Whether we’re interacting with colleagues, clients, friends, family members or strangers, conversations are the way most of us build — or break — relationships. And yet we don’t often think deeply about how to approach this type of casual communication. Alison Wood Brooks, associate professor at Harvard Business School, has studied what it takes to create a great conversation and offers research-backed tips for improving your skills. Brooks is the author of the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
I like to think of myself as a pretty good conversationalist. After all, a big part of my job is interviewing experts for this show and HBR events, and I spend the rest of my time talking to academics and executives about how to shape their ideas into articles. Away from work, you’ll also find me chatting up people pretty regularly, family, friends, the guy at the gym, the stranger I just met at a party.
Still, when it comes to conversational skills, there’s always room for improvement, and I’ll admit that even I come away from some interactions unsure of myself. Did I talk too much, ask questions of everyone, share too candidly? No matter the topic, setting, or partner, conversations can be tricky, and yet, navigating them well, from water cooler to boardroom, school drop-off to dinner outing, can yield both professional and personal benefits. So, whether you’re a practiced talker or more socially awkward, it pays to better understand how conversations work and how to get better at them.
Our guest today is here to help. Alison Wood Brooks is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and she wrote the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Alison, welcome.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. How you doing?
ALISON BEARD: So, we all know people who are just fabulous, fluid conversationalists and others who just aren’t that good. How much of that is due to just an extroverted, confident, warm personality or the way you were brought up in a talkative family or just having lots of interesting things to say versus being a more shy or self-conscious person, growing up in a less chatty environment, or just not having that much to contribute to the conversation?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think at the heart of your question is how much of our conversational ability is from nature versus nurture? When we think about things like personality, extroversion, and introversion, or even other parts of individual differences in the ways that our brains work – if you’re on the autism spectrum, if you have ADHD, all of it matters in terms of who you are and how your brain works, but ultimately, what really matters is how are you feeling when you’re talking to other people, and how are those things influencing your behaviors, your little micro-decisions that you make at every moment of every conversation?
Some introverts are fabulous conversationalists. Some extroverts are terrible. What really matters is what are you thinking about? How are you feeling, and how is it affecting your choices as your conversations unfold?
ALISON BEARD: So, it seems like you’re saying that anyone can learn to be a good conversationalist?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Absolutely. You can learn to be a better conversationalist. You can also learn and change your preferences around conversation over the trajectory of your life and even from one moment to the next.
ALISON BEARD: So, you mentioned micro-decisions. You also say in the book that conversations are a unique coordination challenge each time. So, explain what you mean by those two things. Why are they so complicated and complex?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s so funny. We learn to have conversations starting around the age of one and a half, when we’re toddlers. So, by the time we get to adulthood, it feels like conversation is one of those things that’s second nature and that we should be great at it and that it should be easy and that it’s this task we’re doing all the time.
But when you start to look under the hood of what’s going on in people’s brains when they’re talking to each other and what about all of these little choices that we’re making at every moment of every conversation, when you look under the hood, conversation is so much more complex than it first appears. In fact, it’s sort of a miracle that humans learn to have dialogue, to take turns speaking and listening with each other in pursuit of goals like information exchange and connection and fun.
And so, I call it a coordination game because you’re coordinating hundreds of thousands of little decisions together with another human mind that you don’t have control over, and those coordination choices are hard.
ALISON BEARD: Why is it so important to think about the context and purpose of a conversation before getting into it, before you start making those decisions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What it means to have a good conversation or to be a good conversationalist depends so much on both the context, the who, what, where, when, why, how of each individual interaction, but also the purposes. So, every conversation, every person involved has their own set of needs and desires, sincere needs and desires. Sometimes we want to learn from each other. Sometimes we want to keep secrets.
Sometimes we want to persuade someone else, and sometimes we don’t want to be persuaded by them. And so, these needs and desires, these purposes profoundly shape the meaning of what it even means to have a good conversation. And every human has their own set of purposes, their own set of goals in every interaction.
So, in the book, I work really, really hard to have principles that are helpful guides to having good conversations regardless of the context, right? We can’t actually script what it means to have good a conversation. You can’t memorize lines. You never know what your partner’s going to say. There’s so much uncertainty around conversation, but in the book, we talk about these principles that can be applied and helpful across all conversational contexts, whether it’s work, non-work, and as we move fluidly from one context to the next.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. So, let’s dig into those principles. You call it TALK, T-A-L-K, which stands for topic, asking, levity, and kindness, and I want to address each of those. So, first, what do we need to know about choosing and moving between topics?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So, I think the topics part of the framework is the one that I continue to sort of ruminate about the most personally. At every moment of every conversation, everyone involved is making little micro-choices that help to steer topics. So, it’s not like you’re just starting a conversation, and you’re like, “Oh, we’re going to talk about our hiring decision.” Actually, every time you speak, you sort of have your hand on the steering wheel of the topical flow, and you’re choosing, “Should we stay on this current topic? Should we drift gently in another direction? Should we jump cut to something else entirely? Should we end the conversation?” All of these moves steer the trajectory of the conversation itself. They determine what the content of the conversation is and therefore what you’re actually able to accomplish.
