CHAPTER 3

Taking Personal Responsibility for Communication Failure

In Chapter 2, we worked to define communication and to share with you some of the secrets that separate the effective business communicators from the rest of us. From our perspective, communication is a process including symbolic, spontaneous, and pseudo-spontaneous messages in which the parties involved are interdependent and able to influence one another. To be effective, we argued that business communicators must (1) get their audience to understand their messages and (2) get their audience to respond appropriately. We also advocated for a personal responsibility approach to business communication.

Remember, there are no breakdowns. As communicators, we sometimes fail to overcome barriers. In this chapter, we discuss the basic communication model and describe common barriers to effective business communication. In addition to describing barriers, we give you the tools to overcome those barriers. Let’s begin by taking a look at the basic communication process.

The Communication Process and Personal Responsibility

If you’ve ever taken a communication course in college, then you’ve likely seen the process model of communication depicted in Figure 3.1. Although the model offers a relatively simplistic view of a complex process, it also provides you with a starting point when something goes wrong. For example, when you share financial analytics with an audience of non-experts and they give you “trout face” (heads back and mouths open), you can look to the process model to find out what put your audience in that nearly vegetative state. So, let’s take a closer look at the process model and what it tells us about barriers to effective communication.

Figure 3.1 Process model of communication

To begin, we should define some of the terms used in the model. In this model, person A begins the communication episode by having an idea and encoding it into a message. Person A transmits the message by some channel (e.g., conversation, e-mail, phone call, text). Person B receives the message, decodes it, and responds in some way. Encoding refers to the process by which we put our ideas into messages using symbols and signs (i.e., words, numbers, expressions, etc.). Decoding is the process by which we assign meaning to symbols and signs. Feedback in this model is simply the response person B has made to person A’s message. It’s a fairly simple model, but let’s take a look at where we can run into barriers that could cause us to be less effective communicators. We can identify places in this model where barriers can impede your ability to communicate. For now, we discuss barriers at the encoding, decoding, and transmitting phases.

Encoding Barriers

The first place where you can encounter barriers is in the encoding phase of the communication process. Barriers at this phase include those things that limit your ability to put together a clear, concise message that your audience will understand and respond to appropriately. It is important to remember that our audiences will use whatever information they have available to make inferences about you and your message. Box 3.1 identifies some of the most common barriers to encoding. In this section, we address those barriers.

Box 3.1 Common barriers to encoding

Inability to Take Perspective

One of the greatest barriers to encoding your messages is the inability to take perspective. As you learned in Chapter 2, you are not your audience. When you fail to consider your audience’s perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult to craft messages that speak to their interests, needs, and wants. You should take special care to frame your messages in such a way as to demonstrate that you know your audience’s perspective.

We discussed this barrier with Rob Cassella, a financial planner with more than a decade of experience in the finance industry. Over the past six years, Rob has worked for a large financial services firm that offers services such as retirement planning, insurance, financial planning, group retirement, and group insurance. He has a great deal of experience working directly with clients who have little expertise in finance. He told us how important it was for his career to learn how to speak about finance from his clients’ perspective. He learned to answer the WIIFM question.

When I first started I really had no idea about “financial talk,” if you will. The thing that I learned was that working with clients you need to focus not on the “what” but the “why.” So, why are we doing this or why do you have what you have? In other words, what’s important to you, the customer? Getting to the core of knowing the client is more important than what it is they have.¹

Rob Cassela
Financial Planne Large Financial Services Firm

Lack of Knowledge

Crafting messages that are clear and concise requires that you thoroughly understand the information you’re sharing with others. When you write or speak on topics about which you are not well informed, your lack of knowledge becomes evident through inappropriate use of terminology. How can you encode an idea that is accurate and clear if your idea is not well informed?

Expertise

On the other end of the spectrum is what some call the curse of knowledge. Have you ever heard the term legalese? It refers to specialized language used by lawyers that most laypeople don’t understand. When you have a great deal of knowledge about a very narrow subject, like law or finance, it can be difficult to share that information with people who do not share your knowledge.

Chip and Dan Heath wrote about cursed knowledge in their New York Times bestselling book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. What they argue is that once you know something, it becomes difficult to share that knowledge with others because you can’t remember what it was like to not know that information. For many of us, it is a challenge to take our audience’s perspective (see Barrier #1 and Secret #5 from Chapter 2) and truly appreciate what it means to not have a piece of knowledge. The Heath brothers wrote that “you can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.”² One way to transform your ideas is to make them simple. Effective business communicators overcome this barrier by developing a keen sense of the language they use, especially in mixed audiences.

