Wrapping It Up with Principles and Caveats
Each interaction between humans involves understanding one’s audience, specifically what motivates them and what affects their decisions to respond a certain way. This book has presented ways to think about how neural activity influences these responses. The several questions related to audience considerations that we have considered represent detailed analysis that can affect how an audience responds to a message. In this chapter we will summarize those points to create a more concise listing of the considerations and also consider some caveats related to these principles.
Considerations
In Chapter 1, we considered some primary neuroscientific concepts to consider relative to an audience. These included: mirror neurons, reward neurons, prior experience, and fear. The audience considerations may be viewed more simply by focusing on generalizations about the effect these concepts have on response. Table 10.1 repeats the information from Table 1.1 that appeared earlier in the book; however, I have added a few caveats.
In the simplest terms, put yourself in your audience’s place; how would you want the message conveyed to motivate you toward action while recognizing your concerns about the particular situation?
Explicitly and Genuinely Mirror the Audience’s Values
Understand what your audience values in their work and other people, including you. Culture plays a role in this; however, so, too, does upbringing. Get to know your audience. However, avoid “pretending” to value similar things that your audience values; Pillay (2011) notes that our neurons help us to understand when someone is not genuine.1 Several studies also note this relative to trust.2
Table 10.1 NeuroCommunicative model with caveats
Rewards: What will motivate this person to respond a certain way (What reward can I offer?)? How can I phrase the message so that reward is explicitly stated? CAVEAT: Theory X (unmotivated employee) or Theory Y (motivated employee) Spectrum: May need to customize to the person. |
Mirroring: What does the audience think of me (including my trustworthiness)? What of my attributes or qualities does the audience value or admire? How can I appeal to that perception? What attributes or qualities of my audience do I value/admire? How can I integrate those into my message? What terms can I use that my audience values and will get their attention? CAVEAT: Model desired behaviors. Don’t mirror undesirable communication behaviors. |
Fears: What about this situation may invoke fear in my audience? Do I want to raise fear to provide some kind of motivation toward action? How can I defuse or minimize that fear for my audience? To what from their experiences might my audience compare this situation, and how can I help them overcome that fear or the fear they experienced before? CAVEAT: Understand Good use or Bad use |
Mode of Delivery: How can I best deliver this message to get the desired response from my audience? Writing—letter or e-mail? [only print-linguistic text] Phone call? [only aural] In person? [multimodal] CAVEAT: Available mode(s): Conference call may be more effective than e-mail or phone as a substitute for in-person. |
Understand as well what your employees and supervisors value in terms of the persona and character of a leader or executive, and mirror that. Model desired professional behaviors. Indeed, others tend to look to the leader or manager to understand exceptional skills and behaviors that they should mirror.
Be Explicit with Rewards
Again, understand what your audience perceives as rewards (and penalties) associated with their work and what actions you want to get from them. Talk about how they may directly benefit, as well as how the organization benefits or is rewarded if they do something. Develop fair rewards, too; people understand fairness and respond negatively to seeing unfairness around them. It affects trust.
Consider applying positive language when describing negative items—such as weak performance. Offering some kind of hope of a reward for improved performance can help the audience accept changes more readily than mere threats of being fired.
Use Stories
Narratives are a way of offering details about successful implementation of projects and a way of offering hope of successful change. Everyone fears change because of uncertainties. The more people understand that change can lead to rewards for everyone, the easier it is for them to accept change.
Recognize Good Use and Bad Use of Fear
Fear is associated with any kind of change. However, we need to moderate fear carefully. Some fear is good to have, because the will to live or survive is powerful. We will do what we think we need to do to survive. The easier we perceive that action to be, the more hopeful the situation becomes. When too much fear arises, a situation may seem hopeless. Whether an audience expresses fear, understand there may be some fear implicitly integrated into a situation.
Express the potential fear and how the audience can overcome it. While acknowledging potential drawbacks if it fails, nursing the fear, convey rewards employees will receive (organization-wide or even individual employee-specific rewards) if the change is successful. Convey contingency plans if there is risk.
Caveats
Various dynamics affect an audience’s response to a message and will, therefore, impact your message strategy.
Office politics should be considered within the various portions of the set of questions related to audience. For example, if you understand that a manager may “pull rank,” consider why he might do it. Is it because he has seen others use it and it worked for them? That is a consideration of mirror neurons and prior experience that may also link to reward neurons if those others were somehow rewarded for their behavior. If he knows that you have little recourse for his behavior, he may be doing it merely because someone once did it to him; that would be related to prior experience.
