DO LAST WHAT YOU WANT TO DO FIRST
When one of my clients initiated a corporate restructuring, the company offered Mary a major promotion into executive management. There was only one catch: her promotion was conditional on her ability to iron out differences with her colleague Jill. The two women had a long and antagonistic history, but would now have to work closely together.
I met with Mary to discuss the potential promotion. As soon as I mentioned Jill’s name, Mary jumped right in. “Jill doesn’t respect me and my opinions; that’s why we don’t get along. She doesn’t listen to me, and she tries to embarrass me all the time. Let me tell you what she did last week …”
Mary continued talking for several minutes. When she stopped, I didn’t say anything. “Well? What do you think?” she asked.
I told Mary that I couldn’t help her until she quit blaming Jill and started looking for other ways to improve the relationship and get more of the productive communication she wanted. I didn’t say anything else and there was a period of silence while Mary—known for her fiery personality—probably thought about giving me an earful.
But when she spoke again, she only said, “I’m not thrilled about having to work more closely with Jill, but I have to figure something out because I want this promotion.”
Mary did what most of us do when we aren’t getting the communication (or anything else) that we want; we blame the other person and try to force them to change. But blaming others and demanding that they change doesn’t usually lead to more of the interactions we want. It leads to reciprocal finger-pointing, counterpressure, and usually a damaging escalation. Fortunately, there are three better ways to get the communication we want.
There’s no button to get people to do what we want them to, especially if they’re not ready. Research by James Prochaska, Carlo DiClemente, and John Norcross suggests that people typically progress through behavioral change at their own pace, moving through a series of steps over time and often repeating steps before they make significant change.1 Prochaska, DiClemente, and Norcross’s Stages of Change model (modified for our use) describes this progression, with insights about what you can expect from people and how you can best support them at each stage.
Precontemplation stage. People in the precontemplation stage are not thinking about change in the immediate future, which researchers usually define as within the next six months. Advocating or agitating for change in this precontemplation stage is almost certain to be counterproductive. Just wait. They aren’t even ready to think about change.
Contemplation stage. Here people begin to think about changing within the next six months. It’s appropriate for you to serve as a sounding board and to provide encouragement and support in this stage (“I think that might be a good idea” or “That sounds like a sensible plan”), but don’t push for them to act until they’re ready. This is where Mary, from the earlier example, was when I first met with her. She was out of the precontemplation stage and had been thinking about her conflict with Jill for months. Additionally, Mary’s conditional promotion provided the spark she needed to move to the preparation stage.
Preparation stage. In this stage, people commit to initiate change in the next month or earlier. Your encouragement here can be especially valuable. Give them positive feedback every time they talk to you about the impending change, and reiterate your support occasionally. At the end of our first meeting, I asked Mary to put a plan together for improving her working relationship with Jill and bring it to our next meeting. This assignment fit where Mary was mentally—almost, but not quite ready to act—and gave her an opportunity to develop her own change plan.
Action stage. In the action stage, people implement their change and set new behavioral patterns for the next three to six months. Provide continual support and encouragement here to help them cement the new path. Give positive feedback when you see manifestations of the new behavior and when milestones are reached, and prop them up when they stumble. It took Mary a week to come up with her plan. Her first action was to convene a meeting with Jill about reshaping their working relationship. I helped facilitate the first two meetings until they were comfortable with the process. Progress was uneven for over a month, as Mary worked to be less reactive in her relationship with Jill.
Maintenance stage. In this stage, a new behavior has been established for at least six months. Periodically highlight and celebrate the positive aspects of the change, and provide support to help people recover from any setbacks. Backsliding is a possibility, but the change effort has been initially successful because they have maintained the change for six or more months. Mary called me a few times after the new relationship was established when she had concerns about reverting to old, unproductive behaviors, but she never needed much more than reassurance to stay the course. Mary and Jill never became best friends, but they did find a way to get more of the productive communication they needed. With their relationship sufficiently improved, Mary got her promotion.
Our efforts to force communication change (or any other type of change) on someone else often fail because when we demand that someone act right away, we ignore a person’s need to work through the first three change steps. No matter how carefully we communicate what we want, the other person often resists.
