Silence is Not Always Golden

by Rodger Dean Duncan  

I grew up in “tornado alley,” that stretch of geography up the midsection of Oklahoma and Texas that’s a breeding ground for killer storms.

The spring I turned 12 we had 63 consecutive days of tornado warnings. That’s when a tornado is actually sighted on the ground. In those days, the TV weatherman was pretty good at reporting the weather that had already happened, but his predictions of weather-to-come were spotty at best. 

Today’s meteorologists are not only better trained, they have life-saving technology called Doppler radar. This marvelous tool enables them to track the earliest warning signs of a brewing storm, then predict with pinpoint accuracy when and where the storm will strike.

You can do much the same with the storms of everyday relationships.

Good relationships are built on things like trust, caring, and follow-through. And the glue that holds it all together is dialogue. Real dialogue occurs when people feel safe in expressing their views without fear of being judged or ridiculed. Two competing monologues do not make for good dialogue.

So what does that have to do with tornadoes and Doppler radar?

Storms are the enemy of dialogue. Not the wind and rain variety. I’m talking about storms that are spawned by our own behaviors.

There are a number of common behaviors that get in the way of dialogue. These dialogue-snuffing behaviors fall under the headings of violence and silence.

Conversational violence is not necessarily mean-spirited, ill-intended or even loud. For instance, I recently overhead someone in a meeting say “As any smart manager knows, this is the best option. What do you think, Bob?” The unspoken implication was that if Bob disagrees he must not be “a smart manager.”

Other forms of conversational violence include using absolute language (words like “every” and “always”) or monopolizing the air time. On the surface, these practices may seem a bit annoying though relatively benign. But they still do violence to the dialogue by tending to shut people down or discourage them from open participation.

One form of conversational silence is “masking,” which consists of understating or only selectively revealing our true opinions. Another form of conversational silence is “avoiding” or staying completely away from sensitive subjects.

In a previous column I told of a large organization where only six people received a “Needs Improvement” rating on their performance appraisals. The CEO said his people were pretty good at most everything except holding each other accountable. The problem was sugarcoating. Rather than talking openly about performance issues that begged for honest discussion, people danced around the subject for fear of jeopardizing friendships.

An interesting thing about conversational silence is that you can talk all day long with someone and still be in silence. In this context, silence doesn’t mean you’re not talking. It means you’re not talking about what needs to be talked about.

Silence can be very expensive, or even deadly.

In one widely reported case, a woman checked into a hospital for a routine tonsillectomy but had half of her foot amputated. No fewer than seven hospital employees had sensed that something was amiss – for example, the person assembling the surgical instruments knew that an electric saw was not used to remove tonsils – but none of them spoke up to question the doctors giving the orders.

During a planned outage at a nuclear power plant I visited, crews worked two complete shifts before someone on the third shift challenged the supervisor and pointed out that work on a particular project wasn’t scheduled until the following year. Oops. The error cost the company more than $2 million in lost revenue and outage expenses. Why did it happen? Workers on the first two shifts reported to supervisors who didn’t welcome feedback. In other words, the workers simply didn’t feel safe in speaking up.

And at NASA they have what has been dubbed the “culture of silence” in which some NASA employees felt intimidated to the point of shutting down their repeated warnings of impending danger. This was famously apparent in the case of the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Two competing monologues do not constitute dialogue. Genuine dialogue occurs when people are comfortable in putting their honest opinions and feelings on the table, when they aren’t worried about being judged or ridiculed. In other words, dialogue flourishes only in a “safe” environment.

There are a number of skills that help us establish and maintain safety in a conversation. One excellent safety tool is both an attitude and a behavior. It’s something called patience.

I received some excellent coaching in patience nearly forty years ago. I was a young investigative reporter at The Dallas Times Herald. My editor was another young journalist named Jim Lehrer. Yes, it was the same Jim Lehrer you now know on PBS.

One day in the newsroom Jim walked over to my desk and said “Tell me about your interviews.”

“Well, I do a lot of them,” I said. “What exactly do you want to know?”

Jim asked me to walk him through my interview process. Good interviewing skills are important for any reporter. And they’re especially important for an “investigative” reporter because, for many of the people you interview, talking to a reporter is about as appealing as sliding down a giant razor blade into a vat of alcohol.

I explained to Jim that after doing preliminary research on a story assignment I would assemble a list of possible sources to interview, compile an inventory of questions, then set out to do the interviews.

“Okay,” Jim said. “But tell me what happens during the actual interview.”

I thought all of this should be self-evident to my editor, but I played along.

“Well, it’s fairly simple, Jim. I ask a question. The source gives me an answer. Then I ask another question.”

At that point, Jim gave me the “time out” sign. “Consider this approach,” he said. “Ask a question. Then listen to the answer. Then silently count to five.”

“What?” I said. “Do you mean literally count to five? That’s going to seem like an eternity.”

“Exactly,” Jim said. “It seems like an eternity because many people are uncomfortable with a lull in a conversation, even in a conversation they might prefer not to be having. So their tendency is to fill a void of silence with noise. They will often either elaborate on their initial response to your question, or they will respond in a different direction that’s even more revealing than the first.”

Jim challenged me to develop my patience with this pause-to-listen approach.

That same day I set out on a series of interviews for an investigative series I was doing. The people on my interview schedule were sure to be “reluctant conversationalists.” I tried Jim’s “count to five” idea. And you know what? I was never able to count past “three” because the people immediately jumped in with another thought, an even better quote, or an even more revealing insight.

Genuine listening – with the intent to understand rather than with the intent to judge or to prepare your rebuttal – is one of the best ways to create and maintain safety in a conversation.

Another good safety tool is to welcome disagreement. That’s right, welcome disagreement.

Many people are conditioned to avoid disagreement, even to the point of evading some subjects altogether. Doing so forfeits wonderful opportunities to learn.

I have a friend – exceptionally capable and productive in every way – who frequently starts a conversation by saying “Make me smart on something.” He’ll ask what I’ve recently read that I found interesting or helpful. He’ll ask my view of current issues in the news, or my opinion on a hot social topic. If I express a view that’s different from his he’ll say something like, “Oh, that’s great, you see it differently. Tell me more about your thinking.” He’s not only not threatened by disagreement, he recognizes disagreement as a great fulcrum to learning.

One of the great joys of being a human being is the opportunity to interact with and learn from others. That opportunity is enhanced when we behave in ways that make it safe for people to express their true opinions and honest feelings.

Silence is not always golden.