Slack Gave Me A Smack

What happens to our voice when we let another party do the talking for us?

Photo by Matthew Brodeur via Unsplash

My phone was possessed.

Or so it seemed, as I tried to message my team on Slack last week. Sometimes I only have a couple of minutes in between meetings to check messages, refill my water, stretch my legs, etc. I’ve come to rely on voice-to-text a lot. And much to my embarrassment and my team’s amusement, I don’t always catch all the typos before I hit “Send.” Over the past few years, there have been some real doozies.

But this was on another level.

After selecting the mic icon, I started dictating a message to my team about recreating and sending one of our self-assessments to a client in PDF format, using a newly acquired program. I looked down at my phone and saw a message forming that called my team member a completely unacceptable name (which was spelled with one letter and ***) and this: “OK I'll stop just about to the exit. Can you make sure he wants pancakes before I go though?”

I was standing in my apartment, mouth open. The auto-text was so specific and yet made no sense. I tried dictating again and the next message was worse: full of expletives and aggressive language.

What was happening?? I coach people on how to enunciate and speak clearly. How could what I dictated be interpreted as the message I was reading? I thought I had been Slack-bombed. Is that even a thing?

With only moments before my next meeting and my original objective still unmet, I messaged again quickly—by typing. Not only did I still have to communicate to my team about the PDF, but now I needed to warn them about the possibility that there might be some weird new hack that could alter our messages to become offensive. As much as we strive to be respectful to each other, the thought that we might also inadvertently offend anyone else communicating with us was unthinkable.

We tested our respective systems and devices, and I re-installed my related apps. These measures helped. Although we were no longer experiencing this crazy glitch, we were now on high alert and checking every message even more carefully before sending.

The whole situation got me thinking.

How many times is the message we’re sending received in a drastically different way than what we meant? How often do we mistake or misunderstand what we are receiving? How often is what we hear and see a distorted version of what the other person is really thinking or feeling? What about those instances where we find ourselves in an explosive conversation—how many of those volatile exchanges are actually houses of cards built on foundations of faulty communication?

Right now, there is a LOT being communicated, through multiple modalities and means. Verbal and non-verbal, we’re receiving and sending messages that are experienced through any one or a combination of all our senses. All of these messages are a lot to absorb and interpret and going by words alone, spoken or written, will give only part of the picture. Our behavior expresses just as much, if not more, than what we say. Actually, in the cases where there seems to be dissonance between actions and words, studies show we tend to believe the message we’re getting from the actions we witness and not the words spoken.

If we’re conscientious and connected to what we’re communicating while we’re communicating, we stand a better chance of expressing ourselves in the way we want to be heard.

What felt like a crazy hijacking of my personal voice reminded me that we don’t have control over how our message is received. It reinforced for me the importance of both following through to make sure that my message is being conveyed with accuracy, and the value of checking in with others to see if I’m accurately understanding what they’re conveying to me. After all, we’re living in an age where miscommunication can happen by more means than ever before. #technicalglitch #reactingtotextwhileonzoom

So no more taking for granted that I’ll understand or be understood with the amount of attention I used to devote. Now, I take an extra beat to become present and check for accuracy. What’s in our hearts and minds is too important to be sloppy or lazy in sharing it. And we all benefit when we are truly seen and heard.