Instead of asking for change on our schedule, look for and encourage signs of progress when someone is moving through the Stages of Change. Although personal change is difficult, people are often aware of and are actively trying to address their communication (and other) failings. Jim knows that his sarcastic tongue gets him in trouble, Betty is aware that she’s sometimes too quick to dismiss your ideas, and Sam realizes that he’s prone to overreaction.
When you catch a behavior that’s in the direction you want, positive feedback can encourage the other person to continue through the Stages of Change. Thank Jim when he stops a criticism in midsentence, express your appreciation to Betty for hearing out your thoughts, and tell Sam after a productive collaboration that you enjoyed working with him.
People seldom change on demand, and by ignoring this reality we set ourselves up for likely failure.
But I don’t try to change people on my schedule, you might be protesting. Think again. You probably ask people to stop or start doing something—to change—more often than you realize. And even if you’re not intentionally pushing change, expedient communication can make your messages sound like a demand to change something, do something, or stop something immediately.
Hasty e-mails and curt text messages can’t carry your tone of voice or easily convey your positive intentions, and so it’s easier for others to misread your messages as demands (which people love to reject) instead of requests (which they are more likely to consider). Expediency also makes us jump into conversations faster, contradict people more often, and push harder for our terms without laying interpersonal groundwork first. We skip small things like openings (Dear Sarah) and closings (Sincerely yours) and rush into our message, thereby subtly reinforcing the idea that we are really making demands instead of requests.
Sending a text to Scott about a new deadline (“Can I get your report by 4 p.m.?”) is more likely to trigger Scott’s resistance than a phone call, where you would have the space to tell him why the deadline moved up, to acknowledge the disruption to his schedule, and to express your appreciation for his help.
Without those interpersonal details, your expedient text could trigger multiple issues. Scott might get upset because this is the second time in as many weeks you’ve inserted yourself into his schedule. He might feel like you’re ordering him around, even though the two of you are peers. He might be stressed out about another deadline that he can’t ignore. He might be worried about something at home. He might think that you’re overreacting by moving the deadline up. He might not be inclined to help you because of something you did or didn’t do in the past, because of the way he feels about you in general, or just because he doesn’t want to. Without a higher-order interpersonal channel, it’s hard to gauge, and possibly address, what’s bothering him.
Asking people to stop, start, or change anything is almost always better communicated by synchronous, higher-order communication channels that allow you to monitor verbal and nonverbal cues, decrease reflexive resistance, and, if needed, adapt on the fly based on the feedback you receive.
Asynchronous communication channels, like text messages and e-mail, don’t have the capacity to easily handle the interpersonal factors that come with many situations. The real issue is not how much digital bandwidth our devices can process; it’s how little interpersonal capacity they can readily manage.
We know this intuitively, because when a text message gets misconstrued or an e-mail gets mangled in transmission, most of us reach for a synchronous channel like the phone or a face-to-face conversation to straighten things out. But we usually don’t switch to a more time- and energy-intensive synchronous channel until there’s a problem.
People don’t like it when we pressure them to change their communication or any other behavior, and many of our expedient communication practices make sensible requests seem like imposing demands.
