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Welcome to the Leadership Buzz with Lloyd Buzz Buzzell.
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Buzz is a retired Air Force colonel who served for 37 years, rising from enlisted airman to colonel.
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Much of that career was spent in nuclear operations, from missile alert duty to strategic command and control, where trust, discipline, relationships, and values were not abstract leadership ideas.
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They shaped how people performed when the mission mattered.
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Today, Buzz is an International Coaching Federation credentialed coach and disc practitioner.
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He brings those military lessons into conversations for leaders who want to grow in self-awareness and better align their behavior with their values.
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Each episode features one book, one idea, one story, and three coaching questions to help you reflect on your leadership.
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Work hard.
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Tell the truth.
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Here's Buzz.
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Welcome back to Leadership Buzz.
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Hey, one of the toughest things we do as leaders is to have a conversation with someone who's upset or just convinced we just don't understand.
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I spent much of my Air Force career in nuclear operations and operations.
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The work required clear standards and people who could make good decisions under pressure.
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But even in that kind of environment, people were still people.
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They had concerns, they could feel overlooked, and they could disagree with the decision.
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And when the pressure was high, simply giving someone more facts didn't always solve the problem.
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Our instinct, I think, as leaders is often we explain.
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We want to clarify what happened, then give our side, give that rationale.
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I have certainly done that from time to time.
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But when somebody's being emotional or very passionate, more exploitation usually does not help at first.
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It can make them feel as if we're trying to talk them out of what they're experiencing.
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Just think about a time someone came to you very, very frustrated about something.
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Maybe it was a team member who felt overlooked, or a colleague who did not agree with the decision, or just someone who believed their concerns had not been taken seriously.
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They may not need you to fix it immediately.
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They may need first you to know that they actually see what this actually looks like from where they sit.
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That doesn't mean you agree with them or that you lower your standards or reverse a decision just because someone is unhappy.
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Hey, maybe it's it sounds like you feel like nobody asked you for your input, or it seems like this decision caught you off guard.
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Those statements can change a conversation.
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We want to move things forward.
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We have deadlines, decisions, and responsibilities.
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But people are far more likely to work through a hard issue when they believe they have heard been heard first.
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Today's book has a lot to teach us about that.
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TJ, introduce this week's book.
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Today Buzz is talking about Never Split the Difference by former FDI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.
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One idea from Chapter Three really carries into leadership and coaching.
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Tactical empathy.
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It does not mean you agree with someone or take on their problem as your own.
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It means you work hard enough to understand what their experience may feel like, then put that understanding into words.
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Voss calls that a label.
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It sounds like you feel overlooked.
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It seems like this decision put you in a tough spot.
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For a leader, that can lower the temperature before you ever get to solving the problem.
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For a coach, it helps a client hear what may be underneath the words they are saying.
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Here's Buzz with Never Split the Difference and why good leadership starts by helping people feel seen.
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Welcome to episode 35 of the Leadership Buzz.
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I appreciate you being here.
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Let's jump right into it.
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The chapter that stood out to me in Never Split the Difference is chapter three, and that's on tactical empathy.
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That phrase can sound a little strange at first, and empathy is usually thought of as being kind or agreeing with someone or compassionate.
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But that is not what Chris Voss means here, the author.
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Tactical empathy is that deliberate effort to understand somebody else's point of view and let them know you understand it.
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You don't have to agree with them.
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You don't have to give away your position, or you don't have to lower your standards as we mentioned before, but you do have to take seriously what the situation may look like and feel like from where they sit.
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I spent
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much of my Air Force career in Nuke Ops.
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I served in missile operations and later spent time in the Strategic Command Global Operations Center in Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska.
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Those environments demanded clarity and attention to detail all the time.
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There were procedures for a reason and there were standards that could not be ignored.
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But even in a very structured environment, you're still dealing with people, and those people get tired, they get frustrated, and they may not understand why a decision was made, whether that was by me or other leadership or another agency that we're dealing with.
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People who may have information you don't have.
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And when pressure gets high, it's easy for some leader just to focus only on the task.
