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Chapter 05 - Communication
5-1
Chapter 5
Communication
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
While great managers need not be highly charismatic or gifted speakers, they do need to be able
to deliver a persuasive message either in person or in print. Great managers process information
and translate it into coherent messages that others can easily understand. They listen well, and
can accurately interpret communication from others. This chapter focuses on models for creating
and presenting persuasive messages, active listening and overcoming common barriers to
effective communication.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
KNOWING OBJECTIVES
1. Explain how the curse of knowledge creates a barrier to effective communication
2. Describe the fundamental elements of persuasion
3. Describe the key elements in making a communication “sticky”
4. Articulate methods for overcoming common weaknesses in presentations
5. Explain the barriers to active listening
6. Describe the strategies for listening more effectively
DOING OBJECTIVES
1. Create a persuasive message that communicates personal credibility and evidence, while
arousing people's emotions
2. Deliver a presentation that incorporates strategy, structure, support, style and
supplements
3. Choose the appropriate media for communication in various circumstances
4. Communicate your wishes using empathy and unambiguous statements
5. Know what and how to communicate in a crisis situation
6. Actively listen to gain shared understanding
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KEY STUDENT QUESTIONS
When faced with the topic of communication, students most often want to know how to
communicate across corporate boundaries - a common question is "How can I communicate
more effectively with my boss?" or "How can I communicate more effectively with my
subordinates?" In answering these questions, stress the following two key points:
1. Any communication that takes the perspective of the listener into account is likely to be
2. Presentations that incorporate ethos, pathos, and logos are likely to be persuasive regardless
of the audience.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. Communication = sharing information with other people in order to reach a common
understanding
2. Communication skills can be learned and developed
B. Traditional Communication Model
1. Sender transmits message to a receiver
2. Receiver decodes the message and sends feedback message back to initial sender
multidimensional, depending on several links in the system
C. Communication Myths
1. If you have a strong case, everyone will be convinced
a. People are influenced by who presents the evidence and how it is presented
2. If communicated enough times, your communications are effective
a. Most messages are forgettable
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b. Communication is often rated as among the biggest weakness of managers
3. Words mean what they mean
a. Words carry different meanings in different contexts and to different people
anyone else
6. Listening is a passive activity
a. Hearing may be passive, but to truly listen requires active work
II. Creating Persuasive Messages
A. Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge
1. The first step to becoming a better communicator is understanding why
communication so often fails
2. Gifted experts often fail as teachers and coaches because they do not how to
sticky and persuasive messages
B. Audience Analysis
1. Develop an argument that will speak to your audience
4. Ask your audience what they expect and prefer
C. Fundamental Elements of Persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, Logos
1. People align their attitudes and behaviors with those of the speaker based on personal
credibility (ethos), emotional appeals (pathos), and logical arguments (logos)
2. It is best to incorporate all three when making a presentation
3. Ethos: Personal credibility
b. To enhance your ethos:
ii. Establish your authority and/or expertise
4. Pathos: Arousing others' emotions
a. Pathos = an appeal to the audience’s emotions
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b. Most effective when speakers use stories and examples that are highly relevant to
their listeners, or when emotions are aroused in a way that prompts their
compliance with the message.
5. Logos: Appealing to logic
a. Two ways to enhance logos
i. Construct logically sound arguments in support of their position
ii. Find evidence in support of those claims
b. Two basic kinds of arguments:
i. Inductive - moves from talking about specific things to generalizing
iii. Inductive and deductive reasoning work only if listeners accept each piece of
the argument.
