CONCLUSION
Community and Communication
Radical Authenticity
Modern brain research puts us in touch with a far more powerful understanding of the way that humans communicate than we’ve had before. We are hard-wired to join up and communicate together through our unconscious minds. Our evolutionary past necessitated this confluence of communication, and we need to get in touch with it again in order to realize the full power of influence an individual can have over a group. At the same time, the radical connectivity of the digital revolution has necessitated significant changes in the way we communicate with one another.
In Ancient Fiesole, There Is an Amphitheater
In the hills above Florence, Italy, is an ancient town founded by the Romans or maybe the Etruscans before them. Fiesole is perched on a tiny summit with views that stretch forever in all directions. In the middle of the town are the ruins of Roman baths and an amphitheater.
A few years ago, I stood on the stage of that theater, orating to an invisible crowd, hearing the amazing acoustics as my voice echoed around me, and thinking about the rhetorical and communications wisdom that the Romans and Greeks have passed down to us.
They understood that the audience is the most important part of any communication. Amphitheaters go up to the audience, not down. The stage is the lowest point.
They understood that there was something sacred about gathering, ritual, and storytelling. Amphitheaters are open to the sky. Human ritual begins in communal acts of coming together to understand essential events, the passage of time and season, life and death.
They understood that any presentation has to begin by answering a key question for that specific audience: Why does this matter? Why is what the speaker is going to say important? When you collect people in an amphitheater, the grandeur of the setting demands an immediate answer to that question of why.
They understood that only once you’ve oriented the audience in this way, can you tell them the what and the how—in that order. Once you’ve set such a stage, then you must deliver something of import.
They understood the importance of community to communications. We gather together to communicate because only in that way can we share in the emotions and the journey as one.
So they understood sight and sound. Every single seat in the amphitheater in Fiesole has a perfect view of the stage. And the brilliant acoustics mean that you can be heard from any point on the stage anywhere in the audience.
The Ancients Understood the Importance of Presence
These ancient orators were masters of the communications challenges of their day. Now we have to learn anew how to be masters of our communications issues in this complicated twenty-first century. We can draw on some ancient wisdom; after all, some things haven’t changed. But we also need modern brain research and experience to help us the rest of the way to mastery, because the sturdy common sense of the ancient Greeks and Romans doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny in the modern era. Not all of their advice is useful in our helter-skelter, information-overloaded world.
The combination of ancient, amphitheater-tested wisdom and hard science brings us to a place we’ve never been able to reach before: complete mastery of personal communications. Because communication is the beginning of leadership, the techniques in this book will propel you to new levels of leadership.
How do you show up when you walk into a room? Take control of your presence and change both your thinking and the messages you send to those around you.
What emotions do you convey for important meetings, conversations, and presentations? Share your focused emotions and control the emotional tenor of your tribe.
What unconscious messages are you receiving from others? Use your unconscious expertise to stay attuned to the hidden messages of everyone around you.
Do you have a leadership voice? Tune your voice to automatically lead your peers.
What honest signals do you send out in key work and social situations? Establish the right levels of energy and passion to win the contract, the negotiation, or the raise.
Is your unconscious mind holding you back or propelling you forward? Shed your unconscious mind of the blocks and impediments to success.
Are you telling powerful stories? Convey your message in ways that ensure that your listeners are aligned with you, down to their very brain waves.
Communication Has Changed in Three Ways
Twenty-first century communication has changed how we connect to the world in three essential ways: connectivity, authenticity, and style. The first way is obvious to any sentient being within reach of the digital world. As Nicco Mele notes in his brilliant book about the darker implications of the digital revolution, The End of Big, “Radical connectivity—our breathtaking ability to send vast amounts of data instantly, constantly, and globally—has all but transformed politics, business, and culture, bringing about the upheaval of traditional, ‘big’ institutions and the empowerment of upstarts and renegades.”1
I like Mele’s phrase, “radical connectivity,” because it gets at what’s truly different in ways that words and phrases like the internet and social media do not. They are the media; radical connectivity is the result. By putting us all within one or two removes from one another, the digital era has radically flattened hierarchies of communication everywhere and completely reshaped the old power relationship between the rulers and the masses. Now, a single furious customer can close a restaurant, a single, impassioned person can ignite support for a cause, and a single disgruntled citizen can start a movement and bring down a government.
