Silence works exceptionally well in many interpersonal situations. That’s especially true, for example, in a problem solving or conflict-oriented situation. In such contexts, strategic silence is often one of your best approaches to resolution. It’s an interpersonal behavior used when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.
So, when a person violates expectations by silence, the other’s attention is riveted on the silence. It violates expectations and typically leaves the other with “silence nerves.” A tension based on the innate need for social connections and relationships among humans. A tension often so strong that it defines the person—the initiator of the silence.
For example, I was recently involved in a highly frustrating situation with my website provider. Since my blogging and regular interactions were either via email or Typepad, I had decided that my website served no significant purpose and there was no reason to continue the monthly financial payment. Since my email worked out of the website, I contacted my provider and asked to keep the email. That was not possible, but I could purchase a simple stand-alone email site for just a few bucks a month. I also agreed to purchase a transfer process from a provider. But before I had worked thru the password issues for Outlook to transfer those archives and data, the hosting firm closed down my website. The provider sent me to the stand-alone email site, but I needed passwords from my old site to transfer all the data from that site. The agent worked with me for easily half an hour to transfer the material, but we failed. I couldn’t get the new site up and running and the agent couldn’t go online. Frustrated, he asked whether there wasn’t a more experienced person to do the work for me, an obvious snub. I had followed his instructions at least three times, but none of my passwords worked, resulting in a great deal of frustration for him. Clearly, he saw me as inept. I asked whether he could pass me up to his supervisor and his first response was negative. After ten minutes of more screwing around during which I said nothing, I asked again and this time I was passed on to a supervisor. In effect I rejected his definition of me—and he finally accepted my decision.
The supervisor and I walked through the new email process twice, like the former agent. It failed both times. Then he suggested it might be a cache problem, so I followed his cache deleting instructions. That resolution brought me to the “create a new email” site. But we needed an accurate password to create a new email site and transfer all my materials. I had worked with the hosting firm for more than ten years so I had a number of passwords, but none of them worked, making transfer impossible. I owned the password problem, but here’s where the issue got messy. Because of the firm’s privacy issues, my contact couldn’t retrieve the working password. I was silent while he searched. He slowly went up the ladder, finally telling me that I’d have to handle the issue by paper and that it would probably take a week or two to get the password. I clarified quietly and slowly, “you’re telling me that I won’t be able to use an email for a week?” He didn’t respond. I remained silent. “Let me try something else” he finally said. That failed. I remained silent. So, he said, he might have another option. I remained silent. That failed. I remained silent. Finally, he said he didn’t think there were any other options except the paper route. I remained silent. Then he commented, “you’re not saying anything.” I very slowly and quietly remarked, “I don’t think you need to hear my anger” –and said nothing else. He was silent for a long time, as was I. My silence gave him no clues of how to work with me, so he was obviously playing around with the potential meanings of my silence. My past experience suggested that my silence was controlling the situation and the agent—exactly what I wanted. If I had talked, there was a high probability that I would have lost control of the situation. He would have responded to whatever I said, and taken back control.
Finally, he said that there was a “privacy team up the line, maybe they can help.” Again, I was silent. He said that he’d get back in a couple minutes. I remained silent. About three minutes later, he came back with both password and resolution of the problem. I responded quietly and with simplicity, “thank you.” The first agent was clearly both inept and pissed at me, a relation that brought practically nothing from me except silence, forcing the handover. The second agent revealed no serious frustration like the first. But my silence kept him from gaining control of the situation. “Silence,” however, drove his final search for me and ultimately resolved the problem.
Note well: Silence drives the resolution. Silence is tangible, the hard, strong presence that displays itself openly—so that we can’t escape its presence. The resolution is forced by the silence, not by me and not by the agent. If you can make that drastic mental shift, then tools and competencies assume a level of capacity that offers power that human persona cannot match. Our task as professionals, then, is to set these competencies free to operate in contexts of need.
On some occasions, however, silence does not violate expectations. It may be role silence, that of a subordinate to a superior--a sign of respect. Superiors may be silent toward others as a mark of their status. A senior person may not return a phone call or check in to update a subordinate. Though that kind of silence takes on meaning, it’s not strategic because it follows custom. In such customary settings the onus is inevitably on the subordinate to call the superior back.
It’s important to understand that strategic silence does not stand for, signify or symbolize the person. Instead, the behaviors actually create the person originating the silence. Silence controls the other. So, silence impacts us—and gradually creates us—our persona. It’s not just that the behaviors are different, but that the competency takes on a persona itself. Our task, then is to understand that persona in the contexts where it operates.
