Podcast #20 – Mary Jane Copps on Mastering Real-Time Communication Skills, Mentoring & Leadership

Doug Dvorak (00:01.614)
Good day Mission Podcast community. I’m your host, Doug Dvorak, and I’m incredibly excited to bring you inspiring stories from incredible guests. These individuals are on a mission to create remarkable possibilities that not only enhance their lives, but also make a significant and lasting contributions to the individuals and communities they serve and around them.

Mary Jane Copps (00:13.036)
Okay.

Doug Dvorak (00:40.204)
Stay tuned for some truly amazing conversations. My guest today is Mary Jane Copps who hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. For our US listeners who may not know where Halifax, Nova Scotia is. Hi Mary Jane.

Mary Jane Copps (00:56.524)
Hi Doug, I’m really excited to be here with you today.

Doug Dvorak (00:59.598)
Well, we’re excited to have you. What a great topic. A little bit about Mary Jane. Mary Jane is affectionately known as “The Phone Lady,” New York Times bestselling author. Her book, The Phone Book, is a go-to for anyone that wants to really use telephone and conversation skills to get a hold of contacts, prospects, and clients, but also to inspire meaningful conversations.

Mary Jane, again, is an accomplished author, speaker, and facilitator, and passionate about creating excellent communication. During her career going back as far as supporting herself through university, she’s always relied on effective conversations to make things happen as a receptionist, a manager, a journalist, a salesperson, and a researcher and an entrepreneur. Since starting her first business in 1987,

Mary Jane has been analyzing the psychology of phone communication. Today, whether she’s working with entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, corporations, or government organizations, she uses this knowledge and skill to improve all of their conversations, phone, video, Zoom teams, in-person, and email, with stakeholders, funders, clients, and prospects, and helps them build stronger, long-lasting relationships.

Mary Jane has worked with over 700 clients since launching the Phone Lady brand in 2006, and she has trained over 15,000 individuals, giving them the necessary skills to increase revenue and customer satisfaction through her proven communication techniques. Mary Jane, welcome. It’s a high honor and privilege to have you on the Mission Possible Podcast. Today’s title, Mentoring, Leading, and Exemplifying.

real time conversation skills. Mary Jane, you’re known as the phone lady. How did that moniker come to define your mission in mentoring and communication?

Mary Jane Copps (03:06.67)
Well, I think at the beginning in 2006 when I launched Under the Foam Lady, I didn’t realize where I would be today 20 years later. So what we’ve experienced in the last 10 years, eight years, and certainly since 2020 is a struggle in businesses.

who are seeing their employees develop anxiety and fear around real-time conversations. And we know from our connections with CEOs at the research we do every year that 92 % of senior executives believe this is impacting their bottom line.

Doug Dvorak (03:58.562)
Excellent, excellent. And I’m going to share a story with you. I was on a flight with a very nice

man sitting next to me, he was a doctor, and we got to talking about his life, our life, and families, and he said, I’ve got a 16 year old son, and he pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of a typewriter, and his son didn’t even know what that was. Then he said, yeah, my kid, it’s all email, text, they don’t want to use the phone. In fact, I was speaking in Orlando a few years back to some really young, talented crypto.

business people and I just was on the side listening and they said I don’t care if I ever talk to a human being I want to do everything on my phone by myself I don’t want to talk to anyone how are those younger cohorts dealing with the older generation or cohorts who still rely on the phone as a communication and business tool

Mary Jane Copps (04:57.784)
Well, I mean, that’s a good question, because right now we have five generations in the workplace. We still have baby boomers in the workplace, and we have 19-year-olds in the workplace. So we’ve got all these generations working together. And what isn’t happening enough, which is why I like to talk about mentoring, teaching, and exemplifying, is that those

older generations aren’t necessarily encouraging the younger generation to learn communication skills. It’s not that they don’t want to always, it’s that they actually don’t know how. And through the work that we do, what we hear most often is, I’m so grateful. I didn’t realize this was so easy.

