248: Converse Expertly to Connect, with Sayre Darling

28
Sep

Sayre Darling, a business coach and strategic advisor, is driven by her passion to help leaders converse expertly to connect and foster meaningful relationships.

We learn about the difference between transactional business communications and true conversations, emphasizing how the latter fosters stronger connections, builds trust, and creates energy. Sayre introduces her 4-step Communication Framework, which encourages a shift from corporate jargon and rigid communication patterns to active listening, asking the right questions, and being fully present in each interaction. She also highlights the importance of “momentary surrender.” Learn how by listening to the podcast.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Converse Expertly to Connect, with Sayre Darling

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Sayre Darling, a business coach and strategic advisor to middle managers and executives. Sayre, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, Steve. It’s great to be here.

Well, it’s exciting to have you because you will talk about a completely different perspective than what we discussed on the show, at least in the first 200 episodes, so I’m all ears for it.

Excellent.

My favorite question is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing in your practice to manifest it?

Well, my personal “Why” came from about 30 years where I was working in communication. So you would think that would take care of my “Why,” but I found that no matter what position I had, either as a middle manager or a director or vice president of communications, that I was unable to really address the core issues that create so much confusion and conflict in organizations. And how do you understand each other? How do you have a conversation?

Okay, so why is this such a problem?

Well, it’s such a problem because we don’t have conversations, we do business communications. And all business is built on a conversation. Yes, I know we do a lot of transactional business today, but if you want to create a relationship with a client, you want your clients to give you the benefit of the doubt sometimes, if you want to upsell, you need to have built a connection of some type, and that comes with a conversation. And a conversation is different than a communication in that it builds that connection. A business conversation is much like volleying a tennis ball. You ask me a question, I answer the question. You ask me a question, I answer the question. And you may come away thinking, wow, we had a great conversation. But the fact of the matter is, you only received the answers to the questions that you knew to ask. You didn’t ask questions about things that you knew you didn’t know anything about, or things you didn’t know you didn’t know. So you have a much smaller body of knowledge coming out of a business communication than a conversation.

Wow, that’s very profound. I mean, it makes sense. You won’t get the answer if you don’t ask the question. You have to be curious to ask the question, so you have to be open to listen, to hear the other person, and so on. So let’s dig deeper into this, and I believe that you have a 4-step Communication Framework. Can you explain what it does and what are its elements?

