Understanding the Neuroscience Behind Effective Communications - with Dr. Laura McHale

0:00 Daniel Nestle: welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, when we think about how we communicate within an organization, or team or even with clients and customers, if we're not just speaking off the cuff or naturally, then we tend to depend on what we learned through experience or technique or both. But rarely do we delve deeper to understand why we communicate the way we do. Why Some things work. And some things don't, you know, maybe just maybe some understanding of psychology and how the brain works would help us be better at messaging and storytelling and employee communications, and more. I mean, maybe armed with some understanding of neuroscience, we would not only be better communicators, we'd be better leaders, Unknown: better managers.

0:54 Daniel Nestle: I don't know. Maybe I'm just making all this stuff up. But I'm sure my guest today can shed some light on this, what I think is an incredibly interesting and important topic for the field of communications, a former head of executive communications for a global financial institution in Asia. She earned a doctorate in leadership psychology, and is now an executive coach, consultant, lecturer and writer, a charter member of the British Psychological Society, and American Psychological Association, tongue twisters. An emcc accredited Coach and an IABC accredited business communicator, she is deep in the field of communications, and her recent book neuroscience for organizational communication is a must read for both communicators and the leaders they counsel, I can't wait to dig into neuroscience, communications, and a whole lot more with a fascinating Unknown: Dr. Laura McHale, Laura, Daniel Nestle: how are you doing is great, see you what's going on. It's Laura McHale: great to see you too, Dan. And it's a pleasure to be here to talk about one of my favorite topics, Daniel Nestle: that being neuroscience, communications, boasts both of those things, all the above Laura McHale: all of those things and throw in a little, you know, little dashing of psychology as well. But all of those things were are some some of my favorite things. You Daniel Nestle: know, I mean, I think when we look at the communications profession, you know, and we think about where we are in the world today, I mean, not a great place in the world, and we as communicators have a important role to play. And more and more, we're under scrutiny.

2:27 Unknown: And we, we are, Daniel Nestle: we're sort of subject to the vagaries of, you know, geopolitics and, and business issues. And, you know, let's, let's face it, since the pandemic, it really hasn't been the straightest, or most, you know, most direct ride to success, it's been bumpy, and it's been curvy, and turning and twisty. And that's just continuing, we're in this VUCA, you know, uncertain world that we're in. But communicators have a really, I think, important role to play. And I think we're under skilled, like, I think we're under skilled and not ready for the future, like as a whole, right? I mean, there are people in our field who are really great at what we do, and, and they have plenty of experience in their, their counseling, their leaders, but when we think about, you know, moving forward, there's so much more that we're going to need to be doing in order to shepherd our organizations, you know, through these times, and be the kind of advisors and counselors that we need to be so my where I'm getting with this is, you know, the number of people in communications, who have successful careers and communications and sort of say, you know, what, I think we need more, I need more skills. I'm gonna go get a doctorate in psychology. I don't know how many people I mean, I think I can count on one hand, how many people those are, clearly I'm looking at one. So Laura, can we start off by sort of, if we can go through a little bit of what got you there? Like, how did you start off as a communicator, you know, running a pretty big comms function across across Asia for big bank, you know, how did you go from there to saying, You know what, I think I want to go get my doctorate psychology.

4:01 Unknown: What happened? Oh, it's Laura McHale: a very good question. You know, I will preface this whole kind of conversation by saying that so many communicators have actually contacted me to ask me about my journey. I think there's a really core interest in psychology and human behavior among communicators more generally. Um, but for me, I really I you know, ever since I'd gotten my master's degree, which feels like it was 1000 years ago now, but I had always been interested in continuing my academic studies on my master's was actually an international affairs. I studied international finance and business more specifically. And it was after that, that I focused on communication. As I continued in my comms career. My last full time comms role. I was a speechwriter for a CEO in Asia Pacific. I adored my boss and it was really interesting. Being a full time speech writer, I'd usually had more of a corporate communications hat, but this one that particular role gave me an opportunity to do much more of a deep dive into leadership. And I realized that leadership itself was really fascinating. I, in particular, I was just amazed by how people's behavior changed when when my boss entered a room, whether it was employees sometimes doing a little brown nosing, sometimes not. A client's also kind of naturally gravitated toward a leader. And I became really interested in what that was all about. It wasn't just the leadership piece, but it was also the followership how follower behavior actually changes. So I

5:35 started looking at graduate degrees, I think, initially, I was gonna get like another Master's in Applied Psychology or something like that. And I was really, I was looking at it, I was living in Hong Kong at that point, I had been living in Hong Kong for a few years, I inserted my voices. So gradually, all of a sudden, let me just take a sip of tea, no worries, Daniel Nestle: you know, you speak a lot for your for living, you know, and, and I should tell our listeners, you know, this is, this is like, this is the world we live in. I'm in New Jersey, and Laura is in Hong Kong. So we're on opposite timezones, it is morning for her in the mornings, before I have my coffee, before I do my, my tea and my water and everything. You know, sometimes it's, it's just you got to get the engine going to get the voice out there. So, you know, we're bearing, we've all been there, and we've been there earlier. So we're bearing with you a little bit.