Doug Dvorak (05:43.514)
Mmm.

Mary Jane Copps (05:56.942)
I just didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. That kind of response is what we get.

Doug Dvorak (06:04.792)
So not so much they don’t want to use the phone or any other device or medium. It’s just they don’t know how and their age cohort is different. That’s really interesting. You know, in today’s digital first world, why is real time communications still such a powerful tool for leaders and mentors?

Mary Jane Copps (06:29.538)
Well, when we are using digital communication, and that’s everything from text, instant messaging, email, social media, we aren’t going back and forth. We aren’t doing what you and I are doing here. And that teaches us that we can just say whatever we want, and we don’t have to take your ideas.

or comments or knowledge into consideration. So it’s hard to support and grow leaders if we’re not supporting and growing people who can listen to the other side of the story, respond to that, ask questions. All of those things have a discussion as opposed to, well, this is what I know to be true and you’re wrong kind of thing.

So real-time conversations are incredibly valuable. And if we think about sales, sales is selling a customer what they need in the way they express they need it. I can’t sell you something if I call it something else, if I use different language, if I insist on using my way of describing your problem. I have to describe it the way you know it to be true.

Doug Dvorak (07:58.218)
Interesting. Mary Jane, how do you coach leaders to overcome their fear or discomfort when they need to mentor younger people on effective communication and meaningful conversations?

Mary Jane Copps (08:23.086)
The first barrier I have to overcome is their disbelief or their skepticism that these people don’t know how to have a conversation. Because I’m so close to the topic, I understand that we have several generations that have always had this in their hand and have never had, for example, a house phone.

Right? But when I am talking to a CEO or senior VP, they’ll think these people are being lazy or that they’re not motivated. And in reality, they’re just in many cases anxiety ridden and fearful, but also in many cases lost. So one of the challenges that came up in our 2025 survey of senior executives was my staff

don’t know are afraid they’re going to be asked a question because they may not know the answer.

Doug Dvorak (09:29.861)
Mmm.

Mary Jane Copps (09:31.438)
And I learned very young in my career that it was okay to say, you know, that’s a great question, I don’t have the answer. Let me do some research and get back to you later today. But that’s not obvious if no one’s ever told you that. So it’s really once you give people these basic conversation skills, they actually start to really dig in and enjoy their work and want to learn more.

Doug Dvorak (10:01.508)
Can you share with our listeners some of the barriers or the backstory as to why it’s even harder today to mentor or to listen actively or have great communication and conversations?

Mary Jane Copps (10:21.774)
Well, we’re all incredibly overwhelmed. Technology early on, I guess in the 80s, there was this promise we’d get rid of all our paperwork and we’d all have less to do and we’d be working a 25-hour work week. Well, that hasn’t happened in any way. There’s more coming at us and…

If you are a senior executive, if you’re a CEO or you’re a manager, you have a lot of responsibilities. So it’s making time to A, be empathetic. Where is this person coming from on their understanding of real time conversations? Where, how is this person feeling when they’re in a team meeting? Are they intimidated to speak up? And if so, why? So there’s

time to take some empathy and then time to figure out when are you going to do a little bit of one-on-one coaching. And I always say even if you do 15 minute coaching sessions with someone, that’s valuable. Just focus on one skill or one word that they’re using that is causing their conversations to go sideways. And then allowing yourself to also do group coaching and

Doug Dvorak (11:44.558)
Mmm.

Mary Jane Copps (11:45.824)
those individuals on your team that are doing really well, give them the responsibility to mentor someone else on the team so that it isn’t always up to you to find the time and make it work.

Doug Dvorak (11:53.356)
I love that.

Doug Dvorak (11:58.08)
Excellent. Mary Jane, how can leaders model strong real time conversation skills for younger team members or remote employees? You talked a little bit about that. Can you go a little bit deeper?

Mary Jane Copps (12:11.084)
I can. Put this down.

