Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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The last exercise in this chapter provides an opportunity to reflect actively on the people or events that cause you stress, and the practical steps that might be taken to deal with these in the future.

There are four things you can’t get enough of in life – laughter, sex, vegetables and fish.

(John Tickell, Laughter, Sex, Vegetables and Fish, 1998)

And on the seventh day, God rested. (Christian and Jewish creation mythology)

Exercise 2.4

Strategies for managing stress in the future

Please find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. For about 30 minutes, think about the five things that most often cause you to feel stressed and what you can do to deal with these in the future. Recall that leadership and management is not just about action, it is also about reflection, and this is essential for your personal health and well-being, now and in the future.

stress reactions

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

When you’ve done this, remind yourself at regular intervals, ‘I will find solutions to these problems.’ Then work actively on these over the coming weeks and months.

Notes

1The origin of the first spam email is uncertain, but is believed to have come from an unnamed marketing executive at the defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in May 1978. He sent an email message to all DEC Arpanet (a precursor to the Internet) users on the US West Coast, alerting them to an upcoming open day where the company’s new range of machines was to be displayed. Just over 25 years later, on 24 November 2003, the US House of Representatives voted to pass laws aimed at curtailing the spread of intrusive Internet junk mail, with fines of up to 6 million

dollars for intentional violations. This quickly became known as the Can-Spam Act. The EEC passed similar legislation, covering all member states, on 11 December 2003.

2Unfortunately, men can be very reluctant to do this and often delay visits to their doctors, until it is far too late. So, for any guys over 35 who are reading this book, there is a personal experience I’d like to share with you. Before moving to Australia from the UK in 1997, I was required to have a full medical check-up in December 1996. This revealed a problem that required immediate surgery and also prompted me to give up smoking. This has probably extended my life by another 30 years, and I now have a full medical check-up once a year.

3One research study has suggested that too much sleep (more than eight hours a night) may be bad for people and insomnia, in moderation, may do little harm. However, this study indicated that ‘a minimum’ of five to six hours’ quality sleep each night was still important to aid physical and psychological recovery (cited by Macintyre, 2002).

4The 2003 Pan Pharmaceutical scandal in Australia, which led to the withdrawal of more than 1369 alternative products for violating health regulations, suggested that not only were many of these of questionable medical value, some may have damaged people’s health. The company was later prosecuted for falsifying test results, failing to clean equipment between batches and lying about the ingredients in their products. If you’d like further information on this contentious issue, see John Diamond’s inspiring valedictory book about his battle with cancer, Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations (Chapters 1–6). John was Nigella Lawson’s husband.

5In one of those ‘it could only happen in New York’ stories, Bruce Van Horn, author of a book on yoga for pets, offers ‘Ruff Yoga’ for stressed canines (reported in The Sunday Times, Western Australia, 30 June 2003).

communication, companies all over the world make decisions that affect millions of people; the activities of thousands of employees are organized, complex management systems are coordinated and the success or failure of businesses is determined. Communication between individuals and groups is essential if organizations are to function properly and cope with the increasingly turbulent international business world of the 2000s. If an organization has problems with communication, the chances are that it will not be operating effectively. If you remove communication completely, an organization cannot even start to function. We all know from personal experience that communication breakdowns between individuals and groups within organizations occur frequently and, sometimes, can be very costly. Among the better-known examples of communication breakdowns in organizations are those that have occurred within NASA, in particular those associated with the crashes of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1987 and Columbia in 2003. In the first case, the subsequent investigation revealed a catastrophic breakdown in communication between the engineers, who had designed and built the rocket boosters and urged caution about launching the vehicle in cold weather, and the bureaucrats within NASA’s administration who needed the launch to go ahead in order to keep the Shuttle programme on track to support their funding demands from Congress. In the second case, the inquiry revealed a breakdown in communications between Shuttle programme managers and the engineers and technology experts who understood the potential ramifications of the loss of the heat-bear- ing tiles on Columbia’s wing. This breakdown, and a ‘complacent safety culture’ were cited as significant causes of the lack of action taken by the mission controllers prior to the spacecraft’s doomed re-entry, although there would have been little that ground control could have done to repair the damage to the wing or rescue the crew prior to re-entry (Columbia Accident Investigation Report, 2003).

