Advocate to Win with Heather Hansen
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
“There are times when you can't keep a promise or meet an expectation, and that is actually a huge opportunity to build credibility.”
— Heather Hansen
Identifying Your Jury
Everyone has a jury, whether it's a listener, a client, or a group of people in a workshop.
It's important to know who your jury is so you can understand their perspective and speak to them effectively.
A jury's job is to listen and choose, not judge.
Your job is to help them choose you by giving them a story that works for them to believe.
Defining Advocate
The dictionary definition of advocate is to publicly support something.
Advocating involves asking for what you want in a way that makes you likely to get it.
Building belief is another form of advocating.
To advocate for a change, you need to build belief in it and ask your team to be on board in a way that makes you likely to get it.
Advocating involves changing perspectives, and it requires specific skills that can be learned.
The 3 Cs: Compassion, Curiosity, Credibility
The three Cs are an umbrella concept under which the 10 tools of advocacy lie.
The first C is compassion, which means seeing things from the jury's perspective and acting accordingly.
The second C is curiosity, which involves asking questions to build connections, show compassion, and credibility.
The third and most important C is credibility, as without it, one cannot win over the jury or team.
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is important for effective teams
Amy Edmondson is known for the idea of psychological safety
Proportionate speaking is a component of psychological safety
Proportionate listening is also important and can impact the team negatively if not practiced
Leaders should be willing to be surprised and focus on what they can learn in meetings
How To Influence Others
To get buy-in from the team, it's important to look at each person separately and ask questions about how they see the change.
It's important to get input from diverse people, not just those who look like you or have your background.
Collect and create evidence to build credibility and argue for the change. Use the nine x nine formula to share evidence in as many different ways as possible, such as data, stories, and testimonials.
Speak to each person in a way that resonates with them by understanding their perspective and preferences for receiving information.
The mistake leaders make most often is not taking the time to understand each person's perspective and failing to communicate the evidence in ways that resonate with them.
The Importance of Understanding Perspective
Leaders often assume that people see the world the way they do, which is not the case, and their perspective becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Compassion and credibility are essential for leaders, and they must understand the perspectives of others to help them.
Feedback should be honest, and leaders must surround themselves with people with different perspectives and encourage them to speak up.
A study shows that knowing each other's names in the operating room reduces complications by 35%, emphasizing the importance of communication and speaking up.
Thanks for listening!
Apply for a free coaching call with me
Get a Free Gift ⬇️
🆓 The limitless organization short video course
Connect with me
www.instagram.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.facebook.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.www.linkedin.com/in/mgoldman10/
I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
-
To know who your jury is is very important. You can't be an advocate until you understand your jury.
And so everyone listening, no matter who you are, If you're a stay-at-home mom, your jury might be your children. Who you want them to choose broccoli over brownies. And you need to persuade them to do that. You might have your partner might be your jury, and in any given day you probably have a bunch of different juries.
So the first thing that I learned in the courtroom that I'd take into my life outside the courtroom is identifying your jury and how they see the world so that I can change it.
You made it to the Better Leadership Team. Show the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things so you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach Mike Goldman. I'm gonna show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team.
Alright, let's go.
Heather Hansen gives her clients the tools to advocate for themselves, their ideas, and their teams. She was a trial attorney for over 20 years and was consistently named one of the top 50 female attorneys in Pennsylvania. Heather combines her psychology degree, her experience as a TV anchor and her years in the courtroom to help her clients build belief, advocate for their products and services, and to turn even an adversary into. an advocate.
She's been an anchor at the Law and Crime Network, has appeared on NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC CBS, and Sirius Radio. Heathers has helped thousands of keynote audience members in Kuwait, Ireland, Mexico, and across the US to become their best advocates. She's worked with Harvard Business School, Google, LVMH, Save A Tree, and The American Medical Association, among others.
Heather's the author of the bestseller, the Elegant Warrior, How to Win Life's Trials Without Losing Yourself, Which Publishers Weekly Calls a Template to Achieving Personal and Career Goals, and The Host of the Elegant Warrior Podcast, her latest book is Advocate to Win 10 Tools to Ask For What You Want.
And get it. Wow. Great stuff. Heather and I actually shared the TEDx stage together. She was speaker number two. I was speaker number three. She was wonderful. So really, really glad to have you on the show.
Oh my gosh, Mike, it's so great to be here. What an experience that was and how awesome your talk was. So I'm really delated to have this time to talk to you.
Yeah, do a Google search for both of them. It was TEDx, Gainesville. That's great. And it was great. So the first obvious question, Heather, is why the shift from the law to speaking, coaching, consulting?
Yeah, it's a great question and it's sort of a formative question for me. I loved being a lawyer. I loved the fight. I loved winning. I loved defending my doctors. And then I stopped loving it, and then I started really disliking it. It's very aggressive and it's a zero sum game. There's a winner and a loser, and because it's a zero sum game, it really changes people's personalities.
