Hi, Matt here. On Think Fast Talk Smart, we're all about building strong communication skills.
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What do you get when you combine world-renowned faculty, hundreds of participants of Stanford's Executive Education Online Program, and an expert in strategic communications and a podcast host, Me To We.
This event is one of my favorite all year on the Stanford campus.
And today we have a special episode from this event.
Abraham's took the stage with four of the GSB's most popular faculty members to learn more about their research and how it applies to improving our communication.
I'm Jenny Luna, Executive Producer of Think Fast Talk Smart.
Get your pencils out and enjoy this peak into a panel discussion, Think Fast Talk Smart style.
And stay tuned after the episode to hear from Stanford lead participants, as they share their learnings from courses with professors featured in this episode.
And without further ado, let's welcome strategic communications lecturer and podcast host, Matt Abrahams.
Big thank you to Jenny, the show could not run without Jenny, I am thrilled to be here with all of you to do a live version of Think Fast Talk Smart.
It is my distinct privilege now not only to host the podcast in general but to host this event for you today.
For a steam GSB faculty members are joining us, we're going to have a bit of a conversation.
Shall we get started? Excellent.
Michelle, welcome, for those of you who don't know Michelle, Michelle Gelfand is the John H.
Scully Professor in Cross Cultural Management and a Professor of Organizational Behavior.
Michelle's research explores cross cultural organizational behavior, negotiation, conflict, and diversity.
And she is the author of a rule makers, rule breakers, how tight and loose cultures wire the world.
And Michelle and I had two lovely conversations on the podcast.
We talked about conflict, we talked about negotiation, I apply some of the things you taught me in my life with my two teenagers, thank you.
When we were together, we talked a lot about your useful tips to manage conflict and negotiation.
And many of the challenging issues in the world today are affecting our work and our personal relationships.
Can you provide some ideas on how we can best navigate and manage conflicts around broader societal issues that affect us in our everyday lives?
Sure, and first I want to welcome all the leaders back to campus, we're so happy to have you here.
Woo! So what's fascinating is that negotiation happens all the time, but many of us leave a lot of value at the table.
And what we know from research is that often that's because we are either too competitive or we're actually too cooperative.
So it's trying to have a mixture of cooperation and competition that really helps us to create the best deals.
And that means really two things.
We need to really be firm on our own interests and our priorities, but also be looking out to listen to what the priorities and interests are over counterparts.
So as an example, you could think about two sisters fighting over an orange.
And at first glance it looks like just split it down the middle or one's going to take it all.
But if they discover that one sister wants the peel to make a cake and the other sister wants the pulp to eat it, they can actually both win and that's an example of understanding underlying interests.
I just want to take another example, it's going to sound a little stereotypical, but this is negotiation with my husband and I.
I want to go to the spa at the beach and he wants to go to a log cabin in the mountains.
Now first glance it looks like we're going to go on separate vacations, but we discover that my priority is the spa and his priority are the mountains.
And so if we can figure that out, we can go to a spa in the mountains.
And so that's really a sense of understanding interest-based negotiation.
The other thing I've been thinking a lot about is how we conceptualize negotiation.
The metaphors we have that we bring to the negotiation table that really affect what we're doing.
Is this a battle? Is it a sport?
Is it a dance? Or some people I interview say it's like visiting a dentist.
The necessary evil. There was metaphors really affect how we behave and so we really should be mindful of the metaphors we bring to the table because sometimes they could be mismatched.
We don't want to bring a very cooperative metaphor by dating to a distributive one-issue task type of negotiation.
That's really ineffective.
Likewise, we don't want to bring a sports or battle metaphor to a very integrative, multi-issue type of negotiation.
And so it's really about minding our metaphors and even creating a shared metaphor with our counterparts.
What are we doing here? Creative puzzle solving types of metaphors really are very constructive in this regard.
I like this idea of minding your metaphors.
And I think in our personal lives and our professional lives, we bring those metaphors to bear.
And sometimes the conflict is over the metaphor we're using.
That's right. Less over what we're saying.
So I challenge all of us and I need to think about this myself.
I know when I have to give my kids some strict news, I prepare for battle.
And maybe what I need to do is prepare for something different.
Yeah. And so I like that.
Thank you. So next, Brian, I'd like to come to you.
Brian Lowry is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick, Professor of Organizational Behavior, co-director of Stanford's Institute on Race and Host of the Podcast.
Know what you see and you should all tune into it.
