Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.

Charles Duhigg (MBA 2003) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of the bestselling books The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better.

But the path to his latest book begins earlier in his career—when he first became a manager. He was at the New York Times back then, and he was pretty confident in his new role. After all, he had his MBA from HBS, and he was really good at logistics and strategy. But when his direct reports would bring him problems, he would move too quickly to solutions and often fail to pick up on what they were really trying to tell him about their challenges. He was a professional communicator, he thought; he needed to get better at this.

That experience stuck with Duhigg, and his search for answers has culminated in the release of his latest book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

In this conversation with contributor April White, Duhigg talks about how he came to realize the power of conversations, the biology behind these exchanges, and why being a good communicator is good for our health.

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Photo by Glenn Matsumura

April White: Conversation is all around us, it’s one of those things that's just ubiquitous in our lives. So I'm curious how you came to recognize its importance.

Charles Duhigg: For me, it really started at HBS. Every class that we had on leadership was ultimately a class about communication. And it was really made clear that the job of a CEO is mostly to communicate. The CEO can't make all the decisions themselves; they can't do all the work themselves, but what they can do is they can help people align around a common vision. And in order to create that common vision and common strategy, you have to be able to communicate what it is.

AW: Was there an aha moment where you said, oh, this is a book?

CD: I got into this bad pattern with my wife, which was that I would come home for a long day at work and complain about my job and my coworkers and my wife very reasonably would offer me this good advice – like why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other? And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset and say, you should be on my side, you should be outraged on my behalf. And she of course would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.

I went to these researchers, and I asked them, “what's going on here?” And they said, well, look, here's what we've learned: we're living through this golden age of understanding communication. Because of advances in neural imaging and data collection, we really understand what's happening inside people's brains. One of the things that we've learned is that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing. We're talking about my day or the kids' grades, or we're going on vacation. But actually every single discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations. And in general, those conversations fall into one of three buckets. There's these Practical Conversations, where we're talking about plans or we're solving problems. There's Emotional Conversations where I might describe to you what I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize. And then there's Social Conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and the social identities that are important to us. And they said, look, if you're having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, it's really hard to hear each other and to connect. Which of course is exactly what was happening with my wife and myself.

And when they said that to me, it made so much sense. It explained so many of the times that I had failed to connect with someone and didn't understand why – that was the big aha moment for me.

AW: Are there tools that you might suggest from your research for how people can figure out what type of conversation they're having?

CD: Oftentimes, it's not hard to figure out what kind of conversation is going on. You just have to listen for it, and you have to ask a question. You have to get the other person talking. But once you do, if you just take a step back and say like, okay, is this person talking about how they feel? Are they talking about logistics and practicalities? Are they talking about how they relate with other people? You're going to know pretty quickly what kind of conversation you're in.

AW: In the book you call this Rule One. Rule One of conversation is figuring out what conversation you're having. This is rule one of four, so we're not finished yet. What are the next steps to having these productive conversations?

CD: Once we've sort of figured out what kind of conversation we're having, trying to get aligned, right? At that point, one of the things that you want to do is you want to show the other person that you're listening to them. There's always this sneaking suspicion at the back of our brain that the other person isn't actually listening to us but is just waiting their turn to speak. The best way to overcome that, to counter that, is to prove to someone that I'm listening to you. This can be as easy as just asking follow-up questions, right? Saying like, oh, that's interesting that you mentioned X, tell me about Y. But in a tough conversation, in a conflict conversation, one of the best things you can do is something called “looping for understanding.”

And looping for understanding has these three steps. The first step is ask a question. The second step is, once a person has answered the question, repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. Show them that you're not only listening to what they're saying, you're paying attention, you're also processing what they're saying – you're trying to make sense of it. Finally, once you've done that, step three is ask if you got it right. And this is the step that usually people forget. But what we're really doing is we're asking the other person for permission to tell us that we've heard them. And if we do that, if we do this looping for understanding, if we prove that we're listening, then what happens is the other person becomes more willing to listen to us. This is actually the best way to ensure that other people will listen to you. It's almost hardwired into our brains. It's this social reciprocity that when someone proves they're listening, we become more interested in listening to them.