6. Use of evidence
a. Use valid evidence that is relevant to your audience
common mistake is to rely too heavily on just one element
D. Making Messages Sticky: The SUCCES Model
1. Simple – find the core of the idea
2. Unexpected – grab attention with surprise
3. Concrete – illustrate your ideas in ways that are tangible and easy to grasp
a. Look for simple and well-known images and examples
4. Other ways to make messages sticky
a. Vivid details
b. Anti-authorities – sometimes messages are more believable when heard from
e. Stories – bring ideas to life by showing not telling
III. Delivering Powerful Messages
A. The Basics of Effective Presentation: The Five S's of Effective Presentation
1. Strategy - Make your presentation choices based on the answers to five questions:
a. Good planning is critical
b. Consider your goals, audience, and general persuasion approach
2. Structure
a. Get to main point quickly
b. Begin with the end in mind
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c. Barbara Minto approach to structuring a message:
i. Start with statement audience will agree with
iv. Use the rest of the speech to explain why your recommendation will solve the
problem
3. Support - Provide evidence which backs up your point
a. If you have moderate credibility, evidence will probably increase your persuasive
effectiveness. Speakers with low credibility are almost always seen as more
credible when they cite evidence
qualifications are provided
e. Using irrelevant evidence or poorly qualified sources may provide an effect
opposite to what the speaker intends
4. Style - deliver your speech in a compelling way
a. Show enthusiasm and passion
5. Supplement
a. Be prepared to answer questions
b. Gather additional evidence to support your claims.
justification during a Q&A session, if needed
c. Be able to talk about costs
d. Paraphrase difficult questions, and then ask listener if you've understood correctly
e. Listen carefully
f. Specify when you want questions at the beginning of your presentation
B. Presenting Plans Bosses (and Others) can Approve of
1. Four key components for a proposal
a. What is the plan?
ii. Next list concrete actions to support the strategy
b. Why is the plan recommended?
c. What important goals will the plan help us achieve?
d. How much will the plan cost and what are the risks?
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C. Effective use of PowerPoint and Visual Aids
1. Advantages of visual aids
a. Hold audience attention
b. Enhance memory
2. Tips for effective visual aids
a. Know your goal – e.g., persuasion, providing information
b. Be learner-centered
c. Dual channels
i. People have separate information processing channels for visual and verbal
material
ii. Present information that taps into multiple channels
d. Limited capacity
e. Active processing
i. Include elements that will encourage the audience to actively process the
information
IV. Choosing Your Communication Medium
A. Information Richness = the potential information-carrying capacity of a communication
channel, and the extent to which it facilitates developing a common understanding
between people
1. Media high in information richness can transmit more information
2. Media can be high in richness in one of three ways
a. Feedback - Rich media allow for immediate feedback, non-rich media offer a
c. Personal or impersonal - Rich media encourage and facilitate personal contact
3. Face-to-face communication is typically highest in information richness and includes
nonverbal information
4. Written communications have lower information richness and lack nonverbal
information
a. Some written communications utilize emoticons like type-written faces to convey
nonverbal information
B. Topic complexity
1. Low complexity situations are routine, minor matters.
a. High complexity situations often require input from several people for resolution.
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b. Handle low complexity topics with media that are low in information richness,
and handle high complexity topics with media that are high in information
richness
c. Take the recipient's comfort level with a particular communication channel into
account when choosing a channel
C. About e-mail
a. Any e-mail you write on a work computer can be, and probably is, monitored by
c. Before "dashing off" an e-mail, make sure it is professional - complete, clear, and
not easily misinterpreted
V. Active Listening
A. The Paradox and Importance of Active Listening
1. Hearing is the physical reality of receiving sounds - listening is an active process that
6. Listening to customers can increase sales and customer satisfaction
B. Traps and Barriers to Active Listening
1. The Tendency to Evaluate
2. Misreading Nonverbal Cues
3. Personal Focus
4. Thinking is Faster than Speaking
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b. To correct the disparity, try to guess where the speaker is going, and confirm it or
5. Selective Perception/Filtering
6. Tendency to Advise
C. Tips for Good Listening
1. Know Your Objective
a. Empathize
b. Analyze
c. Synthesize
D. Actively Interact
1. Active listening requires conscious effort
2. Ask informed and thoughtful questions that put people at ease, engage them, and
prompt thoughtful responses
a. Paraphrase the speaker's comments in your own words
b. Frequently mirror back what the speaker has said and your empathy for their
position
c. Make supportive comments
E. Stay Focused
1. Don't allow your mind to drift into random thoughts
2. Think of listening as a treasure hunt - look for nuggets of valuable information
CASES
Tableau
Suggested answers to case questions:
1. We are bombarded by massive amounts of information every day. We are not capable of
processing and remembering all of it. So what makes some information stick while other
information gets lost in the shuffle? One of the biggest factors that makes a message stick
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© 2013 by McGraw-Hill Education. This is proprietary material solely for authorized instructor use. Not authorized for sale or distribution in any
manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in whole or part.
