Supercommunicators Quotes

If there was one thing everyone knew about Felix Sigala, it was that he was easy to talk to. Exceptionally easy. […]

That’s why the scientists had sought him out.

These were lessons that Felix would share with younger agents when they asked for advice: Never pretend you’re anything other than a cop. Never manipulate or threaten. Ask lots of questions, and, when someone becomes emotional, cry or laugh or complain or celebrate with them. But what ultimately made him so good at his job was a bit of a mystery, even to his colleagues.

This book was born, in part, from my own failures at communicating. A few years ago, I was asked to help manage a relatively complex work project. I had never been a manager before—but I had worked for plenty of bosses. Plus, I had a fancy MBA from Harvard Business School and, as a journalist, communicated as a profession! How hard could it be?

Very hard, it turned out.

Why was I struggling to connect with—and hear—the people who mattered most?

I have a feeling I’m not alone in this confusion. We’ve all failed, at times, to listen to our friends and colleagues, to appreciate what they are trying to tell us—to hear what they’re saying. And we’ve all failed to speak so we can be understood.

Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.

“I wasn’t trying to be manipulative[.]”

When Lawler managed to connect with Yasmin at dinner, it was more luck than anything else. Afterward, he would spend years trying to repeat that success and failing, until he had polished his skills and understood how to make authentic connections.

The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?

Unless we know what kind of discussion we’re hoping for—and what type of discussion our companions want—we’re at a disadvantage. As the last chapter explained, we might want to discuss practicalities while our partner wants to share their feelings. We might want to gossip while they want to make plans. If we’re not having the same kind of conversation, we’re unlikely to connect.

So the first goal in a learning conversation is identifying what kind of dialogue we’re seeking—and then looking for clues about what the other parties want.

W]ithin every conversation there is a quiet negotiation, where the prize is not winning, but rather determining what everyone wants, so that something meaningful can occur.

If they acquit Reed, Boly tells the room, they’re sending a message to the police and the district attorney: Focus on the real criminals. Focus on keeping the public genuinely protected. By finding Reed innocent, they’re actually helping public safety. It’s a creative take on the situation, for sure, but he’s applying reason, comparing potential drawbacks with expected gains. He’s using practical, analytical logic to add new options to the conversation. He’s aligning with Karl, and arguing that if they care about stopping crime, the rational choice is letting Reed go free.

[M]atching isn’t mimicry; it’s not simply looking concerned and repeating back what others have said.

Rather, matching is understanding someone’s mindset—what kind of logic they find persuasive, what tone and approach makes sense to them—and then speaking their language. And it requires explaining clearly how we, ourselves, are thinking and making choices, so that others can match us in return.

People tell us what they want to discuss through their non sequiturs, asides, and sudden shifts—or, put differently, through the experiments they conduct. If someone asks the same question in different ways, or if they abruptly introduce a new subject, it’s a sign they want to add something to the table and we’d be wise to let them proceed.

The researchers assumed the best approach was to start with shallow, safe questions (“Whom would you want as a dinner guest?”) and then slowly get to the deeper stuff. “It felt weird to ask people to start baring their souls right away,” Melinat said. “So we decided to start simple.”

“One reason women are penalized for talking about emotions is because it plays into stereotypes,” said Madeline Heilman, a professor of psychology at NYU who studies gender and bias. Humans tend to be cognitively lazy: We rely on stereotypes and assumptions because they let us make judgments without thinking too hard. “So when a woman talks about her emotions, it can be damaging because it gives listeners permission to assume a stereotype—women are overly emotional—is true.”

Katie, the jaded neighbor, was axed. So was Gilda, the sexually adventurous Star Trek fan. Instead, they would introduce a new character: Penny, a friendly aspiring actress who is waitressing while waiting to be discovered. “We went the other direction and made Penny light and bubbly,” Prady told me. “Someone who, even though she’s not book smart, is smart about people.”

“It shook me to hear everyone’s stories like that […] It made me feel naïve, like I had just assumed all gun owners were the same angry white guys I saw at rallies.”

During any conflict—a workplace debate, an online disagreement—it’s natural to crave control. And sometimes that carving pushes us to want to control the most obvious target: The person we’re arguing with. If we can just force them to listen, they’ll finally hear what we’re saying. If we can force them to see things from our point of view, they’ll agree we’re right. The fact is, though, that approach almost never works. Trying to force someone to listen, or see our side, only inflames the battle.

Instead, it is far better to harness our craving for control so that we’re working together, cooperating to find ways to lower the temperature and make the fight smaller. Often, that cooperation spills into other parts of our dialogue, until we find ourselves looking at solutions, side by side.

Godfrey, the former cop, sent a private message to Jeffcoat, saying he had noticed she kept getting shouted down in online chats. He wanted to help, and so they hatched a plan.

Emotional reciprocity doesn’t come from simply describing our own feelings, but, rather, providing “empathetic support.” Reciprocity is nuanced. If someone reveals they’ve gotten a cancer diagnosis, we shouldn’t reciprocate by talking about our own aches and pains. That’s not support—it’s an attempt to turn the spotlight on ourselves.

But if we say, “I know how scary that is. Tell me what you’re feeling,” we show we empathize and are trying to understand.

The social justice movements and tragic examples of violence of the past decade have made it painfully clear that inequality and prejudice touch many lives—and some more than others. Talking about our differences is important if we are to begin to move beyond these blights.

“So I went to one of the senior physicians, and I asked him, what should I say to patients who refuse vaccines? […] And he said, just tell them: I’m the doctor and I know better than you.”

The last chapter looked at a hard conversation—the debate over guns—where people were divided by ideologies and politics. But there is another, different kind of division that can make it equally difficult for people to connect. This kind of division stems from our social identities, how society sees us and how we see ourselves as social creatures.

The issue at Netflix, however, was that the firm’s culture was designed to push people to speak and act quickly, often before ideas were completely thought out. The company’s culture deck proclaimed that the “goal is to be Big and Fast and Flexible,” and “as we grow, minimize rules.” Employees were encouraged to be unconstrained and unstructured, to challenge anything and everything. “You may have heard preventing error is cheaper than fixing it . . . but not so in creative environments,” the culture deck decreed.

[…]

But when it came to the toughest, most sensitive topics—including prejudice and bias—that kind of unconstrained, chaotic culture could be disastrous.

“We now have robust evidence indicating that being socially connected has a powerful influence on longevity, such that having more and better relationships is associated with protection and, conversely, that having fewer and poorer relationships is associated with risk,” reads one paper published in 2018 in the Annual Review of Psychology.