Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the
Joanne Lockwood: Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of
Joanne Lockwood: amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of
Joanne Lockwood: inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place
Joanne Lockwood: for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please
Joanne Lockwood: do drop me a line to
Joanne Lockwood: jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk,
Joanne Lockwood: that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot UK. You
Joanne Lockwood: can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and
Joanne Lockwood: the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab
Joanne Lockwood: a decaf and let's get going. Today is
Joanne Lockwood: episode 102 with the title Humanising
Joanne Lockwood: Business and I have the absolute honour and privilege
Joanne Lockwood: to welcome Ben Afia. Ben describes himself as someone
Joanne Lockwood: who makes business more human, and when I asked Ben to describe his
Joanne Lockwood: superpower, he said he has a particular sensitivity to
Joanne Lockwood: the nuances of language. Hello, Ben, welcome
Joanne Lockwood: to the show. Thank you for having me, Jo,
Ben Afia: it's an absolute pleasure. Yeah, we've been having a great chat in the green room
Joanne Lockwood: and I'm so looking forward to this
Joanne Lockwood: humanising business. What does that mean? Yeah, it's quite
Ben Afia: a bold statement, isn't it? I suppose, but it's been my mission
Ben Afia: for possibly the last 2025 years.
Ben Afia: I've really started focusing on language, in particular, when I was at
Ben Afia: Boots, the chemists, about 25 years ago, and I got to work
Ben Afia: on the first brand tone of voice. We were working on brand strategy,
Ben Afia: the tone of voice and language of the business. And in any
Ben Afia: large organisation, you've got a level of complexity
Ben Afia: and dehumanising, if you like, because you've got a lot of people,
Ben Afia: so you have process and you've got bureaucracy and politics, and that all
Ben Afia: gets in the way of relationships inside the
Ben Afia: organisation and that gets in turn in the way of
Ben Afia: relationships outside. So with customers. So at
Ben Afia: Boots, I was trying to help the organisation to relate to customers in
Ben Afia: the way that they want to be related to, the way they would want to
Ben Afia: be spoken to. And then when I set up my consultancy about 19
Ben Afia: and a half, nearly 20 years ago, I found myself
Ben Afia: coming across organise other organisations who had similar problems. So I worked with companies
Ben Afia: like BP, Vodafone, Aviva, Google,
Ben Afia: and I found a similar pattern that these larger businesses, just because
Ben Afia: they're large, they have certain issues that get in the way of being
Ben Afia: human. And what's the impact of that? Well,
Ben Afia: certainly when I was an employee, I felt slightly dehumanised,
Ben Afia: actually. Boots was a wonderful place to work. But I worked in some less
Ben Afia: wonderful places before that. Many people have this sense of working
Ben Afia: for the man and that being a dehumanising
Ben Afia: experience. So if we feel treated less than human
Ben Afia: internally, how does that reflect in the way that we treat our
Ben Afia: customers? And it's that connection that I'm really intrigued about.
Ben Afia: And what I've learned, I suppose, through all the work, that all the consulting that
Ben Afia: I've done with various clients, is that in order
Ben Afia: to change the relationship you have with your customers, you need to change the relationship
Ben Afia: with your people internally first. So that's the nub of it,
Ben Afia: I'd say. I like that. I like that nuance. And we
Joanne Lockwood: see that echoed in, you say the companies you've worked for, the
Joanne Lockwood: airline industry changed the way they operated many years ago as well,
Joanne Lockwood: we can probably imagine. I see on LinkedIn every day, people get really
Joanne Lockwood: frustrated with computer says no, or whoever you talk to.
Joanne Lockwood: I appreciate you're not necessarily talking about customer service here, you're talking about how you
Joanne Lockwood: communicate. But sometimes you get a letter and it feels like you're
Joanne Lockwood: being, I don't know, criticised or attacked or
Joanne Lockwood: sued in a correspondence that should be friendly and warm. But
Joanne Lockwood: that warmth never comes through, does it? Absolutely. And to
Ben Afia: that extent, yes. I am talking about customer service, because what is
Ben Afia: a business? A business has products and services
Ben Afia: that it sells to an audience. That might be a business audience or
Ben Afia: a consumer audience, or both in many cases. So ultimately,
Ben Afia: we're creating something that serves a need for people, and
Ben Afia: people will buy that or not. And
Ben Afia: so that's where the sense of customer service comes in.
Ben Afia: Because when you get through the selling and the marketing
Ben Afia: communication, it's the customer service that really matters. Do you
Ben Afia: deliver what you promise in your marketing, through your service?
Ben Afia: And all of those tiny moments, all
Ben Afia: throughout a customer's journey, are absolutely crucial in
Ben Afia: shaping a customer's perception of what you're like as an
Ben Afia: organisation and what you believe in, what you stand for. So every one
Ben Afia: of those letters, every one of that, and I look at the kind of the
Ben Afia: micro copy on websites, the form that you fill in when you make a
Ben Afia: purchase, or the terms and conditions when they come through at the bottom of the
Ben Afia: email, when you've bought something, all the contractual stuff is all
Ben Afia: evidence to a customer of what you stand for, what you believe
Ben Afia: in. And as a business, it's a promise. It's all part of your promise.
Ben Afia: What's really interesting is that most organisations spend a lot of time and
Ben Afia: money investing in the marketing and the
Ben Afia: sales pitch and aren't necessarily following that through in
Ben Afia: the rest of the journey, which is when you really learn
Ben Afia: whether you can trust their organisation and whether you're prepared to stay with them. And
Ben Afia: the end result of that for me is, and all the
Ben Afia: evidence shows that companies that deliver on
Ben Afia: their promise and turn customers into advocates,
Ben Afia: people who come back and buy more and bring their friends with
Ben Afia: them refer are more profitable. And I was just listening to a
Ben Afia: webinar the other day with Fred Reichld, who created the mps net
Ben Afia: promoter score system at Bain and Company 25,
Ben Afia: 30 years ago or something, and his latest book,
Ben Afia: winning on purpose, I think it is. And he has great case studies.
Ben Afia: He talks about T Mobile in the US in particular, who were at the bottom
Ben Afia: for customer service, who then really spent time focusing on
Ben Afia: turning customers into advocates and referrals and
Ben Afia: became the top for customer service and then for profitability
Ben Afia: amongst all the mobile networks in the US. So there is really compelling
Ben Afia: evidence that treating people like human beings,
Ben Afia: humanising for your people and for your customers, works. It's quite
Joanne Lockwood: easy for you and I, we're solopreneurs, we run our own micro
Joanne Lockwood: businesses. Our tone of voice is inherent in
Joanne Lockwood: everything we do because it's basically only ourselves speaking.
Joanne Lockwood: I like what you're saying there. It's thinking about all those subtle
Joanne Lockwood: touch points and nuances. I worked with a
Joanne Lockwood: mutual friend of ours, Sarah Fox, on my terms and conditions recently, and when
Joanne Lockwood: I wrote them originally, I wrote them with my bouncing ball on the
Joanne Lockwood: words in my head so that they actually sound like me. And I was
Joanne Lockwood: very keen. I didn't want them to sound distant,
Joanne Lockwood: detached, legal. I wanted them to sound warm and friendly
Joanne Lockwood: like, this is what I'm thinking. I hope you're thinking the same thing. This is
Joanne Lockwood: something that I'm worried about. This is something you'll be worried about. I want us
Joanne Lockwood: to work together and come up with a collaborative solution. If it doesn't work out,
Joanne Lockwood: let's have a chat about it was kind of my approach. And what do I
Joanne Lockwood: mean by this? I mean this and it's written in that very friendly, chatty
Joanne Lockwood: language, which is my internal head voice. And
Joanne Lockwood: that's what I asked Sarah to keep going. I don't
Joanne Lockwood: call them terms, I call them my expectations of our relationship.
