by Walker Royce
I attended excellent public schools in the suburbs of Los Angeles, then elite institutions of higher learning (the U.S. Air Force Academy, Cal Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). I have worked at successful companies that are standouts at investing in employee education, including TRW, Rational Software Corporation, and IBM. Surprisingly, I can’t remember my education or professional training courses allocating much time to improving communications. And they certainly didn’t spend much time motivating me to care, or making it fun and relevant.
Why are students, employees, supervisors, parents, spouses and teachers so lackadaisical in improving their communications? One hypothesis is that communicating more effectively is hairy, personal, and introspective. It requires people to get outside their heads to evaluate objectively what they need to do to improve. It also takes objective and personal critique and forces us to make judgments about style. In my experience such objective self-reflection is rare, limited to the few truly egoless people who can do it well. For a great treatment of this topic, see Eckhard Tolle’s A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
ADJUST TO YOUR CONTEXT
We could blame our schools and parents for ineffective teaching, but we students were equally at fault: We were so smart in our teens and twenties that we didn’t listen well to our instructors or parents. My father, who earned a PhD in astronautics from the California Institute of Technology, was an expert in the benchmark of hairy stuff, better known as rocket science. Although he was a gifted writer and communicator, he never emphasized to me the importance that those skills played in every facet of life. Or maybe he did, and I wasn’t listening. My mother, a voracious reader, writer, and lover of crossword puzzles, did emphasize the importance in her words and her actions, but my brain was not wired to listen as I went through my formative years. That was my loss, because she was right.
I was naturally gifted in math ability, so science and math became my selfproclaimed identity. Most of my clique had no use for the more social skills of English, and we put minimum effort into our English courses and into developing our communications skills. Our future was certainly some sort of engineering or scientific pursuit. English, literature, writing, speaking, and teamwork exercises were for others, not for engineering studs like us. How naïve we were.
This is one lesson that we need to teach better as parents, as educators, and as professional coaches of the people we supervise: There are few growth paths in this world that don’t require strong communications skills. That is just as true if your career is in engineering as it is in sports, journalism, medicine, law, or finance.
As I started working as a systems and software engineer, I realized that building software was much more about communications than it was about engineering. Good writing and good speaking were clear differentiators in my superiors and the engineers who were the most valuable to our organization. They could sell an idea; they could convince and influence others; and they could build teams. Most of all, they could save time and money by avoiding scrap and rework caused by miscommunications. I developed a passion for the English language, including the power inherent in its effective usage and the humor associated with both its intentional and its unintentional misuse.
Communications involves the exchange of information between a transmitter and a receiver. Although this is a nerd engineer’s viewpoint of a non-engineering concept, I think the physical analogy works well. Consider the following examples of communications where there is an obvious mismatch between the transmitter and receiver.
An AM radio owner wants to listen to FM music stations.
A radio station transmits in French, even though there are few Frenchspeaking people within its range.
A professor delivers a graduate-level talk to a middle school class.
An amateur sits down at a poker table with five professionals, who are licking their chops.
A southern conservative talks politics with a Cambridge liberal.
A woman from Venus chats with a man from Mars.
These situations involve obstacles to a meaningful exchange of information between the parties. The differences between transmitter and receiver are so stark that we know the information exchange will be rough and erroneous because the transmitters and receivers are not adjusted to each other’s context. No one who values their time would attempt any of them, except the last one. John Gray’s classic, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, is an enlightening treatment of the different contextual perspectives between men and women. It provides a great analysis of male-female communications and the importance of synching up your transmissions with the receivers of the opposite sex.
For high-quality communications to occur, the transmitter and receiver must be in synch. In everyday life, this can be hard to achieve. Nevertheless, you should do whatever you can to get better in synch, whether you are the transmitter or the receiver. This is especially true for stressful communications like a father/daughter talk about a touchy subject or a yearly personnel performance review, and for high-stakes communications like an interview, a sales presentation, or a PhD oral exam. The transmitter generally has more responsibility for knowing the receiver’s preferences than vice versa. The person doing the speaking or writing is in control of the words, style, delivery, and tone. That person can adjust to the context of the audience best, whether it is a oneon-one conversation or a one-to-many presentation. If you are on the receiving end of a communication—reading a newspaper, magazine, book, or internet site—adjusting to your context means knowing the transmitter’s frame of reference.
Consider what it takes to do the New York Times crossword puzzle. For the first few years, it was quite difficult for me because I didn’t understand the style of Will Shortz, the editor (transmitter). I did hundreds of puzzles before I learned what to expect from him and his biases in editing crossword puzzles. Understanding his style made a huge difference.
