Have you ever had a person go stupid on you during a phone
conversation? You're trying to come to some agreement, and
you're making progress, then the other person says something
that tells you that you lost him. He isn't following your
logic, and his comment makes no sense.
When this happens, you're not sure what to say, so you back
up and start again, but it soon becomes hopeless and you end
the conversation. You may not make another call all day.
If you've ever found yourself in this situation, recent
research by Kathleen McGinn, of Harvard University should
interest you. She learned that telephone conversations are
inherently inferior methods of communication when agreements
are sought, and she learned three techniques people use to
try to salvage phone conversations that are going badly.
Professor McGinn studied the behavior of 87 pairs of people
as they completed a simple bargaining task. Some of these
pairs were friends, some were strangers. Some met
face-to-face, and some talked on the phone.
She gave them a financial stake in the agreements they made,
and this added a realistic element to the experiment. She
wanted to discover the different ways people come to
agreements, but she found more than she was looking for.
In the first few moments of the conversations she studied,
people signaled to each other a set of expectations for the
conversations that were to follow. Like deciding whether to
do the waltz or the fox trot, people quickly came to
agreement and then matched their comments to each other like
dance steps. They quickly agree, that is, unless they were
talking on the phone.
When strangers tried to begin conversations on the phone, 71%
of the time they failed to establish agreement on how their
conversation would proceed. They couldn't agree what dance
they were going to do.
This lack of agreement frustrated their desire to seriously
discuss the task Ms. McGinn had given them, but rather than
just give up, they tried to salvage their conversations, and
they used specific salvage strategies in this effort.
Professor McGinn described three of them.
The first she called process clarification. With this
strategy, one person asked explicit questions of the other
about the rules of interaction they were going to follow.
Here's an example:
Seller: "We're talking about the lamp, right? Shouldn't we
just disclose how much . . . "
Buyer: "I don't know how . . . to work this."
Seller: "Well, the object as far as I'm concerned is for us
both to make a profit."
With process clarification, the parties explicitly explore
how they will discuss the task facing them to come to an
agreement. Unfortunately, she found that it tended
to increase competition between the parties.
The second, she called trust testing, which includes two
behaviors: 1) one person questions the truthfulness of
information the other person has supplied, and 2) one person
makes small moves that reveal his/her own trustfulness and
then watches the response of the other person.
Trust testing sometimes helped, but more often, it did not.
The other person failed the trust test, and they were unable
to proceed. Being unable to proceed, they failed in the
task Ms. McGinn had given them, they reached no
agreement, and they had no money to split at the end of the
experiment.
The third strategy she called emotional punctuation. This
strategy is an abrupt display of strong emotion, positive or
negative, in which one person, in frustration, becomes
noticeably dissatisfied with the way the conversation
is going and emotionally tosses it out. It's a crucial
moment for the other person. If he/she fails to adjust,
there will be no agreement. Here's an example:
Seller: "I'm being very frank with you and I hate people
not to be frank with me . . . At the beginning I was just
asking for your price and you were doing all this
calculation . . . so I'd rather forego my profit than be
called a fool."
In this example, the seller clearly wants the buyer to
consider profit for both parties, not just his own profit.
If he does so, then the discussion can continue.
When you find yourself on the phone with a stranger trying to
make some agreement, be alert to these salvage strategies,
and when you hear them, respond promptly, if you really want
an agreement.
Of course, if you really want agreement, you shouldn't be on
the phone in the first place. You need to be face to face
with the person.
Reference: McGinn, Kathleen, and Angela Keros (2002)
Improvisation and the Logic of Exchange in Socially embedded
Transactions. Administrative Science Quarterly, September,
442-472.
Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Don't Use the Telephone!
New research reveals the weakness of using the phone to try to reach agreements.