Joanne Lockwood: And she followed that through. And I think you're so right.
Joanne Lockwood: Everything I do has to have my bouncing ball in my
Joanne Lockwood: head of how I speak on the words as I speak it, and it has
Joanne Lockwood: to have my cadence, my rhythm, my bounce, all those. But when you work for
Joanne Lockwood: a corporate, the challenge is they're so big, so large,
Joanne Lockwood: who has that internal voice that you're trying to match and how do you
Joanne Lockwood: communicate? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there
Ben Afia: are some, although few businesses, maybe like virgin,
Ben Afia: and they can imagine a person at Virgin, they can imagine Richard Branson
Ben Afia: speaking, and there's the voice. But for most large businesses, you don't
Ben Afia: necessarily have a publicly known figurehead that you can lean on in that
Ben Afia: way. So you do need to find a way of describing that voice in
Ben Afia: a way that the people using it can apply. And I
Ben Afia: suppose that's what I've done a lot of in the last 20 years or
Ben Afia: so, is helping an organisation to develop its strategy and its
Ben Afia: brand strategy, in particular values and behaviours,
Ben Afia: and translate that into ways of speaking
Ben Afia: and writing that people who don't have english
Ben Afia: degrees can relate to and actually employ. Now, you might call that
Ben Afia: tone of voice guidelines, perhaps, which is something I've done a lot of over the
Ben Afia: years. But those people who are connecting with your
Ben Afia: customers, first of all, your marketing teams, and if you're
Ben Afia: Vodafone, you have hundreds, if not thousands of marketers, you then have tens of
Ben Afia: thousands of people in customer service, potentially, and you have
Ben Afia: salespeople dealing with customers in stores, on the
Ben Afia: phone or in b to b going out to see corporates.
Ben Afia: So you've got thousands of people representing the brand day in, day
Ben Afia: out. So how do you help the ethos or the story of the brand come
Ben Afia: through consistently? And that's, I guess, what I've been really interested
Ben Afia: in, because we don't want to turn people into puppets, we're not trying to turn
Ben Afia: people into drones and get people scripting
Ben Afia: and repeating the same phrases. I actually
Ben Afia: strongly believe in help, in empowering people and in equipping
Ben Afia: people to bring their own voice into it. And what I've found
Ben Afia: is that when people feel more confident in the way
Ben Afia: that you want to say things as an organisation and the messages that you want
Ben Afia: them to bounce off, they actually become much more
Ben Afia: confident communicators and they will reflect the brand
Ben Afia: with confidence, naturally. So partly is about definition and
Ben Afia: defining things, in defining the tone of voice, but then it's
Ben Afia: also about developing the skills, the capability for
Ben Afia: people. And quite often in business, we use language day in, day out. We
Ben Afia: write all the time, don't we? We write emails, we
Ben Afia: write web pages, we write pieces of marketing in customer
Ben Afia: service. We're on web chat, or we're writing letters to customers.
Ben Afia: And how often have we had training? Quite often. I'll go into an organisation and
Ben Afia: there's been very little training in writing. It's almost the assumption that you've
Ben Afia: learned to write at school, so you ought to be able to do it. But
Ben Afia: actually, no, there's a way of writing in business that is
Ben Afia: actually different. And it's interesting. My daughter is about to do her a
Ben Afia: levels. She's doing english literature, and I almost can't coach her because
Ben Afia: they've been taught to write at school in a way that actually
Ben Afia: is. They've been taught to use adjectives in a way that I never would in
Ben Afia: business, because we aim for simplicity and clarity and humanity in
Ben Afia: business. And it's almost like at school they're being taught something else, and then in
Ben Afia: academia, it's even worse. Yeah, don't talk to me about academia.
Joanne Lockwood: I was doing an MVQ and I couldn't
Joanne Lockwood: handle the assignments because every time I had it moderated, it was
Joanne Lockwood: saying, no, you have to write like this. Have to write like that. And I
Joanne Lockwood: said, no, I can't write this without filler words. I can't write this
Joanne Lockwood: without my voice in it. You want me to strip it down to
Joanne Lockwood: short, factual sentences? That's not me. No.
Ben Afia: What this makes me think of is the perceptions that we have of the way
Ben Afia: that we should write. So we grow up in whatever environment
Ben Afia: we do, learning a way that we're taught to
Ben Afia: write. We should write the way that we should sound. And so we sort
Ben Afia: of enter the workplace with lots of assumptions
Ben Afia: that have been drummed into us as if they're rules of grammar and they're not
Ben Afia: actually rules of grammar. So a good example is starting
Ben Afia: a sentence with and but because or so now, if
Ben Afia: you read most newspapers, you'll find that they do that a lot. I think the
Ben Afia: Guardian doesn't, but most newspapers just do that with abandon and you don't
Ben Afia: even notice. But in business writing, it's almost as if we've been taught that
Ben Afia: that's not correct. And people have this idea embedded in their brains
Ben Afia: as if it's a rule of grammar, but it's not. It's actually a style
Ben Afia: rule. And style emerged. I don't want to get too
Ben Afia: distracted on too much of a tangent here, but style emerged in the victorian
Ben Afia: period when people were coming into the cities
Ben Afia: in the victorian period looking for work, they were coming off the fields
Ben Afia: and looking for jobs in the factories, when in the industrial
Ben Afia: revolution and things were booming in the factories, people were coming in and
Ben Afia: starting businesses, earning money, and you had this
Ben Afia: emerging middle class coming in from the villages,
Ben Afia: but there were people who didn't feel very confident in communicating,
Ben Afia: in conveying themselves in polite society. So
Ben Afia: you had a whole raft of out of work actors who
Ben Afia: were turning their hand to creating these style guides to help the
Ben Afia: aspiring middle class to sound poshure. And this is where a lot
Ben Afia: of these rules of grammar that we perceive and have become embedded in the last
Ben Afia: kind of couple of hundred years, but they're actually matters of style, and what they
Ben Afia: were writing were these style guides. So we have this hangover in business
Ben Afia: that we should have a certain formality, but actually, our business
Ben Afia: language, certainly in Britain, to the
Ben Afia: US, to some extent, Australia as well, has become less
Ben Afia: formal. So the Internet in the last 2025 years ago or so, has
Ben Afia: actually brought in different styles of communication, different
Ben Afia: forms of language. If you think that we came into the Internet age writing
Ben Afia: formal letters, and we now have text and
Ben Afia: WhatsApp and telegram and all sorts of apps, where we message in a much more
Ben Afia: immediate form, and what that's done is it's brought a style of
Ben Afia: speech into our writing. And so now, if we write
Ben Afia: in the traditional letter way, as organisations tend to,
Ben Afia: or we feel that we should, in business, actually, customers and the
Ben Afia: public at large find, feel that actually, that's rather over formal,
Ben Afia: and that puts a barrier up. And I did some work with legal in
Ben Afia: general, 1819, years ago, not long after I'd started
Ben Afia: freelancing, and they had done a piece of discourse analysis that
Ben Afia: highlighted that actually, this language, this formal insurance
Ben Afia: language, was putting a barrier up between them and customers. And that was the
Ben Afia: spark, that was the catalyst for them to make some
Ben Afia: changes. As you were speaking, I was listening to the way you were constructing
Joanne Lockwood: your sentences and the words, and you were using the word and
Joanne Lockwood: sequentially, in a way that you would never use that if you were
Joanne Lockwood: writing a letter or writing a document, because you just wouldn't have.
