Up Front Communication

Helping people and businesses through the art of communication

Communicating Intimately #3: Intimacy within a business

Have you ever been in the desperately uncomfortable position of having a “buddy” conversation with your supervisor, or being in charge of an employee who treats you more like a therapist than a manager?  I’ve never experienced the latter, but know several colleagues who have.  The former has happened to me in a few situations, and each time was so writhingly awkward that I never wanted to repeat it again.

That’s the problem with intimate communication among employees within a business.  It is its own type of intimacy peculiar to that environment. It matters where people are within the organization’s hierarchy.  Even if the organization is relatively flat, there are still underlying pecking orders and relationships that inherently affect the types of conversations that can be held.* Generally speaking, intimate conversations within a business should be just about that – business.  It isn’t that we shouldn’t learn about our peers or our supervisors or our employees; it’s that the power structure of a business affects the relationships up and down the ladder.  That can change what we are comfortable discussing with our co-workers.

In one industry I worked in, “buddy” type relationships between managers and those working beneath them were encouraged.  The idea was that if you could develop a fuzzy, cuddly relationship with your underlings, they would be more likely to be open and honest with you when discussing work.

Ha.

It was a nice idea in theory.  In practice, it muddied working relationships and created a climate of agonizing phoniness.  Get-to-know-you conversations with new managers were saccharine in the extreme and did not improve working relationships.  People wondered why their managers wanted to know so much about them.  Instead of creating stronger and more personal relationships, people began mistrusting the motives of managers acting like their buddy.  Would private conversations be shared?  Could something they said about their personal lives be used against them?

The difficulty with this approach was that the development of personal intimacy was forced.  It was as though merely working with one another in the same industry and the same company meant that you had – or should have – a ‘friend first, manager second’ relationship.  If that sort of relationships develops naturally between two co-workers, than that’s great.  But it cannot be created quickly in staged situations.

I believe that intimate communication within a business should be about just that – business.  You can have intimate conversations and not delve into your employee’s personal lives or play armchair counselor. Intimate business conversations involve discussions where people are able to express their joys, their irritations, and their passions about their work.  Fostering this kind of communicative intimacy does not involve becoming your co-worker’s buddy.  It involves developing your co-worker’s trust.  They need to know that you will allow them to express their feelings and actual opinions without adverse impact on their job or your working relationship.  This climate of trust doesn’t depend on your knowledge of their kids’ extracurricular activities or their fondness for off-hours geocaching.  It depends on a climate of respect and consideration in which opinions are solicited and considered without fear of backlash.

The type of intimate conversations that happen within a business will change depending on the relationships of the people involved.  Conversations held up or down the hierarchical ladder are naturally more constrained than those that happen between equals or peers.  Managers are often concerned with revealing too much high-level information to their subordinates.  Subordinates are worried about criticizing their managers.  There is more opportunity for peers to express their actual opinions to one another, provided they trust the other to not mention those opinions to their supervisors.  If the relationship changes, so will the conversations.  It is not uncommon for friendships between co-workers to dissolve when one person gets promoted and moves higher up the corporate ladder than their friend.  The risks taken when having intimate conversations change are amplified.  Conversations end up changing along the same lines as the friendship itself, often becoming more cautious and less open than they were before.

If relationships within a business affect conversations, and conversations are affected by the relative power held by workers, how do you know when you are having an intimate conversation with a co-worker?  Look for the degree to which they express emotion.  Will they openly express excitement or nervousness?  Consider the degree of risk they take when talking to you.  Are they willing to challenge your opinions or ask for explanations of your decisions?  Pay attention to the content of their statements.  Do they make lots of “I” statements and use strong emotive words like “I believe” or “I feel”?  These are markers that the person you are talking to trusts you to consider the meat of their points without taking personal affront to what they have to say.  This is hugely advantageous; if the people you work with know that they can challenge and debate with you, and then listen to you in return, then you know you can have intimate business discussions with them.  These conversations foster a worker’s passion and buy-in, and can result in productive and challenging exchanges that could hugely benefit the company.