In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment that would become famous. Using some vacant office space in Stanford University’s psychology department, he simulated a prison and recruited untrained undergraduates from the area as guards and prisoners. Shortly after the experiment started, Zimbardo noticed that many of the guards were verbally harassing the prisoners. The harassment quickly escalated into more direct hazing. The prisoners’ sleep was disrupted, they were made to do exercises to the point of exhaustion and clean toilets with their bare hands, and solitary confinement was doled out to unruly prisoners. The simulation became so “real” that Zimbardo ended the two-week experiment after only six days.2
The study, called the Stanford Prison Experiment, demonstrated that putting “normal” people in unfavorable circumstances (in the case of the prison, the existence of asymmetrically powerful roles, with little oversight of and no formal training for the guards) can lead to undesirable outcomes. Zimbardo’s experiment was a vivid contradiction to the human inclination to assign blame for bad behavior to only “a few bad apples.” If the barrel itself is rotten, even good apples have a tendency to sour.3
In another research study, when seminary students were told that they were running late to deliver a brief speech, their inclination to stop and help a person in distress was dramatically reduced. This was true even when they were on the way to deliver remarks about the Good Samaritan parable.4
Situational changes—even relatively small ones—can significantly alter human behavior. In communication situations, people readily change their speech patterns to converge with or diverge from various people and groups.5 Someone born in Brooklyn but living in Los Angeles may talk like a West Coast beach boy 99 percent of the time, but when he returns home or when he talks with old New York friends, the original accent returns (convergence). Or he might slip back into the East Coast accent if he wanted to highlight his New York roots in a group of California natives (divergence). I act one way with my boss, another way with my friends, and another way with my mom. I talk one way at a restaurant, another way in a company meeting, and yet another way on a sales call. In organizations, situations shape behaviors and can encourage or discourage positive behaviors like mentoring, volunteering, and assuming extra-role behaviors.6
So what does all this mean for us and our quest for better communication? The examples help us to remember that situations—people, places, and events—exert a great influence on our behavior. Likewise, structural changes in how we communicate—quick, cheap, and easy or thoughtful and deliberate—change our behavior.
Just as it is possible to construct a prison that brings out the worst in guards or squash helping behaviors in would-be preachers by changing a deadline, we can change how people interact with us by changing the underlying conditions of the situation and by changing our communication with them.
Let’s say your colleague Sarah never lets you finish a sentence without jumping in with questions, criticisms, or ideas of her own. Naturally, this upsets you and makes you feel like she doesn’t listen. Instead of thinking about all that’s wrong with Sarah and how she needs to change, ask yourself a different question: How can I change the underlying conditions of the interactions I have with Sarah so she’s more likely to listen?
You want Sarah to listen to you—that’s the specific communication behavior you want more of—and there’s plenty you can do to affect that.
To get good at changing underlying conditions, you’ll need to think more like an experimenter (I wonder what happens if I try this?) and less like a drill sergeant (Change now, private!). Think about the conditions that surround you and Sarah. What were your best interactions with her? How do other people who interact favorably with her behave?
Then try different things to find out what works best. For example, what happens if you send an e-mail first (so she can’t interrupt) and then follow up with a face-to-face conversation? Are there certain times of the day when Sarah is more likely to listen? Does she interrupt you more frequently when other people are around? Is she more relaxed (and more likely to listen) away from the office? What happens when you talk to her over lunch? Is she a more focused and better listener when she’s away from her computer or when her phone is quiet?
Test different situational variables and see if the result is better communication. If you find one or two things that work fairly consistently—perhaps Sarah’s more relaxed and willing to listen first thing in the morning or when she’s away from her computer—plan your interactions around these favorable conditions whenever possible.
In addition to changing underlying conditions, how you choose to communicate with Sarah also exerts a significant force on how the two of you interact. People are keenly impacted by social cues, which is a major reason why conversations often converge in pace, tone, and intensity.7 My conversational actions influence you, and vice versa, which makes our communication behaviors powerful factors in shaping our interactions.
To encourage Sarah to listen more, for instance, you might try to repeat your key points during the conversation. Or you could talk softly so she has to listen harder just to understand what you’re saying. Speaking softly might also cue Sarah that what you are saying is important. You could strip everything but the essential points from your dialogue or ask her for one minute of uninterrupted time to talk at the beginning of the conversation. And so on. Again, experiment with the variables to see what works. Each situation offers different ways you can change your communication to get more of the communication you want in return.
Let’s take another example. I once helped a new manager, Sally, to communicate more effectively with a manager named Rick. Rick was an emotional person, and Sally was having a hard time troubleshooting work issues with him. As soon as the conversation touched on something he was responsible for, Rick would react forcefully and shut down the conversation. Everyone else steered clear of Rick, but Sally had to collaborate with him on multiple issues. And neither Sally nor Rick would ever be fired: Sally had been with the company from its humble beginnings, and Rick was related to one of the owners. They were stuck with each other.
Sally and I knew that Rick wouldn’t change, so we looked instead for steps Sally could take to improve their interactions. We quickly determined that the only way to have a nontrivial conversation with Rick was one-on-one (he was hyperdefensive in groups) and either face-to-face or over the phone (Sally needed a synchronous channel to be able to hear his voice to pick up on cues that Rick was getting uncomfortable).
