The First Great Communication Art: Representation
YOUR PRESENCE AND your words, when skillfully combined, are knowledge and power in action. They allow you to generate voluntary compliance from the most difficult subjects. Now let me suggest that if you deal with people in any profession you have an identity that can be very clearly defined, one in which you can take great pride. You can be a Contact Professional.
Contact is an interesting word from the Latin con meaning “with” and tact meaning “to touch on all sides.” I always emphasize the necessity of being a pro rather than an amateur. Amateurs have good days and bad days. They have not been trained to be tactical.
A professional, for example, is someone like Michael Jordan. He plays the greatest basketball in the world game after game but what really sets him apart is what he does under pressure. What does he do when you double-team him? I’ll tell you what he does. He gets better. He passes more often, he passes better, he scores more, he has more assists.
You should take pride in your ability to get better under the pressure people put on you in the workplace. To be a contact professional who can handle any kind of stress, you must exude credibility and an aura of power.
In all the fancy courses I took and all the degrees I earned, I never had a course on how to handle my own weaknesses in interpersonal relationships. I learned this through experience and dealing with people. I learned that to be a contact professional you must first, of course, be in contact with yourself. Most of us have weaknesses in dealing with people. What are yours? Is there a list of five or six things that get under your skin about difficult people?
We all have buttons and triggers, but if you’re going to work for others and represent them, you must not allow people to push your button or pull your trigger. The question is, how do you build a trigger guard? The answer: Know thyself. The old samurai used to say that if you don’t know yourself, you lose 100 percent of the time.
THE “WANNA BET?” GUY
I discovered very early on as a police officer that one thing I hated was having my authority challenged. There was always somebody who’d say in a nasty, whiny, contentious voice, “You can’t do that to me!” It seems I heard that twenty or thirty times a day, and it always angered me. Every time, a little voice went off in my head, You wanna bet? Watch me! Immediately I would take a more aggressive, attacking stance, and each time I made errors I was not able to explain them on paper or justify them to a superior.
The only person who had ever said anything about that problem was the old Indian who taught me things while I was growing up. One day when I was eleven, he said out of the blue, “Thompson, some day you will have enemies. Here’s how you handle ’em. First always define. Then, name them. Then you will own them.” The Indian walked off into the forest and I thought, What? What does that mean? It sounded kind of like some Indian folklore, and I hardly gave it another thought until I was thirty-five. Then I was on the streets, making enemies and not being able to handle them.
I still didn’t understand his advice, but I acted on it anyway. What did I have to lose? I knew my biggest enemy was anyone who challenged my authority. One day I wrote that down. I had defined him. Naming him was more difficult, but I finally decided to call him by the voice that went off inside of me. That voice always said, “Wanna bet?” So I called my enemy the “Wanna Bet?” Guy. I said to myself, “George, be careful of the ‘Wanna Bet?’ Guy or he’ll own you somewhere, sometime.”
The very next night I placed a young man under arrest, and he came back with “You can’t touch me. I’ll do what I want. My father’s on the city council; he’ll have your job!”
Immediately I thought, Wanna bet? But at the same time, a warning bell also went off in my head. There he is, the “Wanna Bet?” Guy! Be careful! He’s gonna get you!
I literally took a step back, forcing myself to remain calm and not say or do anything that would jeopardize the integrity of that very legitimate arrest. I wanted the bust, all right, and I wanted it to stick because of the kid’s snotty attitude. I could have lost it all—and maybe even my job—if I had let him get to me and make me do something stupid. I didn’t, and he got in big trouble.
To this day you cannot challenge my authority and make me show anger. Sure, I’m still angry inside. My trigger has been cocked, but you can’t pull it. My trigger guard is in place. I defined my enemy, and I named him. Now I own him, rather than the other way around. What is your enemy? Define it. Name it. Own it.
THE TEDDY BEAR TRUTH
I remained so intrigued by the power of that truth that about ten years later I asked a psychologist why it worked. He told me that when we define our weaknesses, or our so-called communication enemies, we actually bring them out and make them part of our consciousness. We admit them, bringing them into the light of recognition. We can name only that which we own, so when we name them, we acknowledge that we have taken ownership of them.
