If our concerns and contributions are to be heard as we would wish, and if we are to understand what others are trying to say to us, we need to take care in how we speak and listen.
This latest blog comes from guest contributor, Dr Silke Paulmann, who is Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex and an expert on the ‘non-verbal’ aspects of the human voice and the vital part they play in communications.
How my confusion helped me to see the value of choosing my words carefully.
We all do it…
We ask a question when, in our heads, we have something else we want to say.
“What do you think about that new restaurant down the road?” I ask my husband.
In VoicePrint terms, a simple, open-ended inquiry you might think.
My husband, wise to the ways of the world (and, in particular, those of his wife) knows better than to fall for it.
“That’s not a question” he states using the voice of Challenge “what you really want to say is ‘I’d like to go to that new restaurant down the road’”.
And he’s right. Add mind reading to his already long list of accomplishments…
This is the latest in our series of blogs about helping young people to find the voices they need. It takes the form of an interview with Junaid Hameed, a school student and alumnus of the English-Speaking Union’s public speaking programmes. It shows how teaching oracy skills can develop the range and impact of a young person’s VoicePrint profile.
It’s an inevitable by-product of sub-dividing effort. Splitting work into different functions, departments and roles creates differences of priority, attention and concern. It not only produces unintended barriers to the flow of communication, but also real inter-personal tensions and active differences of opinion, arguments and conflicts that need to be recognised and resolved.
The other reason why all organisations have a problem with communications is that individuals differ enormously in how they go about these things. While there is only a limited number of different ‘voices’ – or modes of expression – that we can use (VoicePrint identifies nine useful voices and a further nine dysfunctional ones), individuals tend to draw on them selectively and then exhibit many, many different ways of deploying the particular ones that they prefer to use. The result is that we often talk at crossed purposes.
Yes, I know. There’s been a surge of interest in internal communication in the last couple of decades. There are now around 50,000 people in the UK alone involved in developing employee communication. Employee attitude surveys are commonplace whereas they hardly existed until the early 1990s. A new vocabulary has emerged encouraging managers to think in terms of ‘internal marketing’, ‘aligning’ employees with Mission and Vision statements, ‘empowering’ them and most recently ‘engaging’ them. But the fact is much of this internal communication directed at employees has been a lightly disguised form of progaganda.
Do occupational roles have distinctive voices, and, if so, what are they? We expect doctors in general medicine to use the Diagnose voice and barristers in legal practice to Advocate. We expect traffic wardens to Admonish and pharmacists to dispense Advice as well as remedies. So the intuitive answer is yes. But in many cases role definitions are less clear-cut than these. What voices are involved in those cases? And what empirical evidence is there to identify specific voices with particular roles?