Brian's research explores the ways individuals understand inequality and more recently, the way his relationship shape our experience of meaning in life.
Brian also wrote the book Selfless, The Social Creation of You.
Since we last spoke, Brian, you became the co-director of Stanford's Institute on Race.
I'm wondering if you can share with us some of the efforts of the Institute and what are some things those in the audience can take back around the issues of race to their firms.
Yeah, so welcome. It's good to see you all in person.
So this little race kind of gives the wrong impression.
So it's really about the diversity of human experience.
Like we look out here and you all are incredibly diverse.
You're from different places, different communities.
And the question is in society, how do we manage that?
Because it turns out around the world that kind of diversity and people's experience in the communities they come from and the places they live create stumbling blocks for us living together well, living together in a productive way.
Everybody flourishing and the institute is designed to address the stumbling blocks associated with human diversity to us all flourishing together.
And so you can think about around the world, different communities have varied access to health care, for example, or the criminal justice system works differently for some communities than others.
And the reason I don't want to say focus on race is because in the United States race means something very particular.
But in every community in every country, there's some division and you might not call it race, you might call it something else.
But whatever it is you call it, that's what we're talking about.
So the institute is designed to bring together the knowledge insights of faculty, like the faculty up here and pair that with communities, organizations, nonprofit organizations, government organizations, define ways so that diverse communities can flourish together.
That's the goal of the institute.
And so when you think about that, I hope it's pretty obvious how you would connect that to being a leader.
So if you're a leader and you're dealing with a diverse set of people that either work with you or a diverse population that you sell to or interact with, how do you create the situation such or create the parameter such that you all either work incredibly well together, that everyone has opportunities to succeed and demonstrate their strengths or that all of your clients feel equally respected so that they want to come back to you and continue to work with your organization.
So I think the general thrust of the institute is a part of how we should all think about engaging both our organizations and in the communities we live.
I think the notion of branching beyond your organization and connecting more broadly can be very helpful and it strikes me that some of the things Michelle was talking about around negotiation and conflict play out as a result of these differences that you're looking at.
And so I think the insights that come from the work that some of these faculty do could be helpful.
So perhaps all of us can think about how we can reach beyond our organization to address some of these differences.
So thank you. Deb, thank you for being here.
Deb Gruenfeld is the Joseph McDonald Professor of Organization Behavior and Deb's research examines power and group dynamics.
Deb is the author of Acting with Power.
Why we are more powerful than we believe the class you teach is amazingly popular and helpful to our students.
You were also one of the very first guests on the If Then podcast and I really enjoyed listening and learning from you on that.
When we spoke we were in the midst of the pandemic.
We talked a lot about the things we can do to enhance our status and power.
I'm curious now that we are back in person or at least hybrid.
Do you have some thoughts now that are newer or different from what we talked about back in the day?
Yeah, sure. First let me just join the chorus and welcoming you and thanking you all for being here with us today.
It's a general rule of thumb when it comes to signalling power or status is the simple idea of taking space, taking more space.
And in the real world on the ground like where we are today we can understand what that means in terms of like physically spreading out.
We know we're all kind of doing that especially if I like reach over and touch someone that I'm really taking liberties with the amount of space that I've been entitled to.
That's the idea. That was the idea.
So here's an interesting thing that we noticed about going online during the pandemic.
Zoom is a very interesting and I think Skype and all of these different platforms that we've used.
A very interesting environment because everyone gets a square the same size.
So it's like the great equalizer.
You know what I mean? Like people who are used to having power and influence based on how they use their bodies are really disempowered by this environment.
I've had a lot of people come to me and say, you know, I don't know what to do.
I did not realize how much I rely on my physical presence in order to connect and get things done.
So there are a couple things that I've noticed about this environment.
One is not that surprising.
The second one has come so real surprised to me.
So the first one is that one of the ways you could think about taking space has to do with the way you speak.
And in a Zoom environment, in a virtual environment, your voice and the way you speak is one of the only instruments you have left.
So the idea of applying the notion of taking space to the way you speak.
So slowing down a little bit when you're speaking, you know, not rushing, being comfortable owning silence.
So the rule of like more time and fewer words is definitely a more authoritative way of speaking than what many of us do and what I'm probably doing right now, which is to speak quickly and try to make everything go as quickly as we can.
So that's a little bit about speaking.
I would say to something else that's very useful when you're thinking about relying on the way you speak is to make sure that you make space in your mouth for your words.