Rick’s day-to-day moods were also heavily impacted by what was going on at home. He spoke freely about the challenges and the joys of being a single parent, which made it feasible for Sally to determine, without asking, more optimal times to talk to him.
Through trial and error, we discovered that Rick was particularly sensitive to questions. Sally’s questions couldn’t contain a trace of accusation, or Rick would shut the conversation down. Sally learned to ask her questions in less threatening ways (“Could you help me think through why our Wichita Falls store is calling about its supply order?” versus “Why is Wichita Falls complaining again about its supply order?”), and this led to the observation that if Sally let Rick say whatever he wanted to early in the conversation, she could usually contribute her thoughts later. Finally, Sally determined that once Rick got defensive and started shutting down the dialogue, there was no saving the conversation. She needed to abandon the discussion for another day.
These experiments and observations led Sally to find the underlying conditions that were most likely to facilitate the kinds of results-oriented conversations she needed with Rick: one-on-one, synchronous conversations, preferably when things weren’t tumultuous in Rick’s home life. And Sally changed her communication to encourage better dialogue in return by letting Rick talk first, by asking nonthreatening questions, and by not continuing conversations when Rick became defensive.
Sally’s techniques don’t work every time; she still calls me occasionally for ideas after failed conversations. And Rick’s personality didn’t change in the slightest. But by finding and using favorable underlying conditions and by altering her communication, Sally found ways to get more of the communication she needed from Rick.
If you don’t get more of the communication you want by encouraging someone through the Stages of Change, by changing the underlying conditions of the interaction, or by changing your own communication, you’ll need to have a direct conversation with the other person.
As someone who makes his living helping people and organizations improve their communication, I’m a big supporter of having direct, meaningful conversations when necessary. But there’s a mountain of caution in those last two words.
Multiple forces encourage us to think we need more direct conversations—like interventions or confrontations—than we really do. As we’ve already seen, the hypercommunicating digital environment propels us into more marginally important conversations, and we often erroneously inflate the seriousness of those discussions. Our Neanderthal instincts see threats to overreact to everywhere. Our human flaws cause us to exaggerate how much someone else is to blame and minimize our own culpability. Our emotions cause our words to trump our goals.
And let’s not forget the three fundamental properties of communication: powerful, imperfect, and asymmetrical. Our words matter (power). Errors happen when people interact (imperfect). We can destroy in seconds what it took years to build (asymmetrical).
Add to all this the fact that our attempts to change someone else usually fail, and it’s easy to see why we should try everything else in our communication toolkit before directly confronting another person with a negative issue.
But sometimes we do have to directly address problematic behaviors that aren’t improving through other strategies. At the root of a conversation like this is negative feedback. Something isn’t right, and you’re going to point that out in an attempt to alter the behavior.
Negative feedback is hard to deliver effectively, because people don’t want to hear it. Even the most well-intentioned feedback is often reflexively perceived as personal criticism. You say to Jim, “I think we’d be more productive if I could tell you what I’m thinking about our key clients more often,” but what Jim hears is “You’re the reason the Gatorville project failed” or “You’re a bad listener.” When people perceive feedback as criticism, conversations can escalate quickly as the receiver pushes back against the unwanted and threatening advice.
Delivering negative feedback is a tough, but essential, higher-order communication skill that usually comes with a relational cost. Because it’s easier not to say anything, a great deal of potentially helpful feedback is not delivered.8
But feedback is too important to abandon, and some issues need to be faced with a direct conversation in order to avoid a major problem or to provide crucial missing information. Our feedback might even, in exceptional cases, save a job or a marriage.
Starting a negative conversation is often the hardest part, since you need to overcome the other person’s tendencies to reflexively treat negative feedback as personal criticism and immediately tune out your message. If you want to give negative feedback to a peer (or someone you have no formal authority over), the most effective way to disarm this reflexive resistance is to ask for permission to deliver the feedback: “I’ve noticed something that I think is causing you trouble. Would you like my observations about it?” If you don’t get permission, let the feedback go. If you get permission, proceed directly to the issue: “I’m noticing that you are inadvertently cutting off your boss during staff meetings,” or “I don’t think Janet understands what you’re saying during staff meetings. You seem to be talking faster than she can process your words.”
