Why Communication Is the Leadership Differentiator
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“Communication is always the differentiator and the separator.” – Jen Mueller
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author and communication expert Jen Mueller on how intention is the key to great leadership communication.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is a business communication expert and the founder of Talk Sporty to Me, where she helps companies level up their communication skills with actionable strategies. She has a 25-year career as a sports broadcaster and Emmy-award-winning producer, working with the Seattle Seahawks and Seattle Mariners. Author of 3 books on communication, her latest: The Influential Conversationalist: Conversation skills that develop leadership potential
Connect with Jen and learn more about her work…
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Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Jen Mueller, and here is why she is, dramatic pause, awesome. She is a business communication expert and the founder of Talk Sporty to Me, where she helps companies level up their communication skills with actionable strategies. She has 25 years under her belt in a career as a sports broadcaster and a Emmy Award-winning producer, working with the Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Mariners, keeping it pretty local for us BC Victoria people.
Uh, she is the author of three books, count them, three books, on communication. Her latest one you certainly check out if you’re a leader, which is The Influential Conversationalist: Conversation Skills That Develop Leadership Potential. We’re talking comms and intention today. Hello, Jen.
Jen Mueller: Hello. This is gonna be so fun and something I’ve been looking forward to for a
Russel Lolacher: I always get excited talking to other communication people ’cause there’s like, there’s a s- it’s funny, we talk in another sort of language and we get a little more intricacies about it other than… Don’t get me wrong, every job’s a communication job. Communication I don’t think is prioritized enough in any sense of the word when it comes to the workplace.
But once I have that sort of like, ooh, we have that underlying understanding, so excited, extremely excited for this conversation.
Jen Mueller: Yeah, we get to geek out together is what you’re saying.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah. Thank you for being succinct.
Jen Mueller: Geek out on some really small, like, conversation things. So I’m thrilled.
Russel Lolacher: And I like how you just schooled me in communication. You’re like, “You use 75 words, I’m using three and doing the exact same damn thing, Russel.” Well done, Jen. Thank you for that. So before we get into the conversation, I do have to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, of course, which is what, Jen, is your best or worst employee experience?
Jen Mueller: Yeah, I’d have to go back to the first time that I was sent into an NFL locker room. And there’s a couple of different dynamics at play here. So I was really excited to be doing that. I had anticipated the moment. It is something that I had worked towards, and I knew that it was a little bit of a negotiation and a fight to get in there in the first place.
I’ve done this now for two and a half decades, and when I started, there were women who were doing sports. There just weren’t a lot of women doing sports. And so I felt like it was a privilege, and it was something that, you know, you really had to work for to get into the locker room. Before I went in, my employer had given me this advice: “We just need you to go in there, uh, and hold a microphone.
It’s best if you don’t say anything, if nobody notices you, and if they don’t figure out you’re a woman. Like, that’s probably just gonna be the easiest way for you to approach this.” I understand why they said that, because they didn’t have any experience working with women either. So that was kind of the best advice for, “Hey, let’s not rock the boat too much so that you can continue to get opportunities.”
On the flip side, when you walk into a locker room and I look different than everybody else, it is impossible not to draw attention to yourself. And at that point, I started to get the feedback in real time from players who said, “Get out. You don’t belong here. We don’t want you here. Fine, if you wanna come over and talk to us, we’re gonna make this as challenging as we possibly can on you.”
And it is a lot of the stories that you have heard about what it was like in locker rooms 25 and 30 years ago. And at the time, it is a really hard thing for the go-getter in me who was like, “I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna push through. I’m gonna find the opportunities,” but I don’t know how to operate in that space because my employer, I wanna be a good employee, my employer’s telling me one thing, which, by the way, when you tell me not to talk and I’m in broadcasting, now I really don’t know what to do.
And on the other side, it gets really lonely because it feels like you are just pushing through on your own and trying to figure out what the measure of success, and quite honestly, how resilient you could possibly be when you have people yelling at you saying, “We don’t want you here every day.” Looking back, it was a very formative time.
I understand more of the dynamics now than I did then, but it was, uh, it, it was definitely a memorable time when I first started going into locker rooms.
Russel Lolacher: And I can understand that. I mean, as- when- so you have this energy, you have this exuberance because you are out forefront. You are doing a thing that people in your situation, your gender, isn’t getting the opportunity, and the first advice you get is, “Don’t exist.”
Jen Mueller: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: And, and
Jen Mueller: That’s a better way to put it than I’ve ever put it. Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s what it feels like
Russel Lolacher: And so how do you take that moving forward? I mean, hindsight 20/20, lovely, 25 years later going, “Well, that wasn’t great.” But also un- at the same time, understanding that environment, that understanding was very different and it was of a time. How do you sort of reconcile that moving forward going, “Well, this is how I don’t wanna ever be,” but at the same time going, “I have a little compassion and empathy for those that I was around because they just didn’t get it yet”?
Jen Mueller: 100%. I can look back now with empathy and understand that what everybody was going through was change, and change is hard. And when you are in a locker room, it truly is, I don’t wanna use the word a sacred space, but it is a really tight-knit, close space, and it’s very vulnerable. And the minute I say vulnerable, people are gonna go, “Yeah, because they might not be dressed.”
