Laura: Are you unknowingly asking the wrong question at work and getting useless feedback in return, and also damaging your leadership and executive presence potential in the process? Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high performing introverts, including you, social introverts, where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, godmother and strategist. By the end of today's conversation with Dr. Haley Blunden of American University, yes, you'll learn why feedback often fails and what actually leads to more specific actionable insight for you. How small tweaks in your communication strategy can preserve relationships and reduce friction, even when you reject someone's advice. And why audio-only communication may outperform video in conveying warmth and competence, especially in emotionally charged or remote work settings. So this is going to give you another tool for your toolbox.
So welcome to the show, Dr. Blunden, it is great to have you here. I am so excited for our audience to get to learn about your research because you have done a deep dive into some of the details of personal connection, of the power and appropriacy of different communication channels, and even this quality that's key for high performers, which is always, we're always asking for feedback. And I understand that may not be the best approach.
Hayley: That's right. Yeah. And thank you so much for having me. It's a privilege, especially to talk to this audience, because I really feel that this level is right where things start to really take on a huge leap. So that's really exciting to get to connect with you today. But you're right. So you touched a little bit on the focus of my research, which is around workplace interaction and how we can make that more productive and in a variety of ways that we'll touch on.
But you're right. The first element of that, right, or one element of workplace interaction that's really important, I think, is developmental input. And what I mean by that is, I mean, often we are talking about feedback.
Laura: Yes.
Hayley: Right. And I'm intentionally not using the word feedback because we have this finding that whereas in most organizations, they actually are asking for feedback.
Laura: Yes.
Hayley: And we find this in—we've done kind of some surveys to look at how are organizations soliciting this information that we can get from others about how to improve. Often they're asking feedback. Similarly, when we ask people in their workplace, how are you trying to get this information from your colleagues about how to improve? We find that they also say they're asking for feedback, right. But what we find is actually asking for feedback specifically insufficiently orients feedback givers on the future.
Laura: Oh, Okay.
Hayley: So, saying feedback, it’s so past focused that it’s actually inhibiting people from being so future focused that they’re not as actionable as they would be otherwise. And they’re not as specific as they would be otherwise. So we conducted a field experiment as a large organization with over 50,000 employees and we just made a really small but impactful tweak. We asked for advice—
Laura: Oh.
Hayley: instead of asking for feedback. And just that kind of small shift—
Laura: Yes.
Hayley: Actually, we did see an appreciable effect on the specificity of the input. I'm not going to necessarily call it feedback, but you would think of it as feedback—
Laura: Right.
Hayley: That people provided. And we saw that people were more game, more actionable information.
Laura: That's so interesting.
Hayley: To take a step back, we often think about our performance as some objective thing, right?
Laura: Right.
Hayley: But for most of us, honestly, out in the workplace, it's not so objective. Our performance literally lives in the eyes of our colleagues. That's how we're rated. That's how our decisions are made about us. It's our colleagues' opinions of us. So when we get this information from them, it's so valuable. So the more specific information we can get, the more actionable information we can get, kind of the better we're going to be able to change and improve along those dimensions, which our colleagues who are really the arbiters of our performance share.
Laura: Yes. And that's true. The higher up you go in the organization, that's more true than I think it is even at the bottom where maybe early career, you may have more objective milestones and metrics to measure your performance. But the longer you work, the more this interpersonal aspect matters, right?
Hayley: I think that's so true. But I also think that even at those levels, even when there are objective metrics, there are almost always also not only subjective metrics, but subjective perceptions of those objective metrics. It really does matter. And being able to get this type— people talk about the gift of feedback, again, orienting us toward this kind of commonly used thinking around this being a feedback, which is why I'm shifting toward calling it developmental input and really, really suggesting people ask for advice instead.
Laura: Dr. Blunden, you say, I think, in your research that there are risks to too much asking for advice because we come across as like wishy-washy and indecisive. Is that what? How do we need to be careful about soliciting too much advice?
