First we have the difficult conversation, the people feel awkward, go their separate ways and wait for the dust to settle. Then, at some point in the future, if the people start talking again they either apologise for their behaviour and try to move on, try to pretend that the conversation never happened at all or they find that they have ‘cleared the air’, as the expression goes, and are able to be open with each other many times after that.

This need to learn to ‘have the tough conversation’ comes up again and again for us on projects and amongst ourselves as consultants. How is it possible to tackle a difficult issue with a colleague not only without souring the relationship, but actually, with the possibility of improving it? And is it possible to make a positive outcome less hit-and-miss?

An incentive.

It goes almost without saying that the people involved have to have some incentive to get their heads together – they have to all/both have or perceive a payoff from doing something that they may find very uncomfortable. These payoffs may take many forms but will all have something to do with feeling better, more relaxed, relieved, better motivated, more cheerful. The effort to improve communication in a relationship that is based on a predominantly business goal, be it financial or organisational, will probably not be strong enough to motivate the people involved to take difficult action. We rarely feel strongly enough about improving business to risk our own feelings in that sort of effort (unless of course it’s our money and then that goes back to feelings anyway).

Ingredients.

So, what are the ingredients of a ‘let’s get real’ conversation? I think they are:

1. A shared keenness to take the relationship somewhere new: less laboured, more trusting, less tactical, more open.
2. A shared keenness to listen to difficult material about ourselves without interrupting or judging.
3. Some degrees of capability and willingness to talk truthfully about our own feelings and to hear about the other person’s, too.
4. A very specific topic or incident to discuss or repair – this could for example be entitled simply: ‘how we get on’ or ‘merging our departments humanely’.

But the overarching need is for the people involved to create the environment between themselves that makes them feel reasonably confident that what is exchanged will stay within the relationships in the room. How do we do this?

Perhaps the simplest way is for the people involved to look each other in the eyes and profess their wishes: “For me to be able to be open with you I need to know from you that what we talk about will go no further than you without my agreement –  I will of course promise the same in return.” The point here is that there doesn’t have to be a big, fancy preamble. Having said that, if the individuals or group involved have had difficult times in the past then it can be helpful to give people the chance to discuss their fears surrounding disclosure before they are actually asked to do it – a ritual that serves as a warm up period – a chance to ’size up’ the other people in the room – to build a little rudimentary trust. To give people the chance to communicate thoughts such as: “I’m taking a risk here – are you going to treat me properly?”

A focus.

Finally, as a note to No. 4. above: The conversation may be tiring as well as progressive so to save people getting tired and then reverting to old, non-functioning habits or getting ground down by the volume of negative material about themselves, I suggest that the topic be carefully limited to something SPECIFIC and SMALL. It is by doing this that big things happen. Why? Because the small but essential invisibles get discussed properly e.g. how I feel about you and how you feel about me…

But let’s be honest, this short piece (and the many others like it on the web at this very moment), is worthless without there being a willingness, in some form, for the people involved to have a real, less tactical conversation. It doesn’t matter why they want to be more open, it’s just important that they should want it at all.

Also, following guidelines like these is OK but the No.1 priority is to just GET TALKING and DON’T STOP – however scruffy, embarrassing or aversive it might be at the beginning.

Life is complicated. Cultures are complicated. Traditions are complicated. Relationships are complicated. Conversations are complicated. We are participants in all these arenas, and many more besides and we are bound to get it wrong – a lot. The interesting question here though is what is ‘wrong’?

As children growing up in a complex world we labour constantly, often without knowing it, to work out what is going on around us. What does that frown mean? What do I say when someone says that? How do I stop the shouting? Why am I getting peas again?

So we guess. We develop ‘rules of thumb’ so that we don’t have to work things out from scratch every time. Much of this rule-making is done by the time we reach pre-school age or soon after, although our accumulated expertise might not always be evident because, at that stage, we often lack the words to describe our insights to our carers. But let us be clear, this expertise is just based on really good guesses and personal interpretation. Fact-checking features very little at this stage.

