Communication for Leaders: How to Speak So Others Want to Listen

Wiktor Żołnowski: When you want to deliver a public presentation, start with the audience and not with your topic. Usually, when we start watching or listening to our recordings, it’s a very negative reaction. Always argue as if you were right, but always listen as if you were wrong. Our brains have a limited capacity for acquiring knowledge, so don’t overflow people with information. Don’t overflow people with difficulty. Create opportunities for your employees to hold informal meetings. When people talk over their coffee or they meet informally, it’s not wasting corporate money; that’s a perfect investment of corporate money.

Welcome to Pragmatic Talks, a podcast and video series where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern technologies, and product management. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Coders in collaboration with ACE!, one of the largest agile conferences in Europe. We believe that everyone should have equal access to knowledge about product development and entrepreneurship and also, everyone should have the opportunity to apply it in pursuit of making our world a better place. Through this series, we aim to create an impact on the future world.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Patrycja Obara, a communication coach and trainer specializing in public speaking. Her expertise extends to both cross-cultural and cross-gender communication. Patrycja is also a talented singer, songwriter, music producer, and academic teacher. Today’s discussion covers several key areas of communication, especially communication for leaders who want to be listened to and heard – that is not always the same thing. We also dive into effective communication strategies and knowledge sharing in the workplace. Then we cover the topic of communication challenges in a remote work setup. In the end, we offer practical tips on how to communicate to sell better. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Patrycja Obara.

Patrycja Obara: Hello. Thank you for the invitation. Hello, everyone. It’s great to have you here.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And we always start with the very first question: Who is Patrycja, and what is your story?

Patrycja Obara: Okay, long story short. Long story short, I stand on three legs, I would say. And one leg is corporate training: communication, public speaking. The second leg is the voice. I work with the voice; I’m a certified vocal coach, and I run a singing school. And the third leg is art, and it’s between the realms of music and theatre.

The connection between art and business communication
Wiktor Żołnowski: Let’s start with the connection between the third leg that you mentioned: the art and songwriting, singing. How does it relate to communication and then teaching people how to communicate better? Are there any lessons learned from concerts or singing to people or being on stage and the communication itself?

Patrycja Obara: I think it actually works both ways. I draw a lot from my professional experience and put it in music, and I draw a lot from music and put it in my business activity. One thing for sure is when I’m on stage, I don’t think it’s a big difference if I’m there to sing, to perform a theatre play, or to deliver a public speech. It’s the same kind of emotion, it’s the same kind of stage fright, the same kind of fear, and the same way to manage it. I think being on stage artistically gives me an opportunity to connect with the audience in a unique way, deep from the heart and not from the intellect. And this is what I like to draw from then in my business operations and business presentations because I think in the end – I don’t want to sound too emotional because I’m a very practical person – but I think in the end, it all comes down to the heart, to emotions. Every engagement, I believe, is emotional engagement. And this is the lesson that I learned on stage. But also working in business allowed me to make some good choices when I’m creating music: to make a plan of promotion, for example, to look from the perspective of the client, of the audience, and figure out what they may want, what may be good for them, and how I can meet them in the middle. So I don’t sell myself but still do something that can be good for people. So I think these two areas are intertwined.

How to deliver a great presentation
Wiktor Żołnowski: Perfect. So let’s dive deeper into the topic of being on stage or speaking to people. Because this podcast and video series is mainly recorded for people who are working with other people as well but mainly working on products: product managers or CEOs, startup founders, etc. They need to pitch their startups to investors, sometimes pitch on stage to the crowd. Let’s dive deeper into this area. Tell us a little more about how to do it well, both on stage and also with people. How to be convincing? How to be good at promoting yourself, your product, your services?

