Published June 2002

Big thinkers, doers aren’t always big talkers

Many people have criticized President Bush for mangling the language when he speaks. In fact, the president often makes fun of himself for it — perhaps most famously during his appearance on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” where he admitted to thinking that some of their material was “offensible.” (Try that word out on your spellchecker.)

Most of the criticism has been good-natured fun, though there was an organized effort during the presidential election campaign to use his language mangling as evidence that he lacked the qualifications to be president. This effort continued in the first months of his presidency, but has dropped off dramatically since Sept. 11.

From a management standpoint, what is interesting about the submergence of this criticism is that President Bush’s tendency to mess up words and sentences hasn’t really changed, but our perception of him, and how important his particular speech shortcoming really is, has been altered. Our entire framework of assessment has shifted. Before Sept. 11 we seemed to think that TV-style appearance and diction was important. Then, we realized that it was not.

Communication skills are important, especially in today’s world, but communication effectiveness does not always fit the same mold. And, as importantly, communication skills are an important part of leadership, but only a part.

As managers, it is very important that we remember this when we are interviewing job candidates, when we are evaluating a worker’s performance and when we are selecting someone for additional responsibilities. It is a natural tendency for us to overvalue language skills and to overestimate articulate people. And, equally naturally, we tend to underestimate, and sometimes even make fun of, people whose language skills are not up to our standards.

If you would like to get an idea of what it is like to be underestimated by way of a sudden, dramatic change in how people perceive you, it’s easy.

Imagine that you have been invited to participate in a dinner meeting to discuss a subject you know a lot about. But when you arrive, you find out that most of the other experts have just flown in from Europe and that the meeting is going to be conducted in German, which you cannot speak, read or write. It is as if someone put an electronic probe to your head and subtracted 90 percent of your IQ. There you are, a grown person whom everyone has to treat as if you were a preschooler — speaking very slowly, with explanatory gestures, using the simplest words of a child’s vocabulary.

While specific language capabilities are easy to spot, in the workplace, managers have to be aware of communication behavior as much as raw language skills.

There are very few experienced managers who have not struggled through a meeting where team members discussed and argued about a problem and finally hammered out a solution that no one was entirely happy with. There are also very few who haven’t had the experience of someone who said nothing at the meeting asking to speak with you later — and proposing exactly the right solution to the problem.

There are individuals who simply do not communicate or function well at meetings, and to get the best ideas for your company and build an effective team, you, as a manager, have to keep that in mind. Over time you may succeed in making these individuals more comfortable at meetings and increase their participation, but don’t count on it. And in the short run, you simply have to accept people’s communication behavior patterns for what they are.

As you observe interactions in the workplace you may also find that some workers tend to defer to others, and often it is because they believe they cannot express ideas as well as their co-workers can. As a manager, it is your responsibility to bring out the best in these individuals, and, fortunately, that is not always difficult. Many times all it takes is shifting some responsibilities around to convert someone making “don’t draw attention to yourself” contributions into a star performer.

In today’s global economy you will be working with brilliant, foreign-born engineers whose command of English is marginal. You will work with superb computer technicians who grew up right here in the USA but mangle their sentences so badly you can hardly understand them. And you will work with productive people who simply cannot deal with expressing their ideas in public. They are all counting on you, as their manager, to recognize their abilities and maximize their contributions. And when you do, it will make a star performer out of you, too.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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