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Although human beings have created an impressive range of sophisticated and complex communicational methods, including over 7,000 current languages, rich nonverbal communication (body language) signals, and the rather impactful large language models powering today’s AI, our efforts to communicate with others often backfire, even in highly-consequential situations, such as professional or work settings.
Consider that while knowledge workers spend around 88% of their working time communicating, misunderstandings abound, not least because people are generally too self-centered, prone to overinterpreting things, and unwilling to depart from their own preferred style to meet others where they want to be met, causing major workplace stress as well as performance deficits.
To illustrate this with a simple example, many people are not even clear about the amount of time they should spend talking, either in meetings or one-on-one interactions with others. Deviations from the optimal norm tend to result not just in errors of communication, but also reputational costs: “X speaks too much”, “Y speaks too little”, and “we just cannot get Z to shut up,” not to mention complaints about “mansplaining, “infodumbing.” “oversharing,” or “corporate waffle,” which have fueled Dilbert cartoons, The Office, and corporate memes for decades. Add to this generic ineptitude the fact that we are often deprived of constructive feedback (at times, because of the prevalence of prosocial or conflict-avoidant cultures) to edit our style and improve, and it’s unsurprising that 100% of workers report miscommunicational problems on a weekly basis.
So, how can you figure out if you are talking enough or too much, and if the quantity and quality of your communication is fit for purpose? Moreover, how can you identify critical opportunities to improve how you present your ideas and arguments to others, and how to be more effective when you speak to your coworkers, clients, and boss?
Here are five generalizable lessons from the rich science of workplace communication;
(1) Sadly, talking time is positively correlated with leadership emergence: It is a sad but clear-cut fact that speaking time positively predicts status attainment in organizations, including whether people emerge as managers or leaders. Sad, because there’s no inherent value of speaking a lot (especially if you have nothing to say), and because in a world that cannot shut up, listening is desperately needed. However, just like people praise (and yearn for) humility, while actually celebrating and positively reinforcing overconfidence, we pay lip service—pun intended—to those who listen while falling for those who just cannot shut up…
(2) Culture matters, but less than you think: Of course, some cultures (organizational and national) are more prone to rewarding those who speak more, which is predominantly an indicator of how extraverted cultures are. I love spending time in Scandinavia, which is in many ways the opposite to by native Argentina when it comes to talking volume. And yet, even within Scandinavia, Danes tend to see themselves as much more extraverted than Swedes, and Swedes than Finns, and so on. So, yes, talking norms will partly depend on cultural expectations (same goes for organizational cultures, each come with their communicational rituals and etiquettes). And yet, it is generally true – that is, across cultures—that talking more, louder, and assertively will indicate higher rank or status (e.g., senior leaders, successful people, men rather than women), or at least the intend to signal higher status. So, for instance, if you just join a firm and you spend your first employee-wide meeting monopolizing the conversation, you may not be seen so much as someone important but rather as someone who wants to seem important or is merely deluded about their importance. Indeed, confidence does not always signal competence, though (again) in most cultures if you stay too quiet too long people may sooner or later conclude that you are shy, demotivated, disinterested in working there, and perhaps not “leadership material”, so it is nearly impossible to fit existing stereotypes and generalizations regardless of whether they are true.
(3) Self-awareness is generally helpful: Who we are, especially at work, depends mostly on what others rather than we think about ourselves. In other words, our reputation is made up, not by how we view ourselves, but by how our colleagues, coworkers, and bosses view our actions and intentions. So much so, that the best way to find out whether we speak too much or too little, as well as whether we communicate poorly or well, is to internalize how we are viewed by others, particularly around this specific skills or behavior. In other words, we can all become more self-aware about our talking habits, which in essence means becoming aware of how other people feel about them. Use 1:1 meetings, performance appraisal reviews, and any formal opportunity to ask specific and generic questions to those you trust, especially if you think they are willing and able to provide you with their candid views, so you can adjust your behavior and improve (as Kim Scott compellingly notes, this is more about empathetic than brutally honest feedback). For example, you may want to ask whether you talked too much during X meeting, whether you were too quiet during a particular client call or pitch, or whether the key points you tried to make during your presentation were clearly articulated and conveyed. You may also want to find out whether your views or feelings about the company strategy, culture, and business performance are known by others or not.
(4) Not everybody cares about everything you think or feel: Although our colleagues are generally interested in understanding us, this is mostly for the purposes of interacting with us and collaborating more effectively at work. This means there are typically guardrails and extra-professional topics or thoughts that may be best not discussed. As I illustrate in my latest book, the authenticity cult, which nudges people to “bring their whole self to work” and “always be honest and truthful with others,” has made people oblivious to one of the most fundamental rules of interpersonal trust and cooperation: we gain trust, not by telling people everything that’s on our mind, but by sharing with them what matters, what is important, and doing so in a way that demonstrates that we care about them. Well-adjusted adults who inspire trust and are seen as rewarding to deal with colleagues (the opposite of self-centered, narcissistic coworkers) understand that the right to be themselves rarely eclipses their obligation to others, so talking should not be a substitute for listening and being heard should not be more important than hearing and caring about others. Even if your ultimate goal is to get ahead at work this is best achieved by first getting along, which in turn will be more likely to happen if you show an interest for how others think and feel rather merely seeing them as your audience.
