The Language of Success

Kim Wilkerson, Alan Weiss

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631573019
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

The Language of Success provides pragmatic and practical advice on how to harness the power of language in business and in life. Influencing for results, creating a culture of intelligent inquiry, utilizing critical questioning skills, and managing critical situations are all integral to success in any setting. The concepts, skills, and techniques to achieve results are applicable whether in the office or with family or friends. In this day and age of intense focus on engagement, commitment, and most significantly, results achieved, the readers will benefit by learning thought-provoking key principles, applicable practices, and techniques to leverage and ensure success with the language they use every day.

Chapter 1

Our Hesitancy to Question

Why we always say later, “What I should have said …”

We tend not to question, because we are convinced the other party is an expert, or the questioning is impolite, or we’ll be seen as dolts. These various fears and myths disempower us from finding truth and acting on it.

Authority Figures and God: Yes, Doctor!

The historical, stereotypical fears include public speaking, flying, heights, and first dates. We’ve found that you can add to that the fear of questioning authority figures. We act as if our teacher were Aristotle, our guide Odysseus, our stock broker Warren Buffet, and our doctor Louis Pasteur.

We’ve observed underlings in executive meetings at Fortune 500 companies actually address the CEO as Mr. President, and employees in the hall move out of the way of senior managers bearing down on them as if they were the chambermaids in a Four Seasons Hotel trained to get out of the way of guests.

We tend to imbue people with more than respect, but with an infallibility that would make a pope blush. In our work with hospitals all over the world, the abject refusal of nurses (and even lesser doctors) has resulted in botched operations, prolonged illnesses, and even death. (“Surgeries on wrong limbs” on Google brings up over 830,000 items.) We have a colleague, a former surgeon, Vickie Rackner, who has built a consulting practice on the basis of helping patients gain the courage to ask their doctors the right questions, whether in the hospital or in the office. What is the right question?

It’s any question that’s on your mind related to your condition and treatment.

To confuse expertise with perfection is dangerous in the extreme, whether in the operating room or the board room. We often fear a retribution that isn’t present or likely, but sometimes we do react to curtness and impatience by holding our tongue. As a result, we’re often left holding the bag.

We are inculcated with our inferiority in the presence of experts. In the third grade we had a visiting teacher ask us to name a word starting with “X.” We proudly offered “xylophone,” and the instructor informed us that our answer was wrong, since it started with a “Z!” That prompted a very early and fortunate cynicism about expertise based on title or rank (or even experience).

College professors adore the mantle of intellectual invincibility and law school professors seem to thrive on it. In fact, the narrower and tougher the specialty, the more imperial wisdom seems to be reserved for only the select few, and neophytes need to grovel in the presence of such gravitas. We recall a newly minted political science professor in a freshman class at Rutgers, outraged at students talking in the rear of the room, screaming, “Don’t you know that you should never interrupt an urban intellectual when he’s speaking!!”

Well, no, we didn’t. It wasn’t in the freshman handbook.

Profitable Language

When you vest someone else with superior powers of logic and speech, you diminish yourself. The most effective and profitable language involves mutual respect.

Examples of profitable language and mutual respect:

• Your point is well taken, and I think my view is supportive, though somewhat different. How can we best combine them? (Not: Would you be willing to combine them?)
• That’s an unusual approach. Let’s discuss the pros and cons since we’ve never attempted it before. (Not: I don’t know what to say, I’ve never even considered that approach.)
• Please don’t feel that we’ve ignored your suggestion. I’m prepared to adapt some of it and revisit the entire proposition at a later date. (Not: You were unprepared and your response shows it.)

Why do we hesitate to question at the most pertinent times and wind up bemoaning our timidity, languishing about what we “should have said,” and “Why didn’t I say …”? We’ve found the following elements at work, which are a lot more rational and manageable than fears of heights or public speaking or first dates:

• The insinuation that our questions are naïve or even stupid.
• The perception that we will lose respect by asking.
• The fear that we will antagonize someone with power over our future (health, graduation, advancement).
• The misbelief that we are under time pressure.
• The notion that our question has been answered and we missed or didn’t understand the answer.
• Normative pressure in meetings from others who are also not asking questions.
• The fear of retribution (it’s your fault, you can lead the committee, you go see the complaining client).
• Not being in the moment (distracted by something previously said, trying to formulate a future comment, and so forth).
• Poor self-esteem (they are more important than I am).

All of these steps are remedial, of course, and revolve around these basic approaches:

1. Prepare for the meeting or interaction when possible. What do you want to know about your condition, the decision, the objectives? Write down the concerns.
2. View the other person as a peer and coequal. You are both adults, and job titles, honorifics, and specialties don’t change that immutable fact.
3. Focus on asking a specific question. Don’t think out loud. Too many people articulate their cognitive processes, searching for meaning while they speak and driving those around them into semicomas. Practice being specific and succinct.
4. Remind yourself of the implications of not asking the question. Will you take the wrong route, study the wrong subject matter, arrive at the wrong time, lose the wrong kidney? These are far greater risks than a question being scoffed at.
5. Eschew perfection and infallibility. Satellites blow up on the launching pad, underdogs win ball games, no one can really time the stock market. Stop vesting others with talents and power they neither possess nor claim.

The first lesson in overcoming the hesitancy to question is to vest authority in yourself, not in others. Never begin by disempowering yourself!

The Mania of Perfection

The opposite of vesting others with infallibility is believing that we must possess it ourselves to be credible.

Our observation in all manner of organizations is that perfection is the arch enemy of excellence. People hesitate, invest too much time, check too many contingencies, and generally drag an anchor to try to ensure a project or decision is perfect before launching.

Which, of course, is abjectly impossible.

You have never been in a perfect plane, enjoyed a perfect meal, or experienced a perfect vacation. Imperfection is the norm, else, we wouldn’t be able to walk erect. Baseball lore honors the perfect game, without a hit or walk, but the pitcher did throw balls (nonstrikes), and the ball was hit to the fielders. It seems to us that a perfect game would involve 81 pitches, three each to 27 batters who wouldn’t touch any of them.

That, of course, will never be done. (If Sandy Koufax had a longer career, well, who knows?)

We seek perfection because we’re afraid of others finding fault. We believe that errors and mistakes are commentaries on our self-worth rather than merely situational failures of attention or skills. (Whenever someone says, “I found four typos in your last book,” we reflexively reply, “There were nine, you’d better have another look.”) The U.S. Constitution has a bad slipup, not allowing women to vote, and God is often redundant in the Bible (“Take your two shoes off from both of your feet.”)

Assembly lines and automation are intended to try to enhance the odds of perfection, yet we still have ...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Abstract
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Our Hesitancy to Question
• Chapter 2: Snarled in Data, Saved by Clarifying Language
• Chapter 3: Truth or Consequences
• Chapter 4: Critical Questioning Skills
• Chapter 5: Critical Situation Skills
• Chapter 6: Critical Results Language
• Chapter 7: Overcoming Language Pressure Anxiety
• Chapter 8: There Are a Few Good Questions, a Lot of Good Answers
• Chapter 9: Avoiding Brain Drain
• Chapter 10: The Language of the Future
• Index
• Adpage
• Backcover