Directive Speech vs. Dialogue: How Leaders Communicate with Clarity, Balance

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Matt Abrahams: Communication is a critical element to success in business and in life. In this best of episode, we revisit my conversation with Stanford Graduate School of Business, Dean Jon Levin. In our conversation, Jon provides insight and personal experiences regarding the role and importance of communication. Jon will soon become Stanford University’s 13th president. We thank him for his strong support over all these years of our podcast, and we wish him well as he steps into his new role. Without further ado, enjoy our conversation. A big challenge for leaders and managers is to balance the tension between being directive and specific and allowing for space for discussion, debate, and difference. Today on the podcast, we’ll discuss this and the ever-changing expectations of leaders in communication. I’m Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I’m excited to chat with Jon Levin, who is the Philip H. Knight professor and dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before becoming Dean in 2016, Jon spent 16 years in the economic department at Stanford. In 2021, he was appointed to President Joe Biden’s, council of Advisors on science and Technology. Well, hi Jon. Welcome to the podcast. I’m super excited to have you here.

Jon Levin: Thanks, Matt. Great to be here.

Matt Abrahams: Cool. Let’s get started. As your career has unfolded, you’ve had more and more opportunities to share your thoughts with larger and larger audiences. I’m curious to learn more about this and how your thinking on communication has evolved over time.

[1:48]

Jon Levin: My thinking about communication has evolved over my career. I started as a professor teaching, and when you’re giving research talks, it’s just everything is about presenting ideas and information clearly, and maybe even impressing people a little bit and getting them to change the way they think about a problem in a leadership role, so much more of communication is about connecting with people, establishing shared humanity, motivating them, inspiring them, sometimes challenging them. So I’ve gone through my career that has really reinforced to me the different purposes that communication serves to inform people, to connect with people, to motivate and inspire them.

Matt Abrahams: I too have seen over my time how it’s changed and the expectation has changed, and I think a lot of people who listen in have found themselves as their career has developed. They’ve had to adjust the way they perceive communication, much like you have, and for many people that can be very challenging. It’s good to hear that you recognize that. Any particular moments or thoughts that you’ve had that really helped you make that shift from talking about your own research in your own department to now being on a larger stage?

Jon Levin: I wish there was just a single moment when the light bulb went on and I magically got better, figured out different ways to communicate. For me, it didn’t happen that way. It was more of a gradual process of learning and improving. And like anything, communication is a craft and the craft that you teach and you have to work at it.

[3:23]

Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that candor, and thank you for reinforcing the fact that communication is something you have to work on in practice. Very, very true. In your six years as Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, you’ve had to address many significant issues happening on campus and beyond. What are your thoughts on the role of leaders in communication in times of ambiguity and challenge, and do you have any best practices you’ve learned that you rely on?

[3:48]

Jon Levin: One of the most important things is to be able to provide clarity in a timely way. Often the way I tend to think about that is what do people need to know and how would I like them to feel when they read a message? For me, there’s a very complex set of issues that has arisen on campuses in an academic leadership that has to do with how do you communicate about issues that are going on in the world? And the landscape for that particular question has changed hugely over the last, say, five or 10 years, where historically academic leaders were hesitant, often did not rarely communicated about the events of the day and so forth. And today there’s a much higher expectation and a much greater demand to know where did the institutions stand? What does the president of the university think? What do deans think about different issues? I find that to be one of the most complicated and challenging set of questions in leadership, communication, figuring out what to talk about and how to talk about it, wanting to be able to make clear statements about what I think or institutional values to reassure groups of people who really want to hear something about that. But at the same time, leaving space for people to form their own opinions, to discuss ideas, to debate what’s going on because that diversity of ideas, of viewpoints of perspectives is just so absolutely central to our mission.

Matt Abrahams: I think in that you’ve clearly defined attention that all business leaders need to manage, which is how do you step forward and put forth your position, but also leave space for people to discuss, to debate, to discover? And that’s a hard tension. And it sounds like part of how you navigate through that is by thinking through what do you want people to know and how do you want them to feel about those issues? And that is something we’ve talked about before on this podcast. And I think critical in all communication, it’s not just the information you need to put out there, it’s how do people need to feel or do you want people to feel about it? So thank you,

Jon Levin: And I wanted to try to maintain that. And so I did keep that up through the main part of the pandemic, and I got a lot of positive responses and appreciation partly just for putting that effort in to try to maintain community.

[6:17]

Matt Abrahams: As you think about the future of business and business education, I’m wondering what you think about the role communication is playing now and will play in the future.

Jon Levin: There is just no doubt whatsoever that communication is going to play, is going to continue to play such an important role for business leaders. That’s true. Whether they’re communicating individually to their leadership team or to different people in their company or to employees or to customers or to shareholders or testifying in Congress or to the public. It really is just so important for people who are in leadership roles to be able to communicate with clarity. Our students are really fortunate to have folks like you to help prepare them for that world. Such an essential skill.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you. And I agree with you that the role of communication, the pandemic taught us how critical communication is and when we’re cut off in some ways from our communication, it could be very challenging. Let me ask you about a question that is relevant to someone who is an economist and the dean of a business school. Capitalism is under fire these days. We’re facing problems of economic inequality, climate change, loss of jobs to technology, privacy concerns and many other things. How is the GSB teaching students to think about capitalism and what is the role of the school in leading a broader conversation on the subject?

