Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills

Trust comes down to three pillars: logic, authenticity, and empathy. But when you’re under real pressure, one of those pillars usually starts to crack.

Leadership coach and bestselling author Anne Morriss joins Andrea to unpack the trust triangle and introduce two ideas every leader needs in their back pocket: your trust anchor (the pillar that holds firm no matter what) and your trust wobble (the one that slips the second things get hard). You’ll learn how to spot your own anchor and wobble, why this same pattern shows up in even the most accomplished leaders on the planet, and how knowing the difference can help you build trust faster and hold onto it longer.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

CONNECT WITH ANNE

🌐 Website: AnneAndFrances.com

🔗 LinkedIn: Anne’s LinkedIn

🎙️ Anne’s Podcast, Fixable: Anne’s Podcast: Fixable

▶️ Anne’s TED Talk: Anne’s TED Talk

BOOKS MENTIONED

📖 Move Fast and Fix Things by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4wcl5JM

📖 Uncommon Service by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4wF8i3D

📖 Unleashed by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4ySGhqR

📖 The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226755

TRANSCRIPTION

Anne Morriss: If I’m underslept or haven’t fed myself properly or under stress, I am more likely to wobble. And when I’m wobbly on authenticity, what will happen is a people-pleasing part of me will show up and tell you, Andrea, what you want to hear and not necessarily what I think, know, and believe. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was entrepreneur and leadership coach Anne Morriss.

And if her name sounds familiar, it might be because she’s also the co-author of three books, one called Move Fast and Fix Things, one called Uncommon Service, and one called Unleashed. I am really excited to share with you my conversation with Anne. Amongst other things in this episode, you’re gonna learn the three-ingredient recipe for how you can establish trust.

Okay, so first of all, yes, of course it is a three-ingredient recipe. The power of three, right? And secondly, trust is critical. I realized that I really don’t use this term trust very often. Instead, I talk about personal branding and credibility, but these are all related terms, aren’t they? So if you wanna make an impact, and I know you do, then you need to establish trust.

In this episode, you’re going to learn the three pillars of trust, how to identify your trust wobble and your anchor, and a lot more. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Welcome to Talk About Talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please, just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I help ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so that you can get ahead in your career.

A quick note before we get started. If you wanna go deeper on improving your communication skills and your credibility at work, I encourage you to head to talkabouttalk.com. That’s where you’ll find lots of free resources, plus information about my keynotes, my corporate workshops, my master classes, my online courses, and lots more. It is all there. TalkAboutTalk.com.

About the Guest: Leadership Expert Anne Morriss

Okay, let me introduce today’s guest, and then we’re gonna get right into this power-packed interview. I encourage you to stay with us through the end, though, because as always, I’m gonna wrap up with three key learnings that I wanna reinforce for you. People tell me that they appreciate this. I get lots of emails saying this.

So basically, you do not need to take notes. Okay, let me back up. I came to know Anne Morriss through her partner, Frances Frei, an award-winning faculty member and exceptional teacher who generously mentored me when I was a student at Harvard Business School. So the three of us, Anne, Frances, and myself, we all share a passion for helping leaders communicate more effectively.

I was absolutely thrilled when Anne agreed to join me on this podcast. As I mentioned, Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, a leadership coach, and an author. She’s also a TED speaker and the founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that prepares emerging leaders for senior leadership.

Over the past 20 years, she has helped organizations around the world strengthen their leadership, culture, and transformational change. Here we go. Thank you very much, Anne, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk About Talk listeners about trust and communication. 

AM: Oh, Andrea, I’m so delighted to be here.

The Three Pillars of Trust: Logic, Authenticity, and Empathy 

AW: Let’s get right into this. Let’s talk about trust. I know that you and Frances say that trust is the foundation of leadership. Can you share with us what the three core components are of trust? 

AM: Yeah. It actually goes all the way back to Aristotle’s logos, pathos, ethos, which was a persuasion framework. So it will not surprise you that these ideas are very relevant to your mission on this podcast and in so much of your work, Andrea.

But the three component parts of trust are, I’ll go through them the way we often teach it, which is that I am more likely to trust you, Andrea, as a leader, if I believe you can do the job, if I think you’re competent at the wheel, if I think your reasoning and judgment are sound. It is not enough; I also have to believe that I’m interacting with a real version of you, so that your, you know, your thoughts, your feelings, your actions are all aligned.

We call that authenticity. It is still not enough. I also have to believe that you’re not just in it for you; you’re also in it for me. You’re also committed to my well-being, and you care about my interests and success, often in the job. When all three of, we call them the trust pillars, when all three of these trust pillars are sturdy and strong, trust is a very natural byproduct.

And by the way, this is all from the perspective of the other person. So I have to be convinced of your logic, authenticity, and empathy so that I can trust you. And as you said right at the top, it is very foundational. Leadership is a relational practice. We often forget that when we tell the story, you know, these great men and women stories of leaders.

We forget that it is fundamentally about having impact through other people. So that’s why this is just, this is so critical to anything you’re trying to accomplish as a leader. 

AW: So first of all, the power of three. Anyone who listens to the Talk About Talk podcast knows it. And actually, Aristotle, I was looking back at evidence of the power of three, and this is one of the things that comes up.\

What’s Your Trust Wobble—and Your Anchor? 

So logic, authenticity, and empathy. Can you comment on, as folks, you know, are climbing the corporate ladder, as their careers are progressing, they’re becoming more senior, they’re leading more people, where those wobbles in this triad might be more likely to happen? Or may- and maybe this is a different question, where they can be the most damaging or catastrophic in people’s quest to create, I guess, leadership presence or identity?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. We think about this question all the time. And as you suggest, so we use this word wobble to describe this other very stable pattern. So one stable pattern is, we call it the trust triangle. So logic, authenticity, empathy, you need all three. The other pattern we see, even among the most accomplished leaders, is that all of us lose trust some of the time.

And when that happens, it’s not that all three of these pillars collapse. One of them tends to get a little shaky. We call that your wobble. So that’s pattern one. And then the other pattern, the good– that’s the bad news. The good news is that one of them tends to be rock solid. So if I were to drag you out of bed, Andrea, at three in the morning, you would be logical or authentic or empathetic.

So we call that your anchor. So we’re constantly working with leaders on these two questions of how do you lean into and leverage your anchor, and how do you keep your eye on your wobble? So it is different for each of us. And it is tied more to personality, is just a layman’s way to think about it, than role.

What we do find, however, is that empathy wobblers, so that’s the language you use, I’m an empathy wobbler and an authenticity anchor, is a common leadership profile. That’s actually not my trust profile. I would tell you my trust pro- profile in a second. But we do find that empathy wobblers are disproportionately represented at the top of organizations.

AW: Do you think that that’s changing? ‘Cause I have this conversation a lot with folks that this, you know, think back to the Jack Welch era, right, compared to today. Do you feel like this might be changing in terms of the emphasis or significance? 

AM: Yeah, I think with the pattern we are seeing more than empathy wobbler.

So we, we are still finding empathy wobblers disproportionately represented at the top, and I think a longitudinal study of that I think is a really interesting question. What does seem to be reinforced in 2026 is that authenticity anchors are disproportionately succeeding and ascending the hierarchy in organizations.

So if that’s your anchor, then you have two wobbles to choose from, and I think we’re finding that profile of authenticity anchor, empathy wobbler to be pretty stable at the top of the hierarchy. 

Authenticity vs. Transparency: How Much Should Leaders Share? 

AW: So can you define what authenticity is? I just wrote a paper, and I write about this and think about this all the time.

What’s the difference between authenticity and transparency and being a professional, and how do you walk this line? I’d love to hear your take on that. 

AM: Yeah, so and I will use myself as an example. So I am an empathy anchor, authenticity wobbler. The way we define it, we are very practical people. When I say we, um, you know, my partner in all things, including my co-author, Francis Frei, who’s on the faculty at Harvard Business School.

So the way we define it is the alignment between, which is, uh, between what you say and what you do and what you think. And then we’ll sometimes throw in what you feel, because often in leadership roles, we forget about this powerful variable that is our emotions, the emotional experience of the people around us, the role we can play and to change both of those things, both what we’re feeling and what other people are feeling. But we talk about it in terms of the alignment. 

AW: Right. So alignment is different from full transparency, and I, I, I actually really like that term. I say, you know, this whole idea of sharing your whole self at work, the full transparency folks, I’m like, “I don’t share my full self anywhere,” and I don’t suggest that my clients do either.

You can be authentic to yourself without being fully transparent simply by filtering what parts of you you want to share, and I totally agree that this consistency and alignment is much more important, and I, I see how that ladders up to trust. 

AM: Yeah, I, I agree with you. Again, we’re practical people, so we’ll sometimes say 80% is plenty.

You know? 80% of any of us is plenty, probably tops out at 80%. But the metaphor I like is window, not a door. So what is the window that… of transparency that’s most useful to you and most useful to the people you’re leading? 100% transparency is not helpful in most cases. It just, it creates a lot of friction and noise and anxiety, and it’s not helping people make better decisions, including about their own lives.

So that’s part of your job as a leader is to curate information very thoughtfully, but you can, you have to continuously solve for that authenticity piece, or other people won’t be willing to be guided by you. And that’s really our, my favorite metric of leadership. When you boil it down, are other people willing to be guided by you?

Like, that’s what matters, and that’s why trust is so foundational and that’s why communication, which you focus on, Andrea, is so critical, because that is the way that you are engaging with these other people and influencing their discretionary behavior. 

AW: So I can see the significance of effective communication skills in all three of the pillars.

AM: Back to our friend Aristotle, it’s not surprising that I think actually all three of these are quite material to the challenge of communication. So I think about logic as content, as how we would traditionally think about content. Like what is the message? What are you trying to say? Is it persuasive? Is it rigorous?

Is the credit is the content effective? I think authenticity is, is voice. Like, does the messenger… If logic is message, now it’s about does the messenger match the message? And it is– I am increasingly, like, interested in and persuaded by how important that alignment m- has to be for, like, the story to land.

And then the last one, empathy, I think of in terms of mission. Like, when you walk into a room, are you there to perform? Are you there to get what you came for, which is affirmation from the crowd? Or are you there to be in service of your audience and give them a gift that they would not have otherwise received?

I think that is a very, also a very powerful variable in effective communication. 

AW: Definitely. But I was actually having this conversation this morning when I went for a walk with a girlfriend of mine who just got promoted into a big new position, and she’s meeting with the board chair, and she’s talking about what she’s gonna wear.

And she goes, “Well, the… I guess it doesn’t matter.” And I said, “Actually, it matters ’cause they’re gonna see you before they hear one word that comes out of your mouth.” And it’s not that we need to overemphasize this, but I said, “We are constantly checking each other out. We’re looking for signals of, do we trust the person?

Do we like the person? Are they capable?” And I realize now that I was, in a different way, kind of talking about exactly the same thing as the three pillars here. 

AM: Yeah. And it will have a huge impact on how she feels in the room, which arguably matters just as much. Like, is, you know, what is she putting on her body so that she can show up in the way that she wants to show up?

Personal Branding, Trust, and Leadership Influence 

AW: Yeah. And that, that’s a big theme of the personal branding work that I do. ‘Cause one of the big criticisms of personal branding in the context of establishing your professional identity at work is that you’re caring too much about what other people think. And then the epiphany that happens when I’m working with clients on developing their unique identity is that it, it elevates their internal confidence.

They feel validated, and their confidence grows. So I’d love to shift it to personal branding here. I see a very strong link between trust and establishing a strong personal brand. Do you agree? 

AM: Yes, 100%. I think it goes back to, like, what is a personal brand? And to me, it’s very connected to this metric, are other people willing to be guided by you?

Like, you, you want to show up in a way where you can be an influence on the way other people think, act, feel, behave. Ideally, in your absence eventually, but in the beginning, in your presence, and you need to live into a version of you- Yeah … that allows that exchange, that beautiful exchange to happen. Yeah.

Call it whatever you want. Um, but personal brand is certainly a good word for it. 

AW: Yeah. Yeah, personal branding may have a branding problem, but I agree, as long as we’re defining it purposefully. I say that personal branding is being yourself on purpose, and yourself, it’s your whole self, your true self, and your best self.

So you are filtering what parts of you you’re sharing, but it’s your best self. And I think the, um, the whole idea here that you mentioned the word alignment and consistency, I think that’s a huge part of personal branding, right? Yeah. So I’ve got a question for you: Do you think that leaders should encourage their folks to invest time and energy into developing their own personal brands?

And I’m asking this not facetiously. I’m not, I’m not trying to, whatever, get more coaching clients. I’m asking honestly. Many of the folks that I coach on communication skills will come up with a list of 10 or 12 topics that I’m gonna coach them on over the course of six months, including personal branding, and then when they share this list with their manager, their leader, they’ll say all the topics on the list are approved with the exception of personal branding.

I have some ideas about why that is, uh, and it could go back to the definition, but do you think generally leaders should encourage their folks to invest their time and effort into this? Or what, what’s your take on that? 

AM: Yeah. So I think I agree with your, uh, I don’t know if we… If, if it’s strong enough to be a premise, but your suggestion that personal branding might have a branding problem.

And I think part of it is when we hear that word, and that is no fault of the people who created the term; it’s a term of art, a very reasonable thing to call, like, this phenomenon. It reads as self-distracted. It reads as self-promotional versus, you know, how do I get better at advancing our shared mission?

Like, if we go back to our trust triangle, it raises questions about empathy. You know, it seems to be the phrase and the way people hear it; it sounds like, okay, authenticity, yes, and maybe, maybe a little logic, but the, like, where is e- you know, leadership is the practice of setting other people up for success.

So in the personal branding, like, universe, where is that part of the story, is where I come at this phrase. There are other things, but if we define it the way we just defined it, which is around, you know, being intentional about being the leader you wanna be in the moment, that to me is a critical part of effective leadership, and bringing intention to it is a very reasonable thing.

You know, you can call it executive presence. I have a very humble relationship with language in the sense of this stuff gets locked in and weaponized. And when that happens, like, move on to another term. Let’s just move on. As opposed to fi- dying on the hill of, like, “Oh, you’re getting it wrong.” I feel the same way about psychological safety.

The world’s very confused about what this means. I think we just need another term instead of like, spending so much energy fighting people on this is what we mean. 

AW: I am so with you on that. And in fact, e- even before I went into academia, I would be in meetings, you know, people would start talking about something, and then they’d get all riled up, and I’d be like, “Hang on a second. We need to define some terms here, or come up with better terms.” 

AM: Yeah. I think this kind of friction is an indicator that we need different language because I do think in the way the world hears this term, it’s missing a very critical part of leadership, which is that it’s not about you. It’s actually about the other people.

We use the metaphor of a mirror versus a window, and I spend a lot of time coaching people to move away from the mirror and look out of the window at the people you’re here to serve and the mission you’re trying to achieve. 

AW: So this conversation is reminding me of an experience I had recently. I was coaching 14 executives at a pharmaceutical company, and I did one-on-one coaching sessions with each of them, where we were identifying some of their personal brand themes.

And by personal brand themes, you can just think of it as the… It could be expertise or credentials or leadership styles that kind of define them, okay? They’re typically unique things about them. And so as we were creating this list of themes, I noticed that some of them, some of these pharmaceutical executives, most of whom had PhD degrees, they’re scientists, and they would very easily list their scientific and academic credentials, right?

So I feel like this is the logic foot on the, on the stool, okay? And some of them, they would just keep adding these things, right? And, and I said, “What about your leadership style? What about your default kind of social interaction? Are you a leader? Are you a follower? Are you a collaborator?” And then they’d be like, “Oh, I never really thought about that before.”

Whereas others were… It came naturally to them. Like, they would say their number one strength is their scientific background and their schooling, and then that in combination with their people leadership skills. And I think that this is actually a, a new lens for me to coach folks through this exercise.

It’s like, so when it comes to logic, substance, and style, what are your personal brand themes there? And then when it comes to empathy, this would be your interpersonal communication style, and then your authenticity. So what would that be if we’re thinking about personal brand themes? 

AM: So I’ll show you how my an- authenticity wobble shows up for me, and this might lead your beautiful mind somewhere interesting.

But, so for me, the exposure, and this is true for all wobbles, so if I’m underslept or haven’t fed myself properly or under stress, I am more likely to wobble. And when I’m wobbling on authenticity, what will happen is this, as a people-pleasing part of me will show up and tell you, Andrea, what you want to hear and not necessarily what I think, know, and believe.

And so your personal brand doesn’t happen in isolation. There’s no personal brand until other people come into the scene. So it is always about you in relationship to others. And so how does that other person experiencing me is the material question. And is what I am saying, doing, selling persuasive? You know, that feels like logic.

Is, like, do they think that I am telling them the truth instead of bull them is a very material personal brand question. You know, like it sometimes shows up in the workplace as, you know, like, it’s too salesy or, you know. It’s like, so that, to, to me, that’s where th- that all of those questions live. And then is it like, a- am I, as the person outside this, you know, this, this hu- this system of this human being, like, do they care about me?

And can I be persuasively convinced of that? And it feel, it, they all, those all three feel relevant, but quite separate to me. 

AW: I, I hear, you’re reminding me of another theme that, that people will represent themselves when they’re talking about themselves and their brand. They’ll talk about, like, “I’m a very direct person,” or they’ll say, “I’m really not direct.

I communicate implicitly to people,” right? So I feel like that belongs in there somewhere. This is fascinating. I love this idea of merging these frameworks that we’ve developed. 

AM: Yeah, someone who says they’re direct tends to be an authenticity anchor and an empathy wobble because they’re saying, “I’m direct,” and unspoken is regardless of the cost of that directness.

And so what, how, when we work with that person, we’ll often say, “Okay, like, how do you make sure that your empathy, you’re coming in hot,” right? Sometimes, ’cause that’s sometimes the goal of the triangle is that it’s balanced. So if you are gonna come in hot with a strong point of view and like calling it like it is, ’cause that’s the other story people like, then you have to make sure that your empathy is just as strong, that I understand as someone receiving your directness that you are doing it in service of something that we both care about, or you’re doing it to make me better, or you’re doing it for this thing that we both decided is important, this shared mission that we both signed up for.

So you might wanna dial it back a little bit, but the real solve for most people is to dial up the empathy, not dial back the authenticity. 

AW: Yeah. Generally, these are three things that we want to increase. Like, we wanna keep them all in a nice equilibrium, but we, the higher they all are together, the better.

High Standards, Deep Devotion: Leading Without Performing 

Yeah. Okay, so last question before we get into the three rapid-fire questions is, what advice would you give to emerging leaders, especially women and other underrepresented minorities who wanna build visibility and influence and this leadership presence? And to do so, how can they achieve this without feeling like they’re performing leadership, even when they have this beautiful triad that they’re aspiring to?

AM: It’s a very deep question. So for those of us who don’t fit the expectation of who we think is gonna be at the front of the room, the world has notes, right? 

AW: Oh, I love that, Anne. You are gonna be quoted on that. 

AM: Yeah. And so it can lead to a higher, like, self-distraction, self-consciousness, which is totally understandable.

But the mindset shift, the story shift is also counterintuitive, which is not like, oh, you know, our instinct, the spotlight is brighter, and so our instinct is to not it up. Sorry if this is a family show. Not screw it up, right? And then, and that, that can, like, pretty quickly tip over into perfectionism, so we’re not taking the risks we need to have the impact that we can have in advancing our career.

And so the mindset reset is often it’s not about me. It’s about this, this thing bigger than me and beyond me. Leadership is a team sport. The people who are most effective, even at the very top of organizations, they are not lonely at the top, right? They are deeply interconnected with the people around them, and they’re playing this leadership game as the team sport that it is.

So the work on that one is around like resisting the story that it is about you and that you are isolated in some way, and just, like, treating isolation as the enemy, playing leadership as a team sport, like, waking up every day, even though, even when the world wants you to look at yourself, like refu- like refusing to take the bait.

So I think that’s part one. And then when we look at the demographics around wobbles, if we are Xs in an organization of Ys, and that can mean a lot of things. It do- it’s not necessarily, like, visible demographic differences. It can also be, you know, like level of education or geography or, you know, it can be so many things.

Like, there’s so many of us walking around with this “I don’t belong” story that’s getting in the way of the impact we can have and the le- the leader we can be out in the world. So if you identify with, “I don’t belong,” for whatever reason, those of us who have that experience of being Xs in a, in an organization filled with Ys, we are more likely to wobble on authenticity.

And again, this is for very good reasons. We are more likely to have these people-pleasing habits because it is a safety tactic. It’s a security tactic ’cause, you know, we weren’t faster, fiercer. Like, back on the savanna, early Homo sapiens, we were not stronger, faster, fiercer. The thing that we were better at was working with each other.

We weren’t even smarter in the beginning. The thing that we were better at was collaboration. And so it was an existential threat. Like, we could not survive on our own. We had to survive in tribes. And so we have this very ancient cellular biological memory of that being a, a, a big problem for us to be separated from the herd in some way.

So I think all of that gets, gets swirled together for those of us who feel different in any way. And so bringing the same strategy. I mean, I have two sticky notes on my computer. One of them is tell the truth. Because if I’m not intentional, like, that’s the one that’s gonna slip. The other one is host the party, which is ’cause if we have this storyline that we don’t belong, we’re also less likely to properly take care of the people around us.

And that’s one of the advantages of these, of authenticity anchors, is it doesn’t occur to them to not host the party. Obviously, they’re hosting the party, right? So yeah, I mean, uh, you’re asking a very deep question. We could have another 30-minute conversation about it, but that’s my top-line response.

AW: I love your metaphors. And as you started answering that question, Anne, I was thinking about the tightrope metaphor that I hear almost every day from women saying, “If I show up and I’m too empathetic, kind, nurturing, they dismiss me. And then if I’m too focused on performance, the logic stuff, getting things done, the expertise, the maybe bit of command, leadership style, then they think I’m a jerk,” right?

And it’s, like, really impossible. And what I’m hear- The metaphor that I saw in my mind was you’re desperately trying to balance on this tightrope, and maybe what can kinda pull you up and help you with that balance is shifting the focus to the greater cause or to the other people around you. 

AM: I do think that’s the exit from this safe room that feels like a trap. I also think resisting the false trade-off of those two experiences is really important.

‘Cause what, when we, we, the most effective leaders we see are setting high standards. They’re making the expectations really clear, while also signaling their commitment and devotion to the people around them. So we call it high standards, deep devotion leadership, ’cause you can do both, and the most effective leaders do both.

AW: High standards, deep devotion. 

AM: Those are the two axes, and most of us spend most of our time, like, on the off-diagonal, thinking that we have to pick one or the other, when in fact, you can and should most of the time choose both. 

AW: So it reminds me of the lovable fools and competent jerks 2×2, right? Everyone thinks they’re in, on the offside, and we- you really wanna be in the top corner.

I was gonna say, I recently interviewed the recently retired CEO of McDonald’s Canada, and she was relentless about this, and she actually had this mantra that she used to say, which is, “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.” She said, “W- I created this virtuous cycle of high performance,” because we were creating an environment of psychological safety, right?

Where people were coming up with new ideas. They were truly being themselves. They were admitting their mistakes. They were learning from them. We were learning fast. We were kind to each other, and then it, this flywheel started, and it’s like that. Yeah. Another metaphor. Gosh. 

AM: I love that phrase, uh, my kindness mistaken for weakness. I think Rihanna put it in a song. 

AW: Do you know who said it first, Anne? 

AM: No. Who said it first? 

AW: Al Capone. 

AM: No. 

AW: The mobster. 

AM: No way.

AW: Wow. He meant it in a very different way. Yeah. “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness, ’cause if you piss me off, I’ll kill you” is what he meant, right? Yeah. 

AM: Yeah, that follow-up sentence is, is, is, it’s a little brutal.

AW: There you go.

AM: Um, but that’s, that is so fun to know. Thank you for that fun fact. I grew up in Ohio, and I think Midwesterners in the US and Canadians, I think, have a little bit of advantage on this one because we can visualize it. I think we are more likely to grow up with role models, coaches, teachers, and parents who at least some of the time were in that upper right of, like, revealing high expectations without, like, without being an, to be, to just actually use…

I don’t know why I’m swearing like a sailor in front of you, Andrea, today. That was not my intention. 

AW: I was, uh- You sound like my 19-year-old son. 

AM: I was trying to be on such good behavior. 

AW: That’s funny. You’re being authentic. 

AM: Yeah. 

Wrap-Up & Rapid-Fire Questions 

AW: Okay. Speaking of authentic, let’s get on to the three rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?

Yeah. Okay. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

AM: I am an extrovert. Your follow-up question, which is how does this affect your communication? This one is, uh, th- we could spend another 30 minutes on this, so I was really contemplating this. I think it’s not necessarily an advantage. I think that what’s helpful is it makes me more interested in my audience.

It makes it easier for me to connect to that mission orientation, being of service, bringing my audience a gift. All of that helps because I really like people, right? I like being around them. It does make me more distracted when the guy in row three is, like, on his iPhone instead of paying attention. So I am paying attention to the other humans around me, and sometimes that’s not helpful to me as a speaker or as a messenger.

The other thing I will say is some of the most effective speakers I know are introverts, and I think there is some advantage built into, I think, a couple of things, including– Well, and it depends on the, um, like, scale of the audience. But you put an introvert up, like in a stadium of thousands, okay, like, and there is an advantage in that dynamic somewhere that we can tease out in a follow-up conversation.

AW: Yeah. I think introverts, I’m also an off-the-charts extrovert, but I think introverts are underrated, and I know based on the research that they are, uh, typically exceptional listeners, which can make you a great presenter and communicator, right? Okay. That wasn’t very rapid fire, but it was awesome.

Question number two, what … I’m curious about this one, Anne. What are your communication pet peeves? 

AM: Talking down to your audience. 

AW: Yeah. Also using terms that aren’t well-defined? 

AM: No, no. Language is a living, breathing thing. Something that was well-defined and well understood 10 years ago is now not … I, I mean, I, I have two Gen Z kids, and nothing is more fun than them bringing new vocabulary home.

So I love how dynamic language is. I think this is the only communication sin. Really, the only communication sin is, is not treating your audience as, you know, sophisticated, complex human beings. 

AW: With respect. Agree. Yeah. Okay, last question. Is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending lately?

AM: The work I’ve been talking about in the last 72 hours is the original peak performance work, which is Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. Their kind of breakthrough book was The Power of Full Engagement, and they were the first to really make the case persuasively in a way that broke through into the business world, that high performance really is about managing energy and not time.

And I think there’s a lot of people, the world is moving fast, there’s a lot of uncertainty, there are a lot of forces acting upon us that are outside of our full control, and I think many people are trying to feel the illusion of control by working harder and working more, and it’s not working. 

AW: Yeah, it backfires.In fact, it backfires. 

AM: And so I think they have a lot of insight that is still very relevant today on an alternative way to live and to work. 

AW: Okay, I’m gonna put a link to that in the show notes. Now, before I let you go, do you have any last words, suggestions, advice for the Talk About Talk listeners on developing trust in their communication?

AM: We spent a lot of time on defining the terms. There is so much power in understanding your message so deeply that you can describe it simply And so actually taking the time, back to respecting your audience, taking the time to figure out, okay, though a lot of people are s- speak in a complicated way, like bringing a, the next level of intention to translate what I’m saying in a way that other people can really absorb.

I think that’s one. I’m gonna do two because I can’t resist. The other thing is just get, like, is just the power of, of reps and, like, practicing in low stakes environment before you walk into any high-stakes environment. No serious performer or comedian, w- you know, or like pick a performing art that is hard, that is about, that rests on communication.

So I go to comedy all the time because, I mean, it really is distilled down to, you know, the power of saying things to affect another human being. There’s no serious comedian on the planet that would ever go out on a stage that matter without working out their material in smaller rooms and on smaller stages.

And then we have this illusion that we’re gonna like make some slides and like run through them in the privacy of our own mind and then go and nail it in the room, you know, where our nervous system has no preparation for what we’re asking it to do. So deeply, simply, and get your reps in. That’s my, my final advice.

AW: I love it. Thank you so much, Anne, for sharing your frameworks and your coaching and your advice. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. 

AM: Very mutual, Andrea. Thank you for bringing me on the show. 

AW: Thanks again to Anne. I absolutely loved this conversation. I always enjoy speaking with people who challenge and expand my own thinking.

That’s part of why I love what I do, and this discussion certainly did that. As I promised, I’m now gonna leave you with my three biggest takeaways, the things that I want you to think about. Number one, trust is earned through three pillars, or dimensions, or ingredients. The three pillars are logic, authenticity, and empathy.

And Anne traces all three of these back to Aristotle. So logic is good judgment, authenticity is being real, and empathy is genuinely caring about other people’s success. As Anne said, when all three of these trust pillars are sturdy and strong, trust is a very natural byproduct. The second insight that I want to reinforce for you is that every leader has an anchor and a wobble.

All of us. And under stress, one pillar tends to get a little shaky. That is your wobble. One tends to stay rock solid. That’s your anchor. So Anne shared that her anchor is empathy, and her wobble is authenticity. For the record, mine are the opposite. My anchor is authenticity, and my wobble is empathy. Why is this important, and why should you diagnose your anchor and your wobble?

Well, this is really about self-awareness. Rather than trying to become perfect, understand where you’re naturally strongest and where you’re most likely to lose trust under pressure. How could this not help you show up and build trust, right? Okay, last, the third point that I want to reinforce for you is that leadership is not about performing.

It is about serving others. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite belong in the room, Anne’s advice is to shift your focus off of yourself and onto the people that you are there to serve. She said it best. She said, “For those of us who don’t fit the expectation of who we think is gonna be at the front of the room, the world has notes.”let m

I love that. The way through this is not perfectionism; it’s connection. Lead as a team sport, because it is one. I love this. There are so many quotable moments in this conversation with Anne. Another one that stayed with me is Anne’s description of the best leaders as combining high standards with deep devotion.

I think that is a beautiful reminder that kindness and accountability are not opposites, and that strong leaders consistently demonstrate both. Okay. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be very grateful if you’d leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help more listeners discover Talk About Talk.

And if someone on your team or maybe in your network is working on building trust and executive presence and their brand, and they’re looking to become a more influential communicator in their career, please send them this episode. I think they will thank you for that. And I thank you for listening.Talk soon.

The post Leadership & Communicating TRUST with Anne Morriss (ep.219) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Job loss, awkward boundaries, and the art of saying no without burning bridges. These are real Qs from listeners like you. Andrea takes the mic to answer communication and career questions with hard-hitting advice and tips you can use today.

We cover 5 questions:

1️⃣ How do you reposition your brand when people have already decided who you are?

2️⃣ What’s the best way to talk about getting fired or laid off?

3️⃣ How do you say no to a request without burning bridges?

4️⃣ How do you disagree with someone without sounding disagreeable?

5️⃣ Where’s the line between being authentic and being strategic?

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

TRANSCRIPTION

What’s the best way to frame a job transition that was not in your control? How can I say no to requests without hurting the relationship or collaboration opportunities in the future? Where is the line between being an authentic communicator and being a strategic communicator? I am very excited about this episode.

Five Communication Challenges Every Leader Faces 

I’m going to answer for you five real questions from a few of the incredible leaders that I coach. We’re gonna cover how to upgrade your reputation or your professional identity in the eyes of others that you’ve been working with for a long time. We’re also gonna cover how to talk about your career when you get laid off or even fired.

Then we’re gonna cover how to say no to requests without burning bridges and, similarly, how to disagree with others without sounding disagreeable. And last, we’re gonna cover the important question of how to navigate the fine line between authentic communication and strategic communication. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so they can achieve their career goals. You can learn more about me and about what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to the website.

It’s TalkAboutTalk.com. I really hope you’ll check it out. We’ve got the archive of this podcast there, plus lots of free resources and information about the keynote speaking, the corporate workshops, the master classes, the online courses, and the private coaching that I do. Okay, let’s get into this.