If you have formal authority over the other person, don’t ask for permission to deliver negative feedback—it’s your job, and the other person really doesn’t have a choice to decline (which makes asking for permission a faulty question). Move right into the conversation: “Mary, I need to talk with you about something that I’m observing when we meet with clients,” or “Mary, we need to talk for a few minutes about something that I’m seeing during our client meetings.” You can also use this procedure when you aren’t the boss but when the behavior in question is directly impacting you.
Whether you have formal authority over someone or not, you can reduce some of the resistance people feel toward negative feedback with the following five guidelines:
1. Have a simple message and provide examples. Decide precisely what you’re going to say and make that message the conversation’s focal point. Your conversational goal when delivering negative feedback is to get your message across with the least amount of collateral damage (damage to the underlying relationship or to the person’s internal motivation) as possible.
Keep your feedback specific to the situation, avoiding pervasive (broad and expansive) statements. Effective feedback always points to a solution or a way to succeed. Bill doesn’t get much that’s useful from a blanket criticism that he’s a bad presenter, but knowing that he had way too many slides at today’s client meeting may help. Most people can work with specific, incident-related negative feedback, but pervasive feedback is demoralizing and can throttle a person’s internal motivation. After all, Bill can look for ways to be more organized and concise in his next client pitch, but if he’s just a bad presenter, how does he fix that? Similarly, Jane can’t do anything with the criticism that she’s bad with people, but concrete examples of her constant interruptions of me, Sarah, and Steve during our meeting yesterday may point the way toward better interactions between her and the staff.
If you don’t have a specific instance of the behavior you want to address, you aren’t ready to have the conversation. Without an example, your interaction can quickly devolve into unhelpful generalities and allow the other person to easily (and possibly correctly) dismiss your feedback as groundless. A simple, specific message with an example or two to illustrate the problematic behavior will help you achieve your conversational goal—getting your message across with the least amount of collateral damage—more than any other approach.
2. Discuss the incident or behavior, not the person.9 Don’t talk about what the person is (a terrible presenter or bad with people); instead, talk about what he did (showed too many slides on Thursday or interrupted too frequently yesterday). To reduce resistance to your message, have the conversation one-on-one and in private, which will help the other person feel safer in the conversation. And as always, contain throughout the discussion should escalation occur.
3. Separate intentions from perceptions. If you want to preempt some reflexive resistance, or if you’re finding a lot of opposition to your message, you can give your feedback in the following way: I know you probably didn’t intend for X, but that’s how I perceived it (or that’s how it felt to me). For example, “Jim, I know you probably didn’t intend to cut me off in the meeting, but that’s what I perceived today,” “Bill, I know you don’t intend to ignore my ideas, but that’s how I feel when you don’t let me finish my sentences,” and “Sarah, I know that you don’t mean to confuse our clients, but that’s what I perceived today.”
4. Don’t dilute your message with a pile of positive statements. Have you ever heard that when you give feedback you should offer two positive statements for every negative one? Disregard that advice, because an avalanche of positivity will dilute your message and may confuse the other person (Am I in trouble? What’s with all the compliments? What’s this conversation really about?). As long as you’re talking about an incident and not about the person (see the earlier point about discussing the behavior, not the person), you are already doing more to protect the underlying relationship and the internal motivation of the recipient than a dozen positive comments will do.
5. Don’t worry if the initial conversation is short. After you have crafted a worthwhile message and delivered it clearly, don’t allow yourself to fall into hours of meandering conversation. Don’t let your message—the reason for the conversation in the first place—get suffocated as extraneous topics are heaped on top of it. Sometimes people need two conversations: one just to get the information and another to respond, discuss, and potentially move toward a resolution of some kind. Listen to what the other person has to say, and if the initial discussion doesn’t resolve the underlying issue, schedule time for another discussion.
To get more of the productive and meaningful communication we want, we should first pull on the levers that work best.
For better communication, we also need to ignore the pervasive digital age notion that all topics are fair game. That’s the subject of our next chapter.