And that’s true, but here’s why it’s vulnerable. It’s because that’s where you live out your best and the worst moments of your entire career. That is where, right, you see the brokenness in somebody after a game and after a loss. Like, there is a really close-knit thing that happens among teammates and people who are really close to the team.
I understand that at a much different level, right? And now when you have an outsider coming in, I know what that friction point is. I know how to make it easier for people. But what I really took away from that experience was if you weren’t gonna give me the chance to talk on a big stage or to talk at all, I had to find a way to make myself known in small ways.
And that is the first time I recognized why and how I needed to be intentional in the way that I showed up, the way that I asked questions, the words that I used, how I introduced myself, and how I took advantage of the interactions I knew I was gonna have, right? ‘Cause there’s a few that I know I’m gonna have with you just because people are polite and we follow the same scripts all the time.
And so I started to look for those little ways to just kinda show that, yeah, I’m, I’m here and you can trust me, and here’s what we’re gonna do
Russel Lolacher: See, here’s why I love talking to comms people. You do segues like nobody’s business. We’re already talking intention, which is obviously that we’re talking about today, and I, I’m super curious because you were quite, you know, early in your career. don’t know that intention is something that you have to have.
You’re still trying to figure out your place in the world, trying to figure out a presence when they’re telling you don’t exist. What was sort of a, a, a tipping point maybe for you, a wake-up call? Because a lot of people just starting out in their career, intention isn’t part of the script. It is purely exist, try not to F up, and that’s kinda it for the first five years when you’re entering into a career.
Not having the foresight to be intentional and drive leadership skills and… Was there something like a wake-up moment for you?
Jen Mueller: I would say it was every time I walked into a press conference or every time you were sent in to do an interview. So here’s how it worked back then, and it still works this way, um, for the most part. But when you’re sent in and it is a group interview, so there are… And I was in Dallas at the time, so there were 20 to 30 people standing around one guy trying to get an interview.
This is not an orderly conversation. This is every person for himself. You’ve got a list of things that you need to find out, right? Everybody’s talking about this matchup, this player, this play, and you’re just trying to figure out how to get all this stuff and take it back to the studio. It’s whoever’s voice shows up loudest and longest, and people talk over each other all the time.
And if you can be very clear and precise in how you deliver that question, if you can exude the confidence or the smile to at least get that person to turn your direction, that’s a win. Because the minute I make eye contact with my athlete, I have a much better chance of getting my question asked and less chance that people are gonna talk over me.
Now we do a lot of those things at podiums, so we do sit… Excuse me. We do a lot of those things at podiums, and so it, it looks a little bit more organized because we’re in an auditorium setting, but you’re still talking over people. And so again, if I know that I am… And I’m not gonna say fighting, because we all get along, right?
But in order to have your voice heard, you just need to be very specific in the approach, and I think that’s where it started, because I knew, A, I wasn’t gonna find my voice unless I started to ask questions. It’s a challenge enough to ask a question and actually get the question out. When I do get the chance to ask one question that day at work, it had better be a good one that shows that I was doing my homework and that I am worth talking to, because I’m gonna show up again the next week and I’m gonna do the same thing
Russel Lolacher: I love, first off, I love a scrum which, which, where everybody’s jockeying for position. But what I love that you’ve kind of broken it down to is it’s really signal versus noise. Because, and I’ve been to meetings like this, we don’t have to be in a, in a, in a sports environment. There are meetings where everybody thinks they’re important, everybody has something to say, everybody has an agenda, and they’re trying to get the attention of the biggest paycheck in the room, right?
And it’s this, how do you, how do you break through that noise? Signal versus noise. So I love the idea of attaching it to intention, but I wanna just dial back, back for just a moment ’cause I would love to get your definition of what you mean by intention. Because we, we talk about the words, these words all the time, but we don’t always define what you actually mean by it, so I’m kinda curious yours, Jen
Jen Mueller: Yep. So if I am thinking about that scrum situation and being in a press conference, I’ve already thought about my question ahead of time, and I’ve already thought about the objective of the question, and there is only one answer to that question, which means I won’t walk in there and say, “So what do you think about this weekend’s matchup?”
It’s a question, and I would get an answer, but the question doesn’t have intention and there’s no real objective. The objective in something like that is just answer it, right? And when we ask questions that don’t have the specificity around it, I have no idea what I’m gonna get, right? And our standard is really low in our daily interactions, right?
Because the minute you answer that question, I think, “This is great. Russell’s talking to me. He answered my question.” It’s only gonna be after I go back to look at the tape to realize that really wasn’t the answer that I was looking for, right? It wasn’t a good answer. Actually, that wasn’t even a good question, right?
And so understanding that you’ve gotta be prepared for the conversations. It’s not a matter of just being present and in the moment to be authentic. I’m gonna go in there with an objective, and I’m gonna ask the question that only has one answer so that you give me the exact answer I’m looking for, right?
