Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Now, as we focus mostly on communication skills on this podcast, especially in the West place. My guest today, Dave Collins, who is the founder and CEO of Oak and Reed. He conducts workshops on soft skills in the workplace. He is an executive leadership coach and he specializes also in interviewing skills and team communication skills. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Dave. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to be here today. Thank you for being on the show. I'm glad that you came. You are such a perfect fit for this podcast. Well, yeah, I saw you online and I feel like we have a lot to talk about you and I. So I'm glad to be here and I'm glad to be chatting. Thanks. And before we talk about the work stuff, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. So I started my own business about seven years ago, Oak and Reeds. I live in the Bay area in the East Bay, San Francisco Bay area, originally from Boston. What I like to do for fun is I love doing improv comedy, which is part of the genesis of my business. I love getting on stage. I do that for fun. I've been doing it for close to 20 years now, I think. Wow. And I'm married. We're expecting our first kid this spring. And so, yeah, a lot going on and doing a lot of workshops, a lot of training, a lot of coaching. So thankfully the business is strong, but yeah, that's a little bit about me. That is amazing. First of all, congratulations on the new addition to the family. Thank you. Yeah. We're excited. A lot to do, but it's going well so far. Must be exciting. So you went from one end of the country to the other. Yep. I grew up in Boston and then made my way to Chicago for college. I went to Northwestern and that's really where I fell in love with improv. And I majored in communication. That's who I am. Yes. A lot of places for that. Yes. Yep. And it's funny. I had a lot of friends who were engineers and things. They said communication like. when are you gonna use that? That's such a squishy major. And I'm like, I use it every day. This is the most useful. Even in your personal life, it's not even a business thing anymore. Even in your personal life. Yep, exactly. It's like, we're talking right now. So after school, moved to San Francisco and started working at a company called DEGW where we did a really interesting kind of consulting where we would do research on how companies worked, how their teams were structured, where their offices were. And then we would design physical offices to suit the way they collaborated. So my job was running workshops to help people adjust to the change of more open spaces, different types of collaborative spaces, different technologies to communicate also did a lot of remote or work from home programs that were built into part of the strategy. So that was where I got my start teaching and facilitating and also thinking about how do teams. communicate and how do people communicate within that? And how does it tie to the physical spaces they're in? Which fast forward to now, and with a lot of working from home, it's the same stuff from a different angle. You mentioned collaborative conversations. We've had a few of our own collaborative conversations, topics that have been covered lately on this show. What are some of your thoughts? What makes for good collaboration? A great question. Good collaboration, I mean, my perspective on that comes from the world of improvisation. And it comes from this core principle of yes and, which for people who are listening, it's this idea that drives improv comedy. It's that any idea someone brings to you when you're on stage, you have to do two things. You have to say yes to it, which doesn't mean just fully stopping everything and saying 100% that's true. It just means validating the idea. That's a real idea that exists. I hear it, I understand it. And then taking it one step further, you and it, you add something to it. You create something new based off of what that other person just said. You add a little piece to it and then throw it back to them, right? For them to now react to this slightly modified version of what they just said. And this concept I think is at the core of collaboration. It's listening, it's validating and it's building together and then handing it back to someone. And a lot of us don't think of it this way. I mean, I think of it this way because I'm trained this way, but really great collaborative conversations have this yes, and back and forth as balance to it. And that's really what I like to teach those fundamentals in my workshops. Yes. And I find that the key part of that is the listening. Why do we struggle so much with listening? Great question. Why do we struggle with listening? I think because We are really good at listening, but we just like listening to what's in our own brains. So we're just listening to our own thoughts a lot of times when there's a lot of information from the other person. And so kind of changing our listening focus from like, what am I thinking? What are my opinions on this too? Well, what does this person across from me saying? A lot of people don't make that switch very often. They're just much more focused on their own monologues in their head. So it's how we decode what you are saying based on our perspective. So we're not literally listening to what you are saying. Yeah, I think a lot of people just, they're hearing people, right? Like the words are sort of washing over them, but most of what their brain is doing is coming up with, well, what's the next thing I'm gonna say? Do I agree or do I disagree with that? You know, what am I gonna have for lunch? Did I like, did I remember to put on deodorant today? Like all of these sort of. other thoughts in your own head while you're smiling and nodding. So you're only giving, you know, five percent of your energy to the person actually talking or ninety five is your