Supercommunicators, page 4
Instead of trying to cheer up Yasmin, he talked about his own frustrations and disappointments, the same way she had. It felt like the most honest thing he could do. “I wasn’t trying to be manipulative,” Lawler told me. “She’d already refused me, and I knew I wasn’t going to change her mind. So I stopped trying. It felt good to stop pretending I had all the answers.”
Yasmin listened. She told Lawler she understood. The worst part, she said, was that she felt as if she were betraying herself. She wanted to do something, but she felt powerless. She began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Lawler told her. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
This was all a mistake, he thought. I should have left her alone. He would have to report this discussion, in detail, to the agency. It would be one final embarrassment to cap off a humiliating year.
Then Yasmin gathered herself. “I can do this,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?” Lawler said.
“I can help you,” she replied.
“You don’t have to!” he said. He was caught so off guard that he blurted the first thought in his mind. “We don’t have to see each other ever again! I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
“I want to do something important,” she said. “This matters. I can do it. I know I can.”
Two days later, Yasmin underwent polygraph testing and training in secure communication methods at a CIA safe house. “You’ve never seen someone so nervous,” Lawler told me. “But she stuck with it. She never said she was having second thoughts.” Once she was back home, Yasmin began sending Lawler messages detailing the memos she had seen, the officials the foreign minister had hosted, the gossip she’d overheard. “She became one of the best sources in the region,” said Lawler. “She was a gold mine.” For the next two decades, as Yasmin’s career inside the foreign ministry thrived, she communicated regularly with the CIA, helping them understand what was happening behind the scenes, putting context around governmental declarations, making quiet introductions. Her assistance was never discovered by the authorities.
Lawler still has no real idea why Yasmin changed her mind that night. In the years that followed, he asked her to explain it numerous times, but even she struggled to say what had caused the shift. She told him that somehow, during dinner, when it became clear they were both so uncertain of themselves, she suddenly felt safe with him. They understood each other. She could hear, for the first time, what he had been trying to tell her: This could be important. You could make a difference. And she felt genuinely heard. They agreed to trust each other.
When we match someone’s mindset, a permission is granted: To enter another person’s head, to see the world through their eyes, to understand what they care about and need. And we give them permission to understand—and hear—us in return. “Conversations are the most powerful thing on earth,” Lawler told me.
But matching is also hard. Simply mirroring another person’s gestures, or moods, or tone of voice doesn’t forge a real connection. Giving in to someone else’s desires and preoccupations doesn’t work, either. Those aren’t real conversations. They’re dueling monologues.
Instead, we have to learn to distinguish a decision-making conversation from an emotional conversation from a social conversation. We need to understand which kinds of questions and vulnerabilities are powerful, and how to make our own feelings more visible and easier to read. We need to prove to others that we are listening closely. 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.
Eventually Lawler became one of the CIA’s most successful recruiters of overseas assets. By the time he retired in 2005, he had convinced dozens of foreign officials to participate in sensitive conversations. Then he began teaching his methods to other case officers. Today, Lawler’s techniques are woven into the agency’s training materials. As one document on recruiting foreign agents puts it: “A case officer creates an ever-deeper relationship through the process—from becoming an ‘associate’ then a ‘friend’ in the assessment phases and then moving to the role of ‘sounding board’ and ‘confidant’ as development moves to recruitment…. The agent then can look forward to each meeting as a chance to spend quality time with a comrade he can trust with his life.”
In other words, CIA recruiters are taught how to synchronize. “Once you understand how it works, it’s completely learnable,” an officer trained by Lawler told me. “I’ve always been an introvert, and so I hadn’t thought much about communication before I started my training. But once someone shows you how a conversation works, how to pay attention to what’s going on, you start noticing all these things you missed before.” These aren’t just skills she uses at work, this officer told me. She uses them with her parents, her boyfriend, the people she sees at the grocery store. She notices when her colleagues use their training in everyday meetings: Nudging each other to align better, listen more closely, speak in ways that make it easier for others to understand. “From the outside, it seems like a Jedi mind trick, but it’s just something you learn, and then practice, and then do,” she told me.
In other words, it’s a set of skills anyone can use. The chapters ahead explain how.
Skip Notes
* Because the transcript of this conversation is filled with asides and verbal overlaps, I have streamlined this exchange for brevity and clarity. I have removed trip-ups, noises like “umm,” tangents, and dialogue unrelated to the issues at hand. I have not altered the meaning of anything said, nor put words in anyone’s mouth. Throughout this book, anytime a verbatim transcript has been edited in this manner, it is mentioned in the endnotes.