Joanne Lockwood: And this and that and this and that, you'd almost force
Joanne Lockwood: yourself to shorten that sentence and start again
Joanne Lockwood: without the third. And because you just look at it and go, that doesn't seem
Joanne Lockwood: right, but when you were speaking it, you were linking
Joanne Lockwood: paragraphs and sentences with, and listening
Joanne Lockwood: to it, it sounded relaxed and normal and typical conversation.
Joanne Lockwood: So is it a challenge trying to turn the written
Joanne Lockwood: word into the internal voice of the person, reading
Joanne Lockwood: it in a way that they can understand it and pick up
Joanne Lockwood: the same feeling in which it was given onto the page?
Ben Afia: I think it is, yeah, that's a really good point, Jo. So,
Ben Afia: quite often, what I'm trying to help people to do in organisations is to
Ben Afia: be more themselves and more conversationally themselves. So
Ben Afia: when I'm working with marketers, it's actually a bit more
Ben Afia: straightforward because there's a distance off generally between them and the
Ben Afia: customer, so they have time to think and to think about what's going into their
Ben Afia: advertising or into their social media or onto a
Ben Afia: website. So they've got time to consider and they can work as a
Ben Afia: team to bring more of their spoken voice into
Ben Afia: play. It's slightly different in customer service because in customer service
Ben Afia: often people have been taught certain ways that they've picked up in various training
Ben Afia: over the years, but often that training hasn't been very comprehensive, so they
Ben Afia: don't have that much confidence in being themselves. I can
Ben Afia: remember running a workshop in Aeon, so I
Ben Afia: helped Aeon transition from Powergen to Aeon must,
Ben Afia: what was it, 15 years ago? Or something like that. I worked with Aeon for
Ben Afia: about eight years, I think, and we went through that transition.
Ben Afia: My team and I trained about 4000 people there and I can remember
Ben Afia: a workshop with some very senior customer service people. And they
Ben Afia: were translating a letter, they were looking at a letter and they were really
Ben Afia: struggling to get the clarity into the tone of voice that I was trying to
Ben Afia: encourage. The clarity and the informality, not
Ben Afia: necessarily chattiness, because I don't think customers want that and certainly
Ben Afia: not from an energy provider. So it's not a chattiness, but a more
Ben Afia: conversational human tone helps somebody. It expresses, for
Ben Afia: me, expresses empathy. It shows somebody that you've heard them, a
Ben Afia: simplicity and a clarity and empathy that shows that you've heard.
Ben Afia: And I can remember there was a couple working together and I suggested, and
Ben Afia: they were really struggling to get through their kind of
Ben Afia: legalistic language, the formality. So I said,
Ben Afia: why don't you say it as you would say it on the phone to the
Ben Afia: customer? So person a say it to person b as you would on the
Ben Afia: phone. Person B write down exactly the words that they say.
Ben Afia: And they wrote the words down. I said, there's your letter. They said, what? We
Ben Afia: can't say this. It's too simple, it's too
Ben Afia: natural in a way. And I said, you absolutely. Can you tidy it up? You
Ben Afia: edit it, you can turn that into a letter. But what you've done is you've
Ben Afia: then brought 25 plus years of experience looking after
Ben Afia: customers to bear into that letter. And you've shown some empathy and
Ben Afia: you've connected on a more human level. So for me, it is about having
Ben Afia: empathy for the audience, what they're likely to take on
Ben Afia: board in terms of a message and how they want to hear it and how
Ben Afia: they're going to feel recognised as a human being, as. An individual is the challenge
Joanne Lockwood: with that, though. Whilst we talked about having an avatar of
Joanne Lockwood: the tone of voice. So Richard Branson Virgin is clearly a person you're
Joanne Lockwood: talking through, but do you have to try and find an avatar
Joanne Lockwood: of the receiver? So the person is going to open that letter and that must
Joanne Lockwood: be a massive challenge because of the multicultural
Joanne Lockwood: nuances of the person. Open the letter, their heritage,
Joanne Lockwood: their lived experience, which part of the country, which part of the world, which
Joanne Lockwood: language they speak. They're going to interpret things with
Joanne Lockwood: their own bias or lived experience. And that must also be a challenge.
Ben Afia: It is. And so there's two sides to that conversation, isn't there?
Ben Afia: There's the company. So what's the character of the company? And yeah, what's the character
Ben Afia: of the person you're talking to? So let's take both in turn. So start with
Ben Afia: the company. In the jargon, in the corporate speak or the marketing speak, I
Ben Afia: would call this brand personality. And there are all sorts of ways of
Ben Afia: describing brand personality, but that's part of the kind
Ben Afia: of the process of developing a brand strategy and it needs
Ben Afia: to come from the values and it comes from the behaviours that
Ben Afia: you want to encourage through the organisation. The
Ben Afia: personality is how that all comes across. So when you
Ben Afia: connect with a customer or connect with somebody internally, how does that
Ben Afia: convey itself? What personality traits would you describe yourself
Ben Afia: by? So that's the first step
Ben Afia: and you can have some fun with that. The key is to try to bring
Ben Afia: it to life in a way that enables people within the
Ben Afia: organisation to project themselves onto it, to see themselves in that
Ben Afia: personality. It needs to not be completely prescriptive. You can't
Ben Afia: tell people how to be as a human being. You can
Ben Afia: encourage, but you can't force people. So you have to do it in
Ben Afia: a way that people will relate to and enjoy playing
Ben Afia: with, enjoy working with and expressing. So that's the kind of the business
Ben Afia: side of the conversation. But when it comes to the people that we're
Ben Afia: talking to, I have an exercise that I've used for many years which I found
Ben Afia: is really powerful for this. You've probably come across the idea of
Ben Afia: audience personas and I think that they can be misused in a
Ben Afia: way, and can we really ever
Ben Afia: describe one segment of an audience in a way that
Ben Afia: makes sense? There's all sorts of arguments about this and in fact,
Ben Afia: in my book that I'm hoping to be publishing within two or three
Ben Afia: months. The human business. How to love your customers so
Ben Afia: they love you back. I have a chapter on brand personality, and
Ben Afia: I talk about this process of an exercise where I help people to
Ben Afia: step into the personality of their audience. So
Ben Afia: trying not to be too prescriptive about audience personas, I run
Ben Afia: this exercise where we use. It uses NLP neurolinguistic programming, and
Ben Afia: there's this idea of perceptual position, so stepping into somebody else's shoes.
Ben Afia: So I get people into groups and I give them a communication.
Ben Afia: So we get some communications from within the organisation that
Ben Afia: could be better. Obviously, I'm generally looking for
Ben Afia: communications that are quite poor, but actually you don't need to look too
Ben Afia: far within an organisation to find things that people want to improve.
Ben Afia: And I get people to spend 20 minutes, 25 minutes
Ben Afia: scoping out, getting an idea of a character of one of the audience,
Ben Afia: somebody who might be receiving a letter or reading a web page or receiving an
Ben Afia: email or something like that, or reading a social post. So give them a name,
Ben Afia: give them an age, imagine what they do, what's their family set up, where do
Ben Afia: they live, what job do they do? And then imagine a day in their life
Ben Afia: right from the moment they get up. Because I want people to have the idea
Ben Afia: that when you're talking to your customers, when you're communicating with an audience of any
Ben Afia: kind, the context in which they're receiving a communication
Ben Afia: is the whole of their life. It's almost like within business. We've got this idea
Ben Afia: that when you're writing to somebody, they're in their business mindset or they're in their
Ben Afia: customer mindset, and it's obviously not true. We
Ben Afia: get up, we walk the dog, we get the kids to school.
