The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [75]
In business, these issues are further complicated by a basic tension. Each worker, from CEO to envelope stuffer, faces a dual requirement: to be himself and to play his part to get the job done. If the personal and the professional conflict, there can be drama.
➺ Rule two: Artful shoptalk mediates emotion, information, and power
One solution might be to copy what a best-selling author told me she did to survive speaking engagements: “I put on a rubber head.” But nine to five, a smiling mask chafes, and phoniness is repellent. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t put up a front. Substituting “if ” for an optimistic “when” levers deals. Certainly, without the chutzpah—i.e., fibs—of Tim Smit, cofounder of the Eden Project, regarding other backers’ “firm commitments,” Cornwall’s wildly popular botanical showcase would have remained a fantasy.
Every worker should strive for something beyond balancing personal and professional. To excel means harnessing emotion, severing personal from professional concerns yet building relationships; heating discussion without searing pride or hazing priorities; and communicating clearly, without talking down, or over heads.
Oh, and ideally, all contacts should be personal, as Dee Dee Myers, ex-press secretary to Bill Clinton, advised West Wing actress Allison Janney:
Your relationships aren’t determined by the boundaries of your job. It’s by who likes you.
Face-to-face cements connections that ten thousand emails cannot. Sadly for party-phobes, research has found that newcomers who attend even just one corporate social in their first eight months feel greater attachment to a company than those who don’t. Not that they identify paintballing or pub quizzes as the cause: The binding is subliminal.
In the end, said agent Mark McCormack, people buy from a friend. To succeed, treating colleagues and clients like one is the place to start.
What about creative tension? I’ve worked in companies that set employees at each other in survival contests that rewarded the fittest at politicking (not necessarily those fittest at their tasks). Sure it was chatty, but cost-effective? Backbiting ate time and morale.
This may seem to support the line used by vending-machine salesmen in the 1960s to convince factory owners that canteens carried a hidden cost: camaraderie—staff talking, griping, forming loyal bands able to mobilize and strike. But it can be costlier if employees don’t talk.
A business is, in effect, its workers’ acts, and the knowledge driving them is a capital asset—and a liability if underdeveloped, or if it leaks. Photocopy company Xerox found this out in the 1970s when engineers and scientists, who saw each other as “toner heads” and arrogant dweebs, stopped talking, and upper echelons failed to appreciate the scientists’ ideas. But corporate outsider Steve Jobs spoke the scientists’ language, saw a chance, and licensed their innovations. Apple Computer ripened them to bear glorious fruit.
Miscommunication lost Xerox the PC. But just gossip is hugely valuable. So much of twenty-first-century activity is obscure or shrouded in jargon (specialization being one of conversation’s arch foes) that sharing with others who get what we’re on about is a huge boon. The hardest-hearted manager should appreciate, as Socrates did, that dialogue percolates knowledge, and the stories shared in breaks, handily sorted by cause and effect, dole out user-friendly training on a coffee spoon.
Since Steve Jobs’s giant leap, globalization has accelerated competition and adaptive “learning organizations” like Toyota thrive. Smart businesses see employees as their nerves, and seek to unlock the cutting-edge know-how in their fingers and put it to work. But wherever we toil, however unenlightened its communications