Celine’s knowledge, or rather, her perception of her knowledge about Piers’s position on the market competition could have helped her. Instead, it hindered her. The danger with prior knowledge about a person or a position is that we can succumb to confirmation bias. In social psychology, confirmation bias is recognized as a robust tendency for a person to look for, select, interpret, favor, and recall information in such a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs and underweighs disconfirming evidence.7 Researchers at the University of Missouri examined confirmation bias in a study of 142 tax professionals.8 Participants tended to focus on information in line with their earlier recommendations to a client, even when the recommendation conflicted with the client’s subsequent position. Another study, using data from an experiment in South Korea, examined how information from virtual communities, such as stock message boards, influenced investors’ trading decisions and investment performance.9 The study looked at 502 investor responses and found that in processing information from the message boards, investors exhibited confirmation bias. Investors used these boards to seek information that confirmed their prior beliefs. Furthermore, those investors who exhibited stronger confirmation bias demonstrated greater overconfidence. They had higher expectations about how they would perform and traded more frequently, but actually obtained lower returns on their investments.
We are drawn toward information that confirms what we already know. In a world where we are bombarded with new information daily, confirmation bias can serve as an automanagement technique to help us get through all the novel information and make decisions. We have to choose to recognize the potential for confirmation bias and, while drawing on our prior knowledge and understanding, be intentional about asking questions to explore changes in others’ thinking and circumstances. We need to choose to attend to cues that disconfirm our existing beliefs about others, their situation, the market, the organization, etc. Such changes may be broader than our particular topic of engagement, but these could be influencing the decision-making of that person. Celine didn’t connect with Piers as well as she might have because she wasn’t considering what might have changed in his thinking since their last meeting.
So the first reason we don’t act on the unknown is that we fail to recognize it. We can hold a subconscious assumption that we do know what’s going on with the person we’re dealing with, that their thoughts and feelings are static. We know where things were before, it seems as if all is on the same track, and surely in response to our quick, “How are you?” they would say if things had changed. We have a past reference point and, unless a red flag appears, keep using that as the basis for our interactions. Sometimes after a fleeting, “How are things going?” people will open up and proactively share new information. But often, they don’t. Not necessarily because they don’t want to or can’t (although both could be the case), but usually because they fail to recognize the new information themselves. In Piers’s case, his changing views about the market situation resulted from an industry conference he had attended a month before his meeting with Celine and was old news to him. He didn’t particularly remember previously sharing his take on things with Celine, so he didn’t think to share his modified views now. Others also often don’t share their changes in perspective because they seem outside the scope of the immediate discussion.
2. A Life of 30-Minute Windows
Another reason we don’t engage in enough discovery is that we simply lack the time. Or rather, we find it, understandably, difficult to prioritize. Often we barely have enough time to get through the agenda points for the meeting at hand. Discussing wider topics is a luxury few of us afford ourselves in a demanding working day. Exploring changes in people’s thinking and situations is time-consuming and hard to prioritize when we’re all very busy. We can have a niggling feeling that we should be taking more time to explore what’s going on with them, but find it hard to carve out a window in our day for it. Most people are aware that “connection conversations” need to happen at the right time and place. It’s not as though we’re about to yell from our desk to theirs across the busy open-plan office, “So, what’s really going on with you? How are you feeling about how the company’s changes will affect you?” Unless a major red flag appears, we often just push the niggling to the back of our minds. While we need to get through our to-do list for the day (more on managing this in chapter 5), it can be at the expense of connecting, and as a result, we might miss a window for significant, timely impact.
We also may just miss the opportunity because of the culture and structures within which we work. One head of human resources for a large multinational company told me that she was considering implementing a half-hour-meeting rule across the whole organization—globally. It sounded to me like a surefire way to kill off much potential for powerful connections and collaboration. I understood the driver: too many meetings, taking too long, with the wrong people in them, or dominated by two people having a lengthy conversation that really should be taken off-line. But surely the answer is to equip people to have good meetings, not to regulate their behavior with a stick. We can all easily succumb to meeting habits that hold us back from genuine connection. I’ve noticed an increasingly common tendency among professionals across industries and geographies to automatically schedule half-hour meetings. In the rush of daily working life, we may plow through meetings and tick off agenda points at a rapid rate, but this can come at the cost of connection and collaboration. Sometimes half an hour is all that’s needed—sometimes less. But if we consistently cap meetings at a half hour, we’ll likely be missing some opportunities that may bring greater benefit than just getting through the sheer volume of work.
3. The Trap of Expertise
The third, and perhaps most dangerous, reason we don’t consistently and effectively explore areas of the unknown is our familiarity and comfort with our own expertise. We are “safe” inside conversations within the realm of what we know.