Ben Afia: We are panicked and stressed. The packed lunch didn't go
Ben Afia: quite as well. There was a traffic jam. Getting the kids to
Ben Afia: school, you got to your office, or you got back to your
Ben Afia: desk at home and you're already fraught, and then you read that
Ben Afia: letter or you get that email through. So when we imagine the whole of this
Ben Afia: life context for a member of our audience, we
Ben Afia: immediately have more empathy for that person. Then
Ben Afia: I get them from that place of empathy to go, okay, in character, in audience,
Ben Afia: character. Now read the communication. How does it feel to you?
Ben Afia: What does it make you feel? And people go, I'm confused.
Ben Afia: Actually. It makes me angry. It's legalistic, it's
Ben Afia: formal. I don't understand, I'm not
Ben Afia: clear. And immediately people know what they want to do differently
Ben Afia: immediately in that place of empathy, they know what they want to do
Ben Afia: differently. And that's how I help them to step into an audience frame of
Ben Afia: mind and appreciate what's going on for them. I love that. That's so true. I
Joanne Lockwood: often use a similar example of that where, because we're reading
Joanne Lockwood: a lot of communications now on our phones, we've got
Joanne Lockwood: even less control about where that person will
Joanne Lockwood: pick up that correspondence, whether it's a text message, email, whatever it may
Joanne Lockwood: be. They could be sat on the toilet, as you say. They could be in
Joanne Lockwood: a traffic jam, they could be just dropped the kids off at school having
Joanne Lockwood: a stressy moment and suddenly ping, they go, I'll just quickly read
Joanne Lockwood: that. And I've picked up communications and
Joanne Lockwood: there's nothing particularly wrong with the tone of voice or what was being sent to
Joanne Lockwood: me, but my frame of mind was in completely the wrong place. I was not
Joanne Lockwood: in the right place to receive that, no matter how good it was. What I
Joanne Lockwood: should have done was turned my phone off. What happened was I read it and
Joanne Lockwood: it then destroyed my mindset for the rest of the day. So
Joanne Lockwood: I'm looking at the other side sometimes is I'm getting stuff that I really shouldn't
Joanne Lockwood: read. But we have to appreciate when we're sending stuff, as you
Joanne Lockwood: pointed out, we've got little control over the situation the person's in.
Ben Afia: Absolutely. I've actually got quite an extreme example of that just at the moment. So
Ben Afia: I'm working with a lovely norwegian consultancy called
Ben Afia: DNV. They're 14,000 people. They're global. There are 119
Ben Afia: nationalities. So I'm thinking about translation and non native
Ben Afia: english speakers. I'm working on the
Ben Afia: people HR, intranet and LNd programmes and
Ben Afia: that sort of stuff. And they have engineers
Ben Afia: and surveyors who are literally out on ships. So they do
Ben Afia: risk and assurance globally. And so many of
Ben Afia: their people are going to be remote, they will be managing large
Ben Afia: teams. They might be reading a communication
Ben Afia: on a phone or a tablet. They probably have patchy
Ben Afia: Internet access. And I'm trying to encourage them to
Ben Afia: think, okay, everything's got to be mobile, responsive, everything has got to be super
Ben Afia: concise. We've got to be thinking about what's in it for our audience,
Ben Afia: not what do we want to communicate as a company. And this is
Ben Afia: classic across all of the companies I've ever worked with, because
Ben Afia: I think it's human nature to have an idea of what we want to
Ben Afia: say. And it's so much harder to think what do people actually want to hear?
Ben Afia: What do they want to receive? So what I'm encouraging in this situation, as I
Ben Afia: always do, is what's in it for our audience? What do they want to
Ben Afia: hear, and what way are they most likely to receive that
Ben Afia: message? How are they likely to take it on board? How can
Ben Afia: we help them to be open to our message? Because a
Ben Afia: communication that doesn't land is not a communication. It's completely one sided. It's
Ben Afia: deaf ears. And how do you work with organisations where
Joanne Lockwood: you may be trying to diffuse some conflict? Because sometimes
Joanne Lockwood: correspondence that goes bad ends up in conflict, or
Joanne Lockwood: disgruntlement or frustration or whatever it may be. So the
Joanne Lockwood: customers may be responding to you in writing, via text, in the
Joanne Lockwood: chat window, however they're going to communicate or on the phone, and there's conflict there,
Joanne Lockwood: or there's escalation, there's anger, there's frustration.
Joanne Lockwood: Do you have techniques to help people respond to that sort of
Joanne Lockwood: communication in a human fashion? Yes. I think the key to
Ben Afia: that is leaning into the
Ben Afia: reality of the situation, the reality of the conflict,
Ben Afia: the nature of the conversation, or the nature of the
Ben Afia: negotiation and being real and not trying to clothe
Ben Afia: things in legal and corporate speak. So what tends to
Ben Afia: happen when we're in conflict is we default to
Ben Afia: ways of speaking or ways of writing that
Ben Afia: legalistic or have a formality. We put a formality to it in order to
Ben Afia: give the language more gravitas. And that's understandable.
Ben Afia: That's human, that's normal. The problem with
Ben Afia: increasing the formality of the language, which is what happens in conflict, is
Ben Afia: that that then puts your counterparty's
Ben Afia: barriers up. That actually inspires them to react
Ben Afia: negatively. The way to bring those barriers
Ben Afia: down is to be more human. It's right to the start of the podcast where
Ben Afia: we talked about making business more human. It's to be more simple,
Ben Afia: more clear. Use Anglo saxon
Ben Afia: language. What do I mean by that? So a lot of the language of the
Ben Afia: professions that arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066,
Ben Afia: so he brought French, French came from
Ben Afia: Latin. And so a lot of the language of
Ben Afia: authority and the professions and power and control
Ben Afia: has a latin origin, and we end up with these longer words,
Ben Afia: which people don't trust, interestingly. So what the research
Ben Afia: suggests is that in British English, certainly
Ben Afia: people tend to trust shorter anglo saxon origin
Ben Afia: words, words like love and friends. I don't have any more examples there,
Ben Afia: actually. So shorter, simpler forms of words we
Ben Afia: trust instinctively. And so this is what I'm trying to encourage people to do
Ben Afia: when they're communicating, whether it is strategic communication. Chief
Ben Afia: exec or leaders communicating with their
Ben Afia: board, with their stakeholders, investors with their people,
Ben Afia: or whether it's in customer service, talking to customers. It's to simplify the
Ben Afia: language and to get really specific about what you mean. And so what
Ben Afia: tends to happen is, when we're not feeling confident in conflict,
Ben Afia: we dress up our language in order to have an appearance of
Ben Afia: more confidence. It takes confidence to lean into what's actually going on in
Ben Afia: the situation and to tackle it more directly and to use simple language. And that
Ben Afia: actually then disarms people. It brings the temperature down,
Ben Afia: it brings blood pressure down, and it enables people to be more
Ben Afia: receptive to what we're saying. As you're talking, I'm thinking about different
Joanne Lockwood: dialects in the UK. And you look at, say,
Joanne Lockwood: the traditional received pronunciation, the
Joanne Lockwood: BBC language, the World Service language that the BBC had. You're
Joanne Lockwood: right, is all about authority. All around. These very formal language
Joanne Lockwood: constructs sentences, long words, complicated
Joanne Lockwood: things. I remember there was a musical show
Joanne Lockwood: when I was little called the good old days, and they used to have this
Joanne Lockwood: announcer on stage, the biggest words you could ever imagine, that no one knew what
Joanne Lockwood: they meant, but everyone was whooping and cheering at them to make it sound impressive.