Patrycja Obara: I hope that throughout this conversation, pragmatic business leaders are not going to jump to the next movie because I will be saying a lot of human-centered things instead of business-centered things. And my practical tip here would be to start with the person that you’re talking to and not yourself. When you want to deliver a public presentation, start with the audience and not with your topic. Very often when I do public speaking training and I talk to the participants of this training, they are delivering a presentation. Then I want to give them feedback, and the first question I ask is, “What was the purpose of your presentation?” And most often, the answer that I hear is, “Because I think this topic is important, and I wanted to share it.” “Yeah, what for?” “Because I want people to know about this.” “Why?” “Because then they will understand.” “Okay, what’s the point of understanding?” Because knowing something, understanding something is not an advantage in itself. It only becomes an advantage when you can translate it into your life, into your practical operations. “So how can they translate it?” And then after five more questions, we reach the purpose, which is, for example, they can be more effective at work and they can finish early, get more money, whatever. This is the practical advantage. But to figure it out, you have to start with who’s listening to you, not with the topic that you want to share. So think about the people. Think about what problems they have, what hopes they have, what dreams they have. And then if what you serve them is an answer to these problems, to these dreams, you’ve got it. If you don’t think about it beforehand, it’s random. It’s a game of chance. And for some people, it will work; for most people, it won’t. I believe thinking about your audience first is a game-changer.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I believe that’s pretty similar to what I have had the chance to speak with some successful startup founders about, and all of them said that you need to speak in a way that will address the investors’ needs. The investors’ dream is to actually invest in a company that will become a unicorn or even more, that they will have the return from– a return on investment of not even 10 times but 40 or 100 times. Yes. So having this intention in mind that you want to show them that you are this kind of startup is very important, as you said. Think about the audience; start with them, their dreams. And what about the emotion? You already started talking about emotion. So how to play on the emotion, how to use– so how to use the emotion of the audience to be more convincing?

Patrycja Obara: Well, I want to be careful with answering this question because I don’t want to suggest anything that would sound like advising people to manipulate the audience. I always recommend honesty, building an honest connection with the audience. Don’t be an actor when you stand on the stage. Be who you are with your real intention and a real intention to connect. For example, what I often see is a speaker on stage who asks a question, but there is no intention to actually hear the answer. They have a predetermined agenda. They ask, “Okay, who in this room likes pierogi?” I know that everybody likes pierogi, but maybe some people don’t like pierogi. And if your presentation is built on the preconceived answer that everybody will raise their hands, then first of all, you’re lost. You don’t know where to go with your presentation if somebody says, “No, I hate pierogi.” But secondly, the connection is broken because this is the moment when people understand, “Okay, this person is not listening.” So if you switch off from the audience, the audience will switch off from you.

So I would say always be honest. Always find the intention that may be curiosity. What’s going on in this audience? And then you will know which emotion is the right emotion. If it’s okay to make them laugh, if your job is to deliver bad news, you want to tell people that a project is being shut down, you don’t want to make jokes. But maybe you do, because maybe you’re also on the same team and you’re with them, and you’ve been expecting this for quite a while. And by making jokes, you show them that you’re on the same ship. So if you understand what’s going on in the audience, you can reach for these emotions rather naturally. And I think when we just talk to people normally, like you’re with a group of friends and you want to pitch an idea to them, you will naturally do it. So I would ask myself the question: Why does it change when I’m on stage? Why do I stop taking people seriously when I’m on stage? Why do I start pretending when I’m on stage? Do you know what I mean? Start with your own intention. If you really believe in what you are talking about, people will respond with believing in what you’re talking about. If you are disengaged, you’re just there and you’re reading from the slide and you don’t care what you’re saying because you’re thinking, “I have this next meeting in half an hour,” your audience will very quickly start scrolling their phones. Second of all, be present. Observe what’s going on around you and respond. So if you feel like people are losing their attention, maybe it means you’ve given them too much, too much to digest, too much meat. Maybe now they need a vegetable, something lighter, a question, some food for thought, maybe a story, maybe a joke, maybe an anecdote. And I would also recommend, like I said before, not trying to be someone else on stage. Because if you focus all your attention on, “What should I do with my hands? How should I modulate my voice? Oh, now I should speak slower, or now I should speak faster,” then you’re disengaging from the emotional flow between you and the audience because you’re only focusing on yourself. So if you want to practice things like voice modulation, gestures, I don’t know, thinking about eye contact, I suggest you do it when you’re rehearsing and not when you’re already on stage.

How to prepare for a public presentation
Wiktor Żołnowski: So how to prepare for that? You already started talking about if you want to prepare. So how can a person teach themself to be a good public speaker?

