Brent Stewart:
Welcome to the Everybody Matters podcast, a show dedicated to the idea that when organizations care enough to show their people that who they are and what they do matter, they unlock the only business idea with truly unlimited potential. I’m Brent Stewart, your host. This podcast is an outreach of Barry Waymiller. Don’t forget to connect with us on the web at barrywaymiller.com, on Twitter at Barry Waymiller, on Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out our blog, trulyhumanleadership.com. Some may say William Ury is a master of the art of negotiation, but it may be more accurate to say that he just recognizes the value of true communication.
Bill Ury is the author of such best-selling books as Getting to Yes, Getting to Yes with Yourself, The Power of a Positive No, and Getting Past No. But for the past 35 years, Bill has served as a negotiation advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from the Kentucky Wildcat coal mine strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers all over the globe. With former President Jimmy Carter, Bill co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. In an advisory capacity, he helped end a civil war in Indonesia and assisted in preventing one in Venezuela.
You’ll actually hear more of that story in a little bit. Bill has long been a friend of Barry Waymiller. He and our CEO Bob Chapman both feel very strongly that listening is one of the keys to good leadership. They believe listening is the most important thing we as humans can do for one another. It shows empathy, it shows you care, and most importantly, it shows the person you are listening to that they matter.
So here’s a conversation our global messaging leader, Mary Redder, and I had with Bill about listening, conflict, the power of a positive no, and getting the yes. In negotiation, I think of listening as the cheapest concession you can possibly make because it costs you almost nothing and it means everything to the other side. So if you want something that costs you little and delivers a lot of value to the other side, opens the door, opens their ears, makes them more willing to listen to you, then there’s no better step, first step, than to listen to them. We think of communication as talking, but actually it’s just as much, if not more, about listening, which is the invisible part of communication, that actually if you observe the behavior, if I observe the behavior of successful negotiators, be they in the workplace or in diplomacy or wherever, they listen far more than they talk. That listening turns out to be the key skill that we all need to learn and we need to listen even more than we talk.
William Ury:
I remember actually once when Bob Chapman took me to visit some of the Barry Waymiller plants and there was one plant, I think it was way up in northern Wisconsin, and we were walking the floor and just talking to people who were working these giant machines, what difference had it made since Barry Waymiller had bought the plant? One fellow took off his earmuffs, his work earmuffs there, whatever, and thought about the question for a moment. He says, well, I’ll tell you the difference. They listen to you. That was the difference.
What he meant by that was that every morning there was this council, this circle or whatever, where the supervisor would invite everyone to talk about what’s working, what’s not working, and then follow up on that. That was key. I don’t know if that gives a substantive improvement to, obviously, the processes of work, but I think underlying it is listening is the basic way that we communicate respect for other human beings, that we say, I see you, I hear you. Before he felt that they were pretty much not listened to. They were not treated with the respect that every human being deserves.
What I’ve found is that whatever the issue is, whether I’m negotiating in Colombia with the guerrillas or dealing with a business dispute, that the basic fundamental first step is to respect, and the best way to do that is to really listen to the person. In this day and age, it’s not always so easy because there’s so much coming at us, emails and texts and so much all the time, that we forget that most elementary lesson, which is to listen. As you mentioned, listening isn’t as easy as it sometimes seems to be. It’s not just hearing the other person. Sometimes when we say we listen, okay, that means you’re taking in what the other side is saying, their words, but listening, true listening means listening for what’s behind the words.
Where’s the person really coming from? What are they really concerned about? Listening for what’s not in the words. It’s also about not just listening from, as we do, from our frame of reference, which is we listen, but there’s an inner voice saying, I disagree with that, I disagree with that. You’re just listening in order to be able to rebut or refute what the other person is saying.
True listening is when you put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You listen from within their frame of reference. How does it actually feel to be in their shoes? That’s where you can get the true breakthroughs.
Mary Redder:
I think it’s interesting though now that it’s almost like we have to change the word listening if you think about it, because so much of communication now happens without the use of our ears.
My children that are teenagers, they spend their time texting. That’s how they communicate. It’s foreign to them to actually make a phone call. I’m wondering if your work has had to change based upon the way we have come to communicate these days.
William Ury:
That’s a really, really good point, Mary.
As an anthropologist, just reflecting, we evolved for 99% more than that of our history as creatures who took in information like that through our ears. We’re oral cultures. Writing is a recent innovation. We listen differently with our ears than we do with our eyes. You’re right that a heavy reliance on reading texts and so on, it brings in different faculties.
