Improving Teamwork Through Awareness of Conversational Styles

Business Communication Quarterly
http://bcq.sagepub.com Improving Teamwork through Awareness of Conversational Styles

Louise Rehling Business Communication Quarterly 2004; 67; 475 DOI: 10.1177/1080569904270991 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bcq.sagepub.com
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BUSINESS 10.1177/1080569904270991 Rehling / AWARENESS COMMUNICATION OF CONVERSATIONAL QUARTERLY / December STYLES 2004
INNOVATIVE ASSIGNMENTS
IMPROVING TEAMWORK THROUGH AWARENESS OF CONVERSATIONAL STYLES

Louise Rehling
San Francisco State University
CONVERSATIONAL STYLES can sometimes cause conflicts on problemsolving writing teams. When such teams encounter difficulties, some familiar complaints are heard:
He never contributes but just sits like a bump on a log. I cant get a word in edgewise. I give my opinion, but they act as though they never heard me. When I talk, she always interrupts.
These and other communication roadblocks often occur as students struggle to adapt their conversational styles to an unfamiliar format: outside the familiar structure of family and friends and focused particularly on problem solving related to writing. Magnifying the difficulty of this transition are individuals tendencies to default to a favored conversational style, typically one influenced by family, culture, and gender. In self-defense, students often resort to blaming and shaming around conversational styles, which can just worsen unproductive group behaviors, limiting idea exchanges and deflecting attention from substantive issues and onto what is often labeled personality conflict. With the best of intentions and abilities, problem-solving writing teams may fail to produce their best work. Even worse, student team members may retreat to their cornersconversational styles and prejudices intactwithout learning how to make problem solving in writing teams more effective in future groups when in the workplace. Fortunately, research demonstrates that training in teamwork skills can
Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 67, Number 4, December 2004 475-482 DOI: 10.1177/1080569904270991 2004 by the Association for Business Communication 475
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BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2004
improve team success (e.g., Bacon, Stewart, & Silver, 1999; Schullery & Gibson, 2001). And research also shows that classroom discourse can help to develop professional attitudes in students that can later help them on the job (Dannels, 2000). This article provides some background about conversational styles and also describes an exercise that can help students improve their abilities to work effectively with different conversational styles.
TALKING WITH STUDENTS ABOUT HOW WE TALK TOGETHER
In more than a dozen years of teaching professional communication courses that require students to work together in problem-solving writing teams, I have learned to bring the problem of conflicting conversational styles out in the open in my classes. Drawing on the simple distinctions first popularized by linguist Deborah Tannen (1991), I ask students to discuss their opinions about and experiences with both turn-taking and overlapping conversational styles. To start the discussion in a balanced way, I usually begin by describing two recent conversations that I have observed among students in the class: both conversations positive and successful in solving some kind of problem, but one conversation exemplifying an overlapping style, the other a turntaking style. For example, a recent overlapping style conversation that I used in this way involved three students helping a fourth to collect notes and assemble handouts from a class that she had missed. In that conversation, as one student began to describe an assignment, others chimed in to elaborate and offer references, while the student who had missed class talked over all the others to ask questions. This conversation was animated, supportive, engaging, and almost entirely overlapping, with all speakers feeling free to talk at any timehelping to clarify and also helping to make the before-class information exchange go quickly. After describing this conversational example, I then reminded students of a turn-taking example from a recent class discussion about determining the deadline and precise deliverables for a course project. On that occasion, students held up their hands and were called upon before making their individual arguments about the decision that our class would make. To be sure that the class had reached consensus, I also polled some students who had not volunteered comments. Again, this conversation was animated, supportive, and engaging, but this time that outcome resulted from turn-taking, with classroom
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conventions for managing discussion helping to give all voices weight without privileging any above the rest.
Selecting the Right Style
These examples make the point that both extremes of conversational styles can be comfortable and effective for all involved and also that one style can be more appropriate and/or helpful than another for a given situation. In other words, the point is that neither style is either universally right or universally wrong, but rather that both can demonstrate the qualities of high considerateness and high involvement that Tannen (1991, p. 196) uses to discriminate between them. Also, after each of my examples, I call on students to remember and describe recent (and constructive) problem-solving conversations (ideally outside of the classroom) that they have had and that exhibited a similar conversational style. These examples point out to students their own flexibility in using different conversational styles, based not solely on their personalities but rather on the social context and collaborative purpose of different discussions. These exchanges then lead to our discussion of the different advantages of both overlapping and turn-taking conversational styles, as summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Advantages of Conversational Styles Overlapping Intimate, impulsive, spontaneous Sharing, supportive, engaged Energetic, enthusiastic, encouraging Ideal for brainstorming Turn-Taking Formal, sequential, deliberate Individualistic, thoughtful, complete Calming, focused, respectful Ideal for polling