Patrycja Obara: Preparation is an essential part of public speaking, maybe even more important than being on stage in the end, which is just a side result, a side effect of preparing. Very often, the preparation process looks like this: we have an idea of a topic, we sit down at our computers, write down some key points, sometimes we write down every sentence, we prepare slides, and then we keep reading, reading, reading, repeating in our head. And I would say this is the introductory phase of preparing. The essential phase of preparing is to say it. Because only when you start saying it, you begin to understand, “Okay, here it’s a little bit unclear. And here, maybe this joke was not too funny, not as funny as I expected. And here I said two thoughts, but they don’t connect. I need to find a way to connect them.” Most of all, you can look at the clock and see, “Is my timing right? I had 15 minutes for my presentation, and it’s 10 minutes, and I’m only at the introduction.” These are the things you can only realize when you’re rehearsing. Many people say you should rehearse in front of the mirror. I would say don’t, because when you are on stage, you can’t see yourself. Yes. And practicing in front of a mirror may be a distractor, and it may make you more stressed instead of more prepared because you look at yourself and you say, “Ah, something’s wrong with my gestures, something’s wrong with my, I don’t know, left profile,” or something like that. So I’d recommend you try to create for your rehearsals conditions which are as similar as possible to the conditions you will have on stage. If you’re going to present sitting down in front of your computer, I don’t know, get two people to connect with you on some online platform and present to them as a dry run. If you’re going to present standing up, rehearse standing up, not lying in your bed in your bathrobe, because it’s a different kind of condition. Yeah, I had a funny situation yesterday in one training because one of the participants was practicing an elevator pitch, and he took all the people that were in the room, there were 10 of us, and he told us to stand between two tables. So we were squeezed in there as if we were in an elevator. And he said, “Okay, so now you’re a group of managers, and I’m pitching to you in the next 20 seconds.” And it was amazing because suddenly he felt it, “Oh my God, I’m trapped with these people in this small space. It’s very uncomfortable, it’s very inconvenient. We’re almost intimately looking at each other, and I have 20 seconds to tell who I am and why they should invest in me.” If he was standing on the stage far away from the audience, he wouldn’t have had this experience. It was his idea, credits to him. A great one.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yes, yes. Also, I hope he will succeed with the investment. I’m quite sure he will. What about recording yourself when you’re training?

Patrycja Obara: It’s another thing that I would be careful with because a recording can be a great source of information if you can work with it, because I think it takes a little bit of training. The first thing that happens to us usually when we start watching or listening to our recordings is a very negative reaction. You know, this inner critic is sitting on our shoulder, this little devil, and telling us, “This was bad. This was wrong. Here you spoke too fast, and here you looked ugly, and here you, oh dear, you shouldn’t behave like that. It’s so horrible.” And this is not constructive; this is just traumatizing. I had people in trainings – and it happened the day before yesterday, actually – that a woman said, “I’m traumatized by public speaking because two years ago, I was in this training, and I watched my own recording, and since then, I hate public speaking.” Wow, this shouldn’t have happened. Somebody should have told her how to work with the recordings. And if she wasn’t ready to do that, she shouldn’t have done it. So if you’re ready to do it, which means you can distance yourself and be objective and treat the person in the recording like it was your best friend and not yourself, then it’s a great source of information. With your best friend, you would probably tell them what they could correct, but you would also probably tell them what they did right. You would balance it. Do the same thing with yourself, and then you can work with the recording.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Sounds like great advice. One more thing about speaking to the computer when you are remote. That might be my advice to people, something that I learned, I think somewhere at the beginning of the pandemic, is that most of the video conferencing tools have an option to turn off your own picture so you don’t see yourself. It’s the same as insight. Yes, you are not focused on yourself but focused on other people. Because otherwise, when you see yourself speaking, then you are more focused or always distracted by yourself. You are not looking as great as you would like to, etc., etc. Yeah, thank you.

Improving team communication
Wiktor Żołnowski: Let’s talk a little bit more about communication and speaking because speaking is usually one direction. Of course, there is emotion, feedback from the audience, etc., etc., but communication is rather a two-direction, two-dimensional, not one-dimensional, but two-direction flow of information. So how to – again, a very broad question – how to improve the communication between people? Between a team, a group of people, etc., when we have to work together or do something together?

Patrycja Obara: I love your questions because almost every single one of them is material for a separate conversation. So I think “long story short” is going to be a motif of our conversation today. That’s a very nice question. I really like it. And there was a piece of advice that I recently read in a book that I really like. The book is called *The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain*, and I’ll be referring to this book in my speech today, actually. And there was a piece of advice: “Always argue as if you were right, but always listen as if you were wrong.” Which is to be confident, be adamant about your point of view, but always be open to other people’s perspectives. So if I were to narrow down all communication to this one piece of advice, maybe it would be this one.