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I guarantee you that people don't get out of bed in the morning and say, Hey, how can we make Buzz mad today?
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Now there are some people probably that disagree with you all the time, and you probably feel that way.
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But you can't be so determined to get the mission done that you forget to understand what's happening with that person right in front of you.
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I learned that because I could explain a decision, that didn't mean the other person felt heard.
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And if they don't feel heard, they were very much likely to truly hear me or not to truly hear me.
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That's where tactical empathy comes in.
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That's what Voss talks about and makes this really important point in his book.
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I mean, imagine yourself in your counterpart situation, not your version of that situation, but their situation.
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What pressures are they under?
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You know, what are they worried about and what do they stand to lose?
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You know, what might they believe that you don't understand?
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Now that takes a lot of humility, and it did in the military also, because really what I noticed was that most of us walk into a hard conversation already thinking about what we need to say.
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Like I'd go to meetings and we'd already have been in an argument already.
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We we have our facts, we know why our decision makes sense.
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But what Voss says is he says the reasons someone will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than the reasons they will.
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I think that's true in leadership too.
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So a leader may be offering a good plan, a reasonable change or an opportunity that makes perfect sense.
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But that other person may be thinking, This is gonna create more work for me, or nobody asked me about it.
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And if something goes wrong, I'm gonna have to be able to pay for it.
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Or maybe they're just not saying anything out loud, or just thinking, Wow, that sounds really negative, and they may just push back.
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They may sit quietly in a meeting and then complain afterwards.
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And with many of our folks where we worked, there was people that had done the job for a long time, and so many things that got repeated or tried again had already been tried in the past.
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And sometimes that's a flag when somebody just says, Hey, we've already done that and we've tried that.
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Well, things change, times change, technology changes, and sometimes we need to change.
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And if we only respond to those words, we may really miss the real barrier.
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And that's what Vonce Voss wants us to look at.
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What is getting in the way?
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Buzz, how does a leader do that without making the conversation feel forced or like they are using a technique on someone?
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I think that's an important distinction, and I think it starts with genuine curiosity.
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And you can't really fake this very well, you need to be genuine.
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People know when you're just waiting for them to stop talking, so you can make your point.
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Tactical empathy means you want to understand before you try to persuade.
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I saw this in the military, I saw it at very many several meetings, and even though in nuclear operations where you're following checklists, there was a lot of gray area that needed to be worked out to be able to accomplish ops and plans.
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And I we had our intercontinental ballistic missile code change, and to be able to get those plans done, many times you'd have to negotiate things of how many people need to be on alert, who had to go on alert, where those people were going to be placed.
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And that took a lot of jockeying sometimes with other organizations.
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One of those tools Voss gives us is called labeling, and this is a pretty good technique as I read through it in the book, and something I probably could have done a lot better in the military in these types of situations.
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A label is simply putting words to what you think the other person may be experiencing.
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You might say, It sounds like you had this decision, it was already made before anyone asked for your input.
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Or it seems like you
are concerned your team is going to carry out most of the burden here.
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Or it sounds like you do not believe we understand what this will require from you.
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Those have been great type of things to ask when we are trying to ask other organizations to support us in these type of cryptographic code change operations out in the missile field that were just vital and that everybody knew was important, but needed a lot of collaboration to get done.
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Notice what those statements don't say.
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They do not say, you are right, I will change the decision, or you should not feel this way.
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They simply acknowledge what might be true for the other person.
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There was a person that worked for me once, and every meeting I when I looked over there, he was shaking his head.
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It was just the worst type of thing I could have in the meeting.
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So eventually I just haven't stopped coming to meetings because the other team would just get so wound up and and mad because they didn't really even think that we were looking at their side of the story anytime.
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And after you do label that, as Voss says in the book, take a pause.
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And that pause matters.
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Do not rush in to explain yourself and don't soften the label by adding but and do not immediately start defending the plan.
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That other person needs some room to respond.
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And they might just come out and go, yes, exactly.
