Say It Skillfully With Molly Tschang

In this episode, we sit down with executive coach Molly Tschang to discuss her groundbreaking book, Say It Skillfully. Every word you speak signals far more than your professional credentials and directly shapes how others experience you. Molly shares her simple Me-You-We framework to help us handle our toughest conversations with confidence and ease. Learn how this renowned Marshall Goldsmith coach helps us find our authentic voices and build trust on our teams.

Interview Highlights

• The Me-You-We Framework: Molly simplifies high-stakes communication into a highly adaptable, personalized three-part mental model that helps anyone find their authentic voice.
• Communication Starts Within: Fully 80% of effective communication relies on the “Me” component—getting grounded, letting go of unhelpful emotions (like anger or impatience), and entering meetings with a clear, positive intention.
• The Power of an “Accurate Shared Reality”: The single most common gap in organizations is the lack of a shared reality. Without it, teams struggle to make optimal decisions, execute quickly, or achieve their highest potential.
• Empathy is the Ultimate Bridge: True empathy means actively seeking to understand another person’s context and experience. When people feel you genuinely care to understand them, it builds the trust necessary to open the door to real communication.
• Molly’s Mention of Alan Mulally: Molly highlights how legendary CEO Alan Mulally integrated the core of “saying it skillfully” directly into his collaborative “working together” leadership structure, alongside his famous philosophy to “Love ’em Up.”
• The Legacy of Frances Hesselbein: Reflecting on her quarterly meetings with the late Frances Hesselbein—whom Peter Drucker called the greatest CEO of all time—Molly shares how Frances embodied the powerful leadership ethos that “to serve is to live.”
• Martin Lindstrom’s Kidnapping Story: Molly shares the astonishing (and true) story of marketer Martin Lindstrom, who does not own a mobile phone and was kidnapped on a trip. Driven by curiosity and empathy, he connected so deeply with his captors that he stayed an extra day to finish his ethnographic study.
• Sam Allen’s “User Manual”: Sam Allen famously created a personal user manual for his team to ease communication, which humorously warned colleagues not to try to BS him because of his incredibly attuned “BS meter.”
• Curtis’s Grace Under Pressure: Former NFL Pro Bowler Curtis Martin overcame a devastatingly difficult childhood and a college coach who told him his body wouldn’t hold out. Instead of lashing out, he handled the discouragement with immense grace before Bill Parcells took a chance on him.
• Feedback vs. Feed Forward: Molly introduces Marshall Goldsmith’s “feed forward” technique, a highly positive, future-focused activity where team members ask for and exchange constructive ideas for future growth without judging past mistakes.
• The “Rapid Round of Appreciation”: To foster positivity in high-performing teams, Molly explains how this workshop experience includes a “hot seat” exercise where participants receive sincere, specific praise and are only permitted to say “thank you” in response.
• The Cost of Staying Silent: Molly issues a direct warning to professionals at all levels: if you hold back your ideas or stay silent when you see your team making a critical mistake, you are actively contributing to the problem.

Books Mentioned

• The Messi Effect: How the Global Legend Changed the Future of American Soccer
• What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative
• I Am: Escape Distractions, Unlock Your Imagination & Unleash Your Potential
• Working Together: 12 Principles for Achieving Excellence in Managing Projects, Teams, and Organizations

Seven Ideas to Put Into Practice

1. Master the ideas behind EI, SI, and RI (emotional, social, and relational intelligence) and why these are important both professionally and personally.
2. Understand and either eliminate or minimize the three fears that Molly describes in this very readable book.
3. Consider finding a blog post or two that reflects on the life of Frances Hesselbein and learn why Peter Drucker called her the best CEO ever. If you get stuck, read chapter three of Managing the Non-Profit Organization by Peter Drucker.
4. At a future workshop or small-group gathering, personalize the rapid round of appreciation with your fingerprints. Consider doing a post-mortem with your mentor to find out why it works and what you learned from it.
5. You might need to revisit the section on feedforwards. Create your own feedforward exercise when the timing seems right in your organization. Repeat the post-mortem process.
6. Pretend you are being filmed. What will that film look like? You get extra credit if your peers and teammates do this too.
7. Mulally’s working-together model, which he started at Boeing and took with him to Ford, includes his mantra, “Love ’em up.” What does that mean? The Greek language has three words for love, and one is agape. Is agape the kind of love Mulally is referring to? If not, then what does he mean?

