Power Cues

Nick Morgan: Well there's a couple of things really. I've been coaching people in the communications business mostly but also the government end of things and the not-for-profit world and helping them become more effective communicators, I've been doing that for 25 years now and over and over again I saw people sabotaging themselves unintentionally, not on ways that were alarming or surprising, they were just minor ticks that got in the way of somebody becoming completely effective as a communicator or things were showing up on their face or in their body language that unintentionally gave them away or caused them to be less than effective. So I just started asking myself, what's going on there, why would people knowingly do this? If you are on target to be a successful leader why would you sabotage yourself? So it was really from that insight, that very simple insight that this work started and then of course, what we've seen in the last 15 or so years is an extraordinary advance in neuroscience and brain research that enables us to understand better exactly why people do these things.

Rachel Salaman: Now your book is called "Power Cues," what are these, what should we understand by that term?

Nick Morgan: These are the tells, if you will, to use a term from poker, the ways in which we communicate, by and large unconsciously, that really dominate our communications lives if you will. How do you look when you walk into a room? Most of us aren't that self-aware so we don't realize how much information we bring into the room, if you will, for other people about how we're feeling and what our attitude is toward a meeting or toward a conversation or toward the other people in the room. We bring that in by and large unconsciously so these power cues are ways to understand both how you're communicating unconsciously and how other people are communicating and once you understand that mostly unconscious level of communication then you can become a much more adept leader.

Rachel Salaman: You talk about the unconscious mind there and in the book you say that that is actually more powerful than our conscious mind, which is an interesting way of looking at things, can you explain that idea?

Nick Morgan: Sure, the research seems to show that the unconscious mind can handle something like eleven million bits of information a second whereas the poor conscious mind, the one that seems vast to us because we're aware of it, can only handle about forty bits of information a second so just in that simple sense the unconscious mind is a bigger machine that handles far more inputs and outputs, it's just faster and bigger and yet we are unaware of it because by definition it's unconscious.

Rachel Salaman: And you say that in order to be the best leader possible we need to align our unconscious power cues with our conscious content, in other words to you leadership is about alignment. What led you to that conclusion?

Nick Morgan: Well to take a very simple example in the realm of public speaking, so this is a scenario that I have encountered many, many times. Let's say you're a leader and you have an important town hall meeting to undertake, there's been some lay-offs in your company and you have to stand up and talk to those employees who are now a bit shell-shocked and wondering what's in store for them. They have "survivors' guilt" if they're still around or they are just simply worried about their futures and so you have several jobs to do. You have to reassure them in some way and yet you can't overstep legal and fiduciary norms and limits so you have to tell the truth in some sense and then you also have to give them some vision of the future. Now that's a lot to do for a leader in the course of say a couple of hours semi-public meeting and typically when I coach people to get ready for that sort of thing they're nervous going into it. Because they are competent leaders they're not terrified, they're not reduced to shivering wrecks, they are able to walk and talk and even smile bravely as they walk into the room but nonetheless they are a little bit nervous and what happens is, their unconscious body language telegraphs that nervousness. They might clutch their hands in front of their stomach, they've learned not to perhaps do the obvious things like fold their hands over their torsos in the famous crossed arms pose that everybody knows is forbidding or closed but they are going to do some unconscious, fairly subtle disclosures of how they are actually feeling, of their nervousness and what happens is that connects with the unconscious minds of the audience in the room. Because we have these things called mirror neurons, the audience fires those same little nervous neurons that the leader is firing and so you can imagine how well communication works. The leader is trying to reassure people, get them excited about the future and instead what he is actually telegraphing to their unconscious minds is a sort of low level of nervousness. How well do you imagine the communication goes after that?

Rachel Salaman: So then when you talk about alignment, how do you apply that to that example?

Nick Morgan: Yes, so the goal is then to align the professed content, the reassurance about the present and the excitement about the future with the emotional state that the leader wishes to convey so this is part of the work described in the book. It's easy to say to do it, it's also hard work, it takes some practice but what the leader needs to do is focus his or her emotions around those appropriate ones, to sort of crowd out, if you will, that low level nervousness so that when they walk out into the room they are broadcasting that reassurance and enthusiasm about the future rather than the low level nervousness so that's the alignment that I'm talking about.

