Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
SuperCommunicators on The PriceWriters Podcast Episode 51
11 Plays9 days ago
This episode is all about better conversations. Inspired by SuperCommunicators, we look at how to listen, how to connect, and how to create dialogue where people feel understood rather than managed.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Price Writers Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
We're just need a pause.
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Price Writers Podcast with Jeremy Keating and me, Katrin Townsend. Join us as we explore and discuss the world of insurance-related books, sharing our insights and
Discussion on 'Super Communicators'
00:00:19
Speaker
recommendations. Today we're talking about a book that is a classic in the business genre.
00:00:24
Speaker
It's called Super Communicators by Charles de Hig. Jeremy, tell me all about this.
Influence of Super Communicators
00:00:30
Speaker
Say there are some people who are exceptionally good at communicating.
00:00:36
Speaker
Hence the name super communicators. Some people just are really, really good at bringing people into their world, the way that they think.
00:00:48
Speaker
And often they're extremely good at influencing, particularly the views of groups. And actually one of the things that's very interesting about this group is that often they actually don't know that they're really good at at it.
00:01:01
Speaker
And they're not the people we think that they might be. They're almost certainly not people who very pushy with their opinions and views. But the book is all about these types of people.
00:01:15
Speaker
It's not really a hill to guide to be that sort of person. You certainly can come away with it with an idea of things that you could do to make yourself better at this, but it's very much a book that is about this type of person.
00:01:30
Speaker
Okay. So how can we identify these kind of super communicators?
Brainwave Synchronization Study
00:01:35
Speaker
The overall experiment that begins the book and is the basis for it is where they were analyzing different types of communication and how people work together in groups. And they actually did brainwave studies.
00:01:49
Speaker
So they got people together. They'd all do things like they would watch different snippets of films, either without the sound or in a foreign language. So they couldn't really tell what was going on.
00:02:00
Speaker
And then the group would have discussions and they would talk about what they thought was happening in the films. So most groups, quite diverse people would end up largely without a consensus among them about what happened, but they'd have a nice discussion and their brainwaves would be kind of all over the place and everything like people are when they do group work.
00:02:21
Speaker
And there was a number of groups that for some reason, brainwaves in the groups tended to synchronize. And they would come away generally all agreeing with what the snippet from the film was about.
00:02:36
Speaker
So they started to analyze those particular groups until they found the particular individuals in those groups who were the particular unique thing about those groups.
00:02:49
Speaker
And then they started forming groups just with those people or with a couple of those people in. or they began to talk to them, and record them. And they found this fairly small number of people who were just incredibly good at getting groups to think like them and come away with the same opinions as them.
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting, isn't it? it I watched the Simpsons movie in Russian the very first time that I saw it. I will admit to not having any idea what was going on because firstly, the pig on the ceiling, the spider pig, I was like, what? and What is this?
00:03:25
Speaker
But secondly, also you can't like do any lip reading or anything because they're all animated. So yeah that was a kind of ah a slightly bizarre experience. I wish someone who could have told me what was going on then, but there you go Do is still Do.
00:03:38
Speaker
But anyway, so that's super cool. So they found some people who kind of have this superpower of communicating.
Traits of Super Communicators
00:03:45
Speaker
What do they all have in common? They tend to ask 10 to 20 times more questions than other people do. So that's an interesting word straight away.
00:03:56
Speaker
They're not telling you their opinion. that's quite surprising, isn't it? So you're not coming away persuaded by what they say. They ask you more questions than people normally do.
00:04:08
Speaker
They tend to be very good at mimicking and talking in the style, the tone and the mood of other people, but they often do not realize they do this and they tend not to realize other people don't do it. They tend to match how other people talk.
00:04:24
Speaker
They usually very comfortable continuing conversations when there's an awkward pause or a silence, but they tend not to do it in a forced or off-putting kind of way.
00:04:34
Speaker
So they might just continue. So the conversation lulls, they pick it back up where it left off or they're straight in there with a new joke. They're comfortable talking about another topic. It's really interesting, but it doesn't feel forced and they generally not dominant speakers.
00:04:49
Speaker
And they might typically have roles that involve using these skills as you would expect, but they're not necessarily leaders either. And they are often unaware of their pillars.