Doug Dvorak (12:14.808)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Mary Jane Copps (12:16.333)
So have a few meetings where no phones are allowed or they have to turn them off or create a day where whatever comes in by email you’re going to respond with a phone call or you’re going to ask for a phone call. Maybe you can’t respond with phone call right away but it’s the digital back and forth where we send the message and we wait.

And that’s so passive in terms of building a business, creating revenue, et cetera. Do we even know that that email got received? So yeah, this morning what we’re gonna do, whatever emails come in, see if you can set up a 10 minute conversation with that client or that prospect. The other part which you and I have worked on often is teaching people how to book

phone conversations so that they’re happening when the other person is available. The other person gets to choose as opposed random calls which tend not to work today because again, we’re all really busy.

Doug Dvorak (13:19.706)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dvorak (13:27.052)
Yeah, excellent. Mary Jane, what’s the relationship between active listening and mentoring through conversation?

Mary Jane Copps (13:36.12)
Well, when we are actively listening, we are paying attention to a wide range of things. So we’re paying attention to body language, we’re paying attention to sounds. Right now you might be paying attention to my hands. So you hear, even though I’m using common words, you can hear my enthusiasm, so you’re paying attention to tone of voice.

when we are mentoring, all of those things are important. So if we are helping someone learn real-time conversation skills, but they come away from those lessons and they talk like this, Doug, it is really great to see you, that isn’t really mentoring them in active listening and active participation in a conversation. So the two things go together.

Doug Dvorak (14:34.73)
Excellent. You talk, you know, I’m a graduate of Second City and Improv School. You talk a little bit in our trainings with clients about improv. Can you talk about improv in the context of today’s podcast?

Mary Jane Copps (14:51.63)
Absolutely, so I didn’t prepare for this conversation at all. You sent me an outline which was great and I had a busy day so I looked at it briefly and said, yeah, that’s okay. So what we’re doing here is we’re kind of riffing off each other if you want to think of it in a musical way. You have no idea how I’m going to answer. So you are prepared to go in a direction based on that answer. And you can see

that if you have for most of your career or most of your young life, use digital communication. With digital communication, we can edit, we can proofread, we can decide not to send it at all. So this idea that you’re in a situation where anything could happen and you need to respond is really scary. And this morning I…

I was with a group of business administration professors and this is really what they want to teach their students is simply how to do improv. And you can make that, as you and I have done in some of our workshops together, you can make that really fun for them, but it also gives them the courage to know that yes, they can respond to a situation quickly in an instant.

Doug Dvorak (16:03.374)
Hmm

Doug Dvorak (16:19.65)
Excellent. Now the next question I’m going to ask might sound weird to some of our listeners, but you’ve got some really interesting research on active listening and real-time conversations and doodling. Would you share that with the listeners, please?

Mary Jane Copps (16:35.95)
Sure, sure. So several years ago, I was really digging into, you know, how do we shut down that voice in our head? Because it talks to us 24-7. Like even in our dreams, right? It can show up and say, what is it have to do tomorrow morning? Or whatever it’s saying. But it really impedes our ability to listen because often it’s saying, well, as soon as Mary Jane stops talking,

this is what you want to say to her so that you can get through this conversation. I’m making that up. But we’re often, especially in customer service, I encounter it a lot. A customer calls about a problem that for them it’s the first time they’re having this problem. But the customer service rep has answered this question so many times. So they’re just waiting, they’re not listening. They’re just waiting for their opportunity to get in there and start talking.

So it turns out that when we either hold a writing instrument or we doodle, we can shut down that voice in our head, or at least we can turn down the volume a great deal. And I had this demonstrated to me once in a workshop. I sometimes go and teach young people some skills they need to do job interviews.

I had this young woman at the back with the long hair covering her face for the whole two hours and didn’t participate at all. But when I went around, she doodled the whole time, pages and pages of artwork. And at the end, when I went around and I said to everybody, what did you take away today? Most people will say the last thing I taught, but she remembered the whole two hours. It was amazing. I’ve never had that happen before since. And it was really

Doug Dvorak (18:25.902)
Mm-hmm

Wow.

