Cherry,
You wrote, "Someone I'm working with has recently been saying that in his view
managers don't always think about the 'message behind their words' - by which I
found he meant the message that people _infer_ when they hear a manager's
words."
In my experience, when you send a mixed message, people almost always get the
_real_ message.
The NLP folks have a saying: The meaning of your message is the response you
get, independent of your intentions.
This was difficult for me to accept when I first heard it, because it implies
that I may not even know what my own words mean. I've since found that it's a
very helpful way of thinking about communication. Sometimes I get surprising
responses to the things I say. For example, I might say something to someone,
only to have them respond as if I were blaming them. When I take a closer look,
I find out that I was feeling more blame than I had been aware of.
Dale
--Dale Emery <72704.1550@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>