6:32 Unknown: So I also really appreciate you doing this in the evening or at night, your time Dan. So thank you very much for accommodating my age on time and nightbird it's cool. Yeah. Laura McHale: Yeah. So um, I became interested in looking at these programs, I didn't really want to do clinical psychology, I was interested more on the organizational side, and that I didn't quite feel like an IO Psychology program. Io, psychology is great, but it's more of looking at assessment centers, and you know, kind of more industrial aspects of, of, you know, assessing human behavior in organizations, I stumbled upon a program that was a new doctorate that was being offered by a small school in Boston called William James college. And it was a doctorate in leadership psychology, which is not even a real field of psychology, there is no APA, you know, division on leadership, psychology, it's incredibly multidisciplinary. And, but I remember when I, when I saw the program online, I sort of felt my energy shift was like, Ooh, this one is interesting. And the more I learned about the program, the more excited I became. And it was actually in doing that program that I took my first neuroscience class, we had a required course in the neuroscience of leadership. And, you know, I was interested in neuroscience sounded great, but when I took the course, it was just this kind of love affair

8:04 with neuroscience was born. And I decided to actually do a concentration in the area. So before long, you know, I was taking neuro anatomy and dissecting sheep's brains and all sorts of things. But I just fell for the topic, hook, line, and sinker. And I felt really fortunate to be studying at the time that I was, because neurosciences just you know, with the with the advent of fMRI machines, and the new access to brain imaging that we have never had before. It's just an incredible time to be in neuroscience, and the application of neuroscience to organizations and different aspects of organizational life is brand new, it's really pioneering this field. So I think it's a great time to be exploring it. Oh, Daniel Nestle: yeah, very much. You know, and I read when I read the book, I have to admit, you know, being several decades out of university, and in grad school, and, you know, getting into a text that was not only highly relevant to my day to day work, but also academic, that very, that it's science, neuroscience is a real thing, you know, so going through the models of, of behavior and going through the, I guess, some of the different terminology that floats through the book, and you do make it very understandable for people, which is fantastic. You know, but I remember like just just reading, reading the

9:34 book and thinking, you know, gosh, and by the way, shout out to Michael Nestle, Dr. Michael Nestle, who's, who's also in who's in Singapore, who introduced me really more to neuroscience way back in the early days of my show. And Michael, you'd be probably pleased to know that I have continued to be very interested in it, but you'd be disappointed to know that I haven't really cracked too many books on the subject yet, except for Laura's But I am I'm really, you know, I'm really fascinated by the whole thing. So like, you're when you talk about neuroscience and you know in psychology is can you just back up a little bit and keep sort of illustrate where neuroscience where psychology ends and neuroscience begins or aside, you know that what, what is the relationship between those two? Because not, it's not the same thing. And I think people make some mistakes that way. Definitely Laura McHale: there no, there's definitely some overlap there. I think it's most helpful to look at neurosciences really the physiology of behavior. When we look at human behavior, and psychologists have all sorts of models and frames and ways of understanding human behavior, it gets incredibly complex even within the field of psychology, you know, if you look at a construct such as personality, for example, you have a million different ways of looking at it, you can understand it from more of a neuroscience lens, you can take a more kind of psychodynamic perspective, looking at the role of the unconscious, and particularly in our group processes, you can take a look at the social psychology aspects, more humanistic psychology aspects, there's just a lot of a lot of different ways to slice and dice it. When we look at the neuroscience of, of some of these behavioral phenomenon,

11:26 we're really trying to understand what it looks like from a brain perspective on and neuronal activation. But we're also because it's such, number one, these are such complex ideas, but neuroscience itself is so complex, there's a lot going on. And there's also these are physiological reactions, these aren't just taking place in the brain, these are usually full body events. And, you know, even when we look at something like communication, which would be just one small aspect of human behavior, it's extraordinarily complex. From a physiological perspective, you know, we use, we have motor control that enables us to move our tongues and moves move our our lips and our mouths to create sound, we have memory that's involved so that we can remember the right words to use. We have all sorts of emotional processes going on, so that we can understand the stress, the stress and intonation in people's language, and how to interpret that, which can sometimes be a little easier said than done for sensing a little bit of tone and what somebody's saying, and again, activating memory centers in the brain so that we know how to interpret that. So these are incredibly complex constructs on but neuroscience does try to give a physiology to behavior in this way. I don't know if that helps. Or maybe

12:58 Daniel Nestle: it does. I mean, it certainly does. And, by the way, if it doesn't, if you need to, you know, people need to understand that a little bit deeper, just rewind, listen, again, it's just it, believe me, it takes, it takes a little while to sink in, because, you know, we, we can understand, I think some physiology because we see our fingers and we see our hands and we see our other but we don't You don't you don't have a have a special like kind of lens that shines a light into your brains that you can see what's happening in there. And it's it is extraordinary complex, as you say. But particularly in the field of communications, you said it yourself that communications is an extraordinary complex field. I'm not going I'm not you know, not to sort of compare or be relativistic about other fields of other professions. But when we when we talk about comps, you know, there's this old school kind of feeling that it's a soft or fluffy area and I think that's because it's been associated with very difficult to measure metrics that sometimes companies doubt whether or not they're effective or not, but really when it comes down to it communications, itself and I should never say when it comes down to it because it's complex, and then I'm trying to simplify something that's impossible simplify. But when it when you think about it more deeply. The interaction from from one person to one person is hard enough, reading all the cues that's on that you see in one person understanding

14:33 you know, whether you're in person or whether you're you know, speaking through through zoom or you know, through a, you know, a screen or video conferencing apparatus, which we all do now, you know, the, the way you communicate in one meeting is very, very different from the way you should be communicating in another the, the cues you pick up from Laura, on the screen are different from the cues that you pick up from Laura, when she's sitting across the table from you, or you know, in the read, like, you can see things differently, you feel things differently. And you you talk about this very extensively in the book. And you know, I love your show here a little bit on Zoom fatigue, by the way, I've shared that again and again, and, and to this day, I try to remember to turn off my own video when I'm on Zoom, you know, like, because, because you taught Laura McHale: me and your book taught me that this conversation.

15:26 Daniel Nestle: Yeah, and you know, it's, it's, you start to look at yourself and start to focus in on on all these elements that your brain isn't supposed to be processing, when you're having a conversation with someone else. It's not natural, you know, so it's not so there's no, it's not, it's no surprise that there's a neuroscientific and psychological breakdown, when you're speaking to yourself and to others at the same time, and it causes all sorts of issues with your dissonance, that, yeah, will tire you out, Laura McHale: or something like that, it's so great to have, you know, to understand that there's a neuroscientific explanation, because I think, you know, a lot of people when, when they're on zooms, and there's that self face reflection, they feel like it's some kind of personal failing, you know, that they're narcissistic, or they're really self absorbed by focusing on their own images. But it's not that at all, it's just hardwired to focus on our own images. And, and that's where our eyes are naturally going to gravitate. You know, there's some knock on effects that are a bit more sociological, like the increase in dentistry in plastic surgery. That's been borne out of the COVID Zoo, epidemic, oh, for coming on. But it is fascinating. Knowing that even for, you know, for something as simple as zoom, and having that self face reflected back to us naturally draws our attention in our eyes. I just love stuff like that.

