Tag: Communication

Effective Communication and Social Media – Policy Not Required

Effective Communication

Effective communication matters right? Last time I looked there were roughly a bazillion articles and charts and other stuff available about effective communication. It’s important – we want to know our message is getting out there and being correctly understood, in order that it can be usefully responded to, and/or acted upon. And when communication passes through the filters of different people and teams, these filters apply distortion to the message. Kisu Kisu, or Chinese Whispers if you prefer, is an example of this many are familiar with.

Email versus Telephone

The channel you choose to use also has a bearing on effectiveness. I’ve used some data I found lurking down the back of the sofa in this little home made movie to illustrate how tough it is to correctly interpret a message. I made this little film partly in response to some tweeting coming from the Training Journal Winter Conference yesterday (search #TJ12 on Twitter for the backchannel). I got involved with some tweeting between David Goddin and Perry Timms about whether or not a social media policy is necessary, here are a couple of exerpts from the conversation:

Tweets from #TJ12

Tweets from #TJ12

I don’t think a social media policy is necessary, neither do I think it is helpful or productive. Via the #TJ12 I suggested that examples of where social media policy has enabled stuff would be helpful. Have you got any you can share please?

I believe a social media policy supports increasingly out dated hierarchical models, and I hope this film shows in part why I think this. I also made this film partly because I promised Erin I would make a talking blog post. Sorry for the delay Erin.

Effective Communication – Some Challenges

The tools we use impact our effectiveness.

The filters and hierarchies our words and sounds pass through create distortions, and this is partly why I think it is critically important to Tell Your Own Story.

A social media policy in part seeks to support the very hierarchy that social media is dissolving.

Social Media as an Enabler

If the culture is right for social, it’s a fabulous way to support better work, better business, better learning. If the culture is not right – I suggest you think about leaving social to one side until such time as you can fix the much more important stuff like why you don’t trust people where you work. Fix that, and a social media policy is not required.

Behind Closed Doors

Being too selective with your communication is a surefire way to blow your trust out of the water, slow important stuff down and piss your employees right off. We talk a lot about openness and we often don’t see the behaviour to back it up. Let me give you an example.

During my time in BT Global Services we went through a very difficult period and a new CEO was appointed from within the company to lead some necessary change. He spoke about how things were going to be different, said we needed to trust each other and used words like open and honest, and we were invited to contribute our ideas and thoughts on how we might work differently.

What followed were periods of silence from the top, they felt like forever though in reality were probably only a couple of weeks or so at a time. When folks know change is coming – they don’t like silence and soon, stories and half truths begin to walk the corridors like wraiths in a dodgy horror movie.

The silence was punctuated by updates via conference call and webinar, and huge, dull, uninformative PowerPoint decks were waded through. We quickly became quite grateful that all the updating was done virtually – people’s absence is so much harder to detect that way. It became clear that the reason for such long gaps in communication through our time of uncertainty was in part due to a form of cascade briefing.

News was radiated out from the CEO and his team, layer by layer and being represented in slightly different flavours as it cascaded out. I was a General Manager at the time so got to see a lot more than some others, but it wasn’t until I asked specifically that I realised people were being briefed very differently according to their position in the hierarchy. The default position was ‘Tell ’em as little as possible’, the whole thing sucked and the vast engine room of befuddlement (for it truly was vast) was a huge drain on resources and morale. I left shortly after, this managed and layered method of disseminating information was one of the key reasons I no longer wanted to put my heart and soul into the company.

The approach didn’t work, things didn’t improve and so it was deemed that further change at the top was required. Shortly before leaving BT, Hanif Lalani said in an interview with The Times: “I think the ‘stand-up-and-speak-your-mind culture’ doesn’t exist [at BT]. When you’ve come through the civil service you do what you’re told. I think there’s a characteristic that’s still there and one that you would really want to break,” he said. “You want people to stand up and give their views and I think people are reluctant to do that. As we bring more people in, you can see that changing slowly. But I don’t think it’s one of those natural things here.”

As he prepared to leave, the Finance Director web site said Lalani finished his career with BT under a cloud, calling it “an ignominious end”. I can’t help but feel that if Lalani practiced what he preached he would have helped create a much better, more productive working environment for everyone and less importantly perhaps, a better end to his time with the company.

Of course it’s up to each and every company to decide how it wants to communicate and there may be sensitive issues that warrant due care and attention. But I think the default position should be we tell people as much as possible and work back from there as needed, not the other way around.

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Ask Me No Questions…

…And I’ll Tell You No Lies, is an oft used phrase attributed to the Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith. It’s been bouncing around in my head on and off for a few weeks now, courtesy of a recurring theme – communication, and specifically how do folks get better at it?

The Front Line

A lot of my work involves spending time conversing with and listening to frontline staff which is very stimulating because with apologies to all you shiny tabled, big desked, thick piled carpeted CEOs out there, the frontline is usually where the real action is. The edges of an organisation buzz, any place where one group interacts with another and dialogue is taking place offers great learning and great opportunity. And yet thanks to the multi layered effect of most companies that vibrancy often doesn’t manage to penetrate to the centre.

The Centre

But that’s OK – because the centre does its damnedest to communicate, frequently too often as it tries to compensate for the fact that so little feedback is received. ‘Maybe we’re just not shouting loud enough and often enough?’ ‘Well let’s send out more news more often then’, and so it goes on, and on, and on.

Ask More, Tell Less

So how does it feel to be on the receiving end of all of this? Let me paraphrase something I’ve heard many times in recent years which I think will help create that feeling: ‘All they do is tell us stuff. They never ask us any questions’.

Alas – all too often ‘they’ simply don’t ask questions or invite opinion, and ‘they’ also mistake their approach as communicating. Sure there may be times when you just need to get a message out, so go ahead and broadcast it. Most often though – if you begin the practice of asking for feedback and ideas and reflecting and responding, you’ll create an environment that’s less coercive and more open – more communicative.

Remember this:

com•mu•ni•cate: Verb/k??myo?oni?k?t/
To share and exchange information, news, or ideas.

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