Supercommunicators | 3. How to Have the Hardest Conversations
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A quick warning. This episode includes references to racial slurs and offensive language. If you were to ask employees at Netflix when the Civil War began inside their company, a lot of them would probably point to an afternoon in February of 2018. There were about 30 people gathered inside a conference room, and the company's chief communication officer stood up to speak. The executive told everyone that Netflix had recently released a new comedy special that was particularly offensive.

In this special, the comedian Tom Segura makes fun of people with Down syndrome. He complains that you can't say words like "retarded" anymore. And so the Netflix executive told everyone that they need to expect complaints and that they needed to treat those complaints seriously. Everyone should appreciate how hurtful those offensive words can be. And then, to drive home his point, he offered an analogy. Hearing those kinds of slurs, he said, would be "as if an African-American person had heard

And then he said the N-word. Netflix has fired its top communications executive. Jonathan Friedland has been the company's chief communications officer for the past six years and is now leaving Netflix after allegedly using racial slurs and insensitive remarks to his team during at least two meetings. To the outside world, this seemed like a very simple story. But inside Netflix, the executive's firing was very, very divisive.

Some people thought it was unfair that this executive was being blamed for using that word in a non-offensive way and that firing him was way out of proportion. However, other employees felt exactly the opposite. That using this word was completely unacceptable. And if people don't understand that, it just shows how little they understand their Black coworkers and how they feel about the word. That this was evidence of racism at the company.

Friedland tweeted about his exit on Friday and then later tweeted out, "Thanks. Rise high, fall fast." All on a couple of words. He quickly deleted that post. And it was then, as these two perspectives began battling with each other, that the Civil War began. I mean, I was there for it all. And those were hard conversations.

I'm Charles Duhigg, the author of Super Communicators. And today in the third and final installment of our series, we're talking about how to have the hardest conversations. The kinds of conversations that make your stomach clench up, that you worry if they go wrong, they might damage relationships or organizations or the world. Because what happened at Netflix shows us how easily these conversations can go wrong and what it takes to get them back on track.

I'll talk with Vernee Myers, who helped lead those conversations inside Netflix. You know, a situation like this can tear a company apart, or it can create a level of awareness that wasn't there before. Coming up, you'll hear the inside story of what happened in Netflix and what it can teach us about having tough conversations at home, at work, and anywhere else. Stay with us.

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Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone and see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. We're back. And before we return to the story of Netflix, I want to talk about what we know about the science of hard conversations. So what's the last hard conversation you had?

Huh. I think I have them all the time. I actually just had a student who didn't get tenure, and I had to offer challenging feedback, and it was hard. This is Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University. And he's spent a big part of his career studying what we know about tough conversations. The first thing we know is that a lot of people try to avoid them.

They're awkward. They cause a lot of anxiety. You know, Democrats, if they talk to a Republican, expect it to go much worse than it actually is. And part of that is because we have stereotypes in our head that they're radically different from us. And so we imagine when we interact with somebody, they're going to be just a total extremist. In other words, if that person is in favor of guns, we tend to assume that they're a gun nut who wants everyone to own a gun.

Or if we have to give a colleague some negative feedback, we assume that they're going to get really angry and upset and it's just going to be awful. Basically, we're really bad at anticipating how hard conversations will go. And that anticipatory anxiety, it nudges us to avoid having these conversations in the first place. But then when we actually have the discussion, most of the time we find that our worries don't come true.

And it turns out the average person is actually not like that. And we actually share a lot in common with them more than we would expect. And so the average interaction goes better than we would imagine. But even if you assume a hard conversation is going to go better than you thought, that doesn't mean it's going to be easy, right? Let's say I'm a manager and I need to give an employee a negative performance review. Maybe that conversation won't be awful, but it's not going to be pleasant. There's going to be fundamental disagreements.

But what Jay says is, that's okay. As long as you have some ground rules for how this conversation should go. So I think we have to start with the premise that we're never going to get to 100% consensus with any human on Earth. We're just going to not agree with everybody on anything. But that doesn't mean you can't agree on how you're going to disagree with each other. Right. My brother and I, when we get together, we disagree politically very strongly. And we actually enjoy the give and take.