We spoke with Eric Bergenn, an assistant branch manager for a full-service financial management company, about some of the boundaries he has confronted in communicating with others. He discussed how challenging it can be to communicate with a lay audience and how important it is to use plain English language.

I find communicating financial information can be most challenging in group settings. I imagine it’s a challenge that school teachers and college professors are very familiar with. It’s challenging to keep a savvy investor interested while explaining something simple such as compounding returns to someone who has no experience or knowledge. At the same time, it’s hard to keep a novice interested while explaining complex retirement income strategies to a savvy investor. I find it’s important to avoid industry language and to speak in common terms and analogies when faced with these situations.

I face similar struggles when working internally. People come in to the company with varying levels of understanding, and everyone learns in different ways. What I generally find it to be most important is to use simple, concrete language. There are so many nuances that must be worked on as well for efficiency and to help understanding communicating on a higher level, but a message lost is often of greater value than a nuance gained.³

Eric Bergenn
Assistant Branch Manager Full-Service Financial Services Firm

Emotional Interference

How you feel affects the way you interact with others. We are all human and we have emotions. Our emotions affect our behavior, including our communication behavior. Emotional displays are not always bad. They do, in fact, demonstrate for others that you are truly invested in what you’re discussing. However, emotional outbursts can tarnish your reputation. That’s why we always give the advice of “think before you hit send.” Effective business communicators understand that they have emotions and work to maintain an awareness of their emotions. They also work to maintain an awareness of others’ emotions.

Research has demonstrated that emotions are contagious. Others are influenced by our emotions, and we are influenced by others’ emotions.⁴ On the positive side, when our enthusiasm for a topic shines through, others are more likely to share in that enthusiasm. To reference the Heath brothers again, one way to enhance the stickiness of our messages is to make our audience feel something. This doesn’t mean we manipulate their emotions, but when we demonstrate that we truly care about a topic, others are more likely to care as well.⁵

Unchecked emotions can take away from your key message. For example, a colleague received the message in Box 3.2 from a disgruntled student.

Box 3.2 Emotion-laden e-mail distracting from the message’s true purpose

The situation the student describes is beyond unfortunate. It’s difficult not to feel for her. What does the student want, however, from this professor, beyond empathy? The student cares about school, and you can see that passion, but the emotion has distracted the writer from her goal as a communicator. Moreover, the writer’s emotional state has led to a solid block of poorly written text. How might you approach the situation differently?

Limited Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a concept that has received greater attention in recent years. According to the work of John Mayer and Peter Salovey, emotional intelligence is “the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.”⁶ People with greater emotional intelligence are more aware of their own emotions and better able to control them. They understand how to display appropriate behavior in any situation.⁷ These individuals also have greater social sensitivity and exhibit more prosocial behaviors.⁸ These are key factors in communicating goodwill and building meaningful relationships. In fact, some have argued that emotional intelligence has greater impact on career success than cognitive abilities.⁹

Biases

Our biases and stereotypes can influence our ability to put ideas into words. We all hold biases of one sort or another. In particular, the biases you have about the people with whom you are communicating will influence your demeanor and the words you choose. Effective business communicators do their best to understand the biases they hold and to reduce their impact on their messages.

Lack of Communication Skills

Encoding is difficult when you lack the appropriate communication skills to convey ideas to others. Those who do not have adequate speaking, presentation, and writing skills will struggle to achieve the goals of effective business communication. Effective communicators understand that they should always be working to improve their communication skills. You’re doing so right now by reading this book.

Decoding Barriers

When you try to place meaning to messages you receive, you can encounter a number of barriers that may prevent you from doing so efficiently. If communication is all about relationships, then both the sender and receiver of messages have some responsibility to overcome communication barriers. Before we dive into specific decoding barriers, you should know that many of the barriers to encoding also affect the decoding process, including the inability to take perspective, lack of knowledge, expertise, emotional interference, and emotional intelligence. In this section, we discuss some of the more common barriers to decoding (see Box 3.3).

Cognitive Schemas and Worldview

Our experiences, both general and specific, lead to the development of our attitudes, values, and beliefs. In turn, these things connect to our cognitive schemas. Schemas are how our brain represents and organizes knowledge about people, places, things, and so forth. Our schemas fit together to make up our worldview. Human beings are sense-making creatures. We try to understand the world and integrate our experiences into our worldview. Research tells us that we seek out information that fits and makes sense in our worldview. When we are confronted by information that runs counter to our worldview, we often ignore that information or assimilate it (twist the information to make it fit). The phrase “sit down” can mean any one of a number of things, depending upon your worldview. Is it an invitation to relax? Is it a command from an assertive colleague? How we interpret the phrase will depend upon our worldview. Effective business communicators understand that the way they see the world will influence how they decode information.