Rachel Salaman: Now of course all leaders need to communicate and your book debunks several communication myths, we can talk about a couple of them now starting with the idea that you need to repeat your message three times. Can you talk us through why that is not a good idea?

Nick Morgan: Well, let me hasten to say that repetition in many forms is a good thing, just because the more often you are beaten over the head with something the more likely you are to remember it but it has a negative effect these days. The idea originally came, well it came from antiquity from what we call the fairy tale rule of three. There is something about the human mind that just likes threes, groups of three, ideas set in groups of three and that crept into public speaking and into message making, probably in World War Two when we were trying to get soldiers to obey very simple instructions but very important instructions and go into battle in a certain way so the idea in World War Two was that we had a whole lot of soldiers with very different levels of competence and understanding and intelligence so we're going to repeat everything three times in the hope that they get it right and then everybody who survived World War Two came back and went to work in the business world and so the myth was born – tell them what you are going to say, tell them and then tell them what you said. The problem is that in the modern era our minds simply rebel at that and by the time we've heard the agenda slide we're already off on our smart phones thinking of something else. We don't have the attention spans for that kind of simple, straightforward mindless repetition anymore, we dislike being … it feels like we're being preached at or we're being hit over the head, as I say, with the messages so what you have to do is be artful. If you're going to repeat you have to do it in different ways and it doesn't work to just say the same thing over and over again as perhaps it used to. Maybe it didn't even work then, who knows?

Rachel Salaman: Another myth that you talk about in your book is that PowerPoint is helpful because it appeals to different learning types and it can also enhance a message by illustrating what the speaker is saying. Now you don't agree with either of those beliefs do you?

Nick Morgan: That's right, the idea of learning modalities came from research that was very primitive and early days in the late 60s, early 70s that we had visual, oral and kinesthetic learning styles and that sort of got hardened into dogma and in fact later research and much brain research has completely debunked that. We are all, let's get it straight right here and now, we are all visual learners. A huge amount of our brain is set aside – I spoke earlier about eleven million bits of information a second, a huge amount of that, sometimes as much as ten million bits, it taken up with visual information so we're all visual learners, period, end of story. We also learn in these other modalities but it's not the case, it simply doesn't hold up, that people are violently one or the other and so PowerPoint doesn't work in the way that its makers claim it does because fundamentally what you are asking people to do is pay attention to two things at once in a speech. You are asking them to look at the speaker, which is a very visually rich and important activity for us because we're getting those unconscious cues from the speaker and then you are also asking them to look at the PowerPoint and they may be reading the PowerPoint, they may be looking at pictures on the screen or trying to decode charts and graphs and the result is, as we know from the research on multi-tasking, that we don't do it very well and there's information lost whenever we switch from one to the other, so that simply doesn't help reinforce learning in the way that it was advertised as the reason why we should all start using slides like that. I believe there still is a role for slides but it's not in reinforcing learning in that way.

Rachel Salaman: What do you think the role for slides is?

Nick Morgan: Well I've seen people do it very effectively as an emotional accompaniment so you can convey things in powerful pictures that are harder to describe in words, it's the old cliché a picture's worth a thousand words but it's true if it involves a human face, somebody evincing a strong emotion or a picture of humans doing something that is powerful emotionally, you can convey that information in a way that is very difficult to describe.

Rachel Salaman: Now the discussion in your book about the importance of gesture is really fascinating. Can you share some examples of how gesture works in day to day communication and what we can do to improve our use of it?

Nick Morgan: Well yes, the research in gesture was hampered for a long time because it first focused on the very few gestures that we all have in cultures, they vary slightly but we have in cultures around the world which are properly called emblems, so those are things like the peace symbol, the okay symbol – that's the circle with the first finger and the thumb, the upraised middle finger which is pretty well universally understood. They vary slightly and you have to be careful because sometimes what means okay in one culture might mean something obscene in another culture, so there are these things called emblems and so we thought that gestures were all like that, that they were specific meaningful things you did with your hands that conveyed literal one to one meaning and so we started to research the other gestures, the waving of the hands that we do when we're talking and the assumption was that that was sort of meaningless and extra and a waste of time and yet researchers noticed that people gesture when they are speaking on the phone. Now why would you do that if there was no point to it and perhaps it's just habit but it turns out that if you don't gesture – and I have to say this very precisely, you increase your cognitive load. So that means if you hold your hands still or put them behind your back or stick them in your pockets, you make your brain work harder and literally it makes you dumber.

