Lisa Poulson on Unlocking the Psychology of Communication(s)

Mixing Board Studio Session

Lisa Poulson is an Executive and Communications Coach for innovators as poseycorp’s principal. She pairs the principles and practices of executive coaching with 30 years of experience in technology communications. As a communications coach she has served a diverse range of clients in technology, biotech, healthcare and finance – from two person start-ups to global multi-nationals. 

In this Studio Session, Lisa and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about de-pluralizing communications and focusing on communication (singular); why ambiguity about the function is a gift; understanding your audience; meeting the unconscious needs of our colleagues and clients; and, the power of distinctive human voices.

SG: Tell me what you're up to today and what led up to this point? 

LP: I’m just about to hit 11 years with my own business as a communications coach. I got there through being a tech PR person for 30 years. In PR, you often work with people who have mixed feelings about communicating at all. They're introverted, their content is complicated, and they don't want to be on the radar screen of so many different audiences. It was interesting going to coaching school, because that's when I learned – ‘Oh, that's why that person is doing that. That's actually what's going on.’

SG: Once you started coaching, what was the light bulb moment? When did you start to understand the psychology behind things versus just the action? 

LP: It’s about neurobiology, patterns, and how our brains develop. The big insight in coaching school was that our brains hate when we change patterns. As children, we're taught specific ways to answer questions. Your teacher asks you a question, you answer as fast as you can. You're taught to be polite to older people and always answer them. 

When you’re an adult and you’re working with customers, you might repeat their language and let them reset the agenda of what you wanted to talk about, because that's how you bond with customers in a meeting.

Engineers are hilarious - they have their own patterns. When I’d ask one question, they’d presuppose the 14 questions they thought I might ask next and then answer them all just to get me out of their offices. 

Repeating questions, suspending your agenda, answering questions that you haven’t been asked, none of those things are good in a media interview. But these are habits we develop as we do our jobs every day. 

Whenever we break a pattern, our amygdala tells our adrenal glands to give us a shot of cortisol. That’s why we feel stressed, uncomfortable, and wrong if we pivot or if we choose not to answer a question. That’s a huge reason why media interviews can feel so stressful. 

Explaining how brains work is so helpful with engineering and scientific clients. It’s great to be able to say: “There's a biological reason why you hate doing this.” This helps the light bulb go off for them too. 

When I'm coaching, I tell my clients that this work is an invitation to rewire their brains, that they’ll feel uncomfortable doing media interviews or giving talks for at least six months. But after their brains recognize and embrace the new pattern, the icky stress feeling will go away. 

Explaining resistance and stage fright using neurobiology and biochemistry helps my clients see that they feel stressed, it’s not their fault, it's just a normal biological process. That puts us on a level where we can start to work on building their communication skills.

SG: Ironically, what stresses me out is doing the same thing over and over. 

LP: Yeah, it's boring, and you're worried that people are going to be pissed. What I say to people about that is, don't assume you have 100% of anybody's attention at any time. They're listening to you with 10 or 15% of their brain, and they're preoccupied with their own problems. They won't even notice that you're repeating yourself until you've said something 15 times.

SG: As a coach, how are you identifying the different types of psychological archetypes that people bring to the communications table?

LP: In 25 years of working in PR, I had to identify – ‘How is this person going to be a problem for me, what is this person doing?’ I built those instincts through trial and error over time in PR. But coaching school gave me a framework to make sense of my instincts. One of the big things that you learn in coaching school is that people aren't always conscious of how they see the world and how they see themselves. And they certainly aren’t conscious of how other people perceive them.

I recently worked with a client who answered a question with a rapid fire hose of information that was overwhelming and confusing. I said, “Dude, you can't do that.” He said, “Well, that's just the way my brain works.” I said, “I don't care that that's how your brain works. That's not how other people's brains work.” 

Communication isn't about your comfort, it's about your audience’s comfort. 

Another client was super mavericky, wanted to be an iconoclast, and couldn’t bear delivering the same message more than once. He was driving marketing and comms insane because he created new messaging on the fly every time he opened his mouth. I said to him, “Just be a fucking meat puppet, man.” And it worked. 

One of the things about communications people is that we meet people in stressful situations. We already see them when they're less defended and more transparent. We can read them and get a sense of what they really need to hear to learn.

SG: You’ve worked with hundreds of different types of comms people. How do you see the multifaceted personalities within the communications field mapping to the multifaceted personalities and the people that we partner with?

LP: This is part of what makes what we do so complicated and complex. One of the things that is most dangerous is that, as humans, we are very often unaware of our deepest fears and our deepest desires, both professionally and for our egos. The way that I used to think of it when I had my last day job was, everybody comes to work with their little lunchbox full of all the gremlins, fears and issues. They open up that lunchbox, all the gremlins run around the office and fight with each other. Then they jump back in the lunchbox and come home with you.

