Welsh poppy.
Why a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email (Usually)
Ross McCammon
This isn’t going
to be about efficiency. Sometimes the phone is a more efficient way to
communicate than e-mail, and sometimes it isn’t. If two people leave a dozen
messages on each other’s voice mail, that’s a lot less efficient than sending a
single e-mail and reading a reply to it.
No, this isn’t going to be about how telephonic
communication helps you work faster.
This is about how the phone makes you
work better.
Because unlike e-mail, the phone forces you to be more
emphatic, more accurate, more honest.
Tell that to a neuroscientist, and before you’ve even
finished the sentence he’ll start laughing
—at what you’re saying, and the accompanying emotional
gradients.
What, you’re not aware of emotional gradients? You have
tons of them, and you’re constantly communicating them to people—but only when
you speak, not when you write.
“We’re picking up and processing heard information
within
50 milliseconds of someone speaking.
A lot of this information doesn’t get processed at a
cognitive level,” says Seth Horowitz,
an auditory neuroscientist. “Some of the first targets
for heard information
are emotional substrates, so [when] listening to
someone’s voice,
you’re picking up emotional gradients from them.”
Read the following e-mails and consider the emotional
gradients that aren’t being conveyed.
From: Corleone,
Michael “Don”
To: Staff
Subject: Me
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back
in!
Best,
DC
From: Gekko,
Gordon
To: Fox,
Bud
Subject: Lunch
… is for wimps.
-G
From: Blake
To: The
Fellas
Subject: Reminder
ABC. A—always. B—be. C—closing.
Always be closing. Always be closing.
Always be closing. Always be closing.
Yours in closing,
Blake
Joe Huff, co-founder of Los Angeles-based LSTN
Headphones, which partners with a nonprofit
that provides hearing aids to people in need,
is—obviously—a believer in the power of voice.
“There have been so many times, a new store or account or
potential press relationship,
we’ve gotten on the phone with them and after the
conversation, even [after] just a 15-minute story about what we do and why,
they say, ‘Wow, I read everything on your website,
but to hear you tell it, there’s a huge difference.’
Because we have a passion-based business, it’s really
important for us to get that across.”
This happens all the time in business. Yet we are still
wary of picking up the phone.
We don’t want to bother people. We think they don’t want
to talk. And maybe they don’t.
But you’re not ever going to find that out through
e-mail. You’ll find it out on the phone.
If they stammer, hedge and pause, then you have valuable
information.
Maybe not the information you were looking for, but
valuable info nonetheless.
THE MEANING OF SILENCE
Speaking of pausing, it’s important to remember that some
of the most valuable information comes from the pauses in a phone conversation.
Pauses that simply don’t exist in written communication.
Says Horowitz: “There have been studies that show
that if you’re presenting a listener
with a series of words or tones, and you
take an extended silence,
certain populations of cells in their brains start
looking for the signal,
and if it doesn’t happen in a certain period of time,
it triggers arousal centers, emotional centers.
Silence is an important part of communication, and
something people don’t pay attention to.”
Our obsession with e-mail denies a crucial truth about
human beings: that we have evolved
as listeners, not as readers. Here’s Horowitz again—and
as you read this paragraph,
think about how much more powerful it would be if this
guy were talking to you on the phone:
“We think about ourselves as being the new smartest
rulers of the planet, but our ears
have evolved, and a basic brain circuitry of hearing has
evolved over 400 million years,
and a lot of it centered on hearing the sound of your own
species. That’s the most important signal, even if you can’t see them. Hearing
evolved as your alarm system, because we’re diurnal, we don’t see well at
night, but our hearing is running all through the darkness
and even when we are
asleep. A sound, even without a visual tie to it, is very important to us.
We’ve evolved to listen to other people talk.”
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238385
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