CHAPTER 3

Honor Purpose and Identity

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1

Ecclesiastes reminds us that everything has a purpose, whether we realize it or not. Communication, especially business communication, intends to convey information that will help an organization and individuals perform their duties and hopefully prosper. Although most of us have encountered someone we swear communicates only to hear himself speak, that person too has a purpose for talking.

The problem here is that the purpose for many of us is buried. It’s covered up with all sorts of things we need to do and other thoughts. We often go through the motions, unaware of why we are really communicating. Remember the first day of the third grade, when your teacher had you write the infamous essay on how you spent your summer vacation? Many of us, clueless in our self-centeredness, thought the teacher wanted to know how each of us spent our summer days. In reality, the teacher’s purpose was to get us back in the groove of school, thinking in an organized and logical manner, and working with a subject we had plenty of knowledge of, so we could be prepared for another school year.

So often we just tootle along, sending emails or leaving voice messages, thinking our purpose was in the act of sending that email or leaving that voice message. Yet the purpose is usually much deeper. Those who take the time to look at the proverbial bigger picture see the details—and they see that the purpose is much more than just to complete an action.

Burke’s Pentad, a method of evaluating drama created by Kenneth Burke in 1945¹, offers the theory that things happen because of five elements: agent, act, scene, agency (or by what means), and purpose. How those elements are applied in a human action can vary; in the Halloween movies, for instance, the creepy scene and setting of October 31 supposedly move the agent to act as he does. When the rational part of the viewers is saying, “Why did she even open that door in the first place?” the intended message is that the scene was so powerful that the agent had no choice but to act as she did.

In other examples, however, the act chooses the agent. When the Germanwings airliner crashed in the French Alps in 2015, supposedly as the result of a suicide by the co-pilot, the only acceptable public spokesperson was Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr. Here, the agency—the means by which the co-pilot achieved his act—overshadowed the act itself, which then became so large that the only agent to handle the public communication had to be the CEO himself.

Often interpretations of the Pentad find that the purpose often lies in the agent. Yet purpose is rarely singular and surface. An organization, for instance, may have a strategy—a series of actions to be completed in various scenes by various agents. But that strategy came only after strategic thinking, which in itself could be possible only after deep critical thinking. Critical thinking, which is defined as thinking about the validity of our thinking, involves examination of our biases, our misperceptions, our distortions, and our blindness.

So we may send off a group email reminding people of a meeting the next day. Without due thought of our purpose, we may just look at it as “Yep, I told them when and where so I’m good” and hit Send. In this case, we as agent may give up our power as we act, in essence putting the email as one small bit of process that the scene—our busy day—demands, meeting the purpose of ticking off tasks on our to-do list.

But is the purpose just to remind them of the meeting? Why are we having the meeting anyway? Though many of us may feel our organizations meet just to meet, that’s not really the purpose. Is the meeting’s aim to decide on the next year’s budget? To solve a problem? In either of these situations, each of the various agents who attend this meeting will have his or her own view of the scene, or his or her own agenda and belief of how the outcome should look. In crafting a reminder email, is the purpose also to remind others to bring supporting documentation with them? Or does your purpose include an unspoken reminder for all to leave their emotions at the door when the meeting commences?

To use an analogy, in Zen, a rose is still a rose, but it is also much more. Careful examination, or critical thought, of the rose allows you to see each petal, how it builds on its neighbors, is supported by a rather complicated combination of green parts (known as the sepal, the hypanthium, and the receptacle) that allows the beauty of the rose to happen. Close examination allows you to see all parts, even the small gold parts in its center (the anther and filament) that will help create this rose’s progeny. A more panoramic but still detailed view of all these parts will show you the rose as a whole, with its gradations and flaws and what needs to be fixed for a more perfect rose.

Seeing all the parts of that meeting reminder, from the view of each player who will attend the meeting, will allow you to see who also may need to be there and hasn’t been asked. It will allow you to create your communication in words most likely to bring the results you want. And it may show you that the email—the agency—isn’t the best way to achieve an agreement on the budget. Maybe you need to make a call to each attendee, or visit invitees in person to remind them of the meeting. Understanding the purpose in its entirety will determine the act as well as the agency, not the other way around.

And maybe you aren’t the best person to send the email. Would the scene and acts be more down to business if the email came from someone with more authority than you? Less authority? Only careful analysis of the purpose can tell you that.