Mary Jane Copps (18:34.546)
a valuable demonstration that if you have someone that is doodling, don’t take offense, don’t take that personally. It’s helping them listen.

Doug Dvorak (18:44.566)
Excellent. Mary Jane, what tools or best practices do you recommend to keep real time conversational skills sharp in an age of texting, AI and email?

Mary Jane Copps (18:58.444)
Well, I think in the workplace it’s important to encourage social interactions, whether that’s the group of professors I was working with this morning were going to have a potluck lunch after I left, so that people are talking to each other in a social way. And then I think in a meeting situation, it’s important to

make sure it’s balanced. There will always be people who don’t participate, right, or don’t voice their opinions. So make sure you try to balance that out. And as I said earlier, maybe say, okay, well, leave your phones on your desk while we have this meeting. And there’s exercises you can do, you and I use one of them, where you can have them work with open-ended questions.

and learn something new about their colleagues. It’s a great exercise to do for sales and customer service teams to help them know the power of open-ended questions and how much they’ll discover about a prospect or a client based on those conversation skills.

Doug Dvorak (20:20.89)
Excellent. Now you’ve shared some great examples of ideas, strategies to inspire deeper, more meaningful real-time conversations. But can you share personally a specific breakthrough moment with a client where mastering real-time conversation skills made a significant impact?

Mary Jane Copps (20:42.978)
Yes, I’ve got many. I did read that question. thought, what will I choose? What will I choose? I’m going to go towards every once in a while, a CEO will call me about one particular person on their team. So I got a call from a CEO and he said, Mary Jane, I’ve just finished a meeting with so-and-so and she cried for the whole meeting.

Doug Dvorak (20:46.219)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Mary Jane Copps (21:10.152)
and she’s booked an appointment with her physician to get some ativan in order to be able to do her job. I need your help. So we set it up for the coaching call. Now the way that her job worked was it was constant inbound calls from existing customers or prospects that she needed to answer.

and address the problem or describe the product. What she would do is she was terrified of answering those calls. So she would let every call go to voicemail first. So that they would leave a message and she could prepare for the call and then call them back. But then in that call back if they asked a question they hadn’t left on voicemail she was back to being really anxious. So

I gave her a structure. said, even if you pick up the phone and you don’t know why they’re calling, you’re going to listen to why they’re calling. And then you’re going to create an agenda for the call. So you’re going to say, well, Doug, what I hear is there’s three things you’re really having trouble with with our product. So let’s talk about them one by one. So you can instantly give that call a structure.

And because you’re using numbers, you know it’s going to end after you discuss the third thing. Because that was the other thing she was concerned about is, how do I end a call?

Doug Dvorak (22:49.242)
Mmm.

Mary Jane Copps (22:50.984)
So we only met for I think two, two and a half hours. And a year after that, she did a couple of national radio interviews with me, because she was so amazed. But also she ended up moving into being the vice president of that company.

Doug Dvorak (23:10.936)
Wow, that’s a great success story. Wow, wow. Mary Jane, what role does emotional intelligence play in inspiring and engendering real-time communications?

Mary Jane Copps (23:12.386)
It is.

Mary Jane Copps (23:27.82)
Well, mean, being emotionally intelligent in our relationships and our conversations is so important in terms of each individual that we’re interacting with. So we have a lot of recognition today of neurodiversity. I’ll start there as an example.

So sometimes it isn’t the fact that the other person is anxious about the real-time conversation, but that perhaps they’re somewhere on the autism spectrum and social interactions actually exhaust them a great deal. So your emotional intelligence can pick up on that and approach them in a different way. In a sales and customer service situation,

empathy and intuition play a big role in how we create trust and relationship with both our existing customers and our prospects. that emotionally intelligent salespeople when they sell something the other person never feels like they were sold. They feel like they purchased something themselves. And so it’s really important, yeah.

Doug Dvorak (24:47.203)
right.

