With over 15 years of experience in marketing, Moni Oloyede has dedicated her career to solving complex business challenges by empowering professionals.
As the Founder and CEO of MO MarTech, Moni's mission is to equip clients with the skills they need to navigate any business issue, fostering self-sufficiency rather than reliance on external vendors.
Moni firmly believes that business challenges are rooted in five core areas: communication, problem solving, relationship building, teamwork, and leadership. These are the pillars of her educational approach to teach professionals how to diagnose business problems and find solutions for those problems.
Is There a HIPPO in the Room?
Many of us have encountered situations in corporate settings where one person dominates the conversation and tries to drive the outcomes based solely on their own feelings. These situations are often referred to as HIPPOs which stands for "highest-paid person's opinion".
The "HIPPO Syndrome" occurs when decision-making and communication become skewed in favor of the highest-ranking individual, regardless of other perspectives or data.
When it comes to the decision-making processes, these dominant personalities can greatly impact the outcome of important decisions within a company. They hold a lot of power, and their opinions often carry a lot of weight.
In addition to being influential, HIPPOs are also very strategic communicators. They know how to present their ideas in a way that gets people to react and believe that their opinion is the correct one. They are skilled at making their opinions seem obvious and logical, thus establishing them as the dominant opinion. This is why they can easily get their way in decision-making processes.
Spotting the HIPPO in real life can be challenging, but it is crucial for creating a more inclusive and effective work environment. It involves recognizing situations where one person's opinion consistently overrides others, leading to limited collaboration and stifled innovation. By identifying these instances, we can begin to address the issue and find ways to overcome it.
Tactics for Dealing with HIPPOs
When dealing with HIPPOs, it is important to be a good communicator yourself. You need to counter their strategic communication skills by being strategic in your own communication. It is easy to become reactive or defensive when faced with a forceful HIPPO, but it is crucial to stay composed and present your own ideas effectively.
The following four aspects of communication can help you successfully counter HIPPOs:
(i) Active Listening: It's crucial to understand what is emotionally driving the HIPPO's behavior and responses. Fear is a common emotional driver, so it's essential to identify if the HIPPO is motivated by fear of failure or looking foolish. Additionally, some HIPPOs may simply enjoy the status of being the dominant figure in the room. Others might just like to share their opinions without expecting agreement. By actively listening, you can gain valuable insights into their motivations and emotions.
(ii) Asking Questions: A truly effective conversation is one where you ask more questions than make statements. HIPPOs love to talk and share their opinions, so asking questions not only builds a better relationship but also helps you understand what drives them. Use questions to guide the conversation and keep it on track. By asking purposeful questions, you can control the direction of the conversation and steer it towards your desired outcomes.
(iii) Making Definitive Statements: When communicating with HIPPOs, try to make definitive statements backed by facts. Remove your emotions from the equation and present data and information as statements of fact. By doing so, you establish credibility and authority, as well as avoid potential conflicts that arise from subjective opinions. For example, instead of saying "I think this social media campaign was successful," present the data like "This social media campaign drove X amount of responses." By focusing on objective facts, you establish a stronger case and reduce the chance of pushback.
(iv) Creating a Narrative: It is important to come into the conversation with a narrative. Craft the story you want to present to the HIPPO and guide the conversation accordingly. By setting the tone and direction, you can influence the HIPPO's perceptions and create a favorable outcome. Steer the discussion towards the resolution or results you want to achieve.
Self-Reflection: Don't Become a HIPPO Yourself!
When it comes to avoiding dominance in conversations, one important step is to self-diagnose if you may be becoming the HIPPO. This requires some self-reflection because, as humans, many of the decisions we make are actually based on how we feel rather than logic or reason.
To avoid falling into the HIPPO trap, it's necessary to check ourselves and see if our decisions are driven by our emotions. One effective way to do this is by seeking the opinions and perspectives of others in our organization or team. By involving them in the decision-making process, we can prevent ourselves from relying solely on our own feelings and instead make more balanced and well-informed choices.
Another crucial aspect of avoiding dominance in conversations is striking a balance between being assertive and allowing others to contribute. It can be challenging, especially for executives or team leaders, to find this middle ground.