Processing strategic silence
Although silence is all around us, it becomes “strategic” only when talk is expected. Someone has a pressing reason to talk, but does not talk and does not explain their silence.
Strategic interpersonal silence is marked by a definite process, often involving a descriptive contextual comment, followed by a brilliant, daring, open question, then silence, then response from the “other,” then still another silence and then a more significant response, usually involving more significant clarity, a slight change of mind, and even material the person did not intend to share. It’s quite probable that the supervisor in the above case did not intend to go to the privacy team and resolve my issue. If I’d given him control, he’d quite happily have resolved the issue with paper and a week-long response. So, two silences or more in the rhetorical process are exceptionally useful. They tend to force a more thorough response. .
Note that in the above illustration, I explained my silence without fully breaking my silence. I did not say anything about the resolution of the problem, only that the agent “need not hear my anger.” He was not going to ask about my anger. The silence was still operative. And so the agent changed his mind, kept searching for a resolution, and finally resolved the issue for me—on my terms.
Strategic motivations. . .
Although I can’t essay all the motivations for silence, my professions as minister, educator and consultant have surfaced five fairly distinct functions of strategic silence.
Information-seeking is the most basic motivation for strategic silence. It overlaps the other motivations and uses. Since all my professions were solution-oriented, understanding behaviors, contexts, objectives and people was absolutely necessary for success. What became very clear over the years is that the quality of my questions typically supported the success of silence. As a consultant, the questioning was just as important as the strategic silence that would sometimes follow.
Typically, my uses of strategic silence with a client or others were for the initiation and eventual development of relationships. My consulting business always took place on the business turf of the other. So, I’d introduce myself, make a few comments about the context and then ask a question, sometimes an unexpected, daring question. If one of the first two or three questions was really effective, it provided me with a strategic silence opportunity. That meant that I’d be getting far better information than merely asking directly throughout the conversation. I realized, while writing, that though my process is fairly objective and straight-forward, it’s also very artful. Using the process of questions and then silences in such settings is a fine art. It is an imaginative and creative activity. And like any art, it takes time to learn. And also, like any great piece of art, it can control a situation, often without the participants’ awareness and understanding.
A third motivation for strategic silence is conflict management. In my professions, interpersonal conflict management and resolution was often necessary. On the one hand, I had to be knowledgeable about the issues at hand. But for solutioning, some kind of negotiation is usually necessary for conflict management. And that means I need to understand the other’s position in spades in order to get to mutual agreement. Nothing, absolutely nothing, works better in problem solving than brilliant questioning and strategic silence. As a church minister, usually conflicts have to be resolved without raising anyone’s hackles. Though I worked with plenty conflicts over the years, I always labelled them “problems,” “issues” or “opportunities” in order to keep negative emotions out of the picture. It’s nothing more than a language shift, a shift which could eventually enable me to label conflict for what it was. Strategic silence is especially useful when dealing with conflict averse people. And actually, just as useful with the highly conflict-averse organizations that populate business and the professions.
Self-protection is still another basic motivation for strategic silence. Every decision to say something is a decision not to say something else. As I consulted in different organizations and disciplines, I knew from my parish experience that sometimes saying something can be personally damaging. Silence may be de rigueur. . . required by the situation. In one early business consult, I answered a question when silence or distraction would have been far better. I lost a potentially large contract with a major firm simply because of that failure in silence. Nick Verouden, who has studied silence, at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), points out that “relational silence can be a way to protect one’s own position within relational networks” and a “political or tactful way to turn down a proposal without openly offending anybody.” His work is helpful in that he rightly indicates that silence carries a risk as a “sign of passivity, lack of commitment or even disrespect.”
But most risk is easily mitigated. I believe that’s because I come to silence with an appreciation of what my field calls audience analysis competency, an awareness of when and when not to use silence. Furthermore, when you hold off the use of silence until the receiver recognizes that you’re a knowledgeable person, offering relevant expertise and revealing discernment in other fields, you’re limiting the possibility of risk.
Finally, over the years I’ve learned that strategic silence can be highly useful for impression management. On numerous occasions business leaders and even numerous consultants (McKinsey, etc.) have pointed out to me and others that my ability to surface information is highly unusual. A number of McKinsey interviewees told one client—a McKinsey director—that they had not anticipated providing as much info to me as they revealed, but they couldn’t ignore my effectiveness.
