Dan Erwin

Double-Checking My Conversational Skills

Last Sunday, I headed to one of my restaurant haunts for a late lunch. Although I have a number of favorite restaurants, I usually head to NoLo’s for their weekend brunch, especially for the avocado toast and salad, a favorite of mine. Although I very often go with friends to favorite restaurants, my Sunday brunch is inevitably solo. As a consequence, I always sit at the large bar and order my meal. The place, as usual, was mobbed with late 20’s and 30s, along with a few “olders.” I inevitably take my male purse, stuffed with a couple articles or a small book, just in case. I took the only chair with two young black women on my right and two young black men my left, all obviously college grads. The neighborhood is young professionals and Sunday is a packed noisy crowd. The kind of happy noise that lets me know I’m still a member of the human race, even as a member of the so-called “elderly.”

I pulled a couple study articles out, looking at them briefly, turned to my left and started talking, a conversation that lasted more than two hours—and was great fun. But what made it especially insightful, creating the rationale for this post, is the three of us had several conversations, then together analyzed the relationships.

I began by commenting that the avocado toast that the fellow to my immediate left had just been served was one of my favorites. I usually have two eggs, sunny side, but he had scrambled eggs on top, providing another opportunity for small talk. And then, we were off. We talked about favorite restaurants, where we all lived and whether we ate here regularly. I asked about their work, learning they were sales people, both college grads and obviously successful professionals. After introducing myself as “Dan,” the fellow to my left introduced himself, providing me with his name—“Isaac”—to which I responded that Isaac didn’t fit any African Americans I knew. I was correct: he was Ethiopian. I couldn’t remember who colonized Ethiopia, to which he responded “no one.” And then I remembered, “Haile Selassie and all that stuff,” I commented. Yes, but he wanted to know how I knew that and I responded with my “don’t know shrug.” Both he and his friend talked so rapidly and so humorously that with my hearing deficit, I had to ask them to repeat, explain, rephrase, etc. They were quite OK with that.

Shortly, we had a ten-minute conversation on Detroit, my home in the 1940s. Detroit is inevitably a conversation for a lot of people. .

Intelligence Is About Stories, Not Just IQ or EQ

It’s the smart folk that do well in business. At least that’s what we’re told—and I suspect that to some degree it’s true. But if it’s the smart folk, what really is smarts? Or, to put it in a more academic framework: what is intelligence?

Cognitive psychologists have played around with these issues for decades and they’ve arrived at similar conclusions. Typical is that of Harvard’s well-known Howard Gardner, who first captured my attention in 1983 with his study of “Multiple Intelligences:” To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail

"It's Just African!"

Identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff. I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of...

How to Read a Conversation

In business, as in other vocations, what’s not said is often far, far more important than what is said. Indeed, sometimes people lose their jobs, opportunities, a raise or a promotion because they fail to understand what’s not said. So, in many of my posts, when I write about “subtexts,” I’m referring to these covert meanings, hidden commitments, “undiscussables,”or what's not said.  

Reading a conversation can provide unstated information on such things as organizational politics, influence, needed adaptations, special expertise, and the potential, or lack thereof, for collaboration on specific issues. It reveals such things as how to...

The Return to the Soft and Squishy

David Brooks beat me to the punch again. I had half finished a blog on Geoff Colvin’s fascinating new book, “Humans Are Underrated,” planning to finish it in the next couple weeks. But no, he reviewed it in a superb column, “The New Romantics,” emphasizing business’ return to the importance of the relational. Still, there’s a lot more to be said about Colvin’s seminal work.

Colvin emphasizes that most business tasks are relational (i.e. conversational). Ironically, technological forces are actually driving the need for relational or conversational skills. Case in point: tech project managers are essentially conversationalists. (They don’t code and for that matter don’t need to know how to code. They just need to understand coding and what it can do. But they’re responsible for making certain those development jobs get done well and on time.) Recently I checked out project management positions available just in the city of Minneapolis. Linkedin surfaced 801 openings in a couple seconds. A friend of mine, recruiting for a staff augmentation firm, told me that a good tech project manager in Minneapolis can get up to $140-$150,000.

Reframing the competition with computing.
Colvin’s point is that trying to figure out what computers can’t do and getting an education to fill that need is wrongheaded. The driving question is...