On one hand, if we are overly assertive, people may simply fall in line with our opinions because of our position, hindering open and diverse discussion. On the other hand, if we refrain from providing our input altogether, we risk appearing disinterested or allowing others to dominate the conversation. So, how can we strike the right balance?
For those who tend to be people pleasers, it's important to challenge yourself and not excessively worry about what others think. People are usually more resilient and less sensitive than we imagine. Speaking up and sharing your opinion is necessary to ensure your thoughts and ideas are heard.
On the other hand, some people may fear being seen as wrong or silly in front of others. To address this, it can be helpful to adopt a mindset that embraces failure. Taking Improv classes, for example, can teach you that it is OK to make mistakes and not be afraid of looking foolish.
By creating an environment that encourages open communication and accepts the possibility of failure, you can find the confidence to strike a balance between assertiveness and avoiding dominance.
Key Takeaway: Approach with Understanding
When dealing with difficult situations or challenging individuals, such as HIPPOs in corporate settings, it is essential to counter your initial instincts.
Rather than reacting defensively or engaging in a combative stance, take a breath and pause. Approach the situation with questions to understand where the other person is coming from. Stroke their ego when appropriate and make an effort to comprehend their perspective.
Engaging in a fight or argument is counterproductive and will only lead to a losing situation. By taking the time to listen and understand others' emotions and motivations, you can find common ground and communicate effectively.
It is crucial to remember that empathy and understanding are key in all communication scenarios.
- Hello everyone. We're about to start with episode 13 of the Cerebrations Podcast.
- After a short pause, we are resuming our quest to explore topics of leadership, coaching, or management that can help executives become greater performers.
- Today's topic has links to several other episodes I've published. It has a lot to do with effective communication and active listening. We'll be talking about corporate situations where someone dominates the conversation and tries to drive the outcomes based on their sole feelings. In the business lexicon, those folks are often called HIPPOs, which is short for highest paid person's opinion.
- I've invited for this conversation a business acquaintance with whom I've crossed paths on many marketing meetups. Her name is Moni Oloyede. She has been very vocal on her LinkedIn profile about this topic, so I thought that I'll invite her for a talk.
- Moni has a strong background in marketing analytics and is naturally very data-driven. However, she has also made a very conscious choice to develop some of the softer skills required to be a successful marketer.
- Today she'll be sharing with us how those skills can help overcome HIPPO situations. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to invite Moni Oloyede to the virtual stage.
- Hi, Moni. How are you?
- I'm well, how are you?
- I'm doing great. I'm so, so excited to have you on this podcast episode. I'm looking forward to our talk today, not only because I've known you professionally for years, and it's always great to have a reunion, but also because we recently realized that we share a lot of common interests and perspectives on what makes or breaks a successful marketing or sales leader. And the theme for today that I've picked is very much aligned with something that you have been very prolific about recently on your LinkedIn profile I've been following and I was so excited to see you do that because I've been thinking about a similar topic, so it was just very naturally for me to reach out to you and invite you. So thank you very much for accepting my invitation.
- Thank you for the invite, I'm honored to be here.
- Great, great. So I'm super excited to speak with you about HIPPOs today. And those are not the zoologic hippos. I have nothing against animals, and I really like hippos, but they just don't fit the theme of my podcast. What I want to talk about is a different breed of hippos, and those are the ones that we see in corporate boardrooms and on Zoom calls, and they go by another designation called the highest paid person's opinion. So I'm gonna ask you to share your experiences on that. But before we get started, just one thing that I always do, I want to point out to the bottom of the screen where I've just added a ticker and it suggests for everyone who's watching this or listening to this podcast to go to Cerebrations.info to find out more about you and to find what other interviews I have recorded so far. And I definitely recommend for people to visit the website because there's a lot of additional information there about any of the topics that we're discussing. So now that I've taken care of this item, I think we can get started with the actual conversation. So, I just wanted to ask your, kind of your perspective on, I mean, I call this podcast episode overcoming the HIPPO syndrome, and I'm trying to play here a little bit of, you know, certain words and, you know, capture people's attention to that. But it is a topic that I'm sure everyone who's been in corporate world and everyone who's had to deal with decision making in big or large or small corporations has probably had to experience a few times. Hopefully they were on the receiving side and they weren't on the actual giving side, but maybe they were. So, what is the HIPPO syndrome and how do we spot the HIPPO in real life?
