Eureka Moment: How to Get People to Tell You Stuff #52

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor and the inaugural episode of our new Eureka Moment series, where we'll be delivering 10-minute moments of inspiration and discussion to get you thinking throughout your day. Today's discussion is all about getting people to open up to you and the failsafe method that Gary's discovered to make it happen. Gary, hello!

Hey, are we cracking on?

We're cracking on, yeah. Yeah, it's the very first of our new series of Eureka moments, which I just learned about just now.

I know, and what is a Eureka moment, George?

I have absolutely no idea, so I'm excited to find out.

Yeah, I mean, for people listening, we've decided to record a few Eureka moments, which are like ahas, you know, like, oh my God, I never thought about that before. We want to share them with you. And at the end of each Eureka moment, there's hopefully a bit of an explosion of eureka.

Sounds great.

That's very exciting. I set myself up on this one.

Yeah, it better be now. Now that you've said it.

It better be.

So what's the premise here? These are sort of shorter episodes where we're gonna just talk about one topic in a sort of quick fashion with a eureka moment revealed at the end.

Yeah. Great. We're gonna sort of shoot the breeze and then hopefully at the end there's a big reveal.

Nice.

Okay, well, I'm on board. You're on board with it? And for people listening, you should get a little explosion in the end. If you don't, we blew it.

Blew it. And we'll never do it again.

And we'll never do it again. So let us know what you think. And they're short. So, you know, when you're running, we're probably using up most of the time just bantering right now. So we should crack on with that. So the title of this first eureka moment is How to Get People to Tell You Stuff.

Great. And this isn't sort of interrogation-style tactics, is it?

This is— No, but sometimes one wishes it needed to be to get the stuff going. So there's kind of two examples of this. One, if anyone's got any teenage kids, that will be helpful for you. And I'm going to tell you a bit of a story. And if you're in business and you're either coaching or you're with a customer or in any situation where you want people to open up a little bit, then that's the premise of this.

Right. Okay. So it's getting people to open up as opposed to sort of extracting information.

From someone. Yeah, but you know, sometimes it's necessary. You've been there where you kind of need to hold people down. I'm pinning you down until you tell me.

Yeah, nice.

I must admit that the danger of doing this is, because you've mentioned it now, I've watched a lot of Netflix stuff, right? And I've been watching a lot of drug— I'm not into drugs, but I've been watching these drug dealers, Narcos, and things like that. They get people to tell them stuff, but I'm not using those tactics.

There's some pretty brutal ways that they get people to do stuff and tell them things.

Right. So let's get into it because it's supposed to be a quickie and we're ranting on. So I'll start with the teenage analogy and I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story when my son was a teenager and he's not anymore and hopefully he doesn't listen to this. So have you ever, for those of you listening, if you've got teenage kids or you know anyone who's a teenager, they generally don't like to tell you stuff. But you say something like, what did you do last night? And they say nothing. Yeah, I was sleeping.

They did absolutely nothing.

How was school? Nothing. Fine. It's that kind of thing. Or if they are teenagers, sometimes they say, give me cash and I'll tell you. And I remember, and I'm going to give you a Eureka moment at the end, so I'm going to explain the phenomenon. But I remember having these conversations when my son was a teenager, and it's like any other teenager, so I'm not picking on him. You don't find out anything. And in fact, they don't tell you anything at all. I found out when I took him somewhere and we were driving in a car. I could ask all sorts of questions, and I'll give you an example of how I asked him a bit later on, and he would tell me stuff. Right. I didn't join the dots at the time, but I just remember thinking, okay, maybe we need to go in the car, just drive around.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So that was— that you hadn't heard that that was a particularly good way of doing it, you just thought, let's give it a go.

Yeah, well, I just found out that one day I was doing a drive somewhere and I just started chatting casually and we got Yeah, we've got a conversation going beyond normal. I'm going to join the dots in a minute. So that's the first example. Second example is I had a customer that at the back of their office there was a lake. And he, when I turned up one day, he said, do you want to come and walk around the lake? And I went, how romantic, I'd love to walk around the lake with you. Sounds great. So we had a business meeting. Yeah. But we were walking around the lake and I would say that's probably one of the best business meetings I've ever had.

In terms of the business that was done or in terms of just the scenery or both?

I'm pleased you asked me. Well, scenery, yes, but the quality of the conversation, you know, because it was originally like a networking meeting, so I just get to know and find out what's going on, see if there's any work in there and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And because of the nature of the fact we were walking outside, I felt we just had a better quality conversation. I did get some work. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. I suppose it's less— you're not face to face, are you? So there's not it doesn't feel as confrontational. You're not necessarily having to maintain eye contact. It's just you're just sort of walking side by side with someone.

