17 wnt. Book review (4), “Talking from 9 to 5, Deborah Tannen
I have thought that Deborah Tannen’s work on linguistics is a way to open to other people’s style of talking and communication. This is the last segment.
We tend to like our own style, and therefore feel that those that don’t match-up to our way of talking, are somehow deficient. If they talk softly, we may read-in that they are not confident. If they monopolize talking over listening, we might think they are proving themselves superior. If they have a “machine-gun style” with no pauses, they live in the past, and already have everything figured out.
But you don’t have to take it personal. This is just the style they developed, and it suited them in the formative parts of their life. Still, their message is “in-there” somewhere, if you listen and can ferret it out. At some time, you might also “meta-communicate”, that is talk about talking styles. But it is not necessary that one or the other change or adopt someone else’s style.
Men and women in every society had/have different roles with different expectations. Speaking styles grew out of fulfilling those roles. Therefore, it is somewhat obvious that the genders will have certain tendencies in speaking. It is not a binary, nor it is insurmountable. Conversational style is made up of habits with regard to pacing and pausing, indirectness, use of questions, apologizing, and so on. I would say the tendency is that a certain style “feels better”, feels more natural to each person. Knowing the patterns makes it possible to understand others as well as yourself, and to be flexible in your style. The best style is one that is flexible. Tendencies should not be mistaken for norms.
This flexibility is a way to mirror other people’s energy level and the load carrying capacity of their words. (I attempt it often with a new encounter, it’s fun, but not guaranteed that I can get through to a deeper rapport.) This is the same with soft-spoken people, as it is with the boisterous crowd.
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This is the fourth and last of my reviews on Tannen. You might want to go back and read them as a whole. Or if you would like to read the book for yourself, please take my copy.
In some of our previous articles I had written about strategies to manipulate other people, (or to win an argument). One that I mentioned is “I’m important” so I am busy right now. I had said that no one is “busy”, but that statement just refers to someone’s priorities. Evidentially, YOU are very low on the priority. Well, that acknowledgement is one way to start a discussion.
1. I called him up; they are “in a meeting.” Do people at work spend all their time in meetings? Sometimes it seems that way, to those at work, as well as to those who are trying to reach them by phone. One answer to the puzzle is that the term is used freely to refer to any focused conversation that has a specific agenda, especially but not only if it has been set up in advance: “He’s in a meeting” can mean simply that he’s talking to someone in his office. Yet many people spend large portions of their work time in what we think of as typical meetings: Three or more gather around a table at an appointed time to discuss business matters that have been set forth in a previously determined agenda. “Too much time spent in meetings” was one of the most common sources of dissatisfaction with work that I heard. Although I have talked to people who say they like meetings, “especially if they are running them”, frustration with meetings is pervasive.
One conviction is that your time is being taken up without obvious results; another is the feeling that you are not being heard. In that sense, meetings are a pressure-cooker, a microcosm of the workplace: A diverse group of people, with their own ideas, comes together to get a job done. Not everyone’s ideas can be taken up, and individuals’ styles, and how their styles interact with the others, are as influential as the quality of the ideas themselves. Furthermore, in addition to getting the job done, people are getting credit (or not getting it) for their contributions to the outcome.
Many people (especially women) try to avoid seeming presumptuous by prefacing their statements with a disclaimer such as, “I don’t know if this will work, but... “or “You’ve probably already thought of this, but . . .” Linguist Charlotte Baker calls these self-protective openers “butter-finger-buts.” (Butterfingers is a saying in a girl’s game, if you drop something, but you say “butterfingers” quickly enough, you don’t lose points; in Hopscotch).
We made tape recordings of seven university faculty meetings and found that, with one exception, the men spoke more often and, without exception, spoke longer. The men’s turns ranged from 10.66 to 17.07 seconds, the women’s from 3 to 10 seconds. The longest contribution by a woman was still shorter than the shortest contribution by a man.
All but one of the five women used an “attenuated/personal” voice: “I am intrigued by your comment.. . Could you say a bit more?” The tone adopted by the men who dominated the discussion was assertive (“It is obvious that. . .”; “Note that. . .”). All these aspects of how one speaks at a meeting mean that when two people say “the same thing,” they probably say it very differently.
They may speak with or without a disclaimer, loudly or softly, in a self-deprecating or declamatory way, briefly or at length, and tentatively or with apparent certainty. They may initiate ideas or support or argue against ideas raised by others. When dissenting, they may adopt a conciliatory tone, mitigating the disagreement, or an adversarial one, emphasizing it.
How we speak is inextricable from who we think we are. Not everyone is eager to undergo a personality-change operation. People tend to equate assertiveness with confidence.
