Communication is not about winning

Allow me to introduce a formula that will enhance your corporate communication skills and thus, your work experience. RESULT: If you incorporate these key ingredients into your corporate presentation, your communication at work will improve on every level.

Communication is not about winning or about persuading, but simply about communicating, and that is a potentially endless road that becomes unbearable to walk unless you are honestly interested in the person you’re walking with.

COMMUNICATION FOR RESPONSIBLE LIVING - THE MINT FORMULA

In my latest article, I told the delightful story of the white mint, from the 80s cinematic masterpiece, Roadhouse. A story that I have turned into an approach to corporate communication. Applying The Mint Formula to your communication means assuming that the famous George Bernhard Shaw quote is always in play, ready to mess up the communication, unless we anticipate its presence and actively work past it.

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” ?– G.B. Shaw.

The Mint Formula is how you turn the illusion of communication into the reality of communication. As a metaphor, the Mint represents several aspects of communication that I find overlooked or misrepresented in terms of what makes them vital to communication. It may seem, in what is to come, like I have begun talking to corporations and not to people, but that is likely because corporate management, in recent years, in many corporations, has attempted to achieve what should be achieved by the people, the employees. I’m speaking to you, the reader, the individual. I’m trying to make you better at taking your hopefully enhanced communication skills into your life and making a positive change with it.

The Mint represents three things within communication:

??? THE HIDDEN AGENDA. The Mint represents the hidden agenda or potentially misunderstood message; what is presented before you seemed to be one thing, but was, in fact, something else.

??? ACTIVE LISTENING. It also represents the value of communicating with active listening as if you’re hearing truth for the first time – the adjective use of the word ‘mint’, meaning undamaged; Striving to preserve and pass on a message in its mint condition, as intended from the first utterance of said message.

??? INTERPERSONAL INTEREST. Finally, it represents the purity of interest. Again, the adjective use of the word 'mint.' Pristine. Original. Untarnished. Communication will only be truly successful, especially on a management level – communication from managers and down – if there is an honest interest in how the communication is being perceived, and perception I will come back to in a later article. In my humble opinion, the most underrated word in the entire corporate world is the word interest, and I don’t mean interest rates, I mean interest in the person next to you.

THE CORPORATE PRESENTATION

If you get up to do a presentation at work, the age-old, well-tested tool for such rhetorical endeavours is the triad of Aristotle. Ethos, meaning your credibility as a presenter, Pathos, meaning your ability to connect emotionally with your audience, and Logos, meaning the core of your message, the reasoning or the logic behind your argument. These three elements work wonders for almost any kind of public speaking, EXCEPT when in the corporate world. Aristotle’s triad of rhetoric is traditionally turned into a pyramid, but to introduce The Mint Formula to this equation, we must turn the pyramid shape into… what’s the shape… A diamond? … Ah, a Mint, of course! We need to turn the triad into a tetrad because there is one more pillar that must be added to Aristotle’s equation. In the corporate world, where presentations are often given on demand, one thing will be as necessary to take into consideration as credibility (ethos), emotional impact (pathos), and reasoning (logos), and that is expectations.

If we turn the pyramid upside down and place Ethos at the bottom. We will have a flat top with Pathos and Logos on either side of the top. Now, on top of this flat, we put another layer. Let’s keep in the linguistic spirit of Aristotle’s Greek and call it Expectationos. (Absolutely not a word, I know.) Let’s call the whole thing The Corporate Mint, just to pay a little homage to Wade Garrett and his road house-business acumen (as well as selling my new brand). A nice success-scented white mint. It looks like this:

The point of this is that in the corporate world there is often a factor that trumps the other three points of the trinity. This factor is the often hidden agenda of your boss, your manager, or whoever gave you the assignment to make this presentation.

“The point is simply that we can safely assume, in any type of situation of communication, that whatever is said, there is also something unsaid because that is how people work."

THE HIDDEN AGENDA

A while back, I was coaching a guy for a job interview. It was a senior partner position in a pretty high-end, private consulting firm. He had gone through two interviews already, and for the final one, he was asked to do a mock presentation for one of their clients, which was where I could make a difference. He was given all the specifics of the business case, what the presentation should be about, objectives, obstacles, et cetera, all so that we could fine-tune a 10-minute pitch and pull out all the stops.

To prepare for the pitch, I asked him if he could film himself doing a presentation at his current job, to get a sense of his usual style, but also to see what the environment he was working in at the time was like, what the lingo was like, how the vibe was, and so on.?

A week later, he showed me a video that he had recorded in secret from the webcam of his laptop, just filming himself doing a presentation on pricing strategy in his current job. But you could hear everyone in the room chipping in and commenting on his presentation as he went along. There were about 10 people in the room. He was sitting down at a table doing the presentation which was mostly focused on a PowerPoint. At some point, on the screen, I could see a guy walking into the room, placing himself standing behind my guy sitting. This new fellow started pitching in a lot, and soon he had more or less taken over the presentation and the conversation.

“Who’s that guy?”

“That’s my manager.”