In October 2013, when budget disagreements ground the U.S. government to a halt, five Congresswomen saw beyond their parties’ stated purpose of winning over their opponents and having their own acts approved. Stating later that while they were aware that members of both political parties saw their movements as threats to the states they served, these women saw that the real purpose of how they needed to act was to help the people the shutdown was hurting. The purpose of the government, they said, was not to be mired down in wrangling over who was right, but to provide for the people.

It takes a strong understanding of others around you to be able to realize that maybe what you’ve been told is the purpose really isn’t. And it takes a strong sense of personal identity to know when to act against a simplistic and deceptively stated purpose. It also takes a deep understanding of yourself to know whether, despite what appears to indicate you need to act, you really aren’t the right one to do something. Knowledge of yourself and your role in the greater scheme of the corporation isn’t employed best only in Burke’s Pentad; knowing who you are and the role you play in any communication can help ensure your communication makes the point you intend.

Who Are You Anyway?

Who are you? Ask most Americans that question and you will get an answer that goes somewhat like this one: “My name is Jane Smith and I am a manager at XYZ corporation.” If pushed a little further, we may add our parental or marital status; we may also add something we like to do.

But in answering this way, we are not only identifying mostly by what we do but identifying in a vacuum that is all about us. We’re not answering in how our lives are part of the whole that surrounds us. Unfortunately, most of us communicate in that identity. We may identify at one particular moment something such as “I am Jane Smith the manager of Joe White who has just lost us a great client.” What we may not recognize in this identification is that our emotions color how we see ourselves. Or that those emotions narrow our perspective to one small and often incorrect conclusion.

So Jane isn’t just a manager at XYZ corporation, who happens to be married, has two kids, and likes to play tennis. Jane as manager is the role model for those who report to her as well as for her children. She is the partner to her peers as they help the corporation achieve its mission. She is the mentor to those who report to her as well as perhaps to others in the organization. She is the one who has expert knowledge in a particular area that affects all employees. She is the face of the organization for clients and vendors she deals with directly; she is the face of her department to executives in her company. She is the decision-maker, the purchaser, the rewarder, the motivator, the demotivator, and often the barometer or one who sets the emotional and ethical culture for her department.

In other words, Jane is a lot more than her initial identification of herself. And when she takes a step back to see the larger view of that actual identity, how she communicates will change.

Every action has an opposite reaction, and those reactions can have consequences. If, for instance, Jane sees herself only as “I am Jane Smith the manager of Joe White who has just lost us a great client,” she may think about Joe in an angry manner and then communicate with him in a manner that reflects poorly not only on who she is but poorly on who she thinks he is. Joe may be a good employee who has made one bad move, but that doesn’t mean he is all bad. And that doesn’t mean that he needs to be treated poorly. The result of that treatment won’t be good for anyone, not even the client.

The technique for leaving out that emotion is pure Zen method: the negotiator acknowledges the emotion that is stirred in him by the circumstances and communications, but he does not act on it. He acknowledges it and analyzes not only why he feels the way he does but what consequences that emotion could have on his larger goal. And he then views that emotional reaction in a larger scope, seeing it as only a part of the whole scheme of the negotiation rather than the trigger for the negotiation’s next move.

This technique, often summed up as name it, claim it, and reframe it, allows him to see a bigger picture and a brighter goal. He becomes enlightened as to the long-term possibilities while his sense of self retreats to be equal to that of how he views the others in his negotiation.

If one presses Jane about who she wants to be, she may answer that she wants to be a good manager. She may say she wants to be the CFO as well; that depends on Jane herself. But implied in those terms, be they the adjective good or the position CFO, really what she means she wants to be is successful. Jane’s definition of being successful may mean highly paid, but unless she is really shallow the pay is only a portion of what she means. She most likely means she wants to understand as well as be understood, motivated, motivating, and happy. She wants to shine and be a leader and have purpose in her life and actions.

And by recognizing her larger identity and connectedness to all things, including that client that Joe presumably lost, she gains compassion. True wisdom is having compassion for all things, including one’s self—or as radio show Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keeler puts it, being kind to those who may deserve it the least. Compassion allows understanding.

And admit it: you don’t delete unopened emails from people you consider wise, do you?

The Dancing Icons, or What Image Do You Want
to Send?