Communication problems also caused the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft. Zooming towards the planet at more than 25 000 kilometres an hour on 30 September 1999, the craft was supposed to have settled into orbit around the planet to begin its surveying work. Back on Earth, the flight controllers waited for the signal to confirm that it had achieved this objective. After some time, the signal from the orbiter faded and died. Subsequent technical analyses revealed that it had probably approached Mars at an altitude of 60 kilometres, not the required 150 kilometres. Further investigations revealed that the engineers who had written the navigation software had been working in separate groups, with some using modern metric measurements (kilograms and metres) and others using old-style imperial measures (miles and pounds). The result: a $US125 million blunder and another dent to NASA’s diminishing credibility.

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Communication is important in organizations for other reasons. For example, if one looks at job advertisements in the press for senior managerial/leadership positions in organizations, it is hard to find any that do not specify ‘communication skills’ as being one of the essential criteria for applicants. Some employers will even demand ‘exceptional’, ‘outstanding’ or ‘highly developed’ communication skills. It is regarded by some commentators as the single most important nontechnical skill that leaders need (Conger, 1991). Surveys of employers, going back 20 years, have shown that it is often the number one criterion when promotion decisions are made in organizations, or when assessing new recruits for positions in organizations. Other surveys have shown that the number one attribute sought in new graduate employees is communication skills (for example, Business/Higher Education Round Table, 1992).

Research in organizations has also revealed that most employees want their senior managers and leaders to communicate with them more often and increase their involvement in decision-making processes (Brownell, 1990). One study, involving thousands of employees from more than 80 Australian companies, asked the question, ‘What would improve your workplace more than anything else?’ The answer was not ‘more perks’, or ‘higher wages’, or even ‘more time off’. The top two responses were ‘more effective leadership’ and ‘good communication with management’ (Pope and Berry, 1995). Furthermore, as we will see later in the book, organizational competencies such as innovation, perpetual learning and change are not possible without having sophisticated communication systems in place to support these. In a fast-changing world, organizations also have to be able to engage in two-way communication with the environments they operate in, through improved scanning methods, in order to spot new opportunities, keep pace with the competition and prevent their market share being eroded by competitors. More than ever, organizations have to maintain close relationships with their customers and clients, in order to respond quickly to their changing needs and ever-rising expectations. In a globalized business world, national workforces are becoming more culturally diverse, and cross-cultural communication throws up a complex set of issues that also have to be managed effectively.

Given its importance in so many contexts, it is no surprise that communication has been the subject of extensive research across a variety of academic disciplines. Globally, all major universities have departments or schools dedicated to communication studies, and a library web search in July 2003 uncovered more than 5000 references to this one topic. Given all the knowledge that is now available on this subject, it is rather puzzling that poor communication in organizations remains

something that most employees continue to complain about. This becomes an even greater puzzle when we look at the origins of the word ‘communication’. This is derived from the Latin communicare, meaning ‘to make common’. An associated and often overlooked element of communication concerns the meaning of the word ‘audio’, in relation to hearing. This comes from the Latin, obaudire, meaning ‘to obey’ or, in modern parlance, to respect others. Therefore communication can be described simply as a process of respectfully sharing information with others in order to improve understanding.

If these two basic elements form the basis of effective communication, why does it still cause so many problems in organizations? I’ve regularly invited groups of MBAs, and managers on leadership development courses, to identify the main problems or difficulties they encounter at work. Communication always comes in the top three and, quite often, comes first. This has remained consistent over the last ten years. Group members have then been asked to identify what causes these problems. Almost without exception, they have attributed blame to someone or something else. The scapegoats include, ‘other people’, ‘senior management’, ‘the board’, ‘the idiots in [insert the department/branch/office/disliked professional group of your choice here]’, ‘the system’, ‘the people at headquarters’, ‘the people from the company we merged with’, and so forth. I follow this question by asking them to rate how well they think they communicate with others at work. Predictably, almost all believe that they are very effective communicators, and they also believe that communication problems are the fault either of ‘the system’, or of other identifiable groups or particular individuals. With very few exceptions, they feel that their communication skills were either better than, or at least as good as, those of everyone else in the organizations they worked for. If this was true, and we extrapolated these results, organizations should not be having any communication problems. So the first reason why communication causes problems must be that most people are not as good at communicating as they like to believe they are.

