There’s not much academic research that tries to determine whether an emotional or information-rich, strategic pep talk is more effective. But much of what we do know about the power of pregame rhetoric comes from a former soccer player turned academic named Tiffanye Vargas.
Vargas grew up in El Paso, Texas, and played on a competitive soccer team. During the regular season, her team often cruised to easy victories, but they’d encounter tougher competition in the playoffs. So before important games, her coach would try to fire them up by talking about how good the other team was.
The coach meant well. Perhaps she thought emphasizing the other team’s prowess would make her players rise to the occasion. Whatever the intentions, this strategy backfired. “All we heard was ‘The other team is awesome,’” Vargas recalls. “More often than not, it left us afraid. We lost games when we shouldn’t have.”
Looking back, Vargas sums up her old coach’s pregame speeches simply: “I don’t believe she had a clue.”
When Vargas began studying psychology at the University of Texas, she started looking for academic research on what kinds of pep talks really work. She found very little. So over the next decade, while earning a PhD in sports psychology at Michigan State, she set out to do the research herself.
In all, she’s published a half dozen studies. Some of the results are inconsistent and seemingly contradictory, partly because the methodologies differ. In a lab experiment, for instance, she played one of three different versions of a taped pregame speech to ninety soccer players, to try to determine whether a strategy-focused, information-rich pep talk or an emotionally persuasive approach would leave the team with higher levels of team efficacy. (In this case, the emotional approach left the players feeling more confident and optimistic.) In a field experiment, she surveyed 151 soccer players on ten teams immediately after the teams heard their coaches’ real-life pregame speeches. In contrast to the first paper, this time the players who heard speeches that contained more informational content reported feeling higher self-efficacy.
Despite the inconsistencies, some of the findings in Vargas’s research are useful. For instance, in one study she found that 90 percent of players enjoy listening to coaches’ pregame speeches, 65 percent said it impacted the way they performed in a game, and when players were dissatisfied or asked to critique a coach’s pregame speech, the most consistent request was for the coach to be more emotional. (Female athletes, however, show a general preference for more informational speeches.) Across different sports, athletes prefer a pep talk that’s information rich if they’re playing an unknown opponent or a team to whom they’ve narrowly lost in the past, and a more emotional pep talk if they’re an underdog or playing in a championship game.
Vargas, now at the University of California, Long Beach, would like to find a way to quantify the duration of the effect a good pregame speech can have: Does it help players perform better only during the opening minutes of a game, or is it longer lasting? She’d also like to study how coaches’ pregame speeches evolve over the course of a season.
In fact, Barry Staw, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has tracked coaches’ speeches across a season. Staw is a basketball nut: at age sixty-nine, he still plays full-court pickup games. In the mid-1990s, Staw and a graduate student decided to study the halftime speeches of high school basketball coaches. In all, they corralled twenty-three coaches who taped their talks at 321 games. “There’s a huge range of behavior, a lot of very heated rhetoric,” Staw says, describing how he used to listen to the talks at home while cooking dinner until his wife outlawed the practice due to all the profanity.
Staw’s had coders rate each speech on how strongly it contained nineteen different emotions. The researchers combined these numbers to come up with a single score that captured how “unpleasant” the coach had been in his halftime speech. Then they looked at each team’s won-loss record, the record of their opponent in each game, the score at halftime, and the final score.
The primary finding: Teams whose coaches give a really unpleasant, angry halftime speech perform better in the second half.
There are a couple of qualifiers. First, an angry halftime speech has more effect if the coach isn’t normally very angry. Second, the effect is curvilinear, meaning the upward slope of the results eventually turns down. More anger doesn’t directly equal more performance. “When the coaches start screaming and swearing and breaking trophies and throwing chairs, that does have a negative effect,” says Katy DeCelles, a University of Toronto professor who’s collaborated with Staw.
Even twenty years after making the recordings, Staw recalls some of the speeches. “One was particularly inspirational. It was better than Hoosiers,” he says. “It turns out it was given by a coach who went on to run a major college program, and I also learned he had a history in the clergy.” Others weren’t so uplifting. They were nasty, even frightening. “There were a number that were bone chilling,” Staw says, recalling one female coach’s talk that left him shaken.
Staw sees anecdotal support for his angry-pep-talks-work-better theory in the world of business. “It probably applies to Steve Jobs,” he says, recalling reports of the Apple founder’s notorious temper tantrums. “You could argue that a product development team is kind of like a basketball team, and [Jobs’s outbursts] did have a particular kind of performance aspect.” Still, he believes if a coach’s speeches are always angry, they lose their impact. “There is a role for arousal in getting some sort of peak performance, but you only have a certain number of bullets, and you have to allocate them appropriately,” he says.
Both Staw’s and Vargas’s findings suggest that leaders who show emotion during pep talks, and who appeal to their audience’s emotions, can be effective and lift the group’s performance. But Vargas’s results suggest that many audiences want something more than emotion. In many circumstances, an information-rich pep talk may be more effective.
