"It's Good to Talk?"

A professor in a classroom here in Mumbai tells me that he encourages his students to speak up in class. He says that the only way to ensure the students do so is to make speaking in class mandatory. “Once they understand this is the norm you expect, they’ll get used to it,” he says. “But you have to make it clear in India”. On the same day, the Chairman of an engineering company tells me that one of his Managing Directors from overseas has, “Just learned the difficult lessons that Indian employees don’t always tell you when something is going wrong. He’s just found out that saying nothing, means something”.

In Western society, communicating assertively is generally perceived as a sign of a healthy personality and those who are rather silent, tend to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions. Westerners perhaps make the assumption that talking is a positive act, a critical ingredient of independent thinking. By talking, an individual expresses his ideas, his points of view and individuality. Socrates viewed knowledge as existing within people and needing only to be recovered through verbal reasoning. Homer considered one of the most important skills for a man to have to be that of a debater. Freud of course believed that the critical success of any psychoanalysis was the patient’s ability to freely associate verbally his thoughts and feelings, with the voice of the internal critic held in abeyance.

In the consulting room is a client who is a Managing Director of one of the banks. Instead of hearing him say that rather overused legacy of the British, “I’m fine”, a sign of “Improvement” might be to hear the client verbalise more of the complexities of what is going on in his internal world. Things like, “Well, I’m struggling to maintain my enthusiasm at work, yet at the same time, I seem to be working 12 hours a day and can’t stop”. Narrative complexity as a sign of intelligence is one of the ways Western psychological models rate higher levels leadership consciousness. And of course such models are being imported into India. My culturally specific beliefs and assumption backed of course by evidence from Western psychology, suggests that this client will benefit most by such revelations aloud not only to himself, but with a skilled professional who is interested in him. In this relationship space of two people’s curiosity about the deeper motivations of this man, we hope that new personal awareness arises, and thus a richer picture of how he might live his life and conduct his business. A client may want to explore how he can relate better with his team members, how to energise and motivate staff across many geographies or how to deliver a profoundly moving speech.

But is such talking about such things valued in the context of a developing country like India? There are signs that it is, although perhaps the nature of the development process is not fully understood. This may be partly due to the lack of management education and development that focuses on the critical skills of relating in the workplace. After all, it is our ability to work together effectively and efficiently that gets things done and done well. However, most large Companies here now have 360 degree feedback processes, whereby an individual receives written feedback on the impact his leadership has. Yet judging by some of the reports I read here, they seem rather censored and “Nice”. Shame may also be attached to speaking with someone outside the immediate family, but also a sense of uncertainty of what this sort of relationship entails, and so it is easier to pick up a book on leadership, as though insights transplant themselves magically from the page to the leaders actions.

In the Indian tradition, personal development has historically focused upon meditation; the idea that silence and introspection will be beneficial for higher levels of thinking. In fact from this perspective, perhaps all this thinking and talking may indeed be viewed as the root of the client’s troubles. Talking might therefore be conceived of differently. Eckhart Tolle, known for his book “The Power of Now”, popular here in India as well as overseas, extolls the power of being in the present moment, promoting the importance of meditation, and other forms of contemplative activity. In a recent talk he gave, he rather humorously warned his students, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week living with your relatives and see how reactive you still are”. He was also suggesting that meditation is not something to do to become better meditators, but to enable us to have greater peace and more harmonious relationships with others. He also warned that we babble too much, mindlessly filling up space with words like the ramblings of the disoriented madman we might see on the street. We say what we don’t mean, and we keep hidden what we really feel. And we say a lot, not only in speech, but critically in how we say things. Some evidence suggests that the greatest distortions in our communication are in the sound, the music of what we say, and the dance of how we use our bodies. If I verbally try to tell you I value you, whilst at the same time, using the tone of a depressed bureaucrat, with my arms folded as I gaze at the ceiling, you will get a very clear message from me. When we are unsure about someone’s intentions in their communication, we draw only 5% on the words, some 38% on the sound, and a massive 55% on body language. One of the most common criticisms of Indian leaders is their harshness with staff. This is often justified to me with comments like “it’s the only way to get them to do anything”. Yet as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that at times, rather sadist leadership virtually immobilises staff in a vicious circle of freeze and fear. One writer in response to the previous blog on cricket and coaching suggested to me that this harshness is developed in the Indian household, as the child observes his mother berating servants. Whatever the roots might be, it important that Indian leaders with aspirations to work in the International context understand there are much more rigorous expectations of their conduct.

All these ideas of “East” vs. “West” are of course a rather common post-colonial polarity. It is likely that the business man in India has far more in common with the business man in New York than the villagers in rural India. In fact internationally, all the leaders who have been measured and rated as having a higher level of leadership consciousness, report having both a regular practice such as mediation and being involved in some sort of dialogue with others as a means of their growth. The international evidence however, on influential communication, reminds us very clearly that if a leader wants his staff to speak out, he must role-model that behaviour himself. So, for example, if he wants his staff to be open about production or trading problems, whatever the issue might be, they will need to have witnessed their leader disclose his own personal challenges during his career. Of course, in order for someone to talk, there must be a listener. How good most leaders are at listening is questionable. Professor Richard Hackman from Harvard University, found that in his research on black-box data from flight crashes, that almost without exception, there was a dissenting voice saying early on there was a problem with the plane. Yet in each case, no one listened. The voice was too junior, too small to be taken seriously. Listening involves stepping into the agenda and perspective of another. One suspends one’s own greedy needs to say this or that, and let go of control of a conversation. Only those with solid enough self-esteem are good listeners.

No matter who we are, or where we are from, whatever unknown cultural codes are embedded in our being, we all share in common the never-ending decision-making about what to say and what not to say. When the veil between the conscious and the unconscious mind is thin, we will be verbally reactive, or blocked like cement so that we cannot find the flexibility to utter even one word.

I think it is fairly culturally safe to say that we are all on some level, longing for real human contact. The workplace is of course the site of our attachments with others. For many, it is not only a source of identity, of self-esteem it is also a place of belonging. Our leaders just like the teacher at the beginning of this piece signify what is expected, what is permissible and what degree of depth in relating to one another is “normal”. Leaders of course do this, not only by what they say, and whether they have the confidence to be good listeners, but in what they do.

As Gandhi put it, “My life is my message”.