And I just didn't find it to be rewarding anymore. And so what I was finding rewarding is the speaking that I was doing. First I started speaking primarily to doctors, teaching them how to become better communicators, and then from there started doing more and more speaking to bigger and different groups and found that to be so rewarding.
Started coaching as a result of the speaking and it sort of just grew on its own very organically and compelled me to be drawn more and more into that world. I will say that I'm still a partner at my law firm. You know, some people say leap in the net will appear and I've been creeping from one career to another for about five years, and I think the creep is about over and I'm pretty thoroughly in the speaking and coaching realm.
Nice. It's kind of good and bad to have something to fall back on. I remember I started my first business, which was a miserable failure. It was a staffing business, all my savings out the window, and it only took three years. So I did it really well, and my wife kept saying, what's your plan B?
And I'm like, honey, you don't understand. If I have a plan B, I'm never gonna be dedicated enough to make this successful. But I guess that's not always true.
Well, it is true. It's actually something I work with my coach on because it is, there is always that. Plan B, and it's a very lucrative and profitable plan B. And so it's hard to force your brain not to see that because it's always there, right? It's always something that I could go back to, and it does make it so that when you have a bad day, rather than buckling down and figuring out how to.
Bring in the next client. You sort of start looking to see, well, should I be reaching out to old lawyer friends? I think it's just a battle, but the plan B is sort of always there and always gonna be there. And so I have to find other ways to motivate, to stay focused on what it is that I wanna do and how it is that I wanna serve.
So I'm playing coach now. Is there a date in the future where you've committed, here's when I'm a hundred percent. Or is that not even the goal?
Well, at the end of this year, I will have sort of divested from my current firm. I will probably be of council there. I still do a lot of work that I do with them is similar to the work that I do in my business in that it is coaching. I always say, so let me just take a step back here. All of my years in the law, I defended doctors in medical malpractice cases.
And I always say that we won our cases, not because I am a very good advocate, but because I'm very good at teaching the doctors how to advocate because the juries didn't wanna hear from me. They wanted to hear from the doctor who had done the thing, right?
And so I still do that. That's what I do now for my coaching clients or in front of audiences on stages. So I still do that with my firm for some of the clients that I serve. Going in and preparing the witnesses and talking to the witnesses about how they can best communicate with the juries, and I think that will always be a part of my work. I also do a lot of teaching of doctors on how to advocate for their patients and their treatment plans, but I think that the divestment from stepping into the courtroom will probably be done at the end of this year.
Got it. Beautiful. And that kind of leads me into kind of the next obvious question in my mind, which is, what did you learn?
And I guess, what are you continuing to learn from all the years in the law? What have you learned there that you are now taking and using with your clients outside the law?
I think that's the bulk of my thought leadership, but I think the thing that I would lead with is that everyone has their jury. So right now, Mike, our jury is the listeners, right? We are trying to persuade them and help them to believe that they should keep us on and not turn this podcast off.
And so our job is to persuade them to believe enough in what we're gonna say and what we're gonna share, and that it will serve them, that they will do that. If you are working to get a new client for coaching, they are your jury. Once you get in front of a group, if you're giving a workshop, that group is your jury.
And so to know who your jury is is very important. You can't be an advocate until you understand your jury and the way that they see the world and what their perspective is. And so, Knowing that you have to understand your jury is something that is inherent in the courtroom. You know, we know as much as we can about our juries in a very short period of time so that you can speak to what the jury knows in the way that they see the world.
And so everyone listening, no matter who you are, you're a jury. If you're a stay-at-home mom, your jury might be your children. Who you want them to choose broccoli over brownies. And you need to persuade them to do that. You might have your partner might be your jury, and in any given day you probably have a bunch of different juries.
So the first thing that I learned in the courtroom that I'd take into my life outside the courtroom is identifying your jury and how they see the world so that I can change change it.
I love that idea, and I guess you've gotta be careful not to look at that. Well, actually, let me ask this. The question, how do you make sure you don't look at in a negative way? Right? Because if I think of my wife as my jury, or my kids as my jury, or my clients as my jury, I can have a tendency to look at them in a less than loving way. Right?
It's so funny, and I love this question because that is what most people assume, that a jury is there to judge. You know, I don't like a jury. They're judging me. A jury's job is not to judge. A jury's job is to listen and choose. All they do in the courtroom is they listen to the other side's attorney, put forward their case with their evidence and their stories, and then they listen to me, put forward my case with my evidence and my stories and my energy of belief.
And then they choose what to believe. And the same is true of your jury. So if you think of them as they're to judge, you're gonna feel nervous about them. You're gonna feel a little bit of dislike for them, a little bit of judgment towards them and that, so that's not the way to look at them. The way to look at them is their job is to listen and choose.
Your job is to help them choose you. And I often talk about the inner energy, which is the part of you inside your brain that listens to all the voices and chooses what to believe. And same deal that part of you, that inner part of you, whether you call it your conscience or your higher self or whatever, it's listening to all of the voices, all the negative voices in your head. And it's not judging, it's choosing what to believe. And part of our job with our inner jury is to give it a story that works for you to believe as well.
