Dan Erwin

I’ve Actually Been Paid to Teach People How to Do Small Talk

You’d think it was a waste of time and money if, that is, you didn’t know who paid me to learn how to do small talk. There were fifteen to twenty out of my nearly five-hundred one-on-one executive coaching contracts. Those who paid for my services were at least vice-president level in huge (multi-billion dollar) international companies. It was never an ordinary manager. In fact, several who contracted for my services were C-Suite executives.

So why were the small talk clients all C-Suite execs and vice-presidents? The answer was the same for every single one of these clients. They were high achievers. They really knew their business and they’d focused every working day on their business discipline and its demands.

But now they needed to know how to do small talk because of their role as company representatives to community and neighborhood charities as well as national and international charities. Since involvement was important to their firm, they were expected, as executives, to attend as company representatives. Most of them didn’t know how to talk about anything except their business, so they were tongue-tied in their new role. They were embarrassed to talk about their problem in the firm, so an external consultant was the way to go. And I just happened to be available—or one of their close friends recommended me.

How to Understand Artificial Intelligence Two Completely Different Ways

One of the basic characteristics of truly intelligent people is that they take advantage of new situations, have a natural curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. They are eager to learn about different areas of life, including people, culture, animals, history and the world. Intelligent people recognise that others have information and insight that they can share which will help them grow, expand their wisdom, and enhance their intelligence.

How does this play out
Having worked with a great deal of very intelligent people, one of the unique characteristics about this thirst for knowledge is that they look for different ways of understanding. Sometimes this plays out in striking metaphors. Other times in plays out in exciting analogies. And sometimes it's a person from one discipline talking about another discipline and revealing how differently they think about another person's discipline.

How To Improve Personal Intelligence with Exercise

All kinds of advertising and web stuff out there says that this exercise will do that to your intelligence—or that AI tool will do this for your brain. Tough to identify expertise from fads when they’re being thrown at you from every angle on a regular basis. But here’s the well-researched big stuff that pulls everything together and includes brain stuff for everyone.

Research published just this year reveals the positive impact of aerobic exercising on brain smarts for middle-aged and elderly. It takes just 150 minutes per week when working out at moderate intensity levels. That’s not much of a surprise. We’ve known this was true for younger adult cohorts, but we lacked the sampling of middle-aged and older adults. The growth relationship between the physical and the mental was spelled out years ago—and no one questions that conclusion. But now we know that conclusion applies to both middle-aged and the elderly. Why did it take so long to get the research for the last two groups? It’s easy to get a sample for younger people while they’re in an education program. In contrast, getting a consistent sample from adults not in an education program is more difficult. Adults outside education systems start the research program, drop out for numerous reasons, making it difficult to develop a long term consistent sample. But this time the researchers were successful. Here’s their conclusion.

This randomized clinical trial demonstrates the efficacy (the desired result) of aerobic exercise for cognition in adults age 20–67. The effect of aerobic exercise on executive function was more pronounced as age increased, suggesting that it may mitigate age-related declines. Increased cortical thickness suggests that aerobic exercise contributes to brain health in individuals as young as age 20. (Thomas, Tanzi and Westover: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-17

What was most intriguing to me were the measurable improvements among middle and elderly adults in all three specific areas for which positive impact of aerobic exercising was already known in younger adults: fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence and total cognitive performance.

The Greatest Business Value and Personal Power In Today’s Work World . . .

comes from high-powered questions.

The least used and one of the most productive tools for professional conversation is high-level questioning. But for a number of reasons, questioning has always gotten short shrift. Traditionally, asking questions is thought of as revealing your incompetence, which is then rewarded with a loss of influence. Even today, when the need for intelligent questions ought to be obvious, I meet very few who actually use questions strategically, much less effectively. Furthermore, even fewer professionals, including yesterday’s traditionalist or today’s knowledge worker, understand that questioning is a linguistic device that can make great contributions to the organization—and grant profound influence and power to the individual. In more than 20 years of consulting hundreds of high-powered executives, I have heard no one asking  or talking about questioning unless I initiated the subject.

