Today, I’d like to share an interesting perspective on communication I learned from the king of pop economics, Malcom Gladwell, in his book Outliers. According to Gladwell, linguists divide societies into two categories, based on how they place responsibility for effective communication. In a Transmitter-Orientated culture, the speaker, or transmitter, is responsible for clearly communicating his and her ideas in such a way that other people can understand. Western cultures are mostly Transmitter-Oriented. For me, this brings back memories of endless hours honing and polishing my research presentations until they could be understood not only by the avid listener, but also by 1) people with no background in my field, and 2) people who slept through half of my talk and then decided to tune in to the second half. It was MY responsibility to engage the audience and convey my message.
The opposite of the Transimitter-Oriented culture is, you guessed it the Receiver-Orientated culture. Several East Asian cultures are Receiver-Oriented. This is one of the reasons that my fiance Anthony loves Japanese culture so much; what seems like a simple statement to a Western ear, such as “No thank you,” can be laced with nuance that the listener, or receiver, must unpack and understand, such as “it is not necessary, but if you ask two more times, I will say yes.”
Each form of communication is powerful in its own way, but the problem arises when you have a Transmitter-Oriented and a Receiver-Oriented person communicating. For example, Gladwell told the story of a Columbian pilot (Receiver-Oriented) who communicated with New York air traffic control (Transmitter-Oriented). The pilot hinted that their plane was about to run out of fuel by saying something to the effect of “… and we might be running slightly low on fuel.” To the Receiver-Oriented pilot, the air traffic control should interpret this as “the plane is low on fuel… let’s ask more questions, and prepare an alternate landing plan.” But the Transmitter-Oriented air traffic control is trained to respond to direct, clear messages… they are not used to fishing for subtle nuance. And so they made no special landing plans for the Columbian plane. As a result, the plane crashed over Long Island when it finally ran out of fuel.
If you think about it, this disconnect happens all the time in relationships, not just in an airport cockpit. For example, one of my clients, Lucy, recently grumbled to me about her stay at a hotel. Upon entering her room, she found the carpet to be dirty, so she called the front desk. “Has my room been vacuumed recently?” she asked. “Yes, today.” said the receptionist. Lucy didn’t believe him. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Yes, quite,” he replied. Lucy hung up the phone fuming at the incompetence of the hotel staff. “He should have offered to send someone up to vaccum my rug,” she told me. “This customer service is horrible.” But what if the service wasn’t horrible, and this was just a matter of Lucy being a Receiver-Oriented communicator, and the receptionist being Transmitter-Oriented? Lucy expected the receptionist to understand her nuance, while the receptionist was waiting for a direct, explicit request.
Or take an example with Anthony and I. We were having a delightful conversation last weekend in a cozy lounge with couches and low lighting and the yummiest martinis I have ever tasted (mine was white chocolate and macademia nut liquor…. mmmm). We started talking about his career aspirations, and 20 minutes into the conversation, he told me that he was upset, and that I was being insensitive. Upon further investigation, I realized that he had been hinting for 15 minutes that he was not happy with the approach I was taking in the conversation. When I didn’t respond to the hint, he began to think “she is SO insensitive. She doesn’t care that I am obviously getting hurt!” But in my mind, there wasn’t any hurt because he didn’t tell me “ouch that hurts!” Receiver- vs. Transmitter- oriented.
So the moral of the story, I am convinced, is to play both roles. To have beautiful conversation, it is our responsibility to both speak clearly, and listen deeply. I’d wager that each of us is pre-disposed to one or the other… I am Transmitter-Oriented just as certainly as I am left-handed. So what if the key to becoming a better communicator is to strengthen the other communication style within ourselves. That means me learning how to listen deeply, and read between the lines. For someone like Lucy, that means learning how to ask explicitly for what she wants.
A personal development blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group.
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