And then the tricky stuff really begins. From the first days in contact with other children it begins to dawn upon us that we don’t all think alike, or to be more precise, we don’t all believe alike. Each of us has by now developed a subtly different set of rules from everyone else in the group and here we face an even tougher challenge than before – deciding which of the competing rules is ‘right’.

Much of the time our need for an instant decision in tandem with a need for comfort leads us to one of the binary conclusions: either you’re wrong and I am right or you are right and it’s me who is wrong. It is this decisional dead-end that opens the opportunity for ‘mistakes’. Of course, mostly, there is no mistake, there’s a mismatch.

If there is a mistake it is one that we seem to often miss the lesson on – even as we grow into adults. The mistake in a given situation is not made when I fail to match your rule or you fail to match mine but when we both fail to notice that there is a rule. Or to be more precise, two. The follow-on error is to for each person to promptly decide that the other person is wrong/bad/thoughtless/horrible (add your own judgements here).

So, is the remedy simply rule recognition – noticing that we are just believing something different rather than being different, right or wrong? Partly. But first an example:

I am writing this sitting on the train to London. 10 minutes ago, as the train filled up with passengers a man drew level with the seat across the table from me and slammed his orange drink down as if to say “Mine! This is my seat – anyone got a problem with that?!” Now his version… “Oh no, I don’t think I’m going to be popular, three people at the table already and it’s very quiet. I hate asking ‘is this anyone’s seat? Instead, I’ll just put my drink down here and they will hopefully get the message that I’d like to sit down and if there’s a problem it won’t be so embarrassing as actually sitting down or asking the stupid question which often gets a negative reply…”

Of course I don’t know what he was thinking, I’m making it all up, his version and mine. The point is, which version of events do I need to believe to bring about the better outcome? Do I make the juice man nicer by treating him badly? Of course not. Do I make myself nicer by treating him badly after guessing nasty things about him? Definitely not.

Which brings me to the second part of the remedy:

Stop guessing like a child or guess something nice.

At about 7.20 every morning I take our two Deerhounds for a run. They are brother and sister, very large and easy to care for. They love running but they love snoozing and generally lying about even more. The only problem is their coats. Cross a sheep with a grey wire scouring pad and you begin to get the picture – and the problem.

Actually there is another problem – Milo and fizz hate being brushed. In fact all deerhounds hate it (it’s an insult to their dignity) unless you give them cheese to eat at the same time and that can become expensive given how much brushing is involved. The fact is that most owners simply don’t bother unless they plan to show. And since showing involves giving up your life and that of your family, liquidating your assets, giving up work and buying a gypsy caravan to take you round the country for 6 months of every year, most deerhound owners don’t show – well not us sane ones anyway.

Back to the coat.

It takes about an hour and a half to groom a Deerhound that has been left a little too long. It takes about an hour to groom a deerhound once a month. It takes about a minute to groom a Deerhound once a day. In that light I could say that Fizz and Milo embody the dos and don’ts of maintaining relationships and intimate communication. By intimate I not only mean the conversations that we have within our most personal relationships but to those that we can have with colleagues with whom we have developed what we might call a special relationship. A situation which enables either person to raise even awkward topics so openly and honestly that there is very little risk of the input being met with anything more obstructive than moderate awkwardness (a red face or a bit of fidgeting!).

The ritual of brushing the dogs daily (I actually stroke them at the same time to take their minds off the wiry brush), whether I perceive that I have the time or not, works on many levels. (Incidentally, this morning I swore that I did not have time and yet still brushed for two minutes. Was I late for my first appointment? No, of course I wasn’t – it was only two minutes).

After two weeks of the daily campaign:

1. The hounds look great.
2. Milo and Fizz are staring to like being brushed – or at least to dislike it less.
3. I don’t berate myself multiple times a day for not brushing the dogs.
4. I feel proud every time I see them because I am caring for them properly.
5. I appreciate them and their presence more; they now receive more attention, through the day, than ever before.
6. They seem to respond to a call to heal even more quickly than before.
7. I have stopped making promises that I know I will not/cannot back-up – “I really will brush you properly this weekend…”
8. Lots of minute and apparently insignificant efforts (positive and negative) stack up remarkably quickly.
9. I have realised that there are a great many tiny things that I can do to make life go better for me and for others.

