Spicing things up
In this episode of Forging Common Ground I reflect on listener responses about communication styles and identity, and then expand the conversation into how bridging across conflict styles can help us forge common ground.
Hi everyone. This is Forging Common Ground.
If it's your first time, welcome. If it's not, welcome back.
Listener input has been starting to pick up just a little bit. If you sent in a comment or a question or other thought, thank you.
Three topics today:
First is a reflection on a listener response about communication styles.
Second is a reflection on a listener response about identity.
And third, we're going to get into expanding communication styles into something even spicier.
Communication Styles and Values
We'll start with something that a listener shared about a communication challenge that they once had with a supervisor.
I will call the listener Pat.
Pat is a highly direct communicator. Their supervisor was a highly indirect communicator, and one who shied away from directly imposing his authority.
There came a time when he wanted to shift Pat's hours so that he could work hours that were more convenient for him. He communicated this to Pat by trying to convince Pat that the hours were actually better for them — that is, for Pat.
Pat did get the message, but in their own words described the supervisor's communicative approach as follows:
“I found it a dishonest imposition of his authority to ask me to pretend he wasn’t the one deciding.”
What I want to highlight here is Pat's use of the word dishonest.
A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how communication styles are driven by values, and that honesty and transparency are two core values for direct communicators.
And here it is, honesty, showing up in all its glory.
Now, Pat is an attentive and skilled communicator, and was able to figure out what was going on, so that the two were able to have a respectful, productive relationship — presumably because Pat also valued relationships.
Recall that group harmony is often a key value driving indirect communication.
Pat was able to do what I was talking about a couple episodes ago: to bridge to their colleague by recognizing and honoring shared values — in this case, by re-ranking their value system so that group harmony became more important than Pat's default value of honesty.
This may seem like just one small story, but it contains a powerful lesson in forging common ground.
This sort of bridging can be hard precisely because it can feel like we're betraying our own values.
So my encouragement here is the same as it was before: connect to the values of the person whose behavior you find annoying.
If you're looking for values to connect to, you will find values to connect to. And when you do, you'll calm the threat response, engage the neocortex, and be better able to forge common ground with others.
Identity and Detaching from Who We Perceive Ourselves to Be
Moving on to our second of three topics: identity, and the need for us to detach from who we perceive ourselves to be when forging common ground.
Regarding my brief discussion of racism in the last episode, a listener wrote the following:
“I especially liked how you underscored that racism doesn’t equate to someone’s inherent worth (good versus bad), but rather equates to someone’s behavior being good or bad (a good thought or bad action).”
The key to this listener's observation is how they distinguish between who I am — a racist versus a non-racist — and the impact of my words and deeds.
As I mentioned last episode, it's a lot easier to look at our own harmful impact if we focus on specific things we've done, versus who we perceive ourselves to be.
I'd like to build a bit on the listener's response by shifting the context just a little bit.
In the context of racism, we can and should be making value judgments of good versus bad. Racism is fundamentally about valuing certain human lives more than others, based on race.
We should full-throatedly condemn racism and be constantly working to change:
hearts
minds
and most crucially, systems
until racism becomes a historical relic.
One of my frustrations over the years with the intercultural field, broadly speaking, is its value-neutral approach.
One of the field's favorite taglines is:
“It's not wrong, it's just different.”
Which in many cases is a helpful mantra, but in the case of racism, and in all forms of oppression, is morally bankrupt.
For now though, I'd like to focus on one aspect of the mantra that can be helpful to us.
Take communication styles. No communication style is inherently better than any other communication style.
The default human condition is to feel like our communication style is best, because we see a straight line from our deeply held values to best behavior: because I value efficiency and transparency more than group harmony and honor, my direct communication seems obviously better to me than indirect communication.
This is in large part because I feel, mostly unconsciously, that my values define who I am. And so an alternative communication style grounded in a different ranking of values feels threatening to me.
This explains some of the challenges that I faced building trusting relationships with my colleagues when I was working in China and just going about my business as a direct communicator.
When people didn't respond to me in ways that I was used to, I felt like there was something wrong with me.
Let's take a closer look at what I just said.
I felt like people weren't responding well to me. But of course they weren't responding to me at all. They were responding to my communicative behaviors.
The better I got at disentangling those behaviors from the entirety of my being, the more skilled I got at bridging to the predominant indirect communication and feeling just fine about it.
The less attached I became to a certain idea of me, the more effective I got at forging common ground with my colleagues.
The fact is, just by showing up as we are, we are going to end up annoying other people. It can feel like I'm being rejected.
And these feelings can lead to a developmental orientation known as defense.
Now, that's another topic for another episode. But for now, suffice it to say that being in this developmental stage — the stage where essentially I'm better than you — does not help in forging common ground.
For now, here's the point.
