The Surprising Cultural Tension Between Emphasis in Communication and Rigidity of Belief
In which we look at how emphatic discourse can be perceived by some as a sign of mental rigidity but not by others. And what can happen when we don't realize which one we are or we're talking to.
One of the things that took me a long time to understand is the surprising and insidious cultural differences related to the perceived correlation of emphasis and the strength of holding a belief.
Imagine someone holding a belief and wanting to communicate this belief to someone else. Now imagine two different people with two very different communication styles: one that is soft spoken, neutral, detached, almost timid. Another that is emphatic, passionate, charged. Which one of those two people do you think are more likely to be adapt their beliefs as they acquire new information? Which one is more likely to listen and adjust?
I (and most Italians I know) operate under the default assumption that emphasis correlates with passion and care, not the strength with which the belief is held. Emphasis is perceived as correlating with interest, passion, care, desire for action. I can be emphatic about something, feeling passionate about it, wanting to act on it and spur motion from others, and yet hold such belief lightly and be open minded about whatever additional information I receive during the conversation. I can be passionate about something, change my mind and be passionate about something different a minute later. This feels obvious and healthy to me and to most people I grew up with.
But many people I worked with in the US operate under a very different default setting: they perceive communication emphasis as a proxy signal for the strength of beliefs one holds. For them, emphasis is a potential concern: the more emphatic and passionate somebody is about a belief they hold, the more likely “set in” this person will be, the more effort will take to influence their opinion because emphasis likely means “strongly held”.
There are a handful of things I wish somebody had told me about cultural differences in the workplace when I started working in the US almost 20 years ago. This is one of them. The amount of frustration, confusion, misunderstanding and energy that went into dissipating the friction created by such tension has been embarrassingly high.
I had a first glimpse of this disconnect many years ago. I was leading an effort and I was very passionate about it. I was passionate about it because I believed in the outcome and I wanted to rally people around me to focus on obtaining such outcome. It had worked well for me in my open source past, but it didn’t work as well in a working environment: my actions ware praised by some and dismissed by others. One insightful performance evaluation feedback I received during that time was that passion was both my blessing and my curse.
I spent many years operating like that, doing what I felt was pushing a boulder up a hill. I will make them join me by sheer force!
It won’t come to a surprise to you, wise reader, that I burned out. One day at dinner, my wife put a hand on my arm and told me, in a very loving and gentle way, that all I was bringing into the house was negativity.
It snapped me out of it. It felt like walking up from a dream. In an instant, I realized that I was sacrificing my life for proving I could achieve the goal that I had set to achieve. It wasn’t even financial reward, personal prestige or power hunger: I just wanted to prove to myself I could climb that mountain and get to the top. It wasn’t work: it was obsession. It was just harder, but I could do it! And it was slowly deteriorating all the things I held dear.
So I let go. I stopped climbing. I bent the knee and did exactly as told, including dismantling structures I had spent years building. I stopped fighting, stopped pushing, stopped caring. I had a job I was paid well to do and I was going to do it with the least amount of effort possible, while focusing on the more important things in life.
My expectation was that if had been difficult to me to catalyze action while fully invested, it would have effectively gone to zero the moment I stopped pushing. I didn’t care: I was even willing to get fired. If $employer demanded my soul for the compensation I was receiving, I probably needed another job anyway.
This is where the plot twists.
The moment I stopped pushing and effectively stopped caring, people started to change their beliefs and align theirs with mine. Leads that had previously dismiss my concerns started to come asking for strategic analysis. They gave me more reports, more responsibility, more agency.
WTF?!
It took me many more years (and a few other similar ups and downs) to recognize that emphasis had been the key. The more I cared about an outcome, the more emphatic my communication became. Sometimes emphasis meant highlighting differences and contrasts for sake of simplifying the narrative and catalyze agency. Some would resonate with this and some would be put off by it. Today I believe the reason for that is that the first did not feel that my emphasis signaled close-mindedness, while the second believed it did.
Once you see it, it’s everywhere, especially in a work environment like mine which is effectively a melting pot of a variety of cultures. Even the last US presidential election can be seen as “emphatic vs. thoughtful” as a proxy fight for the adaptability of governance.
I came to recognize that emphasis is indeed problematic in cross-cultural settings because the cost of misjudgment is dramatically asymmetric. The downstream cost of misjudging an “emphatic as rigid” person as an “emphatic as passionate” one is extremely high. The cost of misjudging a “soft-spoken as uncaring” person as a “soft-spoken as open minded” one is far smaller. As a result, the stable point of the repeated prisoner dilemma which is judging other people’s character and build trust bridges across a large multi-cultural organization necessarily converges to low emphasis communication.
It’s not by chance that my $employer’s CEO’s is one of the most soft-spoken people you’ll meet and his most often used word (to the point of parody) is “thoughtful”.
This is something I continue to struggle with, especially when I’m tired or hungry or frustrated; my default setting is emphatic and falling back to it automatically makes the climb steeper, the bridge to gap wider. But at least now I know about it and I can see it and act on it.