[7:36]

Jon Levin: I love that question because I think you’re just spot on with where the world is today. The place I like to start in thinking about that is just to think about the extraordinary triumph that we’ve had in this country and in many other places around the world over the last century, century and a half in the United States, over the last 150 years, standards of living almost doubled every generation and that rise from subsistence to prosperity. There’s no precedent in human history, and it’s been even more dramatic in countries like China, for example, that adopted many elements of capitalism. And so it’s just incredibly important to keep in mind that markets that private enterprise coupled with stable political legal institutions can be the single greatest engine for societal progress. Particularly important to keep that in mind at a business school because that is the engine we’re trying to build and support at the same time.

You’re absolutely right. You think of challenges like climate change, inequality, the misuses of technology. These are serious issues that we have to grapple with in this century, and we’re living at a time when our political system, which in some sense is the right place to deal with those types of challenges, just seems entirely unable to come to terms with them and address them in any sort of reasonable way. And so people naturally then look elsewhere for solutions and for leadership. And so they look to business, they look to investors, they look to the private sector to tackle these market failures, externalities, these problems to be responsive to relative stakeholders. And that just raises all kinds of hard questions. It’s hard enough to run a business to maximize long-term value for your shareholders. And then someone asks you to solve global climate change.

So when I think about what we want in educating students today to be business leaders, we want them to dive into those questions, to wrestle with them. There’s all kinds of tensions and trade-offs. We want them to really think hard and understand those complexities. And of course, we also believe, particularly a place like Stanford, we’re an epicenter of innovation. We want our students to be the source of the solutions. We want them to solve problems like climate change, to bring new technologies, ideas to market with great business models that deliver them with scale, with speed. We hope students when they come here are going to be inspired to take on big challenges and then to do it in ways that will restore people’s faith in business and the ways it contributes to society.

Matt Abrahams: I certainly see as our students leave here, that energy, that excitement to do just that. It’s one of the greatest pleasures I have teaching here.

Jon Levin: It’s incredibly inspiring. Absolutely renews your faith in humanity and people every day and every year when we get a new generation of students.

Matt Abrahams: I so agree, because the challenges are formidable and yet the students leave ready to tackle them, and it’s very rewarding. Stanford GSB is one of the most competitive management education programs in the world. What do you see as the opportunities for the GSB to reach and educate even a broader set of leaders than those fortunate enough to come here?

[10:56]

Jon Levin: So your question sort of alludes to attention in our core model of education at a place like Stanford, which is we take a very small and highly selected set of students and we pair them up with an even smaller and highly selected set of faculty. That’s a magical, immersive educational environment, very intense campus experience. We hope that the outcome of that is that students go on, graduates go on to have an outsized impact in the world. At the same time, we need a much larger, stronger cohort of global business leaders to help continue to move toward prosperity and to have growth and solve the big challenges of the world. And particularly with the interests that people have in continuing to learn throughout their lifetime and the capabilities that we’ve developed others have developed with technology. I have a very strong feeling that places like Stanford have a tremendous, in some ways a responsibility to try to reach and engage with and educate a broader set of people around the world. And to do that in ways that are transformative and meaningful and impactful. We do that today through short on campus programs. We run for executives or for other leaders in our online programs. Our lead program nearly doubled during the pandemic in programs we run globally, like Stanford Seed, which we run for entrepreneurs in Africa and South Asia. And we continue to look for new opportunities to do that. And it’s one of the things that I find most exciting about the future.

Matt Abrahams: I have certainly seen your commitment and your leadership team’s commitment to expanding how this place, the business school, but also Stanford reaches people. And I truly appreciate the support you have of what we do here because we’re trying to reach people as well.

Jon Levin: I think a podcast like this is such a great example of the ways that a place like Stanford can share ideas with the world and reach a broader audience and give people a sense of what’s going on, what are people thinking, what happens here.

[13:02]

Matt Abrahams: So before we end, I’d like to ask you the same three questions I ask everybody who joins me. Are you up for that?

Jon Levin: Let’s do it.

Matt Abrahams: Alright. Question number one. If you were to capture the best communication advice you’ve ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be?

[13:20]

Jon Levin: I have a story about this, which is maybe 20 years ago, my brother and I were asked to speak at an event that was in honor of my father, and we were supposed to be the dinner speakers. And so we wrote to the people organizing this event and we said, well, what should we say? What’s going? What do you think? And so forth. And they wrote back this incredibly long email with, well, maybe you could touch on this and that and this and that, and you could do it this way. And oh, by the way, maybe tell a joke and say something about your mom and all this stuff. And I looked at this email and I was like, wow, this is going to be the tough assignment. And my brother immediately just hits reply all and he says, got it. Standard talk. Funny, touching and short.

Matt Abrahams: I love it. Funny, touching and short. I think that’s great advice for many of our communication situations. I’m curious, how did the talk go?

Jon Levin: We were short.

Matt Abrahams: I’ll leave it at that. I’m curious, Jon, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[14:23]

Jon Levin: So one person is Barack Obama. No matter your political affiliation, you have to admire President Obama as a communicator. He came and spoke on campus. He gave a incredibly detailed, pretty technocratic talk about social media and misinformation. It was easily an hour, maybe even an hour and a half, and it was mesmerizing. He’s a wonderful speaker.

Matt Abrahams: Let me ask you my third and final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[14:55]

Jon Levin: Clarity, connection, inspiration,

Matt Abrahams: Very, very important. All three. And you do all three of those very well and serve as a good role model for all of us. And I think all business leaders and people developing their careers can think about how they can leverage those three together to help them successfully navigate the communication challenges that they have. Jon, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time, your insights, your candor, and truly appreciate what you do for us and for all of our students.

Jon Levin: Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much for having me on. And we’re so fortunate to have you teaching at the GSB and doing this podcast.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another best of episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about leadership, please listen to episode 1 21 with Jacob Morgan. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos and me Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium podcast company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. Check out faster smarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.