Can You Hear Me Read online

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  Harvard Business Review Press

  Boston, Massachusetts

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  HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts Harvard Business Review Press titles are available at significant quantity discounts when purchased in bulk for client gifts, sales promotions, and premiums. Special edi-tions, including books with corporate logos, customized covers, and letters from the company or CEO printed in the front matter, as well as excerpts of existing books, can also be created in large quantities for special needs.

  For details and discount information for both print and ebook formats, contact [email protected], tel. 800-988-0886, or www.hbr.org/bulksales.

  Copyright 2018 Nicholas H. Morgan

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

  The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morgan, Nick, author.

  Title: Can you hear me? : how to connect with people in a virtual world /

  Nick Morgan.

  Description: Boston, Massachusetts : Harvard Business Review Press, [2018] |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018037883 | ISBN 9781633694446 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Communication and technology. | Business communication. |

  Teleconferencing. | Communication—Psychological aspects.

  Classification: LCC P96.T42 M665 2018 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037883

  eISBN: 978-1-63369-445-3

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  To Nikki, the center of my world To Sarah, Eric, Howard, and Emma, bridging old worlds and new

  To Lakin, Logan, Eryn, Thaila, and Cyril, knowing only the new

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  CoNTENTS

  Prologue: Is This Thing On?

  ix

  Introduction

  1

  We’re More Connected Than Ever, So Why Do I Feel So Alone?

  PART ONE

  THE FIVE BASIC PRoBLEMS WITH VIRTUAL COMMUNICATIONS

  1. The Lack of Feedback

  27

  Where’s the emotional clarity?

  2. The Lack of Empathy

  43

  Where’s the consistency?

  3. The Lack of Control

  65

  For better or worse, your life online is public 4. The Lack of Emotion

  85

  Can you make me care?

  5. The Lack of Connection and Commitment 105

  Anyone here from Dubuque?

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  viii Contents

  PART TWO

  SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES FOR SPECIFIC DIGITAL CHANNELS

  6. Email, Email Alternatives, and Texting 127

  7. The Conference Call

  149

  8. The Webinar

  167

  9. The Chat Session

  191

  10. Sales

  213

  Conclusion

  233

  Notes

  247

  Index

  255

  Acknowledgments

  267

  About the Author

  269

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  PROLOGUE

  IS THIS THINg ON?

  We are all unwitting participants in a massive social experiment that began slowly after World War II and gathered speed in the last decade with the introduction of the smartphone. We have created virtual personas, online worlds, digital connections, social media lives, email relationships, audioconference teams—

  the whole panoply of ways that we now communicate with one another virtually.

  That ability to communicate virtually seemed at first to be an unmitigated advance. We could communicate faster, more easily, with less friction, at our own convenience, to multiples of our previous audiences, with the click of a mouse or a “send”

  button.

  Only recently have we started to realize that this huge social experiment has a downside, too. We’ve started to worry about shorter attention spans, and we wonder if the internet makes us stupid. But the real downside has remained largely invisible to us because it touches on the workings of our unconscious minds.

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  x Prologue

  As we’ve made room for virtual communication in our lives, our workplaces, and in all the ways we connect with one another, we haven’t fully realized how emotionally empty virtual communications are. Every form of virtual communication strips out the emotional subtext of our communications to a greater or lesser extent. Every one.

  Take email, for example. We’ve all experienced the frustration of sending an email that was (to us) obviously meant to be a joke. But the recipient, instead of being amused, was offended, and we had to spend huge amounts of time repairing the relationship. That’s the simplest, most obvious form of emotional undercutting that virtual communications foist on us.

  Most of us have also spent hours on audioconferences at work, with the mute button in force, taking care of other business while people on the other end of the box drone on endlessly.

  We’ve had to lunge for that mute button when the boss suddenly says, “Nick, are you still on? What do you think of the new cross-eyed widget?”

  And then there’s social media, which would seem to be all about emotional connection but in fact is like Pringles potato chips; you need to keep eating them because one chip doesn’t satisfy. The bland taste creates a need for more but doesn’t allow you to stop. We get one like on Facebook, enjoy a brief hit of pleasure, and crave more. We get social love on Twitter and Instagram, and it’s just enough to keep us checking our mobile phones hundreds of times per day. In short, we’ve transferred a surprisingly large amount of our human interactions to the virtual world, and as a result, we no longer get the emotional information, support, and reinforcement we used to get without thinking about it while communicating face-to-face.