How to Reinvent Your Professional Brand 

The first question that I’m gonna read for you is from a master class client of mine named Laureen. Laureen, thank you for your question. Here’s what she asked. She said, “Let’s say you’ve been in a business for a few years, and while you’re successful, you notice that your potential is being defined by a role that you were in when you first joined, or by a specialized skill set that you realize is actually limiting your future.

What is your advice for repositioning yourself or changing the perception of your brand with the people who have already decided where you fit and who you are?” Great question, Laureen. Thank you. This question is really about updating or upgrading your identity or your personal brand in the eyes of others.

It’s about reinvention. In my mind, you have three options here, Laureen. The first is to reinforce your new and improved identity every way you can. Create a list of the different ways that you can reinforce your new positioning. These can be direct or explicit, and you can directly use your words to tell people about your new skills, your new expertise, and your passions.

Of course, and you had to know this was coming, you can do this through your self-introduction. Your self-introduction is the most direct way that you have to reinforce your professional identity. These are your words from you about you. So when you introduce yourself, tell people what your expertise, your skills, and your passions are.

Use your filter and tell them what the words are. Be direct. You can also be a little bit less direct. Maybe you can start sharing information, re-sharing some articles that you might have read on LinkedIn or commenting on others. Make it clear that you have an interest, expertise, and a passion in this new area.

So it’s about consistently communicating directly and indirectly about this new expertise or level of skill that you have. That’s my first suggestion. My second suggestion, Laureen, is that you formalize your new skill set in some way that is formal. Like, for example, taking some training, earning some credentials, maybe even joining an association.

This is about formalizing your new skills. The third and last suggestion that I have for you is something that probably crossed your mind, and it’s to leave. So this would be the last resort, I’m gonna say. It seems rather dramatic, but sometimes the easiest way to change and improve your brand is to have some kind of significant catalyst, like leaving an organization and starting somewhere else. So those are my three answers for you, Laureen, and we’re gonna move on now. 

Framing a Job Transition with Confidence 

Question number two, this question is: Thinking about all of the recent layoffs across industries, people whose roles were impacted still face bias when they’re looking for a new job. Even when we know that mass layoffs were triggered by a volatile economy, over-hiring in tech, etc.

The question is, what’s the best way to frame a job transition that was not in your control? Another fantastic question. I really love this question. This is one of the most common questions that I get about how to create a narrative that is true and optimized, and the stakes are high. You’re looking for a new job.

Whether you were laid off or fired, your narrative is in your control. So my suggestion is that there are two things to think about. There’s the what and the how. Okay? So the what is labeling what happened, and then the how is how you communicate it. Let’s dig into these a little bit separately. First, the what.

Labeling what happened. While I am not a fan of scripts, this is where you can memorize a sentence or a phrase that is true, valid, and optimized for your context, and this will serve you well. You could label the departure in a way that is true. So if you were laid off, you could say that you were downsized, you could say that the role was eliminated as part of a restructuring, or you could say that the position, or maybe even the department, was cut.

On the other hand, if you were fired, my suggestion is keep it brief. You could say, “I was let go.” This is simple, neutral, and it doesn’t overexplain anything. Or you could say, “The expectations and my work style just were not aligned.” Even something like, “I can take ownership of some of it, and here’s what I would do differently.”

So there’s the labeling it. That’s the what. Now the how to communicate it. I do have a few general principles to share with you. First, keep it brief. Do not dwell. The longer you explain, the worse it sounds. One or two clean sentences at the most, and then pivot to what you’re looking for next.

Secondly, do not trash your employer. Never ever do this. Even if they were awful, it only reflects on you. And last, and this is big, focus on learning. This experience was a catalyst that really made me think about what my values are and what my skills are, and now I’m really excited about moving on to a new opportunity where I can really focus on these skills and passions of mine. You see how much better that sounds? So focus on your learning. Okay, let’s move on to question number three. 

How to Say No Without Burning Bridges 

Question number three is from Jennifer, a longtime client of mine that has actually become a friend. Jennifer asks, “How can I say no to requests without hurting the relationship or collaboration opportunities in the future?”

Great question, Jennifer. I have three specific suggestions for you. My first suggestion is to decline the request in terms of a boundary or a rule that you set for yourself. “I’m not doing that right now. I am focusing on this other thing.” As opposed to saying, for example, “Sorry, I have to say no because of,” and then filling in the line with whatever the excuse is.

This just begs for negotiation. And I’m gonna get a little bit personal here with this one. I have a lot of people who ask me for a lot of favors in my role as an executive communication coach, and I typically do say yes, but recently I’ve been writing a book. And so it’s actually pretty easy. I have this boundary or this rule of a certain number of hours that I need to spend every day and every week on my book, or I know that it’s not gonna get written.

And so I tell people, “I am declining all of whatever it is that they’re asking at this point because I’m singularly focusing on my book. This is what I have to do to get this out the door to the publisher on time. I’m really sorry.” So set a boundary or a rule for yourself and make it clear. That’s my first suggestion.

My second suggestion for you is to decline the task, not the person. So what does that mean? “That doesn’t work for me right now,” lands differently than, “I can’t help you.” The idea here is to keep the door open by making it clear that your no, your decline, is about the specific task, not about the person.

And then my third suggestion, Jennifer, is just to work on softening the blow. There are a few ways that you can do this. For example, you could offer to help the person with a small part of the task. Like if they ask you to create a document, maybe you could say, “I can’t create it, but I could review it for you after you’re done.”

You could also give them a timeline. You could say, “I am really gonna be hunkering down on my book until the end of October, so maybe you could circle back to me in November.” This is about softening the blow and making sure that they know that saying no today doesn’t mean no forever. I hope that helps, Jennifer.

How to Disagree Without Sounding Disagreeable 

Okay, moving on to the next question. Question number four. Whoo, this is going fast. All right. Vivian asks, “How can I disagree with others’ perspectives without sounding defensive and disagreeable?” I love this, Vivian. How do I disagree without sounding disagreeable? So this is when there may be a sense of conflict, and I have three suggestions for you.

The first is slow down, take a breath, and remind yourself to lead with curiosity, not correction. You’re not correcting the person; you’re simply curious. This is about taking advantage of a real power pause; a calm, measured pace signals confidence and credibility. You are in control of your emotions, and this pause is a habit that you can build up with practice.

Trust me, I’ve been doing this myself. The power pause is real. Put a smile on your face, maybe tilt your head, take a breath, and remind yourself, “I’m curious.” You can even nod when they start talking just to show that you are open-minded and listening. And remind yourself of your objective when you pause.

How much does this really matter? Does it matter if I agree or disagree? And then instead of saying, “I disagree,” say something like, “Help me understand your thinking on this.” This disarms the defensiveness before it even starts, both their defensiveness and yours. My second suggestion for you is to focus on the dynamic, not on the disagreement.

Or to put it another way, focus on the situation, not the person. This one is gold. You can signal that you are in problem-solving mode by starting by articulating what you agree with first. Take a step back and label it. Then find the sliver of truth in their view and say it out loud. And by the way, this is not weakness.

Rather, this is credibility. Let them know that you’ve heard them. Then chances are they’ll wanna hear you, too. This is about reciprocity. So that’s my second suggestion. Focus on the situation, not the person, and look for the commonality that you share before you go any further. My third and last suggestion is probably the easiest thing to do, and this is about watching your language.

So, for example, I encourage you to use first person. This is I language, even we language. Not second person, not you, not you’re wrong. Saying something like, “I see this differently,” that’s a position, right? You’re focusing on the situation. “You’re missing the point,” that’s an attack, a personal attack. One invites dialogue and the other invites a fight.

Secondly, I encourage you to avoid the but. Instead, you could do like improv actors and say, “Yes, and…” You could also just pause and make your point separately, like, “That’s a fair way to look at it. Here’s where I land differently.” So those are my three ways that you can disagree without sounding disagreeable.

Authentic vs. Strategic Communication 

Now let’s move on to the last question, question number five. This one is from Angela, and it is a fantastic question. This is why I saved it for last. The question is: Where is the line between being an authentic communicator and being a strategic communicator? How should we think about that balance, especially when the stakes are high?

The easiest way to answer this question is to define the words that we’re using here. The first word is authentic. Think of authenticity as being true, valid, and not misrepresenting yourself. The second term is strategic. I encourage you to think of being strategic as being disciplined, disciplined about what you say and how much you share.

Now, there’s a third term that I want to introduce here. Beyond authenticity and strategic, I want you to think about the word transparency. Transparency as in how much you filter. This goes back to strategic. You are strategically filtering how much you share. Here’s how I encourage you to think about this.

First, you are always authentic. In every context, you are valid and true, and you are not misrepresenting yourself. And secondly, you are strategically filtering what you share. You are self-aware enough to know what your thoughts and your feelings and your opinions are, but you are strategic about how much you are sharing.

You are never fully transparent. Angela, I hope that helps. This is really, really important. And again, I think it’s most easily understood by thinking about the definitions. What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be strategic? And what does it mean to be transparent? And understanding and distinguishing between those three terms.

Okay. That’s it for this Q&A episode. I want to say thank you very much to the five of you for asking such fantastic questions. And to you, the listener, I hope that you found this Q&A episode helpful. If yes, I’m gonna ask you to please leave us a rating or a review on whatever podcast platform you’re on.

This helps us be discovered by other listeners. Thank you so much for listening, and talk soon.

The post Q&A: Andrea Answers Clients’ QUESTIONS (ep.218) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Career communication skills, interview mistakes, salary negotiation, and personal branding are all areas where small shifts create noticeable results. The frustrating part is that most people don’t know what they’re getting wrong, and by the time they figure it out, the job offer is already gone.

Emily Durham, known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter-turned-career coach and author of Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind. She has spent years on the other side of the hiring table and brings that insider perspective to every piece of advice she gives.

You’ll learn why confident communicators slow down instead of speeding up; what 80% of interview candidates get wrong about how much to say; how to answer the strengths and weaknesses questions without sounding like everyone else; when to bring up salary before you even get on the phone; and why audacity is what executive presence is made of.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

CONNECT WITH EMILY

🌐 Website: EmilyDurham.org

📸 Instagram: Instagram.com/Emily.The.Recruiter

RESOURCES

Emily’s book Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind – https://amzn.to/4gmfMTP

Emily’s podcast: Clock In – https://emilydurham.org/podcast

TRANSCRIPTION

Emily Durham: People I like super, super admire at work, they’re okay with silence. They don’t need to fill silence. They make an ask, and they sit there quietly. So learning how to slow down and be the person to sit in the quiet, like that’s the power move. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Emily Durham, also known as Emily the Recruiter and author of this book called Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind.

Don’t you love it? In this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast, we’re gonna talk about how to use your communication skills at work so you can get ahead in your career. After I introduce Emily, we’re gonna get right into the interview, and then at the end, as always, I’m gonna summarize with three main points that I wanna reinforce for you, so you do not need to take notes.

You’re welcome. Let’s do this. Let’s Talk About Talk. 

My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m your communication coach. I founded Talk About Talk to help you and other leaders learn to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can get ahead in your career. You can learn more about what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com. It’s all there.

About the Guest: Emily Durham (“Emily the Recruiter”) 

Okay, I’m gonna introduce Emily now. I’m gonna actually read her bio from the back of her book. Emily Durham, better known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter turned career coach and content creator. On her popular social media accounts and her podcast called Clock In, she gives real-world advice to help people thrive in their careers. She lives in Toronto. Here we go. 

Thank you so much for being here today, Emily, to speak with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about how to communicate at work. 

ED: Thank you for having me. There’s one thing I’m excited to talk about, and it’s everything. I am so excited for us to jump into it all. So thank you for having me.

AW: My pleasure. I wanna start big picture, if you don’t mind, Emily. I know you have opinions and advice and suggestions for us in terms of job interviews and salary negotiations and being with difficult people, and all of these very specific things, but I wanna start broad. What do you think the most important communication skills are for us to acquire in terms of advancing our careers and succeeding at work?

Why Pacing, Pausing, and Precision Matter 

ED: It’s an incredible question. I really think the most important communication skills are the slightly counterintuitive ones, so pacing and then pausing. People talk about this all the time, but you can really tell how experienced someone is by how they are physically, like, you know, pacing out the words that they’re using.

So if you’re a super confident communicator, chances are you’re giving yourself the space to speak slowly, and that automatically communicates that sense of authority. But what you’ll really notice, at least the people I, like, super, super admire at work, they’re okay with silence. They don’t need to fill silence.

They make an ask, and they sit there quietly. So learning how to slow down and be the person to sit in the quiet, like, that’s the power move. 

AW: I agree. I agree, Emily. The power pause is powerful. And in my experience, interestingly, I would say the junior folks that come to me for communication skills coaching are really focused on speaking up.

They actually wanna fill the silence, right? And then as they become more senior, they’re asking for me advice on how to communicate with precision and brevity and clarity. It’s a real interesting transformation. So I think my next question for you is: what other communication skills do you see evolve as people become more senior, from being a junior to middle manager to a senior leader?

ED: It’s so interesting ’cause I think the more junior you are, naturally you feel like your place at work, or even in your personal life, is to prove that you know something. And we’ve all been there. You’re, like, 20 in a brand-new job, and it feels like you need to prove that you’ve earned your spot in this room.

So oftentimes the communication skills people are working on is the baseline, like how do I communicate what I’m working on? How do I make sure other people hear me, that they aren’t speaking over me? And all of that is really meaningful, but sometimes that trickles into us over-explaining, over-communicating to really assert that we deserve to be in the room.

But really, like echoing kind of your client and what you hear is the more senior someone gets, it becomes less about what to say and more about how to say it. ‘Cause at that point, you know what you’re supposed to say. People should know your worth. You know what you have to advocate for at work, but it’s more about how you’re communicating it.

Little things I think of, especially early in my career, the sorries before you ask a question, “Oh, sorry, can I do this?” It’s second nature. It feels like we’re just kind of cementing: do I deserve a seat at this table? 10 years into your career, 15 years in, I have no time for the sorries, but I want coaching on how to sound not like a great middle manager, but exactly like a great CEO, and being a bit more direct, having that same audacity the successful people do.

So I really see it shift from what to how the more you grow in your career, but we all inevitably have to go through that icky early phase of what the heck am I doing here? 

AW: I love the word audacity. You used the word; I love that word. That, that’s like synonymous with executive, this all elusive executive presence that so many folks are aspiring to.

But I wanna back up to even before you get the job, talking about the job interview. So I know a lot of people that come to you, and definitely people that come to me are seeking help; not everyone, but a significant proportion are seeking help when they are in job transition. So they’re either actively interviewing for jobs, or they’re planning to in the future.

How to Stand Out Without Talking Too Much 

Let’s start with what common mistakes do people make when they’re in this job interview process? 

ED: Oh my gosh. There’s quite a few, but the most common, which if I had to put a percentage to it, I’m talking 80% of interviews, the candidates either spoke too much or not enough. Which I know sounds like, you know, “How am I supposed to get it right?”

It’s actually pretty easy once you know what they’re looking for. When it comes to the early parts of the interview, you’re always going to be asked, “Introduce yourself. Why are you looking for this job? Talk to me about the icebreakers.” Where people go wrong is they feel the need to explain everything.

They’re thinking that this is a confessional instead of a sales pitch, and it’s a sales pitch. So when your answer is extending for any of your questions, whether it’s introductions or, like, the meat and potatoes, if it’s more than two minutes, people have tuned out. You’ve lost them. So keeping things more succinct, and it’s important to practice that.

We’re not inherently able to self-correct in those moments of anxiety. But the other part of it is you’re not saying enough. If someone asks you at the beginning of the interview, “How are you?” and your response is, “I’m good. You?” Well, you’re giving them nothing to work with. You’re not helping your case by creating a personable relationship with this individual interviewing you.

So it’s really about striking that balance, and it comes down to practice. So practicing answering questions on your own, recording yourself answering those common interview questions, even striking up small talk with a barista at your local coffee shop so you get into the habit of what crisp communication sounds and feels like.

