Dave Stahoviak (4:23)

As I read about this situation again in the book, I thought back to when I first saw this video on the Internet, when it went viral. And I, I think I had a similar reaction to most people that are like, wow, how could someone be so tone deaf in their interactions and how they presented this. And as I reflected on it more and thought about your work, I've. I've changed my mind a bit on it. Not in that it didn't land well, because of course it did not. But like, how it could have been me and so many leaders that, like you said, this person handled it personally. They clearly didn't take it lightly. They got on video. It's not like they delegated to someone else. There's so many places that intentions here seemed really good and yet it went bad really quickly, didn't it?

Andrew Brodsky (5:11)

Yeah, there's many organizations like Meta and Google that have done layoffs via emails and those went viral. On the other extreme, just due to lack of caring, you know, you've been with an organization for 10 years and all you get is an email that really hurts. The reason why this video layoff, one of the reasons why it went so badly, is that when we're interacting virtually and via video, we don't have the other people standing right in front of us. We're just looking at the text of an email or during a video call, just a small square of the other person that we're interacting with. So it's so easy to become self focused. And that's what happened here with the CEO. He was talking about how much was hurting him to do this. He was focused on himself, whereas if the other people were standing right in front of him and he was taking their perspective more, that might have been less likely to happen. And then of course, the other issue we have here is that with video, it wasn't as scripted. These things could leak through here, things his emotions, he might not have displayed over other modes. But again, email doesn't seem like the ideal solution either because you create a situation where it just doesn't seem like you care. If you're laying off people via email.

Dave Stahoviak (6:32)

You write in virtual interactions, what feels authentic to you may not seem authentic to the person you're interacting with. Make sure to pause to consider how your communication choices and messages will come off to others. I was thinking about those two lines and you also said a key word a moment ago. You said leak. And you do talk about emotional and nonverbal leakage as a challenge that faces us especially in tougher situations. Could you tell me a bit more about that? And what is it about leakage that's that's so troublesome?

Andrew Brodsky (7:08)

The thing about authenticity in organizations is that many times we're being inauthentic, but for good reasons. So for instance, a coworker has something really good that happened. They just got a promotion, or maybe they just got engaged. But that morning you had a really awful commute. So you're in a horrible mood and you don't want to be authentic in that situation. When a coworker tells you and be like, that's nice for you, but I'm annoyed at my commute this morning, that would be really bad. So what we do in many workplace interactions is we engage in something called surface acting, which is we pretend to have a different emotion. And often cases it's for the benefit of the other person you're interacting with. If you're facing a customer, this is often called service with a smile. But we do this in a lot of our internal interactions because it's not great to go to work with all Your emotional baggage. Tell everyone you had a fight with your spouse. That's why you're unhappy. You want to leave a lot of that at the door for good reason. And so what ends up happening, unfortunately, enricher modes of communication. So that's in person or video. Oftentimes our underlying emotions can leak through. We do something unintentional we don't mean. Maybe we raise an eyebrow unintentionally, or maybe we accidentally grimace, and those emotions can show through, which creates this kind of virtual communication paradox, where richer modes of communication seem more authentic, but they risk exposing nonverbal behaviors we might not have intended to show.

Dave Stahoviak (8:44)

One of the pieces of advice, like so many of us have heard and many organizations have instituted, especially in virtual meetings, is be on camera. That that's the best way to show up. And you write that if your goal is to seem present, video is generally going to be your best choice. But when it comes to authenticity, your goal may be less straightforward in terms of managing your expressions and potentially leaking your underlying emotions. There's a risk to using video, and I'm guessing that same risk shows up in person, too, with what you just described. Like, I had a difficult time this morning. All of a sudden, I'm in a different interaction. Sometimes those things do come out, don't they?

