Communication

There is probably no single greater influence on your success, or lack of it, than your ability to communicate personally and to develop strong communication networks.  The principles are incredibly simple, but at the same time elusive and difficult to master. Here are a few tips.

First, let’s think about Paul Revere.  Trust me on this one.  Mr. Revere employed a simple communication system to signal the coming (or not) of the British.  One lantern meant that the Brits were approaching by land, and two indicated that they coming by sea.  We can reasonably assume that three lanterns would have meant that they were coming by both means. 

But let’s consider a situation in which no lanterns were displayed. What would that have communicated?  Well, it might have meant that no British soldiers had been sighted, hence no lanterns.  But it could also have meant that the system was not functioning—that is, that for some reason no one was manning the lanterns.  In this situation, how would one determine how to interpret the silence of the system?  And more importantly, how would the patriots waiting for information know what to do? In this case, the course of events might have turned out quite differently.

OK, enough revisionist history.  The point here is that if there is not an adequate system of communication, ambiguity is created, and with ambiguity comes the potential for users of the system to behave in unpredictable ways.  Random actions rarely end well.

The lesson to be learned is that as a leader you must ensure that you create and maintain open channels of communication and allow for ample feedback.  Without feedback, it is difficult for you to determine whether you are being heard, understood, misunderstood, ignored, or whether the communication channel is somehow blocked.  And the same is true for your team.  They need to be confident that you hear them and are responding in a way that reflects your understanding of what they are trying to communicate. This is where it gets a little tricky.  You might assume that communication is a discreet process.  You speak, and the team members listen.  Then they speak and you listen.  Then you respond, and so on, back and forth.  This is absolutely not the case.  In a sender-receiver model like that just described, the receiver is not only receiving, but at the same time is processing the incoming message and preparing to send a response.  This creates some interference in the system and so may affect how the receiver interprets the message and thus how they respond.

The response message, in turn, may or may not be a response to the message as intended.  And of course, the response is then sent back the sender (now a receiver), who is also processing their response as the message is received.  At this rate, it doesn’t take long for the whole communication to get off track.  Yogi put it succinctly in describing a situation he encountered:  “It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”

So your communication channels need a good bit of redundancy (read: feedback) built in to allow for verification and authentication of messages.  A bit of advice here is that one of the best ways to listen to someone is to stop thinking about what you are going to say next.