Category Archives: Business Communication

Business Communication

“Self-Packaging” and Appearance as Personal Brand Attributes

Napoleon Hill

Al Ries

During the US economic Depression of the 1930s, motivational writer Napoleon Hill laid the foundation for personal positioning, described nearly forty-five years later by marketing executives Al Ries and Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

By 1997, business writer Tom Peters introduced “personal branding” as self-packaging that communicates an individual’s accomplishments and characteristics, including appearance, as a “brand promise of value.”

Tom Peters

Self-packaging can be considered “the shell of who you are” whereas personal branding is “what sets you apart from the crowd.“

Jim Kukral

These differentiators can include visible characteristics like attire, education, experience, expertise, sense of humour, and speaking style, according to Jim Kurkal and Murray Newlands.

Daniel Lair

University of Michigan’s Daniel Lair with Katie Sullivan of University of Utah, and Kent State’s George Cheney investigated components of personal branding, presentation, and packaging.

George Cheney

They found personal branding worth analysing for its complex rhetoric tactics that shape power relations by gender, age, race, and class.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Talent Innovation identified some of these power relationships and potential biases facing women and members of minority groups who are expected to demonstrate aspects of personal branding, including executive presence.

These analyses suggest that personal packaging and branding can significantly affect professional opportunities and outcomes.

-*What elements do you consider in “personal packaging” and personal appearance?

-*How do you mitigate possible bias based on expectations for personal appearance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Who Negotiate Salaries May Elicit Negative Evaluations

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Linda Babcock

Women negotiate their first post-university salaries less frequently than their male counterparts, leading to a long-term career wage disparity, reported Carnegie-Mellon University’s Linda Babcock.

Hannah Riley Bowles

In addition to this disadvantage of avoiding salary negotiation, women who did negotiate “salary” in a lab study encountered a different problem: They were disliked by men and women participants due to their perceived “demandingness.”

Lei Lai

In this study Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai found another challenge for women attempting to achieve both salary parity and colleagial work relationships.
Less assertive women negotiators were equally disliked and they failed to achieve equitable “salaries.“

These findings findings suggest the challenge women face in achieving salary parity and being accepted in work groups.
When male and female volunteers in another lab study asked for salary increases using identical scripts, participants liked men’s style, but disliked the same words from women.

Women negotiators were considered “aggressive,” but they could counteract this perception when they:

Smiled
Displayed a friendly manner.

These tactics improved others’ perceptions of women negotiators, but did not improve women’s negotiation outcomes.

In contrast, women negotiators improved both social and negotiation outcomes when they:

Justified the salary request based on a supporting “business case,”
Communicated commitment to positive organizational relationships.

Women who smile and focus on the interpersonal relationship fulfill gender role expectations, leading to greater approval by male and female observers.
This suggests that both men and women have implicit biases about “appropriate” behaviours and communications from women in the workplace

Kathleen McGinn

Bowles, with Harvard colleague Kathleen McGinn and Babcock, suggested that “situational ambiguity” and “gender triggers” modify women’s willingness to negotiate.

When women have information about the potential salary range and whether the salary is negotiable, they are more likely to negotiate.

Women can improve their negotiation outcomes by asking:

the salary range,
which elements of the compensation package are negotiable.

Daniel Pink

Effective negotiation is a survival skill, according to Dan Pink:

“The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.”

He noted that effective persuaders and “sellers” collaborate in “inspecting” a negotiation and “responding” to the negotiation through “interpersonal attunement.”

Pink suggested ABC negotiation skills:

– Attunement: Aligning actions and attitudes with others,

– Buoyancy: “Positivity,” optimism, asking questions,

– Clarity: Helping others identify unrecognized needs that can be fulfilled by the negotiation proposal.

Joan Williams

UC Hastings College of the Law’s Joan Williams offered wide-ranging structural strategies to address documented wage discrepancies.

What is the best negotiation pitch you’ve heard for a job-related salary increase or role promotion?

How did the negotiator overcome objections?

How did the negotiator manage the relationship with the negotiating partner?

