by Alan Alda
I started again, earlier in the story, and muddled my way through a description of particles as the basic building blocks of matter, but I could see she still found it a little vague. Later, I asked Brian Greene, the physicist, how he would explain the notion of a particle. His description was homey. I wish I’d had it the night I’d come back from CERN. (“If you cut a loaf of bread in half, and then take one of the halves and cut that in half, and keep doing that, eventually you’ll get down to the smallest bit possible. That’s a particle.”)
So, knowing what they’re ready to hear is critical, and coming in too early or too late can be confusing. And, of course, having a clear, homey image like Brian’s helps the listener visualize it and remember it.
Sometimes, though, they don’t want an explanation at all.
If someone has a medical problem, do they want a detailed account of the facts (some do), or are they too vulnerable for that? Are they even able to hear the facts at that moment? Maybe they need presence more than knowledge.
Valeri Lantz-Gefroh, the director for improvisation at the Alda Center at Stony Brook, tells a story about this. Val is an accomplished actress with extraordinary teaching skills. I’ve watched her teaching workshops around the country. She’s clearheaded and runs her improv classes with a kind but firm hand. She doesn’t strike me as overly sentimental, but when she told me about an encounter between a doctor and a patient, she choked up.
“One of our medical students came and met me after one of our classes,” she said. “It was a late class and he stayed until eight o’clock at night just to tell me how important improv has been to him. And the exercise that really stuck with him is the mirror exercise. He told me about a woman he had met a month earlier. She was dying. They had just found out that she had metastatic lung cancer. She had about two weeks to live. This student was on the rounds with the internist, and he listened as the internist shared the news with her. But he told her in such a way that, the student felt, she really didn’t get it. She didn’t seem to understand what was going on. The student said, ‘I’d like to talk to her. Would that be all right?’ The internist gave him permission and left.
“The student sat next to her and held her hand. He explained to her slowly and simply what was going on. He didn’t use the word metastatic. He didn’t use the word malignancy. Even those words felt like too much for her. And for the first time the woman cried. The student told me that…”
Valeri paused here for a moment and said, “I’m going to cry, just talking about it.” After a moment, Val went on. “The med student said, ‘I cried too….’ And then—for the first time—the woman began asking questions. And he was able to answer them. He said, ‘It was the perfect mirror exercise. I had been leading, but then she took over and I followed. And, ultimately, what emerged was that I helped her understand death—and she helped me understand how to be a better doctor. It was exactly what the mirror exercise is about—that level of connection and active listening.’ ”
Our goal is not to make doctors cry, or to be overcome by the patients’ emotion. We certainly don’t want them to get trapped in “affective quicksand.” In this case, though, the med student was reacting to a sudden ability to connect richly with another person. He was moved by his own personal breakthrough.
Even though he had a strong emotional reaction to his patient, he was engaged in a subtle exercise of leading her from one state of thinking to another—something that can happen in radically different situations. Even, it seems, in business.
LEADERSHIP
I’m certainly not learned about business, but I think there are similarities between what we’ve seen as we’ve worked with doctors and scientists and the experience of successful leaders.
Bill Gates, for instance, has written that when we assess how well suited people are to their jobs, it matters that we think about how well they relate to others. “Do they have both the IQ and EQ to succeed?”
His friend Warren Buffett, who eventually learned some of these same lessons, had a surprisingly slow start. He said in an interview that in school he was “terrified” to speak in public and avoided classes that he knew required it. Finally, realizing he would have to speak if he was going to succeed in business, he took a Dale Carnegie course. “I gave them a hundred bucks and I got my little diploma.” It paid off in at least one way. While he was taking the course, he proposed to his wife. “So,” he says, “l really got my money’s worth there.”
Aside from the homespun humor, what struck me most about Buffett’s interview was that this once taciturn person could talk about communicating comfortably with 330,000 employees. He does it, in part, by getting right to the point. His messages to the CEOs of his companies are models of economical writing. “I don’t believe in two-hundred-page manuals,” he said, “because, you put out a two-hundred-page manual, and everybody’s looking for loopholes, basically.” Instead, every two years, “I write ’em a very simple letter. A page and a half.” In it, he reminds his managers that he and they all have plenty of money but not an ounce of reputation to spare. He cautions them to make business decisions that they wouldn’t mind seeing reflected on the front pages of newspapers.
He speaks plainly and is aware of the readers’ state of mind. He said he left a few things out of one of his reports to shareholders because “when I got to sixteen thousand words, I thought I might be losing them.”
I’m fascinated by how CEOs manage large companies, mainly because my experience is so slim. When I’ve directed movies, I’ve never had to manage more than two hundred people at a time, and they all knew their jobs, so they pretty much managed themselves. In production meetings I’d tell them well in advance what I needed from each department, and then I’d leave them alone to go off and do what they knew how to do.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy organizing things. On one shoot, for the movie Sweet Liberty, I had to reenact a battle scene from the Revolutionary War, with a hundred soldiers charging a line of another hundred soldiers. The sequence could have taken days to shoot, but we didn’t have that kind of time. I had to do some fancy organizing. I asked seven stunt men to train a hundred pairs of men in seven different kinds of hand-to-hand combat and gave them a week to learn these different routines. Then I placed them in the scene so that no encounter would be next to one just like it. It had the look of a chaotic battle, but had been rehearsed in miniature.