ALISON BEARD: So, what’s an exercise that I might do to get better at picking topics and switching between them?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So, I teach a course at Harvard called TALK, and there are a number of exercises that I have my students do to practice. To start with, a great exercise is to try topic prep. Some people do this naturally, and other people are like, “What are you talking about? That’s a terrible idea. It’s going to make my conversation awful and rigid and scripted,” but don’t knock it until you try it. In our research, we find that people who spend even 30 seconds thinking ahead about possible topics they could talk about leads to more enjoyable, less anxiety-ridden, smoother conversations.
So, you can push yourself to try and come up with a list of two to three bullet points of ideas of things that you might talk about, and not just with work colleagues for a 20 or 30 minute meeting, but also for people you’re really close to. When you call your mom or your best friend, think ahead about what they’re going to find fun to talk about or important. What’s been going on in their life that you should ask them about? What did you see in the world that reminded you of them? Maybe you’ll have the chance to bring that up and make them feel really loved and seen.
So, topic prep helps in all of these ways. In the experience of topic prep, the fears about it making the conversation seem scripted or rigid turn out to not be true. It actually usually makes the conversation feel more exciting and more smooth.
Another idea and another exercise I have my students do is about topic switching once the conversation is underway. Whether you’ve done topic prep or not, once you’re in the conversation, you’re making these choices on the fly about, “Well, should we stay on this topic or switch to something else?” On average, people tend to make the mistake of staying too long on topics more than jumping around too quickly. It’s more common that you have a lull and you start saying things you’ve already said or having long pauses because, usually, because people are polite, and they feel weird switching to a new topic, but in those moments, it’s really important to be courageous and confident and switch to something else.
So, an exercise I have my students do is take a list of a lot of topics, maybe 10 or 12, and just challenge yourself to switch more frequently. Anytime it seems like your partner’s not interested or you haven’t landed on something that’s dazzlingly exciting or there’s … Even if you have landed on something exciting, push yourself to sort of switch more frequently than you naturally would and see how it goes. Most people are pleasantly surprised to learn that it just makes their conversation more exciting and more interesting and actually doesn’t feel as rude as you think it might in theory.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting because one of my tricks when I’m entering a group conversation is to figure out something that two people have in common and mention it, or even if I don’t know what they might have in common, just sort of give a quick backstory on one person and then the other so that they can find a topic to come together on. I sort of just now realized in talking to you is that that’s what I’m trying to do, help them choose a topic.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Totally. That’s such a nice service to the group, and we can do the same thing one-on-one essentially, right, especially … That was kind of the main thing that I did when I interviewed for all my jobs, right, in a job interview. I mean, everybody’s desperate for commonality and ease, and so, finding, landing on something, even something really insignificant that you have in common makes conversation feel so much easier and like you’re developing a really meaningful shared reality together.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Okay. That seems like a good transition to asking questions because that might be another way you can find commonalities. So, I think most of us know that this is a path to better communication and understanding, particularly in the workplace, but why do you think so many people still do tend to share more information than they solicit and talk more than they listen in conversations? Because that’s the worst conversationalist, right, the person who just talks at you and doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t engage you.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Listen, there’s a million ways to be a bad conversationalist, which is part of the challenge in becoming a better one, but certainly, talking too much about yourself is a very quick and common way that people fail. One reason that people under-ask questions is just that our brain, the human mind was built to be egocentric. We’re most familiar with our own perspective. We’re most interested in our own experience of the world. And so many people, because they’re so focused on their own perspective that they really forget to ask and realize, “Oh, I’m talking to another human mind that has had maybe even more experiences and have even more knowledge than I do, and I should be trying to pull that information out of them.” You just sort of forget that that’s even possible in the chaos of conversational flow.
Another reason is that even if you think to ask people questions, there are lots of barriers there too, right? We worry that by asking, it’ll make us look incompetent or too intrusive or that we’ll ask a question on a topic that they don’t actually want to talk about or is too sensitive. I mean, there’s all kinds of hesitations and worries that prevent us from asking questions, even when we ask, even when we think to do it.