But they always refer to my questioning, never saying anything about my use of strategic silence. There’s a reason for that. The strong, obvious presence of my questioning displays the competence forthrightly. But the very opposite is the case with silence. The ordinary, common sense of questioning betrays even the Harvard-educated, McKinsey executives. Strategic silence has a quite remarkable capacity for fading from view. It becomes naturalized and taken for granted, the background for my behavior. Silence acts typically like the frame around a picture, rather than like the painting (or questioning) itself. As such, it has been and continues to be profoundly reputation building. Business people are taught constantly about the role of talking, but rarely about the role of silence.
Resistance to interpersonal skill development
Resistance to interpersonal skill development is widespread. Sometimes it’s personal ignorance and other times it’s the limitations resulting from the power of technology in people’s lives. Sherry Turkle of MIT argues rather strongly that we have sacrificed conversation and its skills for mere technical connection. But to “empathize, to grow, to love and be loved, to take the measure of ourselves or of another, to fully understand and engage with the world around us, we must be in conversation.” As she writes, the costs are of serious consequence.
On occasion, I’ve observed overt resistance to learning interpersonal skills. One of the most hilarious episodes surrounded my attempt to teach strategic silence to a senior factory manager and his managerial subordinates at a candy factory in Memphis, a subsidiary of Hershey. I had gotten to know the managers, many who were industrial and technical professionals. But the senior boss was a classic Southern “good old boy,” who been with the firm for most of his life and was clearly not open to skill development of any kind. Though my parents had been in Detroit since the 1920s, they were originally from western Kentucky, where I did my undergrad at Murray State. So, I was quite familiar with “good old boys.” The VP of manufacturing, my Chicago client, had hired me to develop managers at all of the production sites, focusing on team problem solving. And that included, questioning (and strategic silence).
I had worked with each of the managerial subordinates at the Memphis factory, and noticing the exaggerated need for smart politics, I kept the senior manager (“the boss”) appraised. It was obvious that he was a lot more interested in control than in learning. On one of the last trips, I put the group, including the boss, into a team session, focusing on questioning and silence. I noticed when I started working with silence that the boss was turning red-faced, angry, and obviously disinterested. After talking the group through open-ended questioning, I began to work with strategic silence. When I was about finished, the boss interrupted and said “this is a waste of my time. This stuff won’t work.” Not especially surprised, I stared at him, and, as you can imagine his subordinates were glued on me. I turned face-to-face to the boss and asked slowly and softly, “Why do you think this is a waste of time?” The politics were such that he’d have to answer my question. After at least thirty seconds of silence, he gave me a perfunctory response of about three statements. I continued staring at him in complete silence—and then he began to detail—still red-faced and angry--and explain his reasoning. The team just exploded with laughter. Realizing what had happened, the boss got up, still very angry, and stomped out of the room. I was certain he was heading for his phone and the VP, a response that I knew would be in my favor. But the subordinates were laughing, talking and questioning, all at the same time. They were still talking about the experience when I came back for several coaching sessions, weeks later.
The minute I walked into the Chicago VPs office, he started laughing and bubbling about his delight. That it was a great lesson for the “boss” and his subordinates. After that, not only my reputation, but my opportunities and my fees increased significantly in the firm. And, the other four factory managers all heard about the experience, further enhancing my credibility. Significantly, the VP confirmed that the level of problem solving was improved at all of the factories. It validated both the coaching and my reputation. In fact, my experience with managers at all the factories remained on a “high” until I finished the project, six months later.
Although the Memphis case was obviously a situation that could result in rejection, from the get-go I sensed instead that it was a teaching opportunity. I was also unconcerned about the potential for risk, not just because the “boss” was not my client. I was certain that I could “work” the boss, and that I had nothing to lose because of my relationship with the VP of manufacturing and the rest of the managers.
My greatest admiration and respect are reserved for the ethics of pragmatism and compromise. Admittedly, I enjoy taking these rhetorical competencies into the fray of everyday life and the glorious mess of contradiction and ambivalence that is found there. I don’t want to place this stuff on a pedestal, or even ignore the harm it might cause in a rare situation. Though the uninitiated might view my behavior as manipulative, in truth it was a straight-forward act of rhetorical intelligence. Though initially embarrassed, in the long run, that “good ol’ boy” was better off for what he learned. So, in most situations the stuff of silence is a competency that can open up the world to new, even creative insights and behaviors. More than 500 clients will attest to the value of my mentorship, a value significantly enhanced by the competencies of rhetorical intelligence like “strategic silence.”