14 wnt. book review (1), "Talking from 9 to 5", Deborah Tannen

People talk, listen, understand and react differently, depending on their habitual “Style of Communication”. Without awareness of these differences, we may tend to make judgments and classify people.

This book is really “earth shattering” about developing understanding, collaboration and cohesion.  Tannen, (78) has written about a dozen books on communication styles.  This one is about the work setting, but I think it contains all of her expertise.

I will do a series of posts on this one book.

People have different conversational styles, influenced by the part of the country they grew up in, their ethnic backgrounds and those of their parents, their age, class, and GENDER. But conversational style is invisible. Unaware that these and other aspects of our back-grounds influence our ways of talking, listening and understanding. We think we are simply saying what we mean.

Gender is only one of many influences on conversational style, but this one tendency becomes quite evident.

The reason ways of talking, like other ways of conducting our daily lives, come to seem natural is that the behaviors that make up our lives are ritualized. We do them over and over again.  Indeed, the “ritual” character of interaction is at the heart of this theory. Having grown up in a particular culture, we learn to do things in the way the people we encounter do them, so the vast majority of our decisions about how to speak become automatic.

In the workings of conversational style, we’re explaining the ritual nature of conversation and the confusion that arises when rituals are not shared on the two sides of communication, and therefore not recognized as such.

There is something called “one-up” or “one-down”, which is about “loss of face” or stature.  This is more important in some styles, than in others.  If both sides are non-confrontational, that is, not worrying, and matching with a “play of one-down”, then nobody really gets put down, and a greater connection, and perhaps a greater collaboration may ensue.  That is how many women play the game.

Conversational rituals common among men often involve using opposition such as banter, joking, teasing, and playful put-downs, and expending effort to avoid the one-down position in the interaction. Conversational rituals common among women are often ways of maintaining an appearance of equality, taking into account the effect of the exchange on the other person, and expending effort to downplay the speaker’s authority, so they can get the job done through connection, but without flexing their authority muscles in an obvious way.

When women use conversational strategies designed to avoid appearing boastful and to take the other person’s feelings into account, they may be seen as less confident and competent than they really are.

Someone who takes a job, is entering a world that is already functioning, with its own characteristic style already in place. Although there are many influences such as regional background, the type of industry involved, whether it is a family business or a large corporation, in general, workplaces that have previously had men in positions of power have already established male-style interaction as the norm. In that sense, women, and others whose styles are different, are not starting out equal, but are at a disadvantage.

“Why don’t men like to stop and ask for directions?” Again and again, in the responses of audiences, talk-show hosts, letter writers, journalists, and conversationalists, this question seemed to crystallize the frustration many people had experienced in their own lives. And my explanation seems to have rung true: that men are more likely to be aware that asking for directions, or for any kind of help, puts them in a one-down position.  Of course there are other factors too, like the challenge of learning for yourself.  And people do give wrong directions.  Women will ask more questions than men, (one-down doesn’t bother them).

People have very different ways of reaching decisions, and none necessarily better than others. But when two people with different styles have to make decisions together, both styles may have worse results than either would have had, if those styles were shared, unless the differences are understood and accommodated.

Someone who expects negotiation to proceed from the inside and work its way out, hears a vague question as an invitation to consider and decide; someone who tends to negotiate from the outside-in hears a specific claim as a non-negotiable demand. In this sense, both styles are indirect—they both depend on an unspoken understanding of how the subsequent conversation is expected to go. This is a sense in which conversation is ritualized: It follows a preset sequencing scheme that seems self-evidently appropriate.

Is it only a few years before the women’s pay once again falls behind? This too can be a matter of ways of speaking, since anything you get, depends on your talking and communication ability.  This ability depends on syncing with those you are talking with, and their style of listening.  All of this is to say that results like the salary gap may come from a range of factors, including ways of speaking as well as preconceptions about women and men.

A superior in a large corporate setting may have to make a judgment in five minutes about issues the presenters have worked on for months. “I decide,” he explained, “based on how confident they seem. If they seem very confident, I call it a go. If they seem unsure, I figure it’s too risky and nix it.” 

You judge by a range of signs, including facial expression and body posture, but most of all, speech. Do they hesitate? Do they speak up or swallow half their words? Is their tone of voice declamatory or halting? Do they make bald statements? He is judging only from male conversational rituals.

Different people will talk very differently, not because of the absolute level of their confidence or lack of it, but because of their habitual ways of speaking. There are those who sound sure of themselves even when inside they’re not sure at all, and others who sound tentative even when they’re very sure indeed.  It would be better to make decisions based on the consistent results produced on projects, but there isn’t always time to intimately get to know everyone’s situation.

It seems that women are more likely to downplay their certainty, men more likely to downplay their doubts. From childhood, girls learn to temper what they say so as not to sound too aggressive—which means too certain. From the time they are little, most girls learn that sounding too sure of themselves will make them unpopular with their peers. Groups of girls, as researchers who have studied girls at play have found, will penalize and even ostracize a girl who seems too sure she’s right. Anthropologist Marjorie Harness Goodwin found that girls criticize other girls who stand out by-saying, “She thinks she’s cute,” or “She thinks she’s something.” Talking in ways that display self-confidence are not approved for girls.

By the time she gets through junior high school and puberty, chances are she will have learned to talk differently, a transformation—and loss of confidence that white middle-class American girls experience at that stage of their lives, according to a great deal of current research. But it is crucial to bear in mind that ways of talking are not literal representations of mental states, and refraining from boasting may not reveal a true lack of confidence.

Their lower predictions evidenced not lack of confidence but reluctance to reveal the level of confidence they felt. The first of some ingenious experiments dramatizes that the social inhibition against seeming to boast can make women appear less confident than they really are. And the second study shows that part of the reason many women censor themselves from proclaiming their confidence is that they are balancing their own interests with those of the person they are talking to. In other words, they modify their speech to take into account the impact of what they say on the other person’s feelings.

Many girls discover they get better results if they phrase their ideas as suggestions rather than orders, and if they give reasons for their suggestions in terms of the good of the group. But while these ways of talking make girls—and later women—more likable, they make women seem less competent and self-assured in the world of work. Standards of behavior applied to women are based on roles that do not include being boss.

Boys are expected to play by different rules, since the social organization of boys is different. Boys’ groups tend to be more obviously hierarchical: Someone is one-up, and someone is one-down.

Many boys learn to state their opinions in the strongest possible terms and find out if they’re wrong by seeing if others challenge them. These ways of talking translate into an impression of confidence.

Men who are not very aggressive are called “wimps,” whereas women who are not very aggressive are called “feminine.”

“You have such a gentle way of bringing about radical change that people don’t realize what’s happening—or don’t get threatened by it.” This was a compliment, but it also hinted at the downside of the woman’s gentle touch: Although it made it possible for her to be effective in instituting the changes she envisioned, her unobtrusive style ensured a lack of recognition. If people don’t realize what’s happening, they won’t give her credit for what she has accomplished.

Quote:

I repeatedly noticed that Carol performed stereo typically female behavior (she cocked her head, filled the air with social chatter, and, above all, she smiled), while Willie played the stereo typically male part (he was strong, detached, and accumulated facts to impress people). So, it struck me as amusing, but also troubling, when I read in Williams’s memoir that it was Willie who went for job interviews but Carol who held down jobs.

(I think this was a couple that had a joint business.)

.

Jules Massenet 1842 - 1912

.