ALISON BEARD: As you might imagine, I am the opposite, and very often, my husband will be in a conversation in a group setting. And he’ll say, “You really have to forgive her for asking so many questions. She’s a journalist.” But what does your research show about good types of questions to ask people?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So, let me tell you about a specific data set that I think is really illustrative of the power of question asking. We got our hands on this great data set of speed dates. It was about a thousand speed dates, four-minute conversations between strangers on heterosexual speed dates, and there’s all kinds of stuff you can study about their conversations, have this beautiful outcome of does the person want to go on another date with you or not at the end?
There’s a very strong and clear effect of question asking such that, for both men and women, asking more questions means that your partner’s more likely to want to go on a date with you, a second date with you, but when you look at that effect, when you dive in and look at the content of what people are asking about, you see that that effect is almost entirely driven by follow-up questions. Follow-up questions are such a superhero because they show that you’re listening to your partner and you care about their answer, and then you want to know more. And that’s what psychologists call responsiveness in action, right? You are actually listening to them. You actually care, and you actually want to know more.
So, follow-up questions are such a superhero. They help us get away from small talk. And it helps us share with each other. It helps you say, “Look, I really want to hear more from you on this. Don’t be afraid to share it with me.”
In a different data set, we looked at question asking in negotiations. So, this is a much more conflictual context compared to dating, where your incentives are very much aligned, right? It’s very cooperative. You have a lot to learn about each other. When you’re negotiating and you’re working through disagreement, you could feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t ask as much because they’re going to feel like I’m trying to learn information that I’m going to use to exploit them and use for my own gain, right?” It’s more competitive, but even there, even in negotiations, we find that people who ask more questions are, on average, better liked by their counterpart, and they learn more information that helps them identify creative solutions and value creating solutions and helps them claim more value in the negotiation.
And this was particularly true for open-ended questions. So, closed questions, of course, have a sort of predetermined set of answers like yes, no. Open-ended questions are more like, “What do you think about cell phones?” or, “What did you have for breakfast this morning? What’s on your mind?” They beg for more information, more open sharing from your partner, and in fact, in conversation, by asking an open-ended question, people respond with more than twice the word count when you ask them an open question compared to a closed one.
And then we could look at the wording of these questions that negotiators ask each other, and what we saw was really stunning, very helpful in practice. People who asked open-ended questions that start with the word “what” seem to strike the right balance between relational outcomes like likability, trust, as well as informational outcomes, so eliciting more information that’s helpful in the negotiation. So, “what” questions strike that good balance compared to, let’s say, a “why” question. So, I say, “Why did you have cereal for breakfast? Why don’t you like cell phones?” which can feel more accusatory and more threatening.
ALISON BEARD: Hmm. Interesting. So, how might I practice being a better asker of questions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Great. This’ll feel very good to you, Alison. It’s an exercise called never-ending follow-ups. I feel like you’re doing it to me right now, which is awesome. It’s an exercise I ask my students to do where, one, it’s in a pair. One person is put in this role of asker. The other person is answerer, and the asker’s job is to ask a follow-up question every time they speak. So, you can make it feel smooth and natural. You can disclose things about yourself, but before you turn the conversational microphone back over to your partner, you end with a follow-up question based on something they just shared with you.
This is the most extreme version of question asking, right? If you’re asking a question every time you talk, that’s a lot of questions. A lot of times, my students are like, “Oh my God. That’s crazy. It’s going to be too much.” In the experience of it, it feels amazing. And when I ask my students at the end, they describe it with words like “fun,” “amazing,” “authentic,” “learning,” “connective,” because there’s so much information and sharing that comes from asking so many follow-up questions.
ALISON BEARD: And it’s also fewer decisions in a way because you’re not thinking about what you need to say or how you should respond. You’re just purely focused on the other person.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. I think a lot of people put pressure on themselves to be knowledgeable about things, like, “Oh, I need to have something smart or funny or surprising to say,” but questions are so beautiful as an improvisational tool because you don’t need to know anything about anything if you know that you can always just ask more questions.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. The L is for levity. Does this mean telling jokes or finding ways to make the conversation lighter with smiles or laughter or self-deprecation? What are we talking about?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, there are very obvious killers of conversation like anger and hostility, conflict. But the quieter killer of conversation is actually boredom and disengagement. Even if one person becomes disinterested or bored or wants to leave, it’s very hard to continue a conversation a fun and productive way, and it happens all the time, right? It’s very, very common, more common, probably, than anger and hostility.
So, levity is the antidote for boredom and disengagement. It includes any moment or any move that infuses lightness into the conversation. And that can come through humor and laughter, but also through unfunny things like compliments or topic switching, which is … I hope for people who think they’re not funny and never will be, I hope they find that very empowering.
