The Wall Street Journal
09-24-06
Boss's word obscured by Telephone Game
JARED SANDBERG
The Wall Street Journal
The childhood diversion known as the Telephone Game, in which the details of a
sentence or phrase deteriorate with each retelling of it, is played the world over.
Sometimes called Whisper Down the Lane and Pass It Down, it's also played,
inadvertently, in almost every corporation on the planet.
George Franks, who runs a Bethesda, Md., management-consulting group,
witnessed it, appropriately enough, when he worked at a telephone company.
Years ago, when the company brought in an Italian executive to improve a
division, the executive suggested that the business become more international.
"Before long, staff and line managers were wearing double breasted continental
suits and using cigarette holders - to emulate the executive and be more
'international,' " he says.
Miscommunication in corporate culture is so endemic that whenever
management consultants, industrial psychologists and executive coaches hear of
almost any problem, they prescribe "better communication," as if it were two
aspirins. But they're right on the money when it comes to lieutenants and staffers
relaying the boss's wishes, some of which the boss has no idea he had.
What may start as a passing mention, a simple question or some faint musing
gets layered with what people hope to hear, fear hearing or never heard at all. So
as word of the boss's comments reaches the far corners of the hierarchy, a
question can become a directive, which can then mutate into an initiative,
contorted into a campaign and ultimately memorialized in a mission statement.
A mere "yes" or "no" might have sufficed.
Research suggests that "when we listen, we drop information because we can't
remember every word that someone has said," says Mark Redmond, associate
professor of communications studies at Iowa State University. "When we
retell it, we put information back in, adding elements that may completely change
the meaning of the original message."
There's a double-whammy. Not only might you recall it incorrectly, but the added
stuff reflects your own ideas, he says.
Bias was a problem that Claire Cardie, a professor of computer science at
Cornell University, ran into when she and associates were trying to write a
computer program to be used in industry to understand people's opinions of
products. They knew there might be a problem evaluating information from, say,
an article that quoted a report that quoted a person's opinion. They were hoping
they could work their way around it. "But we couldn't," she says.
What she also found was that in a chain of communication, "someone in that line
always messes up," she says, meaning the message is only as good as the
worst communicator who ever carried it. When Dick Nicholson was a sales
manager, one salesman was underperforming. At an annual sales reception, the
chairman of the company said to the vice president that Mr. Nicholson reported
to, "Why is so-and-so still a salesman?"
The vice president then told Nicholson that the chairman wanted to promote the
salesman. Stunned, Mr. Nicholson went into the chairman the next morning and
asked what he meant.
"Happily, he meant 'Why is the guy still on the payroll?' " When Nicholson
explained what had happened, the chairman "came out of his chair like a Saturn
rocket," he recalls.
Nicholson spent the next several months pressing the salesman for better
performance to no avail. But he had prevented the misunderstanding from
escalating into a catastrophe by employing an unusual but elegant tactic: "I
asked what he meant," he says.