The Curse of Knowledge Bias in Leaders and Other Communication Pitfalls
It’s interesting how many times each of us has heard that communication is one of the key elements of effective leadership. It seems like a truism that every leader or manager is well aware of. It’s obvious that to achieve common goals, a leader must create a compelling message, express an exciting vision, and motivate a group of people to make quick decisions and take action. However, how and what specifically to communicate to truly experience desired results and collaborate with a motivated team is certainly a competence far from trivial.
It turns out that all of us, especially leaders, managers, and experts, are susceptible to strong communication stereotypes. To better understand one of these pitfalls, let’s do a simple exercise. Recall a situation where you had to communicate something, such as negotiating, explaining, articulating a new vision, describing a process, or conveying a key strategic point for the organization. How did you know how much to say or write? How did you know when to stop speaking or writing? And when did you need to write a bit more? If you base this assessment on your own intuition, it means you might be under-communicating or over-communicating. The assumptions that drive the tendency to provide too little information or too many details in a single message or statement are what we call strong communication biases.
The “curse” of knowledge bias is a communication bias that causes, for example, a manager to provide too little information to colleagues, superiors, or clients. In one 360-degree assessment review conducted by Stanford University, managers were almost ten times more likely to be criticized for lack of communication than for excessive communication. The trap a leader falls into is the assumption that what they are communicating is obvious information to the recipient and that the recipient already knows it. Based on this, the sender heavily filters and limits information, which results in many more errors in understanding the message, and consequently, in the actions taken afterward.
The illusion of verbal clarity, i.e., over-communicating, occurs when something seems complicated to us, or when we assume it will be complicated for our listeners. We then assume that the more descriptions we provide and the more detailed we make an offer or idea, the clearer what we want to share will suddenly become for the recipient. In reality, however, an excessive amount of information overwhelms the recipient because they cognitively need more time to process it and make a decision about action.
We are not as well understood as we would like to believe. However, if we analyze and examine the communication patterns of the best speakers: leaders, managers, politicians, who are truly effective communicators, we can observe linguistic structures in their communication based on persuasive communication patterns. Persuasive communication influences the change of attitude, emotions, reactions, or behavior of the recipient in a moral and ethical way. A pattern that effectively influences the understanding of content and motivates the recipient to perform a task is, for example, a communication pattern starting with “why” or a cause-and-effect pattern: position – reason. Furthermore, to avoid the illusion of verbal clarity, and also to stop overwhelming the recipient with excessive details or information, it is worth presenting the most simplified version of your idea, not the most complex one, and focusing on one aspect of the idea, and in the next message, on another. When the recipient understands this simple version, they will be better able to handle a slightly greater complexity of the topic.
It is worth remembering that communication is an art that requires balance or calibration between two conflicting tendencies. However, to become a master of communication, we need to understand that communication is a craft, and like any other, it requires practice and feedback. Becoming a communication master simply requires effort, patience, and repetition.
