A conversation with Stanford’s Matt Abrahams on an essential skill for leaders.
We all know the feeling of being asked to speak, or feeling like we should speak when we aren’t really expecting to. The boss suddenly wants your opinion in a big meeting, a colleague asks you to kick off a client dinner with a toast. You’re giving a prepared speech at a conference but then you have to take audience questions after. Some people have no problem addressing a crowd off-the-cuff.
When I was at the business school, the deans came to me and said, “Matt, we have this big problem. Our students, some of the most brilliant young minds in the business world, are choking when they’re cold called by their professor.” You know the mean, evil, cold call, “What do you think?” And they had the answer, they just couldn’t get it formulated and out, and so the deans asked me, “Can you create some content?” And that’s what really got me into researching it.
ALISON BEARD: I would imagine that anxiety plays a very big role here. There are people who just get nervous in those types of situations. So what advice do you have for how to calm those initial nerves, either when you’re thrust in the spotlight, like you just described, or you’re getting ready to go into an environment where you know you’re going to have to do a lot of this.
But we can also address the sources of anxiety, and there are many of these. The one that looms large for many has to do with the goal we’re trying to achieve. Whenever we communicate we have a goal. So if I’m answering a question for you, I want to answer it well. If we’re making chitchat or small talk, I want it to progress, I want to avoid embarrassing myself.
ALISON BEARD: In thinking about this, I realize that the people who are truly best at this are, first, very quick thinkers, and second, have a great facility with language. They know lots of words, they know how to use them well. If you aren’t in either of those camps, how do you get really good at this if you don’t have those natural building blocks?
Similarly, if you’re writing a text, a Slack, or an email, the subject line is the now what, and then the what and the so what become the body of that email. So it can help in writing and in speaking. If you’re describing a product, what’s the product? Why is it important? Now, can I show you a demonstration? That’s again what, so what, now what.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, it’s like a shortcut. So let me ask you about that how, because I think there are also people who aren’t necessarily saying the most amazing things when they speak off the cuff, but they say them with such intonation or delivery that the audience is really left with a good impression, even though if you looked at a transcript of their words you would think, that doesn’t make sense, or that’s not intelligent.
MATT ABRAHAMS: This is a big challenge. We get in our own way when it comes to spontaneous speaking. This desire to do it right, or do it well, actually precludes the ability to actually do it well. It’s a simple cognitive load process here.
So I would suggest two ways to help focus our messages. One, really think about your audience in that moment and what’s most important to them. If you can make the content relevant and salient, it will help you focus and it will help your message be tighter, and because it’s more relevant, people will be more engaged with it.
MATT ABRAHAMS: Yes, so I have a whole chapter in the book on listening, and I borrow from one of my colleagues, Collins Dobbs, this framework. Now he applies this framework to conflict and negotiation, but I love it, and it’s called pace, space, grace. When you are in a circumstance where you have to respond spontaneously, you really do have to listen in a different way.
MATT ABRAHAMS: It’s not just the words taking in the words spoken, that’s correct. So listening to me is a much broader idea, it’s paying attention to the words, to the environment, to the context, and that’s hard for many of us. Most of us listen just enough to get the gist of what somebody’s saying, and then we begin to rehearse, to judge, to evaluate, and we miss the nuance that can make a huge difference in the situation.
ALISON BEARD: Talk about some people that you have seen get better at this, through practice, through structure, through calming their nerves, and how it’s helped them in their careers. And so what we did is we worked on practicing, and we practiced certain scenarios and situations. We came up with ways to buy him time to process what he needed to process before responding. He became an expert in paraphrasing the questions that came in, and even more so combining questions together and listening for and commenting on common threads.
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