Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot is the managing editor for Western City magazine; he can be reached at bhendershot@calcities.org.

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For an early-career writer, there are perhaps few things more nerve-wracking than interviewing a longtime radio host about how to have good conversations. Luckily, Celeste Headlee is a true pro. The Whittier native didn’t miss a beat when asked an ill-formed question about the First Amendment.

It’s (hopefully) not the worst question someone has asked her in her 25-year career as a journalist, which includes anchoring “All Things Considered,” “1A,” “Weekend Edition,” and other national shows. And even if it was, I suspect I would never know.

We sat down in advance of her keynote speech at the Cal Cities Annual Conference and Expo to talk about talking — why it’s important, how we can get better at it, and why we shouldn’t shy away from difficult or embarrassing topics. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Brian Hendershot: These past few years have been really challenging for journalists, which impacts local governments. What do city officials need to know about their local newsroom?

Celeste Headlee: The first thing they need to understand is that local newsrooms do not have the resources or the personnel that they used to. Often, newsmakers behave as though it were the 1980s in terms of resources for local news. Many of the practices — being late to interviews, having press conferences start very late — just don’t work anymore. People are overworked and they don’t have time for shenanigans. 

So, make it as easy as possible for the journalists. Send them to sources. Read the pitches and the questions they’re asking you, and don’t offer experts who can’t answer those questions.

Second, many of the people who are supposedly writing news right now are not trained in journalism. You can and should be choosy about who to do interviews with. Try to do that with trained journalists who are responsible for the accuracy of what they report. It’s buyer beware if you go to an outlet that is more focused on clicks than accuracy and fairness.

Another thing I would say is that journalism is the only industry that is specifically protected in the Constitution. Journalists are not your enemy. They are here to help the democratic process. Politicians, when they face journalists, it’s kind of like going to a performance review. We are there to hold people accountable. And that’s not because journalists hate politicians. It’s something they do because that’s the job, and it’s part of the politicians’ job as well.

If you go back to those original documents and letters written by the Founding Fathers, they also found journalists irritating, but they also understood how crucial a healthy journalistic industry is to any democracy. Otherwise, things happen behind closed doors. They’re made by the elite and the powerful without anyone understanding why decisions are made, how they’re made, or how we change them.

Your tips in 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation are brilliant, but for many subject matter experts, they might feel unorthodox. How would you coach someone on overcoming their natural instincts?  

Research shows that the smarter you are, the worse your conversational skills are. Conversation requires you to be as good a listener as you are a talker, and good talkers are very often not good listeners. If you walk away from a conversation and learn nothing from the other person you were speaking with, you didn’t have a good conversation.

You know everything that’s going to come out of your mouth. Nothing you say is going to surprise you. You already know it. The only way you’re going to learn new stuff and get different perspectives is by listening to other people.

There’s always this criticism that public officials are out of touch with their constituents and that is because they rarely listen. Or they’ll hear — which is a physiological process — but they don’t listen, which is a cognitive process. If people have trepidation, it’s because they often go into conversations entirely concerned about what they’re going to say. There’s even research showing that our enjoyment of any conversation goes up the less we talk.

Could you dig down into this a little bit more? I can almost hear someone saying, “Oh, but I listen to my constituents all the time. We have five-hour long meetings about the size of fences and these surveys about all this other stuff.”

What I generally see in these forums is what’s known as performative listening — people following the advice that was given to us for so many decades before. Nod your head, say “uh-huh.” Repeat back some of the words they used. This is all to prove that you’re listening, but that’s not actually listening.

If you can summarize accurately what everybody just told you, then you listened. If what you heard changes your decisions and your perspectives, then you did active listening. But that is not what most politicians do. They already know what decisions they’re going to make and they’re engaging in performative listening.

It doesn’t matter how many forums you hold or how long you let people talk: If you’re not actually actively listening to them, and if what they say has no influence on what you choose to do, then the people who spoke will not feel heard. You’ve just wasted their time and yours.

There are some conversations that are, let’s say, unproductive or unsafe. What’s your tip for ending those conversations or perhaps redirecting them?