I’m not putting words into your mouth, but you are very confident that in what that answer is because you know it. Now you’re gonna give me the answer I want, and I can walk out of a press conference that has lasted 20 minutes and get everything I need in my two or three questions
Russel Lolacher: Now, how does that translate? I hear you from an interview standpoint, I hear you from a collecting information standpoint. How does that work as an intentional communication, like for a department or a group, or I can’t tell you how many communication teams are one person. But needless to say is how do we embed that intention into how we communicate that two-way?
Jen Mueller: Well, I think it is, again, it’s going back to what do you wanna get out of the conversation, right? Do you just wanna pass time while you are grabbing your coffee and you’re walking back to your desk? That’s a very different conversation. Or are you sitting in a meeting and there are three answers that you need to get to, and I’m just gonna be very clear and direct in how I ask the question.
And instead of leaving everything open-ended, “Hey, what do you think about this? Could you give me feedback on that? Hey, I’d love to get your ideas on X, Y, and Z,” we now are very intentional about saying, “I am looking for specific feedback around the timeline for this marketing rollout. In your experience, what should I consider?”
Russel Lolacher: Mm-hmm.
Jen Mueller: Now I’m being very intentional and I’m directing that conversation exactly where I wanna go, and I’m thinking about that ahead of time. I’m gonna write the questions down ahead of time. I’m actually gonna run through this conversation in my head and think, if somebody asked that question to me and it was totally out of the blue, even if I’m sitting in a meeting, would I be able to answer it, and would I be able to answer it confidently and clearly?
And so for me, it’s like that imaginary role play of let’s make this easy for people to have a conversation with me so that we can all get more done in less time
Russel Lolacher: Do you feel that’s any different in other modes of communication, i.e., through a Teams chat, through email? Because we’re not o- now we’re even more remote. And, and for some reason, Jen, I, I know, I hear you saying no, because we treat it differently for some reason. Like, oh, we’re remote workers? Oh, I don’t even know how to communicate with them.
You can tell the sarcasm in my voice. Um, how, how do you combat that for people that are coming to you going, “Well, you know, that’s all good when we’re in the office, but, you know, how do you communicate when we’re virtual, remote,” blah, blah, blah?
Jen Mueller: I have the same exact strategy when I’m in the locker room, when I am working with clients, or when I am texting my best friend on when we are gonna have wine and where it’s gonna be. And here’s the strategy. The strategy is ETA, which I know normally stands for estimated time of arrival, but now every time you get into a car or an Uber, I want you to think about this: expectation, timeline, and action item.
And I was forced to come up with this because nobody teaches you how to ask for an interview when you’re in broadcasting school. And so the very first thing you do when they send you into a locker room or a scrum to, to get an interview is ask the question, “Do you have time for an interview today?” And people generally being friendly and understand what’s happening here will say yes, and I would think, “This is awesome.
I’m gonna get the interview that I need.” And then I would walk away and I would be like, “Should I stand here or should I stand over there? Shoot, are they gonna go into the cages and hit? Are they gonna go into the weight room and lift? Are they…” I literally only have two questions. Do they understand they are gonna kick me out of the clubhouse in 20 minutes?
And I need this today, right? I thought I had really communicated what it is that I needed. I did not. I thought I had gotten the answer I needed. I did not. So here’s how I ask for an interview instead. “Do you have time to answer three questions about tonight’s pitching matchup? I can find you after batting practice.”
The expectation is, here’s what we’re gonna talk about, tonight’s pitching matchup. The timeline is three questions and after batting practice. And the action is I will find you. When I have spelled this out, I can now get buy-in and I can get you to agree to that, or if you say, “I don’t have time after batting practice, but I can do it right now,” awesome.
“I don’t have time for three questions, but I can get one,” awesome. Now I’ve actually engaged you in what it is that we need, so I’ve increased the likelihood of having the conversation I need to have, of having the right conversation because you know what’s gonna happen, and when I do what I said I was gonna do, which is find you after batting practice and only ask three questions about tonight’s pitching matchup, I just built trust and rapport because that’s the easiest way to do it, is by doing what you said you were gonna do.
When you do this in every single conversation, whether you are asking your kids to empty the dishwasher within the next 20 minutes or you are communicating on Slack, it’s the things that we don’t say that create the biggest problems in communication. This formula allows you to easily spell it out in one sentence so that everybody’s on the same page.
Russel Lolacher: So what’s the dark side of this? ‘Cause from hearing you talk, it sounds like if we’re not getting this right, if we’re not communicating, engaging with intention, we’re wasting time. That’s the biggest thing I hear. Is there anything else that sort of resonates from basically from your conversations with people you’re trying to fix their problems with this?
What, what’s, what are they getting wrong?
Jen Mueller: Well, it is a waste of time, and they’re not getting the answers that they need, right? And so you’re, you’re kind of missing, you’re missing the good stuff. And some people are gonna take that, and they’re gonna be, right, the go-getters, the high achievers that say, “Okay, I got enough of the answers, so I’m gonna start moving in this direction, and I’m pretty confident I’m going in the right direction, so I’m just gonna go headlong into this direction.”
That’s great, unless they actually needed to be going the other direction. So now, even though you took action, you might have been wasting time that direction. And when you find out from your manager that, “Nope, this was actually what I needed you to be working on instead,” now you are frustrated, angry, right?