Whenever you listen to a presenter or a commentator, or read a nonfiction work, it is extremely important to understand the author’s perspective and background in order to understand the author’s biases and to qualify or interpret the information for your use.
Here are a few transmitters with obvious biases:
A political party leader giving a speech on why their candidate is the best choice.
A product salesperson describing the pros and cons of competing products.
A child’s parent discussing their child’s accomplishments.
An alleged criminal providing an alibi.
What is the likelihood of getting objective and fair assessments from these transmitters? Zip. Although these are extreme cases, most people transmit and communicate with their own innate biases. Everyone communicates within the larger context of their personality, their background, and their immediate specific purpose for communicating.
William Zinsser summarized the perspective of most receivers well:
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds—a person assailed by many forces competing for attention. At one time those forces were relatively few: newspapers, magazines, radio, spouse, children, pets. Today they include a galaxy of electronic devices for receiving entertainment and information—television, VCRs, DVDs, CDs, video games, the Internet, email, cell phones, Blackberries, iPods — as well as a fitness program, a pool, a lawn, and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who has been given too much trouble by the writer.
The main point is simple: Know with whom you are communicating and adjust your communications to your receivers and transmitters. This is true whether you are engaged in personal conversations such as talking to your spouse or speaking at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or engaged in professional exchanges such as delivering a professional sales presentation or presenting a yearly performance assessment.
Adjusting to your context is an importa
nt aspect of more leisurely forms of communications as well. For example, many games require competitors to do battle through their communications skills. Adjusting to your context in sports and games translates into knowing your opponents.
I was a student of the game of poker throughout my teens, twenties, and thirties. I read every book I could find, wrote computer programs, and played in home games with friends. I also played in the card rooms of Gardena and San Jose, California, with both amateurs and pros. This was during the 1970s and 1980s, long before poker became the popular game it is today. Great poker players had not begun disclosing the secrets of the game, so there were few books with top-notch poker guidance. But the great players all knew that their skills in transmitting and receiving, both accurately and deceptively, were far more important than knowing the mathematical odds and logically deducing the other opponents’ cards from the sequence of playing and betting. They knew that poker is a game of communications skills more than anything else.
One basic poker strategy is to play good hands like they were mediocre and to play mediocre hands like they were good. The key to making this strategy work is to communicate with the other players through your mannerisms and actions. However, communicating to players who know how to communicate well, versus players who are oblivious to communications, adds some challenging complexities to the game. Today’s books on poker strategy have matured and improved. They spend much more time on how to read other players (receiving) and playing your cards with varying styles (transmitting).
I am also a lifetime student and fan of baseball. Many people have a superficial understanding of the game and think baseball is a rather boring spectator sport. With a deeper understanding of how much communicating goes on inside the game, baseball becomes a fascinating spectator sport. Inside baseball is a term used across the media nowadays to describe the depth of understanding that practitioners inside a particular domain have, compared to outside observers.
George Will synthesized the best description of inside baseball in his classic book, Men At Work, The Craft of Baseball. His macro- and micro-analysis of communications between batter and pitcher, pitcher and catcher, fielder and batter, and coaches and players provides an exceptional case study on how communications give the better players and teams a significant edge in what most people think is simply a contest of athletic ability.
This excerpt from Will’s book summarizes this relatively misunderstood aspect of America’s favorite pastime.
Thinking infielders who want to cheat must do so at the last minute, lest they telegraph to the hitter the kind of pitch that is coming. Kubek recalls that Rick Burleson of the Red Sox lacked quickness, so he moved two steps to his right on off-speed pitches to right-handed hitters and two steps to his left on fastballs — and he moved too soon. He moved as soon as the catcher gave the sign to the pitcher, before the pitcher started his motion. Kubek says that Mickey Mantle feasted on Red Sox pitching during the season when Jimmy Piersall was the Red Sox centerfielder. Piersall was a fine outfielder but he, too, moved too soon. The Red Sox shortstop would signal with his glove behind his back indicating a fastball (no glove meant a breaking ball). Piersall would move and Mantle would sit on whatever pitch was coming.
Of course an intelligent outfielder can use disinformation against an observant batter. When Tony Gwynn briefly became a center-fielder after five seasons (and two Gold Gloves) in right field, he discovered a way to mislead hitters. From center field he could see the catcher’s signs, so he would shift “wrong” before the pitcher started his motion, then he would quickly move back to where he really wanted to be. His hope was that the batter would make a mistaken inference from his first move.
