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As a communication specialist, I’m particularly interested in surprising information about the effects of communication. I’m fascinated by those books like The Tipping Point, Blink, How We Know What Isn’t So, Freakonomics… the books that explore the irrational in human behaviour.

I’ve been talking recently about how we should be extremely clear and honest in our dealings, both in business and in our personal lives. This doesn’t mean that you spill every thought that passes through your mind, but it does mean you don’t hide things deliberately to make someone feel differently about you and your recommendations. I dubbed this concept ‘radical transparency.’ (I found out today Andy Beal got there first…)

I figure that all relationships fare better when everyone knows exactly where they stand.

Well, it turns out that I may be mistaken in how much this creates good feeling between people.

One insight comes from a study quoted by Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz, in her great blog. In the study by Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra published in MIT Sloan Management Review, the authors conclude that transparency is overrated in terms of building trust, and what is important is that people feel the company has the necessary competencies, they feel the company cares about them, and they feel that the company shares similar values.

Another insight comes from a chapter I was reading this morning from Ori and Rom Brafman’s new book Sway – The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour, published last month. In situations where you would expect evaluations of someone’s performance to come pretty strongly from the outcome of a situation, it turns out that the evaluation comes more from the amount of time and care that the person has showed.

For convicted felons, they rated their lawyer highly if they spent a lot of time with them on the case, despite the ‘negative’ outcome. Car dealerships rated their suppliers based more around the care and respect the reps showed them, rather than on whether they paid a fair price for their inventory, or if they had been stocked with cars they could easily sell.

Even venture capitalists judged the Chief Execs of their ventures more by how much the CEOs provided information in a timely manner, than by how much return the VCs received on their investment.

There seems to be a pretty clear message here.

Before we judge that a customer (internal or external) is only interested in hard numbers or pure performance we need to work harder at:

• making sure we treat them and our shared relationship with respect
• listening carefully to their needs
• showing how much we share common values and goals

You don’t get much harder-nosed business people than venture capitalists. If even they get swayed by being treated well by their clients, maybe our idea of how we treat hard-nosed business people needs changing.

There are situations where we’re sure we will only be judged by objective performance (completing the project on budget, or system uptime). Maybe a focus on the three intangibles above can make the whole relationship run smoother.

Another example where it pays to treat people like people.

NB Lois’ blog had something interesting on practically every post. Trends and research in marketing tend to apply to any kind of senior business communication. Well worth keeping up-to-date in, even if you don’t think it’s your field.

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