00:05:02
Speaker
So they started to think about what these people do and what is special about them and how they tend to
Types of Conversations
00:05:10
Speaker
work. What the researchers found is that there's actually three types of conversation mostly super communicators know this to be the case.
00:05:19
Speaker
Most the rest of us have no idea, but most them know it to be the case. And these three types are are that people either want to have a conversation that involves coming to a decision, You want to have a conversation that is about their identity or it's about emotion.
00:05:36
Speaker
Okay. So another way of putting it is decision, emotion or social. Now, the particular one to focus on there actually is the social conversation. So that 70% of conversation that we have is actually social. Okay.
00:05:51
Speaker
We're not particularly communicating how we feel about anything. We're not particularly communicating that we need to make a decision together about anything. we're just talking. If I'm telling you about a book that I read, that is social conversation, but it also links very heavily into my identity as a person.
00:06:10
Speaker
What these communicators tend to do in that situation is ask me questions about at the thing I'm talking about, but they're not surface level questions. They tend to ask about feelings.
00:06:25
Speaker
If you're telling me about book, as an analytical person, I'm going to ask you where you read it, what it's about, you know, factual things. All the things we talk about on this podcast. check that fact Yeah, exactly. A super communicator will tend to ask you things like, how did you feel about it?
00:06:42
Speaker
What did you change in your life because of the book? actions did you take because of it? and It tends to be questions that are not surface level.
00:06:53
Speaker
It tends to be that they will ask you things that make you talk more, that you talk more deeply about yourself. And let's be honest here. Most people are not very good ah opening other people up about how they feel and think and being interested in what other people say.
00:07:14
Speaker
that' so it's quite interesting in that way because we all hear the phrase, oh, you're a really good listener. But actually it's not just listening. It's getting people to talk about how they feel about things.
00:07:26
Speaker
So as an example, and they use this one, say you're talking to your partner and you've got a problem at work. Okay. Now we have all done this. We try and solve that problem for them, don't we? And we're like, well, what you should do.
00:07:42
Speaker
And then the conversation goes badly. And you're just like, why did the conversation go badly? Yeah. Really strange. So the problem is that they didn't want a decision conversation there.
00:07:55
Speaker
So they didn't need you to help them decide on how they deal with this problem. Most likely they just wanted to give you their emotions. So we can call this offloading sometimes and sometimes it goes to that far, but often people want share their emotions. How are they feeling about this?
00:08:11
Speaker
And they want to be asked questions. They don't realize they want asked questions about it, but they want to be asked questions about how they feel. how they are, or they just want to talk. They're just being social.
00:08:23
Speaker
They want to tell you about their day. And where they're hearing, oh, you've got a problem. I want to solve it for you. And it's not a decision conversation. So it goes badly. they found these three types of conversation type. And they found that super communicators are exceedingly good at following along with the right conversation type instinctively and bringing people together.
00:08:47
Speaker
To the point where they're willing to talk a lot more about themselves, about their feelings, about stuff that's really below the surface of what goes on in their mind. Okay, so I see how this works on a personal level when some people just want to have social conversations or just want to then and talk about emotions.
00:09:05
Speaker
But at work, surely most of our conversations are not necessarily just about making a decision, but could be a discussion to canvas different opinions. We're not talking about different deployment testing approaches because that's our preferred topic. We're doing it because, you know, that's something that needs to get done.
00:09:26
Speaker
So how does this map to our work environment? And i guess what does super communication look like in our processing teams on a good day?
Workplace Application of Communication Skills
00:09:38
Speaker
You're absolutely right. We think to ourselves, a lot of the conversations we actually have at work are what we call decision conversation. So I'm giving you a task. We're deciding that you are going to go and do this thing.
00:09:51
Speaker
Well, you've come to me having done some work and we're deciding if I'm happy with it. Yep. But this is the point. Most conversations are not that actually, that might be a small snippet of the conversation we actually had.
00:10:03
Speaker
The conversation probably begins with, hello, how are you? What did you do at the weekend? So actually the super communicator has already opened up the conversation, in tune to themselves emotionally with you before we go into doing the decision conversation.
