In this insightful episode, Salvatore Manzi, Facilitator of Leadership Communications, shares how to transform fragmented team communication into clear collaboration. If you're in stage 4 feeling like the hub holding everything together while your leadership team talks past each other, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why speaking only from your dominant thinking type limits your team's effectiveness

- How to address all four thinking types (Why, What, How, What If) in every meeting

- What simple rules like the 10-second pause and QA framework do to build real alignment

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Salvatore Manzi is a leadership communications coach who helps leaders turn complexity into clarity. His book, Clear and Compelling, releasing in 2026, combines research in neuroscience, psychology, and organizational behavior with years of communication coaching to deliver practical strategies for turning insights into influence. He helps leaders communicate clearly, lead with authenticity, and navigate complexity with confidence. With over 20 years of experience, he brings a unique blend of strategic insight, real-world leadership, and human-centered communication to every engagement.

Want to learn more about Salvatore Manzi's work at Leadership Communications? Check out his website at https://www.salvatoremanzi.com/

Connect with Salvatore through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/salvatorejmanzi/

Get a copy of his book Clear and Compelling: Communication Strategies for Big Thinkers with Bold Ideas at https://www.amazon.com/Clear-Compelling-Communication-Strategies-Thinkers-ebook/dp/B0GQP1W448

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Retzheimer, and one of the most

frustrating things about reaching level four as a founder

is discovering that the people on your team have no idea how to

actually talk to each other, because for years you've been

the one holding it all together, you've had this conversation

here, this conversation there, and you've been able to hold it

all together yourself. But now that things have gotten as big

as they are, as successful as they are, and let's face it, as

complex as they are, something needs to change. We've got to

figure out how to get these folks to talk to each other, but

that is like herding cats. One, you can't get them in the same

room, but even when you do, they just seem to talk at each other

and not to each other, let alone listen to one another. So, here

to help us figure out how to get out of babysitting mode and into

leading a team that can not only talk together but perform

together is the one and only Salvatore Manzi, who is a

leadership communications coach who helps turn complexity into

clarity. His book, Clear and Compelling, which was released

in 2026 combines research in neuroscience, psychology, and

organizational behavior with years of communication coaching

to deliver practical strategies for turning insights into

influence, he helps leaders communicate clearly, lead with

authenticity, and navigate complexity with confidence. With

over 20 years of experience, he brings a unique blend of

strategic insight, real-world leadership, and human-centered

communication to every engagement. He's here with us

today. Salvatore, so glad to have you on the show. Welcome.

You open up with this scene that a lot of founders will

recognize, and there's this feeling of like being the

smartest person in the room, but they're just kind of tired of..

is kind of a nuance that founders feel, and one of the

challenges I think that they start to see at this stage, when

they realize, "Hey, I can't do all of this myself, I need other

people to, is that some folks they realize talk way too much,

some folks don't talk even close to enough, and you find yourself

actually wanting more and more from the smart but silent types

to speak up. How do you get the team to operate on that same

wavelength, that same waveform to communicate effectively?

Well, thank you for inviting me on the show, Scott.

And the question of how do you get your team to start

communicating with each other when there are both different

personality types and different thinking times is critical in

order to make that leap and the stage and growth. What I've

noticed and what I build my practice around is thinking

about the different thinking types in the room, and I'll just

go through this quickly. Bernice McCarthy did a lot of research

on the learning styles of people, and her work led to a

lot of instructional design, but I'll break down into there are

four thinking types. Any room you go into on your leadership

team, you have four thinking types: why, what, how, and what

if. If you can speak to all four types, the room will start

communicating with each other, and I'll break it down. The why

is the CEO, typically, why are we here? Why are we talking

about this? Why are we talking about this right now? The what

is the more analytical, technical, the CTO. Well, what's

the background? What's the history? What has been tried?

What worked before? The how is the COO, the operations, or how

are we going to implement this? How is this going to unfold? How

do we do this from where we did last time? And then the what if

is bifurcated into the realist and the optimist, right? The

realist is more the CFO. What if we go off schedule? What if we

go over budget? What if it collides with this, and the what

if optimist is the well, what if we try this? What if we get this

going? What if we do this instead? And anybody out there

that's listening is probably like I'm a what if, I'm the

founder who has the idea I started it with the what if. Now

I've got it rolling, and the what if personality and thinking

type has to move up to the why to become the CEO. Otherwise,

they get stuck in the weeds answering all the questions.

