Communication a life and leader's currency

As an example here in Thailand, graduates of the liberal arts programme at Chulalongkorn University are known for their excellent communication skills and frequently land jobs as executive secretaries to influential leaders in the public and private sector.

The Lao-American College in Vientiane has been highly effective by providing excellent training in English communication skills and information and communication technology capabilities.

There are three basic elements of communication skills: speaking, writing and reading well in one’s own language; speaking, writing and reading well in another language(s); and having good non-verbal communication skills.

Good non-verbal communication skills are far more important than many educators realise. As much as 93 per cent of all daily communication is non-verbal, as indicated by Dr Albert Mehbrian in his groundbreaking book, “Silent Messages”. The father of non-verbal communication was the late Dr Edward Hall, author of “The Silent Language” and “The Hidden Dimension. 

From its early days, the US Peace Corps emphasised in its training of volunteers the development of non-verbal communication skills. The wai in Thailand, for example, illustrates the importance of non-verbal communication. By carefully observing wais among a large group of people and noting who wais whom and how, one could ascertain the relative status of nearly everyone in the room.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to take a group of Thai educators to visit Hope Community Academy in St Paul, Minnesota, a prominent Hmong charter school. Its dynamic principal and instructional leader, Dr Maychy Vu, emphasised the mastery of basic communication skills, with a strong emphasis on critical reading and writing. Samples of students’ critical writing were prominently displayed on the school walls. 

One of the classic critiques of failures in written communication is “The Politics of the English Language” by George Orwell, a former colonial police officer in Burma. Although this essay was written almost 60 years ago, it is still highly relevant today. Orwell thought that much writing was vague and/or meaningless and designed to hide or distort the truth. Instead Orwell called for clarity and honesty and presented six rules for good writing, which basically call for clear, precise and concise writing.

Years later, William Zinsser wrote the valuable books “Writing Well” and “Writing for Learning”. The important idea of writing for learning is a missing element in most teacher education programmes. In the United States a national initiative exists to promote writing for learning called the National Writing Project (NWP): Improving Writing and Learning in the Nation’s Schools.

Among major problems in communication are the following:

Writing, particularly that done by academics, can be excessively abstract and hard to understand.

Journalists use a metric, the Fog Index, to assess how understandable our writing is. The ideal Fox Index results when the writing is neither too complex nor too simple, a kind of middle path in communications.

Too much writing is ethnocentric or uses ethnocentric language such as the “Far East”, “Orientals”, and Pacific Rim. Philip Herbst has compiled a valuable volume, “Color of Words”: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States. The work provides valuable insights into the appropriate use of an extensive list of ethnic and cultural terms.

In terms of total quality control, there is much carelessness in English writing with embarrassing typos or spelling mistakes. For example, writing that there are many NGO’s in Thailand is the same as writing that there are four car’s in the garage. It should be plural NGOs not possessive NGO’s. There is also a |tendency to read speeches, papers and Power Point slides that is deadly ineffective and boring, and to over rely on notes.

What must we as educators do to enhance the communicative competence of our students? I |suggest the following:

The Gladwell rule (expressed in his insightful book “Outliers”) is relevant here. We must devote at least 10,000 hours to become proficient in something. Our students must have ample opportunities to write and read. There is an over-reliance on texts and “objective” multiple-choice tests. We must push for creative writing and critical reading across the curriculum. Otherwise students in majors such as maths, engineering and business tend to fall behind.

James B Patterson is one of the world’s most popular and successful writers with 76 best-selling titles and the first person to sell over one million e-books. He also is known for working with co-authors and promoting reading, books and libraries. He is now offering an inexpensive online course on writing well.

It is important to show our students good examples of writing and speaking. I have students in my leadership class observe and critique John F Kennedy’s famous Berlin speech (probably his best). For leaders, communication is the currency of leadership. Ronald Reagan was known as the great communicator. 

We are now in the new world of the Internet and social media. Every university should offer a freshman seminar on communications, social media, and the Internet to make students critically aware of these new tools and how they can enhance learning and education. Relevant here is Sherry Turkle’s book, “Alone Together”, which is highly critical of social media and its impact on communication among humans. We must teach students to avoid the “Twitter disease”, using language such as “how r u?”.

Finally in the Asian Economic Community era, we must enhance the cross-cultural communication and linguistic skills of our students. 

In today’s information and multicultural age, truly educated individuals are those with outstanding communication skills in their own language, excellent non-verbal communication capabilities, and the |ability to communicate across cultures.

Gerald W Fry 

Distinguished International Professor, 

Department of Organisational Leadership, Policy, and Development, University of Minnesota

[email protected]