00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:11: The messenger vs the message
00:03:42: How we place trust
00:06:00: Hard vs soft messengers
00:11:21: The most appropriate messenger
00:14:20: Content vs context
00:15:19: Introductions in meetings
00:20:02: Influencing remotely
00:23:04: Mimicry
00:24:54: Steve’s career advice
00:26:49: Final thoughts
Helen Tupper: Hi, it’s Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast. This is a weekly show where we talk about the ins, the outs, the ups and occasional downs of work, and try to give you some tips and tools to help you feel in control and a bit more confident about your career development. Normally, this show is brought to you by me and my co-host, Sarah, but today we’re doing something slightly different. We’ve got one of our experts and we’re going to talk about the topic of influence. So, over the next 30 minutes or so, you’re going to hear me talk to author, Steve Martin, and specifically we are going to focus on when you are influencing, why the message and the messenger make such a big difference to how successful you are.
This is based on Steve’s book, Messengers, and I’ve known Steve for a little while now, and I find his work very, very well-researched and very, very practical. So, I think you’re going to learn a lot from the conversation today. Some of the things we talk about are why we need different messengers for different messages, and also why things about hard and soft power make a difference to how we influence at work. So, I’m going to let you listen and learn, and I’ll be back at the end to let you know what’s coming up next on the Squiggly Careers podcast.
I’m very excited that we get to talk, because I feel like we’ve been talking around this topic for a while. And influence is so important for people to succeed in their Squiggly Careers, but I think sometimes it can feel a little bit uncomfortable, like, “I don’t know what to do”. And I think your take on understanding the messenger, as well as considering the message, which I think a lot of people prioritise, is something that I know is going to be a really useful conversation for people today. So, why does differentiating the message, so what you want to say, from the messenger, so who is saying it, why does that matter, why do we need to even make that distinction?
Steve Martin: I’ve kind of landed on this idea that it’s a helpful shortcut. We live in a society, in our business now, where there’s so many things that we do have to pay attention to, the challenge can sometimes be, “Well, what message do I listen to? Do I believe this point of view? Do I look at this proposal? Do I think about this potential option?” And as more and more options, more and more information becomes available to us, it can be really confusing. And one of the things, as humans, we all are is we want certainty. And I think what the messenger effect does is it allows us to answer a question that wasn’t asked, but in an easy way. So, instead of saying, “What do I pay attention to?” instead we say, “Well, who can I rely on? Whose voice can I trust?” And that then often becomes the output of what influences us.
We don’t have to worry about, “Well, do I have to weigh up all the pros and cons? Do I have to go and do my own research? Do I have to figure out these conflicting messages?” I trust Helen, or Helen knows what she’s talking about, or this person has served me well in the past. And so, I rely not on what’s being said to determine the direction I go in, or who I pay attention to, but rather who is saying what is being said. And so, that messenger effect is essentially why we pay attention to certain people, regardless of the truth or wisdom of what they say, just because they sent the message. And I only see this becoming even more relevant in our busy workplaces, in our busy lives. We don’t have the time to pay attention to everything, and so it’s a neat, easy shortcut, a reliable rule of thumb that generally guides us in the right direction.
Helen Tupper: So, our brain is going about its very busy day, making these mental shortcuts about who we trust, because that person is a messenger, so I trust this person more than that person, that messenger more than that person. But what are the factors that influence our brain? I mean, I’m sure our brain’s just doing that all very quickly, all very automatically. But what’s going on that makes me filter out that person as being more trustworthy or more credible, or whatever my brain is saying, I trust that messenger and what they are saying more than that person and what they are saying, I guess even if they’re saying the same thing?
Steve Martin: I remember early in my career, and I think lots of us have this situation, where you go into a room, you’ve got an idea, a proposition, your proposal, your presentation, you’ve got your nice PowerPoint slides, and you deliver your message, you deliver your presentation, and it kind of falls on deaf ears. You think, “Why did I bother?” And that in itself is frustrating. But when that frustration turns to annoyance is when someone else comes along with pretty much the same thing, pretty much the same idea that you had, and then they present it and everybody’s like, “Oh, this is the best idea ever. We absolutely have to do that”. And I think that’s just a really neat demonstration that happens to all of us in our careers, of what’s being said, the message, being entirely irrelevant in that instance and it being a function of, “Well, I trust this person because maybe they look like they know what they’re talking about”. Or sometimes, the reason we trust people is a factor of frequency of contact. I mean, trust really is a contact sport. We need to build up interactions with people and recognise that their behaviour has been consistent over time, and so therefore we can trust them.