country because local rates are more likely to affect you personally if you buy or sell a
house. Other factors also affect whether a message will stick. Messages tend to be sticky
when they are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and contain vivid details. Messages
from “anti-authorities” are sometimes even more “sticky” than those from the typical
expert or authority. Also, we are more likely to remember messages that stir up our
emotions or that we can test out for ourselves to see if they are true.
2. Tableau makes the information recipient much more involved and active in the
communication process. Rather than passively sitting back and getting whatever message
3. Using a tool like Tableau might be harder in some ways than presenting raw data. A great
deal of work must go into programming and formatting the data in a way that allows for
the features of Tableau. It also might be difficult for some people to learn how to use
4. Answers will vary. Some possible concerns are listed in the response to question 3 above.
Storytelling at Nike and FedEx
Suggested answers to case questions:
1. Answers will vary. Students will likely interpret the story to mean that FedEx employees
2. Stories carry more “punch” than other types of messages for a variety of reasons. Stories
are often about people, and we are wired to think and care about people more than we are
Chapter 05 - Communication
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© 2013 by McGraw-Hill Education. This is proprietary material solely for authorized instructor use. Not authorized for sale or distribution in any
manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in whole or part.
one child who is suffering from poverty and hunger rather than if we were presented with
statistics about poverty in the United States. Stories convey specific and concrete imagery
so that we can vividly imagine what happened. In comparison, we have a more difficult
time visualizing theories or data.
3. Good stories use strong imagery so that people can clearly visualize the situation. Stories
"MANAGE WHAT" SCENARIOS
1. Selling an Idea to Your Boss
Debrief is found at the end of the chapter.
3. Fixing a Typically Bad PowerPoint Presentation
PowerPoint is not an inherently bad way to deliver presentations. In fact, PowerPoint
presentations can be done very effectively! But don’t get so tied up in the bells and whistles
of the technology that you forget to attend to the message itself. You need to start by
considering the goal of the presentation – if you don’t know it yourself, then ask your boss to
help clarify the goal. If the goal is to convey information, your PowerPoint will be different
than if it is to persuade or stir action in employees at your firm. Because the presentation is
about using social media for internal communications, you will likely want to focus more on
persuasion than on conveying too many dry facts, figures, and statistics.
You will also want to consider the audience (other employees at the firm) and make the
presentation.
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4. Actively Listening to Understand a Problem: Debrief
Debrief is found at the end of the chapter.
MANAGEMENT LIVE
5.1 Tappers and Listeners – The Curse of Knowledge
This Management Live describes an experiment in which people were asked to either tap the
rhythm of a song or to listen to someone else tapping and to guess what song was being tapped.
Listeners correctly identified the songs only 2.5 percent of the time yet tappers thought that
listeners would guess the correct song 50 percent of the time! This experiment shows that just
because something is obvious to you doesn’t mean that it is obvious to other people. Especially if
you have unique access to information or expertise in a particular area, you might not realize that
other people don’t know what you know.
This experiment would be easy to replicate in class. Even though students have read the chapter
in advance and should be aware of the outcome, having the class demonstrate the finding for
themselves would likely enhance learning and memory for the concept. Of course, with previous
knowledge of the outcome of the experiment, tappers might downwardly adjust their estimates of
Alternatively, the instructor can conduct a different exercise that conveys the same point. Keysar
and Bly (1995) conducted a study which utilized outdated idioms like "The goose hangs high."
