What does brain management have to do with communication styles?

Below is a lightly edited and polished transcript of Season 1, Episode 2 of the Forging Common Ground podcast, released today.

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Hi everyone, this is Forging Common Ground. If it's your first time, welcome. If it's not, welcome back.

Two topics for today.

First is following up on the last episode.

And second is taking a first pass at one specific and extremely common form of difference that can get us in trouble and make it difficult to forge common ground.

I want to thank listeners for engaging after episode one. I received several responses, and I just really appreciate y'all taking the time to listen and to respond because, as I stated in the first episode, this is all about dialogue, and it isn't gonna work without the dialogue and I think with dialogue we can make a lot of stuff happen.

The themes and the responses that I received mostly revolved around the behaviors of the two younger women that I encountered in the two stories that I told in the last episode. And the responses focused on gender and on generation as two dimensions of difference. So I want to read you a quote from one email from a listener. This listener said, wrote the following: “In the first experience you describe, you may have encountered some gender-based inner rage that's pervasive in workplaces. I feel it when mansplaining occurs, or when hidden male privilege rears its head. Women can be quick to defend ourselves before an infraction even occurs as a sort of reflexive behavior.”

So I'd like to pause and ascend the soapbox for just a moment and reflect for a bit on this concept of gender-based inner rage. So, especially for the male identifying among us, let's just let that sink in. It can be too easy to accept something because we're so used to it. Gender-based inner rage may be something we just kind of shrug off, well, like, “That's the patriarchy.” I don't think we should become used to the existence of gender-based inner rage, or race-based inner rage, or ability-based inner rage, or any inner rage that's based on who we happen to be.

As I wrote about in my book, mostly it's the duty of the folks like me with more unearned advantages to build our awareness and also our bridging skills. That's gonna be a big theme in the pod.

Okay, I am now climbing down from the soapbox.

So that's gender, and then regarding generation, there was some commentary on how Gen Z doesn't take constructive criticism well. And when I replied to this listener, this is what I emphasized. I shared that in the research that I'm familiar with, it shows…the research shows that it may be less about Gen Z not taking feedback well, but it may be more about the type and the setting of the feedback that we give to our Gen Z colleagues.

Gen Z tend to prefer feedback that is (a) frequent, (b) in person, and (c) focused on their development. And so I think that knowing this, Boomer, Gen X, and millennial leaders could experiment and see if we can get any more traction rather than kind of throwing up our hands and saying Gen Z doesn't take feedback well or constructive criticism well.

So once again: Gen Z prefers feedback that is frequent, in person, and focused on their development. So any of you who are managing Gen Z workers and in a position to provide feedback, I recommend trying those three strategies.

So that's one piece related to episode one.

The other piece, which I haven't yet heard about from anyone, is the part that I was really motivated to do this episode around, which is what the heck was going on in my own mind in reaction to these two colleagues?

Now I’m…on one level I'm pretty sure that I know what was going on in my mind. My threat-detection mechanism sensed that my power was being threatened. But wow, the intensity of it and how long it lasted, especially in the second instance. They tipped me off to this being a big area of growth for me, both as a leader and also as a human. I mean, 30 full minutes I was thrown off my game by the second incident. And it's not like I'm sitting around with all this extra time and all this extra energy. So for this incident to lead to me being off my game for 30 minutes, not good, not good.

Dr. Susan David, if you're familiar with her work, has said that emotions are data. And so it's good for me, it's helpful information for me, helpful data for me to note the really strong reactions that I had in both instances. And so next time I feel like I'll be more ready for it.

I think I might have been a little bit overconfident because as I mentioned in episode one, that that incident, I mean, it's what I kicked off my book with. Since I had written about it and reflected so much about it, I thought maybe I was past it.

Well, no.

Clearly I wasn't because it was just a little bit over a year ago that I had the second one.

So, I would love your thoughts on that if you've got any thoughts to share and if you have any similar struggles in identifying triggers that are especially powerful for you.

And then finally, one reflection that I've been struggling with around this as well, which is…I have had, I would say most of the people that have led me — when I say led, I'm talking about the formal organizational authority type of leading, so like my supervisors or people at their level or people above their level — I don't know that I've ever had a leader who would tolerate being spoken to in the ways that I was spoken to by those two colleagues.