A chief nursing officer of a large hospital in a large city tells the story of a nurse manager whose unawareness of her identity in the organization led to chaos and decreased patient care. This particular nurse manager was well educated and, although fairly young, had extensive professional experience in her field. Her department attracted highly trained specialized nurses, so when the CNO began noticing the significant turnover in this department, she at first attributed it to the nurses moving for pay increases. But when she also started noticing that the patient care scores were lower than expected in this department, she started wondering what was up and began conducting the exit interviews for this department herself, in person.

The first few interviews yielded nothing but the fact that the nurses who were leaving were guarded about their reasons for doing so. The third interviewee, however, was more than willing to discuss why she was leaving: she was tired of being talked to “like a piece of dirt” by a “spoiled child.” Moreover, she pulled out her smartphone and showed the CNO an email from the nurse manager to illustrate her point. The email read as follows:

I watched you work yesterday. You were too slow in getting the vitals and you were rude to the patient’s family. Fix this immediately or I will write you up.

The email was concluded by a series of smiley faces that were animated to dance. (I kid you not.)

When confronted by the CNO about this email, the nurse manager was surprised that the nurse had taken offense to it. “I was just giving her daily feedback,” she said; “that’s good managerial practice, according to training I’ve had. And she shouldn’t have taken it so seriously. I mean, that’s why I added the smiley faces: so she would know that this was a basic ‘here’s what you are doing’ email and that in general she was doing a good job.”

Indeed.

The issue here is that of the old saw about knowing all of the words but knowing nothing of the meaning. The nurse manager was right in that giving daily feedback is a best practice—but how one gives that feedback, as well as the intent of that feedback, is much more crucial in the long run for a department’s success than the actual point being discussed. The nurse manager didn’t look at the bigger scope of the goal or the scene in which she was communicating. She also surely didn’t think about what kind of image those dancing smiley faces would send to her employees. Even if she had written the perfect email to achieve her goals, her audience would see those dancing smiley faces as sarcastic or as coming from someone not to be taken seriously.

As Robert Tannenbaum² pointed out in 1958 in The Harvard Business Review, all leadership communication falls into one of four types: tell, sell, join, and consult. Tannebaum, and Mary Munter (1992)³ after him, explain that you tell when you are in complete command of the information. You sell when you want to persuade others that your ideas are valid. You join when you connect your ideas to those of another person to build something larger than the ideas that each of you has on your own. And you consult when you offer insight or experience on a subject or an action.

Usually, the tell approach is the least effective, yet it is the one used most often by poor or inexperienced managers. These novices usually operate in the I mode: they think, I know the information, and I know what I want to say, so I am in control of the information, so I can tell my audience what I want them to know. Do you hear the fallacy in thought here?

In I mode, you’ve narrowed the scope of how you view the situation, setting yourself up to be blind to other possibilities and information that may pertain to the situation: Very rarely do we know everything in a situation enough to say we are in complete command of the information. Moreover, you’re not in complete control of the information even though you may know all aspects of the situation. In 99 percent of all communication, you are not the only one involved. Therefore, someone else exists in this exchange—and you don’t have control over how that person will process or react to the information.

You can walk into a crowded movie theater and yell Fire! and be pretty certain of how people will process and react to that communication.But without careful thought and audience analysis, using tell rarely works. Even grasping that reality, we fall into traps where we think we have control. We consider the audience, and then we write small scripts in our heads that convince us that our audience will react a certain way once we tell. The problem is that we don’t share those scripts. Therefore, other people rarely know their lines—they may not know how you see their roles, much less when you have determined they should appear on stage. So we start telling, thinking that we are gracious and generous and offering the products of our minds. And we wind up becoming Oz the Great and Terrible—the talking green head who pontificates like the speaker in T.S. Eliot`s Wasteland: I will tell you all; I shall tell you all—whether or not anyone wants to hear it.

Unfortunately, tell is the form that usually makes people resentful and often carries with it an unpleasant tone. It’s one-way speech, because the speaker wants no feedback or any input from the other person; the speaker just wants action from the listener, and it’d better be exactly the action we tell the listener to take.

In using tell, we become autocratic and querulous, and demanding without meaning to. And the result echoes another quote from the Wasteland: I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Remember that old joke about the Marines? When the sergeant says jump, your next move is to ask how high? And you don’t stop jumping until you are told to? Keep that image in mind; that’s tell.