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  Prologue xi

  Virtual relationships are more fragile and easily disrupted because they lack the unconscious connections our face-to-face interactions automatically convey. The lift of an eyebrow, the tone of a voice, a quick smile, a shake of the head—these are the ways we decode other people’s intents. These signals are largely absent from all forms of digital communication.

  In business, this absence leads to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and a huge amount of do-overs, workarounds, and relationship repair. It’s expensive. It’s inefficient. And the cost in fractured relationships, missed opportunities, and lost connections is incalculable. Because we make decisions with our emotions, moreover, when we take them out of the communication, the audioconference, or the webinar, it becomes almost impossible to make good decisions when we’re immersed in the virtual stream.

  In our personal lives, the same problems oc
cur, especially when we’re trying to connect with someone at a distance, virtually. It’s expensive in many less quantifiable ways.

  The result of this massive social experiment is a huge increase in loneliness, social isolation, fear of missing out (FOMO), and Instagram/Facebook envy, and, tragically, teenage depression and even suicide. We may be raising a generation of people who are unhappy communicating virtually and incompetent communicating face-to-face. Those of us with one foot in the face-to-face world and one foot in the virtual world are torn. We are invested in both, but we lack the time to master either world or feel completely at home in both.

  What’s to be done? The experiment will continue. We can’t live without our gadgets. Too much of our personal and work lives today relies on the virtual. Indeed, most organizations with an international reach couldn’t function without the digital means of communication they use every day.

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  xii Prologue

  But we need to learn to live smarter and communicate differently to survive in this brave new digital world. We need to begin to consciously add the emotional subtext back into our virtual communications to avoid the costs—personal and financial—associated with miscommunication.

  That’s the subject of this book.

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  INTRODUCTION

  WE’RE MORE CoNNECTED THAN EVER,

  So WHY DO I FEEL SO ALONE?

  “It’s state of the art.” I was being ushered into half a conference room in Boston. The other half was in Denmark, at another branch office of the company I was consulting with. My assign-ment was to coach a half-dozen executives preparing for an important meeting at which they would all be speaking. These executives were spread around the world, some in the United States, some in Europe, and some in Asia.

  This day, I was coaching one executive. She wouldn’t be back in the United States for a week or two, and it was important that she start rehearsing sooner than that. The solution was to put her in one-half of a conference room that showed up virtually in the US office where I was seated.

  “It’s as good as being in the same room,” was the considered opinion of her administrative assistant, who was leading me into the windowless room that promised to deliver Denmark to me.

  “It’s state of the art.”

  I sat down, as instructed, in a chair in front of a curved table that looked like part of an expensive business school auditorium.

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  2 Can You Hear Me?

  In front of me, instead of a stage and lectern, was a screen. On the screen was the mirror image of the room I was in—the same curved table, with chairs, and microphones in front of each chair.

  It was like looking into a huge mirror. Only the half of the room inside the mirror was empty.

  I glanced around the room and waited. The assistant whis-pered a few instructions. “Speak into the microphone. It’s voice activated. Tap it. Don’t stand up. And you don’t have to shout.”

  I wondered why she had told me not to stand. She left. In a minute or two, in walked the torso of what I presumed was my executive.

  Her head was cut off. I learned later that “state of the art”

  only allowed for a picture that covered people sitting in chairs.

  People of average height. Very tall people had to slump slightly in their chairs.

  When she sat down, I could see her face.

  “— you?” she said.

  After a moment’s confusion, I realized that she must have asked me how I was. The voice-activated microphone had cut off the first words of her response.

  I tapped the microphone and said, “( tap) I’m fine, thanks.

  How are you?”

  The coaching conversation proceeded in a strange series of percussive sounds and overlapping comments. By the end of the session, we were shouting at each other. I wasn’t sure why. We could see each other well enough unless we stood up. We could hear each other, as long as we kept tapping the mic before speaking. Why did it feel like such hard work, and why did we end up shouting at each other? Why was an hour or two all we could sustain? What was so hard about something that looked almost like we were in the same room? (I’ll answer those immediate questions at the end of this introduction and take up a more Introduction.indd 2

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  Introduction 3

  in-depth discussion of the problems and opportunities of videoconferencing in chapter 9.)

