Gravitating towards the positive

Grant Leboff: Michael, one of the things you talk about in the book, which I think is extremely important, is when you’re answering questions, especially difficult ones, ‘gravitating towards the positive’. Maybe dealing with any negatives that come up, but as you go towards the end of your answer, gravitating towards a positive end. Can you just explain to our audience why that’s so important?

Michael Dodd: It is really important because you need to consider the effect of what you say is going to have on the audience. If I can give an example, one that came up in the training program was a business leader who said, “Look, I’ve got this problem. I walk around the factory floor, and the company’s going through hard times, people come up and say, ‘Are our jobs safe?’ ” We got him to actually re-enact what he does and we had someone came up to him and says, “Are our jobs safe?” His answer was, “No, they’re not safe.” Full stop, end of!!!

The thing was that that was actually misleading in a way because the jobs were safer than he was actually telegraphing. When we probed him, there actually were positives. Sure, the company was going through a rough time, but they had done that before. In fact, they’d even laid off some staff, but then they’d re-hired them, the same ones because they went through a tough time, they prepared properly, and came out all the better. They were also doing things to actually improve situation, marketing attempts with new markets in Asia, for example.

So we formulated a much better answer, which capitalized on the honesty of the first answer, but made it far more positive. So, “Are our jobs safe?” It was, “Well, they’re not as safe as we’d like them to be,” and then you gravitate to the positive, “What we’re doing is this, and this, and this to make things better,” and also finished with the example of sighting the fact that in the previous recession they have had to lay off a few people, Fred, and George, and Elaina…. and Fred, and George, and Elaina were now back.

Because the company had been positioned right for the recession, they were able to hire them back and those people now have better paid jobs in the company. By finishing on that story, there was a far more positive impact for next time he was wandering around the factory rather than losing his people, getting them to think, “We better resign. We better get a better job.” They were more inclined to stay. So always consider being fair to your audience by making sure that if there is a positive message, and often there is, then you’re getting that across.

Grant Leboff: Another thing, one of the things you talk about in the book as well is the fact that a journalist, an interviewer, will often pick up on the end of the answer. If you finish with a negative, you’re kind of … The interview slowly sinks into a real negative situation. Can you just explain how that works?

Michael Dodd: Yeah. I mean, if the person who’s asking questions is struggling for what the next question is, the most likely thing is to pick up on the last thing you said. Typically, you want to craft your answer so that even if you’re dealing with the negative … Which you should. If there’s negatives there, you’ve got to address the negatives, but then gravitate to the positive and ideally give a positive real life example at the end. If you finish on that, supposing it’s a fantastic new product, then they’re more likely to say, “Oh, would you be able to design a product for us like that and have the same fantastic effect?”

It’s a way of often heading off tough questions. I do want you to welcome tough questions, because they can provide a great platform for great answers, but if you play your cards right and you are feeding in the positives early on, then it can change the whole course of the interview or the conversation and gravitate the whole thing towards the positive.

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