The Psychology Behind High-Stakes Decisions: Lessons from the CIA with Mike Mears, Part 2

[00:00:00] Mike Lander: Welcome back, Mike. Delighted you could rejoin us for the second part of your fascinating insights into the world of spies and the parallels with the world of sales. For those people that missed last week's episode, we were talking to Mike Mears, who obviously was the senior person in the CIA about the parallels between leadership.
In CIA and in other leadership positions and sales. So without further ado, we'll let Mike get into more about sales and spying. My name's Mike Lambda and you are listening to hile, the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations, and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders.
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So let's move on to the whole, how this relates to sales as part two. But first, let's just touch on when you worked with Jack Welsh, who was in my book, an unbelievable leader as a, a very successful leader, what did you learn from working in and around Jack Welsh? About leadership and about getting people to do the right thing and to feel positive and to feel like they're making a difference.
[00:01:18] Mike Mears: I'll give you three quick stories. You know his, his style, I don't think his style would apply today. I just was with a guy that worked for GE for 20 years this morning, and we're talking about how you're cutting out the bottom 10%. There's a lot of fear. There was a lot of fear when I worked there for my nine years.
Not a lot, but there was some, but I'll tell you, he did so many things right. Now here's one. Where it's extremely difficult for a CEO to be able to communicate with people because if you broadcast, if you tell them, they won't listen. This is one of the basics. I had a CIA director once, we were walking down a hall and he said, Mike, why aren't they being more innovative?
And I knew he was talking about the employees 'cause that was his big, but then he paused and he said, I've told him in my first five speeches, I wanted more creativity. So how do you answer a CIA director asking a question like it's both naive and brilliant at the same time, right? So if you talk from the top, you're not gonna get your message across one-way, transmissions.
But what Welch would do, I remember this, he would fly into Crotonville, which is GE Training Center, and we pull all the classes together in this one mammoth amphitheater like room. Welcher go in there and he would talk for five minutes on what was most important, not an hour. He is not lecturing. It's five minutes of what's really important and people are alert that first five minutes.
Then, then he would ask somebody a question and he would start a dialogue. He would go on some of these things up to four hours, just discussion. And one time I walked back with him to a helicopter and he turned to me. He said, Mike, you know, it's amazing. I learned more about GE in my hour or two here than I do back at the headquarters in a month.
And that's something. So it's that give and take. The other thing I want to go back to something you brought early in earlier is you get involving the customer into this decision making process. There was a apocryphal story. Gee, I don't know if it's true or not, but it was Jack Welch was with his retiring union chief back in the day.
Those were pretty abrupt collisions that could occur between union and management, but it all went really well until right at the end. The union chief stood up. And he really gave an impassioned talk and he, he talked about how much GE meant to him, how GE was able to pay. He was able to pay to get his kids through college so they wouldn't have to be blue collar workers.
And he talked about the caliber of the employees people he worked with. He loved that. But then he, right at the end, he looked at Welch and he said, Mr. Welch, see these hands, you had use of these hands for 34 years? He said, if only you'd asked, you could have had my brain too. So I think, I mean, if that's true or not, it doesn't matter.
It's a great story, but I think that's why he launched something called Workout, which is I call Quick Wins. Which is just, you pull groups together, get the boss outta the room and let them debate on issues, rank 'em, and just report out to the boss when the boss comes back. It's a great way to get around some of these little cognitive biases that we have.
And then he started. He copied Six Sigma from Larry Bosy at Allied. And what that involves is you've got to get the employees involved in the process improvement for two reasons. One, they know the process better, and number two, they're bought in to the solution. Right. So I'm convinced it's back. Right.
Back to what you were talking about that, that was a big lesson I carried from him is for goodness sakes, let go of your ego and get the other person involved in and
[00:04:47] Mike Lander: stop making assumptions. Oh yeah. And it definitely applies in sales. You know, with sales teams, we make assumptions all the time about why someone appears to be the best performer, why someone is behind quota, why they appear to be not working hard enough, or why they're not closing quickly enough, or we make all sorts of assumptions.
