What Do Rats Tell Us About How We Learn?

Updated July 25th 2023

My mother is terrified of rats. Actually anything that resembles a rat, e.g. mice, guinea pigs, gerbils, hamsters, in fact anything that is small and furry, with a tail, and could potentially sit in your hand. This fear does not extend to miniature dogs…yet!

I haven’t got to the bottom of what caused her fear, but I am now scared of rats too! I don’t even know how this happened, because I used to think her fear was ridiculous! It’s something I am now working on getting over!

As terrifying as they may or may not be, the great thing about rats is that they tell us so much about our own brains and behavior.

Did you know, that when rats are raised in a complex and challenging environment, their brains increase in the size of the cortex, the length of neurons, the number of synapses, and the level of neurotransmitters and growth hormones (Guzowski, et al., 2001; Ickes et al., 2000; Kempermann et al., 1998; Kolb & Whishaw, 1998).

The benefits of stimulating environments are not just reserved for the young. When adult rats are exposed to training and enriched environments, the effects of earlier nervous system damage and genetically based learning deficits can be ameliorated (Altman et al. 1968; Kolb & Gibb, 1991; Schrott et al. 1992; Schrott, 1997).

Although it is not possible to do such invasive research with humans, there is much evidence to suggest that our brains react in the same manner (Cozolino & Sprokay, 2006).

The brain has been shaped by evolution to adapt and readapt to an everchanging world (Cozolino & Sprokay, 2006).

The ability to learn is dependent on modification of the brain’s chemistry and architecture, in a process called “neural plasticity”. Neural plasticity reflects the ability of neurons to change their structure and relationships to one another in an experience-dependent manner according to environmental demands (Buonomano and Merzenich, 1998; Trojan and Pokorny, 1999).

My point is, that everything you think you know and feel now, can change for better or worse depending on what you focus on. Although rats freak me out, I can get rid of this fear!

All this applies to things like communication skills training and customer service training – Courses just actually need to be designed to take what we know about the brain and learning into account. We obviously make every effort to do this at Adaptas™.

By the way, I am still one step ahead of my mother because I am at peace with guinea pigs, gerbils, hamsters!

I believe there is a hamster hotel in France, that gives guests the chance to live like a hamster – where you can eat grain, run in a giant wheel and sleep on hay. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJW4RAUDBBo for a short video.

Let us know if you visit it!

Caveman Communication in The Workplace

Updated July 25th 2023

In ancient times, our ancestors had to engage in life-or-death battles against both wild animals and other humans merely to stay alive. Fortunately, the majority of us no longer face such dire circumstances. Nowadays, there are designated areas in the world such as safaris and zoos where we can choose to experience encounters with potentially threatening animals safely. As for our food, skilled individuals are responsible for preparing animals for consumption, and this processed meat is readily available in our grocery stores.

Regarding the act of taking someone else’s life for the sake of our own survival, it is disheartening to acknowledge that in certain regions of the world, this is still the case. People murder others in the name of land ownership and religion amongst other reasons. However, for the most part, the majority of us live in relatively safe and civilised societies where we ideally care for one another—or so it is commonly presumed.

Recently, numerous conversations with individuals employed across various levels of medium to large organisations have left me concerned. These discussions revealed distressing accounts of certain individuals or entire teams deliberately creating obstacles or failing to take necessary actions, thereby forcing others to shoulder heavier workloads or appear inadequate in front of their peers. Consequently, this causes undue stress among colleagues, and if not appropriately addressed, it could potentially lead to severe health issues such as strokes, heart attacks, and other adverse outcomes.

To what extent does this approach deviate from the core values and beliefs of the original founder/s of the respective companies? How distant is it from the organisation’s vision and mission? To what degree have the employees drifted away from the very purpose for which they were initially brought together? Why do some individuals feel entitled to come to work each day and get paid to make their colleagues’ lives more challenging? Shouldn’t we have progressed beyond such primitive behaviors of the past?

Is this phenomenon evident within your organisation? If so, in which areas is it manifesting? Are you turning a blind eye to its existence, or could you possibly be contributing to its occurrence? Perhaps it’s time to take responsibility for your actions and consider whether it’s necessary to challenge the behavior of those around you or modify your own actions for the better.