When we roll over consonants, it's a low power way of speaking.
It's a non-threatening way of speaking to not make short, sharp sounds.
So something else you can think about when you're in one of those moments where you're trying to maximize your expertise or your authority in a Zoom environment is to just to make sure that there's space in your mouth for you to hit every sound in every word.
That's the speaking part.
Here's the most interesting thing that I noticed as someone who pays attention to how we signal power and authority all the time on Zoom.
And that has to do with the way people have learned to use space or set the stage for themselves in their little box.
So here's what I noticed.
I don't know if you have noticed this yourselves, but I've noticed when during the pandemic, when we were on Zoom a lot, and I'd meetings with very important people, let's say like the president of the university would be an example.
I noticed that the very important people showed up in a big formal room, not very close to the camera.
And it makes sense if you think about it, one of the other signals of power and status and authority is psychological distance.
So when we're very close to the screen, it's a little bit like leaning in, it's very friendly, it's very engaged, it's very warm, it's wonderful.
But if you're thinking specifically about power and authority, you might want to think of taking, creating more space around you and a more formal setting to signal that you're an important person who owns a lot of turf.
I sometimes think about it this way.
I'll notice like, oh, they've got a huge desk, because that's the desk they always use, or is that the desk they're using for their Zoom meetings.
So you know, it's something we often don't pay a lot of attention to, but it is something that I've noticed and I think that it's true.
Little more distance from the camera, a little more formal space around you, I think is a way of signaling power and status in those in those contexts.
I'm going to purposely pause long and simply say, I will just add one pet peeve I have, please, for goodness sake, get good lighting.
I cannot, it just drives me nuts.
People look like they're in the witness protection for you.
If you don't know how to get good lighting, ask a teenager because TikTok has got it right, at least on terms of lighting.
I think this notion of how we have to manage ourselves and our space is very different when we're virtual and we have new tools and it's interesting to see how we do that.
I remember I was sharing with them when we came back for the first time and my students saw me, used to see me in the box and now they see me, the first thing that says, I can't believe how short you are.
We form perceptions of people, so thank you for that and I'm thankful we're in person in that virtual.
Next is Zach Zack-Tormila, is the Lawrence W.
Lane Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing.
Zach's study is one of my favorite topics, persuasion and influence and we've had the great pleasure of teaching some courses together.
Zach, when we spoke on the podcast, we talked about the importance of, in relevance, of capturing people's attention long enough so we can actually persuade them.
You have some new research out on pronouns, specifically the word you.
Can you share with us about what you found in your work and help us learn how we can leverage it?
That's not how you do it.
Okay, all right. So don't do that.
All right, good. Just kidding.
Just kidding. Hey everybody, welcome.
I'm Zach. It's good to see all of you.
I teach persuasion in a lead course, so if any of you are out there, great.
Just work in the crowd a little bit.
Yeah, hey. And I'm a little self-conscious about how I'm speaking right now after hearing about rolling consonants.
I don't even know what that means.
I'm probably not worried.
I'm not doing it. The pronoun research, so in persuasion, you won't be surprised to hear that language and word choice matters a lot when you're trying to reach people.
For those of you who have taken my course, you already heard a little bit about the word you and how the word you can be engaging.
And so there's longstanding research in this area showing that when you use the word you in the opening lines of some pitch or message, it makes your message feel more personally relevant to the audience or the recipient, even if it's a generic use of the word you.
But there's something about the word you that makes us feel individually responsible or weighing in or evaluating something.
So the word you is a really good way to engage your audience.
Often, though, this is kind of coming around to the newer research.
Often when we're interacting with somebody that we're hoping to move or shift or persuade in some way, we might be in a more adversarial context or maybe there's disagreement.
We have different perspectives on some issue.
We're debating, arguing, and so on.
What we've found is some of our recent research is that the word you, although it still engages the audience, it still gets their attention and holds it.
It gets them to think a little bit more and tune in.
That's still true. But it can also feel aggressive, the context of disagreement or adversarial discourse.
And so what we've been looking at in some recent research is what you should do instead in those moments.
And what we find is that changing out the word you, yours, those kinds of second-person pronouns, changing them out for first-person plural pronouns.
So we, us, our can create a more inclusive, receptive dynamic.
And so what we've been testing is the past and finding is that in a neutral to supportive context where everybody agrees or at least there's no antagonism or attention, you is still great.
That's still true. So if you learned that in my class, it's still true.
But in those adversarial contexts, it can backfire.
