A guide to communicating at work

1. Talking Business
A guide for communicating at work

2. First and foremost:
Expect misunderstanding
 Miscommunications can be very frustrating, but they are to
be expected. Language is necessarily inherently ambiguous
You cannot possibly spell everything out every single time
that you try to express anything to someone else. There
simply isn’t time. So we make shortcuts and in those
shortcuts, meaning gets lost.
 Expect misundertstandings to occur.

3. Equally important:
Assume good intentions
 Everyone assumes that their own way of communicating is
the most natural and therefore the best, so when we
recognize that someone is communicating differently, the first
instinct can often be that of frustration, to assume that when
miscommunication occurs that it is the other person’s fault,
and even worse, that it was done willfully or with intention to
hurt.
 In adapting an analytical stance to language, allow for the
possibility of “what if?” “what if this person is trying just as
hard to be helpful and informative as I am?”

4. Be an ethnographer
 This guide is designed to help you be an active investigator of
your own use of language and communication – to teach you to
be an ethnographer of your own ways of communicating!
 Ethnography is a research method based on observing people
in their natural environment with an aim to understanding how
they make sense of their world.
 As linguists, our focus is language. By studying how people
talk, and recognizing patterns where others might see chaos, we
hope to gain access to things like motivations, beliefs, values,
and identities.

5. Your toolkit:
 Listen
 Mirror
 Ask Questions
 Know how to Repair / Recover
 Get at underlying assumptions
 D.I.E.

6. D.I.E. Practice of Observation
Describe
Interpret
Evaluate

7. Conversational style
Unconscious way of speaking.
But also how we listen and evaluate. How
we gather information about people:
Is this person nice, smart, trustworthy, polite,
aggressive, threatening, confident, competent
etc etc etc?
Do we like each other?

8. To what extent can style be changed?
 To the extent that you can become more aware of your own style
and your expectations about style

9. Some things to pay attention to

10. Discourse slot
 How you structure your contributions to an interaction.
 For example, when structuring an open discussion, if you are
team leader, wait to give your contribution LAST. Allow the
space for others to give their ideas BEFORE you give your
decision.

11. Silence
 Silence is as rich, and has situated meaning as any other
form of social interaction.
 Be aware of the meanings that you attach to silence, and
how you interpret it. Be aware that these meanings may not
be shared.

12. Face Threatening Acts

13. The Meaning of Questions

14. “Noisy nots”
 things that are not talked about, but which you might expect
would be
 Negeation. Often people tell you who they are by telling you
what they are NOT. Pay attention to who/what they “other.”

16. What to call this skill?
 Critical Thinking: Awareness of underlying assumptions
 Cross - Cultural Communication
 Awareness of Conversational Style
 Recognition of Meaning-Making – Processes
 Ability at perspective-taking

17. An inherently transferrable skill
 By increasing your awareness and understanding of how you
use language, you will become more aware of ways that
others use language and be better able to recognize and
recover from misunderstandings.
 In-depth knowledge of how languge works in one context can
be brought to your own organizations and communities
(families, friends, etc.)