Overcoming challenges in communication requires many tools such as empathy, active listening, and cultural awareness to name a few, but consistently missing from lists about communication is effort. Without effort focused on the goal of empathy, a person cannot pierce deeply enough into the experiences and emotions of the target of their communication to successfully leverage anything to be gained from it. Without effort, someone amazing at active listening will still flag eventually and cease to demonstrate an overt interest in the target of their communication. Without effort, cultural awareness or the search for pertinent cultural information will stop at surface-level insights one could simply gain from a cheap guidebook. It can be exhausting, but few things in life offer more immediate results from concerted effort than successful communication with another person, despite its difficulty to appreciate.
For an example from my own experience, my time in Iraq immediately comes to mind. The culture clash between US Soldiers and Iraqi citizens was always at the forefront of our minds in our encounters with Iraqis, and was an oft-discussed subject between us Soldiers following any significant interaction between us and the Iraqis. Iraqis were commonly very jovial, gracious hosts, with little regard for American concepts of “personal space”, firm handshakes, and “getting down to the point”. In my early days in Iraq, I could not find a way to perceive this in a comprehensive manner and so it was simply an assault on my sensibilities and what I would later realize, a source of stress as my brain tried to decipher this wildly different cultural interaction equation. Add to this the language barrier and having to pipe all our communications through an interpreter, who may or may not have been translating our nuance correctly in any given conversation, and it was a uniquely frustrating period of time. However, once I came to terms with the concepts of their culture and its priorities, and recognizing, as Abramson and Moran (2018) state, that “Cordiality is at the core of this culture” (p. 377), it increased the gains of our encounters many times over. Instead of the first things out of our mouths being direct questions about the intelligence we sought, we allowed the natural flow of the encounters to proceed through the “hospitality phases”, as we named them. Drawn out greetings were no longer unnecessary delays before getting to the crux of the visit, but were a necessary preamble and also a good opportunity to get a feel for the mood of those we were meeting with and the chief concerns that they had about their neighborhoods, or muhallahs. The prerequisite serving and drinking of chai was no longer a distraction but the chance to tease out more personal updates from the people we met, family news (both ours and theirs), and the sharing of new pictures from home. All of this led to a better understanding of each other, and that understanding added the much-needed spice of nonverbal cues and emphasis to the translator’s messages as they passed them back and forth, and an intrinsic desire from both parties to better understand a message when miscommunications occurred. None of this would have been possible though if we had taken the easy road and refused to try and understand each other despite the very different features of our unique cultures. It took an effort to overcome the discomfort of these initial encounters and our own biases, and a disregard of our instinctive dislike of the position it put us in but was ultimately enormously worthwhile.
Alternately, when one looks at culturally identical parties that ignore the threats posed by bland communication mediums such as email and text, coupled with a lack of critical appraisal of changing situations, despite the difficulties that they offer, you can see similar problems arising in communication. To this point, I offer the scenario of a growing organization with multiple mid and senior-level personnel changeovers as the growth takes place. This organization suffers from long-standing disagreements and bad blood between the existing departments, which is complicated by the geographically diverse locations of its workforce. As new leadership steps into some of these positions with troubled pasts, using email and text as its primary means of communication with those other departments with negative assessments of those positions, they might be confused by the lack of teamwork and support they receive from these other departments. Add to this the email medium by which the bulk of their communications takes place, and the misunderstandings between the parties only grow greater. Now at this point, they have a choice: presume foul play and commit to a defensive, or worse, offensive means by which to overcome pushback they detect throughout the organization as they try to accomplish their mission, which is technically understandable, but philosophically lazy, or commit a greater effort to deduce the why that might surround the other department’s hostility. “If one isn’t able to take on another perspective, it is difficult to see what they want or need, but also to shape a message that they understand” (Pennsylvania State University, 2021). It would take effort, effort that no one would actually ask them to put forth, for these leaders to reach out to these other departments via other mediums such as video teleconferences or the tried and true personal visit to begin breaking down these barriers. This effort though is the only way to re-establish a solid foundation on which to move forward. By rebuilding this foundation, which may be as simple as clarifying a past email, or as significant as a sincere commitment to the greater good of the organization and a dismissal of the wrongs of the past, these departments can then start seeing eye to eye again and operate with the understanding that the old hostility and rivalry is gone.
All this said, the effort I speak of here can be as dramatic as the situations I detail above, but it can also simply be the effort it takes a normally introverted person to add more eye contact and verbal feedback to a conversation with a co-worker. These efforts, big and small can pay dividends to any relationship, but more often than not we take the easy way out and blame the situation or the other party. The worst part is, in what I feel like is 90% of these situations we know that no one would blame us for not making the effort, because it would be outside the norm, despite the potential gains to be made. This makes it even easier to ignore the potential of making this effort because there would be no concrete blame on us if the worst did happen. It is up to us to recognize our ability to do so much more in attempting to successfully communicate with each other, even if we don’t stand to lose anything by not taking the chance, the reward is absolutely worth the risk.
References
Pennsylvania State University. (2021). Lesson 02: Introduction to Leadership in a Global Context. Differences within versus the differences between. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2146712/modules/items/32847646
Abramson, N., Moran, R., (2018). Managing Cultural Differences. 10th edition. Routledge. New York, NY.
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