David Patient, Academic Director at The Lisbon MBA, has many years of research about communication and how to give bad news. He believes the way organizations communicate is essential to make people understand the right messages and adopt the conducts they are expected too. When talking to The Magazine, he admits most companies avoid difficult conversations which are often the most important ones. He also underlines the importance of positive feedback to keep people engaged and motivated.

Interview with David Patient

You have a degree in Law. Why did you decide to go into Law?

I think I was always interested in using language in a powerful way and as a lawyer you learn how to get things done by expressing yourself very clearly and precisely.

So how come you never practiced it?

I saw Law more as a technical career. The reason I decided to do an MBA and move toward business was because I wanted something that had a little more scope. My interest in the use of language to get things done was also what lead me to go back to university to do my PhD, after working for 10 years. Since then a lot of my research and teaching has focused on communication, including how bad news is communicated, giving feedback, persuading others, power and influence, using fairness to motivate, …

Your research focuses on effective managerial communication and employee motivation. Why do you feel these topics are important?

People are fundamentally social animals and our status inside our groups matters a great deal to us. We want to feel safe, to avoid being exploited, and to use the groups we belong to – including the organizations we work for – to achieve our material and non material goals. Communication is a key way to evaluate our relationships with other people, and so not only do we pay attention to what is communicated to us, we also pay a great deal of attention to the way it is communicated – especially when outcomes are negative. Also, from a practical point of view, it makes sense to study communication because we have a lot of control over it. For example, doctors may not be able to avoid giving a patient a bad diagnosis, but they can control how they communicate it. In fact, how they communicate it is going to have a great effect in how the patient responds to it, not only in terms of attitude, but also in terms of behavior. The same applies to managers. As managers and leaders we have to sometimes give people negative feedback, and other negative outcomes. To me, leadership is a lot about helping people cope with change and accept loss. Whether people accept difficult change and still stay motivated and committed depends a lot on the way it is communicated.

“leadership is a lot about helping people cope with change and accept loss. Whether people accept difficult change and still stay motivated and committed depends a lot on the way it is communicated.”

 

And what do you think are your key findings?

One of them is the importance of empathy, which is the ability to take other people’s perspectives and also to imagine how they’re feeling. This is key trait for effective communication: if we take our audience’s perspective, we focus more on them and understand their needs better, and we are likely to adapt the message to them and transmit it in a way that will increase the chances it is understood and acted upon. Although some people are more naturally empathetic, the good news is that people can easily be trained to be more empathetic and better at perspective-taking.

How can people be trained for this?

People can be given perspective-taken exercises, they can read about or listen to people from their intended audience. They can also simply be told prior to communicating: “take a few moments to think how this will affect your audience and how they will feel.” I have used this 10-second intervention in several experiments, and it works, by shifting the communicator’s attention to the other person, we change the way they communicate … for the better!

Any other findings you’d like to highlight?

Another approach I take in my research and teaching on communication is fairness, which looks at whether people believe the procedures and the outcomes are fair and well explained. Most of the early research on fairness focused on outcomes. So we know that people compare what they receive with what they expect, and this affects their motivation. But the last few decades have shown us how important are people’s judgements regarding the fairness of procedures and of communication.

In fact, a lot of what we know about communication and about what people should do is pretty uncontroversial. We know, for example, which steps we need to take to persuade people, to give negative news and in, these cases, the most interesting question becomes why don’t people do it.

“most of the barriers to communicating well are psychological. We fear that we are going to be negatively evaluated by someone else. We don’t want to raise difficult issues because of what it means to our identities. We anticipate and try to avoid strong feelings from other people”

And why don’t people take these steps toward communication?

There is a number of factors. It could be lack of training, poor models, or it may take more time or more emotional energy. However, most of the barriers to communicating well are psychological. For example, we fear that we are going to be negatively evaluated by someone else. We don’t want to raise difficult issues because of what it means to our identities. We anticipate and try to avoid strong feelings from other people. So it’s not enough to tell people how they should communicate, we also need to provide people with tools to overcome these personal barriers. This can be done in the form of structures that they can rely upon, or we can use realistic role-plays so that people can practice. We can help people anticipate some of the challenges, understand why everyone finds these situations difficult, and have some strategies to overcome them.