Wiktor Żołnowski: This is very connected to the advice that we got, I think yesterday when we recorded here the conversation with Pete Behrens, who said that in terms of leadership, the leader should always be listening in a way that “I may not know, I may be wrong” and have this mindset of listening to people because I might be wrong. And that’s very connected to what we had a conversation about yesterday. So when you watch this episode, the one with Pete was already published, so you can reach for it as well.

Patrycja Obara: I’m looking forward to watching it as well. You really got my attention here.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That was a great conversation as well, as this one. Okay, so communication.

Communication challenges in remote work
Wiktor Żołnowski: What about remote work and remote communication? It’s much harder. I remember 10 or 15 years ago when I started working in the industry, working with people, training others, teaching others, I learned about something that was called communication osmosis, that the communication is not only the dialogue, but it’s also all the information that is flowing in your work environment, any environment, at home or whatever. But for example, we sit together in a room, there is much more communication that happens, much more information is flowing than we could imagine. Even sometimes we are not participating in some conversations, but we hear it, even not listen but just hear the conversation someone was speaking to someone else about some problem, some issue. And then let’s say two months later, I’m facing the same issue, a similar issue, and I already know that those people, they already solved it or already got through it. So I can reach out to them. So I save a lot of time instead of figuring things out on my own. And that’s impossible, in my opinion, in the remote world. But maybe you have some tips to improve the communication, especially in the remote environment.

Patrycja Obara: I don’t know how much I should reveal about my talk today, but when this conversation is published, the talk has already been done, so I can reveal. And there is a chance it also will be published because it was recorded, so people could reach it. In the talk, I’m talking about our brain not being a machine or a muscle but being something more of a magpie. A magpie is this black and white bird that steals everything that it finds and uses these materials, which are randomly found everywhere in their environment, to build their nest or their little surroundings. And our brain works in a similar way. And the three sources from which it likes to collect its materials are the body, our own body, the space in which we reside, and other people. And in online communication, I would try to involve as many of these elements as possible. So I would try to incorporate movement when possible. I would try to incorporate nature, so take your laptop outside if possible because it increases your focus, your ability to think creatively, to solve problems, to make decisions. And then incorporate other people. So as often as possible, try to make your online meetings interactive. So don’t just switch off all the cameras and let one person speak. And don’t prepare a presentation like it was an in-person presentation where you speak for half an hour and everybody’s listening. Whenever you’re preparing a presentation, think of it as a dialogue and let all the people leave their microphones switched on so that there is no barrier to joining the conversation.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Use the crowd as much as possible. Turning microphones on is a very important tip because there are so many situations where, “Oh, you are on mute.” So if you have all the microphones turned on, then it’s much easier, right?

Patrycja Obara: But there’s also this psychological barrier on the side of the participant. They want to say something because it’s a split-second thought, but they have to find their laptop, find the trackpad, find the arrow, find the microphone, unmute, and then somebody else is talking or the speaker is on a different topic completely. And then they think, “Okay, I didn’t make it. Too late.” What do you think about the– you said about movement. What do you think about taking a walk together remotely?

Wiktor Żołnowski: Fantastic. Fantastic idea. Yes, yes.

Patrycja Obara: Take your phones. Just be careful so that you don’t cross the street looking at the screen. But go to a park, take your phone, and walk and talk at the same time. It’s almost as if you were walking together. That may be a real idea. And it’s nature and movement in one, right? So you have two of the three elements, and three, actually, because there is the other person that you’re talking to.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah, and that sounds like a nice idea. I will try it later, right?

Patrycja Obara: Let me know how it went.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I hope the weather will be good enough in autumn. Yesterday, we also spoke about remote work and we talked a little bit about knowledge sharing in the organization, a remote organization.

Effective knowledge sharing
Wiktor Żołnowski: But let’s try to talk about it because I know that this is a subject of your presentation today here as well. Let’s talk a little bit more about effective knowledge sharing, both in the remote and physical environment of work.

