Leadership communication and the importance of language

Commical – Episode title: Leadership communication and the importance of language

Published 27/04/2021 on Chasing Albert website, spotify and apple podcasts.

Marie 00:00

Brand, reputation and culture can be impacted by bad processes just as much as they can by a good marketing campaign. They are three topics that are linked and critical to business, be it large or small. My guest today is David Marquet, former US Navy captain and author of the brilliant book Leadership Is Language. He analyses the language used by the crew and captain aboard El Faro and shares lessons we can all learn about the power of language. Oprah, Steve Jobs, Andrew Denton - to me, these guys are masters of communication. The rest of us, well, mainly you, because I'm a pro, fumble our way through. Commical examines this funny little thing called communication that can either tear us down or make us soar. Join me. I'm an amateur comedian and a communication expert. Join me and listen, learn and laugh through the experiences of my very talented guests. Welcome, David. Thank you for joining me today.

Guest 01:26

Thanks for having me on your show.

Marie 01:29

An absolute pleasure. Now, the El Faro story is a recent one. Can you tell us what happened?

Guest 01:40

Yeah. So this is a tragic story. The El Faro is a huge container ship, two football pitches long, and she left Florida, sailed into a hurricane off Bermuda, and sank. All 33 crew members lost their lives at sea and were never found. You might be thinking, well, when did this happen, 100 years ago? No, this happened five years ago. This happened in the 2015 hurricane season, and the ship had all the equipment and knew the hurricane was there. So the problem wasn't knowing about the hurricane. The problem was how the crew talked to each other about making the decisions they needed to avoid it. Fortunately, ships have black boxes like airplanes do, and the government was able to find the ship and recover the black box from the bottom of the ocean. So we have a 500-page transcript of exactly what these people said. It makes for harrowing reading, because we know the end, we know what's going to happen, and you just cry out. You want them to turn. There's this critical point where the storm is battering the ship and it's getting worse and worse, and they're reading the weather reports, and there's this turn they can make that will take them behind the Bahamas into protected waters, but they don't make it. I think it's a story worth paying attention to because we have this notion, 'Oh, that would never happen to my group. That would never happen to my team. We would never make a bad decision.' But then over and over and over again, we have Wells Fargo or Volkswagen or the Boeing 737 Max, and over and over again, we see well-intentioned people making really, really bad decisions. I think it's because we're using the wrong language.

Marie 03:38

So you are a former US Navy captain, aren't you? And so was your interest in this stemming from your experience in the Navy, or was it coming from a communication perspective?

Guest 03:51

No, it was from my personal experience. I didn't know anything about communication. Luckily, we say even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. My story in the Navy is that I was coming up through the ranks. I was very good at telling people what to do and getting them to do it. I was getting promoted, and then I was selected to be a submarine commander. For 12 months, I was trained to go to one ship, and then at the last minute they said, 'No, no, you've got to go to this other submarine, the USS Santa Fe, because the captain there has quit. Oh, by the way, it's the worst-performing crew with the worst morale, and it's one of the newest ships in the fleet, not the kind you were being trained for, and you've never been on this kind of submarine before.' So my experience there was that there was so much not in my control - who to hire, for example. I hear business people talking about spending a lot of energy getting the right people and putting them in the right positions and all that. It turns out that actually the most important thing to drive team performance is how the team interacts, not any of those other things. Fortunately for me, I spent zero energy and emotion on those things because I had no control over them. It's more complicated for your typical business leader. All I was able to control was the language, and we just started chasing the words that we used. For example, we had this word 'they' that we used a lot, and 'they' meant everyone but me and my tribe or my little division. It could be my rank. If I'm an enlisted person, then they are the officers. If I'm an officer, they are the enlisted personnel. If I was in engineering, they meant operations. If I was in operations, they meant supply, or whatever. But 'they' was always somebody else. I got upset one day and said, 'There's no they on Santa Fe,' which rhymed, so that was convenient. I'm a bit of a jingle guy. So that became our mantra: no they on Santa Fe. You had to say the word 'we' - 'We didn't order the right part. We didn't do all the preparations we needed to,' whatever it was. The weirdest thing happened. After six months, it would have felt just as wrong to say 'they' as it had earlier felt right to say it. What I discovered was we think the language lags the feeling, but the language actually drives the feeling. It's the repeated use of language. So when you keep saying the word 'we', that sends a signal to your brain: my tribe, my tribe, my tribe. Then your brain grows the connections and makes it feel like your tribe. So people visiting the ship couldn't understand it and said, 'This is the most amazing culture of teamwork.' I laughed. I said, 'We don't have a culture. I never use the word culture. What is that?' We just always referred to each other as 'we'.

