#349 from Innovative Leader Volume 7, Number 7          July 1998

Myths of Effective Communication
by Brian H. Spitzberg, Ph.D.

Dr. Spitzberg is professor in the School of Communication at San Diego State University. He is co-author of Interpersonal Communication Competence (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1984), Handbook of Interpersonal Competence Research (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1989), and co-editor of The Dark Side of Close Relationships (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, due June, 1998).

Could Harry S. Truman be elected in the today's political context? Probably not. A  candidate who really tells it like it is would likely alienate too many factions of the voting public. Instead, contemporary candidates employ vague symbols such as peace, prosperity, democracy, freedom, and resounding phrases such as a "thousand points of light" and "bridge into the 21^st century." So, as a society, we greatly value clarity, specificity, and honesty. Yet, we only elect leaders who are equivocal and distinctly reluctant to discuss specifics. Such a mismatch between public ideology and actual leadership practice is a good example of the "dark side" of human behavior.

What is the dark side of human interaction? It is many things. First, the dark side refers to things we cannot see, things lurking in the shadows of ignorance, either not observed or not understood. Second, it concerns actions we presume to be positive and valuable, which actually can function in negative and destructive ways. For example, honesty is highly valued, but you may be exploited if you are completely honest in the early stages of negotiation. Third, the dark side draws attention to encounters that strike us intuitively as unethical, unpleasant, or dysfunctional, but that are in fact productive, in often surprising ways. A manager lays off well-liked employees and creates a climate of uncertainty and dissatisfaction. But in the long run, the efficiencies gained may produce a working climate that is more productive and desirable.  This dark side exposes a number of common myths that a leader needs to appreciate.

The Myth of Clarity

The ideology of clarity, accuracy, and understanding runs deep in the ethos (and mythos) of our businesses, governments, and relationships. Yet, if we carefully consider these concepts, we rapidly reveal them to be problematic. Several examples should illustrate.

Politeness is considered a universal goal. Without basic politeness, society begins to fall apart. Yet, much of what passes for politeness is deceptive. "Hi Jennifer, how are ya?" "Fine." Jennifer may be feeling ill, concerned about not getting the recent promotion, and apprehensive about her husband's suspected affair. But she says "fine" as a pleasantry, and perhaps to avoid appearing less than competent in a competitive environment. If we are this duplicitous in casual conversation, consider the possibilities when we communicate about issues with larger strategic interests.

Getting the message across, avoiding communication breakdowns, and being "clear" are "good terms" in most people's minds. Even a best selling self-help book admonishes us that we "just don't understand," as if this is one of the worst sins of human relations. Yet, as humans, we thrive on ambiguity and strategic misunderstanding. We often use ambiguity to cope with predicaments, difficult situations, and conflict situations. A team member who just gave a fairly bad but somewhat inconsequential presentation, may ask "How did I do?" How do you respond? You may say something like: "Probably better than I would have done," or "I've never seen a presentation like it." Such messages may not satisfy the other person, but they assist you in managing a difficult situation and preserving the peace of work relations.

Leaders often must rely on equivocal and ambiguous messages if they are to bring diverse groups together. People find it difficult to agree on much of anything specific, but almost everyone can agree on the values of freedom, prosperity, and so forth. People agree to these things in their leaders, without having any real idea of what these ideas mean in terms of policy. Through the use of such equivocal symbols, people come together and make progress toward goals, even if they don’t all have the same image of those goals.

The Myth of Adaptability

Adaptability, the ability to change one's actions as the situation requires, is essential to interpersonal skills. Or is it? In the world of athletics, proficiency is often based more on performance consistency than flexibility.  In many realms we define excellence by how "single-minded" and focused a person is, and how she pursues the goal to its end with dogged determination.

Change brings unpredictability, uncertainty, and often, a diminished performance because a person has left his or her domain of expertise. Adaptable people can come across like a chameleon as they change their "face" for each person with whom they interact. This is itself somewhat unnerving. But if everyone is adapting to everyone else's adaptations, people become chameleons in a paisley room, disabled by the shifting pattern of their social context. Persistence and consistency may be hobgoblins of little minds, but they can accomplish great things when applied in a focused manner.