“The guy who asked you to do that presentation?”

“Yes.”

“Then why is he effectively taking over the presentation that he asked YOU to do.”

“Well, first of all, I’m supposed to be the guy with the specifics of this issue – the numbers that are the basis for whatever decision was to be made about this new strategy. But also, next to him, you can’t see him on the screen, is his manager, and I think he had a hidden agenda with implementing this new strategic approach, to position himself in the company relating to his manager.”

Aah, now that’s where it took a turn for the interesting. There are short-term outcomes and long-term outcomes when working strategically with communication and especially with presentation skills. The short-term is usually what you are expected to do; the immediate necessity of the presentation. Solution now! Long-term is often what you might want to achieve down the line.

Here, we suddenly had an apparent short-term outcome. A) Figure out what the best strategy is for the project, based on the numbers of the presentation. But we also have a hidden short-term outcome. B) My guy’s boss had a hidden agenda, his own purpose for asking for this presentation to be done: he wanted a reason to get HIS boss in the room as well.

Now, the success of my guy’s presentation suddenly rests on a two-fold venture. A) To fulfil the contractual obligations of his job description, he must crunch the numbers, do the presentation, create the basis for an evidence-based, valid decision. B) To go anywhere in the firm, to serve his own long-term strategic objectives, he must also serve the hidden agenda of his boss, as that is the one that will get him attention in the firm. “A” will just get him accepted. “B” will get him attention, which in turn is where the potential for his own advancement lies.

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My best suggestion for all the corporate speakers:

Forget about the actual presentation, initially, and do some research into why you are really asked to do this.

All the tricks and tools of the trinity (Ethos, Pathos, Logos, anchoring, voice, structure, etc.), might not be irrelevant but damn close to, if there is a hidden agenda that you have missed. I must say, though, that a hidden agenda might not necessarily be something to be perceived as negative. The hidden aspect does not have to be there for selfish or malicious reasons. They are most likely there for personal reasons, but we all act for personal reasons. It could just as well be a manager covering over an employee doing a bad presentation because the manager knows that the employee was not given proper time to prepare. The point is simply that we can safely assume, in any type of situation of communication, that whatever is said, there is also something unsaid because that is how people work.

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“... are you just telling yourself that you heard, understood, acknowledged, and empathised with what was said, so you can claim to have listened actively because the communication consultant said that this was wildly important?"

ACTIVE LISTENING OR SELF-AWARENESS

This has become such a buzzword in recent years, active listening. Or, I guess, a buzzing concept, so easily trivialised or taken for granted concerning its necessity in communication, be it corporate or private. Everyone says that active listening is paramount to successful communication. It’s important in change management, it’s important in sustainable leadership, it’s important in conflict management, well, when is it not important? The answer is: Never. However, and this is a big fat ‘however’… HOWEVER, in my experience, active listening is quite often deemed achieved by hearing. It’s tragically often turned into a subjective claim by the one with ears. Yeah, I heard you! Ten minutes later to a colleague, Yeah, I listened. It was bullshit. It’s even deemed achieved if you go so far in your listening as to claim, I understood what was said. I even acknowledged what was said. I even empathised with what was said. Did you though? Did you really? Or are you just telling yourself that you heard, understood, acknowledged, and empathised with what was said, so you can claim to have listened actively because the communication consultant said that this was wildly important? Do you claim to have communicated competently because it feels good to feel competent about your communication skills? Should I pull the opening quote out of the hat again? You know, the George Bernhard Shaw one. Are you just under the illusion that you have communicated? Who was at the other end of your communication? Did you ask them about it? Did you care enough to check with the other side of the communication how they felt about what you said, were you that interested?

EQ, also referred to as Emotional Intelligence has been labelled the predominant factor in corporate communication. Still, in Denmark, almost 40% of people in corporate jobs consider leaving their job because of dissatisfaction with their immediate management. That’s a shockingly high number, considering how much everyone talks about communication, and about EQ, and about active listening. Nonetheless, an astounding amount of managers seem to be quite useless at what they all talk about and seem to value so greatly. They must be, otherwise that many employees would not be considering quitting. If Emotional Intelligence is such a big deal that everyone knows it’s a big deal, yet 40%ish of stakeholders/employees are unhappy with their management, what then is the missing link? Why are so many people so seemingly incompetent at communicating? For one, I’m not a fan of the word emotional intelligence. I’m not convinced it even exists, but that might just be a matter of semantics, and I can be quite the language Nazi when in the right mood (or wrong mood). Something deep in the bowels of my very being is disgruntled with this word, just like I am with the word self-esteem. I can’t see exactly how an intelligence about your own emotional capacity equals a capacity to recognise the emotional status and needs of another person, and that’s what this is used for in the corporate sector. But then again, I’m no expert on this. My feeling, though, is that it ends up being a word we don’t quite understand and thus are not able to turn into good use. I even fear, nay dread, that it’s one of those words that only manages to remind us of what we are useless at or not able to achieve. I’m not convinced that we gain a positive outcome from throwing this term, emotional intelligence around. EQ is usually described with several sub-categories, one of them being the top dog of sub-Cs, and a word I think should simply replace emotional intelligence. That word is self-awareness. You could also call it personal insight. This self-awareness, we all know what is. This, we all know what means, both in terms of how well you know yourself, but also how you relate to others, and after all, that is the whole point of throwing this EQ-thing around, flogging it to death; to get better at relating to those around us. If you gain self-awareness; gain the ability to recognise how your actions impact your life, your state of mind, and your productivity, you also develop the ability to recognise how you impact others. Now, THIS makes sense to me. This can create results in communication.

