Most of us say that we want good communication, but we’re often guilty of doing things that actively undermine this laudable aspiration. Here are four common communication-defeating behaviors:
1. If we want someone’s input, we can’t act like we have all the answers. A cartoon caption of an executive reviewing a report says: Why is everyone’s valuable input so stupid? That’s funny in a cartoon, but self-defeating in real life. Nothing halts input faster than reflexive criticisms (“That’ll never work”; “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”), dismissive gestures (like eye-rolling or head-shaking), or cynical responses (“That’s a g-r-e-a-t idea Einstein”; “Did you get that idea from a gumball machine or from a fortune cookie?”).
2. If we want dialogue, we can’t try to control the conversation. Robust dialogue—a conversational back-and-forth that may result in the creation of shared meaning—can’t be controlled. People have free will, they want to express their opinions, and they have finely-tuned radars that detect when we are trying to steer their responses. Real, meaningful conversations may be messy, but they are a productive mess. If you transcribed a conversation (like researchers often do), you’d see fragments, repeats, mistakes, gaps, and reversals, with scarcely a properly constructed sentence in the mix. But you’d also see two people grappling with a topic and often arriving at a mutual understanding. Shared meaning can’t be coerced. It’s the beneficial byproduct of conversations that aren’t micromanaged and are free to converge around a shared understanding.
3. If we want meaningful face-to-face conversations, we can’t hide our faces. Sure, we’re busy. But we can’t bury ourselves in our smart phones or disappear behind our computers and wonder why the important people in our lives sometimes feel disconnected from us. People know it—and don’t like it—when we’re distracted and not fully present in a conversation. For better face-to-face connections, let the person at hand trump the device in hand.
4. If we want to be good listeners, we have to actually listen. It can be a struggle to resist the urge to add our two cents to a conversation, even when we suspect that we really should be listening. For example, we quickly suggest an action plan for a colleague who only wanted to vent to us about troubles with a client. Or we unleash a long-winded monologue on a young cousin, crushing her hopes that we might be the only person in the family who will listen to her without judgment. Or we divert a coworker’s comments about the grief he’s experiencing today to talk the grief we felt ten years ago. All of these things happen because we’re trying hard to help, but sometimes letting someone else talk is the most powerful and effective communication behavior we can perform. We can’t talk our way into good listening skills.
Communication improves when our aspirations for better conversations align with our actions in conversations. That’s how we put communication-defeating behaviors in the rearview mirror and set in motion a virtuous cycle where good communication today fuels good communication tomorrow.
Originally posted on mouthpeaceconsulting.com.