Don’t try to force friendship.  That won’t always result in intimacy.  Try, instead, to create trust.  Trust is the absolute foundation for intimate conversation with the people in your organization.

*Let me make the following very clear:  when I’m talking about the kinds of conversations that can be had, I’m referring to conversations that are fairly “normal” in nature.  If someone is having non-work issues of a nature that require them to have a serious, personal discussion with a peer, supervisor, or other colleague, than that conversation needs to happen.  It should be treated with the utmost respect and discretion.

Fill-in post: How to Listen

I started working on the next instalment on communicating intimately this weekend, and then got slammed with a nasty infection.  Needless to say, it has completely derailed my writing efforts.  Hopefully the antibiotics kick in soon (seriously – even the cartilage on my ears hurts).

In the meantime, I would like to leave you with the following blog post by Seth Godin.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of a fan girl.  This recent post is very much related to intimate communication, in that the skill of listening plays a major role.  I hope you enjoy his post as much as I did.

Seth Godin:  How to Listen

When tone is more important than content

I interrupt our series on communicating with intimacy to bring you a long overdue bit of Friday Silliness.

In today’s lesson, Toby Turner – also known as the YouTube personality Tobuscus – demonstrates how tone can completely contradict content.  Alliteration aside, it is a useful lesson.

Tobuscus: Dramatic Song

 

Does your chorus sound like Coldplay?

Communicating Intimately #2: The Experience

The funny thing about establishing intimacy with an audience is that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you, the speaker, feel that an intimate moment has been shared.  Like just about any desired emotion, what really matters is that your audience feels it.  They, quite frankly, don’t give a damn about what’s going on in your own head, and neither should you.  The audience’s focus is on their own personal feelings and experience.  Your focus also needs to be on your audience’s experience.

What constitutes an intimate experience for your audience, be it an audience of 1 or 1000?  It’s when they feel that you, the speaker (or manager, or persuader, or whatever you may be) gets them.  They feel that you understand them, their context, their desires, their needs, their wishes.  They feel that you care about their problems and are helping them improve their own lives on an individual level.  Because they believe that you do (or would) understand them, they feel that you can also relate to them, that the two of you have something in common.  That feeling of connection can happen whether you are sharing a one-on-one conversation or you are speaking to an anonymous group of people comprised of individuals you will never actually meet.  It doesn’t matter that you, the speaker, feels this connection.  Your audience feels it.  Because they feel it, they will most likely accept what you have to say as right and/or reasonable.

Your job is to create that feeling of connection and intimacy.  The difficulty is that you as the speaker become wholly responsible for generating that feeling.  The speaker must be willing to forgo every consideration of their own comfort and constantly, constantly, constantly strive to establish an intimate connection with the audience.  The audience doesn’t – and shouldn’t – give a crap about your own state.  Your job is to project whatever it is you need to project to create intimacy.

Are you physically, mentally, or emotionally tired?  That doesn’t matter.  You need to appear energised and alert; the audience must see that you are energized about speaking to them.  Energy means you care.

Are you completely bored about the topic at hand?  That doesn’t matter.  The audience needs to believe that you think that topic is the most important thing you could be speaking about at that moment.  If you show that you don’t care about the topic, then neither will they.  Boredom is the death of intimacy.

Are you uninterested in or lack knowledge about your audience?  That doesn’t matter.  You must either find something about them that interests you or be able to flawlessly imitate interest.  The audience absolutely must feel that you find them worth your interest if they will allow an intimate connection to be established.  Do your homework about your audience and find something out about them that interests you; become knowledgeable about the people you are speaking to.  If your audience is small, you may potentially discover something about them on an individual level.  If your audience is large or you don’t have the means do find out much about them, then research the company they work for, or the area they live in, or the culture they come from, or their demographic, or their interests.  There is always, always, always something you can learn about your audience that will help you become interested about them.

Are you disdainful about your audience?  Then fix that attitude, fast.  It doesn’t matter if your experience or qualifications leads you to think you are somehow better than them.  Your audience will pick up on your disdain within moments of you starting to speak.  Something will betray you – the words you use, the posture you adopt, your tone of voice, a way of behaving that you never considered.  Once your audience picks up on this, they will reject you and everything you have to say.  If you are approaching a speech or conversation with feelings of superiority or disdain, then you again need to research your audience and learn something about them that you can respect.  Intimacy cannot exist without respect, and respect is the antidote to disdain.