I would say those are the big boys. Heavy on the talking too much, though. That happens all the time. 

AW: Yeah. So I learned when I was an undergraduate student from a career education session that I went to one of the career counselors told the audience, including myself, that the less you talk during an interview and the more airtime you give to the interviewer, the more likely you are to get the job.

So in my mind, I started playing this game, but I think it’s really important that people understand this might be true, but you can take it too far, right? Like, you don’t wanna be short, and you don’t wanna be, like, evasive, evading, not answering questions. So one line that I coach my clients on is I say, “You know, you’re asking me what are my strengths.

I’ve got this one, this one, and this one. I’m, I’m happy to elaborate on any of them. In summary, these are my three strengths.” Like, whatever the question is, the line that is magical is, “Happy to elaborate.” What do you think of that? 

ED: I like that a lot, ’cause I think a lot of people are scared, and what I hear so much from folks is they’re scared that if they don’t say everything up front, the next candidate who does is getting the job.

But I really think that’s where this mindset shift comes in. The interview isn’t exclusively about making sure you hit every single list of wishes on their job description. It’s about seeing, can I work with you? And we’ve all worked with someone who is really unclear with how they communicate or really long-winded, and those are hard people to work with.

That’s just the truth. So the communication is a skill in and of itself, so I love having that opener to say, you know, “If I need to go deeper on any of this, you let me know.” It also puts that recruiter in the driver’s seat, so they’ll tell you, “Hey, we gotta go left, we gotta go right,” instead of that just being the burden that you carry.

But it really is a middle road we have to walk. 

AW: So putting the interviewer in the driver’s seat, I love that because you’re communicating respect. Like, you are driving this interview. I’m happy to elaborate on any of these things, or y- of course, you can ask me other questions, right? And you’re being respectful, and you’re being very clear and direct about that.

So this question, though, about what are your strengths, I get a lot of questions, and I have opinions, but I would love to hear your guidance on the two questions that you’re sure to get. What are your strengths? And then also, what are your weaknesses or the things that you’re working on, right? If you can share with us your guidance on how to answer both of those questions, I know you’d be helping a lot of people.

ED: Of course. I will say, God, am I ever over these questions. Like, so 101. They’re really, really flat. I think if we could evolve into a world where we’re not asking these, the world would be maybe just 2% better. What I want to urge people not to do, please resist and fight that urge to go to your AI platform of choice and say, “How am I supposed to answer these questions?”

The problem with resumes today is everyone’s resume looks and sounds the same ’cause AI is writing it. So the resume inherently is starting to lose value. As people start to lean on AI for their interviews, the same thing’s going to happen. The best thing you can do is be you and stand out with your unique perspective, ’cause if you sound like Suzy and Bobby and Joe, well, then you’re not standing out.

So resist that urge. As far as the strengths go, don’t be scared to boast. You don’t need to use we language the entire time. You’re allowed to talk about you. If it feels uncomfortable, focus on a specific example. The best way to do this, look at the job description. What’s clearly one of the two or three core skills they’re looking for?

And say, if you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable, “You know, my peers have often applauded me on,” or, “I’ve really succeeded at work on these three.” So it kind of takes you out of the aren’t I fabulous and says, “Well, other people think I’m fabulous.” And then if you’re really nervous, give an example. Like, “Here’s a really great example of when this happened.”

On the weaknesses, God, I hate this question. I think the best formula for this is answering, like, semi-honestly with a solution. Don’t do the basic, “You know, I’m a perfectionist,” ’cause those are the things that everybody, like.

AW: That’s what AI will tell you. They’ll say either, “I’m a perfectionist,” or, “I’m a workaholic,” right?

ED: Yeah, or, “I care too much about my work.” Spare me, right? So be honest. For me, data and analytics is not something I’m naturally incredible at. That’s just the truth. It’s also the truth that it’s a very important part of the work that I do. So when I would answer these questions, I’m saying something like, “To be honest, data and analytics doesn’t come naturally to me, but here’s what I do to make sure I stay on top of it,” and then I share a win.

So you’re always sandwiching it with, “Here’s what I’m not naturally inclined at, here’s what I do to bridge the gap, and here’s proof that I’m really quite good at it instead.” 

AW: Beautiful. Okay. So let’s shift gears a little bit to salary negotiations, but starting in the context of in the job interview.

When should you bring it up if they haven’t? And when they do, what do you say? And maybe even, I know I’ve heard you talk about this when I saw you live, how do you prepare for this conversation and this topic on kinda this taboo topic of salary negotiations? 

Confident Salary Conversations Start with Preparation 

ED: Definitely, and I hate that it’s still so taboo.

I thought with us, you know, having so many conversations online about this, but there’s still fear, and it’s natural. The second you start job hunting or entertaining interviews, that’s a good time to benchmark what you’re worth. So you’re going to go to a website like PayScale or Glassdoor, just see what the general salary range is for your ideal job in your city specifically.

And then be honest with yourself. Where am I? Am I low, mid-band? It’s always a good idea whenever you’re moving roles that you should be getting a bump above 5%. That’s just my belief. Well above 5% on the base pay, ’cause oftentimes you can actually acquire a 5% bump if you stay in your job while maintaining job security.

So above that is what we’re targeting. You get to decide what that range is. As far as when you ask, I’m audacious. I think ask before you get on the phone, honey. Time is money. Why would I get on the phone for a job that I know doesn’t have budget? It’s okay for you to reach out and say, “Happy to chat.

Thanks for reaching out. Do you happen to have the range of salary for this position?” That’s a great place. But if you’re already on the phone and you want to proactively ask the recruiter, leave it for the end. Don’t say, you know, “What are you gonna pay me?” Keep it simple. “Have you guys landed on the salary range for this role?

Are you able to share?” Simple as that. Oftentimes, though, as we know, what happens is the recruiter ends up asking you, and you feel a little bit backed into a corner. You have two options. Option number one is you go to that recruiter and say, “Actually, are you able to share the range? I love just getting a flavor of that before I share my, my, uh, kind of desires.”

AW: Yeah. Or you can basically, I asked you first. 

ED: Yes. You sh- I’ll show you your, me, I’ll show … What was that, what’s that saying? I’ll show you mine- I’ll show you- … if you show 

AW: me yours. Yeah. 

ED: Like, that’s the only way. Or what you can offer is the lower end that you’re willing to accept. And the reason I like offering the lower end is you frame it like, based on where I’m at in my current role and external market, I’d be looking to start at a range somewhere near $80,000 a year.

The reason I like that is you’ve inflated your lower end, of course, but you’re able to bump it up as the process goes on. You’re not saying, oh, 80 to 90,000, ’cause now you’ve capped yourself. Um, but I’m a big believer in put it back on them. You’re trying to sell to me just as much as I’m trying to sell to you.

AW: I think that that’s so helpful. I know that the listeners who are on the job market or planning to be so will appreciate that very much. I love this idea of giving, like, a bottom line. Like, the lowest that I would consider, depending on the job, right? Like, you kinda leave it like, this depends on other parts of compensation, right?

What the benefits are, what the job description is, and on and on. This conversation is just beginning. Here’s kinda the bottom line. Um, I love that. 

ED: It just gives us flexibility. We just… Sometimes you need space, and the more you learn about a job, you’re like, “Whoa, this is way bigger than they said it was gonna be.”

Suddenly, December doesn’t seem fair. 

AW: So what about if you’re already employed, and it’s been a while, and maybe, I don’t know, you find out that a friend of yours who works for a different company doing a similar job is getting paid more. Whatever the catalyst is, how do you broach that with your current manager in your current job?

ED: It’s a really good idea to root these conversations in data, not necessarily personal experience. So I personally like to avoid saying, “This person said this,” or, “I know someone doing this.” Focus more on market data. Book a 15-minute meeting or tack this on to your one-on-one with your boss. You always start with thank yous.

“Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love growing here.” We butter them up, and then we have that direct call to action, which is, “I’ve loved how much my role has evolved,” or, “I’ve loved,” insert this thing you’ve loved about your job. Based on how much my job has expanded and the fact that the market has continued to inflate, is there an opportunity for us to look at my salary, and what would that process look like?”

The reason it works when you ask it as a question is it’s no longer this kind of demand. It’s collaborative. So your boss is buying in. They get to say, “Here’s the process. We get to do this.” Maybe the outcome is you need some more performance metrics to be hit, but now you’re having that conversation.

What I caution people, though, against is if you start hearing things like, “Yeah, you know, we’ll talk about it next review season, and th-,” and it’s starting to kind of be this thing that exists in a very distant and murky future, and it doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you’re not getting clarity, that’s often a sign you’re not gonna get what you deserve here.

Handling Toxic People Without Losing Your Professionalism 

AW: Hmm. So when we are at work, speaking of taboo topics, there inevitably there are people who are difficult people, whether it’s your manager or your peers. I’m curious, maybe you can start general and give some specific examples of when there’s someone at work who’s making things difficult for us; what do you suggest we do?

ED: Oh, as much as I would love to be like, “We’re gonna send them nasty letters to their home,” um, unfortunately, we do have to play within the rules. I like to anchor this in one very real truth that I will never forget my dad told me when I had a manager for years who must have aged me by 10. You know, happy people and people who are good at their jobs are not the people making your life hell, and that’s just the truth.

So really rooting yourself in that is a little bit more liberating. But if you’ve got a toxic coworker, it’s really different from a toxic boss. A toxic boss, I would argue, you can create boundaries around so that you have distance; you are practicing grounding exercises so you don’t let them drive you crazy.

But oftentimes you can’t change your boss, and your boss is your biggest advocate. So that’s one where we sometimes need to make the decision, can I live with this or can I not? When it comes to your peers, there’s a few little, like, tricks I enjoy keeping up my sleeve. The first is we never engage with gossip, ever.

Doesn’t matter how good it feels. If they’re gossiping with you at work, I promise they’re gossiping about you. So learning how to deflect with a positive gossip response is ideal. 

AW: I think it’s also easy to get sucked into gossiping about the person who’s toxic with other people, right? So because it’s validating, like, “I noticed this.

You noticed this, too?” Right? So I actually tell my clients to explicitly say if, especially if they’re escalating a situation that’s gone, like, past whatever the boundaries are, to say, “The purpose of this conversation is not to gossip. I’m validating. Have you noticed this? Thank you. End of discussion, ’cause I’m doing something about it,” right?

ED: Love that. Well, I think that’s the healthiest way to do it so that you don’t get caught in the loop of now you’re just on the other end. And I think what people sometimes don’t realize is regardless of why you’re in that cycle, if word gets back to HR or to leadership, you are still being seen as gossiping, regardless of whether or not you’re entitled to.

So I big cosign, big plus one. But even just the power of that, like, positive gossip response can shut things down when you’re a little uncomfy. Someone says, “Did you hear about Susie? She did blah, blah, blah.” You say, “Oh, no, I, I didn’t hear about that, but I did see her report, and it looked great.” Like, respond with something, “Oh, no, I, I don’t pay attention to that, but here’s this great thing that I did see,” is a great way to deflect and condition people out of behaving in this way with you.

But really, when it comes down to toxic people, it’s really about shutting down and not engaging. It’s about them saying that snarky comment. This might be argumentative, but I’m a big believer in just like letting them sit in it, sit in it. Or, “I don’t understand. What does that mean?” Like, “Explain to me what that means.”

And you really have to gauge how safe you feel based on your work environment, but it’s all about boundaries. I think you can work more with, uh, your coworkers. When it’s your boss, that’s a tough sell 

AW: That’s a tough one. But back to the sit in it, one of the best responses that I heard long before I was doing communication skills coaching, that someone told me that I tried, and it is just beautiful, is just ask the person to repeat themselves.

If they say something egregious, say, “Pardon me?” And it doesn’t have to be like, “What did you say?” Right? It could just be like, “Pardon?” 

ED: Pretend you didn’t hear. 

AW: And then when they, when they repeat themselves, and everyone turns their head and says, “What?” Right? Or they’ll say, “Oh, well, what I meant was,” right? And there you go. 

ED: And who knows? Yeah. We’re assuming benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a poor choice of words. But sometimes just letting people know that you hear them, but that you’re above responding can be enough. And if it’s not, that’s when we start documenting, and that’s when we seek support.

Like, you are not meant to untoxicify the people around you, right? Sometimes we need to call in the big guns, which is, is getting that support which you deserve. 

AW: Yeah. I mean, we could, we could go on and on about this. I tell people, especially as they become more senior in their career, part of their job becomes dealing with difficult people.

When you’re more junior in your career, your boss is looking over your shoulder, right? Making sure that you are acquiring the technical skills, doing the right things, giving check marks, guiding you. If something or someone gets in your way, they’ll deal with it. As you get more senior, that becomes part of your job.

ED: You’re the protector, not the protected, and it’s… That- that’s a really big shift, and I think especially as women at work, there is a different layer of how you’re perceived the more senior you become, and the more effectively you communicate and show up for work. It’s… That’s a whole, that’s a whole other can of worms.

How Visibility and Likability Shape Career Growth 

AW: Well, let’s open the can of worms called personal branding, ’cause how you’re perceived at work is all about personal branding. I was thrilled when I heard you speak and when I looked at the table of contents of your book and read it, that you have a whole chapter dedicated to personal branding. And as I said before we pressed record, even more thrilled about your, like, yes, that is your personal brand.

Can you share with the listeners your take on personal branding when it comes to our careers, and I guess some of the best practices for how to effectively manage your personal brand? 

ED: I really see personal brand as something that has a bad brand. I think people hear personal branding and they think of a very dated career concept.

But the truth is, you know, if you think of having a personal brand or if you don’t think of having a personal brand, you still have a personal brand. Your personal brand is what people think of when they think of you. It’s really as simple as that, and it’s a combination of you being good at the work you do and how you make other people feel.

It’s really as simple as that. I don’t believe that you need to be the most innovative, sharpest, top-of-the-class individual, ’cause I’m not, in order to have an impactful personal brand. And really, if the secrets to work success, which in my perspective, these are the secrets, is likability and visibility.

How you get there is with a really good brand. And I think if you can focus on having a really high say to do ratio, meaning everything I say I’m going to deliver on, I do exactly how I said I would, and I really make you feel like you’re in the room when I talk to you, that’s really all you need to do, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

AW: Yeah. So you made this comment about, you know, personal branding may have a branding problem. Do you think that Generation Z or, like, the new generation is a little more open to it? ‘Cause I kinda get the impression in the folks that I’m talking to that personal branding brand is starting to evolve and improve, and people are talking about strategically managing their personal brand.

Do you see that? What, what do you see about, like, the generation differences? 

ED: I think the motivation behind personal branding is really different for Gen Z. I think Gen Z has really grown into a career without rose-colored glasses on. They are not disillusioned by the idea that working hard gets you the great lifetime career, that you’re, you know, it’s we operate within a meritocracy.

Like, they don’t exist within the same confines that millennials did really. And I think where Gen Z has a unique lens is they are interested in personal brand, but not just for their nine-to-five job. Where I see Gen Z’s careers evolving is kind of the polar opposite of where millennials did, where myself as a millennial, we were raised with, “You’re gonna have a great nine-to-five.

You’re gonna hustle.” There was this hustle culture. Whereas Gen Z has now shifted to say, “I don’t trust the nine-to-five job to fulfill all of my financial needs. I don’t trust they won’t lay me off, ’cause I’ve seen them do it. Instead, I’m gonna have more of a portfolio career,” meaning I’ve got my hands in a couple of pots.

And their brand is something that unites all of those. So I do see Gen Z investing heavy in their brand, for example, on socials, use of LinkedIn. There– I literally watched a Gen Z intern two days ago when I was having a meeting, um, at one of my offices, and I saw a Gen Z student walk in with a printed resume to go to the security desk and was like, “I’m gonna hand this in, ’cause no one’s responding to my emails.”

That’s a kickass personal brand. So I think they’re still engaged with branding, but their why is a little bit different. They’re just a fascinating generation. 

AW: They are. There is such hope for the future, I think. 

ED: I love them. Yeah. I love Gen Z so much. 