I think sometimes, Helen, people confuse truth and trust. They are very, very different things. We’ve seen in our politics over the years that we can get people that will lie, and their trustworthiness ratings go up, not down, because trust is not, “Is this person truthful? Are they advising me well or not?” Trust is basically a bet that we make with ourselves about our ability to predict someone else’s future actions.
Helen Tupper: It’s quite interesting, because Sarah and I, we’re quite different, but we think similar things about career development. We know similar things, we think similar things, and we’ll sometimes be in conversations in the same meeting, and I can see when I’m the messenger that’s more powerful in that situation, and I can see when Sarah is the messenger that is more powerful in that situation. And we’re not doing anything different, we’re not saying anything different. But something has happened that has made either me or her the better messenger to the person that we are talking to in that moment.
Steve Martin: Right, exactly right. And I think one of the primary reasons why that occurs is that that situation, that context, that environment we’re in, will often influence audiences to be more receptive to one kind of messenger or another. So, in our research, and the research, I should also quote my colleague, Dr Joe Marks, who and I that published this work, we find that there are broadly in our societies, in our businesses, two types of messengers. We have what we call ‘hard messengers’, and hard messengers, Helen, are defined as those that are able to be heard and that their message is accepted, because the audience they are communicating with see them as having some form of status and a status over their audience. In contrast, there are times when we seek out the soft messenger. And the soft messenger is essentially defined as someone who doesn’t have status over their audience, they have a connectedness with their audience. And there are certain contexts and situations where we are psychologically more inclined, sometimes hardwired, to be more attentive to what the hard messenger is saying over the soft, or vice versa.
Those hard-messenger traits are typically defined by things like, are they an expert? Are they rich and famous? Are they physically attractive, is another one? Or in the case of some of our leaders and some of our politicians, are they the dominant personality? And then, by contrast, soft messengers are heard because they have a connection, a warmth with others. They are able to communicate some sort of vulnerability, they are seen as trustworthy, and in certain circumstances, they’re seen as charismatic. And so, all these things are playing out, and around the boardroom table, in our meetings, our project teams at work, is going to be a variety of different messengers. And what’s also interesting is that these messenger traits, it’s not that we just have one. We might have a preference for one kind of style, but we typically have at least one and a secondary one, and sometimes we even swap between messenger traits. We may not necessarily be dominant by personality, but sometimes we just have to take a hard stand with the kids, right, and kind of do that thing. We often fall into the preferred styles, and I wonder if that’s, with you and Sarah, that people are actually noticing that, even though what you’re saying is exactly the same.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, I guess it’s making me think about the sort of dynamic between the messenger, so let’s say it’s me, I’m presenting some information to someone, I am the messenger, and then the person who is receiving the message. And let’s say I’m naturally hard, I’m sort of wired for status, I’m that kind of more dominant person, and let’s say the person that I’m messaging to, so I’m presenting to, is kind of softer in orientation, a bit more relational, I think, a bit more values that sense of connection. If I want to influence that person then, is the best thing for me to recognise that difference, like quickly get a read on that person’s a bit more relational, and drop my hardness, if that’s a word, but drop my dominance in order to dial up the relational; is that the skill that we need to be having, that sort of sensing the difference and then dialling up one of the other styles?
Steve Martin: I mean, that is one route you could take. The other thing to think about, of course, is depending on the actual message itself, it might require a dominant messenger. Because one of the things that audiences do is they don’t just make assumptions about who’s speaking to them and who’s communicating. We do a pretty good job when a messenger delivers a message of connecting that message to the messenger. We have, “Don’t shoot the messenger”, which is why it can be often difficult to give bad news, even if it’s not your news. One of the things that I think, as you know, I first started working with Bob Cialdini about 25 years ago, and we’ve been in a very close partnership and I trained under him. And one of the things that he taught me early on about influence is that the best influencers know when they’re not the best influencers. And sometimes at work, we might be objectively the most qualified person to speak about a topic, we might be the most experienced, we might have the longest tenure. And all those things are kind of important for credibility and displaying our competence. But that doesn’t necessarily make us the most influential or persuasive communicator at that moment in time.
So, maybe one of the lessons here is that, even though we’ve worked hard to establish that over our careers, I think there’s something wise about recognising when, even if objectively you’re the best messenger and best qualified, that doesn’t make you necessarily the most effective communicator, and you would choose someone else in that instance.
Helen Tupper: I mean, I think in a lot of organisations, the assumption is it’s the most expert person that should deliver this message; or more likely, it’s the most senior person who should do this presentation, deliver this message. And it’s really interesting for you to hear that that assumption is not necessarily that effective for what’s going to be most influential.