He works in a very different field than me. He works in like the oil fields of Alberta. And I work in like the academics of like Manhattan. And so we don't get to actually have like pretty heated conversations with people who really differ from us that often. And so it's actually really interesting for us when we get to have those conversations.

But Jay's mom hates it when the brothers start arguing with each other. My mom wants like the holidays to go smoothly. And so her goal is to like, please like keep it to small talk. And I want this to be like a smooth holiday because we don't get together very often. And so I think what you have to have is a little bit of ground rules.

These kind of ground rules can be tiny, like "let's only argue when mom isn't around." Or they can be big, like "let's not call each other names." And many times, these rules aren't necessarily spoken aloud. But the best communicators pick up on those norms, and they abide by them. You have to actually read the room and figure out what the norms are. Maybe your mom is not there for this. And then you go outside and have a drink with your brother and you can do it and it's cool.

So what I hear you saying is like, we need ground rules. I can't force my ground rules on your mom and say, you have to talk about politics, but she also can't force her ground rules on me. She has to let us go outside and talk politics outside. Now I'm guessing when you're talking to your brother, there are some other ground rules that are kind of unwritten. There's probably some things you would say or wouldn't say that

in order to remind your brother that like, actually, we disagree on this, but still, we have this connection, or I still love you, or I don't think you're an idiot, even though I keep on implying that. What's happening with that conversation with your brother? What are the other ground rules that both of you are aware of, but maybe not fully conscious of? I think one of the key things is that it helps if you focus on the issues and don't attack the person.

The moment I start implying that he's an idiot or he starts implying that I'm an idiot, then it gets heated and then it blows up. We're brothers, right? So that's probably happened for about 40 straight years. And so I think that's one of the things is you have to learn to talk to each other in a respectful way and separate the issues you're debating from the person you're debating with. The way that we keep things respectful, the way that we signal what the ground rules for a conversation ought to be, is often by showing the rules through our behavior.

I'll give you an example of this. We have a speaker series every week. And at the very first talk of the year, what I said to the students and audiences, I said, I want you to ask tough questions of the speakers. That's a norm and something we value. It's not a mean thing to do. That's a way of showing that you are actually paying attention and are deeply engaged and care about the talk and are helping the speaker improve their work.

So, if one suggestion for having tough conversations is to set ground rules, then the second suggestion is demonstrating those rules through our own behavior, like asking tough questions to show others that it's okay. And how we act is important because sometimes people stop listening to what we say and instead they listen to how we treat them.

But that almost never works. And the reason why is that in a tough conversation, facts are pretty secondary.

What matters to people is what they're feeling. They might feel threatened by this discussion or disrespected, or they feel like you don't actually want to listen to them, you're just waiting your turn to speak so you can correct them. And those feelings are much more powerful than any statistics or factoids you might throw at them. So if we want to connect with someone, if we want to convince them to listen to our facts, then often we have to start by activating their sense of empathy. And the way to do that is by describing our personal experiences.

People will open and listen to your personal experience because they can't deny it. You know, it's really hard to deny somebody who has been stuck in a school where there's been a live shooter or lost somebody to a situation like that. They can spew all the statistics they want about how guns are necessary for defense or their constitutional rights. But when someone comes and talks to them about that experience,

It changes the conversation, changes the tenor of the conversation immediately. And that's what people will remember. That's what's going to get them to open their heart and open their mind. So to review, there's three big principles about how to have a hard conversation. First, don't avoid having them just because you're anxious about how it's going to go. It'll probably be better than you're imagining. Second, even if it goes well, there are still going to be things that you and the other person disagree about. And that's okay.

To help with that, it's really useful to have some ground rules in place, some norms, and to make these norms clear by demonstrating them through our own behavior. And finally, don't just spit facts and arguments at each other. It's not going to change anyone's mind. Instead, talk about your experiences. Tell stories about how something has impacted you or how it makes you feel. When we come back, we'll return to Netflix and figure out how to use these rules when conversations are about topics that are really, really hard.