00:10:22
Speaker
And that just goes a lot better because you're already in tune with each other. So you might think of someone you just instinctively like at work. They may not actually be easy to work with. They may not always agree with you, but strangely, you just think of them as someone that's really nice to work with, someone you get on with and you get work done with and so on So when you just want to talk to, and often that's these super communicators that they don't have to agree with you all the time. So at work, firstly, taking the time, understanding how someone is feeling when they come and have that conversation, because all of us,
00:10:59
Speaker
are feeling different ways at all the times that we come and talk. Yeah. So just instinctively matching how people are being emotionally when they come and talk to you can be quite effective.
00:11:11
Speaker
Making that conversation go well. That's just one example of how you can be at work. So the conversation is probably going to eventually lead to decision in point at work. Probably. That's, you know, if you come to someone's desk and they work for you, that's probably where we're going with it.
00:11:27
Speaker
That that is not the majority of the conversation. And that part will go much better if we're good at the 70% of it is probably social. Privacy teams aren't very extroverted. Most of the time we talked about this in the past, most the time it's a team full of introverts or heavy majority introvert.
00:11:47
Speaker
We're also a team that is often pretty ambitious and competitive. We want to get stuff done. And we're very analytical people. We're not always necessarily in touch with that emotional or identity kind of touchy-feely, fluffy side of of who we are and what what we do. Particularly not when we're at work.
00:12:12
Speaker
But it strikes me that identity actually plays a big part in our lives at work. Whether it's, oh, I'm the expert in this thing and people put a lot of store in in being seen as the expert in a certain software or a certain process.
00:12:32
Speaker
You even see this at manager or director level where people feel they can't ask questions or learn a new coding language or whatever because that they they want to continue to be the expert where they are.
00:12:44
Speaker
But also people who feel like they should be the decision maker for whatever topic. How can we use identity and talk about identity at work in a more open and honest way?
00:13:00
Speaker
So I think interestingly, identity, as I said, the sort of 70% of conversation that's about identity, that's about social areas. The thing you can really do if you want to be considered a super communicator is the asking lots of questions, but not making them service level, not just very blue minded analytical questions.
00:13:22
Speaker
And you can do this with work quite easily actually. If someone's showing me their work, You can ask questions like, how did you calculate that? Or you can ask questions like, what was your method for calculating that? The point is to get a bit more deeper into people's thoughts and open them up to talking more about it.
00:13:46
Speaker
So if you ask someone simply, how did you calculate that? The answer is just very, I took this cell and that cell and I did this and did that. It's very fractional.
00:13:57
Speaker
They're not sharing with you anything about who they are as a person in the answer. If you ask them, what made you calculate it in that way? I feel if someone said to me, what were you thinking when you calculate? I would be like, yeah oh my goodness. That sounds like there's something majorly wrong.
00:14:15
Speaker
It's just so interesting though, because there's technically nothing wrong with that. You know, as a question, it could be totally neutral, but I think it does speak to our educational backgrounds.
00:14:27
Speaker
that we are trained to think that there should be a right way to calculate anything that we come up against, even things that are brand new situations or ad hoc analysis.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so we're expecting that there would be a right answer. And... that any questioning of what was your thought process around it or any he even it was any tentative step towards those emotional conversations makes us feel supremely uncomfortable and slightly defensive i think you know even when you asked me that and like this is hypothetical work right but like i'm thinking nothing wrong with it i'm thinking that that's the right way to do it like
00:15:09
Speaker
but So isn't that just a really interesting, you know, i guess cultural thing. I can easily imagine that a team are very analytical price impressionals would all have a similar reaction to that.
00:15:21
Speaker
it would be a really interesting experiment though, just to try for a week or two to see what reactions you get. and to understand the difference in both documentation, but also creative thinking.
00:15:37
Speaker
If we moved from asking people, how did you calculate it write down the formula effectively, to what was the thought process behind it, or even talk me through how we got there.
00:15:49
Speaker
Those are much better ways of asking that question. that them affair but But the point is that that opens someone else's up to talk to you about it. They're not just going to point at sales and tell you how they multiplied it together. They're going to give you some of their thought process about how they did it, more of themselves, more about their identity.
Critique of 'Super Communicators'
00:16:09
Speaker
You nearly led to the main problem with this book there, actually, which is that it's very interesting that these people exist. But I think it really lacks a framework to tell you how to do this.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's just, it's 5% of the material is how to actually do But I do wonder though, we hear a lot from pricing teams who say they are absolutely swarmed with work. They're in the middle of big projects with just so much to do all of the time.