Having established the positive potential for both conversational styles thereby reducing the likelihood of blaming and shaming around a preference for either style, students talk about when they most frequently encounter each of the two styles. The overlapping conversational style typically is identified with close and trusting relationships, the turn-taking style typically with more distant and hierarchical relationships, such as those common to classrooms and courts. However, we also talk about different styles used at family dinner tables, on sports teams, and at a variety of workplaces to tease out how culture, gender, status, and other context elements influence our choice of conversational styles and, sometimes, our personal tendencies to favor one style over another and perhaps even to fear or judge a differing style. Often
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this discussion produces some striking aha moments, when students recognize, usually with some surprise, how their assumptions about how conversations should take place are not always shared by others, and how those assumptions can harden into prejudices and cause reactions that could be especially damaging when problem solving is the goal. From such recognitions, we can easily turn our class discussion to the issues of dominance and control that Tannen (1991, pp. 181-215) raised with regard to conversational styles and how they can come into conflict. Here, again, I ask students to recall examples from their own problem-solving conversations with others, this time to identify occasions in which they felt that one partys conversational style caused difficulties for at least one other person in the conversation. At this point in our class discussion, the quotations in my introduction frequently are raised. So next, students identify the conversational style that each expression is in reaction to and why it leads to the negative comment, as summarized in Table 2.
Table 2. Examples of Negative Reactions to Conversational
Styles
Overlapping When I talk, she always interrupts. when an interrupter has her own agenda He never contributes, but just sits like a bump on a log. because the pace of idea exchange does not give him time to respond
Turn-Taking I cant get a word in edgewise. when a monologist controls the floor I give my opinions, but they act as though they never heard me. because the idea exchange is sequential and nonresponsive, not synergistic and based on listening
By analyzing these examples together, the students and I can more systematically clarify the potential disadvantages of each of the two opposed conversational styles, as summarized in Table 3.
Table 3. Disadvantages of Conversational Styles Overlapping Selfish, distracting interruptions Individual ideas lost or undervalued Incomplete thoughts Outcomes: frustration and domination Turn-Taking Selfish, serial monologues Individual ideas not connected together Repetitions Outcomes: withdrawal and domination
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This discussion of disadvantages leads to the realization that when problems arise with overlapping and turn-taking styles, those problems are often due less to how people talk and more to how poorly at least some of them are listening. Discussing and practicing effective listening techniques then becomes a welcome and useful topic. One approach is to have students pair up asking each pair to discuss for several minutes a topic relevant to their team projects. The other partner must listen to the speaker carefully enough (and with only clarifying questions, no other comments) to be able to summarize what the speaker says and then report that back to the class. This exercise demonstrates how much attention true listening requires and how if the listening partner distracts the other by an unsupportive interruption, or distracts himself or herself by thinking about what to say on the next turn, that can limit the expression of the speaker. As research has shown, practicing silence in this way can be difficult for students, but it also can be useful as a tool for developing better listening skills (Johnson, Pearce, Tuten, & Sinclair, 2003, pp. 34-36). Once the students have reached some consensus about the pros and cons of different conversational styles, recognized their potentially serious consequences and power implications, and practiced resisting the students own self-involved conversational style habits through active listening, I then turn our discussion to the goal of practicing with conversational styles in the collaborative work required for the students team writing projects, which presents complications and challenges. The student teams are writing community service learning projects: The student teams develop documents for external nonprofit clients. So students must hone their problem-solving conversational skills, both within their teams and when their teams meet with their client supervisors and informants (often in group sessions). Sometimes, of course, potentially contentious differences of opinion arise in both internal and external team meetings regarding project scope, design, and execution. To help students be most effective in such discussions, I recommend a series of practices.
Self-Awareness Practices
One set of techniques aims to help students to resist a first impulse to change the conversational style and, instead, to monitor their own behaviors. Paying attention to the issues raised in our class discussion helps students be aware of how their conversational styles are affecting a team problem-solving activity so that they can exercise more constructive control.
