Communication in the Workplace

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THRIVE TAKES//April 11, 2019

Try This Now: Stop Sending a “Gentle Reminder”

A popular way to nudge a co-worker is to employ this phrase, but it misses the opportunity to be compassionately direct.

By 

• Stephanie Fairyington, Thrive Global Senior Staff Writer

Photo credit: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock

Often, receiving an email with a “gentle reminder” can feel stressful… and not at all gentle. If anything, it feels passively hostile. And it definitely runs counter to compassionate directness, the idea of encouraging everyone on a team to surface problems and raise questions with straightforward clarity and kindness.

Instead of sending a “gentle reminder,” a better approach would be to say: “I completely understand that you’ve got a lot on your plate, but I need to hear back from you on this today.” This wording is more effective — and better underscores the urgency — because it expresses appreciation for the person’s busyness, but also offers a clear call to action, says Joseph A. Devito, Ph.D., author of The Interpersonal Communication Book. “It also confirms the person’s importance to the larger organization by emphasizing their ‘full plate’ and the importance — the need — of the individual’s contribution.”

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— Published on April 11, 2019

• COMMUNICATION,
• EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS

Stephanie Fairyington, Thrive Global Senior Staff Writer

Stephanie Fairyington is a senior staff writer at Thrive Global. A New York-based journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic (online), The New Republic (online), The Boston Globe, and several other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her spouse Sabrina and daughter Marty.

Etiquette and communication

Here's a wonderful brief post on etiquette and communication. A neat summary of some essential rules..


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-timeless-rules-of-etiquette-to-live-by_us_5a81b99ee4b0c6726e15bff4

New Book on Listening

Here is the TOC for a new book by Sharon Drew Morgen who asked me to post this and to alert readers of this coming book. I'm happy to do so. The book is called What? Did you really say what I think I heard?  The book will be out in December at which time I'll try to post the first chapter.

Foreword 1

Author’s notes 3

Introduction 4

Section 1: How do we hear others? 16

Chapter 1: What do we hear? 17

Chapter 2: How we mishear: the role of filters 23

Chapter 3: The components of communication 36

Chapter 4: Filling in the communication gaps: noticing what’s missing 52

Chapter 5: The elements of a conversation: case study 67

Section 1 summary 82

SECTION 2: How to have conversations without bias or misinterpretation 84

Chapter 6: The skills of conscious choice 85

Chapter 7: What to listen for 109

Chapter 8: Preparing for conversations 123

Chapter 9: Conversations that went wrong 138

Chapter 10: Final thoughts: what good is good communication? 155

Section 2 summary 161

Bibliography 163

Footnotes 168

Acknowledgements 173

Author’s Bio 174

For those with interest in this topic, you can contact Sharon Drew Morgen directly sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Communication Infographic

Here's a wonderful Infographic on communication sent to me by Michael Yunat, coordinator/GetVolP. It should make a good discussion starter in interpersonal or fundamentals of communication courses.

Relevant education

Here's an interesting article on making education relevant--especially interesting is the comment--last para on page 2--that 89 percent of employers surveyed wanted workers who had "the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing."

Success with Communication

You'll notice that I added a link to Success with Communication (listed at the right as Interpersonal Communication Skills) at the request of Joel Seah. Joel's masthead reads: Through techniques from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), The Enneagram and daily life experiences, I will share with you simple yet powerful tips to enhance the way you communicate and increase your influence! It seems to offer a different take on communication which I thought some of you may be interested in. Joel, if you'd like to add a comment, please do.

Communication

If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at the advertisement for Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Web conferencing: the lead is:
Travel is a luxury. Communication is not.