Is it time to become more conscious of the impact you are having on the future of yourself, others, and the place you work? Is it time to evolve and grow?

Are you ready?

Who’s Shoe Is It Anyway?

Updated July 25th 2023

Ever been a pedestrian, a cyclist or a driver of a car? Ever get beeped and shouted at and felt like you didn’t deserve it and instantly hated the person who beeped and shouted at you?

I recall a situation, where whilst driving through Dublin city, (oh and being a woman of course!), I veered slightly into the incorrect lane at a junction (that I think, if truth be told most people would agree is slightly confusing). The guy in the car behind me, pulled up alongside me, rolled down his window and literally cursed and abused me all the way to the end of the road, a good half a mile. It was quite shocking. Yes for that half a mile or so, I was angry, and bordering on getting quite upset at his shouts, cursing and remarks. However, I kept my head together, told myself he must be having a bad day and eventually stated firmly and loud enough so that he could hear, ‘ It must be difficult being you’.

On that note, and following on from last weeks blog, I though it worthwhile to look at the rationale behind the focus of another of our processes at Adaptas™. Our process ‘Who’s Shoe is it anyway?’ examines our ability to understand emotions and to empathise with others.

Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ famously said: “You can never understand someone unless you understand their point-of-view, climb in that person’s skin or stand and walk in that person’s shoes.”

The objective of ‘Who’s Shoe is it anyway?’ is to enable participants to see how similar they and their customers are. We all have fears, pain, desires etc. Regardless of our experiences, and/or how we live our lives, how we brush over issues or face up to them, at a core level our emotions are all the same.

I endlessly find it amazing, how we are not taught about our emotions in school and are not provided with communication skills training. If we understood our emotions from a young age, we could learn how to have better emotional management. We would also identify and empathise with other people more readily.

Of course the business case here is that managers and leaders who are emotionally intelligent are consistently recognized as being more effective and successful in their roles.

Ineffective managers are expensive, costing organizations millions of dollars each year in direct and indirect costs. Ineffective managers make up half of today’s organizational management pool, according to a series of studies (e.g.Gentry & Chappelow, 2010).

If managers and leaders can genuinely take another persons perspective into account, they are much more likely to get the results they require. Perspective taking can be applied to solving problems, managing conflicting, or driving innovation. And we could all do at being better at those things!

With the hustle and bustle of daily life, you might be thinking we have no time to consider our own or others emotions. I argue though, that if we understood emotions better, every reaction we have to situations and people could be more positive for ourselves, our long-term health, and the health of others! It generally just takes recognizing how we are feeling and making a decision to respond differently to how the child in us would like to respond. Our behaviours, patterns, beliefs about others and ourselves are all laid down when we are children. How many of us have actually grown up and out of our childhood ways of being and reacting?

Yes maybe that man who cursed and shouted from the car beside me that day could be called a rude, ignorant, angry person (I made a mistake in the lane but I didn’t deserve the level of abuse I got for it!), but no doubt his personality and how it was expressing itself was probably caused by his upbringing or the stress he is currently under in his life. And yes, it is difficult to be patient with people when they are treating you badly, but what we can do is take responsibility in how we react…can you?

Communication Skills: Listening or Hearing?

Updated July 25th 2023

In business and in life, it is essential to know how to listen properly. When we sense that someone genuinely listens to us, a foundation of trust and respect is built. For managers, neglecting to truly listen to their colleagues’ concerns or issues can severely harm the relationship and, consequently, the organisation. If a customer is not being listened to, we lose them as a customer, and potentially also lose a lot of their own friends and family as customers; word of mouth is powerful!

Recently I have found myself attempting to explain, to previous and prospective clients, many of the new processes we use in our communication skills training.

Many of our processes at Adaptas™ are situational-based tasks, taking the form of pseudo-life scenarios. Some tasks involve observing examples of human behaviour, others require immersion within a situation. All involve ‘doing’ and much self-reflection. Without self-reflection and awareness, no real change can take place in how we feel and behave.

Our processes present participants with tasks carefully crafted to mirror the real-life situations encountered in our workplaces and daily lives. Each process centers around a specific aspect of communication and behaviour, enabling every participant to delve into their comprehension and proficiency in that particular area.