Steve Martin: One of my favourite, well it it’s a story that we wrote about, but I actually found this in the Catalogue of Government Business back in the 1980s. There was a cabinet office meeting that was taking place, and they were discussing essentially public order and what to do if, God forbid, someone from another country pushed the big red button, and we were suddenly at threat of a nuclear war. And the government at the time actually had some really quite detailed plans, including millions and millions and millions of leaflets advising people about what they should do in the event of a nuclear attack, and how they should behave and conduct themselves and look after themselves after the fallout. And I noticed in one of these meetings there was a long conversation about who would be the best person or the best group of people to go on the news and communicate this to people, and to put their name and their signature to these leaflets and public information appeals and these kinds of things. Of course, the obvious answer is, “Well, is it someone from the government? Is it Margaret Thatcher? Is it someone from the Department of Defence? Is it a nuclear scientist?”
I tracked this conversation, it was going on and on and on, and then one junior minister then turned around and said, “What about Kevin Keegan?” I’m like, “What?” And he goes, “What, the captain of the England football team?” “Well, yeah. He may not know anything about nuclear fallout, he may not know anything about the politics of the situation, but we know him, we trust him. Oh, and by the way, we should probably throw Ian Botham into the mix as well, because he single-handedly batted the Aussies into submission at the test the other day”. And it’s a really good example, I think, and it sounds extreme, but actually that’s what they ended up doing. They ended up putting the pictures of the captain of the England football team and cricket team on these, “What to do in the case of a nuclear attack”, public information films, leaflets, all these different kinds of things. It’s a perfect example of, you know what you want to say, you know what the objectively correct message is, but now think carefully about who you get to deliver that, and it’s not always the obvious person.
In this instance, they wanted the connected person, because if you think about an audience in that context, they’re going to be frightened, they’re going to be highly anxious, highly uncertain, “What do I do?” In that instance, I need someone that perhaps is a little bit more connected and familiar. But there are other instances where we might be uncertain about something and we’re going to rely on maybe that harder messenger. Sometimes we do need to hear the hard message from the boss or the doctor. So, that context is actually going to play a big part.
I think what I would want to highlight here is how much time and effort we often put into the content of our message. And all that’s important, but the cost of doing that is that we don’t pay attention to the source of the message, and that happens first. Often people make a decision about whether they’re going to say yes or no to you before you’ve even started speaking.
Helen Tupper: So, do you think actually it would be a really useful exercise for a team to maybe look over a month or look at a quarter and think about, “What are the top three messages that we send from this team to influence an outcome?” and then, “Who is the best messenger?” If a team practised that approach, do you think that would result in a more influential outcome?
Steve Martin: I think it would. In fact, actually, I’d add to that. There are little tests that you can do. It gives you a kind of sense of what type of messenger you are and your teams as well, and we can put a link maybe to where you can find those. They’re free to do. But here’s another thing that I think is under-noticed but important: how we have meetings. Oftentimes, we’ll get together in a meeting. Sometimes we’ll be familiar with each other, but other times there might be other people, new people in the meeting. And someone invariably starts the meeting by saying, “Right, okay, well let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves”. That’s a terrible way to start a meeting. The first reason why it’s a terrible way to start a meeting is that most people don’t necessarily have a high level of motivation to stand up in a room full of people that they either know or don’t and say, “Well, hi, my name is Helen Tupper and I’m a best-selling author, I’m a world-leading expert on careers and how squiggly they are, and you should listen to what I’ve got to say in this meeting for all these reasons”, right? No one’s going to say that. So, generally what you get is, “Hi, I’m Steve from IT”! And the only information that’s actually conveyed is about the same amount of information that you’ll see on someone’s signature of their email. So, that’s one reason.
But there’s another reason, of course, which is that no one is listening anyway. Because as that creeping ring of death goes around the room, everyone’s sitting there going, “Oh my God, what am I going to say about myself when it’s my turn?” And so, it’s a wholly ineffective, arguably big waste of time. And what it also does is it potentially, if you’ve got someone quite senior in the room that is quite charismatic and that everyone looks to, you might have someone in that room that is highly qualified, has a really brilliant insight, whose voice isn’t heard. And so, the recommendation for teams, if you’re a manager, if you’re leading teams, if you’re sponsoring a meeting, is at the beginning of a meeting, just simply go around and say, “Hey, subject of the meeting today is X, and I have Helen in the room, and this is what Helen brings. We’ve invited Sarah because Sarah has good insights on this. We’ve got Joe because Joe generally has a good insight in what’s actually happening outside”, etc. And we go around, and we establish everyone’s credibility and their contribution to the meeting. And if you can’t think of something worthwhile to say about the person that’s in the room, don’t invite them, don’t waste their time.
