The ability to communicate is a crucial skill for leaders at every level. But if you work with a multicultural or multigenerational team, you may encounter barriers in how different members receive and convey information. Making the most of differences in communication styles depends on understanding where these differences come from, and finding ways to bridge the gap.
What Are the Different Communication Styles?
If you feel like you are struggling to talk with a team member, it may be because you are using different communication styles. Your communication style refers to how you express yourself and how you interpret things other people tell you. The way you communicate can be shaped by everything from your personality and upbringing to your professional experiences. Even the setting or interpersonal dynamics of a conversation can change the way you speak (this is sometimes called “code-switching”).
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While there is flexibility in how communication happens in different contexts, psychologists have identified four primary communication styles:
Analytical
If you prefer precise language and tend to avoid or be skeptical of emotional appeals, you may have a strong analytical communication style. Analytical communicators focus on the facts, using data, statistics, and logic, to convey specific ideas. They tend to avoid vague statements or generalities.
Example: An analytical communicator may say “How do we know we are on target to meet our goals?”
Intuitive
If you tend to focus on the bigger picture and avoid digging into the details, you may be an intuitive communicator. An intuitive communication style tends to avoid procedural or step-by-step discussions. Intuitive communicators also prefer to get straight to the point of the conversation, and may become bored with discussing particulars.
Example: An intuitive communicator may say “I don’t really care which route we take, as long as we understand the destination.”
Functional
If you think it is important to go through things step by step so nothing gets missed, you may have a functional communication style. Functional communication is detail oriented and process driven. A functional communicator tends to be methodical and detail-oriented, and may take time to process information they receive.
Example: A functional communicator may say something like “I understand the goal, but what steps are we going to take to get there?”
Personal
If you tend to focus on the people you are talking to more than the things they are saying, you may have a personal communication style. Personal communicators value emotional connections and relationships. They tend to use emotional language and try to understand what others are thinking and feeling, over more objective metrics.
Example: A personal communicator may ask “How are we feeling about our progress?”
If more than one communication style resonates with you, that’s okay. Most people fall somewhere on a spectrum of multiple different communication styles. But some communication styles clearly conflict. When team members with different communication styles work together, their different priorities and preferences can create problems that you as a team leader will need to work through.
How Does Cross-Cultural Communication Affect Team Relations?
While many things can shape the way you communicate, culture is one of the strongest. A person’s culture can impart deep-seated beliefs and assumptions about everything from treatment of authority to personal priorities. If diversity is a priority in your workplace, your team likely will have different cultural communication influences. This can affect:
- Directness
- Conflict avoidance or resolution
- Social niceties
- Giving and receiving feedback
- Understanding the company hierarchy
- Decisionmaking
- Dissent and disagreement
- Nonverbal communication
- Tone and word choice
All of these differences can mean that a statement made by one team member will be heard as saying something entirely different by another. When each party to a conversation is bringing different cultural assumptions and expectations with them, it can sometimes lead to miscommunication and conflict.
Do MultiGenerational Employees Have Different Communication Styles?
There has been a lot written about the struggles managers face when dealing with different generations in the workplace. Some comedians have built their whole careers on picking apart the differences between “Boomers” and “Gen Z”. It is true that different generations tend to have different communication preferences. For example, while older employees gravitate toward in-person meetings or phone calls, younger employees may respond “this could have been an email.” Millennial and Gen Z employees may prefer written instructions or informal text chats over more structured Zoom meetings.
While it is important for team leaders to recognize and adapt to these preferences, they are not the same as the communication styles discussed above. Your team may have an analytical communicator who prefers written documentation of data, or a personal communicator who will “drop by for a chat” but these differences have more to do with the priorities in their conversation models than their preference in platform or format.
How to Make the Most of Different Communication Styles
There are steps you can take to make the most of your team’s different communication styles, and improve effective communication to and among your team members.
- Identify Your Team Members’ Communication Styles and Preferences
Assessment is an important first step to making the most of different communication styles among team members. In assessing your team’s communications, you should evaluate both their communication styles and their preferences and account for both to increase effective communication. At Stanislaw Consulting, our business consultants, David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood, are trained psychotherapists with extensive experience addressing how individuals and teams communicate. We can help you assess your team members to determine their communication styles and preferences, and identify any gaps in their communication skills.
- Receive Feedback About Communication
While understanding the broad strokes of communication styles is important, you should also be open to receiving feedback, or even criticism, about specific issues within your own workplace. Your employees may have a better understanding of the bottlenecks and pain points within your communications frameworks than you do. You can take advantage of that. For example, if a team member frequently tells you she doesn’t feel like anyone is listening to her, it may be a sign that different communication styles are creating a mismatch to be addressed.
- Observe Communication Between Others
It is easy for miscommunication to feel deeply personal. One way to objectify your assessment is to observe how team members communicate with each other, even when you are not involved. This could mean using anonymous questionnaires to assess team members’ skills and communication styles. Or you may simply need to focus on the verbal and non-verbal cues happening in your office every day. These can be signs of where miscommunication is happening, and who may need additional training or correction.
- Train Up Skills to Adapt Communication Styles
Adapting your communication style can feel uncomfortable and inauthentic. But effective communication among team members often means adjusting to the listener’s needs to ensure you are being heard and understood. With employee communication assessments in hand, you can create a plan to train yourself and your employees in different communication skills (including emotional intelligence) and implement procedures that lean into how your employees communicate best. By making small, gradual changes, and encouraging ongoing feedback, you can develop stronger communication skills and a more collaborative working environment.
- Take Advantage of Different Communication Styles’ Priorities
But effective communication should not mean forcing everyone to be the same. Look back at the different communication styles described above. Your business can benefit from team members who focus on each of these aspects of the work. You need big-picture dreamers and detail-oriented proceduralists. You can benefit from someone keeping track of the data and another person focusing on how team members are feeling.
Often making the most of different communication styles means putting people in positions and assignments that lean into their strengths. Rather than forcing people to change, you can encourage them to do what they do best, while acknowledging that some flexibility will be necessary when those different communication styles come together. By positioning people to work in ways that build on their natural communication styles, you can develop a team that builds one another up, rather than letting miscommunication tear your relationships down.
David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood are leadership and executive coaches with 70 years of combined experience. Together, they apply their psychodynamic training and extensive experience to help leaders, business owners, and employees develop skills to make the most of different communication styles. Contact us to meet with Stanislaw Consulting today.
This post was written by a human without the use of AI. Stanislaw Consulting does not consent to the use of its online content to train large language models or other forms of artificial intelligence.
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