Let’s first remind ourselves how important empathy is in communication. It’s so important that it’s the first rule of lean communication: I call it outside-in thinking. That’s because the number one imperative of communication is to add value, and only the recipient defines value. That means that you must be able to take the other person’s perspective on every issue, and communicate in a way that they are most likely to understand, believe and accept. Two sides can communicate much more effectively—and pleasantly—when each side strives to meet the other more than halfway by seeing things from their point of view.
In leadership terms, outside-in thinking is about getting followers to do what you want for their own reasons. As Dwight Eisenhower said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”
How Leadership Can Erode Empathy
Leaders should be able to effortlessly think outside-in—it should actually be easier for you as a leader, because after all you’ve been in their shoes but they haven’t been in yours.
But what happens in reality to perspective taking as you gain power? Unfortunately, a lot of evidence suggests that you’re less likely to take others’ perspectives into account as you become (or at least think you become) more important. In his book, The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner says, “When we experience absolute power, our attention shifts to our own interests and desires, thus diminishing our capacity for empathy—understanding what others feel and think.” (p. 101)
Keltner refers to absolute power, but Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky has demonstrated that people who are primed to feel powerful even for just a short time, show diminished empathy in three ways.
- When asked to write the letter “E” on their foreheads, they are almost three times as likely to write it so that it appears backwards to an observer. In their own minds, they see it correctly from their own perspective, and they fail to take into account how it looks to others.
- They’re more likely to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, which means that when you know something, you assume that others do as well, so you leave out important details and context to help them understand—and probably get impatient when others don’t get it.
- When shown photos of people expressing various emotions, they become less accurate at reading them.
Galinsky summarizes by saying: “…power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how other people see, think, and feel.”
And what could be less conducive to outside-in thinking than feelings of entitlement? Here’s more evidence: In another study, researchers observed a four way stop sign, and counted the number of times a driver cut someone else off by going before their turn. They found that drivers of expensive cars cut off people 30% of the time, four times as often as drivers of less expensive cars.
In another experiment, college students of different socio-economic backgrounds were brought in for a study, and afterwards they saw a jar filled with candies. They were told the candies were for young children involved in another study down the hall, but they could have some if they wanted. The richer students took twice as much candy as the poorer ones.
Finally, there’s the additional problem that Heidi Grant Halvorson, in her book No One Understands You, tells us that people in power tend to view others more instrumentally: how can they make use of them? You see them less as a person and more as a tool. You can even measure the erosion of empathy. There is a phenomenon called motor resonance, which simply means that when we observe someone else doing an activity, the same areas that are firing in their brains during the activity are firing in ours. We feel them, and it’s what helps us imagine things from their perspective. But those with more power showed diminished motor resonance in in MRI scans of their brains. They do think differently! As Halvorson says: “It’s not so much that they think they are better than you as it is that they simply do not think about you at all.”
Why does it matter?
If you step back and look at the problem practically and non-judgmentally, is it really such a bad thing if leaders are less empathetic? There are times when the job demands less empathy; sometimes you have to make hard decisions for the greater good and if you tore yourself up about each person it’s going to affect, it would probably paralyze you. Eisenhower knew that thousands of those troops he led would not survive executing his orders—but he had to issue his orders anyway.
And you have so many important tasks on your plate that it’s tempting to put efficiency and speed over relationships. You just don’t have the time, and if you don’t get it done, they’ll find someone who can.
But there’s the paradox: the fact that you don’t have enough time to devote to thinking about the people side is exactly why you need to take the time to think about the people side: no one can do everything by themselves. They have to trust others to do things, and they need for them to give their best efforts. Who will give their best efforts for someone they don’t think cares about them? When someone does something because they have to, they will generally do exactly what they’re told—and not a bit more. When they do it because they want to, they do it for pride, for meaning, for each other—maybe even for you as a leader whom they respect and admire. (If they respect and admire you, that is…)
So, think of empathy as an investment in long-term leadership effectiveness.
The good news about empathy erosion
But wait, there’s good news in all of this. There’s evidence that the condition is not incurable.
Other research shows that when leaders are reminded that the goal requires them to see others’ individual differences, they can actually do it more effectively than the less powerful—so maybe their empathy isn’t eroding—it’s simply being put aside for most of their tasks.
So, the simple cure is to accept that empathy is a critical tool in your leadership toolbox, and to remind yourself that it’s not something you “have” or “don’t have”; it’s a skill that you can and must cultivate. As a leader, you have countless opportunities to strengthen and demonstrate your empathy—as long as you make it a priority.
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As part of my research into my book on Lean Communication, I have been interviewing CEOs to get their perspectives on the general quality of communication they receive from their subordinates, and I’ve received excellent ideas and suggestions to pass on to my principal intended readers. But almost invariably the leaders I’ve spoken to have reflected on what they need to do to improve their own communication, and that has caused me to think about adding a special chapter on lean communication just for leaders.
