Communication In A Work Environment Calls For A Balance Between Professional Formality And Basic Sincerity.
By Thomas J. Roach
“Be Yourself,” is good advice, but it is an odd expression. Logically, if someone encourages you to be yourself it is because they think you are being phony. On the other hand, if you are advised to be yourself, the implication is that who you really are is preferable to who pretend to be, so it is also a compliment.
Communication in a work environment calls for a balance between professional formality and basic sincerity. When we communicate with coworkers we have multiple objectives. We want to be understood, to persuade, and to build and maintain good relationships. Put another way, we don’t want to be ineffective, off-putting, or to embarrass ourselves. The trick is to be formal but not overdo it and be too formal, or worse, be phony.
Using rhetorical skills to make what you say more clear, interesting, or memorable isn’t phony, it’s just being an effective communicator. Choosing words to impress others and to give the appearance of expertise that you don’t possess is being phony and the effect is opposite of what is intended.
Aristotle
Teachers of rhetoric have always recognized that audiences are highly sensitive to the character of speakers and that the main measure of character is honesty. Aristotle observed that most of human communication is about things that we cannot prove, so our trustworthiness is more persuasive than the arguments we make. In other words, being sincere is more important than being smart.
Early in my career I helped a CEO write a quarterly letter to employees. He wanted me to help him articulate his goals for open communication, participative decision-making and customer satisfaction. I had an additional objective – he was a role model and a natural leader, and I wanted our employees to get to know him.
When he spoke, he used everyday expressions like “by golly,” and “the world is our oyster,” and I decided to include them in one of our letters. He initially thought the first draft was fine, but when he passed it out in a meeting with corporate vice-presidents, they told him the language was undignified.
At our next meeting he asked me to remove the informal language and replace it with more important sounding words that had been suggested at the meeting. I made a few changes, but I convinced him to let me leave in most of his colloquialisms. The day we sent the final draft to the printer he said, “I hope you know what you are doing; everyone who read this told me not to send it out.”
Unexpected Result
He wasn’t the first employer to tell me “I hope you know what you are doing,” but as the days went by and I hadn’t heard from him I couldn’t help wondering if my job was in jeopardy this time. Then he came to my office at the end of the day on a Friday.
He didn’t fire me. He said that something new and unexpected was happening. Employees were writing him back. He quoted some of the comments from the letters and saved the best one for last. He said one letter didn’t even come from an employee. A woman wrote and said she didn’t work for us, but she read her husband’s letter, and she wished she worked for a company that had leaders like him.
By definition, all human communication is subjective. Technically then, whether we want to or not, we can’t help but be ourselves. And the people we communicate with, eventually they can’t help seeing us for who we are.
Two key questions for everyone: who do you think you are and who are you really? If you can get comfortable with the answer to the second question, you can communicate more freely and, most importantly, more sincerely. After all, the best way to sound assiduous, compassionate and unaffected is to be hardworking, kind and sincere.
Thomas J. Roach Ph.D., has 30 years experience in communication as a journalist, media coordinator, communication director and consultant. He has taught at Purdue University Northwest since 1987, and is the author of “An Interviewing Rhetoric.” He can be reached at [email protected].