own stuff. Hmm. So you'll skip the entire validation part of the collaborative process. You just mentioned. Yeah. You can't do yes. And if you're just paying attention to your own thoughts. And this is something I do a lot of in my workshops, active listening skills where. Thinking about the three levels of listening, I think is a really helpful concept. Level one listening is kind of passive, it's doing what I'm talking about, like listening to your own thoughts. Level two is where you turn up the dial a little bit and focus more on the other person. But you're very much focused on the other person and their ideas may spark, oh, that's interesting, that's new. I wouldn't have picked that up if I had stayed in that first level. And the level three listening is this, what I teach in coaching is, a much more holistic type of listening where you're almost hearing things that the person isn't saying, because you're paying attention to their energy, their pauses, their facial expressions, all that kind of stuff. And you can really understand a lot about someone, but it's also exhausting to do that. It's really intense. It sounds like an ideal situation, but we're not gonna be able to accomplish that all the time. Speaking of those nuances and the energy and the body language, which is a huge part of communication. It's funny, the first time you go to a communication course, they say only 7% of what you say is communication. Yeah, yeah. So all the other 93%, now that we are on a hybrid environment, how does that play out? It's a great question. I mean, the short answer is I still don't know because it's changing so much. We're in this really fascinating, like you and I think about communication all the time. I think it's fascinating. Others I think are finding it terrifying and really frustrating. Or maybe not even relevant. Or yeah, we're not even relevant, but it's everything's shifting. So as far as body language, I think one of the things that's really fascinating to me is one, body language is still incredibly important. It's just that a lot of the variables that we're used to paying attention to, we don't see. So we don't see posture. We don't see arms crossed nearly as much. We don't see a lot of the physical whole body language that we're so used to. And that can be frustrating for people who have traditionally communicated a lot in that realm. It's good in some cases, because I think a lot of that physicality has been used to establish power and dominance in ways that aren't always so healthy, right? The ability to tower over someone if you're six foot eight and intimidate someone in a conference room or the ability to be really loud and yell at someone. Like I can just hit mute. Like I could just turn the volume down. So I'm not intimidated anymore, yeah. I can control your level of intimidation through your physicality much better. if I'm at home on zoom. And so I think some of that stuff isn't really being talked about as a real equalizer in terms of power dynamics and status. However, a lot of people are struggling because a lot less information in total is being communicated about non-verbals just because of the flattening. Everything's mediated through a camera. So it's harder for me to see the small facial expressions on your face. that I would have if we were in person. And for someone who's attuned to that, that can be frustrating. That can be like disconnecting and draining. If you're a manager and you're facilitating a Zoom meeting of 20 people, so you have 20 little screens in front of you, should you even focus on that? Or should you just get, hey, Dave, did you do that? Okay, submit it tomorrow. Annie, did you do this? And just get things done. Is that something you should even have on your agenda? It's a great question. And the unsatisfying answer is it depends on what you're trying to do in the meeting. Because I think a lot of times, and I've seen this firsthand with clients, they've simply tried to recreate a type of meeting that existed with everyone in person. They've tried to just recreate that on Zoom. And that doesn't work because you don't feel a sense of connection in a status type meeting on Zoom. Maybe you did in your weekly team meeting in person because you had a little chit chat before, it felt good to be in physical presence with each other. You could have little side conversations, but those types of status meetings on Zoom are very robotic and don't do all of the side benefits of promoting a team and connection. They're just check-ins. And so, a meeting like that, I often say like, destroy that meeting. Make that something that happens in a Google Doc, right? Make that something that happens in a Slack channel and then invent a new meeting that is more about connecting with people. So you're not trying to do two things at the same time. It's kind of a roundabout way of answering your question of like, don't force it. There's nothing you can do to recreate that. Yeah, because the practicality and the time factor, I just don't see how you can have so many and just to cover everything in that particular department. Yeah, and like you can have 20 people up in a gallery mode and I'll do that for a workshop. And I'm a hundred percent focused on facial expressions and who's engaged, but also there's not as much that I can do with that because I can cold call on someone and say like, hey, you're making a face or I can tell you're distracted, right? You're texting or something like that. or you're looking at something else on your screen, you know how people, I'm looking at you right now. You know how sometimes people will be looking at a separate window tab. You can see that the eyes are at a little bit of a right and not straight up on the camera. Yeah. And some of it's totally valid. You're like, hey, obviously you're multitasking, like stop. And sometimes it's, oh, sorry, I went on mute because my dog is barking. And that's not really their