Chapter 8

There Are a Few Good Questions, a Lot of Good Answers

Language fine-tuning: These are advanced techniques and nuances to increase speed and ease of gaining facts and honest analysis. They allow for flexibility and adaptation outside of one’s “home turf” and with a wide variety of people not generally under one’s control.

Adjusting Language to Audience

One size does not fit all.

In the days of domineering, autocratic, bureaucratic management, the leader’s style ruled all. That individual style was a constant that was imposed on others. There was little, if any, consideration in adapting one’s management or leadership style. Orders were barked out and everyone was expected to fall in line and follow suit. This was true figuratively and often times literally. While this style was prevalent in organizations in days gone by, it still exists. (Think of the military as an extreme example of this.)

Steve Jobs might be considered a my way or the highway type of leader. Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is that kind of football coach.

The other extreme is the leader style that is nurturing, encompassing, fully embracing and operates exclusively in a world of decision by committee. These leaders want everyone to be happy. They figuratively lead via a fireside chat while creating a kumbaya moment. They hire consultants who lead retreats to camp in jungles or build sand castles on beaches.

To be successful in today’s organizations, leaders can no longer impose their preferred style on others and be universally effective for the long term. This is particularly true in the language they use. Even with language, one size does not fit all applies.

You cannot merely exhibit your preferred style of static language with no adjustment. Successful leaders adjust and adapt language based on audience, circumstances, purpose, and perception. Successful leaders know how to position and pivot accordingly, in any given aspect of language and communications.

Leaders are most likely to be cognizant of adjusting language to the audience. But, many are not aware of the necessity and value of adjusting language for circumstance, purpose, or perception. After all, we’ve all been taught to be consistent in our messaging. The key is to be consistent in messaging, while appropriately adjusting language. The information here applies whether:

• Your audience is individual, small group, large group, or a global reach
• The setting is casual or formal in nature
• Your medium is face-to-face, audio, video, or print
• Your communication is strategically planned, ad hoc, or spontaneous

Let’s explore adjusting language in each of these situations:

Adjusting Language to Your “Audience”

Think of the audiences you communicate with on a regular or periodic basis:

• Executive committee or council
• Peers
• Direct reports
• Teams, departments, divisions, companywide
• Clients or customers
• Prospects
• Shareholders or stockholders
• Board of directors
• Advisory board
• Partners, vendors, suppliers
• Regulators
• Associations
• Media
• Community
• Public at large

In consideration of your various audiences (individual conversations and group conversations), our advice is not to dumb-down or elevate your language based on your audience. It’s a matter of strategically focusing your messaging in regard to positioning content and language that is appropriate to you audience.

• What is to be communicated (topic, issue, concern, announcement, game plan, recovery, and so on).
• How and why is this topic relevant to this particular audience? Be explicit not implicit. While this particular topic may be universal (you are discussing with multiple audiences), the language of how and why will vary from audience to audience.
• Incorporate examples that are specific to your specific audience. It’s imperative that you use examples that each audience can relate to versus using generic examples that every audience should be able to relate to. This means you need to change or customize examples for different audiences. Your core messaging may be similar, but your examples may be drastically different in order to drive your message.

Adjusting Language to Circumstance

What are the circumstances requiring and prompting your communications? The answer to that question determines your language. Your communications may be based on:

• Strategic direction
• Successes
• Failures
• Performance or results updates
• Proactive promotion
• Damage control
• Crisis management
• Restructure or reorganization
• Mergers and acquisitions
• New product or service announcement
• Community support or affiliation
• Competitive information
• Annual report
• Awards and acknowledgments
• Business setting and social setting

You may be dealing with the same audience in different circumstances. You may be dealing with different audiences in different circumstances. Each of these scenarios warrants an adjustment in language.

We’ve usually heard a significant other at home say suddenly, “You know, you’re not in the office now!” That’s our cue to remember that the circumstances have changed. We speak with some clients with great familiarity, but to prospects with more arm-distance formality. I react very poorly to a company employee where I’m doing business who meets me for the first time and immediately uses my first name. I’m neither old-fashioned nor arrogant—I’m a pragmatic business person and first impressions are lasting ones. The fact that you call colleagues or even long-time clients by a first name doesn’t mean you should do that to new people under different circumstances.

The managers and captains in our favorite restaurants, our drivers, and others always use honorifics with customers: Dr., Mr., Ms. They know the circumstances merit it.

We usually have a great many clients with whom we are familiar, and well-liked and trusted. We also have many prospects who know little about us and have no experience with us. We can’t expect the familiarity of the former to travel to the latter through osmosis. We have to adjust our approaches to suit the circumstance.

Some examples:

• You need to create trust with new people.
• You need to slow your language in new circumstances.
• You can’t use past references and past metaphors with new relationships.
• You need to be careful with humorous, satirical, and ironic language. “How did that work out for you?” or “What made you decide to do that?” can be an innocent inquiry or a venomous question.