Most of us, by the time we attain a certain age, will claim to be competent at conducting positive, deep, relationships and performing all of the skills that are required to stay ‘in relationship’ with the people around us more widely. But the point is not whether we know what it takes, it is whether we do what it takes. Do we really behave as if we mean to make progress with the people we spend time with, professionally and personally? Or do we tend to operate on the literal, factual level with them, trusting against all logic and experience, that the relationship will simply look after itself, and even improve over time – just like the coat on a large, shaggy dog?

What hidden forces really operate behind organisational decisions? Politics? Empire- building? Shareholder pressure? I would have to say “all and none of the above”. All of those are the evidence; the things that we see people doing. In reality, it’s the drivers of those things that we should be interested in: emotion. What we actually see are the disguises that people adopt to communicate their feelings about how things are going. We resort to political manoeuvring when they have run out of ideas for how to ask for something. We build empires when we are worried about getting lost in the machine and shareholders express their feelings by buying, selling and voting.

And all of these are proxies for proper emotional expression. But before I tell you about the more useful alternatives let me explain what I mean by ‘proper emotional expression’ because you may already be thinking: “oh-ho, getting emotional is ‘not me’ or at least it’s not done where I work.” I bet you’re right if we are talking about people putting on major displays of emotion (ranting, stomping about, going red in the face, bursting into tears, going quiet and moody etc.). What I am talking about is giving a clear, rational explanation of how I am feeling so that people know what is going on and can make an informed decision about what to do next.

Right, practical details next; how do you do it yourself or help others to do it if they are struggling? Three ways for you to experiment with:

Listen and mention – don’t just blunder on when you are talking with someone who is becoming unreasonable. Be brave – give them the chance to express how they are feeling – you don’t have to ask them outright – you don’t even need to mention the word ‘feeling’ (the f-word). Instead, try: “You sound/look/seem…” [the name of the feeling] and then pause to let them acknowledge your observation and to continue with their point. My guess is that they will become more open as you encourage them to be clear about what is driving their point (how they feel). You may need to do this repeatedly as they express their various views. Be patient – your time will come!

Notice and declare – if you notice yourself getting stuck in a particular position and sense that you are being taken over by your opinion (emotions, actually) give yourself the chance to be explicit about how you are feeling. Again, you don’t have to mention that f-word.

Try: “I’m getting worried/annoyed/frustrated about where this conversation is going/the change in plan/the loss of momentum… because…”

What’s left unsaid – we frequently leave difficult conversations half finished, or at least with important things left unsaid. This is often because someone has purposefully or accidentally shut the dialogue down prematurely. To make sure that it’s not you, you can say: “Before we finish I want to ask a question of us both – “what’s left unsaid?” You might think this is completely artificial, too off the wall. This way of talking is certainly unusual because it does not follow convention but it does give us access to immense opportunities to clear up bad feeling and thus make progress on issues that most of us can get for ever stuck on. Deal with the unspoken and the rest will sort itself out.

If we want to keep emotion in its proper place in our lives, and not least of all in our businesses, then we need to learn how to deal with them. Properly managed, emotions help us to make great decisions, to be worth living with and drive us to do amazing things. But left to run riot by lack of acknowledgement they can make things truly miserable. Emotions for business people are like water for a plumber; if we don’t channel them properly we will forever be plugging the leaks – occasionally getting flooded out without warning.

This month, and for the next couple, I will be exploring not only what keeps us from changing but what questions we need to ask ourselves if we are serious about adopting new ways.

Quick and gone

Speed is seemingly a characteristic of many habits; by definition, habits produce action that happens quickly and without conscious thought. Many of our habits are sparked off by, and happen in, social situations that are fast-moving such as not joining in with a conversation, missing opportunities to give praise or reacting defensively to feedback. All of these happen in quick-time. OK, but what about something like smoking? That doesn’t.