Marie 06:44

Team accountability as well, right? So it creates that we're all accountable for our success and our work together.

Guest 06:50

Yeah, exactly. There's no blame. A number of other things came from that too. For example, on a submarine, let's say we're about to shoot a torpedo and someone thinks that at the last minute we might be shooting the wrong target. I would never say, 'Don't shoot,' because what if they don't hear the 'don't'? What if someone sneezes or there's a bang right then and all they hear is 'shoot', and then they shoot? So we learned to pay a lot of attention, and we would go over the words over and over. What exactly are we going to say? We would do it very deliberately. I'm an engineer and kind of a geeky introvert. If someone says to me, 'How are you?' I actually answer the question. I don't get that you're just supposed to say, 'Fine. How are you?'

Marie 07:47

You give the blow-by-blow details.

Guest 07:50

No, it's not what I'm buying. I'm just supposed to say, 'Fine. How are you?' back? Oh, okay. So I became really struck by the power of language, and the most important changes were that we shifted from a doing language to a learning language, and we shifted from a language of disempowerment to a language of emancipation. I won't even say empowerment, because our special word was 'intent'. Instead of people coming up and saying, 'Tell me what to do,' or 'I'd like permission,' they would say, 'Hey, Captain, here's what I intend to do.' That was super, super powerful. So that got me on this question: how do teams actually talk? We delude ourselves with, well, this is how we teach people to talk, or this is how we think they talk, or this is how they should talk. I don't care about any of that. What I care about is how we actually talk.

Marie 08:43

And that's what's beautiful, actually, about the way you start your book Leadership Is Language, where you start with the story of El Faro. What's remarkable is that through tragedy, as you say in your book, you're given this treasure, which is the ability to analyse the conversations that happened on that ship at critical points in time. So what did your analysis of those recordings find?

Guest 09:10

First off, I'm very sensitive because I'm talking about people who lost loved ones, and they're going to read this. It's easy to be critical. It's easy to take anything you said yesterday - if we had it on recording - or anything that I said, and say, 'Oh, well, you could have done this a little better.' That is easy. But the thing that strikes me is these were well-meaning, well-trained, well-equipped people trying to do their jobs. They obviously weren't trying to go out and die. The captain got some criticism for how he behaved, but I worked for all kinds of captains who said exactly the same kind of thing that this captain says. And by the way, if he was such a bad captain, why did the company make him a ship captain? It's highly competitive. Why had all of his evaluations been wonderful, wonderful, wonderful? Then suddenly, 'Oh, you're terrible'? No, that doesn't make any sense.

Marie 10:08

What I took from it was actually more that the captain acted in a true captain way, right? That old-school 'It's my job to just give you directions.' So that was what was fascinating. So what did you find when you went through the analysis from a language perspective?

Guest 10:26

Thanks for getting me back on track. Two things. Number one, the word distribution followed salary distribution.

Marie 10:37

Are you referring to share of voice? Is that what you mean?

Guest 10:41

Yeah. In other words, when the captain and an officer and a crewman were standing on the bridge for several hours, all we did was count the words - long word, short word, doesn't matter. Remember, I'm an engineer and kind of a math oddball. So I said, 'Well, let's just count the words and see what we learn.' We counted them. Here's the eerie thing. Every single time there were that combination - captain, officer, crewman - and we added up all the words over the two to four hours the captain would be on the bridge, then we'd reset the tally and do it again. Every single time the word count exactly followed that hierarchy. The captain always said the most number of words, the officer was next, and then the crewman way below. So it was typically like 52, 45, 3, something like that. Not only did it follow the sequence of their salaries, it sort of matched the difference, because the officer would make close to what the captain made, but the crewman would make a lot less. We see this pattern in meetings too. The leader gets the most words. It's sort of an unwritten rule, and the lowest-ranking person has to sit at the end of the table, or even against the wall, and everyone knows they're not really supposed to speak up. But this is a fragile, anti-resilient pattern. What you want to do as a leader is make sure you get this more even. If you've got 10 people in a room, each person should have about 10 percent. You don't need to measure it - humans are very attuned to it. We did some samples where we measured it, and then we just asked people, 'Hey, who do you think spoke the most? By how much?' People are pretty good at guessing. The second problem was the kind of words they used, and I call it using doing words in a thinking game. When they were in situations where they needed to make decisions, the words they were using tended to be words that would have been appropriate for a team that was just being told what to do, a team that was focused on production and action, as opposed to reflection. The key here is that doing views variability or diversity as an enemy, but thinking views variability as an ally. Variability is an ally for thinking. It's an enemy to doing. So we're using words that are inherently designed to reduce variability, and we're applying them to a decision that needs variability, and it doesn't work. For example, I hear business leaders say, 'Let's build some consensus.' No, don't build consensus. What is that? I'm reducing variability because I'm squeezing the outlying opinions toward the middle. That's not what you want to do. The decision has to be made after we understand all the opinions, especially the ones on the fringes. Over and over and over again, all innovation starts as an outlying opinion.