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“Communication always has two sides, a giving and a receiving end, and there must be a mutual interest in understanding the mint condition of a message and there must be an interest in carrying said message into fruition."

INTERPERSONAL INTEREST

Finally, the Mint represents the purity of interest. Again, the adjective use of the use: Pristine. Original. Untarnished. I stated above that interest, in my humble opinion, is the most underrated word in communication, especially in the corporate world. Communication will only be truly successful, whether on a management level – communication from managers and down – or from the ground floor up, if there is an honest interest in how the communication is being perceived, and perception, though we have already touched on it, I will come back to in a later article. Communication always has two sides, a giving and a receiving end, and there must be a mutual interest in understanding the mint condition of a message and there must be an interest in carrying said message into fruition. Easy for me to say, right? And sounds reasonable and achievable enough, right? Unfortunately, it is neither that reasonable nor that easily achievable.

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Let me talk briefly about a popular corporate concept. You could call it an initiative often opted for by corporate management. Change Management. Whenever a corporation wishes to make changes to the organisational structure of a corporation, they tend to hire some people – maybe they even have people working in the corporation just to manage such things – who say they are good at making plans for how to make these changes. They will assess the current situation and the apparent urgency shared by the executive management. They will devise clever strategies where they will state fancy things like, focusing a vision for the transformation of the corporation towards a successful and sustainable future. Management loves it. Yeah, let’s do that! Change plans are drawn and implemented after some impressive and motivational speeches in front of the stakeholders, all the people who are supposed to embrace the changes with open arms and cheers. The cheers are somewhat subdued, nonetheless. The changes are communicated under an inspiring cloud of disillusion (You get where I’m going, right?). In the weeks following, as long as the change managers are hovering around, skulking in the hallways, the implemented changes are working beautifully, but as soon as they leave, as soon as life returns to normal, as soon as the stakeholders are left to their own devices, they also return to their old way of doing things, and the grand plan, the spectacular vision for change falls apart. Why? Everyone was there when the changes were announced. Everyone heard the message. Everyone understood the message. Everyone said they acknowledged and embraced the message. Everyone SAID they had listened, but here’s the thing:

People are an astonishing collection of selfish beasts, and you can’t blame them for being selfish.

It’s part of our human DNA. It’s called survival. We serve our own interests first, then we can consider the good of the firm. The change managers SAID to the executives that they had communicated the changes thoroughly to every level of the corporation. Every level of the corporation SAID they had understood and accepted the changes to be made (Had they any choice?). BUT was any of the employees interested enough, on a personal level, to ask management what this was all about and whether there could be alternatives when they failed to see the purpose of the changes from their point of view? And much more importantly, since the communication came in the form of an announcement from the management, did any of the managers, be it change- or executives- bother to check? Were any of them interested enough, on a personal level, to figure out what would make each of the employees, each of the stakeholders interested, on a personal level, in embracing the changes? But then again, that level of interest does indeed sound quite overwhelming not to mention time-consuming, and at the end of the day, time is money.

We must be willing to accept the selfishness of people as an inherent need in every individual to have a sense of, what’s in it for me?. If we don’t tolerate and expect that minimal level of selfishness, and it really is quite minimal, then how can we expect the individual to embrace what we have communicated, especially if it involves changes that also affect them.

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Now, back to you, the reader, who might be a senior manager of a large corporation, knowing all about these matters, or who might be a cleaning person in a private company, who has never and never will hear the term change management. You will need to face this, though: That speech that you might be crafting, this communication thing that you desire to excel at, the success of it will always come to this annoyingly simple thing called interest.

??? Are you honestly interested in how your message is perceived?

??? Are you honestly interested in how you are being perceived?

??? Are you honestly interested in understanding why your listener seems reluctant to embrace your message?

??? Are you honestly willing to listen with a pure, untarnished interest in understanding their hesitation?

The Mint Formula can help serve your purpose. Uncover the hidden agenda of your presentation or your speech. Then put your vanity aside and train yourself to listen with the intent of understanding a perspective other than your own. Value the integrity of a message in its mint condition. And finally, be interested in the person/people you are communicating with, and FYI a mindset of trying to prove that you are interested will not work. I have yet to witness someone successfully faking interest when it comes to communication. You can always tell if they claim it but aren’t. Either you are interested, or you are not.

Communication is never about winning or persuading. It’s simply about communicating, and that is a potentially endless road which becomes unbearable to walk unless you are honestly interested in the person you’re walking with.