Now, here's the thing that I didn't know until I studied

deeper. Everybody has a dominant thinking type. Everybody can do

all of the thinking types, but everybody has a dominant one. If

we only speak from our dominant speaking type, we're losing the

other types of the room. So, what I train leader teams to do

is I train them how to speak to all of the thinking types in the

room, so that everybody understands. Now, you mentioned

consider. Engine, we can go into that if I'm a what, if I'm a

what thinking type. I like the engineering, I like the data. I

created this incredible technical product, and I want to

take it forward. I've got to switch and speak to the other

types in order for the entire table to voice their opinions,

get involved, keep going. How's this landing so far?

This is so good, it's so good, and folks

will recognize we use slightly different language for some of

it, this challenge exactly, and and I love this idea of a

thinking type, because we've always talked about them more in

terms of leadership style, which brings some of this into play,

but for this conversation in particular, and this challenge

in particular, tell me a little, and maybe this, maybe this is

there, maybe it's not, but I would imagine that there's a

different cadence of each of these thinking types. Is that

accurate?

It's a yes. And, here's the challenge: if I'm in a

dominant thinking type, I'm going to go deep on that

thinking type. If I'm a what thinking type, I'm going to give

you the entire background of how we got from there to here.

Nobody else in the room actually needs that, but because that's

the way my brain thinks, it becomes a challenge. Your

question again was, how do we..

Yeah! my experience in the room is I'm

thinking through some of these different what I would imagine

is their type, not that it is or isn't, but some of the more

stereotypical ones, the kind of how, and maybe the one side of

the what if they might take a little longer to process a new

piece of information, they feel a little bit more comfortable if

maybe they get data before the meeting than after, where as the

what if you know positive optimist side or even the why

side is just kind of like new ideas squirrel and they're often

and after it. Do you see that is that part of this thinking type,

where some folks like to process a little bit more deeply before

they make a comment or a decision.

I love this question. I wouldn't put it in the same

categorization. I offer two things: one, a good leader is

going to require everybody in the room wait 10 seconds before

responding to give everybody in the room, a chance to get up to

speed. It takes an introverted leader, an analytical,

data-driven thinker, up to 10 seconds to formulate the perfect

response. Now, those on the more extroverted are going to jump in

with the first response, because they will find their way to

their point, whereas the more introverted leader is going to

think through, and then give you the concrete. There's a both and

here the extroverted is taking us on a journey that's getting

our brains thinking creatively, is helping us, we start to

brainstorm, we get to it, but it can sometimes silence the more

analytical thinker that is considering all of the

variables, and then we'll just hit you with the punchline with

the point. The problem here, giving me just the answer,

doesn't bring me on the journey. So I am starting to think, well,

how did you get to there? And then that person starts talking,

and then the whole room goes into chaos, and we don't move

forward. So provide that as an opportunity for everybody to

stop and think about what it is they want to say and elicit

responses from the ones that you see, personality types might be

more reserved and hold back the ones that might be more quick on

their feet to speak.

Yeah, I'm tempted to just pause for 10

seconds, so everyone can feel how painstakingly long that is.

It sounds so easy, but that's an eternity, that's forever. You

might use, like, the cows have come home. How well, let's

just.. I think that's really practical, is really helpful. I

don't hear you saying every time anyone talks, there's a 10

second gap every time. So, walk us through, how does that

actually play out in the leadership team room,

you have a challenge. You want to present the

challenge to the team, set them up for success. If you set them

up for success by sending them the topic, the talking points,

the agenda of the meeting, it helps the more analytical

thinkers prepare. It helps the more extroverted thinkers have

an overview, a vision of where it's going, then when you get

into the meeting, you're not going to do the 10 second rule

every time, but if you have that one key question, we're going to

start with this. I need to get everybody in the room to give me

their insights on this challenge that we're facing, and you don't

have to keep silent. Silence is not necessarily during that 10

seconds. You can reframe the question. So, again, we're

looking at the scope and the longevity. How is this going to

affect the budget? What's going to happen to the team? I'm going

to go around the room, and I'd like to get everybody's

impressions and find out what your take is on this. Set them

up for success one step further by saying we're going to start

with Mitra over here, and we'll go around to the right, so

everybody think about what is it, and I'm doing this language

thing as a leader guiding the room. I just gave Mitra an

opportunity to think about their response, and everybody else has

had that 10 seconds. It window to begin thinking about theirs.

The one challenge I would offer: give them a constraint, keep

your insight to one sentence, that way we don't get somebody

monologuing, taking over, and then we don't get to everybody

else. So that's that's the practicality of how you play

that out in a team meeting.