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Or they may correct you and say, no, that's not what I was thinking, or that's not the way I look see it.
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Either way, you're gonna learn something.
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That would be very important in any type of meeting when you're trying to negotiate or arrange things.
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I think another idea I found valuable was to list the worst things the other party might say about you.
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And that's what Voss talks about.
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That could be pretty uncomfortable.
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Maybe they think you're not listening, maybe they think you are pushing your own agenda.
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So in the operations, we had maintenance and we had security forces and support.
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And sometimes, you know, the maintenance people would think the operations people were just doing it and focused only on how operations were affected and not considering how much work they were doing in maintenance to be able to support us and make things go the correct way, and being outside in the element and the hard weather.
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And maybe they just think that you don't care and the result that the people who have have to carry it all out, just like I was talking about with our maintenance folks who did such a great job and fantastic job in the missile field for nuclear operations.
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Instead of avoiding those possibilities, you could name them.
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You may think we haven't listened to you very well, or it may feel like we are asking you to do more without understanding what the impact is for your organization.
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Or it may just seem like I already made up my mind and that's what we're gonna do, and we could care less about your organization.
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That may or can diffuse a situation because people want to be appreciated and understood, and leaders want to be able to support and take care of their people.
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So if they don't think that you care about their organization or care whether they're gonna be out longer in the missile field, or that they have to wait on you or your operators, say in our situation, the one I was describing, that may make a big difference.
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They want to know they matter, and in leadership, that does not mean every person gets their way, and that doesn't mean either organization always gets their way.
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It does mean every person deserves to be treated as someone whose perspective is worth understanding, and I think that's pretty important.
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I do remember a moment in the missile field when we had a disagreement with another organization during a code change.
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They were upset because our operations team would not let their group move forward and gain access to a facility.
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From their perspective, we were holding things up for no good reason.
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What they didn't understand was the paperwork was not in place to authorize that access.
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If we tried to force it, it would have delayed the entire day.
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And the missile field and nuclear ops, it was often a puzzle that had to fit together perfectly.
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You could be coordinating activity over an area the size of like Rhode Island.
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One piece out of place could affect a lot of people and a lot of work.
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At one point, one of the guys said to me, I have no idea why you guys do some of the things you do.
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To be honest, that made me pretty mad.
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I wanted to explain why they are wrong and that we're gonna do it my way anyway.
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But I took a breath and I said, It sounds like we just have not included you in this.
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That changed the conversation entirely.
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They were really not questioning whether we cared about the mission.
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They're frustrated because they just didn't understand what was happening or why from our perspective either.
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Once we talked our way through it and walked the dog on it, they understood the issue.
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We still had to follow the process, but now we were working together.
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We worked through it.
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That is tactical empathy.
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You don't have to agree with someone or change the standard, but sometimes you just have to make sure they know you understand why they're frustrated and what their point of view is so that you can articulate it and talk with each other over it.
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Remember, you're dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood.
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Buzz, before we go, what are three coaching questions leaders can use this week to practice tactical empathy?
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When someone brings you a problem this week, what can you do to understand their perspective before offering your solution?
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What emotion or concern might be underneath the words they are saying?
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And finally, what is one sentence you could use to name what you're hearing like it sounds like or it seems like?
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Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of The Leadership Buzz.
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Today, Buzz explored Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and the leadership value of tactical empathy.
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Strong leaders do not have to agree with every concern to make people feel heard.
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Sometimes the most important step is to slow down, listen closely, and name what may be underneath the words.
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Next time, Buzz will bring you another leadership book, one big idea, and three coaching questions to help you reflect on your leadership.
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Until then, keep learning, keep leading, and thanks for listening to the leadership buzz.
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Back to you, Buzz.
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Thanks for listening to the Leadership Buzz.
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If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe so you don't miss future conversations.
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And if you have a moment, leave a rating or review that helps other leaders discover the show.
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If these kinds of leadership questions resonate with you and you'd like to explore them more deeply, feel free to reach out to me.
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Coaching Conversations often start exactly this way.
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Until next time, work hard, coach.