Nate Clark's Musings

The more I learn about people the more I realize we’re all just bald monkeys with a big prefrontal cortex. Evolution optimized us to be hunter-gatherers living in small groups. Everything about our brain physiology is optimized for wanting to be part of a group, because being left out would have been pretty un-great for survival back when we had to worry about getting eaten by lions or conquered by other groups of monkeys or whatever.

I read a great book recently, “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz, that is ostensibly about negotiation. But I was struck by how many of the negotiation tips applied to my day job, where I do very little overt negotiation.

I obsess over how to make my team more productive, and studies have shown that groups with high levels of psychological safety are the most productive. Many of the techniques described in the book were all about generating psychological safety in order to help with negotiations. The book is basically a wealth of shortcuts for tapping into our monkey-brains that can be used for either negotiation or generating psychological safety.

Let me recount some of those tips here for my future self, who will likely forget them:

• Smile – creating an atmosphere of positivity makes people more likely to collaborate and feel like part of the community.

• Listen attentively and listen slowly – People want to be understood and accepted. Listening and demonstrating empathy is the surest way to do that. And be sure to pause and think for a beat or two prior to responding. If you reply too quickly or interrupt people while they’re talking, then they don’t feel like they’re being heard.

• Mirroring (aka isopraxism) – People like people who are like themselves. Copying speech patterns, tone, body language validates others’ emotions and helps establish empathy. A great verbal trick is just repeating the last few words of whatever someone says back to them to keep them talking. For example,
  
  Person A: I’m having a really hard time training my dog to do my taxes. He seems to get the basics but doesn’t really understand tax loss harvesting or how to depreciate my snow globe collection.
  
  Me: Depreciate your snow globe collection?
  
  Person A: Yeah, like he understands they lose value, but…
  
  This type of interaction makes Person A feel like they’re understood.

• Labeling – Labeling is when you listen to what someone is telling you and give their feelings a name. For example,
  
  Person A: I cannot believe Taylor Swift won’t endorse my cryptocurrency exchange! I mean, yeah, we do sell unregistered securities, but I asked really nicely!
  
  Me: It sounds like you’re really upset about this, Person A.
  
  Person A: Definitely! You totally get me, Nate. Come visit me if I’m ever under house arrest.
  
  Like mirroring, labeling is another great technique for generating empathy. By stating what they’re feeling you demonstrate that you’re listening and that makes the other person feel like part of the tribe.
  
  Labeling is particularly effective at defusing strong emotions. Research has shown that labeling is one of the best ways to calm people down when they’re having strong reactions.

• Talk in person – Back in the 60’s UCLA Professor Albert Mehrabian did several studies on communication and found that people attribute meaning 7% based on what you say, 38% based on tone or how it’s said, and 55% based on body language. These specific numbers are BS, but the bigger finding remains that tone and body language are incredibly important to your message. You need to talk to people in person to generate connection, and when you do pay close attention to how you say things. Email, Slack, etc. have their place but they are no substitute for talking in person, particularly if the conversation is sensitive or difficult.

• Use “How” and “What” questions to guide people through conflict – Disagreements will naturally arise in any relationship. I see this a lot where two engineers will disagree about the which is the best solution for a particular problem. If you have a preferred solution, it’s often possible to lead the other person toward that destination by asking guiding questions. This is often much more effective than directly arguing, particularly when emotions are high. For example,
  
  Person A: I really think we should store all our user data in a single CSV file. It’s simple, it’s human-readable, and I can write a parser in like 2 minutes!
  
  Me: That’s an interesting idea. How will that work when we have to update the schema? or
  
  What will happen to performance when we need to query a particular user’s information? or
  
  How will that scale if we need to access it from multiple computers?
  
  Basically, rather than explicitly stating, “We should put this in a database,” I’m guiding them toward that solution. You’re engaging the other person’s intelligence to solve the problem in a way that works for you without direct confrontation.
  
  Many disagreements can be resolved with dispassionate arguments about the relative merits of the two proposals, but when emotions run high using “What” and “How” questions is a fantastic technique to help reach agreement while lowering the temperature.
  
  In a separate book, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio recounts a fascinating tale of people who had damaged part of their brain where emotions are generated. He noted these people couldn’t make any decisions. They could describe exactly what they should do logically, but they couldn’t make even the simplest decisions. The conclusion is that decision making is fundamentally emotional. So when emotions are heated avoiding direct confrontation can be the best way to reach agreement.

Hope you find this useful!