16:51 Daniel Nestle: Oh, yeah. And it's, it's, that's just one small tidbit. And maybe that might be the easiest thing to immediately put into effect from reading your book. But, but I want to talk about the some of the bigger picture items. And you said a few minutes ago that the, the physiology of behavior is, is the neurosciences, the physiology of the mind, and then just the physiology of behavior. And these are, these are full bodied events, right, there's a lot of hat, there's a lot of stuff that happens to you, you may or may not notice as you're communicating with others. And, you know, some of this, you know, does build a result or kind of lead to anxiety and stress and a lot of issues that, that kind of float up between two people or are on a team or in an organization. So, and sometimes it's exacerbated by being remote and sometimes not. But what I wanted to kind of look back at is okay, you mentioned earlier that you're really interested in in what got you interested was the way that people will react to the leaders when they come in the room? Right, was that it's that follower? That followership, I suppose. And it got me thinking immediately, and I've said this before, on my, on my, on my previous iteration of my show, and certainly to a lot of my friends that, you know, I lived in Japan for 16 years, I came out of Japan with this kind of sense of deference for leaders, right, like, I didn't feel comfortable speaking to leaders in a flat or, you know, sort of egalitarian way, then, you know,

18:38 after a little while of being in the US, it wasn't getting any better at that I was still really uncomfortable talking to people who were my superiors. And that ended up kind of result, again, a little bit of his trust in me, because the leaders are like, Well, this guy is holding back. Whereas I was just, I was just sort of, you know, doing what a follower I think is supposed to do, or what I thought a follower is supposed to. I've gotten a lot better at this over time. But how like, what's up, just throw throw this at you? What is the neuroscience behind that? Like, how, why does that happen? And how does it change across cultures? Maybe that's a bad massive question. But let's, let's hit Look, Laura McHale: that's that's a compliment. This is a juicy one down. Let me just kind of unpack this a little bit as I think about this question. Because, you know, the first thing that comes to mind when you describe that particular dynamic i I'm thinking of, if we look at this from a kind of social psychology perspective, or sociological perspective, if we use like Hofstede as cultural dimensions, Hofstede identified a number of dimensions that include things like power, distance and gender egalitarianism. For example, the degree to which men and women are regarded as equals in society individually realism versus collectivism, etc, these are all kind of Hofstede constructs, which are incredibly helpful. You know, you talk about a culture like Japan where there would be a very high power distance. So that's a lot of very hierarchical culture, a lot of deference, for leaders, lots of rules, and that are written

20:20 or unwritten, about how leaders are treated and how we regard them. So there, I love the story, because you have a little bit of a culture clash, even though it is, you know, returning to your own culture in the United States, it still feels a little foreign after having been in Japan for so long. From a neuroscience perspective, you know, I'd need to think about this a little more. But immediately, what comes to mind is from David scarfs, that I'm sorry, David rocks scarf model, where he looks out, these are kind of the one of the largest stress and reward triggers in the brain.

21:03 And I should mention, David Rock was very kind to me, because he let me use his trademarked model in my book. So thank you, David Rock. Thanks, David. But when we look at status, is a very big one status triggers both threats and reward, when we are high status, we tend to releases a lot of dopamine, a lot of feel good, feel good neurotransmitters in the brain neuromodulators. And so that can end when our status is threatened when we're regarded as very low status, that also can trigger a lot of stress, full stress cascade in the brain. But also this sense of the are in the scarf model is stands for relatedness. What David Rock called relatedness. And that's the degree to which we're in group and out group. With leaders, when we look at things like leader distance or power distance, we can talk about very, you know, physical, like, how close do we sit to with a leader? is the leader in DDP even in the same town or country that we live in? But how close we could be to to that leader? Do we shake their hand? Do we interact with them? There's also a social aspect, you know, you ran into your leader, your CEO out on the street, would you kind of run away and hide? Or would you go up to her or him and say, Hey, let's grab a beer, if you're not doing anything want to grab a cup of coffee, you know, the degree to which we imagine a scenario like that with with cringing or not cringing can tell us a lot about leader distance. So there's, there's a lot going on there. So the

22:49 constructs, again, I keep on talking about these complex constructs. But we're, you know, when we talk about work, we're just, that's just full of complex constructs. And the thing is, we have to remember that they are complex for reason, we cannot be overly reductionist in how we identify a lot of these dynamics. A perfect example, I think, is one that is is very close to many corporate communicators hearts, and that is the ubiquitous term employee engagement. And, you know, every employee survey that has ever existed, always has a measure or claims to have a measure of employee engagement.

23:33 But when we think about what we actually mean, by employee engagement, and it does mean different things to different people, it becomes clear that this is a very complex construct, it is not something that's easy to understand conceptualize, and it's definitely not easy to measure. So I think, yeah, I think with a leader, power distance with leaders wouldn't be an equally complex construct. And that poses a real problem with neuroscience, you know, mentioned before that, you know, we can't we're not at the stage yet where we can kind of open up somebody's head and see their thoughts. But they're, you know, people used to regard like genes. You know, before, like the human genome process into this discovery of DNA. We knew genes were a real thing. We could see hereditary traits that are passed down in generations, we could see familial, you know, similarities of parents send their children, but we couldn't actually see them. With neurosciences the same way, a lot of things we are suddenly able to see, but there's still a lot more, a lot more mysteries of the brain and we can't open up a brain and see thoughts just yet.

