The podcast by project manager for project managers. A great leader strikes a balance between warmth and strength. If it’s time for you to conduct an honest assessment of your leadership style to connect better with your teams and understand your stakeholders more effectively, take a listen to hear how to connect, then lead.

Table of Contents

02:47 … Meet Matt04:44 … Social Power and Personal Power06:38 … Knowing your Likeability09:17 … Strength and Warmth12:12 … Strength and Warmth Matrix15:04 … Changing Your Impact17:51 … Make a Stronger Team Connection.20:02 … How Not to Compromise Warmth21:54 … Snap Judgements and First Impressions24:23 … Kevin and Kyle25:20 … Connect with Your Audience27:25 … Preparation is Vital29:44 … Be Your Authentic Self33:03 … Connecting Remotely36:26 … Keeping Energy Levels Stable37:33 … Communicating to Highly Skilled Professionals39:18 … Using Analogies40:05 … Speaking Truth to Positions of Power42:13 … Contact Matt43:57 … Closing

MATT KOHUT: Some people tend to go with their strength first, and they backfill on the warmth.  Some people lead with warmth first, and they backfill on the strength.  And it’s sort of like being left-handed or right-handed.  Everybody’s just got a dominant hand.  And as long as you can pick up objects with both of them and not drop them, it’s okay.

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts from all around the world.  Our aim is to bring you some support as you navigate your projects.  You can also claim free PDUs, Professional Development Units from PMI by listening to our show.  At the end of the show we will give you advice on how to do that.

Today we’re talking to Matt Kohut.  Matt is a co-founder of KNP Communications, and he has 20 years of professional experience writing and preparing speakers for both general and expert audience.  In addition, he has served as a communications consultant to organizations including NASA, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Harvard University.

Matt is currently a fellow at the Center for Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, and he’s previously worked at Harvard University as research specialist to the dean of Kennedy School.  Now, this is an interesting conversation, and we are very excited to bring it to you because it follows on so well to our conversation we had with Vanessa Druskat on emotional intelligence.

BILL YATES:  Yes, this is an area that I think because of my own experience, I feel like this is an area that a project manager, certainly me, should and can grow in throughout their career.  It’s amazing talking with Matt.  He knows so much about social science.  That’s the background experience he has.  But the advice that he gives is so practical.  Not only did he write speeches, he coached those who were delivering the speeches as to how to make a good first impression, how to connect with their audience, how to not overpower them with too much information. 

These are things that project managers struggle with.  These are things that we have to be aware of.  So the advice that Matt gives in our conversation is really going to help us be better at our jobs, connect better with our teams, understand our customers better, and amp up our performance.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Matt.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for being our guest today.

MATT KOHUT:  Thanks for having me.

Meet Matt

WENDY GROUNDS:  We are excited to talk to you about communication and leadership and all of those good things; but I am really intrigued by your other career, the side of you that is a professional bassist.  Can you tell us a little bit about that and your passion for music?

MATT KOHUT:  Sure.  I started playing music as a kid, like a lot of kids do, just picking up instruments.  And it was in high school I really hit on bass playing as something that was my instrument.  I had started down a path as a freelance writer and a teacher.  And around my 30th birthday I realized, you know what, if I don’t take the leap now, I’m not going to do this.  So I spent about seven years working more or less as a full-time professional musician.  And that doesn’t mean I didn’t have little day jobs here and there; but my primary focus was performing, recording, touring.  And it really has informed the work I do now as a communications professional because music is a language, and bands are teams.  So no matter what setting you find yourself in, there’s a lot of overlap.

BILL YATES:  That’s good.  I know many times I’ll hear people make the reference of a conductor to a project manager.  It’s a nice analogy, bring out the best from each instrument and knowing the right mix and that kind of thing.  That’s fantastic.  You know, I’ve come across others in project management who have something like this that really informs them.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, I’ve listened to your podcast.  To our audience out there, Matt has a podcast called Sounds Out of Time.  And he talks to musicians, talks about music, and it’s really interesting.  You have this great NPR voice.

BILL YATES:  Yup.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Here’s the jazz section from Matt; you know?  It’s really good.

MATT KOHUT:  I didn’t know that until somebody told me that.  I had no idea.

Social Power and Personal Power

WENDY GROUNDS:  All right.  Let’s jump into talking leadership and talking communication.  One of the first things we wanted to talk about was there’s a difference between having social power and personal power.  Those are two very different leadership terms.  Can you define them for us?

MATT KOHUT:  Well, social power, as the word “social” suggests, has to do with being with other people.  And to a certain extent I think that it all comes down to the idea that, if you have power in a situation, ultimately you’re getting people to do something they might not otherwise do.  And there are a lot of different ways to do this.

I’m actually a fan of an old boss of mine, a guy named Joseph Nye, who is an international relations theorist, a foreign policy expert.  And he was the person who coined the terms “soft power” and “hard power.”  And I actually find these really almost in some way the more interesting way to frame power.  Hard power is coercing people, that is, you have to do this; and soft power is attracting people.  And he always made the point that it’s much cheaper to attract people than to coerce them.  They’re going to want to do what you want them to do, and they’ll do it even willingly.

And there are a variety of different ways you can do that if you’re a country thinking about trying to attract others to your agenda.  But then I think it’s a really interesting metaphor for project managers and for anyone working in teams and professional settings, as well.

BILL YATES:  Certainly.  And there’s so much fallout when you do have to use hard power.  It just doesn’t last, and especially if you want to keep your team together.  And, “Okay, we had to push hard to finish something up.  I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll start the next project.”  Some of them are looking at you like, “No, you won’t.  I’m out of here.”

MATT KOHUT:  That’s right.

Knowing your Likeability

BILL YATES:  There’s a big price.  There’s a quote from an article that we wanted to reference with you.  “Before people decide what they think of your message, they decide what they think of you.”  It’s such a key to being an effective communicator, understanding how other people judge your character.  So how important is likability, not only in terms of good leadership, but also when managing other project stakeholders?

MATT KOHUT:  Well, there are a couple of things to that.  I think that, first off, that point about the fact that people are judging your message through their feelings about you is really important, and that can have to do with likability.  It can also have to do with their sense of your legitimacy or of your credibility, as well.  So likability for sure matters.  It’s one of the things that matters.  There are other things that matter, as well.

So let’s just take the idea, though, first, of the importance of your message being filtered through how people feel about you.  Right now we’re having a conversation.  You’re figuring out how you feel about me at the same time you’re figuring out how you feel about my message.  And you can’t really sort the two out.  It’s not like our brains say, “Well, I dislike the person, but I like the message.”  Generally speaking, it’s just not that conscious on our part.  More often emotion leads, and logic follows. 

And we feel some way, and then we make up a rationale for why we feel that way.  It’s called “motivated reasoning” in the political world where people choose their candidate based on a gut sense, and then they come up with all these reasons why they think that person is the perfect person to be governor or dog catcher or whatever.

And that’s largely true about the way we interpret messages from people, too.  We filter them through our feelings about the person.  And sure, sometimes once we know someone, we can have some nuance about it and say, “Well, I really like him even though we disagree about X.”  But by and large there’s a gray area there.  So when you get to likeability, it’s a lot harder to disagree with someone you like.  Think about this in your own life.  You have good close friends, and then they say something.  “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe he just said that.”  But it’s your friend and you like them.  You don’t want to hurt their feelings.

So likeability makes you more influential with people,