I am a straight talker, I proudly wear it on my shoulder. I like it when people can trust my words and identifies me as a person who "talk the talk, walk the walk". A year ago someone in my workplace told me that I should work on being diplomatic since direct communication might hurt relationships. As much as I'd like to argue that I'm not looking for long term friendship in office and I'm here to complete my task, as I level up in the ladder, my vantage point changes and so does my perspective about the workplace communication.
Now I find myself in a place where I have to communicate more, about the same thing to multiple stakeholders with different level of business and technical knowledge. It is getting increasingly difficult to continue being 'the straight talker', which I regarded highly in the past. Sometimes it is not just about knowledge of the audience, it is more about the style of communication. I'm Indian, and my domicile has not changed since birth and so one might assume that I use indirect communication style and they cannot be farther from the truth. In reality, I'm direct to a level where even my western peers might consider me rude.
My first year at Cognizant with training wheel intact went without seeing one mail from the client. One month later, my training wheels came off as I got into a billable project as a Programmer Analyst. I found myself working for Harris broadcast in a single man team and more importantly directly interacting with clients based out of USA. And it is an understatement to say they use direct communication and this place forged my communication style for the years to come. Luckily my next & current employer, (Banca) Sella had a similar culture, to be more precise my team had a similar culture.
When the IT Architetture office says, they will do, consider it done; and when they reject your implementation with comment 'improvement required' consider yourself lucky. It was that direct, no one had anything to hide and I learnt it from the best of the lot; the same cannot be said about the rest of India branch, and that is a huge problem. It was a bit odd but not something unheard, I interacted more with partners in Italy than colleagues in India, and this didn't help one bit to mould my communication style which was forged on top of 2 years of interaction with Americans.
Fast forward to 2019 and a colleague comes up to me and asks if I can be more diplomatic, you see this communication style is not something that I choose, but it was a perfect fit for me since I highly regarded honestly and will get easily frustrated by, 'technically not lying'. The indirect communication is not my alley but yet it is a recommendation from high up, and I must try to do something about it right? I did, I picked up the book titled 'Emotional Intelligence'. The book recommended something like this, "Be aware of yourself, what you want to do, about the recipient, stand in their shoes maybe and now do the thing". I have nothing against Daniel Goleman, but if I do follow his logic; I'll end up lying proactively and work on changing the lie to truth.
More simply Emotional Intelligence called for faking it till making it. I decided I'm not going to do it, to hell with indirect communication, I leave it for diplomats and managers. I might revisit the idea, but today I will stick to direct communication . Months pass I get a call from an executive to let me know I sound rude and tone-deaf! Well, this has turned into a problem, I'm starting to lose my sleep. I honestly cannot get over this idea of me hurting someone with my words; which are 100% truth to the best of my knowledge and has always been written or spoken with best intentions for everyone involved.
To be honest, Emotional Intelligence (EI) is looking more attractive now and it has been only six months since I have decided for the second time that it is not for me. Earlier to improve my English language skill my well-wisher made me read the book (circa 2010). I have decided EI is not my cup of tea, but some excerpts struck a chord with me, especially "standing in others' shoes" and oh it has a fancy name "Empathy". Yeah, I can be compassionate, I can add 'please', 'if you will', 'can you consider', 'it will be a big favour' here and there and sound nice, but I decided not to be shallow. I don't even want to stop at understanding how to feel like others, I want to know why anyone feels the way they feel. I found some answers in the book 'The Difficulty of Being Good' by Gurcharan Das. let me talk about the book later it has been a long post already. And I'm going to write a lot about it, I took notes, I wanted to practice Empathy and I was not joking.
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