One example of a game-based process called ‘Worldwide Whispers’ tests our ability to listen to other people. The game is not the same as, but is definitely inspired by the game ‘Chinese Whispers’, which many of us played as children.

In ‘Worldwide Whispers,’ participants are immersed in diverse scenarios, putting their listening skills to the test. Success in this game depends entirely on how effectively they can listen. Through this process, individuals gain valuable insights into their genuine listening abilities and identify areas where they can enhance their effectiveness as listeners. Instead of assuming their listening prowess, participants quickly grasp their actual strengths and weaknesses in this crucial skill.

Here are some tips on improving listening skills:

1) Listen to hear the meaning behind what others are saying.
Pay particular attention to nonverbal cues. Emotion expressed nonverbally may be more telling than the words people speak. Focus on tone of voice, pace of speech, facial expressions, and gestures.

2) Be an active listener.
Active listening is a person’s willingness and ability to hear and understand someone else. Active listeners are able to reflect the feelings expressed and summarize what they are hearing. There are several key skills all active listeners share:
-They pay attention to others.
-They hold judgment.
-They reflect by paraphrasing information. They may say something like “What I hear you saying is…”
-They clarify if they don’t understand what was said, like “What are your thoughts on…” or “I don’t quite understand what you are saying, could you repeat that…”
-They summarize, giving a brief restatement on what they just heard.

Also, see a great video on listening skills for leaders: ‘Why I’m a listener: Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer’

Why do managers go through leadership training and not improve?

Updated July 24 2023

On reading the 14th CIPD Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey 2012, I was delighted to see an emphasis on the need for new approaches to learning!

According to the survey, ‘nearly three-quarters of organisations see a deficit in management and leadership skills’. This means that despite years of management training and development, much of the skill base of managers remains unimproved. This survey indicates that senior managers are perceived, as much as line managers, to be lacking in management and leadership skills.

The report states that ‘Learning & talent development practitioners have a big role in using their insights on leadership and behaviour in making sure those leaders are developed properly’, and that ‘a lot of this activity is going to require a step-up in our awareness of a new and emerging evidence base from the sciences about how people think, act and behave.’

The report states that familiar models such as Myers Briggs, Kolb, and Honey and Mumford which have been used to generate insight on how people learn and develop are too familiar, and that the challenges we face now require different insights and a refreshed evidence base.

Yippee!! That’s what we at Adaptas™ have been arguing!! Yes, of course all of these theorists and measurements have their place in people development, but as the survey states ‘there is a low awareness of the emerging evidence base from neuroscience, cognitive research and areas like economics which could transform the way we think’. Yes, for most organisations and for most training providers there is a lack of awareness of all the new findings and the power of the brain. However, Adaptas™ combines approaches taken from these areas and which are monumentally important for adult learning and for organisational change!

The report states, ‘Understanding neuroscience issues such as how the brain codes, captures and cleans knowledge and memory, helps us to know much more about how to pace and develop our learning interventions.’

Agreed! The reason so many managers and leaders, who have gone through staff training are still not effective, is because the trainings they have received have not been cutting edge. They have not taken into account what we now know about the human brain! Are you ready to be one of the organisations who actually sees a change when your managers go through training? If so, get in touch with us….

Note: The 14th CIPD Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey 2012 was researched and developed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (www.CIPD.co.uk) with Cornerstone OnDemand

What Makes A Great Leader?

Updated July 24th 2023

I asked a friend of mine about an old boss of his the other day, and what it was that he admired about him. He said that his old boss, let’s call him John, was a brilliant leader and salesman, that he was liked by everyone, that everyone would go out of their way to assist him in building his business and not one single person from factory floor to board of directors had a bad thing to say about him. On asking my friend what it was about this man, that had everyone liking him and wanting to support and collaborate with him, the answer my friend gave was not John’s ability to anticipate what was coming next, say for example, in a competitive market, or to make decisions quickly, or to think critically. The answer my friend gave was plainly and simply, that John was always interested in other people. It always mattered to John how other people were doing, what was going on for them in their lives, what they needed in the way of support with their current role.

Surprising?