I encourage you to learn what you can about your employees through informal discussions or dialogue to help them recognize their prior experiences and motivations. Some opportunities can emerge from the job interview; others can come from lunch meetings and light conversation. Such conversations engage a personal bonding of sorts that helps the other person feel less afraid of leadership. Consequently, such encounters have an effect on amygdala-related dynamics. So, while you are helping employees overcome a fear, you can also learn more about them toward understanding how to communicate future messages.
“Going Over the Boss’s Head”
Sometimes an individual needs to “go over the manager’s head.” This is a difficult situation that quickly becomes awkward because of lasting effects. Once you have gone over your boss’ head, your boss may not trust you to come to her directly. I have encountered such situations, though I do not present any as examples here because of the awkwardness. However, I provide some tips to manage such situations if you find yourself in such a situation—having to go over your supervisor’s head to get desired results.
In situations requiring upper-management’s involvement, approach the supervisor first and ascertain her response. Be sure to help her understand WHY she needs to act on your concern or make upper management aware of it, applying audience consideration principles. This transaction may be connected to mirror neurons (your supervisor wanting to be like upper management) or reward neurons (potential reward/bonus for bringing it to upper management’s awareness).
A way around the awkwardness may be to offer the message in a conversation with the higher level manager you are trying to reach with your idea or issue. If the topic comes up in conversation and you offer a suggestion in that setting, it seems less like you have “gone over the boss’s head.” If you have talked to your boss about it, you can even mention that:
I told Susan about this, but I don’t know if she has done anything with it yet. She may be thinking of different ways to address it….
Such a statement makes your boss look diligent. It also allows the boss’s boss to bring up the issue without it looking like a political mess. In fact, it may come across as an invitation to talk it over with that boss:
Steve mentioned…, and it sounds like it could be a problem. He said he talked to you about it. What ideas have you come up with?
The awkwardness of going over the boss’s head can be minimized. If set up skillfully, the exchange can be productive for all.
Clarity, Conciseness, and Narrative
You may have noticed that the examples I used in the latter chapters seemed relatively lengthy in terms of business style. As I indicated previously, these are messages that are, in many cases, difficult. Effective communication (not just clarity for the audience, but the audience’s acceptance of the action one is communicating or getting the desired response from the audience) requires some narrative elements to elicit favorable neural response. Narratives appeal to several neural elements, and they can help get the desired response. These narrative elements contribute to a longer message; though, one should not consider the narrative elements to be “fluff.” As I wrote in an earlier chapter, each part of the message is doing something toward facilitating a desired response.
Understand your audience’s needs relative to “stories” that may help them understand and accept a given action being implemented. Very little narrative may be needed; or a lot may be needed. If you know of a change that occurred somewhere else and that proved to be successful not just in terms of profit but also in terms of ease of transition, share that story. Employees at all levels are concerned about a company’s financial results, but they are also concerned about how a change affects them. That effect is not just in terms of employment; it is also relative to the stress of changing a usual habit.
The Value of Failure Stories
No one likes to, or wants to, fail. In several chapters I’ve echoed the value of narratives and encouraged the telling of success stories to help the audience understand that a change can work out well. However, there is value in failure narratives, if they are presented carefully. These are stories about an initiative or project that you tried to implement and that failed. Such stories help to lend credibility to your position while helping an audience understand that you are human. Change involves risks; risk-taking is part of leadership.
While talking about failures, talk about what you learned from them. Talk about how something that failed lead to a success, even if it helped to identify a limitation that could not be changed. How did you address that limitation, or a similar one, with the next project? Some years ago, we tried to coordinate a team assignment across multiple sections of a single course, and it did not go well. Teams of four students each were created from six sections; yet in some cases only one person from a team may have been in a given section while in another team, two or three members were in the same section. The more diverse the group was in terms of the number of different sections of the course involved in the group, the more challenging students found it to collaborate. It was also difficult to coordinate assessment of the submissions, because the teaching team had to be trained toward a normed assessment; that is, everyone had to understand how to grade so grading from one instructor to another would be consistent. No single grader would be deemed “easier” or “harder” than another.
I had applied multisection teams previously with success, but those were set up with pairs of students from each section involved in four-person groupings. No one felt “alone” as they worked in class on the assignment. Recognizing the challenges related to the larger multisection assignment on both ends—students and instructors—we dropped the assignment for future semesters. However, the new policy was that instructors were allowed to arrange multisection team assignments limited to two of their own sections or closely coordinated with one other instructor’s section to assure ease of coordination for both students and instructors.
