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And whoever is expecting the shorter pause will find themselves doing all the talking. This could be solely a matter of conversational style. To me, the key is to understand that there is such a thing as different conversational styles. DT No. I get asked that question a lot, and people get quite frustrated with me for not saying one is better than the other.

For example, many women are uncomfortable with outright conflict and opposition. GS Along the lines of women in the workplace, your book mentions that women may be perceived as more cooperative in communication style. It would be easy to view that as superior to the way men communicate.

DT Correct. In fact, women can be quite competitive about who comes off as the most cooperative, and men can be very cooperative about how they compete. GS Is it a similar oversimplification to say that men are more straightforward and put aside their differences more easily than women? DT Yes, it is. And in some contexts, men tend to be more indirect than women. At the same time, though, I would certainly say that there are things men could benefit from by adapting styles more common among women.

One is apologizing. More from pw. The Best Books of PW Picks: Books of the Week. New Pub Dates for Forthcoming Books: Children's Announcements. Stay ahead with Tip Sheet! Free newsletter: the hottest new books, features and more. Premium online access is only available to PW subscribers. If you have an active subscription and need to set up or change your password, please click here.

New to PW? To set up immediate access, click here. If working at an office location and you are not "logged in", simply close and relaunch your preferred browser. She was just talking automatically, but he either sincerely misunderstood the ritual simply took the opportunity to bask in the one-up position of critic.

Although this exchange could have occurred between two men, it does not seem coincidental that it happened between a man and a woman. Linguist Janet Holmes discovered that women pay more compliments than men Anthropological Linguistics , Volume 28, In the social structure of the peer groups in which they grow up, boys are indeed looking for opportunities to put others down and take the one-up position for themselves.

In contrast, one of the rituals girls learn is taking the one-down position but assuming that the other person will recognize the ritual nature of the self-denigration and pull them back up. If one person is trying to minimize status differences, maintain an appearance that everyone is equal, and save face for the other, while another person is trying to maintain the one-up position and avoid being positioned as one down, the person seeking the one-up position is likely to get it.

At the same time, the person who has not been expending any effort to avoid the one-down position is likely to end up in it. Because women are more likely to take or accept the role of advice seeker, men are more inclined to interpret a ritual question from a woman as a request for advice.

Apologizing, mitigating criticism with praise, and exchanging compliments are rituals common among women that men often take literally. A ritual common among men that women often take literally is ritual opposition. A woman in communications told me she watched with distaste and distress as her office mate argued heatedly with another colleague about whose division should suffer budget cuts.

She was even more surprised, however, that a short time later they were as friendly as ever. Many Americans expect the discussion of ideas to be a ritual fight—that is, an exploration through verbal opposition. They present their own ideas in the most certain and absolute form they can, and wait to see if they are challenged. Being forced to defend an idea provides an opportunity to test it.

This style can work well if everyone shares it, but those unaccustomed to it are likely to miss its ritual nature. They may give up an idea that is challenged, taking the objections as an indication that the idea was a poor one.

Worse, they may take the opposition as a personal attack and may find it impossible to do their best in a contentious environment.

People unaccustomed to this style may hedge when stating their ideas in order to fend off potential attacks. Ironically, this posture makes their arguments appear weak and is more likely to invite attack from pugnacious colleagues than to fend it off. Ritual opposition can even play a role in who gets hired. Some consulting firms that recruit graduates from the top business schools use a confrontational interviewing technique. Those who are uncomfortable with verbal opposition—women or men—run the risk of seeming insecure about their ideas.

Anyone who is uncomfortable with this linguistic style—and that includes some men as well as many women—risks appearing insecure about his or her ideas. In organizations, formal authority comes from the position one holds. But actual authority has to be negotiated day to day. The effectiveness of individual managers depends in part on their skill in negotiating authority and on whether others reinforce or undercut their efforts.

The way linguistic style reflects status plays a subtle role in placing individuals within a hierarchy. In all the companies I researched, I heard from women who knew they were doing a superior job and knew that their coworkers and sometimes their immediate bosses knew it as well, but believed that the higher-ups did not. They frequently told me that something outside themselves was holding them back and found it frustrating because they thought that all that should be necessary for success was to do a great job, that superior performance should be recognized and rewarded.

