I have never taken kindly to commands, no matter how gently communicated. When I was a child, I would turn my ears and brain off when receiving orders rather than requests. This resulted in an abundance of daydreaming to escape the pressure and discomfort of forcing myself to follow orders. As you can imagine, I wasn’t a good student at school and I wasn’t easy to manage at home.
I find, however, that in the workplace my mentality isn’t a terrible thing. As an older teenager, and then as an adult, I learned to control my reflexive disgust with commands to do what I needed to do to finally excel at school and then to become a productive employee. I now find I sometimes I have to communicate to others work that needs to be done. When I need to do this, I always try to ask rather than tell.
“Would it be possible to send this completed to me by X date?” “I noticed an error on our Website. Do you know how we can fix this?” I would ask in those two ways rather than writing, “I need this complete and sent to me by X date.” “There is an error on our site. It needs to be fixed immediately.” The last two ways of communicating are effective at expressing urgency, but turn off many people.
At a company that formerly owned Training, a lower-level employee was elevated to a position in which she communicated what she viewed as needed tasks with the editors and writers. In her elevated position, she felt empowered to communicate, even with those senior to her, in a dictatorial manner. She was notorious for sending e-mails that enraged people. It was so bad that some people decided a phone call was necessary to communicate because her manner of communicating in e-mails so often inspired kneejerk anger. I wonder now if she would have gotten a better reception if she had first explained what she noticed on one of our Websites and then asked whether it would be possible to fix or improve it, rather than ordering us to do so. She could have closed the message by asking us to let her know how she could best help us make these improvements or fix the error she had noticed. That way, it would have come across as one team member communicating with another on a shared challenge, rather than an order coming from on high.
An advice column in Inc. by Alison Green notes that a manager who prefers to tell rather than ask may be exhibiting insecurity. “…I’m wondering about why you’re feeling like framing things as requests is making you look weak. That suggests you’re either feeling insecure about your authority for your own reasons, or your team is unclear on roles and expectations, or something else is going on. I’d explore that piece of it—because in a healthy, functioning team, a manager’s authority won’t be compromised by politely asking people to do what needs to be done,” Green writes.
My former co-worker, who was so talented at upsetting us without even trying, may have been insecure in her new position. When promoting an employee, it’s important that, in addition to having the needed skills and competencies, the person is secure enough for the job. Poor managers are often insecure people who are most concerned with and enamored of asserting their authority. A secure person, who isn’t suffering from imposter syndrome, is more likely to be focused solely on getting the work done.
Part of executive and manager training programs should focus on how to recognize talent that will do well in a promotion. That process of determining which employees to promote has to include an informal psychological and emotional assessment, as well as a skills assessment. Questions managers and executives could be trained to ask themselves when considering a promotion include:
- What have I noticed about how this person communicates? Looking at past e-mails I was copied on where they asked co-equal employees and people outside our organization to do things, what was their tone like?
- How do people most often respond to this person? Is there an enthusiastic, “Sure, that sounds good!” in response, or is there more commonly no reply at all for weeks and then a tepid, “OK”?
- Does this person have one way of communicating with me and another way of communicating with co-equal and lower-level employees?
- What have I heard, and overheard, about this employee? Is this someone who frequently confuses or irritates colleagues?
- Is the reason they upset colleagues a function of jealousy and competition among peers, or is it due to the way they communicate?
You never want to penalize a worthy person who is disliked by peers because of jealousy. Sometimes, however, the irritation and resentment is a controllable factor related to the person’s communication style. In the age we live in, in which everyone and their uncle often are copied on e-mails, managers and executives have an opportunity to easily assess communication skills. They just need the training to learn how to do this effectively.
Do you train managers and executives to identify candidates for promotion who are not ready for advancement due to the way they communicate? What is the culture of your organization? Is it to ask rather than tell, or just the opposite? How do you ensure that mode of communication is carried throughout your organization?