AW: Some of the other guidelines you lay out in the book are, for instance, sharing your goals for a conversation and then finding out what the conversation partner goals are. Can you tell me how that would play out in a conversation?

CD: Sure. I mean, sometimes it's very obvious. You can just ask or there's an agenda. You walk into a meeting, and they say, here's the three things that we need to decide. Or you sit down with your spouse, and they say, okay, we got to figure out where we're going for Thanksgiving next year. Are we going to my mom or your mom? Or hey, let's talk about Jim's grades – what's going on with that kid? So sometimes it's very obvious, but sometimes it isn't in part because we might not know explicitly what we want to talk about and we're not certain what the other person wants to talk about. And in those situations, what's really useful for ourselves is to just give it 30 seconds forethought, not even 30 seconds. You're sort of figuring out for yourself, do you want this to be a formal kind of important, serious conversation or just something casual and fun? You're figuring out a topic and a mood.

AW: You also suggest to people that they ask about others' feelings and that they share their own.

CD: Emotions are part of every single conversation, and they're influencing a conversation whether you're aware of it or not, whether you acknowledge them or not. Sometimes listening for this and then leaning in a little bit makes a huge difference. One of my favorite examples is say that you're waiting for a meeting to start. This happens all the time. You're just making conversation with other people at the table and the person next to them, you say, what did you do this weekend? And they say, oh, man, I went to my kid's graduation, it was awesome. The most natural thing to do is to say, oh, congratulations, that's fantastic. Okay, here's the agenda, let's get down to business.

But think about how powerful it is. If you just take half a second and you say like, oh, congratulations, that's awesome. What did it feel like watching your kid walk across that stage? What was that like? That's not a deep question, that's not too heavy or too intrusive. It's an invitation. And that person's going to spend 30 seconds telling you how proud they were and how it felt and all these emotions that are positive, that they're still processing that are important to them. And then you can get down to the agenda. But that moment of connection, that moment of emotional connection, it is going to serve you throughout that entire meeting and throughout your relationship.

AW: So the final rule that you lay out is exploring if identities are important to the conversation. And I think this one can feel particularly fraught in a business setting. So tell me what you mean and how you can explore that in a sensitive way.

CD: Well, the first thing to recognize is that social identities are not just the scary things we think about, right? They're not just about religion or politics or race. Social identities are how we see ourselves, what's important to us about how we move through society. So for instance, if I see myself as a reader, or I see myself as someone who plays pickleball, and that's really important to me, being able to bring that social identity to work is really, really important. I want to share who I am in a fullest sense. Now, that being said, there are some of those identities that are important that do fall into those categories of race or gender or politics.

If I'm someone who, as a minority, has experienced different aspects of society than you have, then understanding those experiences is valuable in connecting with me and understanding who I am. The key is to make this something where everyone has a role in this conversation. Everyone has a seat at this table. In the book we tell the story of Netflix, and this incident where a senior official used a racial slur in a meeting and the official was fired, but it set off this real firestorm within the company. And Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, it would've been very natural for him to say, okay, look, we're not going to talk about race at work. That doesn't belong here, let's keep politics at home, just focus on getting the job done. But instead, he did the opposite and he said, look, this clearly is important to many people, and this is something that is causing some controversy. I want us to talk about how we see ourselves in terms of race or gender or any other number of social identities that are important to us. But it has to be a conversation where everyone can participate, where everyone feels like they have a role, and everyone has a voice.

And they came up with some rules for having these conversations. The first one was they always started by acknowledging this could be an awkward conversation. This is a tough thing to talk about and I hope that if I do say the wrong thing, you'll explain to me why I'm saying the wrong thing and also forgive me, and I promise you the same thing. If you say the wrong thing, instead of just getting offended and yelling at you, I'll assume best intentions. And that's really important. And that doesn't mandate that anyone has to speak up. It doesn't mandate that you have to share your experiences with your colleagues. But it does say, if this is something about yourself that you think is important that you do want to share, then let's do it in an environment where we're forgiving of each other and where we recognize that we all have to participate in a conversation for it to actually be a conversation.