Smoking is an interesting habit because it does indeed, happen relatively slowly, and you would think that we would get plenty of warning when we were about to do the damaging behaviour. As it happens (you may know this already) the urge to smoke can be based on one or a mixture of two elements: chemical addiction and ritual addiction. The chemical element speaks for itself; the ritual element is the one which fulfils the need for a structured activity that brings some pleasure or relief. Pipe smokers and cigarette smokers who roll their own are a great illustration of this. They choose to go through a long ritual to get to the bit where they actually get to smoke. This suggests that they probably derive as much ‘benefit’ from the routine as they do from the intake of nicotine. Does this mean that we can get addicted to routine itself? More likely that what we are becoming hooked on is the feelings of calm and safety that a routine can provide us with. Performing routine behaviours gives us time to contemplate, to rest our minds, to celebrate our abilities like rolling the perfect cigarette, splitting the log perfectly down the middle, mixing the perfect drink or laying the perfect log fire.

So, on one hand, the speed at which some habits happen make them tricky to change because we have to be super-alert to stop ourselves in time and yet other habits, that occur at a snail’s pace, are hard to change because of the feelings of comfort and wellbeing that they afford us.

Sell it to me!

Leaving tobacco and log fires behind, there are of course other powerful characteristics of our psyche that make it difficult for us to change the way we behave. One of the most potent would seem to be our ability to justify, to sell a concept to ourselves as a way of releasing us from the need to do the difficult thing – changing. Rather than stand up to our compulsion we devise elaborate explanations to justify our U-turn. We literally sell the old, undesirable habit back to ourselves because we don’t want to admit that we have decided to go against our previous good decision (“shouting at people is OK because at least it gets things done around here!)”. That sounds harsh doesn’t it? It is but it’s not the whole story. If you want the truth, step this way down the dark corridor of your personal feelings and hidden desires.

The truth is that we are driven by fear and pleasure. That’s it. Fear and pleasure, fear and pleasure; day in day out. When we are trying to break a habit we are fighting against the primitive drives of escape and attraction. The rest is window dressing.

Some examples: If I find it hard to delegate it’s probably because I fear being let down and looking stupid. People who find it hard to stop arguing are often worried about what might happen to them if they appeared weak, left out or not in charge. To cite a particularly common example: those of us who find it hard to prioritise don’t lack organisation ability, we probably get hijacked by our fears and desires:

• Fear of not being able to do the difficult task (so we ignore it)
• Fear of losing control on the appearance of too many tasks
• The pleasure that comes from doing ‘this’ but not ‘that’
• Fear of running out of time and getting into trouble (so we do a bit of everything, in the wrong order, badly)

So, it seems at first glance that we have to tell stories to ourselves to cover up the fact that we haven’t stuck to a promise to change. In reality we are probably being hassled by our fears around negative outcomes but then rather than facing those fears and talking them through (even with ourselves) we make excuses for why we back-tracked and all is well again. Except that we haven’t changed.

Too much, too long, too radical

And as if things aren’t already difficult enough we often make our own attempts at changing even more difficult by setting unattainable objectives in the first place. For example, I might decide that I’m going to get into really great shape this year. So I go out and buy a load of fruit and vegetables, a juicer, a gym membership and a tracksuit. And then, knowing me, I go to it really hard for a week, maybe two. I run every day until I feel sick, I have fruit for breakfast until I’m fainting for lack of carbohydrates; I cut out biscuits and chocolate completely, which makes me miserable, and then drink enough water to render my blood dangerously thin. Not surprisingly the excuses then begin: “I shan’t run today because my shoes are still drying out from yesterday. Oh and I’ve eaten all the bananas so I can’t do my 2 litre smoothie. I’ll have Coco Pops today as a special one-off treat to give me a bit of a boost and because I have been so good!”.

New habits don't come easy

There are two problems here. Most of us can’t voluntarily handle drastic change, be it in our personal or in our professional lives; physical, emotional or intellectual; the fact is that we really don’t need to because the stakes aren’t high enough – the consequences of giving up simply aren’t dire enough.