And I think the important thing is for any sales leader is. To stop making the assumption 'cause it's a shortcut as an assumption. And to go and ask and have a discussion doesn't mean being soft means just having a discussion, finding out what's really going on.
[00:05:18] Mike Mears: Some of this stuff's hardwired, sort of hardwired traits.
Like I couldn't, I have a tough time. And even though I did recruiting, well that's probably more of an indicator, my empathy, low empathy level rather than, but, but I have a hard time with sales. Like I could not pick up the phone and make a cold call. So I think some of this is certainly you have attributes or traits that help you in the sales field, but I think some of this can be learned and what you were just talking about where you can learn to ask more questions, you can learn to put breaks on yourself.
To keep a discussion going and to pull out more information and gets into something. You had said this before the the session, but we were talking about the curious salesperson.
[00:06:02] Mike Lander: Yeah. So let's come back to that in a second. Let's come back to curiosity, because I wanna just go back to something that you mentioned in the kind of the first half, which was about safety, trust, clarity and challenge.
In a sales situation, I think this is quite fundamental. Just talk to me about how a sales person might start to do that with a customer. Because ultimately, there was a book called The Challenge of Sale many, many years ago by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, very famous book In sales. It was called The Challenge of Sale to Challenge a Client.
But of course, in order to challenge someone, as you say, you have to go through safety, trust, clarity, and then challenge. Talk to me about how you would think You're not in sales, Mike, but think about the parallel world. How might a salesperson do that with a prospect, and why is it important to go through those four different layers?
What did you find about creating safety first? Then you build trust, then clarity before you challenge.
[00:06:57] Mike Mears: Why was that so important? You know, on one level, when I was working with this best boss stuff and trying to cluster these things into that, there's kind of this natural flow that obviously. Somebody's not gonna trust you if they don't feel safe with you.
And it's really hard to have a meeting of the minds and clarity if they don't both trust you and feel safe. So there's, there's a logical progression I think, to this. And you know, again, I, I probably feel more empathy or sorrow, I suppose, for people that have very short sales cycles in some way that they don't get to really.
Meet and quote, develop that custom. To me, that makes it harder.
[00:07:34] Mike Lander: But if you've got time, if you've got like six months to close this deal, how do you even, just some basic things, Mike. How do you build safety? How do you build trust? What is clarity?
[00:07:45] Mike Mears: Even before that, let me just go and say there's a golden rule for leadership, sales, and recruiting agents, which is first do no harm, and I flew out.
I heard about an experiment out at UCLA and as soon as I heard about this, it's called social pain and it's just a fancy word. Uh, neuroscientists have for extreme social, extreme emotional pain. Okay? And soon as I heard about this, I said, I, I gotta go see this. So I flew out there and met with a Matthew Lieberman, who was the doctor doing this.
And, and what they did is they had people inside an MRI machine, and they're watching a little cartoon of three stick figures throwing a ball. And the subject in the MRI scan is, has got a lever. So every time they get the ball, they throw it to the other party. Right? So Lieberman lets this little cartoon that they're looking at, go for a couple minutes, let the brain settle.
It's amazing how much the brain's working, even when it's doing nothing, you know? Communicating with different parts of the brain. And then he pushes a button unbeknownst to the subject and the cartoon changes where these two figures start throwing the ball back and forth and it cut out. The third party, you the subject, and you look at what happens to the human brain.
I wouldn't even tell you this, that I hadn't really seen this. It's anytime you inflict social pain, inadvertently or on purpose, the brain of the other person that goes absolutely haywire. And this happened to be a test on what happens when people feel something's unfair. So if you, and things they looked at were like a sense of status, what if I said something inadvertently in a staff meeting and I insulted you and demeaned you in some way as you perceive it, not as I perceive it?