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©Kathryn Welds

“Everything is Negotiable”: Prepare, Ask, Revise, Ask Again

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Women have negotiated less effectively for salaries than men in a number of studies. The real-life consequences of this trend is a persistently lower salaries than men throughout women’s working lives.

Linda Babcock

The lifetime salary gap for women MBAs was estimated at USD $500,000 – USD $2 million when compared with male classmates, according to Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock.
She linked this difference to men’s greater willingness to negotiate salary and promotions.

Catherine DesRoches

This salary difference also exists for women in academic medicine, who earned about 80 percent of their male peers’ compensation in a salary study by Harvard’s Catherine DesRoches, Sowmya Rao, Lisa Iezzoni, and Eric Campbell with Darren Zinner of Brandeis.

Babcock, with Sara Laschever, suggested that these negotiation differences are linked to gender socialization practices.

Sara Laschever

They observed that many parents encourage boys to take risks, earn money, and participate in competitive team sports.
These activities can prepare people to negotiate, compete, and tolerate disrupted interpersonal relationships.

In contrast, they suggested that parents may encourage girls to play collaboratively and value interpersonal affiliation instead of getting part-time jobs and participating in sports teams.

John List

Women’s avoidance of salary negotiation and preferring less competitive work roles, was also reported by University of Chicago’s John List, Andreas Leibbrandt, and Jeffrey Flory.

This team’s research studied respondents to two identical “job ads” on internet job boards with different wage structures.
One position offered hourly pay whereas the other role’s pay depended on performance compared with coworkers.
More women than men applied to the hourly wage role.

Andreas Leibbrandt

Men were 94 percent more likely than women to seek and perform well in competitive work roles among nearly 7,000 job seekers across 16 large American cities.
This gender wage gap “more than doubled” as performance-linked compensation increased.
Women in these studies were significantly more likely to choose less competitive employment options.

Jeffrey Flory

Women were also more likely to apply to jobs in which the performance required teamwork rather than individual accomplishment.

Likewise, women favoured flat fee compensation that was unrelated to performance.

Men did not wait for an invitation or permission to negotiate.
They were more likely to negotiate even when there was no explicit statement that wages were negotiable.

When there was a specific invitation to ask for higher salaries and job titles, women negotiated as frequently as men

Babcock and Laschever noted that negotiation practices considered “acceptable” for men may be unfavourably viewed when women use them.

They advised women to adopt several changes in negotiation mindset and behaviours:

Consider that “everything is negotiable,”
Research personal “market worth” using online resources like Salary.com, Payscale.com, and Glassdoor.com,
Consider oneself worthy of higher salaries and job roles,
Examine self-limiting beliefs about negotiation,
Plan negotiation talking points, including accomplishments, results, impact,
Practice negotiating the salary proposal, suggest timing, set an ambitious anchor point, prepare for objections,
Plan counter-offers and practice self-regulation (such as through intentional breathing) to maintain negotiation position and interpersonal rapport.

Harvard’s Roger Fisher and William Ury added recommendations for Collaborative Negotiation that enables both people to derive value from the negotiation conversation through preparation, proactivity, and persistence while reaffirming the negotiation goal’s value for all parties.

Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki, David Saunders of Queen’s University, and Vanderbilt’s Bruce Barry of Vanderbilt contributed additional research-based guidance on effective Negotiation.

Leigh Thompson

Related research by Leigh Thompson of Northwestern, found that more than 90% of negotiators neglect to ask “diagnostic questions” that reveal the negotiation partner’s most important needs, priorities, preferences, and even fears.
When negotiators elicited these “wants,” they achieved significantly improved negotiation outcomes.

Pat Heim

Women’s reluctance to negotiate may be related to gender differences in attributions of success and failure, suggested Pat Heim

Women often attribute failures to themselves (“internalizing”) whereas men identify external factors (“rationalisations”l, “excuses”) associated with their shortcomings.
Women are more likely to attribute success to external factors (“deflection of merit”), whereas men typically attribute their effective performance to themselves (“self-bolstering”).

Men are often promoted because they are seen to have “potential,” but women are more likely to be promoted based on their results and accomplishments, noted Heim.