The researchers told some participants that the phrase "the goose hangs high" meant that “things
look good.” The other participants were told that the phrase meant “things look bad.” Next,
participants were asked what an uninformed person would believe the idiom meant. Each group
thought that the uninformed person would perceive the meaning they were given as correct. In
other words, they thought that their newfound knowledge would be automatically known to
outcome back to the class.
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Reference:
5.2 Getting to the Core: A Six-Word Long Story
This Management Live suggests that we can convey a lot of information and even emotion in
just a few words. Students should challenge themselves to try to compose their own six-word
5.3 Risks in Promiscuous Sexual Activity: The Power of Testable Credentials
This Management Live describes a very unique tactic that the NBA took to teach new players
about the risk of HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, it seems that many messages don’t seem to “stick”
with us – instead of listening to experts and people who have more experience than we do, we
often want to learn for ourselves. The instructor might wish to lead a class discussion about this
Management Live. Some possible questions are listed below.
Class Discussion Questions:
1. Do you think the message was more effective at changing players’ behaviors than it
would have been if they brought in a doctor or former player who had contract
HIV/AIDS? Why or why not?
2. Do you think it was ethical for the NBA to send the message in this way? Why or why
not?
3. How could this strategy be incorporated into other kinds of messages that we often want
to convey to young people (e.g., staying in school, the dangers of doing drugs, smoking,
drinking and driving)?
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5.4 Presentation War Stories
Students will likely identify with some of the “presentation war stories” told in this Management
Live. Most students probably have given at least one presentation that flopped or didn’t go
exactly as planned.
Students should break into small discussion groups and discuss their past experiences of
“presentations gone wrong.” What happened? What was the primary problem (e.g., not knowing
the audience, technology glitches)? What tips and strategies from the chapter could have been
implemented to improve the presentation?
5.5 What Google Can Teach us about Picking the Right Communication Channel
This Management Live discusses the importance of picking the right communication channel to
convey different information. Importantly, technology is not always the answer to sending
messages. As evidenced at Google, where technology dominates, posters taped to doors was an
effective way to draw attention. If the audience is being overloaded in one channel, presenters
might want to try to send their message through another channel. Or, presenters can alter the
Students should read the section in the chapter about communication channels as they relate to
information richness and topic complexity. Next students should consider the following
messages and discuss which communication channel would be most effective in each scenario
and why.
1. Managers at a shipping facility are concerned by the number of back injuries employees
are suffering due to improper lifting techniques. Workers have already been trained on
proper lifting, so how can management get the message to “stick”?
2. A college professor wants her students to participate in a research project in the evening.
How should she send this message so students will notice it and participate?
3. An employee is frustrated by his job. He feels like his boss doesn’t give him enough
direction about the goals and expectations of the job. How can he best communicate this
message to his boss?
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TOOL KIT
5.1 The Effective Presentation Checklist
Instructions:
Have students review "The Effective Presentation Checklist" from the Tool Kit and the rules for
creating effective PowerPoints and visual aids. Their assignment (which should be given in
advance, so that they have time to prepare) is to deliver a 5 minute presentation with visual aids
to the class. Topics might include:
• Why You Should Buy _____ (anything from the generic "organic produce" "fuel-
efficient cars” to the specific "an iPod, " "Abercrombie & Fitch clothes”).
• The Benefits of _____ (anything the audience might not know about, from "owning a
poodle" to "living in a blended family" - the goal here is to persuade the audience to want
to do something.)
• Important Things to Know About _____ (anything from "eating right" to "Saudi Arabia"
- the goal is to give the audience information they didn’t have before.)
The instructor should print copies of the “Presentation Evaluation Form” below. When the
speaker gets up to present to the class, the class should have the Presentation Evaluation Form in
front of them. At the end of the presentation, ask the class to give the presenter feedback on one
or two things the presenter did RIGHT (no negative feedback allowed in front of the class).
Then ask the class to give ALL written feedback to the presenter so that person can improve his
or her skills.
Presentation Evaluation Form
Does this presenter:
Circle One
Suggestions for Improvement
1. Tailor presentation to the
audience?