Marie 13:49

That's fascinating. And by variability you mean more ideas, more opinions?

Guest 13:56

Yeah, exactly right.

Marie 13:58

And is that because it helps make a quicker decision, or a leader views that variability might delay a decision, or is it about control?

Guest 14:05

Both. It's certainly about delay. So in your head, you're the leader. You've done all this testing. You're nervous because the competitor is going to come out with a competing product. You have a lot of money invested in it. You've made earlier decisions supporting the product that's coming out, so your ego is attached to that product. And even if you want to say, 'Okay, I'm not going to be this passionate about this,' your brain can't be. It's already attached itself, and it's going to muster arguments to try to convince you it's the right thing to do. What you really need to do is put all that aside, and the best thing you can do is just say nothing. We always say, 'Vote first, then discuss.' Most teams, when they come to a decision meeting, say, 'Well, let's talk about whether we should launch the product next week.' Blah, blah, blah, yes, no. That is not the right way to do it, because the discussion inherently makes it harder for the people who think differently - 'I don't think we should launch. I don't think the 737 Max is ready for prime time.' That person, if they thought that in the meeting, will be dissuaded from speaking. But the leader can say, 'Oh, well, everyone had a chance to speak up.' But you don't know what you didn't hear. We don't have transcripts of those critical Boeing meetings, so I can't tell you for sure, but we know from other patterns. When you look at word count, the word counts are skewed and the CEO is getting their way, thinking they're doing the right thing. Well, if he or she is right, great. But over and over again, you'd better be right 100 percent of the time, which you never will be.

Marie 15:39

You talk about language of vulnerability. What does that mean, and why is it beneficial to leaders?

Guest 15:48

In the industrial age, let's say I'm running a textile mill in the 1800s. I hired you to do what you were told, and what you were told to do was manual labour. It was a simple, physical, repeated task. It may have been in sequence with other people, but it wasn't really in teamwork with many other people. In that situation, the way a firm became profitable was that we made the task so basic that we could hire the most uneducated person, which meant we could pay them the least amount of money, and they would just do exactly what they were told. Since I was telling you what to do and I was making the decisions about how we should do it, where we should do it and what we should make, I didn't care what you thought. I didn't care about your emotional health. I didn't care about your psychological health. Now we know it's best that the people who are closest to the work know the most about the work. The person who's in the code, the person flying the airplane, the person doing the medical procedure - they know the most about the work. So we started saying, 'Hey, well, why don't we ask them?' I think we need to go further and actually let them make decisions. Say, 'I'm not going to ask you so that I can still make the decision. I'm going to try and give as much decision authority to you as possible.' But this means we're now asking people, 'You did the work last week. How could you do it better?' That only works if I feel like we're in it together and I come from a sound and safe emotional place, which means I need to feel connected. The play is to connect. In the industrial age, in hierarchy, we actually used disconnection. We wanted people to conform to their position. That's why we built big executive offices. I was literally at a company in Switzerland, a big multinational, one of the top 100 companies on the planet, and as I got closer to the CEO's office, the carpet just got thicker and thicker and thicker. Why? Because we're separating. We're sending a signal: hierarchy is important, power and status are important. This is about making it easier to get people to be compliant. This is not how we want to run our organisations today, but it's so baked into the culture and the language and the way we run meetings that even if I get rid of the carpet, the way I run the meeting can still reinforce it. I come in, I'm the CEO, and say, 'Okay, hey guys, we're here to discuss blah, blah, blah, so I think we're all set to go, right?' You just made it really hard for the person who thinks that's a bad idea to speak up.

Marie 18:16

Exactly. Another book I'm reading at the moment is David Epstein's book Range, and it's funny because there are very similar themes, although you both use very different language and examples in sharing those stories. But he makes the same point.

Guest 18:31

Yeah, I don't know that book. What's he writing about?

Marie 18:36

It's basically about range of experience and taking on the views of people who might not be the hyper-specialists, for instance. He uses examples of organisations where CEOs have been more open to problems being solved by everybody, rather than them finding solutions or dictating what a solution might be.

