The 3 Biggest Problems with Communication
Need someone to blame? Blame communication. In every survey, HR investigation and consultants report you will find someone pointing a finger at communication. If you see an employee with a disengaged glazed stare it is probably to do with communication.
After years of knowing that communication is at the hub of most evil it is suprising that it is still something we are not that good at. Communication systems do not exist. We have email but this tool has devolved to being most vilified corporate tool that hardly supports best practice communication. If you are Gen Y you don’t even use it.
Attached is a neat little graph that shows two axis:
The quantity of Communication Content
The richness of Relationship Context
By looking at communication in this way we can identify at a systematic level the three core communication problems in an enterprise.
1. The Spammers
Look at your inbox. See all the cc carbon copies. Imagine if these memos really were the old fashioned carbon paper creations. The typing pool would be in melt down. Now ask yourself why has the postman stopped by to deliver this message to you? Often you do not even know the senders and in many cases you have ended up as collateral damage as result of “reply all” email wars. You can try and stop this but you also still want to be in the loop. Our desire to be part of what is happening combined with tremendous volume creates a flood of information that is just impossible to control. Copying someone in becomes a proxy for informing. The responsibility has been passed on. Consider the brave souls that even add “read receipts”. They double their volumes heroically. These are the people who have been blamed for communication stuff ups before.
Does this communication represent rich, connected relationships? Clearly not. Low context, high volume. The problem of spam.
2. The Spinners
The second big problem is the issue of “spin”. This is the rapidly declining industry of spinmastery. It all started happily with communication experts carefully crafting key messages for senior leaders. Wordsmithing became an expertise and suddenly CEO’s who everyone knew were ex engineers or accountants became skilled writers using corporate speak to clearly communicate. New words were created - seamless, paradigm, transitioning - you can probably add your own. This was fun for a while until the employee population realised the risk management nature of the spin. How to say a whole lot without actually saying anything.
Enter social media and a touch of Gen Y cynicism and the beautiful creations of internal media releases that carefully said nothing devolved into counterproductive spins. It began in an elevator with 30 second speak until someone finally figured out the obvious - people don’t actually speak in elevators.
Everyone knew that the CEO didn’t even write the newsletter and this low trust context combined with infrequent and meaningless content has created the big problem of spin.
3. The Slackers
A good leader saves the day. You might have spam and spin circulating but a good manager according to Corporate Leadership Council research “filters the bad and emphasises the good” to create an engaging environment. I don’t want to shock anyone but this quality leader puts up the cascading Powerpoint communication pack and distributes the carefully crafted FAQ’s and then says “here is what is really going on” or worse “look, I haven’t been told anything either”. Now on the up side the relationship promotes excellent trust but the content in terms of volume and accuracy is often quite poor.
Another example in this bucket of “good but not great” lies coaching and mentoring relationships. The method of face to face communication is ideal and a lot of value is gained. The problem is one of consistency and content. The success relies on the actual participants and is often very, very patchy.
In many cases the content that supports these relationships is quite poor. The kick off pack is about it and the intellectual capital to drive growth is coming from the wisdom and expertise of the participants. This is great but is not reproducible and by nature will improve your organisation in fits and starts.
Now imagine if I could solve these three problems for you. Would you be interested in an organisation that could reduce emails yet handle volumes of essential content, improve the levels of trust and richness of relationships and support these relationships with important structure and systems?
The answer exists and it is called Social Business.
(Source: Yackstar.com)