Yep. Well, first just a little bit more about the difference between communications, business communications and conversations. You’ll notice when you’re having a business communication that people speak without moderating their voice too much. It’s all one tone. It’s kind of a run-on sentence. You’re using all the corporate jargon. And a conversation, people pause. They moderate their voice a bit more. They may even take time to laugh and find interesting things to talk about beyond the purpose of that particular conversation. And the other thing in business communications is that you’re there to talk about one thing, how can I sell something to you today, how can I get you to understand what I want. And so you miss all of those signs along the way where someone looked at their watch or made kind of a weird face that would indicate there’s something that you said that didn’t quite sit with them, but if you ignore it, you can’t really go back to it and say so what crossed your mind at that point, and they would say, Oh, I don’t even remember or they have given up wanting to share that kind of detail with you, because they’ve already made up their mind, they’re not going to be moving forward with you. So, conversations create more connections, and they create more energy. And that’s really what we’re looking for. So conversations take some more advanced listening skills. During COVID, we told a lot of executives to say, you have to be transparent, you have to be empathetic, and you have to be authentic. The trouble I have with being something when you’re in conversation with people is you’re concentrating on, am I being authentic? Am I being empathetic? Your focus is on yourself. Whereas if you’re having a conversation, you are focused on the other person, you want to see the other person, how are they feeling today? Are they really down? Are they tired? Are they preoccupied? Are their thoughts really not coming together? So that’s what you want to do is to act as the host, if you will. What does a host of a party do? Well, they don’t think about if they have the right clothes on at that point, if so-and-so likes them or not. They’re focusing on bringing people into the room, getting them into conversation, making sure they know where all the refreshments are, introducing them to others. They’re totally focused on that other person. So to create a conversation instead of a communication, this is something my dad taught me, and he was a mechanical engineer, and I mentioned that because one doesn’t think that mechanical engineers are such good communicators, but my dad was. And he always taught me that understanding what you want to say isn’t as important as figuring out what you need to say in order to be heard. So think about any business communication that you are in. You have your notes, you know what you’re gonna say, you’ve rehearsed it, you say all those things in front of the person you’re speaking to, but you’re not really there. You’re saying what you want to say, you’re not bothering to figure out if that’s what you need to say in order to be heard. You want to start with focusing on where people are at. Are they paying attention? How much time do they have? How are they showing up? Do they want to help expand the conversation with adding new information or do they have time just to get to the business? So then when you move on from there, then you want to focus on asking for permission. That is more important today than ever before. Share on X You know, Steve, we’re here to talk today about communications and conversation. It requires a little bit of bandwidth from you and some little extra time. I want to make sure you’re not rushed. Is that okay? Can we still talk about that agenda today? And if they say, thanks for asking. I just do not have it. I’m not here today. I’m preoccupied. I can’t listen well enough. Could we reschedule? Great. So then you have built in an immediate opportunity to circle back to that person and reschedule. When you are in the middle of having a conversation, then share the agenda. Avoid making your point or starting with a question that is a very long run-on sentence, and then expect the person across from you to remember that five-minute question or statement that sounds like they’ve already made up their mind. They haven’t stopped to ask questions to make sure I’m still connected with you. They didn’t pause and take a breath, which gives the other person a chance to think about what they want. There’s no conversation here. It is you speak, I speak, you speak, I speak. You think about the pacing of things. You also stay aware of what’s being said as well as what’s not being said. Ask questions about that. And then you want to notice how people are reacting. Their reactions will give you far more information than just their questions because they don’t even realize sometimes that they are reacting. All of a sudden they’re disconnected, they’re not present. They looked off in the distance and then they wrote a note down which means something came in that they didn’t want to forget. So when you see those things in the moment, you say, Steve, I saw you that were just a bit distracted there. Where did I disconnect with you and where should we loop back and what do I need to restate? So you call those things out in the moment. And then you continue with the conversation by putting your information in small bites. Remember to use your questions and make sure your audience is still engaged. And maybe they wanna ask a question a couple sentences ago, so go back and set the context for them, answer that question. Don’t rush. One of the most difficult things to do today is to take time and listen and the reason why I say that is because the best definition I’ve ever heard of what listening is, it is a momentary surrender. It’s a surrender of all those thoughts running in your head, all the stress you’re feeling from this morning’s meetings, all the things you have yet to get done today, and what you have to pick up from the store on the way home or what errands you have to take your family members to, you surrender all of that and you are present. And that is very, very difficult today. And then you want to look for the aha moment. You want to look for where that energy spark occurred. And it’s when they understand what you’re talking about in their head, as well as understand where it engaged them, where it ignited their curiosity, where they really bought in and opened their hearts to, oh, yeah, I can do this. I see what’s in it for me. I get it now. That’s the point you want to look for and build on that.

Okay, that’s very interesting. Yeah, I’ve never looked at it this way. I mean, I love the Socratic method and engaging people with questions. I like how you put this together, the permission piece, sharing the agenda in advance, observing the behavior of your conversation partner and catching them getting distracted and kind of rewind for them so that they can stay engaged and you won’t keep them lost. And the small bites, you can see professional speakers who understand this. And like I’m watching DNC event and how the speakers speak on the stage and not all of them, but some of them really know the art of rhetoric and how they can keep the engagement. You mentioned the laugh, which is also a very natural way to bond with people. Isn’t that a bit too much to keep in mind? It doesn’t take a lot of practice to master all these levers?

It takes an incredible amount of practice. And as I tell my coaching clients all the time, every day is just practice. So conversation is not an individual sport. You’re not getting on that balance beam. You’re not running on that track all by yourself. Conversation is a team sport. And so you have to be ready to play on whatever team shows up for you to practice on every day.

Okay, I love that analogy. So team sports. So you talked about this momentary surrender. Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by that?

Well, when people think of listening, they often think of, okay, now I have to have my attention right here, but they forget everything that is still running in their mind. They don’t take a breath themselves and say, okay, I’m 100% present in this conversation. Everything else that I can set that aside, my worries are still going to be there when I get done. My stress is still going to be there from the meetings this morning. So bringing it into this conversation is not going to be helpful. And so I’m showing up as a blank slate. What do you want of me? The flip side of that is when you are asking people for a momentary surrender, you better make darn sure what you have to say is worth their time.

