Peter Gill, director of business development consultancy Boreas Partnership (UK) Ltd explains how and why firms should strive to get their message across clearly.
Last month we considered the ten steps to effective delegation [1], a simple process that certainly seemed to resonate with many members. While negotiating, cross-selling, managing staff, delegating and running meetings are all important skills that require frequent reviewing, success in all these areas is based on effective communication.
One of the most common mistakes made in business is a lack of clear communication, both internally and externally. Messages passed internally through firms are often inconsistent at best, and can become corrupted through the ‘Chinese whispers’ effect as they are passed among staff members. This usually results in external communications becoming blurred, confused and mixed as it is based on the inconsistent ‘noise’ within the business.
Basics of communication
The communication process is used to convey information, make our ideas understood, initiate action, convey ideas, feelings and beliefs, to create social connections and to persuade and influence. In business we communicate to ask questions, respond with answers, create awareness of our product or service, promote and sell our products or services, as well as to satisfy the needs of our staff, customers/ clients, suppliers and other interested parties.
How we communicate depends on the purpose of the communication and the most appropriate channel to use. We have two types of communication at our disposal: Verbal and non-verbal. Every oral message is accompanied by a non-verbal message and the non-verbal component usually carries the greatest impact.
Non-verbal communications
Non-verbal communication takes many forms including (though not limited to) reports, letters, memos, marketing material, websites, internal notice boards, sticky post-it notes (often hurriedly written and stuck to a computer screen), text messages, emails, social networking sites such as Twitter, and body language. (Body language will be considered separately in a future article). Non-verbal communication carries its own set of challenges.
For example, a manager received an email from a partner written in upper case asking for some information on behalf of a client. She assumed it was very urgent and that everything else must be dropped in favour of researching and providing this information. She also picked up a hint of trouble if the information wasn’t provided as quickly as humanly possible.
The partner was going to be out of the office for the rest of the day and was not contactable, so the manager dropped the other work and spent chargeable time researching the information in order to respond to the partner by 5pm on the same day. Imagine her surprise the following morning when she was informed by the partner that the other work she had been dealing with was far more important and should have been the priority, as that the information requested could have been provided later in the week.
Why had the partner demanded that she turn her attention to this matter as a matter of urgency she asked? The partner commented that he hadn’t made any such demand and hadn’t stressed it was urgent and to be dealt with as a priority. The manager, by now feeling under pressure, asked then why had he used upper case if there was no real urgency. It transpires that he hadn’t intended to use upper case, caps-lock must have been on and he simply sent the email to her having typed it.
The non-verbal communication (in this case the email in upper case) had triggered a sense of urgency in the manager and led to inefficiency given that the more important work had been set aside in favour of something that could have been done at a later date.
It is clear from this example that we often read between the lines during business communications, but sometimes these lines were not the ones that were intended to be painted.
Verbal communication barriers
Verbal communication (i.e. face-to-face, over the telephone, via video conferencing or web-cam) can equally present its own obstacles. Potential barriers can include:
Overcoming these barriers can be achieved through feedback, simplified language and active listening.
Feedback: When communicating, check that the recipient has understood the message by asking the recipient to restate the message in their own words.
Simplify the language: Tailor the language used for the audience it is intended for. Jargon is the most commonly over used language though is of course useful, provided the audience understands and uses it.
Active listening: This involves making a conscious effort to hear what the person is saying and to understand the total message being sent out.
Creating a communications plan
Understanding the potential barriers to effective communication and planning how to overcome them is an essential part of any business plan. It may appear overkill to have a communications plan in some businesses, particularly in smaller firms with a lower number of staff and/or customers, but unless the message is clear at its point of origin, it won’t stand out in the marketplace. Below is another example to illuminate this case.
A managing director of a small business recently commented that communications between two departments were appalling. The sales team consisted of one manager, two field sales people and one support person, while the accounts department comprised a sole accountant. The two departments had developed the ‘eight foot walk’ syndrome.
The ‘eight foot walk’ was the distance from the desk of the accountant to the desk of the sales manager. It involved going through two doors, from one office to another, and the journey would take all of 20 seconds. Both the accountant and the sales manager were always busy and the economic downturn had only served to make it worse. Neither had time to make the ‘eight foot walk’ and therefore communication had reduced to just emails and telephone calls.
The MD asked for our help in improving the business performance believing that if additional sales were not achieved, jobs would have to be cut, and borrowing may have to increase at a time when banks were not looking too favourably at additional credit facilities. The initial review highlighted a number of issues including the fact that the two departments (particularly the two people involved at the top of the organisation in driving and monitoring the business performance) were not communicating effectively. The message going into the business was not consistent, unspecific and therefore did not help to co-ordinate and drive the overall team.
The simple act of holding regular face-to-face meetings was one part of the process to improve internal communications which led to the improvement in business performance. The communications plan (as simple as it was) worked.
Conclusion
Businesses often run the risk of having poor internal and external communication because they don’t have the most basic communications plan in place.
The benefits of effective communication include:
The soft skills essential for the success of the individual and the business are often simple to master but easy to forget. Communication is critical to any business; keep it simple and ensure it has been understood to be effective both internally and externally.
Peter Gill is director of the Boreas Partnership, a business development consultancy working with accountancy practices to increase fee income, reduce costs and increase profits per partner. For more information, click here [2]
Links:
[1] http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=196719&d=1025&h=1022&f=1026&dateformat=%o %B %Y
[2] http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/www.boreaspartnership.co.uk/rose.html