Even factors like attire can influence perception of authority: Men judged women as less authoritative when wearing “business casual” attire.

These studies encourage women to develop skills and behaviours required to close the wage gap between professional women and men.

-How do you prepare for negotiations and overcome objections during negotiations?

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©Kathryn Welds

Executive Presence: “Gravitas,” Communication…and Appearance?

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Professional advancement requires demonstrated knowledge, skill, and competence, coupled with perceived “cultural fit,” “collaboration,” and “executive presence.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

These requirements appear prone to subjective definition and biased judgments.
What is “executive presence”? How is it measured?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, CEO of Center for Talent Innovation, conducted 18 focus groups and 60 interviews to investigate behavioral and attitudinal aspects of Executive Presence (EP).

Perceived Executive Presence includes three components:

“Gravitas” – Authoritative Behavior

- Confidence, composure,
- Decisiveness,
- Integrity,
- Emotional Intelligence: Self-awareness, self-regulation, interpersonal skills,
- Personal reputation,
- Vision for leadership,

Communication

- Speaking skills: Voice tone, articulation, grammatical speech conveying competence,
- “Presence,” “bearing,” “charisma” including assertiveness, humour, humility,
- Ability to sense audience engagement, emotion, interests,

Appearance

- Grooming, posture,
- Physical attractiveness, average body weight,
- Professional attire.
  According to Hewlett’s interviewees, “Executive Presence” accounts for more than a quarter of factors that determine a next promotion.

Harrison Monarth

How can Executive Presence be developed?

Harrison Monarth suggested that Executive Presence behaviours can be cultivated with Image Management tactics including:

-Maintaining a positive personal reputation to influence others’ favourable perceptions and willingness to collaborate,

-Effectively managing online “brand”,

-Gaining followers online and in the “real world,”

-Influencing and persuading others,

-Demonstrating “Emotional Intelligence” through self-awareness, awareness of others (empathic insight), and regulating one’s own emotions.

He focused less on appearance than Hewlett and Stanford Law School’s Deborah Rhode, who summarized extensive research on Halo Effect and “The Beauty Bias”.

Deborah Rhode

Rhode estimated that annual world-wide investment in appearance was close to $USD 200 billion in 2010.
She contended that bias based on appearance influences career and life outcomes and is:

Is prevalent,
Infringes on individuals’ fundamental rights,
Compromises merit principles,
Reinforces negative stereotypes,
Compounds disadvantages facing members of non-dominant races, classes, and gender.

Executive Presence is widely recognized as a prerequisite for leadership roles, yet its components remained loosely-defined until Hewlett’s investigation and Rhode’s human rights analysis.

-*Which elements seem most essential to Executive Presence?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Who Express Anger Seen as Less Influential

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Jessica Salerno

Women who expressed anger were less likely to influence their peersin computer-mediated mock jury proceedings, found Arizona State University’s Jessica Salerno and Liana Peter-Hagene of University of Illinois.

Liana Peter-Hagene

More than 200 U.S. jury-eligible volunteers reviewed opening arguments and closing statements, eyewitness testimonies, crime scene photographs, and an image of the alleged weapon in a homicide.

Participants made individual verdict choices, then exchanged instant messages by computer, with “peers” who were said to be “deliberating their verdict decisions.”

In fact, “peer” messages were scripted, with four of the fictional jurors agreeing with the participant’s verdict, and one disagreeing.
In different test conditions, the dissenting participant had 1) a male user name or 2) a female user name or 3) a gender-neutral name.

Victoria Brescoll

Half of the dissenting messages contained no emotion, anger, or fear, and had no influence on participants’ opinions.

However, when a single “male dissenter” sent angry messages, characterized by “shouting” in all capital letters, participants’ confidence in their verdict decision significantly dropped.
This confidence-eroding effect of one “male dissenter” held even when the majority of “jurors” shared the same opinion.

A single female dissenter who expressed disagreement in an angry message did not undermine the other juror’s confidence in their decisions.

This finding suggests that a single male dissenter’s angry communication causes people to doubt their opinions, and that “female” anger was less influential than “male” anger.

