Effective Communication: How to Develop Reasonable Responses and Promote Respect

In the movie Shawshank Redemption, the supporting character, Brooks, is released from Shawshank prison after spending 50 years (his entire adult lifetime) behind bars. During his transition from institutional to civilian life, he discovers that a lot has changed. Brooks narrates a letter about his experiences in a new world that he finds foreign and unfit for him. He comments that "the world went and got itself in a big damn hurry."

I sometimes feel like Brooks in that moment - the world is moving at a frenetic pace I have a hard time keeping up. Apparently I’m not alone - many people face the challenge of moving at the speed of life and the ever increasing demands of our attention* and the limited time and energy* we have to respond in kind. 

We live in a highly connected world where we have the ability to communicate with one another through multiple modalities in real time. This hyper connectivity enhances the problem of always being available and having to respond to each. This is not a new problem. Our ancestors said the same thing with every advance in technology from hand written language to the telegraph, telephone and the internet - all sped up the ways and means that we communicate. 

I recently had a thought provoking conversation that centered around effective communication.* It was triggered by sentiments of feeling “ghosted” and prompted the question:

What are the behaviors that promote effective communication and respect amongst all parties involved?  

Reasonable Personal Standards

The reasonable person standard as used in tort and criminal law to denote a hypothetical person in society who exercises average care, skill, and judgment in conduct and who serves as a comparative standard. The reasonable person standard is often used for determining liability or who is at fault. 

A problem with communication in business and in real life is that there is often no clear reasonable personal standard or mean average to compare behaviors. When is comes to digital communication specifically, reasonable person standards are subjective and vary widely. This creates a disparity in expectations determined by a seemingly infinite number of variables between individuals, groups and situations.  

Servant Leaders and High Standards

I find that coaches in athletics, leaders in the military, and managers in business who adhere to Servant Leadership, have exceedingly high and unrealistic standards - foremost of those are responsiveness to the people they serve the most. This includes fellow coaches on their staff, athletes on their team or their customers. The Servant Leadership philosophy coined by Dr. Robert Greenleaf is broadly defined as making sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served, often before your own. 

While the high standards of servant leaders are well intended, there is a tendency to be open and available to everyone. Examples of this include open door policies in the workplace or even declaring yourself as a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker). If you are always open, you are essentially saying yes to every demand signal that gets sent your way. 

Try as we may need to be everything to everyone with our communication, we run the risk of being nothing to no one - starting with ourselves. The old adage is being "a mile wide and an inch deep" suggests that your attention and energy is stretched thin, thereby reducing the quality of our engagement and communication. Eventually, we will miss something and proverbial balls get dropped. In the long run, this behavior risks burning ourselves out and disappointing and/or disrespecting others through phenomenon such as the “brush-off” or “ghosting*.” 

Helpful Attitudes, Behaviors and Principles 

In order to promote effective communication and promote respect, I recommended the following attitudes, behaviors and principles that you can put into practice today. 

Context Matters: There are four types of communication: verbal, non-verbal, written and visual. Verbal skills include speaking, listening and sign language. Non-verbal skills include body language, hand gestures and facial expressions. Written skills include reading and writing and visual skills includes use of imagery like pictures, videos or charts that help convey a message. Some studies suggest that up to 70% of effective communication requires non-verbal factors to promote feelings of trust. If this is true, the for digital communication such as email and text messages eliminates the critical non-verbal component - this leaves a lot of context out of the communication equation and risk in terms of interpretation. 

Pro-tip: Negotiations expert Dr. Stewart Diamond explains in his book Getting More a simple rules of thumb: If your conversation is complex in nature and requires context, have that conversation in person or over the phone. If your communication is for situational awareness and requires at least a paragraph (three sentences) or more in length, write an email with the people you want to respond on the ‘To’ line and the people that need to know, but not necessarily respond, on the carbon copy (‘cc’) line. If it’s simple and can be answered with a "yes or no," a text message will suffice. Note: I had a colleague who believed the cc line meant you can NOT respond to the email as if this was written in a stone tablet somewhere. My response was “who says?”   