Guest 18:58

Yeah, nice. I love it. I'm going to go check it out. But here's the deal: I'm supposed to be a guy who knows something about leadership and has read a bunch of books. I could have pretended like I'd heard about the book. So me saying, 'Hey, I'm not familiar with that book,' that's a little bit of vulnerability, because there could be some listener saying, 'Oh, this guy, he doesn't know? Of course that's a famous book.' But this habit of being able to say 'I don't know' really came hard to me late in life, but it's so powerful. If you can't say 'I don't know', your people can't say 'I don't know'. And if your people can't say 'I don't know', then you're just going to keep finding ways to BS. There's no honesty and integrity in the organisation. You're going to waste a lot of time chasing your tail.

Marie 19:48

Now, most companies aren't recording employee conversations, or so we'd like to think.

Guest 19:55

With Zoom, I think Zoom is recording a whole lot more. I know it's weird. If you're in a meeting and I had a microphone there, you'd be like, 'Oh, this is weird. You're recording us.' But on Zoom, with the little record button, no one cares.

Marie 20:07

I have to say, I find it strange when I'm on a Zoom call and it's being recorded. It does make me feel a little uneasy, I have to say. But anyway, let's assume that hopefully most organisations aren't recording conversations in the way, for example, an airplane or a ship might, for obvious reasons. So how then can a team identify language of invulnerability or a lack or an imbalance in share of voice? What are those signals that we should be looking for that the language might be contributing to a lack of collaboration?

Guest 20:39

Yeah, that we're applying a reduced-variability doing language when we really want an embrace-variability thinking language. So it starts with you. Stop thinking that you're going to give other people feedback and fix them. Start with yourself and invite feedback. I'll give you a very small example. A lot of people, myself included, have a tendency to say something like, 'Okay, so I've heard all the arguments, blah, blah, blah, we are going to go north. Does that make sense? We're going to go north, right? Everyone on board?' That final bit is just another nail in the coffin. It says, don't speak up. So I say, you know what, I want to get rid of that. What I want to say is, 'Okay, here's the decision. We are going to go north. How could this go wrong? What gives you trouble? What should we be looking for that would give us an indication this is the wrong decision?' You want to ask for disconfirming information, because everyone nodding their head is the socially approved behaviour. We don't need more everyone-nodding-their-heads. We need some more shaking heads. So you say, 'I want to get this out of my language. I don't want to say that anymore.' Then you can record yourself, or you can get a collaborator and say, 'Hey, I want you to listen. If you hear me say right, then you're going to take one of these referee cards and hold it up and yellow-flag me,' or you're going to tell me afterwards how many times. It's very difficult to root it out yourself. Another thing in the early days, especially with leaders, is binary questions. So: 'Will this work? Is this going to make sense? Are you sure?' No, I'm never sure. Anyone who says they're sure about something is an idiot. Other than the sun coming up in the east, I'm really not too sure. If I ask the question, 'Are you sure?', I'm narrowing the responses down. You're in a box. It's either yes or no. That's not interesting. I don't learn anything. If I say, 'How sure are you?', now I'm learning something. Now we can have a conversation, and it naturally also levels the share of voice. When I just say, 'Are you sure?', it's three words to one. If I say, 'How sure are you?', then you might say, 'Well, about 55 percent sure.' Then I can ask, 'Tell me what's behind that.' Naturally, I'm inviting a lot more words.

Marie 23:17

What you've just explained to me is that you should start with self-reflection and see how you can change your own language rather than changing someone else's. Let's assume, in an organisation, that the leader or the boss doesn't have that level of insight, and you're faced, as an employee - somebody on that team, you might be a manager, right - with a boss who is not giving you permission or room to speak up. Is there a level of accountability or obligation on the employee to speak up anyway?

Guest 23:49

Yeah. In healthy organisations, what happens is people say, 'No matter how hard you make it, no matter how socially unwelcome my thoughts are, I'm not dedicated to you, I'm dedicated to our process, our product, our client, our purpose, our values.' If you were going to get on an airplane and fly from Sydney to LA and you got to interview the cockpit team, one copilot says, 'Yeah, I'm the copilot. She's the pilot. What she says, I do.' A second copilot says, 'I'm the copilot. She's the pilot. What she says, I'll probably do because it's probably consistent with safety. But if safety of flight deviates from what I think the pilot is saying or doing, I'm going to speak up because my highest purpose is safety of flight. It's not to do what this person sitting next to me tells me.' Which airplane are you going to get on? The problem is we get so sucked into following the person that it doesn't work. So the answer is yes, you want to do that. You want to be careful, you want to be respectful, and you've got to earn the right to be heard before you try to convince anyone. So we always say in those situations: get permission and start with observation. Don't say, 'Oh, I think that's a bad decision,' because now you're attacking the decision. Say, 'Here's how we see it.' Let's go back to Boeing 737 Max: 'Hey, we've been having a lot of trouble in the flight simulator. The thing went crazy a couple of times and the autopilot took over and crashed the airplane, and we don't really understand why that happened. Now, if you want to go ahead and release it for public consumption, that's on you.' Eventually you'll earn the right, and hopefully the boss turns to you and says, 'Hey, so Marie, what do you think?' But if you never get there, get a different job, because that's going to eat away at you. There are plenty of people out there who want to do the right thing. There are plenty of leaders who will react in a positive way to help like that.