Considering length of a narrative, the story I just conveyed takes less than 1½ minutes to share orally.
The Dismissal or Layoff Message
I intentionally omitted what most would consider to be the most challenging message to deliver; the one in which you acknowledge to someone that they are being let go. One hopes not to have to convey such a message; however, the nature of a leadership position means it will likely occur at some point. I have never been in the position, but I write based on exchanges with others and their experiences.
The message depends heavily on the nature of the reason for letting the person go. For example, if one is being let go in a cost-cutting effort but has been a good employee, that message will differ from the one involving a weak employee.
• Cost-Cutting a Good Employee. While buffering the message with recognition of the person’s hard work (mirror/reward), acknowledge what criterion influenced the decision, so the person understands it is not a personal issue you had with his work. Also, if possible, convey hope that he can be rehired
at some point if available. The more hopeful the message is, the better.
Also, if possible, create a transition program for such employees, helping them prepare for the job search and providing ways to facilitate finding other employment. A layoff will invoke the amygdala quite a bit—survival is challenged and jeopardized. Just as with any kind of fear, the more explicit the appearance of an effort to help address the fear the more the person feels he can trust you and the company, and he leaves feeling better than if no support was offered.
• Dismissing a Bad Employee. There are employees at any level who do not seem to care much about their work and take
each day of work as a burden. They recognize that they need a paycheck to pay for their lifestyle—whatever that lifestyle
may involve—but they are not enthusiastic about work. This demeanor can affect the quality of their work negatively, putting them in the position of being a liability to the organization.
Principles of good leadership generally encourage working with such a person to help her improve, but it does not always work well. In such cases, it is possible to offer a short message, having warned her previously about consequences and reminding her of those acknowledgments. Remind her of the situation, your efforts to help address it, her lack of improvement, and the need for you now to act on the consequences that were previously discussed.
The dismissed employee may still blame you for the dismissal, but others in the organization will understand the fairness of your actions.
What About “Me?”
In the first chapter of this book, we considered the attributes of the messenger that are included inherently in the various elements of the message. Further, we considered that it may at times be important to omit some information from the message that the messenger may be aware of because it could negatively affect the desired response. Consider the following caveats relevant to those situations.
Discuss your concerns about a situation and potential message with others at your level in the organization or higher to ascertain how credible your concerns are; this may change your perception of the situation and your understanding of how others perceive it. These conversations may also help you to understand what information is relevant to a message and what is not.
A manager may fear telling an employee about pressures the manager faces because they seem irrelevant to the employee. In many cases, I do not hesitate to acknowledge pressures I face from others, because it is important for my audience to understand what is motivating a given action or message. Such information may help me gain the desired response; my audience will take appropriate action because they understand I am not the only one who has something to gain or lose based on the actions.
However, I do omit some information if I perceive it will negatively affect the response. If a certain detail could incite panic or express likelihood that a task will fail, the audience may quit the effort associated with completing the task. “Why should I even try if the effort is for nothing?” A sports coach may perceive that the game is lost, but he still needs to get the best effort out of the players. So he may omit from a pep talk his concerns about how a loss will affect his own job or how a few players seem to not be trying hard anymore. The coach is aware of these issues, but conveying them won’t help the team play well. Likewise, a manager needs to continue to motivate her employees even when a situation seems hopeless. In Chapter 2, we considered the impact of positive and negative language. Omitting certain details may help the message seem more positive than if the details were included. The audience may, consequently, respond more favorably to the message.
Consider the recommendation letter scenarios presented in Chapter 2. In one of the sample responses, all the details were included; in a few, they were not included. I posed the question about which was most effective and which was least effective. How did the inclusion of details, or lack thereof, affect the audience’s response?
Science Versus Art
I mentioned a caveat in the first chapter of this book, and I end the book reminding the reader of it; communication is an art form. One person may react a certain way to a given message, while a second person reacts very differently to the same message. The tips and discussion in this book attempt to offer insights into ways to improve communication effectiveness by providing insight as to how messages affect neural dynamics and what is involved in shaping those dynamics.
So many factors influence development of neurons and those neural dynamics associated with responding to a message that it is very difficult to predict that a given message will work for a particular audience. Through study and practice of recommended communication strategies, you can achieve greater success in getting your point across effectively.