Worth Repeating: Say It Skillfully

Below are some of my favorite lines in Molly’s book. The first two are in the introduction.

The reality is, if you’re not saying what needs to be said and sharing what others need to hear, you are part of the problem.

Every word out of your mouth, what you say and how you say it, signals more to the team and leadership than your credentials. Your words determine how people think about and experience you.

Pages 3-4; Kindle version

Molly quotes Garry Ridge, the former CEO and chairman of WD-40:

We don’t make mistakes. We make learning moments, positive and negative, and they are one of the most powerful parts of our culture. We trust each other to communicate what doesn’t work. There is no lying, faking, or hiding due to fear.

Pages 13-14, Kindle version

On never speaking out of anger, Molly quotes Frances Hesselbein, who asks, “Why should I be entrusted to lead anyone else if I cannot even control myself?” Molly adds the following:

As soon as we start to speak from anger, as soon as we lose self-control, the problem we are addressing suddenly stops being “out there” with the other person and starts being “in here” with ourselves.

Page 42, Kindle version

Empathy matters:

Empathy is not only how we connect as human beings. According to a 2021 Catalyst study, empathy is a driver of workplace performance. Seventy-six percent of those who worked for an empathetic leader felt more engaged at work compared to only 32 percent who worked for a less empathetic leader. Overall, employees had more positive work experiences and wanted to retain their jobs. In other words, empathy can improve outcomes, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

Pages 63-64, Kindle version

Regarding high-velocity relational dynamics:

Research done by MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory shows that on high-performing teams, members talk and listen equally while keeping contributions short and sweet. This is what I call interacting with “high velocity.”

Page 74, Kindle version

One more time, let’s hear it on appreciation:

The next time you open or close a meeting, try a rapid round of appreciation in which each person appreciates someone else in the group. It doesn’t cost a thing and takes almost no time. It’s a win-win that can have an outsized impact on those receiving and giving that appreciation.

Pages 81-82, Kindle version

Harry Kraemer’s core four of performance excellence:

1. Set a clear expectation.
2. Communicate the expectation repeatedly.
3. Hold each other accountable.
4. Reveal consequences.

Page 106, Kindle version

1.5 million views. When I read non-fiction, I read the acknowledgments first. I’m glad I did in this case because I got immediate validation that Molly’s content would have a strong center of gravity worth reading:

The idea of Say It Skillfully was pure serendipity—no grand plan, that’s for sure. Early in 2019, my friend Bill Carrier stopped me mid-sentence during a call: “Wait, wait. What you just said . . . Say It Skillfully . . . There’s something there.” Then, in February, my fearless social media guru, Bruce Kasanoff, dismissed my hesitation to post online: “Don’t worry! Doesn’t matter if it’s not great.” So up went my first-ever ninety-second LinkedIn video, which led to a yearlong commitment to weekly videos—essentially taking over my life. The series ultimately garnered 1.5 million views, thanks in no small part to the extraordinary support of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches community.

Page 179, Kindle version

Episode Pairings

1. Amy Bruske Discusses Conative Instincts and Family Business
2. It’s Not About the Coffee
3. What’s Your And?
4. People Skills for Analytical Thinkers
5. It’s Time to Start Loving Mondays Again
6. Rookie Smarts with Liz Wiseman
7. Surrounded by Idiots

Important Links

• Molly’s bio in her words
• Molly’s profile on 100 Coaches
• LinkedIn profile
• Molly’s consulting firm