Here's, here's the what I think is a principle

behind this that I want to touch on, and then talk about how to

help each of our team members get the most out of their time,

and what they say, but your job at this stage shifts from it's

shifting from being the one to make all the decisions and

knowing all the answers to cultivating an environment for

those answers to come out, and I love again the practicality of

the approach here. Now, one of the, the other challenges to

doing that is you may not have prepared them to take on that

responsibility, because oftentimes we hire like the best

salesperson to become the sales leader, and then we put them in

the room with the ops person, and it's, it's chaos. So, how do

you help folks when they, they even with some of these ground

rules, still seem like they're talking at each other instead of

being able to talk with each other?

I love this, because this is the work that I go into.

Do I work with a lot of startups when they're making that pivot

from startup to growth, and they have to pivot the team to get

all wrapped around, and we'll have an offsite where we go

through frameworks. The number one framework to practice is Q

and A. How do you answer somebody's question? How do you

respond to them? Because this is where most intelligent, smart

people miss because that person asked a question on your team

because they pose this idea to you, it doesn't mean they want

an answer, what they want is a connection to start building

something together, and I'm not going to go into listening 101

here, but there is a fundamental gold to responding to their

question by first saying this is what I heard you're asking, is

do I have that right? Great, I think you're answering this

because of this and this, and I can tell in your department

you're probably overseeing this, and you might be looking at that

as well. Am I right? Boom, at the end of those two points,

your two team you just described, the two people on the

team that aren't listening to each other, now they've started

to understand each other. People cannot listen until they feel

heard. So, those first and second steps, if you practice

this, get it ingrained, especially in a leadership team

to first make sure you understand the question, second

validate why that person is asking the question, and then

from that place you can get to an answer. Otherwise, you just

have smart people popping answers to each other, and

there's no resonance in the room, because it's just a bunch

of good ideas that aren't going forward. There's no

collaboration.

Yeah, what last question on this thread,

and then I've got another question I like to ask all my

guests. I'm very interested to see what you have to say, but

let's say, let's say the founder has laid this out, maybe they're

even doing a decent job at modeling it, and someon e else

breaks one of those rules.

you find that it's most effective to like to call it out

there in the moment, or is that an offline conversation

afterwards?

Well, there is the call-in-call-out dichotomy,

right? Do I call them in, tell them afterwards, 'Hey, this is

what happened, I saw you do this, and you might want to try

better. I think that's good for the first pass, but if I were

leading the meeting, I would call it out in a gentle and a

kind way, because it sets the tone of these are rules, and

we're all going to play by them. Accounta bility, if it's broken

once, it's going to be broken all the way down.

So good, so good. Salvatore. There's a

question, like I mentioned, that I asked them, I guess. And here

it is. The question is, what is the biggest secret you wish

wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you wish every

founder watching or listening today knew?

Metaphors move minds. You have a brilliant idea, and

you can explain it conceptually. You can explain the complexity

of it, and they won't get it. What they will get is the

metaphor. If you, as a leader leading a team, or just a small

unit, can start practicing using a metaphor, find a metaphor that

works for you, and play it all the way through. I have a

financial advisor that uses tennis every time he's talking

to a client or to his colleagues, tennis is getting

played out in that meeting to explain the theory, to explain

the complexity of what he's saying, and now his teammates

and clients get him as a leader. The secret that not enough

people use is to practice you. Using metaphors to explain your

thinking, and then you can move things faster.

So, good, so good. I love that, and I'm so

bad at it. But it's a great reminder, as a great reminder.

Salvatore, there are some folks listening who would love, love,

love, love to get a copy of your book, we really haven't talked

enough about that so far, but they'd also love to have you

come in and work with their team. Where can they find more

out about you and the work that you

Oh, Thank you. I would say to anybody out there, if you

are sharing ideas and the energy isn't moving forward, I would

love to talk to you about what's going on there. The easiest way

is to join my newsletter, you can go to Salvator manzi.com

It's a communication strategy every couple of weeks. My book,

Clear and Compelling, will be out in October, and you can

pre-order now on whatever, wherever you buy books.

Fantastic, fantastic. Get the links to

those in the show notes for you all, and highly recommend

checking it out. I got to read an early version, and it's

fantastic. Salvatore, thank you so much for being on the show.

Really was a privilege and honor, and a very fun

conversation. So, thanks for being here, and for those of you

watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as

I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.

Hey everyone, Scott Retimer here. Thank you so much for

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