24:47 Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a fascinating question. Can you see? I mean, you know, there's, there's all the studies about alpha waves and do the brain waves that other people talked about, but it's actually cool. but more stratified than that. So you can get impulses and like, you know, you could get readings of the way people are, you know, their physiology while they're thinking different things or saying different things. And you know, what, we have lie detector tests for a reason, right? But, but I was just, I was just thinking that it would be very interesting to be able to, like, you know, hold up a hold up a, a, an object or a lens or something, you know, to yourself and say, okay, my brain is feeling this way, today, you know, that if we can get to that point, it'll help us to have those relationships, because, to me, like, self awareness is a huge part of the way that we communicate with one another, it's certainly a huge part of executive communications. And I think you've touched on this in your book a little bit too, like, when you have a leader, who is addressing their company, like, what's the right tone to use? What's the right? What's the right type of communication to use in to engage employees, for example, which is, as you just said, difficult to do. When you think about the variety of employees and the way that different people respond to the to status, or relatedness and so on, right? What's that? What's the power distance between me and the power is interesting to

26:22 me and the, and the CEO is a lot different than the power distance between, you know, somebody working on the line, you know, in a manufacturing factory, and the CEO, and they're going to interpret every message differently than I will. So scale that out, you have 1000s of employees, that's potentially 1000s of different interpretations of of a single word. And then you start to imagine, you start to understand how communicators get caught up in, let's say, the right thing, and let's kind of get the words right. And we very rarely get them exactly right. And in reality, it's a big win when we do. I was just thinking about those models, though, like the, you know, that because what you said about power distance, and the scarf models, which which for for our listeners, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness are the are the five things in the scarf model, which I know because of Laura's book, these are threatened reward triggers. And the biggest thing is this is this pain of social exclusion that comes from that. I think that's what you mentioned in the book is there's, to me, that's what hit me hardest, right? That pain of social exclusion, because I'm a very, you know, extroverted and, like, the relationships with other people is so, so important indicator of my own success, that when that's threatened, it's a problem for me, and, you know, the scarf model helped me kind of understand that a little bit better.

27:56 Unknown: Yeah. And if we, Laura McHale: the relatedness one is really interesting, this whole idea of being in group and out group, it turns out that when our relatedness is threatened, it lights up the so many pain centers of the brain, it's an extraordinarily painful phenomenon. And, and that's important to know at work, because even something as seemingly minor as excluding someone from a meeting, that they may feel that they should attend, or, or, you know, believe that it was important to them individually, excluding them without having a conversation with them about why that exclusion is taking place.

28:42 That triggers an enormous threat response in the brain. It makes sense if we think about this through kind of an evolutionary biological perspective, for our species to survive, we cannot be alone, we are required to work in collectives, that's what we're designed for in order to survive and to thrive. So it makes sense that this would exist from an evolutionary perspective, but it's incredible how ingrained it is in us and how important it is at work to speak to that sense of relatedness. Yeah, Daniel Nestle: I just did a, you know, it's the end of the year here, when we're recording right now, this will be by the time people hear this, it'll be early 2024.

29:25 Unknown: But right now, we're Daniel Nestle: recording still, it's still the, the closing of 2023. And at the end of the year, when things slow down at work, and I'm a corporate communications person, and I'm sure that a lot of of my of our colleagues out there or friends out there in the same boat will say yeah, you know, we're sort of waiting, making sure that there's no crisis happening. We're monitoring things we're, you know, we're sending out messages. We're making sure that things that making sure that that the lights stay on, you know, but this is a good time to do all your corporate training, right, that's been piling up have you sit down and you're like, hey, nobody's going to call me right now. So I will take the next two hours and go through, you know, the, the 2023 thing that I forgot to do, which was, you know, fraught, anti fraud training or whatever it is. So, so I just, you know, I caught up on all my training in the last couple of days. And in the light of like, the scarf model, for example, and in the light of these threatened reward triggers, they make a lot more sense like it, you, you look at big issues that we face in corporations and in society as a whole, like bullying, harassment, you look at just discrimination and so on. And the, what you often find is that people who are, you know, people who are guilty of harassment in from the, in the old days, it'd be like, Did you touch the person or, you know, did is there like, something had to happen. But as our understanding of people kind of has become

31:10 refined, for sure. It it's not, it's, it's all about how the message is received, it's not on the, it's not necessarily whether you've intended to do something or not, if the recipient of the of your message of your action of what you do, feels that you're you've done something that's unwelcome or, you know, or, or has caused some sort of harm to them in some way, you know, what, no matter what your intent was, that's, that could be harassment. So it seems to me that a lot of that is right here, this is that it is exactly that threatened reward, trigger the pain that comes from that social exclusion. And in this case, not necessarily social exclusion, but, you know, you, you may say something to somebody on your team AND, OR, or NOT let them in a meeting and they're gonna feel like you're bullying them, you know, and you have to be aware Laura McHale: of that, Dan, you're, you're touching on something that is so important because and one of my kind of big interest areas, both from kind of a more academic kind of scholar practitioner way, but also in really providing concrete recommendations to comms teams and also for leaders and how they communicate. There are very subtle ways that we are not even consciously aware of that can actually lead to some of this social exclusion. One thing that I actually devoted two chapters to in the book because I think it's so fascinating and so important, is pronoun use the use of AI and we

32:42 pronouns now, and I'm not Yeah, the whole gender pronoun issues as a separate conference separate thing. Yeah, he, she, and they, but this is just specifically using ion we pronouns. It was interesting to me with my pronoun hat on and just even how you set up this question you talked about, I have this experience, and we we do this at the end of the year, we many of us do that. Those are, you know, pronouns are awesome part of life. And they're a great way of creating affiliation and a sense of community, which is, you know, really what they're designed to do. The pronoun use particularly we gets very tricky, because there's actually two different kinds of we so this is this concept, you know, what linguists call it cluesive ality. But whether it's an inclusive or an exclusive we an exclusive, we means that we're talking about a group of we that is set apart or a difference. So for example, if we are talking about Americans in the world, you know, we say we Americans, we're talking about all Americans. And sometimes we use this inclusive way, which, you know, if we're saying all human beings in the world need to do something about climate change, climate changes, is impacting everyone. So sometimes they're very grand, inclusive ways. Where the X XClusive ways get problematic in organizations is how leaders often deploy them. And sometimes it's not clear sometimes it's a little ambiguous on on purpose. Politicians do this all the time. We who is the we that we