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Recognize the sources of your own conversational style habits. Often, of course, these are family-based or school-based habits. Someone may recognize, for example, how he was rewarded with attention for being able to think on his feet, generate quick answers, offer the first opinion, and raise his hand before others, making him feel that jumping in conversationally will make others value his participation most. Or someone may realize that she was reprimanded for interruptions but praised for careful articulation of ideas; and so she may be expecting her ideas to resonate before someone else chimes in with a new point of view. Recognizing when and why habits arise can make it easier to rein those habits in when appropriate. Monitor yourself to avoid the downsides of the conversational style that you habitually use with your project team. The first and best suggestion for students is that they ask for feedback from their peers about the pros and cons of their conversational styles in team meetings. Some students habits vary depending on whether the team conversation is internal or external, which also is worth noting. Acknowledging what others see in their behaviors helps students to notice when their conversational style habits turn, usually under stress, from being constructive to being damaging to group dynamics and effective decision making. Apply everyday ethics to your conversational behaviors. Most people accept that it is wrong to take something that is not given. Grabbing a conversational turn by means of a selfish, agenda-driven interruption is an example of that kind of unethical behavior. Similarly, holding onto ones turn by means of selfish monologue is possessive and violates the ethical value of sharing. Flex your own style to adapt more to others. As the initial discussion of examples usually illustrates to students, people are not stuck even in styles that are heavily favored by culture, gender, and other context influences. Everyone can recognize how different circumstances bring out different behaviors: No one talks to a judge the same way as he or she talks to a lover! From that recognition follows the opportunity to make some choices about conversational styles to adapt to different situations and others styles.
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Other-Awareness Practices
Students can follow another set of guidelines to develop their understanding of others conversational styles and to have some compassion for how difficult conversational style clashes can be. Recognize how others, too, express their backgrounds through their conversational styles. Without stereotyping, it still can be possible to be sensitive to how gender, culture, occupational history, and other influences predispose individuals to conversational styles that may seem counterproductive for the team as whole yet still be very comfortable for those individuals. Also, accepting that it may be more difficult for others to change may make it easier to decide to take on the burden of conversational style-flexing on ones own for the good of the group. Recognize others preferred conversational styles without judging. The blaming and shaming language that often accompanies conversational styles can be very damaging to team cohesiveness and decision making. For example, it is worth noting the unnecessarily self-righteous sting behind the all-too-common snappish response to someone with an overlapping style: Could you just let me finish, please? followed by a sarcastically exaggerated, Thank you! that implies the interrupter was rude. In the same way, many a turn-taker has been crushed to hear from a teammate, Well, obviously you have nothing to contributethe quality of deliberate thoughtfulness misread as vacuity or, even worse, stupidity. Such reactions can be demotivating, leading to the major problem for academic teams that Daniel Levi (2001, pp. 59-61) has labeled social loafing. Identify how others define the group or occasion to choose between conversational styles. Some students view team meetings as more social, whereas others may view them more as an extension of the classroom. Clarifying these differences, and deciding upon a useful way to acknowledge them, can go a long way toward a teams arriving at a conversational style that is comfortable for all of its members. For example, a team may decide deliberately to shift styles from the opening phase of each meeting, when base touching is the focus, to a later phase of the meeting that is more directed toward decisionmaking.
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Practice actively listening to others. This may be the most important suggestion of all. Although it may seem paradoxical, if everyone in a discussion focuses on truly listening, rather than on talking, and responds only out of that listening context, the talk of a team can be richer and both more efficient and more effective for team problem solving. Active listening prevents selfish interruptions and also prevents monologues, so it provides a one-size-fits-all solution to many team conversational style communication problems.
CONCLUSION
All of these awareness techniques can help students in problem-solving writing teams to be more ethically sensitive to and understanding about the conversational styles of others. Such awareness also can encourage students to flex their conversational styles to adapt to different people and situations: a useful tool for encouraging effective writing collaborations inside and outside the classroom.
REFERENCES
Bacon, D. R., Stewart, K. A., & Silver, W. S. (1999). Lessons from the best and worst student team experiences: How a teacher can make a difference. Journal of Management Education, 23(5), 467-488. Dannels, D. P. (2000). Learning to be professional: Technical classroom discourse, practice, and professional identity construction. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 14(1), 5-37. Johnson, I. W., Pearce, C. G., Tuten, T. A., & Sinclair, L. (2003). Self-imposed silence and perceived listening effectiveness. Business Communication Quarterly, 66(2), 25-45. Levi, D. (2001). Group dynamics for teams. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schullery, N. M., & Gibson, M. K. (2001). Working in groups: Identification and treatment of students perceived weaknesses. Business Communication Quarterly, 64(2), 930. Tannen, D. (1991). You just dont understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Ballantine.
Address correspondence to Louise Rehling, Technical & Professional Writing Program, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco CA 94132; e-mail: RehlingL@sfsu.edu.

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Business Communication Quarterly

http://bcq.sagepub.com Improving Teamwork through Awareness of Conversational Styles

Association for Business Communication

IMPROVING TEAMWORK THROUGH AWARENESS OF CONVERSATIONAL STYLES

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2004

Rehling / AWARENESS OF CONVERSATIONAL STYLES

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2004

Rehling / AWARENESS OF CONVERSATIONAL STYLES

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2004

Rehling / AWARENESS OF CONVERSATIONAL STYLES

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2004

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