A GUIDE TO USING THESE IDEAS
PART I
The Four Rules for a Meaningful Conversation
Happily married couples, successful negotiators, persuasive politicians, influential executives, and other kinds of supercommunicators tend to have a few behaviors in common. They are as interested in figuring out what kind of conversation everyone wants as the topics they hope to discuss. They ask more questions about others’ feelings and backgrounds. They talk about their own goals and emotions, and are quick to discuss their vulnerabilities, experiences, and the various identities they possess—and to ask others about their emotions and experiences. They inquire how others see the world, prove they are listening, and share their own perspectives in return.
In other words, during the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on four basic rules that create a learning conversation:
Each of these rules will be explored in a series of guides throughout this book. For now, let’s focus on the first one, which draws on what we have learned about the matching principle.
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.
This can be as simple as taking a moment to clarify, for yourself, what you hope to say and how you want to say it: “My goal is to ask Maria if she wants to vacation together, but in a way that makes it easy for her to say no.” Or it might consist of asking a spouse, as he describes a hard day, “Do you want me to suggest some solutions, or do you just need to vent?”
In one project examining how a group of investment bankers communicated among themselves inside a high-pressure firm, researchers tested a simple method to make daily discussions easier. Within this company, screaming matches occurred regularly, and colleagues were in competition for deals and bonuses. Disagreements sometimes led to prolonged fights, and meetings were often tense. But the researchers believed they could make these battles less fierce by asking everyone to write out just one sentence, before each meeting, explaining their goals for the upcoming discussion. So, for a week, before each gathering, every attendee scribbled out a goal: “This is to choose a budget that everyone agrees on,” or “This is to air our complaints and hear each other out.” The exercise never took more than a few minutes. Some people would share what they wrote at the meeting’s start; others did not.
Then, during each meeting, the researchers studied what people had written, and took notes on what everyone said. They noticed two things: First, the sentences that people had written out usually indicated what kind of conversation they were seeking, as well as a mood they hoped to establish. They would typically specify an aim (“air our complaints”) and a mindset (“hear each other out”). Second, if everyone scribbled their goals ahead of time, verbal arguments declined significantly. People still disagreed with one another. They were still competitive and got upset. But they were more likely to walk away from a meeting satisfied, like they had been heard and had understood what others were saying. Because they had determined what kind of conversation they wanted, they could convey their intents more clearly and listen as others declared their own goals.
Before we phone a friend or chat with a spouse, we don’t need to write out a sentence about our goals, of course—but, if it’s an important conversation, taking a moment to formulate what we hope to say, and how we hope to say it, is a good idea. And then, during the discussion, try to observe your companions: Are they emotional? Do they seem practical minded? Do they keep bringing up other people or social topics?
We all send clues, as we speak and listen, about what kind of conversation we want. Supercommunicators notice these clues, and think a bit harder about where they hope a conversation will go.
Some schools have trained teachers to ask students questions designed to elicit their goals, because it helps everyone communicate what they want and need. When a student comes to a teacher upset, for instance, the teacher might ask: “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?” Different needs require different types of communication, and those different kinds of interaction—helping, hugging, hearing—each correspond to a different kind of conversation.
When a teacher—or anyone—asks a question like “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?,” what they are actually asking is: “What kind of conversation are you looking for?” Simply by asking someone what they need, we encourage a learning conversation, a dialogue that helps us discover what everyone most wants.
Most of the time, when we’re talking to close friends or family, we engage in these kinds of learning conversations without thinking about it. We don’t need to ask what someone wants, because we intuit what kind of discussion they are aiming for. It feels natural to ask people how they’re feeling, and to provide them with a hug or advice or simply to listen.
But not every conversation is so easy. In fact, the most important ones rarely are.
In a learning conversation, our goal is to understand what’s going on inside others’ heads, and to share what’s happening within our own. A learning conversation nudges us to pay better attention, listen more closely, speak more openly, and express what might otherwise go unsaid. It elicits alignment by convincing everyone that we all want to genuinely understand one another, and by revealing ways to connect.
THE WHAT’S THIS REALLY ABOUT? CONVERSATION
AN OVERVIEW
The beginnings of conversations are often awkward and fraught. We need to make decision after decision, at rapid speed (“What tone is appropriate?” “Is it okay to interrupt?” “Should I tell a joke?” “What does this person think of me?”), and there are lots of opportunities to miss something or fail to notice what goes unsaid.