Joanne Lockwood: And then you think about maybe a different part of the country. I'm just thinking
Joanne Lockwood: about Yorkshire as a dialect and as a culture.
Joanne Lockwood: People see people from Yorkshire as being warmer and
Joanne Lockwood: friendlier and, okay, hard, more hard nosed
Joanne Lockwood: negotiations sometimes, but actually warmer and friendlier, where someone may be from
Joanne Lockwood: London or from the home counties as more businessy and
Joanne Lockwood: standoffish and less warm and friendly. So is that
Joanne Lockwood: just the nature of the dialect and the language constructs maybe
Joanne Lockwood: used outside of the city and more into the rural
Joanne Lockwood: areas? There's a lot of
Ben Afia: interesting stuff going to unpack there. And I guess
Ben Afia: the way I'd think about this is to think of language as being
Ben Afia: tribal. And what I mean by that is, so we, you know,
Ben Afia: language. We use language to identify ourselves, we
Ben Afia: use language to. To say which group we belong
Ben Afia: to, and we also use it. So we use language to
Ben Afia: include, and we use language to exclude. So
Ben Afia: perhaps in the professions, language might be used to exclude,
Ben Afia: to say that we have special knowledge that you don't have access to,
Ben Afia: and you need us to interpret it for you. You need us in the legal
Ben Afia: profession or an accountancy, for example. You need to pay
Ben Afia: us good money in order to make sure you're on the straight and narrow, because
Ben Afia: only we understand the language. And I think that
Ben Afia: happens in corporations. So it's the language of leadership. Interestingly, I
Ben Afia: find quite often that the language of middle management is more
Ben Afia: corporates than the language of very senior management. Quite often when I'm
Ben Afia: working with very senior teams, with executive
Ben Afia: teams, they are actually much more confident in simplifying their language
Ben Afia: because they've achieved status already. So we have this idea of
Ben Afia: language reflecting status and reflecting the tribe or the group, the in
Ben Afia: group, the out group. So if we think about language in that
Ben Afia: way, we can go, well, how are we including or excluding people with our
Ben Afia: language? And so quite often people are using language
Ben Afia: to exclude or to show that we have special knowledge
Ben Afia: unconsciously. It's not necessarily a deliberate thing, but it's a
Ben Afia: subtle dance all of the time, all of the different subtleties
Ben Afia: of class, of grouping within a
Ben Afia: country, between countries, they have very
Ben Afia: subtle nuances of inclusion and exclusion, and that's how we're using
Ben Afia: language. So if we're coming to using it using language
Ben Afia: in business, I'm thinking, what is your purpose, what's
Ben Afia: your intent towards your audience, whether it's internal or
Ben Afia: external, what's your intention behind your message? And then use the
Ben Afia: language that's appropriate for that intention. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: I've written four words down on my pad next to me. I've
Joanne Lockwood: written reserved, caged, measured and considered. And
Joanne Lockwood: that is often the language of corporate. You have to be
Joanne Lockwood: measured. People very often don't have full authority
Joanne Lockwood: to speak their mind. They're speaking on behalf of a company or an
Joanne Lockwood: organisation, that they don't have an authority to
Joanne Lockwood: interpret that view. They have to give the view,
Joanne Lockwood: therefore they step back. Whereas I and
Joanne Lockwood: yourself have the escalated privilege. If you want to speak
Joanne Lockwood: my mind and interact with my audiences and the people I'm communicating
Joanne Lockwood: with and represent myself how I wish. And I've
Joanne Lockwood: often found that by rolling up my sleeves and
Joanne Lockwood: almost like sitting cross legged amongst the group and saying,
Joanne Lockwood: look, I don't have the perfect answer. This is how I think, this is how
Joanne Lockwood: I view, let me brain dump as it's coming out my head and let's
Joanne Lockwood: talk about how that works for you. And that's a very much more approachable because
Joanne Lockwood: everyone goes, great, we can all put our hackles down, we can take our
Joanne Lockwood: pretence out and we have a proper conversation now and resolve this.
Joanne Lockwood: That's hard to do when you've got a corporate voice or a corporate
Joanne Lockwood: behind you. You can't have that conversation. No. And what I
Ben Afia: find helps here is an approach to change called
Ben Afia: appreciative inquiry, that I've sort of delved into deeply in the
Ben Afia: last sort of ten years or so. So when I first started working on language
Ben Afia: at boots, I realised that I was actually working on change. But
Ben Afia: at the time I didn't really have the tools in order to encourage change.
Ben Afia: I got from writing into tone of voice, into
Ben Afia: training in written and spoken language
Ben Afia: throughout organisations. But I really wanted to find a way of
Ben Afia: supporting that change, because when you're training, you are creating change in
Ben Afia: the organisation. So I trained in appreciative inquiry and this was
Ben Afia: quite an awakening thing for me. Appreciative inquiry starts
Ben Afia: by hearing the stories of times people are at their best
Ben Afia: in organisations and we can use it in interviews,
Ben Afia: in workshops, in all sorts of different ways to get people expressing
Ben Afia: times that they've been at their best at work. And when people tell
Ben Afia: these stories, they re experience some of the endorphins that they felt at the time.
Ben Afia: When you've got a room, let's say, sometimes I'll have 30 people or 60 people,
Ben Afia: sometimes 90 people in a room, and we get people pairing up
Ben Afia: and telling these stories of times they've been at their best, and then coming together
Ben Afia: as groups on roundtables of six or eight people and
Ben Afia: giving the summaries of these stories. You get this volume
Ben Afia: increase in a room and you get this energy, this outpouring of
Ben Afia: energy. So what's going on here? So we're telling these stories, we're
Ben Afia: reexperiencing, experiencing some of the endorphins. We're putting ourselves
Ben Afia: in a more emotionally available and emotionally positive
Ben Afia: state of mind, which then enables us to be really creative
Ben Afia: about imagining what the future could look like and being
Ben Afia: creative about finding solutions. So often in organisations
Ben Afia: we're actually inadvertently triggering flight and flight we spend all. It's human
Ben Afia: nature. When we're walking down the street, we're scanning for snakes
Ben Afia: and dog poo, sabre tooth tigers. That's
Ben Afia: how we evolved on the savannahs. So it's human
Ben Afia: nature to scan the horizon for danger. And that's
Ben Afia: why news is negative. You get the one nice
Ben Afia: story at the end of the news, but all news is negative because good news
Ben Afia: doesn't alert us, it doesn't trigger us, it doesn't get us engaged emotionally
Ben Afia: and the same is going on in organisations. So we are
Ben Afia: constantly diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions to
Ben Afia: them. And this can set up this kind of negativity spiral in
Ben Afia: organisations, a downward spiral where people are
Ben Afia: constantly in flight or fight or
Ben Afia: freeze, and that's how people spend much of their working lives. So with appreciative
Ben Afia: inquiry, we can turn this on its head, we can turn this around and start
Ben Afia: exploring times we've been at our best. That encourages people into a more
Ben Afia: positive, you know, more positive emotional state, a positive
Ben Afia: feeling state, connecting with their colleagues, connecting with their people
Ben Afia: across the organisation. I get people the maximum mix of people, so I get people,
Ben Afia: senior and junior, from all parts of the
Ben Afia: organisation. The general idea is to get the whole system in the room, ideally, and
Ben Afia: I have had that at times. I worked with the British Lung foundation some years
Ben Afia: in ago and I had 90 people, 90 employees, the whole
Ben Afia: organisation in the room for one workshop, which was incredibly empowering and
Ben Afia: very exciting. You get people meeting and telling these stories
Ben Afia: to people that they've never met before. And the really
Ben Afia: surprising thing, or maybe it isn't surprising, is that people find that they
Ben Afia: value the same things. So telling those stories, the
Ben Afia: things that they valued from those experiences are very, very common.
