The communication problem about communication problems
When a team starts growing, communication can easily become a pain. A curiously hard one to fix indeed, but why? Let’s find out.
The context of a communication problem
If you ever worked in a team that was concerned about communication, you might be familiar with these situations:
- Listening to how “bad communication” caused a problem.
- Being in a room discussing how “communication” needs to be improved.
- Agreeing with everybody else on wanting to improve communication, but then don’t, even after actually trying.
Most of the times people can easily attach problems to “communication”, but too often its real meaning is left to interpretation, and then, how can you fix something if you don’t know exactly what you’re fixing? [spoiler alert] You can’t.
Finding out what “communication” means
Here’s the interesting part: the actual meaning varies among people. And the way of nailing it is by making the “message receiver” the center of your communication thoughts, so you can have a sort of user-centric-designed communication, which brings some interesting conclusions & recommendations:
- No matter what the circumstances, the solution starts with you. There’s always a way to improve, hidden somewhere. Take the initiative.
- To achieve effective communication, start with your interlocutors. They know what’s actually meaningful for them. Be open and ask: is this relevant for you? I didn’t talked with you about this, was it important for you? Do you like the way we handled that topic?
- Discover the constraints and interests of the people you’re trying to communicate with: do they want continuous small updates? then be brief. Do they want to feel taken into account? spend some time on a one on one. And so on.
- Always ask for feedback about actions you take, so you can know if you’re heading in the right direction.
- It is better to be cautious before deciding to not communicate. Take 24 seconds and try to think on any reasons to communicate before deciding to not to (this same technique can teach you optimism too, it’s a valuable habit).
- Be respectful with other people’s time. Communication is also about other persons making a place in their lives to listen to you. Plan ahead of meetings and casual conversations, and be concise.
- Communicate early and often. Specially when something goes wrong. The only thing that’s worst than a tragedy is a tragedy + bad timing.
- If people aren’t reading the emails or messages you send or won’t attend the meetings you schedule, it’s somehow your fault (too). This might sound unfair, but the takeaway is: don’t just assume that the other people did wrong, as I’ve said before, there’s always room for improvement.
- Learn to listen. Ask plenty of questions and make sure you actually understand what the other person is trying to say.
- If you’re part of a team, make sure that everybody feels happy and taken into account after the conversations, meetings, etc., take place. Everybody has diverse ways of expressing, and it’s a mistake to think that an absence of disagreement means agreement.
- Don’t be boring. People don’t like walls of text (still trying to learn it the hard way). You want people to be motivated and interested in what you want to say. Trust me, that little extra effort to find interesting ways to communicate things will be worth it, and will become easier with time.
- There’s no one-size-fits-all. Test alternatives until your message and mechanisms match your audience’s needs.
- Be grateful about contributions, bonus points if you provide a positive reinforcement. This way you can build a culture of crowd-sourced communication goodness.
Once you opt-in for a “receiver centric” approach, you will be able to fight against the biggest problem of communication: not knowing what the actual problem is, so you can achieve effective and meaningful communication that people close to you will appreciate.
What do you think? Does this makes sense to you?