Consider this, the ability to anticipate, to think critically and to take decisive action are of the utmost importance for a leader and an organisation to be successful. Nevertheless, being an effective leader is equally about getting the right people to work with and collaborate with to build and sustain the vision and the plan. Finding and keeping the right people depends on building relationships with those people, and building successful relationships depends on the ability to understand peoples’ needs. We can only understand another persons needs if we have an ability to be empathic. In other words, understanding an individual, a group and a markets needs depends on an ability to put ourselves in their shoes and at least try to understand their perspective of the world, regardless of our differing experience, beliefs, attitudes and values.

Empathy as a term is thrown around a lot as something that we should all ideally develop to be effective in our relationships, as leaders, as colleagues, as friends, spouses, parents etc. Nevertheless, by many it is still viewed as one of those things over there in the corner that is a soft skill, and as leaders, how much time do we actually have to develop our soft skills as part of our staff training plan? It is also viewed as being the opposite to the concepts of decision-making etc that leaders need to have.

Consider this though, as globalisation increases, and the world becomes a smaller place, as borders collapse, and businesses expand into different cultures, the success of an organization depends more and more on building effective relationships.

Is it time to be more like John, in our ability as leaders to harness empathy within our organisation, and hence to have a real impact so that everyone can share the success, or should we turn our back on developing this skill and get left behind?…only you can decide.

Short Term Sacrifice; Long-Term Sustainability

Updated 24th July 2023

As I drove recently through a state in middle America, which will go unnamed for fear of offending some of my nearest & dearest, I observed, as I do every time I visit the USA how unhealthy the lifestyle is. It is totally acceptable to drive everywhere; there are drive-thru fast food venues on every corner; there are few walking paths and no cycle paths; there are advertisements everywhere for every across-the-counter drug under the sun. And for too many people who were born and raised here it is a way of life, and they do not question it. The level of obesity is frightening, with young children and teenagers, never mind fully grown adults waddling, because they cannot walk properly due to their size. It seriously reminds me of the animated movie WALL-E (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/). People don’t seem to realize that there is a different way to live one’s life. If children are born and reared in this environment, how can they expect to know any differently?! Call me mean, but I know that when people eat this amount of sugary and salty food and get no exercise, they are more likely to have severe health problems in time, that could otherwise easily be avoided.

What has this got to do, you may ask, with organisations and staff training?

Well my stay in the USA, got me thinking; what are the habits in organisations that people think are acceptable and healthy? People become institutionalised very quickly and often those with the best of intentions in a new role, get stuck into the way it’s always been, and they either stop questioning, or they put their head down and get on with it for the sake of keeping their job. They stop asking questions and stop looking for answers. People constantly tell me how they have settled into and accept things such as the following;

-Accepting gossiping within the department;

-Listening to a ranting team-member/ manager who blames everyone else for everything that goes wrong rather than taking responsibility themselves.

-Ignoring customer needs a) as much as they can get away with or b) because they have been indoctrinated into focusing on processes and procedures.

These are only a few examples of course, but people accept it all because this is how it’s always been and this is how it always will be. There is little consideration for the fact that rising stress levels due to these seemingly simple issues cause people to become less productive and/or ineffective. Over time the newbies become ingrained into what has always been the norm at that organization. How dangerous is this a) for the health of the individual and b) for the progress of the organization?

It is one thing to be aware of what is wrong and ineffective. In certain parts of the USA, how life is lived unhealthily by many is acceptable, with no questions asked. It is often only people who have left this particular state, (the one I am visiting), or who educate themselves about life outside of this and surrounding states and outside the USA in general, that realize that this way of life is not healthy. And even with awareness, it is difficult for them to make healthy decisions for themselves to make changes and decisions that their friends and families will also agree to. So it’s one thing to have the awareness, it’s another to have the confidence and conviction to expect anything different in behavior or to promote change, and to make sure it is seen through.

The only reason many organisations admit to needing help from external bodies or individuals, is when they record a massive drop in profits and when customers think on their feet and go to the competitor. Many organisations are reactive, rather than actively looking to get people on the same page, and improving the awareness of individuals before it gets out of control. It’s often too late by then.

Many Americans in this area, whom I have met, and seen, need to make some short to middle-term sacrifices in their lifestyle to adjust to a new way of living for the sake of long-term health. Likewise, long-term sustainability in organisations comes from short to medium term sacrifice at all levels of the organisation. Would you agree?

Quick Tips for Developing Empathy – Incorporating Them Into Staff Training Yields Rewards!