00:16:39
Speaker
Would we want to spend more of our work day talking to each other, our colleagues about our feelings and identity and things. Because like I hear it, in fact, the opposite from most teams, that they actually want to make their meetings more efficient and more streamlined, get to that decision conversation more quickly.
00:16:58
Speaker
How could we redesign whatever meetings that we have on a regular basis to incorporate these ideas, but in a way that doesn't add lots of extra meeting time to our day?
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily about adding lots more than meeting time. i think it's about being better with the conversations that you have. of the things that super communicators do through all of these questions is that they work out what people want what they want from the conversation, what they want as people. Sometimes that people want to be helped, hugged or heard.
00:17:35
Speaker
so that's a different way talking about this whole decision, emotion, social thing. Now as a manager, most of us have dealt with someone coming to us who is upset about something.
00:17:46
Speaker
And we might well go into decision mode very quickly. oh you've got a problem. What would you want me to do about That person's not been heard, have they?
00:17:58
Speaker
They may, you know, it uses the phrase hug, but it doesn't mean literally hugging people. Sometimes people want to be listened to. Sometimes they will a bit of placating, a bit of handholding, and sometimes times they actually want your help.
00:18:12
Speaker
So in many ways, this is more efficient because you can end the conversation quite quickly, but you can tend to have everyone feeling unhappy about who it went.
00:18:23
Speaker
Imagine a situation where somebody who works for someone else comes to you as a manager tells you about an issue they've got with that manager.
00:18:34
Speaker
So that can be a bit of an awkward position to be in. And you're like, well, I don't really have any other to sort out any issues here, but actually that person might just want to be listened to and their own manager is not very good at
Efficient Conversations
00:18:48
Speaker
that.
00:18:48
Speaker
So the very fact that you actually take a bit of time to do that. Which to be honest, you would have had that conversation anyway. So it's whether that conversation goes well or whether it goes badly is in your domain.
00:19:03
Speaker
And it's just like that with so many other things. You're going to have a lot of these conversations. going to have those meetings. How do want them to go? Do you want them to be effective? These super communicators, they get together with a group of people they do not know.
00:19:16
Speaker
They just all watched a film together where they didn't understand a word of what was going on in it. They have a discussion people who go away being like, oh yeah, that's that's what it was about.
00:19:28
Speaker
They went away thinking that that person's opinion is the correct one and it's theirs. Now that is a superpower, isn't it? Imagine that. If you went into meetings, 20 people in a pricing committee in front of you, they went away agreeing with what you wanted them to think at the end of that meeting.
00:19:47
Speaker
Wow. Isn't that powerful? And it's just a matter of asking questions of people, understanding what they want from the conversation. This is the tip. This is depicting the big thing that super communicates to do. So they ask a lot of questions until they understand what people want.
00:20:01
Speaker
They tend to go into those three categories and then They look to answer what you're looking for as the second part, and then you tend to go away agreeing with them.
00:20:12
Speaker
And that's, it's as easy as that. Now, the problem for me with the book is that there isn't a decent framework for how do I apply this? bad But that is quite a powerful thing, isn't it?
00:20:24
Speaker
Okay, so would you recommend this book? Because it kind of feels like the point of the book is that it's tracked that these people exist and told you you may or may not be one, but probably not, right? Given the odds.
00:20:36
Speaker
And doesn't actually tell you how you can be better at this, particularly. So I guess I'm struggling to think, what is that real application here? And...
00:20:47
Speaker
Given the particularly analytical people we have in our pricing teams, is it likely that we work with or for a super communicator? I can think of a couple of people who are quite senior, who are very level headed, very cold.
00:21:03
Speaker
Generally everyone in the team likes them. They're very good at getting work done and very well respected. And I think they probably are super communicators, but there's a racial number of them pricing that I do think they get promoted quite highly actually. Imagine you just instinctively are very good at getting the pricing committee to agree to your proposals.
00:21:27
Speaker
And a lot of them don't even realize they've got this power. Like people leave meetings with literally their brainwaves synchronized to that person. Think about people that are senior who leave you feeling very cruel after you talk to them. Yeah, it's really interesting.
