Prepare with your organization’s public relations or communications experts, if appropriate.When an elephant steps on a trap, no more trap.
Unfortunately, we’re not elephants. If you step in a trap when you’re trying to break through and win people over, chances are pretty good that the trap is going to win.
Traps can exist when you’re communicating in normal or tough situations, but when you step in one in a normal situation, your audience probably won’t notice. Or they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and ignore it. In a tough situation, falling into a trap will begin to erode your CODE score, and if you don’t escape quickly, you won’t be able to win over people when they’re angry, worried, and suspicious of everything you say.
It’s easy enough to step into a trap all by yourself, but if the situation is hostile and high-profile enough, you may encounter people who deliberately set traps to ensnare you. Just as my firm helps to prepare business clients for tough situations, so do experts who work for opposition groups and other organizations that seek to thwart our clients’ goals. They train activists on how to make it more difficult to win people over, in part by getting them angry, worried, and suspicious in the first place.
In Chapter 1, I mentioned a client that wanted to build a high-voltage power line. As part of our work, we helped organize a series of community meetings to engage residents who lived and businesses that operated along the line’s proposed route. Most of the meetings went off without a hitch, but at a few, some attendees sought to disrupt the proceedings. Based on the tactics they used (accusing company representatives of lying, implying they cared about nothing but money, and throwing around a lot of jargon), we concluded that they must have been trained to undermine the strategies, skills, and techniques we’ve discussed in this book. They were trying to erode a communicator’s trust and credibility rather than to bolster it.
To avoid traps, whether inadvertent or deliberate, it’s important to know what they are, as well as how to escape if you do fall in. Based on my firm’s experience in helping clients navigate tough situations, this chapter describes the most common traps to watch out for. Notice that we’ve touched on some of them in previous chapters.
To be precise, we might call the first trap the lack-of-preparation trap. If you fall into this one, it’s entirely your fault. Remember Senator Kennedy’s ill-fated interview with Roger Mudd, described in Chapter 8. The senator had prepared carefully for all the difficult questions, but he wasn’t ready for one of the simplest and most straightforward of them all: “Senator, why do you want to be president?”
One of the messages I’ve tried to drive home in this book is the absolute need to prepare and rehearse for tough situations in which you need to win over people when they’re angry, worried, and suspicious. Communicating in situations like these is as much a skill as acting, dancing, or singing. No professional performer would ever step foot in front of an audience without sufficient rehearsal. And that’s on top of the years of hard work it took to get them to the top of their professions in the first place. In a tough situation, you are onstage, essentially performing, whether you’re talking one-on-one with a colleague or friend, speaking to an auditorium full of people, or conducting an interview with a television program that reaches millions.
Your rehearsal needs to cover the most difficult credibility questions you can possibly expect, as well as general fact questions—friendly ones and even out-of-the-box odd ones. You should have well-rehearsed answers that use stories conveying your key messages. This should prepare you for essentially any question that can come your way.
If you don’t prepare, you will fail. It’s as simple as that. And you can be sure that your opponents, if they exist, will be prepared. At one of the meetings in a community along the power line, opponents turned out dozens of angry, worried, and suspicious residents. To survive, our client’s representative had to use every strategy, skill, and technique at his disposal.
If you fall into this trap, you’ll have a very difficult time trying to climb out. So you have to avoid it. Here’s how:
Prepare with your organization’s public relations or communications experts, if appropriate.
Make sure you have your stories and messages set.
Think about the questions you’re likely to be asked and the answers you’re going to give (more on how to structure those answers is coming in the next chapter), as well as the audience you’re trying to reach. And be sure to remember the benign questions as well as the difficult and hostile ones.
Grab a friend or a colleague for at least one tough practice session where you give your speech or presentation (without PowerPoint!), tell your stories, and respond to questions, both easy and hard.
This last point is the most important. You really can’t over-prepare. My firm gives a lot of presentations to potential clients whose business we seek. Before we go “live,” we engage in multiple dress rehearsals to make sure we’re ready and the stories we want to tell and messages we want to convey are honed to a fine point. I can tell you from experience that delivering a presentation in front of my colleagues is far more nerve-wracking than delivering it to a room full of strangers. Once I’m comfortable in front of the people I know, I’m confident that I’m ready for the people I don’t.
