It’s not just what you say that matters, but also how you say it. Everyone communicates differently, and knowing how to approach different people at different times can make or break you.  Ethan Becker is the President and second-generation senior coach and trainer from The Speech Improvement Company. In this episode, he chats with host Bob Roark and shares some tips from his book, Mastering Communication at Work: How to Lead, Manage, and Influence. Ethan talks about the impact of communicating effectively and how that translates in different business situations. He also discusses the science behind speech and communication to give a better understanding of how it works.

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Dr. Ethan Becker On The Impact Of Mastering Communication In Business

How To Lead, Manage And Influence

This is going to be quite the episode. We have Dr. Ethan Becker. He's the President and second generation senior coach and trainer for The Speech Improvement Company. It’s the oldest communication coaching and training firm in America. More importantly, he's created what I would consider a tool case, a set of tools for Mastering Communication at Work. That's the name of his book with the co-author, Jon Wortmann. It's how to lead, manage, and influence. It's the second edition. He was kind enough to provide me a copy, which I promptly read. It resides on my desk as a go-to resource and how-to in the speech side of the house. Dr. Becker, thank you so much for taking the time. If you would, maybe starting out with a story about your company and your mom and how this all came to pass.

It's good to be here. I get asked that question about the company because we were founded in 1964. My mom and my dad were both at Emerson College, which for a long time is where you would go for communication. She was studying Speech Pathology and he was studying Rhetoric and Public Address, that was the vocation. They met, and dated, and they got together. They had this idea that if you could coach an executive, a businessperson, the same way an athlete was coached, you could help that person.

Their specialty was in communication, so they did that through the lens of communication and the company name, they started right away. They said, “Let's name it what we do, The Speech Improvement Company.” Between the two of them, they found something that could focus on, in some cases, mechanics of speaking, and in other cases, psychology, persuasion, and rhetoric. Naturally, that grew into the business world. That's how it originally started a long time ago.

Was there a recognition or a pushback when they started the company? Good speakers are born not made.

You get some of that stuff. They also had other challenges. They were out of the norm. My mother, a blind Jewish woman who married a Catholic boy. In the 1960s, that didn't go over well.

Your dad must have needed a lot of work for her to marry him and to try to improve.

An Irish Catholic boy from Pennsylvania hitchhiked his way up to Boston and did what he couldn't to get through school. She came from a long line. Her grandfather was one of the founding members of Brandeis University. She came from a different place. These two were not from the same background, but they found love and commonality, and they started this business and then it quickly grew. They never wanted the company to grow large. There were always about 10 or 11 on the team. Now, we're about 20.

They never wanted to be like a Dale Carnegie or a McKinsey or some watered down, one size fits all for everybody type of thing. They always wanted it to be small. They had a real focus on the academics of communication. Even now, there's nobody on the team who might have had a theatre background or wasn't going in their career, so they're doing this. All of us on the team, we've studied Speech Communication at the graduate level or beyond, so that way, we can go a little deeper with our clients than your typical executive coach. It's worked out well for us. It's made for an interesting collection of people.

We talked a little bit before the show and here you are, you're a kid. Somewhere in the book, you talked about plosives. We probably should talk about this, so your mom doesn’t come back and get us both. How was that growing up in a family where they were building a business in communications?

[bctt tweet="Speech behavior, just like every other behavior, can be learned to be very effective." username=""]

Maybe for the readers, let me share with you that word is. It's a technical word in speech communication, plosives. There's one part of our business that specializes in accent. I don't do a lot of accents. Before my mom passed away, she's certified me in accent work but it's not my favorite thing. I do more leadership communication. The accent work in our business, folks who have English as a second language, often come to us because they have a difficult time producing sounds. They study what is known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Which has hundreds of symbols and the symbols represent sounds.

In General American English, which is what we speak in the United States, there are only about anywhere between 40 to 60 sounds depending on which speech coach you talk to. That makes up the entire language. Out of that group, there is one group called plosives and it has eight sounds in them. B as in boy, D as in dog, G as in girl, J as in jump, P as in put, T as in toy, K as in kite, and Ch as in child or chocolate. That's what these things are. They're called plosives because they're exploded when they're made. Why do we care about these? We care about plosives because when we are talking with people who we know very well, meaning they know our speech pattern, we probably don't care about plosives.

We do something in human language, all languages called assimilation. We combine sounds. We say, gimme instead of give me, wanna instead of want to. If I say gimme, gimme a cup of water, and you give me a cup of water, who cares? Until, now I'm speaking with somebody from a different department at the company. Maybe not even in the company. It's not that they don't know my language but they don't know my speech pattern. If I assimilate like that, I make it more work for the other person. This is what this is all about. This is why we get nerdy about these technical things. We talk at approximately 183 words per minute, the average rate of speech. We can think at 600 words per minute. When I talk to you, you can hear me, but there's this extra 400 words a minute trying to process, decipher, and hear.

If I assimilate and I say, “Tomorrow, you can get up at 8:00 and go.” What? Your brain can figure out “Tomorrow, we're going to get up at 8:00 and go.” Fine, until I do it again. After a few minutes of this, listeners begin to zone out. We look at plosives as a way to strengthen the quality of words. We chose them because, one, they're impactful. Two, they're easy. That's the what to answer your question about my house growing up. We had sayings at the dinner table like, “Plosives are neat but hard to repeat.” Anyway, there's probably more of an answer, but there's some technical stuff. That's why we put it in the book. This stuff matters, it does.

I grew up in the deep South, but out West for a long time. In the deep South, I'll go back periodically, there are people from down the holler, for lack of a better word. The words are cut off. It's interesting trying to communicate when you're not from there. I can see where it's a barrier. It doesn't mean they're not smart people, that means that's how they communicate. It seems like you've been doing this since you were this tall, one way or another. There's a transformation if you become a good speaker. Is there a story that you could relate where somebody went through either the book or coaching with you and then the outcome on the other side that changed their life? Do you got a story like that?

We do, every day. In a way, this pretty much is the heart of what we do in coaching. A lot of it is in presentation skills. Folks will come to us and they may feel nervous. A manager may come to us and say, “Yes. Not only am I nervous, but I've also been told I'm boring.” Things like that. We hear that, but as a coach, we have to profile and understand that, because one person saying, “I'm boring,” may not have the same meaning as a different person saying, “I'm boring.” We look at them and assess them. Usually, we can profile pretty quickly, even in their speech pattern. Within seconds, we can understand a whole lot about them. When we see their formal presentation, we start looking at what they need to work on. We've seen folks go from feeling terrified like, “Call in sick to work so I don't have to speak,” scared to raising their hand saying, “Can I do another one?” You can change that. Speech is a behavior like every other behavior. We can learn how to be very effective.

I think about the esteem that we hold, recognized folks that can communicate, Winston Churchill and others. You look at them and they weren't born that way, I don't think. They spent a lot of time. In The King's Speech, there was a g