Love it. Love it. So it's in the name of your book and you've used the word already a number of times, that word advocate, which is so important to you and your thought leadership.
Talk a little bit about how you define that word advocate and about why it's important to advocate for yourself and your ideas. And I guess that's a big monster question, but break it down however makes most sense for you.
So the dictionary definition of advocate is to publicly support something we advocate every day. I love the TV show, Ted Lasso. I will
advocate for Ted Lasso. Oh my gosh, love it. I'll tell anyone who doesn't watch why they should watch. Give them evidence, give them stories. I advocate for Ted Lasso all the time, but my definition of advocate is to, I have a couple of them, but one of them is to ask for what you want in a way that makes you likely to get it.
And you do that. Another form of advocating is by building belief. So in the courtroom, I had to build the jury's belief. I had to help them believe what I wanted them to believe so that I could ask them for a verdict on my behalf. And actually get it. So for the listeners, you are speaking to leaders.
Leaders want to ask their team to enact a certain change. Maybe it's to return to the office full-time, or maybe it's to try a new system within the office that's going to make things slow before it makes things fast. If you're advocating for that thing, you need to build belief in that thing, and you need to ask for your team to be on board in a way that makes you likely to get it.
And that part is a little bit, that's where the advocating comes in. Communicating is sharing perspectives, advocating is changing them, and that takes some specific skills that I learned in the courtroom and can easily teach to anyone who wants to learn them.
So let's do that. Teach me and through me. we will teach the audience. Let's do that. So your book talks about 10 tools to advocate, we can go through the 10 quickly and then we could figure out where to dive in. But I love the idea of getting people to believe and getting people to choose. How do we do that? what are these 10 tools?
So if rather than take the 10 tools, what I'd like to do at the very end of the book, I talk about the three Cs. We can go through the 10 tools, but the three Cs are sort of the umbrella under which the 10 tools lie. The 10 tools are things like words perspective, which we'll talk about in depth, credibility, which we'll talk about in depth, presentation skills, reception skills, questions.
These are like specific tools, but the three Cs are sort of the way that we look at every time that you need to need to advocate. So, let's speak to the leaders in the audience and talk about these three Cs. The first C is compassion. and the way that I talk about compassion is to see things from your jury's perspective and then act in accordance to what you see. So it's really important. That's why I ask at the very beginning, who's your jury? If you're a leader and your jury is your team.
Let's give a very specific example. We're talking about trying to get everybody to be on board to return to the office five days a week. There are a lot of people on your team who don't like that. There's a lot of people on your jury who are inclined to not believe that that's a good thing for them. So we needed to see the world from their perspective. Why do they like working from home so much? Why are they so adverse to coming back to the office. What do they like about coming back to the office?
What are they excited about coming back to the office? That's the compassion piece. The more that you can see the world from their perspective, the more that we can speak to that perspective with stories and evidence so that we can support the belief that it's actually gonna be good for them, not just for the business or the bottom line.
So the first C is compassion. We can dive into that deeper if you want, or I can describe the other two.
let's do the other two. Let's do exactly that.
So the next C is curiosity. You know, as an attorney, people always say, I should have been an attorney. I'm really good at arguing. And the truth of it is that I don't spend very much time in the courtroom arguing.
The opening is an opening statement. It is meant to be very objective, and if I start arguing, I can actually get in trouble. The closing is a closing argument, but that's a small fraction of case.
What I do every day, Mike, is I ask questions. I ask questions to build up my case, to build connections, to show compassion, to show credibility, to educate, and then I ask questions of the other side, to embarrass them and to make them mad, and to knock them down.
And so questions are magic, and curiosity is magic. So as a leader, if you're advocating for for something like return to office, you wanna ask questions like, how can I make this as good as possible? For my team and how could we think about this differently so that everyone's happy seeing things from their perspective first and asking the team questions.
What is it that makes you so sort of adverse to this change? And really getting curious, not just asking the questions out of rote. I had mentioned before we turned on the recorder that you are a very good questioner in the podcast, you ask open-ended questions. They're not closed questions, they're not yes or no questions.
You allow people to answer your questions. You have real curiosity. It's one of the main tools of an advocate and one you can use to build belief. So that's the second C. The third C is the most important, C. When people say, what's your most important C? I always say credibility, because if my jury doesn't believe me, I can't win.
They can think I'm prepared, smart, compassionate, curious, nice, funny, any of those things, but that if they don't believe me and more importantly my client, we can't win. And as a leader, if your jury, your team, your clients, customers, investors, your board, if they don't believe you, you can't win. And so you have got to know how to build credibility. And that's the third c.
Love it. So let's dive in a little bit to one or more of these and then that kind of an overall question too. But let's dive into the first one. Compassion. So, let's get pragmatic. I want our leaders listening to this say, Ooh, I'm gonna go do right after this.
I'm gonna go do that, or I'm gonna do this tomorrow. So compassion you said is about understanding who your jury is, what they're thinking, what they're feeling. How should a leader do that? Is it just a matter of have more conversations with your people? Is it give everybody a disc profile so you know where they are on the behavioral scale?
