TL;DR: We are taught that good communication means knowing our audience, choosing our words carefully and thinking about how a message will land. I believe that. I also think we have placed far too much responsibility on the person speaking and not nearly enough on the person receiving. For Black people and others from marginalized communities, “communication strategy” can quietly become something else: an expectation that we soften, translate and edit ourselves until we are easier for dominant culture to receive. I know how to do that. I have been rewarded for knowing how to do that. I have even taught other people how to do it. I’m just no longer convinced all of it should be called growth.
I know how to read a room.
I know when to soften a sentence.
I know how to take something I know to be true and turn it into a question because the question will be easier for someone else to hear.
I know how to change “this is a problem” into “there may be an opportunity.”
I know how to take emotion out of something without taking the meaning out of it.
I know when the direct version will get me nowhere and when diplomacy gives me a better shot at the outcome I actually want.
That is communication strategy.
It is a skill.
It is one I value.
It is also one I have been thinking about differently lately.
How much of what we call good communication is actually good communication?
How much of it is learning to make ourselves easier for other people to receive?
Those are not always the same thing.
I Know How to Do the Dance
There is a version of professional development that makes perfect sense to me.
Know your audience.
Understand context.
Choose your words intentionally.
Do not let emotion bury the point.
Think about timing.
Understand power.
Know what you are trying to accomplish before you open your mouth.
Yes.
All of that.
Then there is another set of instructions that tends to travel right beside it.
Soften it.
Do not make them defensive.
Watch your tone.
Make it more polished.
Be less direct.
Say it in a way they can receive.
Show more executive presence.
I know those instructions too.
I have followed them.
I have benefited from knowing how to follow them.
I have coached other people through them.
That is part of what makes this uncomfortable for me.
I am not standing outside of this system pointing at something I have never participated in.
I know the rules.
I can play the game.
I am questioning why we keep pretending the game itself is neutral.
We Put a Lot on the Speaker
Most communication advice is aimed in one direction.
At the person talking.
Choose better words.
Manage your tone.
Consider how you are coming across.
Read the room.
Think about how people might interpret what you said.
I believe the speaker has responsibility.
I also believe we have given the receiver a pretty easy job.
Receive the message.
Feel whatever you feel.
Decide what the speaker should have done differently.
That does not make sense to me.
The receiver is not neutral.
You walked into the conversation with your own stuff too.
Your history.
Your fears.
Your biases.
Your cultural norms.
Your insecurities.
Your relationship to power.
Your previous experiences with this person.
Your beliefs about what respect sounds like.
Your beliefs about who gets to be certain.
Who gets to be firm.
Who gets to challenge you.
Who gets to raise their voice.
Who gets to show emotion.
Who gets to say, plainly, “This is not working.”
All of that affects what you hear.
Sometimes someone absolutely needs to work on their delivery.
Sometimes the message is unnecessarily harsh.
Sometimes tone gets in the way.
I am not arguing otherwise.
I am saying there is another possibility we rarely examine.
Maybe the message was clear and you simply did not like it.
Maybe you felt challenged.
Maybe the person did not perform deference in the way you expected.
Maybe their directness activated something in you.
Maybe someone communicating differently from you is not evidence that they communicated badly.
Sometimes I need to examine how I said it.
Sometimes you need to examine why hearing it that way bothered you.
That is communication too.
There Is History Under This
This is where it gets bigger for me.
Black people did not suddenly arrive in corporate America and decide to become hyperaware of how other people perceive us.
There is history here.
There is history in learning when to make yourself smaller.
History in knowing which version of yourself a room will reward.
History in understanding that access can depend on whether the people with power experience you as respectable, safe, intelligent, polished, nonthreatening or “one of the good ones.”
Speak this way.
Dress this way.
Wear your hair this way.
Do not be too loud.
Do not look angry.
Do not make white people uncomfortable.
Know how to behave when you get in the room.
Show them you belong there.
I understand why people learned those things.
Sometimes adaptation was protection.
Sometimes it created access.
Sometimes it was survival.
There is brilliance in knowing how to survive a system that was not built with you in mind.
I honor that.
I also think we should be allowed to ask what happens when survival skills outlive the conditions that taught us we needed them.
Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gave us the language politics of respectability to help describe how Black people, particularly Black women, used ideas of morality, behavior and respectability to challenge racist ideas about who we were and claim our right to full participation.
There was power in that.
There was also a tension.
The dominant culture had already decided what “respectable” looked like.
That part keeps bothering me.
The language changes.
Respectability.
Professionalism.
Polish.
Culture fit.
Executive presence.
Knowing how to read the room.
Code-switching.
I am not saying these things are all identical.
I am saying I can see the thread.
How much do I have to change before you are willing to recognize the value in what I bring?
That question is old.
We Have Gotten Very Good at Teaching Difference to Adapt
This may be the part I am struggling with most.
We say we value diversity.
Then we spend an enormous amount of energy teaching people who are different how to function inside what already exists.
Here is how you should speak.
Here is what leadership looks like.
Here is the tone that will be rewarded.
Here is how you make senior leaders comfortable.
Here is how you communicate with power.
Here is how you become credible.
