Some people call it “chemistry”. You know, when you meet someone for the first time, yet swiftly find yourself feeling at ease, interested and interesting. You have great rapport.
Rapport is crucial for building important relationships based on trust. In a consultancy like Softwire, having good rapport with our clients helps us build the trust we rely on to have a real impact on their businesses. Having rapport also means we’re tuned in to the tiny details of what stakeholders tell us, so we understand what really matters. And, of course, the ability to establish rapport with Softwire colleagues allows us to be effective leaders who can get buy-in when needed, and similarly allows us to be great managers who create the psychological safety needed for teams to do their best work.
Rapport is a little hard to pin down. It’s somewhat a low-level rat-brain assessment of “Phew, I am similar to this person” that floats up to higher cognition, meaning it can have overtones of xenophobia and classism without care. And it might be a little bit hormonal too (look up MHC/HLA and mate selection if you’re interested), yes okay. But “hard to pin down” doesn’t mean “unexaminable”. Rat-brain responses are only a foundation, and we can easily build upon them. And let’s ignore all the smelly stuff because it’s built-in, and we can’t control it.
Let’s focus on what we can control, which is only ever ourselves.
Rapport doesn’t mean faking an interest or manipulating people
Books on conversation and Communication Skills 101-type oeuvres offer us things like “Ask lots of questions” and “Get the other person talking – people love to talk about themselves”. We’re told to make the other person feel like they’re the most interesting person in the world, and to let them know that we see them, that we are like them, and that we accept them. But what…what if they’re…not…? And what if we don’t ‘like’ them? All of which is fine, by the way! Do we just grit our teeth, lie for England, and hate ourselves a little bit more every time? How is this “rapport”? Surely it’s the opposite of genuine interpersonal connection.
Some authors encourage us to mirror a person’s body language and vocal pitch, speed, and tone as well as their vocabulary and emotionality to help them feel at ease. Yes okay, do all these things if you want. It’s well worth learning to take charge of your demeanour, deportment and habits as a skill as you can learn, because doing so will help you navigate difficult conversations. But this physical parroting back of what you’re offered isn’t enough if real connection is what you’re after. You can’t have a conversation with a parrot.
Pickup artists take this further, and some have spilled their secrets about how the careful choice of language and the manipulation of people’s emotional responses, as well as outright lying to them, can force them to like you. But who wants to be liked by someone only because you coerced them?
Rapport is important for writers, too
Books about persuasive writing encourage us to use simple language to maximise the number of people who will feel ‘seen’ by what we write and can hence identify with it. Taken at face value and poorly executed, this advice leads to boring, bland copy, devoid of personality. You know, the kind you see everywhere in dull status emails, beige sales proposals, and adverts with a conspicuous absence of élan. Does anyone really bond with any of this as a reader?
And when we communicate with our clients, we need our writing to be clear and credible, not to manipulate, but to build trust that we know what we’re doing…because we do. Clients hire us as people, not as textbooks or Wikipedia, and our most effective writing reflects that.
For me there’s something missing from most if not all accounts of “good conversational skills”, pickup artists’ techniques, and advice for writing that moves people.
Rapport is an active, living thing
Rapport isn’t a passive reaction to another person’s actions. If we want to foster rapport artificially – and there are plenty of non-unscrupulous reasons to want to do this – it’s not enough (or polite or pleasant) to just Do Rapport At someone until they capitulate.
Rapport is an active and consensual dance of give and take. You can absolutely put your finger on the scale, rather than leaving your connection in the hands of fate and your neuroendocrine system. And doing this just the right amount and in the right way is where the magic happens.
But what about real rapport? The if-only-I-could-bottle-this kind that helps us sell our products and services in a consultative and collaborative way; that allows patients to trust their doctors; and that overall allows us to delight in making authentic interpersonal connections. Real rapport takes more than adhering to a pickup artist’s playbook and hoping your target hasn’t heard of negging.
What’s wrong with faking an interest? Only that it feels horrible!
The problem with the advice I’ve reproduced above is simple. Let’s take the points in order.
Firstly, conversations cannot comprise questions alone, outside that briefly diverting playground game you might remember from childhood. At some point someone has to actually say something. Furthermore, in the hands of a novice or insensitive and dogged question-asker, we quickly feel put on the spot and self-conscious, which blocks those feelings of connectedness we’re looking for.
And what happens when two people have read the same book on body language, where each waits, poised and hungry to glean any fragment of a signal from the other to then diligently mirror? Mirrors facing each other go on forever without need for content. People doing this will each end up doing an impression of the other doing an impression of them, bound only by the imperfect reflectance of intolerable boredom: how totally, totally pointless.
Both parties might feel “Hmmm, on paper this conversation is going very well, so why do I feel weird/nothing?” It’s because the behavioural choices made aren’t based on anything that’s actually real.
As a slight sidequest, I think this lack of sincerity is the main reason why some people believe they hate “networking”. I similarly do not enjoy being in a room full of people all doing an impression of having a conversation. There’s always a better way, which, shockingly, involves actually having a conversation instead of pretending to. Networking can be marvellous fun if you lean in.
Real rapport means offering authenticity and vulnerability
So what’s the missing piece of the puzzle?