Helen Tupper: You should be able to advocate for everybody in that room, or why are they in the room. You should be able to say, “This is what they’re bringing, this is the value that they’ve got”. And so, that is a way that we can give credibility to each of those people being a messenger in their own right, by making that introduction?
Steve Martin: I think it has big implications for career, it has big implications for people’s confidence and actually their future actions and behaviours as well. So, we’ve met a few times before, Helen, and I think you know that my team at Influence at Work, we have 18 people currently in the team. They are ridiculously smart, ridiculously clever. Most of them are young. I’ve got one member of my team that’s actually a principal now. Now, the thing about her is that invariably she’s the smartest person in the room, so in a way, it’s our duty to introduce her expertise. This is someone that is literally a world-leading experimental psychologist. I mean, she published her first papers in Harvard when she was 22, for God’s sake. She is doing groundbreaking work, looking at how you can influence and persuade millions of people to change their behaviours in the context of environment and sustainability. Can you imagine her standing up at the beginning of a meeting and saying all those things about herself? But if we don’t say that, she’s not heard and everyone loses in that instance. And so, it’s our duty to make that information available.
Here’s the thing that’s really interesting. So, when she’s introduced in this way, two things happen. The first is she kind of squirms awkwardly in her seat and is always like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they’re saying this about me”. My God, does she perform afterwards? It seems like when we give people these wholly appropriate and honest, legitimate labels to live up to, most of the time they do.
Helen Tupper: Just to go back to your kind of that hard status point and also kind of the softer status points, I guess what we are adding in by doing this is you’re adding in more hard status, right? Like, no one’s going, “Here are my labels, here are my labels”, because of confidence or worries about coming across as arrogant or whatever. But we are going, “But here are their labels, here’s some things that give this person the hard status”, we’re adding that into them?
Steve Martin: Yeah, there’s an example of how you can kind of orientate an audience back to those kind of status hard messenger effects, which in the context of the meeting could be the most important thing. That could be what causes people to pay attention to what’s being said and act on it. You are literally opening the audience’s ears and minds to what someone is about to say before they’ve started talking.
Helen Tupper: We talk quite a lot about being in a room, and I’m presenting in front of people, and I guess the assumption is that that’s a kind of physical thing. But very often, lots of influence is happening remotely, via Zoom or Teams call, or whatever we’re doing. Does that have any implications on how we influence, how messengers influence? Is there anything that’s come up that’s worth us being aware of?
Steve Martin: We did an experiment during COVID, when everyone was doing their meetings and their sales calls and everything from behind a screen. And one of the experiments we actually did was with financial institutions, financial investors, investment managers, pensions, these kinds of things, and here’s what we found, is that putting your qualifications after your name on that black bar on the Zoom or the Teams call matters a lot. And if you think about it, you don’t have all those signals that you might have in a face-to-face meeting with a banker, a mortgage advisor, face-to-face, you know, “Let’s have a cup of coffee”. You can see maybe a picture of him and the kids or her and the family, and whatever they do. You don’t get that. That humanity is kind of stripped out. What is the credibility of this person? Does this person have a good sense of understanding and can they advise me?
If I just give you an option, you’ve got two financial advisors, they look the same, they’re of the same age, they’ve got the same clothes on, or whatever. One’s called Bob, and the other is called Robert Tupper, ARIP BSc, whatever the case may be. Where and who do you give your money to in that instance? The same proposition, same person, but putting your qualifications in that, that had a big effect.
Helen Tupper: Someone doing that, I really believe it. But I feel like, because it’s not kind of the social norm in an environment at work, I think, to have, “Helen Tupper”, whatever my things are, credentials after my name, I’d feel so awkward doing it.
Steve Martin: And you’re exactly right about that, of course, is that everyone at the time was uncertain about what the right norms were, what the practice was. And so, when you’re uncertain, what do you do? You look to everyone else around you who’s in a similar situation. And if they’re doing it, well, it’s probably the right thing. Well, it might be the normal thing to do, but it might not necessarily be the most effective. There’s a couple of other things we actually found. We noticed that in online settings, people talk louder, and they typically talk at a volume that’s, on average, and it will vary amongst people, but we found in the research that they talk about a 15% increase in volume compared to the same conversation that was taking place face-to-face. But the advice was, turn down the volume of your microphone, because the last thing you want if you’re having a conversation with someone in an online environment is for them to turn your volume down. Better that they turn yours up, or they say, “Hey, Helen, I’m struggling to hear you a little bit. Would you mind speaking a little louder or turning your volume up? Maybe it’s something with our connection”, or whatever the case may be. But I think we’ve all got into those situations online where there’s always someone who’s really loud, and you move away from them.