Looking around, however, I saw evidence that men more often than women behaved in ways likely to get them recognized by those with the power to determine their advancement. In all the companies I visited, I observed what happened at lunchtime.

I saw young men who regularly ate lunch with their boss, and senior men who ate with the big boss. I noticed far fewer women who sought out the highest-level person they could eat with. But one is more likely to get recognition for work done if one talks about it to those higher up, and it is easier to do so if the lines of communication are already open. Furthermore, given the opportunity for a conversation with superiors, men and women are likely to have different ways of talking about their accomplishments because of the different ways in which they were socialized as children.

Boys are rewarded by their peers if they talk up their achievements, whereas girls are rewarded if they play theirs down. Linguistic styles common among men may tend to give them some advantages when it comes to managing up. All speakers are aware of the status of the person they are talking to and adjust accordingly. Everyone speaks differently when talking to a boss than when talking to a subordinate.

But, surprisingly, the ways in which they adjust their talk may be different and thus may project different images of themselves. Communications researchers Karen Tracy and Eric Eisenberg studied how relative status affects the way people give criticism.

They devised a business letter that contained some errors and asked 13 male and 11 female college students to role-play delivering criticism under two scenarios. In the first, the speaker was a boss talking to a subordinate; in the second, the speaker was a subordinate talking to his or her boss.

The researchers measured how hard the speakers tried to avoid hurting the feelings of the person they were criticizing.

One might expect people to be more careful about how they deliver criticism when they are in a subordinate position. Tracy and Eisenberg found that hypothesis to be true for the men in their study but not for the women.

In other words, the women were more careful to save face for the other person when they were managing down than when they were managing up. This pattern recalls the way girls are socialized: Those who are in some way superior are expected to downplay rather than flaunt their superiority. In my own recordings of workplace communication, I observed women talking in similar ways.

For example, when a manager had to correct a mistake made by her secretary, she did so by acknowledging that there were mitigating circumstances. Is this an effective way to communicate? One must ask, effective for what? The manager in question established a positive environment in her group, and the work was done effectively. Another linguistic signal that varies with power and status is indirectness—the tendency to say what we mean without spelling it out in so many words.

It also is one of the elements that vary most from one culture to another, and it can cause enormous misunderstanding when speakers have different habits and expectations about how it is used. For example, linguist Charlotte Linde, in a study published in Language in Society Volume 17, , examined the black-box conversations that took place between pilots and copilots before airplane crashes. In one particularly tragic instance, an Air Florida plane crashed into the Potomac River immediately after attempting take-off from National Airport in Washington, D.

The pilot, it turned out, had little experience flying in icy weather. The copilot had a bit more, and it became heartbreakingly clear on analysis that he had tried to warn the pilot but had done so indirectly. The copilot repeatedly called attention to the bad weather and to ice buildup on other planes:. Copilot: Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?

See all those icicles on the back there and everything? Shortly thereafter, the plane took off, with tragic results. In other instances as well as this one, Linde observed that copilots, who are second in command, are more likely to express themselves indirectly or otherwise mitigate, or soften, their communication when they are suggesting courses of action to the pilot.

In an effort to avert similar disasters, some airlines now offer training for copilots to express themselves in more assertive ways. This solution seems self-evidently appropriate to most Americans. This approach reflects assumptions about communication that typify Japanese culture, which places great value on the ability of people to understand one another without putting everything into words. Either directness or indirectness can be a successful means of communication as long as the linguistic style is understood by the participants.

In the world of work, however, there is more at stake than whether the communication is understood. People in powerful positions are likely to reward styles similar to their own, because we all tend to take as self-evident the logic of our own styles.

Accordingly, there is evidence that in the U. Consider the case of the manager at a national magazine who was responsible for giving assignments to reporters.

She tended to phrase her assignments as questions. Is that okay? But when she had her midyear evaluation with her own boss, he criticized her for not assuming the proper demeanor with her staff. In any work environment, the higher-ranking person has the power to enforce his or her view of appropriate demeanor, created in part by linguistic style.

In most U. There also are cases, however, in which the higher-ranking person assumes a more indirect style. The owner of a retail operation told her subordinate, a store manager, to do something. How would you feel about helping her out? But those for whom this style is natural do not think they are being indirect.

They believe they are being clear in a polite or respectful way.