A brief digression, but also relevant: This is why first dates are so terror-laden and often failures. The circumstances are attended by confusing and conflicting factors: Do I appear desperate? Am I asking enough questions? Should I talk less? Can I have a second drink? Should I mention my religion? Should I mention that I have a child? Should I mention that I like their cologne?

We can all adapt that to an initial sales meeting, a college interview, a traffic officer’s stop, or a pushy salesperson. We’re not ourselves because of the circumstances, and we have to adjust.

Similarly, some circumstances create overwhelming language, intimate language, revealing language. No, I’m not talking about a beautiful moon and romantic music. I’ve found that bartenders seem to encourage customer revelation; people who are allowed to touch you, such as manicurists and hair dressers, engage in intimate conversations. They probably hear more honesty and detail than some therapists.

That’s because the circumstances are encouraging for such talk, shared secrets with a virtual stranger. My advice is to keep control of your language at all times by controlling the circumstances. Just as you shouldn’t get drunk or reveal secrets to a beautician, you shouldn’t expect familiarity from a new prospect or immediate trust on a first date.

Adjusting Language to Purpose

You may think purpose is the same as circumstance. But, they are not the same. Circumstance is related to the condition that exists and prompts your communications. Purpose is what you want to accomplish with your communications. Continuing with our theme here, you must adjust language related to purpose. Your purpose may be to:

Inform

When you wish to inform, you should use factual language that is not mixed with opinion or speculation. Inform and information are cognates. We wish to provide facts.

Written language is an ideal medium in which to inform. There is no debate needed and interaction can be at a minimum. Questions can be asked via return mail. This is why meetings are such poor places to exchange information and are often so boring and elongated. Meetings are appropriate for decisions requiring consensus and joint analysis, but not for the mere conveyance of information.

You’ll find many books that confuse opinion and fact, especially among politicians and those with philosophical agendas. One may have the opinion that vaccines are more dangerous than not vaccinating children, but that is not the scientific fact, which shows just the opposite.

Use language that is evidence and observation-based: “We witnessed lack of participation,” rather than, “She is not a team player.” Be succinct. Facts speak for themselves. In general, the longer one speaks or writes, the more suspect the factual nature of the communication.

The Gettysburg Address and the Preamble to the Constitution are remarkably brief documents.

Educate

This is the act of assisting in others’ learning. It, too, should be factually based, except in instances of philosophic, political, or theological necessity. But we’re considering it here as social instruction.

Educational language needs to be nonbiased and pragmatic. It should reflect a range of views and provide processes, not merely content. In other words, in today’s world, one can easily look up the years of the French Revolution. But learning about its causes, aftermath, and impact elsewhere is a qualitative experience. Hence, educational language should provide insights, challenge, positive inquiry, and self-testing. It’s better to ask what the years of the French Revolution were, better yet to ask its impact on America, but best of all to ask if such factors could occur again today.

In business, the question sequence would rise from, “Are we selling more than our competition?” to “Why are we selling more than our competition?” to “How can we dominate this market?”

Influence

Wielding influence means wielding language. This language anticipates or creates the self-interests of the person or group you are attempting to influence. A common example: “This offer is only good until Friday at 5 pm.” The implication here is one of scarcity: Act now or you won’t have the opportunity to act at all. You will never own this, at least not at this price.

Here is an example of language working in a group business setting. You could ask people to state what their position is on a proposed price increase. Once they state it publicly, they have committed, and it’s tough (because of ego) to change their position. However, if you ask them to simply write down their position without their name and tally the responses, you can often achieve a change in opinion. (In the jury room, this is called secret polling, where acquit or convict can be tallied early but not with anyone committing publicly.)

Publicize or Promote

We are allowed hyperbole when we promote:

• World’s greatest
• One of a kind
• Best selling
• Most requested
• Undeniable

This is the warp and woof of the advertising industry and is generally both given and received with a grain (or a ton) of salt. The idea here is to capture attention, to use the drama of the language, and to not focus on the accuracy of the language.

We expect people to be excited by exciting language, and promotion—whether personal or organizational—must adhere to this equation. Some examples:

• The ultimate driving machine (BMW)
• Guaranteed to absolutely get there the next day (FedEx)
• Think different (Apple)
• The king of beers (Budweiser)
• Between love and madness lies obsession (Calvin Klein)
• When you care enough to send the very best (Hallmark)
• Power, beauty, and soul (Aston Martin)
• Don’t leave home without it (American Express)
• It’s everywhere you want to be (Visa)
• Keeps going and going and going (Energizer)
• The happiest place on earth (Disneyland)

You can dispute or disprove any of these statements, but that’s not the point. This language is not about informing or educating, but about publicizing and promoting.