Ben Afia: I don't think I've ever had anybody tell a story where
Ben Afia: I did it all on my own. It was all about my own personal
Ben Afia: genius and capability and drive and ambition. I did
Ben Afia: this all on my own. The stories are always about moments of connection,
Ben Afia: where teams have had each other's back, where people support each
Ben Afia: other internally, and in turn they deliver for customers because
Ben Afia: they have the support of the organisation, support of their colleagues and
Ben Afia: empathy for the customer. So we have very, very
Ben Afia: common values. And that then gives you a starting point
Ben Afia: for behaving in a different way within an organisation. I've
Joanne Lockwood: actually been on one of your workshops where you did appreciative inquiries,
Joanne Lockwood: so I can actually say that I've experienced what you're saying there.
Joanne Lockwood: And I remember the thing I struggled with at the
Joanne Lockwood: beginning was trying to find something I thought was
Joanne Lockwood: relevant enough and meaningful enough that had a
Joanne Lockwood: positive emotion enough that I wanted to share with somebody else. I had to really
Joanne Lockwood: kind of dig deep. And that was the hardest bit of the exercise, is trying
Joanne Lockwood: to find that moment that was worthy. People do struggle
Ben Afia: with it and so they struggle to find a story that's good
Ben Afia: enough, because. When were you last asked?
Ben Afia: Everybody listening now, just think, when did somebody last ask
Ben Afia: you? Tell me about a time that you've been at your best, when you've been
Ben Afia: most alive, most engaged, most excited, most involved.
Ben Afia: Tell that story and tell it in the first person. So I did
Ben Afia: this and I spoke to John and he spoke to
Ben Afia: Betty, and she got the team together. So
Ben Afia: narrating the story in the first. We never do this.
Ben Afia: Nobody ever asked us this. So it's different.
Ben Afia: And I think that difference is very powerful, but it also gets us
Ben Afia: to a place that is very emotionally resonant for us. It gets
Ben Afia: us wellbeing a story and recognising something
Ben Afia: about ourselves and we just come out honestly, you just come out of it feeling
Ben Afia: bloody good and feeling good about the people around you.
Ben Afia: So in this negativity spiral that I talked about and
Ben Afia: in most organisations, constant firefighting, all
Ben Afia: organisations leaders, their people are
Ben Afia: under massive stress and it's only getting worse.
Ben Afia: We're firefighting, we've got inclusion,
Ben Afia: we've got recession, we've come through
Ben Afia: Covid, we're struggling with hybrid working. How do we get that mix right? How
Ben Afia: much are we in the office? How much are we working at home? How
Ben Afia: do I as a leader, relate to my team when they're home working and I
Ben Afia: can't see them crying, but I know that they are because
Ben Afia: they're so stressed, how do we relate and then pick
Ben Afia: up and support those people? We're under more pressure
Ben Afia: than we've probably ever been under. So this
Ben Afia: negativity spiral is almost endemic. It's one of the kind
Joanne Lockwood: of rules of networking and relationship building is when you're trying to
Joanne Lockwood: engage someone, ask them about themselves, because people like to
Joanne Lockwood: talk about themselves, they like to be listened to and they like to lead the
Joanne Lockwood: conversation mostly. So I suppose what you're trying to say here is, rather than
Joanne Lockwood: the traditional thing, what happens is, how are things going? Oh, yeah, my leg hurts
Joanne Lockwood: or cat got run over yesterday. We dive into this negative
Joanne Lockwood: stuff. We start really trying to dig deep down into what
Joanne Lockwood: I'm proud of, what's made me happy this week. I tell you about a
Joanne Lockwood: success thing or talk about something my child's done that
Joanne Lockwood: amazed me or something, and bring those, as you say, the happy endorphins as
Joanne Lockwood: opposed to the weather's bad, car wouldn't start, had to scrape the ice off this
Joanne Lockwood: morning, which is. We tend to get stuck into that, don't we? We do. And
Ben Afia: one of the pivotal things for me has been actually about ten
Ben Afia: years ago I trained as a coach. I did the Institute of Leadership and Management,
Ben Afia: level seven coaching training. My reason for going into
Ben Afia: it actually was I've always had a remote team, so I've been in business
Ben Afia: coming up for 20 years. I have had a team of freelancers around me
Ben Afia: for all of that time and for about around five years I was trying to
Ben Afia: scale and I had a team of five and
Ben Afia: in the long run it made me poorer and it made me unhappy. I didn't
Ben Afia: like employing people. I think my thinking
Ben Afia: style is a bit too sketchy for that consistent leadership.
Ben Afia: But I had an office manager who was working with me and she
Ben Afia: was a massive extrovert and she really thrived in an office and she
Ben Afia: was struggling working from home. And I thought one answer to that might be
Ben Afia: to train as a coach. So I took on this course
Ben Afia: and I have to say it was completely transformative. Unfortunately, that person
Ben Afia: didn't last with me. She went back to working in an office in the centre
Ben Afia: of Nottingham and she's thrived ever since. So that was the right move for her.
Ben Afia: However, the coaching training actually shifted my perspective
Ben Afia: and I do some coaching, but more than anything it's made me a better
Ben Afia: consultant because it's helped me to understand how to ask better
Ben Afia: questions. So rather than the sort of skin deep, small talk
Ben Afia: questions that you've just talked about, it's helped me to see
Ben Afia: how I can ask questions that encourage people to open up
Ben Afia: and to go deeper, but to feel safe going deeper. So
Ben Afia: it's about, I suppose, creating a sense of
Ben Afia: psychological safety where somebody feels like they can open up
Ben Afia: and that the question suggests that it's not loaded, it's
Ben Afia: not political, I'm not judging, I genuinely want to hear what's
Ben Afia: going on for you. I want to hear who you are as a person and
Ben Afia: I want to hear your story, because when I hear your story as an individual,
Ben Afia: that's enriching for me. And when I'm trying to find
Ben Afia: a pattern in those stories for a whole organisations, I want to hear lots of
Ben Afia: those. I want to hear many of those stories from across the organisation. And I
Ben Afia: can only do that if I create a space, the safe space for people
Ben Afia: to do that, for people to open up. And a coaching style
Ben Afia: helps that. And that then comes into the kind of the change
Ben Afia: programmes that I'm encouraging in organisations, I am trying to
Ben Afia: encourage them to develop a coaching culture, which is quite difficult.
Ben Afia: And what do I mean by that? It's coaching from
Ben Afia: leadership down. So exec teams being good
Ben Afia: coaches, managers being effective coaches. If
Ben Afia: your leadership and your management are all effective
Ben Afia: coaches, you actually don't need so much in the way of training. And that saves
Ben Afia: you money because you are developing people individually
Ben Afia: all the time by asking those coaching questions. And
Ben Afia: the coaching questions really are helping people to understand their own
Ben Afia: thinking and develop their own thinking. And that matters because when we
Ben Afia: develop our own thinking, we are more likely to
Ben Afia: behave differently as a result of that change thinking. Whereas if we have a
Ben Afia: traditional leadership style where we tell people what to do. People resist
Ben Afia: it because humans don't like being told what to do, but they love being
Ben Afia: encouraged to think. We love being encouraged to think.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I think I've been on a similar journey to you, where I've employed
Joanne Lockwood: people. Then I had my own business, which was an IT
Joanne Lockwood: company, 25 30 staff and lots of customers and things. And
Joanne Lockwood: I downsized to be a solopreneur. Then for some reason I got it be in
Joanne Lockwood: my bonnet that I wanted to be bigger. So I hired a few people and
Joanne Lockwood: I found that I had a lack of satisfaction.