So if you were told at some point by a parent or a teacher, you shouldn't gesture, you gesture too much, it looks inelegant or it looks silly or low class or something, then that was profoundly wrong advice. You should gesture because it helps you think and the reason for that it turns out is that we have this comfortable Mr. Spock theory of the brain, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, the logical one, that our brains are pretty straightforward and commonsensical, in other words there's a little Rachel inside your head, a little Nick inside my head and it tell us what to do. So it says "Okay Nick, you're thirsty, go reach for that bottle of water" and then my body carries out those mental instructions, so that's the way we roughly think of it, the common sense view. Unfortunately it's not true, it turns out that we get unconscious intense desires, emotions, things we're not aware of consciously so let's say it's unconscious thirst, to stick with my simple example. Then that unconscious intent pushes my body to start to act and so I'll start to reach for that bottle of water and only after the physical activity has begun do I then become consciously aware of what I'm doing so it is literally the case that my conscious mind spends a lot of time explaining to myself why I just did what I did and so we embody, literally we embody our intents, our decisions, our meanings, our emotions and so therefore gesture is extremely important because it helps us figure out what we think, what it is that we've decided, how it is that we feel and it signals that to other people as well and so to become more aware of that in yourself and in others is extraordinarily helpful as a leader because you get this unconscious dialog, you can become aware of it consciously and so you are one step ahead of everybody else. You see it happening in yourself and in others before they are consciously aware of it.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you suggest that we consciously assess our own current use of power cues like gesture as a first step to improvement and being able to use them more effectively and you say that tools like video can be helpful, to video ourselves and then analyze it. Have you got any tips for making sure that this kind of self-scrutiny makes us more confident and not less because sometimes looking at videos of ourselves can be a bit of a shock?

Nick Morgan: Yes, it's like hearing your own voice on tape for the first time, it can be an appalling experience, nobody likes their own voice. So yes, you have to be braced for it, you have to learn to know yourself in a kind of positive way and forgive yourself for however it is you're showing it now, the whole point is to become better. So there may be a few awkward moments there as you get to know yourself but the main point is, you can't improve unless you know what you're doing. How do you look when you walk into a room, have you picked up some unconscious habits of slouching or rounding your shoulders, of frowning, of looking uncomfortable, with a lack of self-confidence? The point is that people don't look at that kind of postural give-away with a conscious clarity that says, mm, Nick's walked into the room and he looks a bit down today, I wonder what's up with him. Instead they receive it sort of unconscious and they think, oh he's a shmuck and it rarely rises to the level of conscious thinking because it's usually not strong enough. Now on the other hand, all of us have been charismatic and powerful at various times in our life when we rush into a room just brimming over with excitement or anger, some really strong emotion that overmasters us, we've all had that experience of coming home to a significant other and the significant other saying ‘What happened?' because we are just so full of that information that the other person realizes that even before we speak. But most of the time we're not like that, we're just sort of average, every day, with a long to-do list in our heads and so it is becoming aware of what that typical pattern of behavior is. It's just very useful and if it makes you a little uncomfortable, you get over it. The self-knowledge then becomes empowering.

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Rachel Salaman: You say that we can learn things from method actors, what do you mean by that?