There’s tension that’s there because it feels like it was a waste of time for you. And so going the extra step just allows people to move forward with what they need to do confidently and have everybody be on the same page.
Russel Lolacher: Is that how you self-assess? Is that how you… So there are people that are probably thinking they’re communicating. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with them like, “Your title says communicator, and all you do is broadcast. You’re just talking at. There’s no communication here, but it’s in your title.
I get it.” But they don’t know. The self-awareness is so lacking in that, and it’s not their fault. It’s what they’re being asked to do. So how do you self-assess to know that you’re doing this right or wrong?
Jen Mueller: Okay, so I will say this. Here’s another place that broadcast and communication really kind of builds this in. Because for two decades, every time I did an interview, I had to listen back to the interview and transcribe it word for word. You talk about not wanting to see yourself, you talk about not wanting to see yourself or hear yourself?
Oh my gosh, that’s all you did. You’d get back to the studio and word for word you had to transcribe it and pick the soundbite that would go in, you know, the story that night. And so when you see yourself over and over again, yes, there’s a different, like, awareness. But here’s what I’ll tell you when I go back to watch those interviews.
It’s paying attention to the reaction of the person in front of you, right? And so I can tell, and I appreciate being able to see this now. So I’ve got a cooking show, I Cook, You Measure, and in the moment I am really focused on doing about 14 things at one time, including carrying on a conversation with an athlete.
When I go back to watch it, I am so focused on their faces because it’s the smile, it’s the lean in, or it’s the confusion that I’ve created, right? And so when you are prepared for a conversation, I’m not searching for the words and the questions, and I can now look at your face and your reaction and start to go, “Hang on a minute.
I see,” right? “I, I see you kind of nodding or shaking your head, or there looks like there’s a little confusion. Let me back up. Do you have questions about what I just proposed? Or do you have questions about this slide in the PowerPoint?” Right? It is watching that reaction and having, like you said, that two-way.
So I’m not broadcasting at you. I do have an awareness of what’s going on around me
Russel Lolacher: You’re bringing up so much trauma for me, having to listen back to my radio tapes and hearing my safe say, “Um, um, right, right,” every five… Like, just cringing at hearing your own voice.
Jen Mueller: Yeah. It, it, but it knocks it out of you real quick, right? Like, you listen back and you’re like, “Ooh, man, that was… Ugh, I hate that.” Yeah
Russel Lolacher: You, you talk, uh, it kind of leads me into the idea of influence. Uh, your book literally called Influential Conversationalist, what separates influence when it’s around intention versus when it’s built through things like authority and title? Because people confuse the two sometimes
Jen Mueller: I would say influence, especially in this context of communication, it’s when the conversation is easy and when people trust you to guide them down that conversation, right? It, it can be hard to make small talk. It can be hard to feel comfortable in a conversation, right? There’s people that avoid awkward conversations.
There’s people that make them more awkward. But the easier I can make it for you to talk to me, the greater the chance that you are going to talk to me, and that’s where I get the influence, right? When we make this easy, people are gonna lean into it. And so now I’m not telling you what to do. You’re already coming to me and saying, “Hey, I’ve got this idea.
Can we problem solve together?” Because I’ve already made this super easy. You know exactly what to expect from me. We can set the expectation, the timeline, the action item, and it, it just, it, it goes back to the intention part of it, right? I know what we’re trying to accomplish, and you trust me to help you get there, whether it’s the conversation, the project, the meeting, any of those things
Russel Lolacher: We talk about intention a lot, and I’m thrilled to talk about intention on communication ’cause that’s the pre-work. That is the, that’s the rehearsal beforehand. Can’t tell you how many people do presentations and never rehearse before they do that. Drives me nuts. Um, it’s a performance, people. Needless to say that there is this impact on the other end of it.
Intention is only one half, impact is the other, and we, we do intention, or at least we talk about intention, but then we’re like, we gloss over the impact, and then we move on to the next intention a lot of the time. How do you combine how you’re talking about intention to making sure that intention is having the impact that we want as communicators, so we can tweak and do better next time?
Jen Mueller: Well, I think that there’s a lot of self-reflection, right? So when I get done with an interview, and keep in mind just for context, mo- most of my interviews, so if it is a walk-off interview, if it is a post-game interview, those questions last about two minutes, right? So it’s about three questions, maybe four questions.
That’s two minutes of an interview. It’s pretty easy for me to think through after the fact what happened, right? Did I get that right? Would I have chosen a different word? Um, how did everybody react around that? Did I get the answer that I was looking for? And I think that, I think that might be the piece that we miss, right?
When we gloss over and we move on and we do the thing and we never actually think about how did that feel? How did that look? What were people around me doing? Did I get what I was trying to out of the conversation? Did I get that email exchange down to just three instead of the 25 messages that have been going back and forth?
So for me, that’s how I would measure things like that. But some of it, you know, some of it you just have to know where your measures of success are. So let me take this in a totally different direction. One of the ways that I measure success when it comes to both intention and impact is the number of hellos I get in a clubhouse or locker room every time I walk in.