- Absolutely. So as you said, HIPPO stands for highest paid person's opinion. And a distinction of the HIPPO is not just, you know, their status or how much money they make or maybe their title, but it's also that their opinion is based off their feeling or what they think. It kind of is just like, "I feel like doing this, so we're gonna do this." You know, that is also a good distinction of a HIPPO. It's just kind of based off their gut and how they feel. So the challenge is, you know, you have to come with data, you have to kind of speak to a HIPPO in a certain type of way. You have to communicate well, you have to be very strategic when dealing with a HIPPO.
- I see. So when you say that sometimes people just feel entitled to be the HIPPO, even if they may not necessarily have the highest ranking role or the, you know, highest income, highest salary in the company, what do you think drives their opinion? Is it just, you know, the fact that they are naturally more outwards, you know, focused? I mean, are they introverts, I'm sorry, outroverts and that's why they fall in the trap. Do you think that there is a connection between people being introverts and outroverts and, and between those that's are HIPPOs or not?
- You know, I think that's actually a little bit of a trap you may fall into. Now, HIPPOs tend to have dominant personalities. They tend to be outspoken, right? They wanna share their opinion, obviously, as being a key characteristic of them. But I wouldn't say it's an extrovert versus an introvert. I would more look at certain personality types. They tend to be subject matter experts. They think they are, right? That's why they wanna share their opinion all the time. They do like to have their voice heard, right? They're one of those types of people. They're not gonna sit in the corner for sure. They tend to be, they're intelligent people. So they're not, you know, they're not dumb. They come from an area where they, they know what they're talking about. It's just they think they have an expertise in one area, and that expertise translates to every other area of the business. Right? Okay. So this is your common kind of CEO head of sales where they're great at whatever that particular position is, but then they wanna insert their position in marketing or finance or something else, or that may not be their strongest area of expertise. So that's kind of more of the characteristic of a HIPPO. They are a subject matter expert in one area, and they think that that translates into multiple areas of the business.
- I see. Yeah. Okay. That's a very good way of putting it. So since you kind of mentioned a few examples of who may be a subject matter expert in one area, but may lack certain knowledge in another area, but still kind of translates in their head that they can do everything. Let's identify some of the typical people personas, you know, what do we typically see in the corporate world? I can think of you mentioned, I think CEO / founder, some of the senior execs, but what else?
- So yeah, people who, you know, sales guys, because they have to be dominant in their sales position. So they kind of naturally come up in this arena. They, again, it doesn't necessarily have to be title, it could just somebody who has a dominant personality type. So we know, you know, we've all come into encounter with people in the organization who just will talk your ear off and just spout their opinion about everything. Right. And that could be the janitor, really. It doesn't have to be somebody who's high level. So yeah, I mean, it is all type of personality types, but two things that they definitely are talkers, they like to share their opinion, and they definitely have a dominant personality. They can kind of suck the air outta the room for sure. They take over.
- Yeah. Yeah. And to add to that, I'll add also, and that's more in the situation. You mentioned sales a few times, so, and obviously the focus of this podcast is marketing and sales. So perfect example. You're a sales rep and you're working on a big account, and it's a make or break. I mean, this is, you know, if you are successful in closing this account, you're gonna be a hero because it's gonna bring in a lot of money. And, and obviously if you don't successfully close that account, it's gonna have bad repercussions on the company. It's not gonna be great for the company. So I see that how, by using the outcome of that deal as the collateral, as a sales rep, you can pretty much sales rep, you can pretty much go and ask for everything. You can basically say, "This is my opinion, this has to happen now. 'cause I need that. Otherwise the deal's not gonna go." Do you agree that this happens? I mean, do you have to have a collateral all the time to be a HIPPO or?
- It works for them, it works for them. I think the biggest thing that you're underlying is that HIPPOs are actually very strategic communicators. Right? They know what they're bringing to the table. They're strategic. They know how to make people move, right? They know how to phrase things in a way to get people to react. Right? So, you know, we may be jumping ahead, but one of the things that you need to encounter that is also be a good communicating yourself. Try not to be reactive, right? It's just like, you wanna be like, "No, or that's not it. Or I wanna say my opinion." And you have to kind of be a little bit more strategic when you're dealing with HIPPO because they're excellent at this. This is why they're a HIPPO and get their way.
