Up until earlier this year, I worked as a music journalist and editor. I spent about nine years at Hysteria Mag, the last few of which as an Editor of some kind. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the job was the rock star interview.
I’d done about 300+ interviews in my time for a range of publications. I conducted about 95% of these interviews over the phone. These interviews are given out in “slots.”
Journalists and broadcasters are invited to join a one to two-hour block of interviews, with each interviewer given a 15 to 20-minute allocation to talk to the muso.
This was all an exercise in PR and promotion for a new album or tour. About 90% of interviews were about an upcoming album, tour, or both. It was rare to interview a subject “just because.” It had to be during “promotion season” or not at all.
As a greenhorn, I would ask obvious questions. How was it recording this time around? Are you excited to go on tour? Did the new member contribute well? Are you going to have X and Y on the set list?
Woe betide the scribe who hit their subject with generic questions like this at the end of a two hour block. At best you’d get annoyed, one- or two-word answers as they’d been asked the question about six times already.
Sometimes, musos just didn’t much care for doing media. They were strongarmed into it by their PR or record company. At the end of the day, it was like they were being treated like a sponge, each interviewer wringing more and more out of them, even though their mental bandwidth had long since evaporated.
“With apologies to Joel Saltzman who said “if you can talk you can write,” it would seem “if you can interview, you can negotiate.”
In computing, Garbage In Garbage Out means that if you put in erroneous data you’ll get unreliable results. The same goes for interviewing. Ask boring questions, get boring answers. I wanted to make this my career one day (my advice for kids doing it now: don’t) so I had to up my game.
Through trial and error, I hit upon the magic words that signalled a great interview. The interviewer either had to respond with something like:
“That’s a great question.”
Or
“Yes, you’re right.”
The setup to these questions is usually closed, not open ended. For example, interviewing one of my favourite subjects; multi-instrumentalist, and wide-eyed dreamer Devin Townsend, I asked:
“Would you say that you’re a person that sort of craves varied stimulation? I mean this in a creative sense, where doing that same thing will lead to an inevitable inertia, stagnation.”
He replied with “a hundred percent, a hundred percent.” Devin is not a particularly hard subject to interview. The fact that I connected with him on a level that made him heard, not just a resource, allowed me to probe further and ask more personal questions than if I didn’t have him on side.
Not everyone is an interviewer by trade, but we do communicate with people in the same way. In business, we use the euphemism “job interview” as part of the selection process for an open position. In other terms, a person negotiates their way to getting the job. He or she must convince the boss or hiring manager that they are the right person.
Reading and watching videos on Never Split The Difference: How To Negotiate As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, finding an empathetic common ground often leads to a successful negotiation where you concede little, perhaps none, of your position.
He calls this “tactical empathy.” I used to call it “good interview technique.”
With apologies to Joel Saltzman who said “if you can talk you can write,” it would seem “if you can interview, you can negotiate.”
In an interview, the subject has information that a journalist wants to gain. Some interviewees, especially in general news or politics, do not want to give up that information so easily. Gaining the trust of a subject can be a tricky business, especially if they are survivors of a traumatic event.
We all know what it feels like to be heard and empathised with. We all know how it feels to have a conversation where both parties get to know one another. Most things in life are negotiated in a broad sense; a romantic date is a negotiation in some respects, as both parties put their best qualities forward to find love or companionship.
It would seem that “Getting to Yes” (a great book on negotiation) is as important to achieving the empathetic “Getting to ‘You’re Right.’”
Interviewing is a learned skill, like writing is a learned skill. Mathematics is too (still working on that, let me tell you.) It would seem the calculus of a successful negotiation is simply applied listening and empathising.
It might lead to less stress and a greater understanding of our needs. I think it’s definitely something we’re all craving at the moment.
