Originally published on Medium on July 27, 2018.
Common advice says that if you want to be a strong communicator, don’t use caveats. The reality is more complicated.
As a technical lead and a people manager, I often end up intentionally using the sort of caveated[1] language that, earlier in my career, I tried hard to expunge from my speech. Standard career advice for those early in their career says that you should purge from your speaking and writing phrases like “I think” or “It might be useful to” and other phrases which make you sound less confident. This doesn’t mean communicating as if you think you are always right. Rather, it’s to take as a given that people know that you are giving your view and will have no problem letting you know if they disagree[2].
Yet as a leader, especially as a manager, it is useful to pull out those phrases again. Even in a culture where individual contributors have a pretty large amount of discretion over what and how they do things, it is easy for a leader’s suggestion to be taken more seriously than intended. I don’t think that folks on my team take their manager’s word as command — thank goodness. However, it still is received differently that a suggestion from a peer.
Thus, now that I am a lead, when I make a suggestion, I use those caveated phrases. Not to indicate that I am less confident — although, often my distance from the details mean I am less confident in my suggestions — but primarily to communicate that ownership of the decision still belongs to the person I am talking to. My use of language isn’t exactly the same as in my days as a new software engineer. There are important differences between communicating a lack of confidence and delegating authority. Still, it is interesting to reflect that our communication style needs are always changing as our role and context changes.
Building on that, I have spent some time thinking about when caveating is useful and when it is not.
Never caveat
Never caveat your state of mind unless you are truly uncertain. For example, don’t say, “I think I agree”. Unless you really are still thinking about it, this type of caveating just makes it sound like you do not know your own mind. This is the classic case of self-undermining and, in my experience, what people are warning against when they say not to caveat. (Important exception: “I think I understand what you’re saying” because that is really a statement about both your state of mind and someone else’s.)
You also should never caveat statements of fact. But we have to be careful here, because in these days of ideologically based “facts”, it can be easy for opinions to masquerade as facts. More on that shortly.
Optionally caveat
Clear statements of opinion do not always need to have an explicit caveat when given in a neutral or positive context. If I say, “This oatmeal is delicious” then, most of the time, people will understand that I am stating an opinion. Alternately, this could also be caveated to no harm.
Always caveat
It is difficult to over caveat statements of opinion given in a negative context. This could be a normally neutral comment in the context of a disagreement. For example, my love of the oatmeal can become a point of contention if we are discussing how to reduce breakfast options in the cafe down to one.
Another type of opinion in a negative context is when the opinion is likely to create a negative context even if there wasn’t one before. For example, in this age of high tensions on political topics, throwing in some extra caveats is useful even if the discussion isn’t an argument… yet.
Another type of statement you should always caveat is opinions which could be taken as facts. Often, these opinions are well informed enough that it seems almost inappropriate to call them opinions. But when you dig beyond the surface, you start to see that they are not incontrovertible facts. The role of saturated fats in heart disease falls into this category. Not that long ago, it was so widely believed that it might seem to be a fact, but the underlying evidence was not as strong as believed and has come into question more recently.
Thus, while I said above that you should never caveat facts, that is with the caveat that the set of facts should be pretty strictly limited to cases where there is no controversy or the controversy that exists is implausible — e.g., the Earth is round.
Variable caveating
Advice and recommendations are an interesting type of statement because they involve saying that someone else should change their behavior. This makes them automatically more sensitive. Like with descriptive statements, advice and recommendations given in a negative context or likely to produce a negative context generally benefit from caveats.
In a positive or neutral context, my advice is more nuanced, as the opening noted. When you are in a position of power, you should caveat if the recommendation is optional and not caveat if it is not optional. If you are making a recommendation to someone in a position of power, you generally should not caveat in positive or neutral contexts because — fairly or not — it will tend to be seen as self-undermining. When there isn’t a power differential, then it will vary based on context and caveats are often discretionary.
And, 900 words later, we see why this is usually summarized with the less nuanced but more memorable, “Don’t caveat unless it reflects true uncertainty.” 🙂
[1] Yes, I’m using caveat as a verb and will do so heavily throughout this post.
[2] As an aside, I don’t tend to change my communication style much for personal and work communication. At work, I am considered a fairly considerate communicator and in my family, I am considered quite blunt. This amuses me.