Establishing Communication Standards. Just because we are all available and connected with our technology via our devices doesn’t mean we should be connected and engaged 24/7. If you are a leader that makes or influences company policy, I recommend establishing clear available windows for receiving and responding to work related information. For example, if your company does not work on weekends or federal holidays, what are you saying when managers and/or employees are emailing and texting during their time off? Chances are, it sends a message that your teams does not truly respect the concept of time off. If there are situations or emergencies that warrant phone calls, emails and/or texts during designated time off, what are those requirements and how will they be communicated? Consider a policy letter and then enforcing it through good habits and accountability procedures.  

Setting and Maintaining Boundaries. Many people find that establishing boundaries in personal communication to be more difficult because there are no clear policies amongst friends and family - lines are often blurred. Be intentional about communicating expectations up front by being honest and clear about how you intend to meet or not meet the other person’s wants/needs. Effective communication often requires negotiation in the form of influencing each other towards common goals. For example, your friend calls you and wants to catch up - he explains that he has a small window to talk at the airport before he heads overseas on business. Meanwhile, you promised your son you’d go to his baseball practice. You can either take the call at practice, be present and not engaged, or you can reschedule. What would you do?   

Digital Detox. Hard core stress requires self awareness and self management in the form of hard core recovery. Our hyper connectivity is having a negative impact on our brains and bodies. For example, we know that the blue light emitted from our screens keeps us awake at night. Sleep studies indicate that just having your phone on your night stand or near your bed can adversely impact your sleep patterns - critical stages called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) when our brains flush out toxins and our bodies go into micro-paralysis to repair itself. Many of us simply unaware that we have a problem or the potential impacts of our addiction on our health and performance.

Pro-tip: take a week and write down every time you pick up your phone during the day. For iPhone users, reference the screen time feature to see how much you use your phone and on which apps or features. If you’re like me, you may be surprised at how much time you’re spending with your phone. To help balance this habit, Human Performance and Mindfulness expert Dr. Jannell MacAuley recommends taking a break from your phone and devices at least one day a week for what she refers to a "digital detox." I've taken here advice and detox most Sundays in conjunction with the traditional Sabbath or day of rest. Extended periods away (multiple days in a row) from devices are called "electronic sabbaticals." It may be harder than you think, but the benefits are extraordinary.   

Pro-tip: If you take a digital detox or electronic sabbatical, set up an all out of office reply. My favorite example reads, “I am taking the day off from my devices and it feels amazing. Thanks for your patience and I look forward to responding tomorrow.” My out of office email when I’m on vacation reads, “I am currently out of the office on vacation from X to Y. I will have limited access to email during this time and responding at my convenience. Thank you.” 

Promoting Good Ideas. Creativity and innovation often come at the intersection of recovery and behaviors that are unrelated to the problem you’re trying to solve. These are the classic “eureka” moments - think Sir Isaac Newton reading beneath a tree and being hit in the head by a falling apple. Have you ever come up with a solution to a wicked problem while at home in the shower, walking your dog, or playing with you kids at the park? If you experience an “aha” moment during an out-of-bounds period or unavailable windows, don’t ignore it. Capture this dander in the wind by writing it down in your journal or typing it out on your favorite or most convenient device. If you feel compelled to share it, try using the delayed send feature on your preferred email program or app - share with others when appropriate. 

Negativity Bias. It’s well researched that people have an unconscious bias towards negativity. The late Psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis described this as a chain reaction of how we think that affects our emotions, how we behave and ultimately how we perform. Studies on self-talk suggest that the narrative we use in our own heads to describe ourselves and the world around us are unhelpful at best and counterproductive at worst. For digital communication, research suggest that people tend to take otherwise neutral communication and interpret them with a negative lens. This is prevalent when we don’t know the sender well, we don’t understand their intent, or there is lack of context as described above. Sarcasm is a great example of this negativity bias in action. Too much is lost in translation because it lacks the context to makes a sarcastics comments potentially funny. The good news is that we have a choice in this matter and can win the argument between our ears. 

