Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Our similarities become powerful when they are rooted in something meaningful: We may both be friends with Jim, but that’s not much of a connection—until we start talking about what his friendship means to us, how Jim is an important part of both our lives.

Many of these groups had already spent years studying vaccine hesitancy and had concluded that the most effective approach was something known as motivational interviewing, a method originally developed in the 1980s to help problem drinkers. In motivational interviewing, a 2012 paper explains, “counselors rarely attempt to convince or persuade. Instead, the counselor subtly guides the client to think about and verbally express their own reasons for and against change.” Motivational interviewing seeks to draw out a person’s beliefs, values, and social identities, in the hopes that, once all these complexities and complicated beliefs are on the table, unexpected opportunities for change might appear.

But, with this particular patient, she also knew that no amount of data showing that the COVID vaccine was safe, no amount of mentioning that the pope had said people should get vaccinated, was going to change his mind. “All it would have done is make him stop listening,” she said. So Chamie took a different approach. She didn’t mention COVID again. “It’s wonderful your faith gives you so much strength,” she told him. “You clearly have a really close relationship with God.” Then, almost as an aside, Chamie brought up another identity. “I imagine your grandchildren’s health is probably very important to you,” she said. Yes, he agreed, he loved being a grandfather.

“Then we went on to other topics,” Chamie said. “But towards the end of the appointment, as a way to wrap things up, I said, ‘You know, I don’t usually talk about religion with patients, but I’m so thankful that God gave us these brains, and these laboratories, and the ability to make vaccines. Maybe He gave us vaccines to keep us safe?’ ” Then she left the room. She didn’t do anything except acknowledge that they both contained numerous identities, and that some of them—religious devotion, caring about children—overlapped and offered different perspectives on what constitutes “safety.” With that, the appointment was over. Thirty minutes later, the man was still in the exam room. Chamie pulled a nurse aside. “Why’s he still here?” she asked. “He wanted the vaccine,” the nurse said.

Sometimes I just ask: On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel about this vaccine? And when they say ‘three,’ I ask: Why not two? Why not four? Like, I’m genuinely curious why you’re a three, what that says about you.”

“it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement” and that they ought to “farm for dissent” among their peers. Before long, meetings were filled with people tearing apart one another’s proposals. Teams would schedule “feedback dinners” where everyone would go around the table offering something they appreciated—and the five or six things they did not appreciate—about each of their coworkers.

For some, this atmosphere was exhilarating. “All that anxiety you normally feel trying to figure out what your manager thinks, and what their manager thinks, and wondering what’s actually going on, that’s all gone,” one employee told me. For others, the radical candor could feel cruel. “It gave people permission to be savage,” another employee, Parker Sanchez, said. “Some days I’d cry for an hour.” One advantage of this culture, though, was that it made it easy to discuss nearly anything. “Nothing is off the table,” a high-ranking executive told me. “You think your boss is making a mistake? Tell them. You don’t like how someone runs meetings? Say it. You’re more likely to get promoted than punished.” Employees would regularly send Hastings emails critiquing his strategies or what he had said during meetings, or they would openly criticize him on internal message boards, “and Reed would publicly thank them,” said the executive. “I’ve never worked in a culture like this before. It’s amazing.”

This exercise—acknowledge that this discussion might be awkward; think about what obstacles might emerge, and then come up with a plan for overcoming them—took only a few minutes, and it occurred before the participants came face-to-face. The researchers didn’t instruct anyone on how to speak to each other, and they didn’t declare any topics off limits. They didn’t remind people to be respectful or polite or explain how to avoid identity threats. Participants also weren’t told to share their answers to these pre-discussion

questions with each other. They could simply scribble some thoughts and then set them aside, if they wished. But the researchers suspected that simply getting someone to acknowledge to themselves, up front, that a conversation about race or ethnicity can be uncomfortable might make that discomfort easier to withstand.

In any hard discussion, and particularly in a Who Are We? conversation, we are wise to avoid generalizations—and to speak, instead, about our own experiences and emotions. Identity threats typically emerge because we generalize: We lump people into groups (“Lawyers are all dishonest”) or assign others traits they loathe (“Everyone who voted for that guy is a racist”). These generalizations take all of us—our unique perspectives and complicated identities—out of the conversation. They make us one-dimensional.

Netflix’s approach offers one solution: Establish guidelines and make sure they are clearly communicated. Invite everyone into the dialogue and give everyone a voice—and let everyone know they are expected to examine themselves. Focus on belonging, and creating a sense that everyone is welcome. “If the first lesson you hear is that you’re biased and inherently prejudiced, that’s not a comfortable place for most people to begin. It feels threatening,” said Greg Walton, a professor of psychology at Stanford. But when conversations focus on creating belonging for everyone, as well as diversity and inclusion, “you’re inviting people to participate and learn, to take responsibility for improving things.”

“most of the work is about gaining awareness of yourself, your culture, and the culture of others.” The goal is to recognize our own biases, “who we might be excluding or including.”

Companies, like societies, will always have disagreements. Compromise is not always possible, or sometimes even the goal. Often the best we can hope for is understanding. It is through understanding, and dialogue, that a community, and a democracy, thrives. When we create space to discuss conflicting beliefs, we make connection more likely.

The goal of this exercise is to nudge yourself to think about how you hope a conversation will unfold, and what you hope will be said.

Finally, acknowledge, and keep acknowledging, that discomfort is natural—and useful.