We covered the humor trap more than once, so I won’t dwell on it again here. To summarize, don’t tell jokes, even of the self-deprecating variety, and don’t smile unless you’re absolutely sure doing so won’t affect your CODE score. In normal situations, humor can be a good way to break the ice and establish rapport with an audience. In tough situations, it almost always sends the wrong signal: that you don’t take your audience or their concerns seriously.
Being negative is another trap we’ve covered before. Success comes from being positive (S = B+), so whenever possible, convey your stories, messages, and supporting information in a positive way, and approach the conversation or presentation in a positive state of mind. Try to avoid negative words and phrases, particularly when you’re answering credibility questions. The occasional “no” or “never” is OK, but if you do use those words, make sure you’re not repeating the allegation levied against you:
Your Boss: Did you fail to achieve your goal because you didn’t put in enough time?
You (wrong): No, I didn’t fail because I didn’t put in enough time.
You (right): On the contrary, I worked harder on this project than anything I’ve worked on before. Rather than a lack of hard work, I believe the problem was . . .
We use hedges all the time. They typically take the form of a phrase that removes some degree of certainty from a statement:
Well, it really depends.
In my opinion . . .
In normal situations and everyday conversations, hedges are just fine. In fact, they tend to bolster trust and credibility because they suggest a more precise assessment of accuracy. But remember that in tough situations, people perceive everything you say and do through the most negative possible filter. Rather than candor, hedges are interpreted as dishonest and distracting in tough situations.
If you hedge in response to a credibility question from someone who is angry, worried, and suspicious, the questioner will believe you’re doing it to give yourself a certain amount of wiggle room. An angry, worried, and suspicious person will conclude that you’re not willing to take a firm stand because you’re not sure what’s really going on—or even worse, you know exactly what’s going on but you’re trying to hide it from them. (Hedges are OK in response to fact questions when you don’t know a precise answer, but try to keep even those to a minimum.)
The best way to avoid the hedge trap or to climb out if you fall in is with certainty and support. Mr. Malone, the power company executive, didn’t say, “I think you and your families are safe.” He said, “You and your families are safe, and here’s why.” If you slip up and use a hedge, look for an opportunity to go back and correct your mistake. If you never get the chance, just keep going and avoid using any more hedges.
The guarantee trap is particularly tricky, and activists are fond of it. We specifically prepared Mr. Malone for this trap, because we anticipated that someone in his audience would ask whether he could guarantee that no one would be harmed by the leak from his power plant. We all know that there are no guarantees in life, so it would seem that you have only two choices when stuck in this trap:
1. Acknowledge there are no guarantees and thereby lead your audience to believe that the risk you’re imposing on them is very real and must be resisted at all costs, destroying your CODE score and your ability to win people over; or
2. Make a guarantee that you know you can’t back up, which ultimately will subtract openness points from your CODE score, not to mention the possibility—however remote—that you’ll get sued.
Fortunately, you have a way to sidestep this trap. Rather than guaranteeing what the questioner has asked, say what you can guarantee:
Questioner: I want a guarantee that my family isn’t going to get sick because of the leak from your plant!
You (wrong): I think we all know that I can’t guarantee that, because there are no guarantees in life.
You (also wrong): I can absolutely guarantee that your family won’t get sick.
You (right): Let me tell you what I can guarantee you. I can guarantee you that the chances of anyone in your family getting sick are incredibly small. As I’ve said, I told my own family that they’re perfectly safe, and they’ve been swimming and boating on the lake all summer. I can also guarantee that I will do whatever it takes to prevent something like this from ever happening again. And I guarantee you that we will share everything we learn about this incident with you, so you know exactly what’s going on.
Also known as the hypothetical trap, the worst-case scenario trap involves making guesses about what might happen if the worst possible scenario were to play out. There’s never a good time to engage in that kind of speculation, because it will only make the real risk, whatever it may be, seem that much larger.