Or what if I do something unfair? Or what if I create uncertainty in your life, for example? And a CEO and say, Hey, let's do a reorganization. You talking about social pain across the board on every autonomy, fairness, certainty, all that stuff just goes, so what happens? It's the amygdala flare up and, but it's more than that.
It's actually entire brain flares up. And this is what really shocked me was if you've inadvertently done that to someone, the memory of social pain is more intensely held than physical pain. That's why Mike, do you remember that girl in high school that betrayed you? You hold on. You still remember she's, but you sprained your ankle playing soccer and it's hard to retrieve that memory.
Exactly. So it, it's actually, it's held in memory longer and it is a more intense, so for goodness sake, step one is for whatever you do, take a close look at your approach with the customer and everything you say to the customer and just make sure you haven't crossed that line. And then try to get a little feedback as you're talking to the customer to find out, you know, if you did hit a trip wire.
So that's step one. And then on, on the psychological safety, it's just one, making sure you don't inflict social pain. And then number two, smiling. Selling hello in the morning. I mean, this is really a B, C stuff, but again, sometimes we forget in the Russia business. You know, we'll jump right in. Even chitchat is crucial to the human brain.
They've done marriage studies, you know, on, on that. Marital studies at the Gottman Institute. And then this, the safety thing is I would have anybody who's in sales make a list of what are the free. Currencies. Free gifts that they can give to a client. Hence tips, information that they can share about the industry.
Kudos for the company having done something, you make out a list and you can find, you got like. Probably 30 to 35 items on the list, and that's gonna be the key every time you meet that customer is make sure you're giving gifts. It's the consistency of your action to do that, that
[00:11:39] Mike Lander: triggers reciprocity in your prospect.
Yeah,
[00:11:41] Mike Mears: that's it. Absolutely. And then this law holds in psychology, it holds in anthropology, both. So definitely works in sales. So, and even asking people about their interests. You know, my wife points this out to me, talk about, hey, their background or talk about their kids, or any of that. That shows a legitimate interest.
That you have. And it's a way we kind of transmit our empathy levels to other people. And when you ask those type of questions, you know, everything, it could be priorities in business or what worries you or personal life, things like that. Anytime you're, you're open and asking those questions, it shows that you've got a level of concern and have some degree of having their best interest at heart.
That's what we're looking for when we're dealing with other people.
[00:12:29] Mike Lander: If you look at trust, there's a very good piece of work done, I think in the eighties, nineties, I think, by a guy called Meister, called the Trust Equation, and Meister Andy's colleagues worked out that trust equals credibility plus.
Reliability plus professional intimacy, either professional relationship divided by self-interest, IE the higher self. Yeah. The higher your self-interest is, the lower the trust becomes with your counterparty.
[00:12:56] Mike Mears: That's interesting.
[00:12:57] Mike Lander: Does that kind of resonate and is there anything else a salesperson should do to build trust?
It does
[00:13:02] Mike Mears: now because on the manipulative side of the recruiting process, you would never want the. The prospective agent know that this is all in basically in your self-interest or your country self-interest that you're doing this I, that would destroy everything on the front end. So I love that equation.
I think that's really powerful.
[00:13:21] Mike Lander: And was there anything else you can add to, for a salesperson listening about building trust? Is there any other things that you picked up? About how you build trust with someone.
[00:13:30] Mike Mears: One thing that the CIA psychologist pounded at me on a lot is, is the fact that consistency.
So if you inadvertently break trust, and we've all heard this, but if you inadvertently break trust, you've done a huge amount of damage. Lemme tell a quick story on myself. I'm not very proud of this, but. It just shows you how easy it is for this to do this. So I'm walking through CIA headquarters, uh, the old headquarters building.
You've seen the big shield on the floor, the CI, and I was crossing that with the stars on the wall. And I run into an employee of mine, mark, who had worked for me. 10 years before, and I said, mark, I haven't seen you in Asia. How have you been? And he just lit up and he said, oh, I'm doing great. He said, I've just got my coaching certificate at Georgetown University.