Andrew Brodsky (9:23)

Yeah, they can come out the same in person as well. I conducted a number of research studies exactly on this topic to try and figure out what is the best mode of communication to use. And I conducted these studies with negotiators, with managers, and with actually a set of 11 international schools in Vietnam. And that was a particularly interesting setting because you could imagine if you're a teacher in one of these very expensive private schools, the parents are kind of customers. But on the other side of that, you've got children in your class, and not all of them are doing well. So as a teacher, you could think of the experience where you need to tell a parent that their little angel is failing your class and is disruptive. And this is like a really good example of you need to be positive, but maybe you're not feeling that.

Dave Stahoviak (10:19)

Yeah.

Andrew Brodsky (10:19)

And what I found in these studies were three effects. First, if you're being truly authentic, then the richest mode possible, whether that's video, whether that's in person, is best. You want to let your authenticity shine through. The second finding was that when people are engaging in this kind of service, acting where they're faking it for the benefit of their job or the benefit of the person, they're interacting with they tend to choose less rich modes of communication like email or text because it feels safest. But that is the wrong choice. Email, text message, instant message. It comes off as the least authentic because it seems so low effort. You could imagine if someone's congratulating you because you had a massive accomplishment and they could have called you, they could have told you during in person or during a video meeting, and instead they send you an email. It's just not going to hit the scene. And the third finding, when this study was okay, so you need to engage in the service acting. Video doesn't work well because your emotions can leak through. Email doesn't work well because it's seen as solo effort. It turns out there's a sweet spot which is audio interactions, whether that's telephone or video meetings with cameras off. And that's because it's seen as much more effortful than email calling someone or having a meeting with cameras off. It seems like a lot more meaningful than email, but not that different than a video call. But on the other side of that, whereas in video calls or in person interactions, you have to worry about all your facial expressions, your body language, when you're doing audio only, that's not a concern. All you have to worry about is your tone of voice and the word you're using. So there's tremendously less leakage in audio only interactions. But it seems much more authentic than text interactions. So audio can really be that sweet spot when you're engaging in service apps acting so that you come off as authentic, even if you may need to be hiding some underlying emotions in that situation.

Dave Stahoviak (12:33)

It's such a fascinating finding because so often we have been told, I feel like I've heard this for years, like the more difficult, the more complex the situation, the more you should go to the richest medium possible, right in person if you can. If you can't, like videos and okay, fallback, but try not to like intentionally go down. And yet there are times where like actually going to a less rich medium, like audio only can really help. And I had never really, really thought about that consciously until thinking about some of the findings you surface that that can be the right move in a right situation.

Andrew Brodsky (13:10)

Let me give you a couple examples too, of when even going further down to text only may be beneficial. So let's think about brainstorming. Everyone loves to do brainstorming. We're in a room together, we've got a whiteboard, we're all jotting down ideas. It feels really energizing. But that's been shown not to be the optimal approach to brainstorming. There are multiple issues with synchronous brainstorming meetings. First, only one person can talk at a time. If you have 10 people in a meeting and you want each of them to come up with 20 ideas, that's 200 ideas. That would take a really, really long time to discuss or to raise during a meeting. But if each of those 10 people just separately jotted down or typed up those 20 ideas, it could be done quickly. The other problem is that when everyone's staring at us in person, we tend to be concerned they're going to judge our ideas more negatively and we don't want to say anything too divergent. But here's where the advantages of being self focused can be beneficial virtually is during brainstorming, you don't want to be thinking about other people. You want to be as creative as possible. So doing it separately and electronically can be better there. And lastly, when you're in a group and one person says an idea, your brain just attaches to that idea, which is a problem because then every idea you have thereafter is going to be related or anchored to that idea you already heard. So in this case, brainstorming for the early stage idea generation has been shown to be better via electronic text based interactions as opposed to meetings. Although when you're having the deciding of which idea is best, and that has a lot of back and forth as a group, that's when you want to do it via video or in person, because you have that back and forth. So at the end of the day, what it comes down to is the best mode really depends on your goals for any given situation and not to assume that one is necessarily better than the rest across the board.