- Yeah.
- They're good at sort of expressing their opinion and making that either seem like that's the correct opinion or that's the dominant opinion. They have this way of making it seem like it's obvious. How did everybody not see this? This is clearly, this is the way that we should go. So they're very strategic and very good at kind of establishing their opinion and making that the defacto opinion when it's really just what they think.
- Yeah. And actually, I don't wanna jump too much ahead, but I have a comment about the fact that you said that you have to be a good communicator to kind of also deal with that too, the fact that if you're on the other side. But before we kind of go into that topic, let me ask you, I'm just curious if you don't mind sharing, what was your defining moment, or what was the HIPPO moment in your career that really opened your eyes to that problem? I mean, I think all of us can kind of think of something happening in the back of our professional career.
- I spent a lot of time in the cybersecurity industry, in the marketing, and it's full of dominant personalities. And, you know, it was an aha. This was an a-ha moment on a lot of levels for me. It's actually kind of like changed the trajectory of my career. So, just to back up a little bit, I spent a lot of my formative years in marketing technology, marketing automation, kind of working in the background of marketing with, you know, the Eloqua and the HubSpots and the Marketos of the world. And I'm all about data. So it's like you just present data and that's all you have to do. And you prove your point. And you know, you're sold this to show 'em the reports and the dashboards, and you get to move along. And I quickly realized at this organization that that is not how it went at all. I had the data in hand. I had all the proof and all the dashboards and reports about, you know, where we should spend our money and what was working and what was not. And that did not work with this HIPPO. You know, it's like, we're gonna do this and that's just how it's gonna be. And what I realized on top of that was my HIPPO a-ha moment, like this wasn't, we're not actually making decisions based on data. We're making decisions based on how people feel.
- Yeah.
- I mean, that's my simplified version of it. To be fair to a HIPPO, like in this case, it was a CEO and CEOs know more things about the company than what I know, right? Like they have more insight into what's going on. So to be fair to, to this particular CEO, he, you know, probably was dealing with a bunch of other things in the business that, you know, I could, had wasn't privy to, but it was just like, you're sold that this, you just presented reports, and there you go. And I realized like, actually there's a lot more to business than that. You know, there are levels to this. There are many a reasons why people make decisions that they make in business. There are correlations, right? You know, if something's happening over this side of the business, then it affects this side of the business and so on and so forth. So these are interconnected parts. There are not individual parts. And really the key that sent me what I'm doing now is that the core of marketing is communication. You have to be able to communicate well. You have to be able to tell a story. You have to present the data well, just not show the data, right? To tell a story behind it. You have to listen very well. You have to understand people and where they're coming from, and then craft your responses around how they're going to accept that particular message, right? There's a lot that goes into it. So working at this organization, and I really realized like, man, I just can't sit in the corner and just come up with SalesForce dashboards. Like, that's really not how any of this works, really.
- So yeah, that was my a-ha moment at that company. It's like, you present this data and it's like, "Nope, that's not enough."
- Yeah. You know, to me, I mean, I'm sure I've experienced the HIPPO moments many times over before that. But the one thing that really sticks in my head is in one of my previous companies, my boss and I were very data-driven, very, I mean, we were creative as well, but we are also focused on the numbers and trying to justify what we're doing with the numbers. And if it doesn't make sense, then you know, we should look for other answers. Like, that's not the right answer. And we were in a meeting, big meeting, and after presenting for a long time, like the findings and everyone nodding their head and agreeing with everything we were presenting. And, and in general, we were in a position where people enjoyed hearing our insights from market research. And, you know, it wasn't like a hostile environment where no one believed what we were presenting or anything. Like in general, people believed that. But after presenting what we were presenting for like maybe an hour, everyone turns around and starts showing their gut feel and basically saying, and because of that, I think we should do X, Y, Z. And the whole, the whole meeting just went into a completely different direction. Then we went back to his office and he looked at me, he was like, "That's the perfect example of my gut feel is stronger than your data."
- Exactly. It's mean to go. It speaks to like just marketing in general. It's like when we are marketing to our, you know, our audience and our customers, we think, "Oh, you know, we're gonna show this product feature and this function and this thing, and it's all logical." And people buy based off gut emotion. They buy off how they feel.