Doug Dvorak (24:54.615)
Mary Jane how can mentors use tone pacing and intonation to create more impactful learning opportunities for their mentees

Mary Jane Copps (25:15.478)
Well, you’re talking about the foundations of communication there. There’s sort of five foundational things that I teach people when they’re talking to prospects or customers. So our tone of voice says everything about our energy, our enthusiasm, about the company we work for, the product that we’re selling.

It also lets that customer, that prospect hear that we’re interested in them, that we really want to listen to them. Intonation and enunciation are key because we are working with people whose first language could be anything at all. So that’s part of it, is making sure that we’re enunciating really well so we’re not creating barriers

for the person that we’re speaking to. And what was the third one you asked me about? Sorry.

Doug Dvorak (26:16.858)
intonation, pacing, and pacing.

Mary Jane Copps (26:21.43)
And pacing. Yeah, so pacing was one of the… So often, one of the things I do a lot of is I audit sales calls and customer service calls from my clients. And I hear that a lot. I hear a lot of people saying, ABC, come here, Rachel’s speaking, how can I help you? So right at the beginning of the call, the customer is like…

What? Where am I? Who am I talking to? But it’s the same with sales. Is if you’re saying, the reason that I’m calling is that our company does this, this, this, and this. And I’m wondering, does this interest you? Or whatever. Like you really, our pace allows the other person to hear us, right? That quote that I use as that foundation of my company, which is communication isn’t saying something.

communication is being heard. So your pacing is a huge part of how the other person hears and understands you.

Doug Dvorak (27:28.506)
Excellent. Mary Jane, what’s one thing you believe every new manager or mentor should master when it comes through leading through conversations or leading through inspiring conversations?

Mary Jane Copps (27:44.578)
Well, first of all, they need to be comfortable with real-time conversations. And they need to know that having conversations is a skill. I think for many generations, we didn’t recognize it as a skill because we didn’t have the digital choices. So everybody talked to everybody. Those were the choices that we had.

to not judge at all if someone says they’re anxious about a certain type of communication or that they don’t think they can do it. They are afraid. If you haven’t done a lot of real-time conversations, then it’s equivalent to being asked to give a speech without preparation. And very few of us would want to be asked to get up on stage

and give a speech without any preparation. So that’s the level of anxiety they can feel. I know it’s hard. So the CEOs and the senior VPs that participate in our annual survey, mean, 92 % of them said that a lack of confidence and skills with real-time conversations was impacting their bottom line.

I know, so that’s huge number. so whether they hire coaches, whether they take the time to coach, or whether they simply take some of their senior staff or any of their staff that’s comfortable with conversation and allow them to become the coaches and mentors, that’s going to be really helpful.

Doug Dvorak (29:34.262)
Any other data points you’d like to cite from your annual research on effective communication, telephone, digital, that our listeners might be interested in relative to inspiring meaningful conversations?

Mary Jane Copps (29:50.06)
Yeah, mean, 49 % said that they recognized that team members expressed anxiety around phone, video, and real-time conversations. So it was not just that they weren’t comfortable with it, but that they were expressing a real anxiety. And some of the skills, for example, one of them is

I don’t know, what if I don’t know the answer? They really don’t know how to respond if they don’t have the answer. And I’m doing monthly newsletters now on each of the skills that CEOs brought up in that survey. I don’t know how, they never know how to end a call. They don’t know how to follow up.

Doug Dvorak (30:43.556)
Mmm.

Mary Jane Copps (30:47.342)
They send emails only, they don’t match it with a voicemail message. Those kinds of things came up from a wide variety of the individuals that responded. But for 92 % to be still relying on real-time conversations, I think that’s key.

even though AI is coming into it and AI is an amazing thing when it’s attached to your CRM and all of these technologies are going to make us more able to know what our customers want and all of those things. At the same time, real-time conversations are what allow us to keep customers and grow our bottom line. Our churn is less when we still incorporate those real-time conversations.