Dave Stahoviak (15:15)

Yeah. And one of the big distinctions that I'm hearing from you is that sometimes what feels right to us personally just isn't necessarily the best thing for the situation. And the word authentic comes up a lot in your work, certainly in this part of the book too. And I think sometimes we feel like, okay, this feels authentic to me, but the very thing that feels authentic to me actually lands really inauthentically to someone else. So the invitation I'm really hearing from you is like, to the extent we can get out of ourselves a bit and be thinking about authenticity from the standpoint of where it's landing with someone else, that's really key in this, isn't it?

Andrew Brodsky (16:00)

Exactly. This is also related to just generally transmitting emotion in virtual communication. As an example, if you're writing up an Email, you can hear the emotion you're trying to relay in your head. So it seems really clear. But what research shows is that on the recipient end, we end up being overconfident about our ability to relay emotions because we don't realize when they're reading the same message you sent, they're not hearing the emotions you heard when you wrote it. They're coming from their own set of assumptions and information. As an example, if you're a manager or you're dating even, and someone sent you something really long, so subordinate sent you a really long report, or someone else in a dating context sent you this really long nice note and you just respond with thanks, that's great. In your mind, maybe you were in a rush and you wanted to make sure that you just responded quickly so that they saw you acknowledged it, as opposed to feeling like you're ignoring the other person and you're really excited about it and you think that's obvious. But you can imagine as a subordinate who just sent a 20 page report to their manager, getting a 3 word response seems potentially really, really negative. So these situations can create a lot of problems. And one of the recommendations I highlight is that it's beneficial to try and make the implicit more explicit. So for instance, you're in a rush, which is why you're writing only a few words, say thanks, I got it, I'm going to look over this when I have more, when I'm at home or when I have more time, and I'm going to send you a more detailed response then. And doing that can be beneficial because we know we're going to look at it later, but the other person doesn't. And we tend to forget that the other person doesn't know what we know. And we assume that they'll assume the best of us, but in reality, if there's anxiety or nervousness on the other side, they'll often make a negative assumption instead of the positive one we thought they would make.

Dave Stahoviak (18:10)

And you make the invitation as well that if you're using a less rich medium, and that example is a perfect one, like email, right? Like maybe I am responding by an email, it's really helpful to explain why. Or maybe if you initiate a complex situation or communication in a different medium than you would normally do, that you explain why. And if you do that, the audience tends to be a little more forgiving of that.

Andrew Brodsky (18:35)

People make attributions in text based communication and in virtual communication general. And what this means is that there's often not as much information as when we're in person. So when something happens in text based communication, whether it's just you chose a mode you might not normally choose or you've got a typo or whatever else, people are looking for reasons it's oh, the person didn't care about me or they were rushed or whatever else. And to the best you can, you want to make sure that they're not making random guesses here that may not look good on you or may harm your relationship. So when there's one of these ambiguous things going on, providing that information can help that process to ensure that you're both on the same page.

Dave Stahoviak (19:26)

When I think about authenticity, and I'm sure that you people ask you about this too, Andrew, that you know, so often we hear the good advice of we really should show up as authentic in the workplace, as leaders, of course. And I'm thinking about what you said earlier of this sort of play acting that, that sometimes like that we all do right at times, the teachers you, you cited in your study where they show up and may not be feeling super positive about communicating with a parent, a difficult situation, but do need to do need to do a little bit of acting in a scenario like that. I think a lot of times we see that, we think, well, that's not authentic. If I'm like, if I'm showing up consciously in a different way than is like true to my authentic self, that that is a bad thing. And part of what I'm hearing you say is thinking about this in a little more nuanced way is helpful. And I'm wondering what do you find is helpful for people to calibrate on that?