All questions are speech actions that affect the way individuals and teams organize their thinking about people, problems, and processes. And in effective teams high-powered questions are a--and sometimes the--major element of the conversation. The better questions can often positively impact personal influence, relationships, team focus, team organization, problem solving, strategies, priorities, motivation, and decision making. In short, higher order questions can have a huge role in shaping both our thought and our behavior.

Not all questions are created equal. John Hagel has written that the greatest value and personal power in today’s environment comes from questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention on promising but previously ignored areas. Although such questions often require more complex, critical thinking and very thoughtful formatting, let’s begin with the basics.

Why Is Listening Accuracy So Very Difficult?

The obvious reason for listening failure is that people are unaware of listening processes. For example, lots of folk think resolving listening failure is all a matter of listening harder. But research makes it very clear that listening harder barely improves listening. As an exec coach and a specialist in listening, I learned years ago that people don’t understand that listening is actually a process containing several elements.

Got some doubts about that insight? Here’s how I found out about listening ignorance. And learned that very few smart MBAs—even from the top schools--understand that process.

Whatever my client's developmental objectives, whether influence management, strategic thinking, client management, decision processes, bias recognition, or leadership, I usually get around to asking participating interviewees a few very, very basic questions.  

One of the killers is this simple query:  "How effective a listener is my client?"  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I get the innocuous response--"he’s good."  Then I dig in:  Does he repeat what you've said?   Does he clarify or check out what you've said?  Does he summarize or paraphrase what you've said?  Or an even more significant question--to what extent does he verbalize the implications of what's being said? 

After four "nos" in a row, half the interviewees fill in the blanks and say something to the effect that it’s obvious my client may not be as effective as they once thought. The majority of interviewees have a question right at that point. In fact, I’ve found it advantageous to respond to their implicit listening questions.  (When I get three or four “never thought about that” responses, I’m knocking on the door for further business.) Then after confirming their insight, I take the next step—providing research information.  

The research is a shocker. It reveals that a busy manager spends 80% of her time listening to people, . . and still doesn't get half of what is said.

When My Conclusion Was Dead Wrong

As a research-based consultant, I’m used to getting my ideas tweaked by new research. After all, I think of myself as a fairly flexible, open guy, so a small adjustment to my theories and ideas is usually illuminating. But unknown to Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter, she took a Shillelagh, a big club to one of my big ideas. Her blog, Why running a family doesn’t help you run a business, knocked me back on my heels. And I yelled a silent Aaargh!, knowing full well that she was quite correct and I was quite wrong. So there, I admitted it Prof Kanter.

Kanter lays out her case with panache, acknowledging the conventional wisdom first. Here’s her argument:

In theory, those years of family work at home could look great on a resume. Consider the skills required: setting priorities, training others, organizing complex logistics and schedules, and using interpersonal sensitivity to handle difficult people problems. Indeed, some advocates have argued that the time women--and sometimes men--with advanced degrees spend out of the workplace managing a family is valuable experience for managing back in the paid work world. 

I agree it is valuable experience — if the paid job one returns to involves managing a handful of people who are vulnerable and can't leave. Otherwise, the operating skills for family manager are nothing like the qualifications for workplace professionals.

Her reasoning and evidence that follows are flawless—and quite correct.

Suffice it to say, that I’ve taught the very opposite and spent time preaching to the choir of empty nest women wanting back into the workforce.

To err is human
Yet I’m certain that most of us go through life assuming and even insisting that we are right about everything. And that includes stuff from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. That’s why Moliere’s comment is spot on: It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

But I’ve figured out why, primarily, I’ve wanted so badly to be right. It was all about my allegiances and the narratives I’d built around them.

WYSIATI
In his fascinating book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb introduces the idea of narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our view of the world—and our expectations for the future. I have three daughters, all of whom were raised to be professionals just like their mother. Inevitably, as a father of smart daughters, I experienced male chauvinists who drove me nuts. After all, every father wants his best for his daughters, and their achievement was always tops in my priority list.