The best way to avoid this trap is with a bridge. Several years ago my firm helped to prepare the CEO of a food company to testify before Congress regarding an outbreak of salmonella. His company wasn’t responsible for the outbreak, which made several hundred people sick, but he got caught up in the congressional investigation because the outbreak started in one of his customer’s facilities. We’ll call him Mr. Dawson, because we’re going to talk about him again in Chapter 10.
We spent a lot of time rehearsing, particularly answers to several different worst-case scenario questions that we expected. He never got one of those questions, but he was ready for an exchange like the following:
Congressman: Given the amount of tainted meat that got into the food supply, what’s the maximum number of people who could get sick?
CEO: Congressman, rather than speculate, I think we should focus on what we know to be true. We know that about 400 people got sick, and that’s unacceptable. Even one case is too many. We know that, fortunately, as far as we know, everyone who got sick has recovered.
If this trap catches you and you do respond directly to a hypothetical, try to bridge back to a more specific response as quickly as you can. This is one of those cases when it’s OK to admit to a mistake by saying something like this:
CEO: You know, I made a mistake responding to a hypothetical question, and that’s an unproductive exercise that may leave people with the wrong impression of what happened. I really would prefer to stick to what we know to be true, which in this case is . . .
If you fall into the deception/dishonesty trap, it’s impossible to climb out. Once members of an angry, worried, and suspicious audience decide you’re trying to mislead or deceive them or are outright lying to them, your CODE score will be irreparably damaged. You might as well pack up your things and go home. Since you have no way out of this trap, the only recourse you have is to not fall in. Keep in mind that being deceitful or dishonest is not the same as saying you don’t know or making a mistake. Even in a tough situation, people will forgive you as long as you promise to provide an answer or acknowledge or take the time to correct the mistake. This trap involves deliberate deceit or dishonesty, which has no place in breaking through and winning people over under any circumstances.
This trap also will catch you if you try to cover up, which is so often worse than the crime itself. It certainly was for President Clinton, who was impeached not for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky but for lying about it (specifically, perjury and obstruction of justice). Had he simply acknowledged the affair and suffered the embarrassment, he almost certainly would have been spared impeachment. Of course, in President Nixon’s case, the crime was worse. As I’m writing this chapter, we’re in the midst of a controversy over Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s decision not to release more than two years’ worth of his tax returns. Many are wondering whether he decided that this “cover-up” is preferable to whatever embarrassment he was trying to hide. But it’s important to note that no one accused Governor Romney of criminal activity of any kind.
While honesty, as the saying goes, is the best policy, you may find yourself in tough situations where telling the truth isn’t so simple (perhaps that was Governor Romney’s problem). The truth can be subjective, and even if it’s objective, your audience—and your opponents, if they exist—may not accept it anyway. If litigation is a possibility, your attorneys may prohibit you from sharing the whole truth. In these circumstances, you should share as much of the truth as you can and back it up with stories, facts, and data. Be sure to have very good reasons for why you can’t share all of the truth, if that’s the case. In my firm’s experience, legal issues are usually what stand in the way. Fortunately, we’ve found that audiences, even in tough situations, usually accept the threat of litigation as an acceptable reason for holding back information. If you know when you will be able to share that information, say so and follow up (just as you would if you didn’t know the answer).
We’ve discussed jargon already, so there’s no need to dwell on it here. Activists love to set this trap. They’ll stand up at public meetings and ask jargon-laden questions designed to confuse people who are already angry, worried, and suspicious. Their goal is to erode your CODE score. Don’t use jargon yourself, and if someone tries to trap you (or simply asks a question that innocently includes jargon), take the time to define the terms.
Remember, too, that plenty of words and phrases you throw around in everyday conversation may not seem like jargon to you but would to most eighth-or ninth-graders. Even simple business terms such as fiscal year, CEO, and stock options can be confusing to many people and come across as impersonal. Other phrases, including out-of-the-box thinking and new paradigms, have become clichés as well as jargon.
