CANDOR SKILL #1

Stating Your Position

Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another. . .

—STEVEN PINKER

Without specific skills for putting the ideas into action, the mindset we explored in the last section is little more than a bumper sticker. It is the focus on skills—specific behaviors you can learn, practice, and adopt—that separates this work from most of the other training and development advice on the market today. Think about it. Most of the guidance on interpersonal effectiveness, team building, or leadership development focuses on improving your intentions:

•   You should always communicate in a way that builds trust.

•   To have a good meeting, always leave your emotions at the door.

•   To be a good manager, you should be an active listener.

•   Always create outcomes where everybody wins.

•   Never make assumptions.

•   Always separate the person from the problem.

•   Be open to new ideas and perspectives.

•   To increase your stature and influence, always speak authentically.

These books, trainers, and “thought leaders” tell you what you should be doing but fail to provide the underlying skills to do what they’re counseling you to do. Instruction like this ignores two problems.

The first problem is that they fail to show people how to implement the advice—the actual behaviors needed to employ it. This problem is similar to someone asking a friend, “How do you play the piano?” and having the friend respond: “It’s not that hard. You just sit on the bench, place your hands on the keyboard, and use your fingers to hit the appropriate notes.” Sadly, a lot of the advice about communication falls into this trap. But teaching communication skills by just telling people how they should communicate is like teaching people to play tennis by just telling them how they should hit the ball.

The second problem is something I highlighted with the subtitle of Chapter 2 of Conversational Capacity: “Why Good Intentions Are Never Enough.” Even if the advice you’re giving is sound, if you’re not also showing people the internal barriers that make implementing the advice difficult, you’re still not being helpful. If I told you to balance candor and curiosity under pressure, for example, and also shared the skills for doing it, I’d still be providing inadequate counsel if I didn’t help you recognize the powerful tendencies that make implementing that advice so challenging: the primal fight-flight reactions that often hijack your good intentions.

Only advice that hits all fronts—awareness, mindset, and skills—can be translated into effective action. Anyone advocating ideas about how to improve your effectiveness but failing to address these three factors is providing feeble counsel. They’re suggesting you adopt better intentions while providing little in the way of actionable skills for acting on those intentions when it counts. They’re selling what Chris Argyris refers to as “good advice that isn’t useful.”¹

Only advice that hits all fronts—awareness, mindset, and skills—can be translated into effective action.

The Four Foundational Skills

With all that in mind, now that we’ve explored awareness in Part I, and mindset in Part II, let’s turn our attention to the skills. Navigating a tough conversation without keen awareness and a guiding mindset, after all, is like trying to find an unfamiliar destination using a GPS unit without a satellite connection. You’re soon lost. But even a satellite connection isn’t enough if you lack a steering wheel—a way to take your directions and put them into action. Without awareness you can’t see. Without a mindset you can’t navigate. Without skills you can’t steer.

Fortunately, just as there are basic skills in any sport (for example, throwing, hitting, running, and catching in baseball), there are also basic skills you can master for balancing candor and curiosity:

1.   Candor

a.   Stating a clear, succinct position that shows others where you currently stand on an issue.

b.   Explaining the thinking behind your point of view in an accessible way to show others how you arrived at your position. (The first candor skill tells people where you stand on an issue; the second candor skill shows them how you got there.)

2.   Curiosity

a.   Testing your perspective to discover ways to improve it.

b.   Inquiring into the views of others in the pursuit of learning.

It is the adept use of these four skills, backed by disciplined awareness and a mind set on learning, that helps you remain constructive, balanced, and learning-focused under pressure. The goal of this section is to help you do just that. In this chapter and the next I’ll help you strengthen your facility with the candor skills. Then, in the two chapters that follow, I’ll show you how to build your competence with the curiosity skills.

Without awareness you can’t see. Without a mindset you can’t navigate. Without skills you can’t steer.

The Basic Discipline

The skilled use of these four behaviors helps you align your actions with your mindset. This is the next step in “The Basic Discipline” of conversational capacity I’ve been sharing with you all along. In a conversation, you’re first catching, naming, and taming your emotional reactions. You then refocus on learning and head to your workshop. The next step is to replace your habitual reactions with the appropriate skills for remaining balanced. If your need to minimize is being triggered, for example, the candor skills will help you maintain equilibrium. If your need to “win” is threatening to knock you out of the sweet spot, the curiosity skills are the ticket.

