Future-Proof Your Career Tom Cheesewright | Podcast.co

Welcome to Future-proof Your Career, your guide to the most important skills for a long, successful working life. This special season of the Talk About Tomorrow podcast will explore in depth the idea of the Three Cs, three skill groups that are critical to success, in a business or as an entrepreneur. The ability to curate information, create new things, and communicate ideas. In each episode we explore a facet of one of these skills, alongside a guest.

Thanks for listening to this first episode of our new season of Talk About Tomorrow, focused exclusively on how you can Future-proof Your Career! After each episode I’ll be collecting my notes from our guest here.


In this episode we spoke to Chris Warburton, award-winning BBC journalist. radio presenter and host of a series of excellent podcasts including Ecstasy: The Battle of Rave, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, The End of Days, and most recently, Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game, about Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto.


Chris covers a huge range of topics for the BBC, from major sporting events, to politics, to once even a live heart transplant. So he was the ideal person to talk to us about how you ask good questions.


Here are my key takeaways from the conversation:


Create a personal editorial policy


Think about how your own behaviour and presentation when you’re asking questions. Do you maximise the chance of getting the right answers? For example, think about:


What tone should I be using?Do I have the right level of formality or informality?Am I using the right language to ask questions? E.g. jargon?

Prepare in advance


Do your research. You might not be an expert in the subject - that’s why you’re the one asking the questions! But you need to know enough to shape your questions appropriately and ensure that you’re asking the most important ones. Think about the audience for the answers too: are you asking these questions on someone else’s behalf, and if so, are you getting the answers that they need and in a format they can understand?


Have a game plan


Don’t just think about your questions, think about the answers that you might get from the person you are speaking to. How will you respond to those answers? What is your follow-up?


Switch modes - the ‘red light moment’


Chris talked about the difference between the off-air conversation and the on-air conversation - when the red light goes on to tell everyone that the mics are live and that you are broadcasting. Before the red light goes on, you might be putting the other person at ease, asking them social questions and building rapport. Once the light goes on, it’s about getting answers. Think about this in your conversations. It’s fine to switch modes between the social chit-chat and the important business. But think about the transition. And just because the red light is on, it doesn’t mean anything goes. You can be forceful but you want to be able to end the conversation on good terms.


Listen and take notes


Take notes of the other person’s answers throughout the conversation. It shows you’re listening, ensures you capture the answers properly, and helps you to structure the rest of the conversation. You can always refer back to them if you want to explore a particular answer in more depth, even if it was much earlier in the conversation.


Use open and closed questions


Open questions allow the interviewee to return long form answers that might be packed with information but that might be vague. Follow these up with closed questions that have a fixed range of answers to lock down critical details. For example, an open question might be “Tell me what you want to achieve with this project?” whereas a closed question would be “What is your budget for this?”


Useful reading:


https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-surprising-power-of-questions


https://www.forbes.com/sites/goldiechan/2021/02/01/why-asking-questions-is-good-for-your-brand-and-your-career/?sh=6f0cff751c23


https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-to-do-life/202102/the-art-of-asking-questions

Thanks for listening to this episode of our Future-proof Your Career. After each episode I’ll be collecting my notes from our guest here.


In this episode we spoke to Dr Simon Moore. Simon is a doctor of Psychophysiological Psychology and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. He leads a team of researchers at IB, a business he founded to help brands to better understand their customers and employees.


Here are my key takeaways from the conversation:


What are you listening for?


Simon highlighted that we often go into a conversation or interview situation with a bias. We’re not neutral as listeners, we often want something from the conversation. Be aware of this. Consider your biases and your own objectives and try to see the conversation through that lens.


There are different modes of listening


Sometimes you might be listening in an informational mode, looking to fill in the blanks on your mental questionnaire. Sometimes your mode might be more empathetic, where you’re trying to extract or understand the emotional context behind the words


Think about which mode you’re in when you’re going into a conversation. Which one should you be in? What information are you missing by being in one mode or the other?


What’s behind the words?


Though we have to respect what people say, it’s worth sometimes being a little sceptical and questioning the drivers behind those words. Look for signals beyond the vocal for what’s really going on: gestures, behaviour, visual cues from both the person and their surroundings. What can you take from the objects and pictures with which they surround themselves?


Who are you listening to?


Simon talked to us about four different categories of people - categories that help us to understand their desires and their behaviours. Planners, adventurers, sociables and individualists. These categories are laid out in more detail in this interview with Simon that is well worth a read: https://insidebe.com/articles/interview-with-simon-moore/


Shut up and count to ten


We talked about a variety of techniques for listening, not least enforcing a little silence - especially on yourself, if you’re prone to fill in every gap in the conversation. Give people room to speak and expand by making yourself count to ten in your head before you speak.


Make a movie


If you really want to understand someone, try Simon’s technique of making a movie in your head of what they’re saying. It’s comparable to how writing things down can help you to learn them. But making a mental movie of someone’s story won’t just help you to understand the details, it will help you to empathise with their situation - putting yourself in their shoes.

In this latest episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we tackle the tricky topic of empathy. What is it? How do you use it? And can you grow - or shrink - your empathy? 


We all think we know what empathy is, but as ever, we ask a real expert. Dr Lauren Kerwin is a Harvard- and UCLA- Trained Psychologist with over 20 years of experience treating borderline personality disorder, autism spectrum disorders, depression, anxiety and trauma in teens and adults.