Andrew Brodsky (20:29)

That's a good question. It's a little bit tricky of one. I do think there's often been this fad with authenticity where it's gone a little bit overboard where people say always be authentic at work, that's a bad idea. There was an old comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle, keeping it real goes wrong. And it's this idea is all these situations about people who always say what's on their mind, always say what they're feeling and it just goes horribly. And the thing is it's not just for you, it's for the other people you're interacting with. If you're a manager and you've got a subordinate who you're, who's struggling, let's say it's a situation where unfortunately you need to fire them but you're in a spectacular mood because something great just happened in your life, maybe you won the lottery, maybe your partner accepted your proposal for marriage or whatever else you don't want to go to. Fire that employee and say, I'm in the best mood ever. I'm so excited, but I do have to fire you today. That is just a horrible thing to do. Obviously that's an extreme, and there's a whole lot of more gray area in the middle about, okay, should I be authentic or should I be putting on the face that I need to on behalf of my work and the other person I'm interacting with? And what I'd recommend is you kind of have to think about this as a scale. On one side is the impact to yourself. On the other side is the impact to the person you're. You're interacting with. For the person you're interacting with, there's obviously going to be some set of appropriate rules for just in that interaction. In most cases at work, it's being positive. Although there are examples like the one I just noted about being more, more sympathetic and sad that someone might be leaving for some reason. But on your side for what's better for you, it's going to depend on the situation. In some cases, being authentic is better because it takes less energy to have to fake it. It's exhausting faking it, and sometimes it just really, really can be depleting. But on the other side of that, you may create a whole lot more work for yourself by being authentic in a situation. If you tell as an example with the parents and teachers in Vietnam, if a teacher just directly told a parent, your kid is horrible, they shouldn't be in this school. You better believe that teacher is going to be hearing from their principal and is going to have a ton more work and interactions to make up for that. So it's really weighing the scale of, okay, is it better for me to be authentic in this situation, or am I going to create more work and more trouble for myself? And on the other side is, will I benefit the other person by being authentic myself and showing them who I am or by doing what I need to in this situation to make them feel good?

Dave Stahoviak (23:30)

It's so helpful to think about it that way. And I think oftentimes we were so, especially in these tough situations. As much as we think about being a servant leader and showing up in the right way, it's so easy for our own emotions to crowd it out, either positive or negative, depending on the situation. And just like the nudge to be thinking, all right, how is this likely to land with someone else and where Might the leakage happen? Right, like you mentioned earlier. Okay, if this is a situation where I'm not really, I don't really want to show up in the most authentic way, I might think about that because I don't want to, I don't want to unintentionally signal something I don't really intend to signal in this situation. And this leads me to one other thing you mentioned in the book is you highlight blunders. And obviously there's a lot of situations where we don't want to make blunders. We don't want that leakage to happen in some of these interactions. But there's plenty of places that blunders can actually be helpful in interactions too. Could you share a bit about that?

Andrew Brodsky (24:33)

This gets to the benefits of authenticity. At the end of the day, the reason why emotional leakage is problematic is it makes other people feel like you're lying. Even if the reason you are engaging in this kind of service, acting or faking it, is to benefit the other person, it can end up worse if they realize that you're faking it, which is the problem in those situations. So things that show that you are being authentic, that you aren't over scripted, that you are a human, can be beneficial. An example of this is a classic research study on something called the pratfall effect. In this research study they had participants listen to a quiz show. In this quiz show, one participant got a bunch of questions wrong but got some right. And that person was rated as very likable but not necessarily highly competent because they did get a number of questions wrong. Then there was another participant who got every single question right. And that participant was rated as very competent but not very likable. And you can think about it this way. Think back to middle school or high school and was there that one kid who just raised their hand for every single question and they were like a know it all and like they were really smart but kind of everyone hated them. And the issue with this is that there's often this trade off between competence and warmth in that people who are too perfect or who to or are who are too competent end up. It just feels unrelatable. You just can't relate to that person. But this research study had a third condition. In the third condition they had someone get every single question right. But in that condition, participants heard that a crash and then spill coffee on themselves. And in this third condition, the person who got everything right but spilled coffee on themselves, they were, they were rated just as competent as the person who got every question right without spilling coffee, but they were much more likable. The reason being is that making a mistake makes you feel more human, makes you feel more likable. And the takeaway here is that pratfalls or mistakes that are not in your domain of competence. So in this case, spilling coffee on yourself during a quiz show can make you seem more human as opposed to this unapproachable person.

