You might be surprised to learn the causes of a potential breakdown in communication at work.
Often, managers assume the culprit is a lack of technical or hard skills. They invest a lot of time and money in training on those functional/technical skills. Or they invest in new tools to enhance the technical skills or bring in people with stronger technical skills, only to be disappointed when these problems persist.
The real issue may be that there's a harmful lack of communication skills in the workplace.
Is your team suffering from a lack of communication skills in the workplace? These 10 signs of a communications breakdown may help you diagnose the problem:
Getting to the root cause right away is a faster and better way to solve these problems than improving the technical/functional ability of the team. At the very same time, if you address the real problem you’ll boost employee engagement and enjoy the cascade of benefits that come with higher levels of engagement. We’ve covered those extensively in this CONNECT2Lead series, so go back and read the earlier posts if you need a refresher!
Let’s make the links to show how these 10 problems stem from poor communication. Mostly, this falls on the shoulders of managers.
All 10 of these problems could have a root cause of employees not fully understanding what’s expected of them. One of the most important jobs for any manager is to be clear and complete in conveying what others are expected to do. That’s more than the final output or results. What are they supposed to do? What activities? How? When?
It starts with the job description. And if the job changes, the job description should change, too. Take a look at the jobs you hire for. The job description should spell out what people do day-to-day and how they go about doing it. Instead of “completes monthly reports,” it should say “gathers data from department heads each week and resolves discrepancies to balance monthly reports.”
Once hired, and on an ongoing basis, the three things people need to know are WHAT to do, HOW MUCH to do, and HOW to do it. Additionally, you need to tell people WHY each of those matter.
Use this series of questions to check how well you’ve set expectations for someone on your team.
Were you immediately able to answer each question? If you don’t know the answers, you can’t expect anyone else to know them! And if you do know the answers, have you clearly, directly and recently communicated this information -- ALL of this information -- to the person you’re expecting to do the work?
If they don’t understand expectations and the rationale for them, it’s only natural that productivity and quality might be compromised. It would be only natural to see:
You might be able to rectify all these issues by communicating more effectively about expectations!
There is some crossover here. Setting clear expectations will, by itself, boost engagement. It will also improve employee retention.
Take a look at the top four reasons people seek other employment:
According to Gallup, all four of these reasons are more frequently cited than the need to earn more money. Setting and communicating expectations are deeply embedded in all of these.
Additionally, you can boost engagement and morale by communicating effectively with employees. Among the leadership behaviors that are proven to significantly impact engagement levels:
These are just some of the behaviors from the evidence-based leadership framework known as The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®, a body of work by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. You can complete an assessment or attend a workshop that provides insights about the frequency of your leadership behaviors and what you can do to improve your leadership effectiveness.
You’ll notice that this all comes down to simple behavioral choices about how you communicate and how frequently you communicate. Managers with strong communication skills have teams that are happier and more productive.
Most of these communication breakdowns stem from a manager not providing critical information that’s complete and continuous. But there’s another aspect that more often gets overlooked. It’s about managers hearing what others have to say.
When people feel they’ve been heard, they are more committed to the work. They buy in more to the decisions made. They adapt to change faster. Even when their ideas or input are not used, people who feel heard are more accepting of a manager’s directives.
When people do not feel heard, they withdraw. They feel marginalized. They may “go through the motions” in doing their work, but they’re not applying the additional discretionary effort that comes with higher levels of emotional connection.
Not feeling heard causes people to clam up in future meetings. Marginalized people:
Using your communication skills will also address the most common reasons that people underperform. But only if you are clear and not sending any mixed messages! Here’s what you’ll need to evaluate to be sure you’re avoiding mixed messages.
First, know the primary reasons that employees underperform:
Setting expectations properly and checking in frequently will address a number of these issues. But you’ll also need to be careful not to accidentally send mixed messages that cause these issues.
Second, make sure all your messages AND your actions are aligned. Here are some examples of ways you might not be aligned… ways you are sending mixed messages without realizing it.
Getting to the root cause, setting expectations, and making sure you aren’t sending mixed messages will improve team performance.
All of this requires excellent communication.
Since communication involves both sending messages and receiving messages, both parties have certain responsibilities for effective communication. We’ll address both, but first let’s step back and review what’s really happening when we communicate.
Communication is defined as the process of transmitting information and a common understanding from one person to another. The key word there is common. It signifies that both the sender and the receiver understand the information that’s been transmitted in the same way.
This is the heart of communication. In fact, the word itself -- communication -- is derived from the Latin word communis which means common. Without common understanding, there is no communication.
In any communication, there are two parties: The sender, who initiates the communication, and The receiver, to whom the message is sent.
It begins when the sender encodes an idea by selecting words, gestures, symbols or expressions to convey an idea. This applies to all verbal, nonverbal and written language.
It continues as the receiver decodes the message into meaningful information.
The way the information is transmitted is known as the medium or the channel. Mediums include face-to-face conversations, telephone calls, emails, texts, or written words. Selection of an appropriate medium for transmitting a particular message can be critical to the effectiveness of the communication.