Hayley: Yeah. So this is a really interesting finding. So when we were first examining this research on advice, right, most of it, for good reason, right, was oriented towards getting people to make the right decision, getting the information you need to make a high quality decision. So when that's your main focus and that's your dependent variable, we want to make the right, you know, want to get all the information so we make the right choice. The more you get, the better—
Laura: Right.
Hayley: When that's what you're focused on. However, we live in a world that is an amalgamation of relationships and relationships are an amalgamation of these individual interactions. And we kind of thought, well, okay, yes, that's fantastic if our main objective is getting the right decision. But if our objectives also include things like caring about our relationships with our advisors afterward, maybe that's not going to feel so great to advisors to have spent some time and invested in giving us high quality ideas that we then turn around and ignore. Well, by definition, when you ask multiple people for advice, they're not going to all say the same thing. Almost certainly. That's part of why it actually helps you make a better decision is that they don't say the same thing.
Laura: Right, right.
Hayley: But unfortunately, that means that you're going to select something and have to effectively reject somebody's advice. So with that insight, it might be kind of aversive. So I'm not suggesting at all that people shouldn't ask as many people as they want for advice. You know, we do care about decision quality. We do care about people getting as much information as they can, as they need to make good decisions.
Laura: Right.
Hayley: However, I think just recognizing that doing so will likely come with this potential that you're going to reject someone's advice. Just managing that and being aware of that, I think, can help actually preserve some of these relationships.
So, for example, if I am going to reach out to maybe, say, 10 of my colleagues for advice on something, knowing I'm not going to necessarily take it all, maybe I could later on tell each person kind of the elements of their feedback that I accepted. Or maybe I didn't take them specifically, but maybe it helped me think about the problem in a different way. So it's this recognition of the value that I think, you know, we talk about the wisdom of crowds, and I do want people to be able to leverage the wisdom of crowds without fear of repercussions. But I think there's a way to be cognizant of the fact that it's not going to feel good to advisors who have given this advice only to not have it be taken.
Laura: I want to switch topics a little bit because you have some fascinating insights about fitting the right technology to the task. And based on one of your findings, reinforce kind of an intuition that I had, which often happens in research. I'll tell it in just a minute. But tell us a little bit about where you're coming from in this whole idea of fitting the technology to the task.
Hayley: Certainly. So I talked about how organizations are the amalgamation of individual relationships and relationships are kind of the sum of all of our interactions, right? So one piece of that, as you mentioned, is this, you know, feedback, advice, developmental input. And another facet that I look at in my research is virtual work. So the fact that we are communicating via electronic means. And when I run workshops on this, I put up a timeline of human history and then I show where email came in and where, you know, video conferencing came in. And, you know, it's this tiny little, it's almost the very end.
Laura: Like yesterday.
Hayley: Just to show that we are not really well evolved. The way that we process input just as humans. Yes, they're great technologies. Absolutely, we should be using them. But we need to be cognizant of the fact that our observation, the way we're reacting in the world is not necessarily attuned to these particular forms of communication. So some of my colleagues, particularly Juliana Schroeder and the inimitable Andrew Brodsky, who is one of my co-authors as well, have some work looking specifically at the role of audio, right. And I think this is really valuable to think about because what I observe in the workplace today is that we often are not using audio-specific medium. I see that people are— when they want to be asynchronous and not have to deal with being in touch at the same time, they'll use email. So text based or when they want to be synchronous, when they want to be in touch at the same time, they'll often go to video. But I don't hear a lot about calling people. I don't hear a lot about voicemail even, which would be asynchronous, but have to have that audio.
And I think that there are some really interesting, valuable findings that suggest that this role of audio might be undervalued in the workplace. So first, I'll share some work from Juliana Schroeder. They look at the role of audio in communicating both competence and likability. And what they find is that actually some of these studies will involve something like a job candidate giving their pitch. And they'll have a few conditions. One will be text-based, but then they'll say the same thing in audio, rightSo it's someone's voicing it.
Laura: Right.
Hayley: And then they have a video condition as well. So the full— you get everybody's cues and everything. And what they actually find is that audio does most of the work. In communicating our competence and our work.
Laura: That’s so interesting.
