 Jargon, clichés, technical terms, acronyms, abbreviations: Writers may find them helpful, but readers do not. For Harvard linguist Stephen Pinker, the source of overusing such potentially confounding devices is something called “the curse of knowledge.” He defines this as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know”.
As Pinker says in his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, the more proficient people become at a job or hobby, the more they get caught up in the lexicon of that world. The problem arises when they forget that not everyone else is attuned to the same catchwords. Business school grads, he says, can be the worst offenders—transporting their academic buzzwords into the workplace. To combat the curse of knowledge, Pinker urges writers to become more “considerate” of readers. They can do so by adding a few words of explanation to a technical term, and by offering examples. For instance, a financial advisor mentioning index funds might say…“Index funds are mutual funds that mirror the components of a particular market—for example, Standard and Poor’s 500 stocks. They can limit risk exposure.” In sum, Pinker advises: “Before sending your writing out to the world, it's better to be honest with yourself about how much your reader is likely to understand a given passage or sentence. Before you commit your writing to print-- or to the internet-- take a few moments to make sure that what you write is clear and understandable by as many of your intended readers as possible.” (Tweet it!) Do you wish your writing could be clearer? How often do you use explanations, examples, and analogies? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.
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 Managerial incompetence can take many forms, but research shows that one insidious kind is “absentee leadership”, sometimes known as avoidant leadership. Absentee leaders inhabit the roles of leaders, accepting the perks and rewards, but they avoid meaningful engagement with their teams and add little or no value.
Absentee leaders take a laissez-faire approach to leadership, but if you think having a boss who ignores you might have its upsides, think again. A 2015 survey of 1,000 employees showed that eight out of nine complaints were about what bosses didn't do. In fact, being ignored by your boss can be more alienating than being treated poorly. The impact of absentee leadership degrades employee satisfaction over a long period of time. It also leads to role ambiguity (with no one sure who is responsible for what) and increased bullying by team members. Absentee leaders can be hard to weed out: Many organizations don’t confront them because they have other bad managers whose behavior is more egregious. However, Scott Gregory, CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, calls avoidant leaders “silent organizational killers.” Left unchecked, he adds, “absentee leaders clog an organization’s succession arteries, blocking potentially more effective people from moving into important roles while adding little to productivity”. Your organization may be unaware of its absentee leaders because they are good at flying under the radar. But over time, organizations with the best leaders will win. (Tweet it!) Reviewing your organization’s management positions for absentee leaders, and doing something about them, can improve your talent arsenal. Have you ever experienced an absentee leader? What, if anything, did your organization do about them? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Few of us like confrontation, and having to confront an underperforming employee about their performance can be a daunting prospect. Writing in the Harvard Business Review global CEO coach Sabina Nawaz offers some guidelines to de-pressurize this difficult situation:
Have you ever had to confront an underperforming employee? Did your talk lead to productive change? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  When journalist Kate Murphy was writing her book, You’re Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters, few people she asked could define what it meant to be a good listener—but they did know how a bad listener behaved: interrupting, checking their phones, responding in a self-involved way. “The sad truth,” she says, "is that people have more experience being cut off, ignored and misunderstood than heard to their satisfaction”.
How to reclaim the lost art of listening? After years studying the neuroscience, psychology and sociology of listening, as well as consulting numerous professional listeners (including a C.I.A. agent, focus group moderator, radio producer, priest, and bartender), Murphy “discovered that listening goes beyond simply hearing what people say. It also involves paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it, in what context, and how what they say resonates within you.” Some pointers:
Good listening has many rewards. Your relationships will be stronger, you will gain more knowledge, and you will certainly have more interesting conversations. Do you consider yourself a good listener? How do you keep your attention focused on your conversation partner? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Human beings have a fundamental need to belong; yet 40 percent of us say we feel isolated at work. To better understand this basic need to belong, the career and life coaching platform BetterUp conducted research to investigate the role of belonging at work and “the outsized consequences of its absence”. Here’s what the research showed:
Organizations are not powerless in the face of exclusion, but leadership must ensure that recruiting for diversity is not an end in itself. To ensure that no one feels left out, regular feedback should be solicited and attended to. Have you ever felt excluded at work? What have you done to make others feel they belong? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Every movie started with a logline, a one or two line synopsis to grab the attention of studio executives. For Jaws, it was: A police chief, with a phobia for open water, battles a gigantic shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open.
