Talking Business A guide for communicating at work

First and foremost: Expect misunderstanding  Miscommunications can be very frustrating, but they are to be expected. Language is necessarily inherently ambiguous You cannot possibly spell everything out every single time that you try to express anything to someone else. There simply isn’t time. So we make shortcuts and in those shortcuts, meaning gets lost.  Expect misundertstandings to occur.

Equally important: Assume good intentions  Everyone assumes that their own way of communicating is the most natural and therefore the best, so when we recognize that someone is communicating differently, the first instinct can often be that of frustration, to assume that when miscommunication occurs that it is the other person’s fault, and even worse, that it was done willfully or with intention to hurt.  In adapting an analytical stance to language, allow for the possibility of “what if?” “what if this person is trying just as hard to be helpful and informative as I am?”

Be an ethnographer  This guide is designed to help you be an active investigator of your own use of language and communication – to teach you to be an ethnographer of your own ways of communicating!  Ethnography is a research method based on observing people in their natural environment with an aim to understanding how they make sense of their world.  As linguists, our focus is language. By studying how people talk, and recognizing patterns where others might see chaos, we hope to gain access to things like motivations, beliefs, values, and identities.

Your toolkit:  Listen  Mirror  Ask Questions  Know how to Repair / Recover  Get at underlying assumptions  D.I.E.

D.I.E. Practice of Observation  Describe  Interpret  Evaluate

Conversational style  Unconscious way of speaking.  But also how we listen and evaluate. How we gather information about people:  Is this person nice, smart, trustworthy, polite, aggressive, threatening, confident, competent etc etc etc?  Do we like each other?

To what extent can style be changed?  To the extent that you can become more aware of your own style and your expectations about style

Some things to pay attention to

Discourse slot  How you structure your contributions to an interaction.  For example, when structuring an open discussion, if you are team leader, wait to give your contribution LAST. Allow the space for others to give their ideas BEFORE you give your decision.

Silence  Silence is as rich, and has situated meaning as any other form of social interaction.  Be aware of the meanings that you attach to silence, and how you interpret it. Be aware that these meanings may not be shared.

Face Threatening Acts

The Meaning of Questions

“Noisy nots”  things that are not talked about, but which you might expect would be  Negeation. Often people tell you who they are by telling you what they are NOT. Pay attention to who/what they “other.”

What to call this skill?  Critical Thinking: Awareness of underlying assumptions  Cross - Cultural Communication  Awareness of Conversational Style  Recognition of Meaning-Making – Processes  Describe  Interpret  Evaluate

An inherently transferrable skill  It our our belief that by increasing your awareness and understanding of how you use language, that you will become more aware of ways that others use language and that you will be better able to recognize and recover from misunderstandings.  One to bring to your own organizations and communities (families, friends, etc.)