And now, I haven't tended to admire the leadership of many of the people that I've reported to or people at their level or above their level in the hierarchy. And at the same time, I have wondered, you know, was I too quote unquote soft? I hate that term, as a derogatory term, especially as gendered as it is, but I don't have a better term right at the moment. Was I too quote unquote soft? So that I become somebody who people feel like they can talk to that way?

I think the answer is no.

I think the benefits of trying to create an environment where people feel free and safe to speak their minds is more important than the fear of being spoken to in a particular way. But I don't know. I would also love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

Okay, so that's all the stuff from the last episode.

Moving on to topic number two for today, and sticking with the theme of managing our brain state. I'm starting another experiment today, which is I'm which is to look at how our brains react negatively to various forms of difference, and also how we can interrupt those negative reactions, how we can flip those negative reactions into appreciation.

And also how we can change what we do in order to bridge to others.

And we'll start today with communication style, specifically direct and indirect communication, which is also known as low-context and high-context communication.

Now, a lot of folks tend to think that this topic is a little light or a little frilly or even silly, and I don't think that could be further from the truth.

The frictions that we encounter every day, oftentimes these frictions are based on communication style, work style, conflict style, leadership style, and so on. And each and every time we encounter a friction, we have the opportunity to practice the big skills of self-awareness and other-awareness and bridging. That's a sort of a holy trinity of the world of intercultural communication and leadership development. I'm not going to get into the precise definitions and understandings of those terms right now. They're pretty self-explanatory and pretty intuitive. Self-awareness, other-awareness, and bridging. The point for now is that the better that we get at identifying and managing these style-based frictions — and many of those frictions might seem minor or ancillary — the better we get at a lot of what matters most in being the colleague that we want to be, and the leader that we want to be, and the person that we want to be.

So, to me, this is all gold, even though it might seem ancillary, etc.

Specifically regarding direct and indirect communication, this is a source of a lot of tension in the workplace, not to mention in everyday life. I would be really surprised if each and every one of you didn't have a lot of stories about that annoying person with that annoying communication style.

So late last fall, I posted twice to my blog about communication styles. And in a companion post on LinkedIn, I invited readers to share their negative thoughts about the other style. So for direct communicators to share their negative thoughts about indirect communicators and vice versa. And I just want to read some of the responses that I got.

So this is folks talking about their annoyance with indirect communicators:

“I get lost in their stream of consciousness.”

“They bury the most important points in minutiae.”

“I never really know what they're thinking.”

And on the flip side, people annoyed by direct communicators:

“Their candor can be off-putting.”

“Word choice is often offensive.”

“They don't seem to speak to their audience.”

“It's all about what they have to say, not what they want the other person to hear.”

There's more. I'll stop there. But what I want to highlight here, and what I find remarkable about these responses — not surprising, but remarkable — is that there seems to be a gap here. And it's a big gap and it might seem like a gap that can't be bridged.

There's two different styles. Each of these styles seems normal and natural to those who use it, and each of these styles seems to really bother folks who don't share that style.

And one of the big lessons here is that just by showing up as ourselves, we're going to annoy other people.

There isn't anything we can do about that.

Now the good news is there are plenty…we can't do anything about annoying other people, but we can do plenty about that gap…plenty of ways that we can go about bridging that gap.

That's going to be another big theme of this pod. It's a big theme of my work and my writing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We don't have time to get into that today with regard to direct and indirect communication. So we'll do that next time.

Questions I've got for you, in addition to the ones I've sort of been peppering throughout the pod so far:

How is this all landing with you?

Are you finding yourself chafing at any of these quotes that I read about direct and indirect communicators?

And if so, why do you think you were chafing?

It's really good data for us to note how we react to the stimuli in our environment. So I encourage you to use that as data for your own communication style.

And, you know, I chafe at this stuff too. It's like I'm…I've done a lot of work around this and I've got tools and frameworks and models and all of that. And that's great. And I've been trying my best to take the work to heart myself. And I still…there are communication styles that bug me. I do tend to be a more direct communicator, so indirect communication still tends to bug me, even though I've learned and have gotten better at implementing bridging strategies.

So anyway, good data.

Another question: Have you got a case to make for either, for or against either of these communication styles? That can be really fun.

Do you have any stories to share?

I would like to invite you to fill out the Google form that is linked in the show notes, or to email me, common@jasonpatent.com.

Thank you again for coming.

Until next time, let's keep forging common ground.