And I said, great, mark. 'cause I know you are always interested in coaching and I'm so happy for you. And he had this lean back and he had this perplexed look on his face. And I said, what's wrong? And he said. Oh, I thought you hated coaching. And I said, why? And he said, oh, I, I came to your office 10 years ago and told you, I said there were some opportunities to take coaching training, and I told you about it, and you grimaced.
Isn't that something? So I remember him coming in saying that 10 years, Mike. 10 years. 10 years. He remembered that he remembers that. And I was under pressure from my boss, who's real detail oriented person on timelines of doing this project. And, and Mark was in the part, part of the project that was farthest behind.
So the only thing I can think of was I show my emotions through facial expressions. So. I'm thinking to myself, oh God, if I let him go to training and do this extra thing, we're gonna fall even farther behind. But again, it goes back to that social pain. Remember, it embeds absolutely stronger and more lasting than physical pain.
So I know Mark is right. Because he would, rem memories are fallible, but he remembered the grimace, and so it's just my, you know, again, this thing on building trust, you really gotta be careful and legitimate and authentic as you're going through this process of reciprocity and building, and building and building that trust.
[00:15:56] Mike Lander: So just for also something that I picked up literally this week. Which I hadn't really thought about. As with a communications coach, I give quite a lot of keynotes. So I have a communications coach that helps me get 1% better every time I do it. And he said something really interesting, I thought about facial expression, which talks to exactly what you've just mentioned.
So as a salesperson, you, you're building trust. You have to be 100% authentic if your face tells a different story to the words that are coming out of your mouth. You cannot fake it. It's not possible because the other person will see through it. So be really careful about what you say and how your face looks at the time that you say it, because it's these things we're unaware of.
Right?
[00:16:41] Mike Mears: We're totally unaware of some of this. Let me pile on and add to what you just said. That 1% struck a Another big thing like in leadership training, leadership development. What we find, this is a hidden secret, is we don't do well with people actually applying it in the workplace. So I've been working on that problem.
What is it about leadership training that, so I finally centered on this problem of habit and you mentioned, you know, there was a book called Atomic Secrets. You know that that pink says recently was saying, you can improve, but remember, we're captive to our brain and you can improve, but do it 1% per day.
And I think that is a beautiful message to tell anybody that's doing sales and wants to up their game and any anywhere to be, uh, open-minded, see where your weaknesses are, or see where can you push your strengths even more. Especially important, and that 1% a day, it just means to keep on trying, trying, trying.
This is what happens. I, I found this out with my psychologist when it's a miracle of the brain, but let's say you've done something for the first time, three times, five times, 10 times, whatever. It varies. Your brain says, wait a minute. Why am I using the logical part of the brain and chewing up all this glucose?
And somehow magically it writes a software packet that throws it into the automatic brain. So. This is where it gets interesting. Now, let's say you've got your habit and you're unthinking, and most of our day, a lot of, not most, but a large part of our day is habitual. You see sitting in meetings and listening people.
But let's say you decide to change that habit. Our silly brain thinks, wait a minute, if this habit has been safe, I haven't died as a result of this. So now somebody wants to change it, I better warn 'em. And so they send, it, sends out an error message. It's a little tiny ping. Sometimes you notice it, sometimes you don't, but, ooh.
And is simply a way to hold habit in place. And that's why it's so hard to break habit is our brain. You know, it's the the crazy survival instinct rearing its head and saying, wait a minute, don't change this. But if you do this, if a salesperson would just look at 1% a day, I'm gonna do this tomorrow, the next day I'm gonna do this.
And then use some kind of visual display, you know. Stick it on calendar or on the to-do list to give them an added boost. I think that's the way you really get better and reach excellence at something.
[00:19:10] Mike Lander: The fact that you've brought up that automatic brain, I think is really important. Definitely. Yeah, and it's what I would, I, again, the shortcut I think is we say.