It's never about me. It's never about who I am.
We can follow our brain's well-worn neural pathways that take us there if we want to, but it's not going to help us forge common ground. It's only going to hold us back.
The antidote? Exactly what we've been talking about and keep coming back to: focus on specific behaviors and the values that drive them. Connect to values that drive unfamiliar behaviors, and focus on expanding our range of behaviors.
The process, repeated over and over and over, is a massive part of the work of forging common ground.
Conflict Styles
Okay, now for our third and final topic, and one that presents even more of a bridging challenge than communication styles.
We're going to expand from communication styles into something even spicier.
Conflict styles.
I'll start with a story.
Someone I was coaching — let's call her Jane — had an issue with a colleague — let's call her Sarah.
Sarah was not Jane's direct report, but she was more junior.
Jane and Sarah worked together frequently on matters of some urgency to the organization.
Jane had been providing Sarah with some difficult feedback and didn't like how Sarah had been handling the feedback: first by leaving emails unanswered for days, and then with what Jane described as defensiveness.
In response, Jane had doubled down on the feedback, leading to Sarah copying her supervisor on an email which she, in Jane's words, refused to accept accountability.
Not an expert in the subject matter of the disagreement, I thought maybe something cultural was going on.
I recalled that Sarah was from somewhere outside the United States.
I asked Jane, “Where is Sarah from again?”
Jane said, “Morocco.”
I said, “Okay, well, for what it's worth, the cultures of the MENA region — that is the Middle East and North Africa region — in general tend to favor a conflict style called Dynamic.”
Jane had been through a workshop that I lead around conflict styles, so it rang a bell.
She asked me to remind her what the Dynamic style is.
I explained that the Dynamic conflict style combines:
indirect communication
emotional expressiveness
When in a conflict situation, a common behavior associated with the Dynamic conflict style is long periods of silence, sometimes followed by something that feels like a bit of an explosion.
In person and in real time, this explosion involves audible signals like elevated volume and pitch range, and visual signals like expansive gestures, eye rolling, and lip pursing.
Over email, it could look something like the email that Sarah copied her supervisor on.
I reminded Jane that these behaviors were driven by deeply held values of group harmony and honor, which drove the indirect communication, and also emotional authenticity, which drove the emotional expressiveness.
One particularly triggering behavior for people who have a Dynamic conflict style is when they're questioned in a way that has them feeling like they're on a witness stand.
They start to feel hemmed in. The threat response escalates.
And you get to where Jane and Sarah had gotten: impasse and mutual frustration.
My advice to Jane was that the next time she found herself in a disagreement with Sarah, to say explicitly:
“You don't have to answer right now. We can take a break and continue this topic later.”
The simple act of creating room for someone with a Dynamic conflict style can be just the right medicine for calming the amygdala and getting things back on track.
I also advised Jane to validate Sarah's feelings, another key bridging strategy for the Dynamic conflict style.
And finally, I suggested to Jane that she pay close attention when Sarah repeated something; it was sure to be something Sarah cared about deeply.
Jane decided to get ahead of the issue by sending an email to Sarah, addressing their latest conflict.
In the email, she validated Sarah's feelings and reassured Sarah that they didn't need to rush anything. Finally, she suggested they connect again on Zoom later in the day.
When the Zoom meeting began, the first thing Sarah did was make a heart hands gesture, and then proceeded to express her deep appreciation to Jane for her email.
Now, this incident didn't mark the end of their disagreements, or of Jane's frustrations with Sarah.
But it did mark a turning point in their relationship, and specifically in the mutual trust Jane had built with Sarah by bridging to her in this way.
Issues around competence are real.
Not everything can be explained away or dealt with simply through bridging.
But bridging gives us our best chance.
It reduces noise and increases signal, helping us understand more clearly what's really going on and what we can do about it.
Before we go any further, a quick aside.
I guessed Sarah's conflict style was dynamic partly based on the global region she was from.
Whenever we're talking about entire cultures, we need to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush.
Every individual is unique.
It turns out my guess was correct, given the behaviors Jane had described to me and how Sarah ended up responding to Jane's bridging.
The fact that Sarah had grown up in Morocco was almost a footnote: just one more data point that made my guess just a tiny bit more likely to be correct.
And one more quick aside
The role of statistically based generalizations versus stereotypes is itself an enormous topic, which we won't take any further here.
Closing
That's it for today's topics.
My turn to ask you some things.
What topics do you want me to talk about?
What are you learning?
What questions do you have for me?
Do you disagree with anything I've said?
Are you bothered by anything I've said?
As always, write me at common@jasonpatent.com or fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes.
And again, a special invitation to you if you haven't yet sent me anything. I promise it'll do you no harm to send me something.
Thank you again for coming.
Until next time, let's keep forging common ground.