fault. And so instead of playing like catch the third graders being distracted, because that's kind of what you end up playing as like a third grade teacher. Just drop it. If you really want to connect with people, have a three person meeting, right. And just ask them about what's going on and do that for 15 minutes. Right. It, you can be a lot more creative with how you reestablish connection. Don't just map old meetings onto zoom. This is everyone hates that. Yeah, back to first time managers who you work with, there's a lot of your clientele. So here's the thing, even before COVID, we've always said people learn technical skills at university, but they are not taught how to manage teams because they do less of the technical work when they manage teams, they must delegate. So now you're a first time manager, managing teams for the first time, needing these soft skills. And in top of that, the hybrid dynamic we've just spoken How do you manage all of that? Yeah, with a lot of patience. Well, to back up a little bit, I think a lot of organizations get in trouble where they don't provide an opportunity for highly skilled, high performers to say, I wanna stay here, I wanna continue my career journey, but I don't wanna manage people. Because it starts with that option, so you can retain that excellent engineer or marketer. or finance expert, you can retain them and they can say, I don't even wanna touch people management because that is not something I care about nor is it something I wanna work on. Because when you force that very talented person to then take 40% of their day and use it to manage people, they're gonna be resentful, they're not gonna wanna work on this skill, they're gonna feel like this is the wrong choice and they'll leave. They'll just go leave and go to another organization. So I think that's like the first big decision point is to design that high level individual contributor path. And then giving people a chance to try out people management and see if this is something they like. Giving people an option to dip their toe in and manage a project, right? As opposed to making it part of their everyday full-time role. So they can say, actually, I thought I liked this. I really don't. Or maybe someone who wasn't sure can say, ooh, this is awesome. I love dealing with the intricacies of people management. Give me more of that. So at least your paths are stocked with the right people. Once you're there, I think so much of people management for first time people managers, the challenge is understanding when do I give feedback and when do I coach? And it's two very different skills and different approaches. feedback being, I know what you should do. Here's how to do it. Come back to me in two weeks and I should have seen this behavior change versus coaching, which is I know you, the direct report. You're actually the expert here. My ideas won't be as helpful. I want you to solve this problem. I'm gonna guide you to help solve this problem on your own using your own tools. And just switching back between those two modes is really what I coach a lot of new managers to figure that out. Because if you can get that right, a lot of it becomes a lot easier. Because also you're not gonna fully put the responsibility on the leader to fix everything. Right, right. We always say leaders must do this, create safety, create a culture, create this. What do you think are some of the things that, what we call managing up? They can initiate, they can take responsibility for and say, hey, Mr. Dave, is it possible for us to do it this way? Yeah, I think the managing up skill is such a great call out by you. And the first thing starts with having a feedback culture in an organization that's healthy. So people know how to give clear feedback and they also know how to receive quality feedback. Cause I think being afraid that your manager will react poorly if you provide them feedback is a huge deterrent to managing up. So you got to teach everyone. both sides of the feedback conversation and give a little bit of patience if people aren't good at it at the beginning. Cause oftentimes managers think they're done receiving feedback once they become a leader. And it's like, it's no, you're going to get more from multiple directions. So you got to take it with a little grace. You got to enjoy that and you got to respect people, especially those you manage, if they give you feedback on something that maybe hits close to home. That's like a big long-term as an organization. And I think also the idea of managing up, oh, one of the big things I'm talking about, we're talking about hybrid communication, is allowing people a safe place to talk about their virtual communication expectations. Because I think a lot of stuff gets lost. I'll give a specific example. I think it's okay to text someone at 6 p.m. a question. Whereas someone else might think that's an intrusion into my personal space. you never text me something personal, that's an email. Or a manager sends a bunch of emails at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, just because they put their kids to bed and they like to get ahead of things before Monday starts. But their teammates assume, if I'm getting emails at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, that manager is expecting me to be working then. And that's a big miscommunication just based on tools and what receiving a message in that medium means from someone. Which means there was no clarity of communication to begin with to say, if I send you at 11 p.m. on Sunday, it doesn't mean respond and take care of it right away? Mm-hmm, exactly. And there's lots of other smaller examples. Like, what does it mean to get invited to a meeting when I get a calendar invite? Does it mean I'm expected to attend? Can I say no? Is it the responsibility of the person inviting me to explain why my presence is important? Or is it my job to ask? Because if I'm trying to get stuff done