There’s one more factor. There’s noise that interferes with communication. Noise is anything that distorts the message. That can include different perceptions of the message due to:
The quality of the communication depends on the encoding of the message, the decoding of the message, the medium chosen, and the noise.
Effective communication is a two-way process that requires effort and skill by both sender and receiver. That’s why this illustration of the process shows it going both directions and shows both parties being receivers and senders.
The receiver is responsible for being open and receptive to the message and then checking for understanding.
The sender is responsible for delivering the message as clearly as possible and for checking to make sure the recipient understands what has been conveyed.
For managers, the best practice is to seek clarity in all communications, whether you are sending or receiving the message. This will save you a lot of time and stress as you eliminate misunderstandings. It will also model for others how to get clarity and how to be more effective in communicating.
When you’re the receiver, try to focus on the message without getting distracted. This includes eliminating the distractions inside your own head that keep you from giving your full attention to the sender. We seem to think that we can multitask while receiving communications, but studies reveal most of us are not as capable as we think we are at multitasking.
You also have a responsibility to be receptive and to make it easy for the sender to convey information to you. Help by putting the speaker at ease. Look and act interested. Don’t be too quick to interrupt or cut off the sender.
It also makes it easier for the sender to effectively communicate when you make an effort to understand what’s being said and why it matters. Put yourself in the sender’s shoes when you hear an important message. What feelings accompany the message? What is the Sender’s point of view? You don’t have to agree with it, but you can try to understand it.
If you ‘re not clear about what’s being communicated, your responsibility as a recipient is to ask for clarification. Even when you think you do understand, it’s a good idea to paraphrase and repeat what you received and then to ask, “Is that right?”
You may notice that most of these responsibilities for the receiver are linked to listening skills. That’s absolutely right. Listening is a particularly valuable skill, as we covered in a previous post in The Ultimate Guide to Soft Skills for Managers. It’s not as easy as we think it is to truly listen effectively to others.
On average, people in a business setting can pay attention for no more than 60 seconds without being distracted by an unrelated thought ... and for many of us, that attention span is closer to 30 seconds.
Why is it so difficult to listen and give our full attention to other people? Here are a few reasons:
We routinely confuse hearing with listening. That, in and of itself, is a barrier.
We aren’t taught the skills of listening in school. You may have taken a speech & communications class in middle school or high school, but you learned there how to speak and not how to listen. It’s a skill that is underappreciated, so it’s no wonder that it remains underdeveloped and underused for many of us.
Why? Because we’re hard-wired to build on our past experiences.
We drive on autopilot, for example, because our brain remembers how we did it before. You can type with your thumbs on various devices without thinking because you don’t have to think.
Similarly, we make assumptions, judgments and leaps when we listen to someone talk about anything that’s even a little bit familiar. Your brain gets in the way of listening because it races to make connections instead of keeping you focused.
Often, communication is a contest -- who can be the loudest, sharpest, fastest talker vs. who can hear and understand the best. Therefore, we place a higher value on speaking than on listening.
We get lazy. after all, who knows if we are really, truly listening? So we put on listening looks and do the head bobbing and mmm-hmm’ing, and we think that we can get by….
Despite those difficulties, there is tremendous value in listening. It’s worth the extra effort to build listening habits that make you more effective. Consider these benefits:
This is what good listeners do differently. These are behaviors, not intentions. Behaviors are choices. You can choose to do any (or all!) of these things more frequently. Good listeners:
This free, on-demand webinar is a basic introduction to communication skills with some tips for quality listening you may not have heard before. Be sure to check out the ECHO Listening Assessment below, too. It’s a powerful tool for improving communication effectiveness in your workplace.
When you’re the sender, disseminating your message is not the point. The point of communication is getting the other party to understand what you want them to know or do.
That means you are responsible for:
Take time -- especially with your most important messages -- to get clarity for yourself about the main idea.
That way you can be brief, and you won’t lose the main idea in a jumble of other ideas.
It may help to think about your objective for the communication. What outcome are you looking for? What do you want your receiver to know or do?
Convenience and expediency may interfere with communicating an important message. You’ll need to consider which medium will help you achieve your objective. A pointed text may be appropriate for conveying urgency, but it may not be the right medium for giving feedback that requires tone and two-way dialogue.
Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes. What medium will make it easiest to understand the message? Know your receiver’s preferences instead of resorting to your own preferred medium every time.
You need to match your:
Your actions related to the message also need to be aligned with the message. Otherwise, you can confuse your receiver.
Because you’re in a managerial role, part of your job is to get others to take action. Your messages need to be received AND compelling enough to mobilize others.
Important messages need to be repeated multiple times. You’ll want to communicate about the important stuff over and over again until others are saying it, too. It will feel like overcommunication to you a long time before it feels that way to others.
Before you step into the sender role, make sure you’ve been a good receiver.
Understand how others will be impacted by what you say. Solicit opinions and input before you make decisions that affect others. Enlist support by creating plans that include others and help them achieve their goals. In other words, to be a sender everyone wants to respond to, first be a receiver.
That brings us back to listening skills, doesn’t it? As a manager, nothing serves you better than listening well and asking questions to demonstrate your genuine interest. Communication becomes so much easier when your intention for it is to understand others.