Improving communication is usually one of the challenges on the agenda when executives call me about improving team performance. It may be vertically, top floor to shop floor, or horizontally within a team, executive, or across departments.
Endemic communication challenges are more often than not symptoms, not causes. This post is redundant. Every leader either knows these three points intellectually, has heard them repeatedly in books or classes, and hates them when on the receiving end. Yet many are challenged to eliminate these fails from their own behavior. Consider this an unfriendly reminder.
To keep it simple, without getting into the causes of organizational communications issues, just stop it!
- Stop listening to rebut and start listening to understand. The meaning in what is being said by someone else is not all in the words. Defensiveness kills learning and worse, a pattern of defensiveness stops the flow of feedback that is essential to personal and business growth and success.
- Stop being a chicken and start saying what needs to be said, then say it clearly and with kindness and respect for the dignity of others. “There is no I in team,” was a cute and inane motivational poster, but the lack of diverse opinion from smart people creates a flock of sheep or in business parlance a bunch of yes women/men – not good for any high performance leader.
- Stop using authority or emotion to kill difficult discussions. Usually everyone knows what the issue behind the issue is. The messenger gets shot, the topic gets changed, the meeting ends and the issue becomes pervasive and a topic that everyone has learned is taboo. Teams and individual leaders don’t learn, grow, and improve when there are sacred cows.
I’m the Outsider and that’s what I think.