What are one or two things a leader can do to better understand who that jury is and what's important to them?
Well, I think that they have to prioritize it and know that it is a skill, and also studies show that it's a skill. Seeing things from other people's perspectives is a skill that you lose as you become more powerful. So there's actually an exercise and I do this exercise in my keynotes, that you ask someone to snap five times with their dominant hand and draw a capital E on the, their forehead with their finger. There's two ways to draw that E. You can draw it facing the other person so that they can read the E or you could draw it facing yourself. As people become more powerful, they're more likely to draw it facing themselves.
They see the world from their own perspective, in part because other people do. You know, there is, if I'm not in power, I wanna see the things through my boss's perspective so that I can get what I want from my boss. And so it is more important for me in the social hierarchy to sort of see how other people are seeing things so that I can serve that.
As you become more powerful, that goes away, but it's less likely to go away if you're focused on it, if you practice it. And there's exercises that I give my coaching clients and the teams that I go in to serve that actually make them better at it. How can you see your day from a different perspective.
One of the quotes that I love, and it's anonymous. I don't know who to attribute it to, but it is if you're having a bad day, think of it as a comedy instead of a tragedy. That's an example of a way to practice seeing things from a different perspective. And there's a bunch of different ways that I give people, but the first part is just being aware that this is a skill that you want to build and grow.
The other thing for leaders is, If you feel like it's a skill you don't wanna build and grow, and it's really good to have a trusted advisor around you who can speak to you candidly, because if you're not good at this and not all leaders are, and sometimes some leaders have a personality that makes them not as good at seeing things from other's perspective, then surround yourself with people who are.
So, for example, I serve a lot of doctors, and many doctors are not great at seeing things from their patient's perspective. And I can try to help them. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, we make sure we hire for it, that there's a nurse practitioner or a pa, a physician's assistant who's very good at it, who can help.
So that's the second piece. And then the third piece is what you said, Mike, which is the conversations, and it gets us to that curiosity, asking people, how do you see this? Do you see what I see? You know, one of the things that really is a freak out for trial attorneys is the fact that like optical illusions, or I don't know if you remember back in the day, there was that audio that people played where some people heard Yani and some people heard Laurel.
Yes. Yeah.
Oh my God. I was full-time lawyering at the time and I was like, this is terrible. If some people are hearing Yani and I'm hearing Laurel, how do, I don't even know that they're not hearing what I hear. And so that is super, super scary. And so to ask questions, what do you hear? What do you see? What's important to you of what I just said?
And when we get to curiosity, I'll tell you my favorite question that sort of lends itself to that, but I think that being aware that other people don't see the world that we do is part of compassion and then seeing it the way that they do by asking questions when you have to and speaking to that is where the compassion really comes into play.
And I imagine one of the things that makes it harder, as you said, you become kind of more and more quote on quote powerful, higher and higher in an organization, is people can have a tendency to tell you what you want to hear.
That's right. That's right. And they won't tell you their perspective, which is why it's really helpful to head of a trusted advisor. Some of the most powerful, I have served some very powerful men and some of them have had really powerful, fabulous partners who are able to say to them things that other people won't.
You know, like you didn't speak very nicely to that patient or to that. Team member the other day, and it's really important for those who are listening who are in those positions of power to look around and consider. Do you have people who are willing to speak, and I'm putting quotes here, truth to power and say to you, you know, you may have lost your perspective a little bit here because if you don't, everyone loses, including you and the business.
Love it. Let's dive into the second C, curiosity and I'll give you a personal experience that'll guide maybe where we go with this, cause I think it was a challenge for me and I'm gonna assume that means it's a challenge for a lot of people. Way back when I had my failing staffing business and I had a couple of staffing supervisors working for me.
I had read all the books about leadership and about asking questions, don't dictate, ask questions. This way people own it. You know, I knew all the right things to say and I was, I had these morning meetings and and I was great, quote on quote great. I thought I was great and asking questions. And then I sat down with Jamie, one of my staffing supervisors, who was also a friend.
So she could tell me, she could be really honest with me. And I said to her, this was in, in some quarterly performance evaluation. I said, what could I do to be a better leader?
And she said, you could listen to us more. more. And I said, wait a minute, Jamie. Every morning I ask you guys questions. And she said, yeah, you do, Mike, but we always come around to your idea.
And what I realized, and here's the heart of the question I want to ask, what I realized is asking questions, even if I thought that maybe they were good questions, asking questions was a technique.
And as long as it was a technique versus true intellectual curiosity, my team saw through that and it didn't work. In fact, it backfired. How do we as leaders make sure it's not a technique, that it's a true attitude and a belief that maybe there's some things these folks know that I don't know.
Yeah, and I think that there's a couple of answers to that question. The way that a leader decides to believe that there might be things that these folks know that I don't know is by collecting and creating evidence. So the only way, if I have a leader who's doing what you just described, right, and is pretty stuck on doing that, stuck on, well, I'll ask these questions, but I know my way is the best way.