Box 3.3 Common barriers to decoding

Attributional Biases

One of the ways that our worldview can inhibit our ability to process information and decode messages is through attributional biases that we develop. In other words, we try to explain people’s behavior. One way we do that is by observing people’s behavior over time to look for consistencies. When people behave consistently over time and across situations, we attribute their behavior to a personal characteristic (i.e., personal attribution). When the behavior changes with the situation, we attribute the behavior to the situation (i.e., external attribution). These attributions can lead to errors in how we interpret messages, because our attributions are not always accurate. For example, when someone else takes a loss on an investment, we may attribute it to his or her lack of research or planning. If, however, we experience a great investment loss, we are more likely to contribute it to some feature of the situation beyond our control, such as blaming our investment loss on a tornado that wiped out a company’s manufacturing facility.

Information Overload and Selective Perception

Having too much information can make it difficult for us to decode messages. Information overload comes in two forms: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative overload refers to having too much information. We discussed this idea in Chapter 2. People are busy and are bombarded with messages. Qualitative overload refers to receiving information that is too complex for us to process effectively.

When faced with overload, people choose to pay attention to some information and ignore other pieces of information. Additionally, people often seek affirmation. In other words, they hear what they want to hear and ignore those things that they don’t like, can’t assimilate, or with which they openly disagree. These selective perception processes can cause us to miss key pieces of information, which results in a lack of understanding.

Listening

We don’t listen well. And there are a number of reasons why this is the case. Sometimes we are so excited about making our own point that we simply wait for our turn in a conversation to make our point and forget to listen in the process. Sometimes we use selective perception processes to filter out what we hear. Sometimes we get distracted or use our excess cognitive capacity to think about other things. Sometimes we follow social scripts and simply pretend that we’re listening when we are not. We learn the rules associated with listening—we shake our heads at appropriate times or say things like “uh huh” or “I understand” or “I see” in order to move the conversation along, even though we don’t actually listen. We hear, but we don’t listen.

Listening is not only polite but it’s an important way to gain insights into what other people are thinking or what they know. We recently talked with Peter J. Bianco, who has 30 years’ experience in banking and owns his own consulting firm that provides analysis of individual commercial loans. He told us about the power of listening skills in his role as a workout officer.

For about 11 years of my banking career, I worked as a workout officer. This involves dealing with commercial loans that have “gone bad.” Handling a portfolio such as this involves working with borrowers and business owners who are under a great deal of stress. My primary objective was to do what was best for the bank (i.e., get its money back). When meeting with borrowers, I always made a point to say as little as possible. I would ask pointed questions and listen. On many occasions, I would not speak. This awkward silence always forced the other party to speak ad nauseam. I was able to obtain new and useful information about the situation that would allow me to tailor a solution to the situation and formulate a strategy.¹⁰

Peter J. Bianco
Managing Member Consulting Company

Effective communicators understand the importance of truly listening to others, and they use a few simple techniques to help them do so (see Box 3.4).

You can be a better listener during a meeting by taking notes. The simple act of taking notes will help you to focus on what is being said. Provide honest feedback and ask questions. Don’t fall back on social scripts to guide you through the conversation. When all else fails, you can always ask the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” questions. Avoid interrupting people while they are talking. You can also use your reflective listening skills by paraphrasing what you’ve heard in a meeting or conversation to ensure that you understand.

Box 3.4 Tactics to improve your listening skills

Transmitting Barriers

The final place where you can encounter barriers in the communication process is at the transmission phase. A number of barriers may confront you at this phase of the process. For now, we focus on two barriers: serial communication chains and channel selection.

Serial Communication Chains

One of the barriers to communicating within and across organizations that you have likely experienced is serial communication chains. Many people are familiar with the grammar school game called “telephone.” In it, the first person in the room (usually the teacher) whispers a message to the second person (a student). That student, in turn, whispers the message to the next student, and so on, until the last student hears the message. The last student is then asked to repeat the message for the entire class. What that student says is often vastly different from what the teacher initially said.

