Supercommunicators, page 19
Second, try to ensure everyone is on equal footing. Don’t offer unsolicited advice or trumpet your wealth or connections. Seek out topics where everyone has some experience and knowledge, or everyone is a novice. Encourage the quiet to speak and the talkative to listen, so everyone is participating.
Finally, look for social similarities that already exist. We do this naturally when we meet someone new and start searching for people we know in common. But it is important to take those connections a step further and make our commonalities more salient. Our similarities become powerful when they are rooted in something meaningful: We may both be friends with Jim, but that’s not much of a connection—until we start talking about what his friendship means to us, how Jim is an important part of both our lives. We may all be Lakers fans, but that only becomes powerful when we share what it felt like, for each of us, to go to games with our parents and watch Magic score, how we share the memory of that thrill.
Social dialogues—Who Are We? conversations—are gateways to deeper understanding and more meaningful connections. But we need to allow these discussions to become deep, to evoke our many identities and express our shared experiences and beliefs. The Who Are We? conversation is powerful not only because we bond over what we have in common, but because it lets us share who we really are.
ADDRESSING THE COVID CONUNDRUM
By the spring of 2021, Jay Rosenbloom was frantic. COVID had already killed more than two million people globally, and had pushed billions more into lockdowns. Inoculation campaigns had begun, but Rosenbloom was convinced they would fall short of their goals. “Lots of experts were saying, well, if we just educate people that the vaccines are safe, if we give them the data, they’ll come around,” he told me. “But anyone who’s worked with these patients knows that won’t work. They already have lots of data! They’ve spent hours doing online research! You’re not going to convince them they’re wrong.”
Rosenbloom had started volunteering with a group named Boost Oregon to search for new approaches. Hundreds of similar groups had sprung up around the planet, a loose network of physicians and social scientists focused on persuading people to get the shot. Many of these groups had already spent years studying vaccine hesitancy and had concluded that the most effective approach was something known as motivational interviewing, a method originally developed in the 1980s to help problem drinkers. In motivational interviewing, a 2012 paper explains, “counselors rarely attempt to convince or persuade. Instead, the counselor subtly guides the client to think about and verbally express their own reasons for and against change.” Motivational interviewing seeks to draw out a person’s beliefs, values, and social identities, in the hopes that, once all these complexities and complicated beliefs are on the table, unexpected opportunities for change might appear.
For more than a decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been urging physicians to use motivational interviewing techniques with patients who resist vaccines. For Rosenbloom and his colleagues, that meant speaking with people who were skeptical about COVID vaccines in very specific ways. When an elderly patient came into the clinic of Dr. Rima Chamie in Portland, for instance, and the patient said he didn’t want a COVID vaccine because he’d heard rumors the science was untested, the physician didn’t argue with him. Instead, she began asking open-ended questions about how he saw himself. He said he had three grandchildren and was a retired police officer. He was also deeply religious. His church was the most important place in his life. “That’s why I don’t need the shot,” he told her. “God will take care of me. I wash my hands, I wear the mask. God will provide. He knows my path.”
Chamie is the kind of doctor everyone hopes for: Confident and warm, someone who can quiet a wailing infant with a caress or their overwrought parents with a sympathetic laugh. She’s a mom herself, and her children know they ignore her advice at their peril. She’s spent her career serving migrants and kids, the poor and the homeless. She knows what her membership in the tribe of medical experts means. “The white coat, it’s got some power,” she told me.
But, with this particular patient, she also knew that no amount of data showing that the COVID vaccine was safe, no amount of mentioning that the pope had said people should get vaccinated, was going to change his mind. “All it would have done is make him stop listening,” she said. So Chamie took a different approach. She didn’t mention COVID again. “It’s wonderful your faith gives you so much strength,” she told him. “You clearly have a really close relationship with God.”
Then, almost as an aside, Chamie brought up another identity. “I imagine your grandchildren’s health is probably very important to you,” she said. Yes, he agreed, he loved being a grandfather.
“Then we went on to other topics,” Chamie said. “But towards the end of the appointment, as a way to wrap things up, I said, ‘You know, I don’t usually talk about religion with patients, but I’m so thankful that God gave us these brains, and these laboratories, and the ability to make vaccines. Maybe He gave us vaccines to keep us safe?’ ” Then she left the room.
She didn’t do anything except acknowledge that they both contained numerous identities, and that some of them—religious devotion, caring about children—overlapped and offered different perspectives on what constitutes “safety.” With that, the appointment was over.
Thirty minutes later, the man was still in the exam room. Chamie pulled a nurse aside. “Why’s he still here?” she asked.
“He wanted the vaccine,” the nurse said.
Chamie and Rosenbloom have used motivational interviewing with hundreds of patients. “It’s different every time, of course,” Chamie said. “Sometimes we talk about religion, sometimes our kids. Sometimes I just ask: On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel about this vaccine? And when they say ‘three,’ I ask: Why not two? Why not four? Like, I’m genuinely curious why you’re a three, what that says about you.”