- I think there's actually a book called, "My Gut Feel is Stronger Than Your Data." I haven't read it, but I think it's definitely something that we should research.
- Yeah.
- So you kind of start talking a little bit about what it takes. So I'm gonna ask you, what skills do you need to overcome a HIPPO situation?
- So now my entire marketing career is driven by learning, studying, and teaching communication, because that is the number one skill that you need to have. And you know, 70% of communication is listening, right? So it's so easy for us right now to instantly get defensive, right? That's your gut reaction is that, you know, you're either being attacked for something, so you have to defend yourself, or like someone's just trying to railroad you. So you have to like, defend the honor of whatever you're trying to present. And that's kind of the opposite of what you need to do because all that is gonna do is make the other person defensive. And now you're kind of in a battle and that's not where you wanna be, especially with a HIPPO, they're dominant. Yeah. So that's gonna be a losing battle. So, the first strategy is to listen, right? Like, you have to kind of listen, find out what is emotionally driving the HIPPO, right? Sometimes, you know, it's fear, you know, that's a lot, that's a big emotional driver for a lot of people. I'm scared we're gonna fail at this, or I'm scared, I'm gonna look like a fool. I'm scared this is gonna happen, right? Fear drives a lot of people's emotions and responses to things, right? Sometimes people just like, they like the status of it, you know what I mean? I like being the big dog, right? I like taking up a lot of oxygen in the room. I want people to know that I'm smart. I know what I'm talking about, you know, I'm the man or the woman or whoever. Like, that's a big thing, right? Some people just like to share their opinion. They're just talking, right? It's not even that you have to agree with them or whatever. They just like to talk, you know what I mean? It's like you have to sort of listen and then after that, ask questions, right? I'm, one of my biggest things with communication is, one of the things I say is like, you know you're having an effective communication when you are asking more questions than making statements, right? That's an effective conversation. So ask a lot of questions. It questions work beautifully with HIPPO because they love to talk, they love to share their opinion, right? Yeah. So you're building a relationship while you're also understanding what's driving the HIPPO to say that the things that they're saying. Another piece of advice that I would give with a HIPPO is try to make definitive statements with them. So if you are presenting data with them, it's not like, "I think this or I I feel this way." Try take you out of it. Take your emotions out of it and make the statements of statements of facts. It's like, you know, that social media campaign drove X amount of whatever responses. Here's the data, right? It's just statement of fact. It is what it is. So you take your feelings out of it, right?
- Right.
- Key advice idea.
- Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And you mentioned active listening, and that's definitely something I've been very much interested in, is actually was one of the previous episodes on this podcast series. Communication as a whole is also a big topic of this podcast. So again, just a little plug here for the podcast series, but going down to the ticker at the bottom of the screen, Cerebrations.info, if you, everyone who's listening or watching is interested in these topics, you'll find other episodes on similar topics there. But what I wanted to ask you, when it comes to communication, I personally at least have been successful, I believe in the past in terms of deflecting some of the people, you know, attack that I'm facing would be to kind of get ahead of the narrative. Like basically create the story before they start creating the story.
- Yes. Yep.
- Do you agree with that? And have you experienced?
- Absolutely. 100% I would in dealing with HIPPO at all, you always wanna come in with a narrative, right? What's the story that you wanna show and present intel, right? And try to navigate. The other thing reason why I really like the ask questions is because it actually puts you in control of the conversation, right? The questions you ask guide the conversation, right? So it come in as part of the narrative. Come in with a set of questions that you would ask the HIPPO, right? What do you want to know from them? It seems like since they're talking, they feel like they're in control, but you're really in control because you're guiding the conversation with the questions. And you can take them kind of wherever you want them to go, and you can actually lead them back to your results resolution wherever you wanna go to. I've done that plenty of times, right? By asking questions that guides me right back to kind of where I want to be at the end of the conversation.
- Okay, that's good to know. So we talked for some time how we are under, we're assuming that we are on the receiving end of a HIPPO situation and how to overcome that or how to make sure that the conversation is not being dominated only by one side. But I'm sure that most folks that are listening or watching this have also probably fallen in the trap of being the HIPPOs themselves. So my question is how do you avoid becoming a HIPPO? But I think there is a sub-question to that. I mean, how do you even self-diagnose that you may be becoming a HIPPO?
- Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a great question and I think that it requires some, you know, self-reflection, because again, we're humans, most of the things we do are based on how we feel, to be honest with you. We think we're so logical, we're not. It's based on how we feel. So we do have to kind of check ourselves and see if we are making decisions based on feeling and not based on logic or gut or coalition. So that's the other thing that I would say about how to check yourself and avoid the HIPPO. HIPPOs make decisions based on them and how they feel. They don't ask other people, right? So, you know, get with a group of people, you know, check your, you know, feelings, check, you know, your decisions with other people in the organization on your team. That's a great way to avoid being the HIPPO syndrome and not just being isolated on making decisions based on, you know, what you think or feel.
- Okay. Kind of like a related question to that. I mean, how do you also avoid not going in the extreme opposite of that? I mean, being so hesitant to be assertive in a way that's almost like letting everyone else dominate the conversation, but the not having an opinion or not wanting to present your opinion so that you don't come across as someone who's trying to force everyone into, especially, I think this may be a relevant example if I'm, let's say I'm an executive overseeing an entire department, then we are having a brainstorm. If I joined a brainstorm and started talking a lot, I'm sure a lot of people start falling in line with what I'm saying just because I'm there.
- Yep.
- And you know, a natural reaction could be, "Oh, okay, I'm just gonna keep quiet, sit in the corner and listen to them." But how do I strike the balance?
- Yeah. Well the first part is like, how do you kind of, you know, state your opinion and you know, to me that falls into two kind of personality types. One is a people pleaser, right? There's a lot of people pleasers. "I just don't wanna step on toes. I don't wanna be anybody to be mad at me. I don't wanna say anything wrong." Right? That is more of a challenge of self, of kind of like, you gotta, it's not not care what people think, but don't overly concern yourself with that, right? Like, people are not as sensitive as we think they are. I've definitely been in organizations where I'm not afraid to say my opinion. I've sometimes I do the opposite, where I should shut up and and speak. So I don't have that opinion. But when I, you know, as my career, throughout my career, I realized like people are not as sensitive as, they get over it. You know what I mean? Like, it's okay. So, you know, nothing's bad's gonna happen to you. I've definitely been in some kind of knockout, drag out kind of things and been fine with the person the next day. So it's okay. And then the second part of that is that the meagerness part is that, you know, you don't like to be, there's something in us that doesn't like to be seen as wrong or dumb or chastised. Like, it's just an innate thing in us where you wanna avoid kind of that "I look silly thing," embarrassment. We wanna avoid embarrassment at all costs, right? And that's a natural human thing. One of the things that I've done recently is I've taken some Improv classes, which in, you know, one of the big things in Improv is like, don't be afraid to fail. Failure is a part of Improv. Like you have to do it, right?
- Yeah.
- It's like, no safety net, just fall. And that mentality has kind of helped me a lot with that part of it. It's like, not wanting to be embarrassed, not wanting to look silly, just say it, you know, it's easier said than done. It takes a lot of practice. But if you create an environment where it's like, "It's okay," you know, a lot of this stuff is in our heads. Other people really don't care. So, you know, it's all in your head for the most part. Don't be afraid to be silly. So those are the two things I would say to that. As far as like really sort of avoiding the pontificate overstate that side of it. That's probably where my challenge was. I, you know, I consider myself an intelligent person. I consider myself to, like, I do the work, I do the research, I dig deep. So I think I have the answer to a lot of these things. And what I had to realize is that I only knew what I knew, right? There are more people in the room that have information that I don't have. They know things that I don't know. They see things from a different perspective than I see things, right? And those are all important too, as well. So, you know, I may be, you know, very good or I may be right from this particular angle, from this particular perspective in this particular scenario, but that doesn't mean that that translates across all parts of, you know, just say marketing or whatever the campaign or whatever strategy that we're trying to do. So I think that's another key takeaway from a lot of people, especially on a marketing team. Like it's a team for a reason. You have these other roles for a reason. So getting buy-in and getting consistency is huge. I don't wanna do analysis by paralysis, right? We don't wanna avoid that, but it's very important to make it a point to get other people's opinions. You may learn something that you didn't know before.