Patrycja Obara: This brings us back to the three elements that I talked about a minute ago: so incorporating the body, incorporating space, and incorporating other people. Let’s maybe focus on this third element because I think it’s crucial here. First of all, if you want to share your knowledge effectively, you being the mentor, the teacher in this specific situation, remember that you know much more than you think you know. Remember that there is something like the curse of knowledge, and you’re aware of maybe 30% of your expertise. The rest is subconsciously carried out on a day-to-day basis. So if you’re trying to transfer this knowledge to other people, you’re skipping the 70% of important bits because you don’t even realize they exist. So always take a moment to stop and think, “Does the person I’m trying to teach something to have the background to understand what I’m talking about?” And there is an easy way to check it: ask them what they know. And start with what they know. Don’t start with what you want to share. Always start with what the other person knows and then stack up new knowledge on top of what they already have.

Becoming a great teacher
Wiktor Żołnowski: Could everyone become a great teacher? Is it something that people can train, can learn? Or is it something that requires special skills that people are born with?

Patrycja Obara: The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second question is yes and no. Okay. So yes, it is something that everybody can learn how to do. And yes, it requires a special set of skills, but these are not skills that you’re born with. These are skills that you can teach yourself, you can learn from other people. And I think it’s a very important topic. Thank you for bringing it up. Because I don’t know about other countries, but in Poland, teaching is considered to be self-explanatory, right? You’re an expert in something, it means you’re a teacher. When I was doing my PhD studies, we had to teach students. And for me, it was fine because I had been teaching students before I started the studies. But most of my fellow students were terrified because we had 15 hours in the four-year program. We had 15 hours of didactics. And within these 15 hours, we had three hours on motivation, three hours on how to write the syllabus, and some other bureaucracy, right? So this is not important when you’re a teacher. Teaching is a skill that has to be learned. You can’t just go with, “Okay, I’m an expert, and I’m going to stand in front of people and talk about my expertise.” Because first of all, you have to understand how the brain works, how the brain consumes knowledge, and you have to operate on that. And there are many wonderful resources on how to be a better teacher. And I would also recommend trainings, train-the-trainer workshops where you can learn some practical tools, maybe some tricks, but also a lot of psychological knowledge that will guide you through the teaching process.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So what is one silver bullet, one silver piece of advice that you would give? Maybe something with this psychological knowledge about people’s brains. So what should people who want to teach others know about other people’s brains or their brains?

Patrycja Obara: Our brains have a limited capacity for acquiring knowledge at one point in time. So don’t overflow people with information. Don’t overflow people with difficulty. Less is more. Less is better. It’s better to teach one fundamental thing but teach it very well because this increases curiosity, and your students will want to learn more because they feel confident. They feel, “Okay, I got it. I want to learn the next thing,” than to give them five things and leave them confused and lost and frustrated.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Focus on one thing. Shorter agenda, more time, yes. More breaks as well, yeah. Something that, and then you get a cognitive loop. They learn something, they bring something back, you can learn on top of that, then they bring something back again. And I would say, correct me if I’m wrong, but this sounds agile, doesn’t it?

Patrycja Obara: That is definitely it. This is why I think that, for example, you already said teaching students at the university or somewhere else. This is why I think universities, especially in Poland, are not doing a great job because usually when you go to the university, regardless of the faculty, whatever you want to study, it’s like the first year, you’re learning some basics. The second year, you are also learning basics but from another teacher, from another area. And then maybe in the third year, in the last semester, you will use this knowledge that you learned after two or two and a half years and start using this knowledge. And that actually doesn’t make sense, especially that, let’s take the math subject. You have one class every week for two hours for five months. That gives you 100 hours or something, yeah. And you are not using this knowledge for the next two and a half years or two years. For it, but also you are not actually learning it because learning is a process of using the knowledge that we have. Yeah. Otherwise, you haven’t learned anything. You only possess some knowledge, but if you haven’t used it, it’s not learning.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s so important.

Patrycja Obara: And for example, my experience with one course of studies that I’ve done is that we had a lot of psychology classes with different teachers. But one was positive psychology, the other one was another type of psychology, and then another type of psychology. And almost every teacher started with the same things. Almost every teacher talked about the Big Five and other personality classifications. I was sitting there and thinking, “Why? Why?” It would take one board meeting, two hours, to decide, “Okay, so who does the Big Five?” “You do the Big Five.” “Okay, so when is your class?” “In January.” “Okay, mine is in February, so I’ll add something to it because they already know the Big Five. Let’s not waste the students’ time. Let’s use it effectively.” Right? So my big dream is that one day at all universities, there will be board meetings not to talk about formal bureaucracy, but to actually talk about how we are going to teach these people effectively this semester.