Trying to combine the two approaches could result in a long, cumbersome pep talk. Vargas suggests that’s a bad idea: In her view, the best pep talks are short and simple. “Remind your athletes of their strengths,” she says. “Don’t overload them with new content. This is the time to remind them of whatever key concepts you’ve been working on during the week in practice. Give them a boost. Tell them something that shows you believe in them. Make them know that they’re capable.”
6.
When Erica Galos Alioto managed smaller sales teams at Yelp, she didn’t rely on formal pep talks. Instead, she led team-building exercises to get everyone energized to sell. They’d sit at tables and pound them like drums. In a favorite drill, she’d ask her reps to stand in a circle and take turns performing a self-designed, silly kung fu move—a trick she learned from an improv class.
“In improv, you warm up so that when you get up there on stage, you’re not nervous or anxious,” she says. “A lot of reps get really anxious about getting on the phones, and the more we can do to warm them up, the better they’re going to be.”
Once her teams reached a certain size, she couldn’t be so interactive. At first, she tried talking from bullet points, but the results were inconsistent. So she took a full day of training on public speaking. Now she writes a script and practices until she knows the gist of it, then delivers it from memory.
For her August LDOM pep talk to the New York office, she began preparing three weeks in advance, writing a draft and rehearsing on her own. Then, the day before the talk, she asked two senior colleagues to critique her presentation. “I told them very specifically: ‘I don’t want to just hear that it was great—I want very specific feedback about what could be improved,” she says. They told her she was cramming in too many points, so she cut back two sections and streamlined. And she practiced some more.
Although Alioto appears naturally gifted at speaking in front of a large crowd, she’s not. She gets nervous. Before a b
ig presentation, she uses a technique she learned in her training. She goes alone into a room. She jumps around energetically. She yells out loud: “You’re going to be so excited about what I’m about to tell you! It’s going to be amazing! I’m going to blow your mind.” She describes this sheepishly. “It’s very embarrassing. . . . But I’ve learned tricks to get past the anxiety.”
Most of her sales talks use a simple format, one that’s a variation of the formula Stanley McChrystal used with his soldiers. She starts by thanking the team for their hard work, and singling out people who are crushing it. She emphasizes that if one Yelp salesperson can put up spectacular numbers, all the reps are capable of it, since they have similar skills and training. Then she offers up insight on a basic informational concept—often dealing with having the right mentality, or goal setting, or having a commitment to act. “I try to get some response from the audience, and then recap.” Her recap isn’t just a summary. It’s a rallying cry aimed at leaving the group energized.
She’s tried angry pep talks, but they don’t work for her. (She cites research suggesting women have a hard time using anger as a motivational device.) She abandoned the angry tone not only because it was ineffective, but because of her evolving views on why salespeople aren’t successful. She used to blame lack of success on laziness or low engagement, things that naturally made her angry. Instead, she came to see poor results as resulting more from anxiety, lack of confidence or energy, or self-doubt. Instead of reacting critically, she began expressing empathy—“We’ve all been there”—and offering informational tools to help.
There is surprisingly little academic research into managerial pep talks, but what does exist fits in nicely Alioto’s approach. This research describes a concept called Motivating Language Theory, which suggests that leaders giving a pep talk use three kinds of rhetoric.
First is direction-giving or “uncertainty-reducing language”—useful information about how to do the task at hand. When Erica Alioto describes how sales reps can reduce negative self-talk, she’s reducing the uncertainty people may feel about how to do their job. This mode of communication focuses on the what or how of the task at hand.
The second type of communication is “meaning-making language”—which explains why this task is important. When coaches or managers emphasize the importance of team or family or the legacy of the institution, they’re engaged in meaning making.
Third is “empathetic language,” which shows concern for the performer as an individual and a human. Praise, encouragement, and thanks fall under this heading.
Much of the research into Motivating Language Theory has been done by Jacqueline and Milton Mayfield at Texas A&M. “MLT provides a framework for understanding how leader communication can invigorate and activate people toward achieving desired organizational goals, as well as their own,” Jacqueline said by e-mail.
It’s a conceptual theory, and there’s not an easy or obvious way to prove or test it scientifically. But in a 1998 study of salespeople tasked with selling ads for university telephone directories, researchers Theodore Zorn and Sarah Ruccio found real-world results that more or less jive with the theoretical model. Based on interviews with reps and managers, they found that communication in three areas were most valued by reps: modeling success (which sounds a lot like direction giving), individualized attention (which is empathetic communication), and exuding energy.
At Yelp’s New York office, Alioto’s pep talk doesn’t really end when the salespeople file back to their desks. During her formal remarks, she’d asked every salesperson to write a goal for the day on a Post-it note, and she’d set her own Post-it goal: to talk individually with at least one hundred Yelp salespeople. After her speech, Alioto grabbed a soy latte and began walking the floor to talk one-on-one with her team.