Dave Stahoviak (27:09)

Fascinating. And I think the message here isn't necessarily for us all to bring in a cup of coffee, do our interactions at stage and falling over us, Right. But that there's a larger message here of, like, how would you like, practically bring this in? And when you think about knowing this, like, hey, on one hand, I want to show up competently, obviously, in the things that are my area of expertise, the subject of the meeting, the interaction with the customer, whatever it is that day, and at the same time show my humanity. How do you invite people to think about doing that both and of like it not being staged, but showing up in a really genuine way?

Andrew Brodsky (27:47)

This is a topic I focus on when I'm teaching leadership a lot of the time. Oftentimes, one of the biggest problems leaders can have is that they feel this need to put on this perfect front, this perfect posture that they look. They never make mistakes. And that can be a mistake because then there are people work for them, don't feel like they can really connect with their leader, that they can really open up to their leader, that they can express when they've made errors to their leader. But rather than just telling the people who work for you, oh, yeah, I messed up the other project last week. It's, you know, it's bad for our team. Instead, you kind of let some of your life show through. Maybe you mention, I accidentally took my child's Pokemon lunchbox today, or you can mention something humorous or a little clumsy that might have happened the past weekend, Use a little bit of humor with it. And by showing that you are not this infallible being, it can make people feel like they can trust you more, that they connect with you more, that you're more relatable, while still not losing that degree of competence that you have by being good at your actual job.

Dave Stahoviak (29:02)

Boy, the distinction I'm hearing there is the. The tendency. I mean, you. I think you just so nailed it. Like, a tendency, especially in a leadership role, a visible role, to, like, downplay anything that people might see as a mistake. And the invitation I'm hearing is, like, on the things that aren't central to the core competency of your work. Resist the temptation to cover those things up and maybe even you, like, offer those in the context. Not making stuff up, of course, but just offering something that is, that shows your fallibility, your humanity that you might otherwise not necessarily discuss. That just helps bring out some more of that humanness and again, to really connect, ideally, in an authentic way.

Andrew Brodsky (29:46)

Exactly. And if you think about political candidates generally, often the person who's perfectly scripted and feels like they hit everything exactly right doesn't end up relating to the general population. It's oftentimes a person who feels like, oh yeah, I think I know someone like that. Or you see some of their, like, actual humanity show through, even if it's not this perfect picture that ends up making those candidates feel relatable. And it's the same thing true with executives and companies as well.

Dave Stahoviak (30:22)

You've been in the midst of this work and research for many years. You've obviously put the whole book together, built an organization around this. As you've brought this book into the world, Andrew, and been into the research and also now talking with people about this so much. I'm curious, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on?

Andrew Brodsky (30:40)

The biggest thing I would say I've changed my mind on is related to how to choose the mode of communication in some cases, because I'm a scientist, a researcher who's always studying what's best and when and how do we leverage it. It's often easy to forget that sometimes in certain situations, there may be better way to do things than the best way. And one of the recommendations that came out from this is instead of just in any given situation, assuming what a motive is best. So in this situation, video is best. In this situation, email is best. Consider asking the other person what they like. Ah, I would say 99 out of 100 invites I get to meetings. No one asks me what I want to do. I get a video link or I get a phone number to call, or they just decide to have the conversation over email, even though I have my own preferences. And this can be quite meaningful for many people. For instance, people who have difficulty hearing, they may prefer video meetings so that they can read lips. People on the autism spectrum in some cases may prefer video off because it's lower stimulation and they don't have to worry as much about nonverbal behavior. But even beyond people with disabilities, maybe someone had their kid is home sick from daycare and running amok in the background, so they don't want their video on. And even beyond people who have actual reasons for this, we all have our preferences. Some of us really like seeing the other person. Some of us hate being on camera. And when you ask the other person, how do you want to do this? Do you want to do phone video? Not only can you include more people, but I found out that people are going to want to interact with you a lot more because you're communicating on the way they want. So that makes them more amenable to actually interacting with you going forward.