The Candor Skills

A writer uses words, sentences, and paragraphs to get thoughts out of her head and into the minds of her readers. A composer uses notes to get music out of his head and into the minds of his performers and the ears of his listeners. An engineer creates a schematic to get a design out of her head and into the minds of other people. In the same way, when you converse you’re using language to get an idea out of your head and into the heads of others.

To do this well, you need to be as clear and accurate as possible. The adept use of two candor skills serves this very purpose: stating your position and then explaining the thinking behind it. There are multiple reasons to hone your ability to use these skills well:

•   They are the antidote for the formidable minimizing tendency. When you’re being triggered to acquiesce or shut down, the deft use of the candor skills helps you stay in the sweet spot.

•   They enable you to test your thinking to expand and improve it. There is no way to do this if you can’t get your ideas out of your head and into the heads of others in a lucid way.

•   They give you more power in a conversation by increasing the degree of influence of you and your view. Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox, defines power as “your capacity to make a difference in the world by influencing the states of other people.”² Again, your ideas are unlikely to have much influence if you can’t express them in a clear and potent manner.

•   They help you convey your ideas in a way that makes them harder to misunderstand. Karl Popper once said: “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.” He’s probably right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t communicate in a way that limits the chances it’ll happen.

•   You’ll inspire more learning in others. By sharing how you’re seeing things you can help other people see things they might be missing, to entertain perspectives they may not have considered, to help them sharpen their own thinking, and to perceive ideas in a more useful way. When you don’t speak candidly you deprive others of aha moments.

•   It’ll make you a sharper thinker. This more rigorously responsible approach to being candid will also make you smarter in two ways: by forcing you to be more conscious about what you think and why you think it; and as I pointed out above, putting forward your view in this rigorous and responsible way helps you to test and improve it.

Candor Skill #1: Stating Your Position

A well-crafted position distills your main point—your thought, concern, suggestion, or feeling—to its essence. It provides a synopsis of your idea or view. This is important. You’re working to expand and improve your thinking, after all, and it’s hard to do this well if you’re not stating a clear point of view in the first place. By summarizing your central idea in no more than one or two sentences you provide the base for a more grounded, less ambiguous conversation. It’s the first step in thinking smarter—and helping others to do the same.

I’m often asked why I call it a “position.” The reason is simple. Because it’s a clear description of where you currently stand on an issue. “I think we should hold off on another acquisition for at least six more months,” for example, is a direct statement of your position on the subject. But a clear position need not be such a strong, fixed opinion. Consider these three statements that would clearly inform others where you stand on the matter at hand:

•   I think there are two ways we can solve this problem and I’m not sure which is best.

•   This decision really scares me.

•   I’m confused.

Topic Sentences

Stating your position in a conversation serves a similar purpose as a good topic sentence in effective writing:

•   “Topic sentences reveal the main point of a paragraph.”³

•   “It introduces the main idea of the paragraph.”⁴

•   “A topic sentence (also known as a focus sentence) encapsulates . . . an entire paragraph.”⁵

•   “A topic sentence . . . tells the reader what the paragraph is going to be about. All other sentences in the paragraph should support that idea.”⁶

•   “. . . a topic sentence makes a claim of some sort . . .”⁷

•   “. . . the topic sentence must be the unifying force in the paragraph.”⁸

•   “. . . acts as a signpost for the argument of the paper as a whole . . .”⁹

An effective position statement reveals your central point; it serves as a signpost to the perspective you’re putting forward. Crafted effectively, it signals to the listener the general hypothesis you’re about to explain and test.

The Price of Doing It Poorly

When you fail to state your position you risk the following consequences:

•   You’ll have less influence. Without a clear position, your ideas will get less traction. I’ve never ever heard anyone say to a colleague: “Your advice didn’t really catch my attention until you stated it in a weak and ambiguous way. But once you obfuscated the idea, I immediately saw the value of your suggestion.” There’s little value in thinking through an issue and generating a good idea if you can’t communicate it effectively.

