Professional communication – Day 3
Professional communication (or business communication) encompasses written, oral, and visual communication within a workplace context. The concept signifies on the one hand all manner of business letters, memos and reports, and on the other hand various oral situations like the interview, the sales pitch, the negotiation, the presentation, etc. In this blog post I’m going to focus on the negotiation, since the other areas are covered elsewhere in the course.
To be able to negotiate well we need to be persuasive – to do that we need a mix of psychology, rhetoric and ethics. Regardless of whether we are trying to persuade people within our own organization or without, we must think about what the best strategies of affecting people’s opinions and decisions are. In negotiations we can see quite clearly how understanding of people’s needs and desires plays a role in successful communication (psychology); it is also evident in a negotiation that the way you frame your offer has impact on the final outcome (rhetoric). The ethics part is trickier – no clear cut rules – but we all have to ask ourselves: how far am I prepared to go to seal the deal?
The Ultimatum Game
A very simplified situation like the Ultimatum game (which we played like this today) shows that humans aren’t always rational. People will for some reason take seemingly irrational decisions – for instance, not accepting a gift of money. This is mainly due to deeply rooted psychological needs. For instance, many of us wouldn’t accept if a stranger in the street gave us 10 euros, if we understood that we had just been mistaken for beggars. Or, we would demand a pay raise for an equally competent colleague, if we learnt that the colleague only got half the salary – because of skin color. These actions are not rational in a strict sense, although it surely seems like they could be described as psychologically or ethically valid.
People feel a need to be consistent in character and morality, they wouldn’t sell their mother for a million euros, or kill someone even if doing so could save the world. In psychology they speak of ontological security which is a human need of being consistent in both thinking and in actions. We must make sense to ourselves. The need for ontological security sometimes forces us to make decisions that are irrational from an economic standpoint. This teaches us that in any situation where we are trying to persuade we must first consider the people we are trying to influence – who are they, what are their needs? Deals are made between people, not in a cold, logical vacuum.
From the game we could perhaps also see that a negotiation is affected by issues like credibility, social relationships and the very words we use when arguing our case. Noone wants to buy “used clothes”, but everyone wants “vintage fashion”
Assignment
Read one of the texts for May the 13th. We will during that lesson discuss the content and the language of the two texts. Please make sure to make note of your general impressions of the text and any reflections you had while reading. (Your own experiences and thoughts on reading these texts are of course very interesting.) Also, make note of all words and phrases that you thought were good and that you would want to share with the rest of the class.
Please notice that attendance during this lesson is mandatory.
P.S.
I managed to restore this posting from back-up. Thank God, or rather thank MySQL!
D.S.