I will say, do we have any evidence out there that they have good ideas? Look back into the history of your business and have there ever been times that they've come up with something that has been effective, that has reduced the bottom line, that has increased the ROI. You know what are the things?
And so we wanna collect evidence, and then I also ask them to create evidence. Give it a try. Tomorrow, ask questions and really listen to their answers, and listen to their answers with the perspective that you have to implement something that someone says and then implement it and use that as evidence that curiosity actually works.
Whenever you're advocating for something, you want to be collecting and creating evidence. And we'll talk about that a little bit more when we talk about credibility, but it's important to, in order to believe, You're not gonna believe just by hearing Heather Hanson say it on your podcast, right? You have to look around and say, well, do I have any evidence of where I actually listened to the answers to questions and implemented them and it improved the bottom line?
And whether I do or I don't, sometimes creating evidence is the most effective way to believe. The other piece of it is to look to studies, another form of evidence. So there's a lot of research out there that the best teams are teams that have psychological safety. Amy Edmondson is the famous person who came up with this idea of psychological safety, and I was fortunate to share a stage with her at Stanford Medex, and I've since had her on my podcast and she's helped me with some of my projects for physicians and psychological safety.
There's a bunch of components to it, but part of it is proportionate speaking. So everyone on the team speaks as much as everyone else, but she and I have talked about the impact of proportionate listening. Because to your point, if your team is speaking, but you're not listening, you're in your head thinking, well, this is all great, but I'm just gonna do what I'm gonna do.
They feel the energy of that, and it's actually detrimental to the team, to the bottom line, to your leadership and to the company that you lead. So I think you just need to know what the stakes are. And be willing to be surprised. Oftentimes I will suggest that leaders go into meetings like that asking themselves two questions.
What am I going to hear that surprises me? And what am I going to learn from this conversation, this meeting? And if you go into it focusing on those things, you're gonna find something that surprises you and you're gonna find something that you can learn.
So the challenge. That some leaders have, cause some of what you're talking about are the things I try to do with my clients. And the challenge I see is, you know, as a CEO, as a CFO COO, VP of sales, whoever, you know, you've got, man, I'm busy. I know what we need to, I know we, let's go back to your example of bringing people back into the office. I know we need to bring people back into the office. It's not working.
You know, I need people right here when I need them. And you know what? I don't have the time to be compassionate and under, I know how they're feeling. I know they're not really gonna be really happy about it. You know, I'd love to be curious about what they think, but I know what the end like.
All of this compassion and curiosity that takes time. And I don't have the time. How do you fight that battle?
Again look to evidence, right? So I say to them, and let's look at places in the past where you have not taken the time and you've tried to strong arm the team into doing things. How did that turn out for you? There's probably evidence that it didn't turn out really well. Now if the evidence shows that it did turn out, well, then I wanna know why.
How did it turn out? Well, ultimately, the team came to be on board. Was that because you paid them more? They ultimately just sucked it up. You know, we wanna play with the evidence. But it reminds me of, so all those years defending doctors, doctors are very time aware. In fact, one of their biggest frustrations is in the courtroom.
It's a lot of hurry up and wait. And so they would arrive on time at, you know, 8:45 and the jury would roll in. We were supposed to start at nine and the jury would roll in at nine 30 and then we'd start at 10 and then we'd take a 20 minute break at 10:30. And the doctors are like, ah.
Hold, hold on, hold on. But how come when I go to a doctor's office, I have to wait 45 minutes and that's okay. Wait, you know.
(No) you're totally right. But the thing on the doctor's end is they're not just sitting around. They're actually seeing patients. They're just running behind because they haven't allotted enough time for each patient. But they're always busy and so the sitting around and waiting is not great for them, and they don't like to give up the time for a deposition, which they have to do in preparation for the trial.
And I will often say to them, you know, the time that we spent at the deposition may mean less time at trial if you do a very good job at your deposition. Which doesn't happen very often, but there are times when I can then file a motion to make the trial not even happen, or we could settle the case, which means that you don't have to take two weeks out of your life for a trial and we can get a good settlement.
So it's, you're always trading time, right? It's just a question of how you're gonna spend your time. So to the leader that says, I don't have time to ask questions and listen. My answer would be, are you going to have time to hire five new employees when those five employees quit because you haven't listened to them and been compassionate?
And they may need to see the evidence that that's actually gonna happen, but once they see it, once they get on board with the idea that advocating is probably a pretty good idea.
Absolutely. So let's go to the third C, let's talk about credibility.
So when we talk about credibility, people often say, well, I want people to believe in me. Or believe me. And I have a belief triangle because the belief thing has three parts. You want your team, your jury, your inner jury to believe in you, to believe you, and to believe that you can help them. And that last one, Mike, is the most important for credibility, and it's the one that people seem to focus on least. But all three of those have specific ways to make sure that that happens.
So let's take those one at a time. So believe in you, believe you, and believe that you can help them. What's a strategy maybe for each?