  For most people, moving into the digital world to communicate means experiencing significant loss of clarity, ease, and depth. You struggle to convey the lightness of tone you want in an email, and you risk offending your colleague because the smile doesn’t come through. You tune out during an audioconference because some connection is missing and you can’t stay focused virtually for ninety minutes. You flounder to find the right sense of engagement on a Skype call. It’s a job interview, but the interviewer is calling in from her home office (as you are), and how does that change the dynamics of the interview? Are you at home or at work? Is the right tone more or less open, more or less formal, more or less sincere?

  You can’t find good emotional footing

  in the virtual world today

  Over and over again, people find that they struggle when trying to communicate virtually. Something—a lot—is missing. It’s harder to get the nuances, the emotions, and the details right.

  Does that mean that the digital world makes us stupider? Less able to concentrate? Less desirous of an emotional connection?

  No, but it demands that we learn to behave differently. We need to learn a new set of rules—like learning to communicate in a new language. The virtual pushes us to invest in multiple different worlds, often simultaneously. These new worlds come with new, vague codes of conduct and create new needs. A lot of work we used to take for granted, because it was done automatically by our unconscious minds in face-to-face communications, now has to be done consciously and intentionally. The digital world forces us to rewire our unconscious communication habits for conscious success.

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  4 Can You Hear Me?

  And clearly, we urgently need to learn to avoid the traps of the digital world and its new forms of communications. For example, psychologists have identified a new phobia: nomophobia, the fear of trying to live without your cell phone.1 And yet, much research shows that as our digital engagement goes up, our personal sense of loneliness increases just as fast.2 Why this perverse attachment to tools that are actually increasing our sense of detachment? We develop Facebook FOMO, Twitter envy, and LinkedIn loss. And we respond by diving more deeply into the very digital means of our discontent. The virtual water we drink simply makes us thirstier.

  We’re more connected than ever, and more alone We need help.

  In-person communication is incredibly rich, loaded with information about how the person we’re talking to is feeling at every second of the conversation. It’s satisfying in a way that virtual communication can’t be. Virtual communication is much flatter—online conversation requires us to deliberately engage our own and other people’s emotions.

  We need a new rule book for conscious communication in the digital age. Our unconscious minds fail us at the doorway to the digital world. We have to learn how to put as much of the missing emotion, pattern recognition, and memory back into the digital world that those well-intentioned engineers have stripped out.

  That’s what the book you’re holding in your hands (or reading on a Kindle, or listening to with earbuds, or having directly implanted into your brain by some technology waiting to be invented) will show you how to do. This book offers a Fodor’s guide for the unknown digital country we find ourselves in, Intr
oduction.indd 4

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  Introduction 5

  because how can we leave it? We need the digital realm, and yet the cost of living in it is far too high, psychologically speaking.

  The opportunity cost of free, fast

  information is surprisingly high

  Now you know the grim truth about this brave new digital world. What specific problems does it raise for us inhabitants of the world of work—those of us who have to get stuff done?

  And what can we do to make things better? The rest of this chapter will sketch out the main ideas this book covers on the digital-communications conundrum.

  Sadly, the more we learn, the worse this world we’ve created looks. Study after study documents the impoverishing effect of life in the digital era: the absurd collation of unlimited data, supercomputers in our pockets, and endlessly trite, recycled, bite-sized information fed to us in ways that make sense for machines to broadcast but not for humans to receive.3

  And even worse, although we can’t easily see how the digital world makes some work harder, the difficulty is no less crippling. Let’s take a quick tour of the research on what happens to good communicators in the virtual world.

  With email, recipients are less cooperative—and feel more justified in not cooperating.4 They feel more entitled to lie.5

  They evaluate each other more harshly because of reduced feelings of social obligation.6 It turns out, for example, that if you have even a brief conversation over the phone before trying to negotiate via email, it goes better.7 Or, if you use a webcam to make eye contact with someone you’re about to debate with, the conversation goes better, with less hostility.8

  Eye contact enables us to determine, in the long run, who’s dominant and, in the short run, who’s talking.9 In general, Introduction.indd 5

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  6 Can You Hear Me?

  workplaces that make an effort to put back in the workplace some of the absent human emotions—the emotions so easily conveyed in face-to-face conversations, the “I care” kind of feelings—reduce absenteeism and burnout and increase employee engagement.10

  Virtual communication sabotages

  us in unexpected ways

  People who use social words in their communications, words like coffee or football, are less likely to get fired.11