In contrast, volunteers became more confident in their initial verdict decisions when their vote was echoed by the majority of other participants.

Eric Luis Uhlmann

Male and female evaluators assigned lower status to female CEOs and female trainees when they expressed anger, compared with angry male professionals in research by Yale University’s Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, now of INSEAD.

Kristi Lewis Tyran

Men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness.

Likewise, women who expressed anger and sadness were rated less effective than women who shared no emotion, according to Kristi Lewis Tyran of Western Washington University.

Evaluators judged men’s angry reactions more generously, attributing these emotional expressions to external circumstances, such as experiencing pressure and demands from others.

These differing judgments of emotional expression suggest that women’s anger is more harshly evaluated because anger expressions deviate from women’s expected societal, gender, and cultural norms.

-*What impacts and consequences have you observed for women and men who express anger at work?

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©Kathryn Welds

Costs of Workplace Incivility

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Christine Pearson

A single incident of incivility in the workplace can result in significant operational costs, reported Christine Pearson of Thunderbird School of Global Management and Christine Porath of Georgetown University.

Additional consequences of workplace incivility include:

Decreased work effort due to disengagement,
Christine Porath
Less time at work to reduce contact with offensive co-workers or managers,
Decreased work productivity due to ruminating about incivility incidents,
Less commitment to the organization,
Attrition.

P.M. Forni

Other organizational symptoms include:

Increased customer complaints,
Accentuated cultural and communications barriers,
Reduced confidence in leadership,
Less adoption of changed organizational processes,
Reduced willingness to accept additional responsibility and make discretionary work efforts.

Workplace incivility behaviours were described as “rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others,” noted Pearson and Lynne Andersson, then of St. Joseph’s University.
“Uncivil” behaviors were enumerated in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study by Johns Hopkins’ P.M. Forni and Daniel L. Buccino with David Stevens and Treva Stack of University of Baltimore:

Refusing to collaborate on a team project,
Shifting blame for an error to a co-worker,
Reading another’s mail,
Neglecting to say “please,” “thank you”,
Taking a co-worker’s food from the office refrigerator without asking.

Respondents classified more extreme unacceptable behaviors:

Pushing a co-worker during an argument,
Yelling at a co-worker,
Firing a subordinate during a disagreement,
Criticising a subordinate in public,
Using foul language in the workplace.

Gary Namie

Workplace bullying was included in Gary Namie’s Campaign Against Workplace Bullying.
He defined bullying as “the deliberate repeated, hurtful verbal mistreatment of a person (target) by a cruel perpetrator (bully).

His survey of more than 1300 respondents found that:

More than one-third of respondents observed bullying in the previous two years,
More than 80% of perpetrators were workplace supervisors,
Women bullied as frequently as men,
Women were targets of bullying 75% of the time,
Few bullies were punished, transferred, or terminated from jobs.

Costs of health-related symptoms experienced by bullying targets included:

Depression,
Sleep loss, anxiety, inability to concentrate, which reduced work productivity,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among 31% of women and 21% of men,
Frequent rumination about past bullying, leading to inattention, poor concentration, and reduced productivity.

Widespread prevalence of workplace incivility was also reported by Forni, who suggested ways to improve workplace interactions and inclusion:

Assume that others have positive intentions,
Pay attention, listen,
Include all co-workers in workplace activities,
Acknowledge others,
Give praise when warranted,
Respect others’ opinions, time, space, indirect refusals,
Avoid asking personal questions,
Be selective in asking for favors,
Apologize when warranted,
Provide constructive suggestions for improvement instead of complaints,
Maintain personal grooming, health, and work environment,
Accept responsibility for undesired outcomes, if deserved.

More than 95% of respondents in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study suggested, “Keep stress and fatigue at manageable levels,” a challenging goal for leaders who shape workplace cultures.

Organizational change recommendations include:

Institute a grievance process to investigate and address complaints of incivility,
Select prospective employees with effective interpersonal skills,
Provide a clearly-written policy on interpersonal conduct,
Adopt flexibility in scheduling, assignments, and work-life issues.

-*How do you handle workplace incivility when you observe or experience it?

