What defines good communication skills?

I was talking with my insightful brother last night about social communication and David Brooks' piece in which Brooks asserts that "mastering" social skills is at the essence of achievement. In a blog post, I took issue with Brooks' blanket assertion, arguing--perhaps not with the best communication skills--that not everyone defines achievement, skills, or even communication in the same way. As my brother and I discussed it, I mentioned that I'd been wondering since then about different communication milieus and how a certain kind of communicator can be perfectly effective in one group but an abject failure in another. My brother offered that what it comes down to is being an effective social tactician within one's specific milieu. That, he suggested might be the real core of what many agree is achievement.

Bright young man, is he not?

He encapsulates what I had been turning over in my brain since reading Brooks' piece. What works as social communication with one group or type or sort of people can be a failure in another. As an example, take scientists. From my experience, they're a direct bunch, taking down one's statements if they detect a flaw or weakness, bluntly critiquing, whether it's the paper you're submitting for peer review or your assertion over a fifth beer that REM's newer work is favorably comparable to their early albums.

Take that kind of communication into another scenario I know pretty well--elementary school teachers--and you know what? It's not a great fit. Not at all. The set of skills required to do well among most elementary school teachers differs considerably from the communication skills that gain you an ear--and respect and acceptance--among a group of scientists.

In other words, social communication is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. And one would have to be a true social chameleon to transfer their own particular suite of skills and tactics from one circle to another. One would need to be a politician to pull that off, a good one, or be someone like my brother, one of the most socially capable people I know. Having left a trail of nonplussed people in my wake through a lifetime of encounters in which my flat affect and low voice belied my perfectly well-intended social interactions, I can say that I will never be that social chameleon. And that's OK. I'm a scientist. I can just study chameleons instead and then speak bluntly and without preamble to other scientists about them. In terms of extrinsic achievement, the world would view my brother the social adept and me as equals, in spite of our differing abilities as tacticians.

My children's therapists have often referenced circles of communication, indicating that a circle closes when a child reciprocates a social overture, but those have always seemed more like two-way communication highways to me. Perhaps to distinguish, what I'm talking about here are communication circles in which the skills required to be successful--to achieve--can vary, even though the circles may overlap like a Venn diagram. A truly apt communicator within one's best-fit circle is the tactician of which my brother spoke, and an accountant's circle may be one that scarcely brushes against that of, say, a stage actress.

That's not to assert that we don't have to try to communicate within other circles. We do. But you may have noticed that as you moved from childhood to adulthood, your circle became a much more self-selected entity, one you guide to some extent, rather than a construct of the Fates. How many of you find, in review, that your self-selection is based in large part on a reciprocal recognition of kindred communication spirits? In its way, it is a reverse form of natural selection: if you're lucky, you find the environment that's best fit for your adaptations.

This observation may be something that communication experts have long known, but I've not seen it discussed anywhere. I'm curious to know from therapists or other knowledgeable ones who read here what the literature has to say on this idea.

I've written here before about how TH, in spite of his clear deficits in "typical" communication, seems to find his own kind, others from "France," as we call it (lifted from the lovely Susan Etlinger and her apt lexicon), and communicate just fine with them. In his social skills classes, the children hail each other as though recognizing and rejoicing in those ineffable signals that yes, they each belong there, understood. When I was young, I was completely inept among a bunch of 14-year-old rich girls in a dormitory, but I did great at a summer camp with other girls who loved to ride horses, wander around outside looking for snakes, and sleep under the stars as I did. Well, some of the other girls. In other words, we found our kindred spirits, we understood one another's communication beautifully, and we connected because of a million little spoken and unspoken tokens of commonality.

A study has just come out indicating an interesting--but not firm--association between people who share similar mutations in specific genes. The results, the media have blared, suggest that birds of a feather flock together, although for some critics, the study doesn't stand up to much parsing. Whether those results eventually lead to other, less-equivocal findings, I think the hypothesis itself remains worth considering. Birds of a feather do seem to flock best together, and the question remains: Why?

Speaking of wild animals, Amy Chua's Tiger Mother approach has been dissected to death. I've noted here that my own parenting efforts are more along the lines of "extremely not extreme" (or, as my sister-in-law put it last night, I'm a "Panda Mom." My sister-in-law is also a smarty pants, like her husband). Chua's efforts to control her children will ultimately fail for any number of reasons. But whatever time she should have allowed for enhancing their social communication would likely have succeeded or failed based more on each daughter's intrinsic affinities than some ultimate goal of "achievement." Like so many of us, from Trekkies to Trappists, her daughters will find their communication circles. I'm not entirely sure how much attending slumber parties would ultimately have helped them, except possibly as a process of exclusion.

And I still think Brooks has it wrong. Mastering social communication in a general way, as my brother seems to have done, is not necessarily at the "very essence of achievement." I think certainly an aspect of achievement may be finding and joining the communication circle in which you best belong and doing your best within it. I probably was articulating something like that when I reminded myself that I should rarely get off the boat, the place where I'm most comfortable, most effective, and best understood. The place where, as my brother put it so well, I'm at my most able as a social tactician.