Category: Theory Points
While most of the world was watching the Condoleeza Rice testimony yesterday for the political discourse, folks in our firm were watching the behavioral discourse, and in particular, the extent to which she projected “confidence markers.”
Confidence markers are the relatively small set of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that communicate certainty to an audience. They also strongly contribute to persuasiveness, and they’re well documented in the interpersonal communication literature. What’s important is that they’re all behaviors a speaker can focus on and control, which is why we tell clients confidence isn’t something you feel as much as it’s something you project.
So what are the confidence markers? We break them into two groups: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal markers include:
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While I’m on the topic, it was at another PR weblog worth reading, Greg Brooks’ Engage, that I found this Richard Mayer article on the cognitive load of PowerPoint. Reading the full article requires a free registration, but here’s the gist:
(1) PowerPoint presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation; (2) filling the slides with information will easily overload people’s cognitive systems; and (3) the presentations should help learners to select, organize and integrate presented information.
We agree and encourage you to read it all. We’ve posted about PowerPoint quite often: click here for a summary, and click here for our one-page Principles of PowerPoint primer.
Take note: This is the first time we’ve seen fit to reference the terms “epistemology,” “Talking Heads,” and “surrogate decision-making process” in a single CommLog post…
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In 2001, with support from the National Science Foundation, a group of communication researchers produced a 40-page monograph detailing emerging issues in communication. Entitled Communication: Ubiquitous, Complex, Consequential, the monograph reviews what is known and emerging about communication in four areas:
Politics and society
Public health and well-being
Organizational communication
Relational development
The monograph is a very clear, accessible summary of a typically academic and technical body of communication theory and research. It’s worth reading, and you can see or download the monograph (in PDF / Acrobat format) here. (Selfishly, we’re also proud to say that the monograph reflects the work of two friends of CRA: Dr. Marshall Scott Poole and Dr. Noshir Contractor.)
The medium with which you send a message is just as important as message content, and when sending any message, it’s critical to thoughtfully choose the most appropriate medium for the message in question. As such, when deciding which medium to use, it’s important to first consider its �richness.�
What is media richness? All communication media vary according to the opportunity they afford for feedback and their capacity for conveying meaning. As an example, face-to-face communication affords nearly instant feedback from the receiver, and has multiple “cues” by which the receiver can determine meaning (not only what the speaker is saying, but also the look on their face, their tone of voice, etc.). Written memos, however, have slow or no feedback opportunity, and have very few cues by which the receiver can determine meaning (only the words on the page and their format). The more feedback and cues the more “rich” the media; the less feedback and cues, the more “lean” the media.
Why does it matter? Neither rich nor lean media are �better� than the other � they’re better at communicating different types of content. As a general guideline rich media are best suited for communicating information that is strategic, uncertain, or symbolic, while lean media are more effective at communicating information that is tactical, specific, or historical. The key is to appropriately match medium and message. To help clients better understand media richness and its application, we’ve been sharing a two-page toolkit primer on the topic. You may download the primer here. (PDF format. Click to download, or right-click over the link and select “save target as” to save to a folder. If you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the PDF file, click here.)
We’ve all known since we heard it in grade school that “actions speak louder than words.” But many leaders fail to fully appreciate how this adage applies to the practice of effective internal communication. The extrapolation is this: Leaders’ decisions and behavior, and the way they reward and recognize employees, will always send more powerful messages to the organization than any messages transmitted through formal communications (e.g., speeches, emails, etc.).
Accordingly, after leaders use a formal communication channel or event to share new strategic information (such as a new strategy) with the organization, most employees will assume that “this too shall pass” and withhold acceptance and commitment until they see tangible leadership actions that support the leadership rhetoric. As a result, it’s critical to build highly visible “convincing decisions” into any strategic internal communication campaign.
In a Fortune Street Life column last year, Andy Serwer shared a post from a reader that beautifully illustrates how a well-intentioned but ill-conceived formal communication activity–and subsequent leadership decisions–can send competing, inconsistent messages:
“Just a quick note from down in the trenches. I work for an e-consultancy and a while back the Culture Committee came up with a list of the company’s core values. To keep them fresh in our mind a hat that exemplified each was purchased and given to a person that had demonstrated that core value and has been passed on to a new recipient at the company’s quarterly meeting. Well, things have gotten a little lean on the demand side in the industry and this week right before the quarterly meeting there was a layoff. The bad news: Integrity, Teamwork, Fun and Respect for the Individual will soon be working for someone else. The good news: Growth and Innovation are ready to cut loose in a leaner, meaner, e-business machine.”
The study of communication networks has grown dramatically since Everett Rogers first published his seminal work Diffusion of Innovations in 1962. The theory (very well established by both popular and academic research) posits that in any organization, all individuals are not created equal when it comes to the frequency and breadth of their communication. Indeed, the modern corporation is filled with a variety of communication network “types,” including (in our parlance):
- Most of us, who communicate with average frequency to an average number of people
- Isolates, solitary recluses who communicate infrequently if at all
- Bridges, who, although they don’t communicate with more frequency than others tend to have key relationships with people from a variety of groups or communities (hence they act as a “bridge” between those groups), and
- Stars, who communicate and maintain relationships with a significantly greater number of people than does the average person.
For practitioners and leaders these differences are important. Try to move your message through isolates, and it goes nowhere. Try to move your message through stars, and it spreads like wildfire. Try to credibly introduce your message to a new group without a bridge, and you’ll never get through the door.
The principles of communication networks are the principles upon which all effective grass-roots campaigns (and all effective stakeholder management approaches) rest, and they’re wonderfully summarized in a 1999 New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg. We recommend the article to any internal communication professional, change management professional, or leader of people.
You can read the article here …