You also work with numerous companies. What are the key issues they want to overcome?

A frequent issue is Difficult Conversations. What I try to do is help organizations explore why they often avoid discussing what is most important and help them find some tools to understand others’ perspectives and some practical ways to initiate these conversations. To make engaging in these conversations feel safer and to drive them in a more productive way, so that both sides understand each other better. So they can come up with a plan to move forward.

Would you say that in order to better communicate, one needs to know one’s own barriers and be aware of other people’s perspectives?

Yes, we should understand our own motivations, our interests, our assumptions about other people, and the triggers that make us react in different ways. But we also need to understand that people are different from us. Although we may have a lot in common with our colleagues, it is quite likely that they will have different motivations and preferred ways of communicating and receiving messages from us.

You were talking about other issues that were common in companies…

Performance feedback and specifically negative feedback is a huge issue. On the one hand, we know how important is feedback, both positive or negative, to employee motivation. On the other hand, a lot of organizations either postpone feedback, sugarcoat it, or avoid it completely. Companies and managers need help in knowing how to provide feedback in a way that is going to be understood and acted upon. Managers also need to appreciate the power of positive feedback. If their people don’t feel valued and understood, they simply aren’t going to accept the negative feedback and change their performance in the ways that we’d like them to.

And if we talk about the Portuguese reality?

In Portugal, feedback is a tough topic. Because Portugal is a very relational culture, we are often worried about any type of criticism being taken personally, so we often avoid negative feedback. On the other hand, Portugal is a culture with a high-power distance, meaning that status differences are very salient in the workplaces. These differences between levels can also make it more difficult to give feedback, especially upward feedback. This is a topic that seems to be coming up more and more as I work with Portuguese and International companies.

“Managers need to appreciate the power of positive feedback. If their people don’t feel valued and understood, they simply aren’t going to accept the negative feedback and change their performance in the ways that we’d like them to.”

 

Does it help to have formal feedback procedures?

Formal procedures can be a start but are not enough by themselves. They are only as good as the managers implementing them. And they are only going to be effective if the employees see top management acting sincerely and consistently with the procedures. Managers should be looking into creating environments where employees feel safe challenging the system and offering suggestions – and are rewarded for doing so, rather than sometimes risking punishment.

What do you think is the most important thing that your students can learn from you?

Some of what I teach involves taking different perspectives, so this is one fundamental lesson. I also try to bring research to the classroom, so I also want managers and students to appreciate that there’s a great deal that we know about people and some of it is complex and messy, but so are people. But a lot of what we know has been established carefully through hundreds and hundreds of studies and it should be paid attention to. So I really try to say to students that, even if understanding people and changing behavior is not easy, there is a lot of science out there which we should pay heed to and try to implement. There is no point for anyone to reinvent the wheel. If people are curious and if they look in the right places, they will find a lot of interesting and practical research, which companies and individuals should pay a lot more attention to. And sometimes the results are not what we expect, many findings – and the advie they lead to – are counterintuitive and run contrary to our expectations.

Such as? Could you give us some examples?

A lot of what we believe that motivates people is often not so. For example, one may believe that if we give people positive feedback they may perform less well, they become arrogant or complacent or they would simply be satisfied with their performance. Interestingly people believe this to be true of other people, but not to be true of themselves. And research very clearly shows that when we provide people with positive feedback, they do not become more complacent, they become more motivated and tend to work harder. In fact, when people receive positive feedback, they’re also likely to become more open to negative feedback. So that would be an example of a relationship that we may take for granted but which bears closer examination.

Is this something that students find important right straight away?

From what I’ve seen, the more experience people have in organizations and especially the more difficult situations they face, the more relevant they find material on communication, leadership and motivation. A lot of what I do is through exercises, because people often do the opposite of what they might predict or expect, which can provide valuable learning. So I really hope that in all my sessions, there are some situations when they think ‘aha, this is not so easy but really important, this is something I can use’.

Book recommendations:

Friend & Foe, Adam Galinsky & Maurice Schweitzer

Give and Take, Adam Grant

Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

The Power Paradox, Dachen Keltner