We rolled seven cameras, and instead of taking days to shoot, we had a battle scene in two hours. For years, I was prouder of how I had organized that scene than I was of the scene itself. But I had done something that was mainly logistical. I hadn’t needed to motivate people or rally them to a grand vision. And it was only two hundred people. It was a far cry from managing tens of thousands in a large corporation. How did CEOs do it on such a huge scale?
I was really curious, so when I met the man who headed one of these corporations, I asked him naïvely how he was able to manage 350,000 employees who were stationed all over the world. He regarded me with the kind of look you use if you’re trying to decide if someone is actually crazy or just stupid. Finally, he said, “Well, I have good lieutenants.” Oh, I thought, so it’s like how you manage an army. And then I remembered my brief time in the infantry, where if you didn’t do what you were told, you could be sent to peel potatoes, or locked up. Or shot. I wondered if you could actually make a profit with a business model like that. I was pretty sure there was more to it than that.
The experiences we were having in the workshops seemed to be pointing to the idea that while leadership is important, just as important is how leadership is communicated. On the one hand, you can command good performance from someone in exchange for not firing them. On the other hand, you might be able to ignite the desire in a person to perform well by tuning in to their state of mind. And, in fact, this has been shown by research to be the better way.
In 2001, Golnaz Sadri, Todd Weber, and William Gentry collected reports on 6,731 managers
from their bosses and subordinates. They wanted to know how much it matters if leaders express an understanding of the emotions of those working for them. Apparently, it matters a lot. They found that “leaders who are rated by their subordinates as engaging in behaviors that signal empathic emotion are perceived as better performers by their bosses.” In other words, around the time someone under you rates you as pretty empathic, your boss is beginning to notice that you’re getting better results from your team.
One day I found myself talking about this at lunch with the CEO of a large public company. I felt he must be regarded as a pretty good manager since he’s listed as one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country. I asked him what he thought about these two kinds of leadership: tough versus tuned in.
He told me he once worked under someone who was a very tough leader. As in, “Make a better presentation next time, or you’re out.” But in the company he runs now, he feels he gets better results if he starts by praising what they had been doing well and then urges them to bring their next presentation up to that level.
This is not just softening the blow; it’s keeping in mind what the other person is thinking and feeling. And it’s enlisting them in the effort to move them to their best. Instead of saying, “You’ve done a bad thing; don’t do it again,” he’s saying, “You’ve done really good things; do more.” The first gives them a vision of failure they somehow have to avoid, while the second gives them a model of success to live up to. The CEO I was having lunch with might not have realized it, but he was following the improv principle of Yes And. He was accepting what the other player was giving him and adding to it.
But, of course, it can’t be faked. Faking praise is really lying. I’ve seen it fail badly between directors and actors, especially when the director tells you to do that wonderful thing you did two takes ago—and you know very well you did no such thing. It’s too easy to spot the manipulation, and the person on the receiving end will probably be thinking, This guy is aware of what I’m feeling, all right, but only so he can use it to make me do what he wants. If we’re actually able to get inside someone’s head, it’s not a good idea to be guilty of breaking and entering.
There are times, of course, when the only thing you can do is deliver the bad news.
Some of my limited experience as a boss has included the unpleasant task of firing people who, it suddenly turned out, were wrong for the job—that remarkable transformation where someone you thought was perfect has turned into a werewolf.
They haven’t actually become something else, of course. They’re the same perfectly fine people they were months earlier. But with all my supposed sensitivity and mind-reading ability, I hadn’t picked up on who they really were when I hired them.
I could have avoided all the mind reading I needed in firing them humanely if I had been better at it when I was hiring them. Again, a deeper kind of listening would have helped.
More than once, I’ve found that in the first five or ten minutes of a job interview, the person applying for the position will tell me exactly who he or she is and what I can expect from them. They often don’t realize they’re laying it all out. Later, when I realize they really aren’t right for the job, it’s only then that I remember they had told me so. I just wasn’t listening.
They don’t frame it in a negative way, of course. Someone once proudly told me she was very, very good at paying attention to every single detail. It might have been a good idea for me to start asking myself a few questions, such as, Is this someone who will turn out to be late with every task because the details are just too inviting?
And it can be worse. As bad as getting the wrong person for the job is, getting the right person, but finding them incomprehensible, can be disastrous.
Someone once worked for me who handled a lot of my money. He seemed good at what he did, and the only problem was that when he talked to me I couldn’t understand anything he said. He would go on at great length explaining depletion deductions and tax-deferred exchanges in complete double-talk. These terms started out in double-talk. How he made them worse I couldn’t fathom. Somehow, I let this go on for a long time—well, actually for years—and then I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “we’re going to have to part ways.”