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This is Super Communicators. I'm Charles Duhigg. And now that we've learned some of the science behind having a tough conversation, let's go back to the situation at Netflix. Sources say that Friedland used the N-word in a meeting with other Netflix staffers, some of whom later reported the incident. Per Insider's Netflix CEO... This firing set off a battle inside Netflix that lasted long after that executive was dismissed.

And in the battle, some people thought that the company had overreacted. That, yes, the executive had used a deeply offensive word, but he hadn't used it in an offensive manner. Well, here's the thing. When I first heard it explained to me, I thought...

It's not so bad. Like, he wasn't calling anybody the N-word. This is Vernee Myers again. And she watched all of this unfold as a consultant to Netflix. And it's worth noting that the fired executive, Jonathan Friedland, he's apologized repeatedly for using this word. And there's more on that at the end of this episode. But even after Friedland left,

The battle inside Netflix dragged on for months and months and months. And as a Black woman herself, Vernet recognized how complex this situation was. It's not, okay, it's not a good idea to do this, to use the actual word, but it sounds so horrible when you hear, oh, he used the N-word because people are thinking, oh, he called someone that, right? Which wasn't the case. So I was sort of saying, okay, well, maybe,

you explain that that is not what you're supposed to do. And also, this person had a very good relationship with lots of people, was loved and respected by lots of people. So my first feeling was, okay, this needs a correction and an apology. But I changed my mind about it. Vernet changed her mind when she saw how much other people at Netflix disagreed that an apology was sufficient.

To them, using that word in any context was completely unacceptable. And they were angry that their coworkers didn't understand that, that Netflix wasn't making a bigger deal about this. Vernet understood that. And she understood that there was now this gulf in how people saw the situation.

Many, many people of color, many allies of those individuals were upset and were feeling like they weren't being heard or understood about why this felt so injurious to them. And when the leaders invited me to help in this situation,

What they said to me is we thought we understood each other, but it's clear that there is something we are missing because our Black colleagues are, like, not having it. This kind of conflict was particularly hard within Netflix because Netflix has a kind of unusual corporate culture. When you get hired at Netflix, one of the first things you're told to read is what's known as the Netflix Culture Deck, this document that's over 100 pages long

And in it, there's a lot of the standard HR policy that you might expect, like be honest with your coworkers and always seek excellence. But there's also stuff in the culture deck urging people to argue and fight with each other. It tells employees that, and I'm quoting it here, it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. And silent disagreement is unacceptable.

This brutal honesty, this mandate that you must argue with someone if you think they're wrong about anything at all, is at the core of the Netflix culture. It's a form of insurance, executives believe, against groupthink and mediocrity. The company's founder, Reed Hastings, once explained why this was so important.

It's better to enable people to be rude by conventional standards and to be very direct. And so it's important to farm for dissent and to stimulate mechanisms by which contrary views can be heard. So if you work at Netflix, you're expected to disagree with each other, often very fiercely. And that works when we're talking about, say, budgets or debating how many movies should appear when people log in.

But that kind of radical candor and brutal honesty and disagreement, how do you have those kinds of conversations when you're talking about race or politics or other sensitive topics?

It was at this moment, when this turmoil was unfolding, that executives decided they needed to hire Vernee Myers full-time. Because she had spent her entire life helping people have these kinds of conversations. She'd worked for the Massachusetts Attorney General promoting inclusion within the agency. And then she became a consultant to companies like Netflix, helping them work through issues that often divided employees. But now, she was going to become the company's full-time vice president of inclusion strategy.