People tend to think of these moves like compliments and laughter and jokes as this sort of extra, sparkly bonus thing that sometimes happens in conversation. When you start to study the psychology of status, hierarchies, and connection, you realize it’s not actually this extra bonus. It’s a core determinant of how people relate to each other and who earns status and maintains it. In our research, we found that even one mildly funny joke, like kind of a bad joke, confers so much status to the person who tried. Even when the joke flops, that person is seen as much more confident than a person who’s sort of afraid to make a joke like that. If the joke succeeds, that person is much more likely to be voted as the leader of the group. And so, in terms of status striving, which is the basis of all humanity and how people relate to each other, it seems like levity actually is a very important factor in how we relate to each other and how we hold each other’s attention.
ALISON BEARD: So, it sounds like this is as important in work settings and serious professional conversations as it is in social settings.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think it might be even more important at work. This is just a hypothesis, but because … We have this data, this Gallup data with millions of people. They ask them all kinds of survey questions, but one of them is how often did you smile and laugh yesterday? And you see this cliff, this very dramatic drop off in people’s answers to that question around age 23. And what happens at age 23? You’ve entered the workforce. At age 22, 20-
ALISON BEARD: That’s depressing.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Very depressing. At age 22, 23, you’re going to work. The norms of so many workplaces and office conversations, work related conversations seem to dictate that you’re no longer allowed to express levity in conversation. In some ways, people think of it as unprofessional, and you could make the argument that that’s a huge loss, right? If we are aiming for psychological safety, trust, playfulness, creativity, discovering solutions, innovation, making good decisions, all of those goals that we cherish in the workplace, you actually can’t achieve them very well without levity.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I feel like I’ve always been blessed to have bosses who are very good at that. Are there ways to practice it?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You are blessed to have had bosses that are good at it. So lucky. And colleagues too, right, when we think of our work besties and the people we love working with, often it’s the people who make us feel engaged and happy and excited.
How can we practice it? Going back to this idea of topic switching, topic switching is a really easily accessible way to infuse more levity in your conversations. Pushing yourself to switch topics more frequently and not let conversations get boring I think is a really good thing to practice and push yourself to do.
I’m not convinced as a scientist and as a teacher that I can make people funnier. Of all conversational skills, I think it’s the one that I have the most skepticism that is very, very easily learnable, but I do think that there’s a lot to learn from the funny people in our lives. And most importantly, what we’ve learned in our research is people who end up being viewed as funny, it doesn’t mean that’s what they’re trying to do. They actually don’t go through the world thinking, “I want to be funny.” Often, their mindset and their goal is, “How do I make this conversation fun? How do I make this situation fun?” And sometimes that’s as simple as making sure that you yourself are smiling and laughing. A lot of people put pressure on themselves to be funny and I think that’s the wrong goal.
ALISON BEARD: And finally, kindness, what exactly do you mean by that, and why is it critical?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh my goodness. In a way, topics, asking, and levity are all working their way up to the most important maxim of the talk framework, which is kindness. They are all helping us make these micro-decisions, these coordination decisions more effectively, but ultimately, the question is in service of what? Are you becoming a better conversationalist to pursue your own goals and needs, or are you doing it – are you thinking about other people’s goals and needs and sort of more collective pursuits?
People who push themselves to move beyond natural human egocentrism and really focus on their partner’s needs are much more well positioned to actually fulfill those needs, and being able to do that at work and in our relationships outside of work is the key to having great relationships and great conversations.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, and then how do you show kindness in a conversation?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Listening lives within kindness, and I think one thing we’ve uncovered in our research that was surprising to me is that we have decades and decades of work on active listening, right? And it’s mostly nonverbal stuff like eye contact and smiling, nodding, trunk lean, leaning towards your partner while they’re talking. Those are all great, but they also don’t necessarily align with what’s going on inside your mind. The human mind was built to wander, and it wanders a lot while we’re talking to other people. And the whole time, you can be smiling and nodding while you’re actually thinking about your grocery list or that thing that they said earlier in the conversation. So, it’s not a high fidelity signal of what’s actually going on.
A way to become an expert listener is actually showing that you’ve put in the hard work to listen to someone through your words, so repeating back what you’ve heard from someone, trying to paraphrase or reframe it in some way, calling back to things that people, your partner said earlier in the conversation or even earlier in your relationship, and, of course, as we talked about earlier, follow-up questions, which you can’t ask if you weren’t listening in the first place.
