I may have a penchant for film noir and watched a lot of X-Files episodes in the ’90’s, but I never thought of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a source of useful career advice. I recently stumbled on a couple of books written by ex-FBI agents that altered my point of view. As it turns out, the men and women of the FBI are full on human firmware hackers with very refined techniques for dealing with people effectively. I highly recommend the two books I profile this month. Picture them as the edgy version of your typical self-help book: sort of like How to Win Friends and Influence People with guns. However, expect little machismo. Both authors spend a lot of time discussing how things like “emphatic statements” and “tactical empathy” get better results than a hard-boiled approach.
The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over
by Jack Schafer
by Jack SchaferImagine you have the task of interviewing strangers with the goal of getting them to reveal information that implicates them in serious crimes voluntarily. Impossible? Well, that was Jack Schafer’s job, and by his own account he succeeded at it routinely. The Like Switch documents his techniques and tells quite a few interesting stories from his career. A fraction of Schafer’s skill is probably all you need to ace most job interviews or entice that special someone to go on a date with you.
Schafer goes in-depth describing “friend or foe” signals that fall below the “human baseline.” In other words, there are behaviors you can use to predispose people positively (or negatively) to liking you that will go unnoticed because they are interpreted at a subconscious level of the brain. This low-level social single processing, built up over our millennia of evolution within social groups, is what I refer to above as our human firmware. It is a strange experience to learn of these small gestures (e.g., eyebrow flashes) and suddenly see them everywhere when you have spent your whole life looking right at them, but never consciously seeing them. Add in the discussions of the “friendship formula” (yes, there’s a formula) and many core conversational techniques, and Schafer’s guidance will have you well on the way to better outcomes when you interact with people.
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
by Chris Voss
by Chris VossThere was a time when I thought of “negotiating” strictly in the context of buying stuff, like a car or a house, or agreeing on a salary figure. Later, I realized that conception of negotiation is an order of magnitude to narrow. We all negotiate constantly in life. From what I have seen, most of us suck at it and typically get the short end of the stick. Don’t believe me? How do you split up work with your lab partner? How does authorship order on a key scientific paper get decided? How do you come to an agreement with your advisor on how much work is “enough” for your thesis, and, consequently, how many years you spend in graduate school? Those things are negotiated, even if the negotiation consists of one side folding before they get started and simply taking what they are given. Getting better at negotiation can have a large payoff, and Voss will show you the way to getting a lot better.
Voss was a lead FBI hostage negotiator. His accomplishments include things like negotiating the ransom demanded by Haitian kidnappers down from $150,000 to $4,751 and a new portable CD stereo. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not, and Voss describes the process and the general psychological principles behind it in actionable detail. From “calibrated questions” designed to get the other party to consider and work on solving your problem, to techniques for guaranteeing the agreements you reach are successfully carried out, all the plays you need for expert negotiating are covered. The compelling stories of bank robbers and terrorist are a bonus.
Caveats and Comfort Zones
It is worth mentioning a couple of points along with my recommendation of these books. First, this is the type of material that doesn’t do you any good without practice. Basically, you need to read this stuff and give yourself some “social problem sets” to practice on in order to realize value from it. You could purposefully go to a party or mixer with a checklist of techniques from the The Like Switch to try or pick a few tips from Never Split the Difference the next time you ask for funds to attend a conference in an exotic locale. It’s wise to start small and build up your skills and comfort level, so you are ready when it truly counts. Second, it seems inevitable that some people will think practicing anything like the methods and techniques described in these books is inauthentic and manipulative. I once thought that. What I came to appreciate, however, is there are rules and best practices for dealing with people, just like there are for handling a scientific problem or technology. If you set out to build a high-voltage power supply without a firm grasp on how circuits work, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the whole thing blows up in your face. The same is true for interacting with people. Expecting people to agree and cooperate with you because you are “right” and bluntly tell them so, or to like you regardless of how you treat them because you are great/smart/awesome, is equal parts naive and arrogant.