Simply put, the money trap involves placing a price tag on risk. If people believe you’re imposing a risk on them, particularly one that threatens their physical well-being, they don’t care how much it’s going to cost you to eliminate it. If it’s going to take $1 billion to make sure that a landfill isn’t going to leak, they’ll want you to spend $1 billion. If it’s going to take $100 billion, they’ll want you to spend $100 billion. The same applies to emotional and financial risks. If you have to lay off someone for economic reasons, don’t dwell on that aspect of the decision—and definitely don’t talk about how much money the organization is going to save by letting her go. Discussing the role that money plays in making decisions makes people feel cheap and undervalued. And it plays into the assumption, which is always present but even more pronounced in tough situations, that people in positions of authority only care about the bottom line.
I slipped partway into this trap myself recently. My firm was a member of an organization that fell on difficult times. The Great Recession took its toll, and by 2012, the organization was losing members and running out of money. Another member of the executive committee and I had to have a difficult conversation with the group’s executive director. We weren’t sure we were going to make it, and we needed to discuss our options. We started off by talking about the budget and accounts receivable, but it quickly became clear that the executive director wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t want to hear about money or finances; she was worried about her job. She was thinking, quite understandably, with the emotional part of her brain. So we switched gears and talked about how difficult we knew this was and assured her that our top priority was doing what we could to make sure she was OK. Once we backed up out of the money trap and applied some caring and empathy, the conversation went much more smoothly. (Unfortunately, the organization did not survive. Some outcomes are beyond even the power of the strategies, skills, and techniques contained in this book.)
Like the dishonesty/deception trap, the numbers trap is one you will not be able to escape once you get caught. This trap falls into the category of risk comparison, which we’ll cover in more detail in the next section. It typically comes into play in tough situations that involve public health—the leak from Mr. Malone’s power plant, for example. Government agencies and others tend to talk about public health risks in terms of “one out of how many.” If a train carrying toxic chemicals derails in this community or that community, how many people out of the entire population will be hurt? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? We played a little of the numbers game in Chapter 4.
Let me give you an example of how the trap is set. We’ll return to the scenario in which one of our clients testified before Congress regarding a salmonella outbreak (though I should point out that, while we prepared for this question, this particular exchange did not take place):
Member of Congress: This outbreak was contained geographically, but let’s say we have a nationwide outbreak someday. What are the chances that someone in my district could die as a result?
Client (wrong): Oh, I don’t know. It’s one in a million.
Member of Congress: One in a million. Well, there are more than 300 million people in this country, right?
Client: Yes, that’s right.
Member of Congress: So if I do a little simple math, and assuming you’re right about the chances that someone will be killed, that means we can expect 300 people to die during a nationwide salmonella outbreak.
Client: Well, I—
Member of Congress: Is that acceptable to you?
At this point, the client would be caught in the numbers trap and would have no way out.
Avoid this trap by not talking about “one out of how many.” Again, use bridges to move from the question to a more appropriate and effective response:
Member of Congress: This outbreak was contained geographically, but let’s say we have a nationwide outbreak someday. What are the chances that someone in my district could die as a result?
Client (right): You’ve raised a hypothetical question, and I can understand why you’d ask it, but I prefer to deal with what we know and can prove . . .
This is also a good place to look for ways to borrow credibility from those who have more than you do. To do that, you would cite an independent source. In this case, regulatory agencies and universities would be particularly effective.
In Chapter 4, we learned that risk perceptions are influenced by numerous factors that often conspire to turn big risks into nonexistent threats and very small risks into imminent dangers. That makes the use of risk comparisons a dicey proposition, because it’s difficult to be sure what your audience perceives to be risky.
Over the years, my firm has had many clients ask if they can compare whatever risk they may be imposing on people with an obvious danger such as smoking or driving. It seems to come up most often with clients that want to build something controversial—a landfill or a power line, for example. They often don’t understand why people would protest and resist something like that when they engage in other, much more dangerous behavior on their own. The factors that influence risk that we covered in Chapter 4—trust, benefits, fairness, dread, etc.—explain why.
In this sense, risk comparisons work in much the same way as credibility (see Chapter 2). In tough situations, and normal ones too, it can work to your advantage to borrow credibility from someone who has more than you. But you have to be careful; if the source from whom you’re borrowing turns out to have less credibility than you, your own will fall, along with your CODE score.
