A few months ago, I bumped into a statistic suggesting that more than 80 per cent of North American drivers think they are better than average. Hmmmmm. Do the math.
This impossible belief seems to apply to communication, too. How many resumes have you seen that claim “excellent communication skills” among the list of awesome attributes? If everyone who claimed to be a good communicator actually was one, would “poor communication” be one of the big employee dissatisfiers that show up in exit interviews? Not likely.
Good communication is the workplace skill people seem to need the most yet demonstrate the least. How does that happen? I think it’s because the communication profession is missing a huge opportunity. Few of us do anything to promote interpersonal communication.
The reasons are many: tradition, the narrow confines of our job descriptions, our bosses’ and clients’ urgent needs, habit, competing priorities, the intangibility of interpersonal communication, and [insert your favourite excuse here]. Organizations lack a sense of what great face-to-face communication looks like, so it’s hard to measure and reward.
Meanwhile, professional communicators are up to their eyeballs in artefacts. Publications, memos, marketing material, financial reports and executive edicts receive lots of attention and billions in funding. Corporate communication departments, advertising agencies, public relations firms, and consultants spend huge amounts of time and energy developing plans, programs, strategies, tools and tactics to help organizations communicate with customers, shareholders, employees, regulatory agencies and the public. IT departments, manufacturers, service providers, and armies of techno-folk are hooking us up with faster, cleaner, more reliable computing and telephone communication devices. But when it comes to face-to-face communication – which still makes up the bulk of daily communication in business – people scarcely give it a thought.
Humans are “hard wired” to send and receive messages face-to-face, yet nobody really teaches us how to do this type of communication well. They teach us other stuff, like declining verbs and using punctuation, saying “please” and “thank you,” and not talking with food in our mouths. Sometimes they teach us to converse in foreign languages, in classes with names like “French Conversation.” But who receives formal lessons in how to conduct meaningful conversation in our own language?
Conversation is something the world just expects us to know. Not studied, not measured, and not well-understood, face-to-face communication is something that, if not quite an unconscious act, seldom receives much thought.
What would happen if everyone gave conscious consideration to their face-to-face communication? The results could be very beneficial to us, as individuals, and to the world.
Making a shift to conscious communication is something we can do that improves both work and life. Are you willing to try it?
Today’s homework: Be aware of your communication. You don’t really have to do anything differently (though this may happen as you become aware). Be aware of how you communicate and how that communication is received. Log it in your journal, if you’re so inclined.
We can start the conscious communication revolution just by paying attention. How cool is that?