34:25 are talking about, is it a political party? Is it a particular group of people, but in organizations, many leaders will use we sometimes talking about everyone and sometimes talking about, for example, only front office, or the executive team. This consent send a very subtle but very potent messages about who has a legitimate stake in an organization's success, who the power brokers are in an organization who are the influencers, who are the people that really care once. And so something just as slight as that of not having awareness over whether a leader is using an inclusive or exclusive, we can really send powerful messages around social exclusion in organizations. So that's, that's one example. Another example is work that I've done a little bit more recently, um, so actually isn't in the book, but it will be a section if I ever do a second edition of the book, which I feel like I need to because so much of the book, the you know, the research keeps coming in. And, of course, the massive changes from chat GPT, the latest iterations GPT, for latest iterations of these generative language models. But an area I'm really interested in is both with my leadership psychology hat on and neuroscience hat on is absentee leadership. And that is also a form of social exclusion. Now, it may not be as overt as things like bullying and harassment, I'm having your boss scream at you or give you a terrible, you know, dressing down in front of others, etc. Absentee leadership is something that works more by

36:15 stealth it is occurs when leaders occupy leadership positions and and enjoy all of their privileges. But they do not for one reason or another, they are not able to fulfill the core functions of leadership. And this ends up being something that's characterized more or more by neglect, than it is by overt overtly hostile or negative behaviors. But that also leads to a strong sense of social exclusion as well. employees do have legitimate needs around leader presence. And those needs are often marginalized, many leaders are too busy to spend adequate time with their teams or to you know, help them resolve problems and conflicts, help prove you know, give proper role orientation, set performance expectations, etc. Absentee leadership is reported seven times more than any other destructive leadership behavior seven times more, it is absolutely epidemic in our organizations. And a big problem, Mom, Daniel Nestle: I'm nodding my head and and also sort of metaphorically flagellating myself at the same time, because I mean, I've done that, you know, I've been there I can, I can think of concrete examples of where I've been absent, like, literally absent or where I haven't fulfilled what my team needs for me. And, and, you know, I've learned to see the signs, but I've also, you know, learned of some of the kind of, I guess, words and phrases that you start to hear when, when it's becoming an issue. I mean, there's always a straight up, you're never here, that's one star sign. If somebody said,

38:04 Hey, you're never here, believe them. You know, well, I mean, you travel a lot, you got stuff to do. It's, there's sometimes the business requires what the business requires. But you need to figure out a way to make that up to your team, then, or include them in your journey in some way, you know, like, figure out what, what's going to happen while you're away and plan for that. And I'm not, I've never been fantastic at that. I will tell you that right now. And the other the other thing that I hear, and then I've heard sometimes is, is, you know, well, that's just not that hands on. Right? Oh, you know, person, so and so is not that hands on. And that's I, I kind of interpret that in several ways. But one charitable way of thinking about that is really nice guy, but not doing the work for us. Right? One uncharitable way is is, is lazy, not doing anything, right. There's, there's a whole range, but none of it's really great. And sometimes it just, it just means that as a leader, you know, I'm not doing a good enough job of showing the team what's at what I'm doing, or explaining to the team what's happening so that they understand why I'm unable to participate in a particular activity or, you know, get down into the, into the weeds or roll up my sleeves or do whatever it needs to be done. So there's there's not it's not just one straight, one size fits all thing, but when you hear that, not hands on. I used to think that was a little more accusatory, but now, you know, now, it's makes a lot more sense

39:41 in this kind of it thinking under through the lens of absentee leadership. I haven't really thought of it that way. But I hear that sometimes from not just about myself, but about others as well. So I think Unknown: it's a big complaint. It's, Laura McHale: it's an interesting phenomenon and you know, by drawing attention to do things like absentee leadership? I think, you know, we have to, one of the things we need to do is not not so much condemn absentee leadership, but understand why it's happening and also enable conversations between leaders and their teams about what's going on. Different employees have different needs with regard to leadership presence. And it also it depends on what's going on as well. It can also depend on you know, are they a new employee? Are they you know, are they just starting a job? Are they people who are just starting jobs and new to organizations need a lot more leader presence? The really important aspect of it is to actually engage in dialogue around it, you know, how much presence do you need? How much am I able to give you, leaders are not babysitters they are not they do sole purpose is not to be to all of the needs of everybody in their team, that's impossible, but being able to engage in a dialogue. And I would say to I always, you know, the psychologist in me gets interested when I hear things like, you know, if a leader gets a bit of feedback like that he's not hands on. I'm like, Okay,

41:13 that's a little passive aggressive to my ear. It's like, what's the real ask here? Was, Is there some way that I can make a request or that somebody else can make a request of the leader? That's a little less passive aggressive, a little less covert opposition? That's actually like, Hey, Dan, I would really love to see you around more. This is a project that I had that I would have loved more input, I realized that there's demands on your time, what would be the best way for us to engage so that I can get that attention from you when I need it? Yeah, great conversation opener that makes everybody happy and leaves all the passive aggressive stuff to the side. Because you're right, it makes us very defensive. Sure. Sounds like you took it like a champ, but I wasn't very defensive.