AW: Yeah, yeah. So we were talking before about being in job transition and interviewing and so on.

In terms of your personal brand, how can we talk about or I guess, narrate career transitions or, in particular, setbacks or gaps? How do we make that, turn that into part of our brand? 

ED: A lot of it is just understanding sales fundamentals. Uh, you know, you don’t go to McDonald’s and expect to hear them talk about the nutritional value of what you’re purchasing.

That’s not what you went to McDonald’s for. But if they started off by saying, “Well, we’re budget. You… We’re really good at this, but we’re not great on vitamin B and vitamin D and really high in saturated fat,” you might walk away being like, “I don’t wanna eat from these people.” But they’re packaging it as, “Oh my gosh, this is delicious.

What a treat. It’s quick, convenience.” You need to think of sales and marketing fundamentals as you think of yourself, and the fundamentals are you talk about the stuff you have, and you paint pictures around the stuff you don’t. So if you’re in career transition or you’ve had gaps on your resume, I’m a believer in lead with the stuff you have, the legacy work that has worked.

You can address very simply without apology what that gap is. I’m transitioning careers because I was laid off. I’ve been focused on family for the last little bit. And then include what you’ve learned. And in that process of, you know, family care, I became really incredible at my time management. It really put into perspective the work that matters for me.

That’s why I’m focusing on working at a company that gives back to their communities. Like, there’s always a spin. You just have to find your spin and get ahead of it before they can kind of paint their own negative picture based on bias. 

AW: I love it, Emily. So we create our narrative. We don’t let someone else create the narrative for us.

Confidence, Curiosity, and Communicating with Audacity 

Love it. Can I ask you the three rapid-fire questions now? 

ED: I would love nothing more. I’m so excited. 

AW: Okay. Question number one: are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

ED: Oh, I’m a big fat extrovert. Big fat extrovert. 

AW: Do you use that insight about yourself to manage your day or your week in any specific way? 

ED: I would say yes, but on a very subconscious level. It’s not until I, like, come home and talk to my partner, and he’s like, “You have been out 12 days in a row,” and I’m like, “Yeah, isn’t it great?” That I realize that this is just the routine that I’ve built. But work-wise, definitely. I make sure I have a meeting or something in person with people at least twice a week. Otherwise, I start to feel a little cuckoo. 

AW: Oh, I’m so with you. 

ED: Yeah. Are you the same, extrovert? 

AW: 100%. Really? And I’ve retaken the test. I’m still an off-the-charts extrovert. 

ED: I was gonna say, if I took the test one more time, they would be like, “We need something new. You are existing in a new, a new pathway.” 

AW: Yeah. That’s funny. Okay, question number two: what are your communication pet peeves? 

ED: Apologizing for taking up space, so lots of sorries, lots of I don’t knows, that self-deprecating language. Doesn’t peeve me as much as it just makes me sad. I want you to believe in yourself as much as you deserve. And this is maybe, like, a little bit of a hot take.

I think overactive listening is a communication thing that we need to take a peek at. When someone is so actively listening to the point where you have a hard time continuing to speak ’cause they’re like, “Mm-hmm, yep, oh, uh-huh,” and it’s so over-exaggerated. Of course, there’s layers to this and, A, we’re told that this is great communication, and B, how we define and reward communication is inherently rooted in bias.

But I think, like, you can really tell when someone’s been told, “You need to overpay attention and overly actively listen,” uh, that it actually feels a little bit disconnected. So that’s one that I always think keep an eye out for. Like, it’s, it’s okay for you not to be an overly active listener if that’s what’s authentic to you. That’s fine. 

AW: Well, speaking of authentic, I was just gonna say, you can, in an authentic and engaged way, truly deepen your listening, or you can try to inauthentically signal that you’re listening, and those are two very, very different things, right? 

ED: Yes. Like, are you trying to listen, or are you trying to make it look like you’re listening? Cause there’s a difference. 

AW: Exactly. Okay. Question number three: Is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending lately? 

ED: You know what? I have one that I have been recommending. It is so offside from the world that I operate within, but I will tell you why I love it. The show, it’s a podcast, it’s called This Podcast Will Kill You, and it’s an epidemiology podcast, which is essentially the study of infectious disease.

I’ve been listening to these two fabulous doctors; they’re both named Erin, and they are infectious disease doctors. And they, in each episode, break down the history of given disease or vaccine and then talk about the mar- modern implications in the medicine space. And the reason I have been recommending it is, A, it’s freaking fascinating, and B, I think it’s such a great accidental story about innovation and how powerful accidents are.

Almost every single vaccine or medical breakthrough, to some extent, had some kind of unfortunate mishap that brought us there, whether it be it was intended for A and it was used for B, or it was supposed to launch here and it didn’t. And I think just the context of how many mistakes actually have landed us in meaningful positions, and the importance of educating ourselves on history and the way the world operates, and also celebrating two incredible women in STEM that host the show.

I freaking love it. I’ve been listening, I think, six-plus years. Oh, really? My most listened to by far. Oh my gosh, it is my most listened-to podcast by far. By far. Wow. Okay. It’s incredible. 

AW: I will put a link to that, uh, show in the show notes. Before I let you go, Emily, I just wanna know, do you have any last words for the Talk About Talk podcast listeners in terms of, I guess, optimizing their communication at work so that they can advance their careers?

ED: I would say, A, keep listening to this show because it’s a mini practice that you implement every single week that is essentially upskilling you while you’re living your life. But the biggest thing in the world is start learning to trust yourself, and it’s not always about saying the perfect thing. It’s trusting that you will say something.

Sometimes something is better than the perfect thing, and getting really bold with practicing striking up conversations with strangers and small talking in your personal life naturally extends into your professional life. So try to do one bold thing a week, whether it’s going on a friendship blind first date or chatting up that person at your local flower shop.

That can be really, really helpful for your career on a, a meaningful level. 

AW: I love it. Thank you so much, Emily, for sharing your time and your insights with me and the Talk About Talk listeners. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. 

ED: Thank you. 

Three Career Communication Lessons from Emily Durham 

AW: Isn’t she great? Emily, I just love your positive energy.

Okay. Now, as promised, and as always, I’m gonna summarize with three of the key learnings that I wanna reinforce for you, just briefly.

1. Slow Down and Embrace the Power Pause

The first one was Emily’s point about the power in your communication at work comes from pacing and pausing. Her point is that confident communicators speak slowly, and they tolerate silence. They don’t rush to fill the space. It’s true. The pause really is powerful, so think power pause.

2. Keep Your Interview Answers Concise

The second point is that when folks are answering questions in job interviews, the most common failure may be on length, either rambling and speaking for way too long or cutting yourself short, so then being evasive and not answering the question.

You wanna reach that happy medium, and my suggestion, and Emily agreed, is to provide a concise answer and then say, “Happy to elaborate.”

3. Lead with Audacity

The third point that I wanna reinforce with you is Emily’s word that I just love. The word is audacity. Audacity as in being direct. When I’m coaching folks, they often ask me how they can achieve the all-elusive executive presence.

When Emily used this word audacity, it crossed my mind that maybe this can inspire you to communicate with confidence, being a little bit more direct, and truly developing either leadership presence or executive presence. Maybe lean into this word. I’m gonna try and do the same. Let’s all try to be a little more audacious.

Okay. That’s it for this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast. I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned as much as I did. I also hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re on. And if you have a moment, please leave us a rating or review so you can help us be discovered by more listeners.

Thanks again, and talk soon.

The post Emily the Recruiter on CLOCKING IN & Communicating at Work (ep. 217) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Professional identity, authenticity, and bias at work are more complicated than we like to admit. The challenge isn’t just about confidence or self-expression. For many people, managing what they reveal at work is a carefully strategized survival decision.

Organizational behaviour researcher Dr. Sonia Kang joins Andrea to share what the research says about identity at work, resume whitening, psychological safety, and the double bind ambitious women face in leadership.

You will learn why “bring your whole self to work” places an unfair burden on individuals rather than organizations; what resume whitening is and what audit studies reveal about hiring bias; why ambiguity is where bias thrives and how structure reduces it; and how leaders can design processes that give everyone a fair shot.

Sonia holds the Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion and is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour and HR Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

CONNECT WITH SONIA

🔗 LinkedIn: Sonia-Kang.com

🎓 University of Toronto Research Profile: Discover.Research.UToronto.ca/3195-Sonia-Kang

RESOURCES

New York Times – The Hour Between Babe and Hag: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/opinion/women-men-work.html?eafs_enabled=false

The ‘Busted’ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/busted/id1588965394

TRANSCRIPTION

Sonia Kang: Anytime where it’s unclear what the process is for a promotion or what the process is for even hiring, that’s where you can see bias in people’s individual idea of fit, let’s say, come through. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Professor Sonia Kang, Professor of Organizational Behavior and HR Management at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management.

I met Sonia a few months ago when we were both teaching in an executive education program there at the University of Toronto. We hit it off, and here we are.

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk.  My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m your communication coach. I coach ambitious executives like you through the Talk About Talk podcast to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can achieve your career goals. 

Sound good? You can learn more about me and about Talk About Talk if you go to talkabouttalk.com.

In this episode, you’re gonna hear my conversation with Sonia, where we talk about identity at work. Everything from the distinction between authenticity, transparency, and bringing your whole self to work, to her fascinating research on resume whitening, to psychological safety, and the leadership tightrope that ambitious women are forced to balance. At the end, as always, I’m gonna summarize with three key learnings so you don’t have to take notes. 

About the Guest: Dr. Sonia Kang, Expert in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion 

Now, let me introduce our guest. Dr. Sonia Kang holds the Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and she’s a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Toronto, where she’s also the academic director at the Institute for Gender and the Economy, or GATE.

Sonia earned a PhD in social psychology from the University of Toronto, and she completed a CCHRC post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. Here we go. Thank you so much, Sonia, for being here today to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about our identity at work. 

SK: Thanks so much for having me on.

AW: So your work focuses on identity and inclusion in organizations. I would love to start here with identity and authenticity and transparency and professionalism. What do you think about the idea of bringing your whole self? 

Why Bringing Your Whole Self to Work Isn’t Always Safe 

SK: So I think that in theory it’s a nice idea, right? Like, everyone wants to feel like they can be authentic.

They wanna feel like they don’t have to change who they are at work. But in reality, it’s, I think, overly simplistic to think that everyone can bring their whole identity to work. Some people can, for sure, right? And that is gonna be the people who are kind of part of the dominant culture and who, like, really feel, like, safe within a space.

But if you’re someone who’s from a group where you may have traditionally experienced discrimination or stigma at work, bringing yourself to work is, A, harder, and B, maybe not a good idea, right? So if you’re thinking about this in terms of, like, strategy, if you’re from a group where you have consistently experienced discrimination based on some part of your identity, like, bringing your whole self to work might not make sense for you, right?

And so strategically, it might make more sense to conceal parts of your identity or kind of downplay them just to get through the day. And so I think the goal of bringing your whole self to work is a good one, but it’s not really like an individual-level goal. It’s more of an organizational level goal, where organizations need to create the conditions in which that can actually happen for everyone.

AW: I love that you brought that up right out of the gate. It’s not all on the individual. Organizations need to create a culture, and we can get into psychological safety, uh, later, but create an environment where people feel comfortable to be themselves. So something that I sometimes share with my clients, Sonia, is I wouldn’t share my whole self anywhere, never mind at work, because you’d think I was crazy.

We have multiple identities, multiple roles, so we’re already filtering some of who we are and what we’re thinking and what we’re saying. What advice do you have for leaders who may be leading diverse teams or people who are A visible minority where they experience discrimination? What advice do you give them, I guess, in both of those contexts for the dos and the don’ts?

Why Structure Matters More Than “Fit” 

SK: Yeah. I think like one of the big things is making sure that you’re not making authenticity or, you know, like sharing things about your personal life or like bringing your whole self to work, making that kind of like a performance requirement, which can often happen when people start talking about fit.

Fit, I find, is really just like coded language for, “Are you like me? Are you like the other people who are here?” And so this happens a lot with I think when people are first entering into organizations, right? So when you’re doing like interviews, when you’re trying to like assess whether someone’s gonna like work with your group.

I think so much of that is based on personality, someone’s interests, and so that fit is really a proxy for similarity, right? And so that also carries forward often into performance evaluations, like who gets promoted, who gets really great assignments. And so I think like my advice would be to try to make sure that you’re not including something like that into your assessments of who will be best for whatever the opportunity might be.

Concretely, I think that means that you have to have a really like detailed idea of what your assessments will be based on, right? Because anytime you have like ambiguity, that’s where bias really thrives. So anytime where it’s unclear, you know, like what the process is for a promotion or what the process is for even hiring, that’s where you can see bias in people’s individual like idea of fit, let’s say, come through.

And so the more structure you have in terms of like what I’m actually gonna be assessing, the better, ’cause then you can stick to that in the same way for everyone. 

AW: So in other words, ambiguity is where bias thrives. I love that. You’re gonna be quoted on that. I had an experience when I was in my 20s where I was in the final round of interviews for a big job that I ended up getting, but in the last interview, the senior vice president who was interviewing me said, “Andrea, I have one last question.

On Friday night when we’re all going out for drinks, are you gonna join us?” And in my head I was like, wow, so he’s literally asking me, “Are you one of the guys?” Oh yeah, are you one of the guys? And I was, I said, “Of course,” right? And then afterwards I was like, yeah, that’s about as close as you can come to saying, are you gonna fit?

Are you gonna make sure that you fit in with this crew? 

SK: I also think, like generationally, that’s not of so much interest anymore. Like, I think that that idea of like you wanna spend all your time at work and like hang out with your work friends and just like that’s your life, I think is much less common now, particularly with the generations who are just like entering the workplace now and probably within the next five, 10 years.

Like, I don’t think that’s gonna be such a big focus. And so it’s good to get in the habit now, I think, of eliminating that kind of fit stuff from our kind of assessment of people and their performance at work. 

AW: Yeah. I think about that conversation back then, and it… You know, if you, if you… Speaking of thought bubbles, if you could have read my thought bubble, I was like, “Did you just say that?”

SK: Yeah. Right? Yeah. So- And also, like, I don’t wanna hang out with you, like, outside of work, you know? 

W: I’m like, there’s- Yeah, I was like, maybe, maybe once or twice, but really? Yeah. Come on. Yeah. 

SK: Exactly. Yeah. And like, not everyone can say that. People are gonna feel like they have to go every single time, and they have to be there, and that could be true, right?

Like, it could be like, again, like a lot of the responses that we see are strategic. It’s like, I know what’s gonna happen if I don’t do this. I feel forced to do this, but I’m gonna do it. And so that’s where that individual, like the kind of like onus on individuals becomes so hard to bear, and that’s where you see people like burn out and leave and try to, you know, like a lot of like mental health issues come up with that.

Creating a Culture Where People Feel Safe to Speak Up 

AW: So I think, I feel like this is a nice segue to the conversation about psychological safety, ’cause one of the components or elements of psychological safety is actually diversity, and celebrating diversity and creating an inclusive environment where people believe it’s safe to say risky things or do risky things, bring up issues, admit to challenges that they’re having, all of that.

So in this context of building on this idea of fit and diversity and then all of this research about how psychologically safe cultures are the highest performing cultures or teams, how can leaders encourage themselves to create and then sustain a truly psychologically safe and inclusive culture?

SK: People in those positions kind of, like, need to pay attention to the cost of disclosure, right? So, like, if you want people to disclose anything, right? So, like, whether that’s based on their identity, whether it’s based on, in the true, like, psych safety research, you know, like things that are going on that need to be fixed or mistakes that they’re making, you really need to diagnose, like, what’s going on when someone actually discloses.

Like, what is that process like, right? So is it, like, awkward? Do they really feel like they’re putting themselves on the line? Do you respond right away? Like, the worst thing I think is, like, having a culture where people are bringing things forward, but then, like, nothing happens with it, right? And so I think for psychological safety, like what happens before, so like is it super stressful?

Are people having to, like, work themselves up to say something? And then what happens after? Like are you actually following up on it, and does something actually change tangibly? I think those two parts around the disclosure are so important for leaders to pay attention to. Even like in parenting, right?