Empathy is an emotional and thinking muscle that becomes stronger the more we use it. Here are a few practical tips to consider. You can use them during communication skills training, or share them with your colleagues to lend them a hand!

• Listen – truly listen to people. Listen with your ears, eyes and heart. Pay attention to others’ body language, to their tone of voice, to the hidden emotions behind what they are saying to you, and to the context.

• Don’t interrupt people. Don’t dismiss their concerns offhand. Don’t rush to give advice. Don’t change the subject. Allow people to have their moment.

• Tune in to non-verbal communication. This is the way that people often communicate what they think or feel, even when their verbal communication says something quite different.

• Embrace the “93% rule” in your communication. According to a renowned study by Professor Emeritus, Albert Mehrabian of UCLA, when expressing emotions and attitudes, the words we use only contribute to 7% of the overall message received by people. The remaining 93% is conveyed through our tone of voice and body language. Therefore, it’s crucial to take the time to grasp how we present ourselves while communicating our feelings and attitudes to others.

• Make an effort to learn and use people’s name. Also remember the names of people’s spouse and children so that you can refer to them by name.

• Be fully present when you are with people. Don’t check your email, look at your watch or take phone calls when a direct report drops into your office to talk to you. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if someone did that to you?

• Smile at people. This will also boost your own self-esteem and your immune system!

• Encourage people, particularly the quiet ones, when they speak up in meetings. A simple thing like an attentive nod can boost people’s confidence.

• Give genuine recognition and praise. Pay attention to what people are doing and catch them doing the right things. When you give praise, spend a little effort to make your genuine words memorable: “You are an asset to this team because..”; “This was pure genius”; “I would have missed this if you hadn’t picked it up.”

• Take a personal interest in people. Show people that you care, and genuine curiosity about their lives. Ask them questions about their hobbies, their challenges, their families, their aspirations.

Can Empathy Be Learned? A Valuable Aspect for Staff Training!

Updated July 24th 2023

Extensive research consistently demonstrates a direct correlation between empathy and business success and profitability. Numerous studies have linked empathy to increased sales, superior performance among top managers in product development teams, and overall enhanced organisational performance. Consequently, companies are now actively seeking new recruits who exhibit healthy levels of empathy. Although empathy may be considered a soft and abstract skill in an individual’s repertoire, its impact can yield tangible, concrete results. Naturally empathetic individuals, adept at fostering positive connections with others, utilise empathy to build trust and establish strong bonds. Conversely, a lack of empathy often leads to organisational bullying, employee and team distress, and difficulties in selling and retaining clients.

Can empathy be developed in employees to increase sales and improve teamwork? Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that it is indeed possible to teach someone to be empathetic. However, the bad news is that the process requires their willingness to learn, as it demands dedicated practice and commitment to master effectively.

Many individuals find the requirement to be empathetic deeply uncomfortable, but for the majority, it is a skill that can be acquired and developed with time. Of course, some people may lack the capacity to experience empathy due to adverse early-life experiences and insecure attachment to primary caregivers, or due to certain brain and genetic disorders. However, for most people, cultivating empathy is entirely feasible. The benefits of nurturing empathy are significant: as you practice it, your relationships improve, and you develop a desire to continue honing this skill. Empathizing with others’ perspectives enables smoother conflict resolution, reducing the likelihood of disputes. Considering the immense advantages, is prioritising the development of empathy in staff training worth it? We think so!

Empathy, Diversity and Staff Training

Updated July 24th 2023

When we see other people getting hurt, our brain responds in a characteristic way. The same neural circuits that process first-hand experiences of pain are also activated by images of pain in others. This phenomenon can be described as empathy – the ability to share and understand another person’s feelings. For instance, if I accidentally slam a door, hurting my finger, I wince in pain. Similarly, my colleague, who witnesses the incident, experiences distress on seeing my discomfort.

But there is more to human empathy than merely sharing another creature’s pain. Neuroscientists Jean Decety and Philip L. Jackson argue that human empathy requires several components (Decety and Jackson, 2004). Apart from experiencing shared feelings, an empathic person should also possess the ability to:

• A sense of self-awareness and the ability to distinguish one’s own feelings from the feelings of others: When my colleague sees me wince, she feels my pain. But does she understand the source of her discomfort? If my colleague lacks self-reflection, she might not recognize that I am the one in real trouble.