41:59 Daniel Nestle: Oh, no. I mean, I, I'm saying that now, after going through the process, and after going through it, and, you know, I didn't know, I don't always take it like a champ, that's for sure. I'm a human, you know, I But, and I don't have a, I'm not a psychologist nor neuroscientists. So it's hard to step back when you're in the moment. And but even if you were you, it's still hard step back, when you're in the moment, you know, as people, you hear things. But yeah, well, you know, when you deal with, when you deal with teams of people, there's always going to be a variety of behaviors in those teams. And you know, it's hard to be the conductor or the, or the, the, it's, some people call it say it's like, it's like being a jazz conductor. Some people say it's like being a, a symphonic conductor, or, you know, just kind of situational leadership stuff that you see happening all the time. It's just, it's, I just think it's hard. I mean, it's it, people are people, everybody's just different. And, you know, there's never, I've never seen anything, where, where one thing makes everybody happy all the time, apart from perhaps money. You know, put that aside, you know, put that aside, you know, but what's interesting Laura McHale: limits, Daniel Nestle: even as this limits, I mean, you need in, that's something we can get into with the whole idea of, of purpose as well, because you cover that your book, but before we get there, there's, you know, this whole idea that Unknown: when you are, Daniel Nestle: I guess, I just completely lost my train of train of thought which happens, which happens to me sometimes, but we were talking about drivers being hands on hands off, hands off, and, and this kind of an absentee leadership, you know, I,

43:42 Unknown: I just think that, Daniel Nestle: that we need to be just, we just need to be more more self aware and more aware of what's happening around us, and just just, you know, understand, now, I know where I was, now, I've connected the dots, what I wanted to say, the train is back on the tracks, people, all right. When you think about this absentee leadership, right, for those of us who are really involved with employee communications, or with internal communications, you know, there's a massive implication here right, because your, you know, you're leaders that you know, the the kind of, I suppose, in a hierarchical sense, the higher they are in the organization, the more likely it is for there to be this accusations of absenteeism from distant parts of the organization. So, when you have the opportunity to do an executive communication or or a front office communication or you know, something where, you know, the leader of such and such and such and such from never gets out to the field is able to speak to the field, you know, what, what are the things that need to be that people need to take, take under account or take into account and under consideration from that, you know, to ensure that, that they're not they're addressing the absentee leadership issue. I think it's interestingly what Do you think communicators would should do? I? Oh, Laura McHale: that was an interesting question. Because I, you know, on the one hand I, you know, communicators are so often tasked with doing kind of the magical, you know, it's like as if they can just kind of wave their wands and like it, it really doesn't matter how perfect communication is, if the

45:24 leadership behavior does it that back it up. It's, you know, the whole thing that actions speak louder than words. We as communicators can be brilliant at drafting words, but ultimately, it needs actions and behaviors backing it up. Otherwise, it just becomes an exercise in cynicism. Yeah. So I think the, the absentee leadership or the leadership presence conversation, is actually involves a lot more than communication, I think it involves really fulfilling those core functions of leadership. Yeah. And, and it doesn't necessarily mean physical presence, is it was interesting, we're still we're starting to really get interesting data from the COVID pandemic, about, you know, kind of the greatest mouse experiment and work history, which is going to almost entirely at least for knowledge workers going to almost entirely remotely, but their, their leaders do need, it's not just a question of getting a free pass, by having a fantastic communication, there was a lot of actual behaviors and ways of showing up that needs to really back it up.

46:36 Daniel Nestle: So we can only go so far as to get people off the hook, I suppose. You know, but it's true. The word smithing is important, of course, and I always, I always tell people are getting into the profession. You know, they if they bother asking that, first be a writer, you know, first understand how to string sentences and together and how to put thoughts together in a, in a way that makes sense. Because that's really the main motive of most of the work that we will do through the course of our career. You know, but we are not, it's not a magic wand, just like you said, it's not it's not going to change leaders behavior, more and more as we get, as we as communicators play a much more important role as an influencer upon the leadership. And that's been a topic a big topic recently, well, maybe forever, but certainly recently, in places like the Paige society, and prsa and, you know, how can we wield more influence?

47:40 How can we as communicators be, you know, either a taken seriously by our, by, by the business side, or, or just contribute more to the business, you know, you know, one falls from the other generally speaking. And, you know, how can we grow our influence, build trust, etcetera? And, you know, there's the basic simple answer, which is, well just do a great job, and people trust you, but that's not always true, you know, but that building trust, etc. Like, we can only go so far in helping the leaders, you know, to frame what they're gonna say, or to say what they're gonna say. But ultimately, it's going to be their behaviors. And, you know, if we know a little bit more about neuroscience, we can advise them a little bit better, maybe, yeah, Laura McHale: there's also because Dan, you're touching on something that's really important. There's, you know, there's really a symbiotic relationship between leadership and communication. Now, I just said, My grand pronouncement that actions speak louder than words. And that is, of course, critically important, but words we know are also, you know, of massive importance in organizations. I talked before about the pronouns about using ironweed pronouns. I'm also very suspicious of communications, by the way, but leaders of communications that do not use the word I I've done, I've done some interesting analysis of that I always counseled leaders, and corporate communicators who are drafting leadership comments and talking notes. To have a really nice healthy balance between AI and we pronouns. I call that pronoun agility. But we also need to be aware of how corporate discourse has become

49:28 riddled with what are known as weasel words. Yes, or the the infamous soft modals which are words like my could baby and that signal less, less certainty, which are often used by corporate comms people, lawyers and leaders to sort of wiggle out of difficult conversations on we also if we, you know, the new fields, not just generative language models, but also big data analysis and protect Killer sentiment analysis in language is revealing that there's actually direct relationships between corporate corporations company's financial performance and the use of weasel words. And as well as kind of negative sentiment analysis than numbers, there's a lot of kind of generic terms that companies use to describe difficult financial performance, you know, that includes like impairment and loss. A lot of financial reports don't go into a huge amount of detail. But there is a direct relationship between the financial performance of these companies and this types of language. There's also I talked about in the book, one of the most fascinating things that came out of the Enron debacle was a big data analysis of internal communications at Enron, Enron in the months leading up to the implosion of the company. And it was very interesting, because it wasn't just the words themselves, it was actually the size and length of emails and messages and the frequency with which they were occurring. There was one, I think it was like a six week period that email lanes declined by like 13 characters a

