An email message to the student worker

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References

Adams, S., & Zanzi, A. (2004). Course preparation for management consultants. Journal of Management Education, 28, 655-673.

Cameron, K. (2007). Developing a teachable point of view. Journal of Management Education, 31, 392-404.

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writing. In J. F. Reynolds, C. B. Matalene, J. N. Magnotto, D. C. Samson, Jr., & L. V. Sadler (Eds.), Professional writing in context: Lessons from teaching and consulting in worlds of work (pp. 1-31). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Anish Dave is a PhD (rhetoric and professional communication) student at Iowa State University. Previously, he completed his MFA in creative writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and MBA (marketing) from Gujarat University, India. He has 12 years of industry and 6 years of teaching experience. Address correspondence to Anish Dave, Department of English, Iowa State University, 203 Ross Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1201; email: [email protected].

MANAGEMENt CONSULtING AND tEACHING: LESSONS LEARNED tEACHING PROFESSIONALS tO CONtROL tONE IN WRItING

Daphne A. Jameson Cornell University

DOI: 10.1177/1080569909340626

IN WORKING WITH business executives, engineers, and government officials to improve their writing, I learned that it is much easier to teach

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clarity than tone. To bolster lessons on tone, I now draw on theory and research from interpersonal communication and social psychology. In the following discussion, I describe one such approach: applying the concept of defensiveness to business and technical writing.

teaching About tone

Managing tone is a more complex ability than writing clearly. To achieve clarity, writers can follow concrete action steps: organize the ideas, write previews and summaries, insert substantive headings, use active verbs, and apply all the principles stressed by the document design and plain English movements. To manage tone, however, writ- ers need insight into readers’ psyches, sensitivity to the nuances of language, and imagination enough to anticipate how readers will emo- tionally respond to the words chosen.

Complicating the situation, writers do not always recognize that managing tone is important. Although the practitioners with whom I’ve worked agree that their writing could be clearer, they often dis- agree that their writing’s tone might be problematic. Strong, harsh, forceful language, they believe, is necessary to defend themselves and their departments, to protect their organizations legally, to move readers to action, or to achieve other goals. Fed up with complain- ing customers, incompetent employees, unreliable suppliers, irre- sponsible colleagues, or inflexible bureaucrats, some practitioners intentionally choose tones that, according to business communication principles, are self-defeating. Although practitioners with whom I’ve worked have never resisted the principles of clear organization and readability, many have balked at the principles of you-attitude, posi- tive statement, and others matters of tone.

Shifting Focus From Writing to Reading

The first step in breaking down such resistance, I found, is to shift the focus from writing to reading. Although I’ve always asked prac- titioners to provide samples of their own writing to use as one basis for discussion, I now also ask them to provide examples of both good and bad writing they have received. When they discuss pieces of writing from the perspective of recipients, they are much more open to the idea that creating an appropriate tone is a major challenge for writers. Asked to explain what phrasing offended, annoyed, or infu- riated them as readers, participants can easily point out examples

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from other people’s writing. Ironically, they rarely see a problem with similar passages in their own writing.

Applying Interpersonal Communication Principles to Writing

The second step is to help practitioners learn a systematic way to analyze tone in writing. To do this, I turned to a fundamental con- cept from interpersonal communication: defensiveness. Defensiveness refers to behavior in response to a perceived or anticipated threat. Psychologist Jack R. Gibb (1961a, 1961b), known especially for his contributions to the field of organization development, studied how defensiveness affects group effectiveness. Over 9 years in the 1950s and early 1960s, he and his colleagues at the University of Colorado and University of Delaware did 49 experimental and 64 field studies, many in workplace contexts. Gibb recorded work-group discussions and then analyzed how the interpersonal dynamics affected group performance. He concluded that certain communication behaviors evoked responses that directly increased or decreased the efficiency and effectiveness with which the groups worked. Defensiveness escalated in a circular pattern as people responded to one another. When group members became defensive, they concentrated less on the substantive message than on planning their responses, which then engendered greater defensiveness in others. The more defensive people became, the more they distorted what they heard and the more they misperceived the motives, values, and emotions of others. When defensiveness decreased, conversely, groups let more members exert leadership, modified actions in response to legitimate influence, and ultimately produced more and better ideas.

Although Gibb was studying face-to-face interpersonal and group communication processes, his findings translate well to written com- munication contexts. Defensiveness is at the heart of many problems of tone in the writing of the engineers, executives, and government offi- cials with whom I’ve consulted. Engineers, for instance, were offended by the condescending tone and one-upmanship of their colleagues’ memos even when the technical information was clear. Business executives who had to answer complaints or mollify angry clients bristled because they often believed that they and their staff had done

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nothing wrong. Government officials who dealt with unions wanted to heighten the rhetoric of grievances.