So, for instance, when my youngest was a high school freshman, I found myself in a teacher conference that raised my ire. Her male math teacher rather pointedly said, “Kris does very well in math, especially for a girl.” Knowing that her husband was about to become slightly volatile, my wife kicked me under the table, got my eye and essentially said (nonverbally) “cool it.” But you get the point. And so in later life, after having kids, they went back into the workforce rather successfully. Clearly, because of my family allegiances I got caught up in the narrative fallacy about mothers going back to work and began to preach it.

The narrative fallacy
The narrative fallacy is a decision error that most of us make largely because we are gripped by the illusion of understanding. As Daniel Kahneman explains them, they arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. And inevitably also, the explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple: are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity , and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. 

Why Is It So Hard to Learn?

There are at least ten or so reasons that tend to make learning difficult for most of us.

Less than 10% of professionals are agile enough learners to quickly process an experience and apply their lessons to new situations. That's a spooky statistic. In today's economy where innovation, skill development  and learning are the only means to circumvent  personal obsolescence, why is the number of agile learners so small? In other words, why is it so hard to learn? Max Bazerman of Harvard  suggests three basic obstacles to learning. In this brief summary I add eight more insights gleaned from both research and face-to-face experience with hundreds of clients. 

The need for balance
If you’ve achieved some level of professional success, the idea that your skills could be lacking won’t compute. In fact, as Bazerman reminds us, balance theory emphasizes that we want consistency when we organize our thoughts and think about our expertise. To maintain our cognitive balance—our need to believe we’re consistent--we are nearly certain to avoid hard or painful truths.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Generally, most of us reach a level of competency between four and six years into our vocation—then we slow down and eventually stop learning. Partly, that’s because we’ve been praised in the past for our work prowess. According to reinforcement theory, we tend to continue behaviors (skills) that brought positive rewards such as raises and promotions. If your professionalism has rewarded you, you’ll tend to resist information suggesting that your judgment and your toolbox could be systematically improved. 

Mistakes were made, but not by me
You’ve probably relied on your way of doing things for years. When you receive negative feedback about your performance, that will mean that you’ve made some costly mistakes in the past—and that will be unsettling. Interpersonal studies suggest that getting negative feedback causes us to avoid the person who gave it, filter information to him in the future, and constrict our  thinking. It’s no surprise that most of us will try to discredit the truth about our deficiencies, and become impervious to self-correction.

Missing the big picture
When learning new competencies, some people are so wrapped up in the detail and concrete specifics of a new skill that they miss the big development picture. Our education, whether business, law, architecture or engineering is highly specialized—making us all "Incrementalists." As a result, we fail to fully integrate the new skill into our toolkit, thinking that learning is merely an item-by-item matter. Without integration, our learning results will be nothing more than mediocre, barely moving the needle.

Understanding Relationship Barriers and Breakdowns

Communication breakdowns happen a lot more than most of us think. It may be obvious that with a wide range of organizational associates, relationship breakdowns are inevitable. But candidly, it also happens regularly with one-on-ones. The actual researched percentage of misunderstanding and breakdown in an ordinary work conversation is so high you won’t believe me without extensive explanation. So, I won’t share the percentage. But suppose a tech manager is relating to a colleague in sales. That’s a set-up for breakdown. Inevitably, they’re working on different timelines, based on different objectives. Furthermore, the rewards are typically conflicting, the techie on salary and sales on commission.

But add four or five more people into the mix, all from different organizational disciplines, and you’re not just adding to the potential for relationship breakdowns, you’re both multiplying and speeding up the potential for misunderstanding and breakdown.  Inevitably, conflicts over personnel, resource allocation, timelines and turf, surface.  Differences of objectives, strategies, measures of success and even values can escalate the emotions.  We have a “communication breakdown" is not just Led Zeppelin, it remains a common buzzword for these differences.  In a real sense, however, the above relationships are not, strictly speaking, "communication breakdowns."  The parties involved understand exactly what's going on and they are effective at communicating their differences, and hopefully, negotiating them.  They involve trust and competition, usually over scarce resources of one kind or another. What makes interpersonal breakdowns especially difficult is that resolution often requires behavioral negotiation skills, skills more complex than negotiating products and dollars.