Wiktor Żołnowski: We will start studying again. All of us will. All of us will because it will be much more fun and much more effective. Yeah. Okay.

Structuring knowledge in organizations
Wiktor Żołnowski: Interesting knowledge sharing. There is knowledge that people are exchanging, teachers who want to teach others, but organizations need to pass the knowledge across the organization, across to the next generations of employees, still to just assure the survival of the organization and the growing of the organization as well. Do you have any advice on how to structure the knowledge, how to pass the knowledge to new employees, for example, in the organization or across the organization?

Patrycja Obara: I think it would be a summary of many things that we have already said, my advice and your advice. First of all, make sure you don’t serve the knowledge in portions which are impossible to consume. This is what often happens in organizations, that the onboarding training lasts, for example, the whole week, and it’s five days, eight hours a day, of learning the theory of how different departments and projects operate. And I have no idea about it whatsoever. And with every following day, I understand less because I get all the abbreviations, all the procedures, all the processes, and I don’t understand. How about making one onboarding training once a week and making it last two hours and not eight? And maybe prolong the onboarding process to three months instead of one week, making sure, what you said before, that the trainee has an opportunity to apply the knowledge so that they understand why they needed it and questions begin to arise. It’s a kind of Montessori model. When questions arise, you want more knowledge. So then they come to you after one week and they say, “Okay, I’m ready for more. I want to understand how the customs department works.” I would focus on that. Another thing is to start with “why,” not with “what.” Listen to Simon Sinek and his advice. And this is also a thing we talked about today already. Start with your audience. Figure out what they need and give them an answer to that need. For example, if you’re teaching new knowledge in an organization, find practical applications of this knowledge. Show the trainee how it’s going to make their work easier, for example, because then they have a motivation to learn.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s great advice. I’m pretty sure that I will recommend or even make it mandatory for our HR department to watch this episode only for those pieces of advice to actually improve our onboarding process and all the communication processes that we have. Hear that. That’s really great.

Creating a learning-friendly environment
Wiktor Żołnowski: Let’s talk a little bit about the psychological aspects of learning or maybe the environmental aspects as well. What environments do people need to have to be able to learn new things? Because I know that very oppressive environments, for example, or a situation that people are stressed, are limiting their capabilities of learning. So how to increase people’s capability of learning?

Patrycja Obara: This well-being aspect that you mentioned, of course, it’s very important. And also, it’s a foundation of learning. If I were to think of something else, I would say walls. People need walls. People learn better when they have walls than when they are working in an open space because they are less distracted by conversations, by faces, by movement, and they can focus. But also, they get privacy, and privacy allows us to experiment without feeling any social pressure. Because whenever we are around people, even if we like them, feel comfortable with them, we want to belong, we want to be a part of this group. So we will not make such risky choices, experiments, as we will if we are alone. And when you have these walls, let your employees arrange them, I mean, decorate them in any way they like. Make them feel at home. Let them have little pictures or tokens that remind them who they are, what they are good at, and what they like because this will focus their attention on these things and grow their curiosity to learn more. Also, I think a very, very important thing is to create opportunities for your employees to hold informal meetings. This is where the magic happens. And when you talk about an interaction you’ve had with a client during an informal meeting, and it’s juicy, right, with all the juicy details, with all the taboo words and everything else, it’s a story that people will remember and learn from. And if they have a similar client in the future, they will remember, “Ah, you had this experience. He did it this way, so maybe I will do something similar. Or maybe for him, it didn’t work, so maybe I will do it in a different way.” But if you presented the same case study in a formal situation, you would get rid of the juicy details, you would get rid of the taboo words and everything like that. You would probably skip some important elements of this knowledge, real-life elements of this knowledge, which would make it less relatable. So informal meetings, definitely a wonderful learning opportunity.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So actually, in the past, when people were still working from the offices, that thing happened usually over coffee, the coffee machine, the kitchen, or somewhere. And now it’s harder. So yesterday when we spoke with you about remote work, we also mentioned that these informal conversations are very, very important. And this is a part where our culture is built, but not necessarily only there and shouldn’t be built only there. But also the things that you are mentioning, the informal communication, is very important for knowledge sharing as well. Yes. So at least once upon a time, the team should, or the entire company, should meet in the office or somewhere and work together and have a lot of informal meetings. So whenever people are saying that they are not coming to the office because there are so many informal, irrelevant conversations, no, those conversations are very, very relevant for business.