Yeah, sure. So do you think that it is becoming harder to communicate as people’s attention span shortens?

Yes, I do. Not only do we have more channels, more software, more apps, more ways to communicate, we miss the fundamental basics of you have to have a sender and a message and a receiver and the chance to have a feedback loop, which is where the conversation comes in. And that is the basic communications model. And it is the most complex to implement of any model that I can think of.

So what do you recommend or how do you coach people on this? Do you give them a mental checklist of the things that they should be kind of making sure they don’t miss?

Well, I share all of this information with them and it’s really up to them to adapt these steps to what their style is. Everyone has a different communication style, yet we have to adapt it to whomever we’re speaking to. So I don’t really advocate for those models that say I’m a particular communications type, so this is how I communicate. If I can’t listen, if I can’t hear that, if you are communicating the way you want to, not the way your audience hears you, your message isn’t going to get across. If you do not take time to translate corporate jargon into the language that is used at the level of whomever you are speaking to, managers speak a different language than senior managers than the C-suite does. So if you do not take the time to translate the language into the language of that person’s culture within the organization, we wonder why misunderstandings and miscommunications occurs. That’s one of the primary reasons. We don’t take time to listen. When we do listen, we’re listening only in our own best interest. It isn’t a team sport we’re playing in. And we’re relying on corporate jargon to get across all of our misunderstandings and everyone takes away a different meaning. They understand it differently.

So I wonder if to be a really great communicator whether you don’t need a high level of self-awareness and a high level of confidence at the same time, because essentially when you do this surrender, aren’t you letting the other person to control the agenda in some ways and to potentially hijack the agenda? And aren’t you giving up some control, which must require a lot of self-confidence that you would still be able to steer things along?

So that’s where the skills come in of the person who is speaking to be able to ask questions, to check to make sure his or her audience is still with them and understanding. Does this work for you? Can you see any issues coming up? Do you agree with this? What do you think about this? And that means your culture has to be more than an agreeable culture. If it is not safe to speak up in an organization and share what you’re really thinking, it’s very difficult to do communications. You have a very narrow lane to travel in to talk about what’s appropriate feedback, what are appropriate questions. And so you have to be very thoughtful in some organizations on how to ask a question so you don’t seem that you’re being derogatory, that you’re not going along with to get along kind of thing, and it takes a lot of thinking and understanding this is a team sport and working with the other person to say, I have a question I don’t know that I feel very comfortable asking it, so maybe we can talk offline and give me some time to think about how I can say this and feel comfortable being in conversation with you about this topic.

How long does it take for you, from starting to work with someone who realizes that they have some deficiencies in this area, for them to be highly competent communicators who follow these kind of frameworks that you’re teaching?

I would say we make some pretty good progress after a month. Three months would be ideal, and it doesn’t have to take that long, but oftentimes, it’s much better if the individual I’m coaching has a chance to practice these skills in different situations, and you can’t push that. Difficult conversations don’t come across your path every day. Handling differing perspectives doesn’t happen every day. So, that practice occurs when the opportunity arises in an organization. In the meantime, what I do with my clients, we do a lot of role playing. Okay, well, what if this comes up in the conversation? What would you say? Okay, if you hit a brick wall, how are you going to give yourself some different alleys to go down in the conversation if the thing you want, the main topic you want to have a conversation about, if you are stopped dead in your tracks, how do you recover from that? And the way you recover from that is to have a conversation, not a communication. A conversation helps you expand a communication. You’re not there to talk about one thing, do it one way, just have one question. You can talk about all of these other topics, understand the context, understand the politics, think of everything that’s impacting this situation, and then when you’re stopped dead in your tracks, then you can loop back around and say well, what about this situation? Could we look at it from that perspective? This might change in the future. Could I come back and talk to you about it then?

Well, one of the things that you mentioned in our previous conversation was language energy. It’s energy behind the language. So can you elaborate on what that means and what makes people have low or high energy or different kinds of energy and how do you pick up on that and what you do about it?