Russel Lolacher: Okay
Jen Mueller: It is always my goal to get five people to say hi to me, and I realize that sounds like a really low bar, but they are just as busy as you and I are, and you and I don’t say hi to everybody that we pass on the sidewalk or hi to everybody that we saw on the way to work or hi to everybody that we see at work, right?
Sometimes we just skip over that or we’re too busy or we’re in our own world. So when somebody acknowledges and says hello, first of all, it means that they’re paying attention. Second, I feel good, and that’s a small confidence boost because you acknowledged me. And third, I have done this long enough to know that after that third hello, we’re gonna do an interview, right?
I can measure the impact of one small word because I am watching the guard go down and the trust go up, and quite honestly, just warming up the space so that people expect to see me and they know what’s gonna happen next
Russel Lolacher: So what I’m hearing is the groundwork is not just being at home preparing the questions and the intent of what you want, it’s the building the psychological safety, trust, like building the environment of being present before you have that first communication. I, I, I often ask people, like, “We need to send information out.”
I’m like, “Great, who’s sending it out? What’s their relationship with the people they’re trying to engage with? Who’s the messenger?” Because it’s the message and the messenger. So are, h- based on, based on your metric that you’ve given here, your five hellos, what if you get three? What if you get two? What are you doing to tweak your intention next time or, or reassessing that environment?
Jen Mueller: Yes. So generally, five is a pretty easy number to get, which is why I’ve set it at five, right? And if they don’t say it to me first, I mean, here’s my really easy tweak. Put your big girl pants on and go over and introduce yourself to somebody. Because when you’re standing there looking at a locker room full of, there’s about 80 guys in our locker room, only 53 on the roster.
We’ve got injured guys, practice squad guys, all sorts of things, right? I don’t always feel like my best self, and like I really wanna go engage in a conversation. If it looks like there’s nobody in the room, nobody’s gonna say hi, okay, fine, then go introduce yourself to somebody. And f- and I don’t wanna say force the hello, but you go initiate that one so that there is a win on that side.
And when I do that, my introduction is almost the same every single time, and it sounds like this: “My name is Jen. I work on the team broadcast as the sideline reporter. At some point in time, you and I are gonna do an interview. I just didn’t want that to be our first interaction. Hi.” They will say, “Hi, Jen.”
And whether they say anything else, I have now level set why we are gonna have a conversation, when we are gonna have a conversation, and what we’re gonna talk about in the conversation. And so it goes back to your psychological safety and just, like, cluing people in as to what’s going on. If I just walk up and say, “Hi, my name is Jen,” first of all, you can tell I’m a media member, ’cause, well, I don’t look like any of you guys, right?
But you have no idea what my relationship is to anybody, right? When I tell you I work for the team, now you know how this message is gonna be delivered, right? It’s team friendly. When I tell you when we’re gonna have these conversations, it’s gonna be after a game. You’re like, “Oh, I don’t, I don’t need to do anything right now. Cool.” Right? And when I say hi, I am slowly building that just recognition and relationship
Russel Lolacher: I hear you. We’re extroverts, Jen.
Jen Mueller: I know. I know.
Russel Lolacher: There are introverts listening right now
Jen Mueller: 100%.
Russel Lolacher: “Jen, I’m doing none of that. I work in the workplace and I need to communicate, but I can’t, I’m not introducing myself to anybody. Who are you ta- or at least with that intention.” What do you say to them?
Jen Mueller: Well, here’s what I would say. Communication is always the differentiator and the separator. Does not matter what industry you’re in, it does not matter what your skillset is. After a game, these guys never blame a lack of skill and talent after a loss. They will always blame a lack of communication, right?
So if you have high performers who are saying things like, “We weren’t on the same page. I couldn’t hear the call. I missed the call. You know, I was, I’m new to the team and I just didn’t know that part of the playbook,” right? Those are all communication things. High performers, there’s only so much better you can get when it comes to skill and talent, right?
Your real differentiator is how you communicate. Now, I think it would be helpful to also say this: conversations can be measured in seconds, not minutes. And if we think that every conversation needs to be at least five minutes long, or that every meeting or interaction or get-to-know-you session has to be 30 minutes long or 60 minutes long, that really puts us behind the eight ball, first of all, from a scheduling standpoint, and second of all, from the introvert standpoint.
I work with lots of introverts in the locker room. There’s plenty of extroverts, there’s lots of introverts. We still have conversations and communication. Here’s what’s different. I expect those conversations to be short. That hello means a heck of a lot more because I know that it took more for them to say that than it did for me.
But if all I’m looking for is 15 to 20 seconds, every single person can do that. That is three sentences, and you know this. It’s a standard measure of broadcast time, right? That is how we write scripts. So if you think about it from that point of view, I need to be a high performer. I need to achieve.
Here’s the best way that I can put myself in a position to achieve. It is a 15-second conversation. Now I think we look at these interactions just a little bit differently
Russel Lolacher: Fair. I’m also looking at the environments though, that we put ourselves through, whether it’s an introvert or an extrovert, and I’m thinking even again with the sports side of things, the pressure that we’re under to do all these things. And it’s all, what’s the old Mike Tyson thing? It’s great to have a plan till you get punched in the face.