(5) The less you talk, the more people will listen (and vice-versa): We all have our individual patterns of interaction, including speech, and others will no doubt pick up on them. And people’s tolerance levels tend to be quite high, which is why we develop effective adaptations for coping with undesriabel behaviors, like multitasking and “switching off” when people who have nothing to say begin their endless mansplaining monologues, and so on. Interestingly, people are quite susceptible to changes in patterns, so just because you are generally quiet doesn’t mean you wont be able to get their attention when you really want to express yourself. It is as if people attributed a relatively standardized chunk of attention to each person and the portion you don’t use leaves your “credit” intact, whereas people who don’t shut up will use all their credit rapidly, fading into background noise, and need to go to great lengths to persuade others that they actually have something important to say.
Make it count
Ultimately, the goal is not to talk more or less, but to make your talking count. Communication is one of those curious domains in which quantity is easy to observe but quality is much harder to measure, which explains why we routinely mistake confidence for competence, airtime for influence, and verbosity for expertise. The most effective communicators understand that every conversation has an implicit attention budget, and that spending it wisely requires reading the room, understanding what others need, and resisting the very human temptation to broadcast every thought that happens to enter their head.
This is particularly important at work, where communication is not primarily an exercise in self-expression but a tool for getting things done with and through other people. Sometimes this means speaking up when you would rather remain silent; sometimes it means editing a ten-minute intervention into two sentences; and quite often it means asking a question and actually listening to the answer (so, saying something not because you are in performance mode but because you are trying to be a valuable team player). There is no universal formula for the optimal amount of talking, because the answer depends on the audience, situation, culture, and what you actually have to say. But one rule travels remarkably well: if people regularly wish you spoke more, speak more. If they regularly wish you spoke less, speak less. And if you don’t know which one applies to you, that is probably the first communication problem to fix.
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Every year, I look at how much money I earn from each client. Some years, my earnings are very skewed toward one client (or two). If something had happened to that working relationship, my year could have looked much different.
Before I became a solopreneur, I worked in banking and then at a tech company. We had a phrase for reliance on a few clients: concentration risk.
Companies that have this type of risk have a whole system for tracking it, and often try to find ways to reduce the risk, usually by taking on more clients. That’s not always an option for a solopreneur without the ability to scale work. We have the same type of risk—lose one client, lose a large portion of income—but not the same means of managing it.
Start with the percentage
Accounting standards require a public company to disclose any single customer that accounts for 10 percent or more of its revenue, so shareholders can see when that much of the business is tied to a single relationship. But those companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of customers. A solo business with four clients faces a risk of losing 25% of its revenue if a single client leaves.
Knowing the percentage is the first step. If you don’t know off the top of your head because you work with many clients, look at a financial statement from your accountant or accounting software. Look at last year and compare it to prior years.
For you, the breakdown might be by client or by revenue stream—wherever you feel like you have the most risk if something drastically changes.
Client dependency comes at a cost
The risk shows up in how you run your business long before a client ever leaves. If you know you’re dependent on one of your clients, you might hold your rates instead of raising them to keep the client happy. You might also absorb scope creep when the client requests something additional. You find yourself rearranging your week to respond to changes in the client’s calendar, rather than protecting your time.
That’s always the risk with client dependency: you’re letting the client’s needs dictate parts of your business.
There’s another type of exposure if a single client is your only work. The Department of Labor looks at economic dependence when deciding whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor. If the Department of Labor determines that you are functionally an employee, it has tax and benefits implications (mostly for the employer, though you need to be aware of it also).
Reducing your client concentration risk
Many solopreneurs choose to work with only a few clients at a time. The work is deeper and there’s less context switching between clients. At one point, working for an employer, I was responsible for managing more than 40 client accounts. I’m much happier with only a few.
While working with only a few clients at a time is a viable business model, you should always plan for the impact of losing a client. That way, it doesn’t derail your business.
Always market yourself. Replacing a client can take weeks, sometimes months. You need to keep your pipeline active even while you’re busy, so you have options when a spot opens up on your client roster.
Look at your business model. Project-based and ad hoc work spreads revenue across more clients than one large retainer does. In addition to a few anchor clients, I take on a lot of smaller projects from clients to reduce my dependency.
Give yourself a financial cushion. Solo income is uneven month to month anyway, so let the high months fund your low ones. Set aside money when you can, so that if you lose one big client, you can tie yourself over until you find a new one.
You can also write a notice period into your contracts. If a client has to give you a 30-day notice before ending the agreement, you have time to prepare for the change in your income.
Knowing your number
A client who is responsible for a large share of your revenue isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s worth looking at the number, though, and thinking through a few “what-if” scenarios. What would you do if that client emailed tomorrow and gave notice? What would your next steps be?
If you have answers in mind, the concentration risk matters much less.
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