Doug Dvorak (31:44.042)
Excellent. Mary Jane, looking ahead, what excites you or concerns you most about the future of real time communications specifically for mentors and leaders?

Mary Jane Copps (31:55.919)
Well, I think that AI is going to help us in terms of creating scripts maybe that are easier or giving us some freedom to create scripts to match specific team members, whatever their needs are and what they need to work with in terms of language or pacing or enunciation. We might be able to

quickly get our message out, but with very individualized scripting. I think it’s important though to remember that our customers still want to be seen and heard as individuals. And so the idea that you’re going to want to incorporate those real time conversation touch points and access

into what you’re doing. I’m sure that you and your listeners have used chat bots on a website for support and you’ve gone through dealing with AI assistance for support, but sometimes that’s not enough to solve a problem. And we as consumers

Doug Dvorak (33:06.146)
Mm-hmm.

Mary Jane Copps (33:22.016)
we’ll look for a different company to go to if we can’t reach a person when we have a problem that isn’t being solved.

Doug Dvorak (33:30.304)
Excellent. And now my favorite part of the podcast, the rapid fire round 10 quick hit questions, one word response or a short phrase. Take a glass of water and wet your whistle. Are you ready?

Mary Jane Copps (33:44.084)
Yeah, get a drink. I think so.

Doug Dvorak (33:48.472)
Phone or Zoom, what’s your go-to? Scripted or spontaneous? The best time of the day to make a cold call.

Mary Jane Copps (33:50.838)
Zoom.

spontaneous.

Mary Jane Copps (34:00.0)
I have two, so before nine and three, guess, before nine, lunchtime and after five.

Doug Dvorak (34:07.114)
One word that defines great communication.

Mary Jane Copps (34:10.838)
enthusiasm.

Doug Dvorak (34:12.204)
Favorite phone call you’ve ever made?

Mary Jane Copps (34:15.38)
my goodness. Favorite phone call I’ve ever made. I, Doug, I’m gonna choose our very first conversation. I still remember it. It wasn’t in this office. It was a different office. And we had such an amazing conversation and found a spot where we both agreed with each other but also where we could learn from each other.

Doug Dvorak (34:39.244)
Excellent. Texting in business, yay or nay? peeve during a phone conversation.

Mary Jane Copps (34:47.362)
The word just, nobody’s gonna be surprised that I say that I’m just calling or can you just do this for me or, yeah.

Doug Dvorak (34:55.192)
The one thing everyone should say when ending a call.

Mary Jane Copps (35:00.672)
well, I’m Canadian, so I’ll say thanks, but goodbye or I look forward to our next conversation.

Doug Dvorak (35:04.451)
Hahaha

Doug Dvorak (35:10.636)
your communication role model.

Mary Jane Copps (35:14.444)
I have so many.

I don’t know that I can choose. And I’m also gonna forget names, but the film director that did Forrest Gump has written a book on curiosity. And my God, it’s so good. And it speaks to how we learn and how conversations with perfect strangers help us learn and become better people. Yes, thank you.

Doug Dvorak (35:47.18)
Is it Glazer? I don’t know his first name. All right. Coffee or tea before a big client call.

Mary Jane Copps (35:55.948)
coffee.

Doug Dvorak (35:57.046)
Excellent. Our guest today has been Mary Jane Copp sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the beautiful maritimes in the eastern provinces of Canada. Mary Jane, if someone wants to get a hold of you, how can they reach you?

Mary Jane Copps (36:13.066)
easy to find me. The website is the phone lady dot com and I’m also on LinkedIn Mary Jane Copps the only one there with that name. So easy to find. Yeah exactly.

Doug Dvorak (36:25.816)
CO PPS.

Excellent. Well, thank you Mary Jane. It’s been a high honor and privilege I’ve learned so much and continue to learn from you on effective communication and inspiring meaningful conversations and mentoring. Thank you, Mission Podcast Nation, for your time. This is an awesome podcast. Please like us view us and share. Carpe Diem.