And immediately she started to worry about what she'd gotten into. I had overwhelming feelings those first six months. Like, what have I done? What have I done? You know, I had worked on a smaller team for the attorney general's office, but this is like a whole different ballgame. ♪

When she started as a full-time employee at Netflix, Vernet found that people were having a hard time with this conversation for the same reasons J. Van Bavel had found that all kinds of other people avoided tough discussions. Because they were terrified that if they talked to someone who disagreed with them and it went poorly, it would blow up in everyone's face. Some of that is you're worried that you're going to mess up.

if you, you know, wade into any of these conversations. And so some folks felt like, okay, I can't really talk about these two people who are different from me. Like we talked, we talk about stuff, but we talk about it with our own people. To Renee, however, this seemed like the core of the problem. If Netflix was going to have real conversations about topics like race, then employees needed to know how to talk with people that they disagreed with.

So she did what Jay's research suggests we should do. She went out of her way to help people understand that it was totally natural to feel anxious about these conversations. But the anxiety they were feeling? It doesn't mean that the conversation is destined to go off the rails.

One of the first things we did was to make it clear that this was not like a gotcha exercise, right? This is going to be about learning, not about figuring out who's bad and who's good. This was not like a witch hunt to find the bad people, but to actually collaborate as a group of people who all have the same goal in mind and also see the benefit of it.

Vernet's strategy was to start conducting workshops. The idea was to bring people together and, with some guidance, help them have conversations that, up until then, had felt kind of dangerous to everyone. But if those workshops were going to work, then she needed to pay attention to Jay's second insight. She needed to establish some ground rules. The thinking behind workshops is you got to get in a room and have a conversation. So you're trying to give people like an experience.

because experience is really what shifts attitudes. So to do that, we used a set of guidelines like we're not going to blame, shame, and attack each other. We're going to listen to each other. We're going to seek first to understand each other versus insisting that we be understood. And are you actually writing those guidelines and putting them on a poster on the wall so you can sort of refer back to them?

Yes, or they're in the handouts, or they're on the tables. But in situations like this, rules usually aren't enough on their own. You have to model the norms the same way that J. Van Bavel did when he encouraged people to ask tough questions of speakers. For Renee, this meant publicly describing her own conversational missteps. For instance, she would often describe this one time when she was in a grocery store late at night.

And there was a woman who came in and she had like on scrubs, like medical scrubs, and she was black. And so I went to say, you won't believe this, but I went to her in almost everything and me.

wanted to say, I love nurses. Oh my gosh, you guys are just the best. But before it could get out of my mouth, I just asked an open-ended question, which is, hi, what's got you here so late? And she then said, oh, you know, I'm a doctor at blah, blah, blah. And I just delivered a baby. And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Thank you.

You know, you want to get to a world where people in the grocery market don't assume that you're a nurse because it wasn't the scrubs. Because if I had put the scrubs on male, black or white, I'm sure I would have gone with doctor. And here's the thing. I'm a black woman and I have a feeling it would have hurt more.

If it had come out of my mouth, because I'm sure she would have been like, "Yeah, really sister? Like, I can't count on you to see me for who I am?" When Vernée would start a workshop by telling a story like this, when she would model norms like, "It's okay to admit that we've made mistakes," it helped other people be honest with each other.

And that's what I want people to do, which is to say, look, you shouldn't expect to be good at this. And it's not because you're bad. It's because you're human and you've been living in a society that often is undereducated about a lot of these things.

So once Vernet modeled these norms, she usually asked everyone in the workshop to start talking to each other. She would give the audience prompts like, describe a time you felt mistreated. And try to go back to an early memory is what we say. And then what happened? How did you react? What was your response? And what do you wish, what did you do? And what do you wish other people would have done? That's like, that's a goldmine experience.

Just having people share that at their table. And the reason this was so valuable was because everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of how they felt about the Netflix executive getting fired, all of them could talk about a personal experience where they felt excluded. Everyone had an equal right to be in that conversation. All of us know something about exclusion, even if it's like in our family, you know, when you go to a party, you know, and you're like, ugh.

They don't really see me there or I'm gonna have to pretend and or somebody's gonna ask me like a really painful question. You know, most people know what that's like. And what you might notice is that this is Jay Van Bavel's third rule for having a hard conversation. Don't just quote facts at each other. Rather, talk about your experiences. Because we've all felt excluded or worried or like something was unfair.