Hayley: So text performs the worst, but video doesn't really perform that much better than audio. In fact, in some studies, it's not significantly better. We have more and more studies coming out on how taxing it sometimes can be to communicate via video. So I think audio might be an underappreciated medium for that reason. And what they really kind of pin down is that what audio uniquely has is these paralinguistic cues that people can pick up that communicate that we're human. That underlying that is kind of a real person. This is kind of even more relevant in the age of AI, where that's going to kind of be more of a question. But like the fact that our voices go up and down. We don't have a consistent pace. We have little pauses.
Laura: Right.
Hayley: All of these things help, can kind of convey this humanity, which do lead to, for example, perceptions that a job candidate is more competent as well as more hireable. So they had hiring managers.
Laura: Right.
Hayley: Hiring managers actually say that they would rather hire the person who has materials they heard versus read.
Laura: That is so interesting. And for everybody listening, I'm just going to remind you that executive presence, which is a big focus of this podcast, for that quality, warmth and competence are indispensable. We're going to talk about virtual context in just a minute. But while we're on the audio part, so with meetings, what is your take on everybody having the camera on or off?
Hayley: I have not personally conducted investigations on this, but there is certainly work on this topic. And some of this work does suggest that if we are on video all the time, it can actually be taxing. But I'm not going to say there's no benefits. I think there certainly are benefits. And I think we're going to talk about some of those shortly. But I'm saying audio, I think, is an underappreciated medium. But that's not to say that we should never use video. I think there is something valuable about our body language, about seeing someone's facial expression. But I think, to your point, it's a good question as to whether, you know, it should be all on or not. And I think that you a little bit touched on this idea of fitting the technology to the test. And that's certainly an idea that's been around for a long time, even before, you know, a lot of these new technologies.
When I'm leaving a voicemail, there's no written record, right? So when we want to communicate in a way that is a written record, maybe we don't choose a voicemail, right? Similarly, if we want to really make that connection as strongly as possible, and we all kind of feel on the same page emotionally, which I think we'll get into in a minute why that might be important, then video might be the best way to facilitate that if we can't get together in person.
Laura: Is there a specific scenario where a manager, where it would be better, more effective for that manager or leader to leave a voicemail than an email?
Hayley: Yeah, so some really interesting work by my co-author, Andrew Brodsky, looked at this idea of when should we be using email versus voice versus video? And the context that he's really looking at is this idea of feeling an emotion and then either wanting to be able to communicate that or not. There's situations in the workplace that call for us to express certain emotions that we may or may not ourselves feel. So if one of our colleagues is not performing up to our standard and maybe we want to show enthusiasm, encouragement, but we don't necessarily feel that. That's what we call service acting in my field. So you want to show something, you need to or are called to show something, but you don't actually feel that. And it turns out that when we are in these situations where we need to communicate something, that our emotion doesn't match the emotion we're trying to communicate, audio can be really valuable. In video, right, we have body language, we have facial expressions, and that opens up the door for what we call nonverbal leakage, which is effectively when our body doesn't match what we're saying. But voice, right, can limit this. So it can limit the extent to which we have this nonverbal leakage. And that's where voice might be a really optimal solution in terms of communicating in those situations.
Laura: Our final topic for today is about making really strong impressions in a virtual context. Especially, I'm thinking of either it could be a job interview or it could be, you know, a senior leadership meeting or a meeting where I don't know everybody, they don't know me, so I'm a little bit nervous. What are the most important things we want to watch out for to take care of so that we do leave a positive, strong impression in that situation?
Hayley: Yes, certainly. So I get a lot of questions about this. I teach, so I often will have people who are interviewing for new roles.
Laura: Yeah, I bet.
Hayley: Both at the more junior and at the more senior levels. And I think that if there's one thing that's kind of been replicated over and over again across a variety of contexts,
so video interviews, video conferencing, virtual teaching interactions, virtual medical visits, and even customer service avatars.
Laura: Oh, wow.
Haley: Is the role actually of eye contact.
Laura: Okay.
