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I ended up looking for a job after my quantum-simulations-in-chemistry Ph. D. in the midst of my divorce, and ended up in reasonably high end tech support (not laptops or anything, but workstations and clusters handling things like credit card databases) for IBM. I had some misgivings about it — I do not think of myself as a great customer service sort of person, and I doubt many people who know me do either. Indeed, I and they are more likely to think “rhino.” (Though reasonably disciplined and sensible, so I didn’t fear a lot of outright customer complaints. Just customers who weren’t properly soothed or encouraged otherwise pleased by soft people skills.) But as best I could tell, things went very well for me with customers (which was not a given, since they did not for every person who worked with me). Perhaps it was an artifact of the main metric they used to evaluate us — we had no particular control over which calls we took, and once we took it we were judged on satisfactorily (from the customer’s point of view) resolving the issue, no matter how many more interactions it took. Something involving e.g. generating sales leads might have been much harder for me to do well. Possibly that was the wrong metric for them to use, but it seems like a plausible choice for a business with worried customers trying to fix potentially major problems.

The sample size was not huge, though, because I only worked there a couple of months. In one curiously eventful week my IBM shift boss announced that our mandatory lunchtime meetings were not to be put on our timesheets, my supervisor at the contracting company informed me that even though they hadn’t thought to tell me when they hired me it was mandatory for me to start studying and testing for certifications on my unpaid time, my floor boss at IBM sent out a memo saying we should all round our timesheets down in the company’s favor (I have wished many times that I had saved it — part of the explanation involved time that we spent going to the bathroom), and one of the recruiters I had applied with when looking for this job pulled my name out of some file and called to ask if I was available for a significantly-better-paid developer position at Nortel.

I don’t know whether I’d make customers happy in a field where they were less preselected for a stressful situation, but I think conveying competence and seriousness went a particularly long way when almost all the customers were calling about something they were quite worried about. So if you have someone who’s basically capable and polite but a little too impatient with human folly to fit in well in the airbrush section of your body shop, and whose talents don’t really match working the back office, you might consider shifting that person to the major collision repair section.

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The less political the subject, the better is Wikipedia as a source. No surprise then, it is highly unreliable on matters pertaining to Global Warming.

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it’s not immediately obvious why good communicators (as in doctors who took a communication skills course) would necessarily be more honest about their patients’ chances. Perhaps the course “emboldened” them (as the NYT blog put it) to think they could get away with breaking bad news more than they actually could?

My interpretation was that both sets of doctors tried to be honest, but the ones with communication training were perhaps better at getting their point across. The study I cited does pretty well establish that patients get the wrong idea a lot, and I don’t think it’s because most of their doctors were trying to lie to them.

I’m concerned that your study doesn’t distinguish between breaking bad news in such a way as to make patients as comfortable as possible with it (good communication), and breaking bad news in such a way that patients don’t fully understand the badness of it (one type of bad communication). You and the NYT seem to think training caused doctors to fail more at the first thing, but I’m proposing that maybe they just successfully avoided the second thing.

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Thinking to myself: it looks like you’re proposing that good communicators tell patients how bad their chances are, and bad communicators don’t. This makes the good communicators’ patients more depressed. It also means that the bad communicators’ patients like their doctors more because they have happy fuzzy associations of hearing good news from them.

My only two concerns about this theory are – first, that it’s not immediately obvious why good communicators (as in doctors who took a communication skills course) would necessarily be more honest about their patients’ chances. Perhaps the course “emboldened” them (as the NYT blog put it) to think they could get away with breaking bad news more than they actually could? Second, that it requires that patients confuse “My appointment today went well because I heard good news” with “my appointment today went well because my doctor is a good communicator”, which seems to go a little beyond what your study supports and which is plausible but by no means certain.

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I think this is the key problem. The actual principles of interpersonal interaction are massively unethical to think about, much less communicate to others. And so we are left to mostly get by on intuition. We have a word for people who teach communication skills, it’s “PUA”.

Well, GOOD sales training seminars do it too; they just reserve it for their money-makers.

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