Mehira has spent years developing her expertise as a financial consultant. She is carving out a space and name for herself at her firm, and has recently been promoted to lead a small team. She is hoping to soon be the primary consultant on large client accounts. But one thing is holding her back: her expertise. Not her lack of it, but rather putting all her confidence in it. Mehira is excellent at what she does. She’s confident talking with clients about her knowledge areas—discussing challenges, debating options, and giving them advice. But she doesn’t ask questions about the clients’ wider business. She’s not particularly conscious of it, but she stays within her circle of expertise out of fear and uncertainty of what lies outside of that circle. She’s not entirely sure what to ask. Even if she did ask sensible questions, what if the client gave answers that she didn’t fully understand? Worse still, what if they asked her questions she didn’t know the answers to? Mehira prides herself on her expertise and ability to help her clients. She values the trust they have in her knowledge and skills. If she steps outside her circle of expertise, she may trip over her own feet and lose some of that trust and value in her clients’ minds. So while she offers a polite, “How are things going?” she doesn’t drive the conversation to broader issues. Perhaps the most challenging obstacle to connecting to the degree that we could is when we succumb to the trap of our own expertise.
Space in the Middle
Mehira is not alone. Most of us cover “corridor conversation”—polite small talk—as we walk through the reception area, from the elevator to the meeting room. Then, once we enter the room and make sure everyone is settled and comfortable, we go—bang!—straight into the meeting agenda, which usually addresses key, specific points. We wrap up at the end and go back into closing small talk. We miss out on what I call the “space in the middle,” where we find out what is actually driving the other person’s thinking and decision-making. It’s where we understand the real challenges they’re facing and where unexplored mutual opportunities lie. This space l
ies between the two ends of our conversation spectrum—small talk at one end and specific agenda points at the other. But rather than spend time in the space in the middle, we jump from one end of the spectrum to the other out of habit and possibly because, like Mehira, we feel comfortable and confident in that space.
Yet connection for authentic gravitas demands courage and vulnerability. We have to be bold in asking open questions about the goals, challenges, and wider contexts of the people we’re with. It requires us to follow through on conversational cues down a route to different business areas outside of our comfort zone, rather than plow on with our planned conversation. Being vulnerable doesn’t just mean we are prepared to share our deepest challenges and fears with others. We also need courage to intentionally facilitate a line of questioning that will open up the possibility that we don’t look like the expert; that we may even look uninformed. But it’s our only route to a deeper understanding of the other and therefore to the possibility of real connection. We have to courageously believe that genuine interest wins out over posturing.
My least favorite topic to teach in executive education programs is “Asking Questions.” It seems so obvious, but for the three reasons I outlined above, we don’t always live up to our questioning potential. And the people who do—who ask great questions, in the right way, at the right time—have greater potential for gravitas.
Even the most senior executives admit that it’s easy to slip into only using directed or narrow questions. They find it useful to spend a few minutes thinking through powerful open questions. Here are some examples of questions that could help increase understanding and build connection.
What are you most excited about right now?
What’s your biggest concern?
What matters most to you at the moment?
If there was one thing you could change today, what would it be?
What is your gut instinct telling you about this situation?
How do you feel about what’s happening?
What is the main thing stopping you from making progress?
What are the forces at play in this issue?
I’m not suggesting you have to use my list of questions. Often my Aussie way of framing things isn’t quite right for my British clients, so they rephrase my suggestions, and you should tailor your questions to sound like you. There’s an endless list of questions you can ask. Mehira came up with her own list of questions with which she felt comfortable enough (although for her, she still required boldness to ask them). Her list (and her courage to use it) was a turning point in having more “space in the middle” conversations and fostering greater connections with clients. How and what we ask are linked to our ability to build authentic gravitas. So, too, of course, is the way we respond to questions.
SILENT MESSAGES OF VALUE
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re just annoying? (I assume I’m not the only one who feels this way at times.) You might ask someone a question and they respond with a curt tone. You’re left wondering if you’ve said or done something wrong. I think we all know that feeling. Sometimes we also unintentionally send those messages to others, detracting from our ability to have a significant, positive impact on people around us and our wider context. The danger is that if someone does this regularly, particularly if they are in a position of leadership, others typically have one of two responses. They can feel anxious and walk on eggshells in that person’s company—which may create a sense of power, but certainly does not build the relational ease that comes with authentic gravitas. In fact, it can have the effect of adverse gravitas by shutting others down. Alternatively, others may avoid dealing with that person at all and try to go around them, so they end up out of the loop and increasingly relationally detached. People who have authentic gravitas don’t rush through interactions. They create a sense of ease around them. Not because they’re not busy, but because they’ve learned to quickly still themselves amid the busyness of a day, even just for a moment, to show that they value others in the way they interact with them.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study looking at how people’s brains reacted in response to a male walking toward them silently with a happy or angry facial expression.10 They found that several brain regions, including the amygdala (known to be involved in the viewing and interpretation of emotional expressions), showed greater fMRI activation in response to the angry man compared to the happy man. The researchers note that as humans, we have a need to assess one another’s intentions during every social situation, and that facial expressions provide us with cues to help us in these assessments of others’ intentions, through associations with emotion, the likelihood of affiliation, and personality.
We read the facial expressions of others and from that interpret their emotions and their intention toward us. Of course, cultural differences play a role in our interpretations. Recent studies, for example, highlight variations in the extent to which we attend to nonverbal cues, and the ways in which we integrate information from a variety of senses (face and voice).11, 12 But across all cultures, we read facial expressions and body language and then make assumptions based on our interpretations. We can interpret value—the extent to which another person values us. Equally, we all have the ability to send silent messages of value to others. Without any words, we can say, “I value you. In my mind, you have value.” This creates an environment where that person is more likely to feel they can be vulnerable. Having gravitas means others trust us, and trust requires a willingness to be vulnerable. We are able to send these messages regardless of our place in the hierarchy. This doesn’t mean we always agree with the other person—far from it. But we can show value and constructively disagree. We can also do this through the reality of busy days.
People with authentic gravitas are typically efficient and of course have moments of intense time pressure, but still have an ease with others that sends the message, “I have time for you.” The question, then, is how to send the unspoken message that you have time for someone when the truth is you feel like you don’t.
When a colleague would walk into Michael’s office and ask, “Do you have a second?” his automatic response would be yes. Thinking he was doing the right thing with an open-door policy and a positive response, this telecommunications executive was surprised to learn from feedback that he often came across as unapproachable. People never felt certain of his regard for them. Michael would say yes, even when he didn’t really have a minute. And of course when they’re asking, “Do you have a second?” or “Do you have a minute?” people never really mean a second or a minute. They mean three minutes, or ten minutes, or “time for a decent chat about something important to me.” He would often glance at his screen while the other person was speaking, or would be curt in his response, wanting to get back to his work. What was his impact on others? It certainly wasn’t one of positive, significant difference.
Japanese researchers conducted a study of over two hundred employees at a brewing company in the Kansai region of Japan. They assessed the impact on subordinates of their supervisors’ active listening (listening and responding to another person in a way that improves mutual understanding, empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard).13 The researchers found that people whose supervisors demonstrated more active listening reported a more favorable psychological stress reaction than those who worked under supervisors with lower active listening. Of the many potential unintentional impacts, these findings suggest that active listening by a supervisor (or lack of it) has an effect on employees’ psychological stress. For Michael, his inability to be fully attentive to other people gave them the impression of self-importance rather than authentic gravitas.
Michael needed to realize one thing: it is better to say no than to give halfhearted attention. People feel more valued when you say no than when you throw out a fake yes, a
s long as the no is followed up with scheduling an actual time when you can talk. Here are some of the ways Michael now responds when the many people around him ask for his time:
“Yes, I have about three minutes now, or we can have a longer conversation later today at two p.m.”
“I’ve got a tight deadline but I certainly do want to discuss this. I’m free in the afternoon—when suits you?”
“Yes, I’ve got ten minutes—will that work?”
“I’m just in the middle of something, so later would be better, but if it’s urgent or it’s holding you up, then let’s chat now.”
And when he does meet, he is focused 100 percent on the person who asked to speak with him. He’s present. It sounds simple, but we all slip into saying yes when we really should have said no or been explicit with the boundaries of our yes. This one change had a huge impact on Michael’s authentic gravitas, and subsequent feedback suggests he is now not only respected but also trusted.
When Others Gravitate toward You
One reason for Michael to be mindful of the messages he sends is that value is often reciprocated. Think of someone you know personally and most value in your professional life. This is likely to be someone who makes you feel valued and respected. We either move toward or away from people. When we sense that people don’t value us, we can experience a subconscious “threat” response and move away from them. In a study published in the journal Neuron, Japanese researchers described their fMRI experiments relating to monetary and social rewards.14 They found that acquiring a good reputation robustly activated areas of the brain associated with rewards, overlapping with areas known to be activated by monetary rewards. How others perceive our attitude toward them can have a direct and powerful impact on them. If they don’t think that we value them, they can experience this psychologically as a threat, leading them to move away from us, psychologically or practically. But professionals with gravitas lead in a way that means others psychologically and practically gravitate toward them.
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