The Myth of Creativity

The gurus of creativity tout advantages in innovation, unforeseen solutions to problems, and new perspectives toward the world at large. But creativity as an end in itself can result in a host of potential problems. Brainstorming groups, for example, can produce so many ideas that the best tree of an idea can get lost in the forest of alternatives. Creativity thrives on horizontal thinking, but occasionally a vertical solution is best for vertical problems. Here’s a fruitful example. With a son and daughter fighting over the only orange in the house, the mother asks them what they want it for. The boy wants it for a snack and the girl wants it for a recipe that calls for orange peel. The mother could get creative and try to think of alternative, divergent, or numerous solutions, but in this case, there’s a singularly obvious solution. For many routine tasks, the best solutions are known well in advance.

Conformity, by contrast, has the stigma of the old, the traditional, and the boring. But it’s conformity that permits society, organizations, and culture, to exist at all. Conformity is highly efficient because people don’t have to expend mental and behavioral energy figuring out what you’re going to do. You do what everyone else does in this situation, and things work. Certainly, conformity is probably dysfunctional in the extreme, as no source of growth and evolution will exist, but it hardly seems as dark as it’s often depicted.

The Myth of Assertiveness

For the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, many therapists and experiential group facilitators got wealthy hyping the key to interpersonal effectiveness: assertiveness training. We were all wimps, and assertiveness skills were going to make us powerful, successful, and charismatic. A funny thing happened on the way to this self-actualization. Research found that when you observed someone else being assertive, that person appeared to be competent. However, recipients of assertive behavior tend to see it as effective, but also rather inappropriate and unlikable. So thousands of us were being trained "how to lose friends and influence people."

Appropriate, even passive, behavior, has its place in social and task interaction, as it serves to balance power disparities and smooth tensions among people who, after all, perceive that they have the right to be right as well. Finally, it’s sometimes preferable to lose a battle so as to win the war.

The Myth of Competence

Can a person be competent by behaving incompetently? At first blush, this may seem an absurd proposition. But consider the concept of passive aggressiveness. A person dislikes a particular task relative to other jobs that he is not currently assigned. By fouling up on his own task, eventually he may get reassigned to a task he likes more. A student who

wants to shine, can shine more in a normal class than an advanced class, and may choose this alternative by performing less than optimally on selection tests.

There’s a logical reverse of this concept called "skilled incompetence." A person or group may do everything in a skilled way; that is, in a normal way that has always worked in the past and seems to fit all the requirements of effective behavior. Yet, when all the dust clears, the outcomes are deeply flawed. A study of the fatal spacecraft Challenger disaster is a case in point. Everyone was an expert, everyone was competent, everyone was doing what they were supposed to, and everyone was making the best decision they could at the time. And most of the people made the wrong decision.

How Dark is the Dark Side?

So the dark side isn’t so dark after all. And the bright side doesn't look so bright anymore. Does this mean you should be more ambiguous, rigid, traditional, unassertive, and incompetent? Of course not. The myths above are not myths because their opposites are always true. They are myths because you already engage in equivocal, consistent, persistent, normative, passive, and less than optimal communication, and yet, you are probably not banished from meetings, slapped in the face on a regular basis, or treated like a social pariah.

The point of this analysis of interpersonal communication myth-making isn’t to recommend incompetent forms of communication, but to draw attention to two conclusions. First, the ideologies we profess about interpersonal communication are false when taken to the extreme. Business textbooks tend to treat clarity as an inherent "good," rather than exploring the functional uses of non-clarity. Second, to understand such falseness requires that people stop getting their interpersonal wisdom from talk shows, motivational speakers, and people ill-equipped to either conduct original research or interpret other scholars' scientific work. After all, we all know that clarity, adaptability, creativity, assertiveness, and competence are intrinsically good. Right?