This is when the What’s This Really About? conversation can begin. What’s This Really About? has two goals: The first is to determine what topics we want to discuss—what everyone needs from this dialogue. The second is to figure out how this discussion will unfold—what unspoken rules and norms we have agreed upon, and how we will make decisions together.
What’s This Really About? often occurs at the start of a conversation. But it can also emerge mid-discussion, particularly when we are focused on making choices, considering plans, or thinking practically about costs and benefits. As the next chapter explores, within 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 the What’s This Really About? conversation doesn’t happen, what follows can feel frustrating and directionless. You’ve probably walked away from discussions feeling this way yourself: “We kept talking about completely different things” or “All we did was monologue at each other.” The solution is learning to recognize when a What’s This Really About? conversation has begun, and then knowing how to negotiate over how it will unfold.
EVERY CONVERSATION IS A NEGOTIATION
The Trial of Leroy Reed
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” the court bailiff says to the twelve people around the table. He points to a stack of papers. “These are the instructions that the judge read to you”—he points to another stack—“these are the verdict forms.”
The room contains seven men and five women with little in common except that they all live in Wisconsin and have appeared at this courthouse, as ordered, on a cold November morning in 1985. Now they are a jury, charged with deciding the fate of a man named Leroy Reed.
Over the previous two days, they had learned all about Reed, a forty-two-year-old ex-convict. He had been released from the state penitentiary nine years earlier and, since then, had lived a quiet life in a run-down part of Milwaukee. There had been no arrests or missed parole meetings. No fights or complaints from neighbors. By all accounts, he was a model citizen—until, that is, he was arrested for possession of a firearm. Because Reed was a felon, it was illegal for him to own a gun.
At the trial’s start, Reed’s lawyer had acknowledged that the evidence against his client was compelling. “First thing I’ll tell you right now,” he told the jurors, “Leroy Reed is a convicted felon. And on December seventh of last year, eleven months ago, he bought a gun. I’ll tell you that right off the top. There’s gonna be no dispute about that.”
Under Wisconsin Statute 941.29, that meant Reed should go to prison for up to ten years. But “he ought to be acquitted anyway,” the lawyer continued, because Reed had serious mental disabilities that, when combined with the strange circumstances of his arrest, suggested he hadn’t intended to commit a crime. A psychologist testified that Reed could read only at a second-grade level and his intelligence was “substantially sub-average.” When, over a decade earlier, he had been convicted for unknowingly serving as the getaway driver for a friend who robbed a convenience store, he was released early, in part, because authorities suspected that, even after his conviction, Reed hadn’t understood that a crime had occurred.
Now, at this trial, the jurors were learning about the odd events leading up to Reed’s latest arrest. Reed had been trying to get a steady job for years when, one day, he saw an advertisement in a magazine for a private-detective correspondence course. He mailed in the required $20 and, in return, received a fat envelope containing a tin badge and instructions telling him to, among other things, exercise regularly and buy a pistol. Reed followed the directions scrupulously. He jogged most mornings and, about a week after receiving the envelope, took the bus to a sporting goods store and filled out the appropriate paperwork, and then walked out with a .22 caliber gun.
Afterward, he went home and put the weapon, still in its box, in his closet. As far as anyone could tell, he never touched it again.
The purchase of the gun would likely have gone unnoticed except that, one day, he was hanging around the courthouse, hoping someone might hire him to solve a crime, when a police officer asked for identification. Reed handed over the only item in his pocket bearing his name: The bill of sale from the sporting goods store.
“Are you carrying this weapon?” the officer asked.
“It’s at home,” Reed replied.
The cop told Reed to bring the gun, in its box, to the sheriff’s station. When Reed arrived, an officer ran his name against a database of felons and promptly arrested him.
Now he was on trial to determine if he would go back to prison. The prosecutor offered a simple argument for conviction: No matter Reed’s mental limitations, “ignorance of the law is not a defense,” he said. The jury might wish the law were different, but Reed had effectively admitted his guilt. He should go to jail.
The judge seemed to agree. He told the jury, before sending them off to deliberate, that Statute 941.29 dictated there were three questions they needed to answer:
Was Reed a felon?
Had he acquired a gun?
Did he know he had acquired a gun?
If the answer to all three was yes, then Reed was guilty.