•   You’ll be misunderstood. A weak or fuzzy position promotes confusion: “Sure, I like that idea, and that’s probably the way to go, but I’m wondering if we might also consider doing something a little less bold, you know, a little less, in your face? I mean, I’m probably off-base here, right? So, we should probably just do what you’re suggesting. Sorry.” It’s hard to tell where this person stands on the issue. It seems like they have a concern, but what is it? Is it a big concern, or a minor one? Given what they’re saying and how they’re saying it there is no way to know.

•   You’ll make a poor impression. Put forward a waffling, rambling, or fuzzy point of view and you risk appearing uninformed, confused, or wishy-washy. Worse, you might come across as duplicitous, disingenuous, or passive-aggressive.

The Four Characteristics of a Good Position Statement

Given its importance, let’s explore how to do it well in more detail. An effective position statement exhibits four traits: it is clear; it is concise; it is compelling; and it includes no unnecessary harshness.

IT IS CLEAR

If your goal is to help others understand your point of view, you need to explain it intelligibly. To do this, you should avoid trying to sound sophisticated or smart, or to impress people with your grandiloquent, Brobdingnagian vocabulary. Use simple, direct language. Nothing signals intelligence better than the ability to present an idea in an accessible way.

In his brilliant book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser makes this point about writing that also holds true for speaking: “Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.” Zinsser goes on: “How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing [and speaking]; one can’t exist without the other.”¹⁰

The key point is this: Your position should signal to people where you stand on an issue in plain, crisp language. In 1942, for example, out of a concern about nighttime air raids, the U.S. government issued this memo about blackouts:

Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.

A masterful communicator, President Franklin Roosevelt stripped the point down to its essence by using more down-to-earth language. “Tell them,” he said, “that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”¹¹

IT IS CONCISE

“Concision,” says Thomas Kane, “is brevity relative to purpose.”¹² Avoid muddling your point with a lot of unnecessary words or ideas. Do like President Franklin Roosevelt and distill your perspective down to its essence. In Elements of Style, William Strunk and E.B. White share advice that holds true for this verbal skill just as it does for writing: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”¹³

Concision and clarity often go hand in hand. For example, look again at the way President Franklin Roosevelt’s clarified the main point of the memo. It’s not only easier to understand, it’s half as long:

•   “Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.” [38 words]

•   “Tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.” [19 words]

The basic rule is this: Keep it tight. “The notion that this acquisition is beneficial to the short- and long-term performance of our organization is fallacious and ill-advised” is less efficient and effective than simply saying: “This acquisition is a bad idea.”

IT IS COMPELLING

An effective position is also compelling. It communicates why others should care, and why they should pay attention to what follows. Here’s an example: A few years ago, I wrote a letter to the executive in charge of customer service for a national furniture company after an exasperating experience at a local store. I could have started by saying, “I’m unhappy about the customer service at your store in Palmdale.” That’s not a bad position. It meets the first two criteria. It’s clear. It’s concise. But it’s not very compelling. I imagined the executive reading this lackluster position and thinking, “Yawn. Another generic complaint,” before responding in an equally humdrum way.

I wanted to get his attention, to express my frustration, and explain why it should matter to him and to his business. So, this is how I started off: “Unless frustrating and losing customers is a key part of your business strategy, you’ve got a major problem in your Palmdale store.” It worked. Not only did the executive respond with active interest, exploring my experience in detail and suggesting how he would remedy the problem, shortly thereafter I received a call from the CEO.

One way to make your position compelling is to make it specific. Again, Strunk and White provide advice about good writing that applies equally well to crafting an effective position: “The surest way to arouse and hold the reader’s attention is by being specific, definite, and concrete.”¹⁴

When Steve prepared for his talk with Phil, he and his colleagues worked to make sure his position was clear, concise, and compelling—that it showed Phil why he should care in specific, concrete ways. Steve’s first attempt in their preparatory role-playing was: “Phil, people are afraid to talk to you.” But as they practiced, he found that framing his position this way prompted Phil (or the person pretending to be Phil in the role-play) to misinterpret the message and respond with something like, “OK. I get that. I’m not the easiest guy to work for. Give me the names of the people who are struggling and we’ll get them some help. Perhaps some assertiveness training will do the trick.”