Here is how you fit.
I know how useful some of that information is.
I teach some of it.
There are systems you cannot navigate well if you refuse to understand how power operates inside them.
Still, I keep coming back to another question.
Why is all the learning happening on one side?
If we truly value diversity, why aren't we also teaching the room how to encounter people who are different from the people who built the room?
Why isn't curiosity part of executive presence?
Why isn't self-awareness part of receiving feedback?
Why isn't the ability to hear something delivered in a cadence different from your own considered a leadership competency?
Why aren't we asking leaders to examine whether what they call “professionalism” is sometimes simply familiarity?
Someone communicates more directly than you do.
Could you get curious before deciding they need to soften?
Someone's communication style makes you uncomfortable.
Could you ask yourself what exactly created the discomfort?
Someone does not demonstrate deference in the way you are accustomed to receiving it.
Could the question be about your expectation of deference instead of their lack of professionalism?
Someone leads differently from every leader you have known before.
Is the difference a deficiency?
Or is it just different?
We talk a lot about learning to work across differences.
I am not sure we mean it if the person who is different is always the one expected to do the changing.
Diversity Has to Be Allowed to Change the Room
We love the language of bringing your whole self to work.
I have always found that interesting.
Which whole self?
The one that has already learned the rules?
The one that knows which pieces can safely come through the door?
The one that has figured out how to make difference recognizable enough that nobody has to work too hard to understand it?
That is not the diversity I want.
I want diversity that changes the room.
I want rooms where leadership does not have one cadence.
Where directness is not automatically aggression.
Where quiet is not automatically insecurity.
Where passion is not automatically instability.
Where cultural difference does not automatically become something to coach out of a person.
Where discomfort does not automatically mean someone else did something wrong.
Where curiosity travels in both directions.
Diversity that requires difference to become familiar before we can value it is still asking people to assimilate.
That sentence is hard for me.
Mostly because I can see all the ways I have learned to become familiar.
I am good at it.
I know how to enter a room and assess what version of me will work there.
I know how to translate.
I know how to shift.
There is power in having range.
I do not want to lose that.
I just want to know I am choosing it.
Maybe That Is the Difference
I am not interested in telling people to stop code-switching tomorrow.
That feels too easy.
Power is real.
Jobs are real.
Consequences are real.
Some rooms are not safe enough for your whole self.
Sometimes changing how you communicate is the smartest thing you can do.
Sometimes the softer sentence gets the result.
Sometimes survival requires strategy.
I get that.
The distinction I am trying to make is between: I know how this system works, and I am choosing how I want to navigate it. And there is something wrong with the way I naturally show up, so I need to keep fixing myself.
Those feel very different in the body.
One gives me options.
The other makes me the problem.
Maybe that is why I keep coming back to the word choice.
Strategy should give us more choices.
It should not become another mechanism for convincing people that acceptance is waiting on the other side of becoming less themselves.
What Are We Carrying for Other People?
I spend a lot of time thinking about what we carry.
Some of it is easy to name.
Work.
Family.
Money.
Caregiving.
Grief.
Expectations.
Then there are the loads we have carried so long that they just feel like personality.
The constant self-monitoring.
Reading every room.
Calculating how much truth a relationship can tolerate.
Watching your face.
Editing the sentence before it leaves your mouth.
Wondering whether you sound angry.
Wondering whether you sound too confident.
Wondering whether you need to smile before saying something difficult.
Wondering whether someone will call you difficult for doing what someone else in the room gets called decisive for doing.
Carrying the message.
Carrying the outcome.
Carrying the other person's possible reaction.
That last one is the piece I am trying to put down.
Not completely.
Communication is relational. I care how my words affect people.
I do not want to become careless in the name of authenticity.
I do want to stop assuming that another person's discomfort automatically belongs to me.
Maybe you have some work to do with what I said too.
Maybe your feelings are information about you, not always instructions for me.
That possibility deserves room.
I Am Still Figuring Out Where the Line Is
This is the part where I do not have a neat answer.
I know how to communicate strategically.
I believe in it.
I know how systems work.
I know there are times when insisting on saying something exactly the way I want to say it would cost me an outcome that matters more than the sentence.
I also know how easy it is for discernment to become self-erasure when you have spent a lifetime being rewarded for making everyone else comfortable.
I am trying to notice the difference.
Am I adjusting because it serves me?
Or because I am afraid of what happens if I do not?
Am I being strategic?
Or am I performing acceptability?
Is there something I need to learn here?
Or have we once again identified the person who is different as the person who needs development?
I do not want to abandon the ability to read the room.
I want the room to learn how to read me too.
Maybe inclusion is not simply inviting different people into spaces we already created and teaching them how to succeed there.
Maybe inclusion asks something of the space.
Maybe diversity is supposed to change us.
Maybe curiosity is what allows that to happen.
What’s in the Pot
How much of what you call professionalism is actually something you learned to do so other people would feel comfortable with you?
When someone’s communication activates something in you, how often do you ask what they should have done differently? How often do you get curious about what belongs to you?
What would diversity look like if we stopped asking difference to do all of the adapting and allowed the room to change too?
I’m still sitting with it.