51:17 week, and that was corresponding to actually the decline in the stock price. So, so in all of those ways, the you know, the words themselves actually are important. Of course, it's a symbiotic relationship between the words and the leadership behavior, we do want to avoid, I'm in a very cynical world, where we are having multiple leadership crises, leadership failures, we're having shockingly high levels of corporate scandal and fraud. So we definitely want to avoid this giant disconnect between a leaders language and a leaders behavior. Yeah. But at the same time, as good communicators, and most of us, I think, hopefully, work for companies that are not having massive scandals and problems, just being really mindful. And also the need, what are we mean, what do we mean to say, Yeah, oftentimes, we get so couched and we put negative messages and we pad it with all of this positive messaging around it, that you know, it just becomes fluff, it becomes meaningless. We need to ask ourselves as communicators, why are we doing that? What are we afraid of? Would ourselves our organizations or leaders be better served by being more forthright and direct? I think these are really important questions that we need to ask ourselves, Daniel Nestle: sometimes. Sometimes I think, if what you're saying is, is really very, it definitely is resonating with me and serve it resonates with a lot of a lot of our fellow communicators. I think we as communicators have, have in some ways ruined the language, and ruined the, the,

53:04 the kind of understanding of what's acceptable. And it's not just us, I mean, there's a lot of forces out there, but we've caved to those forces over the decades, and, and allowed the weasel words, and the, you know, these these weak modals is that they're gonna get weak modal words, you know, to kind of sneak in because, like, a lot of it, so we avoid the legal issues, if we use the word depending, which we've seen very recently is a very, very, very terrible thing to do in a public hearing, right? I mean, you know, you want to be seen as weak, you want to be set, see, as soon as a weasel use depending on the context as much as you like, you know, go ahead. We should know this, we should understand, go to Strunk and White, go back to what makes a clear communication, you know, shorter words, fewer words, and concrete words, active voice, etc. Now, of course, there are many situations, countless situations where you need to be passive, where you need to be kind of, you know, a little softer around what you say, and where there might not be the right answers. But when there's not a right answer, or when there's not a solid answer, you better at the end of your, at the end of what you're saying saying, You better say something like, I will get back to you with a really solid answer later, you know, you gotta leave even, nobody's going to be satisfied, but at least they leave a commitment to satisfy them at some point. And, you know, sometimes you have to, you know, take the small loss to get

54:36 the big win in the long run as a communicator, but But it's interesting, which the, the this whole situation with with weasel words is something that we're all taught that we forget, you know, which which is, which sort of segues a little bit for me anyway, something you mentioned earlier. And as we're as we're getting towards the close of our awesome conversation here. I did want under under Get your feeling because you mentioned it earlier about what the biggest change in our technical lives these days, and certainly maybe even in our work life and in the way of the way that we will, and we will do things moving forward. And I'm talking about AI. Right? What? What is the effect so far? What do you see, as the you know, that, I guess the biggest kind of implications or concerns or you take it however you want of chat GPT and have large language models, and it's just one thing, not to steer the question. But one thing that occurs to me, of course, from what you're saying is, you know, this high propensity for these weasel words and to rely on on, you know, on large language models, or on GPT. In particular, any of these, these generative AI tools to craft messaging that is just weak. Right? Now, I've gone far beyond that in my understanding of AI, so I really feel like I understand how to get deeper and deeper and deeper, but I think most people stop at the first, the first prompt, and they're like, Hey, I'm good, you know? But, but anyway, like, what are your thoughts on this? And it's,

56:25 Laura McHale: it's so funny, because you were mentioning before about how most people do kind of their catch up on courses and stuff at the year end. And I'm, I'm actually taking a prompt engineering course. Oh, excellent. So I can learn to do better prompts for AI. I was writing my book in mainly the spring and summer of 2021. And at that time, it was pre chat GPT. It was I was talking about GPT. Three. And I it's amazing, just in the in the space of two years, what's happened. I did talk in the book that I felt that these, that these AI these generative language models, posed an existential threat to the communications profession. It is one of one of the reasons that I think it's so important for comms people to really up their game and get much more knowledgeable about psychology and neuroscience, hopefully, as well. And also, just because, you know, it's not just the AI changes, there are seismic changes that are happening in the communications profession anyway. The remit of comms is becoming enormous comms people now have to be experts in corporate social responsibility, Public Affairs, corporate affairs, government affairs, these are monster roles that had been created, it's really hard for mere mortals, to kind of be all things, all things to all people. Now it does reflect the power of communication and the importance of aligned messaging, but But it's, it's, it's a real challenge for us as a profession for those of us in in the profession. The, you know, we're

58:12 gonna see, this is it's changing, it's happening so fast. There is no doubt, you know, I plugged in a couple, a couple of paragraphs from my book and TPT and asked it to paraphrase it, and I'm embarrassed at how much better brilliant. I've gotten the Daniel Nestle: whole book. It's very good at some things. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Laura McHale: It's in its very good at like marketing copy and all sorts of things. On It is terrible at one of the things that became clear, evidently right away is that it's really effective for generating hate speech. This, some of the earliest studies came out and, and you know, the darkest corners of the internet with hate speech conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, it is brilliant at generating. On the organizational side, since a lot of organizations have both, you know, they use, they'll use the external AI models, but they also use internal in house models, especially organizations that have very extensive libraries of content and data. I think it's going to be really interesting to see whether the AI perpetuates some of the existing inequalities that exist in organizations, some of the difference for leaders, some of the marginally marginalization of certain voices within organizations. I think those are going to be very interesting questions, but you know, we have to you they're here, we have to use them. They're brilliant tools. I'm surprising myself at how much I am using them. But the the information I mean, your guess is as good as mine down of what's going to happen and yeah,