Communication Not Bullets

Why is Jimmy Carter getting so much flak? His mission, it seems to me, is to achieve peace in an area that has seen none in the last 50 years. And he is intent on using communication instead of bullets to achieve this peace. To those who would argue that we should not communicate with those with whom we disagree, I would ask: Isn’t this a better way to resolve differences than killing people? And hasn’t Iraq taught us that military action before talking about it—in this case with those with whom we disagreed as well as with our allies—can only spell disaster? One letter to the editor of the New York Times (4/23/08) put it this way: “It is with one’s enemies, after all—not preferred interlocutors—that treaties ending wars must be made.” It’s one of the most obvious statements that can be made about conflict resolution and yet, it’s denied and Carter is made to look like the enemy. Carter is trying to save lives and make life better for both Israelis and Palestinians and he’s trying to use communication instead of military action.
I can only surmise that those who do not want to resolve matters through communication, prefer to resolve them by killing those with whom they disagree. Is this the kind of world we want—where military action is the only alternative considered? To both Israelis and Palestinians: Sit down and talk (and don't get up until a resolution is achieved) unless you want to continue this senseless and horrendous war, where nobody wins and everyone loses. Surprising as this may seem, communication is preferable to war. Communication not bullets.

Why Study Communication?

I just heard from Sherry Morreale that an article she wrote with Judy Pearson will appear in the next issue of Communication Education. The reason I mention this is that this article focuses on the role of communication skills as central to success, both personally and professionally. It’s based on an analysis of 93 varied publications. This article updates a previous one by Morreale, Michael Osborn, and Pearson that appeared in the Journal of the Association for Communication Administration in 1998. I’m sure it will provide just the information you need to counter the sometimes (though it seems to be decreasing; most students, I think, do recognize the value of communication competence) “Why do I need to take a communication course?” question.

ABCD: Ethics

Ethics, also referred to as moral philosophy, is the study of morality, the study of good and bad, of right and wrong. It’s concerned with actions, with behaviors; it’s concerned with classifying and distinguishing between behaviors that are moral (ethical, good, right) and those that are immoral (unethical, bad, and wrong).
Before reading further about ethics, consider some of the popular beliefs about ethics, perhaps one or more of which you hold personally.
For each of the following statements place a T (for True) if you feel the statement accurately explains what ethical behavior is and an F (for False) if you feel the statement does not accurately explain what ethical behavior is.
_____ 1. My behavior is ethical when I feel (in my heart) that I’m doing the right thing.
_____ 2. My behavior is ethical when it is consistent with my religious beliefs.
_____ 3. My behavior is ethical when it is legal.
_____ 4. My behavior is ethical when the majority of reasonable people would consider it ethical.
_____ 5. My behavior is ethical when the effect of the behavior is more beneficial than harmful.
All five of these statements are (generally) False; none of them state a useful explanation of what is and what is not ethical.
(1) Statement 1 is False simply because people often do unethical things they feel are morally justified. Jack the Ripper killing prostitutes is a good historical example but there are many current ones such as stalking (I’m so in love I need to be with this person) or insurance scams (My family needs the money more than the insurance company). Even though Jack, the stalker, and the scam artist may feel justified in their own minds, it doesn’t make the behavior moral or ethical.
(2) Statement 2 must be False when you realize that different religions advocate very different kinds of behavior, often behaviors that contradict one another. Examples abound in almost every issue of a daily newspaper.
(3) Statement 3 must be false when you realize so much discrimination against certain people is perfectly legal in many parts of the world, and, in many countries, war (even preemptive war) is legal.
(4) Statement 4 is False because the thinking of the majority changes with the times and has often proven to be extremely immoral. The burning of people supposed to be witches or of those who spoke out against majority opinion (as in the Inquisition) are good examples.
(5) Statement 5 comes the closest to being possibly and sometimes true; but it’s more generally false. The reason it’s more false than true is that the burning of witches, for example, was in the interest of the majority as was slavery and discrimination against gay men and lesbians. But, despite this majority interest, we’d readily recognize these actions as immoral. On the other hand, in deciding whether to do one thing or another, it may prove useful to weigh the good against the bad that would result from each action.
BTW, I got the idea for this self-test after reading “What Is Ethics?” (www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.html) and think these 5 statements would make for great discussion in small groups or with the class as a whole.