Candidly, the above differences that we label "communication breakdowns" are neither the most common nor the most personally painful.  There are, instead, some very common barriers and breakdowns that get in the way of effective relationships that can be even more damaging than the above list.  The really damaging barriers are about misunderstanding another person's point of view.  Indeed, I've found that that the most common barriers and breakdowns in organizations are inevitably about relational breakdowns.  What makes these interpersonal breakdowns so difficult is that dealing with hard products is a lot different than dealing with the barriers posed by soft people feelings. So, when the breakdown is interpersonal, these breakdowns can require behavioral conversations and at least basic behavioral negotiation skills. Behavioral skill of either type is not always available, so the breakdown remains unresolved or pushed up the ladder.

Attribution theory
The best way to understand these breakdowns is through what is known as "attribution theory" which deals with the ways people interpret observed facts and explain others’ as well as their own behavior. What’s significant about attribution is that the causes we use to explain another’s behavior impacts the way we think about, feel about and behave toward that person. The practice is so widespread that attributions can be made of others’ behaviors without an observable cause. Of course, it takes very little thinking to realize that observed behaviors can be interpreted in numerous ways.  Furthermore, research also shows that once we've created our interpretation, right or wrong, it's very difficult to dislodge.

The process has become so questionable that in response to the potential for erroneous conclusions social scientists speak about the “fundamental attribution error.” The attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others--while under-emphasizing situational explanations. In other words, people are almost inherently biased to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind of person” that manager or worker is rather than on the business context.

Let's say you're the manager of a technology team.  Noticing that one of your employees seems to be working particularly hard over the past few weeks, you wonder why.  You might conclude that his project timelines are causing his behavior.  Or maybe he is angling for a raise.  Could be that he's attempting to suck up.  Maybe he's just bored and wants to keep busy.  So, you decide he's angling for a raise, but a colleague tells you he's just sucking up. Whatever. You've drawn a potentially fallible conclusion based on observable fact. And, in spite of all that's been said, once you've decided he's angling for a raise, you'll reject most any other interpretation. And your relevant behavior will follow.

We also make positive inferences.  You might think your employee genuinely wants to see his team succeed.  Or perhaps, you decide, you've just never realized what a hard worker this guy is. But more often than not, it’s the negative attributions that follow, resulting in the relational breakdown. Bad is always more powerful than good. So, it’s rare for us to ask what’s going right about a situation? Instead, it’s what’s going wrong?

Those dangerous inferences
People draw their conclusions both from the work context as well as past history with a person when they come up with interpretations.  But. . . underlying those interpretations are just a few basic assumptions that drive most of them (I prefer "inferences" even though "interpretation" is the more familiar.  Getting used to the term "inferences" will support some other cool, problem-solving and decision-making skills.)   Anyway, these wrongheaded inferences cause us to flare up, get disgusted, get angry and frustrated, be ashamed or even walk away for another day--or week—or even years.  Some families have had major breakups merely because members interpreted the behavior of another using one of these inferences. Inferences, like conclusions are nothing more than opinions. The language just sounds more intelligent.

Thankfully, attribution theory provides us with a lot of insight into human relationships and communication.  Here are three recurring and dangerous assumptions...

Kevin Costner's "Yellowstone": "Cruel and Uncaring"

Toward the end of episode eight in the third season of Yellowstone, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) says this to his son, Kayce: “In case you haven’t noticed, it (the world) is cruel and uncaring.” And he adds, “you have to be meaner than evil--and still love your family and still enjoy a sunrise.” I could feel my skin crawling, tingling after his words. I understood my rejection immediately, but it took several days to figure out why my emotions were so strong. And why Dutton’s commitment bothered me so much.