Research shows that one of the biggest fears that prevents people from starting conversations with others is the fear that they won’t be able to end it. I’m not trying to poo-poo fears that people have. I get it. But I would say that one of the most useful things that a public servant can do is learn how to redirect, interrupt, or close out somebody else.

If I’m interviewing someone on NPR, very often people talk too long, and I have to say: “That’s all the time we have.” This is something that politicians can practice, and I’m not trying to be condescending about this. Practice it so that the fear is no longer there. I can tell you, as someone who has been doing interviews for live, massive national audiences, it is not that difficult to say.

There are people who are disruptive. That’s not new. It may be that we’re on Zoom now, and that’s what’s different. But if you go back through history, people have been disrupting these kinds of meetings going back to the days of the Greeks and Romans. There are always going to be a certain number of people who are willing to be jerks. Just go into every meeting knowing that could happen and have those tools at your disposal to cut the mic and say, “We gotta go.”

This moment — not just what’s happening to newsrooms, but just in general — feels very unprecedented. Does it feel unprecedented to you? Or do you think a lot of this is just made worse by technology, and we haven’t quite figured out how to manage these age-old problems that are presented to us in this new way?

People keep talking about an unprecedented level of political division. That’s not necessarily true. How that plays out — now that may be unprecedented. For example, we know people today are more likely to make assumptions about someone else based on their political party than they are based on their race. That’s what some research has shown, meaning that we are more partisan than we are racist, and we’re quite racist, right? So that is possibly new.

But people are drawing conclusions about things that I think are not fair. In other words: Because Joe Biden’s stepping down is unprecedented, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. That’s value neutral. We have to wait and see what effect that has or if it’s just kind of a historical marker in the road.

The idea that journalism is in peril, that there are big corporate interests trying to take over journalism, that’s happened before. That’s something that journalism has struggled with forever, and it’s partly in recognition of the power of journalism. I absolutely believe that good journalism is going to be fine. There are really great indicators showing younger generations are more willing to pay for strong, fact-checked, accurate news — especially on the local level — than baby boomers are.

I want to touch on your other work. In 2020, we saw a rise in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. There is now a backlash to those programs. A lot of places are also rolling them back for economic reasons. What advice would you give to city leaders who are facing calls to roll back these initiatives?

On one extent I understand the resistance to some DEI programs. The tactics we’ve used for the past 30 to 40 years have never been effective at reducing discriminatory behavior. That doesn’t mean you get rid of DEI initiatives.

Here is the absolute truth: Human beings do not like diversity. We enjoy comfort. We enjoy the familiar. But the hard fact is we do better work when we’re not comfortable. It makes us more accurate. It makes us more innovative. It makes us more productive. For people to roll back DEI initiatives is quite literally counterproductive. But the focus of DEI initiatives doesn’t need to be on quotas or unconscious bias.

If your DEI training says people are biased and bias is bad, then it will reach zero people. We know nothing about changing people’s values. What we know a lot about is changing behavior. So, our DEI initiatives need to be focused on inclusion. And the reason we talk about inclusion is because it’s really about belonging. And belonging is the most important need that any Homo sapiens has after food, shelter, and water.

When we have satisfied our need for survival, the number one priority for Homo sapiens is to belong. Make people understand that our workplaces and organizations are like the middle school playground: It’s all these cliques where we’re excluding people and advantaging some people and disadvantaging some people and being rude and being mean. We know that’s wrong, so we’re going to focus on how to change our behavior.

Is there anything else we should mention before we close out this interview?

The more you refuse to discuss something, the more it becomes associated in the brain with shame. Talk about these things and allow both yourself and other people the latitude to make mistakes. I’m not talking about harassment. I’m not talking about overt racism. I’m talking about making mistakes. Giving people the benefit of the doubt is just going to make it easier. And with that, we will hopefully start to lower this crippling fear that the United States has of having honest conversations about these issues.

The other thing I will say is that research shows people like you more than you think. We’re all getting in our own way. Our own self-consciousness is preventing us from having really great conversations that make us better as people. It’s not as hard as you think it is. You can do this.