- Yeah. I think what you were saying about not being afraid to state something and not sounding stupid, being afraid that you may sound stupid at the moment. One thing that I've noticed that works for me is just to preface it as, "Hey, this is just an idea that's coming up to my mind right now on the spot. It's still rough. I don't know where it's gonna go. I'm just gonna say it here. Looking forward to your feedback guys," or you know, whatever it is. But just admit that you're not a hundred percent certain what you're saying, that you're just, you know, proposing an idea.
- That's a great point.
- And that way you're not coming across as the stupid people that never listens to anyone else.
- Absolutely. Great point. Excellent point. Just state your emotion in the moment. 100.
- Yeah. And then the other thing that you mentioned is, especially, you mentioned subject matter experts and you know, subject matter experts could be just each of us coming in from different functional background, but also in some industries you are in cybersecurity, I'm sure you had subject matter experts there. They're very technical specific to security. I come from healthcare technology. We have subject matter experts that have clinical background in specific areas. And one thing that I've noticed is that, I mean, as much as they try to sometimes kind of present their ideas from the point of view of the entire organization, if you're a company that has multiple products and those products kind of fall in several different business lines, there's no way as a subject matter expert, you're gonna understand the rest of what's going on because you're looking only at what is happening in your particular field. So you just have to admit that, you know, whatever statements you're making are only focused on that area. And if the conversation is going on the more strategic higher level, then maybe there is gonna be a different opinion.
- Absolutely.
- Anyway, so great conversation. I wanted to ask you, since you have been consulting for a while as a consultant, how do you prepare your clients for HIPPO situations? Is that something that you offer? You know, what do you do there?
- I mean, I would, most of the time I'm kind of dealing with HIPPO to be honest with you.
- So you have to diagnose first and then apply the medicine.
- Yeah, I'm managing up. Yeah. Not vice versa. But, you know, advice that I would kind of give is kind of what you said, Emil. It's kind of being open with your emotions. That's the other thing about communication is being vulnerable. Right? You know, kind of state what it is. People can only take you for what you give them, right? And the more honest you are, the more people are kind of willing to work with you. So being open with your strengths, your weaknesses, your faults, which you know, which you don't know is sort of the best way to move forward. I would also say, to just reiterate the point about communication is, empathy is huge in communication. I'm sure you know, this is big, right? One of the things that I had to learn throughout my career was that first of all, people weren't always attacking me, even though I responded like that, it's not a personal attack. And secondly, it's like I'm gonna get further understanding the other person than I am going being combative with them, right? So now my approach always is to come from a place of understanding and trying to, you know, know what, what is, try to get to, what's emotionally driving them. That's difficult. I'm not gonna act like that is easy, but that's my goal when I'm, you know, speaking to my clients or a HIPPO or anyone really, you know, I'm asking questions to get to the emotional driver 'cause once I understand what's emotionally driving you, whether that's fear, whether that's status, whether that's belonging, whether that's, you know, whatever it is, you know, then that the quicker that I can either help you get to where you're trying to go or communicate in a way that makes you understand me better too as well. So that's, you know, that's ultimately what I'm trying to do with my communication is sort of listen to get to know what is emotionally driving you.
- I see. Okay. I think a lot of the things that you just said in the last few minutes are great way to provide the key takeaways from this discussion. But if you were to leave the audience with one final thoughts, something that you'd like to summarize the conversation and for people to remember even a few months after they watched or listened to this, what would that be? What's your key takeaway?
- My key takeaway for HIPPOs is to kind of go at the opposite of your instinct. So if you're in a meeting with a HIPPO, just take a breath, pause, right? And ask questions. It's okay to stroke their ego a little bit. It's fine, right? And try to understand where they're coming from. You know, don't fight. Don't get in a combative situation, that is a losing situation. So let's take a breath, pause, listen, try to understand.
- Great. All right. Well I think that was a great conversation. We learned a lot about HIPPOs. The, not the zoological side. The zoological type, but the other types of peoples that we deal with on the corporate side. Thank you very much, Moni for your time. It has always been a pleasure speaking with you. And I hope to host you again in another episode.
- That will be lovely. Thanks for having me.
- Thank you.