Observing a dozen or so of these conversations, what’s striking is to me is how much they focus on information and strategy. She talks to one rep about how to more forcefully move an ambivalent prospect into completing the order. For a salesperson who’s about to call an automobile mechanic, she talks about the specifics of that category: Since mechanics rely so heavily on referrals, Yelp drives more business to them than to, say, restaurants. “I love mechanics. The ROI [return on investment] is so easy to explain,” she says.
As Alioto wanders the sales floor, music plays overhead, and the noise level periodically cranks up as a salesperson bangs the bong. At 2 P.M., aka Power Hour, Yelpers rush the kitchen to grab from the free supply of Red Bull to prevent the postlunch lull.
By day’s end, Alioto has talked with at least a hundred reps. The team has a good day: They sell $1.45 million in new ads, meeting their quota but falling $50,000 short of that month’s stretch target. Many reps achieve BME, Yelpspeak for “best month ever.”
It’s impossible to say how much of those results have been influenced by Alioto’s morning remarks, or the one-on-one pep talks that followed. Nonetheless, the sales leader felt the day was successful. “[My speech] wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it helped them think about where they are and what they are capable of in a different way,” she says. “We all can get into our own heads sometimes and set limitations for ourselves. I try to make everyone understand that they have the power to control their day.”
It may lack the poetry or cinematic appeal of “Let’s win one for the Gipper.” But by calibrating the right mix of information and emotion, the Yelp sales team was energized for LDOM. (All that Red Bull probably helped, too.) And amid the polished concrete floors and exposed ceiling beams of a high-tech workplace, this counts as a win.
Chapter Four
CREATING A PERFORMANCE PLAYLIST
WHAT’S THE PERFECT SONG TO HELP YOU ENERGIZE AND FOCUS?
TJ Connelly was not an athletic child. Growing up south of Boston, he participated in school theatrical productions. He tried to play the drums, the clarinet, and the bass guitar, with limited success. By the time TJ was in high school in the early 1990s, he’d become a serious music fan, favoring bands like Ministry. While some classmates impressed girls with athletic prowess, Connelly had a different go-to move: If he liked a girl, he’d make her a mixtape.
Connelly also liked computers. After graduating from high school in 1995, the Internet was just beginning to boom, so Connelly skipped college and became a programmer. For a few years, money fell from the sky. But then the bubble burst. To make ends meet, he took a job as a bouncer at a college bar. There he spent long hours watching over the dance floor, and he found himself paying close attention to the DJ. “He’s drinking for free, all the girls are talking to him, and he’s playing superloud music,” Connelly says. “I was like, well, that’s better than my gig.” So he decided to become a DJ.
He worked some weddings, but his primary job was at a 200-seat improv theater in the North End. Unlike playing music in a dance club or at a wedding, where DJs have plenty of time to plan the right song-by-song sequences, playing songs for improv helped Connelly develop quick reflexes and encyclopedic musical knowledge. “It’s really about being able to connect a spontaneous live event with a random musical connection,” he says. For instance, if the actors on stage improvise their way into a scene that involves driving a car, Connelly might quickly queue up a snippet from the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” or the Cars’ “Drive.” To prepare, he’d spend long hours “making bumps”—that is, capturing the perfect few seconds of a song (often the chorus), so that when he hits PLAY, the audience hears just the right lyrics. Over the next few years, Connelly spun songs at hundreds of nights of improv.
Around this time, in the early 2000s, Connelly attended a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. He noticed music playing over the loudspeakers. He asked around, and found out that Fenway Park had its own DJ. “What a cool job,” he thought. So he sent a letter to the Red Sox detailing his experience as a DJ. He received no reply, but the following spring, he sent another letter. Sending the letter be
came an annual ritual. Then, in 2005, before he had a chance to mail it, the Red Sox called. They wanted him to audition to become the backup DJ. He went to a game, sat in the booth, and in the fourth inning, the current DJ asked him to take over. Connelly felt comfortable: It wasn’t much different than playing music for a 200-seat theater, except that Fenway seated 33,000. A month later, Connelly heard he’d become the Sox backup DJ, remaining on call in case the regular DJ called in sick. In 2008, he became the first-string DJ. By 2015, he’d worked more than five hundred games as Fenway Park’s musical director.
The job involves playing music in four different scenarios. Several hours before the game, he chooses the music the Red Sox players hear during batting practice, tailoring his song choices to each player’s musical preferences. During the game, he spins each player’s “walk-up” music, a few seconds of a song as the player approaches home plate to bat. (Most players choose their own walk-up songs, but sometimes Connelly makes recommendations or uses his discretion to choose the right section of a song.) Between innings, when Fenway’s organist isn’t playing, Connelly plays songs to try to keep the crowd energized. And after key plays, he’ll quickly play “situationals,” snippets of music to celebrate a home run or a big defensive play. If the Sox turn a double play, for instance, he might quickly punch up Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two.” If an opposing pitcher throws a wild pitch, Connelly may mock him with a few bars from “Wild Thing.”
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