Okay, so believe in you is the simple one. Not always easy, but simple. It's your cv, it's your resume, it's your experience. And my formula for this is credibility equals e squared. It's evidence, the things in your cv, the things in your resume, your experience, your testimonials, your recommendations. Times energy.
Because what happens is when you look at the evidence of all the things that you've done, all the ways that you've served, all the ways that you can serve, you start to get more self-belief and you have a different energy about you. You have that, I've got you energy that we want our leaders to have that I can take care of this.
I know that I can take care of this. And when you have that energy, you get more opportunities to do the things that allow you to build that energy. And it's this beautiful cycle. So it's the evidence times energy. Now. Maybe there's someone listening who's a brand new leader who says, well, I don't have a lot of evidence that I'm a good leader.
Well, then we need to start playing with the evidence and look at maybe that person is a mother or a father, and you have broken up fights of your children in the backseat of the car. Well, that's evidence of your ability to manage conflict. And it's evidence of your ability to handle different personalities and ultimately mediate a solution.
And you probably, someone in your family has handled the books for the family and that's evidence of your ability to handle the books. You, there's lots of transferrable skills out there and you need to play with the evidence. You know, I waitressed for many years, I used so many things I did waitressing as evidence that I can do the things I wanna do now.
You've just gotta play with it a little bit to build that belief in yourself and then sort of share the story and share the evidence in a way that resonates with your jury so that you can have them believe in you as well.
Love it. So that's believe in you. Yeah. And then the second was, believe you,
right?
Yeah. That's making a promise and keeping it and setting expectations and meeting them.
That is how you do that. And in the courtroom, I would do it very deliberately in my opening. I would specifically say, you are going to hear Dr. X say y. I had to be pretty damn sure Dr. X was gonna say y because if I made that promise to the jury and didn't keep it, They would lose belief in me. Believe.
They would not believe me, and the other side would point it out for sure. They'd be like, she told you in her opening that you were gonna hear this and instead you heard that. And ugh, that's a nightmare. Keeps me up at night. So there's that. And so for the leaders, it is that if you tell the team that you're going to continue to give them flex hours on Fridays, continue to give them flex hours on Fridays.
And if you say you're gonna start a meeting at 9:00 AM on a Wednesday, start the meeting at 9:00 AM on a Wednesday. And more importantly, if you say it's gonna end by nine 30, end it by nine 30. Now, there are times when you can't keep a promise or meet an expectation, and that is actually a huge opportunity to build credibility because you you own it, when you say, I said this meeting would be over by 9:30, it's not over.
I know that it's 9:30 this is why, you know, this unexpected thing popped up. But next time, I will either end the meeting on time or I will give us extra time so that we make sure that you guys allocate appropriately and then do that the next time your credibility goes through the roof. It's also owning.
It is also being willing to say, I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. These things saying, I don't know. Admitting when you've done something wrong, admitting when you've made a mistake and letting the people that you lead know that you have a solution. That is a huge credibility multiplier.
I love it. And some of it is so easy to do when we've all seen it. I deal with it all the time where I'll be meeting with someone and they're 10 minutes late. And there's no apology.
Yes.
We just jump in. If I'm two minutes late, I'm freaking out.
(Me) too.
Oh my God, I'm so sorry. But it's such an easy thing to do andwe've all probably worked with leaders where you just know the meeting is starting 10 or 15 minutes late.
And it seems like a small thing.
Oh, I'm okay. We wasted 10 minutes of people's time. And what you're saying is you did a lot more than that. You're hurting your credibility.
Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And it's a easy fix. You know, if you just say, I know I'm 10 minutes late, I got caught in traffic, it won't happen again. And then it doesn't happen again. Credibility shoots through the roof. I had an expert who often testified, and the reason he often testified is he was very good and one thing he would do was he would purposefully agree with the other side on a minor point.
But that built his credibility, you know, owning. Oh yeah. You're right about that. Of course, I totally agree with that. The jury would sort of be like, wait, what? You're agreeing with the other guy who's attacking you? But they'd be like, huh. He must be telling the truth. If he agree, you know, he's not fighting everything.
He's not trying to say he's always right. It allows for the jury to see you as human. It allows for them to see you, whoever your jury is, as someone that they can believe.
And you can see also how that overlaps with that first C of compassion to some degree, right?
That's it. They all overlap. And especially the next part of the Belief Triangle, believing that you can help them. There's a huge overlap with that compassion piece because, and the best way to describe this is an exam, an example. So there's a saying in the courtroom that if I say one word, the jury doesn't understand.
They don't even hear the next 10 words I say. And that makes sense to me, Mike, because I go second in the courtroom. And so if the patient's attorney gets up and says, this is a case about osteomyelitis, I watch the jury's eyes go glassy, and I know what they're thinking. They're like,I told these lawyers.
I don't belong on this jury. I don't know anything about medicine. I don't know what that word means. I'm not gonna be able to do this. I should be home with my family. And at least 10 words are lost. Your leaders can't afford to lose 10 words and neither can I. And so I get up and I say, this is a case about a bone infection.
