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Advanced social skills from CNN reporters: saving safe, moving on, keeping it win-win
Some great lessons learned here, including:
- Preserving other people's power, even while fixing mistake (which is otherwise an assault on authority)
- Negotiating frames & saving face (rather than imposing / dominating)
- Moving on quickly (a great fallback strategy when you're not sure what to do)
- Defending one's own power while also adding value to others.
Woman: bla bla bla (forgets to mention and give credit to the reporters of the news)
Reporter: No, that's exactly right (confirms and aligns with her first), and (frames it as adding information, rather than fixing mistake) we've got this report with... (takes the due credit, but she's saved face for Woman 1)
Woman: (notice her body language! She realizes her mistake) Of course (her eyes go down, smiles nervously, fixes her seating position. In this case submissive body language is OK, it's OK to give away some power to make up for value-taking behavior) thank you for mentioning them! (great move! Instead of admitting and "thread-expanding" on her mistake, she defends her own power while also building the reporter up, and acknowledging she agrees with the mistake-fixing)
Reporter: Nono, of course (again, aligning and maintaing rapport), you got the headline out there (builds her back up, makes nothing of the mistake), but what is so interesting about this... (then quickly moves on: caring AND professional at the same time)
You could see the reporter was more professional, more experienced, and higher power.
But they both did a very good job, much to learn here.
This is a great example of assertive collaboration.
She reporter takes her due credit, but without pushing anyone down. The woman acknowledges her mistake and makes amend, but in a high-power fashion. And they both help each other come out of it well.
One thing the reporter could have done even better, cut out the "nono".
Even though everything after the "no" was correct, a "no" is very strong, and draws too much attention to their own little thing going on, the viewers don't need that.
Imagine what a big difference this would have done:
Reporter: Yeah yeah, sure, you got the most important part out, and indeed....
As you can see, it's nothing "crazy".
In daily life -and daily professional life- this is how advanced social skills look like when deployed for value-adding and collaborative exchanges.
Of course, the more challenging the situation, the more advanced social skills will become obvious.
And the more challenging the situation, the bigger the impact they will have on your social success (Pareto law).
So, in that sense, it also makes sense to focus on the exceptional cases.
But it's also good to learn from these small, daily instances, because that's how you will be behaving 90% of the times to keep good relationships, maintain allies, and generally act high-quality.