Second, communication encompasses the complete spectrum of individual personalities, life experiences and interactions with others. Our family, educational experiences, peer groups, gender, class and culture all influence and shape the way we eventually communicate as adults. This is closely interwoven with our personal psychologies and neurolinguistic programming. This is extremely important because only about 20 per cent of what goes on in communication dialogues is related to the words coming out of someone’s mouth. We communicate to others in many hidden ways that we may not be conscious of,

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primarily through our working practices, actions and behaviours. How we behave communicates a lot and, even if we are doing nothing, we are still communicating something to other people. This is because we cannot not behave. In fact, how we present ourselves to others is often much more important that any wise words or utterances that emerge from our mouths in the form of sound waves.

Third, we also communicate in a myriad of ways: in writing, memoranda, letters, magazines, reports, email, video conferencing, one to one, in formal presentations, over the telephone, in meetings and in work teams. If we then add power differentials, the inevitable personality differences that arise in organizations, culture, politics and bureaucracy, gender and cross-cultural differences in communication styles and protocols to this mix, we soon realize that the potential for breakdowns in communication is very high. Hence the third reason why communication often causes problems is that it is an extremely complex, multilayered and multifaceted phenomenon, and this is why we will be spending some time looking at this topic in this chapter.

Interpersonal communication

Exercise 3.1

Before reading the next paragraph (don’t cheat!), please answer these questions:

What is ‘silent’ an anagram of?

Whom do you communicate with most often on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis?

Whom do you most like communicating with?

Well done if you if you solved the anagram (it is not a coincidence that ‘silent’ is an anagram of ‘listen’ as is ‘enlist’). The answers to the second question should have been ‘myself’, ‘myself’, ‘myself’, ‘myself’ and ‘myself’. The answer to the third question should also have been ‘myself’. If you think about it logically, whom do we communicate with most often? The answer, sadly, is ‘myself’. From waking up in the morning and going to bed at night, we experience something in the order of 5000 internal communications. Some are conscious, but most are unconscious. There is always an internal autopilot on the go, a little mechanism in our heads, doing the brain’s equivalent of

yabberder-yabberder-yabberder, even when we are sleeping. It is also very hard to switch this autopilot off, particularly when listening to someone else, for reasons that will soon become apparent. As James Carlopio and colleagues suggest, ‘at work, there are dozens of situations in which listening is critical, yet we typically think of talking when we think of relating to people and communication. When we are coaching, counselling, giving and/or receiving instructions or feedback, it is critical that we hear, listen and understand the speaker. When we are involved in a sale, or when we are servicing or helping clients and customers, we will be more successful if we begin to see ourselves as professional listeners rather than professional speakers’ (Carlopio et al., 2001: 240).

Many commentators have suggested that the ability to listen effectively to others is the keystone of effective communication and, if we cannot do this, we will fail as communicators. However, few people really take the time to consider this, unless they are attending courses like MBA programmes, or receiving feedback on their communication styles at work. Despite its importance in communication dialogues, the reality is that most people have underdeveloped listening skills, and there are a number of physical and psychological reasons why this is so. The first and most obvious reason is that we all like to believe that we are right, at least 95 per cent of the time. However, as we realized in Chapter 1, everyone suffers from selective perceptions. This means that, unless we are all-seeing, all-knowing geniuses, we will be wrong some of the time, and this will lead to problems, sooner or later. Second, humans tend to be very selective listeners. If we like the person delivering a message, or if we think it is relevant or important, or if we agree with the message, we will pay more attention to what they say. If the opposite applies, we will consistently filter out messages that do not fit with our selective opinions, beliefs, feelings and attitudes about the person and the message. Several laboratory experiments have confirmed that most individuals are only about 25 per cent effective in listening skills; that is, they can only recall about one-quarter of what another person says to them immediately after the dialogue (for example, Huseman et al., 1976). If they dislike the other person involved in the communication dialogue, or are in a hurry, this proportion declines even further. How well we listen to others is affected by our emotions: if we feel good about the speaker, we will listen more carefully to them.