Most of us, however, are not Marines, and except on the battle field, even the Corps was never that rigid. One of the major factors that built the Corps to be the few, the proud, and the brave is their respect for each other; the Corps is demanding and it holds its members to the highest standards of the U.S. military, but it does so by building some of the strongest bonds and loyalty in organizations today. Once a Marine, always a Marine; one never stops being a Marine, even after discharge—those bonds and loyalty remain.

Compare that with the fact that people job hop not nearly as much to earn more money as they do to get away from an unpleasant work environment; it’s said that people don’t leave a job—they leave a supervisor who treated them poorly. My guess is that part of that poor treatment is a constant use of tell that demoralizes even the most eager employee.

And those of us who feel entitled to use tell in most situations would do well to remember Newton’s Third Law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. Note that last part: those who hear tell when tell isn’t appropriate push back. Want something to change? Don’t tell someone to change. Whatever you want will fail due to the method of delivery. It will backfire on you.

Yet tell is effective in certain situations. For safety measures, as in the fire example, tell is the only way to fly. And in true emergencies, or in training for those emergencies, we want telling. But that’s pretty much it. Want better results? Try a different approach.

Getting people to accept the products of our minds is what most of us do all day long, even if we don’t work in sales. That’s why the second method works much better. It’s called selling. With this technique, you convince the other party that your message is appropriate. The late great William Buckley reportedly once said that all communication is persuasive in nature. Even in such a simple statement as, “it’s a pretty day outside” you sell the idea that the day is indeed pretty. Some may argue that asking another person how her day was is just conversation; but by asking, you are selling the idea that you care about the person and her answer.

However, when you sell, remember to sell benefits, not features. Just because the latest smartphone has a personal assistant and sixty innate apps doesn’t mean it will serve me; you can list the features and I will walk right on by. That’s telling, not selling. But if you persuade me of how that personal assistant can benefit me, and how those apps can make my life a bit easier, then those are benefits—and you have sold. You have persuaded me.

In other words, remember that the best thing you can do to send any kind of message is remember the “what’s in it for me?” approach for communicating with the audience. (We’ll delve more deeply into this approach in a later chapter.)

The third type of communication is called joining. You use this technique when you need people to work with you according to your point of view. This technique is especially powerful in the workplace because people want to think that they’re in control and they’re not being micromanaged. In a Zen approach, join means you see yourself as one of them. You see yourself as part of all this around you. The perspective widens, grows deeper, adds layers of understanding. This approach is powerful because it will allow you and the audience to see all the details that perhaps you would not see from the sell or tell point of view.

The final and extremely powerful approach is called consulting. Often those who are in a position of power think that because they own the decision, they don’t need to consult. They say things such as “I hold all the information and I make the decisions, so I tell you what to do.”

Oh, really?

How do you know you have all the information? You may have what you have been able to gather, or at least all that the others want you to have. Rarely do employees tell the CEO every small detail—although those details may have huge implications on the decision. The U.S. has lost not one but two space shuttles that way: for a variety of reasons, information about possible malfunctions in the equipment didn’t make it to the decision-makers. As a result, the decision-makers told—with disastrous results.

Moreover, telling rarely gets results, as we have pointed out.

People act like that rock. Enduring constant telling may erode their work ethics and diminish their enthusiasm, and they may eventually have had enough and leave. But the rush of the telling always has to go around them. And if you are the one doing the telling, sooner or later, you will find yourself exhausted. Why? Except in rare cases, this approach simply doesn’t work.

In consulting, you present your information and case. You build a presentation of what is known as a win-win; this approach asks you to sell benefits, not features, for the change not only you but for the listener. Then you ask the other person for his information and input. You have to listen carefully as he speaks; perhaps you have to get past some venting or some emotional outbursts. But what always happens is that you gain information you did not have before, which in turn allows you to build a better decision. Consulting incorporates the best of the three previous methods, so your result is three times as strong. Why? You are actually allowing the other person to communicate your message to himself. By doing so, you allow him the power to consider many of the points of your message—which has deep and powerful internal impact on his psyche.

Much better than dancing smiley faces, don’t you think?

_____________

¹See Burke (1945).

²See Robert and Schmidt (1958).

³See Muntur (1992).