Classes begin at Harvard Business School this week, and a course that’s sure to fill up fast this year is Associate Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ new offering How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. It’s based on gobs of data revealing the importance of how we talk — not the proper use of language or presentation skills — how we converse each other in our daily lives. Students will learn conversation skills based on research insights through lots of practice, feedback, reflection, and wisdom from occasional guest “practitioners” such as matchmakers and comedians.
This hit my radar while listening to Michael Lewis’ Against the Rules podcast. He devoted seven episodes earlier this year to coaching — its history, impact, and potential unfairness. Brooks, along with fellow HBS Professor Michael Norton, prototyped this course last year and Lewis explored the humor and seriousness of their findings.
Social scientists like Brooks and Norton use sophisticated algorithms to analyze data from meetings, sales calls, speed dating, parole hearings, casual conversations, political debates, kids, Twitter, and more to discover what makes conversations work or not. Spoiler alert: Dale Carnegie told us what this research has now confirmed way back in 1936 in his How to Win Friends and Influence Others.
Norton notes, “We talk all day every day, it’s the number one thing that we do,” yet we don’t know how to do it effectively, and make all kinds of mistakes. He poked fun at celebrities caught in the act of bad bragging — complaint brags such as, “Ugh...my hand is so sore from signing so many autographs,” and humble brags like, “So honored to be onstage with Bono to receive this award.” While we don’t love bragging, we like it even less when it’s insincere. He muses, “It’s extraordinary how common bad strategies are. You’d think we’d figure this out, but part of the reason we don’t is . . . we don’t get feedback.” People don’t tell us directly when we flub it. But they sure do tell others!
Brooks points to egocentrism as a major culprit. We’re so focused on ourselves that we don’t know what topics others are interested in, we don’t listen, we offer compliments that don’t land, we use humor that misses, and we commit the deadly “bomerask” — we ask a question, get an answer, and bring it back to us: “How are you?” “I’m OK. I hurt my foot and can’t run.” “Oh, that happened to me a couple of years ago, and …”
How to talk gooder
Brooks packaged the research findings in her TALK framework to help coach students to be better conversationalists:
Topic: Have a topic plan even for simple conversations and don’t be afraid to switch topics. For spontaneous conversations where you can’t plan, data showed that when people switched topics more frequently, the conversation was more enjoyable. This helps at dinner parties as well. An agenda (essentially a topic plan) makes meetings more engaging and productive.
Asking: Ask more questions. This makes it more likely you’ll get a second date, make a sale, and get funding if you're an entrepreneur. We even like our Alexas and Siris better when they ask more questions. The magical question type is the follow-up question: “What else happened?” or “How did that make you feel?” And, absolutely no boomerasking. In short, be more interested than interesting.
Levity: Use and appreciate humor and a sense of play. It creates psychological safety, can make us seem more competent, helps navigate conflict, and makes us more likable.
Kindness: Be genuinely interested in and curious about others, reflect about them when they’re not present, be receptive to opposing views, and be responsive and validating. Smile.
The advantaged keep getting advantageder
Lewis asks, “Now is this a scandal, that students at the Harvard Business School are the first to learn these new data-driven tricks of conversation? Of course not, that’s what HBS does: amplify the advantages of people who are already winning.” When he asked Brooks where she’d take this, she lit up, “ . . . younger children, particularly underserved populations . . . these are the skills that could potentially propel people to success in their lives. Really.”
Lewis notes, “. . . coaching is clearly getting better and better, and spreading into more areas of life, which means it matters a great deal who gets it and who does not. And the people who don’t get it are often the ones who need it most.”
“Think about it,” he challenged. I am.