2. In her 1990 summary, Maccoby explains that her earlier conclusion that there are few or no significant sex differences was based on the testing of individual performance in such areas as mathematical and verbal ability. But subsequent research (her own and others’) has shown that significant sex differences do emerge when children are observed interacting with other children rather than being individually tested. In other words, boys and girls, or women and men, have quite similar individual abilities, but they tend to have somewhat different characteristic styles of interacting, and these style differences often put females at a disadvantage in interaction with males.
Second, and this is the point that is crucial for women’s participation at meetings: Starting as children; “girls find it difficult to influence boys.”
This does not mean women cannot get heard; it just means that they start out with a handicap that may be more easily overcome if it is understood. Women—or anyone who feels ignored—may push themselves not to utter disclaimers: Just jump in and state an idea without worrying about how important it is or whether anyone else has thought of it before. They may practice speaking louder and at greater length, resisting the impulse to let their intonation rise at the end—an intonational pattern often used by women to show considerateness and invite response, but often interpreted as a sign of uncertainty and insecurity.
Those who will take a position and refuse to budge, regardless of the persuasive power or intensity of feeling among others, are far more likely to get their way. This attitude may result from approaching the situation as a win-lose prospect: If your position prevails, you win; if you give ground, you lose—not only lose the argument but lose face, lose points, lose power. Those who feel strongly about a position but are inclined to back off in the face of intransigence or very strong feeling from others are much less likely to get their way. This attitude may result from a different approach to the meeting in the first place—for example, a feeling that “we are here to listen to each other’s positions and make the best decision,” or a different attitude toward conflict: “We must make peace by the end of the meeting and reach agreement; it would be too unpleasant to try to work together if we ended the meeting at loggerheads.”
3. Adding women to decision-making bodies does not always result in women’s points of view being equally represented. Processes similar to those of the law-review board take place daily in newspaper editorial meetings. Many newspapers have hired women writers in hopes of attracting more women readers. But the writers often end up writing articles that are indistinguishable from articles written by the men who were there before them, whereas the editors who hired them had hoped they would write stories of particular interest to women.
Does this “feel” like something that “grabs” me or not? If it is true that women and men (like other culturally diverse readers), have different interests in some regards, then the “gut” feelings of the white men might not be a good indicator of what will appeal to women (or African-American or Asian) readers. If women editors realize they are not rewarded for bringing different perspectives to the table, they begin suggesting story ideas they know male editors will like.
4. When people talk to each other in offices, meeting rooms, and the corridors of power, running a meeting in an unstructured way seems to give equal opportunity to all. But in practice, conversational-style differences result in unequal opportunity. Those who feel they should get others’ agreement before taking the floor, back off when interrupted, and minimize the talking space they monopolize —or those who’s culturally learned rhythms are simply different—end up speaking less.
Like everything else that happens in interaction, it is the doing of two people, not one. For an interruption to occur, one person has to start speaking and another has to stop.
One group leader reporting to the whole class said, “when I tell the class about our small-group discussion, I feel like an abstraction.” I love this description of the alienation of speaking to a large, faceless crowd, not knowing how they are responding—and how different it is from speaking in the small group, in which this young man said he felt quite comfortable. And it is interesting to me that even though he ended up being the one to address the group, he did not feel comfortable doing it.
This suggests that it is not only the fact that an idea is picked up by a man that makes it listened to, but simply the fact that it is picked up at all. If a number of individuals agree to pick up and repeat each other’s ideas at meetings, they may be able to increase the impact of all their contributions.
5. Differing styles as, “report talk” versus “rapport talk.”
The skills girls are more likely to have learned, such as linking one’s comments to those of others, waiting to be recognized rather than speaking out, making suggestions rather than demands, supporting others’ remarks rather than making all one’s comments sound original, are very constructive when everyone at the meeting is observing those rituals.
[I am using the term “ritual” rather loosely to capture the automatic, non-literal, conventionalized nature of conversational language. There are, of course, a number of different levels on which this operates. Technically, a “ritual” per se is a symbolic means of accomplishing a social act.]
Discussing how people feel about their participation in meetings can raise everyone’s awareness and make it easier for some individuals to speak up, for others to speak less, and for the person running the meeting to elicit participation from some who otherwise might not say what is on their minds. These different ethics of participation are opaque to others, so those who speak freely assume that those who remain silent have nothing to say, and those who are reining-in themselves assume that the big talkers are selfish and hoggish. It may come as a surprise to some that quiet group members have something to say, and it may come as a surprise to others that the big talkers want to hear what they have to say.
One strategy would be for quiet people to change their styles, becoming more aggressive about talking up their own ideas. This will work for some. But it may be unpleasant to others and may go against their notions of being a good team member—or a good person. And the results will not always be positive. The most important point is for managers to become skilled at observing group process and noticing the role that each group member takes. It is their job to notice, as in fact the leader of the focus group I discussed did, that the ideas that found their way into the report originated with one employee and were picked up by another.