Every business proposal should similarly be able to be summed up in a “grabber” elevator pitch – so-called because it could be delivered in a brief ride between floors, or in any situation where someone first asks, “What does your product or company do?” Take the pitch for Google’s original startup: Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible. Harvard Graduate School of Design Instructor Carmine Gallo, author of Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to get from Good to Great, offers guidelines for crafting a clear, concise pitch that captivates:
What is your process for coming up with an elevator pitch? Does your entire team use the same message? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Happiness is fleeting and can be influenced by trivial matters. It is also quite personal; what makes one person happy might not make someone else happy. Yet despite the mercurial nature of happiness, many organizations now routinely survey their employees with questions such as “How happy are you at the company?”
Writing in Inc. Emma Brudner, Director of People Operations at Lola.com, says that companies would be better off finding out if employees are fulfilled, rather than happy. Fulfillment, she says, occurs when organizations deliver on expectations set during hiring interviews and when the employee is learning and growing. “Employees can feel fulfilled overall even if their happiness fluctuates,” contends Brudner. For example, personal growth can be uncomfortable in the moment, but valuable overall. (Tweet it!) Brudner suggests that measuring fulfillment is much more effective than attempting to measure happiness. Doing so, she says, will encourage self-reflection. It also “innately places accountability jointly on the employee and the company, versus solely the latter.” To assess levels of fulfillment she suggests companies pose one or several of these questions on their next employee surveys:
Do you think employees at your organization are fulfilled, and, if so, what does the organization do to further that fulfillment? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Let’s face it: It’s hard to make friends as an adult. If you don’t stay connected to childhood or college friends, you might wind up knowing lots of people, but being close to few. It’s an unfortunate reality for many, given that research shows how vital close friendships are for well-being.
There are many reasons why it’s difficult to bond closely with others in adult life—ranging from lack of time to a focus on careers, finances and family, to an emphasis on quantity over quality—but it is possible to get closer to existing friends. Writing in The New York Times, Emma Pattee offers some ways of doing so:
Would you like to have closer friendships in your adult years, and what have you proactively done to meet this goal? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Oppositional employees are perpetual naysayers, refusing to follow instructions, debating or dismissing feedback, or creating an ongoing stream of negative comments. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune 500 consultant and former NYU professor Liz Kislik offers several approaches to help managers get the best from such difficult employees:
Letting an oppositional employee go may not be necessary. First, try understanding their concerns and motivations, and provide support through possible job redesign and relationship building. “Then,” says Kislik, “employees who were once seen as problems can bring their greatest strengths to bear on behalf of the organization, rather than against it.” Have you ever had to manage an oppositional employee? Were your approaches successful? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  As more and more of our encounters—especially first encounters—migrate to online formats, making a good digital first impression is essential. But like other “soft skills” online etiquette is rarely taught. There’s an unspoken expectation that we all know the rules, but often we don’t. To help alleviate awkward digital encounters, Victor Turk offers this advice in The New York Times.
Have you ever made a digital faux pas or been on the receiving end of one? How was the situation resolved? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  This New Year, consider making a resolution to practice 12 months of conscious, healthy communication. Most people navigate through important moments of communication on automatic pilot, reacting from emotion rather than intention. But we can transform our relationships by getting off autopilot and being proactive with positive communication. (Tweet it!) As communication researchers and partners in work and marriage for decades, we’ve experienced both the joy and challenge of personal and business communication and we’ve found some simple steps to resolving conflict and building trust in relationships:
Confronting issues is never an easy matter, but avoidance can be hazardous not just to our relationships, but also to our own health. Here’s wishing you a happy, healthy, communicative 2020! We want to hear from you: do you have a New Year’s resolution that could lead to stronger communication? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Whenever we ask people to share stories about stressful family encounters at the holidays, we are amazed at the outpouring of fraught memories. But reliving the conflicts of holidays past won’t help us deal with the present. This season try something new. When Uncle Joe or Aunt Blanche blurts out an unwelcome opinion or a political jab, resist the temptation to engage in point/counterpoint. This quickly devolves into a situation where everyone feels the only way to “win” is to get louder and LOUDER!