One thing I’m interested in, I’ve started to use WhatsApp a lot. It allows you not just to text messages, but to text short spoken messages. There’s a funny way in which the spoken word is coming back even into those short back and forth. The truth is that we’re learning. We’re in a moment of huge experimentation with communication around social media in which everything is going to have to adapt, including the way in which we negotiate and deal with our disputes and any daily issues or make deals.
Mary Redder:
Tell us a story of one of your most successful endeavors to get people to yes.
William Ury:
Well, good question. I could tell you a story just to demonstrate to me the power of listening in a large context. About a number of years ago, a little over a decade, I was invited in by President Carter and the United Nations into the country of Venezuela, which was polarized at that point between people who supported the current president, who was President Hugo Chavez, and people who opposed him. I was asked to meet with him or meet with the opposition.
At one point, I had a number of meetings with the president. One of the meetings, I remember, was set for, he liked to meet late at night at 9 p.m. in the presidential palace. I waited there with my colleague Francisco and 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, midnight, and finally we’re ushered in to see the president. I expected to find him alone, but in fact, he had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. He’d been having a late meeting and he motioned me to a chair and he said, so Bill, what do you think of the situation here?
What’s your impression? How are things going? I said, well, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your ministers here and to some of the opposition leaders and it seems to me there’s a little bit of progress. Well, as soon as he heard the word progress there, he got triggered and he said, what do you mean progress? He leaned in very close to my face and he said, are you naive?
You’re not seeing the dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to. He leaned in very close to my face and proceeded to shout at me for, I would say approximately 30 minutes. And inside me, I was thinking, I’m not naive. You’re going through this and I was feeling a little bit embarrassed in front of everyone that the president is shouting at me, but above all, I’m thinking, well, here’s a year and a half of hard work going down the drain here. So your mind goes through all these places, but I was able to catch myself for a moment before I reacted and said what I wanted to say.
And it’s a process I call going to the balcony. It’s almost like you’re negotiating on a stage and part of your mind goes to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking that stage. In other words, a place of perspective where you can keep your eyes on the prize. So I went to the balcony for a moment there and asked myself, you know, is it really going to advance this matter if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? I mean, what’s my prize?
My prize is helping to help bring some peace, restore some peace to this situation. So I just decided to listen and having listened to myself, to my own kind of internal kind of voices, you know, I was able to calm them down. Then I listened to the president and for about 30 minutes I was just there nodding my head, listening to him. And he was well known for making speeches for eight hours. But after 30 minutes of me not, you know, not kind of taking the bait and getting into an argument with him, which could have gone on for many hours.
But simply listening to him, I was just watching him carefully, just listening, trying to figure out what’s really disturbing him and so on. And truly listening to him. And at some point I saw, watching his body language, I saw his shoulders sink a little bit and he said to me in a weary tone of voice, so Yuri, what should I do? And that is the, you know, that’s the faint sound of a human mind opening, is when they turn around. If I had tried to, sometimes when someone else is angry and dealing with you, you know, if you try to, you just get angry back or, you know, you’re not going to get through to them using reason because it’s like, you know, hitting your head against the wall.
But that was when his mind was a little bit open. So I said to him, I think, Mr. President, if you’ll permit me to make a suggestion here, it’s December, Christmas is coming near. Last Christmas all the festivities around the country were canceled because of this conflict, this confrontation. It looks like the same thing’s going to happen this Christmas. Why not give everyone a chance, the whole country to go to the balcony, as it were, give everyone a chance to enjoy their Christmas holidays with their families, take a break, call a truce, and, you know, in January, we can come back and resume the conversation.
And he said to me, you know, that’s a great idea, I’m going to propose that in my next speech. And his mood had entirely changed. He was now willing to listen to me because I had listened to him. And then he started to get all chummy and he said, you know, now that I think about it, you ought to come travel the country with me over Christmas and see it better and get to know it better. And then he thought for a moment, he said, oh, but you’re a neutral, maybe it wouldn’t be so good for you to be seen in my company.
And he said, no worries about that, I’ll give you a disguise. And his mood had completely shifted. Now how had that happened? Because of the power of not reacting, the power of going to the balcony, and above all, the power of listening.
Mary Redder:
Wow. Well, your reaction, what if you had reacted negatively, it would have been a mirror of what he you know, it was would have been a mirror of what he was doing. And so, you know, you allowed him to see him for what he didn’t want to be.
William Ury:
That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.
And, you know, he suddenly went from being my adversary to being my partner. And it was kind of a shift. And I think it’s through a power that we all have, actually, that we can use with anyone around us if they, you know, are yelling at us, or if we’re having a difficult situation or a child or, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, there are these simple tools of, to me of listening. And listening allows you to put yourself in the shoes of the other, it’s empathy. It’s not necessarily sympathy, which is just, you know, feeling what the other person’s feeling.
