Madonna Soctomah’s passion is the Passamaquoddy language—hearing it, teaching it and speaking it. Born and raised on the Sipayik Reservation at Pleasant Point, Madonna spoke only Passamaquoddy until age f ve when she began attending St. Ann’s Catholic School. She later went to Shead High School in nearby Eastport, where she found herself speaking less and less of her beloved Native language and more and more English. After high school, she attended college in Bangor, and then traveled around the world to places as far away as Beijing, China. One day, while living in Hawaii, far away. | The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why by Deborah Tannen Harvard Business Review Reprint 95510 The Power of Talk: by Deborah Tannen The head of a large division of a multinational reasonable approach. But my field of research, socio- corporation was running a meeting devoted to per- linguistics, suggests otherwise. The CEO obviously formance assessment. Each senior manager stood thinks he knows what a confident person sounds up, reviewed the individuals in his group, and eval- like. But his judgment, which may be dead right for uated them for promotion. Although there were some people, may be dead wrong for others. women in every group, not one of them made the Communication isn’t as simple as saying what cut. One after another, each manager declared, in you mean. How you say what you mean is crucial, effect, that every woman in his group didn’t have and differs from one person to the next, because us- the self-confidence needed to be promoted. The di- ing language is learned social behavior: How we vision head began to doubt his ears. How could it be talk and listen are deeply influenced by cultural ex- that all the talented women in the division suffered perience. Although we might think that our ways from a lack of self-confidence? of saying what we mean are natural, we can run In all likelihood, they didn’t. Consider the many into trouble if we interpret and evaluate others as women who have left large corporations to start if they necessarily felt the same way we’d feel if we their own businesses, obviously exhibiting enough spoke the way they did. confidence to succeed on their own. Judgments Since 1974, I have been researching the influence about confidence can be inferred only from the way of linguistic style on conversations and human re- people present themselves, and much of that pre- Deborah Tannen is University Professor and a professor sentation is in the form of talk. of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, The CEO of a major .