Three Areas of Ethics

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(www.iep.utm.edu/e/ethics.htm) the field of ethics consists of three areas:
• Metaethics concerns itself with the origin and meaning of ethical principles—where they come from (God? Social conventions? Cultural norms?) and the meanings of various ethical concepts (What is responsibility? What is right? What is wrong?).
• Normative ethics concerns itself with articulating the standards of right and wrong; this is the area that proposes specific ethical principles (for example, don’t lie, don’t willfully hurt another person). It is from normative ethics that we learn the principles governing what is ethical and what is unethical.
• Applied ethics concerns itself with the ethical implications of controversial issues (Is capital punishment ethical? Is preventing marriage to same sex couples ethical? Is it ethical to engage in war?).
These three areas often intersect. For example, the ethics of capital punishment is clearly applied ethics since it focuses on a controversial issue but it also draws on the insights of metaethics (Where do the rights to kill another person come from? Who has the right to kill another human being?) and on normative ethics (By what standard does one person claim the right to kill another person? Under what conditions might it be justifiable to kill another person?)

Two Approaches to Ethics

So, when is behavior ethical and when is it unethical? Lots of people have come up with lots of theories.
If you take an objective view, you’d claim that the ethical nature of an act—any act—depends on standards that apply to all people in all situations at all times. If lying, advertising falsely, using illegally obtained evidence, and revealing secrets, for example, are considered unethical, then they’d be considered unethical regardless of the circumstances surrounding them or of the values and beliefs of the culture in which they occur.
If you take a subjective view, you’d claim that the morality of an act depends on a specific culture’s values and beliefs as well as on the particular circumstances. Thus, from a subjective position you would claim that the end might justify the means—a good result can justify the use of unethical means to achieve that result. You would further argue that lying is wrong to win votes or to sell cigarettes, but that lying can be ethical if the end result is positive (such as trying to make someone who is unattractive feel better by telling them they look great, or telling a critically ill person that they’ll feel better soon.)
Each field of study defines what is and what is not ethical to its concerns (in the normative ethical sense). Here are just a few to highlight some communication-oriented codes as well as a few to indicate the range of associations that developed and, in some cases, enforce such codes:
• The National Communication Association Ethical Credo (www.natcom.org)
• Bloggers’ Ethics (www.cyberjouranlist.net/news/000215.php)
• Online Journalism (www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/Ethics/print.htm)
• Radio-Television News Directors Association and Foundation Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (www.rtndf.org./ethics/coe.html)
• National Education Association Code of Ethics for the Education Profession (www.nea.org/aboutnea/code/html)
• American Medial Association Principles of Medical Ethics (www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category)
• Merrill Lynch’s Code of Ethics for Financial Professionals (www.ml.com/cms/templates/so)
Try looking up the code of ethics for the profession you’re in or planning on entering.