Empathy means feeling into. And it’s kind of, so it’s a, it’s an ability to understand where the other side’s coming from. And that, if you think about it in negotiation, what are you trying to do in negotiation, you’re often trying to change someone else’s mind. And the question is, if you’re trying to change someone else’s mind, how can you possibly do that unless you know where that mind is right now? And how can you do that without listening and putting yourself in their shoes?
And that’s why, to me, the cornerstone, the foundation stone of effective communication, effective negotiation, is the ability to put yourself in their shoes, which is really through the behavior of listening. Taking that from a macro level to a micro level, some statistics, in 25% of workers, avoiding conflict leads to sickness or absence from work. And 10% of workers say that workplace conflict leads to project failure. And more than one third say that conflict results in someone leaving the company. And 2.8, we spend 2.8 hours per week dealing with conflict at work.
I think I kind of know what the answer is, but what are your thoughts on how there’s this much conflict in our workplaces that people, everyday people, deal with every day? Well, I mean, it’s sad. I mean, it’s a huge cost, and I think a lot of it, some of it may be necessary conflict, but much of it is unnecessary conflict, or it’s conflict that’s badly dealt with. Because for me, the way I’ve come to understand it is conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. Conflict is like, I mean, life is naturally full of conflict.
The real question is not whether we have conflict or not, the real question is how we deal with a conflict. Do we deal with it constructively, through listening and negotiation and problem solving, or do we deal with it destructively, as so often happens through arguments and fighting and threatening and all kinds of destructive ways that destroy relationships, and as you see, destroy huge sums of time, energy, suffering, ulcers, people leaving the jobs. The costs of destructive conflict are huge, and so we have a huge … To me, I see courses in communication, listening, a focus on that, as playing a hugely preventive role in maintaining the health of the organization. The other thing I’ll say, too, is not all the costs of conflict come from overt conflict, but what often happens, I see in the workplace, is there’s a huge amount of avoidance, which is people aren’t necessarily getting angry with each other in an overt way, but they’re seething within, and no one talks about it because no one wants to bring it up because they’re afraid of what’s going to happen. By not talking about it, by not engaging with it constructively, that can be as deadly and corrosive from within, even though there’s no fireworks on the outside.
The title of your book that everybody knows is Getting to Yes, but it’s not just about using yes when you’re dealing with communication in the workplace or dealing with situations in the workplace. It’s also using yes and using no. Could you talk a little bit about using yes and using no in discussions and negotiations just in everyday work? For sure. For sure.
Well, if you think about it, yes and no are the most fundamental words in any language, and therefore, sometimes the most problematic. It’s almost like we have two arms. We have a yes arm and a no arm. From an early age, we’re rewarded heavily for using the yes arm, and we’re stigmatized for using the no arm because our parents do not like to hear the word no, and the age at which we learn to use the word no is around the age of two, and in English, we stigmatize that as the terrible twos. But developmental psychologists will tell us that that’s an extremely important age because that’s the age at which the child learns to individuate.
They learn to become a separate individual. I like this. I don’t like that. No is the word of identity. It’s the word of power, really, and young children love to use it.
It could drive their parents crazy, but teachers don’t like to hear the word no. Bosses don’t like to hear the word no, and yet so what happens is we have a strongly developed yes arm and a weakly developed no arm often, and so what happens is when we do say no, it’s very destructive, or often we don’t say no. We have a lot of us have trouble saying no, and to me, what we need to do in life since we need the word no very much, I mean, in this world right now, for example, in order if you want to get anything done, any product, any project, anything that really matters to you, you have to say no to a lot of other things in order to free up the time and energy to devote to that. So the word no is enormously important. It’s the word of focus.