Are you in a foul mood?  Then do something before you meet your audience that improves that mood.  Go for a walk, meditate, look up funny pictures of cats.  It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it makes you feel better.  If you are surly, your audience will become surly.  No one wants to connect with a cantankerous swab.

Are you an anxious or nervous speaker?  Learn some techniques to control your anxiety.  Stage fright is normal, but you must appear confidence.  Audiences want to connect with strong, confident speakers – speakers who look and act as though they can help them solve their problems.  Learn how to project confidence externally even when you are quaking internally.

You, speaker, need to set aside your own state of being and focus entirely on what will create the desired state of being to those you are speaking to.  So what if you felt that you just delivered the best speech of your life and that you really felt a connection with your audience?  The real question is, did your audience feel the same way?

Communicating Intimately #1: introducing intimacy

A major goal that I assign to all my clients as well as to myself is that of creating intimacy with your audience.  I’ve had people react to this instruction with everything from nervous eagerness to fear and apprehension.  The difficulty with intimacy – aside from the fact that it increases our own vulnerability, which I will address later – is that it is a very complex concept.  Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to attempt to break down and address the nuances of communication and intimacy.

So here we go – welcome to installment #1: introducing intimacy.  Here is a run-down of some of the issues I’ll be exploring further in this series.

Intimacy in communication has nothing to do with romance, attraction, or with the communicating parties even liking one another.  A sense of connection is what makes an exchange feel intimate.  When this connection (or the perception of it) is achieved, your message will stick with your receiver with far greater strength than it would otherwise.  If you really, really want to get through to someone, you need to seek intimacy in the communication, and different circumstances may require in different kinds of intimacies or different tactics to achieve it.

A sense of intimacy can be felt by only one person and still have a powerful effect.  Because it is an individual feeling, it can be experienced by members of a large audience just as readily as people in small groups or in one-on-one conversations.  When you are the primary communicator, the perception you should be most concerned with is that of your audience, whether big or small.  You can feel all the warm fuzzies you like, but if you haven’t triggered a sense of connection among those receiving your message, than you have not created a sense of intimacy.  It’s the opinion and the feelings of the receiver that matter.

While the experience of intimacy on the part of the audience is always genuine, a very adept speaker or performer can fake it for the sake of their audience.  While demonstrating a desire for connection that you might not actually be feeling is mentally exhausting, there are many circumstances where you may need to fake it for the sake of your audience.  There are some key physical, vocal, and facial expressions that demonstrate “reaching out” to an audience or receiver.  Being able to realistically demonstrate these on cue when you are not feeling overly connected to an audience takes a great deal of practice.  When we look at these skills further, I will yet again be railing at you to spend some solid practice time in front of a mirror.

One of the trickier issues with intimate communication is what level and type of intimacy is appropriate in which situations.  The degree of intimacy in communication that is appropriate between co-workers is markedly different than that between managers and employees.  Similarly, the type of intimacy that occurs with a motivational speaker and his audience is generally quite different that that between an academic lecturer and her audience.  It is well worth taking time to think about what degree of personal connection you would wish to experience as both audience and speaker in differing social and business roles.

Language plays a key component in both the effectiveness of creating an intimate communication as well as keeping the intimacy appropriate to the situation at hand.  At times, your audience needs to you be involved in the message at a personal level; sometimes they really need to you be more objective and distant.  Language  and vocabulary is the golden key that allows you to navigate these circumstances and still create the intimacy you need.  Words have power, and discreet differences in meaning, context, and timing may result in massive differences in the level of trust, comfort, and connection between you and your audience.  Know when to mince your words and when to leave them whole.  Find authors known for extensive vocabularies and wordplay and read their works; your own word hoard and dexterity will grow.  You will come to know which words will help create a feeling of intimacy with your audience and which will turn them right off.

Next instalment: your audience experience of intimacy and getting out of your own head.