Can You Hear Me Read online

  9. Did I enquire?

  10. Did I summarize the gist of the exchange?

  11. Did I check for misunderstandings?

  12. What, if anything, should I do differently the next time?

  The emoji summary

  Begin a virtual communication (e.g., an audioconference or a videoconference) by sending out one of several emoji, or symbols, agreed on in advance by your team, to indicate your emotional state at the start of the communication. Have the entire team check in this way. (There’s a reason why emoji and emoticons have flourished in the virtual world—precisely because they add back the missing emotional elements. You need to learn to make this practice deliberate and habitual.) Green, yellow, and red, for example, could mean, respectively, “all good,” “it’s not a great day; I’m a little stressed,” and “all hell is breaking loose,” or

  “something serious is wrong on my end.”

  Then finish your virtual meeting by reporting green, yellow, and red again. If necessary, follow up for clarification.

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  The Lack of Feedback 41

  The feedback cheat sheet

  Review the following list often, ideally before you give feedback each time, to make sure you are offering your opinion effectively.

  1. Feedback should be appropriate to the effort, to the occasion, and to the recipient.

  2. Feedback should be honest, but it doesn’t need to be cruel.

  3. It should be both authoritative and humble.

  4. It should be specific and focused on the relevant object, performance, or creation.

  5. Feedback should never be more about the giver than the recipient.

  6. Feedback is an obligation that the previous generation or class owes the next one.

  7. Feedback should be offered in generosity and received in humility.

  8. Feedback, like trust, falls apart in virtual exchanges because it lacks the unconscious context of human emotional exchange; so consciously restore the emotions in an exchange.

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  42 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications CHAPTER SUMMARY

  • Feedback—both implicit and explicit—is an essential part of the face-to-face world.

  • In the virtual world, feedback becomes much more fraught with misunderstanding.

  • Trust is more fragile online and is essential for feedback; otherwise, the feedback becomes trolling.

  • We crave the human connection in both the real and the virtual worlds, but the virtual connection is less satisfying, so our cravings are never satisfied—and negative feedback is more surprising and hurtful.

  • As a result, we both overindulge in virtual forms of communication and feel more lonely.

  • We should increase the emotional clarity of our online communications by giving agreed-upon signals communicating our emotional intents and attitudes, at both the beginning and the end of virtual communications.

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  2.

  THE LACK oF EMPATHY

  WHERE’S THE CoNSISTENCY?

  Recently, I was introduced to a potential business connection by a mutual friend, and we decided to connect on Skype for an initial chat. I had entered the information incorrectly into my calendar, so it was a bit late by the time I got everything straightened out and we connected. I was frazzled by the experience, and on top of my distractions, the Skype connection was unusually poor; it kept winking in and out.

  I could see—and sense viscerally—that my potential connection might be giving up. Here was this late, frazzled, technologically incompetent person. Why bother? I wanted to say,

  “The impression you’re getting—that’s not me! I’m usually cool, I’m technologically competent, and I’m nearly always on time. A completely different person!”

  The connection did not thrive, and no business resulted. In person, I could have rushed in, obviously sweating and harried, and explained it away with an excuse that would at least have been human. And we might have survived the experience. My personal presence might have compensated for my tardiness.

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  44 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Online relationships must go well,

  or they won’t go at all

  Online, there is no chance. As the old saw has it, if I do something stupid, it’s because I’m having a bad day. If you do something stupid, it’s because of a character flaw. That’s desperately true online.

  Openness is incredibly important in getting relationships off to a good start. And openness that works with humans is all about sending welcoming signals with your face, torso, hands, and body, without overdoing it or crowding the personal space of the other person too much. How do you do that online?

  You can’t. An unintended consequence of our new, amazing, superconvenient virtual world, where everything (almost everything) is a few clicks away, is that it robs us of real closeness. More than that, by spending time online, we lose out on intimacy.

  Facebook, your favorite airline rewards program, and even Amazon take away that real closeness as fast as they offer us faux intimacy. This world knows who our friends are! It knows the kind of seat and meal we want! It can recommend books to us that we might want to buy!

  But even the thrilling sight of a new box from Amazon will never replace the crinkling around a true friend’s eyes when you tell him or her about your adventures on your last vacation—or your last trip into town. The friend who knows all the disasters that befell you on the trip before that.

  All those delightful likes, wows, and loves on Facebook in the end simply make us hungry for more. The virtual world is a never-

  ending banquet that never completely satisfies. The loop is never closed. The internet doesn’t hug you back. The virtual world fails to deliver on a basic human need: empathy. This emotional connection between us helps glue the whole human experiment together.

