Ch. 9 Summary: Build Intelligence with Communication


We communication people give Daniel Goleman, the guru psychologist, some credit: he’s come up with one idea everyone knows. The ability to influence others--a communication skill--is a key determinant for success. It’s also known that recruiters put communication skills at the top rung in their search for capable candidates—89% of them, according to the most recent Wall Street Journal/Harris survey of business recruiters. Yet at no point in time have the cognitive psychologists tied the development of intelligence directly to communication aptitude. One of the reasons must be that the vast majority of conversations on the tube, talk radio and in business tend to be dehydrated, ritualized, “monologues” that add no value to anyone. Paradoxically, and emphatically, this chapter explores the conversational skills of brainware. I believe that intelligence building requires not talk, but conversation, authentic communication.

 

What’s the tie-in between intelligence and communication?

 

Conventional wisdom consistently misunderstands and underplays the role of communication for the 21st century workplace. In the manufacturing world of the twentieth century, you could be a worker or a manager and not have to deal with messages more sophisticated than “pound that widget there,” “polish that airplane part this way,” or “stop the assembly line with this button.” With the complexity of today’s world, rich vocabularies give options. Indeed, organizations with larger vocabularies make for better decision making. When a company can’t talk about networks, data patterns, strategy formulation, constructive conflict, micro-managing, or process efficiency—and many firms are clueless about these issues—then their ability to resolve complex problems is severely limited. None of this language was necessary for 20th century manufacturing. It’s a shock for those of us who consult nationally to walk into a firm and find ourselves bombarded with what people don’t know. The language of problem solving or business process is often absent—so, an employee’s growth of intelligence will be profoundly limited. As a consequence, I will recommend that both entry-level and the more experienced consider the quality of a firm’s business process, and if necessary give serious thought to locating a different position.

 

Anyone who has engaged deeply with entry-level people, knows that the first point at which they stumble is in their ability to ask questions. One surprisingly transparent entry-level architect put it to me this way, “I don’t know how to ask the right questions to get the information I need for this project.” We also know that in the science laboratory, the most creative aspect of research is the generation of a genuine question. Business managers have been hearing about the same issue for years. Shortly before he died, Peter Drucker indicated that the one thing executives never seem to learn is the need to ask more intelligent, creative questions. The ability to ask focused, thoughtful questions is especially important for the enhancement of your intelligence as you go about building your chosen area of expertise.

 

The most profitable entrepreneurial insight I gained in the first few years of my coaching business was that the quality of my questions piqued executives’ interest, marketed my coaching program, and sold my services. I recognize that this can readily be perceived as self-serving, however, it needs to be said anyway. Intelligent questions enabled potential clients to hear and learn something a slick presentation could never do, and made many—that’s right, many—of them my clients.

 

I show in this chapter that an employee cannot develop thinking skills or build a productive knowledge base unless she can ask creative, unique, genuinely productive questions, not merely of herself, but of others. The development of intelligence is a contact sport, but it is also a conversational sport. Learning requires you to ask critical questions of your behavior so that you can identify the ways you may inadvertently contribute to an organization’s problems. Learning also requires you to ask yourself, and others what you need to change in your behaviors—or what additional skills you may need. People who fail to authentically engage others are treading water in their attempt to master intelligence. The frustrating truth is that communication skills are sorely missing in the bulk of employees, and the smartest people are the slowest to learn them. Really smart people make so few mistakes that they are at sea when they do, and so they don’t know how to learn from failure. Their extensive history of success can cause them to become defensive or screen out criticism, even blame others when they most need to engage in reflective and open questioning.

 

I believe that the demands of the global economy require a different set of new, transparent communication virtues in order to make the growth of one’s intelligence feasible. The traditional feel-good, no-confrontation virtues of business will fail when faced with the demands of the talent age. Two narratives, one of Eric Putney, an entry-level technology worker in an auto-rental firm and Monica Shire, a buyer in an upscale retail store relate their initial request for developmental feedback—they got the generic stroke, “good job.” Upon much reflection and evolution, their questions were finally framed successfully. The response from their managers highlighted their development of an appetite for business intelligence.

 

Because the huge bulk of employees have shown themselves lacking a significant understanding of communication process, I will lay out a clean, pragmatic orientation to interpersonal communication. It will provide an understanding of how to create the protocols and scripts that underlie all human communication. Scripts, which are proven step-by-step strategies for gaining a particular response, can be especially useful for many activities of learning including questioning, coaching, giving or getting feedback, or even relationship building. Although novices can misuse scripts, well-intentioned learners use them because they hold out the promise of gaining expertise in difficult and uncertain tasks. I will also provide numerous examples of the evolution of questions, as well as protocols and scripts, taken from interactional workshops on different relationship issues.

 

How to present information in a manner that can make dialog possible is a mystery for most. Managers are trained to be advocates—but not a kind of advocacy that makes dialog possible. Numerous studies remind us that we hear our ideas differently than we think them, thus providing further rationale for dialog. People need to learn how to engage in intentional conversations from which they will emerge as a different employee or manager--with a better understanding of job issues and enhanced competence. In short, the conversation of intelligence is always an experiment in which you agree to cook your work world together and make it not more palatable, but better understood. Effective conversation means that you will disagree and argue and give each other ideas you had not had before. The notion that business communication does not allow criticism is highly destructive, not only of learning, but also of one’s business.

 

To give clarity to these statements, I present three vignettes that illustrate the potential of dialog. These conversational maps surface the dialog that can give readers very accessible and efficient scripts. The examples are from clinical technology, project architecture, and consumer product marketing. Although the interactions are limited to two individuals, they also can apply to teams. Real dialog inevitably leads to important developmental conversations.

 

Finally, I will stress the unbelievable significance of building relationships of mutually perceived respect and liking. Though completely out of the awareness of nearly all workers, it is the quality of relationships with their peers and subordinates (if they have them) that get them promoted. Promotions are not merely at the behest of one’s boss. The fact of the matter is that bosses rarely promote a person who has not shown himself or herself extremely capable of working productively with others in the organization. I will present the story of a director of marketing, who though not brilliant, was known to be a top coach, a superb team player and leader, and a facilitator who was unusually effective at making organizational conflicts productive. His skills were nearly all communication based. When his boss realized the real qualities of his subordinate, he was promoted immediately. His marketing acumen, though solid, was probably irrelevant to his promotion.

 

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