This shift has two implications for communications. First, it necessarily increases the volume and dumbs down the sophistication of the information flow. That’s the bad news: there’s more to wade through now and a lot of it isn’t pretty. Second, anyone’s voice can get heard and perhaps even get the hearing it deserves. That’s the good news. You’re competing with dancing nerds, phony news, and cute cats, but if you persist, your story will most likely be heard.
In a Radically Connected World, Be Persistent and Smart
Another way that communications has changed in the twenty-first century is that we now demand authenticity in a way we haven’t before. Let’s call it “radical authenticity” to go with the radical connectivity.
Let’s be clear: this new radical authenticity is hard. It’s hard because it is hard to be open and honest about ourselves, warts and all. It’s hard because sometimes we want to hide our less than perfect traits from ourselves. And it’s hard because other people may seize on our weaknesses as proof of our unworthiness, rather than our humanity.
Suddenly, it’s all out there. Are you ready for that?
Authenticity is the most important quality in leadership communications. With it, you can move people to action. Without it, you can’t even get a hearing. We think what makes us human is our uniqueness, but it’s really our commonalities. We can lose track of our essence in daily compromises, accommodations, and dealings. Most of us are growing into ourselves; we’re not already complete beings.
Suddenly, it’s all out there, and no one can be fully ready for that.
Radical authenticity means managing your body language.
As I’ve said, every communication is two conversations. The first conversation in every face-to-face communication is the one you’re aware of: the spoken content. The second conversation is the one on which most humans are unconscious experts: the nonverbal one.
It’s the nonverbal conversation that will make or break you as a communicator. That’s really what’s radical about the new authenticity. Faking it won’t work anymore, at least not for the long haul. The nonverbal conversation is where authenticity is created or destroyed. It may confirm you as the top dog, sabotage your authority, blow your chances at getting a raise or get you the big sale, lose you the prize or win it—and on and on through most of the big moments in life.
Understanding and controlling this second conversation are key to leadership, because they are not something that you can leave to chance or the unconscious. There are simply too many decisions to be made, too many inputs to weigh, too many people to manage and lead. In the twenty-first century, the pace of leadership has accelerated, the flow of information has exploded, and the physical and intellectual demands on leaders have intensified.
So you can no longer rely on common sense or instinct or winging it as you once might have done. With camcorders and YouTube everywhere, you have to assume that your life as a leader is almost entirely transparent. Leaders who rely on ad-libbing and improvisation risk looking unprepared and stilted. The irony of leadership in the media age is that winging it looks fake; only the prepared can look authentic. This paradox raises the stakes on our cave-person communication skills. We can no longer leave the second conversation—the source of radical authenticity—to the unconscious, to chance, and to the moment.
Radical authenticity means preparing for the moment, not just being in it.
What we all do, as unconscious experts of the nonverbal communication of emotions, is ascribe intent to what we see. We don’t think to ourselves, Oh, I see a slumped shoulder and a bowed head. I sense trouble. Instead, we jump immediately to intent, decoding what we see: Uh-oh, Jones is in trouble. This could be bad.
That’s precisely because this expertise developed over eons in order to keep us alive and functioning in the tribe. We had to learn to respond instantly to nonverbal cues because by the time they became conscious, it was too late.
That instant, unconscious response is less useful in the modern era, when we have to do civilized things like lead thousands of people to action, manage groups of employees, and have conversations with discouraged coworkers. Here, our natural tendencies to self-preservation can get in the way. Defensiveness, which makes perfect sense when you are about to have a confrontation with a saber-toothed tiger, creates a bad feeling when you are trying to lead a team of software engineers. Fight-or-flight reactions of hostility, rapid heart rates, and flared nostrils don’t serve us well when the boss says, “How are you going to accomplish X in time frame Y?” They would have been fine when fleeing a woolly mammoth, but it’s no longer the case.