It grabs attention, but it makes you seem unreceptive.
It makes you seem like you're more aggressive and that triggers resistance in your audience.
And so when you say we, us, our instead.
So instead of saying something like you're getting this wrong, you don't understand this, you might say we're getting this wrong.
We don't understand this.
Something that simple.
Suddenly you seem open, you seem receptive, and your receptiveness elicits receptiveness from your audience.
If they sense that you're open, they'll be more open in response.
And what we've found in our research in this area is that that feeling of receptiveness following the words like us, we, our in these settings, it facilitates persuasion.
It makes people more willing to engage with the speaker in future tasks or future conversations.
And it decreases the likelihood that you'll get censored or that your content will get blocked in some ways.
So we have a bunch of experiments where we put people in the role of information moderator where they get to weigh in on a discourse that's happening, say in an online discussion group, on Reddit or something.
And the more people use the word we in their disagreeing messages, the less likely they are to be censored, or they use the word you in those contexts, the more likely they are to be censored.
And we've even scraped real discussions from Reddit to look at this there and found that those pronouns predict censorship, likelihood, and Reddit as well.
So real people who aren't there for our experiments also are censoring others based on their pronoun use in Reddit.
So some that seems innocuous or trivial can actually have a pretty profound implication for the communication and people's openness and their willingness to collaborate, open up to others and so on.
So that's a little preview.
If you've taken my course, you've also heard a little bit about the benefits of we us an hour already.
So this is not brand new for some of the people in the audience, but that's what we've been finding.
Well, we are all very lucky to learn from what you've shared with us.
I can imagine that some of these frames that Michelle talked about the way we frame our conversations, our conflicts and negotiation might invite a different type of language so they can pair up nicely.
So thank you. I know all of you are actively involved in new research and taking what you've already done and expanding it.
I'd love to hear from each of you something that you're working on that you're really excited about.
Give us a little foreshadowing of what's to come, Deb, would you mind starting what's something you're working on?
I'm kind of building off what I said earlier.
A lot of the work that I've done most recently has looked at what I call acting with power and it really has to do with the choices that we make about how we show up in different kinds of contexts and how we can be more intentional about that.
What I've become really interested in lately is how investors make decisions about which teams seem like a good bet based on how the teams show up.
And I've started to talk with investors about this.
They are 100% sure that they're attentive to this but they have no idea what they're noticing, what they're paying attention to.
So I'm super excited to try to get into this.
One of the early ideas I have about it has to do with whether startup teams, these small teams are coming in, very hierarchical with a clear division of labor with an obvious leader and others playing very specific roles versus coming in more egalitarian, trying to give everyone speaking time.
I'm also interested in whether people, investors can pick up on whether there's agreement or alignment around the hierarchy that exists versus disagreement or misalignment around it.
So those are just some of the things that I'm looking at but very excited to find out more about all of our late theories about what makes a good team, you know, just paying attention to the dynamic of the team and what it looks like to us.
It takes me back to this morning where many of you were involved in the Lisa pitching competition and different groups had different ways of presenting their team and how they talked about the team and that might influence how investors think.
That's it. Brian, what's something you're working on that you'd like to share?
I'm interested in meaningfulness in life right now.
So like what makes life feel meaningful is kind of what I'm focused on right now and we just backstage I was talking about this.
I think that people often confuse achievement with meaning.
So one way to think about is imagine that you're thirsty but you don't know you're thirsty.
You feel hungry and so you keep eating but you're not satisfied because the really you're not, it's not hunger, it's thirst.
And I think achievement and meaning are a little bit like that.
Sometimes we think what we need is more achievement, what we need to get a better job, make more money, get a better home and we chase those things because we think they're going to make us feel better but my guess is most of you if not all of you haven't had this experience you get these things and you're like something is still missing and the thing that you can think of as well it's missing because I didn't get the right house.
I don't have a big enough salary.
There's another job and you chase that thing and something is still missing.
Think what might be happening is that the seeking of meaning is harder to see clearly because it's more complicated than achievement right.
One achievement is usually easy to measure like you know if you've achieved the thing or not and it's instantly gratifying when you get the thing it feels like great at the moment and so it's only kind of in retrospect that you feel like this is not it.
This is not exactly something is missing.
Meaning on the other hand is harder to quantify like what does it mean like how do you know when you've got it what does it look like and the other thing about meaning is the research suggests it can feel uncomfortable pursuing meaning can feel uncomfortable.