And we can connect over those shared feelings and experiences. When Vernet first started putting on these workshops, people at Netflix were terrified. They sometimes refused to show up altogether. But within just a few months, all of that changed. Pretty soon, every employee inside the company had attended a workshop, often more than once. And the tensions that the company had been feeling started to dissipate.

Employees started talking to each other, listening to each other's concerns, finding enough common ground to put some of these disagreements aside. So, okay. So, so you've been at, at, at Netflix for, let's say two years. You've done a bunch of these workshops. Tell me what the company is like, like how is the company different? How does it feel different than when you walked in that first day where people are kind of at each other's throats over the N word thing?

The kinds of things that people told me about what had shifted and changed, I never knew that that was happening. Oh, interesting. Like, what did they tell you? They were like, I'm a different person. I see things differently. My team reacts differently. I'm not afraid to talk about this. You've changed the culture so that people are feeling closer and feeling more a sense of belonging and feeling more respected. Yeah.

And they're feeling more respected because the expectations have risen, but also the awareness and the tools. So sometimes people are saying things like, I just stepped in it, right? Because ultimately, it's not about what the DEI team is doing. It's what people are doing without you, so to speak.

And there's lessons here for all of us, for when we need to have a hard conversation, whether they happen in a workshop or our everyday lives. Some of those conversations might be about race, but they might also be about less weighty topics, like you need to give an employee some tough feedback, or you need to have a conversation with your mom about her not driving anymore, or your kids need to tell you that they feel like you're not being the parent they need right now. In those moments, it's useful to remember that there's a science that makes these conversations easier.

And that science says these discussions will go better than you expect if you put some ground rules in place, if you model the norms about honesty and vulnerability that you hope others will embrace. Finally, when we talk about our experiences, rather than arguing over who's right and wrong or whose facts are better, when we talk about our experiences, that's when we find ways to connect, even when we disagree with each other. And most of all, this science tells us that these conversations are important.

They won't cause everyone to see eye to eye. They won't erase divisions or differences or end racism. No conversational tactic is big enough to fix every problem. But all the same, these conversations matter. They're often the first step in the right direction. Because the right conversation at the right moment can change how we see the world. Thank you to Vernee Myers and J. Van Babel for being part of this conversation. You can learn more about Vernee and her work and her podcast at verneemeyers.com.

And the book that Jay co-wrote is called "The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony." Before we go, you can read more about the story in my book, "Super Communicators." In it, a Netflix spokesperson talks about these difficult conversations inside the company, characterizing them as a way for, quote, "all of us and the business to thrive." Netflix didn't offer any further comments for this podcast.

I also talked with Jonathan Friedland, the fired executive. "In an interview with me in 2022, Friedland, who has had a long and distinguished career before and after working in Netflix, told me that he understood why he was fired and didn't disagree with the decision. He said, and I'm quoting him here, 'Was I tone deaf? Yeah. I didn't understand how that word would be heard, and I shouldn't have said it.'" But he added, this was one small moment in a long career filled with many other better decisions.

This is the last of our three episodes about Super Communicators, and I just wanted to say thank you for tuning in. We've gotten a chance to learn how to ask better questions and how to hear people's emotions even when they aren't said aloud.

If you'd like to learn more about these and other aspects of communication, we've shared some resources, including some cheat sheets for having important conversations with your family or at work, on my website, charlesduhigg.com. That's D-U-H-I-G-G. And you can find those resources under the tab titled Guides. Or you can find a link to them in our show notes.

And on my website, you can also download a free chapter from my book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Or you can get the whole thing at Amazon or Audible or your local bookstore. And finally, you can find me on Substack, where I have a newsletter named The Science of Better. Super Communicators was produced by Sophie Sommergrad and Derek John, who also did the sound design. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob. Joel Meyer is our supervising producer. I'm Charles Duhigg.

and I hope you have great conversations.