on a day and I get a bunch of meeting invites, can I just say no? And how do I know what's important? Is there an expectation that there will be minutes sent afterwards so I can just learn what happened? And so all of these little minutiae cause a lot of conflict and frustration when it's not clarified. And so many of our habits and norms have been turned upside down. in the last three years because of COVID, because of remote work, and having these conversations as a reset, really important for new managers, back to your earlier point, to get a handle on how to talk to people, what tool to use to talk to them, and all the kind of expectations of the best way to talk to me as the person you're managing. Right. I remember back in the day in the 90s, so you'll have the agenda, you'll have the meeting, and then the secretary taking notes will now go create a spreadsheet where it says, project, five tasks. Number one, do this. And that names next to it, Roberta. Number two, do this. Diane. Number, you will know exactly what affects you just by looking at the name column. Anything else? I'm not saying that you should ignore what your colleagues are doing, but in the matter of urgency and optimizing time, you will know exactly what to go for. So if you miss that meeting, is that something potentially, it sounds very simple, that can be applied as part of the process to say, just focus on what you need to do, you know, because you're not in the office anymore where things were a lot more simpler. Well, and I think that's a perfect example that you just laid out in the meeting. There was a very defined role, the secretary or the admin, their job was to take the notes and then send out the action items afterwards. Assigning roles very explicitly is something I think a lot of people forget is a tool in their tool belt. for making remote meetings work really well. So for example, who's gonna be the person who writes down the action items? They don't have to pick that one anymore? No, I mean, some do, but a lot of places, the team meeting, there's not an assigned person to do that, whether it's the same person over and over, whether it's a rotating role, there's also a lot of other roles that make virtual meetings run smoothly that people don't even think about. So... For example, the person whose job it is to make sure that the in the room technology works for a hybrid meeting so that if everything breaks, it's not the organizer's job to fix it. There's someone else who can handle it while the meeting continues. Or the person who speaks up on behalf of people in a room for all the virtual people to describe something that just happened in the room that no one would see on the camera or no one would hear. but has changed the course of the entire meeting. Right, so for example, if everyone's making a face, right? Or it seems like everyone here in the room is really not happy with this. They're making faces, they're angry, whatever that energy is, describing that to people online, because otherwise that's like a huge miscommunication. And having someone whose job it is to monitor these and communicate it to folks virtually, these are some of the things that can be actually fun to assign. But very often meeting organizers are a little loathe to make too many rules. Even the rules are what are gonna make these virtual meetings run more smoothly. Do they feel like they'll get pushback and then people won't be, oh, okay. It's a feeling that adding structure will upset people in some way because it feels initially like more work, but. I always joke like as a virtual meeting facilitator, you have to have that third grade teacher mindset where you got to give third graders a lot of structure. Otherwise they're going to be upset. And this structure helps people know how to participate, what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to, what matters, what doesn't matter. And you just generally need more of that in a virtual setting because we're not as used to it. It's just a lot of these habits and norms aren't normal for people. Right. Let's cover conflict resolution before I let you go. Earlier when we were having our chat, we said there's a way in which when you coach, you sometimes just let the team, the people in the team handle the conflict instead of bringing everything to the leader's desk because they got work to do as well. Please talk to us about that. Yeah, I think Conflict is one of those things where it's often a symptom of some of the other challenges we've just talked about, like management skills or a poor feedback culture or a lack of structure and it's lack of clarity. But when it comes to conflict, one of the things I like to teach is the idea that there are different modes of conflict, basically different strategies you can take with you into a conflict and you get to choose. as someone entering a conflict, you get to choose how you approach this. It doesn't just have to be a reactive, gut feeling thing. You can decide, like, am I gonna push for myself here? Am I gonna maybe push the boundaries a little and fight, you know, in a respectful way, but really because I care a lot about this? Or am I just gonna give them what they want? Because it doesn't matter to me. Or because they're my VP and I'd rather than be happy. And that matters more than winning this one small thing. understanding that you have a choice in a conflict, I think is really helpful for people for solving their own. And then it also comes down to a lot of conflicts. The only people who are gonna come up with a good solution are the two people in conflict, right? Bringing in a leader or bringing in a third party to mediate there, if you're relying on them to come up with a solution, it's gonna be worse because they're disconnected. from the day to day, moment to moment. And also they're not the one who has to implement it. So teaching people how to solve their own problems is just a really, really