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  The Lack of Empathy 45

  Consistency in communications is even

  more important in the virtual world

  than it is in the face-to-face world

  In the real world, when a team decides to take a difficult action—

  to commit to extra hours to get a project done, for example—the team leader can judge the level of resistance by noting the body language around the table. The leader might offer time off, say, after the project is done, to mollify the unhappy faces around the room.

  But something odd happens to informed consent in the virtual world. Here, without the visual element of those unhappy faces, the team leader hears only silence, and silence implies consent. So, the likelihood that the real feelings of the team won’t get expressed rises exponentially.

  It’s another form of empathy failure. The distance provided by a virtual connection creates conditions where people are much more likely to behave badly to one another and are much less likely to be sympathetic to others’ feelings. There’s a lack of empathy.

  Sandy Pentland at MIT has found that communications on teams works best when all participants communicate in roughly equal measure.1 That’s very hard to get right in the virtual world—on those endless conference calls, for example.

  You know the ones, where you’ve got your mute button on so that you can practice the tuba while the boss is nattering on about something—again. Nothing seems to happen for huge stretches of time, so out comes the tuba.

  On the rare occasions when you actually either want to or have to participate, you wake up, put down the tuba, and lunge for the mute button, so that you can add your two virtual cents.

  But the boss has already moved on.

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  46 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications You wanted
to say something, but the ship of protest has sailed and it’s too late. Assumed consent will take over, and your options are narrowing fast. The digital world robs us of our human reactions and thus a little bit of our humanity in moments like this—something we never get back.

  Email diminishes us as well. In an email message, we can’t show all the nuances we would with a raised eyebrow, a slight smile, or a shake of the head in person. We settle for just a little bit less.

  Our humanity is diminished in the virtual world Add in video, and it doesn’t get any better. On videoconferences, the artificiality of the exchange is brought home to us. We tend to shout, to cut other people off, and to tire quickly on video. Our unconscious minds are not receiving the information we would get in person about how close or far away the other person is.

  Thus, we overcompensate. It’s like trying to have an intimate conversation with someone who is standing on the other side of one of those old-fashioned glass ticket windows. You can’t quite see clearly. You can’t quite hear. And you can’t quite measure with your other senses what’s going on. It’s exhausting. And so a little bit of you resigns itself to being a little less present. Once again, empathy is diminished.

  There is no virtual communication vehicle or channel that works as well as the in-person variety. Less of us gets through to the other person. We are a little blind, a little deaf, and a little less human in every virtual setting. Digital communication channels were designed by engineers, remember. Not orators or extroverts or even politicians.

  OK, that was a cheap shot. But how can we regain our diminished humanity in the digital space?

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  The Lack of Empathy 47

  The key to understanding this conundrum is empathy, the human emotion that connects us to each other. When we are face-to-face, even the coldest of us find our mirror neurons firing when we are with someone who is experiencing an emotion. We laugh together, cry together, bond together. Put us in the virtual space, and empathy can’t work as well. The mirror neurons don’t fire as readily. We remain disassociated.

  We humans need our empathy

  A recent study found that regular face-to-face communication cuts the risk of depression in adults by half. Phone and email don’t have the same effect.2

  Our unconscious minds need to get together so that they can find the emotional connections they crave. We humans are social beings. We don’t do well when deprived of our fellow humans.

  We need to feed the unconscious, and we starve it at our peril as employers, as employees, and as humans. The virtual world is boring for our unconscious minds. We need face-to-face.

  I work with people to help them decide on the persona they want to put across in their conversations, meetings, and presentations, and even these people and I struggle to talk about what we mean by the concept of a persona. When I ask people how they would like to be perceived, they use terms like authoritative, funny, expert, approachable, confident, and humble. The list goes on, but I’m always struck by how impoverished our language is to talk about this very important business of how others take us.

  Mostly, people list positive adjectives—who would list negative ones?—and then we discuss what their behavior is likely to inspire now, what the gap is, and how to get to the desired state.

  How to be more empathetic, or confident, or authoritative, or funny, or expert for an audience.

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  48 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications How do you project emotions?

  Letting your emotions show is slow, painstaking work. Take empathy. How do you appear to be more empathetic? What does that mean, exactly? And can you do it at all online?

  Presumably, the word empathy suggests sensitivity to the feelings of others. How do you project that quality from a stage? Or across a room? Is it a tilt of the head, a hand gesture, a posture, or something you say? And is everyone struck the same way by your attempts at appearing more empathetic?

  In person, we can be empathetic automatically, because of our mirror neuron system. Online, the mirror neuron system can’t work as well. So, what happens?

  A recent study found that you can increase people’s empathy—specifically for others’ suffering—by having them touch rough sandpaper.3 That little bit of discomfort makes us more aware of discomfort in general and thus more sensitive to others’ potential discomfort.

