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An analysis of tentative talk points to another reason why Dave Walton’s stutter might have helped him connect with the jury in the trade secrets trial. Hesitations, hedges, and intensifiers are built-in features of stuttering. When a jury hears Dave Walton stutter, he no longer sounds dominant and imposing. They don’t feel that he’s trying to convince them, so they lower their resistance. They become just a bit more open to being persuaded by him.

When givers use powerless speech, they show us that they have our best interests at heart. But there’s one role in which people tend to avoid talking tentatively: leadership. Not long ago, a marketing manager named
Barton Hill
found out why. He was leading a business unit at a financial services firm, and he was invited to interview for a major promotion to a higher-level position, where he would lead multiple business units. The interviewer opened with a softball question: tell us about your successes. Hill started talking about his team’s accomplishments, which were quite impressive.

Although Hill was the front-runner for the position, he didn’t get it. The interviewer told him he didn’t sound like a leader. “I kept using words like
we
and
us
,” Hill says. “I didn’t use enough first-person singular pronouns, like
I
and
me
. I found out later that it didn’t seem like I was a leader. He thought I didn’t drive the team’s success, and wanted someone who could.” The interviewer expected Hill to speak more assertively, and powerless communication cost him the job.

By speaking with greater speed, volume, assertiveness, and certainty, takers convince us that they know what they’re talking about. In one study conducted by
psychologists in California
, takers were judged by group members as more competent, but in reality, they weren’t more competent. Takers, the study’s authors report, “attain influence because they behave in ways that make them appear competent—even when they actually lack competence.”

By failing to use powerful speech in his interview, Barton Hill failed to create the impression of dominance. Yet the same powerless communication that cost him the promotion ended up earning prestige, making his teams successful. Whereas powerful communication might be effective in a one-shot job interview, in a team or a service relationship, it loses the respect and admiration of others.
Psychologists in Amsterdam
have shown that although group members perceive takers as highly effective leaders, takers actually undermine group performance. Speaking dominantly convinces group members that takers are powerful, but it stifles information sharing, preventing members from communicating good ideas. “Teams love it when their leader presents a work product as a collaborative effort. That’s what inspires them to contribute,” Hill reflects. “The paradox comes from people thinking an inclusive leader isn’t strong enough to lead a team, when in fact that leader is stronger, because he engenders the support of the team. People bond to givers, like electromagnetism.” Eventually, Hill left for another company, and three of his former employees approached him about joining his team. This type of loyalty has paid off in the long run: Hill’s teams have been wildly successful. He is now a managing director and global head of marketing at Citi Transaction Services, a division of more than twenty thousand people.

Of course, there’s a time and a place for leaders to use powerful speech. In a study of
pizza franchises
, colleagues Francesca Gino, Dave Hofmann, and I found that when most employees in a store are dutiful followers, managers are well served to speak powerfully. But when most employees are proactive, generating new ideas for cooking and delivering pizzas more efficiently, powerful speech backfires. When employees were proactive, managers who talked forcefully led their stores to 14 percent lower profits than managers who talked less assertively and more tentatively. By conveying dominance, the powerful speakers discouraged their proactive employees from contributing. When people use powerful communication, others perceive them as “preferring and pursuing individual accomplishments,” Fragale writes, “at the expense of group accomplishments.” Through talking tentatively, the powerless speakers earned prestige: they showed openness to proactive ideas that would benefit the group.

To see if this effect would hold up in a more controlled setting, my colleagues and I brought teams of people together to fold T-shirts. We instructed half of the team leaders to talk forcefully, and asked the other half to talk more tentatively. Once again, when team members were passive followers, the powerful speakers did just fine. But when team members were highly proactive, taking initiative to come up with a faster way to fold T-shirts, the powerless speakers were much more effective. Proactive teams had 22 percent higher average output under leaders who spoke powerlessly than powerfully. Team members saw the powerful speakers as threatened by ideas, viewing the powerless speakers as more receptive to suggestions. Talking tentatively didn’t establish dominance, but it earned plenty of prestige. Team members worked more productively when the tentative talkers showed that they were open to advice.

To a taker, this receptivity to advice may sound like a weakness. By listening to other people’s suggestions, givers might end up being unduly influenced by their colleagues. But what if seeking advice is actually a strategy for influencing other people? When givers sit down at the bargaining table, they benefit from advice in unexpected ways.

In 2007, a
Fortune
500 company closed a plant in the Midwest United States. One of the people to lose her position was an effervescent
research scientist
named Annie. The company offered Annie a transfer to the East Coast, but it would require her to give up on her education. While working full time, Annie was enrolled in a nighttime MBA program. She couldn’t afford to quit her job, and if she did, the company would no longer pay for her degree. Yet if she accepted the transfer, she wouldn’t be able to continue studying. She was in a bind, with little time and few options.

Two weeks later, something extraordinary happened: she was offered a seat on the company’s private jet, which was normally available only to top executives, with unlimited access until she finished her MBA. She accepted the transfer and spent the next nine months riding the corporate jet back and forth, twice a week, until she finished her degree. The company also paid for her rental car every week and commercial plane tickets when the corporate jet wasn’t running. How did she get the company to make such a big investment in her?

Annie landed all of these perks without ever negotiating. Instead, she used a form of powerless communication that’s quite familiar to givers.