It’s also the word of how you protect your boundaries and protect your core values is through the word no, and so what I’ve found is that no may be the most powerful word in the language, but because it’s the most powerful word in the language, of course, it can be the most destructive word, but if we can learn to use it constructively, in other words positively, as what I call a positive no, it can literally transform our work lives and our personal lives is knowing how to use the word no as a positive no, and I wrote a book about this called The Power of a Positive No, but essentially a positive no in a nutshell is like a sandwich. It starts not with a no, but with a yes, and that yes is to what is truly important to you. It’s followed by the word no delivered in a respectful manner, and then it doesn’t end on the word no. It ends on another yes, so it’s a yes, no, yes, and an example would be let’s imagine you’re in your workplace and your boss tells you that you’ve got to work over the weekend and you have an important like a family wedding or something, so you begin with your yes, you know, you explain to the boss, you know, I have a family wedding this weekend, you know, that’s your yes, so you’re not saying no to them, and so I’m not going to be able to work this weekend, and then you go to the yes on the other side, which is, and here’s the solution, I’d be happy to work, you know, overtime some nights, or I can get a couple of other people to work, here’s how we can get the work done and the problem solved, so basically you start with a yes, you have a very respectful, calm, matter-of-fact no, and you end on a yes, and it turns out that, you know, a positive no is key to being able to both use, unleash the potential of no, but do it in a way that doesn’t hurt the relationship, in fact can strengthen the relationship, because people will respect you more if you’re able to say no, and oftentimes the people who don’t say no are kind of like, they’re hiding, it’s like a friend who says, you know, they’ll go out with you, you know, they’ll go out with you next Wednesday night because they can’t say no, and then, you know, a few minutes before, half hour before, they call you up and say they can’t make it, you’d much rather hear the word no, the truth of the word no early on so you can make alternative plans, so actually saying no to someone else can be a gift. So in terms of a good leader, a good leader knows how to use no in the right way?
For sure. Now I think leadership is as much about being able to say no as it is about being able to say yes, a good leader, I think that’s the hard thing of leadership, is really knowing how to do that. I actually remember I had a fellow in one of my classes who was the CEO of an internet company in Seattle, he was a Frenchman, his name was Jacques, and when the internet stock market fell, went bust a number of years ago, you know, internet companies were failing and everyone had to lay off workers, and he had the very unpleasant job of having to lay off 500 engineers because there was no money to pay them, and most leaders would have delegated that to HR, and HR would have said, okay, now there’s a pink slip on someone’s table, but what he did was, Jacques insisted that how you say the word no as a leader is just as important as any deal you would ever make, so he insisted personally on sitting down with every one of the 500 engineers and having a personal meeting with them where he would explain basically the yes was in order to save this company that we’ve all spent this time working that we really wanted to develop, you know, I would like to be able to retain you, but there’s just, there’s no money, I can’t pay you, so what can I do to help you, you know, can I give you a good letter of reference, can we help you find you a job somewhere, can we help you give you a training opportunity, well, lo and behold, he did that, the key element of course was respect, he sat down with them and was respectful, and he said about a year later the money came into the stock market and his company, everyone was trying to rehire engineers, and guess who had first pick, it was Jacques, why? Because he had gone to the trouble of respecting people, he said he was still stopped in the streets of Seattle by some engineers whom he wasn’t able to rehire, who thanked him for the way in which they’d been fired, because it’s that elemental aspect of respect, and so that must be the hardest thing for a leader is to have to face those kinds of tough decisions, but this is where, again, respect is the underlying bedrock. Just thinking about somebody who is, you know, going into their job every day, and maybe dreading it because there are certain things they don’t want to have to deal with, certain people they don’t want to have to deal with, what would you say to them, what kind of tips would you give them to think about the discussions they’re getting ready to have, the compromises they’re going to have to make, the conflict that they may have to undergo, or just some general tips that you would give people to go in and think about communications every day as they would go, as they walk into the door of their workplace?
Well first thing is something I mentioned earlier, which is the ability to go to the balcony, to realize that human beings were reaction machines, we’re under a lot of stress, and so, and as Mary was mentioning, you’re getting a lot of texts and emails, and it’s very easy to be reactive, and so the most important thing is to develop ways to go to the balcony, to get that place of perspective, even if it’s like taking a minute to, just to breathe, or rather than, you know, as the old saying goes, when angry you will make the best speech you will ever regret, you know, the ability to just pause, hit the pause button, go to the balcony, remember before the day, what are your key goals, what is the key prize for you, and keep that in mind throughout, because it’s going to be very easy to get distracted or reactive. And then the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the other, now when you go to the balcony you understand what your core interests are, but then it’s very important to understand what the other sides are, and that’s where the tool of listening comes in so handy. And then understanding what your interests, what you really want, and understanding what they really want, then I think one of the keys is to be creative in inventing options for joint gain, looking for ways that work for both sides, and not just, you know, standard win-wins, what’s good for me and good for you, but what’s good for the whole, what’s good for the work unit, what’s good for the company, what’s good for the community. And so it’s kind of a triple win, you’re looking for a win, a win, and a win for the whole, that I think is, if you can just keep going for that, because you’re going to hit obstacles, it’s going to seem like it’s impossible, but what I’ve often found is don’t underestimate the power of creativity, and not just your creativity, but the creativity of the group. If you put it back to the group and say, how do we handle this problem?
The group itself, if you can tap their collective intelligence, their collective wisdom, there’s a lot there, it doesn’t all have to be on your shoulders.
