Design patterns for communication and influence (part 3)

6 min readMar 5, 2021

Listening

Listening may be the most overlooked communication skill and tools for building trust. By just carefully listening to whatever your counterpart has to say, you make her feel important. The more you do so, the more she likes you. Because being important is everyone’s unsatisfiable desire, regardless of one’s established wealth and fame.

Next time anyone wants to talk to you, be open minded and curious about what she’s talking about and her thinking process. Control all your instincts to impress with your insights, just listen. You will be amazed by how much listening can do.

Leaders speak last

Both Bill Campbell and Simon Sinek advocated the virtue of ‘speaking last’ for leaders. In Bill’s framework of team decision making, the leader should make sure everyone’s voice is heard before saying anything. Otherwise, she will only hear support for her opinion. Marissa Mayer admitted it’s so hard to speak last, but it will make the team’s decision so much better.

Mirroring and labeling

During conversation, mirroring means repeating the last (half) sentence the other person said, labeling means to summarize what they just said in another way.

In How to win friends and influence people, listening is one of the most efficient ways to make others like us. After our counterparts begin talking, we don’t need to do much to win their affections. Just listen carefully to whatever they want to say. But we need to get them talking in the first place.

Mirroring and labeling works like a miracle when the counterpart is unwilling to open up and communicate with us. This technique is introduced in Never Split The Difference. The author was a high stakes negotiator for the FBI.

Do not feel stupid mirroring, the counterpart won’t notice because when they speak, they subconciously focus is on what to say next rather than your response. Our mirroring is cheerleading them to say more. They will enjoy talking and being very carefully listened to. Thus begin the trust building.

Labeling is another way of mirroring if you prefer to use it. I would be very careful to make sure that my labeling is always an encouraging summarization of their original meaning and never cross the line to become a subjective comment. Commenting is usually dangerous and absolutely unnecessary in listening.

Calibrated questions

There are many wrong ways(anti-pattern) to influence someone over a conversation. The only possible way I know is by asking ‘calibrated questions’. No one will change their minds because of what they were told, unless they already want to make the same decision. But they can only be guided to be open minded if encouraged by the right questions.

Assuming the trust is already established and the counterpart of the conversation is in the mode of solving her problem with you, calibrated questions encourage her to think deeper and re-examine established thought. For example:

You seem really passionate about getting promoted, what’s your motivation behind it? What’s the best tool to reach those goals?
What’s your thinking process behind buying this property? What are other investment options you’ve considered?
You’ve laid out a strong path for this project. How do we break down the first milestone into smaller pieces?
I admire your passion supporting Trump, can you tell me how such loyalty developed in the past years?

Asking calibrated questions is a highly skillful technique and requires abundant knowledge and empathy. In this process, we have to be genuinely open minded ourselves. It usually backfires if we come to the conversation with a specific goal to influence or sell. We should have the mindset of a scientist to some extent: be curious about what we don’t know and be ready to accept that our understanding is wrong.

There are situations where our counterpart is highly fixated on some poparlized issues, like pro-life or pro-choice on abortion, climate changes, etc. When that’s the case, the best technique is trying to formulate the issue as a spectrum of opinions. Polarized ideologies are usually over-simplified, people with such beliefs will preach their ideas and prosecute other opinions(detailed below). The first step of influence is thus reaching consensus about the complex structure of the issue and the opinions being a spectrum rather than dichotomous.

Prefer how to why

I avoid asking why as calibrated questions because such questions easily make the counterpart defensive. While asking how to ourselves will usually strengthen our resolution, ‘how’ can be used for either reinforcing or weakening other’s beliefs.

Persuading anti-pattern: Preaching and Prosecuting

Unfortunately, if you are like me, your compulsive instinct about persuasion is not listening and asking questions. We tend to be either preaching our own great ideas, insights, philosophies or prosecuting the others as being wrong, shortsighted, misinformed or lack of judgement.

I hope at this point, you’ve found out that preaching will only be effective among people already in our league and is a fast track to building an echo chamber. Prosecuting will make others defensive, reject whatever you want to advocate. Furthermore, by doing so their existing beliefs will be strengthened.

Checking in

We simply can’t remember all the important old friends in our head. I’ve a list of core contacts who I make a point to catch up with at least twice a year. The list is sorted by the last time. Each week I find one at the bottom and try to schedule a time to hangout. It’s not always easy to reach out to people I haven’t contacted for years, but 90% of the time, I’m overwhelmed and humbled by their warmth.

Denial of toxic condition

This pattern is a last resort to protect ourselves and the people we need to take care of. There are many people and cultures that are toxic yet we don’t have the power or resources to influence them. The only correct move is to distance and isolate the source of toxicities.

It’s a sad fact that in today’s corporation, many leaders and teams are toxic. Typical toxic patterns includes but not limited to the following:

Lead by fear: if you don’t perform, you will be punished or fired
Favoritism: leaders define the group of us and them, push their agenda at the expense of others. In the US, a whole organization of employees from the same background(race, etc) is a strong signal
Self-first: selfishness is the eventual form of favoritism. At the end of the day, those leaders advance their goals at the expense of the rest of the world
Micro management: makes the subordinantes feeling extremely inferior and destroy their self confidence
Treat people as tools or numbers: zero respect to each other, leaders judge everyone by their value to his agenda

I was unfortunate enough to work with leaders having almost all of the above traits, such persons are usually very hard to educate and coach. The best solution is to report such behaviors to the authorities and escape the toxic environment at all expense. I think it’s way worse to be employed in such a culture than being unemployed for extended time.