Joanne Lockwood: Firstly, the balance sheet went down, my cash in bank
Joanne Lockwood: went down, and I wasn't getting satisfaction by
Joanne Lockwood: the managing the people relationship. I think I learned from that, that
Joanne Lockwood: what I actually need in my life, virtual assistants or
Joanne Lockwood: pas or people that it can enact my
Joanne Lockwood: thinking rather than me managing thinkers.
Joanne Lockwood: So I want people to assist me to deliver what I want
Joanne Lockwood: to do, not manage other people to deliver something else. And that's what
Joanne Lockwood: really brought it home to me. That's the relationship I need with people. I've done
Ben Afia: a very similar thing and I have worked with people freelance in a
Ben Afia: range of different roles. Pretty much everything that I do, I have
Ben Afia: other consultants who can back me up and they may be
Ben Afia: copywriters. So I mentioned my client
Ben Afia: DMV, and I have a team of writers and designers and a project
Ben Afia: manager who are helping me with that and we are producing. So it's kind of
Ben Afia: creative agency production work. But what
Ben Afia: I'm also doing in that work is I'm encouraging change within the organisation because
Ben Afia: I'm helping them to develop their working style as
Ben Afia: teams and their process internally, helping them to develop briefs, helping them
Ben Afia: to get clear on scope terms of reference for
Ben Afia: projects. So I'm doing some sort of internal coaching and
Ben Afia: consulting in that sense. And then when I'm working on
Ben Afia: brand strategy, I have brand strategy thinkers who can
Ben Afia: support me in that way on spoken tone of voice. I have specialists that help
Ben Afia: me with that. When I'm working on culture and behaviour, I have people who
Ben Afia: specialise in values and behaviour frameworks, for example, people with
Ben Afia: really strong hr or people backgrounds. So I work in
Ben Afia: a very similar way. And yeah,
Ben Afia: I had a point some years ago where I was getting Sunday night dread again,
Ben Afia: I was dreading the Monday meetings and I was like, I don't know, ten years
Ben Afia: into my business, I was like, why is that happening? I'm running my own
Ben Afia: show here. It needs to work. The
Ben Afia: first rule of business I think is it's got to satisfy the business owner. It's
Ben Afia: got to fulfil what the business owner needs, because the business
Ben Afia: owner needs to be out there selling. And if we're not energised and
Ben Afia: full of life and vigour, we're not selling and we're
Ben Afia: not drawing in the business. So we have to be feeding ourselves first before
Ben Afia: we can feed other people. Not just in terms of cash, but also emotionally
Joanne Lockwood: and satisfying our desires as well and our
Joanne Lockwood: motivations. Absolutely. Yeah. You
Joanne Lockwood: mentioned storytelling, listening to each other, and it
Joanne Lockwood: draws me back to a previous podcast episode that I recorded with somebody who
Joanne Lockwood: the title was listening, not fixing. We have a habit or a
Joanne Lockwood: danger that what we do is we listen to respond, we listen
Joanne Lockwood: to fix, we listen to trying to add value. And sometimes
Joanne Lockwood: listening to acknowledge is a valuable skill as well.
Joanne Lockwood: And I guess if you're a great coach, it's part of that coaching kind of
Joanne Lockwood: model where you're just asking questions. But not everybody wants to be
Joanne Lockwood: fixed. There's dangers. We dive in there and want to go. I know the
Joanne Lockwood: answer to that. Yeah, and I'm a bugger for that,
Ben Afia: actually. I do seem to have this kind of inner
Ben Afia: drive to fix things or to solve problems, and
Ben Afia: it's taken a few decades to develop the
Ben Afia: skill. One of the books that I read a few years ago, which was seminal
Ben Afia: here, was time to think. Nancy Klein and I haven't been on her
Ben Afia: training, actually, I have wanted to, and I know that some of our friends in
Ben Afia: the professional speaking association have been on her training. And it's very much about creating
Ben Afia: space for people to think, and people appreciate that so
Ben Afia: much and it's such a gift. But
Ben Afia: so often when we're talking, we are thinking about what we're going to say
Ben Afia: next, aren't we? We're thinking about what's my next
Ben Afia: step in the conversation rather than genuinely listening. And I
Ben Afia: do think you can make more of an impact on the world, honestly,
Ben Afia: if you are able to be quiet and to absorb and
Ben Afia: to nudge and encourage rather than
Ben Afia: be looking for, what am I going to say next? And I think the same
Ben Afia: goes with customers in business. When we're looking after
Ben Afia: customers in customer service or as marketers or salespeople,
Ben Afia: how can we be listening more than selling, more than talking?
Ben Afia: Because everybody hates to be sold to, but everybody loves to buy.
Ben Afia: And if we think about it that way, then we should be listening more than
Ben Afia: we're talking. I actually love a good salesperson. I
Joanne Lockwood: actually love a really great pitch or a really great hook or something
Joanne Lockwood: where I can stand back, clap my hands and appreciate, go,
Joanne Lockwood: that was top notch, well done. You are a Mastercraft
Joanne Lockwood: salesperson. And I said that to someone once and they went, well,
Joanne Lockwood: I'm not a salesperson. I said, trust me, you are. You may not think you
Joanne Lockwood: are, you may not label yourself as, but you've done a fantastic job
Joanne Lockwood: there. Put me at ease. You had all the facts, you explained the
Joanne Lockwood: product, and I had to applaud their technical skill on
Joanne Lockwood: selling. And sometimes you find people who are either natural or have that
Joanne Lockwood: ability to do that. And I think credit where credit is due. And I think
Joanne Lockwood: this person found it a bit patronising. I was trying to put him down by
Joanne Lockwood: saying, oh, you were very salesy there, but I genuinely meant it. I
Joanne Lockwood: enjoyed the experience, his professionalism. Running this
Joanne Lockwood: podcast show is a challenge because I'm listening to what you're saying.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm also thinking ahead of what I'm going to ask you next, how this
Joanne Lockwood: conversation is flowing. But I've also have this little subroutine in my head that's
Joanne Lockwood: listening out in case you say something that I need to
Joanne Lockwood: acknowledge and have empathy for or reinforce.
Joanne Lockwood: I've really found that hosting this podcast has been a real challenge in
Joanne Lockwood: listening and just developing those communication skills that I wouldn't
Joanne Lockwood: necessarily have if I was just having a chat in a coffee shop. Yeah,
Ben Afia: no, it is an art and I think coaching skills
Ben Afia: actually really help and good selling skills. And
Ben Afia: I'm with you. I do admire a great salesperson, and for me, a great
Ben Afia: salesperson is a good listener. They hear what
Ben Afia: you want or how you talk about your problem or
Ben Afia: the thing that you're trying to solve and listen to that before
Ben Afia: jumping in with a solution. And so often people do just jump in
Ben Afia: straight with a solution. And it's quite binary, quite one sided. So
Ben Afia: it's quite a rare skill, I find. I'm just thinking about somebody
Ben Afia: recently, I think I was talking about something around the house that I needed doing
Ben Afia: and I spoke to this chap and I kind of
Ben Afia: presented a problem and he just launched into a sales pitch about his business
Ben Afia: and I was like, okay, I can see that you can do the job, but
Ben Afia: I don't want to do business with you. You've just talked to me, talked at
Ben Afia: me for three or 4 minutes. You haven't really asked any follow
Ben Afia: up questions. You haven't really understood my problem or what I'm needing,
Ben Afia: what my priorities are. So he didn't get the business. And we see that
Joanne Lockwood: in superficial sort of bulk marketing on LinkedIn where people are
Joanne Lockwood: connecting and pitching, they're shoving their calendar link
Joanne Lockwood: in your throat without even understanding who you are
Joanne Lockwood: and doing a fact find. So yeah, I agree with you completely. It's
Joanne Lockwood: about that humour, sensitivity, sliding in
Joanne Lockwood: building a relationship, having a conversation, seeing where people are
Joanne Lockwood: at, listening to that problem solving. And
Ben Afia: I suppose this is what I mean, just going back to
Ben Afia: the opening to the podcast, talking about humanising business. I think this is what I
Ben Afia: mean by being more human. It is connecting as
Ben Afia: human beings, whether it's one to one in customer service,
Ben Afia: or whether it's create writing marketing or broadcast marketing,
Ben Afia: or whether it's talking to our staff in a larger organisation. How do
Ben Afia: we relate and set up that relationship as human beings and think about
Ben Afia: people as individuals and respect them and acknowledge them as individuals?