In these kinds of situations, Gibb’s insights into the causes and cures of defensiveness are highly relevant. According to Gibb, defen- sive responses are elicited by communication behaviors that con- vey (a) evaluation of other persons, (b) attempts to control them, (c) strategies to manipulate them, (d) neutrality toward their individ- ual feelings, (e) superiority over them, or (f) certainty about debat- able issues (See Table 1). I ask practitioners to identify and rewrite phrases, sentences, or longer passages that readers might reasonably interpret as having one or more of these qualities. Participants do this first with others’ writing and later with their own.

The cycle of defensive tone quickly escalates. For instance, in writing a response to a client’s sharply worded complaint, an execu- tive denied that the problem existed (control), tossed in several coun- tercomplaints about the client and her staff (evaluation), and never acknowledged the client’s feelings (neutrality). Yet it was to his ben- efit to retain her as a client because she represented a large amount of business annually. In writing to a municipal official who had alleged that his business had damaged public property, another executive

table 1. Gibb’s Categories of Defensive Communication Applied to Tone in Writing

Writers increase a reader’s defensiveness when they use a tone that

• Evaluates or judges others

• Attempts to control others

• Uses strategy or deception to manipulate others

• Is impersonal and neutral toward others as human beings with feelings

• Expresses superiority over others • States opinions with absolute

certainty even when information is incomplete

Writers prevent or reduce a reader’s defensiveness when they use a tone that

• Describes a situation, issue, or problem factually and dispassionately

• Uses a problem orientation approach as a way to collaborate with others

• Is spontaneous, honest, and straightforward with others

• Is personal by empathizing with others and acknowledging their feelings

• Expresses equality with others • States opinions provisionally, that is, subject

to change pending new information

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stated unequivocally that the alleged events had not happened (cer- tainty), when, in fact, neither he nor the municipal official had observed the situation firsthand. He touted his company’s long history of “good citizenship since 1920” versus the municipal official’s newness on the job (superiority). Though both executives offered these letters as good examples of their writing, they came to see how the counterpro- ductive tone might undermine their business objectives by making readers even more defensive.

Gibb concluded that although some types of behavior height- ened defensiveness, other types reduced it. Specifically, he found that defensiveness was reduced when communication behaviors conveyed (a) description rather than evaluation, (b) problem orientation rather than control, (c) spontaneity rather than strategy, (d) empathy rather than neutrality toward others’ feelings, (e) equality rather than supe- riority, and (f) provisional opinions rather than absolute certainty about debatable issues. Again, practitioners can benefit from identi- fying phrases, sentences, and longer passages in their own and oth- ers’ writing that convey these qualities.

Gibb’s concept of provisionalism has been especially helpful. Practitioners often make absolute statements of certainty because they believe that doing otherwise will make them seem weak or ineffec- tual. Certainty, however, can create a tone of bravado, condescension, or arrogance. Both the executive who sought to retain an important but unhappy client and the executive who wanted to maintain positive relations with a government official, although not conceding fault, needed to cast their responses as provisional—subject to possible change when the facts were investigated further. And both needed to take a problem-oriented approach: to suggest that the client or offi- cial work with them to sort out the facts, find an equitable resolution, and avoid future problems. Without appropriate tone, their response letters doomed them to broken relationships and lost business.

By giving practitioners a concrete system to use in assessing the tone of writing, I find that their resistance to tone-related concepts such as you-attitude and positive statement decreases and their sensi- tivity to readers’ perspectives increases. Tone becomes a more tangi- ble, manageable quality of good writing.

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References

Gibb, J. R. (1961a). Defense level and influence potential in small groups. In L. Petrullo & B. M. Bass (Eds.), Leadership and interpersonal behavior (pp. 66-81). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Gibb, J. R. (1961b). Defensive communication. Journal of Communication, 11(3), 141-148.

USE OF UNCERtAINtY REDUCtION AND NARRAtIVE PARADIGM tHEORIES IN MANAGEMENt CONSULtING AND tEACHING: LESSONS LEARNED

Randolph T. Barker Kim Gower School of Business Virginia Commonwealth University

DOI: 10.1177/1080569909340627

TEACHING BUSINESS COMMUNICATION while performing professional business consulting is the perfect learning match. The bizarre but true stories from our consulting world provide excellent analogies for classroom learning, and feedback from students about the consulting experiences reaffirms the power of using stories for teaching.

When discussing this article, we recognized that we used two distinct communication theories for consulting and then for relay- ing these experiences in teaching. First, we talked about the chal- lenge of truly in-depth process consulting: determining with the client what they need, not simply what they want. This requires extensive uncertainty reduction theory (URT; Berger & Calabrese, 1975)—continuing to drill down until the true nature of the problem is revealed and further consulting can begin. In the classroom, how- ever, we relay our consulting opportunities using narrative para- digm theory (NPT; Cragan & Shields, 1998). Students are constantly amazed when you explain that the organizations they are going to work for, in truth, are not always incredibly organized or managed, so the rational and value-laden approach of NPT helps to enhance the believability and learning (Stutts & Barker, 1999). The story below illustrates that the effective use of URT, when consulting, provides a wealth of classroom narratives (NPT) for teaching.