If you’ve ever taken your child to a store and bought him a teddy bear from a whole group of similar-looking bears, you know that by the time you’ve gotten to the counter, your child has named the bear. And if that teddy bear is ever misplaced or missing, you see your child bereft and heartbroken because by naming it, he has made it part of who he is. (For this reason farmers don’t allow their children to name the heifers or the chickens. You can’t very well serve up Elsie or Tweety Bird on a plate.)
Make a list of your most harmful weaknesses. Then name them. Give each a little tag and pin it wriggling to the wall of definition. Then you own them. Once you’re in control inside, you can be in control outside. As a contact professional, you work in a highly visible world. You live and speak in a fishbowl. Every time you speak people are watching you. There are a lot of eyes out there, so you have to be careful. Say only what you’d be proud to have quoted back to you on Monday morning. And that all starts with knowing and being in contact with yourself.
REPRESENTATION
To be a top-flight contact professional, you have to become an artist at representation, the first of three great communication arts. Besides being in contact with (or knowing) yourself, you must be in contact with your organization and its constituency. As you do your professional representation work, you stand between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Just for fun, sketch out an illustration that will make this clearer. Draw a circle with the name of whatever organization or company you represent in it. To the right of that, draw a five-point star to represent you. To the right of that, draw a box with a C in it, which stands for your contact point (your constituency or customer or public). Every time you speak you represent everything in the circle on the left (the rock) to the contact in the square on the right (the hard place).
Now draw a figure eight, which represents your job, that begins on the left, passes through you, and continues to the right before coming back through you again. Continue to trace that figure eight, which signifies how you serve as a conduit between the two other entities in such a manner as to generate voluntary compliance.
I emphasize that because it means you are continually serving as a conduit. Keep tracing that figure eight and soon you’ll see that you, the star, are virtually obliterated by your representational job. Now draw an arrow between the circle and the square and you have a figure eight with an arrow driven through the middle. That is the essence of representation: the ability to represent the spirit of your organization, its goods, its goals, its produce, its policies, its philosophy. It is that philosophy that you must fully know and embrace, because every time you open your mouth, you personify it to whomever you’re talking to.
If you do your job right, as I hope you drew your illustration, you’ve disappeared. And that’s one of my crucial points. When you speak, you are a mouthpiece, a representative. You do not represent your own ego. Remember, the more ego you show, the less power you have over people. Egotists only create conflict. The great communicators put their egos behind them and put the purpose and goal of communication before them. Nobody likes people whose personalities intrude.
If you’re in a retail business, your job is to represent your organization in such a way as to not only get customers to buy the first time, but also to ensure they’ll want to come back again and again. Nordstrom’s was the first of many companies that has learned this art. It gave people pride in the organization.
Every time you open your mouth, you represent the boss, whether that is the chief of police, the mayor, the company president or CEO, or whoever. You speak for him and for everyone else who works in the organization. If I as a police officer were to bad-mouth people on the street and make them feel bad, they would go away not thinking about George Thompson (they rarely get my name or badge number), but rather the department. Research shows that if someone has a bad experience with a police officer he will tell twenty-seven to twenty-eight people over the next three days. Imagine the statistics for bad experiences in stores or with companies. If someone in your organization treats people poorly, he lowers your credibility and the credibility of everyone you care about in the company—and he makes your job far more difficult.
Effective professional language is that which contributes to voluntary compliance. Any language that makes compliance more difficult should be shunned. It may make you feel good to insult somebody, to tell him what you really think. But remember, if it makes you feel good, most of the time it won’t work, or as the samurai were fond of saying, “If it makes you feel good, no good.”
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Your customer or client or citizen is under various kinds of influence. He may be under the influence of anxiety, fear, misunderstanding, ignorance, rage, even liquor and drugs. You have to learn to read people carefully. The old samurai who said that if you don’t know yourself, you lose 100 percent of the time, also said, “If you know yourself but you do not know the opponent, you’ll be lucky to win fifty percent of the time. If you know yourself and you know the opponent, you can win a hundred percent of the time.”
That means one of the greatest communication skills is listening, really listening to people—to what they say and how they say it. And that leads me to the second great communication art.