Communication: A Pocket Oracle for Leaders

By Lee Thayer

"This splendid little “pocket” book will tell all of you leaders (“oracle”-style) what you need to know about communication to enhance your everyday performance and thus enable your success. In 53 succinct chapters, this pocket oracle sets forth the basic issues you absolutely need to understand from a highly pragmatic point of view. It is not derived from theories but from the author’s 45+ years as a CEO coach and consultant.

What the author shares with you is what he has learned over all of those years, thousands of presentations, and being “in the trenches” with his client CEOs to partner with them in making thoroughly competent or high performance organizations. He worked with them through the implementation, where 95% of success comes from.

You will want to keep this oracle handy, and refer to it often. Some of the distilled wisdom contained here is counter-intuitive. That’s because it is based on the realities and not on platitudes about communication.

The key is how you talk to yourself. It is also about how you need to interpret the world in terms of your cause and your organization’s mission. On a day-to-day basis, this book is about how to succeed personally if you are the leader. There is nothing more basic and more crucial for your success than the communication that occurs daily in your office, in the hallways, in your head, or in front of customers.

It will become your daily guidebook for understanding this most problematic of every leader’s life. It may take you where you have never gone before. But where you need to go in your thinking and doing."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465306654

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011960987

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-0664-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-0663-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-0665-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

104576

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1. The Cost of Communication

2. Questions Propel, Statements Retard

3. Shallow Questions, Shallow Worlds

4. Who’s Responsible?

5. Information Does Not = Communication

6. Don’t Think Out Loud

7. Say What You Mean

8. Mean What You Say

9. Disambiguating

10. Need to Know

11. Optimize Return on Attention

12. Beware of Right vs. Wrong

13. Don’t Get into Other People’s Heads

14. Competence and Organizational Health

15. Create Compelling Drama

16. Competence and Communication

17. Mapping and Framing

18. Effective Communication Requires De-Centering

19. Avoid Politicizing

20. Make Your Decisions Seem Inevitable

21. Activities vs. Accomplishments

22. Outfit Your Lexicon

23. Be Cliché-Aversive

24. Learning vs. Knowing

25. Underwriting Performance: Code of Conduct

26. Be the Composer and Arranger

27. Your and Others’ Expectations

28. Advice: Getting and Giving

29. The Logistics of Intelligence

30. Mentoring

31. Opinions: Neither Defend nor Attack

32. Compliments and Criticisms

33. Your Inner Voice

34. Process vs. Consequences

35. You Are Not Omniscient

36. Don’t Be Rational unless That Is Your Strategy

37. Your Attitude toward Work

38. You Must Be Seductive

39. Communication Requires No Sender or Intention

40. Leadership, Like Life, Is a Performing Art

41. Do Not Over-Analyze Problems

42. Navigate by Your Cause

43. Be Skeptical of What You Know

44. Manage Meanings

45. Do Not Follow the Fashions

46. Imagine Strategically

47. Create Yourself in Private

48. Don’t Trust Your Experience

49. Get Better Every Day

50. Your Organization Will Make You Successful – or Not

51. Be Your Own Devil’s Advocate

52. De-Politicize at Every Opportunity

53. Be the Communication Exemplar

An Afterword: About the Book and the Author

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of the great minds of history I have encountered in my intellectual expeditions for so fruitfully infecting my own thinking about this most basic human subject.

I am grateful to those people along the way who have either encouraged me in my persistence about this subject, or criticized me for not being more accessible in my approach.

I am grateful to all of those fellow-travelers who have loved me or hated me. Both are invaluable. One dulls, one sharpens one’s wits.

Most importantly, I am grateful to those whose lives and efforts may have been enhanced as a result of having come across my work in print, or otherwise. Everything else pales alongside that reward.

Any achievement requires the unheralded contributions of other people, living or dead, intentional or serendipitous. I have been fortunate to have known personally people of stunning intellectual prowess.

I have had remarkably stimulating conversations in my own mind with thinkers who have preceded me by centuries, if not millennia. I have had superlative mentors and teachers—who whacked me on the head when I needed it, or simply let me stew in the silence of trying to figure it out for myself.

For all of them, I am grateful. They persistently urged me to do better. One can’t do better. It is not an act of will. It is the result of growing competence. That takes smarts. It takes time. It requires the development of mind and skills.

So one can attempt to get better by knowing how. That’s the party I invite you to.

I struggle with what I have learned, and how to express it. If any of it makes a difference to you—the reader—even a bit, that would be my reward.

It has been a great ride, KT. Thank you.

Caveat

What follows is a little different. When the oracle speaks, listen… .

Never mind what seems repetitive. What’s worth learning is worth learning more than once.

1.  The Cost of Communication

First, let’s crunch some numbers.

There is no way to verify these numbers with much accuracy, except by direct experience.

Few organizations actually calculate the costs of communication. But the communication costs for a typical organization range from 40% to 60% of the total costs of running that organization.

The cost of communication in some organizations may be 95% of the total. In others, it might be 15%.

Conversations are an expense item. So are meetings. So are telephone calls. So are emails. So is surfing the web. So is answering an RFQ. So is socializing.

Organizations may expense their Customer Service. But they usually don’t track the cost of the error that may have led to the need for Customer Service in the first place. They do not track the opportunity costs of communication: If you are talking on your cell phone to X, you can’t be talking to Y on your cell phone at the same time.

People who are reading certain documents cannot at the same time be reading other documents. And the latter may offer far more payoff.

The lesson is this: The cost of communication in most organizations is the single largest cost of running that organization.

A client of mine and I invented what we called the Meeting Minder. What it tracked was the aggregate cost of all of the meeting participants—minute by minute. It worked somewhat like a taxi meter.

It put in front of everyone the cumulating cost of the meeting. This made the participants sensitive to the return on the investment. They ended up having fewer and shorter meeting. Assuming the ROI was the same (it was actually higher), the cost savings created a larger margin.

So the second lesson is this: What you don’t measure won’t be counted. And throughout this book it is a matter of counting what counts rather than what is conventionally counted. If you don’t count the cost of communication, you are missing the major source of hidden costs.

Meter the costs of all forms of communication in your organization to develop a communication ROI. Know by contribution what your overhead consists of.

2.  Questions Propel, Statements Retard

Whatever the situation, QUESTIONS propel, STATEMENTS retard.

If you are thinking about something, you will make better progress toward your conclusions by asking questions of yourself rather than telling yourself what to do.

The same is true of other people. It is questions that engage people and compel their attention. Questions provoke movement. Statements recycle thinking to a status quo.

Not just any