Similarly, Jason demonstrates this concept for his students by having one student look at an interesting and complex picture. After a minute of studying the picture, the first student must describe the picture to a second student who has never seen the picture. The second then shares the description with a third student. In this game, the rest of the class takes notes on the mistakes being made in the descriptions. They note what the original observer missed in describing the picture and how the description of the picture changed over time. The results can be fairly alarming to those who care about accuracy.

When information passes serially through a chain, it tends to get warped and distorted. The distortion is usually not intentional. However, each person who receives the message perceives it from a different perspective. The receivers retain the information that fits their worldview, adding or modifying information that doesn’t fit, or changing the words in the message. The larger the serial chain, the greater the likelihood that a message traveling through it will be distorted. That’s why effective communicators understand that key messages must be delivered directly to the source.

Channel Selection

Another common transmitting barrier is channel selection. Sometimes we send our messages through the wrong channels. Are you a heavy e-mail user? Do you prefer face-to-face meetings? Do you like to make phone calls? Despite what some believe, there is no one best channel for effective communication. The best channel in a given situation depends on its ability to help you achieve the two goals of effective communication: (1) The audience understands the message and (2) responds appropriately.

The channel selections you make can impact how the message is received. Research tells us that the primary motivator behind our selection of communication channel (e-mail, phone, etc.) is our own personal preference.¹¹ As you learned in Chapter 2, however, your preferences are secondary to your audiences’ preferences. Effective communicators try to show sensitivity to their audiences’ preferences. They use the channel to which their audience will pay attention. What’s the point of leaving a voice mail if the recipient never checks it?

In addition to social information, you have other factors that can help you make the right choice in channel selection. According to the media richness model (see Figure 3.2), you should select the channel for a message based on the match between the channel’s richness and the message’s equivocality. Equivocality refers to the message’s complexity or the number of ways a message can be interpreted. The greater a message’s equivocality, the richer the channel needs to be. Richness refers to four factors:

• The degree to which the channel allows for immediate feedback

• The number of cues made available by the channel

• The degree to which the channel allows for the use of natural language

• The degree to which the content can be individualized to specific message recipients

Figure 3.2 Media richness model

Channels such as face-to-face conversations and meetings are rich. Your audience can respond as you speak, all of the verbal and nonverbal cues are available to the audience to aid in interpretation, you can speak naturally, and you can modify the message to fit the specific audience. Channels such as written letters, memos, and e-mails are lean. It takes time for you to receive feedback, many nonverbal cues are unavailable, your business writing is often more formal than your natural language, and it is not possible to adjust the message once it has been sent. According to the media richness model, simple messages can be conveyed by any channel, whereas highly equivocal messages require rich channels.¹² Effective business communicators do their best to match their messages to their channel.

Other Important Barriers

In addition to the barriers we described in the preceding text, you will likely encounter other barriers related to context. In this section, we address two common barriers related to context: culture and gender.

Culture

For our purposes, we consider culture from two perspectives. First, we discuss social cultures, those in which we are raised. Second, we discuss organizational cultures.

Social cultures influence communication behaviors in myriad ways. In a business setting, it is always important to be aware of international customs, lifestyles, politics, and demographics. Cultural awareness will help us avoid ethnocentrism. In addition to these variables, there are four cultural variables that we discuss that may also influence business communication: individualism-collectivism, time orientation, power distance, and context. It is important to note that we cannot paint people with broad brushstrokes. A person may come from a culture that values individualism, but act in a collectivist manner.

Individualistic societies emphasize independence and reward individual performance. On the other end of the spectrum are collectivist societies, which place groups before people and downplay individual performance. In collectivist cultures, people tend to identify themselves with their social roles and social groups. The dominant culture in the United States is highly individualistic.

Time orientation can vary by social culture. In the United States, we tend to view time as fixed and finite. We schedule meetings and believe that it is rude for people to waste our time, because we have only so much time. Other cultures tend to view time as more fluid and infinite. Those cultures place less emphasis on things like schedules and punctuality.

Power distance refers to the degree to which people accept and respect unequal distribution of power. Cultures with high power distance value authority, hierarchy, and status differences. Cultures with low power distances de-emphasize status differences. The United States is a low power distance culture. It is generally acceptable for people with less status in low power distance cultures to voice objections to their superiors. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the impact of power distance on cockpit communications for Korean Air pilots and copilots. He described how the high power distance culture led to copilots and other crewmembers avoiding telling pilots when they were making mistakes. As a result, the airline suffered a number of avoidable accidents before communication training helped to turn things around.¹³

The difference between high- and low-context cultures is the degree of importance that is placed on context, the situational variables that influence an interaction (e.g., gestures, time of day, tone of voice, and social norms). High-context cultures place great emphasis on context in encoding and decoding messages. These cultures hold to the old adage that “it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters.” The dominant culture in the United States is low context. Low-context cultures place greater emphasis on what is said or written. That’s one reason why we place so much value on things such as contracts in the business world.