Lauren also has lots of experience in a corporate context, providing executive coaching and organisational psychology support to highly successful start-ups through to their public listings, with a particular focus on employee selection and training, information sharing, and interpersonal interactions.


Understandably this incredible CV has seen Lauren featured on CNN and the Today Show, and in Forbes, HuffPost, and the New York Times, to name but a handful of news outlets.=


We learned loads from Dr Kerwin, so here are the top tips that I took away:






Empathy is about understanding, not emotion: though compassion is important, you’re not trying to feel what the other person is feeling. You’re trying to understand why they feel the way they do.


Perspective adds value: no position is less valid or valuable because they’re seeing it through a different lens to you. 


Don’t walk in their shoes, keep one foot in yours: While trying to empathise don’t lose your own perspective. You need to try to retain some balance and objectivity.


Everyone has an answer: the role of a leader is increasingly to uncover those answers and give people the confidence to share them.


Respect not agreement: you don’t need to agree with someone to empathise. Sometimes the most important time to be empathetic is when you disagree.


Show people they are valued: even if you ultimately disagree, be clear that the other person’s position was appreciated, otherwise they might not share it in the future.

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career we’re talking about scepticism, the willingness, and the discipline, to question what we see and hear. And to have the skills to find the facts amongst the opinions and beliefs. 


As always, we’ve invited an expert guest to speak to us, and this time it’s Gemma Milne, writer and researcher, and author of the excellent book Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It. 






Gemma gave us loads to think about, in terms of how we improve our sceptical skills. Here are a few of the key takeaways from the conversation:






The skill of scepticism has never been more important


There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. And it’s not just on social media. We need a level of awareness to all the places that people through motivation or ignorance might share hype or inaccuracies.






Scepticism is accessible. It’s something we can all do


You don’t need deep expertise in a subject to be sceptical. That’s not to dismiss expertise or experts - this is very much a podcast that believes in those things! But there are some basic questions we can always ask and things we can do to get a sense of truth.






Separate emotion from fact


We have to recognise that a lot of claims and ideas, and the stories around them are designed to play on our emotions. Can we step back from our emotional engagement and ask some logical questions?






Simple questions


We can always ask, even if just to ourselves: ‘What does this claim depend on?’,  ‘How do you get to that conclusion?’, ‘What is the underlying evidence?’






Big claims need big proof


It’s a good rule of thumb that if someone is going to make big claims, they need strong evidence to back it up. How good is the evidence?






Be empathetic


Understand why other people will reach certain conclusions. Why do certain ideas appeal to them? And what makes them so committed? Be sensitive to this when challenging someone’s beliefs.






Scepticism is a responsibility


If we want more facts and less hype and misinformation, then scepticism is a responsibility for us all. Before you share that chart, paper, or meme that confirms your beliefs, do some sceptical checks. 

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we speak to professor of politics at the University of Manchester and frequent contributor to the BBC and other media, Rob Ford. Rob is the co-author of Brexitland with Professor Maria Sobolewska, and the author of The British General Election of 2019. 


We spoke to Rob about how you extract meaning from people’s words, even if they don’t always say what they mean. Here’s what we learned.


Think of leaders as politicians


Business leaders and politicians have a lot of the same pressures, particularly when they are trying to satisfy multiple audiences. It’s one thing leading - and championing - a single team. You can be absolutely partisan. But when you have to satisfy people across the company, customers, and shareholders, and deal with lots more information, it’s a very different situation. So people in senior positions are likely to be more conservative, more political. 






Who is the audience?


Think about the speaker’s audiences. Who do they need to impress or please? This will shape a lot of their message. If you don’t like it, you might not be their intended - or most important - audience.






Social desirability bias


People moderate their language because they’re trying to appeal to you or because they don’t think you will like what they really think. This might disguise negative feedback, people’s real opinions or positions.






We all have a hidden motive


We’re human beings with lots going on, both inside and outside the workplace. Accept that everyone has multiple motivations for their actions.






Sincerity is powerful - even when it’s faked


While we can’t recommend lying, the lesson from politics seems to be that we believe people who can perform sincerity. So try to be sincere in your message. But keep an eye out for those who might not be quite so sincere as they appear.






Separate the message from the packaging


Flowery language can disguise different intent. Take time to look behind the words and see the meaning.






Repetition, repetition, repetition


If you think you’re missing something, or you want someone to reveal a potentially hidden motive, get people to repeat the message until you get clarity. Use variations on a question to extract all the missing pieces of the story.






Foghorns, dog whistles, dead cats


We talked about some of the terminology of political communication, much of which can be applied to the business world. A ‘dog whistle’ is language designed to appeal to a particular group without making explicit statements that might attract public scrutiny - often where a policy might be deemed racist or otherwise offensive. Business leaders might signal to the markets that they want to downsize a business without explicitly talking about job cuts, though most people recognise what ‘rationalisation’ really means now. 


Sometimes there is no dog whistle and it’s an outright foghorn instead, and the message comes through loud and clear. Some leaders are incapable of subtlety or just choose to avoid it.


‘Dead cats’ are stories designed to distract from the bad news. And we see these in business all the time.






CYA


Often people will be motivated by CYA: Cover Your Ass. They will try to ensure that they are not left responsible if something goes wrong. Be particularly cautious about this if you are an external supplier - I speak from experience!






Personality not policy


Ultimately, remember you’re dealing with a human being and in most cases, you will want to maintain a civil working relationship. You may not like what they’re saying, but they may not like it either. In the long term, it’s the relationship that will count.