But with additional thought and practice—which came about as he and his colleagues experimented in some rough-and-tumble role-play—he crafted a position that was more clear, concise, and compelling: “Phil, I’ve never worked for someone who’s more open about his need for timely and accurate information as you, and I applaud that. But despite your good intentions, I think you act in ways that make it really hard for people to do what you’re asking.” This position, stated in two sentences, is more specific, and, as a result, more compelling.

IT CONTAINS NO UNNECESSARY HARSHNESS

Here’s another important rule for crafting an effective position: It should contain no unnecessary harshness. Notice I did not say “no harshness.” That cannot always be avoided. Sometimes the information you need to convey is going to be tough for others to hear. Your goal is to make your point clearly, concisely, and compellingly, and to do it in the least abrasive way possible. You are trying to spark learning, not dampen it.

This can be difficult to pull off. Your minimizing tendency often tempts you to mince words or water down your point, while your “win” tendency often tempts you to be overly aggressive, sarcastic, condescending, or dismissive. There is a sweet spot between those two points that can be hard to find, especially in a tough conversation.

Steve’s conversation provides yet another good example: “Phil, it seems a few people are just a little nervous about talking with you because, well, you can be—and this is not a fault—really passionate sometimes.” This watered-down position doesn’t serve Steve’s goal of helping Phil identify a potential gap between what he wants (people telling it to him like it is) and what is happening (people not telling it to him like it is).

But Steve could have undermined the purpose of the conversation if he had erred in the other direction and expressed an unnecessarily harsh position: “Phil, you act like a Philistine by verbally abusing people in nearly biblical ways and yet expect them to ‘tell it to you like it is.’ I can only think of three reasons you’d do that—ignorance, insincerity, or foolishness. Which is it?”

By inviting both misunderstanding and defensiveness, both approaches subvert the purpose of the feedback: to make things better. Steve finally settled on a more balanced approach that was direct and no-nonsense, but without any unnecessary harshness: “Phil, I’ve never worked for someone who’s more open about his need for timely and accurate information as you, and I applaud that. But despite your good intentions I think you act in ways that make it really difficult for people to do what you’re asking.”

Clarifying Points

It Can Be a Feeling

Stating how you’re feeling is often a great way to frame your point. A clear position can declare confusion, uncertainty, or ambivalence:

•   This decision makes me very nervous.

•   I feel conflicted about the best way to go on this change process.

•   The thought of making this change scares me.

•   I love this idea for two big reasons.

•   I feel torn between these two options.

It Can Be Tentative

You can lower defensiveness by letting people know you’re not wedded to your current position and that you’re holding it hypothetically just by the way you put it forward:

•   Here’s my “going in position” on the issue . . .

•   Right now, I’m looking at the situation like this . . .

•   My current take on this problem is . . .

It’s More Authentic

Speaking in such crisp, no-nonsense terms is more authentic, which generates more trust and respect.

It’s Easier in Some Circumstances, Harder in Others

This skill is harder for some people than it is for others. It is also harder in some circumstances than it is in others. The Flamethrower, for example, was a natural with this skill.* When his internal reaction to a colleague’s suggestion was, “That won’t work,” he’d simply say, “That won’t work.” That’s 10 out of 10 on the position clarity scale.

But if you’re like me and struggle with a strong tendency to minimize, this skill takes more practice to master. I tend to sacrifice a clear position to avoid being confrontational, rocking the boat, looking like a nonteam player, hurting feelings, or making myself look foolish. So, putting forward an effective position is an unnatural act, and I’ve worked hard to strengthen my ability to do it well. I realized that if I didn’t learn to state my views directly, I risk the three problems I mentioned earlier: I’m more likely to be misunderstood; to have less influence; and to appear ill-informed, weak-minded, or two-faced.

In situations where your need to minimize is being triggered, a well-crafted position is often the first casualty. But it’s exactly what’s necessary if you’re to stay in the sweet spot.

* Don’t remember the Flamethrower? Revisit pages 46–47 and 104–105 in Conversational Capacity.