Range Offers vs Point Offers for Better Negotiation Settlements

Group “Intelligence”=Social Skills+Number of Women Members

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Anita Wooley Williams

A group’s “general collective intelligence factor” is related to social and communication skills, NOT to the average individual intelligence or even maximum individual intelligence of group members, found Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, with MIT colleagues Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Group intelligence was most closely associated with:

Group member social sensitivity and empathy,
Equal conversational turn-taking,
Proportion of females in the group.

Christopher Chabris

Nearly 700 volunteers completed an individual I.Q. test, then worked in teams on tasks including:

Logical analysis,
Coordination,
Planning,
Brainstorming,
Moral-ethical reasoning.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Each participant also completed a measure of empathy and social reasoning based on identifying emotional states portrayed in images of people’s eyes.

This instrument, Reading the Mind in the Eyes, was developed by University of Cambridge’s Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelright, Jacqueline Hill, Yogini Raste, and Ian Plumb.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Sally Wheelright

Individuals’ ability to infer other team members’ emotional states correlated with team effectiveness in solving workplace tasks, but not with extraversion or reported motivation.

Teams that performed best in online and face-to-face situations, also demonstrated stronger social and communication skills:

Accurate emotion-reading, empathy, and interpersonal sensitivity,
Communication volume,
Equal participation.

David Engel

High-performing teams accurately inferred others’ feelings even when emotional state was conveyed without visual, auditory, or non-verbal cues, reported Wooley’s team collaborating with MIT’s David Engel and Lisa X. Jing.

CONCLUSION: Teams increase task performance when members have well-developed “Emotional Intelligence,” social insight, and communication skills and when there is a high proportion of women in the team.
These factors are more important than when members have the highest average IQ.

How do you enhance a work group’s collective intelligence in performance tasks?

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Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

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Most negotiators prefer to have a “fall back position.”
However INSEAD’s Michael Schaerer and Roderick Swaab with Adam Galinsky of Columbia found that having no alternatives and less power than co-negotiators can improve outcomes.

A weak alternative can establish an unfavourably modest “anchor point ,” according to Hebrew University’s late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton.

These “lowball” first offers usually undermine a negotiator’s final outcome.

Professional athletes and their agents provided examples of negotiating better deals when they had no “back up” offers and “nothing to lose.” They set more ambitious anchor points, and often negotiate a more favourable settlement.

Schaerer and team asked a hundred people whether they would prefer to negotiate a job offer with a weak alternate offer or without any alternative.
More than 90 percent of participants preferred an unattractive alternative offer, confirming that any alternative is usually seen as better than no alternative.

Schaerer asked volunteers to sell previously-owned music when they had:

No offers (no alternative),
One offer at USD $2 (weak alternative),
A bid at USD $8 (strong alternative).

Volunteers in each group proposed a first offer, and rated the degree of power they felt.
People with the “strong” alternative felt most powerful and those with no alternative felt least powerful.

Volunteers with a weak alternative felt more powerful than those with no alternative, but they made lower first offers.
This indicated that they had less confidence than participants with no alternative.

Conclusion: Having any alternative can help people feel powerful but can undermine negotiation performance.

Schaerer’s team asked a volunteer to “sell” a coffee mug to a potential “buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers.

The volunteer “seller” received a phone call from “another buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers, before the volunteer seller met the original potential buyer.
When half the “sellers” met the original purchase prospect, the “buyer” made a low offer.
The “buyer” declined to bid for the other half of “sellers.”

Sellers without an alternative offer said they felt less powerful, but made higher first offers and received significantly higher sales prices than negotiators with an unattractive alternative.

In another situation, half of the “sellers” concentrated on available alternatives (none, weak, or strong) and the remaining negotiators focused on the target price.

Volunteers with unappealing alternatives negotiated worse deals than those with no options when they focused on alternatives.
“Sellers” avoided this pitfall by concentrating on the target price.
Conclusion: Focus on the goal when alternatives are weak.

Negotiators with non-existent or unappealing alternatives can set audacious goals and make an ambitious opening offer because they have “nothing to lose.”
This strategy usually renders better results for the disadvantaged negotiator.