To establish real rapport, you must reach into the core of your humanity and offer your conversation partner something of consequence. You need to show them something real about yourself; this can be a tiny thing, the merest suggestion, but it has to be real and it has to be true.
Tell people the truth as much as possible. It’s these moments of humanity or unstudied vulnerability where strangers start to establish rapport, the defences go down, and conversations become much more pointful.
You can offer truth and authenticity in your reactions to the other person, or to things that happen around you. Your choices of conversation topic and how truthfully you answer questions (or what version of truthfully) can give you away delightfully too. You can choose how to share your sense of humour. You can offer sincerity rather than platitudes when you want to express empathy. You can be authentic in the way you share your boredom, sadness or frustration (yes it’s ‘okay’ to express emotions like these! Socially! And with strangers!!!!) A sharp intake of breath of a half-stifled giggle show humanity too. And even your choices about how near the nail to play it with clarifying/extending questions when they say something that really catches your interest. And a million more ways.
Note that none of the above suggestions require sharing your deepest darkest secrets, or even sharing any facts about yourself if you don’t want to.
However you decide to let it happen, as your humanity spills out through a million small chinks in your armour allowing your conversation partner to glimpse who you really are, you’re inviting them into your own internal world. Then they might invite you into theirs. And you’ll both feel seen, accepted, enjoyed, and – crucially – connected. This is what rapport means to me. Rapport isn’t something you ask for: it’s something you offer.
Authenticity in writing means that while GenAI tools will replace some writing, they will never replace all writers
My position on generative AI (GenAI) and creativity reflects the same principle. I believe that ChatGPT won’t ever produce truly great writing that establishes a connection with the reader, whether as marketing, as art, or for any other purpose. It can likely write the bare bones of a status email for our clients, but will inevitably lack the incisive precision gained from actually having done the work we’re reporting on ourselves.
ChatGPT has no humanity to draw on, and, thus, no internal world to invite you into. It can establish rapport with you neither as a conversation partner nor as an author opening the door with well-chosen words, because it has nothing of consequence to offer you: it can only offer the average of everything else.
Eddie Shleyner in his new book VeryGoodCopy is world-alteringly great on the subject of authenticity in writing, and on, well, basically everything else about writing too. His position on GenAI’s inability to mimic the human condition is the same as mine (hurrah), and he draws on the dressing-down scene in Good Will Hunting to spectacular effect in illustrating this. You should buy and read his book. But to tide you over until it arrives, here’s the Good Will Hunting bit. Eddie thinks, and I agree, that while GenAI will probably replace some writing, it will never replace writers. The difference is human authenticity.
When it comes to writing that is intended to move people, if you take the average of “the internet” (which as early experiments with neural networks told us comprises mostly cats: cats in, cats out), then spew that back out again in a one-liner about, say, why a commuter should join your gym, or why a stakeholder should commission more work, you’ll need that to land on ‘the average’ human to achieve your desired outcome. Obviously there’s no such person as the average human. Are you the average human? Thought not.
Don’t be average and don’t treat other people like they’re average either
Don’t write like the average human, and don’t write for the average human. Don’t approach conversation like the average human, and don’t treat your conversation partners like the average human either. Average appeals to no one. Dig deep, show people who you are, and let your readers and company select themselves.
As proof I absolutely believe in this advice, I’m leaving a few self-aggrandising ten-dollar words in this article even though The Rules tell me this harms readability. I’m prioritising sounding like myself, and this is how I talk. And I bet you, dear reader, have formed a pretty clear idea by now regarding whether or not you’d enjoy speaking to or working with me in real life.
Authenticity is the sine qua non of true connection
I take the position that establishing rapport, whether with a conversation partner or a reader, means offering something authentic.
If you’re broadly on board with this, but worried about how to actually do it, try this challenge: next time someone you don’t know well, say a work colleague you’re not particularly close to (or a client at the start of a meeting) asks you how you are or how your day is going, tell the truth. Not the whole or unfiltered truth, no no no, probably don’t immediately start telling them about your recent breakup; but tell them something true. For example, “Pretty good, thanks. I’m out for dinner tonight and I’m really looking forward to it.” Or “I just came out of a pretty intense meeting so I’m taking a minute to regroup”. Or even “I saw a really cute cat on my walk to work this morning and it’s put me in a really good mood”. Whatever works for you.
But make it something that demonstrates some aspect of you as a person, or maybe shares some vulnerability.
Connection is a fundamental human need
The bare and truthful thing I’ve managed to skilfully avoid so far is the real fundamental why behind all of this. Skills for building relationships, whether framed as networking or client skills, or indeed in your personal life, are only important if you say they are. Enjoying fleeting moments of connection with other humans helps me handle my relationship with the limited time I have on this planet. Doing anything at all in the face of that is absurd, but I happily navigate that tension when I feel interconnected with other humans going through the same thing.
A little surprising, perhaps, that this article reached this topic; but I’m encouraging you to tell the truth, so it’s only fair that I do the same.
Give and ye shall receive
Know yourself, and be prepared to share glimpses of that with other people. And I bet your conversations will get a little warmer a little faster.