Secondly, when we set huge goals we may even only be doing so to impress ourselves. We perhaps try to give ourselves something really exciting to go for with the added safety net of having made the goal so unattainable that we can put our failure down to unforeseen circumstances.

So what do I have to do to change?

Setting out to change something about my behaviour is primarily about making change happen in my feelings and thinking. Because I can’t fool my feelings or my mind in the same way that they can fool me, I must ask probing questions of myself to get anything like a true picture of my start and end point. I have to think carefully about what exactly I am thinking of changing and for what reason. Most importantly of all, I can get valuable clues about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ by scrutinising my real end game:

1. What do I really want out of this?
2. Who am I doing this for?
3. Why does this need to happen now?
4. What has altered in me that makes lasting change at all likely?

Being successful at change is largely about choosing the right change for the right reason. Willpower may play a part but should not form the mainstay of your personal change strategy. And finally, whatever state you are aiming to achieve, it must be easier than where you are now, not just better.

Why does one part of the organisation (region 1) assume that the other part (region 2) has a bad attitude? Because in the absence of real data they have invented their own version of events.

When a job is delayed? “They’re lazy!”
When only bad news comes out? “They’re useless!”
When no explanation is forthcoming? “They don’t respect us!”
When their presentations are dry? “They’re boring…”

The reality?

When the job was delayed? The new machine falls over – it is leading edge stuff but in that part of the world they don’t like to boast.
When only bad news came out? The national culture is to get on with the job quietly and without fanfare – publish problems but handle success discretely.
When no explanation was forthcoming? The people involved are embarrassed and are working like hell to put things right before anyone notices.
When their presentations were dry? They hate doing them – they are seen as a distraction from creating solutions. Creating a PowerPoint presentation is low grade compared to creating ‘the new kick ass machine’.

Are the folks in region 2 lazy, useless, disrespectful and boring? Nope. But they are really lousy at PR and they are naive communicators who need to learn about the effects of their behaviour as perceived by others hundreds of miles away.

That sounds very fixable.

What do Gordon Brown, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Mrs Doubtfire have in common? Well, more than one thing actually. The most obvious link is the fact that they all get found out in the end – they are, after all, each fakes of one sort or another. The second thing is that all three resort to pretence to achieve something that seems impossible to them as they are.

The father in Mrs Doubtfire yearns to be near his children but can’t seem to grow up. So instead of growing up and settling down he pretends to be someone his wife would want him to be – the perfect nanny. The Grimm Brothers’ wolf decides that running after things in the woods is not for him so he pretends to be an old lady so that his food will literally walk in the door. And our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seems to think that he needs to be seen as warm, understanding and cheerful.

But all these strategies are doomed to failure from the beginning – the wolf is chased out of bed because his features give him away. The perfect nanny is caught taking a leak standing up and Mr Brown looks constipated and twitches when he attempts a smile. The exercise of bolting on a false persona, often the product of our perceptions of how people want us to be (nicer, stronger, braver, friendlier) almost always fails for one or more of these three reasons.

Why disguises fail

Firstly, we humans are shrewd observers – we can spot fake feelings, phoney behaviour and false words at sixty paces. In cases where we fail to spot deceit it is usually because we haven’t wanted to see the flaws in the act – having perhaps already committed ourselves to the prize (the money, the beautiful person, the quick conviction). In essence, we only fail to spot the fake when we make a choice, at some level, to collude with the trickster.

Secondly, faked behaviours and emotions are costly to produce over a long period of time – which means anything more than a few hours. The act often collapses unless it is being attempted by a highly trained operator in short bursts. And thirdly, it is probably a given that we all yearn to be accepted for who we really are rather than for a person we have temporarily pretended to be; in fact, many believe that we often give ourselves away on purpose (albeit through the work of subconscious processes) in the hope of being accepted for who we are.