Like you want your kids to tell you stuff, for sure. But like my son tells me this, like I’m a big, like reactor, right? Like happy, like all kinds of emotions, I’m just like all in on it. And so sometimes he’ll say to me like, “Can you… I’m gonna tell you this thing, but like you can’t react to it.” 

AW: Good for him.

SK: Yeah, I know, it’s great. Like he’s 11. He gets it. So I have to, like, train myself to, like, downregulate that, like, emotional display, I guess, right? And so it’s not gonna be the same obviously with someone who works, like a direct report or something like that. But again, it’s like paying attention to the things that might prevent them from telling you what you want them to tell them, and then also afterwards, like how do you react to that information and what do you actually do, right?

Like what… How do you actually implement something that’s gonna help them or change something for them? Or is it the case that they just wanted you to listen, right? And like they want you to acknowledge that like, that’s a hard situation. Let’s try and think of some ways that you can deal with it yourself, right?

So like sometimes it’s up to you to solve a problem, but sometimes it’s really like scaffolding, and they’re just coming to you for support. 

AW: I remember hearing Amy Edmondson say that when someone comes to you, and I like how you said this, with a disclosure, the best way to respond is, “Thank you for telling me.

Please tell me more.” And I’m imagining even as a parent, right, when your, your child tells you something, “Mom, I messed up. Guess what happened?” And you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh,” like, “What are we gonna…” Right? Instead, “Thank you for telling me. Keep going. Tell me more.” Right? In the moment it’s really hard, but really effective.

SK: Yeah. And even like I think that sometimes is much more effective even than asking questions, because it leaves it more… Like sometimes, of course, questions are important because you need to, you know, like figure something out, figure some specific thing out that’s gonna help you to like understand it better.

But a lot of just like listening and letting people talk about the parts of the problem that are most important to them or that are most important for them to solve is really important in terms of like- tailoring your response to what’s actually gonna help them. 

When People Feel They Have to Hide Parts of Their Identity 

AW: So continuing with this theme of disclosure and bringing it back a little bit more to the theme of identity, some of your most fascinating research that I uncovered focuses on resume whitening and self-editing.

Can you share with the listeners a summary of what you did in your research and what the findings were? 

SK: Yeah, absolutely. So I really like you said earlier, where you were talking about filtering, right? And, like, you’re always filtering parts of your identity, and you’re not just, like, putting it out, all out there all the time.

So resume whitening is like that, except it is another type of individual response that is, like, forced on people when there’s a broken system. So specifically in the work that I’ve done on resume whitening, we look at situations where people will conceal or downplay cues that might reveal that they’re not white.

And so this could be like they might use an initial instead of a first name that’s like culturally linked. They might take off experiences that are for particular racial groups. So like an example of this is someone who was in one of our studies, won an extremely prestigious scholarship that was just for Black students, and took that off of the resume because that would show that they were not white, even though it’s like very competitive, like extremely prestigious, well-known.

They were like, “This signal is gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna help me.” So it’s those types of things that people are kind of either downplaying, which is, you know, like if you were part of, let’s say, Muslim Students Association, you might take out the Muslim and just put like Students Association, or concealing entirely, which is just removing it.

So that’s resume whitening. And what we find in our work is that when people are applying for jobs, there tends to be some element of the filtering that you’re talking about that is specific to these types of racial cues. In our sample, about a third of participants said that they had whitened their resumes previously, and I think it’s probably more common than that, right?

Like this is the number of people who told us about it, but you can imagine that there’s like some degree of this for all kinds of different identities, right? It could be like a gender thing. It could be about disability, right? If you’ve taken time off of work for something. And so we found that people knew about resume whitening and were engaging in this activity.

Then we wanted to know does it actually make a difference in terms of whether or not they get a callback for an interview. So we did something called an audit study, which is weirdly named. Basically, it means that we sent out resumes in a bunch of different areas across the US. Some of them were whitened, some of them had the racial cues that existed previously, and we did this with Black, white, and Asian applicants What we found was that when the resume just included all of the racial information, the highest rate of callbacks came for the white applicants, and there was a decrease for Asian applicants, and then an even bigger decrease for Black applicants.

Specifically, Black applicants were two to two and a half times less likely to get a callback than a white applicant. When you whiten, those differences disappear because, again, these are equivalent resumes. But I think the most, like, striking thing about this work is that we also sent out resumes. There was another variable where we sent out resumes to companies that either had diversity statements or did not.

This work is now, like, 10 years old, right? So this is before a time like now. Well, actually, now we’re in a different time entirely. Yeah. But there was a period of time where- 

AW: The pendulum has swung, Sonia … 

SK: Yeah, we’re like, maybe we’re back to this time. So there was a time where all companies had diversity statements, if you remember.

Like, it was just, like, part of the performance, right? Like, they all said that, like, “We value diversity, and we want everyone to apply.” So when we did this work, it was during a period where not all companies had this, right? So we sent out the resumes to companies that do have those kinds of statements and companies that didn’t.

So what was really striking there is that applicants really paid attention to those diversity statements. At the time, like, these were seen as genuine, right? And so it was a signal to them like, “Hey, you can bring your whole self to work. You can be yourself. You don’t need to whiten.” And applicants didn’t.

They were more transparent. But it backfired because those companies were no less likely to discriminate than companies that didn’t even mention diversity at all. So they were actually opening applicants up to more discrimination because they were sending the signal like, “You know, it’s cool. You can be yourself.”

AW: Be your whole true self. 

SK: Yeah. But there was no actual change in terms of what their process was. Um, and so then they ended up experiencing more discrimination because they were transparent. Now, I think, you know, like, we’re back, so, like, the pendulum has swung back, right? And we’re now in a period where organizations are kind of scaling back on diversity inclusion language.

Less so in Canada, obviously. But it would be interesting, I think, to, like, see how that works now after a period of time where it was ubiquitous, and I think, like, companies did a lot in order to change their processes and, like, you know, it would be interesting to redo it now and see how things, uh, stand in terms of the comparison to the original.

AW: What do you say then to people who are in one of these visible minority groups? Given this information, this is valid scholarly research showing that there is a negative impact for them to not whiten their resume. Do you say, “If you have to whiten it, whiten it?” 

SK: So people do ask this question, and I think, like with everything else, I think that there is a pressure to navigate a system where there is discrimination, right? And so if you experiment with your resume and you find that you’re getting more callbacks by whitening, and this is, like, strategically advantageous to you ’cause you need a job, then yeah, like unfortunately, it’s your choice. Obviously, I’m not gonna say, like, everyone should do this, but if it’s something that you wanna do and it makes sense for you, then I think people are gonna experiment in all kinds of different ways on their resumes, right?

With how they’re presenting themselves, or, like, even in interviews, right? Like, the kinds of things that you talk about, like experimenting, I think, is good to kind of figure out, like, where you’re getting the best feedback or, like, where your value, I guess, is, like, landing in the best way possible. But I also just, like, hate that people have to ask that question because it’s really, like, an organizational issue that there is room for bias anyway, right, at that stage.

Especially now, like, I think that there is a lot that can be done to kind of like, you know, like skills-based testing or other types of ways of making assessments. So that’s what I would say, but again, like, I just hate that people have to ask that question in the first place. 

AW: Yeah. You’re reminding me of a workshop that I coached a couple years ago where a young Asian woman of childbearing age brought this question up explicitly.

She said, “I have so many things going against me right now, and I feel like I need to misrepresent myself.” And I love the way you answered that. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a numbers game. If you’re gonna get a job, you kinda have to play the game. And one thing that I said to her was, “It’s not that you’re not a great mom, and it’s not that you’re not a wonderful member of the Asian community.

You show up as your best self, and eventually you’re gonna get promoted, and I know that you’re gonna end up changing the culture wherever you are to make it more inclusive.” And she’s like, “Yes, that’s the plan.” 

SK: Yeah. Um, again, like also generationally, right? Like, I think looking better because younger generations are less likely to whiten their names, like use an Anglicized name, especially in like bigger cities, right?

So like Toronto, like Vancouver, it’s gonna be a different story than, let’s say, like Edmonton or Calgary for a number of different reasons. But I think this is much more something that earlier generations of immigrants were doing, less so as we move down to like second generation, third generation.

They’ll keep their names, and I think because of that, there’s more familiarity around how to pronounce names and like, “Oh, I’ve seen this kind of name before.” And so hopefully, like that will also play a role ’cause I think some of the, like, issue with resume whitening is even just like a fluency thing.

It’s like I don’t know how to say this name. Like, I… We talked to a hiring manager who, like told us straight up, like, “When I see a name that I can’t pronounce,” like, “there’s so many other people, so I don’t wanna basically, like, hurt this person’s feelings by saying their name wrong, and so I’ll just, like, go to someone else.”

And it’s like, “Okay, you know how you’re hurting their feelings is, like by not hiring them.” So I think as people become more familiar with names from the groups that are, like, there’s higher levels in the population, I think that also helps as well; that familiarity piece is important. 

AW: Yeah. That’s true. I’ve noticed people avoid saying my last name. They sometimes will call me Andrea or Dr. Andrea. Before we get into, uh, one of my favorite topics that, that I can’t wait to hear your perspective on in terms of ambitious women and the leadership tightrope that they’re forced to balance on, I just wanna ask you about ageism.

Have you done any research similarly in terms of identity related to ageism? 

SK: Yeah. So actually, some of my, like during my PhD, I did a lot of work on ageism. Ageism is a really interesting case because it is much more acceptable than other types of discrimination. So whereas in, like, a movie, let’s say, right, like it’s much less likely now that you would see, like overtly racist or sexist content.

Like you do still, but not as much. But like there’s still this kind of like social, like acceptability of ageism. And so that’s a unique case because you’re coming up against… Like with racism or sexism or, uh, ableism, I think there’s like more of an understanding, like these things are bad and we should try and like minimize them, whereas with ageism it’s like I don’t know.

It’s, people still think it’s acceptable. They think it’s funny. Like, it’s a whole different type of discrimination. 

AW: I hadn’t thought of that, Sonia, but you know what you’re making me think is, ironically, it may be the last ism to go in terms of being socially acceptable or unacceptable, and ironically, it’s going to affect everyone because you’re gonna get older, right?

SK: Absolutely. And there’s work on, you know, like gendered ageism, for example. So, like, women will experience ageism much more negatively like men. As they get older, people are like, “Oh, they’re so wise, and they have all this experience.” You know, whereas women, it’s much more likely that the stereotype will lead people to think that an older woman’s incompetent or won’t be able to, like, put in the time that’s necessary ’cause she’ll be tired.

And you know, there’s a lot of gendered and intersectional effects of all of these different types of stigma, but I think ageism is particularly like, you know, for gender, there’s a much greater penalty for older women. 

Structural Solutions for Gender Bias at Work 

AW: There was a great article, you probably read it a couple of years ago in The New York Times, called The Moment I Went from Babe to Hag.

SK: Oh, wow. No, I didn’t read that. 

AW: Yeah. I mean, I’ll find a link to it, and I’ll send it to you, and I’m also gonna put it in the show notes. It basically illustrates exactly that point. And that is a beautiful segue to this other tightrope that women are forced to navigate. So my female clients, the ambitious women that I coach, often bring up this impossible balancing act that they have to navigate, where if they show that they are caring, then people think they maybe that they’re a lovable fool, right?

Versus if they are more focused or direct in their leadership style, people think they’re a jerk. So what do you think about that? 

SK: Okay. So this is a classic double bind. There’s so much research showing that women experience exactly what you’re talking about. There’s this, like, push and pull between competence and warmth.

So if you’re too competent, people think that you aren’t warm enough. If you’re too warm, people think you’re not competent. And it’s a very fine line. It’s not only the case that there are these stereotypes and expectations for women, but also the kind of leeway that women are given to deviate from those is so much smaller than what is afforded to men.

So men can display, like, a huge array of different behaviors and still be judged as competent, whereas for women, it’s, like, so narrow. You make one mistake, you have to prove yourself all over again. So in some of the work that I’ve done with my former PhD student, Dr. Joyce Hu, who’s now at UCLA, we look at coming up with more structural solutions to that, so it’s not up to women to, like, kind of walk that tightrope.

So as an example of that, one of the studies that we did looked at promotion processes. And so historically, women are much less likely to apply for promotions than men. And we looked at how that works, and everything in life, basically, you have to do something to be considered for a promotion. So we call this an opt-in in behavioral science and life in general, where just basically, like, you know, if you’re sitting at your desk and you know about this promotion opportunity, but you don’t tell someone you’re interested in it, you don’t apply, you’re not gonna get it So we looked at that and we thought, like, this is a place where stereotypes might be impacting women and preventing them from applying because they know, like, if you put yourself forward, people might think, like, oh, like, you’re so into yourself, you think you’re good enough to apply for this specific thing.

AW: Yeah. Who do you think you are? 

SK: Yeah. Who do you think you are? You’re gonna get, like, dinged on warmth. There’s so much that’s going into that for women, whereas for men, and there’s research on this, where men will look at an opportunity like that and just be like, “Yeah, for sure.” So let’s say this isn’t what the research is exactly, but I’ll make it simpler.

So let’s say there’s, like, 10 criteria that are needed for a promotion. Women need to see seven, eight, nine before they even consider, like, signing up. Sometimes it’s like you need 10 of those to say yes, whereas for men, at, like, three or four, you’re like, “Yeah.” They’re like, “Put me in.” Like, “This is for me.

I can figure out the rest. Like, it’s fine.” So we wanted to kind of undo some of that so that it wasn’t, um, kind of on women to decide whether they’re gonna put themselves forward in that very fraught kind of social context. So we switched up the way that the promotion system worked to be an opt-out. So basically, everyone who was past a particular threshold that we decided on beforehand of performance would be considered for this competitive process, but they always maintain the ability to opt out.

And so what we find is that when it’s the traditional kind of opt-in system, 75% of men choose to compete under those situations, circumstances, whereas only 25% of women will put themselves forward. But under an opt-out, that completely eliminates that gap. We’re now, you know, 75% of women, 75% of men are staying in the competition when they are kind of put there because they’ve been told, like, “You’re at the threshold.

You’re good.” That takes away that idea of I’m worried that people are gonna think that I think I’m better than I am, or whatever it might be that’s preventing women fr- to put themselves forward. So that’s an example of, like, a structural type of solution. We’ve also done this with hiring, with, um, job language, job ad language.

So we worked with a company who they were having a hard time hiring women for this entry-level position, which on its surface it wasn’t obvious, like, why women weren’t applying for this job. And so basically what we did is we looked at the job advertisement, and we were like, “Whoa. The way that this is written is, like, you wanna hire a man,” right?

There’s, like, the language in this job advertisement is signaling that this is a job for, you know, men to apply for, basically. And there’s lots of work on this looking at gendered language. So, you know, like, gendered language might be things like competence or brilliance or, like, rock star or, like, competitive, like, assertive, right?

Like, where it seems like these are neutral, but those types of things are much more likely to be associated with men, and men are allowed to be those things much more than women. So we took that job ad, and we changed it to make it gender neutral, and we were able to increase the number of both women and men who applied to the position, so it became more inclusive overall.

And I think that’s really important because it also speaks to… Like, we’ve been t- talking about generational stuff a bunch here, but I think it also, like, speaks to the changes in how people approaching work, right? Like, no one really wants to be that, like, hyper-masculine ideal of the ideal worker anymore.

Like, people want a more balanced kind of like… A job where you’re not, like, sleeping under your desk and, like, showering in the bathroom sink is, like, not appealing to people as much anymore. Um, and so taking gender out of that job ad helped them to diversify not only the applicant pool, but then also who got hired into the position as well.

AW: I love how we’ve gone full circle now, and we started talking about the individuals who are experiencing this, and you shifted it to at an institutional level: here are the things that you can do. You change it to opt out, and you watch the language. Words matter. This reminds me also of an incredible woman.