helpful thing in an organization, both from efficiency and just a quality of solution perspective. Cause they're the ones who have to kind of eat the dinner they make. If it comes from you, like you said, it's gonna be the one implementing it. So usually that means it's gonna be solved. Yeah. You are going to be your own problem solver. Yeah. And it's like, that's easier in some areas than others, right? If it's a disagreement on a process or disagreement on what a deliverable looks like, you know, some of those things are like, you can give and take and you can solve it if it's an interpersonal problem of two people, whether it's abusive or the tone of language is a problem. That can be a scenario where it does help to have a mediator. He listened because the emotions are so charged. You have to listen really well to do conflict in a quality way. And if people are really enraged, no one is gonna be listening well to the other person. And you need someone to step in and calm the tension. Is there anything that you do in your workshops that I haven't asked you that you would like to share today? Yeah. The other thing that has been very popular recently is public speaking. So presenting virtually, because a lot of companies are just still doing most of their meetings, most of their presentations over zoom. And I think a lot of people need work on that to be totally honest. It's like, how do you engage with a virtual audience? How do you do like what you were talking about? Look at that 20 person array of faces and know like, what do I do with this? Like, what do I do if someone's making a face or can I call on someone? How do I get people to ask questions in a Zoom, like all hands presentation? And a lot of it comes down to shifting gears between information or telling a story or giving an example and then shifting into facilitation mode. Like, okay, how do I make it really clear? Now it's your time to talk as an audience or now it's your time to ask questions. Cause those transitions are really tripping a lot of people up. Cause it's a lot more natural in person, especially if you've been doing it for a while. So figuring out how to do that dance, I spent a lot of work with executives on that recently. Calling on people, like you said, is different in the office than here. So that's quite a challenge. Yeah, but you know, you have more tools. So one of the big things I think a lot of people don't take advantage of are all the little bells and whistles in Zoom, like chat, like polling. you can have people raise their hand virtually. And there are like quality simple ways to do that. But again, back to our earlier conversation on structure, you gotta teach people, right? You gotta tell people what the rules are. You gotta say like, I'm gonna be looking for people to raise their hand with the little button. And you have to kind of say that at the beginning and remind people, cause it's not second nature yet. That third grade teacher like, here are the rules. You have to get the bathroom pass and raise your hand if you need to go to the bathroom. But once you get that down, like kids get it, adults get it in the meetings. And it's up to us to not be offended or to not take any of it personally, but structure has to be there so there's no chaos. Last words of wisdom, Dave Collins. Last words of wisdom, I would say, if there's one thing you, not you, but anyone listening and their teams can do, it's talking about listening. I think listening is that skill. that everyone can get better at, everyone can talk about. It's a low stress, low pressure type of workshop or type of discussion to bring into a team meeting to talk about how do we show that we're listening? What does good listening look like? What does it look like across different communication tools? Like, what does it mean to listen on Slack, right? What does it mean to listen in a Zoom meeting? And many people have never been asked these questions, but they're affecting our day-to-day work lives. So they're really worthwhile spend 15 minutes talking about that as a team, because you'll learn a lot about people. And we always have this idea of team building having to be something like fun and exciting. Go on a strategic getaway. Yeah, but like that's team building, right? That team building can happen in 15 minutes with a quality question where people reveal things about themselves. So go do that, have a question, have a conversation about anything we just talked about today. You'll save your company thousands of dollars. which you could spend on Okan Reads workshops, but also that's a free one. For sure. That's a free one for you. Listening indeed. Words of wisdom from Dave Collins, the CEO and founder of Okan Read, a company that does workshops on soft skills and executive leadership coaching. Thank you so much for being here today. And before you go, please give us all your connections to the interwebs. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun conversation. You can find everything you need to find at my website, www.OakAndReads, O-A-K-A-N-D-R-E-E-D-S.com. On LinkedIn as well, I do a monthly webinar series, a 15 minute virtual learning session. I call it Work From Home Wednesdays. We cover a quick topic. I've done workshops on feedback, on coaching, on active listening. So if you liked any of these topics, go to the Oak and Reeds LinkedIn page and watch those videos. and shoot me an email. You can find my email. It's Dave at oakandreads.com. I love chatting about this stuff and there's many ways to stay in touch. So come find me. Let's talk about communication. I love this concept. Excellent. And we will continue to do so. Thank you so much, Dave, from Oak and Reads with an S, my bad. For being on our show today, I enjoyed having with us conversation with you as well. Yeah, thanks for having me and have a great day. You too. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review and we'll be with you next time.