Introducing ABCD

ABCD stands for A Beginner’s Communication Dictionary and is primarily addressed to students (but also to instructors) and anyone interested in communication. My purpose here is modest and simple—it’s to elaborate on some of the central terms in communication that your textbook—even if you’re using one of mine—may not have clarified sufficiently. Textbook authors are under great pressure to not add pages when they do a revision; if something is added, something must be taken out. And that’s not easy to do; everything seems so important (at least to the author). So, there often isn’t enough space to include more extended definitions.
I will try to go beyond what I say in my texts though I may use that as a base or take-off point. Hopefully these definitions will expand or supplement or provide additional perspectives on the terms defined in your text—rather than simply repeat what’s in the text. Another value of these definitions (I hope) is to reinforce the terms discussed in your text and course; just reading the definition again with perhaps different examples and in another format will, I suspect, help you learn the concept on a more meaningful level.
Some of these words are common words given special meaning in communication; noise and feedback are good examples. Other words are basically academic jargon; impression management and impression formation are examples. All, however, are important to understanding and learning about communication.
My intention is to post one definition each week for the next 14 or 15 weeks (covering a semester), probably over the weekend, and then see what happens. If these prove useful, I’ll continue; if there are easier and better ways to cover such terms and if this proves ineffective, I’ll turn attention to something else. My goal is to find interesting ways to supplement the traditional textbook with additional materials that we’d probably all recognize are useful to students learning the theories and skills of communication. The question, I guess, that needs exploration and that I’m trying to address, is what materials are most important as supplements to the textbook and how can these materials be most effectively presented. Posting these definitions on the blog is one attempt in this direction.
I also intend to keep these definitions fairly brief and hopefully following Albert Einstein’s suggestion that everything should be made as simple as possible, but never so simple that significant factors are ignored or distorted. I’ll also try to provide suggestions for further reading when appropriate. All of these definitions should be accessible through the descriptor/key word ABCD.
First, however, let me say something about the importance of terms and their definitions to your academic study of communication. As you already know—just from having listened to lectures and having read textbooks in different subject areas—each discipline has its own vocabulary. And, to make matters more confusing, some use the same word in vastly different ways. The term culture, for example, means one thing in anthropology and quite another in biology. If you defined culture on an anthropology exam as it’s defined in biology, you’d be marked incorrect; the meanings are totally different. In the same way, family means one thing in sociology and quite another in linguistics. And, as you also already know, communication has its own vocabulary, consisting of words of jargon, developed specifically to talk about communication, and regular words used in specialized senses.
There are several reasons why these different vocabularies were developed, why they’re maintained, and why they’re ever expanding.
• Each discipline focuses on somewhat different phenomena and therefore each needs specific terms to refer to these phenomena. “Message” is a useful concept in ordinary talk but in communication we need to make finer distinctions; after all, not all messages are the same. Taking just one example: some messages refer primarily to content—to, say, the movie you just saw—and others refer more to relationships—to, say, who gets to make the final decision or the last word. And so we talk about content messages and relationship messages as well as messages (in the more general sense).
• The specialized and technical language of a discipline enables researchers and theorists in the field to communicate more efficiently and more precisely. The distinction between content and relationship messages is just one example.
• Knowing the specialized vocabulary may enable you to identify more clearly or notice or remember certain things more easily. If you can readily label something, you’re probably more likely to notice it and be able to recall it at a later time. The linguistic tag (the name, the label), it’s assumed, enables you to more easily store the information in memory and be able to recall it. For example, once you understand the very elementary distinction between content and relationship messages, you’ll start noticing messages that are primarily focused on content and distinguishing them from messages that are primarily focused on relationships. With further insight, you’ll be able to see quite clearly when misunderstandings and conflicts are caused by the failure to recognize this distinction between these two kinds of messages. And you’ll be able to use this knowledge in your own messages. For example, when a message is primarily relational (“I can’t stand it when you ignore me!”) and you respond as if it’s primarily about content (“I do not ignore you”) you miss the chance to make real contact with the other person’s feelings. A relationally oriented message such as “I know I sometimes get wrapped up in my own world and seem to block out everyone else. . . .” might have been more effective. This is simply one of the skills you’ll acquire and one that can be clarified and enhanced with this specialized vocabulary.
And this is about as good a way as I can think of to explain the nature of “communication skills”. Textbooks differ widely on what they consider a skill even though they all use the term skill. I like to think of the term skill as the ability to do something. This skill will likely depend on your knowing something first. But, just knowing something is not sufficient for skill mastery; you need to be able to do something better or different than you did before you acquired the skill. And that’s what a skill is: the ability to accomplish your communication goal, to do something better, more effectively, more efficiently, more persuasively, more passionately—or whatever your particular goal is.
So, these are some of the reasons why the vocabulary you’ll learn in this course is an important part of learning what communication is and how you can communicate more effectively. At the same time that you’ll learn the subject by learning its vocabulary, you will (I hope) gain a deeper appreciation for the power of language generally.
I invite whoever might read these definitions (students, instructors, blog surfers) to add examples, correct any misleading statements, clarify anything that is not clear, extend the definition to other areas, suggest additional references, or note any research results that might be relevant to the definition. All you have to do is leave a comment to the post of the definition on which you want to expand/clarify/exemplify. Or, if you prefer, e-mail me at jadevito@earthlink.net.