To summarize, here’s one that I made up: If you don’t blow your own horn, there isn’t any music.

Dispute and Debate

When you are disputing or debating (arguing), your language must be a combination of influential and factual. What you must avoid at all costs is personal critique and attack.

The latter is known as ad hominem language, meaning appealing to emotions and not logic, visceral and not cognitive, subjective and not objective. Negotiation, compromise, and conflict resolution all collapse when language becomes personally offensive, employs epithets, and mocks instead of informings.

This is schoolyard language: “That’s because you’re a jerk!” But we hear milder versions of this in the boardroom, on office floor, and in e-mail. “I don’t see any indication of your turning in a cost estimate” is too often met with “That’s because you don’t read them anyway and are too lazy to do them yourself!”

If the object of engaging in debate is to win a point or settle a dispute, then your language has to be positive. If you have ulterior motives, then your language will reflect increasingly personal and dysfunctional dynamics.

Remember: Warfare is simply the least subtle form of communications, diplomacy by lesser means.

Adjusting Language to Perception

Throughout this book, we’ve discussed the good, the bad, and the challenging of perceptions from multiple angles and perspectives. So, what language adjustments are required related to perceptions?

Perception, we’re told, is reality. But whose? Only our own. Eyewitnesses often contradict each other because they have varying perceptions of the same event. “Were you watching what I was watching?” is a common query after two people have starkly differing views of the same theatrical event.

Our perceptions are altered by:

• Experiences: We tend to categorize or lump occurrences into the drawers and with the labels of past occurrences we deem similar.
• Environment: We may be distracted by noise, views, or conditions around us. In a famous experiment, a flare was lighted from a balloon high above a football game during the action, and no one reported it to authorities.
• Attention: The iconic Hawthorne Experiment, though flawed, showed that when lights were turned up, workers’ performance improves, but that performance also improved when lights were turned down. The reason was that the perception that the altered lighting meant more attention was being paid to performance by management.
• Preoccupation: We’re concerned about a family issue or a car repair or a new pet and we’re distracted from the matter at hand. Others’ priority is perceived by us as a minor matter or none of our concern.
• Vigilance: This sounds odd, even counterintuitive, but when we are overly disciplined and overly focused, our perceptions wane. Marshall McLuhan, of medium is the message fame, once observed that “The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” That’s why they so frequently change the security people watching the monitors on the luggage conveyor belts. We can only pay attention for so long before our perceptions are dulled and the mango ice cream begins to taste like vanilla.
• Distraction: Have you ever missed your highway exit because you were daydreaming? Have you failed to notice that you were running out of gas? This happens in hospital operating theaters, when the wrong kidney is removed or limb amputated (this happens with frightening regularity). Perceptions in these cases have been dulled by one’s habit and unconscious competence.
• Physicality: Not everyone has the same reflexes, hearing, sight, olfactory capability, or memory. These differences account for vastly differing perceptions (It was blue, it was green; it was six feet, it was four feet; it was 1992, it was 2002.)

How do we deal with the language of perception reconciliation? Fortunately, it’s not difficult, at least in business settings.*

The key to adjusting language for perceptions is to test understanding. Ask the other people what they experienced. Ask them to describe it, don’t merely rely on your own perceptions. Example: “I thought the client was very circumspect during the meeting, and there was no guarantee of a reorder, even the hint that we should change our sales manager. What did you think?” (Note that it’s always a good idea to ask others’ perceptions first, particularly if you are their superior, so as not to influence their perceptions!)

Test understanding with clients, customers, suppliers, regulators, peers, superiors, and subordinates. It’s nonthreatening and even hard to detect what you’re doing. But the language will be instrumental in alerting as to how others are viewing things, their likely course of action, how to influence them, and what to expect later.

A second major element in perception reconciliation is to simplify the issue, because of the factors above that can skew perceptions away from reality.† Ergo, we have to clarify. Examples: “If you removed the discussion about this meeting suffering from too much noise in the halls, how do you think the client actually felt about our service?” or “If we were to assume that we all arrived here this month, what would we actually think of the operation?”

The final aspect of language in perception is to be careful of our own. We should point out what we observed or heard or sensed, but not as empirical reality and not as absolutes. We should say, “I perceived that she was rushed, and didn’t want to make a hasty decision, what did you perceive?” or “I saw him keep glancing at his watch, did you see the same thing.”

We need this kind of constant, mutual validations because our perceptions are often wrong. We may see someone glancing at e-mail, only to be told that person was glancing at meeting notes stored on an iPhone. I once thought a woman knitting during my speech was simply rude, but afterward she came up to ask some very cogent questions. When I pointed out the knitting, she said, “That’s how I concentrate.”

I once asked a man behind me who kept bumping me, “Are you blind?”

“Yes,” he said, “as a matter of fact, I am!” and I turned to see him and a perturbed-looking, large guide dog.