Another possibility is for those who lead meetings to devote a portion of the meeting to going around the table and inviting all those present to express their thoughts in turn. Maybe the first to say something will inhibit the following from saying something similar. A way to correct for that would be to invite individuals to submit their opinions in writing either before or at the meeting, so they will not be unduly influenced by what others say before their turn comes.
The realization that when people come together and talk to each other in groups, the results are influenced as much by the workings of conversational styles, as by the power of the ideas they bring to the table.
6. Ways of talking do not in themselves have positive or negative value. Struggling to maintain the one-up position can work fine when everyone in the conversation is doing it, just as expending effort to maintain a conventionalized appearance of equality can work fine when everyone is doing that. But problems arise when peoples’ styles differ. And styles characteristic of many women put the speaker in a one-down position in conversations with those who have styles characteristic of men—especially in a work setting, where everyone is continually laboring under scrutiny, their performance and competence subject to judgment. Not boasting, not making an effort to hide your errors or ignorance, engaging in rituals where you seem to take blame even when it is not deserved, all work against the speaker when others in the same context are not observing the same rituals.
We tend to see our own behavior as reactive: “I don’t like John, so I’m curt with him; I like Jim, so I’ll do anything for him.” But we tend to see others as absolute: “John is a difficult person; Jim is a sweetheart.” If we look for explanations, we tend to look for them in psychological makeup or background: “He has a chip on his shoulder,” “She’s difficult,” “He’s an unhappy person; maybe it’s because his father died when he was young.” We rarely think that the behavior we don’t like in others may be a reaction to something we ourselves said or did. But this can be the case. It is always reasonable to try talking differently, though this is by no means simple. It will have to change something—and, who knows, the reaction you get may be different and more to your liking.
We must be careful of psychological explanations, especially those that accuse women of being insecure and men of being arrogant. These are stereotypes that grow out of the characteristic ways women and men are expected to speak; overdoing it just a little bit, or doing it with others who do not share the style, can lead to those impressions. And learning to understand those rituals will make it easier to understand the results that occur when the rituals others are following are not those you instinctively understand.
A man who worked closely with a woman was put off by her desire to tell him about problems she was having with other people at the company, and problems others were having with each other. He felt this was “gossip,” and he wanted no part of it. To both these speakers, and to all of us, ways of speaking are ways of being a good person—or a bad one. People perceive their ways of talking to be who they are.
7. “You’re generalizing” is heard as a serious criticism. Anything that absolute would not be the object of study; it would be self-evident. A strong finding might be 60% versus 40%. So of course, there will be exceptions to the patterns observed. But that doesn’t mean the generalized description is useless. If you do a study that finds women are more likely than men to make suggestions rather than give orders, you risk being accused of reinforcing stereotypes of women as manipulative and of men as bullies.
More commonly, research uncovers patterns of behavior that have contributed to a stereotype and helps us understand the behavior (for example, indirectness)—and eventually dispel the stereotype (for example, that women are manipulative). It’s necessary to understand the cultural patterns that influence our ways of speaking. Not talking about them doesn’t make the stereotypes go away. It just gives them freer rein to affect our lives and robs us of the understanding necessary to change them.
But what is power? The ability to influence others, to be listened to, to get your way rather than having to do what others want. How you talk creates power, both by gaining influence within the role you have, ensuring that you are given the responsibility to make decisions, and earning promotions to higher levels of institutional power. But no matter how high up you go, you have to maintain your position and credibility with others, and this means talking in ways that bolster rather than undercut your influence.
Summary
I am busy Equal abilities might not transmit equally through diverse speaking styles Genders might move toward the opposite position, if that is the dominant culture Structured or unstructured, which gives equal expression Talk to report on the issue, or also talk for rapport in discussing the issure No sense to make a value judgment on the basis of style Drawing a trend, generalizing
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8. Much of the research for this book was done while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. Here’s some books and articles by Tannen.
Tannen, Deborah. 1979. “What’s in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations.” New Directions in Discourse Processing, ed. by Roy O. Freedle, 137-81. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Reprinted in Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 14-56. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Tannen, Deborah. 1982. “Ethnic Style in Male- Female Conversation.” Language and Social Identity, ed. by John Gumperz, 217- 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted in Gender and Discourse,175-94. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1984. Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, Deborah. 1986. That’s Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others. New York: William Morrow, Ballantine. Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow, Ballantine. Tannen, Deborah (ed). 1993. Framing in Discourse. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah, and Christina Kakava. 1992. “Power and Solidarity in Modern Greek Conversation: Disagreeing to Agree.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10:1.11- 34. Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat. 1987. “Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview.” Social Psychology Quarterly 50:2.205-16. Reprinted in Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 57-76. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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Ernesto Koehler 1849 - 1907
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