Dave Stahoviak (32:39)

Andrew Brodsky is the author of Ping the Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. Andrew, thank you for sharing your work with us.

Andrew Brodsky (32:47)

Thanks for having me on.

Dave Stahoviak (32:54)

If this conversation with Andrew was helpful to you, three related episodes I'd recommend one of them is episode 590, how to genuinely show up for Others. Marshall Goldsmith was my guest on that episode. We talked about his concept of singular empathy, of the importance, especially for leaders, of being able to sit down with another person, either in person or virtually as we talked about today, and to be entirely present with them. It's a challenging thing to do, especially with so many of the roles we have of being pulled in different directions every day. But it's an essential skill for leaders. Marshall talks in episode 590 of exactly how to do that, how to enter into that space of singular empathy. Also recommended episode 643, how to make a Better Impression on Camera. Mark Bowden was my guest on that episode. Body language expert. We talked about how when you're showing up on camera, how are you going to do that well and as we talked about in this conversation, different choices of when you might use camera and audio and in person. But often we are showing up on camera these days. Mark walks us through some of the key principles for doing that well, yes, both the technology a bit, but more importantly the practice, the mindset and being able to do that effectively so that we do show up in the way that we want to. And then finally I'd recommend episode 7 13, how to Grow from Feedback. Jennifer Garvey Berger was my guest on that episode and we talked about feedback as a two way street. Street. Oftentimes when we think about feedback it is one way it is a manager giving feedback to a employee or direct report. We don't often think about the two way nature of it and in tough situations oftentimes there is a give and take in feedback. There should be, there needs to be a dialogue for that. Episode 713 exploring that a bit more. All of those episodes of course you can find on the coaching4leaders.com website and I'm inviting you to today to set up your free membership@coaching4leaders.com if you do, you're going to get access to the entire library, searchable by topic. Now you can access the entire library on any of the podcast apps on the website. It's all freely available. We've taken the next step with the free membership, though, to make it easy for you to find the topic you're looking for. The podcast apps don't really do that, but we've done that on the website so they can find exactly what's relevant to you, whether it is on coaching skills or delegation or having difficult conversations or developing the skills of others. All of those are topic areas inside of the episode library. Just log into the free membership, go to the episode library. You'll be able to find what you're looking for right now, plus all the other benefits inside the free membership, including access to all my interview notes, my own personal library, and much more. If you haven't set up that free membership yet, go over to coaching4leaders.com right on the main page. There you will see a way to do that. And one of the other things that I am doing every single week is I am writing. I love journaling out some of the things that come up in conversations with our Academy members and dialogue with listeners and conversations with the experts here on the show. And each week I zero in on one principle, one thing that comes up and journal about it in a way that I hope will be helpful to you. This past week I looked at the concept of getting concise. We had a conversation in one of our Academy sessions recently on this and the dichotomy between being concise but also being really detailed. And it came up in that conversation that those two things are opposites, at least how many people think of them. And I suggested they are an opposite at all. In fact, you can be both very concise and detailed when you need to be. And that's especially important in talking to executive leaders and stakeholders who oftentimes are looking for a very concise message but also need the details so they can make fast decisions. I talked about that in a recent journal entry, how you actually approach that, especially in written communication, when talking to stakeholders, being concise but at the same time providing the detail that they need. That's part of coaching for Leaders. Plus, if you'd like to get access to that journal entry plus a new one each week, the entire archive of entries, plus all of our expert chats that have been data based and available for your viewing. You can find all of that at Coaching4Leaders, plus all the details are there. Coaching for Leadership is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next week, I'm glad to welcome Qasem Ejaz to the show. He is an expert in cybersecurity. We are going to be looking at some of the principles that will keep you and your team and your organization. These make it less likely that you'll be hacked. Join me for that conversation with Qasim. It's an important one. And I'll see you back next Monday.

Andrew Brodsky (37:34)

That.