Being true to ourselves

The consequences of exposure are, of course, unpredictable but in all these cases, the pathetic irony is that we can probably all get further, on many levels, by being true to our real selves. In the case of the three examples that I’ve mentioned, all of them could have probably got more or less what they wanted if they had only been prepared to face up to who they were and to develop what they already had within them. Robin Williams’ character could have learned to cook and clean without all the cross-dressing business; the wolf could have enlisted the services of a good running coach and Mr Brown could simply settle for who he is: difficult to fathom, bossy and serious.

Focussing on what we can already do and developing those talents is not just a wistful, idealistic notion cooked up by those good people in the HR department, it’s the only credible alternative to pretending to be someone we’re not. I believe that growing up as a person and as a professional is chiefly a project in uncovering our sometimes less-than-obvious talents. We may well need to enlist help with identifying and honing our strengths but at least we can look forward to the prospect of becoming truly happy with who we have turned out to be.

There are relatively few people who know how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. When using what is called bow-and-drill technique, the first thrill comes when smoke begins to issue from where the scorching sawdust collects in a gap under the point of the drill. At this stage, novice fire makers will usually discover that the aphorism ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ has little basis in bushcraft reality. It is not long before getting smoke is more irritating than encouraging, the learner having rather too quickly realised that the gap between smoke and flame is much wider than had been anticipated, or indeed, previously advertised. The next surge of adrenalin is provoked by the sight of embers in the small pile of scorched sawdust generated by the umpteenth flurry of determined drilling using the fourth, fifth or even sixth iterations of drill, base board, bow and handboard. In the early days, the novice will record their successive increments of progress with a calendar rather than with a watch. Because of the nature of the challenge that has been taken up by the individual – making fire from little more than a piece of string and some sticks – they often find themselves feeling more than a little ridiculous. The combination of the potential for Crocodile Dundee and Ray Mears jibes coupled with the incidence of smoke-without-fire failures drives many to practise in secret and thus with little external encouragement. The test on the individual’s perseverance with this most basic of human challenges should not be underestimated; a bushcraft warning from the wise reads:

People who do not know how to start a fire with sticks sometimes forget their matches. People who do know how to start a fire with sticks never forget their matches.

The basis for this wisdom only really becomes apparent after the novice has danced Apache-like around his first blaze, taken a suitable warrior name for himself and been compelled to put the same fire out in response to the shrieking of his garage’s smoke detector. It is after all of this and after about the fifteenth attempt to duplicate that piece of pyrotechnic magic that our warrior realises that he doesn’t really understand what fire making is about after all. With knitted brow and jaw set for renewed victory our hero is within minutes presented with a series of questions and decisions: What is going wrong? Is it the bow? Is it the drill? Is it this is or is it that? He may not notice that what lurks in the background; a barely perceptible question demanding to be answered: “When do I give up?”.

Failure to address this issue in time substantially increases the chances of ultimate failure. If our new warrior continues to repeat the same mistakes over multiple attempts at drilling up a fire he will soon lose hope; when he loses hope he loses confidence; when confidence walks out, ingenuity and perspective go with it. Making fire takes its share of perseverance but it takes a steady mind to not get carried away with the energy of the physical activity. The fire builder must be constantly looking in from a mentally-generated distance, questioning which component is at fault and which is performing its function correctly; put more plainly still, he must know when to give up. He must develop a knack of knowing when to start from fresh with new components – to go backwards before he can proceed once more.

But having achieved smoke with one set of tools, it can be very hard to admit that it isn’t going to go any further and that it’s time to call it quits and to begin again with the first stages of whittling and preparation of a new set up. What feels like starting from scratch is both a shortcut to competency (through the repeated preparation of the components) and a shortcut to fire (because the young tenderfoot will simply succeed more quickly with the right components). ‘Intelligent persistence’ is the name of the fire builder’s game.

The fire can of course be anything you care to mention; the skills required do not vary. Our skill at judging when to persist and when to desist will decide whether the task will get the better of us, or we of it. In stopping too soon on one particular tack we run the risk of not exploring and mastering that opportunity well enough to reach an informed decision about its merits; in stopping too late we increase the chances that we will grow frustrated with the lack of progress and abandon the task altogether. Our success at getting difficult things done in life is perhaps less predicated upon our skill in addressing specific challenges and more upon our skill at approaching challenges in general.