In my class, I ask my students to do a number of exercises that nudge them to repeat and affirm what their partner has said. So, one of them, they’ll go around in a group, and you could do this at a work group or with your family, where you do sequential validation. So, let’s say they’re going around, and everybody’s sharing one of their favorite songs or musical artists. So, I start by saying, “I love the song Yesterday by the Beatles. I used to listen to it with my mom. I just think it’s the most beautiful song in the world.” And then you, Alison, go next, and you say, “Oh, I love that you listen to that song. The Beatles were so amazing, and I know a lot of people think it’s the best song ever written. It’s funny that you say that because one of my favorites is Blackbird by the Beatles,” right? So, then you keep going around the circle, but you have to affirm the person who came before you before you share your own thing.
ALISON BEARD: See, you preempted me. I was going to say, “Yes. I love that song too, and it was one of my favorite Carpool Karaoke episodes was Paul McCartney with James Corden.”
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: There was a Paul McCartney Carpool Karaoke episode?
ALISON BEARD: Yes.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You know what I’m going to do right after this. I’m looking it up right after we’re done talking. What an epic karaoke partner in the car.
So, in this exercise, you just practice affirming your partner before you share your own thing. It seems so simple and obvious, but in the practice of our lives, we just forget to do it. And the validation process of saying, “Oh, it makes sense that you would love that. It’s so epic that Paul McCartney did a Carpool Karaoke with James Corden,” the practice of doing that becomes even more important when you’ve landed on things that are not so straightforward and easy. So, when you get into a realm where you’re disagreeing with each other, it’s even more important to say, “It totally makes sense that you feel strongly about immigration.
Tell me more about your family’s history with immigration and living in Miami,” or whatever before you go on to say, “For a second, I wonder if we could think together about how immigration can be harmful too.” So, instead though, most people just move immediately to the hard thing. We fixate on the point of disagreement and forget to do that first half part where we validate and affirm our conversation partners, and that’s a very dangerous omission.
ALISON BEARD: Is the conversational calculus different for people in leadership positions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Absolutely. There’s a chapter in the book about group conversation. So, every group has a sort of inherent status hierarchy. Leaders sometimes have high status, sometimes have high power or control over resources. Sometimes they have high power and low status, where they’re not actually very well-liked or respected, but certainly, their sort of official position in a status hierarchy in an organization and within the sort of social status hierarchy matters tremendously.
When any of us find ourselves in high status positions, we should be thinking about how we can help the lower status group members feel safe and feel invited and feel valued. One really simple thing they can do to start is try to make more equitable eye contact with people during group conversations. In our research, what we have found is humans naturally look at the highest status members of a group while a conversation unfolds. And so, even just a little bit more effort to try and catch the eyes of more people in the group makes them feel like they’re not invisible, like they’re included. And when they do have something valuable to say, they are more likely to actually speak up and say it. And it’s much more gentle than putting someone on the spot, like saying, “Hey, Alison. You’ve been quiet. What do you have to add here,” at a moment when you don’t actually have something to say. So, eye gaze can be incredibly powerful.
ALISON BEARD: Do we need to think about all four of these points for every single conversation that we have throughout the day?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That would be so much to think about, Alison. Right? It’s too much. It’s too much. In a way, this four part framework is very ambitious. I’m trying to capture everything about this very complicated task of conversation in just four things. I think it does a pretty great job. The first two topics in asking focus on informational exchange. The last two, levity and kindness, focus on relational outcomes, but the idea of trying to hold all of them in your head at once is overwhelming, especially because that’s part of what makes conversation hard is there’s already a lot going on. We have to pay attention to our partner and to ourselves and read the room and make all these choices relentlessly while we’re together.
I think it can be really helpful to revisit each of them every so often and remind yourself about the major takeaways. “Oh, yeah. Maybe I should, tomorrow, try and prep topics more than I usually do,” or, “Ooh, in this next conversation, I’m going to push myself to ask more follow-up questions,” or, “Ooh, looking back on that meeting we had yesterday, I think, actually, the mistake we made is there weren’t enough moments of levity.”
Using the framework to identify your own strengths and weaknesses can be helpful. You, as a journalist, are an amazing question asker, but if you really search your soul and your life, reflecting on, “If I have wobbles or weaknesses, where is it?” Maybe it lives somewhere in levity. Maybe it lives somewhere in kindness. Maybe it’s in topic switching. Maybe you get so excited about topics that you forget to switch to new ones. And so, using this framework to identify those areas of strength and weakness can be incredibly empowering, I think.
ALISON BEARD: Alison, thank you so much for being with me today.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. It’s always so fun.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Alison Wood Brooks, associate professor at Harvard Business School and author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. And we have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes now, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts, or search HBR at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