AW: I think I was a little surprised when I first started reading the book that science had spent so much time thinking about why I do or do not click with another person. But as we've been having this conversation, I realize just how far reaching these implications are, how important it is for us to have good conversation. So tell me how this knowledge has helped you approach conversations differently.

CD: You know I mentioned that I had this pattern with my wife. Now, when my wife and I start conversations, oftentimes we'll just ask each other, do you want me to help you come up with solutions to this thing you're talking about? Or do you just need to get this off your chest? You just need to vent? And that's really helpful because it helps us get aligned. In any conversation, when you start to connect with someone, your bodies become similar. Your eyes will actually start to dilate at similar rate. Your breath patterns will match each other. And even more importantly, the neural activity within your brains will get more and more similar. And that actually kind of makes sense because if I describe an emotion to you or an idea, you actually kind of experience that emotion a little bit, or you experience that idea.

And that's why we're able to communicate, is that our brains actually become alike. And so when we think about that – it really changes how we talk, because in my case, it makes us much, much more sensitive to what the other person is telling us. And once we understand that the goal of a conversation is not to convince the other person that we're right and they're wrong, or to convince them that we're smart or they should like us. But the goal of a conversation is simply to understand what the other person is saying and to speak in such a manner that they can understand you – it makes conversations so much easier.

AW: Your research has found that being good at conversation is not about a single exchange. It's about building relationships and those relationships can be really important to our lives. Tell me what you found.

CD: So it's interesting. There's actually this big study that was done by Harvard called The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which many people might be familiar with because it's a famous study, it's still going on. For nearly a hundred years, researchers have been falling around thousands of people trying to figure out what makes you more healthy, more happy, and more successful, however you define success, at age 65. And what they found is that the only real correlate with future health and happiness and success is having at least a handful of close relationships at age 45. But differently, what we know is that connecting with other people is literally the most important thing we can do. It means that as we get older, we're actually healthier. The Surgeon General has said that being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And 15 cigarettes a day is a lot of cigarettes, right? That's not a small number of cigarettes.

Having these relationships, they not only make us happier and healthier, but they oftentimes expose us to opportunities that we might not have seen otherwise. And it is very, very easy, particularly for us HBS grads, to get very focused on our jobs. To sort of use the measure of professional success as personal success. But what every piece of research shows is that the problem with the office is that it’ll never love you back. Investing in connections is really, really important. And the way that we do that most often is through conversation. And so it's worth having those conversations, even if it seems hard at first.

AW: In the book, you are pretty optimistic about people's abilities to learn these skills. Do you feel like you've become a super communicator through this process?

CD: Yeah, and what's important to note is that all of us are super communicators at one time or another, right? And there's definitely been times that you’ll walk into a meeting, and you know exactly what to say in that meeting to get everyone on your side. Or a friend calls, and you know exactly what question to ask them to help them unlock the problem that they're grappling with. We are all super communicators at one time or another. Now, that doesn't mean that we are super communicators all the time, and there are some people who can be consistent super communicators, who can connect with almost anyone.

And going into this, I thought it was because they were super charismatic, or they were extroverts. And it turns out that's not true at all. There's kind of a normal distribution of people who are super communicators between, some of them are extroverts and some of them are kind of curmudgeonly, and some are introverts, and some are people who love to talk and be charming. That doesn't make a difference into whether you're a super communicator. What makes the difference is whether you've just learned a couple of skills. Like asking deep questions, like proving that you're listening, like paying attention to what kind of conversation is occurring. And the thing that we know is literally anyone can learn these skills. It's just like learning to read or learning to throw a football. It's just a skill that you practice until it becomes a habit. And once it is, it's something you can do automatically. And our brains have evolved to make these into habits very, very quickly when just given a little bit of guidance. And so that's kind of the goal of super communicators, is to give people the guidance they need to make these into habits and let their instincts over.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

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For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Featured Alumni

Charles Duhigg

MBA 2003

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