Nick Morgan: Method actors are paid unbelievable amounts of money, your top movie stars are paid still these days, although I guess it's getting tougher but 20, 35, 40 million dollars a picture and you might well ask, what is it that they're doing to earn that money? To boil down to its core is what they're really about is focusing our emotions and what they get very good at is they'll do a scene and have to do twelve takes and every time they do a take they show up with a strong emotion to make that scene memorable or vivid and as you'll recall from our discussion earlier of mirror neurons, that's what's happening as we sit in the audience watching the movie star on the screen having that emotion, we fire the same emotion in our head. That's why movies are powerful for us because we get to experience emotions that we don't always have access to in everyday life. We cry with them, we get angry with them, laugh with them and so on. So it's that ability to consciously focus, call up that emotion and evince it strongly that method actors are good at, that's what we pay them for is control over their emotions and learning to do that as a leader is extremely important if you want to have the same kind of charisma and effect on other people.

Rachel Salaman: How hard is it for people to learn in your experience?

Nick Morgan: It's fascinating to watch. Some people are quite good at it right away, they are surprising, they get the idea. For other people it's like somebody who is tone deaf trying to learn music, it's very hard work, it takes a lot of practice. It seems to depend on how strong your memories are for you because what you are actually doing, the way you invoke a memory and get used to doing it is the way the method actors do which is you recall a time when you felt that emotion strongly. So if you are trying to convey grief in a scene you remember a time when you felt very sad, your dog died say or something tragic happened to you and it depends really on how powerful those kind of memories are for you as to how easy it is to do. For some people it is just immediate and they get right into that emotion and for other people it just evokes a dim memory, they're glad not to be there anymore especially if it's a negative emotion, they have a hard time calling it up but it does get better with practice, that's really all I can tell you. So for some people that's a long learning curve, for other people it is quite, quite rapid.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you also talk about the importance of authenticity for leaders, how does a leader tread that line then between authenticity and, for want of a better word, acting?

Nick Morgan: Yes and the thing to understand is you can call it acting but if you think of it instead as alignment, what it's really about is instead of showing up with that nervousness I described earlier which is the natural human emotion for an important meeting or a high stakes speech, you show up with emotions appropriate to the content and so to me that's authentic, you have a positive real purpose in holding that meeting or giving that speech and what you want is for your content to align with your emotions so it's work to get those things right, to make sure that they align. It's not inauthentic to align your emotions with your content any more than it's inauthentic to decide what it is you're going to say. Now obviously when I work with people we always coach them to deal in the truth, one of the things that people aren't very good at is lying so if they are consciously trying to show up and lie to a group of employees in one of these town hall meetings I was alluding to earlier then the chances are good they are going to sabotage themselves so we always coach people to stick to the truth. As my grandfather used to say, when you stick to the truth then you don't have to remember what you said.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you include a chapter on the power of the voice and you talk about the benefits of releasing what you call our "leadership voice," what do you mean by this?

Nick Morgan: Well this is based on some extraordinary research, it's quite intricate, I'll try to give you the quick version. Basically what the research shows is that at certain pitches, they vary from individual to individual and so you need to find out what your pitch is, at certain pitches your voice is more persuasive than at other pitches. Now at a very simple level this is not surprising, so we've all noticed somebody who's nervous and their voice goes way up into the stratosphere and gets all high and kind of shaky or nasal and we don't find that persuasive, we know in our gut that that person doesn't believe what they are saying or feels like they are on uncertain ground, so we know this on a very simple level at extremes but what we're talking about here is research that shows that you have and I have and everybody has a pitch at which our voices are most persuasive and the really extraordinary thing about the research is that it turns out we put out overtones and undertones to the note that we're speaking at, this is where it all starts to get a little complicated and those undertones are actually below the range of our conscious awareness and yet when we get together in a room, let's say we have half a dozen employees or a dozen employees together in a room, within about five minutes we all align those unconscious undertones with the leader in the room. So something extraordinary is going on there and to have a strong leadership voice is something that will either enhance or significantly impede your career, if you have a voice that doesn't fire on all cylinders, if you will, or doesn't have those strong undertones so that people won't align with you then it's going to be just much, much harder to become a leader and yet this is something that 99 percent of the population is completely unaware of, by definition it's unconscious, we don't hear it and it's going on around us all the time. We're picking our leaders unconsciously because of their voices so what I'm teaching is how to get aware of that and to make sure your voice has a chance to become a leadership one.

Rachel Salaman: What are a couple of your tips for leaders who might want to improve their leadership voice?