Yeah, maybe. And then there was another— my third example is I used to work in corporate life, as you know, for many years. And in those days, people, some of the people I used to work for and quite senior people seemed to smoke. I don't know if it was me, maybe they might have chosen to smoke. Thinking about it anyway. So they would go and have a smoke. Smokers go and have a smoke, apparently. I don't smoke. I've never smoked, but I used to have a virtual smoke because I found out if I went to have a smoke, a virtual one, and we're pacing up and down. Apparently if you smoke, you pace, apparently. So we're pacing up and down. I'm pacing with them. I'm not smoking. I'm just virtually doing this, right? I'm doing this. You can't see what I'm doing. And we're having again, some of my bosses would have good conversations about my future and where I was going in the kind of 5 minutes we're having a virtual cigarette. Interesting. It's very interesting.

Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. So these are places where people feel most relaxed, I guess, or it's not a sort of work environment. I've heard that actually if you want to break up with someone, the best way to do it is to take them on a walk. Not that I'm planning on doing that, by the way.

But, uh, that's fine. Well, actually there was an episode of Friends where they used to say, where's your favorite place for lunch? And that was a sign they were getting fired. But I'm not sure it's the same reason, but that there's something in that. Your point's completely right. And never do it on a Friday. It's never good. Yeah. So it got me thinking and then I was thinking, what is it? There's something in this. And I do a lot of coaching, as you know, and I've always said, and I've said on previous episodes, that people are really formal in the office. And then when they leave, they don't call me Mr. Gamp, they become normal person. Yeah, we go for coffee over the road and whatever it is, and then voilà, we're like having a normal conversation. And when you come back in the office, Mr. Gamp again.

Hello, Mr. Gamp.

Thank you very much for your coaching session. Okay, so that's the discussion I want to have. So I've given you 3 scenarios. Teenager. Yeah. Smoking or virtual smoking. And in the business environment and coaching. What do you think, George? I'm going to join the dots.

Yeah, my, my guess would be that these are places where people feel less sort of like it's a business chat and more like a human-to-human chat and they feel that they're most relaxed. I think it's maybe something to do with not having eye contact or not having to feel like you're face-to-face with someone in a sort of confrontational way. That would be my guess, but I don't know.

Here goes, right? Should we do the big reveal then? Should we do the eureka moment? It's coming.

It's eureka time.

I'm worried because I've built this up, but here it is. You ready for it?

Yeah, hit me.

Ah, I'm nervous. Here it goes. The eureka moment is 45 degrees. What?

What?

What are you talking about?

45 degrees?

If you want to get people to tell you stuff, you need to sit 45 degrees. Here's my example. If you— when I coach, I sit at 45 degrees. I don't look them in the eye. You said it before. When you look at someone face to face, it's confrontational or it's intimate, and normally it's unintentionally confrontational. Yeah, I've noticed I do a lot of coaching now on teams. Unintentionally, it's a lot more confrontational. I'm looking them in the eye. Yeah, yeah. And but normally when I coach people face to face, I'm sitting at 45 degrees. When I take someone to the coffee bar, I sit at 45 degrees. Interesting. There's a psychology to it, by the way, and it's written. It's, well, a well-known thing. I stumbled across it by accident. It's my— you— that's my other eureka moment. Yeah, yeah. What is this? What is the thread? When I'm in the car, we're not looking at each other, we're looking out the window.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm walking around the lake, we're not looking at each other. And someone told me the other day, and as you know, I don't have a dog and I probably never will, but dog owners say when a dog meets another dog, they do two things. One, they sniff each other's asses, so we're not going to do that. The second thing they do is they put their faces against each other there and they bark at each other, but they don't look at each other. Really? When a dog—

when—

if you notice, when dogs look at each other, they growl. Yeah, because it's confrontational. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom, there you go. It's the 45 degrees. If you want to get people to tell you stuff, I mean, there's more to it because how you say it, which is also important, but so don't be confrontational. Have a, have a regular chat as if you're like just an everyday kind of chat. People tell you stuff. Ask good questions, of course, as always. Oh yeah, ask bloody good questions, but don't look him in the eye. Be at 45 degrees. If I go to a coffee bar, if I'm in the office, I always sit at 45 degrees.

And would you just quickly, would you change that if you were, say, telling someone off or if you were— I don't know, are there scenarios where it is better to be head on?

Yeah, definitely.

But not when you're trying to get people to—

Oh, you're trying to get them to tell you stuff.

To relax.

Yeah. That's all this is about, getting people to tell you stuff. It's not the only game in town, but hopefully for our first eureka moment, did we have a little explosion? The 45 degrees?

Yeah, yeah. I wasn't expecting it and I love it. It's great.

You half guessed it as well.

I half guessed it, but there's, you know, I'd like to be proven right. So I feel great about that. And within 10 minutes as well.

There we go. Boom. We've done it.

We've blown people's minds in 10 minutes. Gary, thank you very much.

We've either blown it or we've blown their minds. Thanks for listening.