If you’ve risen to a high level of leadership within your organization, you’re probably already a good communicator, even if you haven’t been formally exposed to Lean Communication. That’s the good news.
But the bad news is that as you rise you need to raise your communication to an even higher level, while at the same time you’ve got two factors working against you to erode whatever skill you have developed.
You need to raise your communication for the simple reason that your position gives you greater reach and influence, which means that every word you utter or write carries more value or creates more waste. You speak to more people about more consequential topics than ever before, and they listen more carefully and rely more heavily on what you say. That places a heavier onus on you to get it right without getting in their way or wasting their time. The higher you go, the more critical it becomes to be a lean communicator.
Unfortunately, just as it becomes more important to raise your game, you run into two natural human tendencies that can weaken your skill. To put it bluntly, you get lazy and you care less about what others think. Those are pretty tough words, so I’ll explain the first in this article and the second in the next.
What do I mean by “getting lazy”? Think about things that once came easy to you that you that you’d be hard-pressed to do well now: maybe remembering phone numbers; doing mental math; driving a stick shift; reading a map; baking a cake from scratch. As we find newer and easier ways of achieving our goals, of course it makes sense to stop using the old skills, and it doesn’t cause any harm—until we need them.
What does this have to do with leadership communication? Quite simply, the higher you go, communication seems to get easier, because people are more likely to listen carefully while you speak, laugh at your jokes, ask your advice, and do what you suggest.
Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer recently wrote:
“A colleague of mine who teaches at Duke University recently told me about a speech he attended on campus by the CEO of a company that is best left unnamed here. It turned out to be a terrible speech — riddled with platitudes, internal inconsistencies, and false facts. On his way out the door, my friend overheard two students discussing what they’d just heard.
“He’s incredibly rich,” one of them said. “He must be smart.”
That CEO gave a terrible speech, but paid no price for it. Do you think he’s going to work hard for his next one? Rich people, famous people, people with impressive titles: they all get a pass.
I personally see the trend with authors I admire. Their early work is excellent—it’s what gets them noticed and helps them become best-sellers. I buy the next book they write and maybe the next after that. Almost invariably, though, they seem to reach a stage when they mail it in, as if their name alone is enough to sell books. (When the author’s name on the book jacket is larger than the title, that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve reached that stage.)
Beware the Ethos Trap
I call it the ethos trap. As Aristotle taught us, there are three means of persuading others: logos (logic), pathos (emotion) and ethos, (personal credibility). Aristotle told us that ethos is the most important, which makes sense because as listeners we can’t help but be swayed by our perception—mostly rapid and unconscious—of the speaker’s trustworthiness. We decide to trust or not trust rapidly and unconsciously and only afterwards justify our reasons for doing so.
One of the most important signals we pay attention to is the speaker’s title or position, because we are also hard-wired to pay attention to relative status and defer to those of higher status. When the speaker does not have the automatic credibility that comes from their title, they know they have to work hard to gain credibility and trust, so they take pains to gather data to back up their claims, think carefully about the logic, and present it in terms of what the listener will most care about. In short, they prepare. But preparation takes time and effort, and if you’re a leader with a lot more important issues on your plate, it makes sense, doesn’t it, to save either one if you can?
Be honest: if people took everything you said at face value, would you take the time and effort to gather evidence to support what you know to be true? If people are prepared to do what you say without question, how much time would you devote to explaining your reasons, or crafting your message for maximum impact?
When a tool works for you every time, you use it more and stop using others. When “because I said so” gets the compliance you want, why rely on logos? Why make the effort to carefully prepare your case, to anticipate objections, to polish your prose, to weigh your words before you speak?
How to avoid the ethos trap
It takes a lot of self-awareness, discipline and humility to avoid falling into the ethos trap, but a little reminder can go a long way. You can’t hire a slave to whisper in your ear, “Remember you are mortal”, as Roman generals did when they were honored by a triumph after a major victory, so you need to remind yourself.
Fortunately, there’s a reasonably simple fix, as long as you remember to think about it. Researchers have shown how easy it is to induce feelings of greater or lesser power in their test subjects, and what works for them can work for you too. Any time you’re preparing for an important meeting with subordinates, you can prime your mind with a little humility in some easy ways. You can think of a time when you felt powerless; think of someone more powerful than yourself, and you can imagine that you have to convince them; prepare as if you’re presenting to your boss, and everybody has a boss, even if it’s the Board or Wall Street analysts.
In my next article of this series, I will explain why, even as your skills tend to get rusty, you fall into the second trap of leadership communication and you care less about what others think.
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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.
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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.