Nick Morgan: Well as I say, it's a little complicated but basically if you can find a keyboard, what you want to do is find the lowest note you can comfortably hum and the highest note you can comfortably hum and then work your way up a quarter from the bottom and so our leadership voices tend to be at the lower end of our range. Singers, people who understand the difference between soprano, alto, tenor and bass will pick this up quite easily, if you haven't had singing training it's going to be a little more tricky but the idea is to find out what your range is and to find that note that's toward the bottom 25 percent of your range and learn to speak at that pitch. You tend to be more resonant, to put out more powerful undertones at that pitch.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk about the importance of using intuition effectively, trusting our gut. How do we know when our gut is right?

Nick Morgan: Well it's a matter of picking the right moments, if you will. Our intuition, we have to go back to that explanation that I gave earlier of how the brain actually works. Intuition is a loose term for what happens when the brain makes a decision or receives an emotion or evaluates somebody who's walking toward them as to whether they're friend or foe, that's our unconscious mind getting there first before our conscious mind is aware of it and when we get a powerful message from that unconscious mind we call that intuition, we say I've just had a hunch but in fact it's just how the brain works and so becoming aware of that and getting more in touch with that unconscious behavior allows you to use what we are calling intuition, just because that's the common term for it, more effectively. In a sense it's learning to become aware of your body language so you know what your body is telling you as well as what it is telling you about others and so once you get good at that, for example if you are in a negotiation you can watch the people across the table and see how they are receiving the proposals and what they are intending to do so that you can become aware of their decisions, their opinions, their attitudes before they are. So that's how you use your intuition effectively.

Rachel Salaman: Can physical cues like that ever be misleading though? For example someone might look like they're lying and they might actually be telling the truth.

Nick Morgan: Yes and I have a strong caution in the book that there's a lot of research that shows all the efforts on behalf of, here in the U.S. the TSA, the security people in airports, the FBI, the CIA and the same with your MI5 and MI6, they have all spent an enormous amount of time trying to get better at reading body language, there is a sort of secret decoder ring for what people are actually thinking and it turns out our ability to read strangers such as a line of people in a security section of an airport, is very poor and all the work doesn't make us much better but what we can get good at is reading the gestures of people that we know and we know well, because we learn the baseline sort of, of how they normally behave and that makes us better at decoding, if you will, their strong emotions of how they are acting at variance to their normal sort of baseline set of behaviors and so the caution is you have to get to know somebody pretty well first before you can reliably decode their gestures and add to that, you have to do it with lots of evidence so you have to study not a specific gesture, a tell, that's a very bad idea but to study a cluster of gestures or a significant set of gestures that seem to be indicating one thing or another. I mean the classic example is if you are trained to spot nervous people say in a line at an airport and somebody walks up and they're nervous, I can imagine a dozen reasons, none of them having anything to do with terrorism, why that person might be nervous: they might be late for the flight, they might not like where they're headed, they might be worried about their job – I mean there are all kinds of reasons why people might be nervous. They might just not like airplane flying and so you need to know that person well, understand the situation that they're in and then get lots of evidence from a variety of physical gestures before you can bet the farm on some particular reading of one thing or another.

Rachel Salaman: Now we've covered a lot of ground in this discussion, what do you think are the main takeaways for leaders who want to start maximizing their personal impact tomorrow?

Nick Morgan: The first thing is to become self-aware, that's step one in the book and that's really where it all starts, start to pay attention and be more aware of what you look like to others because people don't care, in a sense, how you're feeling, what they want to know is what does this mean for me? And so it's about learning how you show up in a room just so you know how you are affecting other people, so that's really the first step. And then the second key takeaway is over time, as you learn to become aware of this unconscious dialog going on all around you, then you can become a much more effective leader, much more in tune to the emotions of your colleagues and employees and much more powerful and strong at leading people to where they want to go.

Rachel Salaman: Nick Morgan, thanks very much for joining me today.

Nick Morgan: It was a great pleasure, thanks for inviting me on your podcast.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Nick's book again is "Power Cues: the Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others and Maximizing Your Personal Impact." You can find out more about him and his work at www.publicwords.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.