Oh, we've got good instincts. What I think we're actually saying is the automatic brain is programmed to do things in a certain way, and we've forgotten why we do it in a certain way, but we know historically we get good results. When we do it that way. It's automatic, whereas someone new to the game doesn't know.
So you learn from people. You look at their automatic habits and then you pick up on those.
[00:19:39] Mike Mears: And I had one more thought, 'cause you asked me a question a while back on kind of spying and sales and so forth. But one thing I discovered, this is interesting, the vision part of the brain, you know, the ctal lobe and all that takes up more space than all the other senses combined was about three months ago, they did a study and they discovered that if you see something and all of your other senses say no, and the site says yes.
That almost all the time you'll go with sight. Ah, isn't that interesting? So that's number one. Keep that in mind. We'll come back to that one. Number two is the brain is actually a story machine. So you and I see Juanita go up to a copier. And as we come up, she runs off and you and I find the copier jammed.
The brain wants certainty backed at the book, but the brain wants certainty. So I have to make up a story to explain this to my brain of what just happened. And so I make up the story of, well, Juanita is really a bad citizen. I mean, she's just selfish and she just bolted and fled the scene. You being a nicer person, you say, oh, isn't she wonderful?
She just ran off to get help. So the visualization part of the brain is called the predictive part of the brain. Looking into the future, it does it, and it also explains things backward, but the predictive part is a vision machine. So when you put the visioning part of the brain together with the vision part, you got like China on the map of Asia in terms of topography, right?
So what does that mean for messaging? If you're in sales, well. You would obviously on the visual side, visually display data. For example, show a graph, don't go talk in numbers, but you know, show a graph, use pictures, use videos. Absolutely. And just don't forget the importance of this vision part. And then now let's get the visioning.
What does it mean you should do? Well, you should use metaphors, right? Analogies, yeah. Pictures of the brain. You should tell stories. And this is crucial. Again, going back to the question you'd asked is, if I were in sales, I would certainly have stories that I could least that are meaningful to that other person, and they could be self-deprecating, never be the hero of your own story, or it could be lessons learned, it might be helpful and obviously envy you to having your combo coach because.
They would tell me to, you know, shorten up those stories too and make 'em, make 'em a little pier. And, but all of this, think about visions and visioning and how you can use that to weave into getting that message across
[00:22:10] Mike Lander: and being memorable is, is what that speaks to. Yeah, absolutely. As a salesperson, you want to be memorable.
So they come back to you, Mike. It's, we could carry on for another half an hour quite happily, but we won't. We might come back, however, on another episode. So just pull together for me. As a kind of final thought, if you draw all this together, what lessons learned do you have for any kind of sales leader, sales director looking to motivate a sales team and drive growth and hit their own targets?
What have you learned through your lessons of looking at great leaders? Being in the CIA, what is it about lessons learned for sales directors looking to motivate a sales team?
[00:22:48] Mike Mears: You know, the way I look at the world, I've got, you've got ad admin, administration and then, uh, let's overlap that with management.
There's another function, but then you've got leadership, right? And something I've recently discovered this, that we all have this, it's called a tangibility bias, which means. We will tend to gravitate to managing and administration 'cause that's hard stuff. And then we will tend to forget the soft stuff, the people stuff.
And you see this where CEOs, instead of trying to work on culture, the people issue, they'll reorganize or you look at your own to-do list. Nowhere on your to-do list as it say. Tell Mary that she did a super job on that last sales call. It's all administrative stuff and because that's the tangibility bias.
So one thing I would tell the, you know, you gotta force yourself into the leadership column and you can do it with just being introspective for about 20 minutes a week. And it could be Saturday morning with a cup of coffee or tea and think through, okay, what am I gonna do on the people side? Think about this.