I see the world from their perspective. I speak to that perspective using my compassion, and now the jury believes that I can help them. That I can help them. They have sworn a jury raises their hand or affirms to well and truly try the case. They take that seriously. And so now they're like that woman is gonna help me do that thing I swore I was going to do. I believe that she can help me better than that guy can, and now all of a sudden I have built credibility with them in a way that he or she hasn't. It's usually a he.
Love it. So we hit the three Cs and if we put that all together and let's take a common scenario. You've got a company driven from the top that has come up with a brand new strategy, which is going to change the actions that a whole bunch of their team members need to take.
So there's the employee side of how do I get people to kind of buy into these changes? And, let me make it bigger too, just so I could, add a dimension to this we haven't talked about yet, which is it's also gonna impact my products and services, so I need my clients.
Who, you know my jury is my team. My jury is my clients. I need my clients to believe in this and buy into it. So I'm sure we've got leaders listening right now who have got something new they're doing in their company that they need to get team members and clients to buy into. What are the first one or two things they ought to be thinking about?
So they wanna start by saying, and look at each jury separately, how does the team see this change that I want to have their buy-in on? And if you don't know or you're not sure that you know, it's so much better to ask than to assume. So you bring in that curiosity piece and you know, ideally you have some people on the team that you know and trust and diverse people.
You wanna make sure that you're not just asking the same people every time and not just people that look like you or have your background. You wanna make sure that you're really seeing it. From the team's perspective and asking them questions about what do you see and how do you, what am I missing is one of my favorite questions.
Tell me what you want me to know about this change is, one of my favorite questions. And so you wanna do that with your team and you wanna do that with your customers, whether that's in surveys or getting their feedback and things, or you know, getting a sense of your customers throughout the customer journey.
But you really want to get to know what, how your jury sees this change. And then you want to collect and create evidence that help you to build credibility and help you to argue for the change. So one of the things that, when I talk about evidence and when I work with my clients on evidence, I have a nine x nine W formula because it used to be that people would say in advertising and so forth, marketing, that you have to share something seven times in order for people to hear it and understand it.
And now with all the content coming in, it's probably for a while, it was nine, it's probably even higher than nine now. But let's stick with nine. You wanna share the evidence about how the change is gonna be good for your clients and your customers and your team, and what it's gonna do for everybody.
You wanna share it in as many different ways as possible. So you want to be look at them things from their perspective and ask yourself questions. But do they see the world from from a data perspective? Are people really data focused? You can share the data about it. Do they wanna hear a story? Stories are a very effective way to share evidence.
So you wanna use your stories. Are they people who really put a lot of weight in other people's opinions? If it's your customers, you want to get testimonials from customers who have tried the new product or the new service. That's another form of evidence. You wanna collect nine different ways of communicating the evidence, graphics, audio, emails, you know, there's so many ways to share evidence of the value of this stuff with your team and with your clients and customers so that you can ultimately get them to believe.
That this new product or service is going to serve them and serve what they want.
Love it. Love it. And part of me says, well, if you've got 10 different people, they may want 10 different things. So part of the challenge is understanding all 10, which is true. But if you're doing the exercise you said and thinking what are nine ways, chances are you're covering what most of those folks are thinking about.
Well, and that's it. Mike, every one of my juries in the venue, the jurisdiction where I tried Case, we always had 12 jurors. They all saw the world. 12 different perspectives in that jury box, right? And so I wasn't gonna speak to everyone all the time, but I would work really hard to, and we only get to talk to our jury for a very short time at the beginning.
You know, I'm not in a jurisdiction where they get to ask us questions. So you talk to them at the beginning and then the rest of the trial they just look at you and they don't give you any sort of feedback whatsoever. But I would try to remember, oh, this one was a construction worker, how can I compare this surgery to something that you do within construction so that they can understand it in a way from their perspective.
But also there's gotta be some jurors who like data. So I'm gonna share the evidence in a form of data. Some of them like pictures. I'm gonna have someone draw an animation or a picture of the Body parts in the case. Some of them like to see things in real time, so I'm gonna have the doctor come down off the stand and do what we call a dog and pony show showing what they did during the surgery.
I want to communicate my evidence nine different ways to ideally speak to how each of my jurors best receives the evidence so that I'm using compassion and building my credibility with them.
What's the mistake you see most often of all of these things we talked about the three Cs, we didn't talk about the 10 tools, but as you said, they kind of fit into the three Cs. So, maybe it's one or more of the tools, but what's the mistake you see leaders make most often when they're advocating for an idea, their view of the world?
It's that perspective piece, Mike, and it's not easy. You know, I feel like it's one of my superpowers. In fact, my doctors would often call me chicken little because I'd be so busy seeing the other side's perspective, what about this? They're gonna say this. Do how? How are you gonna handle this? That they'd be like, are you even on my side?
You know? And so that was something that I had to balance, but I think that leaders assume. That people see the world the way that they do and they don't. They forget that there's other ways of looking at the world, and especially as they get more powerful, their way of looking at the world is often very productive and financially rewarding.