Why How We Fight Matters Most

Analysis of business conversations inevitably reveals that they are chock full of misunderstanding, differences of opinion and inherent disagreement. Yet, it has been more than a dozen years since anything significant on managing conflict has been created. But in a recent and highly awarded study UVA’s Kristin Behfar and her colleagues have provided a new, very practical approach to conflict prediction and resolution.

Rather than focus on conflict types, such as task or relationship orientation, they found that by manipulating two dimensions—directness and intensity—they were able to predict conflict success or failure.

Directness is defined as how straightforward—or “direct”—measured by words and body language somebody communicates information to the other person. Intensity is seen as the emotional component. Is the information presented on almost a matter-of-fact basis—or does it involve...

The Four Competencies of Leadership

It’s wonderful—perhaps because it’s so rare—to reread something that you started using thirty years ago and discover that it’s still highly relevant. Desktops were just beginning to show up and technology organizations were starting to use organizational networks. Organizations began to flatten and the need for leading started to surface. The talk was all about leading, not managing.

The Pillsbury CIO had a lot of money but little leadership talent on his team. So he tracked me down and asked me to work with a number of his new managers. I had done some coaching in R&D--as an experiment--and on a fluke, he brought me in.

I’d first encountered leadership material in grad school in the 1960s. I understood the distinction between managing and leading and could observe the differences. I was also quite certain leadership could be learned—a minority position at the time...

Five Keys to Interpersonal Sensitivity

In a fascinating study, Rod Hart and Don Burks studied the relationship between “expressive” communication and “instrumental” or “rhetorical communication.” Expressive communication is very attractive in business because it involves frankness, honesty, openheartedness and non-manipulative intentions. As attractive as it is, it rarely provides people with effective means for creating and managing relationships—very important tools for people in today’s flattened business environment.

The research surfaced three communication tendencies for interpersonal communication. The first, which you see often in business, is the noble selves tendency: the notion that people should not adapt to other people or to situations in any way that violates their beliefs, attitudes or values. Sometimes this is a commitment of the individual, but more often it’s a practice growing out of lack of tools to make adaptations. The second, which can be seen as “sucking up,” is what...

Deep Smarts, Deep Thinking and Metacognition

Whenever I write a blog about a subject like thinking, I inevitably face up to the fact that blogging about thinking doesn’t easily grab readers. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are a lot more exciting, even though they’re not nearly as needful or valuable. Deep thought is the kind of stuff that more mature clients are after, especially when they face serious decisionmaking or strategic needs.

Deep smarts is the engine of every organization. You can’t really progress without them. And you’ll manage a lot more effectively if you understand what they are, how they are built and cultivated—and how they can be transferred to others. In this blog, I intend only to describe deep thinking.

In the new Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2^nd edition), Keith Sawyer summarizes the differences between “deep learning” and “traditional classroom practices.” His summary was so explicit and so perceptive that...

The Death of the Lone Genius

Slowly, very slowly, the research and some journalists are killing off the notion of the lone genius. You know, that American mythology of individual superiority applied to creativity. Like John Wayne’s rescue before the barbarians get to you, the lone genius is all nonsense. But the myth of the lone genius will require a cruel death of many cuts. It’s one of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs--even though dead wrong.

The latest cut is delivered by William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic. He writes rather bluntly that the “truth is that the geniuses weren’t really quite as solitary as advertised. They also often came together—think of the Bloomsbury Group—in situations of intense sustained creative ferment.”

Does it really matter?
That’s the question. And the answer is a clear-cut affirmative.

Organizations succeed—or fail—based on...

Misunderstandings Can Be Very Good For You

There are few experiences that can drive learning more than misunderstandings with a business colleague. Misunderstandings happen all the time in organizations and in the best of relationships.  Actually, misunderstanding is more prevalent than understanding.  The reality is that consistently successful communication is especially abnormal in organizational settings.  And although the resulting emotions of embarrassment, threat, fear or anger can hinder us from being proactive and growing, just as often it can propel our learning.  

The reasons for misunderstandings are numerous in the organizational setting: levels of hierarchy, larger work teams, cultural, age, sex, gender, religious and value differences, struggles for power ...