15.3 The Smartphone Era and Communication Skills

If you prefer to text rather than talk to people most of the time because that’s how you’ve (and everyone else has) been doing it throughout high school and even in college, you’ll probably find yourself at a disadvantage when entering the workforce. The reason is twofold: (1) When you enter the working world, you join several generations of adults who grew up without smartphones and therefore tend to prefer talking over texting because it’s a tried, tested, and true way to efficiently communicate understanding. Managers, coworkers, customers, and other stakeholders come with high expectations for the quality of conversational skill in the people they interact with, and have little patience for those who are years behind where they should be in basic oracy. (2) You could be addicted to technology, which negatively affects your ability to interact with people in person according to a growing body of research (Andrew-Gee, 2018; Smith, Robinson, & Segal, 2018; Brandon, 2018). Why talk to people when sending a text is just so easy and comfortable?

In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), psychologist Sherry Turkle draws on clinical research to show how profoundly dissatisfied with ourselves and each other technology has made us. Smartphones and social media apps promise to connect us more but effectively isolate us. After a decade of smartphone use, teenagers whose 10-hour-per-day addiction to screens, preference for texting over talking, and habit of filling every idle moment with media consumption arrive at college with under-developed skills in conversation, empathy, patience, and self-reflection. When teens use technology to shield themselves from the countless awkward, embarrassing, and regrettable in-person interactions that lead eventually to social competence and confidence, they enter the workforce in a state of arrested development. “Adulting” becomes a terrifying prospect compared with the protective comfort zone of the screen. Turkle’s guide offers an antidote to the socially stunting effects of technology.

Motivational speaker Simon Sinek presents similar advice to Millennials while sympathizing with them for the “bad hand” they were dealt by a “failed parenting strategy” that raised unrealistic expectations of fulfillment in a whole generation. He similarly points the blame at mobile devices for the short-term dopamine-hit micro-reward feedback-loop pleasures they offer at the expense of the long-term development of soft skills. The enchantment of social media is that it offers users an easy out from the difficult learning experiences that develop the social coping mechanisms helping them through the trials of adolescence. The devices hook you with instant gratification: “Everything you want you can have instantaneously,” he says, except job satisfaction and strength of relationships. There ain’t no app for that. They are slow, meandering, uncomfortable, messy processes. . . . What this young generation needs to learn is patience—that some things that really matter like love or job fulfillment, joy, love of life, self-confidence, a skill set—all of these things take time. . . . The overall journey is arduous and long and difficult. (8:08 – 9:25)

Sinek advocates for better leadership in business and industry to teach Millennials the social skills they were robbed of by constant access to addictive technology.

One practical solution Sinek offers is banning cell phones in meeting rooms to remove the temptation of using them rather than conversing with colleagues. He argues that relationships and trust are built especially through small talk about work and life before and after meetings. Additionally, innovation happens in idle moments when you notice opportunities in the world—opportunities you’re blind to when your attention is absorbed by a little screen. “We have to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen” (12:00 – 13:05). Rather than a quick fix, steady consistency in developing social skills is necessary to bring Millennials up to speed in oracy.

Improving Your Conversation Skills

If anything in the above paragraphs sounds true to life, the onus rests largely on you to improve your conversation skills with all the advice that is available (ironically) on the very devices in question. For instance, Celeste Headlee, a talk-radio host and author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter (2017) provides insight with her well-viewed TEDtalk 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation (2016). Headlee’s main points have been summarised below.