Every comms person has their own feelings and biases about the profession, how it's perceived, and how it should be done properly. Some people are mechanistic about it because they like the control. Some people love to create but don’t care about organization. 

There are as many different types of communications leaders as there are humans. Some people come in defensive and get their back up, some people panic in crisis. Sometimes a comms person's own fears and issues can blind them to perceiving the real situation and the executive's issues. To be a great comms person, you need to be a profoundly skilled observer and listener. If your fears and the dialogue in your head is so loud that you can't do that, you can't do your job. 

SG: Yep, that dialogue could be:  “There's only one solution to this, and I know what it is”...

LP: … And somebody says, “I'm not sure we should do that,” and you panic and fall apart.  When someone comes at you, that’s an opportunity for you to evaluate, “What's triggering this person? What are their conscious and unconscious fears? How can I help them see the right strategy and make them feel safer and more comfortable?” 

When we say yes, no, or ‘have you considered this instead?’ we need to ground our approach in a clear understanding of the conscious and unconscious dynamics around us. 

Every product marketing and product management person in the universe thinks that their widget 7.2 is the greatest product that's ever been shipped. You know in The Lion King, when Rafiki holds up baby Simba, and everyone cheers, “Ahh! Yay!” Whether they realize it or not, these people in product marketing and product management want their Lion King moment. And for them, the only thing that defines that is a press release.

As comms people, instead of fighting with them about whether their silly incremental release widget 7.2 deserves a press release, it's so much more effective if we can understand, what is this person's unconscious need? 

Instead of “No, you don’t get a press release,” we can say, “Boy, widget 7.2 is awesome, we're so excited about it. In fact we're going to build this microsite that all the customers can go directly to, it's going to have this great video,” and on and on. It's about finding a way to meet that unspoken, unconscious need. 

You can only perceive someone else’s unconscious needs if your own head is ready to think about the other person.

SG: When you started making the transition from PR into coaching, it was also around the time where the changes in the communications/PR roles were beginning to get more exponential. One thing that either people can lean into or people can be afraid of is ambiguity, and the industry in which we operate is incredibly ambiguous right now. As someone who's been through this and seen these various evolutions, what would you tell people about this ambiguity?

LP: A distinctive, useful voice will always shine through. It doesn't matter what the medium is. A voice that really sounds personal, human, and has something of demonstrable value to say to the target audience, that'll shine through. 

This is the hill that I die on when I'm coaching people on keynotes – 70% of my energy with clients is spent on: ‘Who's your audience? What does your audience fear? What does your audience need? What does your audience hope for? What is your audience in denial about?’ Because every talk has to be a gift to the audience. How are you going to help get them to where they can feel hopeful after they've heard from you? I'm not starting with your gestures and your voice, I'm starting with, ‘Do you understand what gifts you're giving?’ Then we talk about the message and how it's delivered. The last 5% of coaching addresses how you’ll use your voices and gestures. 

I also think ambiguity about the role of communications opens up new opportunities. What we know as communicators can be applied to any communication. I was working with someone at a large, matrixed, bureaucratic organization. He had an email from someone who, if he handled her the wrong way, could have launched a campaign to destroy either the initiative he was working on or his reputation. He was so stressed that he couldn’t begin to draft a response to her. We spent two hours going through every single pro or possible outcome, every single audience that might see his email if it were forwarded, all of the different possibilities. We basically did a classic crisis communications analysis of the situation. I used all the tools I used to use as a PR person. 

After all of that thinking and analysis, we wrote a three-sentence email, which took us less than 15 minutes to write. He got the response he wanted in seven minutes. I was still sitting with him when she replied. That's an example of – every communication matters. Applying the principles that we have built and know instinctively, to every communication, is part of what will get us, the instinctual and professional communicators, through the ambiguity in our industry.  

SG: To me, this ambiguity is a gift. For a long time, people have beat themselves up in the communications world for not being treated as strategic enough. This ambiguity allows us to walk through that deeper strategic door that is open to us. If you look at what a classic management consultant would do, their action is in the spreadsheets. Our action is in facilitating better human connection and shared understanding. 

The hard part of this ambiguity is defining it. I'm curious from your seat, how would you define this future job. What is the role? 

LP: Chief Communications Officer is not the right title. That title is reductive. Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People says, “Communication is the most important skill in life.” If it's the most important skill in life, it's the most important skill in business, too. I think of communication as the lubricant that gets everything done. The image that I have in my mind is a strong communications counselor as the grout that holds all of the bricks together.