Assumption of Positive Intent. The classic idiom idiom about assumptions is that one “should never make assumptions because they make an ass out of you and me.” While this is correct in some instances, human beings naturally assume things. These are called heuristics or mental shortcuts that we use to bridge the gaps in our unknown information with schema that we know. Humans are hardwired to do this for our own survival as a species. We can leverage heuristics or intentional assumptions to our advantage or disadvantage. For example, let’s say you send a text message to your spouse at work and then don’t hear back from them for a few hours. You can choose to think a wide variety of reasons of why your spouse didn’t respond. These include: a) they are blowing you off, b) you’re not important to them c), they were abducted by aliens or d) they are prioritizing other things right now - like meeting with a colleague or client. 

I believe many people fall into the trap or working through options a-c before deciding on d. In psychology this is referred to as Fundamental Attribution Error. This is a self induced problem about how we attribute the behavior of others that often has little to do with the person on the other end. Pro-tip: Researcher, TED speaker, author and professor of sociology, Dr. Brene Brown reports that 50% of people think other people are truly giving their best efforts. In her book Dare To Lead, she refers to the most compassionate and generous people as the most boundaried and capable of treating others with an assumption of positivity. I believe giving people the benefit of the doubt is the reasonable standard we should all expect of each other. 

Be Patient. We live in a world and western culture that puts a premium on instant gratification. I call this the "drive-thru mindset." When we want something we want it fast, good and cheap. The reality is we can’t have all three at the same time. Just because you send an email or text does it mean you’re going to get an immediate response. It’s import to remind ourselves that when we’re dealing with humans not hardware - organic and not Artificial Intelligence. Slow down and take our appetite suppressant. This sometimes requires getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Keep in mind that even the most reasonably patient people have their limits. There are causes and effects to every action and inaction. If you don’t respond to an email for months or even years, expect negative consequences. Just like that friend you keep inviting to a party - the one who says they’d “love to come” but never shows up. After a while, your eventually stop inviting them to the party. 

Everyone’s Time is Valuable. Just because you’re a coach, leader or a manager who creates the work doesn’t mean that your time is worth more than your subordinates or employees who do the work. Subordinates, just because you do the work and your manager creates it, doesn’t mean they’re not fully engaged or working as hard as you do.

I’m Busy. What does this mean to you and to others? I believe this phrase has come to mean that a lot of things other than what it was intended for. When someone says to you, “I’m busy,” do you feel valued and important? Being busy can easily be interpreted as “you’re not important or “just not important enough right now.” In many ways, I believe this means “I am out of control.” 

I learned the shadow side of being busy the hard way when was a young Army officer serving as executive speech writer. I recall a request by a senior staffer during a particularly high demand period when I was very “busy.” I respond to this person via email with something to the effect of “sorry I can’t help you right now, but I am swamped...” and I went on to explain all the more important things I had to do other than to help them right now. It didn’t take long for my boss to come down to my office and dress me down for making that excuse. 

He coached me up by explaining that I was in the customer service business and that the customer is always right - he or she should always feel like they are valuable and important. Instead of giving excuses I needed to give them a reasonable time when I could help them or someone else who could help them right now with their request. 

I took that to heart and made it right. I apologized to that person and made a point to help them whenever I could. That was also the last time I used the words “I’m busy.” The positive results are that I’ve never been too busy for one of my soldiers to come to my office and talk to me about anything. When they knock on my door and sheepishly ask me “Sir, are you busy?” My response is often “No - this conversation is the most important thing I’ll do all day.” 

*Definitions

I define effective communication is the process of sending and receiving information in ways and means that optimally enhance awareness and understanding between two or more people. In all communication there are senders and receivers. 

Attention is defined as our ability to direct sustain his shift our awareness to internal and external sensory information. 

Energy is defined as our capacity to do work. Energy is not some new-aged "fluffy" term, but refers to the fuel that drives your brain, body and behavior to include glucose and oxygen. Although more difficult to measure, there are mental and emotional components to energy.  Like time, attention and energy these are finite and precious resources with energy and attention being within a person’s locus of control.

Reasonable is defined as something (in this case a behavior) that appropriate or fair.

Ghosting is an unexpected and complete absence of presence and/or engagement without an explanation. Like a ghost, this is when people seemingly disappear.