In the same manner as Salma Mousa’s soccer league, Chamie’s conversations put everyone on equal footing—no one is an expert on parenting or God’s will. And they build on existing social identities to construct a new in-group: We are all people who want to do the right thing for our families. Regardless of other differences, we have that in common.
“I had a family that came to my practice with two kids,” Rosenbloom told me. “They had just moved to town and were upper-middle-class, well educated, but both children were completely unvaccinated. The parents told me they’d heard some scary information about vaccines, but when they brought up questions with their previous doctor, he’d kind of dismissed them.”
So Rosenbloom spoke to the couple for a while. He asked where they lived, where they planned to send their kids to school, what they enjoyed doing on weekends. He told them about himself, and they discovered a few restaurants and parks they both liked. He asked them to describe their concerns about vaccines, but also inquired about other worries: Were they anxious about their kids starting school? How did they feel about things like sugar and soda pop? He never pushed the vaccines. Instead, he just asked questions, and after they answered, he shared his own thoughts. At the end of the conversation, the parents said they wanted to start a vaccination schedule for their kids that day. “It worked because they felt listened to,” Rosenbloom told me. “You have to find some way to connect if you want people to hear what you’re saying.”
The Who Are We? conversation is crucial because our social identities exert such a powerful influence on what we say, how we hear, and what we think, even when we don’t want them to. Our identities can help us find values we share or can push us into stereotypes. Sometimes, simply reminding ourselves that we all contain multitudes can shift how we speak and listen. The Who Are We? conversation can help us understand how the identities we choose, and the identities imposed on us by society, make us who we are.[*]
But what happens when simply talking about our identities feels threatening? How, at moments like that, do we learn to speak and hear?
Skip Notes
* It is tempting to suggest that simply finding commonalities is sufficient in helping us communicate. But, as the next chapter explores, connection also often comes from understanding how differences shape us.
HOW DO WE MAKE THE HARDEST CONVERSATIONS SAFER?
The Problem Netflix Lives With
If you were to ask Netflix employees when things started going wrong inside the company, many would point to an afternoon in February 2018. Netflix’s publicity department—about thirty people—were gathered in a conference room inside the firm’s Los Angeles headquarters. At that moment, the company was on track for its most successful year ever, with more than $15 billion in revenue and 124 million subscribers. Everyone was there for a weekly staff meeting, and people chatted and caught up with one another as their boss, communications chief officer Jonathan Friedland, stood to speak.
Friedland began by telling the group that Netflix had recently released a comedy special titled Tom Segura: Disgraceful. Most of the people in the room had never heard of the program—nor, for that matter, had many viewers. At any given moment, Netflix hosts tens of thousands of shows; subscribers spend an estimated 70 billion hours per year on the platform. This one comedy special, like so many others, would likely come and go. But Friedland was mentioning the program, he explained, because it featured a comedian being unusually offensive: Waxing nostalgic for a time when people could use terms such as retarded, making fun of people with Down syndrome, complaining because he can’t say midget anymore.
A few disability advocacy groups had already raised objections, and the company needed to be prepared for more criticisms. It was important, Friedland stressed, that they treat these complaints seriously. Everyone needed to appreciate how hurtful the word retarded could be. Hearing it was a “gut-punch” to any parent whose child is cognitively different, Friedland said. Then, to drive his point home, he offered an analogy: It would be “as if an African-American person had heard” and here he said the n-word.
Everyone in the room went silent. The mood changed instantly. Did he really just say that?
Friedland did not seem to notice the shift. He moved on to other topics. When the meeting ended, employees returned to their desks. Some seemed not to give the incident another thought. Others mentioned to colleagues what had occurred, and they, in turn, told other people, who told others. Two employees approached Friedland to complain about his language and said that using that word, in any setting, was unacceptable. It was particularly offensive coming from one of the company’s highest-ranking executives. Friedland agreed with them, apologized, and notified human resources of what had occurred.
“And that,” one employee told me, “is when the civil war began.”
* * *
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Netflix had been founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings, an entrepreneur with an unusual business philosophy: The fewer rules, the better. Hastings believed companies were hobbled by meddlesome managers; bureaucracy was the road to ruin. He eventually memorialized his beliefs in a 125-page PowerPoint that was shared with every employee and became required reading for new hires. When it was posted on the internet, the “Netflix Culture Deck” was downloaded millions of times.
At Netflix, the culture deck explained, “we seek excellence,” and in return, employees were granted unusual freedoms. Workers could take as much vacation as they wanted, work whichever days or hours they desired, authorize almost any kind of purchase—a first-class plane ticket, a new computer, millions of dollars to acquire a film—without prior permission, as long as they could justify their choice.