And that, and that we’re talking about a lot of intention here of, of what you do ahead of time to prepare yourself. But when we’re in environments that are high pressure, a lot of that goes out the window for a lot of people. They try to be resilient in this, but it is when we’re dealing with constant change, how do you navigate that for people you work with going, “I wanna be prepared, but the minute I enter the room, it’s chaos.”
It is I’m, I’m not, or, or the, what I had intended is not even part of the script anymore once I get into the room, what do I do now? What do you do in a changing environment like that?
Jen Mueller: You use the environment to your advantage in that case, right? So the best example I can think of for this is the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl against the Patriots. I had a whole bunch of questions ready to go related to the Seahawks’ win, and then the ball is intercepted and everything changes. And you can’t walk into that locker room and ask any of the previous questions, right?
And so you would level set and you would say, “I know this is tough. I hear it in your voice,” and then you would go on with the question, right? You acknowledge what you’re seeing in front of you. That’s how I would do it in an interview. I would also just be honest in some of these conversations, right?
Because we think that if we admit that we are now off script or that we’re not going according to plan, that somehow we have failed. We haven’t failed. We’re just adapting to the situation. So if you walk into the room and the projector isn’t working, you know, there’s three times as many people as you expected and they’re from all different groups and that’s not who you expected to present to, then the conversation starts like this: “Hey, we’re not gonna have the presentation slides.
That didn’t go according to plan, and I had prepared to talk about this specific part of our marketing plan. I’m gonna do my best to, to expand this out so that everybody gets something,” right? Y- and it’s not a matter of failing. Now somewhere along the line there was probably a miscommunication or all hell broke loose on whatever happened, right?
Just level set. Just tell people up front and trust that you have enough information, expertise, and skill to navigate the rest of that conversation, right? Wait, it’s not like you forgot everything that you’ve ever learned, right? When th- there’s now a circus in the middle of the room. You just need to kinda tell people where we’re gonna start the conversation and go from there.
Russel Lolacher: Is there ever any situations where you just don’t communicate? Where it gets so chaotic or so over the top, or I get it from a work standpoint where, like, you’re being thrown in there, you damn well better get an answer to a question. But when it comes to just conversation, sometimes it’s better not to communicate at all.
It- where’s that line?
Jen Mueller: So in your example, are you talking about not communicate because I can’t share this information because this is private information, or are you thinking it’s not the right time to have this conversation? Which part are
Russel Lolacher: More the second, I think, ’cause it, that’s more common for a lot of people because not everybody’s exposed to that, you know, the other side of things
Jen Mueller: Yes. Marshawn Lynch is the best example I can think of. I know it’s another sports example, but Marshawn is famous for stonewalling the media by using the same response over and over again. Now, when he first started doing this, and if you guys are interested in Marshawn, you can go look this up.
It’s on YouTube. When he first started doing this, he would give the same answer to every single question, and I was the person who was doing the interview, and I would ask him a question about the game, and he would say, “Yeah.” And I’d ask him another question, and he just said, “Yeah.” Now, it took me about five questions to figure out what Marshawn was doing.
I have no idea why. He did this for the rest of his career, and every time the media would go to him and try to have a conversation, to which I am thinking, “Why would I do that? He clearly does not wanna talk to you. There’s 51 other guys in here who could talk about Marshawn.” Meaning it does no good to force the conversation with somebody who is not wil-willing to talk to you at the moment or can’t talk to you or just is not in that head space.
Give people an option. And you can read this on people, but in general, when I go and ask for an interview or when I’m having the conversation, maybe I popped into my boss’s office, right? Maybe I’ve bumped into a client and we need to have the conversation. Just give them an option. “Hey, I’d like to talk to you for about 15 minutes related to the performance reviews that I know are coming up in a few weeks,” right?
“Do you have time today or tomorrow?” Right? Or on the flip side, “I need to talk to you about your performance review that’s coming up. It’s gonna take about 20 minutes. I’m available between 2:00 and 6:00. What time works for you?” Right? So I know that I can give you some options. I know that if you’re in a bad mood, now is not gonna be the time to do it, right?
I, it, because you can force the conversation. It is not gonna help the outcome of that one, right? So give people an option, gives you a chance and it gives them a chance to take some agency and to create some buy-in so we’ve got more productivity.
Russel Lolacher: Love that. And, and I, I love the sports analogies because truthfully in the workplace we use terms like family a little too much when it’s a lot more like a sports analogy in work, people coming in, people coming out. So I, I appreciate this ’cause I, I’m finding so many parallels to the workplace where just I’m like, “Yep, yep, I’ve been through that.
Yep, seen that. Yep, heard about that. Yep.” So I appreciate that a lot. Unfortunately, I’m about, now about to even go even deeper into it. You talked about it where conversations are more like trained muscles, where these are things like a workout plan as a leader who wants to maybe strengthen their communication skills or their intentional communication skills.