Yes No
2. Effectively use nonverbal
behavior (e.g., eye contact,
gestures)?
Yes No
3. Make a strong first
impression?
Yes No
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4. Make a memorable final
statement?
Yes No
5. Tell a compelling story?
Yes No
6. Eliminate the extraneous?
Yes No
7. Appear to have rehearsed?
Yes No
8. Appear comfortable with
technology?
Yes No
9. Utilize effective visual aids?
Yes No
5.2 Choosing your Medium: Written vs. Verbal
Instructions:
Instructors should print off copies of the checklist in Tool Kit 5.2 and the messages below.
Students will read the messages and use the Tool Kit checklist to determine if the message
should be put in writing or communicated verbally. Students should explain their answers.
Messages:
1. An employee has violated company policy about disclosing confidential information with
internal promotion. But Diego doesn’t want his other employees to think that he is
singling out Monique for the promotion to their exclusion.
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5.3 Making E-mails Reader-Friendly
This is an important Tool Kit for students because many of them will be using e-mail to
communicate with managers and other employees. It is critical to establish good habits about e-
mail and avoid sloppy mistakes that can reflect poorly on them.
Instructions:
Ask students to go to the “send” folder in their school or primary email account. Students should
locate at least five messages that they sent that were of a professional nature (e.g., asking a
professor a question, emailing a resume to a potential employer, responding to a question from
an officer in a student organization). Students should print off those messages and see if they
conform to the recommendations in Tool Kit 5.3. Were the messages reader-friendly? Which
recommendations did they violate? What could they change to make the messages more
professional and reader-friendly?
5.4 Tips for Good Listening
This exercise involves reading a brief passage to students, and asking them to answer questions
related to the story. If necessary, the story can be read twice to insure student understanding.
Step 1
Pass out the following questionnaire:
True or False? What Really Happened?
Circle One
T ? F
1. The woman appeared after the caregiver had finished work for the day.
T ? F
2. The person who took the prescriptions was a woman.
T ? F
3. A woman demanded the prescriptions.
T ? F
4. The person who opened the prescription pad was a man.
T ? F
5. The woman demanded prescriptions of the caregiver.
T ? F
6. The story concerns exactly three people: the doctor, the woman who
demanded prescriptions, and the member of the police force.
T ? F
7. The doctor grabbed the blank prescriptions.
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Step 2
Read the following story to students:
A doctor was just finishing up work for the day when a woman appeared,
Step 3
Once the students have finished circling their choices, ask them to share their answers with the
class. The correct answers are shown below.
True or False? What Really Happened?
Circle One
?
1. The woman appeared after the caregiver had finished work for the day.
(The doctor had finished work for the day - don't know if the caregiver
and doctor are the same person.)
?
2. The person who took the prescriptions was a woman. (The story says
that blank prescriptions were grabbed, but it doesn't say by whom.)
T
3. A woman demanded the prescriptions.
?
4. The person who opened the prescription pad was a man. (This
statement assumes that the "caregiver" was a man, but that information
is not given.)
?
5. The woman demanded prescriptions of the caregiver. (The story
doesn't say who the recipient of the woman's demand was.)
?
6. The story concerns exactly three people: the doctor, the woman who
demanded prescriptions, and the member of the police force. (Again,
this statement assumes that the doctor and the caregiver were one and
the same, and that the doctor, person demanding the painkiller
prescription, and the police are all different.)
?
7. The doctor grabbed the blank prescriptions. (The story doesn't say who
grabbed the blank prescriptions.)
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Most students will get many of these answers wrong, helping them to realize that listening is
much more difficult than it appears.
Step 4
Use the following questions to stimulate discussion about the listening process:
1. What assumptions did you make about the individuals described in the story?
How did those assumptions affect your ability to hear details accurately?
2. Is there ever a time when making assumptions in advance can influence your
listening skills positively? If not, why not, and if so, under what circumstances?
3. What advice would you give to someone who wanted to improve their listening
skills, based on the results of this exercise?