• Having the capacity to regulate one’s own emotional reactions is crucial. Observing someone else’s distress can be unsettling, and if empathy solely involved “sharing feelings,” empathetic individuals might tend to distance themselves from those in distress, so as not to experience such negative emotions. However, to demonstrate empathic concern or sympathy, my friend must be able to manage her own responses to my pain, showing understanding and support instead.

• Considering another person’s perspective is essential in understanding their emotions and experiences. For instance, while I enjoy attending conferences and events overseas, my colleague has had a fear of flying since childhood. Now, suppose we discover that both of us are required to attend an event abroad that involves flying. To comprehend how my colleague feels upon hearing about this necessity, given her role’s requirements, it becomes crucial for me to empathize and grasp her viewpoint. Without such understanding, it could be challenging for me to recognize and relate to her feelings accurately.

Several other factors also influence the likelihood of people demonstrating empathy, such as:
• Being on familiar terms with the person
• Recognising similarities between themselves and the person
• Having personally experienced the circumstances of the individual

Our willingness to show empathic concern is ruled by our moral, societal and political beliefs. Who deserves our empathic concern? Societies offer different answers to this question. Very often, the answers are about who’s considered “one of us.” A recent survey of preindustrial societies found that people who feel strong loyalty to their own social group are more willing to consider violence against outsiders. (Cohen et al 2006).

What implications does this have in multicultural workplaces and societies? Much of the time, we give less time and attention to others based on them belonging to another group, race, gender. The frightening thing is, that we are often not aware that we are doing this. Therefore it is essential that as part of every organisation’s staff training, awareness is brought to everyone’s own biases, and beliefs, so that we consciously treat everyone equally and fairly.

Enabling people to examine their own beliefs, biases, attitudes and how these might be blocking relationships and productivity is a very important aspect of all our staff training. See some of our Open Courses for examples.

Communication In The Workplace – Not An Easy Task

Updated 11th July 2023

Communication is complicated. Perhaps because we do it so easily and often, we generally do not appreciate just how complicated a process communication is. Without even considering the non-verbal elements of communication, just speaking on its own requires the speaker to perform two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously: conceptualizing the information to be conveyed, while also formulating a verbal message that is capable of conveying it. The number and complexity of the factors that must be taken into account is dauntingly large (Levelt, 1989).

The level of awareness we need to have to be clear communicators is not something we talk about in everyday life. We take it for granted. The first time many people really start thinking about the complexities in communication is if they attend counselling, or a personal development course or a staff training on communication in the workplace or customer service. People generally leave these courses or events with very little change having taken place in the level of positive and worthwhile communication in the workplace and beyond.

Consider this: The meaning of even the most banal utterance is grounded in a set of fixed assumptions about what the communicators know, believe, feel and think. People experience the world from different vantage points, and each individual’s experience is unique to the particular vantage points he or she occupies. The vantage point all depends on so many factors including, background, experience, knowledge, education, gender to name only a few! To accommodate conflict or variation in perspective, communicators must take each other’s perspectives into account when they speak. As the social psychologist Roger Brown put it, effective communication “… requires that the point of view of the auditor be realistically imagined” (Brown, 1965).

However, the content of another person’s point of view is not always obvious. In his classic studies of childhood egocentrism, the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, demonstrated that the ability to take on another person’s perspectives represents a major milestone in the child’s intellectual development. Young children are unable to detach themselves from their own point of view, and, in effect, seem to assume that the world appears to others as it does to them (Piaget &Inhelder, 1956). This reduces their effectiveness as communicators (Krauss & Glucksberg, 1977). Although adults do better, they are far from perfect, and like children their judgments of others’ perspectives tend to be biased by their own points of view. Under time pressure or when preoccupied, adults are likely to formulate messages that neglect their addressees’ perspectives (Keysar, Barr & Horton, 1998). Moreover, adults perspective-taking efforts display an egocentric bias similar to that found in children.

Furthermore, we rarely are given the opportunity to be told or to receive feedback graciously regarding how our communication is effecting others around us. People may get irritated with us, but even then they are unclear half the time what it is you did that rubbed them up the wrong way. How often do employees wane in their productivity because of lack of comprehension of the task at hand, often because the communicator (their colleague or team lead) has failed to take their perspective. How often do clients and customers just walk away because you didn’t take their perspective on board? Most of the time they won’t tell you either. In fact, they just won’t come back.