So, the energy behind the language is the emotion or the intent. An example, everyone has been in a situation where someone who is of a higher position, whether it’s in the C-suite or a senior manager, and they are explaining something or making an announcement. And it’s a difficult conversation. They’re scared of, worried about what people’s reactions are going to be. So they stick just to the message, just to the talking point. There is no energy behind that conversation. They don’t want your questions. They don’t want to have a conversation about it. They just want people to say yes and move forward. Okay, so how much buy-in do you think they are going to get from the people they’re speaking to? Probably not a lot. So when you frame up a difficult conversation and say, I know this is going to be not a popular decision, a lot of you are gonna have some pushback to it, I acknowledge that, and so I’m gonna share some facts with you, then we’re gonna follow up this conversation with some one-on-one meetings, some team meetings, where we can get into a deeper dialogue. You find the ways to put the energy behind it. Now, on the other hand, when you have a positive message to provide or something you’re very excited about, you can see the energy in the conversation, you can feel it. People are excited, they’re looking around, there’s more engagement, informal engagement between the speaker and the audience. The trick with those type of conversations is you don’t want to get carried away by the excitement and the energy. You want to still keep your talking points in mind and make sure everyone is understanding what the message is. But you’re really looking for where is the energy because there’s a greater chance of understanding, interest, engagement, buy-in and support versus did you just understand what I said? Sure, but who cares because I’ve heard this same message before. I don’t care. This doesn’t really hit me.

Yeah, that’s fascinating how to use the energy of the conversation. Is there a way for you to catalyze energy? I mean, there’s got to be. So when you inspire someone, you are essentially catalyzing your energy, their emotional reaction. What do you do? So you’re in a leadership position and you’re just announcing that the company is cutting costs and there will be a reorganization and you’re asking for questions. How do you have the people have more energy than what they normally would have in a situation like that?

You put your heart into it. I know this is very hard to hear. This is a very difficult decision for us to make. Here’s how we made the decision. I want to talk to each of you more about it, or your manager is going to follow up with more personal conversations. Whatever future plans might be announced in terms of hiring back, providing them with an out package, that would be the time to share that information. That would not be the time to ask for questions. It’s like when you go into a doctor and they say, well, you don’t have the flu, but you have something far worse than that. And they’re not going to hear a single word you said after they understand what the real issue is. So you have to give that information to people gently, pleasantly, and very personally. You have to share some of your own stories about how you have overcome difficulties, really identify with your audience.

Yeah. How do you prepare for an audience? Do you do some research to figure out what kind of emotional state they’re going to be in and what is their mental makeup and so forth?

Whenever there’s the opportunity to do a bit of an informal survey or just get the lay of the land. I always try to do that. But the main way I prepare for a conversation, no matter what it is, is I prepare it in a dialogue format. So here’s what I’m gonna say, and here’s two or three responses I might get, or I might anticipate the responses. Something like, so you’re wondering why I’m making such a big deal in telling you this today. Here’s why. I think about it in terms of positive comments, negative comments, resistance. What would I say if people started just yelling at me or walking out of the room? How would I handle that? I think of all of those scenarios. And so whatever happens, I’m ready for it. And my communication with them comes off much better because I’m more relaxed because I prepared for every scenario.

Love it. Well, I think we could continue this conversation for a long time because what you’re saying is very interesting and it piques my curiosity even on a Friday afternoon. But I’m trying to keep these audio recordings at a regular length so that people know what they expect. However, for those listeners who would like to get deeper or maybe have a conversation with you about their needs or their managers or their executives needs, where should they go and how can they connect with you?

They can connect with me on LinkedIn. There’s absolutely only one Sayre Darling. There’s no two Sayre Darlings to choose from. And you can contact me there on LinkedIn. You can also go to my website. I offer everyone a free first conversation. I’m happy to talk through any scenario that might be coming in front of them at the moment and give them several options on how they might approach the situation.

Well, if you want to have a conversation where someone will bring the right energy and will be hearing you and will give you the surrender, how did you call it? The momentary surrender.

The momentary surrender, yes.

That you’re dealing with, then reach out to Sayer on LinkedIn. Sayer, thank you very much for coming and sharing. This is a very unique take on a very interesting topic that all of us need to become better communicators, no exception. So that’s very good. And if you enjoyed this conversation as a listener, don’t forget to follow us on YouTube and give us a review on Apple podcast. Check out the LinkedIn page, Steve Preda Business Growth, and you’ll find the video version and the short video version as well of many of these conversations. So thank you, Sayre, for coming, and thank you for listening.

Thank you so much, Steve. It was really enjoyable. Have a great day.

 

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