Then, third and finally, which I found kind of interesting, there’s a lot of research in the psychology of influence on mimicry, this idea that we tend typically to prefer to communicate with people that we see as sharing similarities with us, commonalities. And that extends beyond just commonalities of experience and political affiliation and similar career backgrounds, and these kinds of things, words we use, the rate of speech, these kinds of things as well. There’s some really famous studies in the hospitality industry that show that if a waiter or waitress repeats back word-for-word the order that you’ve just given them, you’re more inclined to give them a bigger tip. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? Because when you actually repeat back word for word what people say, what they’re also communicating is, “I’m hearing you and I’m understanding you”.
We found early on in the pandemic that the same thing was actually happening online, is that those that were having communications that listened intently and mimicked the words and phrases that people were actually using were deemed to be more in sync with that person; and as a result, more likely in a sales context to place an order or further a meeting, particularly in these first-time meetings. And it seems to be a pretty good way of building a connection when you perhaps aren’t able to use those, you know, look people in the eye, shake them by the hand, see the photographs on their desks, these kinds of things. In a way, what you’re doing is you’re kind of humanising an interaction that for all sorts of reasons means that we can’t be human.
Helen Tupper: And I think I’ve heard for a while the idea of mirroring, like my career started in sales and that kind of mirroring someone’s body language is very interesting. But the idea of mimicking someone’s words, I think that is a newer tool for people maybe to play with. Is there any kind of one last piece of advice that you would suggest to people if they want to think about being a messenger, communicating with influence, anything additional that you think people should consider?
Steve Martin: I really like this idea that I’m playing with at the moment, that in order to be a good influencer or a good communicator, it helps to think like an artist. Artists know that you can create any colour that you want by mixing different quantities and combinations of the three primary colours of blue, yellow and red. And I sense the same is true for influence, persuasion and communication. Sometimes we have our favourite piece of evidence and we double-down on that; sometimes, we just think, well, if we want people to do something, we just pay them; other people kind of like, what’s the compelling story that grabs people? My observation is, it’s never one of those three things. It’s a combination of those three things, but it’s always going to be one that leverages more than the other. It’s never equal amounts. If you mix blue, yellow, and red, I learned, you get this horrible brown.
Helen Tupper: Brown, yeah! My children do it all the time, Steve!
Steve Martin: Yeah. And no one wants that colour. My advice would be to think about, before you go bowling in and say, “Right, I’m convinced this is the argument that’s going to win someone over”, sometimes your argument is not to win the argument, your job is to win the outcome. And I think by thinking in that way and thinking, “What is the right balance here of facts, finances, and importantly, feelings, relevant to the context that will help me construct the best message?” I’m finding that quite a helpful kind of metaphor and frame of reference to think about.
Helen Tupper: I think you’re right about not winning the argument, winning the outcome. I think that’s a really, really insightful thing. Steve, thank you so much for your time today. I will direct people to that survey so they can think about their kind of messaging stance and profile. And I’ll make sure that everyone’s got links to find more of your work, because you’ve written many books and they are very interesting and very helpful in the context of influence, particularly your new book, Influence at Work, as well. So, I’ll make sure that everyone’s got those details. Thank you so much for your time, Steve.
Steve Martin: Oh, absolute pleasure. Lovely to see you, Helen. Thanks for your time.
Helen Tupper: So, I really hope that you have enjoyed that conversation with Steve. He always sparks my thinking when I’m talking to him. I also think if you want to dive deeper into this area, the conversation we had earlier in the year with Robert Cialdini on influence is a really nice one to pair it with. And actually, as you heard, that Robert Cialdini and Steve have worked together. So, they are kind of thought partners as well as Squiggly Career experts that have been on the podcast.
Coming up next on the podcast, we’ve got some exciting things coming. So, make sure you subscribe to the Squiggly Careers podcast. We have a really interesting series coming up over the summer, where we’re going to talk about the quotes that inspire us and how you put them into action. And then, in September, we have got our next Squiggly Skills Sprint, which is all about the five Squiggly Career skills, value, strengths, confidence, network and future, and how adding a bit of AI can help accelerate your learning. So, subscribe, stay with Squiggly, share Squiggly, and we’ll be back with you again very soon.