Here we look at how"Rational Focus Ignores Our Emotional Mind". Also, how our "Top Down Rationality" of workplace structures presents an environment where everybody has the permission of their position to tell the people below them what to do.

1. 1communicateforlife.ca

2. Rational Focus Ignores Our Emotional Mind
• Our rational mind depends on the long term memory storage
of our emotional mind to be able to think at all.
• These include cultural schema – patterns of acceptable
behavior we have absorbed since birth
• Organizational structure is a deeply held schema. If we’re
building an organization our emotional mind simply delivers an
automatic cultural response – somebody must be in control
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3. Top Down Rationality
• Our emotional minds present these schema as positive
judgments of reality – there’s nothing neutral about this –
it’s the “right stuff”
• So most workplaces are “naturally structured” as
hierarchies - everybody has the permission of their
position to tell the people below them what to do.
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4. communicateforlife.ca 4
Most of us believe that hierarchy and control ARE the reasons
organizations actually function and productive work happens.

5. Top Down Rationality
• Well-known organizations that successfully function without
top-down control – Google and W.L. Gore for example – are
seen as outliers, unusual, a bit mysterious.
• Our automatic belief in control also reinforces our belief that
managers make rational decisions and communicate them
thoughtfully.
They don’t!!!!
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6. Learn More From Dr. Talk
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Connect on ca.linkedin.com/in/communicate4life
Dr. Dalton Kehoe has been a teacher, organizational change practitioner
and communications consultant for over 40 years.
Routinely voted one of the top teachers at York University, and chosen
by the province’s educational television network as one of the best
lecturers in the province, Dalton Kehoe is a dynamic business speaker. He
is also a top-rated instructor in the Executive Education Center at the
Schulich School of Business at York University, where he trains executives
from leading companies.
Now the President of Communicate for Life, Ltd. a firm dedicated to
helping people to improve their workplace communication skills.
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