When communication promotes collaboration

By Palle Grzona, originally published June 2019.

Good communication makes myself clear to others and at the same makes room for others. It promotes collaboration and it can be trained.

You need to present a new idea to your management team. It's seems to work out well, but then you start noticing the audience. There's one that yawns. One discreetly checks his phone. Most people look down. And you feel it immediately - your courage drops a little bit. Do you know that feeling?

We often meet each other in ways that do not create the opportunities for the interaction and development we desire. Because we forget the importance of our non-verbal communication and our sense of whether others feel themselves seen, heard and taken seriously.

This need not be the case. Ben Bryant, professor at IMD, has developed a model that helps us become more aware of how we communicate appropriately and when we fall into communicating inappropriately.

Authorizing or deauthorizing

Bryant talks about communicating as authorizing and deauthorizing, respectively. We communicate in authorizing ways when we adjust our way of communicating to match the people we are with. When we are open, inviting and appreciative in the conversation. When we show interest - both in words and body language. This kind of communication promotes the opportunity to unfold what we are talking about, for the benefit of both the task and the collaboration.

Deauthorizing communication is when we talk down to others and shift the subject away from what someone else was talking about. When we sigh and turn our eyes. When we turn the arguments of others so fokcus turns to our own point of view instead of theirs. When we turn our attention to the phone instead of to the speaker. It is communication that shuts us off and limits others.

Authorizing communication promotes collaboration

We can become better at staying in authoritative communication when we become more aware of our own and others' patterns in conversations and meetings. When I observe groups working purposefully with authorizing communication, I can immediately see what a difference it makes. There will be more calm in the room and more ideas will be developed. The participants in the meeting become more aware of living up to agreements, because the communication and the meetings are experienced as respectful and binding in a new way.

At the same time, of course, we should not expect the deauthorizing communication to disappear just because we become more aware. There will still be situations where we feel pressured and react more impulsively and recklessly. It's human. The point is that with increased awareness of how authoritative communication promotes engagement and idea development, we can raise our awareness of when we fall into deauthorizing communication. We can thus more readily stop ourselves along the way and change style. And we can subsequently talk to those who might have been run over by us in a situation.

We cannot non-communicate

Everything we do and do not do in situations is experienced by others as communication. The words make up less than 10% of the total communication. The way we say things is much more important for the experience. Utterance character, volume, speed, clarity and pauses leave about 35% of the total impression. About 55% of the impression comes from the ways we use our body while talking. (Source: Albert Mehrabian)

This is because our brain is great at scanning information. It takes in much more than we consciously have access to. Even though we do not have conscious access to all the information, it still affects us actively. We can see this in people who are in good and close conversation. They subconsciously mirror each other's bodily signals because it is our way of creating calm and safe space for the other.