Whereas it was treasonous at most firms to apply for jobs with competitors, at Netflix employees were encouraged to submit applications to other companies—and if they were offered a higher salary, Netflix would either match it or encourage them to leave. The company expected “amazing amounts of important work,” the culture deck decreed, and to achieve that, employees had permission to try nearly anything, as long as it delivered higher profits or revealed new insights.
Employees who couldn’t consistently deliver top-tier excellence were warned that a merely “adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” And whenever someone was dismissed—which happened frequently—another Netflix ritual kicked in: A note was sent to that person’s team, or department, or sometimes the entire company, explaining why the person had been let go. The departing employee’s disappointing work habits, their questionable decisions and mistakes—all of it was spelled out in detail for everyone who remained. One current Netflix worker told me, “When I got to Netflix, I got a ‘why Jim was fired’ email on my second day, and I freaked out. It was very candid.” He wondered, Did I make a mistake coming here? Is this place a snake pit? “But eventually I realized, it’s actually helpful to get emails like that because, if you’ve read a few of them, you know what the company expects. It takes the mystery out of everything.”
As the company expanded, there were growing pains. In 2011, Hastings, without much internal debate, announced that he intended to split the firm in two: One company would handle DVDs by mail, and the other would provide online streaming services. The announcement was not well received. The stock plunged by 77 percent, forcing Hastings to backtrack almost immediately.
Top executives later blamed this misstep, and the resulting crisis, on an insufficient amount of internal skepticism. Executives should have told Hastings they disagreed with him, should have pushed back more forcefully. In fact, as a rule, all employees needed to challenge one another’s decision making more aggressively. The culture deck was amended to note that “silent disagreement is unacceptable.” Hastings went so far as to tell workers that “it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement” and that they ought to “farm for dissent” among their peers. Before long, meetings were filled with people tearing apart one another’s proposals. Teams would schedule “feedback dinners” where everyone would go around the table offering something they appreciated—and the five or six things they did not appreciate—about each of their coworkers.
For some, this atmosphere was exhilarating. “All that anxiety you normally feel trying to figure out what your manager thinks, and what their manager thinks, and wondering what’s actually going on, that’s all gone,” one employee told me. For others, the radical candor could feel cruel. “It gave people permission to be savage,” another employee, Parker Sanchez, said. “Some days I’d cry for an hour.”
One advantage of this culture, though, was that it made it easy to discuss nearly anything. “Nothing is off the table,” a high-ranking executive told me. “You think your boss is making a mistake? Tell them. You don’t like how someone runs meetings? Say it. You’re more likely to get promoted than punished.” Employees would regularly send Hastings emails critiquing his strategies or what he had said during meetings, or they would openly criticize him on internal message boards, “and Reed would publicly thank them,” said the executive. “I’ve never worked in a culture like this before. It’s amazing.”
It was also effective. Netflix’s stock recovered, and the company got larger every year. Its unusual culture enabled it to hire some of the best software engineers, television producers, tech executives, and filmmakers in the world. It quickly became one of the most admired and successful firms in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Fortune magazine named Hastings Businessperson of the Year.
Then came the meeting where Jonathan Friedland uttered the n-word.
WHY CONVERSATIONS ABOUT IDENTITY MATTER
Over the past half decade—in the wake of reports of racism and sexism within numerous companies, evidence of ignored sexual assaults inside organizations, and the growth of social movements devoted to equality and inclusion—there has been a renewed focus on making workplaces fairer and more just. Thousands of firms have hired “inclusion coaches,” or have purchased diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculums, in the hopes of fostering meaningful, long-overdue conversations about how to combat racism, sexism, and other prejudices. Today, nearly every Fortune 1000 company has at least one high-ranking executive focused on undoing the biases and structural inequities that unfairly disadvantage some employees and customers.
These programs are necessary correctives for real problems, reminders that there are injustices that make it hard for some people to get the jobs they want, the salaries they deserve, or the respect they merit simply because of the color of their skin, their country of origin, or some other aspect of their identity that shouldn’t have any impact on their careers.
However, many of these well-intentioned programs don’t seem particularly effective. When a team of researchers from Princeton, Columbia, and Hebrew University examined more than four hundred studies of attempts to reduce prejudice, they found that in 76 percent of cases, the best that could be said was that the long-term impact “remains unclear.” A 2021 Harvard Business Review article regarding eighty thousand people who had undergone unconscious bias training found that such “training did not change biased behavior.” Another examination of three decades of data concluded that “the positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and…can activate bias or spark a backlash.” A fourth study found that after unconscious bias training, “the likelihood that Black men and women would advance in organizations often decreased,” because the trainings made race and gender stereotypes more salient. A summary in the 2021 Annual Review of Psychology found that while, “by many metrics, the study of interventions designed to reduce prejudice is thriving,” the authors “conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically misguided if the aim is to provide actionable, robust, evidence-based recommendations for reducing prejudice in the world.”