Hayley: So eye contact in video interactions can actually be pretty effective in helping us establish a positive impression. But it's strange because I'm saying eye contact, but it's actually by definition not eye contact. Because in order to look like I am making eye contact, I have to look at the camera.
Laura: Right. Yeah, look at the dot.
Hayley: Necessarily, not at you. So it's actually, it's fascinating that this kind of breaking of that eye contact that we have in person actually can facilitate positive impressions when we're having these interactions.
Laura: Does that increase competence? What is the benefit of doing that?
Hayley: Yes, so it's not increases, but kind of the universal dimensions of social perception, which are, as you mentioned, warmth and competence. We can kind of get a general impression boost from making eye contact, i.e. breaking your essential eye contact and looking at you.
Laura: Right, right, right. No, just understand it's not natural to stare at the camera.
Hayley: It's not natural. It's going to feel strange. It's going to maybe take us a little bit out of our own experience of the interaction.
Laura: Right.
Hayley: But there are some other aspects of virtual interactions, particularly via video, that research has been shown to matter. So, for example, things like a really low camera angle can leave a worse impression. So if I'm looking up your nose.
Laura: Oh, yes. That's so unattractive.
Hayley: That actually, you know, these small things can kind of matter. So higher camera angles are better. Backlighting led to worse impressions when you kind of, I'm going in and out and maybe I'm dark because I have light in the back. But I think you mentioned backgrounds.
And I think I have some good news on that because I often will have job candidates or students who are very concerned about what's the right background.
Laura: Yes.
Hayley: And so some research has actually looked at this. So they'll change the background and see what people's impressions are. And the good news is anything that's kind of relatively professional, books in the background, pictures, like what it looks like you might have some pictures, a blurred kind of neat living room, all performed relatively similarly.
Laura: What about a virtual background versus—
Hayley: Virtual background? You know, I will say that this particular study did not look at that. However, the virtual backgrounds are of things like this. They're professional. You know, I will say the one condition that performed badly was a picture of a walrus on an iceberg. So just something wacky like that.
Laura: Yeah.
Hayley: The only other piece of that is that if you are in a situation where you can communicate similarity of your background.
Laura: Like common ground?
Hayley: Common ground. Exactly. So we know from lots and lots of research that similarity promotes liking. So, for example, if you are going to be interviewing with someone you know is an alumnus of your school, putting up something that will show that can kind of help.
Laura: School spirit. Yes.
Hayley: That's right.
Laura: So is there anything else before we close that you would like to tell our audience of high performers?
Hayley: If people can think about their connections as mattering and giving time to that, being intentional around, you know, the email you send or how you're going to send it or, you know, what's the right medium to send this in? I think just taking a quick step back. I know people are extremely busy and that's definitely a consistent finding as well, right?
Laura: Yes.
Hayley: When bad things happen at work, it's because people are just so busy that it's hard to incorporate these things. But taking just a second, just a beat to be thoughtful about our interactions, I think, could go a long way.
Laura: That is so true. All right, everybody. Well, this has been incredibly helpful and interesting. And I know that we've all gotten some tips to be better at making people do what we want them to do, right? We're all about world domination. Just kidding. We're all about, you know, executive presence, making better decisions, being the best version of ourselves that we can. So thank you so much for this. It's been a delight chatting with you.
Hayley: Thank you so much. It's been a joy.
Laura: So this swapping the feedback for advice to unlock actionable insights was pure titanium. It was excellent. And I can tell you, sometimes, not very often, I will speak with the boss of one of my clients. So that's a C-suite person. And be careful asking for too much feedback or advice. Remember, those people are very busy. Anyway, if you're in a leadership role, but not getting the kind of feedback you need to grow into an executive, or if you're unsure about perceptions around you, it is definitely time to stop guessing that ambiguity can quietly cap your influence and stall your next level growth, which is why I created the executive presence scorecard to give you no fluff, clear feedback on how you're showing up. It's based on the four pillars of executive presence that are in the executive presence mastery systems. If you want it, just email me hello@speakupwithlaura.com. Put ‘score’ in the subject line and I will send it. Have a fantastically glorious day and I will talk to you in the next episode.