It’s not that the words were out of sync with the storyline of the episode or the series. The entire series has been filled with gripping conflicts between good and evil, between protection of the family and property and the attempts to steal the property from the family. Often dripping with brutality. The stories in all three seasons have shown a high degree of consistency and suspense, interlaced with underlying questions about human reality. (Does this actually happen in our world today?) That’s part of the reason the show has kept my interest at very high levels. Obviously, I’m not the only committed viewer. That final episode set a ratings-record with 5.2 million viewers, claiming cable’s #1 spot, in live, same day. If you include the simulcast and encores, the closer drew 7.5M viewers on premiere night.  And it also set up the viewer for season four, next year.

More than a good show?
What bugged me so much about that narrative is that it’s reflective of the distrust of the world and the people in it, the background, for example, for our current conspiracy spasm. Both consciously and unconsciously, my person and my vocations have often circled around our trust and distrust of the community and the world—and how profoundly repetitious stories with similar distrusting values impact our relationships, vocations and communities. I don’t think of Dutton’s two sentences as merely a means for sharing information. It’s an arousing story in which we viewers have been conditioned to participate. And it appeals to our feelings rather than to our thinking. That’s what makes it so powerful and seductive, creating my intense emotional response.  

Dig into any conspiracy theory and you’ll find believers with shattered views of trust in the world, what Richard Hofstadter famously called "an arena for angry minds."

What Is Your Brain Doing While You Sleep?

It bugs me that the latest Time magazine (August 17/24) from which I plagiarized the above title is only interested in issues of physiology. Especially, when the far more interesting, useful and cutting-edge issues are about something else: the unconscious mind. By 1964 I was depending on that so-called black box (the unconscious) every Thursday, Friday or Saturday night.

As a young church minister in the reformed tradition, I had to write two new, creative sermons nearly every weekend. My church included many university faculty and engineers from the local technology firms, who brought high expectations with them to worship.

Thankfully, I learned just a couple years after seminary graduation (1962) that if I went to sleep on Thursday or Friday with a sermon or a creative idea half-finished, or needed some new ideas or anecdotes, I’d have everything I needed when I woke up the next morning. Or if I was just playing around with some creative ideas during the day, there was a high chance that the idea would be complete--or at least zinging some new pointers my way--when I woke up the next morning. At first, if it was an unfinished sermon, I’d go to bed very tired and worried—and toss and turn much of the night. But once I figured out that my unconscious was going to be working all night, I just went to bed—and slept easily. It was years later that I realized that I was actually priming my night brain during the day. I rested easy, because that thinking process rarely failed. So, I made a practice of leaving pad and pencil out on the kitchen table to jot down my new ideas first thing, and not lose the thinking that had been gained over the night. Forty-five years later I still use the model for my thinking and writing, and it works even better. Sometimes my night brain is so busy that I need to take a nap during the day.

When I shared my insight on how my brain worked in those early years, some understood and agreed instantly, while others...

Can Charisma Be Learned?

There are actually two questions here: can charisma be learned, and will it positively impact business outcomes? Since I’ve worked over the years with clients to develop their charisma, I find the questions, well…amusing. Because the answers to both questions from those in the disciplines of rhetoric and communication is yes. Of course. We’ve known that for years. In fact, for centuries.

But what’s especially interesting about recent research (2011) by the psych and economics faculty at the University of Lausanne is that they look at the question from the perspective of economics in the European context, confirming the power of the discipline of charisma.

But there’s a lot more pragmatic stuff to be added to this research as well as most blogs and studies. The discipline of charisma is inevitably viewed from a public address format: a speaker addressing a group. But for career people, there are far more opportunities to practice and learn in a one-on-one or small group. Furthermore, it’s best to start adding charisma from your tool-kit early on, rather than waiting until you get a managerial promotion. It’s also far less intimidating to learn in a one-on-one or small group, than to wait until you’re a manager and have large group responsibilities.

Given my assumption, let’s ignore the research laundry list of tactics, and the unique opportunities provided by public address settings. Besides, if you gain the competencies in small groups, you can automatically transfer them to the public address context. So, skip those long lists of skills to gain the competency, and focus on just two very significant tactics that will set you on the path to charisma. Furthermore, with just a bit of reflection, these two skills for one-on-ones and small groups will readily open up other strategies..