00:21:44
Speaker
I would recommend this book, actually. was like, actually, this is really useful information and only have been applied a lot of things that come up in this book. that's quite interesting itself.
00:21:56
Speaker
it So how are you applying this book in your real life? I had for quite a long time got much better at asking people who I've just met. Questions like, do you like where you live?
00:22:07
Speaker
What made you move there? Say, you mew meet someone, shake her and say hello. Where do you live? You know, that's really common, isn't it? Are you from...Strange? striend a nice question to ask, isn't it?
00:22:21
Speaker
Doesn't tell you anything about the person. They're like, yes or no, are not from Stroud. Nice factual i answer there. What do you like about Stroud? It's certainly more interesting to answer, isn't it?
00:22:33
Speaker
I feel like given our audience, most people are like, well, statistically, they're unlikely to be from Stroud on. But like maybe hitting London might have been slightly more.
Empathy in Astronaut Interviews
00:22:45
Speaker
The authors analysed hours and hours of interviews that were done with astronauts. Oddly enough, so during astronaut selection, they obviously go through a lot of conversations and interviews to frame that as much as possible about them.
00:23:01
Speaker
Now there's two particular examples that they use, but the astronauts were in a particular selection basis. They're all asked quite similar questions. And the in interviewer was wearing a really narrow garish tie that intentionally clashed with their jacket and they dropped all of their papers on the way into the interview. Right.
00:23:20
Speaker
And the col conversation went, oh, I'm really sorry that I'm wearing this tie because obviously it doesn't match my suit. Uh, but my child really wanted me to wear this particular one today. I hope you don't mind.
00:23:34
Speaker
Right. And some and people were very empathetic and asked questions about the child and why they wanted that and so on. And other people were just like, no, okay.
00:23:47
Speaker
Well, yeah. But oddly it enough, people that got up in the shop to them collect their papers together. Some people got up and helped them collect their papers together.
00:23:57
Speaker
Some people didn't. And they were then asked, they were asked some really quite deep questions about themselves. Like, what's the most difficult thing you've been through recently?
00:24:08
Speaker
And then having answered that, the interviewer was would pretend to get visibly upset and talk about a recent bereavement. And some people would ask them questions about it, but careful few questions like how are you feeling?
00:24:25
Speaker
How close were you that person? Did you? And so on. Other people would be like, oh, I'm really sorry. That must be very difficult for you. Now, here's the thing, right? The best astronauts were the ones that did things like asked about the child who'd chosen the tie that got up and picked the papers up that asked deep questions about the bereavement. There's a particular example. There's three astronauts on. I think it's a Colo seven.
00:24:54
Speaker
who ended up very angrily disagreeing with each other whilst they were on their return fly, arguing with mission control or refusing to do the mission properly.
00:25:05
Speaker
And oddly enough, they linked it back to all three of them showed bad communication skills in those initial interview
Teamwork and Communication Skills
00:25:14
Speaker
meetings. And they just, the three of them happened to be put together and then really frictioned.
00:25:19
Speaker
It's incredibly telling isn't it when you put it like that, just how these skills then show up in how well people do it. So yeah, I would recommend this book. Maybe you won't come away from it with loads of things that you can apply. Maybe you need to read it a few times to understand it, but maybe recognizing that other people have gotten skills.
00:25:40
Speaker
If you're choosing a and you, and you spot someone that's got these fantastic communication skills that can literally leave a room with merging their brain waves, well, you should get that person on your team. So yes, I do recommend reading it. it All right. Wonderful. Well, strong recommendation from Jeremy there.
00:26:00
Speaker
and I know that I'm going to go away from this. Trying to notice more moments when people are asking lots of questions. Try it with me. I'd love to hear how you found this. And if you try that experiment by asking people in your team ah how they're feeling, do you let me know how it goes. I'd be fascinated to hear how you go. Join us next time. And we'll be looking at a book that has a pretty punchy title.
00:26:22
Speaker
It's called Bullshit Jobs. You won't want to miss this one.
Pricewriters Services Overview
00:26:37
Speaker
Pricewriters transforms pricing professionals into the most respected leaders in insurance. Find out more about our engaging training, graduate schemes and our capability audit by visiting pricewriters.com.