Friendliness Archives - Page 2 of 2

Swift Trust

In 1996 the organizational scholars Debra Meyerson, Karl Weick and Roderick Kramer described what they called swift trust. A later commentator notes that their main example is the film production crew. Strangers meet, take up their roles and start work at once, with no time to get to know each other.

The chapter describes contexts in which “swift judgments of trust are mandatory.” Such temporary systems “act as if trust were present, but their histories seem to preclude its development.” The theory describes the sequence. The team assumes trust first and checks and adjusts it later.

Topics for Small Talk

JobTIPS, an online guide to job skills, tells readers that “Small talk is a normal and expected thing that happens in almost every work environment.” Good topics include what you did over the weekend and television shows, movies or music.

Topics to avoid include politics, religion, salary, personal financial problems, personal questions about relationships and personal health issues.

The Peach

The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”

MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”

Water Cooler Talk

Water cooler names the drinking water dispenser in an office, and also “the kind of informal conversation among office staff that takes place at such a dispenser.” People speak of water-cooler conversations and of a television show noteworthy enough to give office staff something to talk about as water-cooler television.

Let’s Do Lunch

Let’s do lunch. Let’s get coffee sometime. By 1985 a Los Angeles Times columnist was already joking about the first: “Let’s do lunch sometime, have your girl call my girl.”

MIT’s office for international students explains such invitations to new arrivals. An American writer on the page says that when people say “Let’s get lunch!” it “seems like they don’t really mean it.” If an American is serious, “they will propose a time and place.”

Gift of gab

In his post on Forbes online – Six Reasons Small Talk Is Very Important and How To Get Better At It – Brett Nelson writes:

„Whether getting a job, working with colleagues, winning new clients, entertaining existing ones, all of it requires small talk. You better have the gift of gab.“

He then quotes from How To Get A Job On Wall Street, written by Scott Hoover, Associate Professor of Finance at Washington and Lee University: “In trying to generate business, the deal pitch is obviously critical. What is not so obvious is that simple, seemingly innocuous conversation with potential clients can be just as important. Companies want to hire people who can think on their feet.”

MerriamWebster defines gab as: to talk a lot in an informal way usually about things that are not important or serious; to talk in a rapid or thoughtless manner. First know use 1786. Synonyms: babble, blab, cackle, chatter, chat, jabber, rattle, run on, schmooze, talk, twitter.

Small Talk

Small talk in the USA gets communication going. Small talk allows people to get a sense for the overall atmosphere. Americans seldom jump directly into serioius business subject matter. Patterns