I often hear about people going, “I want…” We go back to the messenger thing. Are they the right person? Are they the one that’s with intention? If I’m sitting here, I want to be a better communicator, Jen, I want to be more intentional, are there muscles that we should be working on day in, day out on a daily consistency, ’cause I’m thinking of resiliency, that will help us show up to be intentional, to use the, uh, ETA acronym and so forth?
Jen Mueller: Yeah. I mean, we can do this in all sorts of little interactions, and my biggest thing is we overlook these small encounters that we have during the course of the day without realizing how impactful they are. So here’s another one: the number of times you get asked, “How are you?” during the course of the day.
I mean, that’s, depending on whether you’re in office or out of office, right? If you’re around people, it’s gonna be two dozen times. Even your barista at Starbucks is gonna say, “Hey, how’s your day going?” And we would normally answer with one word. We would say, “What? Good,” “Fine,” “Great.” Even if you said, “Fantastic,” right?
Here’s what I’m gonna tell you about that as it relates to leadership and practicing these skills. That is the most pivotal moment in every single conversation, but we go through the same script. I’m gonna say, “How are you?” You’re gonna say, “Good.” Then y- I’m gonna say, “Great.” You’re gonna flip it back to me: “How are you?”
“I’m good,” right? And now we wait for the conversation to start. That’s not how this works. Take that one exchange and use it to practice what I call a success statement, but more importantly, to practice in a really low-stress way what it feels like to kinda push these boundaries a little bit. So what I should say to be more strategic is, “I’m awesome, taped a really engaging podcast, and had some keynotes this week I’m proud of.”
That’s it. Now, when I do that, here’s what you’re actually practicing. You’re practicing breaking out of the script that we are used to saying, and that takes a little bit of work, and it feels uncomfortable. You’re practicing advocating for yourself and telling people what’s going on around you, right?
‘Cause I can alter that statement to be whatever I want. I am also practicing what rejection feels like, because sometimes you are gonna be really interested in hearing about my podcast taping or the keynotes, and sometimes you’re gonna go, “Huh,” gonna walk away. And when that first happens to you, you’re gonna feel like, “What?
Ch- what, what did I just say? Like, what, how, how terrible was that?” And how we reframe that is, I used that time in the best way possible, and if that other person wanted the conversation to continue, I made the follow-up questions easy and obvious. So that would be one of those muscles that I would practice.
And you don’t have to do it every single time, but you’ve got multiple times during the course of the day to put yourself in a situation where it feels different, but you can walk away still knowing that you got the win, even if it feels like, “Ugh, man, I wish I had gotten something more out of it.”
Russel Lolacher: And I don’t think people need to immediately think this is stuff you have to do with the CEO or,
Jen Mueller: No
Russel Lolacher: you know, like where’s your team? Start testing it out just on the people around you
Jen Mueller: Absolutely. You know, I, I think we get into this idea of what winning and losing, at least this is how my mind works, right? I work with high performers. I am ultra-competitive myself, right? We get into this idea of what winning and losing looks like. And certainly in an interview setting, when I ask a question, FYI, that’s one of the most, um, productive ways to practice vulnerability.
Ask a question you don’t know the answer to, right? I have a pretty good idea that you know what the answer is, but there are times where I will ask a question and I will say, again, in the sports realm of things, “Was that the same sequence of pitches that you got on the previous at-bat? That’s kind of what it looked like to me.”
And the athlete might say, “No, it’s not.” Now, I’ve got two ways to look at this. I can look at that and say, “Man, I just failed ’cause he told me no,” right? Like, I screwed that one up. Or I can look at it and say, “I got the answer to the question,” right? And so when you sit there and you think about that, I’m not trying to get agreement in everything I’m saying.
I am learning to deal with rejection and no, and just reframing what success looks like. Being in the conversation is success, right? Having people not walk away from me when I’m talking, that’s success. But it feels like I would love everything to be going my way all the time. Does that
Russel Lolacher: Yeah, absolutely it makes sense. I, I think the success is, is for us, especially people just starting out, is up here. When it’s the day-to-day small wins that will build and give you those opportunities and those connections. And to what you talked about before, which is that trust building comes over time.
You can’t knock it out of the park on day one. That is something gradual
Jen Mueller: It is. And, you know, it, I, I call them bubblegum moments. I call it the bubblegum effect, and it’s really hard to see the impact of small things, right? So one piece of bubblegum, if I handed it to you, you could easily tuck it into your pocket, put it in your desk drawer, you’re never gonna think about it again.
If I handed you an entire handful, you know, like the kids at Little League, they get an entire scoop of bubblegum from the giant tub that’s sitting on the bench, right? You cannot possibly hide that from your parents when you walk back over to them, right? They know that you have a handful of bubblegum, and you can’t just overlook it, and that’s what happens with these little moments.
The thing with the bubblegum moments and the bubblegum effect is you have to figure out what success is, and it’s probably not gonna measure to anybody else. Getting hellos doesn’t measure to anybody else. That’s my measure of success, right? Because I need to find a way to stay motivated and confident and to know that I am making progress, right?
Introducing myself to somebody new every day, that’s not a measure of anybody else’s success, right? I can tell you, having done this for so many years, what the impact is later. I can tell you what people say in response to looking at my career, and every single one of those things is little moments. They talk about things like showing up.