Third, active listening is psychologically very hard work. This is because someone who is speaking can deliver about 100–125 words a minute, but a listener (or reader) can process at least 500 words a minute. This leads to ‘idle time’, and an opportunity to start

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pre-formulating responses or, worse still, planning when we are going to interrupt or contradict the other person. The idle time that is present in all verbal dialogues leads the listener to focus on other things like, ‘What a stupid idea, I can’t wait to bury that’, and not focusing on showing the listener that we are listening actively (Mackay, 1994).

Fourth, many managers and leaders believe that when they come to work they should be ‘adult’ and ‘rational’, and not allow emotions to cloud their daily work and decision making. However, this is not actually possible because, with the exception of psychopaths, human beings cannot simply switch off the left-hand side of the brain (the home of logical and linear thinking) from the right-hand side of the brain (the home of emotions and creative thinking) and, where emotions are at play, communication breakdowns and conflict are always possible. Fifth, while evolution has equipped us with a complex set of controls over the muscles of the mouth, throat, larynx, jaw and tongue that enable us to communicate through language, it has not equipped us with a similar level of control over our emotions, and our propensity for selectively listening to others in communication dialogues.

One way of finding out if you and your colleagues do listen well to each other is to play the old game of Chinese Whispers. To play this you’ll need three other people to help you and a small audience. You are ‘Number 1’ and the other participants are ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4’. The game works like this:

•Participants 3 and 4 leave the room and you read the message once to participant 2 (you keep the piece of paper with the message on it).

•Participant 2 exits the room and relays, once only by word of mouth, what they think the message is to participant 3 (out of earshot of person 4).

•Participant 3 relays the message, once only by word of mouth, to participant 4. This person then returns to the room and relays what they can recall of the original message to the group. To complete the exercise you read out the original quote.

Typically, about 20 per cent of the original content of the message is lost during each iteration with little of the original message left by the final one. You can use any short dialogue you like for this, but the message below is one that’s been used regularly with MBAs and in communication skills workshops.

Chinese Whispers

Most people think they are good communicators and it is other people who lack this important managerial skill. The reality is that we all overestimate our interpersonal communication skills. We can all improve our communication skills by learning to listen actively, by managing group meetings more effectively, and by improving our presentation skills. As leaders, we will also need to be aware of the importance of the structural, technological, and cross-cultural aspects of communication in organizations.

Active listening

This exercise highlights the difficulties associated with active listening

– a set of sensitivity skills and techniques that work well in most communication dialogues. It has often been pointed out that we have two eyes, two ears and one mouth, so we should only talk in proportion to these ratios; that is, no more than 20 per cent of the time. We also have to show the speaker that we want to listen, because if we think that another person is not listening to us, it is unlikely that we will listen to them. So, initially, we all need to shut up, by becoming more like the proverbial wide-mouthed frog who encounters a widemouthed frog-eater in the jungle. This is important because, if we are talking most of the time, we are not listening most of the time. We also need to have a reason or purpose for listening, even if we are not particularly interested in the issue or topic under discussion. This requires patience and generosity, because it is not easy to listen to other people. There is also little point in listening just to formulate an instant (negative) response, or listening for its own sake. Good listening requires concentrating on the sender’s whole message, rather than forming evaluations on the basis of the first few ideas that they present, or butting in with our own ideas before they finish talking.

Make mental or written notes of where you agree and disagree with what they are saying. If you are dealing with complex ideas, wait until the speaker pauses, and only then ask questions for clarification. Seek the sender’s important themes by listening for the overall content and feeling of the message. Summarize what the speaker is saying at regular intervals (‘So, what you are saying is . . .?’ or ‘Are you saying that we should . . .?’). Nod, even if you don’t agree with what they are saying. This may seem an odd thing to do, but if you think about it, this makes sense. What would you think if someone had nodded, in apparent agreement with what you are saying? You’d probably think this