Instead, ask for more information about your relative’s point of view—and actually listen to that information. (Do this even if the point of view they are sharing is a direct criticism of you.) Only true listening can provide you the information you need to have influence. And it is only when your “adversary” feels heard that they will even begin to consider another point of view. (Tweet it!) Additionally:
Be realistic: You are not going to achieve perfect harmony with everyone at the dinner table. But with a little resolve you can certainly improve your batting average. And with the current political landscape, every bit helps. Happy holidays! If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Humility: The ability to accurately acknowledge one’s limitations and to assume an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused. Though this trait might be in short supply these days, social and personality psychologists interested in positive psychology are increasingly researching it, according to The New York Times.
Humility, it turns out, is highly correlated with other positive traits. In one series of experiments, Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso of Pepperdine University scored volunteers on a measure of “intellectual humility” — awareness of the incompleteness and potential fallibility of their views on political and social issues. This type of humility was strongly linked to curiosity, reflection, and open-mindedness. Other research has found that people who score high for humility are less aggressive and less judgmental toward members of other religious groups than less humble people. And humility researcher Dr. Krumrei Mancuso contends that humble people are apt to hold onto their convictions and are less easily manipulated. With humility attracting so much attention, some wonder whether it can be taught. The conundrum is that those most open to learning this trait probably need it least. Meanwhile, the good news is that between 10 and 15 percent of adults score highly on measures of humility, depending on the rating scale. “That’s at least 25 million humble people in the USA alone,” notes Benedict Carey of The New York Times. Do you believe you are one of the 10 – 15 percent of adults capable of being humble? How does this trait influence your perspective and your relationships with others? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 85% of companies have undertaken a transformation during the past decade. The same research found nearly 75% of those transformations did not improve business performance in the short or long term.
Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and author of The Way We’re Working Isn't Working, attributes this unimpressive success rate to a natural human tendency: the resistance to change. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he says, “Transforming a business also depends on transforming individuals — beginning with the most senior leaders and influencers. Few of them have spent much time observing and understanding their own motivations, challenging their assumptions, or pushing beyond their intellectual and emotional comfort zones.” (Tweet it!) In short, organizational transformation is likely to stall when people slip back into old behavioral patterns, despite their best intentions to start anew. To counter this mindset, Schwartz and his associates pose a series of provocative questions for leaders and their teams to ask themselves:
Sound strategy can spur transformation, Schwartz contends, but not without “continuously addressing the invisible reasons that people and cultures so often resist changing…” Do you ever find yourself backsliding into old behaviors at work, despite a desire to change? How do you counter this tendency? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  We’ve long maintained that how you say what you say is critical in your ability to persuade. Now new research from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that one specific way to be more influential is by speaking slightly louder than you normally would, and by varying the overall volume of your voice (speaking both more loudly and softly, in turn). Tweet it!
“Every time we interact with someone, we’re trying to figure out how much they know about what they’re saying, how knowledgeable they are, how confident they seem,” said Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at Wharton and a co-author of this study. “We found that the cues related to speaking volume made speakers seem more confident, which made them more persuasive overall.” In our conversations, we think a lot about language, and a lot less about paralanguage — the means of delivery of our message. But whether we think about it or not, its effects are salient. So, the next time you debate whether to send an email or make a call consider this: Simply hearing someone’s voice can make their message more influential. Are you conscious of how you use your voice when you try to persuade? Do you deliberately change the volume of your voice in order to influence? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. |
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