1. Be Present: Devote your undivided attention to the person you’re speaking with and don’t multitask. You won’t have to pretend to pay attention by nodding and making eye contact if you’re doing that anyway by actually paying attention. The worst offenders are those to whip out their phone and engage with it rather than the people around them, called “phubbing” (for “phone snubbing”) (Ducharme, 2018). Though you may feel that you can get away with phubbing by discreetly hiding your smartphone under the table, your conversation partners know exactly what you’re doing when all your attention is on your lap.
2. Be prepared to learn: A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue where you simply unload your opinion on someone and receive nothing in return except for the satisfaction of dominating them with it. In certain situations, such as a TEDtalk itself, you give up your right to speak because of the faith that you’ll learn much more by listening to a wise speaker who needs time to get their points across.
3. Ask open-ended questions: The more vague your questions are (starting with the 5 Ws + H), the more freedom you give your conversation partner to answer on their own terms, whereas very specific questions limit the possible answers. If you ask “How did that make you feel?” for instance, you’ll get a more expressive answer than if you limited your speaker to a yes or no answer with a question like “Did that make you happy?”
4. Go with the flow: Respond to your conversation partner’s main points rather than with some digressive story you were reminded of by one of their minor points. When you respond in that way, it reveals that you haven’t been listening past the part that inspired the barely relevant thing you feel contributes to the conversation, though it really doesn’t move the conversation along so much as derail it.
5. Admit to not knowing: Make your confession of ignorance an opportunity to learn rather than claim to know something you don’t.
6. Honour the uniqueness of their experience: When the speaker relates something that happened to them, resist the urge to make it about you by equating their experience with yours. If they’re talking about grieving a death in the family, for instance, don’t dishonour that information share by responding with how you felt when your dog died. It’s not the same.
7. Cut yourself off before repeating yourself: If you have only one point to make, “hit it and quit it” rather than spin your wheels saying the same thing over and over, even if you change the words.
8. Stay out of the weeds: Rather than struggle to offer up all the details (the names, places, dates, etc.) and digress on minutiae, focus on your main points.
9. Listen: A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue, and therefore requires that you actively pay attention to what the speaker says in order to understand it rather than to merely reply to it.
10. Be brief: People are busy and have things to do, so if your conversation detains them for longer than they have time for, you will stretch their patience. As Headlee says, “A good conversation is like a miniskirt: short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.”

Headlee concludes that these tips are all variations on being interested in what people have to teach you (TED, 2016). If you add the following to Headlee’s advice, you stand a good chance of improving your conversation skills.

Mirror the Speaker

You may have occasionally caught yourself automatically imitating your conversation partner’s posture, facial expression, and manner of speaking. When they look relaxed or lean in, talk slowly because they’re calm or speak quickly because they’re in a rush, or widen their eyes with excitement, you follow suit in every case. Coined the “chameleon effect” by psychologists, mirroring is unconscious physical behaviour motivated by our desire to fit in so our conversation partner identifies with and likes us (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). It supports the cliché that imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Though it happens unconsciously, mirroring deliberately has been found to be especially effective as a sales technique and in job interviews, though only if the person being imitated doesn’t notice the imitator doing it. If you can be subtle and natural about it, intentional mirroring forces you to read your conversation partner’s verbal and nonverbal messages closely. Done effectively, mirroring benefits both speakers by building the trust and rapport necessary to collaborate effectively or close a deal (Shellenbarger, 2016).

Correctly Pronounce Words and Names

Speakers should be careful with pronunciation, especially with words they rarely hear, if ever. Mispronunciation can negatively impact your reputation or perceived credibility. Instead of using complicated words that may trip you up, choose a simple phrase if you can, or learn to pronounce the word correctly before using it in a formal interactive setting. If you think you’ll stumble over a word like archipelago, for instance, just use a synonymous phrase such as island chain.

The importance of pronunciation is nowhere more important than with people’s names. Some take offence to their name being mispronounced, and especially with their name being confused with a different but similar name. If someone’s name looks unpronounceable on paper, simply asking them how they prefer their name to be pronounced is better than confidently mispronouncing it.

Treat Conversations Like Volley Sports

A conversation isn’t a monologue where you fire words at a wall until you have nothing left to say. It’s more like a game of volleyball, tennis, or table tennis where possession of the speech right is exchanged back and forth. If it’s a friendly game, the objective is to volley words for as long as it’s fun or productive. This may mean asking a good question, which lobs the speech over the net to your conversation partner. They answer and can either ask you a feedback question in return or you can respond to their answer with a statement. Every time you speak, you must set up your conversation partner to be able to respond with either a statement or question, and expect them to do the same. Conversations would be frustrating if all the other person did was either spike the ball repeatedly to score points against you so that you could never touch it (i.e., delivered a monologue where you couldn’t get a word in edgewise), or just bounced the ball out of bounds every time you volleyed it straight to them—i.e., answered in a way that stalled the conversation, such as with one-word answers to your questions or bizarre statements you don’t know how to respond to. A conversation must be a dynamic process where both sides make a determined, concerted effort to keep it going until the objective has been reached or the clock runs down.