If you haven’t met her, I hope you listen to this podcast episode. I interviewed Michelle Budria, who’s the past CEO, recently retired, of McDonald’s Canada, and she said that when she got promoted to a certain level, one of her very insightful male managers said to her, “Michelle, you’ve now reached senior management.

You can start being your true self.” And she’s like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “I know that you aren’t the way you present yourself.” And so she let herself be the more kind and nurturing human that she is, and she came up with this kind of mantra or saying that she would say to people, which is, “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.”

And I was like, “Wow.” I did some research. I checked it out online. Apparently, the person that said that first was Al Capone, the mobster. Yeah. He meant it very differently from how she meant it. He meant, “You better be kind to me or respect me, or I might kill you.” She just meant, “I’m gonna get business results, you watch and see,” right?

Final Reflections on Identity, Inclusion, and Career Growth 

Love it. Okay, I wanna ask you the three rapid-fire questions. Are you ready? 

SK: Sure. 

AW: Okay. I know you’re big on psychology. I can’t wait to hear about this- what you say about this. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

SK: Okay, so definitely an extrovert. However, as a caveat, I do have introverted tendencies, so I need a lot of recharge time, I think, right?

Like, in any social situation, like, I’m not a true extrovert in the sense that, like, I come out of that and I’m, like, so energized and I’m just like, “Let’s go to the next one.” Like, I need, like, a cool-down period, and I do, you know, enjoy kind of a lot of activities that are more… I mean, I think it’s part of the job, right?

You know, like, being an academic, I think it’s a lot of introspection, a lot of, like, paying attention to your thoughts, like, communicating them. And so definitely I would say I’m an extrovert, but maybe, like, a little bit of introversion there from time to time. 

AW: You’re on the scale closer to extrovert, but you may be an ambivert, right? Like an extrovert-leaning ambivert. 

SK: Yeah. So my husband is actually a… He’s also on faculty at Rotman, and he’s a personality psychologist, and so when I say stuff like this, he’s like, “No,” like, “you’re an extrovert.” So that’s the professional opinion. 

AW: That’s gotta be fascinating living with a personality expert.

SK: Exactly, yeah. 

AW: Next question is, what are your communication pet peeves? 

SK: Okay. So this is a big one for me. It’s fluency. So I work on my s- work on this a lot with my students, is like, if you are communicating something in too complicated of a way, people aren’t gonna look at that and be like, “Wow, this is really complicated,” like, “I better work really hard to understand it.”

They’re gonna be like, “This is dumb,” like, “I don’t even know what this means.” Like, they’re gonna dismiss it. And so I think so much of communication is clarity and saying less. So, like, one of my favorite things to do with my students’ papers is just to, like, cut. And so they learn over time, I think, that, like you can communicate something once.

You don’t need to say, like, “In other words, blah, blah, blah,” or have, like, a lot of different types of, like, phrasing that sets something up. Like, it’s just, like, say what you wanna say and just be clear. And I think that’s even more so as people’s attention spans for information goes down. You have to be able to say something meaningful in a concise way.

It’s not about, like, saying nothing, right? It’s just put these ideas out there. It’s, like, very strategic communication to communicate a complex idea in the least number of words possible. 

AW: So are you a fan of the TLDR? 

SK: I love TLDR. 

AW: I thought you might. 

SK: I think, like, everything should be a TLDR. 

AW: Yeah.

SK: Absolutely. This is especially the case if you’re asking people for things. Like, I get a lot of emails of people asking me for something where it’s, like, this much information, and I’m literally like, “What do you want?” You know? So, like, definitely TLDR. 

AW: Yeah. Uh, so last rapid-fire question. Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending a lot lately?

SK: My favorite podcast is always The Daily, which is The New York Times podcast. I really love it ’cause they go in depth on one particular topic every day. So they kinda pick out and curate, like, what’s important, and I just really like the reporting on it. And then I’ll also plug Gates Podcast. So I’m the director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at Rotman.

We have a podcast called Busted, where each episode we bust a myth about gender and the economy. So we have episodes on things like entrepreneurship, where the myth is, like, you know, there’s a particular way that an entrepreneurship or an entrepreneur is supposed to look and act. And we show that that’s not the case, that so much of entrepreneurship is actually about, like, community building and connecting with people and lifting people up.

And, you know, it’s not just this idea of, like, you’re a tech bro who’s, like, trying to make a billion dollars. So in each of the episodes, we try to bust a myth like that. So I’ll plug that. I think, you know, that’s a podcast that people who like your show would probably be interested in as well. 

AW: And I will put a link to that in the show notes. Sonia, is there anything else you want to add to share with the listeners about managing our identities at work? 

SK: I think I would say that there is a lot of pressure, I think, to be yourself, but it’s hard because your whole life is about discovering who you are, right? And so it’s not like you have this crystallized idea at any given time, and I think that that’s okay.

And so being flexible and understanding, like, yourself slowly over time, that’s all I would say about that is, like, don’t kind of feel like you need to be a particular thing consistently all the time. Experiment and kind of find out what feels best to you. 

AW: I love that. In the work that I do, we talk about your personal brand not only can, but should evolve over time.

SK: Yes, exactly. 

AW: Thank you so much, Sonya, for sharing your insights and your time with me and the Talk About Talk listeners. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you. 

SK: Yeah, it was fun. Thanks for having me on. 

AW: Thanks again so much to Dr. Sonia Kang for sharing her time and her expertise with us. In particular, I loved how she answered each of the questions from the perspective of the individual and also the institution.

It’s not all on the individuals, is it? Now I’m gonna share with you, as I promised, three of my favorite points from this interview that I really wanna reinforce with you. The first is that bringing your whole self to work may be an aspirational goal, but it is not equally safe or realistic for everyone.

Organizations need to create the conditions for authenticity rather than putting that burden on the individuals. Secondly, resume whitening shows how people from marginalized groups often adapt strategically to biased systems, which highlights that the real problem, again, is organizational processes, not individual choices.

And last, I told Sonya that she’d be quoted on this point: ambiguity is where bias thrives. So leaders should reduce subjectivity in hiring, promotions, and performance reviews, all of it, by using clearer and more structured criteria, and be careful of the words that they use. That’s it for this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast.

Before you go, please leave us a rating or a review on whatever podcast platform you’re on, and make sure while you’re there that you follow and subscribe. Talk soon.

The post Managing Your WORK IDENTITY: Authenticity, Bias, & Resume Whitening with Professor Sonia Kang (ep. 216) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Cross-cultural communication is challenging. The difficulty is rarely about your accent or your vocabulary. It’s the noise in your head telling you you’re not enough, not clear enough, not confident enough.

Cultural intelligence (CQ) coach and bestselling author Victoria Rennoldson joins Andrea to share strategies for communicating with confidence across cultures, navigating imposter syndrome, and making sure your ideas get heard.

You will learn why confidence is a practice, not a feeling; the 3 strategies for moving through imposter syndrome (including why “said is better than perfect” is a game-changer); how to own your accent as part of your personal brand; and how leaders can design meetings so every voice is heard.

Victoria also shares her 4 pillars of effective global communication: confidence, clarity, challenging conversations, and connection.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

CONNECT WITH VICTORIA

🔗 LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/victoria-rennoldson

📖 Read Become a Global Leader: https://amzn.to/4xj0oO6

🎧 Listen to Victoria’s Podcast: https://culturecuppa.com/podcast/

TRANSCRIPTION

Victoria Rennoldson: Ultimately, communication is about talking human to human, understanding each other, being able to engage and lean into conversations. And so for me, that is the ultimate one that we all need as global leaders, wherever we are on that stage of career journey right now. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Victoria Rennoldson, a communication coach who specializes in cultural intelligence.

Lately it seems like I’ve had a lot of questions from Talk About Talk podcast listeners and from my coaching and workshop clients about things like accents and communicating at work across different cultures. That is why I thought we should invite Victoria here today. Before we get into this, let me introduce myself.

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m your communication coach. I coach ambitious executives like you through the Talk About Talk podcast to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can achieve your career goals. Sound good? You can learn more about me and about Talk About Talk if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com.

About the Guest: Global Leadership Coach Victoria Rennoldson 

Okay. Victoria Rennoldson is a global leadership coach, speaker, best-selling author, and podcast host who specializes in communication confidence and cultural intelligence. She helps current and emerging leaders increase their influence, visibility, and impact as they step into bigger roles internationally and across cultures.

Here we go. Thank you so much, Victoria, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk About Talk listeners about communicating across cultures. 

VR: I’m so excited to be here, so thank you so much for welcoming me on the show. Thanks, Andrea. 

AW: I’m really excited to hear your take on communicating across cultures, both at the individual level and at the group level.

But let’s start at the individual level. Many of the Talk About Talk listeners that I coach are ambitious professionals, and some of them, many of them, in fact, work in cultures that feel unfamiliar to them, or they’re communicating in a language that’s not their first language. So I wanted to start there. What general advice do you have for these folks? 

VR: So I think, you know, this is a lot of the work that I do, working with individuals and teams across cultures, helping them to navigate what goes on within the team, but also within the organization. And the first thing that I would say is that there’s a lot of noise that happens up here, so there’s a lot of thinking that goes on, right?

So, you know, I often work with individuals who are saying to me things like, “You know, I’m worrying about getting it right. I’m thinking about how can I get it clear, but b- by the time I work that out, like, the conversation’s kinda moved on.” And the most common one that I hear, actually, is, “I have imposter syndrome.

I sit in the room, I sit in the meeting, whether that’s virtual or in person, and I just feel like I’m not at the same level as everybody else. I can’t express it in the same way. I’m not nuanced enough in the way that I can say it.” 

AW: So hang on. Can I just rewind a little bit? I think in my mind at least you’ve just done is articulated three legitimate and significant pain points that many folks experience, right?

It’s “I’m gonna mess up”, “I’m gonna do a faux pas.” It’s “I can’t keep up ’cause it’s not my first language,” or it’s just, “I don’t have the confidence to speak up.” And each one of those is very significant. 

VR: Absolutely, and it makes it very noisy, right? So you’re trying to, you know, individuals who are trying to do their best job to either they’re aspiring leaders or maybe they’re already there, but they’ve got all this noise going on inside their head.

And this is not great because that’s what it is happening. It’s creating the pause between the thinking, the clarity, and them being able to express it, and that often comes across to others in the room as, well; they’re a bit quiet, or they’re just kind of often very reflective, or they’re not really contributing to the conversation in the same way.

But this could be a massive misunderstanding and actually a downplaying of what an individual’s talents are about. So this is obviously really important. What people have to understand is, how do I step through that? If somebody’s listening to this, going, “Wow, yep, that’s what I’m feeling, that’s what I’m thinking,” I hear a lot about this imposter syndrome, and I don’t doubt for a minute it’s real.

It’s absolutely real. And syndrome makes it also sound like it’s very negative, like something we’re suffering from. 

AW: Yeah, a disease. Yeah. 

VR: A disease. Exactly. Exactly. But instead, if we reframe it and then talk instead about, you know, I’m feeling like an imposter in this moment, then it kind of recognizes that you’re gonna get through this, that there are gonna be ways through. 

Three Mindset Shifts for Speaking Up with Confidence 

And I basically have three strategies to really help people think about this. 

AW: Beautiful. 

VR: I know you love three. Yeah. So three, absolutely three strategies. And so the first one of these is said is better than perfect. So, to all those people who are worrying, am I gonna say it in the right way? Or actually, even, is it the right thing to say in this moment?

In some situations, it’s better to get it out than to leave it unsaid. Silence is also a communication strategy, so we really have to recognize that sometimes we just need to say it, even if we don’t have all the perfect words to kind of say it in the way we’d ideally like to. So that’s the first one.

Said is better than perfect. The second one is really about conversation, not performance. And the reason I talk about this is that I really feel like sometimes people put that pressure on, “I need to be speaking at this level,” whether that means associated with their job title or the aspirational kind of promotional level they’re going for.

But this idea of, “I have to perform, I have to be speaking like this,” just creates too much pressure, extra pressure. So I break it down and say, look at some of the really successful speakers out there, some of the successful leaders. Actually, they could be talking on a stage to thousands of people and be very conversational in the way they’re coming across.

So don’t put that extra pressure on. Don’t see it as you’re trying to act as if you’re something and speak as if you’re at this kind of level. Just get the words out. Treat it like a conversation, no matter who’s in the room. So that’s the second one, conversation, not performance. And then the third one is your communication makes your visibility.

So often the people that I’m working with are aiming to some sort of goal. They’re aiming towards a promotion to a senior leadership level. And so what we have to recognize is it doesn’t matter how talented you are in your work, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, unless you communicate that, unless people see that, and you make it visible, then that cannot be recognized and acknowledged.

So connecting– I’m often doing work with people, helping us connect it to their goal, what is it they’re trying to achieve, and their communication will make that visibility. 

AW: That’s right. So I’ve heard this beautiful quote, I don’t know who it’s attributed to, but, “You must speak for your work. Your work does not speak for itself.”

And I heard a very wise person say that, “If you don’t talk about your work, you may as well have not done it.” So early in our careers- We have someone looking over our shoulder, making sure we’re doing the work, and giving us credit for the work, right? And then when we get more senior, I think it becomes even more important. Do you agree? 

VR: Absolutely that. And I regularly have conversations with people who say, “I know I’m doing great work. I do believe in what I do, but I think it should speak for itself.” And the reality is, and this is another cultural lens, it depends on the context. So I find that I’m often working with people from a variety of cultures, some from South America, some from Asia, some from other parts of Europe.

But primarily they’re working in contexts that are influenced by North American, UK styles, which tend to be more focused on actually you do need to make that work visible. To be acknowledged for it, you don’t need to just do the work, you actually need to make it visible as well. So that’s an adjustment because people worry about, “Am I gonna come across as too confident, too arrogant even, by just talking about myself all the time?” And this is quite a big difference, I think, culturally in style. 

AW: This is something actually that I wanted to double down on with you, Victoria, because I get this question often too. So this topic of various communication, I guess, expectations or norms across cultures, specifically the extent to which we promote ourselves, is a question that I also often get from my clients.

For example, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but within North America, there’s a big difference between the stereotype of the typical female Canadian. So Canadians are known as being kind of less dominant than Americans. This is a stereotype, but it, the stereotype exists, right? The Canadians versus Americans, and also women versus men.

So a female Canadian could walk into a room that’s maybe primarily American men Again, I’m not discriminating, but I am playing with the stereotypes here, and they’re like, “How do I overcome that, you know, be a good girl and do the work and don’t talk about your work that’s going on inside my head when I know that I need to speak for my work in order to be recognized?” How do you deal with all that? Can you unpack that? 

Understanding Different Communication Styles and Expectations 

VR: Yeah. So the first thing is actually awareness, and you’re right. There are lots of stereotypes out there, but then there is also very good research which sits behind cultural intelligence. So in the work that I do, I use a particular model which has 10 different behavioral preferences where we can really analyze how individuals and teams communicate, behave, interact, show up at work.

And this is really helpful because this gives us a language to describe differences in approaches. And some of the things you’ve just talked about there might be differences in approach around individualism and collectivism. So what that means, very briefly, is whether you’re more focused on the self and talking about yourself, or you’re more likely to consider yourself part of the group and talk about, say, group goals, group achievements.

So that’s one dimension. Another dimension might be at play here, which is about how directly you communicate, whether you’re somebody who really likes to communicate directly and be very brief and to the point, both for positive and negative messages, or whether, actually, you’re more indirect. And actually, that’s a very big one across some of the cultures I work with.

And then there is expressiveness. How expressive is somebody? For some cultures, I’ve worked a lot with Japanese clients in the past, it is much better to be very neutral, to come across as professional, so not very strong emotional expression, either for positive or negative communication. Whereas I’ve worked a lot with Brazilians, and for them it’s really important to be expressive, to show your passion, your commitment, your warmth, and really show personality.

So you can see these are just a few of the dimensions. I mentioned there are 10 altogether. We’re not gonna go through all of those, but you can understand, therefore, what’s at play here. So awareness is absolutely the starting point. For somebody who’s listening and thinking, “Yeah, I recognize this,” recognize it, yes, it’s who you are, but it doesn’t define you.