Effective communicators understand that it is important to adjust their behavior to meet the needs of the cultural context. We are often asked why we urge our students and clients to adjust their own behavior. There are a few simple answers to that question. First, it is easier to control your own behavior than it is to control others’ behavior. Second, as we learned in Chapter 2, communication is an interdependent process. Our behavior will influence others to match our behaviors. Third, the two goals of effective communication require us to always put our audience first.

In addition to social cultures, effective business communicators are sensitive to organizational cultures. Organizations develop their own rituals, languages, values, and worldviews. These cultures can affect how we interact within the organization. For instance, some organizational cultures place great value on competitiveness. In these organizations, employees compete with one another for a fixed pot of rewards. These cultures lend themselves to information hoarding and sabotage. Other organizational cultures emphasize cooperation. Open information sharing is encouraged among employees.

Industries have their own cultures and can develop their own languages. Matthew House is a fixed income analyst and trader who has six years of finance experience with a major investment management group. He recently told us about the industry-specific language learning curve he encountered when he started working on the trading desk as a trading assistant:

I first started working on the desk as a trading assistant and was required to pick up the phone for all incoming calls and relay messages from dealers to the specific sector trader. This was an important part of the training, because every asset class has its own language that needs to be deciphered and understood to make sure you are relaying the correct information. The first few weeks of picking up these calls I felt a major industry specific language barrier. A language of numbers, letters, tickers, spreads, maturities and acronyms all jumbled within short efficient messages for relay. I confronted this barrier by not being afraid to ask questions when I didn’t understand something. For example, I would receive a call with the following message:

“15 mm MS 6 1/4 41’s at 159, 10 mm CAT 2.6 22’s at 64.”

That message translates as “Dealer is offering $15 million of the Morgan Stanley 6.25% coupon bonds with a maturity date in 2041 at 159 basis points or 1.59% above the treasury benchmark. Dealer also has $10 million Caterpillar bonds with a 2.6% coupon maturing in 2021 at a spread of 64 basis points above treasury benchmark.”

Effective business communicators are not afraid to ask questions to achieve cultural understanding. They are also sensitive to the impact of culture on communications and adjust their behavior accordingly.

Matthew R. Hous
Fixed Income Analyst and Trader Investment Management Group

Gender

Despite much uninformed speculation, we do not live in a world of gender inclusiveness. This is just as true in business as many other aspects of life. A 2013 Harvard Business Review roundup of research related to gender and work tells the story. First, a McKinsey & Company study revealed that women disappear as you move up the corporate ranks. They account for 53% of entry-level employees, 27% of vice presidents, and only 19% of executives. Those women who leave the workforce are not leaving to care for families but for workplace-related reasons. “High-potential” men receive higher profile assignments with budgets twice as large as their female counterparts. Women in sales make substantially less than their male counterparts. A study of two large stockbrokerage firms found that this was not due to talent differences, but because women were systematically given inferior accounts.¹⁴ As of 2015, the wage gap between men and women who work full-time, year-round jobs stood at just over 78%.

Noted linguist Deborah Tannen has pioneered the research of gender as a cultural variable in business communication. She argues that these noted workplace differences between men and women are due, in part, to differences in communication styles. In particular, her research has found that women tend to share credit more readily, boast less frequently, mitigate criticism with praise, and are less direct and assertive than men.¹⁵ Unfortunately, because men traditionally hold positions of power, the styles of communication more common among women are not valued in the modern workplace. Those in positions of authority tend to assume the logic of their own style and hire and promote people with similar styles. As a result, women may be rewarded less frequently. Effective communicators are sensitive to differences in communication styles and work to make sure that all voices are heard.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we hope to have convinced you to take personal responsibility for your communication behavior (see Box 3.5 for chapter takeaways). The best communicators make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Those of us who are effective learn from our mistakes and do our best to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Look at communication failures as opportunities for improvement. One way to examine your successes and failures is to look at your behavior through the lens of the communication process model. Be aware of the barriers you will confront and adopt strategies to help you break down those barriers. When you fail to achieve the two goals of effective communication, use the lessons in this chapter to help you make continuous improvements as a communicator.

Box 3.5 Chapter 3 takeaways