But, and so that it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy of like, my way of looking at the world is the best way, if not the only way. And it really does get in the way of advocating for someone to. Give you what you want or to believe in what you want them to believe in. So it's really in the compassion piece and it's also in that credibility piece where it's believing that you can help them.
If you don't see the world from their perspective, you're never gonna get them to believe that you can help them.
Yeah. And I love the idea, and I think it's an idea we could all take action on the idea of having someone else, and maybe it's more than one other person, but at the very least it's one other person that. Probably has a different perspective than you that you could sit down with and just say, what am I missing? What am I not seeing?
What am I missing is one of my favorite questions. Because you're always missing something and you do, you wanna have those people around you. I had a client who made a video. He happens to be a very powerful, very successful white man, and he made a video for his business and he didn't ask my opinion.
He showed it to me. So I guess as I was just just assuming that he was asking my opinion and I gave him my opinion, it was a amazing video and showed him in a really great light. And it was, I did not see a single woman. That's not true. Very few women and very few people of color in the video. And so I said to him, there's very few women and very few people of color in that video.
And he was like, I didn't even notice that. And no one said anything. And I mean, they fixed they went back and recognized that they needed to bring in, and they have plenty of team members, you know, it was just an oversight really. But someone on his team could have. Said that to him before I did and saved them a lot of money cause they wouldn't have had to go back and retape the thing.
But it showed me and him to some degree that he needs to be better at making people feel like they can speak up about their perspective and that they will be heard and listened to and to your point about the questions, that it won't just be asking questions, but really putting things into implementation when they're good suggestions.
Yeah. It gets back to that because sometimes, and I fall into this trap when we ask for feedback, That's bullshit. We're not asking. We're asking for praise. That's right. When I say, when I show somebody my TEDx video.
Yeah, yeah,yeah.
I don't want them to point out the five things I did wrong. I want them to tell me I did a wonderful job, but frankly cause I can't fix it now. It is what it is. But you gotta be clear. Are you asking for feedback or are you asking for praise?
Well, and that's true. And also if you're the trusted advisor, right? So I'm this man's trusted advisor. I've worked with him for years. I have trained his team. I've worked with him one-on-one as a coach. And so if you're the trusted advisor, you have to have the guts to say, I knew it was gonna be expensive for him to fix that.
And with our TED Talk, it's different because we can't go back and do it again, but something like this, You know, there's an argument to be made. Well, what's done is done. But I thought it was a big enough thing. It's not like he tripped over a word or he said something that was a little bit like imperfect.
It was something that I thought was very important to him and the organization and didn't reflect the way that he led. And so with things like that, you know, it's not just the that the leader has to surround themselves with those people. Those people, if you're listening, you have to believe in yourself enough and believe in your perspective and believe in your worth and your value to the organization to speak up when you see those things.
I'm, kind of going off, but I just recently shared this on LinkedIn and it got a lot of shares. There's research that shows that if everyone in the operating room knows one another's names, complications fall by 35%. That's not because they know one another's names. It's because if at the beginning of the surgery everyone speaks up and says, Hey, my name's Heather.
Hey Mike, now you've spoken and it's an activation thing that you are more likely to speak up again and be like, oh, you're operating on the wrong leg, doctor. You know? And so once you've been activated to speak, you're more likely to speak again. So leaders want to activate the people around them to speak up.
Love it. Love it. So as we wrap up Heathers some of this, I probably said in your intro, but tell us a little bit more about how you work with your clients, what kinds of audiences you speak to, consult with. Give us a sense of how you can help leaders that might be listening.
So I have a very broad audience with a very deep niche. My niche is teaching people how to advocate, right? So identifying your jury. I do one-on-one coaching, which is a lot of the inner jury. First, you know, how do you believe in yourself and your products and your ideas to such a degree, and that you can actually go out and persuade your outer jury.
And then it's specific tools. you know, we identify the jury and we come up with nine times, nine ways of sharing evidence and so forth. So I do that for leaders across the board. I've done, as you mentioned in my, bio, I've worked with people at Google, LVMH, Save A Tree , the American Medical Association, Stryker, you know, it's really a bunch of different industries, but on a very specific thing.
So I do coaching on that. I also do workshops. I go into organizations and do workshops, whether it's one day or a few days, to help them have the tools to advocate for their products, their ideas, their services. And I do keynotes on bigger stages. And again, from a across the board, sales, marketing, because all of these things are ultimately advocating, especially for leaders.
It is, you know, you've gotta advocate for your ideas, you've gotta advocate for change, and you've gotta advocate for your team. And you want your team to be strong advocates so that when they have an idea or they see that you're making a mistake or they have something to offer, they're willing to speak up.
And if we're talking about DEI, I, it's really important that you teach your team members to advocate for themselves and each other to ensure that everybody's contributing.
Love it. Love it. This will be in the show notes, but if folks wanna find out more about you, your books where's the best place to go?
The best place my website, it'sadvocatetowin.com, and you'll see links to my books, my podcast, my speaking, my consulting. All of the things are there.
Beautiful. Heather, this was great. Thanks so much for doing this.
Mike, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.