I would reverse engineer the role and start with, ‘Where and how can I add the most value? And to whom? So that everyone sees that the value is coming together?’ The communication person may be the best listener and understand where there are deltas – where one team doesn't understand another, helping each team learn how to communicate with each other, building trust so that they will share what's going on, and improving the quality of the whole. A person could do that with any title, and a person could do that being the COO, the CTO, or the Chief of Staff to the CEO. A person could do that as the CEO. To me, it feels more like attitude than function.

Add enough value that you become essential in the process, and then, the title follows. I think that route is more realistic than saying ‘I want this whole organization to have an epiphany about what communication means, and then I can slide into this role that's been pre-created that everyone understands.’ Every organization is so different. What the organization values has a lot to do with how titles are given. 

SG: We do live in a reductive world where corporations have their processes and their roles. People will say, well, we've always done it this way. We already have these titles, and we only have one communications person, and they're focused on PR. Those things don't change overnight. How do we help people see a new way and move the rest of this industry along with us? 

LP: I'm happily working for myself so I don't have to fight for a title anywhere, which is a great side benefit of working for yourself. When I'm coaching comms people, I ask, ‘How can you add the most value to the business that the business will recognize and be thrilled about?’ When I'm working with anyone on a leadership team, I just want them to see the light that communication, with no S, really matters. Because the more they see the light, the more they will reach out to and respect their communication people on their team.

A lot of leaders don't even realize how important communication is, especially if I’m working with a CFO, General Counsel, CTO, or CEO. Heads of Sales usually get it, but many senior leaders think that communication is only 5 to 10% of their jobs. A great communications lead can counsel each executive function to show them how to use skills to, for example, address the sticky issue with a board member. As they deliver value and build relationships in their organizations, communications leaders grow their roles. The great ones become much more of a counselor than ‘just’ a Head of Communications.

SG: In my experience, the one-on-one psychological aspect is really key and unlocks a lot of stuff. But we're talking about organizations, not individuals. The group dynamic group and group psychology is also imperative – how people connect or understand or hear each other. When we talk about communication, singular, sometimes the entire breakdown of an organization is because the CEO and the Chief Product Officer don't communicate well together. Everything else could work underneath that, but there are some basic things that you have to break down.

LP: You have to learn to observe the people and you have to be able to map the organization. When you're talking to people about an organization, it's a little bit like a Faulkner novel, everybody's an unreliable narrator without realizing it. You have to piece each narrative together into one whole. 

When I'm working one-on-one with a client, I'm like, ‘’All right, let's map. Who are all the people that matter? What do you know about what they think? Where are they now? Who gets along? Who doesn't get along? What's happening?’ 

Sometimes they haven't deliberately tried to do that before. Insights can happen just from the process of writing it all down. But you are absolutely right, if the CEO and Chief Product Officer aren't getting along, it can break an entire organization. Sometimes you have to look right to the top of the organization to figure it out. As comms people, we are in rooms and observing more than almost anyone else. We can make great maps. 

SG: There are the people who observe it, and then, there are the people who observe it, and then act on it. How do we give people more agency to act? To take what they see internally, to take that into their job, and share that insight? It's not telling on people, it's shining a light on the friction that's inhibiting the ability to communicate effectively.

LP: You have to do it incrementally. Start with one thing at a time. ‘I noticed this one dynamic, who can I safely talk to about this? What happens when I talk to this one person about this one thing?’ Once you’ve completed one beta test, you evaluate. ‘Okay, I can see that that was helpful. Okay, next time if I see something, I'm going to talk to more people about that thing that I see, and see if I can be helpful.’ 

In a way, it's not dissimilar from when, as a PR person, you're trying to decide how much do I go off the record around background with this particular reporter? You always start with something small, and then you build that trust over time, and you take more risks over time. It's the same within an organization. ‘What can your organization tolerate? What can this person in the organization tolerate?’ You inch along and you see.

SG: What’s your advice for someone entering into communication(s) today? What's your advice for them?

LP: Read a lot, which helps you learn the language and the larger territory. Observe. Map your industry. ‘What are the issues? Where are the conversations happening? Where are the people in my industry launching and initiating new topics? What constitutes something that is orthogonal enough that it's newsworthy and could be viral?’ Over time, we develop a gut instinct for those things, but when you're first starting out, you don't know. In a way, when you start any new job in any industry, you're becoming a citizen of a new country and learning a new language. Learning that language and mapping the industry are the things a communicator must do first. 

The second thing is, watch and listen at your own organization. Sometimes the most important thing to do when you're a young person in the meeting is just treat it like school and watch everybody. It's like you're watching a nature documentary. Just watch and learn. Some of those powerful lessons are taught unintentionally! 

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