Communication is one of the most difficult things to get right in a business. Actually, this is true of life in general. Even in a business that is utterly committed to open communication, the most common failings point back to communication every time.
My last job taught me this lesson daily. I was the CEO of a company that employed roughly 500 people. We were a team-based business engaged in open book management. I think we did as well as any other company committed to open communication, yet nearly every exit interview indicated a need to improve communication. Once or twice a year some department or team would suffer a decline in morale and invariably we would discover that a group of stakeholders had made a poor decision which they would not have made had they been aware of readily available information.
Some of the problem with practicing consistently good communication is inequality of basic understanding. We see this all the time in the smaller communication unit of the family. Our dinner table includes two adults, a 22-year-old, a 16-year-old, and a 6-year-old. Dinner conversation involves adult conversation punctuated by explanations and discussion at multiple maturity levels. With only five people at the table it frequently takes a full hour for one relatively benign topic to be presented, explained, discussed, argued, explained some more, questioned, and eventually polished to a completed idea. And still it is understood at the levels of a 6-year-old, 16-year-old, 22-year-old, and two plain-olds with very different educations and world experiences. Multiply this complexity by 100, or 500, or 5000, and you have the fundamental challenge of organizational communication.
Our assumptions about levels of knowledge – both our own and others’ – interfere with good communication. Let’s start with self-awareness (because it’s always best to address the most difficult things first). The essential challenge of knowledge is to be aware outside of or beyond our current awareness. This constant stretching is the work of a lifetime. On an hour-by-hour basis, however, we are expedient at best. When confronted with another’s superior knowledge, experience or insight, an all-too-frequent response is to discount the other’s abilities rather than question our own, thwarting meaningful exchange. Good communication depends on our awareness of our own limitations.
We tend to both overestimate and underestimate the knowledge of others. In some cases we assume that the things we know are or should be common knowledge, and we attempt to build a communication structure that has no foundation.
In other cases we assume lack of knowledge. I had this experience with my son recently. I began to explain a philosophical concept as a prelude to a discussion. He tried to delve into the discussion and skip the explanation. In my infinite parental wisdom I plowed ahead with the lecture. Luckily, he brought me up short by insisting that I recognize he had been studying this very concept on his own and was perfectly prepared to discuss it. Lucky, because we were able to proceed with an excellent conversation during which I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. But how often does communication fail because someone will not or cannot convey their adequate – or even superior – knowledge of a topic?
The list of barriers to good communication is vast, and the achievement of good communication is the worthy practice of a lifetime. But the first step in the path to better communication is to recognize how our diversity makes communication both richer and more difficult.
When we start with this understanding and seek to accommodate the fullness of human experience present in every communication experience – whether it involves 2 people or 20 – the rest of the communication lessons will be much easier to learn.
(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill
