Or: How acoustics influences delivery

Environmental sounds influence our speaking in many diverse ways: Matches the sound 1.1 the image, people can cope with this best. Does the sound not at all match with the image, it takes a while till the Image can be named correctly – apparently the sound which is not corresponding to the image irritates any speaker significantly. But surprisingly the worst case regarding the correlation between sound, image and verbal expression can be observed when sounds are neither totally wrong nor totally correct in relation to the image. This misleading effect is responsible for the longest latency between having heard the sound, having seen the image and naming the image correctly.

Specifically the four-level-experiment of the University of Leipzig uses the following example: imagine you listen to the neighing of a horse and then you see the image of a horse – you will be easily able to say the word horse. But now imagine you hear drums and then you see the image of a horse: it will take more time for you to let the word horse pass your lips. And finally imagine you hear a dog barking in the background while again the image of a horse is being presented to you. Now it takes according to the German experiment the longest time to name the horse a horse.

Due to the scientists a competition in your brain takes place in sorting out the right sound among an option of two sounds of the same category: animal sounds. Barking and neighing lie close together whereas drums and neighing contrast sharply with each other. In the latter case your brain recognizes the contrast and therefore the sound which is correctly resonating with the image much faster.

Neighing, Barking and Drumming Horses – Object Related Sounds help and hinder Picture Naming, Mägdebach/Wölner/Kieseler/Jescheniak, Journals fo Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2017, vol. 43, Nr. 9, 1629-1646.

From practice:

The experiment´s results confirm all of us, who have – as me – railed all along against the Powerpointitis of nowadays´ business world. All of us who are very skeptical against that overload of powerpoint and do suffer almost physically if charts are used in a wrong way may feel relieved.

What does this mean plainly? If you as the presenter cast abundant words at the wall and you talk something similar, yet not identical to this chart, then your audience will be highly irritated and you run the risk of losing them. Your listeners are puzzled whether to follow your words or your text at the wall and in this struggle most of them give up rather quickly. But you are irritating yourself, too: the chart which should facilitate your delivery is of no help – whenever you look at it and talk differently you yourself are off the road. Let me put it very clearly: powerpoint shall never be your competitor but your supporter.

Consequently it pays off to write only a minimum of words onto the charts enabling you to speak out these words 1:1 before you might add details, explain or ornament. There is one alternative which has shown also good effects: you skip words on your charts but work with huge images instead. In doing this you exert the mastery of presenting as well: inspiring your audience by the professional balance of visual and verbal inputs.

Less is more when it comes to decipher feelings

The widely held belief that emotions of any kind are determined best by facial expressions has ist weaknesses: a new serial of experiments from Yale University demonstrates doubtlessly how much easier feelings can be deciphered by concentrating 100% on the voice only, without being influenced by any visual detraction.

In 5 different experimental settings test persons had to watch dialogues which lasted 1 – 5-minutes long: live with light on, live in a darkened room, via a video, via a video with mute and via a video without pictures. Afterwards they had to name what sort of emotions they had apparently perceived while observing the dialogues and these details were compared with those of the 2 persons involved in the dialogues themselves. The higher or lower congruousness between these data determined the rate of deciphering and therefore the empathic accuracy of the test persons. The best results in empathic accuracy were accomplished consistently with all the voice-only settings. Pitch, cadence, speed, volume and content helped to identify emotions significantly better than facial expressions, gestures or other visual detractions: if you not only hear, but also see persons in a dialogue, you get the content up to 30% less and vocal cues for different emotions up to 40% less.

„Less is more“ the author of the study argues when it is key to capture exactly the emotional state of someone you observe. To rely on voice-only communication for empathic accuracy is sufficient – additional visual sources of information as facial expressions or gestures make the highly complex cognitive perceptual process even more complicated.

Voice-Only Communication Enhances Empathic Accuracy, Michael Kraus, American Psychologist, 2017, Vol. 72, Nr. 7, 644-654

From practice:

Fascinating: even if presentation charts are perfectly visualized, even if your outfit passes the test and your topic is currently talk of the town – with a small, low, monotonous, shakily or constrained voice your performance will not be perceived as masterful. This given, the power of voice is actually fundamental and I cannot point to it too often what a big impact your voice can make by energy, cool-headedness or passion at the decisive moments within your appearances, meetings or one-on-ones.

In parallel I am remembering countless phone calls where I am closing my eyes for focussing and I am pretty sure lots of people do it that way. And yes: by shutting off any visual detractions while talking to someone on the phone, only being exposed to the acoustics, you may be enabled to perceive the slightest nuance of emotional expression in the voice of your interlocutor.

The more I am questioning: what do the results mean for the majority of meeting where you definitely cannot close your eyes? Where the room, meeting participants and yourself are by definition visual detractions and 100% focussing on voices only is not possible? Aren´t in these cases facial expressions and gestures – body language – once again essential additional information which do help to decipher emotions of presenters and interlocutors alike?

Scorn for leaders who do not denounce unethical behavior of subordinates clearly shown

Managers who relativize unethical behavior of their subordinates don´t do anything good to their organisation: US-Scientists have verified in an experiment with 111 test persons how relativization leads to scorn by observers because relativization is considered to be unethical, too.

What is striking in this experiment is the correlation between the ethical standards of the observers and the behavior of the managers. The higher the own ethical standards, the less observers address a negative attitude towards the managers, at least in the beginning. This corresponds with the fact that high ethical standards means tolerance and rejects quick repudiation. But the more and the longer managers kept euphemizing the unethical behavior in their teams, delegating responsibility on someone else or were belittling the consequences, the faster scorn develops in this group of observers with high ethical standards. Conversely: the lower the ethical standards of observers, the more disgusted they have been from the very start – independent of how relativizingly and how long managers have talked about the unethical behavior in their teams.

So the authors conclude: 1. People with low ethical standards have an inherently higher propensity to scorn others – regardless if there is really some unethical behavior happening or not. People with high ethical standards adopt their reactions accordingly. 2. Organisations ought to train their managers to communicate unethical behavior of subordnates clearly and directly, not to inadvertently damage their own reputation and finally also the public image of the organisation.

Journal of Applied Psychology, „Leader Social Accounts of Subordinates Unethical Behavior: Examining Observer Reactions to Leader Social Accounts With Moral Disengagement Language“, Dang/Mitchell(Umphress, 2017, Vol. 102, Nr. 10, 1448 – 1461

From practice:

To address unethical behavior of subordinates is a difficiult task for most superiors – if this has to take place in a small meeting or in the public alike. First you could easily accuse yourself not to have supervised your team professionally and second it is simply challenging to address unethical behavior alone and not punching the responsible persons behind, too.

Yes, I can advise to take each word of yours with a pinch of salt: 1. Express unmistakenly and proactively your attitude = don´t let others tear out of you if and where you draw the lines between fair and unfair, ethical and unethical behavior. 2. Keep in mind not to allow any speculations that in your opinion unethical behavior is a trivial issue,. 3 Train and exercise this type of statement in front of a camera. Even if your worst case does not mean necessarily that you have to show up in a TV-studio: your town hall meeting could be recorded by any smartphone available and can go viral.

And there is another aspect the study has not analysed separately: Managers who relativize unethical behavior of their subordinates might lose the committment of the vast majority of employees who carry based on high ethical standards any organisation.

School effect for adults

People who don´t have information requested ready at hand tend to compensate this deficit with talking or uttering murmurs. To ask for a little pause or to announce such a pause in order to get the information meanwhile is not an option at least in the German speaking market. This results from a study recently presented at the Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm by the University of Bielefeld.

In the experiment the setting of a phone call between a travel agent and a customer looking for a particular flight connection was chosen because here any time automatically and naturally there will be a pause between the question and the correct answer since the agent has to look up the variety of options in his computer system.10 test persons participated as agents and had to got through 10 phone calls each with highly different requests and solutions. Actually it has always been the same caller for every agent. All participants wer German native speakers.

The study intended to find out how people use inevitable latencies which lasted between 4 and 50 seconds on average, most cases under 20 seconds. Mostly during the latency agents asked questions (21%), murmured (19%) or addressed what was happening right now (10,4%). Only 6,3% told the customers explictily that there will be a latency and that they have to wait while the requested information is being gathered.

„Beyond On-Hold Messages: Conversational Time-Buying in Task-Oriented Dialogue“, Gabino/Zarrieß/Schlangen, In: Proceeding of SIGdial 2017, 2017.

From practice

Senders believe regularly that pauses could cause harm and thus they try to avoid them. Pauses, they think, would document their lack of knowledge and would therefore convey unease to the receiver. I am labelling this phenomenon „the School effect“ where most of us have made efforts to swindle ourselves through verbal examinations by talking, talking talking – almost regardless what. Teachers in our memory credited talking per se as engagement while pauses in front of the class were considered as horrible evidences of laziness and ignorance.

On the contrary: in professional life pauses do make their point when it comes to digesting the hords of information we all are exposed to. Only with pauses from time to time we are capable of comprehending what someone tries to communicate to us.

But at times a pause can come across negatively: when it takes longer than it should take – here it is always a good advice to connect in between otherwise the sender might lose the receiver´s attention. Or the sender announces this extraordinary pause explicitly to help the receiver to adapt to that unusual long situation of silence. In a typical Telefone all I do recommend to keep pauses between the question and your answer shorter than in a live conversation. Since we cannot see each other we cannot check what is happening right now.

Follow up questioning increases sympathy significantly

Asking is a main attribute of leading – with this meanwhile traditional management principle a bridge between asking and leadership has been established for years. The connection between asking and liking was not analysed before, though, and a Harvard University study brought now unequivocal results:

Independent of sex and setting (written or verbal communication) people tend to develop positive emotions towards their interlocutors if interest for themselves is being shown apparently. Follow up questions transfer this interest exceptionally well – questions which help getting deeper into the subject that has been addressed from the other side right now. This is why they commence often with „How“ or „Why“ since you cannot raise a follow up question unless you have listened carefully and have understood what the person you are talking to has expressed so far. So using follow up questions in a conversation frequently leads directly to more liking, particularly in comparison to those who are focussed on talking about themselves and who do not reflect on the other person just has said.

Interestingly persons having participated in the study have not at all been aware of this correlation, namely how promising question asking in any dialogue can be as a strategy for raising sympathy. The US scientists interpret this fact as an opportunity for everybody to manage or even steer his/her personal social acceptance better and more proactively in future. Moreover, follow up questioning can be exercised pretty well.

„It doesn´t hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking“, Huang/Yeomans/Brooks/Minson/Gino, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017, Vol. 113, Nr. 3, 430-452.

From practice:

True: one who asks does show interest and one who shows interest conveys respect. From this perspective raising questions is always a brillant idea when building up and establishing personal relationships is key. Let´s consider networking events for example where each of us is making efforts to get in touch with prospective clients. Professionals among us focus in these more or less 15 – 20 minute encounters onto their interlocutors and make in-depth talks actually possible.

But there is an aspect not mentioned in the Harvard study which is due to my experience crucial whether your interest demonstrated in these types of talks will come across with high or low credibility: your eye-contact. How unpleasant, let alone how disgusting if someone allegedly is interested in your thoughts and stories, but all the while tries to figure out who else – perhaps more interesting than you – might be also in the room, his or her eyes not looking into yours but wandering around behind your shoulders.

Follow up questioning and staying in touch while networking is easily to be trained. Videoanalyses prove beyond any doubt where you should not miss your point in this so called professional business small talks and where – even if you are concentrated on what you are going to emphasize next – you definitely should restrain from talking but better ask.

New discrimination factor revealed

Whether a candidate has got the same political affiliation as the HR manager who is assessing his/her application might decide over a job approval or declination. Far more than assumed till now and much stronger than known factors of political incorrectness like race, sex or religion similar political views between the interviewer and the interviewee give way to sympathy or antipahty, contempt or even hatred. Individual features of qualification as education, experience, stress restistence or capacity for teamwork lose on importance if compared. That much politics is arousing emotions – even somewhere you won´t expect it. Impact and implications of these correlations are elaborated on in a new US study via the socalled PAM – Political Affiliation Model.

Particularly in the negative case – the candidate does not share the political standpoint of the HR manager – he/she is pretty much quickly stereotyped (i.e. conservatives would be only interested in making money and working selfishly on their careers). With this approach HR managers can more easily ignore existing and verifiable competences .

The authors point out that in times of ongoing radicalisation of politics in the US, but also in Europe, this type of discrimination has to be watched closely and has to be kept withing bounds. In Washington DC and in the state of Mississippi there is a law already which explicitly prohibits to take into account the political affiliation of candidates in any kind of personnel decision.

„The Role of Political Affiliation in Employment Decision: A Model and Research Agenda“, Roth/Goldberg/Thatcher Journal of Applied Psychology, 2017, Vol. 102, Nr. 9, 1286 – 1304.

From Practice:

Europe contrasts the US in having established a multi-party-system, so polarization known to the American public as „They and we“ had much less chances to develop here. Even on the old continent, though, there is a tendency towards political intensification meanwhile, and so in my opinion it is likely that Superiors and HR Managers decide upon candidates unknowingly also according to their accurate or assumed political affiliation. That means every sector is theoretically confronted with the results of the study. Especially in those organisations whose stakeholders are politicians or members of the political community, the new study can play a role for future reflections since there the candidate´s political preference and his/her presumed loyality to a specific political party is frequently considered more important than his/her qualifications.

What I am hearing most when supporting non-partisan candidates in their preparation for hearings in this context is how they should deal with that hidden agenda. Well, often the best option is to address the issue directly and confront the jury with the question how important one´s political affiliation actually is for getting the job. The candidate can build up his/her mind how the jury is coping with that issue and can decide then after the hearing much better, if he/she wants to join. Another option is to present strategies with political values embedded – in such a case the stakeholders can also make up their mind if they want to go for this candidate or not.

In my personal view I do hope that in the near future all parties understand that they proactively harm organisations more than benefit them in sticking to the tradition of not looking for the best but the most loyal employee only. And I am alerting clients who run for a job in an organisation close to politics that they might fall into dependence of the respective party if they do not fit into the shoes of the job called for.

How Coaching contributes to a better job perfomance

A meta analysis of recent behavioral research and neuroscientific insights indicates the impact of classical coaching. Coaching, so the analysis, supports self efficacy and contributes to building up a stronger ego. To improve directly one´s job performance, though, some aspects have to be incorporated in the coaching process:

1. There should be accurate planning – goal setting and reflecting upon that alone is not sufficient. Only in 28% of the cases goal setting as such was a good indicator for adopting new behavior.
2. Goals have to be taylored and specific. Otherwise coachees cannot identify with them.
3. To develop simultaneously to plan A also plan B decreases statistically the chance of accomplishing your goals.
4. To maintain high flyer goals under all circumstances does not promise success and might on the contrary harm your health substantially. Adapting or letting loose is then the target.
5. To exercise new behavior is ok, but rarely enough to deliver a better performance. It takes at least self-motivation and a minimum of talent and capabilities to guarantee an optimized output of your efforts.

Facilitating successful behavior change: beyond Goal setting to goal flourishing, Kenneth Nowack, Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Reserach, 2017, vol. 69, Nr. 3, 153-171.

From practice

To be a coach results almost everywhere in tremendously positive feedback because we support self-confidence and the sense of well being in elaborating with our clients how they can proactively shape and frame their careers. Frankly speaking I do not know anybody who does not felt satisfied during and after such a coaching process. But I also do believe that knowing what to do right does not mean necessarily to proceed with it – just think of all the resolutions you have made on all the Dec 31st you might remember.

We shake up our client´s ressources, we support to shovel the path clear to the client´s own aspirations and goals. And still it is just the very first step to feel good after the coaching session or to be able to bundle your concerns better.

In the end there are the implementation of new habits or the execution of new plans that count. Hereby we are able to measure how well and how professionally we have worked as coaches. Coaching for me is an output-oriented profession which intends to contribute to a change of the client´s behavior.

I do recommend: Check in advance if the professional background of the coach is of use for your issues or not – my professional background is executive communication & PR – and do not start any coaching process unless there are some jointly defined, accurate and evaluable goals.