“Why?”
“Because we have a communication problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t understand you.”
“In what way?”
“Speaking. I can’t understand you when you speak.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we have a communication problem.”
I was getting dizzy.
I was finally reduced to saying something not quite true, like “It’s not you, it’s me.” And he asked me what that meant.
CHAPTER 10
Listening, from the Boardroom to the Bedroom
Almost all of us have some kind of communication problem that we don’t know we have.
A large company realizes it’s vulnerable to an attack by hackers. But the biggest hole in this company’s firewall might be the gap in their own internal communication—a gap that often goes unnoticed.
Over the years, the management of the company has made minor, stopgap adjustments to their security code. But now the board of directors calls in their expert on information technology (the IT person) and asks for a full report.
She gives them the startling news that their network is wide open to attack. She tells them why, and what to do about it.
The board is listening intently for the bottom-line implications. Instead, the security officer carefully lays out the technical dimensions of the vulnerability. The board members don’t really understand what she’s talking about, so they decide to table the issue until the problem can be studied further.
Jay Leek, the chief information security officer at Blackstone Group, in an interview with the New York Times, identified the problem this way: Security people are steeped in technical knowledge—the knowledge they need to do their jobs—but they aren’t tuning in to what the board members are listening for, or hearing. As Mr. Leek says, IT departments “have made what we do very complicated, very technical. We haven’t been the most articulate communicating upward to a board…in such a way they can wrap their heads around the problem.” He seems aware that good communication is the responsibility of the person delivering the information, not the person receiving it. Without understanding that, the sense of urgency can get lost in the weeds of technical expertise.
It’s another example of how too much information can be a serious roadblock. At the Center for Communicating Science, we teach scientists that it’s not necessary to tell the audience everything you know in one gulp. Sometimes, telling us just enough to make us want to know more is exactly the right amount. We gag on force-feeding. We’re uncomfortable feeling like geese getting our livers fattened.
In the hacking problem above, the IT people weren’t fully aware of the members of the board. They weren’t speaking to what was actually in the board members’ heads, but what was in their own heads—the purely technical dimensions of the problem.
Unless the people they’re reporting to authorize improvements in the IT system, the work won’t get done, and as Leek says, “It’s people’s nature where if they don’t understand something, they tend to say, ‘No.’ ” When saying no leads to a security breach, it doesn’t hurt just the company, of course; it can hurt you and me when, later, our credit cards get hacked.
On the other hand, I was having lunch one day with a husband-and-wife team who help IT engineers communicate with businesses and government agencies, and they told me that sometimes it works the other way around. Sometimes they have to explain to the IT engineers what the CEO is trying to say. Maybe we should be grateful that anything at all gets done.
I take all this personally because I do happen to be an expert in one area of business, and that’s as a customer.
A
s a customer, I get communications from corporations all day long. Almost everything I touch has advertising on it, but an even stronger message is delivered when I actually buy something. Every time I open a package, the company that made it is communicating with me. When I can’t open a hard plastic “clamshell” container with scissors or a knife, or even a hammer, I wonder, Has the president of the company ever personally tried to open this thing?
I’m not alone in using a new product with bandaged fingers. A survey of two thousand people in England found that four out of ten people have been injured opening packages. In one case, the customer couldn’t get into the box without cutting the plastic ties that held the new purchase in place—which was really hard to do because the new purchase was a pair of scissors.
Who’s communicating with whom here? Retail chains want their suppliers to make it harder for thieves to open packages in stores. The manufacturers want their goods wrapped so securely they won’t be damaged in international travel. Meanwhile, nobody seems to be thinking about my fingers. Will I be buying this thing a second time? Maybe not. If we could, 40 percent of us would choose, instead, to buy something similar, but wrapped in a package we can actually open.
But this is a side dish to the main course.
SELLING
The more obvious way business communicates with the rest of us, and with itself, is through selling. Selling, of course, is not confined to business. It probably predates business. There’s a form of selling going on all the time among humans. Deciding on a family vacation is a sales job when one person’s idea of the perfect vacation is backpacking through a majestic national park and another thinks it’s careening through a wet theme park. But selling is not a dirty word, even though I once thought it was.
When I was young, I was hampered by the idea that selling was an exercise in which you bent someone to your will through manipulation and by not telling them what they needed to know to make an informed decision. I was uncomfortable with the whole process. This was not good, because as a young actor I was at one point trying to support my family by selling mutual funds. For quite a while, the only person I was able to sell any shares to was myself. I could hardly afford them, which was why I needed the job in the first place. But it seemed important to display my confidence in the fund. Still, loaded as I was with sincerity, I went into every meeting with the idea that the prospect had something I needed (money) and I had a sales pitch I could use to pry it out of them. This was getting me nowhere. While I was speaking to my prospect, I was thinking about what I had to tell them and not what they were hearing, thinking, and feeling. I was focused on myself, not on them.