  It’s a fascinating study, but it shows us how little we understand about a feeling like empathy and what drives it. If a momentary encounter with sandpaper can make people measurably more empathetic, how is that feeling generated to begin with? And more importantly, how driven is it by our physicality rather than what we normally think of as our psychology?

  Now apply that insight to the virtual world. If most of our humanity is driven, as it seems to be, by literal metaphors from the real world, how can we expect to thrive in the virtual? It’s not just sandpaper. If you give us a hot cup of coffee to hold, we form warmer opinions of brief images of people we see online.

  Holding something cold has the opposite effect.4 There are many such examples. Our brains are hardwired for real sensory data, Chapter_02.indd 48

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  The Lack of Empathy 49

  not ersatz. And given that we can increase people’s empathy with applications to the physical senses, what implications does that have for manipulating people’s perceptions of empathy online?

  A few principles are in order here. Our physical and mental experiences are deeply interconnected. We’re only beginning to understand this relationship. Our nascent understanding alone should make us wary of the virtual world.

  Our attitudes, emotions, and intentions are mostly unconscious. When you make me rub my finger on rough sandpaper, I become more empathetic, but not because I’ve consciously thought something like, “Oh, that sandpaper is rough; therefore, I should be more sympathetic to others’ pain.” It’s rather an unconscious and emotional connection. And it’s more powerful precisely because we’re not conscious of it.

  The physical experience opens us up to the mental, rather than the other way around. At one level, that’s obvious; we are physical beings, after all. But at a deeper level, the connection between the physical and the emotional tells us something profound about how the mind works, something counterintuitive and puzzling.

  We embody our emotions. We move with attraction, with revulsion, with happiness, with sorrow. And only once we begin to move do we become aware of and understand what we’re thinking.

  Finally, our attitudes, emotions, and intentions are profoundly communal and tribal. We experience empathy, and all those other adjectives I listed earlier, as our attitudes toward others and as others’ attitudes toward us. We like to think of ourselves as self-directed, individual, and conscious. What we’re learning is that humans are instead connected, unconscious, and tribal beings.

  That’s our empathy. And that’s what is missing in the virtual world.

  The entire virtual world was supposed to increase our interconnectedness, but instead it has isolated us more because our Chapter_02.indd 49

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  50 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications emotional engines don’t work as well on the information super-highway. In teenagers, there is a direct correlation between mobile phone use and depression. The more time they spend on the phone, the more depressed they are.5 We need to learn new communications approaches to the digital real world we live in today.

  What is the life cycle of empathy online?

  The problem of empathy plays out through the entire business relationship. Imagine the kind of business relationship where one party is the service or product provider and the other party is the client or customer. There’s choice involved; the customer could walk away as desired and choose another vendor. In some sort of initial set of meetings, ideas are pitched, prices are
negotiated, and other issues are hammered out. A deal is struck, and the work proceeds.

  The engagement might last a year, more or less. There are ups and downs along the way; communication by its nature involves miscommunication. Problems somehow get straightened out.

  Baggage is accumulated, but on the whole, the work gets done, the bills get paid, and the client is reasonably happy.

  If it’s a large contract with lots of players, then there will be individual stories along with the main story about the two teams interacting. People will cycle on and off, leave their jobs, leave town, have children, move to Seattle to take care of an aged parent, and so on.

  But what is the life cycle of the main relationship? There will be three main stages, followed by a fourth, the winding-down stage. The stages can overlap and perhaps even restart in various ways, but overall, they go forward with the arrow of time. And each will have its corresponding form of empathy.

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  The Lack of Empathy 51

  Stage 1: Decide on friend or foe. The first stage is the relationship-establishing or deal-killing friend-or-foe analysis.

  Neuroscience tells us that the first thing people do when they get together is decide on a few questions: Do I feel comfortable with this person? Is this person a friend or a foe? Some people rub us the wrong way from the start. Others we click with immediately. Those determinations are largely made by our unconscious minds—and they’re made quickly. That’s the way it works face-to-face.

  We can override our unconscious, so-called gut feelings, or not. We can have our individual reaction swallowed up in the team reaction as a whole. Or we can carry the day. There are all sorts of possible outcomes, but basically our unconscious minds are going to decide on friend or foe, and we can’t stop ourselves from making that fundamental calibration.

  It will affect everything that follows. If we decide on friend, then the relationship is off to a good start and the several stages that follow will have a better chance of working well, too. If we decide the person is a foe, then everything that follows will become much more difficult. Communication miscues will be far more common, and our enthusiasm for the subsequent stages will diminish, perhaps precipitously.