Authenticity is hard because we think it’s all about being, but it’s really all about doing. We have to learn to do new things that our unconscious minds or evolution haven’t prepared us for.
Radical authenticity means using your instincts consciously.
Because our instincts can betray us, we have to learn how to manage them. We must be able to have the two conversations together in a controlled, useful, conscious way. That’s the essence of leadership communications, and it’s a tall order. How can we make the unconscious conscious without losing spontaneity, power, and the appearance of ease?
Here’s where the paradox of leadership comes in. Because we humans tend to interpret fumbling, hesitations, and sloppiness as evidence of lack of preparedness, inauthenticity, and amateurishness, the leaders who wing it instead of preparing always fail to impress. The ones who rehearse, role-play, and prepare with real passion are the ones who connect with their public, their audiences, and their followers—and appear authentic.
Authenticity is essential because it’s the only way to do good work.
Authenticity is essential because our children need to learn it from us.
Authenticity is essential because without it, there is no core.
Authenticity is essential because if we open up about our weaknesses other people won’t bother.
Authenticity is essential because it’s how we grow into ourselves.
Authenticity is essential because otherwise we’ll compromise once too often and lose our way for good.
Authenticity is essential because life is too short for anything else.
Radical authenticity means making what’s staged look impromptu.
We want authentic people as leaders, and what the world doesn’t realize is how hard it is to appear that way. It takes an understanding of how communications works and practice. There’s nothing spontaneous about authenticity in this televised age.
So how do you show up with predetermined authenticity? What about that irony of practicing authenticity? Doesn’t that mean that any such “authenticity” will be fake?
Thinking about it in this way mistakes what it is and how it is projected. Authenticity is genuineness. The shortcut we use to determine it in the people around us is consistency in message and body language—does this person appear to mean what she says?
So the irony is that the more you practice being consistent, the more likely you are to show up that way. When people don’t rehearse, they send out unconscious messages with their bodies that this is the first time I’m doing this. The body language cues of first-timers overlap with the cues of people who don’t fully mean what they say. Both groups tend to engage in self-protective behavior because they feel exposed. Both groups telegraph nervousness through agitated body language. Both groups often restrict their own motion and movement to make themselves feel safer. The result signals to the people around us (unconsciously) that the leader is not relaxed, fluid, and at ease.
So the way to look authentic—radically authentic—is to practice. Your body must get the muscle memory of standing, walking, and talking in the ways that it will during the real event or occasion. If it does, then it can show up with some authority and presence, and your tribe will interpret that as authenticity, if the (more comfortable) body language does in fact match the message. That is the kind of important issue that gets answered by rehearsal.
If you rehearse, you and your body can focus on the moment when you’re actually delivering your message. That greatly increases the chances that you’ll show up as authentic.
In a Radically Connected World, Personal Authenticity Is Table Stakes
Another way that communications has changed in the twenty-first century is style. The development of leadership communications has paralleled the development of acting.
Stage acting in the Victorian period would now seem bizarrely and hilariously stylized to us. The technique was based on a gestural vocabulary that included drawing back, with both hands open and raised up, eyes wide open, and mouth agape to indicate surprise and that sort of thing. Actors would adopt stances that were familiar to their audiences to show the various emotions they wished to convey.
Some of the gestures have survived in the language of mime, but otherwise they’ve been forgotten, except perhaps as jokey, exaggerated reactions in slapstick routines or in charades.
What’s happened is that succeeding generations of actors strove to make acting more and more natural, that is, more closely mimicking real human behavior. The evolution of first stage and then movie acting has proceeded to such a point that even a great actor of a couple of generations ago, like Sir Laurence Olivier, now appears to us stiff and overly mannered. Try watching his version of Hamlet and you’ll see what I mean.
Leadership communications has undergone the same evolution at the top echelons, but the word hasn’t trickled down to everyone yet. The result is that communication habits that were acceptable in the last quarter of the twentieth century now seem overly formal and stagey to us.
What people crave is a conversation—and a conversational style—from their leaders.
Television is partly to blame, but mostly it’s the parallel evolution of leadership communications to a more natural style. Because television has brought our leaders, politicians, and speakers up close, as if they were in our living rooms, we now demand that they talk to us like our neighbors might. Anything else seems fake, pompous, or over the top.
Leaders today need to focus on having a conversation with their followers. Keep it natural, as natural as you can be. Natural is still a style, but it’s an evolving one, and leaders have to keep up with the times just like actors.
With one caveat: when leaders deliberately adopt high rhetorical phrasing, the effect is to create a sense of high seriousness. If the leader carries it off, without becoming pompous or boring, then the result can be very powerful. In truth, both kinds of speech are available to the leader, if used with care.
Similarly, conversational phrasing can become too trite for the occasion, just as more elegant flights of rhetoric can go over the top. We still have a sense that, during important civic moments, leaders should show their sense of the occasion by upping the rhetorical ante.
What is the appropriate language of public discourse? It’s anybody’s to influence, to create, to master. The key test is always authenticity. That’s what we demand of our leaders first, last, and always.
In a Radically Connected World, Your Style Has to Include Listening
It’s time to stop letting our unconscious minds decide our careers, our relationships, our lives. It’s time for us to take charge consciously of the human cues and connections that have evolved over millions of years, so that we can become fully conscious beings, in control of ourselves and our destinies.
Do you want to become a leader in your life, or do you want it simply to happen to you?
What’s needed from leaders is simple: people want to belong and to be led, just as they always have. What’s complicated today is leadership execution—to control your unconscious mind successfully involves lots of moving parts.
But now you’re able, for the first time, to integrate the power of your unconscious mind into your conscious life—your leadership life. The power is there, waiting for you to take it. You know the power cues. You know how to harness your unconscious and make it serve your conscious life rather than betray or undercut it.
It’s not an easy assignment. Of course, it never has been. But it is particularly difficult now. The leadership stakes have been raised, again and again. But the game has never been more worth playing.
Communication is global, instant, and digital. But that doesn’t change the need people have for tribes. What happens is that we learn to pick and choose the information we want from the vast stream that goes past us every second of every day. We identify with selected aspects of the torrent of modern life in order to define who we are—and who we are not. That simply makes the need for tribal identification more important.
At the same time, attention spans keep shrinking. Say it fast or don’t bother. But keep it real. And tell me something I don’t know. So, the ante for public communication keeps getting raised, and leadership keeps getting harder and harder because of that.
In spite of this torrent of communication, or perhaps because of it, there’s a desperate shortage of leaders who are willing to listen, deeply and with integrity, to their tribes. Apparently, the Chinese character for listening is made up of other characters (or perhaps traces of characters) for the ear, the eye, and the heart. That surely suggests something vital about listening: it needs to involve all three. Listening is a skill that is in appallingly short supply in this era of overstimulation and information overload.2
We need to listen to each other more, and more deeply. We need to hear, appreciate, and learn about each other’s stories. If you don’t think so, ask yourself this: When are you, as a leader, going to start paying attention? How are you going to make the time to listen? And how are you going to create the capacity to listen?
In the end, leadership is listening.
We need to listen to each other because life is precious and short. We need to listen to each other because despite our superficial disagreements and differences, we are still the best hope and the gravest danger for the planet we call home. We need to listen to each other because we need to work together in peace in order to build a better world.
Most of all, we need to listen to each other because lives need to be shared, we are a communal species, and isolation kills.
When you listen as a leader, you should listen with your whole body. Use your ears, of course, but also use your eyes and your heart. Listen for the facts, of course, but also listen for the underlying emotions and values of the other person. Only when you listen that carefully and deeply can you begin to understand and then communicate with someone else. I don’t know if the Chinese character for listening really does include the characters for the ear, the eye, and the heart, but I do know that listening needs to include all those things. Let’s start listening better to one another and maybe—just maybe—we can save this magical planet and the precious, irreplaceable people on it.