Ben Afia: Because quite frankly, I think that just makes the world a better place.
Ben Afia: Acknowledging somebody as an individual is such a gift, but is so
Ben Afia: rare and in a way so simple. It
Ben Afia: takes a bit, a degree of humbleness
Ben Afia: I suppose, to acknowledge somebody and appreciate somebody
Ben Afia: as an individual. And we can win friends
Ben Afia: within our business and we can win customers who will work with us
Ben Afia: for stay with us for years just by acknowledging them as
Ben Afia: individuals. And it almost shouldn't be so hard. But I do think for
Ben Afia: organisations, quite often there's a lot of people perceive they
Ben Afia: don't want to get into trouble. That's the main thing I find they don't want
Ben Afia: to say the wrong thing and so they stick to what they've been told they
Ben Afia: should say. But often that guidance is not adequate, it's not
Ben Afia: enough and it's not enabling enough and it doesn't enable them to be
Ben Afia: themselves. Just give you a nice example. So
Ben Afia: I was working with Vodafone's webchat teams in India about five or
Ben Afia: six years ago. I worked within with Vodafone on and off for about 15 years.
Ben Afia: And so I was over in India and part of the job, they had 1000
Ben Afia: people just working on webchat just for UK customers
Ben Afia: and the poor Indians struggling to understand us.
Ben Afia: The weirdness of us Brits and the problem for
Ben Afia: non Brits is that quite often we complain in a very underhand
Ben Afia: sort of way, in a very passive aggressive way, we might say, oh, that's a
Ben Afia: bit disappointing. I thought that would be cheaper or whatever, but we
Ben Afia: say it in a very gentle way when really we're
Ben Afia: furious. We don't reveal our emotions very well. And
Ben Afia: so for people who didn't grow up in Britain, it's quite hard for them
Ben Afia: to interpret and understand that actually we're making a complaint.
Ben Afia: And so the project was about empathy skill. How do we help these
Ben Afia: teams to have empathy for UK customers so that they acknowledge
Ben Afia: what customers need and give them that thing? And there
Ben Afia: was quite a big awake. So I did some work on cultural awareness and
Ben Afia: I used some of Erin. So Erin Mayer is a
Ben Afia: professor at Insead, I think, specialist in
Ben Afia: culture. She's an American based in Paris and she talks
Ben Afia: about eight dimensions of cultural difference. And the one that helped the
Ben Afia: Indians, interestingly, was the way that Brits engage
Ben Afia: and build trust and when we're on.
Ben Afia: So Britain is quite an individualistic culture
Ben Afia: and that expresses itself in business, in if you fix my
Ben Afia: problem, then I trust you, then we have a relationship. But I don't need
Ben Afia: chat beforehand in order to have the relationship. I need to know, be confident that
Ben Afia: you're going to fix my problem. India is a we culture, a much more
Ben Afia: communal culture. The relationship comes first.
Ben Afia: So it might be more natural to ask questions about how's your day been so
Ben Afia: far? But to a Brit on webchat, we don't want to be asked how
Ben Afia: our day's been so far. We want to know that you're going to solve our
Ben Afia: problem quickly. So where does the relationship
Ben Afia: come? And when they realise that when a Brit is on webchat, because they're there
Ben Afia: to solve a problem. Otherwise we would have picked up the phone. We don't want
Ben Afia: a relationship, we want the problem solved. It was almost like the scales falling from
Ben Afia: their eyes and they immediately changed their behaviour and suddenly they knew how to do
Ben Afia: it. Don't do the chitchat. Don't ask how the day's been. Give the
Ben Afia: reassurance that I'm going to sort your problem out in as few words as possible.
Ben Afia: So suddenly there's increased empathy and recognition of
Ben Afia: customers as individuals and that's really empowering. That is
Joanne Lockwood: so insightful. I can relate to that concept
Joanne Lockwood: entirely. That's how I want to do web chat. It's
Joanne Lockwood: short, superficial, short sentences, one word.
Joanne Lockwood: I don't want to keep typing stuff. I'm using one hand on my phone
Joanne Lockwood: doing something else. I just want my problem solved. Yeah, I can
Joanne Lockwood: completely relate, Ben, thank you. This has been
Joanne Lockwood: a fabulous opportunity to get to know you better and have a conversation.
Joanne Lockwood: How can our listeners track you down?
Joanne Lockwood: How do they get hold of you? Tell us a bit more about your book
Joanne Lockwood: as well. Well, the
Ben Afia: probably first place is my website, which is
Ben Afia: benafia.com. So benafia.com
Ben Afia: and that's
Ben Afia: where I've got loads of content. I've got videos, I've got articles, but also I've
Ben Afia: got my book. So the book the human business how to love your customers so
Ben Afia: they love you back. I am expecting to publish in March,
Ben Afia: and that really lays out all of the thinking that I talked about.
Ben Afia: So we talked a little bit about culture and how we work
Ben Afia: internally. So employee experience, we talked a little bit
Ben Afia: about brand strategy. So to my thinking,
Ben Afia: you need to build your brand on top of the strengths of your culture, not
Ben Afia: just on customer insight, which is how it's often done. And that
Ben Afia: then gives you the customer experience. So that's the third element that I talk about
Ben Afia: in the book. So employee experience, brand
Ben Afia: strategy and customer experience, and I talk about how you can relate those
Ben Afia: all together in a practical way. I've got a chapter on each segment of my
Ben Afia: model that's on the website, and I've got a series of
Ben Afia: podcasts that kind of bring the book to life and they're on
Ben Afia: Spotify and everywhere you get your podcasts. And
Ben Afia: I'm a fairly frequent inhabitor of LinkedIn, so I do
Ben Afia: like to chat on LinkedIn. If you just search my name, Ben Afia, I should
Ben Afia: come straight up. You find out more about me there. Engage. Connect with me
Ben Afia: on LinkedIn. Say hello, say you heard me on the
Ben Afia: podcast and I'll be glad to connect and tell me what you found interesting about
Ben Afia: it and I'll be glad to continue the conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you,
Joanne Lockwood: Ben. And a huge thanks to you, the listener, for tuning in for
Joanne Lockwood: listening to the end. I really appreciate that. If you're not already subscribed, please
Joanne Lockwood: do subscribe. Click follow. Click like why not give this episode
Joanne Lockwood: five stars in the comments below, I have a number of other
Joanne Lockwood: exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months that I'm sure you'd
Joanne Lockwood: be equally excited by on this Inclusion Bites
Joanne Lockwood: Podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest yourself, please
Joanne Lockwood: let me know. Drop me a line with any feedback or suggestions to
Joanne Lockwood: jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk
Joanne Lockwood: and finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has been
Joanne Lockwood: an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next
Joanne Lockwood: time. Bye.