Mary Redder:
Yeah, as you say, empathy is sort of the basis of all, you know, conflict, resolution, problem solving, but can you teach somebody to be empathetic?
William Ury:
Well one thing I just want to say, just on that topic, just before we get to the question of teaching is, Google, which, where the work is done in teams, commissioned a big study to study their teams to figure out which teams were most effective, which teams were most productive, and what made for successful teams, and they did this big study, and you know, some teams were a little more hierarchical, other teams were not, there were all kinds of differences in the teams. They found the one common element, or actually the two common elements of successful teams were one, communication, which effectively meant making sure that everyone had a voice, everyone was heard, not just the leader talking all the time, but everyone in the group was heard, and the second was empathy, was the ability to read the feelings of others. So to come to your question, Mary, can it be taught, well I think empathy is an innate human ability, so it’s not just about being, it’s not so much about being taught, it’s about being uncovered, or discovered.
We all have that, I mean even neuroscience these days has discovered that there’s a kind of neuron in your brain called a mirror neuron, where if someone else is sad, that part of the brain gets turned on, and you feel a little wave of sadness, or whatever the feeling is, and so it’s about being able to rediscover our own innate human talent for empathy.
Mary Redder:
But how do we do that?
William Ury:
Well, how do we do that is a good question. I think, first of all, when we’re doing it as adults, we’re beginning, we’re doing what I consider to be remedial education, because it’s something that you learn as children, and then what happens is sometimes our innate capacities for empathy get blocked when we’re young. And so the question is, how do you remove the blocks?
But I think the thing to do, it’s there in us, it’s just covered up, and so what we can do is you can, if you take, for example, in your communication courses, as I know, there’s a lot of exercises where you start to, if you can stop talking for a moment and listen, and let the other person tell their story, then you’ll start to see, ah, okay, the empathy will naturally arise. There’s an old saying that I read that an enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard. And so when you see someone, if you can hear someone, you’ll begin to see the empathy develop, and so it’s partly a question of allowing time, and then practice. All these things require a lot of practice, but just a little, it’s a little practice every day on something. So if someone says, you know, I really want to hone my ability to be empathetic, well, if you set that as your intention, and you’re reflective about it, you can, you know, practice it at home with a family member, with your spouse or a child, listen to them, and then know where you get blocked, where it’s hard for you to listen to them.
You know, one of the biggest blocks to empathy that I find, which is at the same time the biggest block to listening, is ourselves. We are not, the reason why it’s hard for us to be empathetic with others is we haven’t been empathetic with ourselves. And in fact, that’s the subject of my latest book, which is called Getting to Yes with Yourself, because what I’ve discovered is that the biggest block to getting to yes with others is that we haven’t gotten to yes with ourselves, and a key part of that is training our own ability to listen to ourselves. I mean, if you remember that story I told you about negotiating with President Chavez, I wasn’t able to listen to him until I was able to listen to myself, to all those voices that were saying, oh my, you know, what’s happening here, and he’s wrong, and all of that. By listening to myself first, from a balcony perspective, I was able to kind of free myself from those voices a little bit, free up a little space so that I could then listen to him, and that’s the key.
And in terms of practice, it’s true, it takes a little bit every day. These are not things that you can just, like, okay, learn listening in a day, and that’s it. No, these are things we practice every day. They’re like muscles that you have to strengthen every single day. But the great advantage that we have is that we have huge numbers of opportunities to practice in every single context, with every single person that we meet.
You know, thinking about what you’re saying, it almost seems like if somebody’s making a concerted effort to be more empathetic or to listen better, they’re probably already halfway there, if they’re actually thinking about it and making an effort to do that. That’s it. That’s it, Brent. If you set the intention, you’d be surprised. And then, you know, every morning, you set the intention of, okay, what’s the intention for this day?
What do I want to learn today? And then at the end of the day, taking a minute just to review, what did I learn today? What worked? What didn’t work? Am I going to try differently tomorrow morning?
That simple habit of taking a minute in the morning and a minute in the evening can make all the difference. To find out more about Bill Ury, watch videos, learn more about his books, visit his website, WilliamUry.com. If you’d like to find out more about Bob Chapman and Raj Sodhia’s book, Everybody Matters, The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, go to EverybodyMattersBook.com. For updates on the book, this podcast, to get a lot of great content and insight, don’t forget to connect with us on the web at Barrywaymiller.com, on Twitter at Barrywaymiller, on Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out our blog, TrulyHumanLeadership.com. I’m Brent Stewart.
Thanks for listening and don’t forget, Everybody Matters is the only business idea with truly unlimited potential.