Patrycja Obara: Yes. And I think it’s also very important for leaders to remember and understand that when people talk over their coffee or they meet informally, it’s not wasting time. It’s not wasting corporate money. That’s a perfect investment of corporate money because this is how the team grows. And also I’m thinking of a new trend that I’m noticing these days when I do workshops in organizations. For a while, when the pandemic started, many workshops were held online. Companies were happy about it because they didn’t have to bring the trainer from another city; it was enough to send them a Zoom invitation. But now workshops have moved back to corporate buildings. And when people join me for the workshops, very often they say, when I ask them in the end what was the biggest value of the workshop for them, they say that the biggest value was that they could meet after two months, for example, and exchange their experience.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s crazy. Yeah, yeah.

Patrycja Obara: I feel like I don’t even have to be there. Of course, I do have to be there. I’m the facilitator of this.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Otherwise, they wouldn’t have come to the office. Yeah, yeah.

Patrycja Obara: And maybe I asked the right questions, I don’t know. But looking at the group learning from within itself, this is the magic. I really like this part of the process.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That’s something that I also took part in a few online workshops in the past, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s so different from the regular workshop.” And actually, I learned a fraction of the things that I usually learned during the workshop. And as you said, in most cases, when there is a good trainer or workshop leader, facilitator, they are able to facilitate the workshop in a way that people are actually learning from each other and not from them, from the expert. He’s just or she is just there to support them. However, there is one exception to online trainings, I think. When it comes to public speaking, online trainings, apart from in-person trainings, I think today are essential because they give you the real experience because most presentations in business are done online these days. So when you also learn them online, you get the actual experience of people not listening to you.

Assessing remote communication skills
Wiktor Żołnowski: So there’s another topic that I would like to discuss with you that you already mentioned: online. Because the entire industry right now, since the pandemic started, everyone is hiring people remotely or assessing people remotely. Those people in most cases will be working remotely or partially remotely, hybrid. And just a few companies have decided to come back to the office for the full time. So the thing that I was always missing in the recruiting processes in various organizations that I spoke to people from, from various companies, was that actually nobody ever has been assessing the ability to work remotely. And I believe that this is a skill that people need to develop: how to work effectively but also how to communicate effectively. So maybe you have some ideas on how to assess a person’s communication skills. I mean online communication skills, not just make a conversation like this.

Patrycja Obara: The first thing that comes to my mind: do an online interview. Yeah, but you know, that’s just an interview. And this communication is not only verbal, but usually there’s mail, Slack, whatever. First of all, I would think, do an online group interview, because then you see how willing the person is to participate, to discuss with other people in this difficult situation. When you talk about other means of communication like Slack and written forms, maybe it’s too simple what I’m going to say, but if you want to test a skill, bring it into the recruitment process. Get the people to do something on Slack. Design a communication process that is necessary as one of the stages of recruitment where people have to, I don’t know, communicate, interact, find out some information from someone else, find a person responsible for something, get a piece of knowledge, figure out who has it, and do it all in a preferable form of communication and see how effective they will be. It’s the only thing that gives you any real kind of information about their actual skills. Because if you just ask them, “Are you good with online communication?” “Yeah, of course I am. I’ve been doing it.” But if you want to see if they’re really good at it, or maybe I don’t like this idea of checking if somebody is good at something. I like the idea of observing them and seeing in which aspect they need your assistance. And then as a leader, you can decide, “Okay, can I give this person assistance in this area and still hire them? Or maybe their need of assistance is so extensive for the moment that we don’t have the right resources?” Because I think this is the point of recruitment, right? To see if you can meet somehow.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Coachability and the ability of people to learn new skills is also very important. If people are coachable, it’s much easier to actually train them in anything. That should be assessed as well. Okay.

The future of communication with AI
Wiktor Żołnowski: Let’s try to talk a bit about your prediction in terms of communication and knowledge sharing in the nearest future, especially in the context of the things that are changing right now. Obviously, it’s artificial intelligence and how companies, how people are starting to use it. For example, a wide range of content that is created right now is created with the support of AI. I mean the written content, but also some videos, etc., are created by AI. How do you see the future of it? What will change, actually?