“I knew I could turn on the TV every night during baseball season and you were there.” Well, I didn’t ever think about not showing up, right? Because it’s my job and I loved it. That’s a small moment, right? That is a bubblegum moment that I didn’t think about that impacted somebody else. People would also say, “You just look like you loved your job, and the people around you were smiling,” right?
Like, well, I, I do love my job, and I did smile. Didn’t think twice about doing that, but to them, it made a big difference, right? And then the other thing people would say is, “You said hi to me. You know, like, I yelled at you from the stands, and you turned around and you waved and you said hi to me.” Well, of course I was gonna say hi to you, right?
Like, that’s what you do. To them, it makes a huge difference, and so I can tell you from personal experience and from years of measuring this, that’s where your influence comes from, and it is choosing to show up and be consistent with it every day. And if your bar is up here every day, you’re not gonna be able to meet, meet it on your toughest days, right?
My bar is fairly low for measuring success, but it has led to success over long periods of time
Russel Lolacher: And I like how you’re differentiating it between what an organization’s level of success might be. So, so whether you’re out, you know, doing interviews, your bosses have a level of expectation of what you do and how you show up. How you get there is on us. That’s where we’re leading ourselves and where we define our own success to get to that point.
They are two separate things, but they are intermingled.
Jen Mueller: Yes.
Russel Lolacher: Love that
Jen Mueller: And I would say as an organization, be as painfully obvious as to what that objective is and what that success looks like as sports. In sports, every single person who is tracking the team, watching the game, participating as part of a front office, knows that the objective is to win, right? It’s painfully obvious.
We also know that you win by scoring more points, right? And you’re like, “Yep, that’s a no-duh statement, Jen. Thank you so much for that.” Here’s where this helps. Everybody’s on the same page, and if you don’t win and you don’t score more points, we’re gonna have a conversation about it. It’s called a post-game interview.
It’s also where that tough conversation, accountability, and feedback come in. But in business, to your point, we are not clear at every level, because success as a CEO is very different than a mid-level manager, is very different than the new hire. And they can all be different, but the message has to come from the top, and we are gonna get tired of saying that.
This comes back to intentionality and impact. We are gonna get sick and tired of telling people what the objective is and how we win, but you can’t because everybody’s looking at something different from their level. And so that message has to be to the point where you are so tired of saying it, but everybody knows what they’re measuring against
Russel Lolacher: I usually do a test when I’m in a large group of people doing a presentation. I’m like, “So what are your vision and missions?” And everybody in the room’s like, “Nobody knows what it is.” And I’m like, “So you have a horrible vision and mission,” because it’s either not being communicated, not simple enough, not memorable enough.
But that’s– it, it is such a misstep for a lot of organizations, is that this objective of winning or by– and the measurement are glossed over, or just a pretty calendar or a pretty poster on the wall, not actually this northern star that people are aspiring to do. It’s not being hammered home and hammered home and hammered home like you’re supposed to in communication.
So yeah, I, I– it, it frustrates, frustrates me to no end, but it’s also the most powerful communication tool you can have, which is a direction.
Jen Mueller: Yes. Yeah, and it’s Pete Carroll. If you want examples, go listen to Pete Carroll. Always compete, every game is a championship opportunity, and, you know, I, I can list off any number of them, but you heard them so often you’re like, “Oh my gosh, Pete, seriously?” And in 14 years, he never changed his message, and he was extremely consistent, and you knew exactly what you were being measured against
Russel Lolacher: So to wrap our conversation up, Jenn, loved it. I love this. Um, I’m curious, say somebody’s listening today, you’ve given a lot of, of steps in other directions like, you know, ETAs and, and this muscles we should work on and things. But if somebody’s like, “I just wanna start. I just wanna, I wanna be a little bit more intentional with my communication starting tomorrow,” where do they dip the toe in first?
Like, I just… You- when we give too much, people also feel a little scattered as to where I should po- point first. So let’s give them some clear direction. What’s something we should do tomorrow to sort of be more intentional in our communication?
Jen Mueller: I would change your response to how are you?
Russel Lolacher: Mm-hmm.
Jen Mueller: And I would give your one-sentence success statement because you know that you are gonna get that question. It might be from your spouse or your partner, it might be from a team member at work, but you know you’re gonna get the question. So think about it ahead of time and come up with an answer.
This, by the way, is not an elevator pitch or a sales pitch. It is just one sentence that goes beyond good, great, awesome, or fantastic. “I’m fantastic. I can’t wait to watch my kids play their championship game this weekend.” “I’m awesome. I made it through my inbox, and I can go home early today.” Right? I don’t care what it is, because that’s gonna take some practice to break out of our traditional, like, back and forth, but you can do that one time tomorrow
Russel Lolacher: That is Jen Mueller. She’s a business communication expert. She is the founder of a communication str- strategy, uh, consultancy, talks sporty to me, and she’s the author of a book, uh, I’m pretty sure you’ve figured out that you need to pick up by now, The Influential Conversationalist: Conversation Skills That Develop Leadership Potential.
Thank you so much for being here, Jen.
Jen Mueller: Absolutely. This has been a blast, Russel