Kev Kennedy's Blog

You communicate through tone

Growing up, my family had a dog we used to tease on a regular basis. You see, dogs don’t respond to actual words, they respond to the tone of your voice. If you shout “I REALLY LOVE YOU - YOU’RE THE MOST WONDERFUL DOG IN THE WORLD!!” then most dogs will cower away from you fearfully. Or they might respond with an attack of their own: barking, snarling and snapping at you.

But if we got down on our hands and knees - to the same level as the dog - and made fluffy-wuffy sounding smalltalk, you could say anything. “Izzh it time for your bathy-wathy, izzhh it. Are you a gweat big stinkbag? Yes you are, yes you are!” And the dog would enthusiastically wag its tail and try and lick you - right up until the point it realised you had perpetrated a deception (usually when you turned on the hose).

My point - and I do have one - is that it is tone which communicates. How we say things is often more important than what we actually say.

In relationships, most failure in communication is down to what we heard, not what was actually said. Most miscommunication is down to tone - if you say something in an airy, light way, perhaps prefaced with “I was just wondering…”, then your tone is telling people that what you’re telling them isn’t important, and so they’ll probably tune you out by nodding and saying ‘Yes, dear.’

So if something is important to you, then you need to get the tone in your voice that says it’s important.

And certainly in the workplace it’s safe to say tone is everything. I personally hate memos - so much so I’ve been in trouble for defacing them. Terse emails make my hackles rise. I like people to take the time to call me, or to call staff together for important announcements.

Communicating in boring ways implies the information itself is boring and unimportant. If you want me to pay attention, you first need to get my attention, and how you do will depend a lot on the tone of voice you use.

So who are you talking to today? And what are you going to say? And, more importantly, are you going to say it in the right tone of voice?
 

Created on Tue 26th August 2008 09:32