I confess at the outset of this post that I’ve never much been into the ‘cultural differences’ stuff – empathic communication and its breakdowns are my first love. And to tell you the truth, until last week I simply hadn’t been that interested in the topic.

The facts are that I like people from all over the place, I like traveling and I find different cultures, ways, foods, places etc. all fascinating. Full stop. I had of course failed to grasp how someone’s place of birth and the culture of their upbringing might impact on their interactions with other people other than because of differences in their accent, incomplete vocabulary and a quite natural suspicion of British food. A conversation last week has unearthed, for me, a more intriguing subtlety in this cultural difference malarkey.

I imagine that it is generally assumed (well, it was by me) that when a person, for whom English is not the mother tongue, sets out to express an opinion in conversation, any faltering on their part might be explained by a hole in their grammar or vocabulary and/or a misplaced unease about making themselves look daft by using the wrong phrase. According to the one person with whom I have had my only proper conversation about all this (not a large sample I grant you – bear with me) what invariably holds him back from expressing himself more transparently can more accurately be described as a strong dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of the second language and not any lack of his grasp of it.

So, it is not embarrassment that ‘le mot juste’ is, at that moment, beyond his reach but a deep-seated conviction that people from the culture in which he is the visitor would not get to grips with the essence of what he was trying to express, no matter what words he chose. He finds himself thinking: If I can’t get them to connect or empathize with this sentiment then I would prefer to leave the whole thing out. This barrier to expression therefore is not about a hole in idiomatic sharing as much as wider gap in cultural reference points such as what is funny, familiar or foul. The problem is only compounded when a person speaking their second language is skillful to the point that their colleagues believe that none of these problems exist. In such instances, it is possible that untimely failures to speak up might be misinterpreted as examples of ‘not joining in’ and therefore as signs of aloofness.

The conversation last week also shed light on something closer to home. I gave up speaking Italian to our first daughter, Vianne, after more than a year of persevering. I found that I was simply unable to express the subtleties of my feelings for her during the day-to-day ups and downs in a way that did justice to what was going on in my head – and heart. Although I had done my three Rs in Italian, and had been fluent in both English and Italian from first words, I was starting to feel cut off from Vianne. I should not have been surprised. I had, after all, only really been exposed to parent-child language in English and had thus acquired the subtleties of my own parenting vocabulary in that language rather than in Italian.

It seems that linguistic proficiency is only one superficial cultural bridge. The invisibility of other barriers should make us more wary about jumping to negative conclusions about the social faults that we find in acquaintances from other cultures. However, a question remains: In future, will I be quick enough to notice my lack of cultural empathy before they do?

PS. Thanks again to Robert for his excellent cartoon strip. www.robertthompsoncartoons.com

What would you do next?

She’s done it again. The Marketing Director, Jane Shaw has just taken credit for another one of your ideas. It first happened soon after you arrived in your post as Head of Sales.  On that occasion you decided to take it as a compliment, a way of currying favour with your new boss and an opportunity to build up brownie points with someone who would probably turn out to be your ally for the radical agenda that you were hired to execute on – to increase individual client spend. But in the last nine months it has happened again and again. Today it was during a Board meeting when she essentially trotted out the outline of an idea that you had floated past her just a couple of days before as part of a strategy for achieving your objectives. Having said that, there was no denying that Jane sounded incredibly plausible and actually added usefully to the idea with her own input – she really knew how to get John on Board!

Would you…?

Would you confront her with an assertive statement ? Would you let it go and just have more good ideas? Would you communicate empathy with her position as a Marketing Director under pressure? Or would you stop telling her your ideas and go to the MD first? There is certainly more than one right answer – each of us can carry different things off by force of personality, choice of words and by moral conviction.

Different strategies carry different levels of short and long term risk. What would you do next? Let me know with a reply or go to www.originalsoftskills.com for some options and the answer.