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As I start coming back to work from summer its time to settle into my job. It’s an engineering position where most of the day to day is fairly technical. My position, however, still demands that I work with customers (or stakeholders as the corporate lingo goes).
This is seen by many as stressful across almost all industries. After all, there are people who complain, people who demand certain changes, or people who just don’t understand how things work and your limitations. It’s understandable we see this sort of adversity between “the builders” and “the buyers.” It’s not all negative, of course, but we very rarely keep the nice customer interactions living rent-free in our heads, evicted naturally by interactions we ourselves can complain ad nauseum about.
I have come to, at least in recent years, believe this is more of a communication problem than anything that drives this. And that we all suck at communication. So that’s what this fun post is about: The ways we all are just really, really bad at communicating.
A case study of incompetence
Before gaining experience at the level I work at, I was definitely a stereotypical engineer. I wanted perfect solutions to exist and if anything prevented that, it wasn’t my fault; it was everyone else’s! I recall working with some other employees on a project and being very short when issues were brought up.
I want to highlight this gem of an interaction that still periodically pops up in my head when inconvenient:
[Customer]
“I need some help. When we go to [some webpage] and click this button, nothing happens. We’ve tried to reload the page, but this doesn’t help.”
[Me]
“Things take a lot of time to process in the backend database because of how large your payload is. Just wait longer for the page to load.”
Needless to say I didn’t get to interact with customers again until after a lot of coaching, but I want to break down what happened for those that might on the off chance see nothing wrong with the above interaction.
Mistake #1
The customer is clearly non-technical. The most technical thing mentioned in their request for help was a button click and yet I prattled on like I was trying to break a record of how many buzzwords I could fit into a single sentence. Do they even know what a database is? And what is a payload? They just clicked a button, they didn’t launch a rocket.
Mistake #2
Notice how I didn’t even acknowledge the problem. It was just handwaved with a bunch of scary techy words. The problem I should have seen if I was actually listening to the person is two-fold:
- There is no feedback after clicking the button that something is happening
- The time to finish doing whatever it was doing is causing people to lose their flow.
Flow is important. Most people are okay with menial tasks as long as they don’t need to think about it, and clicking a button to load something sounds pretty menial as I think back on it. No one should have to think after they hit a button, even if the thought is “this is slow!”
Mistake #3
As the cherry on top of this lovely interaction, I gave a response that is so ridiculous and abstract it is on par with saying “deal with it!” to their face.
The customer meant well and was taking time to try and highlight a problem they and their colleagues suffered through. However, they were meeting a brick wall and were likely left feeling extremely frustrated and probably with a newfound disdain for our department.
So what would have been better?
Literally anything other than making the person feel stupid would have been better. Many times people just want to be heard, or taken seriously if they are taking time to tell you something. Sure, some people make it a habit to complain about all the menial things, but the vast majority of complaints are founded in practicality. And not all communication needs are based on complaining either. For all general professional communications I have my own little checklist to go through now when handling communication on a professional level and it looks something like this:
- Empathize/relate
- Show intent
- (optional, but nice!) Follow up
Empathize/relate
To me this is not just being empathetic, but also bringing yourself to a level everyone you are speaking to can understand. When you say or write something, the context you have should not be taken for granted. Are you announcing something? Great! Tailor the language so everyone can follow it clearly.
Show intent
Say what you intend to do. Nothing is more annoying if you leave a professional conversation or read a memo not knowing what happens next. This is also not really ideal for anyone that has to deal with the fallout of many many follow-up questions. Note that you shouldn’t lie, and of course you may not know everything up front, but then your intent is probably to figure that out. Say that! Don’t try to be over-political either. People hate that.
Follow up
This is not always needed, but I think it can be a nice end to a saga involving people and something changing. Following up is a way to give closure when that sort of feedback is relevant. For issues where the impact of the fix is obvious, probably it can be skipped. However, for some more nuanced situations, it can be good to just let people know what happened, if anything. And of course this is the point you can ask to confirm if something else is needed, or if clarification of some form of announcement, etc. is required.
Putting all of this together, my response to the person’s complaint should have probably been something like:
“[Empathize/relate] Hey, thanks for bringing this up, that sounds really annoying. [Show intent] I don’t know if we can improve this immediately, but I will add this to our issue list so we can work on this.”
Probably not what they wanted to hear, but much better than just making someone hate you.
We aren’t good at taking criticism
Part of the reason many of my earlier interactions was on reflection in part because I was being defensive. To me, in those moments, I would see criticism as a personal attack. This is probably often the case for people earlier on in their work or certain hobbies where they will attach to the work they do as if it represents their competence as a human being. In other words someone might say “this thing you built has issues.” And your brain will translate that to “you suck.”
It’s easy to fall into that mindset, too because it’s simple. No nuance needed, just us vs. them. The way I combat that this these days is to remove myself from anything I build. It’s hard to do when you exude personal effort on the things you produce, but it helps because you will be able to take feedback as it is. And I do believe honestly that frustrating conversations are an inevitability as soon as any of the people involved become defensive.
WAUTMAAN
We All Use Too Many Acronyms And Nicknames.
During the course if my career, I came to adopt a rule I adhere to when first engaging with someone I don’t really know. I never used terms that I couldn’t use with a random stranger on the bus. With a stranger you can’t just assume for example they know the common lingo of your industry or your specific projects.
We use so many shortcuts in our world we tend to not notice them but try going a day at work without using slang or words only used by you and your colleagues. It is hard.
You might assume everyone you talk to would speak the same lingo but that’s not true! It’s important to just break down everything in plain English (or whatever your language is) when first establishing conversation on a topic if understanding must be 100%. Even then you might be surprised also how many times you still have to clarify things. Start simple to reduce the amount of time wasted on clarifications and the conversation will be easier for both involved.
I have exceptions of course! Sometimes some acronyms are so commonplace in a locale that you should use them. Since that’s very dependent on each situation, this brings us to… [drum roll]
We don’t think about our audience
This is the obligatory final . Whenever you communicate, know your audience. I know my audience for this site is likely to be tech enthusiasts that have a high probability of having worked an office job. This is what makes the example I gave work. However you always need to think about who your target is and sometimes people are just bad at this. I don’t think I need to give examples of this, but here you go anyway before you go forth to explore your own improvements in communication: