Language Does More: “collaboration & cooperation”
Imagine walking into a team meeting. You know what you want to accomplish and what you want to convey to your peers, bosses, and employees. You know that in order to achieve the outcome you want, your team will need to work together to build a solution: you will need to collaborate.
According to J F Stein of the National Library of Medicine, “Language developed for communication, to facilitate learning the use of tools and weapons, to plan hunting and defense, to develop a "theory of mind" and the tools of thought, and to attract and keep a mate.” The entire reason that we use language is to work with others, so why can it be so difficult to use language to accomplish tasks in a group-setting?
Linguists have studied what collaboration looks and sounds like, and they’ve concluded that collaboration involves four main language patterns:
information sharing (which involves task-specific information and logistics)
problem solving (which includes setting goals, making plans, and making predictions)
team coordination (which involves stating your intentions and directing others)'
metacognition (which means “thinking about your thinking” and involves monitoring progress, assessing performance, and reflecting on the past).
These are the language patterns that characterize collaborative conversations. But to fully understand what makes collaboration successful, it’s not enough to simply define and identify it. We need to know where it goes wrong.
Language is multifunctional: it is used in context to both transfer information to others, and to signal your identity to others. It makes sense, then, that collaborative failure can happen either in function #1: during the transfer of information from one person to another, or in function #2: during identity signaling.
When teams fail to transfer information well during collaboration, what is actually happening is a lack of elaborations and breaking conversational norms. On the other hand, when teams fail to signal who they are to one another well during collaboration, what is actually happening is linguistic negativity and asymmetric communicative relationships.
These miscommunications are common - which is a bummer - BUT they are also concrete - which is a good thing. If you recorded your zoom meeting and downloaded the transcript, you could very literally highlight sentences where this type of breakdown is happening. Knowing the specific sentence where miscommunication occurs - and what is happening linguistically within that sentence - enables you to actually figure out what’s going wrong during team conversations.
The top four places where miscommunications tend to occur during a collaborative conversation are:
during Metacognition (when we’re monitoring progress, assessing performance, reflecting on the past)
during Chatter (non-collaborative small talk)
during Problem Solving (Setting goals, making plans & Predictions)
during Team Coordination (Stating your intentions, directing others).
Knowing that we are vulnerable to poor communication when we are being metacognitive, chatting, problem solving, and coordinating helps us prepare and practice strategies so that we can reflect on the past in a way that is effective for the team and organization - instead of being our downfall.
So what are the strategies that will help us optimize our language tech to collaborate better as a team?
First, make sure you’re actually collaborating. Not every meeting is meant to be collaborative, but some are. When you know that your team is gathering to work together on something, make sure that you’re using each of the language patterns that characterize collaboration…otherwise you might THINK you are collaborating, but actually you aren’t.
Second, acknowledge what’s been said and build on it. It is clear from the research that collaboration is more about building on top of one main group idea rather than presenting or pushing for your own siloed idea.
Third, get rid of your meeting leader. During collaboration, what teams really need is someone to safeguard against bad metacognition - not someone to control the flow of the conversation. Call this person the designated reviewer instead!
Finally, play popcorn during the meeting in order to avoid asymmetric communication patterns.
Most importantly, regardless of who you are talking to, there needs to be room for collaboration and cooperation. “Companies that prioritize onsite collaboration are 30% more innovative and at least 36% more productive than those that don’t. Collaborating onsite can inspire people to build on each other’s ideas to strengthen and improve them.” The more people that can weigh in on a business decision, the better.
Humans developed language with the goal being interpersonal communication. There are no languages that exist that do not allow for people to take turns when speaking. Businesses need employees to be able to collaborate and cooperate with each other. The linguistic perspective takes us beyond thinking conceptually about collaboration into the nitty gritty of the actual sentences we use to get the job done.
