Communication Chameleon

When you’re out there a lot, you deal with a lot of agents, and you’re the president of a company. You travel a lot. You deal with a lot of different types of people. How do you effectively engage with people who have different modes of operating?

It’s such an important question. I think you have to be a chameleon. In my role, you just said it, I work with people out there who are working their very first job out of college, and they’re 22, 23 years old, and people who have 40 years more experience than I do in this industry.
I have colleagues who are engineers, salespeople, customer support, lawyers, accountants. I mean, it runs the whole gamut. And I really believe it doesn’t matter what your title is, you can’t expect people to adapt to you. To be successful, you have to adapt to them. It doesn’t matter what your role is at the company, whether you’re the CEO, or the most recent or the most junior person hired. If everybody took that mindset, I actually think it would make a big difference, because the greatest problem with how we communicate is that we don’t listen to understand.
I say this to my team all the time. We don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. We listen to rebut. We listen to react. That’s the way dialogue is on the news, on TV today. And so for me, it’s listen to really understand the person, think about what are their underlying motivations, and then adapt your style. Be a bit of a chameleon.
Speak to each person a little bit differently. Some people may need data to understand what you’re trying to get across or to convince them of something. Some people may need anecdotes. Some people may need to read something. Others may need to talk through it. You have to constantly be adapting in order to be successful in this increasingly diverse workplace.