Patrycja Obara: Of course, AI will take over the world. Yeah. We will be just sources of energy. Too inefficient, but yeah. No, I’m kidding. I’m rather optimistic about AI. I heard yesterday, I participated in a discussion, that we don’t really have AI yet. What we have now is machine learning, right? But let’s assume it is already here, but we don’t know it. I’m rather optimistic about it because it brings a new kind of balance, I think, to the table. Capitalism has taught us that we can keep taking. And we take and we take, and we want to take more, we want to get more. But with AI, there is this slight change that whenever you take something from it, you have to give something to it. You have to share a bit of your knowledge if you want to get accurate knowledge from AI. So it’s a kind of exchange, interaction, which is a nice shift. Of course, there is this controversy about who owns your knowledge after you’ve given it away, but that’s not the topic for today’s conversation, right? What I’m thinking is that AI as a producer of knowledge will shift our attention to some aspects which I think are crucial and overlooked right now. It will shift our attention from memorizing things, memorizing facts, memorizing information, to critically judging things, facts, information. Because storing facts doesn’t have to happen in your head, but understanding what they mean, this is a crucial skill. And so far, it’s been like this: that you can always check something on Wikipedia; you don’t have to remember it anymore. But now you have AI, which will look through the entire internet for you and make a summary. But it’s up to you to see: Is it real knowledge, or is it popular conviction? Is it facts, or is it memes? What does it mean? What conclusions can I draw from it? How does it correspond with everything else that I’ve known so far? So I think it shifts our attention to things which only people can do: critical judgment, emotional judgment, interaction, flow of information, cognitive loops, how the information evolves when I send it to you and then you resend it back to me. So I’m optimistic about it because I think it can actually, paradoxically, make us more human.

Wiktor Żołnowski: That is also, from the few conversations that we already had about AI, not only here but in our studio as well, I also am very optimistic, and for the same reason. I see the potential that AI will free a lot of our time and energy that we are wasting on things that could be done by AI. Yeah. And thanks to that, we will be able to focus more and more on people, on other human beings. We will start noticing other people because even content that we’re consuming, we will see, “Okay, it’s AI-generated,” so we start looking for content generated by people. We start looking for interaction with people, with real people, and that may make us more human, as you said. Yeah.

Patrycja Obara: And I think we are now delighted with what AI produces because it’s so quick, so simple, and so effective, right? When it writes our marketing content, it’s perfectly written. But when you generate three, five, 10, 30 content pieces with AI, you begin to see one thing: that they are generated, but they are also generic. That they are all built in a similar way. And you become bored, and you think, “Okay, what can I add to it? How can I humanize it?” You have music experience, so I think you will know what I’m talking about. But at first, there was this big invention: you can produce drums on a computer, and they are perfectly in line, they are perfectly even. Each beat is exactly where it should be. After a couple of years, they introduced a function called “humanize.” So move this beat a little bit forward and that beat a little bit back because this is what makes it interesting. Perfection is super boring.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yeah. Like, for example, try to listen to a Chopin concert. Okay, this is the same song that is played by multiple artists. And there is a jury and there is a crowd that are judging which artist performed it better. Yes. It’s not mechanical. It’s just about emotion, about things that people are adding to the notes that are there. So yeah, that’s a great example.

Where to find Patrycja Obara
Wiktor Żołnowski: You already started talking about music, so let’s try to wrap up the things that we talked about before and come back to you and your work, your passion, your music. So if our listeners or viewers would like to find your music somehow and listen to your music, to your art, or also to your podcast, please tell us where to find you on the internet.

Patrycja Obara: You can find me on most podcast platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you like to listen to your podcasts. And my music is also there. So Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, wherever you want to listen to it. And also, feel invited to my YouTube channel. On my YouTube channel, you will not listen to my podcast, but you will see my music videos, which is a work in progress because I’m planning to release 12 of them. The third one will be there in October, and then every month there should be another one if I succeed with the plan. My channels are easy to find when you just type “Patrycja Obara” into the search field.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure to have you here. It was a great conversation, it was great communication and knowledge exchange that we made today. I hope that people who are watching it, listening to it, also feel it that way. So once again, thank you very much. I wish you luck on your presentation today. I hope I’ll be there to see the entire story of knowledge sharing in the working environment. Thank you very much.

Pragmatic Talks is delivered to you by Pragmatic Coders, the first choice software development partner for startup founders. Be sure to catch all new episodes. Subscribe to our YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast channels. And if you are thinking about building your own startup or struggling with product development, contact us and find out what we can do together.