Did you know that any conversational speech is produced at a rate of about 2.5 words per second, often in noisy environments and with less than-perfect articulation. Production and comprehension could pose formidable problems for two individuals. Yet participants typically come away from conversations believing they have communicated successfully, and objective evidence probably would indicate that they have. But as stated already it is not this simple, and other people rarely provide us with useful feedback to let us know what we did wrong and what we might do better next time!

Communications skills training is perhaps the most important thing an organisation must consider if it wants its people and its customers to avoid many mistakes that are made in seemingly simple interactions. Getting communication in the workplace correct is inherently difficult as we are not taught elsewhere to be aware of the intricacies of communication and do not appreciate how complicated a process it actually is.

If you would like to have the people in your organisation become more aware of how their communication style is serving or not serving them, contact us and we can discuss how we can help you.

Being Human – Effective Communication Training

Updated 11th July 2023

The ability to communicate is vital to a species’ survival. All animals have the ability to communicate, some in ways that are impressively proficient. However, no other species have achieved the precision and flexibility that characterises human communication, a capacity due in large part to the uniquely human ability to use language (Deacon, 1997; Hauser, 1996).

When it comes to communication, animals have it easy, in many ways, compared to us humans. Robert Krauss (2002) points out that, upon returning to its hive, a foraging honeybee communicates the direction and distance of a source of nectar by engaging in an elaborate waggle-dance (von Frisch, 1967). Vervet monkeys (native to East Africa) have three distinctive vocal alarm calls that signal the presence of leopards, eagles and snakes, their three main predators. Upon hearing one or another call, a Vervet will respond appropriately–climbing a tree in response to the leopard call, scanning the ground when the snake call is sounded (Seyfarth, Cheney & Marler, 1980).

We humans similarly use sounds and body language to communicate. However, we have this complicated system of words and a developed frontal cortex which make us more advanced and effective communicators. Unfortunately, this advanced system also just seems to make the process of communication way more complicated than in the animal world.

Bertrand Russell once remarked that “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his father was poor but honest.” Krauss (2002) points out that although the observation is self-evident, even banal, it points to a fundamental difference in the expressive capacities of language and other communication modalities. Vervets can signal the presence of a predatory eagle, but even the most articulate Vervet cannot refer to the eagle that attacked a week ago; their communication is limited to what is immediately present. Perhaps more than any other feature, it is the capacity of language to convey displaced messages that distinguishes it from other communication modalities.

The ability of language to generate an unlimited number of meaningful novel messages that are not bound to the here and now, combined with the cognitive capacity to exploit these properties, allows human communication to be extraordinarily effective and versatile… and complicated in my view.

We learn to speak from a very early age, which shapes and defines our communication. This is something I am always harping on about and build into almost all staff training programs. As babies we learn to communicate by picking up all the signals around us, we learn about the structure of our mother tongue and how to write in school. Many of us, also have to opportunity to learn the languages from other countries and cultures. Nevertheless, we do not have a class in ‘communication’ and all the subtleties that go with language, body language, the parts of communication that are conscious and unconscious and all the nuances that go with this. The complications of language – verbal and non-verbal cause arguments time and time again amongst people, both people who know each other and who don’t know each other. In families and organisations alike, an inability to understand and utilize communication effectively, and results in things not getting done, because people don’t know how to ask or how to empower others through their communication. On the frontline, staff don’t know how to ask customers/ clients what they need, or to pick of subtle cues of interest or disinterest in their customers.

The way we communicate sets us apart from other animals, makes us human. But in order to utilise this we must learn how to communicate with others effectively. So many problems can be avoided and so many possibilities can arise when people understand the subtleties of communication. When the majority of people spend a minimum of eight hours of the day at work with or near other people (colleagues an customers) it is vital to improve communication in the workplace.

In fact, if people attend effective communication training there is often a knock-on effect on their private and family lives, meaning people arrive happier to work in the first place, and are therefore more productive.

Contact us if you would like to know more about how Adaptas™ can develop and deliver effective communication training for your organisation.

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