59:58 it's going to influence corporate discourse? Daniel Nestle: I agree with you. I mean, the whole discourse? Well, for sure, you know, political discourse, I was on a conversation earlier today, it's exactly about that. And about not just we're not just talking about chatty petite, but we're talking about, you know, video creation and meme creation and things that don't fall under the regulations of political speech. So that, you know, you can have these bot farms creating any number of, you know, have I spoke last was memes and, and ads, and so on that don't fall that don't have to be claimed, as you know, endorsed by a candidate or something like this. And therefore, there are no, no rules about how far these can go. I mean, it's just one one aspect. And then of course, there's all this stuff about deep fakes and, and faking voices and scripting, that's something that we're just going to have to contend with, there's no that's not going away. I am extremely bullish on on AI. As an enabler for, for us to move up the value chain, you know, now, there's gonna be plenty of people, bad actors who are gonna do bad things as they do with anything else. But you know, when you're, as you get into prompt engineering, especially it just sort of think about it, in my view, we communicators have a superpower here, like we are in a really great place. Because something that we have that very few other professions have, which is an extreme obsession with words, and with the way that we string words together. And that's really the whole secret to prompting, you

1:01:46 know, is building an out an argument, essentially, in the form of a question that you then turn into a dialogue. Now, of course, it gets far deeper than that, there's so many other things you can do. And there's so many ways that you can manipulate the, the, the AI or, or, or train it better, do think, but but at the very basic level, you know, if you are a decent writer, and you're curious and have a sort of propensity to ask a lot of questions, as I think many of us do, certainly, I do think you're in a good place, and then you can have to really do interesting things with it. The issue, I think, is time, you know, and also, also, what happens to the younger, to the younger entrants into the profession, that people who are just sort of, like kind of who had counted on like, when you were, when you had started out as a, as a communicator, you know, you didn't start out as the leader of, of executive communications for a large financial institution in Asia, you started out, very likely looking at clippings, and summarizing things, and doing a lot of grunt work in writing press releases, things like this, you know, we've all gone through a lot of that, that's not really that hard, you know, that's not something people are gonna need to do anymore. So what's going to replace that? Like, what is the thing that that aspiring communicators are going to need to do? Or does the does the profession just changed dramatically, so that that's not even a consideration anymore?

1:03:22 And there's a whole new set of tasks and skills that we require of an entrance? And I think that's probably the direction is going to go. But it's going to I mean, I don't know, to hold my finger up in the wind. I don't I think about it a lot. You No, but I, I really do appreciate your input on that. And I'd be curious to see how, you know, as these models evolve, if they develop their own sort of brain physiology of their own, you know, like, if there's a if there's a neuroscience, a neuroscientific approach that can be applied to working within a large language model, you know, I, I imagine there is, and, and it must be very fascinating. Yeah.

1:04:10 Laura McHale: I love what you what you say. And and I love the optimism around it. I think I'm more cynical. And I think because it's the you know, there's there's sort of the the transcendent, the heroic aspect of these technologies and the shadow aspect. I think that, you know, it's sort of like social media in general, where you view it as it can be this incredible enabler of connection on but at the end of the day, it is a profit maximization tool, the companies that control it, and that actually, there's an incentive to create communications that are highly manipulative. Yep. And you know, that can can create a great deal of both cynicism. And to gullibility. And I, we really have to watch out for those because you know, Hannah aren't famously said in the Origins of Totalitarianism that that combination of cynicism, and gullibility is is pernicious. It's a pernicious destroyer of social cohesion and pro social human behavior.

1:05:31 Daniel Nestle: I, I agree with you, too. I think I feel this, like I'm optimistic. At the same time, you gotta be eyes wide open with any of this and you know, it's that's why it's always good. You need to understand how things behave. You need understand psychology a little bit you just in neuroscience, you need to read things by Laura McHale. So I am, we're gonna we're gonna have to wrap it up there. Laura. I'm so slick. I'm so appreciative of your time. If anybody wants to find out more about Dr. Laura McHale, go to LinkedIn look for just search for Dr. Laura McHale. And they'll spell it properly in the episode. Title. Conduit consultants.com. That's co nd you it consultants.com Dr. Underbar McHale on Twixtor X, whatever you want to call it? Are you Are you active on your longer I shut it down, Laura McHale: deleted my accounts.

1:06:25 Daniel Nestle: So so we'll strike that but are you on threads are you on anyplace else? You're just just dealing with LinkedIn and your website? I Laura McHale: have a blog on my website. But that really just links to kind of my public my publications elsewhere that are 50 so them all on my website? Daniel Nestle: Do you have it folks, you can probably find find some interesting information on on on on extra Twitter about neuroscience, but ignore it because Laura is not there. Go to conduit consultants.com. And look up Dr. Laura McHale on LinkedIn. Laura, I'm and also by the way, oh, sorry, one more one last thing. Purchase neuroscience for organizational communication, a guide for communicators and leaders. It is a fantastic book. It is not a long book, it's 100 pages 100 pages of extremely, extremely important and packed information. You heard the scarf model. There's other models that that Laura talks about. You'll learn about zoom fatigue, in you know, you'll learn about, about things like you know, there's there's some there's some amazing things I wrote down cultural neuroscience and we talked about pronoun agility. I wanted to really I wanted to bring up I wanted to actually use the word eudaimonic. Once, but, but I didn't get the really I didn't get the opportunity to eudaimonic well being sense of contentment from having a meaningful purpose in work and life. These are the things that are in the book, but I honestly it's just it's just an important read, I think for our

1:07:55 profession. And you know, Laura, we reach out to Laura and find out more. Laura, any last words? Laura McHale: Oh, just thank you so much for having me on the program, Dan. It's always such a pleasure to connect with you. And I love I love spending this time with you. Daniel Nestle: Oh, it's a real honor. And thanks again for for helping me get get going with my new iteration of the Dan Nestle show the which is now called the trending communicator which you clearly are. So thanks so much for joining the show. Laura McHale: Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Daniel Nestle: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred. But it's up to you if you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show. Let me know at Dan at trending communicator.com Thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.