Marie 26:04

But that culture of silence sometimes - for example, in the El Faro example you spoke about, which I, by the way, became a little bit obsessed with and went into a rabbit hole reading all about it - and you're right, it's harrowing, and I found it really, really sad. I felt for the families who had to read the transcripts or saw the conversations that happened. It was incredibly tragic, but it also struck me that whilst the captain had his direction and seemed quite old-school in the way that he was giving instructions or receiving feedback, so too did the crew of 32. There was a lot of conversation behind the captain's back. People openly disagreed and shared that as a team, but never openly shared it with the captain. For me, it highlighted the importance of speaking up, even if you don't necessarily feel that permission, but finding it within yourself to be brave and to commit yourself to the purpose and not the person, in a very diplomatic but persuasive way when required.

Guest 27:04

You want to believe that you should act like that, but the problem is when the leader says, 'Well, you weren't brave. You didn't speak up,' and blames you. The leader is responsible for making it easy for you to speak up. You're responsible for speaking no matter how easy it is. When you get that, you're going to have an unbeatable combination. But what we too often see is people say, 'Well, I didn't speak up because they didn't make it safe.' And leaders say, 'Well, I tried to do the best job making it safe. You weren't brave enough to speak up.' Rather than each person saying, 'I'm responsible for my part,' which is speaking up no matter how uncomfortable that feels, and leaders feeling responsible for creating a culture where there's not recrimination, where we're truly interested in outlying opinions, different opinions, different ways of thought - truly, not just lip service, but like really, 'Oh hey, Marie, tell us more about that.' When that happens, you have a winning culture. You have a resilient, self-correcting organisation. When this doesn't happen, you have a fragile, brittle organisation that is highly dependent - I call it closely coupled - to the ability of the leader to make correct decision after correct decision. Eventually it's going to be incorrect. So you're going to be, 'Oh good, look how much money - money, money, money - bankrupt. Money, money, money, money - dead people.' That's the problem. That's the seduction.

Marie 28:25

So in summary - and it's going to be hard, because I know this was a big chapter and what much of your book was about - but if you could summarise the top three moves in the new playbook when it comes to leadership language, what would you say they are?

Guest 28:41

Number one, remember that the words you use, and the words that feel natural, came to us from the Industrial Revolution, so they are designed to be coercive. Number two, stop asking binary questions when it's about what people think. You can say, 'Hey, did you go to the game last night?' That's history. That's past. But when it's 'What should we do? How sure are you? How safe is it?' put the word 'how' in front. Number three, your language is designed to enhance hierarchy. There are trappings at work around that - closer parking spots, bigger offices, whatever it happens to be - and this impedes the ability for information to flow up the hierarchy in proportion to how steep that hierarchy is. So what you want to do is try to get that flatter. You do that by coming out from behind your desk, sitting next to the other person, moving your desk into the middle of the office, being human, and having a connection with other people. It doesn't mean you have to spend half an hour talking about the weekend or something like that if that's not what you're interested in, but it does mean you have to genuinely care about them as human beings and as parents, children, cousins, friends, teammates - whatever role they're playing in life besides the one in which you see them at work.

Marie 30:03

Perfect. I could talk to you for hours. I really genuinely loved your book. I think everybody should read it, regardless of whether they're in a leadership or management position. We're all going to get there one day, hopefully, but the lessons that can be learned for anybody in the workforce are enormous. Thank you so much for joining me, David. An absolute pleasure. Hopefully I'll speak to you when I read your first book, Turn the Ship Around.

Guest 30:32

I might come back to you on that. All right. Thanks, Marie, and thank you all, listeners, for your time and attention. Thanks for what you guys do to make the world a better place.

Marie 30:41

Thank you, and that's Commical for this week. If you'd like to join the show, suggest a topic or ask me a question, hit me up on Instagram at Marie El Daghl, or email me at comicalpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening. See ya.