In my blog featured at Huffpo today, Waiting for Obama, I expressed significant concerns about his communication on “60 Minutes” Sunday. If we were to map out the president’s responses in terms of what communication experts call one-up and one-down moves, Obama’s answers would largely be one-down moves. He rarely challenged and even accepted Steve Crofts descriptions, such as the president seeming “aloof”.
If we look at our communication and find that what we say in response to someone is largely of a particular type, then we are in a pattern and that’s usually problematic. Partly because people can manage others who make themselves predictable.
This is especially a concern for those who want to lead. Regularly engaging in one-up or one-down responses, for example, instead of a combination, along with one-across responses that buy time or deflect confrontation (e.g., “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” “That’s an interesting perspective,” “Tell me more”) means the “leader” is in a rut and is likely allowing the other person or other persons to manage how the interaction goes.
Let’s look at a case in point from the interview with Steve Croft of “60 Minutes”:
Steve Kroft: There is a perception out there that you’re anti business.
Obama: Well, I think there’s no doubt that the relationship with the business community over the course of the last two years at times has gotten strained. And so I think that we’ve got some repair work to do there.
Kroft’s comment is a one-up. It asserts. And by the way, this assertion is based on some nebulous assumption. But, the president answers with a one-down response, which lets Kroft’s “perception” become a reality. He should have said, “I’ve never met a president who is anti-business. And I’m certainly not.” He could have asked, “Where did you get that perception, Steve? Because it’s a bogus one. And I’ll tell you why….” That would have asserted his support for businesses, which hire people, and would have broken the Croft one-up/Obama one-down pattern.
Let’s look at another one on the same topic:
Kroft: They’re not convinced that things are getting better.
Obama: Right. There are two separate arguments here. I think a lot of businesses still don’t know what the economy is doing. There’s still a lot of uncertain data out there. And we’re still working through some big problems of the economy. The housing market is a huge headwind. Now, the second part of uncertainty, and this is the one that the Republicans focused a lot on during the campaign is, we’ve got a new health care law, we’ve got a new financial regulatory reform law, we don’t know what all these regulations coming out of various agencies might be, and so that’s making people hesitate.
Here again, Kroft throws out an assertion with no backing whatsoever. The president doesn’t challenge or even question its validity. That in itself is a big one-down.
Then, he talks on and on instead of saying, “A lot of them are convinced, Steve. Let’s start with small businesses, the bread and butter of jobs.” Then he could have told us what the administration has done and will do. Succinctly would have sufficed.
These examples make the point. If you go to the actual interview you’ll find many, many comments made by the president that gave away his 75% responsibility (violating comeback Rule 1) for how people interpret what he says. He abdicated control. And that’s okay once in a while. No one should be using one-up comments all of the time. But the opposite is just as treacherous, especially for a president.
Can the president change this? Absolutely. And sometimes he’s quite effective at managing how conversations proceed. But he gave Croft far too much latitude and missed many “choice points” (defined in Comebacks at conversation junctures) where he could have easily changed the course of the interview and the overall impression of him as a leader.
There are still a lot of people out there who want to see this president succeed. A large part of that success will depend on him recognizing that even the most intelligent among us needs to know how communication works, how choices are expanded or limited by what we say and how we say it. And then go study the way you interact and do some tweaking.
Comebacks at Work link here