So you have the absolute ability to adapt, but that is a choice. And, like, bring it back to the original conversation. It’s not just our national culture that shapes who we are; it’s our gender, our lived experience. What sector do we work in? Like, I’ve worked with engineers, and I’ve worked with people in the advertising industry, like, completely different cultural norms.

So we are shaped a lot by multitudes of our cultural background. We’re not just about national culture. So the point is, yes, start with awareness, but then you’ve gotta get into what we call CQ strategy or culture intelligence strategies, and this is where we really need to play with this and test. We’re not trying to change who we are, but we’re trying to adapt and see what might work better for our goals.

AW: In my personal branding language that I use when I’m coaching clients, I call it filtering. You’re always your true self, but you will filter what parts of yourself you wanna share depending on the person and the context that you’re in. So thinking about the culture in terms of, like you said, like the national culture, the industry culture, the corporate culture, even your team culture, plus your own propensities, thinking about what parts of you you wanna share.

And maybe that maybe generally you’re a shy person, but you know, you do have some great thoughts, so you would filter, filter out the shyness and bring up the great points that you have in a meeting. Is that kind of an example? 

Plan, Practice, Reflect, and Improve 

VR: So I think it kind of breaks down into three parts when it comes to the strategies.

One is planning. So, actually recognizing most people are not naturally confident from the day they’re born. Like, it doesn’t matter how they come across; they’re not often like that. There are very few like that. Most people work on confidence. That’s why it’s one of the pillars in my work, in the book that I wrote.

It’s really important to recognize confidence is a practice, it’s an action, it’s not just what you feel. 

AW: It’s a skill you can learn, right? 

VR: That’s it. That is it, Andrea. So, like for me, this is something we have to understand. We have to do the work. We have to work on confidence, and there are various things that I do in my work to do that.

But includes recognizing actually what are you great at? Like not being shy about that, really recognizing your talent, the value that you bring. So, really kind of focusing on this and then connecting and planning to the goal. Why is it you would communicate? Why would you speak up? What is it you’re trying to achieve here?

And planning for that clarity, if that is something you worry about, like really thinking about how you’re gonna come across and get your ideas clear in that particular meeting, for example. Then the second part is the awareness, recognizing in the moment what’s going on. Not just speaking or getting kind of caught up in the di- the monologue in your head, but really thinking about like, “Okay, let me respond to what’s going on here.

Let me see if I try this out, will this work?” And again, not letting the perfectionism get in the way. And then, very importantly, is what happens afterwards. Doing a review, thinking about, okay, what did land well, maybe what didn’t go so well. Not to beat yourself up about it, but actually to kinda go, “Well, what would I do differently next time?

What am I gonna try?” And this is where it gets very powerful. ‘Cause if you can treat it like a series of experiments, then this is where you kinda don’t get too hung up on getting it perfect. It’s really about this series of testing that you’re doing. 

AW: I love that, Victoria. I don’t, I don’t hear that a lot.

And to the listeners out there, it might sound like common sense, but it is not common. So what we’re talking about here is doing a disciplined review after you’ve been in a meeting and asking yourself what went well, and perhaps more importantly, what didn’t, and objectively speaking, what am I gonna do next time?

Most people don’t do this. It is pretty easy, right, Victoria? I mean, it’s not hard to do, but most people don’t do it. 

VR: Well, this is the thing I find, Andrea, is that people are busy. Of course, they are. Like, it’s really easy to go straight from one thing to the other. But the reality is nothing changes unless we put the little pause in somewhere.

And it doesn’t have to be straight after meeting. It just has to be at some point, I would advise within 24 hours, otherwise we tend to forget. But just have a place, like whether it’s your notebook, on your kind of phone, make a note, but just capture it really quickly as you’re going through the day. It doesn’t have to be big or anything dramatic, but it is noticing, and so that you can do something different with it next time.

AW: I think that this advice, Victoria, is gold. So whether it’s in a notebook or in a list on your phone, tracking your effectiveness in meetings, your communication skills, writing down and recording what you did well and what you wanna do better next time. One thing that I’ve heard from a couple of my clients is that, yes, it’s easy to do. It’s also true that most of us don’t do it, but knowing that it’s gonna give me a competitive advantage, I think, is what motivates some folks that I’ve worked with to make that extra effort.

Why Your Accent Is an Asset, Not a Liability 

I would love to ask you a specific question that I get all the time, and it’s about people’s accents. So we all have an accent, it’s just that it becomes more salient when we’re in with a group where ours is more unique, right? And so people will often ask me, “How can I erase my accent, Andrea? Can you help me erase my accent? And can you help me be more comprehensible to the people that I’m communicating with?” That’s a big ask that, that I hear frequently. 

VR: I can imagine. Yeah. And it’s something that I get asked about as well. I’m sure. 

AW: I’m sure. Yeah. 

VR: And I have a really specific point of view on this. 

AW: Okay. 

VR: So this comes up quite a lot, and actually interestingly, I’ve heard it quite a lot recently in the last sort of year or so, connected to people who have been job searching, and being told, “The reason you’re not getting through the interviews is because of your accent.” And it makes me mad. It makes me really mad because here’s the thing, I’ve been running this business now for 11 years, and in all that time, I have probably only met maybe one or two people maximum where their accent meant that I found it very difficult to understand them.

That means I had to listen incredibly carefully to what they said. So my question always is, is this person clear? So can I understand them without having to really listen super carefully, and are they comprehensible? For the vast majority of people, that answer is yes. They are clear, they are comprehensible in the accent. The concern, where it comes from, the concern they’re really raising is, I sound different to other people.

Is that a problem? Now, obviously, context is everything. If you are the only person with an accent in a very uniform, very kind of homogenous environment, then of course you’re gonna notice that. You’re gonna worry about that, maybe. But there is the thing, like accents are often part of our personality.

It’s part of who we are, and you could live in a country for many, many years, decades in fact, and still hold that accent and that be part of who you are. Does that make you less of a communicator or a speaker? No. And the point I would come to is this is connected again to confidence. It’s often connected to ” Am I clear enough?”

But that is less to do with the accent, the pronunciation, and much more to do with can you express those points? Can you frame the way you’re speaking so that people– it lands, that people understand your messages? And that’s when, like people say that to me, that’s the space I’m focusing on, confidence and clarity.

AW: Beautiful. I am delighted, Victoria, that your answer aligns with what I say. As long as your words are understandable, comprehensible by other folks, don’t worry about it. They will register that you have an accent, and in fact, back to personal branding, you can make it part of your brand. Listen, I have global experience, or I have a different global perspective, and these are things that people are seeking, right?

As they ascend the leadership ladder, they’re looking for people with global perspective. So maybe you can actually use your accent as evidence of that global perspective. The other thing that I often will suggest to people if they’re worried about People understanding them because of their accent is for them to slow down 

VR: Absolutely. Yeah, slowing down is gonna help. It’s also gonna help because it gives you time to think what comes next, how can I start this thought and express it kind of well. But for sure, slowing down helps you; it helps the other person. But the key thing as well is to recognize that communication comes in lots of forms.

So yes, the spoken form we’ve mostly talked about here today, but there are lots of other ways as well to express your ideas, to contribute ideas. And if I flip it, you know, thinking about leaders with maybe lots of people on their team with different accents, different cultures, often you have to be quite creative about thinking about how do you encourage that contribution and get people talking.

How Leaders Can Ensure Every Voice Is Heard 

AW: Let’s dive in there. So we’ve covered the individual level. Let’s shift to the group level. You are a manager or one of the leaders on a team, right? With people that come with a variety of personalities, of course, and cultural contexts. How do you make sure that everyone’s voice is heard? 

VR: I mean, that’s a big question as well, because I’m sure there are people listening to this who’ve been in meetings where they feel like they’re hearing from the same voices time and time again, and there are just some people who are just not speaking up.

And I’ve also had, you know, conversations with leaders where they’re saying, “Well, you know, I’ve spoken to that person individually, and I’ve said to them, ‘You know, we wanna hear from you. Please just, you know, say what you think.'” But here’s the thing, and this comes back to cultural context. For some people, just inviting them to unmute and speak up, or even in the same s- space, like even if you’re all in the same room, you know, just saying, “Well, just speak up and say what you think,” like a lot of people find that quite tricky for a variety of reasons It might be that, again, they’re processing.

They’re needing to think about what they’re gonna say. Maybe they have confidence challenges about, you know, as we’ve spoken about earlier today, like really, how do I come across in the way that I want to? It could be just because, actually, again, they’re collectivists, coming back to the cultural language we were using earlier.

Like, they just prefer sometimes to talk in smaller groups to get a sense of where everybody else is at before they express their point of view. So, as a leader, let’s get really practical about this. Like, how do we really encourage people? Because ultimately, we do want to have that richness and diversity of the voices and perspectives.

That’s where the innovation comes from. It really comes down to being really deliberate and, you know, really thinking about what I call 360 communication, what happens before, what happens during the meeting, and what happens afterwards. And that includes things like thinking about how people are contributing anonymously, perhaps even to things like word clouds or polls, and all the exciting tools that are out there to use for this purpose. It might be about getting some asynchronous contribution going on, so that means obviously getting contributions before you even turn up in the room. And again, that gives somebody maybe confidence to express their views, what they’re thinking.

But also, I always say that the meeting doesn’t finish when the time is up. Also, what happens afterwards? So if you’re not hearing the richness of the ideas and contributions from everyone, go have a conversation. Work out what they do think. Now, clearly this is coming with an assumption that you’ve got the luxury of time, and that’s not gonna be possible for everything, right?

I do get that. I really get that. But I think it’s about designing, really designing good conversations, designing the communication. And then on the flip of this, if people are listening to this and English is your first language, you have that privilege of that, you have the privilege of being in the dominant culture of the group, just be super aware of how you’re speaking.

Are you speaking too fast? Are you making jokes and using humor in a way that might not be understood by everybody there? Are you using idioms even, like, that just are not understood? We have to be quite conscious of this when we’ve got a very diverse, multilingual, multicultural group. 

AW: I think about this when I’m writing my email newsletter.

Sometimes I’ll start to think about a metaphor or an idiom, and I’ll be like, “Ooh, that’s not gonna land with some of my audience.” So that, that’s a fantastic point. I hadn’t thought of that. 

The Four Pillars of Global Communication Excellence 

I’ve got one more question for you, Victoria, before we get to the three rapid-fire questions, and it’s a doozy. I’m gonna warn you, I would love to hear what you believe makes someone a truly effective global communicator.

VR: I mean, I think for me, having done a lot of the research around the book that I wrote last year, Become a Global Leader, for me, I summarize it and focus it in on the four pillars that I think are really important. Each individual, each collective will need that in different combinations, just like when you’re mixing paints, depending on who they are and where they are in their career.

But basically, very simply, those four are confidence, which we’ve touched on many times today; clarity, not only in your thinking, but in the way that you communicate; challenging conversations, knowing how to navigate those. Again, that can be quite complex culturally. And then finally, connection. Ultimately, communication is about talking human to human, understanding each other, being able to engage and lean into conversations.

And so for me, that is the ultimate one that we all need as global leaders, wherever we are on that stage of career journey right now. 

AW: That is a beautiful list, and I love the alliteration. All right, are you ready for the three rapid-fire questions? 

VR: Absolutely. 

AW: Okay. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

VR: So I’m gonna cheat on this one. I’m an ambivert. I used to be… Used to think I was totally extrovert until COVID, and then I realized I’m much more introvert than I kind of anticipated. So I do have, like, moments of both. 

AW: Got it. Okay I’m really curious about this one for you as a communication coach. What are your communication pet peeves?

VR: So this one’s a big one, and I think it also ties into our cultural conversation today. It’s when somebody calls me by the name that I’m not. So I’m a Victoria. I’m never a Vicky, and yet it’s surprisingly interesting how many times people do say to me, “Vicky,” without permission, without asking. 

AW: What?

VR: Exactly, right? I, 

AW: I can’t even… So I wouldn’t have even gone with Vicky. I would’ve gone with Tori ’cause I, I have many friends that are Victoria, and they go by Tori. But I would never shorten someone’s name without their permission. Is that, does that happen a lot? 

VR: Surprisingly, yeah. And it always shocks me.

And I think, to be honest with you, the other person is doing it because they wanna connect. They think that that’s being kind of connective. But when I translate this as well culturally, you know, how often have we turned up to a meeting and not really been entirely sure how to pronounce somebody’s name?

My advice is just ask. Just say at the beginning, “Could you give me some guidance? How could I say your name correctly?” or, “How can I pronounce your name correctly?” That is so appreciated. And never, never shorten anybody’s name without permission. Our name is our identity. It’s who we are ultimately. And so I think this deeply matters in a time where, you know, we might be just on virtual calls a lot of the day.

So actually, our names are super important to us. So yeah, like I think this is why it’s my pet peeve and why I think it’s really important in the context of this conversation. 

AW: Yeah. I just wanna double down on this for a minute ’cause I, I, I totally agree with you that our name is a very significant part of our identity.

One last question. Is there a book or a podcast, Victoria, that you find yourself recommending to people lately? 

VR: The one I was listening to, um, a lot recently is called New Ideas, Big Thinkers. And it’s not about communication ex- exactly, but it’s more about the ideas in the world today. So it talks a lot about human connection.

I’ve just been recently listening to an episode about, um, our aging brain and can we stop that? And I just love being kind of inspired and listening to different ideas, and some of them are sometimes connected to the, what I’m doing in my world, in my work, and other times it’s just about, actually, this is kind of interesting to learn about and important to know.

So I do recommend that one, and I find it absolutely fascinating. Um, really, really good one to follow. 

AW: I have not heard of that one, but I will definitely add it to my queue. Before we go, I just wanna ask you one more time, Victoria, do you have any advice for listeners who struggle across cultural contexts, whether they’re the person leading the meeting or more likely they’re the person that maybe feels like an outsider, or they feel like they’re not part of the group?

How can they improve their communication and their presence in this context? 

VR: It comes down to, if I think about everything we’ve talked about here, recognizing you’re there for a reason. You’re there because you have points of view, ideas, perspectives that are different, and that’s going to ultimately be really great benefit to not only the team, but to the organization.

But unless you say it, unless it is said, and the leader, for example, invites you to say it, unless this happens, those ideas are silent and nothing changes. And remember, silence is a communication strategy as well. So I really encourage people to move through that silence, to really think about- Said is better than perfect.

That it is really about the conversation and not the performance, and that there is a real goal to communication, which is about the visibility. This is where I’d like to sort of leave the ideas with your listeners. 

AW: It’s a beautiful, powerful, and important message. Thank you so much, Victoria. 

VR: Thank you, Andrea. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. 

Three Key Takeaways for Communicating Across Cultures 

AW: Thanks again to Victoria. Don’t you just love her accent? I guess I should have said that to her directly, but she has a beautiful voice, doesn’t she? Okay. Now I’m going to briefly share three points that I want to reinforce from this episode. The first is the power of focusing on the before, the during, and the after.

If you’re the meeting leader, before the meeting, you might wanna plan how you’re gonna make everyone feel included and provide them with different ways of participating during the meeting. And then after the meeting, you can follow up with those who didn’t. As an individual contributor, I encourage you to plan what you’re gonna say, especially for those high-stakes meetings.

And then after the meeting, Victoria and I had a great conversation about this, consider your follow-up. We recognize that you are very busy, but having the discipline to take a few minutes after the meeting’s over to debrief with yourself what went well and how can you improve next time. This can become your strategic competitive advantage.

So really focus on the before, the during, and the after. The second thing that I want to reinforce is I want to encourage you to think about your brand, your personal brand, and your identity. And yes, your name and your accent are both significant elements of your brand, so own it. And third and last, Victoria said this several times, and I love it.

She said, “Said is better than perfect.” I’ll say that again. “Said is better than perfect.” If you are one of those folks who struggles to speak up in meetings, I want you to make this part of your mantra. And that is it for this episode. If you’re not already subscribed, please hit subscribe now on whatever platform you’re on, and that way you won’t miss any more communication skills coaching from me.

Thanks for listening and talk soon.

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