In these few paragraphs, Will summarizes the extent to which communications go on inside baseball. His book is packed with many other examples of communications—both information and disinformation—within the game. Just as poker is much more than a game of odds and card playing, baseball is much more than a game of hitting, pitching, and fielding. Communications play a crucial role, and knowing your opponents or, in other words, adjusting to their context and communicating better than they do are crucial to success.
We play a lot of roles in our lives—parents, colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, friends, coaches, trusted advisors, and strangers—so we use a broad spectrum of behavioral and communications styles. Behavior and communications are highly integrated. Others perceive our behavior—shown by our actions, words, facial expressions, and emotions—as we communicate our intentions, feelings, and judgments. Our communications, oral and written, are a significant aspect of how we form relationships with other people.
ASSERTIVENESS AND RESPONSIVENESS
A lot of my thinking on synchronizing with your audience stems from two books that are extremely pragmatic and useful in building teams and supervising people:
1. Personal Styles and Effective Performance, by David Merrill and Roger Reid (1983). This book summarizes research into personality styles and is well matched to my experience with being supervised and working with other colleagues in the software engineering field.
2. First Among Equals, by Patrick McKenna and David H. Maister (2002). This book builds on the Merrill-Reid work and provides guidance on building and coaching diverse teams of capable professionals.
Merrill’s fundamental conclusion is that people’s behaviors can be grouped roughly into four different styles, based on their relative tendencies on two different scales: assertiveness and responsiveness. These scales are roughly comparable to humans’ basic instincts and how they will react when things get tense or heated; namely, fight or flight.
Low: Flight
High: Fight
Assertiveness: Ask/read/listen
Tell/write/speak
Responsiveness: Reasons/controls
Emote/act/react
Assertiveness captures a person’s instinctive interaction style. Less assertive people tend to speak more slowly and softly with fewer words. They are more relaxed and avoid direct eye contact. More assertive people tend to speak quickly and loudly with more words. They may lean forward and use direct eye contact.
Responsiveness captures a person’s instinctive reaction style. Less responsive people are more independent, indifferent, and objective. They speak monotonously about things or actions and use statistics and data. They tend to be more formal, rigid, and under control. More responsive people are more subjective, concerned with relationships, and care what others think. They speak with inflections and state opinions. They tend to be more informal, casual, and animated.
By combining the two dimensions of assertiveness and responsiveness into four quadrants, Merrill defined a useful mapping of social styles that contains roughly equal numbers of people in a randomly selected population with no predominance of any race or gender in any given quadrant. In other words, about one-fourth of any random group of people will probably fall into each style. Figure 4-1 (adapted from Merrill’s presentation) summarizes these styles.
FIGURE 4-1. Social Style Summary
Here are a few people—both fictional and nonfictional—who epitomize these styles.
Amiable: Oprah Winfrey, Edith Bunker, Ghandi, Billy Graham
Analytical: Jimmy Carter, Martha Stewart, Sherlock Holmes, Eckhart Tolle
Driver: Hillary Clinton, Vince Lombardi, George Patton, James Bond
Expressive: Bill O’Reilly, Ellen DeGeneres, Richard Feynmen, Ralph Kramden
The social styles summarized in Figure 4-1 can be roughly observed in everyone. Table 4-1 presents some general attributes that help to differentiate the social styles. These characteristics simply describe the observable behavior through people’s verbal and physical styles of communicating. There is no inherent judgment that less or more of either assertiveness or responsiveness is good or bad. They do not depict what a person intends or what they are thinking or feeling. There are successful and unsuccessful people on both ends of both spectrums, with roughly equal
distributions. The adjectives used to define each style include both negative and positive connotations. There is no best style. This research paints people with some broad brushes, and almost everyone exhibits a mix of these styles in various proportions. However, almost everyone has a predominant style.
TABLE 4-1. Rough Generalities of Social Styles
A critical skill in life is the ability to observe one’s own behavior. A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle, provides a compelling treatment of the human ego and the importance of gaining objectivity by understanding your ego, then stepping outside its influence to be an objective observer. One of the skills necessary to step outside your ego is to observe others objectively in various situations and judge whether you would act the same way or not. These judgments can help you understand yourself and see how other people judge your behavior. If there is a big difference between your judgments and other people’s judgments, trust theirs first. Your ego is a powerfully polluted filter.
There is always tension when people communicate. In general, when two people of the same style communicate, there is less tension and more comfort. When opposing styles communicate, there is typically more tension and less comfort. Is either good or bad? Merrill’s research and my own experience suggest that too much comfort or too much tension leads to less productive communications and results. A balanced tension leads to more effective communications and results.