E-Mails, Teamwork and Partnership–V. Dominance (Part 1)
So let me just say from the start that e-mails can be highly ambiguous and prone to misinterpretation. There is no shortage of expertise that will caution—especially in business and organizational enterprises—the use of e-mails in sensitive or conflict-based communication. While the use of e-mail for especially conflict-based communication seems to have the potential of letter writing in past eras of communication, e-mails to begin with suffer from the lack of rich communication ques that can nuance face-to-face communication. Back in the day of the letter-writing generation, letters may have been articulate enough to suggest nuanced emotions and meanings that have perhaps been lost in the short, abrupt and abbreviated world of e-mails.
I’m not convinced that we are living in a world where we should no longer risk communication in a fairly new communicative environment, one perceived to have a rapidly evolving syntax and currently limited in terms of reasonably high expectations of common interpretation to basic, disinterested communication. On the other hand, the only way to evolve a new form of communication to the point where it can serve we humans—with our complex and increasingly multiple worldview ways—is to experiment with it, work with it, and remain open to learning from our experiences.
Recently I was involved with a short term goal-oriented team working on a project out of a longer series of experiences that this community shared. I noticed what appeared to be a new pattern emerge in terms of how one community member responded to me after seeing a variation of it occur three times. At that point, I thought it was useful to check in with the other person involved and see if there were deeper issues, or if perhaps I simply hadn’t seen that community member use the same behaviors towards others in the community.
One of the potentials I’ve been exploring is the possibility of cueing in e-mails—by description—the kind of voice I want a recipient to listen for. Here is an excerpt from the first e-mail I sent as a query:
As you read this, I ask you to imagine the tone of voice I used at the table yesterday when addressing your concerns. I’m hearing myself use an inquisitive tone and a considerate tone, because I do carry genuine concern that any issue gets worked out in such a way that we remain community members in good standing with one another, meaning we retain the open two way street (at least that I find preferential) that affords cross-influence. To me this is built on respect, for instance my respect of you and your thinking, even if it is genuinely oppositional.
I have held the person I directed this e-mail to in high esteem for the nine months I have known this community member, as well as all the other persons on my team and in the larger community of which we are a part. Still, conflicts may arise that we have to consider discussing, at least according I believe to the partnership model.
Chances are the community member in question may not have been exposed to any cautionary material on the use of e-mail in a situation like the one I was addressing where a potential conflict may have existed. None of the literature I’ve seen has yet suggested the partnership model of communication, which would respond with questions when meanings seemed to be open to harmful interpretations or difficult feelings. Clarification is paramount. Perhaps this kind of communicative discipline is recommended—avoiding rapidfire judgment and a firestorm of politicized and/or polemical language—in literature I have yet to discover.
You may wonder why I didn’t talk to this community member on the phone or face to face, and the reason I would offer is we had no established custom for addressing potential problems with these lines of communication—and no prior history of conflict that I was aware of. I’ll be returning to this situation and example again in the following weeks, because I believe it stands as a very important opportunity. The problem posed by the series of e-mails and the conflict I shall discuss, as well as the evidence provided by the originating e-mail I sent, may offer clues as to how partnership and dominance has played out in Utah in the work and personal relationships I’ve known.
I never received a response back from the party in question. Instead, I received a reprimand from an authority that read the e-mail, judged that it was condescending, and launched into a criticism of my (‘wrongful’) behavior. The key question addressed in the e-mail was: was there anything that I had done in the past nine months of community and work affiliation to cause that person’s behavior to change from the way it had been with the rest of the community, to the way it was towards me in the three instances in question of late.
My desire—based especially on the way the matter unfolded and the coerciveness of the dominant framework and language used to interpret my original e-mail—would be to label the actions taken as wrongful, putting a should/shouldn’t spin on the communicative tactics that unfolded. From there I could make a pitch in standard win/lose debate form (a root of dominance-based communication) for the partnership model of communication as Riane Eisler and others characterize it, denouncing dominance while praising partnership.
Consider another angle. As far back as the early 1980’s I was studying perspectives on psychology that were based on how people and processes are, on witnessing, rather than moralizing or denouncing. The witness or observer’s role is to simply characterize what is going on. As Riane Eisler talks about her historic experience in her book The Power of Partnership, it seems likely that she too had the experience of looking deeply in an alternative way at the world around her and finding underlying patterns emerge, patterns that were not being identified, discussed or scrutinized for what purposes they served and what harms they may be creating.
In the world we live in today, I would be lying if I didn’t admit I’d rather experience partnership than dominance in my work and personal relationships. I believe we all deserve the kind of dignity, freedom and equality that partnership communication styles and behaviors attempt to afford. That said, the Western as well as the Buddhist psychological perspectives that have informed my perceptive framework have suggested that the best thing we can do as people is to start where we are, and identify how we are; the pros and cons of our behavior, what purposes they serve and the potential harms they can create.
I want to offer an additional caveat. When I’m pulled into a dominance-based dynamic I am likely to resort—especially after the last 15 years of increasingly dominance-based social dynamics with the people and workplaces I’ve known in Utah—to aggressive self protection and identification of what is going on in the dominant language or worldview. My experience suggests what Michel Foucault discusses in his body of work on dominance and social systems. I’m a product of the relationships I’ve experienced and the social dynamics I’ve been steeped in over my lifetime. I would argue this is especially true for the relationships I’ve worked and been socialized in over the past 15 years as I have experienced them in Utah.
While I feel certain that some readers will find this essay somewhat vague and abstract, please bear with me. In following parts of this essay I will attempt to describe in detail how responses unfolded in the situation I’m describing here, as well as how responses could have unfolded under the partnership-based worldview. Such partnership-based responses could have had very, very different consequences for all involved.