What if I gave, what praise would I give? Each employee. And what if, I don't know, if I don't know what to praise Tom for, just ask him, what Tom, what were you proudest of accomplishing you this week? You'll be surprised and then you can praise him for it. The second thing I would do, and this is so simple too, is make sure a lot of us will have these staff meetings once a week or maybe.
Hopefully not daily, but sometimes with that, there are status check meetings, right? That one person says, well, today I did this and I'm calling these people, and next person says, I'm calling these people, I'm doing this, and I did this yesterday, and those can be good occasionally. But the trouble is you're burning up a lot of other people's times that don't have an immediate interest in my, so Adobe started something called check-ins.
And a check-in is not a, it's not a performance review, it's not a feedback session. All it is, it's gotta be under five minutes, and it's just a brief one-on-one between the boss and the, let's say, salesperson. And it is informal. The more formal it is, the less power you have. Getting into the brain. It's quite informal and it literally is a check-in.
Think of a sales manager going like a butterfly from one to the other, one to the other, one to the other. What it's doing, it's lowering all that angst that we have internally of as, again, as the boss mad at me and all of that crazy stuff we've got going on. The reason it works so well is in the group sessions.
I have a big fear, which I call, I don't wanna look foolish in front of my boss. I think that's deep in all of us, but we don't admit it, but it's there. So we're not gonna speak out. Now. We've just got a little friendly session that's under five minutes and we know it happens once a week. And the boss can say, you know, are you stuck on anything?
Is there anything I can help you with? And, uh, if you want, I'll, I can shoot you a list of, uh. Really interesting questions, but what, what you would do, you open it up, it's a little chitchat. How's Timmy's doing in soccer? Then you'd ask this one question and you start the dialogue, what you're doing. It's the difference between a rocket and a missile where Jack Welch inherited a performance management system that GE developed, which was.
We're gonna tell you how you're doing once a year, right? Yes. You're talking about uncertainty, right? He recognized that and so he said he abolished it my second year at ge, and it was like a anvil off my shoulders of worry, and he said, what I want is I want the bosses to. Just talk to their employees more.
And that's what the check-in is, just a way to force you to do that. And I'll send you a, some sheets on people can use to use this. It's great for sales managers, but all you're doing is you're doing a check-in slight midcourse correction and over time. And isn't that better than waiting for a year to try to get the correction like this?
And by the way, John Clea, of course, you know who John Clea is, tells a story, and I'll shoot this to you. Favorite nursery story he claims when he is five years old is Gordon, the Rocket, uh, Gordon, the missile. And he says, okay, so Gordon, the missile is, uh, flying. And Gordon says, Hey, how am I doing since the mess?
And, and the ground says, Hey Gordon, you're off. Go turned left. So Gordon turns left and, and it keeps going. You know, he is going through this thing. Gordon's calling back and, okay, Gordon, you're a foot. Go foot. Down and turn this way. And he just keeps going through the story. And then finally Gordon hits the target.
And so at the end of the story, he says, and then Mr. Criticism stands up and says, look how many mistakes that Gordon made during that process. Yeah. And then he, you know, he sits back and he says, but it doesn't matter, he hit the target and think of, so if you're a sales manager, think about that check ins every week and you're learning much more than you otherwise would in meetings, I promise you.
So I'll send some stuff for you. That you could
[00:27:46] Mike Lander: post. Mike, it's been amazing. Thanks ever so much for joining me on Higg, all the B2B sales for podcast. Where can people find out more about you? Mike mes.com
[00:27:54] Mike Mears: and I can shoot you some links on that as well. So the book, uh, to be a little pushy is called Certainty, but I've got huge amounts of free stuff that I give out on that.
Mike meers.com site,
[00:28:05] Mike Lander: uh,
[00:28:05] Mike Mears: people can download. And thank you. You've taught me a lot thinking
[00:28:09] Mike Lander: about sales and yeah, it's been a pleasure. It, it is made both our brains think in different ways, which is always a good thing. Mike, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks ever so much. Thank you, sir. Thanks for listening to hile, the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host Mike Lambda.
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