“If the Student Hasn’t Learned…”

By Michael Deas, ABC, SCMP:

The philosophical overlap of pedagogy and business communication,
and how it can make you a more effective professional

One of the most influential people in my college career was my Education Seminar professor, Dr. Walter J. Fremont, Jr.

I’d never before seen an academic dean spring on top of his desk to make his point vivid to a lecture hall full of sleepy seniors. Spry, witty, full of humor and wisdom, he was loved by all of us who were training to be teachers. But what made him particularly memorable to me was the day he thundered this sentence, several times, at the beginning of class:

“If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

“Not true,” we all strenuously objected. “The student bears responsibility for his or her own education. If a kid sleeps in class or skips it, goofs off, and doesn’t do the homework, it can’t mean the teacher didn’t teach. We can’t control what our students do or don’t do.” I had already completed my student teaching semester, and I’d seen the worst that middle- and high-schoolers could bring to my painstakingly prepared, impeccably delivered English grammar and literature lessons.

“I’m not saying you didn’t prepare,” Dr. Fremont continued. “But teaching is not simply delivery. Teaching by definition requires learning. You may have the most well-thought-out lesson plans and colorful visuals on the overhead projector. But if students walk out of your classroom no different from how they walked in, you didn’t teach them. You did a lot of other things; teaching was not one of them. You have failed in your mission.”

His words sat hard with us. But they came back to me long after my graduation and well into my career in communications, which began about 11 years later at an engineering design firm. Like any young professional, I wanted to impress my boss, Bruce Dell, with my writing prowess, my project management skill, and my ability to direct our graphics team to produce (what I thought were) stunning brochures, impressive fact sheets, and slick presentations.

But one day Bruce brought me in to his office to discuss a plan to connect our employees with our brand, “Outcomes by Design.” Our business consisted of producing drawings, plans, estimates, and schedules that got things built. We were good at it, but we were missing the mark, he said. It doesn’t matter how much we produce or how good it is if it doesn’t help clients achieve their agenda.

“We have got to focus on outcomes, not output. Because if we don’t understand and meet our clients’ business objectives, then we’ve failed in our mission to help them succeed.”

And that’s when the light came on.

As I grew in my communication career, I began to realize that Dr. Fremont was right all along:

We can spend our entire careers creating communication and measuring output. This is based on the underlying belief that communication is chiefly one way: we speak, they listen. We may not articulate that belief, but from the number of communication award entries I judge every year, I’d say a fair number of professionals still work this way. Measured output; inconsequential outcomes.

What are we doing wrong?

We would do well to rigorously adopt Dr. Fremont’s pedagogical philosophy: just as teaching requires learning in order to be truly called teaching, so communication requires audience response in order to be truly called communication.

Let’s go back to the eighth-grade students I taught. If one of my students comes in late, slouches in his chair, looks uninterested, and fails the test later, I could just write him off for being irresponsible. Or I could engage with him outside of class, find out what’s going on in his life, understand his needs, uncover the factors that are impeding his progress, and work with him to help him achieve the desired outcome: learning.

Which of my responses would you call truly “teaching”? The second response is a lot more work, but most of us can probably think of teachers in our past who did exactly that, and those are the teachers we remember: the ones we learned from.

So now let’s say we’re faced with a disengaged workforce—unresponsive, apathetic about company programs, sometimes even actively antagonistic. We can keep putting out great work: livelier emails with more photos, QR codes on the posters, videos in the breakroom, and town halls that feel like TED Talks. But if the needle doesn’t move—if employees don’t change attitudes and behavior—then we have not communicated. We have simply “done communication.” Output, not outcomes.

What do we need to do differently?

First, change our mindset about our profession. Practically all of us got hired into our roles because we possessed the requisite “superior written and verbal communication skills.” And we use those skills a lot. So we tend to delude ourselves into thinking that as long as we continue to produce high-quality work, we are excelling at our profession. We’ll have great KPIs to point to during performance review, so our next pay bump is justified.

But do we want to be mere producers and independent contributors,  or do we aspire to being business partners, advocates, and advisors? The latter takes a lot more thinking, research, strategy, study, and listening. In his landmark work Nonviolent Communication, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg aptly states:
“We say a lot when we listen to other people’s feelings and needs…. The more we hear them, the more they’ll hear us.”¹ We have to spend time mining out the motivations behind the projects, discover the real needs, and set higher-order KPIs—factors that go beyond quantitative output to qualitative outcomes:  systemic improvement, cultural enhancement, and behavioral amelioration.

Second, we need to change the perception others have of our role. Some in our profession bristle at being called a “business communicator,” because it makes us sound like talking heads or stenographers. But I suggest we embrace this moniker and redefine “communicator.” Just like effective teachers, successful communicators do much more than get the right words on the page. We must present ourselves as change agents, culture enhancers, workforce engagers, audience relators. We motivate, reframe, encourage, support, enable, broker, and accomplish. This kind of communicator is indispensable to the organization.

Not many of us in this profession started our careers in academia, but all of us can emulate the teachers in our own stories who influenced us. They made an impact on us not because they taught, but because we learned. And they knew their job wasn’t finished until we did. If we will view our customers, constituents, colleagues, and media relationships as our “students,” we too can communicate with a sense of mission that makes a positive difference for our organizations.

¹ Rosenberg, Marshall B., Nonviolent Communication: A  of Life. Encinitas, Calif., PuddleDancer Press, 2015, pp. 117, 150. For more information, visit www.NonviolentCommunication.com.

Written by: Editor