Entering negotiations, takers typically work to establish a dominant position. Had Annie been a taker, she might have compiled a list of all of her merits and attracted counteroffers from rival companies to strengthen her position. Matchers are more inclined to see negotiating as an opportunity for quid pro quo. If Annie were a matcher, she would have gone to a senior leader who owed her a favor and asked for reciprocity. But Annie is a giver: she mentors dozens of colleagues, volunteers for the United Way, and visits elementary school classes to interest students in science. When her colleagues make a mistake, she’s regularly the one to take responsibility, shielding them from the blame at the expense of her own performance. She once withdrew a job application when she learned that a friend was applying for the same position.

As a giver, Annie wasn’t comfortable bargaining like a taker or a matcher, so she chose an entirely different strategy. She reached out to a human resources manager and asked for advice. “If you were in my shoes, what would you do?”

The manager became Annie’s advocate. She reached out to the heads of Annie’s department and site, and started to lobby on Annie’s behalf. The department head, in turn, called Annie and asked what he could do to keep her. Annie mentioned that she wanted to finish her MBA, but couldn’t afford to fly back and forth. In response, the department head offered her a seat on the jet.

New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for
exercising influence when we lack authority
. In one experiment, researcher Katie Liljenquist had people negotiate the possible sale of commercial property. When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only 8 percent reached a successful agreement. When the sellers asked the buyers for advice on how to meet their goals, 42 percent reached a successful agreement. Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most
effective ways to influence
peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.

This is true even in the upper echelons of major corporations. Recently, strategy professors Ithai Stern and James Westphal studied executives at 350 large U.S. industrial and service firms, hoping to find out how executives land seats on boards of directors.
Board seats
are coveted by executives, as they often pay six-figure salaries, send clear status signals, and enrich networks by granting access to the corporate elite.

Takers assume that the best path to a board seat is ingratiation. They flatter a director with compliments, or track down his friends to praise him indirectly. Yet Stern and Westphal found that flattery only worked when it was coupled with advice seeking. Instead of just complimenting a director, executives who got board seats were more likely to seek advice along with the compliment. When praising a director’s skill, the advice-seeking executives asked how she mastered it. When extolling a director’s success in a task, these executives asked for recommendations about how to replicate his success. When executives asked a director for advice in this manner, that director was significantly more likely to recommend them for a board appointment—and they landed more board seats as a result.

Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively. When we ask others for advice, we’re posing a question that conveys uncertainty and makes us vulnerable. Instead of confidently projecting that we have all the answers, we’re admitting that others might have superior knowledge. As a result, takers and matchers tend to shy away from advice seeking. From a taker’s perspective, asking for advice means acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Takers may fear that seeking advice might make them look weak, dependent, or incompetent. They’re wrong: research shows that people who
regularly seek advice and help
from knowledgeable colleagues are actually rated more favorably by supervisors than those who never seek advice and help.

Appearing vulnerable doesn’t bother givers, who worry far less about protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it’s because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others. Matchers hold back on advice seeking for a different reason: they might owe something in return.

According to Liljenquist, advice seeking has four benefits: learning, perspective taking, commitment, and flattery. When Annie asked for advice, she discovered something she didn’t know before: the company’s jet had extra seats, and it traveled back and forth between her two key locations. Had she lobbied more assertively instead of seeking advice, she might never have gained this information. In fact, Annie had several previous conversations in which no one mentioned the jet.

This brings us to the second benefit of advice seeking: encouraging others to take our perspectives. In Annie’s previous conversations, where she didn’t ask for advice, the department head focused on the company’s interest in transferring her while saving as much money as possible. The advice request changed the conversation. When we ask for advice, in order to give us a recommendation, advisers have to look at the problem or dilemma from our point of view. It was only when Annie sought guidance that the department head ended up considering the problem from her perspective, at which point the corporate jet dawned on him as a solution.

Once the department head proposed this solution, the third benefit of advice seeking kicked in: commitment. The department head played a key role in generating the jet solution. Since it was his idea and he had already invested some time and energy in trying to help Annie, he was highly motivated to help her further. He ended up paying for the rental car that she used in the Midwest and agreeing to fund commercial flights if the corporate jet was not running.

There’s no doubt that Annie earned these privileges through a combination of hard work, talent, and generosity. But a clever study sheds further light on why the department head was so motivated to offer Annie more than just the corporate jet. Half a century ago, the psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy paid people for succeeding on a geometry task. In the control group, the participants kept the money, and visited the department secretary to fill out a final questionnaire. But when another group of participants started to leave, the researcher asked them for help. “I was wondering if you would do me a favor. The funds for this experiment have run out and I am using my own money to finish the experiment.
As a favor to me
, would you mind returning the money you won?”

Nearly all of the participants gave the money back. When questioned about how much they liked the researcher, the people who had done him the favor liked him substantially
more
than the people who didn’t. Why?

When we give our time, energy, knowledge, or resources to help others, we strive to maintain a belief that they’re worthy and deserving of our help. Seeking advice is a subtle way to invite someone to make a commitment to us. Once the department head took the time to offer advice to Annie, he became more invested in her. Helping Annie generate a solution reinforced his commitment to her: she must be worthy of his time. If she wasn’t important to him, why would he have bothered to help her? As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “
He that has once done you a kindness
will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”