Similarly, a risk comparison works only if you successfully compare whatever risk you’re imposing on others with a risk they perceive to be greater, as well as one they believe to be similar. For instance, you might compare driving with riding a train, but definitely not nuclear power with eating peanut butter (which, believe it or not, people in my firm have seen some nuclear engineers try to do). Remember all of the factors that influence risk: control, understanding, benefits, fairness and equity, and so on. Just because something is actually more dangerous than something else does not mean that people perceive it that way. Toxicity also plays a role. Caffeine is more dangerous than plutonium because almost no one will ever be exposed to plutonium, but don’t try telling that to the general public. You’ll do a lot more harm than good.
Telling someone that the landfill you want to build in their community puts them at less risk than their drive to work every morning will fail (we’ve seen experts try that, too), because the vast majority of people perceive very little, if any, risk associated with driving and because living near a landfill and driving are not similar activities. You’ve just compared the risk that you’re imposing on them to one they perceive to be much lower, which tends to magnify your risk and make their own scarier at the same time. They’ll fight the landfill even harder and worry a little more on the way home.
Some experts have found that the use of risk comparisons can help put risks in perspective for people when they’re angry, worried, and suspicious. They discuss “risk ladders” and “first-rank” and “second-rank” comparisons ordered by desirability. While these concepts are based on sound science, they are complex and difficult to employ without a great deal of skill and practice. My firm counsels clients simply not to use risk comparisons. It’s not necessary, and the chances are very high that you’ll do more harm than good. If someone specifically asks you to compare risks, use a bridge, with a little caring and empathy thrown in for good measure:
Question: Help us put this in perspective. How does the risk involved compare with, say, the risk of contracting cancer from smoking?
Response: I can appreciate that you’d like a little perspective on this. I know I would if I were in your situation, and in fact, my wife asked me exactly the same question. Rather than trying to compare this risk with others, particularly one like smoking and cancer, which is so dangerous and involves so many variables, I think it’s more helpful to look at what we’re talking about in the following way. . . .
Sometimes your audience will try to make an argument based on a false premise. We prepared Mr. Malone, the utility executive, for this trap, because we anticipated that the people in his audience would assume that what his power plant leaked into the lake would be toxic and dangerous. We particularly rehearsed how to respond to the following question:
Audience Member: Since the stuff you leaked in the lake is so dangerous, will you pay for people’s medical bills when they get sick?
Mr. Malone’s instinct might have been to say something like this:
Mr. Malone (wrong): The leak is not dangerous, and you won’t get sick, so there’s no point in talking about medical bills.
But that breaks too many of our rules. It’s not very caring and empathetic. It also includes too many negatives and repeats the allegation. Here’s what we counseled Mr. Malone to say if that question came up (which it didn’t):
Mr. Malone (right): I appreciate that question. I’m sure many other people are wondering the same thing. Let’s step back for a minute. As I said, the leak was very small, and we have been unable to detect any traces of it since the moments after it happened. You and your family are perfectly safe. You can swim and fish without any concern. Medical bills won’t be an issue.
Another form of the false-premise trap involves a forced alternative:
Audience Member: Isn’t it best just to shut the plant down so we can be sure this will never happen again?
Audience Member: Shouldn’t we ban swimming and fishing in the lake just to be sure?
The best response to these questions is something like this:
Mr. Malone: I hear what you’re saying, and I too want to make sure everyone is safe. As I said, my family lives here, and my grandchildren often swim in the lake. But the actions you suggest are unnecessary, and your family is safe. The leak was small and undetectable, and people should feel free to enjoy the lake as they always have.
In either case, the way out of the trap is the same: express caring and empathy, deny the false premise or forced alternative in a positive way, and bridge to one of your messages.
In my firm’s experience, these are the most common traps you’re likely to encounter. Apply the strategies, skills, and techniques we’ve covered in this book, and you should be able to avoid any others you may come across. If some do ensnare you, you should be able to escape.
Now that you know what to avoid, let’s look at a model my firm has developed for answering any question in a tough situation.